What is Litecoin?

Litecoin is the 'Silver' to Bitcoin's 'Gold'. To put it simply Litecoin is a cryptocurrency much like Bitcoin. Litecoin a peer to peer cryptocurrency which can be used to send and receive payments. The payment fee of Litecoin is less compared to Bitcoin; which makes Litecoin very suitable for micro transactions.

Litecoin was developed by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee, in October 7 2011. It was designed similar to the working principle of Bitcoin. But now Litecoin has added some extra features to it called Segregated Witness and Lighting Network. These two technologies are a good solution to scaling problems that may arise in the future. As of now, Litecoin doesn't have a scaling problem. And since Litecoin had already implemented SegWit and Lighting network, in future's also Litecoin may not have been any scaling issues. This is what exactly that gives Litecoin the upper hand; Bitcoin still hasn't been able to implement segwit and lighting network in their system.

Coming to the technical working of Litecoin ; Litecoin operates with the same principle as that of Bitcoin. The Litecoin network has 3 main components They are:

1. Users
2. Nodes
3. Miners

Users: users refers to anyone who uses Litecoin

Nodes: Nodes are the entities which propagate the transaction done by users

Miners: Miners are the entities that finalize transactions made by users. After finalizing, the transaction details are saved in a distributed ledger. Only miners add trasations to the ledger. Miners should have huge computing power. Their efforts are compensated by providing them with Bitcoins for every successful transaction they write to the distributed ledger.

Litecoin currently occupies a position within the top 10 Cryptocurrencies. Given enough time we might be able see Litecoin in the forefront of Cryptocurrency. Hope that day isn't far away.