Why Litecoin is my favorite coin:
The Litecoin is a decentralized P2P cryptocurrency created by Charlie Lee in October 2011. It was created as an open source project inspired by Bitcoin, so it is virtually identical in most of its technical aspects. In the end, what is involved in both cases is to allow a person to send money to another without intermediaries such as banks and anonymously and safely.
However, there are at least four fundamental differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin: its speed, its number of coins, its market capitalization and changes in the algorithm. They are not big differences, but they are enough to change their philosophy slightly.
To begin with, the first big difference is the speed at which transactions are made. The Litecoin network performs the processing of a block every 2.5 minutes instead of every 10 minutes, which means that it generates the blocks of its chain four times faster than Bitcoin. This serves to confirm the transactions that are carried out at a higher speed.
The number of Litecoins is also finite. But if there will only be 21 million Bitcoins, 84 million Litecoins will be created.
Second is the amount of coins you plan to generate. One of the things that gives Bitcoin more value than conventional currencies is that it generates a fixed amount of new currencies every year, and that its number is finite. Bitcoin will stop creating new units when it reaches 21 million coins, while Litecoin will stop at 84 million.
Then there is the fact that the Litecoin was the first coin that changed the hashing algorithm and used scrypt. The first benefit of this change is that it makes any PC able to dedicate itself to mining, turning its back on professional miners and democratizing a bit the creation of the cryptocurrency. In addition, verifiers are more distributed than with coins based on SHA-256.
And then we have its market capitalization, which is a measure by which its economic dimension is measured. For those of us who do not know economics, this measure can be a bit ambiguous, but you can get an idea if we tell you that the Bitcoin right now is 288,687 million dollars, while the Litecoin is only 17,842 million. Despite that, the Litecoin is now the fourth cryptocurrency with more value in the market, which is not bad either.