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Review on Litecoin by Moshe Bal
Litecoin Review
Litecoin has a lot of amazing features, one of which is the Lightning network. It introduces an off-chain approach for small transactions which gives a solution to potential scalability issues.
How it works is users open a payment channel between themselves and can transfer funds freely without miners. Transactions are recorded on a balance sheet which is signed by both parties after every movement of funds.
When they are done, they can close the payment channel and feed the info to the blockchain. It will be counted as a single transaction, removing a lot of stress from the network.
LTC is Atomic Swap compatible, which means that it can be exchanged for other currencies peer-to-peer without the need for a middleman like an exchange platform.
One of the other notable features is that the Litecoin cryptocurrency has SegWit implemented in the network. This means that signatures necessary for transactions can be stored in a different block on the chain, in order to improve the scalability of the network.
Pros
- A smaller blockchain transaction history of roughly 20GB compared to its bigger brother, Bitcoin’s over 180GB
- Litecoin gets updates faster because it is used to test new technology before applying it to Bitcoin
- Small initial investment into Litecoin mining
Cons
- vulnerability for double spending. It is not an easy task, but for a malicious party with enough resources, it could be done.
- In the case when the network is overloaded, the chain could bloat and make future confirmations near impossible and risk of Prone to a 51% attack
