I read an article a while back stating that Litecoin will be replacing Silver as a store of value. I’m fairly certain Litecoin has a long way to go before it gets to the point it over takes silvers market capitalization. Currently silver sits as roughly 1.4 trillion dollars in market cap where as Litecoin is currently siting at 17 billion in market cap…, not even close. This thought of Litecoin and silver is from the creator of Litecoin (Charlie Lee) comparing Litecoin as silver to Bitcoin as gold… Litecoin was for a while (not sure if it still is) used as a test bed for new code that might be introduced to the Bitcoin core. Litecoin is a hard fork of the Bitcoin core with some differences we’ll discuss in another blog post. This is just a short blurb about the correlation from Litecoin to silver.., which there isn’t any. The explanation Charlie Lee gives for the gold and silver analogy in regards to Bitcoin and Litecoin is strictly associated with the mining characteristics. For Bitcoin (as he refers to gold or as “digital gold” it is mined using the SHA-256 hashing algorithm and blockchain transactions happen every ten minutes, whereas Litecoin uses a scrypt hash algorithm and the blockchain transactions take place every two and a half minutes. So, where it is usually harder to mine gold than it is silver due to scarcity and difficulty this is the same analogy Charlie is using. It doesn’t have anything to do with the hard assets and any direct correlation, at least where Litecoin is concerned. There is of course a lot of talk (chatter) on the social media front about Bitcoin and Gold. The conversation is usually about BTC taking place of gold as the hardest asset to own during loose monetary police (Fiat money printing) or like Max Kiser likes to say the money printer go BRRRRRRRR… The reason for this comparison is due to the fact that BTC is currently the hardest asset out there, yes as far as I’m concerned it is an asset, but we’re getting off track, this is about Bitcoin’s little brother LTC…
Litecoin has not really been talk about much in this cycle due to the fact there are other players in the crypto-sphere that have more visibility and utility, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for Litecoin… It seems as if LTC is quietly sitting on the sidelines patiently waiting for the right time to enter the game. Litecoin is another “hard asset” as far as I’m concerned, it too has a hard cap, yes it is 4 times the amount of Bitcoin, but 84 million coins is a drop in the bucket when you consider the amount of capital that is out there and the amount of people try to secure their wealth from the inflationary destruction that is currently happening throughout the world (mainly due to the US monetary policy)… Litecoin shares a few more similarities with Bitcoin, it is POW (Proof Of Work), it has a hard cap, it is accepted at almost all the places Bitcoin is and it has been around almost as long as BTC (it was created October 2011 – younger (little brother))
One benefit of Litecoin over Bitcoin are transaction fees.., where it cost dollars to send BTC it cost pennies to send LTC. Another benefit is the speed of the transactions, the blockchain of LTC is being created every 2 1/2 minutes as opposed to BTC every 10 minutes… There is always the talk of “well, then isn’t Litecoin a better investment than Bitcoin?” as for the investment side of the equation, I would probably go back to the gold and silver analogy, they are both “good investments” but they are not the same…, as BTC was first to market, has worldwide exposure, a market cap of currently one trillion dollars, and no “Leader” per say. The creator (Satoshi Nakamoto has left the room) disappeared 10 years ago April 26th (I believe) His last correspondence was “make it about the open source project and give more credit to your contributors; it helps motivate them” and from that point on BTC has not had a “Leader”. On the other hand Litecoin was created as I mentioned in October of 2011 two years after Bitcoin by Charlie Lee. Which leads to maximum scrutiny on any and all moves Charlie makes. One of the “issues” people had in the past was when during the last Bull Run Charlie sold all of his LTC, the reason he sold was in his reasoning a “conflict of interest” which is understandable, but people were still upset (idiotic as far as I’m concerned)., I can’t say I blame Charlie, I would have done the same thing, but it did dampen the confidence within the LTC community somewhat at least with the “weaker minded” individuals. The other glaring difference is the market cap Bitcoin is 70 times larger than LTC, this makes it fly under the radar of “big money” for the most part, there are funds that are starting to move on adding Litecoin to their offerings. Grayscale being one. I for one am bullish on Litecoin and believe it does have a place in the future of our new state free sovereign monetary system and am enjoying the continued adoption of the cryptocurrency movement…
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