It appears every cryptocurrency is now fighting for the first place on the list of cryptocurrencies or at least considering it. In the spirit of the fight, creator of Litecoin Charlie Lee, said Litecoin is only second to bitcoin on the list of “sound money.”
Although market capitalization of cryptocurrencies especially the top ones has been shaken by the downward trend this year, Bitcoin is still 34 times more than Litecoin in market cap. Charlie Lee said despite the wide difference in market capitalization, bitcoin transaction volume is only 8 times that of Litecoin, meaning Litecoin is not very far from bitcoin with respect to this. He also went on to discuss other areas of similarity for the two networks.
In terms of power consumption which determines the level of security, Lee said Litecoin uses 400 megawatts of electricity which is only 150 megawatt short of San Francisco’s power consumption.
Although there have been several complaints about how much power the cryptocurrency industry consumes for mining and other activities, Lee said the power consumption is what keeps it safe so Litecoin is very secure looking at the amount of energy required to keep it.
“With proof of work, the more energy that is spent on securing Litecoin, the harder it is for any one person, one company, or one government to attack the coin.” Lee said.
The Litecoin network is also huge with a volume of about 30,000 daily transactions amounting to over $300 million worth of money with incredibly low transaction fees. He also mentioned some qualities such as its censorship resistance, the fact that it is counterfeit proof and can be used for any purpose, which makes it “sound money.”
The network is also does not allow stealing of funds in addition to the fact that it is highly stable since no more coins can be minted on the network neither can it accept any newly minted coins.
Although Lee admitted that the Bitcoin network is a lot bigger and more secure than the Litecoin network, he bragged about the network having a hashrate of about 237 Terahash per second with 500,000 miners, which gives the network so much security that it would cost about $150 worth of equipment to launch a 51% attack on the network.
“What’s most important about this is, if you look at the mining hash rate, the total cost for the Bitcoin network in terms of total number of miners that’s protecting network is about 10 times more than Litecoin. Litecoin is about 1/10 as secure as Bitcoin in that sense right it will take someone $1.3 billion worth of mining equipment to attack Bitcoin. For Litecoin it’s about 150 million so but the price is drastically different much more than that.”
With the amazing “specifications” of Litecoin given by Charlie Lee, he said Litecoin is silver only to Bitcoin which he said is gold as far as cryptocurrency ranking is concerned.
