Last two weeks, I payed $20 in fees for a bitcoin transaction of $150 that took over 40 minutes to get confirmed and processed. I didn’t feel good paying that amount of money in fees because I was running at lose with my little crypto gains. Since then, I hate using bitcoin for daily transactions and even holding it, if not in large proportion isn’t appealing anymore.
I’m not the only one paying this much in fees as I have seen people that payed between $30-$50, some fees rounding up to a high percentage of the whole transaction. I wanted to move to Bitcoin Cash, but major exchanges in Nigeria are yet to start accepting Bitcoin Cash transactions so I was forced to test one of bitcoin oldest alternatives called Litecoin, which is becoming a strong competition to bitcoin.
I heard of litecoin not long after I came across bitcoin, but then my reaction wasn’t positive because I thought that there was no valid reason to create a bitcoin alternative than to enrich oneself. Though then, I wasn’t aware that bitcoin might have many of the issues it has now and I didn’t know all the challenges ahead once bitcoin begin to go mainstream.
Passing The Test Of Time
Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has over the years passed the test of time of many challenges and most times coming out stronger after each test. The most challenging one being Mt. Gox hack. Bitcoin largest exchange that was hacked back in 2014 and $460 million belonging to customers were reported stolen.
This caused many to question the future of bitcoin as the cryptocurrency was just gaining acceptance and trust of the public then and many naysayers even predicted the end of bitcoin. But here is bitcoin community today growing large. And many more of other challenges that saw bitcoin to where it is now.
The test of time, I’m afraid bitcoin will have big trouble surviving is the ability to serve the world as a currency useful for fast, easy and cheap daily transaction. That was the original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto but Bitcoin don’t seem to be able to cope with its own anticipated future. Meaning bitcoin has become a victim of its popularity.
Litecoin was designed with the same vision and similar technical principle used for bitcoin, as one of the first fork of bitcoin designed as an online peer to peer payment system. But over the years bitcoin has been claiming supremacy and out shinning all competitions with the biggest market cap and largest community.
But with bitcoin long, congested network and scalability issues which has caused increased in transaction fees and take longer time for transactions to get confirmed,I believe many people like me will source for a better alternatives like litecoin.
Transaction Speed and Scalability
Litecoin has a faster transaction speed and very low fee compared to bitcoin. Bitcoin’s average transaction confirmation time is 9 minutes per transaction, while litecoin throughput is 2.5 minutes. This means that litecoin transactions are 4 times faster confirmed than bitcoin and thus attractive to users like me that believe transactions should be instant.
When litecoin was created, it was noted that the original intention wasn’t to be a competitor to bitcoin, but to be a support to it. The purpose was to be silver to bitcoin “gold”but the future, I perceive is that litecoin might go a long away to compete with bitcoin in dominance with more switch from users.
The Future Adoption.
Bitcoin was fulfilling purpose and was fast enough for the average user until its future begin to arrive earlier than expected, which brought in more customers and transactions increased more than the network could handle.
Is it possible for such thing to happen to litecoin as well? If litecoin has the same or double of bitcoin traffic in both customers and transactions, will it be able to survive the test of time too? Is litecoin Scrypt Algorithm far scalable than bitcoin SHA-256 algorithm?
What do you think? Your reply and input will be greatly welcomed and appreciated, because I really want to hear other people's opinion regarding both coins.
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