A look at Litecoin's roadmap reveals Vertcoin - what's the deal with this joint venture?
It is not unusual for White Papers to mention other, older cryptocurrencies - this way unique selling points can be worked out very well or possible cooperations can be represented.
In principle, it is not surprising that another cryptocurrency is mentioned in the Litecoin roadmap. But what surprised many people was what kind of cooperation was in the pipeline: Not Bitcoin, Ethereum or IOTA are mentioned here, but Vertcoin.
Vertcoin is well known to older rabbits, but currently ranks 109th in terms of market capital, so that many don't have the currency on the radar. So what is Vertcoin and what is Litecoin's reference to it?
Vertcoin - a coin for decentralization
Vertcoin has been around for a while - on Bitcointalk the first announcement thread was published in January 2014. At that time, a topic was already topical, which is still controversially discussed and has its share in the scaling debate Bitcoins: The possibility to mine with ASICs made mining an increasingly centralized sector.
Litecoin has already been concerned about this development, but switching from SHA256 to Scrypt promised the average miner a certain chance to mine effectively with CPU or at least with GPU. Unfortunately, the development of Scrypt ASICs has led to a centralization of the system.
What Vertcoin originally did was to modify the scrypt algorithm in such a way that the amount of memory usage increased over time, so that ASICs always needed too much memory. This algorithm is also known as Scyrpt-N.
Vertcoin has now switched to Lyra2RE, a new proof-of-work algorithm developed in response to scrypt-enabled ASICs. Unfortunately, the corresponding white paper is no longer available on the homepage, so that the corresponding technical details cannot be further elaborated.
Transactions between different block-chains thanks to Atomic Swaps
Although that's a pity, and even though Vertcoin wants to offer or develop interesting features with Stealth Addresses and 1-Click-Vertcoin-Miners, these were not the reason why Vertcoin has been more in the news in recent days. The main reason for this was rather the already mentioned mention of the cryptocurrency in the Litecoins roadmap.
The background of this mention concerns the Lightning Network: both Litecoin and Vertcoin have activated Segregated Witness and both have been doing so for months. Not only have they been faster than Bitcoin, Vertcoin has also been able to present lightning network transactions for several months. Now Litecoin has followed suit - which was certainly a reason for the rapid price increase before Bloody Monday.
The Lightning Network outsources transactions from the blockchain and allows instantaneous payments, which will of course have a big impact on scalability and transaction size.
In short, the Lightning Network is based on the principle of payment channels, which are secured via certain smart contracts known as hashed timelocked contracts. It should be emphasized that this kind of Smart Contracts can be implemented in the Bitcoin Script and according to a large part of the Blockchains which are based on Bitcoin.
If such bi-directional payment channels are not only between two individual peers, but stretched across an entire network, everyone can pay immediately - and a Lightning Network has been created.
So far, this is not only known, but also well known to many who have followed the Segregated-Witness debate. A special extra is that payment channels allow so-called Atomic Swaps between different block-chains and thus allow a decentralized exchange, which allows for quick exchange of coins between different block-chains.
However, the implementation of Atomic Swaps via the Lightning Network offers even more possibilities. For illustration, please refer to the classic communication partners Alice, Bob and Carol. Let's say Alice buys a television from Bob. If Alice is depositing your money on Blockchain A, but Bob is depositing it on Blockchain B, an Exchange is needed to finalize payment transactions. Via the Lightning Network, Carol, which is active on both block-chains, can serve as an intermediary. If the Lightning Network is established on the different blockchains, there will be payment channels that allow cross-blockchain payment - without Alice and Bob having made concrete agreements with Carol.
As Litecoin and Vertcoin are now among the first cryptocurrencies to implement the Lightning Network, they are naturally predestined to carry out such a cross-blockchain transaction as test candidates or pioneers. It also makes sense that Litecoin does not want to wait for Bitcoin here. Failure to succeed on the blockchain with the largest market capital would have negative consequences for the entire ecosystem.
In this respect, the joint venture with Vertcoin is a test run for the Blockchain technology itself. Of course, this can also benefit Vertcoin, a cryptocurrency that has disappeared somewhat from the sinking market in recent months. Thanks to the Litecoins roadmap, however, people have come back to Vertcoin.
