Investment in cryptocurrencies has gone haywire. It may not be wrong to say anyone who has not thought of buying or doing anything with cryptocurrencies in the past five years lives under a rock or is not just interested in making money.

Litecoin is one alternative coin that is gradually gaining popularity.  You can understand it as a peer-to-peer digital currency that allows users to make to anyone in the world with little or no cost. Litecoin is an open-source global digital payment platform.

By this, it means that Litecoin allows anyone anywhere in the world copy, run and change the software as preferred. The Litecoin network is decentralized. It has no central authority in control of transaction activities within it. Mathematical algorithm secures the network and gives participants full control of their finances.

Unlike other cryptocurrency platforms, Litecoin boasts of faster transaction time and better storage efficiency.

Compared with bitcoin, Litecoin uses the same protocol but Litecoin takes the system a little further. Looking at it, Litecoin is capable of handling higher transaction volume than its closest counterpart—the Bitcoin. This ability to handle several transactions rests on its more frequent block generation of 2.5 minutes where Bitcoin takes 10 minutes on average. This support of robust transactions without any need for a change of transaction in future makes the difference. Merchants get faster confirmation time with the added ability to wait for more confirmations when selling bigger items. The Litecoin wallet is secured and mathematically encrypted. You can view transactions on your account balance easily, although you would be required to input your password before sending Litecoins across the network. The use of password provides more protection against potential attack from hackers or malicious software. A sanity-check to make sure that everything is in order before any transaction executes also depends on this.

Litecoin makes use of a memory intensive scrypt proof of work algorithm. Presently, Miners on the Litecoin network receive 25 coins for every new block mined. This amount given as reward would cut by half in a space of four years, after the mining of an estimated 840,000 blocks. Litecoin would reach at most 84,000,000 coins. This volume is bigger than four times the estimated maximum amount of Bitcoins, which stands at about 20,000,000.

A Litecoin sells for USD 246.6833 currently. The lowest exchange per dollar since the beginning of the year is USD 242.71. Its current supply is 54.6 million coins and the total volume exchanged by estimation is USD 682,713,206.

Litecoin has a large 164,234 subscribers on Reddit, 290,208 followers on Twitter and 89,393 likes on Facebook. The average online users of Litecoin are 3,714.0 an average of 3.2 posts comes up every hour.

The Sun describes Litecoin in an article as Bitcoin’s little brother. Well, you could just call it its younger sibling too because they are alike in many ways. Litecoin has enjoyed a steady increase from USD 4.33 at the start of 2017 and on the first day of this year, it was sold for USD 253.4. If you are interested in the math, that is about 5,848% or 58 times increase. Whopping isn’t it. The combined value of all Litecoinsin circulation is given by CNN money as USD 18 billion. This amount may be a fraction when compared with the current USD 300 billion worth of Bitcoin in circulation, but the fact that a lot of people would likely realize the advantage of this cryptocurrency gives it another advantage.

The price difference between Bitcoin and Ripple is so wide that for every Bitcoin purchased, the cost would be equal to what is required to buy about 6,000 Ripple (XRP) and 60 Litecoins.

Litecoin stands at the eighth spot on the cryptocurrency ranking list and could to gain much popularity with the decrease in bitcoins predominance. There is also a comparable difference in hashing between Litecoin and Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s hashing rate is about 20,000 Terra Hashes per seconds while Litecoin is only 95, 642 Mega Hash per second.

Like other cryptocurrencies, using Litecoin requires a wallet where the coins you buy or mine would be stored. Some of the most popular wallets available are Exodus, Jaxx, and Coinbase. Moore sophisticated hardware wallets include Ledger and Trezor which can be used to store them as well.

A major challenge is that it is not easy to buy Litecoin with money via e-currency.  The reason for this is that majority of the exchanges available trade Litecoin (LTC) for Bitcoin especially. With this, buying Bitcoin and exchanging them for Litecoincomes as a handy option. Websites like Polonix, BTC-e or Spaceshift offers an exchange of Bitcoin for Litecoin. Although at the time of writing this article, Gdax, trading about 16.16% of the market volume, offers an exchange of Litecoin for USD at $231.53.

Platforms are also available where anyone can buy Litecoins directly. For example, eToro allows US users to buy and sell Litecoins for fiat currencies like Dollars and Euros. This could be a good option for persons interested in speculating and capitalizing on market price fluctuations for gain. Unfortunately, this is only possible for persons outside the United States.

You can also buy not more than USD 500 worth of Litecoins using your credit card. This limit is set as pending until an identity verification after which it would be possible to buy more. Buyers from 33 countries around the globe are accepted on the Coinbase platform and fee for transfer within the United State is low.

It is also possible to buy Litecoin using your credit card, SEPA transfer or SOFORTtransfers on Bitpanda. Bitstamp, an old name in the crypto exchange market allows the purchase of Litecoin through a wire card transfer of Euros or USD. An option on the platform also allows the exchange of Bitcoins for Litecoins as well.

We would now look at some reasons why Litecoin might be the next big name afterBitcoin. This will help you know why it might be to your advantage if you invest in Litecoin now.

Bitcoin came into existence some years ago. In fact, from the time Bitcoins white paper was published anonymously until now is about eight years. This made it possible for Litecoin, its quite younger pair to have capitalized on some of Bitcoin’s shortcomings you have read already. Nokia was the song of the day until it started to nosedive, leaving a large part of the smartphone market to Android OS products. The advantage Android-based Samsung smartphones had over Nokia was being open source. Litecoin is also like this.                        

Litecoin is gaining wide consumer appeal. Merchants prefer Litecoin for its speed, but that is not all. The speed of Litecoin comes with the complete security of transactions. The segregated witness launched on the Litecoin network during the first quarter of 2017. The technology that reduces blockchain by extracting signatures from transactions. The result of this is that transactions execute at a speed closer to nanoseconds. The first transaction between Zurich and San Fransisco was really so fast.                                      

Another point to consider is the algorithm used. SHA 256 used    by Bitcoin is making the entire process more complex, as creating new   Blocks requires a solution to terribly difficult puzzles.  Scrypt algorithms used by Litecoin makes it easy to mine.

With time, the difficulty of the Bitcoin process might force many miners to start mining the relatively easy and simple Litecoin. This would increase Litecoins popularity and value.

Simple consumer psychology further tips the scale in favor of Litecoins. Think of it, the fiat currency value of Bitcoin standing at a thumping 14,644 Dollars makes it just impossible to get Bitcoins in rounded digits. This might seem unimportant, but studies have shown that people prefer rounded digits when dealing with money. With all these in place, going ahead to invest may not need any more day of thinking.