Litecoin Wallet for Android
If you’re new to the cryptocurrency world, you’d be forgiven for not having heard of litecoin. The currency, which was created by Charles Lee in 2011, is the second largest digital currency next to bitcoin. Here is our guide to what you need to know.
Knowing your litecoin from your bitcoin
If you are used to using bitcoin, litecoin holds few surprises – if you’re not yet initiated, read our guides on What is bitcoin and Why use bitcoin. The ideas in those guides also apply to litecoin.
The primary desktop application is a modification of Bitcoin-QT client, and can be downloaded from litecoin’s website. You may also be familiar with Andreas Schildbach’s bitcoin wallet for Android. If so, you’ll be very much at home with the most popular litecoin wallet for Android on the Play Store.
There are important differences though. For starters, while bitcoin has a cap of 21 million coins, litecoin will be four times larger at 84 million.
Just like bitcoin, litecoin has started with a mining reward of 50 coins per block. However, the litecoin reward will halve every 840, 000 blocks. Again this is four times larger than the 210, 000 block threshold in bitcoin.
The transaction fee for litecoin is 0.02 LTC, which is proportionately higher than the minimum bitcoin fee of 0.0001 BTC, however, keep in mind that a litecoin is currently worth 0.019 BTC.
The factor of four difference between litecoin and bitcoin persists into the block time too. The block time is the time it is supposed to take miners to confirm a block on the block chain.
For bitcoin this is 10 minutes, but for litecoin it is just 2.5 minutes. This means that litecoin has the potential to be more attractive to merchants as there will be less time to wait to ensure that a payment has been received from customers.
Litecoin intelligence
In terms of the web ecosystem around litecoin, you’ll find a block chain explorer here, however it’s in beta and far from the sophistication of blockchain.info for bitcoin.
You should also check out Litecoin Scout and
Litecoin also has a charts website (like Bitcoincharts) at where litecoin’s performance against BTC and USD is compared on several exchanges. Data spans up to one year ago from the current date.
If you want to get involved in the litecoin community, you’ll want to join the forum (you’ll also find limited litecoin discussion on the bitcoin forum) and/or subscribe to the litecoin subreddit. Also, Litecoin Rates provides a quick lookup services for exchange rates between litecoin, bitcoin and various fiat currencies.
Buying and trading
The next most important aspect to address is where on earth to obtain litecoin?
Unless you’re a miner (more on that later), you’ll need to buy from one of several exchanges, Litecoin’s forum – or in person, alá LocalBitcoins style.
