Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency created by Charlie Lee. It was created based on the Bitcoin protocol but differs in terms of the hashing algorithm used. Litecoin uses the memory intensive Scrypt proof of work mining algorithm. Scrypt allows consumer-grade hardware such as GPU to mine those coins. Why Litecoin? Litecoin is a cryptocurrency that has evolved from Bitcoin after its own popularity in the industry, this alternative, or ‘altcoin’ has emerged to allow investors to diversify their digital currency package, according to Investopedia. Litecoin is one of the most prominent altcoins and was created by former Google employee and Director of Engineering at Coinbase, Charlie Lee. Litecoin was the first to alter Bitcoin and the most significant difference is that it takes 2.5 minutes for Litecoin to generate a block, or transaction, in comparison to Bitcoin's 10 minutes. ‘While this matters little to traders, miners who use hardware to run Bitcoin's network cannot switch over to Litecoin. This keeps bigger mining conglomerates away from Litecoin because they cannot easily optimize their profits by swapping to another coin, contributing to a more decentralized experience. Litecoin also has bigger blocks, and more coins in circulation, making it more affordable and swift when transacting,’ Investopedia explained. As explained above, Litecoin can transact a lot faster than Bitcoin, but there are also a number of other characteristics that investors need to know before trading. Litecoin can handle higher volumes of transactions because of the capability of transacting faster and if Bitcoin attempted to transact on the scale of its altcoin, a code update would be needed. However, Litecoin’s blocks would be larger, but with more ‘orphaned blocks'. The faster block time of litecoin reduces the risk of double spending attacks - this is theoretical in the case of both networks having the same hashing power. Litecoin Technical Details: The transaction confirmation time taken for Litecoin is about 2.5 minutes on average (as compared to Bitcoin's 10 minutes). The Litecoin network is scheduled to cap at 84 million currency units. Litecoin has inspired many other popular alternative currencies (eg. Dogecoin) because of its Scrypt hashing algorithm in order to prevent ASIC miners from mining those coins. However it is said that by the end of this year, Scrypt ASIC will enter the mass market.
Turtlecoin is a privacy coin that is forked from Bytecoin. Because of this, turtlecoin has Bytecoin’s privacy aspects to it called RingCT. This coin is more of a meme coin, but there are a lot of serious tech advancements as well. For example, they have a 30-second block time. They also plan on having simple smart contracts sometime soon, since they say they already started development. They have 35 developers on the team and they also plan on somehow making the blockchain smaller to sync faster, but this is TBA on the roadmap, and the details of this are not out yet. Turtle coin uses the cryptonight_lite_v7 algorithm so it is ASIC resistant. Born on the 9th day of December 2017, TurtleCoin faced a backlash from a couple of online forums, not because it had such a funny name, but since its initial single command line and included TRTL giveaways. Luckily, TurtleCoin of about three months later is grown a lot and has various versions compatible with Apple, Windows and Linux OS. Turtlecoin could be the ideal project to get involved in while it is still in the initial stages. There is more potential for return on investment with a microcap coin than there are with established altcoins. Moreover, you do not have to hand over tokens in an overhyped crowd sale to be a part of this. All you really need to do is download the mining software and get hashing. The coin is one of the easiest to mine as was the developer’s intention. Moreover, given the exciting roadmap that the team has ahead for the project, the future prospects also look quite promising. Private smart contracts and no sync blockchains could push the coin towards mass adoption. Fast With blocks being created every 30 seconds on the Turtlecoin blockchain and transactions taking just seconds, sending and paying with TRTL is a breeze. Easy Having an extremely active development team and a lively, helpful community, you can start using TRTL in minutes, no matter your familiarity and/or expertise with cryptocurrencies in general. Mining TRTL is also very easy to get into with simple, detailed how-to guides. Safe With its beginnings as a fork of Bytecoin, Turtlecoin offers the same degree of privacy and anonimity with its use of ring-signatures. Just like using paper cash, paying with TRTL allows you to spend your money the way you want. Being completely open source, the TurtleCoin project is growing daily. We actively encourage the community to jump in with fresh ideas, no matter your skillset or level of experience. Just hop into the discord and say hello!