In October 2011 Charlie Lee, then a software engineer at Google, announced the creation of litecoin, a clone of bitcoin with modifications intended to help it scale more effectively. A little over seven years later, the cryptocurrency has demonstrated the kind of staying power other early bitcoin alternatives couldn’t.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/HsW2O/1/Litecoin price
Litecoin’s price at the time of writing is just under $180, down precipitously from a high of $420 in December, but orders of magnitude above the sub-$4 levels it traded at 12 months ago. According to BitInfoCharts, average transaction fees in dollar terms are much lower ($0.25) than those for Bitcoin ($11.30). With a new block mined every 2.5 minutes – four times faster than bitcoin – litecoin transactions require much less time to gain confirmations. Litecoin can hardly claim to have scaled the way that centralized payment systems like Visa have, but Lee’s claim to have created the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold” has some merit to it.