What about Litecoin (LTC)?

tip

Every coin has its pros and cons, and so an unbiased objective take is impossible. Cryptocurrency is a free market of ideas and voluntary involvement, and the best coins must prove themselves in it, including BCH. Readers are encouraged to explore the communities, apps and events that other coins have to offer and hear both sides of the argument. However, as a candidate for being the global reserve currency, other coins tend to have serious flaws that make them a less viable candidate than BCH.

The Bitcoin Cash Podcast is **not an expert in every alternative cryptocurrency, nor able to argue for their merits**. If you think this article is inaccurate or needs adjusting, please help to improve it and submit a PR with your suggested improvements instead of complaining that it doesn't reflect your own opinions or knowledge.

Litecoin markets itself as "silver to Bitcoin's gold", which is a catchy but meaningless slogan. The use of silver and gold metals as a pair for coin minting historically was because denominating gold bars in small units was impractical due to lack of gold or their small physical size, so silver coins could supplement the circulating supply and provide practical small denominations. This is entirely unnecessary in cryptocurrency however, as software can divide crypto coins down to any fraction with perfect accuracy.

True to this mindset of being a "supplement" to Bitcoin, Litecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies and yet it is also one of the least innovative. No major breakthrough in cryptocurrency has ever come from the Litecoin community, nor does it ever seem likely, as their developers simply copy BTC updates.

Its adoption for payments is low.

The flagship change of Litecoin from Bitcoin was increasing the block time (from 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes), thus increasing capacity 4x. However, their community also prefers to copy the BTC scaling strategy of never raising the block size, therefore this tiny gain cannot help them scale to be a worldwide payments system.