LTC USD

Litecoin is yet another cryptocurrency, much like bitcoin. Some call it the silver to bitcoin’s gold. The LTC/USD pair is obviously a crypto/fiat pair as well. As such, you will only be able to trade it through various cryptocurrency exchanges. It is not an official currency pair, as LTC is not considered a “proper” currency by the powers that be, for now.

LTC (Litecoin)

Having been launched in 2011, Litecoin (LTC) is an early bitcoin spinoff and one of the first altcoins to hit the crypto markets. Like bitcoin, it too is decentralized, peer-to-peer digital cash as well as a payment system. As far as its technical specifications go, LTC is almost identical to BTC. That is why it is often called crypto “silver”, while BTC is crypto “gold”.

The person responsible for the launch of LTC is Charlie Lee, a Google employee and Coinbase engineering director. It is safe to say that Lee is LTC’s Satoshi Nakamoto.

Currently, LTC is perhaps the best performing altcoin out there, value-wise. Its history is rife with episodes of massive volatility, even outside the raging bull market of 2017 and the subsequent crypto meltdown.

LTC was essentially forked off bitcoin core and while it is quite similar to the latter, it differs from it in some ways.

Its block generating time is set to 2.5 minutes, instead of bitcoin’s 10 minutes. The supply limit has been increased from BTC’s 21 million to 84 million. Supply remains fixed, so scarcity is indeed a part of the LTC value equation.

While being an independent cryptocurrency and payment system, willingly or unwillingly, LTC has acted as a sort of test-bed for BTC.

It was the first high market-cap crypto to adopt Segregated Witness. Later, it became the first crypto to complete a transaction through the Lightning Network.

Apparently, the problem that LTC was supposed to address through its very existence, was that of scaling. The 2.5 minute block times are supposed to make faster confirmation times possible too.

While LTC mining via ASICS is possible in theory, such devices are much more complicated and expansive to make than those used for the mining of BTC.

The USD

The top reserve currency of the world, the US dollar is also the world’s most traded currency. The vast majority of Forex transactions involve the US dollar in one form or another.

Supported by the might and diversity of the US economy, the USD is the official currency of the US, but not only. In fact, a surprisingly large number of sovereign countries and territories use the USD as their official currency, in addition to a number of US territories.

Panama, El Salvador, Zimbabwe and Ecuador are among the countries whose official currency is the USD.

Scores of others use the USD de-facto, to some degree.

Much of the power of the USD (also dubbed “petro-dollar”) is derived from the fact that all global sales of oil are conducted in USD.

The Federal Reserve -a private institution – is the authority behind the dollar.