This post will explore the main differences between Bitcoin and Litecoin. It will attempt to present the information in a factual way, while using sources for evidence.
Bitcoin is much larger than Litecoin in market cap.
As of writing, Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market cap and Litecoin is the 16th largest.
Bitcoin is about 67 times larger than Litecoin in terms of market cap.
Speed is one of the main differences between Bitcoin and Litecoin.
Bitcoin blocks are confirmed on average every 10 minutes, while Litecoin has an average confirmation time of 2.5 minutes.
Litecoin’s creator, Charlie Lee, did this on purpose to make Litecoin faster.
However, there is a tradeoff for Litecoin’s faster blocks.
Since Litecoin’s blocks are found more often, a confirmation on Litecoin would not be equal to one confirmation on Bitcoin.
Without accounting for the hashrate power of each network, a Litecoin transaction would need four confirmations to equal the security of one Bitcoin confirmation.
Since Bitcoin has a significantly bigger amount of mining power on its network, it’s likely that 1 bitcoin confirmation is equal to around 1000 litecoin confirmations.
So, Litecoin is faster but there is a security tradeoff.
As discussed above, Bitcoin is more secure than Litecoin. It has many more miners, meaning the network hashrate is much bigger. This means the amount of energy or miners needed to 51% attach the network is much more expensive to carry out on Bitcoin vs Litecoin.
Litecoin does not have many developers. Since its code is mostly taken from Bitcoin, much of the Litecoin code is just Bitcoin developers writing code and then people porting it over to Litecoin.
An example is Segwit, which was released and created for Bitcoin. Since Litecoin’s code was so similar, Segwit was taken on Bitcoin and activated first on Litecoin.
Bitcoin is more well-known than Litecoin.
According to Google Trends, Bitcoin is searched for significantly more than Litecoin.
There are around 300,000 Bitcoin transactions per day, while there are around 100,000 litecoin transactions per day.
Litecoin has lower fees than Bitcoin.
As of writing, the average Bitcoin transaction fee is $1.50. For Litecoin, the average fee is $0.0070 USD. On the surface, this means Litecoin is around 200X cheaper to send. However, since Bitcoin block space is much more sough after, one Bitcoin transaction is often used to send money to many different people.
Since Litecoin block space is not scarce, Litecoin likely has more people sending single receiver transactions than Bitcoin.
Litecoin is for sure cheaper than Bitcoin to send money on, but likely not as cheap as it appears on the surface.
It’s unlikely Litecoin will ever overtake Bitcoin.
