Litecoin Founder Charlie Lee took to Twitter to make it clear that Litecoin is not just a “glorified testnet” for Bitcoin and that the second layer on Bitcoin blockchain, Lightning Network for cheap, fast and scalable transactions doesn’t make Litecoin useless.
Bitcoin LN Doesn’t Make Litecoin Useless
As we reported earlier, Mike Novogratz blasted Litecoin by taking on the scenario of Litecoin being the silver to Bitcoin’s gold, he said, at least, silver is useful for industrial production.
He made these remarks on the current rally in the market which saw Bitcoin rising about 25 percent going from around $4,100 to over $5k while Litecoin surged 57 percent from $60 to $94 that is more than double of BTC’s surge.
Gold has an $8.5 trillion dollar market cap. Silver is $15bn That is .17%. $BTC has a $90bn mkt cap. $ltc is $5.7bn which is 6.4% of $BTC. Silver is at least useful for industrial production. $ltc is a glorified test net for $btc. I don't get this rally. Sell $ltc buy $btc.
— Michael Novogratz (@novogratz) April 3, 2019
Now, Charlie Lee came forward to set the record straight as he said,
“Litecoin a glorified testnet? BTC LN makes LTC useless? Can't be more wrong!”
LTC vs BTC: The Average Fees
He further countered Novogratz’s “Sell ltc buy btc,” with “send LTC to fill your BTC wallet” through Boltz which is an exchange built on Lightning Network that allows on-chain swapping of digital assets.
“High BTC fees? With boltz.exchange, just do a cross chain submarine swap from LTC on-chain to BTC. Send LTC to fill up your BTC wallet! Fast: ~2.5 mins. Cheap: pennies in fees.”
When it comes to fees, Litecoin surely beats Bitcoin as evident from this graph from Coin metrics. On April 3rd, 2019, the average fees on Litecoin blockchain have been USD $0.0549 while on Bitcoin blockchain, it has been USD $1.925.
The lowest Bitcoin fees have been on January 16th, 2015 at USD $0.029 while USD $0.00044 was Litecoin’s lowest average fees on February 8th, 2015.
Average Fees (USD), Source: Coinmetrics
LN Atomic Swap
Back in August 2018, Lee had said atomic swaps through Lightning Network makes Litecoin a sidechain of Bitcoin but with better security.
LN with atomic swap makes Litecoin effectively Bitcoin's sidechain, but with much better security via decentralized PoW mining compared to federated/merge mining of regular sidechains. Value can move across chains seamlessly to take advantage of LTC's faster/cheaper onchain txns. pic.twitter.com/7b2oZacukY
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) August 12, 2018
Now, Boltz, an instant, account free, and non-custodial digital asset exchange that is built on top of the lightning network has made its entry into crypto space.
In order to tackle the challenges faced by the lightning network as it isn’t well suited for infrequent transactions and those transactions with ill-connected nodes are susceptible to rout failures, Boltz has worked on mitigating these issues.
“Boltz allows for swapping the inbound liquidity merchants need without requiring them to trust a third party or spend time growing the capacity organically.”
Additionally, swaps on Boltz already work in both the directions that is LN -> on-chain & on-chain -> LN on Bitcoin and Litecoin both.
Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC) Price Predictions: Today's Crypto Market Analysis
