By Jeff Paul
The founder of the cryptocurrency ranking and technical analysis website CoinCap.io, Erik Voorhees, took to Twitter today to point out that Litecoin’s daily exchange volume may have exceeded bitcoin’s for the first time ever.
Wow… litecoin exchange volume higher than bitcoin today (probably first time this has ever happened). $42m vs $40m http://t.co/X4HCHctfC0
— Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) July 9, 2015
The price of Litecoin has nearly tripled in recent weeks. This rise may be due in large part to the Grexit and increased media coverage of bitcoin. Yet there may be another reason too.
Bitcoin has been attempting to fend off fairly damaging spamming attacks that have slowed down the network.
Charlie Lee, the former Google engineer who invented Litecoin, wrote on Reddit that a spam attack like the one currently slowing down Bitcoin is not economically feasible on the Litecoin network”. Lee added:
The reason why Litecoin is immune to this attack is because Litecoin was attacked in a similar fashion (though to a much smaller degree) years ago. And I noticed this flaw in Bitcoin and patched it in Litecoin. There’s code in Bitcoin that says if someone sends a tiny amount of coins to an output, make sure that he pays the mintxfee. This makes sense because you wouldn’t want someone creating “dust” spam by sending small amount of coins. BUT the code still only enforces the same mintxfee if you send to many small outputs. The fix is simple: require a mintxfee for each tiny output.
Because of this fix, Litecoin’s UTXO set is much more manageable than Bitcoin’s. But the pull request for this that I created against the bitcoin codebase was rejected 3 years ago: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/1536
One of the reasons why I created Litecoin was because it was hard for someone like me (who was a nobody back then) to make any changes to Bitcoin. Having a different set of developers take the code in a different direction can only be good for the resiliency of the whole cryptocurrency movement. And that is why there is value in altcoins.
Litecoin may be finally coming into its role as the most viable alternative to Bitcoin. What do you think?
Jeff Paul is a co-founder of Coinivore. Follow on Twitter or Facebook.