The Litecoin (LTC) mining difficulty set a new all-time high last Friday. The Litecoin Foundation revealed this on cryptocurrency data website CoinMarketCap. Mining difficulty is the difficulty of solving the arithmetic for ‘finding’ a new block. It has managed to peak at just under 18 million hashes.
Mining difficulty
The Litecoin network, like the Bitcoin (BTC) network, runs on a proof-of-work (PoW) system. This means that raw computing power is needed to keep the network running. This computing power is provided by miners. These miners run large amounts of machines that constantly contribute computing power, or hash-rate, to the network.
Like the Bitcoin (BTC) network, the Litecoin network operates on a proof-of-work (PoW) system. This means that raw computing power is needed to keep the network running. This computing power is provided by miners. These miners run a large number of machines that continuously contribute computing power or hash rate to the network.
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To ensure that adding a new block to the blockchain always takes X minutes, the difficulty of the mining process is adjusted according to the miners’ processing power. As the network’s processing power increases, the time needed to discover new blocks decreases. In this case, the increase in mining difficulty maintains the protocol.
Litecoin versus Bitcoin
BTC is also called “digital gold” and LTC is often referred to as “digital silver”. Therefore, it is similar to Bitcoin as a decentralised peer-to-peer currency. Like the king of cryptocurrencies, Litecoin has been around for several years since its inception in 2011. This makes it a very well-known cryptocurrency that is already accepted as a means of payment in many places. With Litecoin, a new block is added to the blockchain about every three minutes. Transactions are therefore processed faster than Bitcoin because the block time of the Bitcoin network is about 10 minutes.
Like BTC, Litecoin also faces the halving process. For digital silver, however, this was scheduled a year ago. In LTC, the next halving is likely in July 2023, while in BTC this event is scheduled for March 2024. The block reward within the Litecoin network will be halved from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC