Back in December 2017, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee announced that he sold and donated all of his Litecoin holdings, attributing the decision to a potential conflict of interest. Around the same time that he sold his stake, a Facebook VP of messaging products joined the board of directors at Coinbase. Many have put the two events together, speculating that the potential conflict of interest that Lee was referring to relates to Facebook’s potential intentions to take on LTC as a cryptocoin within its platform.
So, are the rumors true?
At this point, it’s hard to say. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has certainly expressed the importance of cryptocurrencies in light of a larger debate surrounding centralization versus decentralization in the technology sector today.
The Litecoin team has been hard at work working with companies to support Litecoin. Nothing to announce yet, but here’s what’s in the works:
Merchant processor
Popular online wallet
Goods trading platform
One huge unexpected surprise. :grinning:2018 will be a good year for Litecoin!
— Charlie Lee [LTC] (@SatoshiLite) December 20, 2017
“Technology was expected to give people more control over their lives,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But as a handful of technology companies become the dominant players and governments used technology to monitor citizens, people increasingly believe technology is becoming a controlling, centralized power.”
In this type of landscape, decentralized technology is gaining prevalence as an increasingly important- and viable- alternative. “[Cryptocurrencies] take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how to best use them for our services,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Why Litecoin?
There are multiple reasons why Litecoin could be the cryptocurrency that Facebook chooses to utilize on their platform. Technically similar to Bitcoin, Litecoins are also created through the process of mining, but Litecoin has 84 million while Bitcoin will only have 21 million. This means that as demand increases, there will be a larger circulation of Litecoin to go around.
Furthermore, Litecoins are more susceptible to up-scaling than Bitcoin. Both employ the Proof of Work concept, but use different algorithms to do so. Bitcoin uses SHA-256, a complex algorithm and form of data processing that uses a large amount of energy. Litecoin, meanwhile, uses Scrypt, which is easier to run and more energy-efficient.
Additionally, the generation times of Litecoin is significantly faster than Bitcoin’s block generation time of Bitcoin (2.5 minutes versus 10 minutes), and the transaction fees are much smaller, making it a more appealing choice for large enterprise adoption.
Litecoin in Your IRA
If Facebook partners with Litecoin and offers the cryptocurrency as a payment option in the platform, it could set Litecoin’s price to a record level high. If you’re looking to diversify your retirement portfolio with alternative assets, now is the prime time to consider adding Litecoin.
Here at Bitcoin IRA, we’re the world’s first company to allow customers to purchase Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for their IRA or 401(k) retirement accounts, and Litecoin is one of our supported coins. Give us a call today so we can facilitate the process.
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