Alan Austin, director of Litecoin Foundation, assured that Litecoin miners “are among the most profitable today”, after Ethereum’s Merge. In addition, he highlighted the security that Proof of Work (PoW) provides Litecoin, “the blockchain with the longest uninterrupted operation time”, according to his testimony.
Austin spoke at the World Digital Mining Summit conference in Cancun, Mexico. This event, organized by miner hardware manufacturer Bitmain, focused on Bitcoin, but also included representatives from other networks.
The Litecoin Foundation director said that “there is a great demand for Litecoin miners” and assured that mining the network’s cryptocurrency, litecoin (LTC), has its advantages.
“First, you don’t need to keep the LTC if you don’t want to, you can convert your profits. Second, it’s good for diversifying. I’m a fan of Bitcoin, but having all your eggs in one basket is always a risk,” he explained.
The PoW consensus algorithm is the right fit for LTC’s goal, which is “to be better money,” he opined. “Litecoin is the blockchain with the longest uninterrupted run time. Even Bitcoin had a crash at some point. That’s huge and says a lot about the quality and security of the network. It also says a lot about PoW,” Austin said.
On this non-stop performance, Litecoin’s official Twitter account celebrated “11 years without crashes” in October 2022.
In May 2022, Litecoin launched its latest update, Mimblewimble. While it is “still too early” to assess its adoption, Austin said that “the trend is for it to be used more and more.”
He added: “The more people use Mimblewimble, the better it works. We’re talking to wallet companies about integrating it into their mobile version.”
For the time being, scalability is not a pressing issue for Litecoin, as the blocks have enough space and, in addition, the network can make use of the Lightning Network instant micropayment network. “If we ever have that problem, it will be because so many people are using Litecoin, but we probably have other technology solutions that we’re not even talking about yet,” he said.
The Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake debate.
After Ethereum abandoned PoW mining and switched to Proof of Stake (PoS) in September, the debate between the two consensus algorithms was reborn. For Alan Austin, “we haven’t seen too much of a story yet with respect to PoS, it’s very early days.”
However, it is not determinative and opens the door to it proving to be a suitable solution in certain cases. “It’s interesting to see what will happen with PoS. It can be debated, there are arguments for both sides. Maybe for some applications it is better than PoW,” he said.
For Litecoin, however, changing the consensus algorithm is not in the plans:
“LTC is trying to be better money, and to do that, security is important. I think, at least from a security point of view, PoW is less prone to centralization.”
Litecoin, between the “perfect storm” and the challenges of the future.
At the time of this talk, in November 2022, there is a “perfect storm” that combines many factors, expressed the representative of Litecoin Foundation, an entity whose role is “to support LTC adoption in a variety of ways related to developments, partnerships and other tools.”
“I don’t think there are specific challenges for Litecoin, but for the whole cryptocurrency space. There’s like a perfect storm of a lot of things now: companies affecting other companies as in domino effect, the economy, the effects of Covid. I don’t know how all of that will impact in the short term.”
In such a context, Litecoin not experiencing shocks is a very good thing, he believes. “I think Litecoin will continue to do its thing. It may be boring, but these days being ‘boring’ is a good thing,” he says.
“There are things that momentarily run attention away from Litecoin and even Bitcoin, like non-fungible tokens (NFT). But over time, those time-tested things will come back to center stage instead of these short-term ones that come and go,” Austin expressed.
This year’s shocks, such as the collapse of Terra’s ecosystem and FTX’s bankruptcy, are tantamount to “flushing the toilet,” he says.
“Every so many years, we hit a cycle where all the garbage is flushed away. Unfortunately, that affects a lot of good people, but it also serves to rid us of things that aren’t sustainable. We can start to grow from there,” he adds.
To conclude, Alan Austin remarks the value of LTC by valuing that “there are few cryptocurrencies that have been ‘battle-tested’, and Litecoin is one of them”.
Meanwhile, Litecoin Foundation is working to promote the adoption of the cryptocurrency, for example, through partnerships with “massive companies such as PayPal” and with a Visa card to use LTC directly in stores that will arrive in Latin America soon, according to what he told this media.
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