CoinbaseCoinbase Adds Litecoin and Prices JumpJeff John RobertsYou've probably heard about the digital currency called bitcoin.But you may not realize there are literally dozens of other so-called alt-currencies out there that work in a very similar way and that, like bitcoin, their value has been soaring in the last year.While bitcoin is far and away the biggest—its market cap is more than twice all the other alt-currencies combined—some of its rivals are gaining traction.These include Litecoin, a currency introduced in 2013 by former Google employee Charlie Lee, and that is currently the fourth most valuable alt-currency.Litecoin, as its name suggests, is a "lighter" version than bitcoin.It can process transactions four times faster and has not run into the sort of controversies related to scaling for growth that are currently consuming the bitcoin community.Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.But despite its history and positive reputation, it hasn't experienced the same recent dramatic increase in value as bitcoin or ethereum, which is the No.

2 alt-currency on the list.One reason for this could be that Litecoin is harder to obtain than those other two currencies.That changed, however, on Wednesday as the popular digital currency exchange service Coinbase made it possible for people to buy and sell Litecoin.is bitcoin logo copyrightedAnd, indeed, prices jumped over 25 percent on the Coinbase news according to the site Coin Market Cap.The Coinbase tie-in is significant because is by far the most popular way for ordinary people—as opposed to dedicated crypto-heads—to buy and sell digital currency.bitcoin atualLitecoin's appearance on the platform means it is suddenly a lot more liquid as an asset.Lee, the Litecoin creator who is now head engineer at Coinbase, is (unsurprisingly) bullish about the currency's potential.bitcoin sync stopped

But his optimism is not just due to the fact it's now easier to buy and sell Litecoin.As Lee points out, Litecoin is in the middle of adopting a number of new technologies (such as Segregated Witness or SegWit) that increase its transaction speed—bitcoin backers have been trying to implement similar improvements for months, but the process has been caught up in internecine fighting."Webitcoin pool donationhave all the cool scaling technology.bitcoin lottery by hackingBut the reason we adopted SegWit was not for the scaling features, but because it allows for instant payments off-chain," said Lee, referring to a method for clearing transactions using a variation of the digital currency's core computer protocol.This week's development is likely to give a boost to Litecoin, though it's unlikely the currency will ever emerge as real challenger to bitcoin—a mantle increasingly being adopted by relative newcomer ethereum.mine litecoin windows

A Litecoin blockchain REST and web socket API service for Litecore Node.This is a backend-only service.The API endpoints will be available by default at: http://localhost:3001/insight-api/ Note: You can use an existing Litecoin data directory, however txindex, addressindex, timestampindex and spentindex needs to be set to true in bitcoin.conf, as well as a few other additional fields.The unspent outputs format now has satoshis and height: The timestamp property will only be set for unconfirmed transactions and height can be used for determining block order.The confirmationsFromCache is nolonger set or necessary, confirmation count is only cached for the time between blocks.There is a new GET endpoint or raw blocks at /rawblock/: There are a few changes to the GET endpoint for /addr/[:address]: Some of the fields and methods are not supported: The /tx/ endpoint JSON response will not include the following fields on the "vin" object: The /tx/ endpoint JSON response will not include the following fields on the "vout" object.

The /status?q=getTxOutSetInfo method has also been removed due to the query being very slow and locking bitcoind.Plug-in support for Insight API is also no longer available, as well as the endpoints: Caching support has not yet been added in the v0.3 upgrade.To protect the server, insight-api has a built it query rate limiter.It can be configurable in bitcore-node.json with: /bitpay/insight-api/blob/master/lib/ratelimiter.js#L10-17 Get block hash by height which is the hash of the Genesis block (0 height) Get block summaries by date: The response contains the value in Satoshis.Note: if pagination params are not specified, the result is an array of transactions.The web socket API is served using socket.io.The following are the events published by insight: tx: new transaction received from network.This event is published in the 'inv' room.Data will be a app/models/Transaction object.Sample output: block: new block received from network.This event is published in the inv room.

Data will be a app/models/Block object.Sample output: : new transaction concerning received from network.This event is published in the room.status: every 1% increment on the sync task, this event will be triggered.This event is published in the sync room.The following html page connects to the socket.io insight API and listens for new transactions.Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.