Coinbase has just rolled out full support for Litecoin, its third cryptocurrency.Users will be able to buy, sell, send and store Litecoin from Coinbase’s website or mobile apps, using easy payment methods like a credit/debit card or PayPal.While Coinbase was founded as a platform to transact only with Bitcoin, the company has since announced its intent to add other cryptocurrencies with the broader goal of becoming a “digital currency company.” Last summer Coinbase added support for Ethereum, which is now the second most-popular digital currency with a market cap about one-third the size of Bitcoin’s market cap.At the time, the reasoning was that Coinbase saw Ethereum’s focus on smart contracts as a tangible improvement over Bitcoin, and not just another alt-coin that doesn’t serve any real function.Interestingly, Litecoin’s creator, Charlie Lee, has been director of engineering at Coinbase for nearly four years.And while there were always ongoing discussions about adding Litecoin to the platform, they didn’t really materialize until recently.

Lee explained that it’s been a slow few years for Litecoin.While the digital currency had a heyday in late 2013 with its price spiking to over $50 per coin and over $1 billion in total market cap, it quickly fell back to earth and basically remained flat for three years.So why the sudden change?If you’re familiar with Bitcoin you know that the community is facing an internal struggle with deciding how to scale the currency for the future.Essentially, Bitcoin’s original code wasn’t designed to process this many transactions on a daily basis, and now the network is charging too much per transaction, which takes too long to confirm.Luckily there are two main proposed solutions: Bitcoin Unlimited, which aims to get rid of the block size limit altogether, and Segregated Witness (SegWit), which wants to slightly increase the block size while also moving some non-essential data out of the transaction and off the blockchain.Both solutions would require a “fork,” meaning the majority of miners would have to agree on the changes and signal to slightly alter the currency’s blockchain.

So far the Bitcoin community has been unable to reach a consensus on how to fix the scaling issue.A few months ago Lee and the Litecoin community decided to work on implementing SegWit into Litecoin.And after heated discussions with the biggest players in the Litecoin mining community, the group reached consensus about a week ago to implement SegWit.litecoin pool accountLast week, miners “voted” with their hash power to signal for SegWit, and the actual code will be implemented next week.bitcoin daily beastWhile Litecoin is still small enough that it’s not suffering from the same scaling issues as is Bitcoin, the team thought it’d be a good way to bring something exciting to Litecoin.bitcoin norway studentPlus, SegWit has some other benefits besides just increasing network capacity.bitcoin cloud mining pool

It prevents malleability, which is essentially the risk (that currently exists in Bitcoin) that third parties can alter transactions before they are confirmed by the network.Implementing SegWit will also allow Litecoin to experiment with something called Lightening Networks — which would essentially allow for instant Litecoin payments off the main blockchain, with transactions only settling on the chain when they need to.trade bitcoin dogecoinAnd perhaps best of all, these recent developments have rekindled interest in the Litecoin currency, sending the price (and more importantly, volume) skyrocketing.bitcoin io errorThis increased trading volume is what finally allowed Coinbase to implement Litecoin, knowing they now have a liquid enough market (on the Coinbase-owned exchange GDAX) to supply user demand.litecoin transfer fee

Essentially, Lee sees Litecoin’s long-term goal as being able to help Bitcoin alleviate some transactional volume by taking over smaller, less important transactions.So you could use Lightening Networks on Litecoin to buy a coffee with zero confirmation times or transaction fees.bitcoin news forkBut if you’re wiring $50,000 to your bank, you could still use Bitcoin for the increased security that comes from a bigger network of decentralized miners.bitcoin a okpayHe also sees Litecoin as a testing ground for future Bitcoin features.If Litecoin can successfully implement SegWit and Lightning Networks, it may show the Bitcoin community that these features are clearly the way to once and for all resolve the capacity issue.Advertise Jobs at BTCManager BITCOIN PRICE: 2,716.73 HIGH: 2,744.00 LOW: 2,663.00 BTC = USD #TRENDING STORIES Next Event Money 20/20 Europe • June 26-28, 2017 European-focused event on Fin-tech, providing an overlook of the disruptive ways in which consumers and businesses manage, spend and borrow… → BTCMANAGER TWITTER: TOTAL TWEETS: 3850 total FOLLOWERS: 16163 official hashtag:#BTCManager BTCMANAGER Litecoin Becomes Anonymous, Available on Jaxx Soon After adding compatibility with Ethereum Classic for their blockchain wallets, Jaxx recently announced their newest addition, Litecoin, to be available in October.

Demands from the community and the pre-approval of a select few cryptocurrencies by Apple’s App Store development team means that Litecoin compatibility will be available across all of Jaxx’s wallets.We're thrilled to announce that @litecoin will soon be a part of the Jaxx family!/HTWwDremWt — Jaxx Wallet (@jaxx_io) September 21, 2016 Jaxx also stated that another 15-20 cryptocurrencies will be added by the end of the year, which would make their wallet the most comprehensive on the market.Litecoin has stood the test of time, remaining in the top five cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and October will also see the cryptocurrency’s fifth anniversary.As part of the celebration, Ledger has released a limited edition hardware wallet, the Ledger Nano S with a Litecoin design.The Ledger device will soon support Litecoin as well as Bitcoin.Some advantages of Litecoin over Bitcoin are faster transaction times and almost no blockchain congestion.However, while each Litecoin transaction consists of one input and one output, the amounts of each are known to the public.

Consequently, this could cause privacy issues and a loss of fungibility, a problem also present with Bitcoin.Fungibility is defined as "the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution”.This means that each individual litecoin should be as good as any other.Unfortunately, Litecoin is not fully fungible (as well as Bitcoin), which results in individual Litecoins being different from each other.Due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of both Litecoin and Bitcoin, the lack of fungibility could challenge the value proposition of these cryptocurrencies as money.With both being traceable using the publicly available blockchain, certain coins may be worth less due to being ‘tainted’ as a result of being linked to addresses involved in hacks, drug deals, money laundering and so on.To position itself better in the cryptocurrency market, one Litecoin developer has recently introduced plans to incorporate confidential transactions to strengthen Litecoin’s fungibility property.

To make Litecoin transactions anonymous, the community faces two choices; a soft-fork is required to enable confidential transactions whereas a hard-fork would be necessary to implement ring signatures to improve anonymity further.However, while the former only requires consensus from Litecoin miners, the latters risks a split in the Litecoin blockchain, like the one that occurred with Ethereum’s hard-fork, as a successful hard-fork requires an unanimous decision from the entire Litecoin community.While the proposal may not make Litecoin fully anonymous, it is a step in the right direction.The founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, explained in another Reddit post the after-effects of making Litecoin anonymous: “It's true that Confidential Transactions (CT) will increase the transaction size and slow down node processing.The good thing is that Litecoin has plenty of spare block space.Mind as well make use of it.One thing I am a big proponent of is to make sure that incentives are aligned.