Why Litecoin's Scrypt Hashing Algorithm is Superior

Litecoin is now trading at $180, nearly half of this year's rates.

All the same, LTC is one of the most liquid coins around, with a well-established ecosystem comprising admirable infrastructure.

Litecoin forked from Bitcoin and added a few enhancements.

Besides increasing the total supply to 84 million, the lead developers chose the Scrypt hashing algorithm over SHA-256 for several technical reasons. A hashing algorithm serves to convert data into a fixed-length hash in a simple mathematical process. Even a single character change of the input will produce a different fixed-length hash.

Since the team declared from the very beginning that they intended to be Bitcoin's Silver—not gold, the coin best serves as an alternative currency, a medium of exchange.

In the background, securing transactions are a web of Scrypt miners, working efficiently, daily to keep the network secure. 

Unlike SHA-256, Scrypt is faster and easier, enabling convenient operations. Accordingly, Scrypt uses less energy and can be run from a CPU since the hash rate produced by Scrypt-dependent miners is in the range of KH/s to MH/s. This further helps in miner distribution, making the base layer more robust.