| Online Broker | LTC Trading Platforms | About |
|---|---|---|
| Plus500 | Plus500 Platform LTC Trading Platforms | Plus500 offers LTC Crypto CFD trading on its user friendly platform About |
| Deriv | Deriv X, MT5 LTC Trading Platforms | Deriv offers Litecoin CFD trading on its user friendly innovative Deriv X platform and on MT5, thus supporting LTC automated trading About |
| IronFX | MT4 LTC Trading Platform | IronFX offers LTC CFD trading on MT4 About |
| ThinkMarkets | MT4, MT5, ThinkTrader LTC Trading Platforms | ThinkMarket provides Litecoin CFD trading on its user friendly ThinkTrader and on MT4 and MT5 About |
| FOREX.com | Advanced Trading Platform, Web Trader LTC Trading Platforms | FOREX.com offers LTC CFD trading on its user friendly Web Trader and on its Advanced Trading Platform About |
Litecoin - Increasing the Rate at which Blockchain Blocks are Processed
These brokers offer CFD trading which allows speculation on the price movement of the cryptocurrency Litecoin (LTC). When trading CFDs, the trader does not own the cryptocurrency, does not need a wallet to store it and can go long or short.
What is Litecoin ?
Litecoin is a cryptocurrency, that is a digital currency secured by cryptography. Litecoin forked from the Bitcoin Core and shares a number of similarities with Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies it uses a distributed electronic ledger called the blockchain which records all verified transactions in the cryptocurrency and also uses miners to process transactions.
However it has differences, including that it reduces the time taken to process each block composing the blockchain. The aim of this is to increase the rate at which transactions are processed. It has a different proof-of-work algorithm, as well (specifically it uses scrypt rather than SHA-256).
How does Litecoin's proof-of-work algorithm affect the machines used to process blocks ?
The proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm used affects the type of computers which are used to process transactions on the blockchain. This is because it is a computationally intensive activity which must be performed to mine a cryptocurrency, but different PoWs can have different computational demands.
There are a number of different types of computing devices which are used to mine. These are: CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs. CPUs (Central Processing Units) and GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) are cheaper and widely available.
FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Arrays. These are devices which are more generalised than an ASIC, but are more powerful than a CPU or GPU. ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit and as might be expected from the name, these are purpose built and therefore potentially more effective, but more expensive to run.
Litecoin's PoW differs from Bitcoin's in that it is more memory intensive and less processor intensive. This means that it is meant to be less effective to use more specialised machines, where the advantage is increased processing power, compared with Bitcoin. However it is still possible to build ASICs for memory intensive PoWs, but it can the make the machines themselves more expensive.
