Litecoin: New LTC Partnership Can Help Boost Mainstream Adoption
When it comes to mainstream adoption, the process is a very slow one. It will most likely be a decade or more until we can see the impact that cryptocurrency has on mainstream applications and businesses. One thing is for sure, is that a lot of crypto enthusiasts are eagerly anticipating the day when it happens.
Looking outside of bitcoin, Litecoin is one of the biggest digital assets in the space which is seemingly doing a lot for mainstream adoption. Most recently, the creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee has made waves with the blockchain-based hotel booking platform, Travala.com. So, despite the company being another one based on the blockchain, the way it plays on the travel industry and represents a use case that can serve a model for future agreements is very interesting.
Announcing the , Lee stated:
“We are excited to work with Travala.com to make it easier for Litecoin users to #TravelWithLitecoin. Nothing aids mass adoption more than real-world use cases, and the opportunity to use a global currency like Litecoin to travel around the world is a powerful one.”
The Litecoin Foundation said on Twitter:
Excited to work with to make it easier to ! ⚡️✈️
— Foundation (@LTCFoundation)
With this new partnership with the travel site, travellers will be able to cut their hotel costs by 40 percent by paying with Litecoin on Travala.com. Starting things off, Travala has a portfolio of almost 600k properties which goes across hundreds of nations and territories and is teaming up with the Litecoin Foundation for the upcoming Litecoin Summit, which will be unfolded more at the blockchain week in Las Vegas later in the year. With this, the blockchain-based travel startup is also the official partner of the bitcoin 2019 event. It’s not as though paying with crypto have to compromise, either.
Followers of both projects seemed to cheer on the development on Twitter, including one person waiting to see Charlie Lee tweet about the partnership with the travel firm.
Price
Over the weekend, things took a turn in the crypto space but in a very bullish way! bitcoin surged over the $7,000 key resistance level which is a great sign for the market. Litecoin is priced over $80, and as reported by CCN, “it’s a reflection of a new-and-improved Litecoin Foundation that is taking control of its destiny even if the project is decentralised.”
Low Fees
The Litecoin creator seems to have a vision for the project. Lee wants to include a faster and cheaper cryptocurrency against bitcoin. Lee has been able to do that and in the latest software update, kicked things up a notch. The release of Litecoin Core v0.17.1 leaves us in a lower default transaction fee which users cheered on social media.
According to the announcement:
“The default minimum transaction fee -mintxfee has been lowered to 0.0001 LTC/kB after relaxing the minimum relay and dust relay fee rates in prior releases.”
The timing of the announcement seemed to disappoint a lot of users which unfortunately overlapped with the bitcoin hack on the popular crypto exchange, Binance. Even so, Lee didn’t seem fazed by it as he said:
“Why would we stop working? Why do developers need to time the market with releases?”
With what Lee is hinting at, more partnerships seem to be in the headlights for Litecoin.
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This is a re-write of “”. Please note: Everything in this article is just advice based on our best understanding of the current situation.
Gold
(also referred to as Bgold, and trading under the ticker BTG) November 12, 2017. Since the bitcoin blockchain technically forked on bitcoin block 491407, anyone who held bitcoin (BTC) on October 24, 2017 should have an equivalent amount of BTG attributed to their bitcoin private keys.
In our, we explained how to secure your private keys so you could be sure to access your BTG and B2X. The B2X fork has since been by the leaders of that project, however, and it currently seems very unlikely to happen in any serious way.
As such, this follow-up article explains how you can claim (and potentially use) your BTG — only your BTG.
Be Careful
Good news: bitcoin Gold enforces strong replay protection. This means you can’t accidentally spend your BTC when you mean to spend BTG or vice versa.
As such, if you don’t care about BTG at all right now, you don’t need to do a thing. You can just keep using bitcoin as you always have. If you ever change your mind (and don’t lose your bitcoin private keys in the meantime), you can still claim your BTG at any point in the future.
Likewise, if you want to hold onto your BTG long term, you also don’t need to do anything right now. You can keep using BTC as if nothing happened; just make sure to never lose your private keys.
(In both these cases, however, it could come in handy to keep a record of the bitcoin addresses that stored your bitcoins at the time of the split. This is not strictly necessary, but your future self may thank you if you do it. You should be able to find this information in your wallet of choice, though where you find it may differ a little bit from wallet to wallet. Alternatively, you could move all your coins to a new address. If you then look up all your transactions since October 25, 2017, and note which addresses spent coins since that date, you know which addresses held coins at the time of the split.)
Now let’s assume you do care about BTG right now, at least enough to want to sell your share. (1 BTG is trading around 0.02 BTC at the time of writing of this article, so you could earn a 2 percent “dividend” on your BTC if you decide to sell.)
If you followed the advice outlined in our beginner’s guide, the good news is that you should be in full control of your bitcoin private keys. This means you now hold BTC as well as BTG.
The bad news is that it’s not necessarily easy or safe to claim your BTG. If you’re using insecure (or even malicious) software, you may accidentally expose your private keys. And because these are the same private keys that secure your BTC, this exposure could lead to your BTC being stolen. You stand to lose much more from losing your BTC than you stand to gain from selling your BTG.
Therefore, you are going to want to take your time and make sure you understand what you are doing well enough to do it without exposing your private keys. Your BTG isn’t going anywhere.
Accessing Your Coins
In our beginner’s guide to surviving the Bgold (and SegWit2x) forks, we explained how to secure your private keys and recommended different wallet options. Here, you can find, per option, how to access your BTG.
Note that while it’s not strictly necessary in all cases, it’s probably best to first move your bitcoins (BTC) to a new address, or even a whole new wallet with a new seed, before you even touch your BTG. This way you don’t add any security risks, while it’s potentially also a bit better for privacy. (More on this below.)
Paper Wallet
The first recommendation in our beginner’s guide to surviving the Bgold (and SegWit2x) forks was to use a paper wallet. This advice was given in the context of storing your coins long term in particular. But if you want to access your BTG, you can, of course, do this right away.
However, the point of a paper wallet really is that your private keys are not stored in any device that could be hacked. Therefore, if you’re going to upload your private key into a bitcoin Gold wallet, you should definitely create a whole new paper wallet with a new private key for your bitcoin (BTC). It’s probably best to then first sweep your private keys with a bitcoin (BTC) wallet, and then send the coins to this new paper wallet for BTC.
and are two wallets that allow you to sweep bitcoin private keys. Look for the “sweep” option in the menus of these wallets; that’s where you can scan the QR-code displayed on your paper wallet. (Alternatively, you could type in the private key.) Once you’ve done this, send the bitcoins to the new paper wallet.
Once your bitcoins are stored safely on the new paper wallet (ideally after at least one confirmation), the old paper wallet still holds the BTG.
Now, the same trick must be repeated to access your BTG. Electrum does not support BTG, but Coinomi does. Coinomi also published a explaining exactly how to access your BTG. This includes instructions for paper wallets.
Regular Wallet
Our second recommendation was to use a regular wallet, as listed on.org.
How to access your BTG if you were using a regular wallet differs from one wallet to the next. But in most cases, Coinomi is once again the best wallet to import your keys into. While originally written for bitcoin Cash, explains exactly how to make that switch for a number of wallets. (Just mentally replace “BCH” for “BTG” wherever relevant.)
Full Node Wallet
Our third recommendation was to use a full node wallet, like Core or Knots.
These wallets store your private keys in a dedicated folder on your computer. You can make a backup of this folder using the menu in your wallet and select “Backup wallet.” Once you’ve done this, you should be able to import this backup into the bitcoin Gold full node, Gold Core.
But once again, it’s a lot easier (and possibly even safer) to export your private keys from your bitcoin full node and import them into the Coinomi mobile wallet. While originally written for bitcoin Cash, explains how to do that for BTG as well. (Just mentally replace “BCH” for “BTG” wherever relevant.)
Hardware Wallet
We also recommended using a hardware wallet to keep your private keys secure — though we also noted that these wallets don’t necessarily make it easy to access your BTG.
Indeed, at the time of writing, no hardware wallet has enabled access to BTG. However, and have published blog posts indicating that they will be working on it. If you use either of these wallets, keep an eye out for announcements on their social media or blogs. and have also published blog posts on the Bgold fork, suggesting they might support it; but they don’t support it yet. Keep an eye on their social media and blog to see if that changes.
If you did not follow our advice and instead stored your BTC in any other wallet, or on an exchange, or anywhere else, you may or may not still be able to claim your BTG. In this case, you’ll have to figure out for yourself whether this is the case or not, and how to do so. This may, once again, be of help for some wallets. (Just mentally replace “BCH” for “BTG” wherever relevant.)
Using (or Selling) Your BTG
Once you have claimed your BTG, you can use it however you please. Just like any other altcoin, you could, for example, sell it for BTC or perhaps spend it somewhere if it’s accepted for payment, etc.
If you decide to sell your BTG, there are a number of exchanges where you can do this. The bitcoin Gold website lists most of them. (Which of these you decide to trust is up to you; we’re not giving any particular advice.)
But there are three more factors to keep in mind before doing so.
The first factor is privacy. Your public keys (which are linked to your BTC and BTG addresses) are identical for BTC and BTG. This means that whenever you spend your BTG (for example, to send them to an exchange), you do not only reveal your BTG addresses but also your BTC addresses. This can, in turn, reveal a lot about your current holdings as well as your past and future transactions and can even, by extension, reveal other data about people or entities you transact with. Make sure you are comfortable with giving up this privacy if you are going to send your BTG to an exchange or anywhere else.
The second factor is mostly theoretical at this point but worth a quick mention nonetheless: security. By revealing your public key when spending BTG, you strip away one layer of cryptographic security, even for your BTC addresses. This doesn’t mean that your BTC are insecure right now, but there is an increased chance that your BTC won’t be secure at some point in the (far) future when this particular cryptographic standard is weakened. It is, therefore, best to move your BTC to a new address, at least some time within the next couple of years.
The third factor was already mentioned but bears repeating: If you’re using insecure software to claim your BTG, your BTC may be at risk. It’s probably best to move your BTC to a new address or even a whole new wallet with a new wallet seed before you even start meddling with BTG — regardless of which wallet you were using. That way, if you do mess up with insecure BTG software, you shouldn’t lose your BTC.
So, to Recap …
1. You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to, and there is no rush. If your private keys are secure, your BTG is secure.
2. If you want to use your BTG in any way, it’s probably best to first move your BTC to a whole new address that you control, or even to a whole new wallet generated from a new seed. (But don’t lose your old private keys or seed: These still hold your BTG!)
3. Once you know what you’re doing, upload your private keys into a bitcoin Gold wallet, like Coinomi. Then you can keep it, spend it, perhaps send it to an exchange to sell or whatever it is you want to do with your “free money.”
