Bitcoin is a digital currency, a protocol, and a software that enables
>Instant peer to peer transactions
>Worldwide payments
>Low or zero processing fees
>And much more!
since the prices for bitcoins are really high at the moment and mining a block is really hard, a new trend has etablished. Litecoin.
What is Litecoin?
Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant payments to anyone in the world. It differs from its parent Bitcoin in that can be efficiently mined with consumer-grade hardware. Litecoin provides faster confirmations (targeted at every 2.5 minutes on average) and uses memory-hard, scrypt-based mining to target the CPUs and GPUs most people already have.
The Litecoin network is scheduled to produce four times as many currency units as Bitcoin.
One of the aims of Litecoin was to provide a mining algorithm that could run at the same time, on the same hardware used to mine bitcoins.
With the rise of specialized ASICs for Bitcoin, Litecoin continues to satisify these goals. It is unlikely for FPGA or ASIC mining to take over Litecoin until the currency is widely used.
Litecoin is still at a very low price ( 4$ ), but once it reaches Mt. Gox and become more popular, like Bitcoin, shit will go skyrockets.
You should take a look into this.
More information on Bitcoins:
http://bitcoin.org/en/how-it-works
Bitcoin course:
http://bitcoinwatch.com/
http://www.listentobitcoin.com/ (you can listen to live transactions. higher amounts are deeper tones. )
More information about Litecoin:
http://litecoin.org/
Litecoin course:
http://www.ltc-charts.com/
Q&A for both:
BTC: https://bitcointalk.org/
LTC: http://forum.litecoin.net/
Have fun and stay hydrated
- Doodle
