Pros and Cons of Altcoins – A Guide for Beginners

Pros and Cons of Altcoins – A Guide for Beginners

Knowledgebase
17/06/2020 by Koinal
5795
“Altcoins”, also known as 'Alternative to Bitcoin,' is a name given to all other cryptocurrencies launched after the success of Bitcoin.
Pros and Cons of Altcoin

Altcoins include Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, and many more. They promote themselves as better alternatives to Bitcoin.
You can purchase Altcoins from our Koinal.io website. We allow our customers to buy Altcoins via their preferred payment methods such as bank/credit cards and wire bank transfers.
However, before you make any purchase, you must know about the pros and cons of Altcoins. This blog post will help you find your answers and what you should invest in if you are new in the cryptocurrency market. So, let’s find out.

We will be discussing critical Altcoins that are popular in the cryptocurrency market. Let’s get started!

1) Ethereum (ETH)

Ether is the second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin with a market cap of $21 billion. An alternative to Bitcoin, Ethereum remains in high demand in the cryptocurrency market.

Pros

Ethereum is highly secure and accepted by various industries. In the case of Bitcoin crumbles, you can avail Altcoins like Ethereum to fall back on.

ETH has the largest market cap after Bitcoin, and therefore, it can be the best Altcoin to invest. It also carries components like dApps, DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), and blockchain smart contracts that make it operative and useful blockchain.

Besides, for executing code on the Ethereum platform, ETH is needed. Since many projects are built on this decentralized platform, ETH can become a potential cryptocurrency in the long run. 

Cons

Some do not favor Ethereum due to its scalability issues. For instance, it has a slow transaction time that influences the status and activity of its network. Precisely, the public blockchain of Ethereum can process only 15 to 20 transactions per second as opposed to 45,000 transactions processed by Visa.

Besides, it is highly vulnerable to competition rising in the cryptocurrency market. For instance, other blockchain platforms claim to be more scalable. 

2) Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin is a clone or fork of Bitcoin. LTC can implement technical improvements like lightning network and SegWit (Segregated Witness).

Pros

As compared to Bitcoin, the transaction speed of Litecoin is four times faster; more precisely, the closing speed of blocks is 10 minutes for Bitcoin, whereas it is just 2.5 minutes for Litecoin. It makes Litecoin less susceptible to attacks. Also, the market cap of LTC is $3.1 Billion.

LTC is relatively stable from other Altcoins as it is based on the Scrypt algorithm. Besides, the transaction fee for LTC is low.

Cons

Investing in Litecoin can be risky as the central authority does not manage it since Bitcoin embraces the SegWit update that takes away one of its unique selling points. 

3) Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

It is another permanent fork of Bitcoin. If you don’t like SegWit, you can invest in Bitcoin Cash. The market cap of BCH is $7.7 Billion, followed by Ripple.

Pros

BCH’s transaction fees are $0.0019, which is relatively lower than the original Bitcoin having transaction costs $0.20 per transaction. Besides, BCH’s transfer time is higher than BTC, so you will not have to wait longer to verify the purchase.

Bitcoin cash has its blockchain technology, and it implements an improved blocksize of 8MB as opposed to blocking the size of Bitcoin (i.e., 1MB). This limited size increases the transaction fees while lowering transaction speed.

Cons

Due to serious concern regarding centralization in Bitcoin cash, in addition to branding of BCH, it is problematic to distinguish between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin cash has quite fewer trading pairs as compared to Bitcoin that makes it less tradable among investors.

Moreover, another disadvantage of BCH is its low rates of adoption across industries that can impact its growth in the cryptocurrency market.

4) Ripple (XRP)

Ripple serves as both a digital currency and a platform that streamlines cross-border international payments. Regarding market capitalization, Ripple secures the 3rd rank after Bitcoin and Ethereum with a market cap that totals $18 Billion.

Pros

Ripple network is highly secure and anonymous as opposed to traditional bank services. Adoption rates of XRP are quite high among various financial institutes due to its high traceability and instantaneous transactions.

Cons

Ripple developers decide when and how much XRP coins should be released. Ripple is also vulnerable to attacks once the code is accessible.

Even though Ripple has secured trust and confidence in investors and critical financial institutions, its exercises have low adoption rates. 

Final Verdict

 Now that you know about crucial Altcoins’ major pros and cons of, it is up to you that Altcoin wants to invest in it. If you have already decided, stop waiting and buy an Altcoin that interests you most from our website.

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