How Many Litecoins Are Left?

If you’ve read our beginner’s guide to Litecoin, you already know that this fork of Bitcoin has upped its predecessor’s game in most ways conceivable. It has improved security of transactions by eliminating the possibility of a double spending attack, lowered transaction processing time from Bitcoin’s ten minutes to just 2.5 minutes and democratized mining by using the SHA-256 algorithm to make it less ASIC-dependent. However, in what is perhaps the most key change it has made to Bitcoin’s original formula, it has increased the upper limit of total coin supply.

What is the new upper limit? How many Litecoins are left? What does it mean for the future of Litecoin prices? Let’s find out.

What is The Total Number of Litecoins There Can Ever Be?

Now we all know that the upper cap of Bitcoin is placed at the mythical mark of 21 million. Once that number is reached, no more Bitcoins will ever be mined again. This cap on the supply helps to keep the prices at a standard level. Now, Litecoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin and which is often described as the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold”, has followed this very vision and set an upper limit for itself. However, this cap has been set at four times that of Bitcoin. This means that Litecoin’s total cap is 84 million. After reaching this number, no more fresh Litecoins will be distributed.

How many Litecoins Are Left?

If 84 million is the total number of LTC coins there can ever be, how many are there now? Well, at the time of this article going to press, there are 59.12 million Litecoins in circulation. This means that there are 24.8 million Litecoins that are actually left for the crypto world to use. Now in the next section, let us have a look at the significance of the way in which Litecoin’s total supply was decided.

What Does The Limit on Number of Litecoins Mean?

We know that there is a simple rule of economics: price rises when supply falls and demand rises and vice versa. These little crypto coins are also not immune to this logic and keeping a cap on the supply provides a shallow barrier against the various forces of the market. By making sure there will only ever be a limited supply of Litecoins in the market, the coin’s innate value is reinforced. Having established the need for having a total supply, we come to why the specific value of 84 million was chosen.

By upping the total cap from Bitcoin’s 21 million to Litecoin’s 84 million, the LTC developers were basically playing a game of numbers and psychology. As Richard Brown, an IBM exec, pointed out in an interview back in 2013, people tend to prefer rounded numbers. Our eyes normally move from left to the right and we tend to emphasize more on numbers in decimal places towards the left than the right. Bitcoin can be split up to 8 decimal places but when it rises in value, there is a shift towards the right. Litecoin’s upper limit gives it a psychological edge here as users tend to prefer units that measure their worth in larger numbers and hence are prone to preferring such rounded values. Clearly, while there are many cons and pros of Litecoin, the high upper limit of Litecoin supply definitely makes it to the list of pros!