- The lowering of fees is great news for traders
- The update contains several other features
- The development fulfills Charlie Lee’s desire to create more privacy
Litecoin has announced the release of the much-anticipated Litecoin Core 0.17.1. Because of the latest update, Litecoin has reduced transaction fees by 10 times, which is great news for crypto traders and Lightning Network enthusiasts.
Reduce the Minimum Applicable Transaction Cost
According to an official blog post on May 7, 2019, Litecoin announced that the new client software version dubbed Litecoin Core v0.17.1 will introduce several changes to the user interface, enhanced privacy, a new wallet format, plus a significant network fee policy change that will automatically reduce the minimum applicable transaction cost from 0.001 LTC/kb – the default value of the previous client – to 0.0001 LTC/kb. The blog post stated:
“This is a new major version release, including new features, various bug fixes and performance improvements, and updated translations. It is recommended for all users to upgrade to this version.”
The announcement is great news for Keynesians who love to spend cryptocurrencies and Lightning Network fans who love to onboard the second layer at a cost that is lower than Bitcoin’s.
Lower Fees and Lightning Network
Once the 0.17.1 Litecoin Core update is adopted by most of the nodes, writing your transaction in a full block is expected to cost a paltry $0.15, which is ten times lower than the 2017 Bull Run amount. This means therefore that under the normal circumstances of low demand, a user’s average fee will be less than a cent.
This development is perhaps what has been the missing link to open a Lightning Network channel in order to increase adoption and tackle the complaints around costs since atomic swaps between BTC and LTC became possible.
More Privacy
An extra feature of the Litecoin Core 0.17.1 update is a selection feature that offers greater privacy for user UTXOs. The support for partially signed transactions has also been added to “simplify workflows where multiple parties need to cooperate to produce a transaction”. This inclusion will enable greater functionality for hardware wallets, multi-sig setups, and CoinJoin transactions. The development fulfills Charlie Lee’s desire to create more fungibility expressed in January via a tweet:
“Fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. Now that the scaling debate is behind us, the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy. I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions.”
Back in January 2019, Litecoin set the goal of attaining greater fungibility and privacy and part of the quest included adding Confidential Transactions and the solution seems to be the creation of extension blocks through implementing Beam MimbleWimble protocol.
