In 2019, the total transaction fees accrued from using Litecoin stood at $417,000, 6.76X more than Bitcoin Cash, a Bitcoin network spinoff, that has taken steps to slash the cost of transactions in an effort of being a preferred alternative of Bitcoin, the dominant network. Bitcoin Cash users paid a mere $61,000 in fees in 2019.

In a summary posted on Twitter, Litecoin transaction cost is expensive despite its small block creation time and aim of being Silver to Bitcoin’s Gold.

In 2019, total fees paid to use:

$1,200,000 (@UniswapExchange – liquidity provider fees)
$412,000 (Litecoin)
$179,000 (Ripple)
$70,000 (Monero)
$61,000 (Bitcoin Cash)
$30,000 (Zcash)
$9,341 (Cardano)
$2,982 (Ethereum Classic)

(data: coinmetrics)

— Josh Stark (@0xstark) January 9, 2020

Unexpectedly, the disparity is in a year when Litecoin upgraded to the much-anticipated Litecoin Core 0.17.1.

In this version, transaction fees were to be slashed by 10X, a boon for traders, users of the network and Lightning Network proponents given the cross-swap between BTC and LTC enabled by LN.

Through a blogpost, several privacy changes will be made but what drew attention was the drastic reduction in transaction fees from 0.001 LTC/kb to 0.0001 LTC/kb.

“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.”

Since inception, the founder Charlie Lee has reiterated the project’s ambition of not competing with Bitcoin but complementing it, just like Silver does to Gold.

Charlie Lee, in an interview, expressed his admiration of Bitcoin saying both—BTC and LTC, revolutionized how people transact.

Crypto Is the Best Form of Money

Ultimately, even with technical hitches and Bitcoin’s inability to scale, cryptocurrencies were the best form of money given its cheap transaction fees and the coin’s digital nature. In his assessment, he argues that fiat money, though convenient, is not really “your” money because it is closely monitored and under the tight grip of governments.

“I see cryptocurrency as freedom of money…. I’d like to see that revolution happens, where cryptocurrencies become the reserve currency, where everyone will use it as money. It’s just the best form of money we’ve ever seen.”

Bitcoin Cash transaction fees are minimal and near negligible.

At the time of writing, the cost of transacting over the network stood at $0.007 while Bitcoin’s and Litecoin’s were $0.735 and $0.0229, respectively.