This is a follow up to a comment I left in another topic: What is the current state of LTC development? - #7 by nehgekim
I develop a lot with Litecoin for a project I work on with a company, Crypdex. I skip the test networks and build “real money” applications right on the public chains, mostly Litecoin. Very much the same way people don’t use a test network when they develop web applications, developers just understand TCP/HTTP will work, no testnet required.
Most software I find has methods for calculating transaction fees (just the network/miner fee, not like a exchange fee for using the software).
So, just did a programatic transaction with this project called Sparkswap and here are the numbers I pulled from block explorer, the time was just me manually checking on the page every minute for like 20 minutes while I was watching some videos on Youtube:
Send BTC: 0.00013731 BTC as a fee, first confirmation in 10 minutes, N/A
Send BTC: 0.00000262 LTC as a fee, first confirmation in 4 minutes, 3 confirmations in 8 minutes, 6 confirmations in 24 minutes
I ended this after 30 minutes so Bitcoin is an N/A because it only got one confirmation in 30 minutes.
Developing on Litecoin let’s me skip the testnet, which saves times and makes things simple, without costing more. Fees are low enough and transaction times are fast enough that it’s almost frictionless. I can dump in and pull out a lot of BTC to LTC to build and test applications. I can avoid maintaining a way to deal with the testnet buy just hodling my BTC/LTC.
I hope you found this useful, please let me know what you think about “real money” applications on Litecoin or other blockchains. I would like to know how people are building testing environments for applications using theses public blockchains.