Bitcoin Forum

Since there are only 21 million BTC out there ever, and LTC about 4 times as many, I was wondering what people think could be (if there even can be) an upper limit in terms of price for LTC. Right now LTC price is determined roughly by Bitcoin, but what do people think about 1 LTC being worth 1 BTC if there are so many more LTC then BTC.

LTC is still growing. In time it could. But it doesn't need to go that high. Time will tell.

Just speaking my thoughts here...

All BTC, LTC, PPC, etc price is valued at the price the adopters, miners, investors, speculators, traders etc deem the crypto-currency to be valued at. Having said that the foundation of the Blockchain and Satoshi's ideas and work to create a decentralised money system has attracted a wide spectrum of people so far who believe in the idea and the founding principals of such a monetary system.  As word spreads other like minded people will join in and make some form of investment or interaction with the currency and this will only increase the value of the currency (baring a few extreme malicious investments).

If a coin is "Easy" to mine... then the value of the coin will be proportionally lower as there are a lot of people capable of mining with some serious Hashing, and there are a lot of computers out there that can/are used for mining (I know its still small compared with ALL the computers out there... but of those interested in crypto-currency, there are proportionally more people mining than if everyone was interested in crypto-currencies) ... but sorry got sidetracked... basically people will and do "Pump and Dump" coins... mine a coin and sell for one with higher $ value

If a coin can be used to trade for both $, £, etc.... then "financial investors" are interested, individuals who may speculate on the value of the coins can then buy them, alternatively people can invest the coins to try and accumulate more, for example I know of someone who has written a bot to trade BTC and USD ($) on MtGox, and he has set up an investment fund to allow others to invest in his market expertise and faith in his bot and calculations and you get paid in BTC weekly for your investment etc...
Also by trading from the coin to another currency this is the outsource for the "miners" to convert their mined coins back into £ or $ or whatever to pay their electricity bills and hardware expenses etc...

If a coin can be used to buy goods etc... then the coin reaches more of the general public, and potentially more of them will buy some coins or mine etc... but it is important to remember I feel that these people interested in the coin will probably not read all the papers on the coins, blockchain, etc but will only really become aware of the currency once they go to purchase something and need the coins.

All this said .. one can not avoid the fact that looking through BTC charts http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#ig12-hourzczsg2010-12-01zeg2011-08-31ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv that the sudden rise in the value of BTC was due to being able to use BTC to buy actual goods that you may not be able to get elsewhere.... a prime market for a new currency :)... but this showed both the value of the currency to the people who had coins... as now they could potentially cash out at a higher than initial investment, and to the people also wanting to purchase such goods as now they needed to get hold of some coins.  Personally it is still a rather tentative area for me in BTC as i feel that BTC needs to be backed by alternative sources, ie spreading the risk in investors and buyers.... for example say we all used our BTC to buy potatoes, and only using BTC could you buy potatoes and that was all you could buy with BTC then I think you would find a number of "investment" funds where you could get paid small amounts of potatoes for your initial investment... you would find a number of potato scams :P and gambling sites... might even be able to buy a golden or silver potatoe!! .... But what happens when suddenly there is the potato famine as in 1845, and scientists discover that potatoes actually cause you to spontaneously combust and all the governments across the world unite to outlaw all potatoes... extreme i know but for the sake of an interesting hypothetical... this would make the BTC and potatoes worthless except for a minority of die hard potato fans as no one would have the "NEED" to buy BTC (or potatoes)

There are a few ways it could go though... say the people mining the coins were able to pay their electricity bills using the coins they mined.... and they were able to buy all the hardware using the coins they mined... then the miner would be able to accumulate wealth in the coins and not need to sell all the coins.. agreed with mining if this was the case then everybody would be doing it!! but that is the beauty of the "difficulty" and the limit on the number of coins in existence etc etc.. but my point being that if there is a way for a business to cover their overheads with the crypto-currency then there is a greater chance of more business using BTC and other crypto-currencies.

Sites like http://www.bitmit.net/en/recent personally I think are a real step forward for the currency as it allows people to get their hands on some of the currency by selling items they have, or for small businesses and individuals (like miners) to buy equipment using BTC....  I think that this is such an important part to the Coins stability in value that I have been working on a PPC Auction site... but it still a work in progress...

Just in speaking to my friends about BTC and other crypto-currencies, I have found that there has to be things the individual can buy with the currency... more than just trading back to $ etc for them to feel secure or interested in buying any coins... or if they are a VERY early adopter then they can be convinced to mine :P ... but maybe it is a reflection of the people I speak to.. but they are all interested but none are yet to buy any, one other friend mines...

But what is the value of LTC based upon? the price of BTC right?? and same with PPC and all the other currencies out there... for now it is only really BTC that has a wide pool of people who will buy the coins in order to buy other material goods with them.  I do not know of a LTC auction site?? or something other than a ponzi scam or gambling site related to LTC?? no company selling gold, silver or coffee beans (http://bitbrew.net) for LTC.. yet... but i think the market is there for such companies in LTC and even PPC in due course... and this will only help to strengthen the value of the currency....

If however a country say like Finland :) or say a struggling financial country like Greece looked to invest in BTC or LTC etc and use it as the nations monetary system then it just gets interesting for all of us with any coins :) as number of people on the network would reach unpressidented highs and there would be no turning back for the currency and the decentralised monetary system.. well that's what i feel.

TL;DR Just make more sites where you can buy and sell genuine items for all crypto-currencies,
If you could only buy oil for LTC, then LTC would be valued higher than BTC i think you would find 

1 LTC should cost more than 0.25 BTC coz Litecoin is more handy (faster confirmations). Not sure about 1 LTC > 1 BTC.

While both types of coin can be created by miners the relative profitability of mining them will probably play a part, but once pretty much all the coins have been minted it should start to come down more to whether people actually "back" them or instead just start up a bunch more new types so they can keeping right on minting.

-MarkM-

Litecoin could only be worth more than .25 BTC if it turn out to have a significant advantage over BTC.

I don't think faster transaction times qualify enough.
One possible scenario would be that it turns out to be more secure than BTC. The SHA-3 competition has declared a winner this week and it is in the realm of possibility that some cryptanalysis on SHA-2 is released after now which has been held back not to compromise security of systems.

demand is demand

1/4 btc has been the implicit appreciation limit I've been thinking. There can be exceptions though, some already have been mentioned, e.g.

1. BTC-only security issue discovered
2. BTC community or political issues driving users away
3  The introduction of ASIC mining seriously undermines BTC userbase
4. Somehow large amount of LTC get destroyed/lost
5. LTC gets explicit "sponsorship" or backing from business(es), organization(s) or wealthy individual(s)
....
etc

I don't think keccak (http://keccak.noekeon.org/NoteOnKeccakParametersAndUsage.pdf) really has much to offer that SHA256 doesn't already have aside from faster speeds (which is why it was selected).  The circuit sizes are still pretty small and thus still will probably be mined more quickly with ASICs.

There is something related to this called Gresham's law. A long time ago, countries made coins out of silver and gold and fixed their relative values. The problem was that the actual values of silver and gold varied, and at some point they did not match the fixed values (gold was more valuable and silver was less valuable). The result result was that nobody wanted silver and everybody wanted gold, and that caused currency problems.

In the case of LTC vs. BTC, the scenario is inverted because the exchange rate is not fixed, but the supply is. The nominal ratio is 4 LTC : 1 BTC, but the actual ratio depends on how much people prefer each currency. If nobody wants LTC, then the ratio will change to 10:1 or 20:1 or 100:1, or more. The opposite would happen if LTC has a high preference relative to BTC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law)

Hopefully bitcoins will become so valuable that everyone will prefer to spend any altcoin rather than their precious bitcoins.

Litecoin and Namecoin might be second choices, but between them there are more than four times as many as there are bitcoins, plus as they become more valuable people will be more inclined to spend their I0coins and Ixcoins instead of Litecoins or Namecoins given a choice.

So maybe Litecoins and Namecoins will start moving toward being secondary savings/hoarding coins, not as valuable as bitcoins but still pretty good value.

Maybe once bitcoins are thousands of dollars each and Litecoins and Namecoins a hundred bucks each or so, I0coins and Ixcoins will be worth several dollars and people will be using DeVCoins and GRouPcoins more whenever they can use them instead of their valuable I0coins and Ixcoins.

Who knows, by than maybe even PPCoins will start to have some value and spendability...

-MarkM-

Actually no, just look at the variable cryptographic strength and hash length both could turn out to be incredible useful for a next-gen cryptocurrency. It just so happens to be an ideal candidate for our purposes.

But that was not what my post was about. I was speaking about the implication of the end of the SHA-3 contest for SHA-2. You can say the door is open for academic cryptoanalysts to start hacking on SHA-2 without some three letter agency representative showing up at campus.
I'm not saying that this is certain to have some immediate implications but it _might_ have.

I think 2013 will be the year of Litecoin.  One more big rise in value (3rd in it's first year) and it'll stick and start to see more action in the ecommerce world.  Most likely this has started already with the network hash close to doubling since last month and the steady rise of value on the exchange (btc-e).  The end of this month will tell the community alot... both miners and investors.

I cant imagine what the difficulty will go up to once ASIC's and block halfing DESTROY gpu mining on the BTC side.. that is quite a lot of GPU's that hte owners will be happy to earn some coins with.

There are already quite a few coming over. I'm trying to snag as many coins as I can while the "getting is good".

Well let's think about the possibility of gpu miners switching to litecoin mining in the near future. There is about 21 Terahashes on the bitcoin network. Of which let's put a conservative 15 Terahashes is gpu specific. Let's get crazy and say half of those people choose to give litecoin a try before they shut down their rigs for good. Let's equally convert 7.5 Terahashes to 7.5 Gigahashes worth of litecoin mining. Right now the litecoin network totals about .35 Gigahashes at this moment. It's not too outrageous to say that we could see the network grow between 20 to 25 times what is is right now. If this were to happen it would cost quite a bit in electricity just to earn 20 litecoins in a day. I could totally see the value rising significantly for at least a short period of time if this scenario was to occur. Guess we will have to wait and see.

Interesting times...for sure...

+1

What if one or the other gets to fail ?  ;)