Bitcoin Forum

I'm posting this here, rather than in Alt-Coins because although I speak in reference to Litecoin, really I am speaking to the nature of investment in development versus investment in speculation with crypto-currency in general. Litecoin serves as a convenient microcosm for illustration.

For those who remember (how could you not) an unhealthy portion of last year was devoted to the Pirate ponzi fiasco, (among other fiascos) the collapse of which took down a fair number of longtimers here in the bitcointalk forums. Many trusted community members believed in pirate and fell victim to his scam, even Coblee himself (creator of litecoin) ran a pirate pass through fund denominated in Litecoin, which, on the implosion of the scam, he was honorable enough to refund personally out of his own pocket. (forgive me if the details are fuzzy)

My question I am posing somewhat hypothetically is this: Did the Pirate fiasco stunt the growth of Litecoin (and perhaps develop in cryptocoin services) by a) locking up a large amount of investment capital that might have otherwise been invested elsewhere b) erode a certain amount of goodwill through the endless months of speculation, acrimony and heartache?

An enormous amount of available capital went into the Pirate fund, buy some estimates half a million BTC. The return promise was so large that even otherwise smart and reasonable people choose rather to invest their BTC with pirate than in anything else. I am assuming that durring last year the amount of capital available to invest in things like paying developers to build new services was monopolized by Pirate as his return on investment far outweighed the potential of anything else.

We know Coblee invested with Pirate, he ran one of the passthru's and for awhile he seemed to strongly believe in Pirate. I am not sure how much of his personal funds he had invested. While refunding the people who invested in Pirate through Coblee was the right thing for Coblee to do, perhaps combined with his own personal loss in Pirate, he so greatly depleted his coin reserves that his continued involvement in Litecoin was no longer such a worthwhile endeavor.

Although I speak of Coblee as one of the most visible members of the community at the time, this logic extends far beyond him. I also mean him no harm, I only address his as the most visible example.

We tend to think of the Developers as Saints of some sort (as donations don't come close to covering the amount of time they invest) but the reality is that they frequently have large stashes of coins from early mining that provide them with an incentive to continue to invest large amounts of time to development. Without this large stash of coins to appreciate in value with every new feature added to the code, development becomes a truly thankless task. If Coblee were to have lost a large amount of his coins due to Pirate, could the loss have been so great as to make it economically unreasonable to continue to devote a large amount of time towards development? Could this have been the case with other Litecoin developers? Have any Bitcoin developers found themselves in a similar situation?

On top of the financial aspect, I think there is an emotional question as well. The past year was rife with accusations, acrimony, slander and trolling of the lowest, most bitter sort. A certain amount of 'goodwill' in the community was eroded by dragging reputable, productive and upstanding members of the community into endless flamewars and accusations. Certainly many of the early Litecoin champions that really 'rallied the trops' sort-of-speak don't seem to post very often anymore.

This isn't to say that other causes aren't to blame, nor can one say with complete veracity that the growth of Litecoin has even been "stunted". I do however sense a palpable difference in the tenor of the litecoin crowd.

Even if I am totally off base with this question, and even if the reader might be vehemently against alt-coins of any type, it begs consideration as to the nature of investment in development versus investment in speculation, and how a community might have more to lose than just it's coins.

Pirate goes bust and litecoin goes down to $0.01 then up to $0.10. Not sure if it stunted anything. Time will tell.

*than

I'll give this a good read later, good night. I ctrl+f'd "then" and I found 3 of them all used incorrectly. What otherwise seemed to be a well written content is just spoiled by those basic errors. On my pet peeve scale, it's just slightly almost par with people who use "I" on topic discussions giving the impression of a narcissistic pompous prick of a topic creator.

http://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/than_then.htm

lol who are you correcting? THEN is the proper word to use. THAN would be used in a comparison.

This is the bitcoin discussion thread. There is a whole area dedicated to other cryptocurrencies. Stop posting about lite-coin here because your silly alternative needs attention.

Lite coin is irrelevant not stunted btw

Nope.  In all three cases where "then" has been used in the OP, "than" was the correct word to use.  It's one of those errors which drives me nuts, too, because those words don't even sound the same so it's hard to understand how you can confuse them when writing (at least brain-farts over two, too, and to are understandable).  However, it doesn't detract from the substance of the post so I'm not sure why it was worth mentioning.

It just drives me nuts, that's all. On Facebook, annoying Facebook girls usually make that mistake when they post a half baked rant about something. I guess, the "then" mistake reminds me of them.

You do have me, I am bad at grammer. I'm a native speaker but have spent more then the past decade with non-native speakers. I'll fix it later. Sorry!

That reminds me, for a brief period of time I taught english when I was younger and I learned that many english teachers have a) no qualifications and that b) more of the world speaks incorrect english than correct english and that the disparity is contributing to a fundamental change in how native speakers speak as well. Come to think of it, maybe legions of unqualified english teachers traveling the world had something to do with this.

I'm reposting this in Alt-coins. I can see this won't get very far here. :-)

My bad. I thought you were talking about my post.

mods please don't move this to alt. cryptos.

damnit.....


I'd like a statement from coblee
50LTC on it

you mean people who use use 'then' rather than 'than', then use 'than' rather than 'then'?

I've never seen someone screw "than" rather than "then" oddly enough.

back on topic, yes, yes it did.

Litecoin development ground to a stand still unfortunately after coblee abandoned it.

when was that? he should message me back so I can fund him

Yes, obviously.

Pirate defaulting pretty much harmed everything Bitcoin related, and all cryptocurrencies would be impacted if there was a negative bitcoin event (eg govt declaring it illegal, FBI raids, whatever).

why did he do that? this sounds unnerving

don''t think he completely abandoned it...  (think of it like a vacation from the code) .... and he did this as he honored HIS investment funding from his own pocket in order to cover the losses from Pirates... and ran out of money / LTC and interest perhaps.... colbee still round though right? and there is still access to the github master branch right? so it a project that is still stable and working.. just fewer patches and updates... but there's always someone rummaging in the back of the closet and willing to pick up code etc... and make a few changes / patches

Thats true. There's no reason why these things need to be updated weekly to still be "alive".

how you like litecoin now rabbit?

Pirate stunted the growth of litecoin downwards. meaning upwards growth is in full play.

So It's been about two years and I though now was a good time to revisit this.

Of course in the meantime Litecoin hit the moon and then crashed and burned, but the original premise of this question- especially considering how Litecoin has had so little development for a long time now- I think is still valid.

What do people think 2 years on?

i think the past that far back (in crypto terms) holds little relevance to now, eg mt gox collapse will have little influence over anything bitcoin 2 years from now (except when media beat ups re hash it in future scams and crashes).

Summary: when you posted this thread LTC was $0.10 or less.

Now it is $1.70.

Seems like a growing market.

Wait another 2 years.

True, so is bitcoin. Fair enough. Although I was quite surprised to hear Coblee saying that litecoin doesn't need development right now. He argued his position well on it, but it still seems like maybe he just has no reason to develop it.

But yeah, 0.10 to 1.70 is great growth. We have to keep that in mind for bitcoin too! :-)

why the hell litecoin doesn't need dev now?

effectively you miss some events  :P  ::).