Bitcoin Forum

So what is wrong with LTC why do people hate on them? Is the structure of the coin sound? Does it have a design flaw? What is the deal with the high sending fee for small amounts of LTC? Is the price stable? Does the price move more evenly than BTC?

So far like it. I was thinking of only selling LTC and letting my customers exchange for BTC on BTC-e. Does anyone see any problem with doing that? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks  

Nothing wrong with it really. I think the main argument that people against it use is that it isn't that much different from BTC. If you're only selling LTC, chances are people won't buy from you if they just want BTC, because then they have to go through another step of exchange to get it. But people who actually want LTC will buy from you.

I like BTC and LTC.

No they will buy LTC to get BTC. I sell for Paypal so they will do it.

I have often traded BTC for LTC. I have never done it the other way around.

The guy who sold you the LTC has.

Litecoin wasn't first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

It's not too hard to find someone to sell BTC for PayPal if you have a good reputation. I've actually never bought BTC with anything other than PayPal. Why not just target the LTC crowd?

It isn't as much flaw as deception. Litecoin used the same scrypt parameters as Tenebrix. Artforz had gamed almost everyone involved in the scrypt()-based coins. He had choosen the set of parameters that made GPU mining possible, but made claims that the design is GPU-resistant. Then he proceeded to mine all the scrypt()-based coins (Tenebrix/Fairbrix/etc) on his GPU farm that was significantly more efficient than the CPU miners.

So who cares?

I refuse to use other cryptocurrencies simply because I want one of them to get really mainstream.  Right now, Bitcoin is the leader when it comes to popularity, and the more people use Bitcoin, the more things I do with my Bitcoin.

No offense to LTC, it's just, why would I use it if I could use Bitcoin?  There's already only very few things I can buy with it.  A currency needs people using it to become useful.  If only my dog accepts my SunnyCoins, I may as well not even have them.  And yes, my dog has a little dog computer to browse the dogwebs.

On the other hand, if people suddenly started using LTC more than BTC...

I have nothing against Litecoin or any other Altchain.

There is simply no reason to use any of them. All of them are simply BTC clones, none of them has any improvement so far.

If there where at some point one that makes something significant better than Bitcoin I would give it a try. But there is simply none.

The only use I can foresee for an alt-cryptocurrency is, some day in the somewhat distant future, to have a currency that isn't capped at a certain arbitrary number, and that is backed by BTC, with a free floating BTC/XXX rate of exchange.

This may prove moot if Bitcoin becomes divisible to less than a satoshi and if the blockchain size issues are addressed (by super pruning, for example).

Other than that, I'm still to find a glaring problem with Bitcoin.

It's already moot because bitcoin is already plenty divisible.

I tend to agree, but if BTC ever became universally adopted, then those two issues (divisibility and an unwieldy blockchain) would have to be addressed. One way to do that would be to start an inflationary currency that would piggy-back onto Bitcoin... but we're talking a few decades down the road anyway.

It has been crazy hard for me to find. To get a reputation. You have to pay ridiculous fees and go through all kinds of crap. Almost all of the BTC I have purchased have been for PP too, but it is very hard to find for new users. I offer it on ebay and off my facebook page bitcoin friends.

The reason I dont just target the LTC crowd id i want it to compete will BTC to force the price down and keep it more stable. If people have a choice between btc and something else there will be compition and the price stability of both will benefit and the users will benefit from that.   

The number of altcoins is not capped, and some individual altcoin chains are not themselves capped, and all the altchains are basically backed by bitcoin with floating exchange rates. So all of those parts are already in place.

-MarkM-

litecoin is like bitcoin in some ways.. comparing where things were at the same age of under a year and a half, there values were very similar.. bitcoin moved into the SR economy and grew, where as litecoin is now growing some merchant tools and services to attempt at a clean mainstream direction without any of the negative bitcoin propaganda.

also selling the bitcoin concept to miners is soon going to be obsolete as people trying to make it rich with just GPU's from their home computers on bitcoin wont happen. that's where litecoin will still gather more fresh faces and interest.

it may become that litecoin gathers some recognition as the introduction coin where people begin to mine, sell it for a few items available , and then make enough profit to buy an asic to enter the big coin industry.

it may be that all the hackers and darknet users become the sole users of bitcoin and genuine businesses move to the cleaner coin.

anything can happen. and thats the great thing about these coins. freedom of change, freedom of movement, freedom of choice.

and anyone that loves bitcoin to such an extent that they will try tarnishing other coins is not really into the whole concept of freedom.

thats why im in both boats.

Someone with a brain, thank god. Great post.

New users.

Bitcoin is a new standard for digital payments.  Litecoin is just an alternative that does the same thing.  There could be hundreds of clones made.
Now imagine if for data transfer cables people didn't only use USB (I know there are some alternatives)but hundreds of alternatives.  How handy would that be?  How much would you like yet another alternative that didn't add any extra speed to the data transfer compared to USB?  The more everybody standardizes to 1 format, the better.  Same for power plugs etc. .

Nonsense, of course. It's exactly the other way around. Hackers and darknet users won't become the "sole users" of anything, they will go wherever there is a viable currency. If that's LTC (which is extremely doubtful) then that's where they'll migrate to.

The logic in the previous post is precisely upside down.

Yup copies can be made...but agreement by communities that it is a store of value and that the miners secure it will make it stand out from the rest.

not if litecoin exchanges all do the customer due diligence, AMLKYC stuff to ensure that it stays legit and honourable for merchants to trust using it.. then the anonymous community wont want to touch it.

there's some logic.

I see LTC being a good alternative for the online microtransaction ecosystem, allowing near-instant digital payments at microscopic scales. While BTC could handle this niche also, the longer block times mean longer waits for digital purchases that need at least 1 confirmation.

Just my 2¢ (which apparently gets rounded to 5¢ now in Canada ::))

What is USEFUL?

Silver?

Pizza?

Clothing?

Hardware?

I've bought and sold all of the above with Litecoin so far. So can't say that there is no usefulness.

No thought on LTC stabilizing BTC? You will be able to use litecoin everywhere you can use BTC in the future so if you have a choice why not choose the coin that processes faster and is easier to obtain.

There's nothing wrong with LTC.

LTC is BTC's understudy.  If something catastrophic happened to BTC, LTC is ready to act as a substitute for the duration of the emergency.

LTC also provides an ASIC-proof form of cryptocash, giving GPU miners something to do after the Lunar New Year celebration.

Ah but Ripple is coming, so no one need care which of huindreds or thousands or millions of different currencies people choose to use to pay them with since it will all get converted automagically by the Ripple system into whatever kind they happen to prefer, via whichever bank or other gateway they prefer or even directly to their addresses on their favourite blockchain via a Ripple-to-Blockchain gateway.

So don't worry about it, let your customers choose what weird currency you maybe never even heard of they want to pay you with, just tell Ripple what currency you want to recieve, set your prices in that currency, and go on about your business.

-MarkM-

I have looked into ripple very little, but what I have seen I didn't like. I will look at it a little deeper.

if that happens, you'll be S.O.L, because you didn't have the foresight to diversify

as someone said before me...

Silver, Fast food, pizza, anything on amazon, computer hardware, sexy panties, clothing, dildos, flowers, anything at walmart, coffee, visa gift cards, hell you can even buy sex legally... and this is just at MY website.  There are others that offer more. Lots of places to buy hosting.

Can you name me one thing that you can buy with BTC, that you cant buy with LTC?

I think the main problem is that a lot of people are unaware how much ltc has grown, and how strong the community behind it is.

I think that BTC "needs" at least one alt coin.  having all your eggs in one basket is dangerous.

LTC?

you got me

I think lack of core developers is what's wrong with LTC. We need one or two great developers to continue LTC development, and thus people will be more confident with using it.

I think you need to do more research. LTC does have some great developers, and a lot of advancements/services coming soon.

I've got nothing against LTC, and I like alternative cryptocurrencies and wish them well.  I don't see any value added by trying to make a coin "GPU-mining resistant," so given that that seemed to be one of the LTC design goals I wasn't as interested as I might have been.

Anyone in the LTC market know how it moves? It it determined by btc value or does it stand alone?

Actually wrong. I bought 1.5 LTC for 1 LTC a long time ago as a joke.

It's free floating. Since I've been involved with Litecoin, the Ł price has varied between about 2,5 mBTC (should've bought even more of those!) and almost 8 mBTC per Ł. It's currently hovering around 3,4 mBTC per Ł on BTC-e (Litecoin's "Mt Gox").

Both BTC and Ł have been surging versus fiat recently, obviously.

Great cool i am going to start using it and selling it.

It's not "GPU-mining resistant", more like "ASIC-resistant". You won't appreciate this feature unless you are a bitcoin miner and soon will be driven out of business by big shot ASIC investors.

Not to mention the confirmation speed, blockchain download speed is very pleasant too.

for a long while there was /is a visible pattern between difficulty changes of LTC and the LTC/USD prices to say that "GENERALLY" the price stands on its own two feet.

but due to the main exchange being BTC-E.com* there is a impact in the price caused by people arbitraging the BTC - USD - LTC- BTC circle as well as the other direction BTC - LTC- USD - BTC, when arbitrage events happen for a quick margin of profit.

and the occasional ramps and dumps that happen before settling back to their rational prices again.

so i would not say bitcoin movements are not ruled out of the equation, just not the permanent indicator/value comparison.

but that's where i find that the fun part though. if LTC was on a stand alone exchange with no other currency beside it, the volatility would be less.

in the future LTC will hold more on its own, but when there is money to be made, why stick with a bi-directional trading platform, when there is many directions traders can move between different currencies on BTC-E.

*and why BTC-E has gained its popularity over the other LTC exchanges is because of the multiple currencies in one exchange.

What was your point? Mine was to state emphatically that everyone in LTC is NOT just in it to convert to BTC. Your response seems to reinforce the adage that everybody else must be and that I'm just an anomaly. Since you seem to be a proponent of LTC I'd like some clarification on what you were trying to say unless you were just spewing the same tripe all the LTC haters want heard.

NO NO you have me all wrong. I think lite coin is great. I especially like the potential to stabilize BTC. I do think that it makes acquiring BTC easier. It looks to me like people hold their BTC with a death grip but LTC are more easily attained.

If people held onto their bitcoins with a deathgrip they would not be so absurdly cheap, we would have recovered from the big oh gosh it got hacked crash of a few years ago almost immediately and be up to hundreds of dollars a coin by now. As it is people throw them away for pittances so that it has taken us this long to get back on track.

-MarkM-

We will see

I think Litecoin's main strength at the present time is its general stability within a certain range. The BTC/LTC trade value has been very steady. With BTC's surge from $12-and-change back in November, to the $24 it is now, I feel like Litecoin would be a great place to convert BTC funds to after a sell and store them in a wallet (and not leave funds waiting/vulnerable on an exchange) until the coin has a pullback.

And with Litecoin appreciating slowly over the past couple of months, you'd get a reward in the form of a small rate of interest on your funds until a more opportune time presents itself to jump back in the game. Litecoin is definitely a trader's coin right now, but I don't think its value as such is being fully realized by the trading community as of yet.

Exactly.  I'm not in that situation, so I don't appreciate that feature.  And as a Bitcoin user, I pretty much dis-appreciate that feature. :)


Those are worth experimenting with.

The only "problem" I see is that it hasn't been updated in months. I hadn't started litecoin in a couple months and there were barely any changes when I updated my source tree...

Is https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin still current? Are there any plans to rebase to bitcoin 0.8?

except it isn't GPU resistant, but at least CPU mining isn't 100% obsolete. Makes use of the whole computer which is surely something someone can appreciate.

Here are the 2 reasons why I like LTC:
1- CPU mining is not yet obsolete, so I can use GPUs for BTC and CPU for LTC on the same machine.
2- ASIC resistance. After ASICs hit the BTC network gpus will be much less useful for btc mining, might as well go ltc with them.

It's not ASIC resistant at all. You could make an ASIC for LTC if you seriously wanted to and though it was worthwhile. What you mean to say, more precisely, is that Bitcoin specific ASIC's (SHA-256) will not work for LTC. That said however, almost all of the rest of the bitcoin hashpower COULD work on LTC. So if you're happy about CPU mining, if all that mining power were to switch to LTC, all CPU miners would be similarly royally screwed. Not an ASIC but the effect would be the same. :-)

What is really wrong with LTC is that there is a large contingent of relative long-timers who main stayed through Bitcoin's relative early days and they don't care to see any competitors enter the arena. That someone new to the cryptocurrency scene can get in on the ground floor of a coin with huge upside potential is repugnant to them despite having enjoyed the same opportunity themselves. That said, these people endured the uncertainty and derision that came with buying in to the very first idea so it may be appropriate for the LTC camp to endure similar vitriol.

The problem is that the crypto currencies are not difficult to create (by forking the code, do some modification, mining with the CPU/GPU). It's really no big deal. The competition is tough. Even BTC also will possibly face the competition in the future. The only crypto coins favored by the god can have a long life.

Good point.

Exactly. Scrypt-based mining is not bad but LTC is just a scam

Why hasn't anyone used scrypt with more the kind of parameters it was intended for instead of perverting / crippling it to make it fit in GPUs? Everyone owns GPUs so doesn't really want to make CPUs competitive?

-MarkM-

Without a proof, I view those conspiracy accusation as pure FUD.

OTOH, if you have the technical capability of implementing an alt chain with a better algorithm, making everyone believe it's only mine-able by human brain-cells, while you secretly develop a GPU miner mining it more efficiently, you deserve every penny you "premined".

It's actually a lot fairer than many "software patent" holders protected by IP laws.

 

I don't know, maybe somebody still has the IRC logs from the channels frequented by Lolcust & Artforz. I didn't keep them, although I idled on all of them for a while: GeistGeld; Tenebrix/Fairbrix, Realcoin, etc. The discussion there was really lively. Many people were more burned by the biting sense of homour of both Artforz & Lolcust; more so than by the premine that Lolcust designed into Tenebrix. In this way the origins of Litecoin are realy murky: one could say it is a Tenebrix-clone but without the trolling and sarcastic humour that was associated with them. It seems that nobody had though to even question or discuss the choice that Artforz had dictated. For a while this forum was full of posts by BitcoinExpress (and others like bulanula) regarding mining and attacking various coins. I think most of them are deleted now. If somebody is hell-bent on obtaining the proof maybe theymos or other administrators would give them copy of the deleted posts from this subforum.

Personally, I don't need the proof: I read the Colin Percival papers and presentations about scrypt & tarsnap. He shows how to choose the optimim parameters for each implementation technology. Artforz had choosen much lower values: so low that they would fit in the on-chip BRAM of Spartan-6 FPGAs.

2112 I have no idea what you are talking about :), but as long as it means that LTC is sound that is all I need to know. I dont car if someone pre-mined.

If I understood correctly scrypt algorithm requires memory to function, and creating ASICs with memory in them [which is more expensive] will not be feasible at least for a year or 2.
So Unless LTC becomes really high I dont think any company would bother making ASICs for it since these ASICs will even cost more than the traditional BTC ones.

This is just my understanding, correct me if I was wrong :)

Yes, I plan to do that soon.


I for one, did not see anything suspicious going on when I launched Litecoin. If I remember correctly, at the start the network hashrate was comparable to about a few hundred CPUs mining and it slowly ramped up from there. If there were any GPUs mining at that time, the network hashrate would be a lot larger than just a few hundred CPUs equivalent.

It's true that I probably should not have taken just ArtForz's word on how gpu-resistant scrypt was with those chosen params. But ArtForz was a very well respected member of the bitcoin community and seemed to know a lot about what he was doing... at least a lot more than me. And he has earned enough bitcoins from the early days, that stealing a ton of scrypt-based coins just seemed beneath him. Plus his reasoning for using scrypt with those parameters were posted months before Litecoin launched, and people have looked over his reasoning and no one came out and said anything against his reasonings.

So no, LTC is not a scam. Do you consider bitcoin to be a scam? Satoshi designed it so that everyone can mine bitcoins and get in on the action. But now one ASIC is about a million times faster than your CPU at mining bitcoins.

Here are ArtForz's posts: https://bitcointalk.org/?action=profile;u=584;sa=showPosts

If people wanted to see his thoughts, go read his posts. And stop spreading FUD about Litecoin being GPU-mined from the start. Is it possible that it was? Sure, anything is possible. Just like it's possible that Satoshi was ASIC-mining bitcoins from the start and now actually owns 10 million bitcoins.

Some interesting reading for those interested:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45849
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46063.msg549768#msg549768

So that those "in the know" could mine with GPU before the secret got out.  The whole design choice was deception.  The default scrypt parameters (1048567, 8, 1) is essentially a GPU killer, even the authors recommended "lite" option is (16384, 8, 1).    It would have made GPU non-economical (i.e. they could run but at higher cost and energy requirements than virtually any CPU).  The parameters had to be accidentally changed to far extreme to make LTC GPU capable (1024, 8, 1).   A circa 2008 CPU (running single threaded) could verify the "lite" option hash in about 100ms and that time would only decrease with Moore's law.  There was no reason to "cripple" LTC memory hard attribute except that (16384,8,1) couldn't be secretly mined on a GPU.




"Look here GPU resistant cryptocoin.  It is fair for everyone because with only CPU it levels the playing field"
<pay no attention to the guy behind the curtain mining the shit out of LTC with a hundred GPUs>


..... some months later ....
oh look you can GPU mine LTC!
"Look here ASIC resistant cryptocoin.  It is fair for everyone because with only GPU it levels the playing field"


Strangely no explanation on why to change it.  The default values work fine as a POW on a CPU.   Also GPU never did get that "MB of fast random access on-chip memory" they still have roughly the same 32KB on chip low latency cache that they did four years ago.  Then again that is more than enough to allow a GPU to compete, it always was.

Thanks for the information, that clears up a lot of FUD being spread here.

This is quite true in my case. The first time I took a look at scrypt() was only on the day that Litecon was launched:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47417.msg572019#msg572019

It took me about a month to read about and understand scrypt():

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48863.msg620106#msg620106

You can also have a laugh at my suggestion of an OpenCL-resistant coin amongst the Solidcoin v2 trollfest about a month before Litecoin launch:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44423.msg537010#msg537010

The only thing I disagree would be "people have looked". In my opinion the trollfest was so intense and emotional that almost nobody tried to make any rational reasoning.

Again: too bad I decided not to keep the IRC logs from my idling on the relevant channels.

In a way you can see the failure of scrypt() parameter selection reoccurring right now in the casascius' thread about BIP 0038:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=129317.0

This time there's no trollfest to distract. But there's only one publicly posted scrypt() implementation. And there's a strong motivation to hurry up and just bruteforce to win the competition instead of really analyzing the possible ways of implementing it.

who cares even if ArtForz has a million billion litecoins?

...no different from early people having tons of BTC. the currency still works the same

How is it any different that people GPU mined bitcoins before releasing the miner publicly?

Right, there is no difference.

Let me put this issue about GPU-mining from the start to rest once and for all. I will use cumulative difficulty to figure out how much hashpower has been working on a chain since the start.

There's going to be a lot of math here. First read up on this:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_network_hash_rate_results_in_a_given_difficulty.3F
https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison

Here are the current state of things:

Litecoin was launched on 10/13/2011 03:00:00 at block #3:
http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/dec173dda2735ff11376b68bdfda804cede230c1fa6f1a11765cddfd8edf4398

We can calculate how much hashpower has been put on the chain since the start using cumulative difficulty.
Let's check a recent block 294537 found on 2/12/2012 03:00:00
http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/a065026ba50a71e1d4979e078265dc9ccf15d0b393969cd35ec4c954bf2c22fb
You can see the cumulative difficulty on the block explorer page.


So we average about 1000 GPUs working on the chain. In other words, if you had 246.67 mhash/s pointed at the chain since launch, you'd have found just as many hashes.

Now, here's what you all wanted to know. How much hashing power was pointed at the chain during the first week.
Here's block 14807 found at 10/20/2011 03:00:00:
http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/6fcf032b2edfd3e06ee6cace9ed9b6c219d8dca06fa1f43a47cb1c5b7f87084f

Let's do the same math:


A month later. Block 31011:
http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/7b08a3bfb5f2a865fc0061f6e3f5b97fa1690c8d357ccd814fd9f55641f83187


Seems like the normal growth of a CPU-only (at the time) coin to me.

ArtForz had 24 5970s. 5970s can do 750 khash/s. If he put those 5970s on mining Litecoin, he would have 18 mhash/s, which is twice the work done on the chain in the first month. Litecoin was put on the exchange pretty quickly and mining litecoins was pretty profitable even with a CPU. If ArtForz had GPU scrypt mining from the start, would he not put those machines on mining Litecoin and make a killing?

So can we now stop spreading FUD?

Edit: After 3 months, effective hashrate is 18 mhash/s (http://explorer.litecoin.net/block/55d1323fa4d7175953fab43ef97c0ef18577d8f000e494740ccc867d42fe67f5)

I made it its own thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=143659.0
Probably move this discussion there if there's still doubt about this issue.

Satoshi has never advertised bitcoin as GPU or ASIC resistant, but Litecoin does. Moreover, there was a substantial low hash rate period in 2009, suggesting no GPU was used for mining.

ok a few history and FACTUAL lessons for you all.

LITECOIN is not resistant to any form of computational devices mining it. As long as they can be programmed to do so.
such as CPU,GPU, android phones. and many other devices.

the problem is that the devices such as the bitcoin ASICS have been hard wired to only be able to mine SHA256

litecoin was invented in 2011. asics were invented in 2012. so blame the later for not catering for the former.

the whole "GPU resistant" statement, originally stated on the wiki november 2011 is due to a users with a god complex called Luke-JR, whom has taken it upon himself to try to stop anyone's choice/freedoms of moving away from bitcoin to any other alt currencies people wish to try/use.

because he does not have the power to physically stop you. he can only control the information available on places that he moderates.

it is Luke-JR that makes the comment that litecoin wont succeed and is not worthy of peoples time.

Luke JR and other bitcoin superfans know that deep down, the lingering stench of illegal activities that media highlight about bitcoin will not grow bitcoin at the speeds they desire. he (Luke-JR) knows a sound coin with no negative publicity and nothing structurally wrong with it would succeed better going mainstream. i am not saying guaranteed to exceed in value, i am just saying user adoption would be less of a hurdle to climb.
So he wants to prevent any losses in the bitcoin userbase. He cannot shut down silk road, he cannot find a way to program it so that silk road transactions get ignored. so he is powerless to rid bitcoin of negative press. and from what i have seen. he has not been involved in any main stream expansion attempts outside of the forums.

this is what i call an armchair activist. (big mouth on the sofa, no voice on the streets)

but you have the freedom to mine litecoin if you want no matter what people say. so give it a try, and if you don't like it, you can always go back to how you done things before.

with that said feel free to try all the coins. and if you do want to help main stream a crypto currency i am not saying to not help bitcoin expand into the real world of bricks and mortar businesses. all i am saying is litecoin is a lot less of a headache swaying people away from the media propaganda.

which is at the crux of the whole issue.

OK, some FACTS from http://litecoin.org

If LTC offered better value to SR sellers (in terms of liquidity, stability, and security) they would switch to LTC.  The idea that someone the fact that there is no negative media attention is completley backwards.  There is NO media attention.  Note sure if you are aware but people bought and sold certain contraband online long before the SR.  It was was just more difficult.  Western Union, Liberty Reserve, etc.  The SR exploded in popularity because it used Bitcoin, not because the SR operators were trying to force Bitcoin adoption but .... because Bitcoin worked.  It provided value for users because it did what it was intended to.  If LTC did it as well or better the SR (and clones) would jump on that band wagon in a heartbeat.

"all i am saying is litecoin is a lot less of a headache swaying people away from the media propaganda."
So your have a long list of major businesses you were able to sway.... Of course not.  Nobody* has even heard of LiteCoin and likely never will.

*essentially nobody

in short
coin for coin you will get more litecoin per x number of computational cycles then you would bitcoin.

it does not state that litecoin is just for CPU mining.

this is again an attempt at using information wrongly to say its impossible to mine litecoins using a GPU for profit.

Hey franky1 since you joined in Sept 2012 did you ever think that the forum existed prior to that date?  For most of 2011 Litecoin was touted by its supporters and developers as being "GPU hostile".  Most of it is still in the old threads.  You trying to rewrite history a year and a half later just makes you look like an idiot.

actually i and a few others are in talks with quite a few merchants and services to expand the crypto currencies into mainstream.

how about 25,000 bricks and mortar businesses all in one swoop. if things go in the direction as planned. and the great thing about it is, that i personally am not limiting it to just litecoin or just bitcoin. i give the merchants a choice.

don't believe me that 25,000 merchants in one swoop is possible? then maybe  i shall just leave this link here as the simple answer to just one of the avenues (hint: bottom left of page see how many merchants that service links to)

just-eat.com (http://just-eat.com)

the reason i say this is from actual merchant discussions and not armchair activists forum FUD, merchants find litecoin more appealing, and silk road is not a promotional highlight of bitcoin in the real world.

so please give it a try. talk to some merchants, get them on board to any crypto currency you please. just dont try restricting peoples freedoms, using false information.

as that is ultimately the opposite of what cryotcurrency is about, freedom


most of 2011?? what a shame that litecoin was 'born' in late 2011. and luke JR edited and kept re-editing the wiki about litecoin in november 2011. sorry i have to say it one more time

lol, sorry, couldn't help myself. its obvious that you are a bitcoin superfan only here to try provoking issues to make people with valid points seem invalid, but you misunderstanding of what was read. lets give it a word.. hmm the context.. of what what said, makes superfans look the fools.

saying litecoin is GPU resistant by using other peoples posts is just such a sofa activists failed attempt at reducing peoples perceptons of something, and reducing their choices. everyone knows people can mine litecoin with GPU. so why even bother to continue to highlight litecoin as GPU resistant. take things into context next time.

the events of the luke Jr and his superfans attempts to hoard the bitcoin userbase happened nearly a year before i signed up to bitcoin talk.
so maybe i do read the history, and maybe i do know the facts. and maybe i do put things into context also.

those 'litecoin fans' you speak of were not touting litecoin as a 'you cannot mine using GPU'. they were touting litecoin as a coin that is able to create coins without the NEED to buy expensive GPU just to be profitable..

much like what is happening now with bitcoin. people are flocking to litecoin because soon ASICS will be the only effective way to mine bitcoin for profit. so the GPU users, much like the CPU users of yester-year will flock to the coin they can profitably mine with, without needing to buy expensive equipment to stay in the game.

Oh well, "CPU-specific mining" means "litecoin is not just for CPU mining"?

Sorry, the homepage will need to be updated. Litecoin was supposed to be a GPU-hostile coin. I was mistaken and believed ArtForz that mining on GPUs would be hard. Turns out, the scrypt parameters that ArtForz chose were not memory-hard enough. And when mtrlt wrote an efficient GPU miner and released it, it was pretty clear that mining on GPU is about 10x the speed of mining on CPU. It's not the 1000x different like it is for bitcoins, but it's still enough to cause a lot of GPU miners to start mining litecoins and making CPU-mining not worth it.

I have thought about upping the parameters to make the algorithm more memory hard to combat GPU mining. But that would cause a hard fork and I'm not sure how the users would take that. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to not do that mainly because of the impending Bitcoin ASIC release. One of the original goals of Litecoin was to release a coin mined by a different architecture than Bitcoin. That way, it will avoid the fate of Namecoin, where GPU miners would jump on Namecoin mining when it was profitable and abandon it when difficulty adjusts. This left Namecoin in a hole and made it such that it took months for difficulty to drop back down, and then the whole cycle repeated. You see a little bit of that with Litecoin right now where the difficulty would jump up and down. But with 4x quicker difficulty adjustments, it's not as bad. Namecoin had to resort to merged mining to fix this problem, which I believe kills all ability for that coin to act as a viable currency.

When Bitcoin ASICs come, the difficulty will likely shoot up 100x and GPU mining bitcoins would not be worth it. And a lot of the GPUs would be turned onto Litecoin. This is actually good, because it would help protect the Litecoin network. Mining Bitcoin would then again be on a different hardware mining architecture and we wouldn't see hashrates shifting from one coin to another due to fluctuations in price and difficulty.

Next franky1 will be attacking coblee for being a "bitcoin superfan".  Franky1 you can't fix stupid so I won't try.   It wasn't Luke Jr stating LiteCoin has GPU hostile it was essentially everyone. It is obvious if you read the actual launch thread.

hostile.. not resistant...

luke JR touted it as resistant. EG impossible.
and i seen the epic drama of the wiki edit war. its also well documented.

in the end its now 2013 and people CAN and DO mine litecoins using GPU's so trying to say litecoin is GPU resistant is a moot point. so using old out of context comments from 14 months ago in an attempt to try to keep the userbase within bitcoin is simply a worthless path to try walking. so give users their freedom.

its all about context.

and thank you coblee i got no issues with you

All algorithms will fall to advancements. Making scrypt more 'memory intensive' (isn't it more about amount/bus width/latency?) or leaving the parameters as they were would only delay the inevitable, at best. In fact, it could have easily made the situation worse, leaving the field open to highly specialized hardware domination (high initial costs offset by extreme increases in hashrate).  I've seen claims on here that the current implementation is leaving the field open for FPGAs... That's entirely incorrect.  Yes, you can technically mine with them. No, it isn't very fast and the initial cost eliminates the efficiency advantage.

Specialized FPGAs may change the landscape slightly. LTC-scrypt ASICs will remain prohibitive for a long while yet.



Also, I'm really tired of hearing about you children and your ScamRoad. Some of us do live in the real world and aren't incapable of finding entertainment (or whatever you're doing on there ???) without the assistance of unknown internet people, you know.

Actually I toyed with some native CUDA (i.e. NVIDIA only GPU code) recently and found it has scope for doing things with memory that can't be done with openCL. While the integer performance on Nvidia cards is significantly below that of the AMD cards, approximately 96% of the calculation time in scrypt, by my profiling measurements, is spent on memory operations. I think there is scope for a Nvidia only CUDA kernel that would perform quite well compared to the OpenCL kernel that is currently used by both AMD and Nvidia cards on cgminer+reaper. How well I can't say, but I can say it would be a lot of work, and funding me to code it would be very expensive since I don't really care much about LTC, but I do enjoy coding (especially when funded). I also can't guarantee that it would somehow magically make nvidia cards better LTC miners than AMD. However someone else might find the idea interesting to pursue.

I highly doubt it would yield the results you expect, but I would be interested in hearing more.

However, I have no interest in funding a project based on 1) pure speculation and 2) something that needs to be licensed by people attempting to utilize that hardware's compute functionality for commercial purposes.


"found it has scope for doing things with memory that can't be done with openCL" Care to explain this more fully? How deeply have you examined the opencl documentation?


Anyways, I think opening up the actively mining and available hardware base would be advantageous in the long run, regardless of my views on certain products and the underlying code.

However, on that note, it is prudent to observe that "diverse exchange markets
with coins based on different hashing algorithms should create stability" ...

Extensively...

Sorry, I was still editing.

So, would you say the reaper kernel is not able to be improved, or do you just lack the motivation? This is a semi-loaded question,  ;)



abbyd, makes sense in theory, I guess. Emotionally driven trading might nullify some of that possible stability though.

No, I can't personally improve on the reaper kernel because it does funky shit to work around the fact you can't allocate memory properly to the extent required to do so much parallel work with scrypt. However CUDA does allow you to allocate ram in a reliable fashion in much greater quantities and in layouts you desire without resorting to tricks. What I lack is the motivation and the incentive to start investigating what that would yield. I'm currently busy preparing for ASICs for BTC... and as I said, I can't guarantee what magnitude of improvement it would offer. The thing is that sha256(sha256()) as used by bitcoin mining is very easy to predict the effects of and there is no way to work around the fact that nvidia's integer performance sucks 1st and has no rotate function 2nd (and even adding rotate in Kepler will not be enough to offset the 1st).

Okay...Interesting. I'm familiar with some of these concepts, especially in terms of sha256 hashing. I appreciate you taking the time to cover this. I believe those opencl allocation tricks are still maturing, perhaps....Anyways, It will be interesting to see what the new GCN memory management optimizations yield alone.

  Maybe someone with an nvidia farm (smallluxgpu has changed the GPU render scene, though) will take you up on the offer, it sounds like you have a bit of untapped performance to work with for CUDA-specific scrypt hashing.

However, kernel development isn't exactly stagnant on the opencl side either   ;)



"I'm currently busy preparing for ASICs for BTC" best of luck!

GUYS I WILL BUY YOUR LITECOINS! If anyone is interested PM me. I will pay spot price with PayPal. I want to start selling them on ebay. I am really interested in growing it. I have about 200 customers now that I could be selling them to. If you wont take PP, I will buy with other methods for a lower price. I make my living on ebay so I always have PP it is the most convenient way for me to buy. We have sold BTC on ebay for the last 6 months my store is northoutboards. So mine those bitches and lets get it out there.   

@sublime:

Got to BTC-e.com, deposit via Liqpay (1% fee added by Liqpay, 1% fee added by BTC-e) with a CC (I use the Paypal Debit Card that runs as credit, so I only pay .5% net fees because of my cash-back). You can make two $250 deposits per day via that method. That should be plenty if you only need a small supply and wish to pay little to no fees for them. Even if you have one of the crappy, newer PP Debit Cards that only gives 1% cash back, you can't beat only paying 1% fees to get LTC. And...no one will worry about you trying to scam them for Paypal.

Also, spot for Paypal is ridiculous. Paypal carries risk, so above spot would have to be offered. Other methods MIGHT get you closer to spot. Either way, I'd just do what I mentioned above to build your LTC chest.

-Moose

I will check it out Thanks.

Well, I assume you have found a way to deal with chargebacks with ebay-paypal. It would be wise to use the same technique(s) for the litecoin auctions.

I guess you already know this  :D

I have and I do thanks. Not 100% but 99.8 percent charge back free.

That's a very good return! Feel free to PM me (same name) at btc-e if you need help with anything. Often there are some helpful people in the chat, too.

Best of luck!

@DeathAndTaxes - you are pathetic trying to point out one inconsistency in a statement that had no bearing in a matter to scam anyone made 16 months ago, which makes it now irrelevant. Satoshi didn't expect GPUs to come on board for bitcoin, right? So shouldn't you be complaining about that too? Get over yourself. People will choose to use what they want to use. Use bitcoin, use litecoin, I don't give a fuck if you use Solidcoin, just stop trying to make it seem that Litecoin is the devil and Bitcoin is Jesus.

@Franky1 - It is nice to hear that there is a possibility for restaurants to accept LTC and/or BTC through the just-eat website. Please keep us informed.

@Coblee - good to have you back. Despite how litecoin started, I guess you can't please everyone even myself when it comes to launching a coin. Let's move forward and let the nay-sayers keep saying what they want to. Time will tell ultimately what pans out.

Ultimately the FREE MARKET is what matters, not what DeathAndTaxes think. Keep this in mind guys.

Why would you think that?  Using more efficient technology is inevitable.  General purpose computing on GPU already existed prior to Bitcoin in the form of NVidia CUDA.   Even ASICs are possible on LTC and for a lot less than most people imagine.  Just reading the scrypt whitepaper one can figure that out.  Now LTC will warrant that kind of investment but it would only be for the same reason there are no SolidCoin ASICs not because it isn't possible.  The crippled parameters of LTC made sure of that.

I never said ban LTC.  I said it is nearly worthless, I stated my opinion and justification for those opinions.  Guess what the free market you love so much would seem to agree with me.

Bitcoin was also "nearly worthless" only a short time ago.

The invisible hand of the market tends to pimp slap those who presume to know its future plans.

GPU miners may flock to Litecoin when ASICs have driven the difficulty up beyond BTC profitability.

" for a lot less than most people imagine." Wrong, at least in the way you are attempting to present it.

DeathAndTaxes you continually talk as if litecoin supporters should STFU and that bitcoin is the all saving currency.

Well news flash that FREE MARKET you are touting as agreeing with you wasn't not very long ago (i.e. 2010).

Satoshi didn't have it all together okay? Hence why he needed others like Gavin to step in. Just because you are taking a statement out of context from 16 months ago (how long you gonna hang on to that?) doesn't mean the LTC isn't a viable solution just as bitcoin is.

No one here is against bitcoin's success. But to be blinded and think only 1 can be successful is stupid.

Free markets dont operate on an absolute solution...even Gold had silver to compliment itself.

Just like Taxes had Death (lol)

+1 D&T I would love for you to give us your estimate on how much it would cost to make a genuine custom LTC ASIC and prove that it cost a lot less than we think.

It's ASIC resistant. You can build ASICs for it, but scrypt is designed to make it impossible to get a worthwhile efficiency gain from doing so compared to general-purpose hardware.

nothing is wrong with LTC, we love it :D a fee reduction would be great though ;)

http://satoshiroulette.com/?mode=LTC

What I know about mining can be written on the back of a stamp, gpu' miners moving to LTC is this a certain event?  , and what is the result of such a move ? The argument that focusing on LTC is at the detriment of Bitcoin is this in fact whats happening also with LTC that other altcoins draw energy and momentum from LTC ?

Altcoins draw in people who consider being able to mine the main reason to get involved, they might just go away in a huff due to not being able to mine if there were not various alts around whose difficulty is still really low. A lot of them then sell the alts they mine for bitcoins, thus the alts serve as gateway drugs to get them addicted to cryptocurrencies then they graduate to the hard staff aka difficult stuff...

-MarkM-

So I take it an altcoin miner only ever sells or keeps altcoins never buys- so altcoins must be being bought by non-miners ?

Incorrect. I mine both BTC and LTC. I also trade BTC into LTC, never the other way around. I may be the exception and not the rule but I do defy the myth that alt coins are only mined to be traded into BTC.

Well, for our casino we have bought: LTC, PPC & TRC.

We also mined, but due to our small gpu farm (3x 5970's) it was easier to simply buy chunks of coin.

I mine btc but would like to collect a little more ltc, I'm happy with the current exchange rate, for every btc I mine I can get 360 ltc.

I realise why there's heavy emphasis on the LTC/BTC ratio, if btc investors start taking profits out of btc into LTC the tables could turn, which could lead to a speculative bubble in LTC..... Anyone think this could happen? Any rich btc folk out there ready to pull the trigger on such a move ? Like they would say here of course  ;D

Not that I'm saying speculative bubble are good for crypto coins but if anything they draw in media attention.

Welcome to 5 months ago. :-)

It has to be said my brain operates about 5 months behind  ;D