Bitcoin Forum

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From the looks of it Litecoin is following a similar path to Bitcoin, without the drama.

I'm not a hater of bitcoin (full disclosure).

There are developments behind the scene coming online soon for LTC.

Also Fed printing record amounts of fiat BS paper.

I think it's more about speculation than anything else. I don't see the point of LTC really... I mean, what does it have that BTC doesn't?

Why have silver when we have gold?

1. It is an ALTERNATIVE to BTC.

2. Faster Confirms.

3. Different Hashing Algorithm -> ASIC miners of Bitcoin are locked into mining bitcoin....no switching back and forth unless you have GPUs.

I have more Ł than BTC and will certainly not be in any way unhappy at the explosive success of either currency. :)

For some time litecoin was useful as a way to avoid having to part with your bitcoins, as you could use bitcoins as collateral to borrow litecoins to spend.

Now that litecoins too are going up in price it is time for litecoins to join bitcoins as something to hold onto while it appreciates, thus now some other coin will have to be used as the one to borrow to spend.

Unfortunately devcoin is so insanely low price lately on vircurex that borrowing devoins to sell there to spend isnt a good idea either since it obviously has to go back up a whole lot if people ever start actually using devcoins to pay back all the huge loans that are denominated in devcoins.

Hmmm, looking for next coin to use for pocket-money coin...

-MarkM-

I'm looking at the price of LTC and see it as a way to repurpose my old GPU rig. If nothing else, I can trade LTC for BTC. There are probably enough "get rich quick" speculators to drive the price of LTC a little.

So far, it's just a speculation bubble.  In reality, LTC reward should be the same as BTC reward with the same hardware.  So, someone with GPU 'X' should be able to make the same amount (in Fiat value) if mining BTC than LTC.  However, it's now around 1.85 time more profitable to mine LTC than BTC, although that exact number is hard to find exactly as the algorithm is different (SHA-256 vs scrypt) so the relative difficulty vary greatly depending on which hardware is used.

It's a bubble.  Although I would expect GPU miners to switch to LTC when a lot of ASIC make it impossible to GPU-mine Bitcoins.

This will happen in the next month or two. Then I suspect there will be a crazy rush to switch over to LTC.

As an ASICMINER shareholder I've been following progress there and things are really beginning to ramp up. This will be followed by the Avalons and (eventually so I'm told) BFL.

For those who don't want to mine either currency and just want to buy in LTC is very cheap when compared to BTC even at todays rate so it has some promise of a good return for a comparatively low investment.

You can be an early adopter with LTC, to start trading BTC right now and expect to make any real return in the short term you need to spend tens of thousands of dollars.

I suspect a lot of new users will jump onto BTC, then see LTC and buy some anyway.

Indeed, but with LTC, you also know that you're clear of FPGA/ASIC.  Although it would probably feasible with an advanced ASIC and lot of memory, the lack of in-between FPGA make it so that LTC will probably remain GPU-only.

I do have an FPGA setup (custom hardware, custom miner, re-using off-the-shelf telecom cards we build at our work, using Stratix-II EP2S90, running at a total of 2.2GHash/s).  It's much more cost effective than GPU, both hardware-wise (the FPGA cards themselves cost me nothing) and energy-wise (I use about 450W).  I can do BTC, TRC, etc...  but LTC is a no-no for my FPGA setup!  That's the advantage of LTC.  So GPU miners will switch to LTC.

What will happen to the prices?  It's a good question.  I would expect that LTC will follow BTC prices, hash per hash, but in fact, you won't be able to compare.  BTC will be ASIC only, and LTC will be GPU only.  So I guess people will trade LTC to BTC and make more than if trying to mine BTC with GPU.

+1

Bitcoin has some problems related to "blockchain bloated by SD" and "Luke-JR enemy #1" dramas. I won't be surprised if ppl realize that Litecoin == Bitcoin + some nice features like faster confirmations and 1 LTC becomes > 1 BTC.

The prospects of large ASIC miners coming to town drove many to the LTC's side of fence.

It proves a truly distributed money creation (mining) is important to a cryptocurrency.

It is possible that mining Bitcoin will become an elite privilege while mining scrypt type alternate coins will become a commoners profession. Something to think about.

We need scrypt merged-mining then to make it an efficient profession!

-MarkM-

Interesting point

perhaps the more distributed the mining can be, then that currency will be more successful as it draws in l larger base

if so LTC may overtake BitCoin