Bitcoin Forum

So I realize there are some other forks of bitcoin, but I occasionally see people trying to throw litecoin into a bitcoin conversation with the public, and that only further confuses folks away from getting into bitcoin.   I think if we want any of these to "win" (as in go mainstream), I think we should just focus on the one (bitcoin).
 
Also, some of my own minor ignorance, but why litecoin?  What purpose does it serve, right now, other than seemingly a competing coin? 

Litecoin is silver to bitcoin's gold. It can be mined without fear of ASICs.

I still think the current price is a bubble, though, and I was lucky enough to have bought in below BTC0,005 and turn a fair profit in the recent two rallies (could've made even more in the latest rally had I been greedier, however!).

Litecoin is also a good hedge against bitcoin without having to buy fiat. For me, that's been its killer app, though you can actually buy stuff with Ł too.

Litecoin is not silver to bitcoin gold.  Silver is silver because it has other properties of gold.  There are no advantageous characteristics of litecoin to bitcoin.  Litecoin was created when some individuals felt that they missed out on the early mining opportunity of bitcoin and its still hanging around. 

This is exactly right. 

yeah I wondered if it was one of those folks who missed out on the early days of CPU mining... like me.  :)  But rather than worrying about a competing coin, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and embraced that we were (are?) still in the early adoption phase. :)
 
So are the people still into litecoin trading hoping that it'll take off?  Can it be mined in conjunction with (beside/on top) of my bitcoin mining w/out harming my bitcoin hash rate?   If so I might mine it to trade for bitcoin, but that'd be the only reason.

It's clear that bitcoin derives value from utility.  None of the coins provide clear advantages in terms of utility accept maybe the proof-of-stake coins.... and even that is untested in scale.  This conversation belongs in alt coins.

 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bcr1s/why_is_difficulty_set_to_10_minutes_per_block_why/  (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bcr1s/why_is_difficulty_set_to_10_minutes_per_block_why/)

This is why we have 10  minute confirmation times.

The only logic you will find from litecoin users is that since there are 4 times as many litecoins they should be worth 1/4 a bitcoin.  Nothing beyond that.  It's really dumb.

Because it's not just another "me-too" bitcoin clone started by people who missed out on mining when it started :)

Well I'm annoyed, I guess, because at a time where we should be pulling together, some asshat in a forum will pull out "litecoin" and then people get more confused.  I guess I'm looking for some information so that I can respond and retort in threads when that happens.

says the person joined on February 01, 2013, 05:17:36 AM

different algorithm? faster confirmation times?

Show me solid proof of ur statements and I will listen... till then... educate yourself

Faster confirmation time = less security, higher risk of forks.  It's "best" attribute it actually terrible.  Plus, jebus man, how many scam coins are you promoting?! You're the problem we're talking about here.

It actually is. Designed for miners, by miners :)
However if someone wants to mine them and someone else is willing to buy them... I'm okay with that.

Faster confirmation times means better real world application IMO... people should wait 6 confirmations for BTC... how long does that take?? who actually does this?? older people who have been scammed more in the past maybe, but Noobs who see the coins after 0 confirms may take this as read and sent, I go back to the buying a cup of coffee in a coffee shop the transaction needs to have cleared and been confirmed in the time it takes to make the coffee... or the seller will be waiting for the confirms before handing over the coffee...

But anyway my coins in my sig...

BTC well y not ?
LTC hedge ur bets, different algorithm, good community backing
PPC excellent Developer (sunnyKing) and offers Proof of Stake
NMC - actually offers something different again, .bit domain names
DEV - Ethical currency, supports open source development and as a developer i'm all for that
TRC - My own speculation here having had many chats with Crazy rabbit,  and opportunity to try making my own apps without feeling people have to risk their precious BTC if all goes wrong in my apps
FRC - Again added something different - demurrging so interested to see if that develops
BBQ - This was my plug a little while ago as a great coin to test solo mining on to see how to set up solo mining as was an unheard of coin by many and abandoned as was 51% attacked.

As a developer I am keen to support those coins that allow me to show support for other developers work and thought

Enough though... altcoin forum was a pleasent place to be not to long ago... the shear number of posts a day, and repeated posts means that people are not reading everything new, let alone reading the past conversations that have happened, I'm gonna leave u all to speculate as u see fit and do what u want.  All my thoughts are here in this forum on most coins, and I have better things to do than justify myself when only trying to help bring some insight into the madness that is unfolding.

I wonder if the aim of some is to spread FUD at such a time simply to keep the new joiners to the cryptoworld in the dark and missinformed. But we all entitled to our own opinions i suppose.

LTC has a trust issue with me.  It's website litecoin.org still has no real names listed on it.  Bitcoin.org has always had Gavin Andreson's name along with three others, not including Satoshi's.  Someone has pointed out that Coblee (who is the main programmer of LTC) is Charles Lee b/c he represented LTC at a 2013 conference.  If so, he should put his name on the litecoin website to get more credibility.  At least PPCoin has real names on their white paper and Sunny King (main programmer) is an active poster on bitcointalk, fielding questions and misinformed statements.

LTC was suppose to deter GPU's as well as ASIC's but GPU's are the dominant way of mining.  And ASIC-proof?  If LTC does continue to garner interest, an ASIC will easily pop up having the BTC manufacturers cut their teeth with BTC ASIC's.  Then where's the difference?  LTC could end up acting as counterfeit BTC.  Building a cryptocurrency based on deterring specific technology like GPU's and ASIC's to make mining easier defeats one of the founding premises of BTC -- that is, BTC's mining technology is based on the concept of Moore's Law.  BTC does not target specific technologies; only that processing speed will follow along the difficulty of solving the increasing blockchain size.

I guess you equate involvement in and knowledge of bitcoin/cryptography/p2p networks, to the time on this forum and number posts.  If that's true, bitcoin and every other similar project is destined to fail.

Itt massive butthurt from people who didn't buy at 6 cents.

Litecoin increase in value has been 70 fold while bitcoin is 14 fold over the past six months. The market speaks for itself.

This couldn't be further from the truth, my question was why keep throwing all these alt-coins in to the public (instead of keeping them here on these boards for mental masturbation and theoretical talk) since the public is what we want to legitimize, and the more options(?) they see, the more confusing and convoluted this whole thing (which is already confusing and convoluted to the general public) becomes.

No... But i see ur post still failed to show me any evidence of ANY knowledge whatsoever??

looks like tacotime hit the nail on the head I think :)

Tonto, I don't even care anymore for the dumb sheep that are still ignoring cryptocoins (btc, ltc, nmc and others): They're here, they work and they're ready to kick paypal's ass  ;D

Litecoin definitely has advantages to Bitcoin. Faster transactions is huge.

Just like bitcoin two years ago, there was no public figure in its initial stage.



If that's premise of Bitcoin, it's sad, because it means eventually big money will take over the control of BTC future.

Before we find an algorithm proportional to human brain activity,  LTC is  more people-friendly than BTC.  

Hell yeah i hear ya, I don't talk to anyone else about the details behind Terracoin and PPCoin when i introducing them to cryptocurrencies.... and only if they are interested after discussing BTC will i mention LTC.

I think the forum has suddenly seen a massive increase in new members, and whe BTC out of their price range and mining capabilities they looking straight to the altcoins to make their fortune as they believe has been done with BTC for all the early adopters.

I think ur original post was good and u are looking for the answers to differences between LTC and BTC, and want clarification to eloquently  be able to explain differences to the average Joe on the street... agreed it is hard enough explaining BTC, but the nature of it (being open source code, run on a P-2-P network, was all speculation at the start) kinda opens itself up to natually rolling the conversation round to LTC and new altcoins... but the knowledge of the differences between alts and the history of the alts seems lost to many... even with the very useful sticky post here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0

litecoins have faster confirmations.

LTC is garbage.

The less secure thing is funny and shows how biased the haters are. So 2.5min is too short apparently, so why not 30mins? Or 2 days? So 10mins is magically the perfect number? The less secure element of it is its 4times less secure for a 0.000000001% occurrence (arbitrary number but close enough).

Did you even read this?


Again, redditors missing out on cash are the most upset.  ::)

Can litecoin be mined on top/beside bitcoin with the same hardware, without harming the bitcoin hashrate?

No if u use your GPU for mining BTC, you can not use the same GPU to mine LTC at the same time

You can mine LTC with your CPU though at this point and not affect your BTC hashrate

If u LTC mining on GPU, it uses more memory on ur PC, so best NOT to mine on CPU as well, as you will notice a slowing in ur gPU hashrate.

i think this is blinkered,  the main factor here is not the name but rather the idea behind the name


that was also my first thought but why not.

Why Litecoin? Becauce it appreciate the most faith of all altCoins and have a consistently grown Community.
Whether the difference between btc and ltc will be sufficient, have got to decide the user, not a few people those don't suits ltc.
But it looks like this. For me, it suffices thats ltc is a trustable coin.


if you don't like litecoin, don't buy it. its total easy ;)

Fuzzy love for a fellow bear :)

Seriously quoting a quote who isn't even publishing his source "Somebody did a math paper on this recently". Who did this, what is his/her background and where can we find this paper?

And I'm not anti-LTC, I'm actually quite happily mining LTC with all the GPUs I nearly sold. As a miner I don't care why a coin is valuable, I mine and sell the most profitable. But as a coin user using it for actual purchases and some investments I want to know why a coin is better for me and faster confirmation times without actual, real-world benefits won't convince me...

From the reddit thread: https://bitcoil.co.il/Doublespend.pdf

Always useful to get the source: the original quoter didn't understand the paper's implication in Litecoin's specific context where some assumptions aren't valid.

The paper demonstrates that with a sizable portion of the network hashrate, only the number of confirmations matters, not the time constant (the average delay between blocks) for the confidence you can have in a transaction not being overridden by a double spend.

But... as the paper explains:

The part about acquiring enormous computational resources is relative. It is is truly difficult for Bitcoin because you must acquire ASICs to be a credible threat now. It's not true for Litecoin: botnets are rent you pay them by the time spent using them and botnets are effective threats as scrypt is CPU-friendly.

So if Litecoin had used sha256d its faster blocks could have been an advantage because botnets at best have access to GPUs, not FPGAs and ASICs, but as a CPU-friendly hash is used, botnets becomes the obvious choice for people shady enough to try double spends. In this particular context attacks' costs are proportional to the time constant and the whole argument falls down: a short one is indeed less secure.

There is another problem: block propagation. Assuming Litecoin didn't change Bitcoin block size settings with 2.5 minutes blocks you need 4 times the bandwidth needed by Bitcoin (it could be solved by restricting block size to 1/4th of Bitcoind blocks, but this is a protocol hard fork). Satoshi is believed to have chosen these values so that the lowest network bandwidths would still be able to use Bitcoin.

My logic:

Assuming LTC is superior to BTC, then if LTC succeeds, then after some time there will be yet another cryptocoin superior to LTC. And we'll be switching between those, maybe even  using some common API and reusing most of the software. This would however mean that you cannot use cryptocoins for value storage, and you still have to hide your silver if you don't want gov to steal money from your bank account.

Bitcoin can be used as a value storage and it can have tons of abstractions above, enabling it to have instant transactions. There is no way I'm waiting 5 seconds for any confirmations when buying something in the future. Decentralization is expensive, and even for light it takes more than 100ms to go around the earth (global currency). So my bet is whatever the winning cryptocoin would be, there will still be many centralized payment processors on top. And since we would have them, confirmation time would not be that crucial.

At op, your mom that's why.  She's trading flesh for my ltc.

I'm not here to talk you into ltc.  I don't care if you invest or not.  GFY.

How's that?

If the logic is litecoin is superior due to the 2.5 minute conformation times, would not a new coin with 1.25 minute confirmation times be even better than litecoin?

Not necessarily, the faster the confirmation time the more orphans you get and the more power inefficient your chain becomes.  You also double the amount of bandwidth in the network.

Not at all trying to be cheeky, but time to plug qqqed's site!

www.whylitecoins.com hehe

Litecoins bring a few interesting points to the table, namely:
-Scrypt algorithm: If SHA256 is at some point cracked or a reduction function is created for it, scrypt should still be fairly safe (although I understand scrypt has some ties into SHA family algorithms)
-Transaction time: Blocks are mined faster, confirms happen faster. Some will argue that 10min is perfect, some love 2 minutes.
-Hedging against Bitcoin without Fiat: Awesome


Just like people don't have an issue with Euros and USD coexisting, there is no reason that we can't have more than one crypto currency. However, many people are against the idea of multiple currencies for a few reasons:
-Random spam (BBQ coins?)
-Diverges people from a main coin
-Many Bitcoiners feel that it threatens their coin
-Multiple currencies make the learning curve harder for entry into cryptocurrencies

Due to the nature of the Scrypt algorithm, Litecoins are resistant (not immune) to ASIC and FPGA design, and bridge the gap a bit between CPU mining and GPU mining.

So.... Why not bitcoins to relieve these advantages? :P

Point being you've got bitcoins, and you've got litecoins, and you've got litecoin.... but faster. I'm not sold on litecoin hitting anything special with the 2.5 minute mark. If shorter confirmation times were really important there would be a coin making it even shorter. If it's not, litecoin will not take over bitcoin. Hence.... I think bitcoin will be the long run winner.

Litecoin is inevitable.

It means that the technology behind Bitcoin is so strong and massively hard to break, that sub-mining gear is more than enough to secure a second crypto-currency.

And in the future, a third, a fourth, etc.

ITT, a whole lot of people who don't understand why the Scrypt algorithm was chosen. Vorksholk was approaching the reason in his last post.

Here's a little insight, try to extrapolate some reasoning yourselves:

http://roycebits.blogspot.com/2009/05/colin-percivals-scrypt-new-chapter-in.html

At the rate computing power is improving across the board along with overall improvements in broadband connectivity, I can imagine an alt-coin with 5 or 10 second transaction and confirmation times being used in place of Visa and Mastercards for small face-to-face EFTPOS transactions, as a sort of bronze or copper to Litecoin's silver and Bitcoin's gold. Could end up using Bitcoin's for large transactions like buying a house or a car and Litecoin's for things like TVs and fridges. At least, that's how I would see things settling at some point down the track.

Oh look, another one of these threads. We have not seen to many of these before.

A lot of people know why and it seems quite a lot know why it wasn't a good idea too.

A bank vault's door needs to be just as thick to protect $10M worth of currency inside as it does to protect $1.5 Billion.

Litecoin is extremely vulnerable to a 51% attack due to the vulnerability of its pools to being DDoS'd, and due to there being significantly less mining capacity needed to reach 51%.

Legit question: How is this different from Bitcoin in its youth?

I'm going to do a little calculation for my own sake... and probably to my own LTC-holding peril!

The current network hashrate is 5.6 GH/s. Litecoin Scrypt is said to be (and anecdotally has been found to be) 1000 times more difficult to hash than SHA256 (serialization, memory hardness). So to compare to Bitcoin, that is the equivalent processing power/equipment to 5.6 TH.

50% would be 2.8 GH/TH worth of equipment, all done without ASICs. The most reasonable way to accrue this kind of power is through renting a botnet. Let's assume the average person's computer (as part of a botnet) could do 100 kH/s (most would be CPU, some would be gaming rigs). To get 2.8 GH/s, that is a 28,000 slave botnet. From various articles online I have seen that such a botnet might cost $200 x 28(thousand) = $5600/hr (for a "world mix").

That is not an unreasonable amount to a nefarious character who has a high profile target in mind. But botnets are fickle things. A world mix would see lots of downtime at the bot-per-bot level, such that you may get 80% efficiency. Also, I may have been overly generous with the 100kH/s average estimate.

95% of this thread is people talking about confirmation times. It is my view that the security issues are founded but may be somewhat overblown, but I don't know much about the mechanism and logistics on carrying out timing attacks on the network.


Disclaimer: my crypto holdings are about 30% LTC, 70% BTC.

Lite coin is a backup solution when bitcoin failed, if that ever happens. And for all those miners with GPU mining rigs to have some fun :D

At the current state, the Litecoin is oversold. The price of Litecoin has dropped sharply and there is a lot of market overreaction and panic selling. Almost every investor holding LTC coins is considering going short. Actually, the oversold condition only lusts for a very short while before the market breaks and the bearish forces are overcome by bullish forces. This is the best time for traders to buy the LTC at the current low prices. If one buys Litecoins at the current price, a rise in the prices would result to profits.

with Litecoin continuing to improve will be very profitable and make good profits and increase. and with the advantage and level of development of Litecoin, able to make its own advantages to make it a superior coin and become its own pride in the future.

Lightcoin was always the younger brother of bitcoin and a lot of people have invested in lightcoin, when he was still worth a penny. We can say that a lot of whales hold their money in Lightcoin and I think they are interested in the price increase of this coin.

Actually the company of litecoin is great company because even though they are not like bitcoins and etehreum in this industry through its performance, they can manage to give a great service as well.

so I chose Litecoin Because this coin had decreased mala than that I chose to invest in Litecoin because this coin will be good again when everyone is back stable then I am sure Litecoin will be good and can be profitable and many people who invest in this Coin and wait back to stable