Bitcoin Forum

Quick rant: I have always viewed Litecoin as a detraction from Bitcoin and have refused to make mass quantities of physical Litecoins as a result.  I have viewed Litecoin as nothing more than a hedge against Bitcoin seeing a 51% attack due to choice of SHA256 as an algorithm.

But:  I believe I have thought of an idea that would make Litecoin far more important and relevant in the Bitcoin/cryptocurrency ecosystem, by being as ready in wait as possible in case Bitcoin really does experience a 51% attack.

In a nutshell, I view a Bitcoin 51% attack as eventually possible, for one reason:  ASIC production efficiency scales far more than linearly with the amount of money an actor is willing to put into it; a bad actor with $1 billion to 51%-attack Bitcoin with its own custom ASICs will be far more than ten times as effective than ten bad actors with $100 million.

Anyway: here is the idea:  Add a mandatory merge-mining feature to Litecoin so that it is always "merge-mining" Bitcoins, just for pretend, in hopes that one day Bitcoin will have the option of "let's subscribe to the Litecoin chain" (as a secondary means of block validation) as a way to resolve a future 51% attack on Bitcoin's SHA256-based chain.

Here is sort of how it would work:

1. Add a new requirement to the Litecoin chain such that a valid Litecoin block must contain either a record of the most recent Bitcoin block header hash, or a repeat of the hash found in the prior Litecoin block (with a limit of repetitions).  Litecoin blocks that contain outdated Bitcoin intelligence should be disfavored by nodes capable of detecting that.  Further impose the requirement that Bitcoin block headers must be represented contiguously in the Litecoin chain - Bitcoin blocks cannot be skipped (which shouldn't be a problem, when Litecoin blocks happen 4x as often as Bitcoin)
2. In the event there is an active Bitcoin block chain fork, the requirement is loosened such that the Bitcoin block header hash requirement can be satisfied by any leg of the chain, not just the one Bitcoin considers valid.
3. Add a feature to Litecoin clients that allow Litecoin users to decide to prefer or not-prefer branches of a Bitcoin fork while one is in progress.  The default for this should always favor the Bitcoin leg with the most longevity, and should disfavor long chains that suddenly appear to replace a large amount of the known Bitcoin block chain.  The user/miner/pool-op should always have an easy way to have the final say, such as by pasting in a preformatted message either exiling or checkpointing Bitcoin blocks.

Anticipated benefits:

1. Bitcoin users would have a ready made remedy to a 51% attack that they can switch to:  Bitcoin users can simply add the requirement that if a Bitcoin block header hash makes it into the Litecoin chain, that its proof of work should be given a bonus.  Litecoin community could create and maintain pulls to the Satoshi client that cause it to subscribe to the Litecoin chain and incorporate it as intelligence toward block validation and resolving block chain forks.
2.  Bitcoin would have an easy way to add an emergency upper bound to block creation, just in case an enormous amount of power suddenly appeared.  By turning on an optional must-appear-in-Litecoin requirement, the Bitcoin community could switch on an upper bound of 1 block per 2.5 minutes if it was deemed necessary.
3. Litecoin would be seen as far more important than a wannabe bitcoin knockoff without added value by those who see it that way.
4. Bitcoin's blockchain would be re-democratized to CPU/GPU users without forcing the Bitcoin community to switch to scrypt, they'd have more decentralized influence on bitcoin than those with the means to buy/make ASICs
5. The legitimacy of Litecoins would increase greatly - people would see the value of Litecoins in their role of protecting Bitcoin, and would potentially vote for the longevity of Litecoin by offering to accept LTC for goods and services, thereby increasing their value.
6. I'd start making Casascius Litecoins if you guys did this and did it well.

I'd call the concept "marriage-mining".  By doing something like this, LTC gives a nod to BTC's importance while adding synergistic value to BTC that LTC can benefit from by association.

So if I've got this right your suggesting another axis of selection for bitcoin branches above the >50% hash rate? And that selection factor would be the ability for litecoin mining clients on the litecoin chain to vote which one they favoured; where hopefully litecoin could not suffer from a >50% exploit at the same time as it uses a different hashing algorithm to bitcoin?

I'd definitely buy physical litecoins off of you too mike!

Exactly.

I guess that comes down to if the majority are in favour a voting system of proportional representation or first past the post... if you get my meaning...

I personally like the idea though. Can anyone think of ways we could make the implementation even simpler whilst maintaining similar functionality?

Interesting concept Mike, "marriage-mining"  imo

This would make botnet operators that mine litecoins happier and bitcoiners will benefit from it too, so it's a win-win situation.

This general idea of yours for sync'ing the Bitcoin block header hashes into the Litecoin blocks is an interesting suggestion.

I failed to understand why would we need "a repeat of the hash", according to your suggestion isn't it true that the next Litecoin L_0 block will either include the next-needed Bitcoin block B_0 hash or the last Litecoin block L_1 hash, so after L_0 was generated, the following Litecoin block should include either the header hash of L_0 or the next-needed Bitcoin block, so there are no repetitions? Actually, wouldn't it be better to require that the next Litecoin block must always include the header hash of the previous Litecoin block, and optionally also to include the next-needed Bitcoin block header hash?

What you said about "any leg of the chain" is a bit unclear, nodes aren't required to keep competing legs (a.k.a. branches). I think that what you meant is that if the node sees that its preferred Bitcoin branch disagrees with the branch continuation of Bitcoin hashes inside the Litecoin blocks, then it should still accept these Litecoin blocks, as long as that different Bitcoin branch is valid (even though it isn't the longest Bitcoin branch according to what the node gathered while listening on the Bitcoin network) ?

About allowing users to decide to prefer or not-prefer branches, I've written before in another context that I think that it's a terrible idea:

Count me in!!!

Neat concept.  Anything which favors a larger crypto-economy over a single chain is generally good.

If anyone is looking for a physical litecoin in the meantime, you can get something like it here:  https://www.bitmit.net/en/item/21037-3d-printed-nfc-enabled-litecoin-simulacra

Casascius, I think this is a very interesting idea. I've always thought of Litecoin as a complimentary coin to Bitcoin and I am definitely interested in making a change to Litecoin that is beneficial to Bitcoin.

There are a few things that need to be worked out though.

1) Does this means that each Litecoin client/miner has to be both on the Bitcoin network and the Litecoin network in order for it to verify blocks or create blocks with the latest bitcoin block hash? Or maybe only the miners have to be on the Bitcoin block chain?

2) How do we handle forks? What if the Litecoin blocks have a eventually losing fork in the block chain? How do we then switch to the winning chain?

1. The Litecoin client would have to connect to port 8333 of at least one node of the bitcoin network but probably wouldn't need to validate the bitcoin transactions.  Rather, it need merely listen for blocks and validate the proof-of-work, possibly saving the 80-byte headers and nothing more to aid in this, and throw out any other incoming information.

2. Forks shouldn't matter as this information is purely informational for the benefit of bitcoin... or at least, I don't understand how a fork could cause a problem.  A fork gets resolved the same way it already does.  The criteria of what constitutes valid Bitcoin data in Litecoin's new "bitcoin" field depends only on the Litecoin block before it and the current hash of the newest Bitcoin block.  Litecoin forks are invisible to the evaluation of this, and so long as a Litecoin block satisfies the requirements with respect to the block that came before it, forks shouldn't get in the way.  The only decision making Litecoin ought to do with respect to the Bitcoin data is to perhaps retard the propagation of a newly created Litecoin block that clearly contains very stale Bitcoin data.

If Bitcoin were to temporarily fork and the Litecoin block chain recorded the hash of an orphaned Bitcoin block, this would be OK, ignored, and would not invalidate the Litecoin block.  However, that block would be more likely to be thrown out by the Litecoin network since many Litecoin nodes might never hear about the orphan and won't be able to validate the Litecoin block.  (The behavior could use some more refinement to cover all of the what-if's, but thus far, I just wanted to throw out the general idea of having Litecoin be a validator/observer for Bitcoin as a savior case of a SHA256 51% attack, which sounds like an enthusiastically received idea in and of itself, regardless of there being things to iron out)

Very interesting Casascius.

I like the idea. Appears now Litecoin may actually have another purpose in addition to a hedge against bitcoin.

Looking forward to what comes out of this.

So if there are very large changes to the bitcoin blockchain (in a short period of time), deny the new blocks as invalid? Interesting...

Time requirements as well as size of change in the blockchain would need to be specified. This may need quite a bit of testing to determine what a valid set of new blocks are and how far back in the bitcoin blockchain a fork could be allowed to rewrite if someone were to come online with a large hash rate.

Maybe something like anything above 10 previous bitcoin blocks changed suddenly would consitute a denial of validity of a forked chain?

This will indeed cap the amount of new hashing power (as difficulty increases) that any one entity could put online to mine bitcoins at any one time.

I guess also using old time stamps of created blocks would also be a way of determining which is a "valid" chain that forked recently.

Are you kidding me? This is an awesome idea!

Just like that, Bitcoin is now somewhat protected by SHA-256 and Scrypt, while Litecoin is now given additional value and keep those GPU/CPU around to protect the blockchain. Indeed, it is a wonderful marriage between those two coins.

Casascius,

How would this IDEA have worked in theory in the most recent forking of bitcoin that happened back in March?

It would have had no effect.  It sits in standby until the Bitcoin community has an emergency to which there are very few good competing solutions.  The March fork was easily resolved with a Bitcoin-only option that was clearly going to work all the way from the beginning, and using a Litecoin reference as a fallback wouldn't have been seen as necessary or useful.

This is meant to be a remedy for a deliberate 51% attack to the Bitcoin blockchain... one where you can't trust SHA256 blocks because it's clear somebody malicious has acquired an unexpected ability to do lots of SHA256 hashing.

Gotcha, so it is essentially a fail safe in a real 51% attack that is malicious.

Got it.  :D

I am a fan of KISS? keep it simple stupid. Adding more complexity just for this does not seem necessary. Let bitcoin suceed or fail on its own merits. Litecoin does not need bitcoin.

Okay you had your say. Now the masses (free market) will decide. :-*

free market? more like someone who understands this well enough has to program it, debug it, test it, help deploy it, etc...
the free market better pony up some moolah if they want to see this happen.

unless i missed the post in this thread where a capable dev said he would do it for free.

I don't own any litecoins, but if I did, I would probably leverage my observation from Bitcoin that holding Bitcoins while developing it into something the world sees as useful solution to its problems gets followed by a huge inflow of wealth.  I would infer that those holding Litecoins are going to be able to foresee how they might benefit financially if they produce a valuable solution like this.

fine silver coins with a big Ł on them would be awesome!!!

Coblee, Laseek. Yeah they have enough incentive to want to try the idea.

Chill man lol you sound like a butthurt previous LTC investor that has seller's remorse.  ;D

I am curious to see what Bitcoin development team would say to this.  Gavin?  Comments?

I'm interested in his opinion too, once the idea gets refined.  The best part is that no Bitcoin dev involvement is needed.  It remains a take-it-or-leave-it option.  It could be canvassed by Litecoin devs testing and submitting pull requests to the Satoshi client, which will probably never get incorporated, but which remain a viable option just in case.

Either way, it will force Bitcoin devs to think about the possibility of making sure the mining algorithm can be changed with minimal effort if the need arises... something already possibly valuable if mining power ends up in the hands of very few as a result of the way the Bitcoin ASIC market plays out.

I don't think anyone can seriously propose "Let's switch Bitcoin to scrypt because it's better" and expect everyone to just leap to it on a boring day, because the entire mining community would be up in arms over the loss of their investment in SHA256.  But do everything you can do to be the salvation in the case SHA256 mining cannot continue, and you'll have many Bitcoin miners become enthusiastic Litecoin miners as well, today.

I dont seem to be able to make up my mind on this one... On one hand, this, if executed, coordinated and handled properly COULD be highly beneficial to all involved, on the other, (atleast as i understand it) not only would it take an insane amount of coordination to pull this off properly, but also (and this is from me being somewhat of a hardline supporter/proponent of KISS as well) i dont know that i inherently like the idea and the possible consequences of effectively tying both networks together, or for that matter all the additional complication/overhead and possible FUD that this might bring in.

Personally, i've always been expecting someone to come up with some sort of optional overlay network that would run on top of bitcoin and provide mechanisms to possibly help with making successful 51% attacks harder but also provide for easier mitigation if one indeed happened, but so far it seems that doesnt seem to be happening, at all.... maybe this is, in it's own sort of convoluted, abstracted way it ? i'm not too sure.

A few people seem to be getting thrown by the mistaken belief that Litecoin's SCRYPT is ASIC incompatible— it's true scrypt itself was designed to flatten the playing field between specialized hardware an general purpose hardware by being memory-hard— but because litecoin uses only 128k (instead of the 8mb - 40mb discussed in the scrypt paper)  it's not really all that memory hard, I wouldn't be surprised to see LTC ASICs with _more_ efficiency gain simply because LTC-scrypt runs fairly poorly on GPUs.

But none of this is what Mike is talking about in this thread, his argument doesn't depend on the qualities of scrypt vs sha256 as a POW.  What Mike is basically saying is that if you have to make 10 chip-types rather than 1 chip type you don't get as much manufacturing scaling (e.g. you get 10x the mask costs).

Sadly, I don't think it works out this way. If you know that to be successful you'll need 10 POW implementations you'll just make a single chip that implements all ten. You'll need more of the since you're using up more area but you're back into the realm of good manufacturing scaling.   Ultimately, what counts is that the attacker isn't outspending the honest users... how you dice up the spending doesn't matter much.

Beyond that— some surprise is useful. If the attacker didn't _know_ that he was going to need 10 POWs at first, but after he sunk his costs and began his attack the honest users switched then he could indeed be caught with a useless weapon.  But now you've told him, so he knows. Good job! :P

There is an advantage in pooling resources so that the honest users aren't divided among multiple things— thats why merged mining was created after all.  It's a shame LTC went on the failed anti-GPU lark instead of using it.  Should such an attack happen, we could do as mike suggests— merge Bitcoin onto litecoin in order to undo LTC's mistake of dividing the resources of the honest user and making them choose... I don't see any particular advantage in doing anything in advance, however.  Public preparation would only better equip the attacker.

Although this is a great idea, it makes Litecoin viewed as an even more lesser coin to Bitcoin. Just seems to benefit Bitcoin in the long run and just a few extra resources needed in Litecoin.

There's a couple of other things as well, that don't depend on PoW algorithm at all, whether it's one chip, ten chips, or more.  Allowing Bitcoin clients to subscribe to Litecoin as an optional backup source of data validation brings a whole lot of adaptability to Bitcoin in the face of problems with PoW, without ever having to implement the solution to those problems in Bitcoin itself.

First, Litecoin is, by its nature, going to be more adaptable to change than Bitcoin is, particularly in the area of trying new block validation ideas as backups to PoW.  Litecoin is still a solution in search of a problem, and its supporters would seemingly be willing to do things to alter Litecoin to make sure it fits the vision of "silver to Bitcoin's gold", or Bitcoin's sidekick if you will, while it's still useless for buying goods and services on the market, and while the news media doesn't care about it.  It's possible to tweak Litecoin and experiment with it, with far less of a disaster risk than if those experiments were to be done on Bitcoin.  

One of the most valuable experiments to try, that Bitcoin can't really afford to try, is to incorporate signature validation from trusted parties in the event of a failure or attack on the PoW system.  By this, I mean allowing trusted users to publish digital signatures either endorsing or condemning blocks for whatever subjective reason they decide.  This, of course, is antithetical to Bitcoin's entire nature, as all centralization is frowned upon.  For the purpose of this, the question of how to decide who is trustworthy or whose signatures are worth giving weight to is outside the scope of this idea.

However, if Litecoin were willing to give a more hybrid approach to block validation a shake, AND it turned out to work reasonably well, AND Bitcoin experienced a 51% attack, AND circumstances arose where Litecoin became the only/best source of valid Bitcoin blockchain information available, then the Bitcoin community would have the option to decide whether to subscribe to it, essentially allowing the Bitcoin user community the option of voting in Litecoin trustees to be the temporary custodians of the Bitcoin block chain at a time when it unexpectedly needed it most.  That would give Bitcoin rapid uptime while the Bitcoin community worked to decentralize the power suddenly bestowed on these visionary Litecoiners, possibly to replace the 100% reliance on SHA256 PoW mining with something else entirely or a hybrid combination as needed, while Litecoin infrastructure provided "life support" to keep the blockchain humming along while that replacement implementation was chosen, tested, and rolled out.

Considering the fate of other coins that were merged mined with Bitcoin, I believe that it would end up tanking Litecoin's value. So based on that, no way.

^^  That wasn't my interpretation of it...

If I'm understanding correctly, the mechanism described works like this:
1) Attacker with 51% of hash rate begins mining a fork 7 blocks long in secret while submitting his coins to an exchange (or where ever)
2) The attacker's coins get 6 confirmations and he dumps them for something valuable at the exchange, runs off with it
3) Attacker now dumps his 7 block fork onto the network.  Normally, because it's longer than 6 blocks, the attacker would get his coins back because he would invalidate all 6 previous honestly mined blocks because the network can not tell which blocks are valid or are not valid and just accepts whatever chain is longest,
HOWEVER,
The Litecoin chain for the last hour has included block hashes for the block headers of the previous honest 6 blocks for Bitcoin.  The Bitcoin clients could be alerted to this (and the fact that a reorg of length 6, an exceedingly unlikely event, has just taken place), look at the Litecoin chain where the hashes of the honest blocks' headers are stored, and reject the fork that suddenly appeared on the network out of nowhere because they know the hashes on the Litecoin chain reveal the honest chain (the one that reported blocks as soon as it found them rather than hiding them).

There are some issues with this.  
1) Inevitably bitcoin orphan blocks will appear in the LTC chain.
2) Miners on the Litecoin network can make up any block hash they want and submit it, since there's no easy way of telling whether the hash they give actually exists over some portion of bitcoin network.
3) Because of 2), forking the BTC chain may be made easier in some instances if the BTC network actually pays attention to what the LTC network is saying and the LTC mining nodes are dishonest.

What's being discussed here has nothing really to do with merged mining, it's just a way to lend temporal stability to the Bitcoin network via an independent network (Litecoin)

If this happened, the double-spend would succeed.  BUt afterwards, the entire bitcoin community would be, "Holy shit, someone is attacking us, and pulled off some serious double spends!  What are we gonna do?" while BTC value tanks.  LTC enthusiasts will wake up and get excited knowing their day has come.

If the attacker is not believed to have hash power to 51% attack LTC, LTC enthusiasts will simply say, configure your BTC client to subscribe to our chain, query it before executing a reorg, and don't accept big reorgs replacing lots of data we've seen with lots of data we've never seen.

If the attacker demonstrates an ability to attack LTC and BTC together, LTC enthusiasts will simply say:  "We're signing our new LTC blocks with coinbase keys we've used in early LTC blocks so you know we're the same guys who have always been here.  We are now assigning low weight to unsigned blocks, and negative weight to blocks signed by keys that have been used to sign other blocks we've deemed disruptive.  So, we're now back in control of our chain and it's free of garbage.  Configure your BTC client to subscribe to our chain, query it, show favor to the BTC blocks we endorse."

A Litecoin ASIC is possible, if a billionaire wanted to build enough ASIC for both Bitcoin and Litecoin 51% attacks they could. Be careful thinking that Litecoin is immune to ASIC, its immune to Bitcoin ASIC of course.

How much money did it cost to build a ASIC? A order of magnitude cheaper than Intel spends on its new Fabs.

Avalon and ASICminer designed and created ASIC's for under $50 million.

I'm not sure about the situation here, with ASIC in general existing and being so much more powerful than conventional chips.

A superior long term crypto-currency will one that requires a exponential amount of power to attack the system. The fact that Bitcoin and Litecoin attack vectors require a liner increase in power in regards to current network power presents a problem.

Even though there are ways to recover from a  51% attack, A bad actor could sustain the attack until confidence in the currency was destroyed, remember the only real reason anything has value is because of confidence.

You have confidence in Gold and that people are quite likely to always buy it from you, you might have less confidence in USD but at least the USA will honour it (This is why a government default is so dangerous, destruction of confidence in a nations currency would destroy that government or even the nation itself) and Bitcoin and Litecoin have value because the people have decided they have value. I believe that crypto-currency confidence, even though it can cause bubbles, is the one of the most powerful types of confidence, a type of network confidence)

However if someone sustained a 51% attack against Litecoin and Bitcoin, it would kill this confidence.

If a solution is found, a network that requires a exponential attack to gain enough power, then either a competing currency would use this and overtake Bitcoin, or Bitcoin would adopt it as a superior system of security.

This is the true holy grail of crypto-currencies, if you are very smart and reading this, I beg you to help find a solution.

Take the attack against the wallet address, it requires so much computation that it is not feasible. If the network was that difficult to attack, then we have winner. 51% is too easy, until it requires a hundred thousands ASIC devices running the network. Then we might be able to say its a little secure. :)

Don't believe me? Run the numbers, ASIC exist and they cost no where near a billion to make. Think about it.

You neglect the part of the scheme above that's moronic because you spent tens of millions of dollars to attack a chain with less than that much immediate liquidity on any exchange.  If you were to spend tens of millions of dollars making lots of ASICs, why not just mine with them like everyone who has made ASICs so far is doing?

edit:
For instance, your net profit per day right now mining Bitcoins with 80 TH/s (enough to attack the network) is $530,445.73 (after power given a mildly inefficient ASIC).  Why would anyone in their right mind perform a 51% attack when they're making that much per day off their hardware?

If you attack it because you're a state actor who wants to get people to use your fiat money instead of leaving it for cryptocurrency, the liquidity on the exchange is irrelevant.

That's true.

Litecoin is fine.

It is the first successful currency that has built in protection against ASICS.  

Litecoin is the people's money.

It is people like the OP who have prevented Litecoin from getting its own Wikipedia page.  Something that is ridiculous at this stage.  Litecoin cannot be found on Wiki because of the fears of BTC fanboys who get every mention of it deleted by swarming any mention of Litecoin.

Let every currency stand on its own two feet - LTC will be just fine.

Pure SHA256 - not so much, see TRC, BTE as great examples why.  

It would be best if this discussion is kept purely technical on-topic and not filled with BTC vs. LTC arguments.

If someone has a net worth of 50 million to 100 million, then attacking Bitcoin is stupid! They can make much more mining!

That's not the person I am talking about.

If someone has a net worth of a billion and they can make a lot shorting the entire Bitcoin system, they might spend 50 million to enable this, or maybe a bank or government that doesn't care about making several million more a day when they can make more in fees for moving money around once Bitcoin is destroyed.

The 51% attack is a real viable issue and for 50 million you most likely could destroy all Litecoin and Bitcoin confidence. That's not a lot of money to destroy a billion dollar economy or a rising competitor.

The linear 51% attack is a expensive but viable attack vector.

Until there exist hundreds of thousands of ASIC run by good actors we are in a dangerous era of crypto-currency.

To put it in perspective, the profits of a large bank in one month could easily lay waste to Bitcoin, the profits of Apple in one day would be enough to build ASIC for both Litecoin and Bitcoin and erode all confidence.

Exponential attack vector for the network is required at some point, someone smart please figure it out.

The proposal made would ONLY be for the benefit of BITCOIN and would make LTC subservient for all time.

LTC will step out on its own and stand alone, separately successful from BTC.  The purpose of Litecoin is not to prop up the failings of BTC.

Exactly.  This does nothing to benefit Litecoin and just is an attempt to deal with the insecurities the BTC community are now facing that do not really affect LTC.

And it will do this because......?

Sort of how dollar-denominated gift cards to Applebees stood up and stepped out on their own as currency, separately successful from plain old fiat cash?

"We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin

I like the idea that attacking one of the major cryptocurrencies means you would need to attack them all but this would only happen if Litecoin were protected by Bitcoin as well. In which case, there should be some mechanism by which all coins could depend on another of their choosing for protection against the attacks mentioned in this thread. As gmaxwell points out, it would be great if the fallback chain can be chosen during the attack.

Ultimately, if blocks being signed under human control is any part of the equation, that will benefit all chains with an available option to consider those signatures, directly or indirectly.

This is well said, and something the LTC community would be more likely to support.

There has to be a benefit to LTC from this arrangement, mutual protection would be something reasonable.

Not, hey I have a great idea, re-design Litecoin so it can be our bitch and protect all our BTC investments should they all implode, and in exchange you just increase the valeu of BTC more and reduce the value of LTC.

LTC has value in the size of its network, and the fact that it is not vulnerable in the same way to the problem BTC is.  This alone adds value.  LTC has nowhere to go but up.  The OP would not make this thread unless he knew this deep down in his heart.

The only real threat to cryptocurrencies on the scale of BTC is a state actor - or several state actors acting in unison.

Like if the US, the EU, China, and Russia all decided BTC was destabilizing their fiat, they could easily 51% the network - tomorrow.

The NSA alone certainly has enough processing power today even without ASICs:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

If ASICs were needed, spending $1B or $10B to secure trillions of USD would be trivially cost effective to a state actor.

That would be years or decades from now, but its a real threat and one that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

I like the ideas presented in theory but my technical understanding of them is a bit limited to offer valuable feedback on specifics. 

if we start talking state actors then unless we're taking about pacific ocean island nations, or some of africa and a very few others you hardly need more than 1. in fact for most of the countries out there, except for the "lose face" aspect of it, it would take little to no effort (in terms of a country) to do it. i would actually hazard that most subnational entities could easily do it if it's in their interest as well. In fact, i could actually see a national governments "outsourcing" it to subnational entities just because that way if it came out it was a state actor, they lose next to no face at all, as well as being able to go "sorry, nothing i can do for you bro, they have their autonomy"

It is an issue.  Can you see the same type of effort that was put behind Stux being put to work against BTC's SHA256 with 22nm premium ASICs.  All 50,000 ASICs lighting up the network at once?

LTC and scrypt at least make this type of thing quite a bit harder and much more expensive, but not impossible.

I know this is still early days but what if the bitcoin and litecoin chains both forked around the same time? Hypothetically could you end up with two sets of orphaned data on different chains; where the litecoin chain preferred by married miners that is logging the bitcoin chain that is not being attacked itself becomes an orphan chain.

Could this be a form of attack against this proposed married mining redundancy?

If this a genuine problem could it be fixed by the bitcoin chain reciprocally logging the litecoin chain. (This seems very over engineered).

Lol I was thinking its using at least 1.2 mb :) If parameter is changed to say 12 mb how would then efficiency cpu v gpu compare? I think gpu got only so much ram onboard and its more costly than pc ram :)

As to OP idea.  Imo if btc foundation wants it use bytecoin or launch something to that purpose. Also even if technological solution is found to make any crypto impenetrable to 51% attack since its open source it would be implemented across the specter.

The thing about creating something for btc it now got unelected btc foundation. It said Official site offering documentation, forums and the open source client software which permits to send and receive bitcoins. :D Then http://bitcoin.org/en/foundation Bitcoin Foundation standardizes, protects and promotes the use of Bitcoin cryptographic money for the benefit of users worldwide. :)

Surely the likes of Forbes interests there can finance extra protection grids by themselves? :)

Perhaps for some of the very reasons you have mentioned (not the Aapplebee's ad absurdum), among a few others some like to forget. Otherwise, why would you suggest this? I'm glad to see someone heavily invested in bitcoin understanding that sha256 isn't necessarily the best idea when the main vulnerability is reliant on hardware.  
That said, I think the idea has merit. I also think it is a long way from implemented and may ultimately detract from independent development.  

I'll be interested to see where this goes.

I think I can boil my core argument down into a few basic premises (evolved a bit with this discussion):

1. The whole point of Litecoin as it currently stands, is to bet on Bitcoin weakness but presumed Litecoin strength: either on the perceived or probable outcome that one day SHA256 won't be good enough to keep securing Bitcoin, but that scrypt and its current parameters somehow will withstand whatever befalls SHA256.

2. If both SHA256 and scrypt will survive 51% attacks, then Litecoin is pointless, because it's just a Bitcoin clone with equal durability.

3. If both SHA256 and scrypt will succumb to similar 51% attacks (scrypt simply making the attack more expensive), then Litecoin is pointless, also equal or similar in durability to Bitcoin, because it offers no innovation nor protection not already offered in Bitcoin, beyond a marginally higher attack cost.  If Bitcoin users flock to Litecoin, it will simply be attacked second.  Its superiority will be nothing but illusory: identical to the premise that Macs are inherently "more secure" than Windows PC's for some pretend reason other than the fact that, for the sheer number of them out there, Windows PC's have historically been a juicier target for attacks.

4. If Litecoin is pointless for these reasons, then there's no offense intended:  I'm proposing a change to Litecoin that would make it valued and respected by those primarily interested in Bitcoin.  (This is not being Bitcoin's "bitch", this is exchanging value for value.  Pretending that Litecoin is so valuable today as to be too good for Bitcoin would be like Britney Spears as a child thumbing her nose at the Disney deal that brought her to fame with the notion that she's already too priceless to be associated with Mickey Mouse.)

5. Litecoin is at a stage where it is small enough to be able to afford to experiment with adding features that allow users to manually influence chain reorganizations, but big enough where those experiments could get some real world traction versus being a one-man basement experiment.  There is nothing wrong with being an experiment, Bitcoin itself is rightfully labeled an experiment when compared with the size of the world containing it.  That said, Bitcoin is too big and its objectives already entrenched to make a valuable feature such as manual reorg control a nonstarter with Bitcoin, but the idea of having the user-selectable option in Bitcoin to subscribe to external block validation intelligence remains plausible.  Litecoin can be that intelligence and add value by exploiting now not one, but two inflexibilities of Bitcoin as currently implemented.

Excuse me if I understand something wrong... I'm a girl who dabbles in Java, and some of it might be over my head, but if this were to be implemented, a "hard 51" would go like this:

1) attacker uses Superior ASICs to mine a private BTC chain forked from some point long since past (probably so as to make a double-spend)

2) attacker publishes chain

3) an unspecified mechanism detects that there is, well, a so-called "malicious reorg", and BTC enters "hide yo coins, hide yo wife mode" and starts relying on backup data embedded in Litecoin's chain

It seems to me that

a) it would be exceedingly hard to properly develop detection algorithms for "malicious reorg" detector

b) if you succeed at a) you don't need no litecoin, you just keep around the blocks being reorged away until you are convinced that reorg was "not malicious".

c) you can, of course, just halt everything and have community "heavy hitters" decide in IRC which part of the reorg was "good" instead of doing it with "and then a miracle occurs" automagical "malicious reorg" detector, but as long as you don't discard the blocks involved (which does not require litecoin) you don't really need litecoin in this process.



So, TLDR:
I do see theoretical benefit to this general line of thinking (the "let's detect bad reorgs" line of thinking

I doubt that "malicious" reorg detector that would activate a "hide yo coins" mode when a real attack occurs is attainable

I could see a "dumb" detector being used to facilitate a "consensus intervention" on part of humans who have nontrivial power over the network (pool ops and devs).

I do not quite see why you need litecoin in any such scheme, beyond "let's give this altcoin some semblance of purpose"

I think it's merit need not be so "us vs them".  If what we're really interested in is a secure cryptocurrency why not develop several in tandem so that all of the eggs aren't in one basket?    As bitcoin deals with scaling up, it might be served by having other sister currencies for exactly the other reasons you list, Mike.  More of a crypto-economy with several elements which might each contribute to a larger stability. 

Reorg shows up in the debug output immediately in the client

It's absurdly easy to detect (just look for a chain that's been reliably mined for 6 blocks/1 h and then at 1 h the 7 block fork is detected --> report this to user via pop up)

The likelihood of two totally different chains size max of 6 MB (6 blocks) existing on the network at the same time and both being reported to a vast number of different nodes with neither group of nodes interacting is really, really unlikely

It's not about technical prowess, it's about the network effect. The current "forced" emigration of GPU-miners from Bitcoin to Litecoin is currently distributing this currency into more pockets. Litecoin is developing simply because more people own Litecoins. People don't really care which currency is better, as long as you use it for economic purposes, it's good enough.

The total power of network hash rate is evidently important, the higher the better. But the distribution of this hash rate is also important. 100 people with 1% of the network is better than 10 people with 10% each. If Bitcoin can, in a indirect way, keep the GPU-miners around, it helps this distribution of hash rate. GPU-miners are going to flock to Litecoin anyway, and I think that Bitcoin need to keep them around. Being able to mine the BTC back-up is a pretty nice deal for BTC.

Part C is where the process would break down and where litecoin would shine.  In March, the "heavy hitters" in IRC had the benefit of being able to reliably contact and influence the majority of the hash power in a short amount of time and persuade them to implement the desired solution, and they had the benefit of a ready-made solution (a version to roll back to) so that nobody needed to do anything objectionable.  Without both of those, the devs in IRC would have had far less power than they appeared to enjoy.

If a core feature of Litecoin were that mining nodes can accept operator(user) influence, those mining Litecoins get a decentralized pulpit from which to announce their collective opinion as to which fork of the Bitcoin chain is correct.  Even in the absence of that, Litecoin can implement automated validation rules with respect to the Bitcoin chain that would be too cumbersome for Bitcoin to adopt... example, Litecoin can be programmed to automatically refuse to endorse large Bitcoin reorgs without gaining explicit operator consent, which for a well-connected Litecoin node is typically a good policy.

Bitcoin community has the option to adopt, or not adopt, the Litecoin consensus, just in case it's wrong (default is to not adopt).  By doing this, it leaves Bitcoin with a semi-automated oracle to suggest a singular, neutral, consensus-based "Plan B" recommendation for future Bitcoin fork situations.  For example, on March 12, the chain reorg that was deliberately orchestrated was desirable... the Litecoin community would endorse the target branch through operator UI, and in the event Litecoin block chain failed to gain consensus favoring the branch we were trying to accept, Bitcoin miners would react by selecting "do not listen to Litecoin" as input.

Sorry to be rude, but I really can't stand the way old school bitcoiners act and talk about Litecoin.

This is what your OP sounds like to me: Litecoiners... protect my big stash of Bitcoins, after securing my nest egg, then in return I will make a lot of money by selling physical Litecoins to you guys.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good idea. I am somewhere in the middle of the two extremes:
Litecoiners/Bitcoiners: That's a wonderful idea!
Litecoiners: We don't need Bitcoin, nor are we going to be Bitcoin's subservient guard dog, let the ship sink!

Old school bitcoiners seem to just not get the value and use that LTC can have in the future. You blindly ignore the good things about Litecoin that so many people already see (which is why it's up to 2.30 from .07 months ago.) I'll spare you the time of listing off some of the good traits of Litecoin because I know you know them all already, you are just blinded by your big ole pile of Bitcoins.

IMHO Litecoin is doing just fine without this and it will continue to do just fine without this. Bitcoin needs this more than Litecoin needs this. If you can't see the usefulness in Litecoin at this point in its development, then just get to steppin'... we don't need you.

/rant

::)
 


I am aware of those facts.

However, I believe you missed the part where I explicitly stated the qualifier "malicious".

Detecting a reorg is trivial. Determining whether it is an okay reorg or a "bad" reorg does not seem so.
I don't see why Litecoin is required here.

I mean, I realize that in this scenario, it is, essentially, a large backup tape.

But what exactly prevents BTC from, just, you know, keeping the reorged-away blocks for a little while longer and pleading the node operator to investigate "suspect" reorg when it occurs ?
Both solutions provide, essentially, the same functionality - block material is kept around for a while longer, so that human-op can decide which side of a fork he likes the best. But one requires mutual inter-operation between two cryptocurrency nets, while the other does not.

I, so far, fail to see the advantages to the "inter-operation" scenario beyond "let's give litecoin a sense of purpose" and "it would be a shame if GPU miners starve".

Lol, nice try but Gox has already confirmed LTC is going to their exchange.  Once this happens ltc will have plenty of publicity. 

It seems your op thread only would benefit BTC.  Unless BTC does this too as a mutual partnership with LTC, my vote is no to LTC being BTC's bitch.

I don't care if you make physical litecoins or not.  Someone sooner or later will.  Sorry you choose to ignore and lose an entire market.  But that's your choice.

Cheers.

What development  ::)

Back on topic I think it would be beneficial to both Bitcoin and Litecoin.

So far, it is basically a rather contrived and complicated block backup mechanism so you could counteract and/or recover from a "bad" reorg.

I am not convinced it would benefit anyone.

I could get behind this fork, it sounds like a great idea.

let's try to keep egos out of this. i couldnt care less what bitcoiners think of litecoin as long as this is beneficial for both sides...and if you look at the big picture, YES, it COULD be highly beneficial to all involved.

nobody is trying to give litecoin a sense of purpose. litecoin already has a purpose. many purposes actually. only those who chose to willfully be blinded are unable to see it.

and the reason why litecoin is "required" is simple: litecoin is still small/early enough to be adopting these kinds of things. It's much easier to make it happen in litecoin than to make it happen in bitcoin.

edit:
How is preventing large malicious reorgs/chains that spring out of thin air and ruin all confidence in bitcoin "not beneficial" ?

There are new projects being announced for LTC every day and there are a lot of exciting things are in the works. Also, more and more websites and stores are accepting LTC by the minute.

Bitcoin wasn't developed over night and neither will Litecoin. It is a slow and steady process, but there's definitely development going on and you'd be foolish to think otherwise.

1) slightly faster transactions (to accommodate the needs of...???... ??? )

2) an ex-CPU friendly - now GPU friendly - POW (to accommodate all the GPU miners who are about to be pushed out of business)

3) A general sense of hope for those who failed to get on the bitcoin train in time (to accommodate all those who failed to get on the bitcoin train in time)

4)  ???

...

Well, I admit, technically, that makes 3, hence, "many"  ::)


Which "these" "things" ?

being bitcoin's big and, as far as I can tell, not really necessary, backup tape ? That's some ambition, there ;)

I've read that Litecoin will be forever Bitcoin minus one in the development stakes. A project like this could really test the Litecoin devs and show that they're capable of doing something without seeing how the Bitcoin devs did it first.

I can understand that.  Old school bitcoiners don't see what problem Litecoin solves, but can see how it's a distraction to Bitcoin.


Responses like this focus on the wrong things.  Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.  The presumption you're offering is that I'm proposing something like this for personal financial gain, oblivious to the big picture as to why cryptocurrency was created in the first place.


You seem to underestimate just exactly how tethered Litecoin is to Bitcoin.  Unless Bitcoin sinks due to an attack that Litecoin is immune to, Litecoin is going down with any systemic/sociopolitical/reputational Bitcoin failure, because it is Bitcoin with a different logo.


Perhaps old school bitcoiners define value a different way.  A solution to a world problem has value.  A cure for cancer has value.  A cure for cooties does not.  A hypothetical solution to a nonexistent problem does not.  I think I have already listed off both of the good traits of Litecoin of material significance and if there are any more, they're worth taking the time to point out, so as to dispel the appearance that they don't exist.  Litecoin may as well capitalize on its actual strengths... arrogance that it's better than Bitcoin would not be one of them.

The fact that people learning about Bitcoin for the first time also hear about and become interested in Litecoin is a rational explanation for its rise in nominal value.  That doesn't make it any more inherently valuable for any reason beyond increased awareness and popularity.  The preschooler star on Honey Boo Boo is more "valuable" than she was two years ago, but not for any intrinsic attribute of her own.


Seems to me that the value of a Litecoin is strongly in lockstep with the value of a Bitcoin.  Litecoin needs Bitcoin more than Bitcoin needs Litecoin... that's already a fact today.  Fortunately I think the majority of LTC users understand this, but feel free to prove me wrong.

Actually on LTC/BTC today litecoin has actually gained on bitcoin.  Meanwhile BTC is dropping like a stone and LTC is not.

So much for being tethered.

Cheers.

So, my assertion that Litecoin's future is tethered to Bitcoin's is in error, because of one day's worth of market activity?  (or one month's? or one year's?)

Like I said dude.  Keep yapping.  LTC is going to Gox whether you like it or not.  LTC does not need BTC.  BTC actually needs LTC for security as you've already stated in your OP. 

Cheers

My apologies Casascius, I did not mean to turn this into a Bitcoin versus Litecoin war of words. If you can't see what makes Litecoin valuable at this point in time, then I do not think you ever will, so there's no need for me to rehash old arguments here.

At the end of the day, your idea would benefit both Litecoiners and Bitcoiners, and I think that's great. I just don't think Litecoin needs this as much as you are implying. I also don't think it should be 100% up to Litecoin developers to implement something like this, Bitcoin developers should help with it as well because it greatly benefits them too. Perhaps you should post your OP here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0

You may get more serious responses there and less trolling... us Litecoiners are used to Bitcoiners coming over to the ALT forum and putting Litecoin down and spreading FUD, so naturally we are defensive when it comes to our kid, as bitcoiners are to Bitcoin. You don't seem to be the average Bitcoin troll, so I apologize for jumping to that conclusion.

Coblee has stated that he's going to keep Litecoin one release behind Bitcoin. How does that make Litecoin not dependent on Bitcoin  ???

I actually want to see what makes Litecoin valuable, as then I'd probably want to buy some and undertake efforts to support it.  The way I see it, if nobody can say what makes Litecoin valuable in a clear and concise manner, then the simple assertion that it's valuable isn't persuasive.  Its nominal price having gone up on the market charts doesn't make it valuable.  I can't argue in favor of Litecoin's value at the moment even if I try, other than to point out that it has some enthusiastic supporters getting some attention.  That's pretty much it... the value is in the enthusiasm, which alone is of limited usefulness, and importantly, permanence.


Sure.  Litecoin doesn't need anything per se.  But surely the Litecoin community values being valued, and there's no reason to assume that there wouldn't be an interest in being valued more.


This will happen less, and will be less irritating, when the Litecoin community can be defensive with meritorious answers based in rational argument, framed in terms of how Litecoin benefits society above and beyond Bitcoin, rather than arguments based on market charts and Litecoin's presumed value to those holding Litecoins.

Bitcoin is testing the waters for Litecoin. In a way, Bitcoin development is more risky than Litecoin, because if BTC break due to a recent development problem, it will not affect Litecoin.

As an example, look at the last fork that happened to Bitcoin. Litecoin wasn't affected and we know how to prevent it since Bitcoin tested it before Litecoin did.

Amen.... Bitcoin needs LTC more than LTC needs BTC.  Period.

And thanks to asics, BTC's need for help from LTC has just quadrupled.  There is zero reason for LTC to become BTC's bitch now.   It's bitcoiners that need ltc help not the other way around.  And unless it's mutual. I see no reason to help them as they've kept us down from the beginning.

Bitcoiners in general need to wake up.

So how does keeping Litecoin one release behind Bitcoin make Bitcoin need Litecoin more then Litecoin need Bitcoin?

It will be valued when it goes to Gox. This has already been confirmed...  Op's head stays in sand again.

CoinHoarder is right,  This doesn't help Litecoin as much as OP is implying.  He's trying to reverse the argument when it's BTC that needs LTC help more than LTC needs BTC help.

OP needs to admit that or move on.

Litecoin to me is useful and valuable to me in a lot of ways.

1. Diversification of one's crypto coin portfolio. You already mentioned this, so I won't elaborate too much, but someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.

2. Litecoin being built upon Scrypt makes it stronger than most other ALT currencies, especially the ones that are SHA-256 based. If you look into the problems TRC is facing, you will see that ASICs are hoping on their chain and sending difficulty into the stratosphere. They then go to hash something else, leaving the TRC block chain moving at a snail's pace and transactions taking hours to days to confirm. All SHA-256 based ALT coins (that do not have Scrypt) will suffer from this problem until they are fixed.

3. Litecoin is useful to the crypto currency ecosystem in the way that it's useful to have Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Card... or Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, and Chase. Sure, they all do the same thing, but they all do the same thing a little bit differently. Also, if one were to fail, there are others in existance so all commerce would not screech to a halt across the nation. It is good for Bitcoin to have a competing entity that is similar but not the exact same to itself. For the benefit of free market competition, each currency will always be striving to stay ahead or to catch up to one another, at the end of the day mutually improving both currencies by default.

4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.

5. Because blocks are found 4x faster, difficulty adjusts more quickly.. about every 3.5 days. This is useful because it controls the rate of the minting of Litecoins, and makes sure that they stay provably scarce for some time to come. Again, this is valuable because it stabilizes the network and deters high powered hashers from shooting difficulty into the sky and then leaving the network at a crawling pace for a longer period of time (than if blocks were solved at the same pace as Bitcoin.) This feature is not all butterflies and fairy tales, it also provides the opportunity to manipulate network speed, but as the network grows this will become less and less of a problem.

6. Then there is the "there's nothing to do with your Litecoins" fallacy. These people just don't do their research, there are plenty of things you can do and buy with Litecoin as of this instant. New merchants and services are popping up everyday, and I think this will continue to happen well into the future.

7. The Litecoin community is growing at an exponential rate. Similar to the growth of Bitcoin, as the community grows then so will Litecoin. Litecoin is already far too big and the people that believe in it are too invested in Litecoin for it to fail at this point. Litecoin can at this point proudly say that they are king of the ALT coins. It can no longer be brushed aside as a scam/pump and dump/whatever, it has real value and people are starting to see that.

8. Like Bitcoin, there was no Litecoin pre mine. There was the genesis block, and 2 blocks to confirm the genesis. This is valuable for obvious reasons... no one wants to support scammers, and for a crypto currency to become highly adopted this is a necessary feature.

9. Not everyone was so lucky to be around when Bitcoin was first started and able to buy them for pennies. The possibility of becoming an "early adopter" is very appealing to new crypto currency users. A ton of "noobs" have recently appeared in the last wave of Bitcoin mania and I've noticed that a lot of them overwhelmingly support and/or already use Litecoins.

10. As Bitcoins become more valuable over time, this will further push the poor and "working class" away from it. Some can no longer afford to buy one Bitcoin even at today's prices. People like to get more for their money, and when buying at today's exchange rate people can get more Litecoins than Bitcoins. If the same services and merchants start accepting Litecoins, then what is the purpose of paying $100+, $200+, or $300+ per bitcoin?

11. Litecoin has the advantage of doing everything after Bitcoin. By sitting and waiting in the shadows for people to bring to light exploits and bugs on Bitcoin, these problems can be fixed before there is much of a problem or before someone exploits it. Bitcoin would obviously be exploited first if there was something to exploit, because of the bigger market cap and it is more valuable for someone to exploit Bitcoin first rather than Litecoin.

12. Litecoin derives its value in the same way that Bitcoin does. It is provably scarce and its value is held up by supply and demand. Bitcoin had proven that this in itself can hold up an economy and even make it thrive. As long as there are new services and merchants accepting Litecoin (as there are), then demand should not go away. And... we all know by now that supply stays constant, thus giving Litecoin value.

13. It's anonymous.  8)

Litecoin, a Bitcoin slave, begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.

This is a terrible idea in my opinion. You're basically using Litecoin to protect Bitcoin(Maybe your business?) from what? ASICs? Double spends? 51% attack? Not only does this make Litecoin a slave to Bitcoin, there's no benefit for Litecoin with this idea.


Yeah, to protect your coin? What protection does Litecoin get? Nothing! If Bitcoin is so great, it can survive on it's own.


Oh! So now you want Bitcoin to be like Litecoin because you know it's faster! Yeah... no...


That's probably only you and a few others if you haven't seen the increase in the Litecoin network. It's no Bitcoin knockoff, sorry.


Are you scared of ASICs?


Protecting Bitcoin? Yeah, and it's slave. There's plenty of services already accepting LTC. This "benefit" in non-beneficial.


We're not your slaves either or people that take bribes for "Physical" coins.

I don't understand why others are getting very technical about this idea, when you need to realize that this idea is simple to make Litecoin make Bitcoin even bigger. Cascius, are you afraid that Bitcoins are going to shit and you have a whole inventory you're hoping to get rich off of? If I were you, I'd sell them those coins immediately. This is like making Litecoin a shitty XRP for Bitcoin once again. These are 2 independent chains, so let's leave it at that.

Sorry Simran, but I disagree with this. This would make Litecoin more widely adopted among Bitcoiners, and thus increasing its value exponentially. I think increasing the value of Litecoin would be beneficial to Litecoiners, no?

I think the problem is that this would be very complicated to implement, not only on a technical level, but also because some of the old school bitcoiners/devs might not be agreeable to turning their competitor into their business partner.

I couldn't care less about other bitcoiners. What matters is the general public.  I guess we'll find out when it hits gox in less then two weeks.  No need to panic now.

Keep calm everyone.

Well... IMO, Bitcoiners are inherently more likely to use Litecoins because they are already well versed in the way that crypto currencies work, making them a prime target market for the expansion of the Litecoin community. The know how to make a paper wallet, they know how to mine, they know how to exchange, etc. They would be able to fit right in immediately. :)

And of course I'd like to see many new Litecoiners from the general public as well, but to just brush off the largest user base of crypto currencies (Bitcoiners) is a bit absurd.

My take.  Bitcoiners have dismissed LTC since it's inception.  What they need is a swift kick in the ass to help them out.  I'm not dismissing them.  Only I have given up on their blinders, (I.E. there is only one gold.. there is only one currency, et cetera, et cetera)  Until we see serious investment from the general public and we will once ltc hits gox, we wont see them on board.  After that.... sure.

But this will all happen organically.  Not forced... Just wait and watch.

I agree

The result wanted for Litecoin can be achieved organically. This modification isn't needed for the result wanted.

no one NEEDS anything but why the fuck not act like fucking grown ups for once and stop fighting over whose's fucking dick is bigger and collaborate towards something beneficial for everyone ?

Well said with all the childish language. lol. Not.

Op's proposal benefits bitcoin only.  It automatically makes LTC the "lesser" coin.  Unless Gavin himself says that they will introduce LTC support along with LTC's commitment to support BTC.  I see ZERO reason to even entertain op's proposal.

Sorry but in this world it's kill or be killed.  BTC needs LTC support much more than LTC needs Bitcoin.  That is what we in the real world call leverage.  It's not some stupid silver LTC coin that anyone can make.  Sorry OP but you are about to go the way of the dinosaur.

Simran = the new CoinHunter

:D


Sure, but this time for a better coin, not that scam shit.

There's nothing suspicious about a chain 7 blocks long suddenly appearing on the network after an hour, with nobody else reporting it until then?  And in the meantime blocks are being relayed every ten minutes by other miners?  Really? ::)

ad hominem attacks?really?sigh.Whatever, dude, be the thickest dumbfuck ever.Be fucking blinded by your own ignorance. Be fucking stupid. keep it up. Continue to ignore the obvious benefits to everyone here. Continue with this "us vs them" retarded fourth grade mentality. Keep it up.

go right on ahead being a dumbfuck.

Lol, damn, wish I wouldn't have missed this one.

Litecoin isn't asking anything.  Litecoin just is and is holding value well, on it's own, at least compared to btc and actually gaining ltc/btc wise.

ITT, I see a well known bitcoiner demanding something before he does anything for ltc (which is nothing new).  Too bad for him.  LTC is going to the upper leagues without his demands being met.  It's btc that needs ltc.  Never forget that.

We don't need or want him here.  His proposal benefits BTC only making LTC immediately less than BTC.  Period.

And to ignore you go...  Wow, child.  Mom never washed your mouth out?

Cheers!

Any serious discussion of the topic ought to go into a new thread.  My OP has been heard loud and clear by those to whom it would matter.  If the opinion of most Litecoiners (I doubt this) is that the idea really makes a "bitch" out of LTC, then the idea is DOA I suppose.  I don't mean to come to Litecoiners and dump on Litecoins (freedom means freedom to create and promote your own alt coins after all, my rightful prerogative is limited to not owning any) so... unless someone brings up the topic, I'm outta here.  In view of the most recent posts, I'm locking the thread, and I think you can appreciate why.