Bitcoin Forum

I am new to the whole scene, been using both for a few months now.

Why i think litecoin is better - in order of importance, and all in my opinion:

1) much faster transaction times, much much faster
2) litecoins are not nearly as concentrated in such a few hands as far as i can tell from my short research.
3) harder to mine litecoins with ASICS (never say never, it will one day be done, but they will be slower ASICS compared to bitcoin), therefore mining should hopefully stay more distributed to the general public instead of a few heavy hitters.

comments?

Where's the litecoin sports books?

I am not making the argument that litecoin is as accepted as bitcoin, because it clearly is not even close

What I am saying is I think it is superior for the above reasons.

Bitcoin is the 1st and therefore has the head start out of the gates.

I'm all for currency competition :D Don't see why we can't have both Litecoin and Bitcoin, what I don't want to see is paper money still being widely used in the next few years, I do think there are problems with Bitcoin compared to Litecoin but they'll either get fixed or something even better will come along.

The only issue here is the blockchain increases in size and bandwith 4 times faster


No idea about this one?


Incorrect, because GPU's have a hard time with scrypt, a dedicated ASIC will create a larger gulf between ASIC and GPU, and if Litecoin becomes profitable enough to create ASIC, they will come.

---------

Apart from that I do like Litecoin, I should buy some more maybe.

1) is faster really better? is one fast confirmation in LTC as 'safe' as one confirmation in bitcoin?
2) Not a function of the coin
3) Same was said about gpu mining, if it is worth it to build an asic, an asic will be built, and there is no reason to think it will be slower than a bitcoin asic

The replies show that the OP hit a nerve! :)

I agree with the OP, but only on the basis that every following altcoin is going to be better than bitcoin in some way - or there would be no point in creating it!

My money for a real difference is PPCoin, but maybe someone will bring out an altcoin with every sensible advantage of everycoin and that is the one that goes to $10000!

(1) isn't true.  You need so much work burying your transaction for it to be "confirmed" - i.e. have a desired probability that it will not be reversed.  This isn't measured by number of blocks, but time and total network hash rate, and Bitcoin has a _much_ higher hash rate.

(2) clearly isn't true either, as there are _many_ more bitcoin users currently.

Regarding (3), there are advantages to requiring miners to use specialized, single-purpose machinery.  Dissuading botnet mining is one.  Another is that it makes miners have more "skin in the game", causing them to care about the health of the network that much more - their mining equipment becomes worthless in the event of failure of the mining algorithm.

Edit: by "failure of the mining algorithm" I mean an attacker obtaining a significant majority of the hashing power.

I though litecoin algo was much more ram intensive, so whilest building an ASIC for litecoin is possible, it would be much more costly, and not quite as quick because of the ram requirements?

Can people stop talking about transaction time, when they are clearly meaning Confirmation time.

That's a misunderstanding we really have to work at.

Transactions are basically instant (in the order of seconds) in both Bitcoin and Litecoin and are faster as every other System available.

What you mean is confirmation time. The Time until your transaction is basically impossible to charegeback or be in anyway fraudulent.

Guess what, with a credit card this time frame is about 180 days. Yet I have never been asked anywhere to wait this 180 days until my transaction is "confirmed".

yes confirmation time

what are the odds of a transaction being reversed in bitcoin or litecoin?

lets say you accept a transaction from someone with zero confirmations, but you can see the transaction....

what can go wrong at this point?

can a transaction be faked? ie I am guessing you really do need to wait for one confirmation at least?

what are the odds of someone being able to fake a transaction that somehow manages to get one confirmation?

That advantage is largely illusory. Transaction times are not faster. Only Confirmation time is faster.

However, it's not the number of confirmations that matters for double spending protection. It's the cumulative difficulty of confirmations.

If you decrease the time between confirmations by a factor of 4, you need 4 times as many confirmations for the same double spending security.

The only situation where Litecoin offers a speed advantage is a high trust scenario where merchants only require 1 confirmation  for minimal security, and where the security provided by 1 confirmation greatly exceeds the security they require, but at the same time 0 confirmations is not secure enough.

Such situations are rare.


As for the slow confirmation times of zero fee transactions, Litecoin would suffer from the same problem if it had similar volumes to Bitcoin.



Doesn't bother me. I think that people like Satoshi, Gavin, and Mike Hearn deserve every penny of their wealth.

Litecoiners are profiting from their work.


I agree, but this is both an advantage and disadvantage.  

Too centralized, and mining can be corrupted by monopolies.  Too democratic, and mining can be corrupted by social engineering.  I'm not sure whether Bitcoin, Litecoin, or ppcoin strikes the right balance.

Heh, for what it's worth, I'm not a millionaire or anything. Probably neither is Gavin given his comments about diversifying out of Bitcoin. Maybe Satoshi is, if he were to sell :)

It's not quite true that if you quarter block intervals you need 4x as many blocks to get the same security. I used to think that too, but the maths don't work out that way because blocks form a Poisson distribution. Our resident mathematician Meni Rosenfeld wrote a paper that tries to explain this here: https://bitcoil.co.il/Doublespend.pdf  - but basically 4 blocks in 10 minutes gives you more security than 1 4x harder block in 10 minutes.

Now that said, Akka is exactly right that the 10 minute interval is somewhat misleading. The real competition is credit cards which settle far, far slower. So why 10 minutes and not 2.5, well, it was a tradeoff between wasted work and block propagation speeds. Imagine a future where Bitcoin is very busy and the network is very wide and blocks are very large (and we have an optimised protocol, but still). Let's say it takes 1 minute for a block to globally propagate. This is sort of similar to how quickly BGP propagates and the BGP mesh is a comparable very large broadcast network. So now you waste 10% of all your work due to chain splits. With a 2.5 minute interval you're wasting nearly half your total work!

I have some litecoins and I consider it a good experiment.
However some negative points about litecoin:
- they are too many litecoins and it is not so well suited to conserve value like bitcoin
- litecoin is overvalued at the moment probably because many frustrated bitcoin miner(asic related) went to litecoin mining and many buyer forget that now 8x more litecoins are produced than bitcoins
- litecoin is wasting much more energy than bitcoin with mining (asic mining is more energy efficient)
- attacks against the litecoin network is more easy with bot-net or Google-cluster systems
Especially bot-net attack are very dangerous because the attacker doesn't need to reveal his identity and it is not necessary to have his own network. An asic 51% attack like in bitcoin is less likely because it needs a high investiture and the attacker needs to reveal his identity.

In other words, you have no idea what the risks are or what it takes for a transaction to be reasonably considered irreversible, yet you have the opinion that Litecoin does this faster than Bitcoin, specifically "much much faster". Does that sum things up? An uninformed opinion is not of very much value.

+1

Remember bitcoin can adopt faster block times.

no.

It can technically do any thing, if there is community support for it.

Does propagation time increase linearly with block size? If so, wouldn't the larger block size of more infrequent blocks result in just as much propagation time as a portion of the time between blocks?

no. it would create a hard fork, and would no more be bitcoin. it does not matter how many uses is or what they call it, its not bitcoin.

By that logic, removing the 1 MB max block size, which is going to happen and was advocated by Nakamoto, would make it something other than bitcoin.

According to the bitcoin wiki, the prohibited changes to bitcoin's protocol are:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

• Increasing the total number of issued bitcoins beyond 21 million. Precision may be increased, but proportions must be unchanged.
• Changing the bitcoin distribution algorithm such that the subsidy at any given time period is decreased without miner consensus and 3 years notice, or increased beyond improved precision of halving (lossy beginning with block 1,890,000).
• Any rule that adds required, explicit centralization. For example, a change requiring that all blocks be signed by some central organization.
  

A technical improvement that doesn't change the 21 million coin limit and helps bitcoin better meet its initial design goal of being a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash" which "would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution" does not change what makes bitcoin important and valuable.

by removing the 1MB limit you are not messing up all the old blocks. huge difference.

+1

Akka:  The Voice of Reason!

I also wonder about this. I don't think it linearly increases, but it can be close enough. Also, what is Litecoin's additional overhead?

All in all, I don't think shorter confirmation times make a practical difference, as long as they aren't near-instant (below 20 seconds?).

Almost any change can be done without messing up old blocks. In fact, I can't easily imagine one that couldn't be done that way.

There's plenty of point in creating altcoins even if they don't have any advantages over Bitcoin - the creator has a chance of becoming a billionaire if it works! Other than that, I don't see the advantages for the community.

That's a contradiction!  :P

The more widely adopted a coin is though the more resistance the devs will face to changes which aren't mission critical.

his change proposes to change the protocol. removal of the 1MB limit could look like that there was no need for +1MB block before the first one, and that the limit had never been there.

You know the bitcoiners are scared when more and more of them every day are making their way over to ALT territory to beat their chests and proclaim Bitcoin as the top dog.

Every dog has his day.

LOOOOOL!!!!!

I also like LTC a lot better from the BTC slug.

I prefer FC. It's 4 times moar - so it's LTC 2.0.  ;)

Betamax was technically superior to VHS.

Right, but the same is true of any change. Say the change introduces some new block format entirely -- any change at all in that new format. The old format would still be valid providing it's either the genesis block or a block whose previous block is also in old format. Now, it again looks like there was no need for the new format until the first new format block, after which no old format blocks can ever be added.

That's a myth, just like "Dvorak is superior to QWERTY".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2003/jan/25/comment.comment
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2009/07/the-dirty-backstabbing-mess-called-betamax-vs-vhs/

The only studies that showed Dvorak was better were done by ... wait for it ... Dvorak himself. (Or done by others but rigged by Dvorak.)

http://www.jaysage.org/QWERTY.htm

Of course not. Think about it -- for what possible reason would you want to slow down typing speed? In fact, it was created to speed up typing speed by keeping the hammers on old typewriters from hitting each other when you typed quickly. By pure luck, that also distributed the load over your fingers and avoids having to use the same finger twice in a row to hit different keys.

Nevertheless one important point is that not always the superior system/concept is winning the biggest marketshare or audience at all.

So assuming LTC is superior to BTC there is no guarantee that this manifests itself in a bigger piece of the cake.

Really?  No kidding?

To me it only makes sense to have two main crypto-currencies.  With the new FinCEN statement I don't want to trade my BTC to usd or my LTC to usd.  I'd rather trade them back and forth between BTC/LTC to avoid capital gains taxes.  It is the solution to their ruling and makes sense to anyone that doesn't have their head in their ass or wants to be raped by Uncle Sam.

Edit: BTW, I don't think either BTC or LTC are superior to each other.  I think they both have their place and compliment each other well.  They both need each other now with regulations being put on them.  It's time to wake up people.

A lot of people are waking up to the idea that for many reasons - Litecoin may be superior to Bitcoin on technical merits.

However - there needs to be Litecoin infrastructure built.

Some people may say that Natural Gas (CNG) powered cars are better and less polluting than gasoline/oil powered cars.

However Bitcoin(oil) has a headstart in infrastructure build out over Litecoin(CNG) we may very well end up with Bitcoin winning not because it was better but because it was first.

Though - that does not mean Litecoin is worthless - if you follow my energy analogy - crude oil trades for about $90 a barrel, natural gas still trades for $4/MCF.

Litecoin does have an opportunity coming - if in the next few months it can build infrastructure and leverage its larger more diversified miners, and the wider distribution of Litecoin holdings in the long run Litecoin could in fact overtake Bitcoin.

I however expect that the Gold/Silver analogy will remain a good one, and while Bitcoin may reach $1,000/BTC one day I think it is completely possible that LTC reaches at least 10% of that value.

Just my .02 LTC.  ;) from experience in the energy industry where we DO NOT use what is BEST.

Having an infrastructure for exchanging between LTC and BTC is enough for it to thrive as an hedging tool for bitcoins.  For the same reason people withdraw just enough USD from BTC , someone can hold just enough BTC for it's online expenses.  That doesn't make use of LTC shorter confirmation but I think sCrypt is the most important feature of Litecoin.

Assuming Gox can get their act together and make good on promises RE: LTC then you are correct.  So much is riding on Gox carrying USD/LTC and BTC/LTC.

If it does LTC is eventually off to the races!

You will be correct that a hedging instrument is enough of a value proposition.  In many ways it already is. :)

I still think BTC will retain a preium for some time, but I feel as years pass the premium will diminish as people experience that LTC can be used just like BTC.

I think Mike has hit the nail on the head. What appears to be a strength of Litecoin is probably a major weakness. The 2.5min block time cripples its scalability by trying to solve a problem which doesn't really affect most merchants (waiting too long for confirmations).

We will see soon as massive GPU power is re-directed away from BTC to LTC.

Hashrate has gone as high as 15,000,000Mh/s last night for LTC.  That is HUGE for scrypt.

Here is some interesting questions that needs an answer!



So far, the only person who's noticed this is a rude bugger who, in lack of a better mentality, didn't realize that these were new questions to enlighten things, so (s)he used them questions only to insult the one asking them...

These questions are answered in any "How Bitcoin works" type of article.

I would try to respond item by item here, but the way they are asked betrays some ignorance about how the system works in general. So I would suggest reading about Bitcoin first, and then asking the parts which you don't understand or don't agree.

The "odds" could be considered an interesting question, but I don't understand what the asker meant. The PoW done on Bitcoin is immense, and none of the alternative currencies can really approach the low probabilities Bitcoin has. This won't produce interesting numbers for you. If the asker is in fact interested about potential differences in hypothetical cases, then s/he needs to clarify.