Bitcoin Forum

Due to the super competitive nature of mining bitcoins, many beginners to cryptocurrency have been going to the litecoin and the value of the litecoin has increased as a result of more and more popularity. At what point would litecoins become a threat or maybe even a competitor of the bitcoin?

personally my thoughts are on the adoption for business, we have seen this with bitcoin, but many of the alts currency.  Personally an equal adoption for use could see the LTC match bitcoin, with faster transaction times and a tried and trusted market.  The other coins..... i dont know....  everybody lines up to tell you they are great but thats because they hold large amounts from mining and want to cash out profit.

my 2 cents

Personally, I'm betting on Litecoins to eventually overtake Bitcoins.

No it will not.  Something else might, but it won't be LTC. I guarantee it.

Many liken LTC as silver to BTC's gold.

never, bitcoin has a team of developers unlike litecoin!!

hahaha no

No

It is continuing to rise in value...And it does have an advantage over btc wrt mining.

Instead of just saying "no" it would really be interesting why you guys think LTC will never overtake BTC.

Isn't it true, that LTC provides faster transactions than BTC?
And isn't it true that there are no disadvantages compared to BTC?

(Before you answer please try to imagine that you dont own any BTC or LTC... What I mean: Try to stay objective.)

No, transactions are almost instant in both systems.

Do you mean confirmations?

Yes, this are faster, but this doesn't only introduce advantages, but also new disadvantages.

Confirmation time with a credit card (until it can't be chared back anymore) is about 180 days. the 10min of BTC are fast enough.


Basically no, there are no real disadvantages. But I also don't see any real advantages. It's practically the same, only some of the Variables where changed (Number of Coins, Blocktime, Mining Algorithm) but nothing fundamentally.

It's practically the same.

No real disadvantage, but also no real advantage.

Totally stupid.
If you put 0 fee in a btc transaction and it did not proceed for the last 3 months how can you call that a 10min transaction? huh.

Yes, thats of course what I meant. Thanks for clearing that up.

I think you are trying to say, that it might be a disadvantage because the time until a payment can be charged back should NOT be too short. Well thats true, but in practice it is no problem to artificially prolong this time... On the other hand it is not possible to shorten it, if the network is technically not able to do it faster.

So, I still see an advantage for LTC here. A little one, but still...

YES LTC will overtake BTC.

It will be a while till LTC overtakes BTC.

BTC will get scammed out of its socks with a decent ASIC attack.  The more BTC gains in value to more likely a 51% attack is.  I recall people getting all giddy about BTC passing $100, then $125, ...$200.  I kept on saying cool but tried reminding people that as BTC gains value it is more susceptible to Murphy's Law, and I was proved correct.  Attackers and the pure suckiness of Mt.Gox killed a pretty decent rally.  But who nows maybe the rally getting killed in BTC is good for BTC.

The recent DDOs attacks have been handled pretty well by the market which to me means that soon a pure DDOS attack on Gox will not derive enough benefit for the attackers so they will have to change strategies.  ASIC is the next most likely strategy coupled with DDOS.  Then again noting happening is also a likely possibility.

Once LTC is traded on GOX LTC will begin to slowly siphon value away from BTC and LTC will begin to gain parity with BTC.  Yes Gox is still the first 51% attack on BTC and the only likelihood of a 51% attack on LTC.

I do say that LTC should have been better named, but oh well.  I do still enjoy all the projections about how LTC's coin count being 4x BTC that this fact somehow means LTC's total market cap is 1/4 BTC.

No, it's one of the "principles" of Bitcoin that there are no charegebacks. Also a double spend is not that easy. And it will get harder to make on as Bitcoin develops.

What I see as disadvantage of the faster block time is f.e. the propagation time of new block through the network.

If LTC grows in usage and the block size also grows it will take longer until new blocks are propagated through all nodes.

Let's say at some point it takes on average 1 Minute until all nodes have a new found block.
This increases the chance that 2 Miner find the same block and relay it to nodes. Now one of the 2 chains will have to become longer and form the new valid chain, therefore orphan the other block.

This already happens in BTC all the time. But I can see this happening in LTC much more often resulting in a much increased traffic for the network and therefore increasing Bandwidth requirements for LTC.

Also increased cost of securing the network as miners mine more blocks without a reward.

And why shouldn't that happen to LTC once it is big enough?

Why do you think the amount of currency units matters?

Ok I see. But this is a problem @ BTC, too. So once BTC gets big enough we need a solution for this problem anyway... For BTC not that early, but that doesn't really matter... Who cares about 3 months or 5 years (or whatever), the problem is there. For BTC and LTC.

Yes, but you see that basically the backslash of faster confirmation times.

The faster the Blocktimes, the higher the requirements for the network. That's why I don't see it only as an advantage.

And therefore I don't see LTC as better or worse because of this, it's only a difference.

Ok, got it.

So we could say:
If there is a solution for the (someday) too high requirements for the network, LTC will have an advantage, because it is faster.
As long as there is no solution, LTC will have a potential disadvantage.

Pretty much this is what I believe. If any altcoin overtakes bitcoin, it will be one that hasn't been developed yet and addresses serious issues that have started really wearing on bitcoin at the time the switch is needed.

litecoin < bitcoin.

I don't think LTC will overtake BTC, but there are additional advantages of LTC besides the faster confirmation times:

- 4x transaction capacity (BTC can have 1MB of transactions per 10 min. while LTC can take 4MB)
- smaller blockchain so far (no SatoshiDice)

pretty much no

@transaction capacity:
Does this mean that LTC can do a bigger amount of transactions per time? Is the number of transactions BTC can do per 10 min. too low to work as a widespread world currency?

@smaller blockchain so far:
It doesn't matter how small it is NOW. If LTC gets big, the blockchain will be big. And there will be a LatoshiDice then^^

I'm staying with Bitcoins for now as my mail currency, but I have invested in some Litecoins, because, who knows.

There is a good chance that LTC moves closer to BTC in the near future.

LTC got 4x more coins with a similar strategy, how should it overtake BTC?? o.O

Erm... With "overtake" nobody means 1 LTC has a bigger value than 1 BTC...
What we mean is the general acceptance, the usage worldwide etc.

Another possible disadvantage of LTC:
(Litecoin uses scrypt as a proof-of-work scheme.)

Yes, LTC can do more transactions per time with the current limit of 1MB per block.

1MB per 10 minutes (or even 4MB per 10 minutes) would not be enough for a widespread world currency. Other than actually raising the 1MB per block limit there are solutions, such as Ripple, that would help get around this problem. In effect, Bitcoin could become a "backing currency" such as gold, where you only do large transactions between banks/money services to balance out the accumulated differences from the common transactions.

I agree with this. I think that Litecoin will be a more stable currency because it is ASIC and FPGA resistant. I can definitely see Litecoin jumping in value after being introduced on mtgox, and it being used for "lite" transactions, where Bitcoin becomes a more long term value store.

I see. Interesting stuff :)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)

Okay, i missunderstood this one.

The only real difference between LTC and BTC is the algorithm, and that wont be a reason. I think only PPC with its Proof-of-Stake has a chance in the long run to survive for all time. In 10-15 years miners have to mine for transaction fee's, and not for the basic reward (25 BTC atm). But who wants to pay fee's everytime they make a transaction? And those fees have to be pretty high to make mining still usefull.

Everybody who wants that his transaction will be executed  ;D
But well, that doesnt really belongs in this thread.

Bitcoin sucks I dont even use it any more. It has fucked me more than once on the confirmation time. BTC will die soon IMO, it wont be litecoin that kills it but another coin will. I have no loyalty to any coins and if a better one comes out I will switch for now I use ltc. 

Based on Bitcoin's ubiquity so far, it is doubtful Litecoin will overtake Bitcoin in value although it wouldn't surprise me if Litecoin became very important as mentioned above, "silver to Bitcoin's gold".

Bitcoin is much more popular and the winner takes it all.