Bitcoin Forum

Litecoin is different from bitcoin in following ways, however none of them is particularly useful and on the contrary are only less worthy.

84 million vs 21 millions: since bitcoin is divisible upto atleast 9 decimals and also micro BTC can be used for dealing with low amounts

faster blocks 2.5 minutes vs 10 minutes average: 6 confirmations of bitcoin are not equivalent of 6 confirmations of litecoin, so litecoin payments are usually confirmed after many more confirmations. It also wastes mining power because in litecoin, most of the time miners may start work with non-best blocks.

scrypt vs sha-256: since scrypt can be relatively efficiently run on CPU/GPU which means botnets can easily control a lot of hashing power. Also, scrypt is relatively less analyzed and used than sha-256, so it may not be more secure tha sha-256.

Technically, bitcoin does what litecoin in an equal or better way. Also, bitcoin testnet can be used to experiment with new features.

Why do we need litecoin that actually has monetary value?(around 2.7USD per LTC now) Is it just promoted by a group of people who missed the bitcoin get-rich boat?

Bitcoin is novel concept and early adopters rightly earn their rewards for the risk they have taken.

Litecoin is backed by hopium and jealousy.

My main reason for prefer litecoin (or a faster coin) over bitcoin is simply the confirmation time. When I have to wait over an hour after a transaction is initiated in order to use that amount, it's simply impractical and completely unnecessary. litecoin takes much less time. (though something like worldcoin would be more ideal)

Also, ASIC's will ruin bitcoin mining and all the GPU miners will switch to scrypt coins. I'm not sure that detracts or adds to litecoin's overall value, but it certainly will keep more people interested.

Why wait an hour then?  You are accepting less security just starting accepting Bitcoin with 2 confirmations.  Tada 66% faster.

Chinese scrypt-o?..lol

I've recently (in the past few days) seen BTC often have over 40 minutes between blocks. LTC rarely approaches 10 minutes. If that's not an advantage, I don't know what is.

The biggest downside of BTC that I see is ASICs.

So using your numbers 2 blocks of Bitcoin = ~80 minutes max (95% of time) and 8 blocks of LTC is ~80 minutes (95% of time).  Why are you assumming security in Bitcoin for X blocks = X blocks for Litecoin given the second network is much smaller, and more vulnerable to low cost botnet attack.  You should be waiting significantly more blocks and if you aren't you are simply holding them to unequal standards "look I don't know why people buy expensive safes, that expensive safe only has 1 lock but my cardboard box has TWO locks and it is faster to unlock".

There is no free lunch.  BTC & LTC blocks are relatively small now however in time they will be much larger and when they are the propogation delay will be larger a higher % of hashpower/security will be lost due to orphans.  The orphan rate for LTC will grow significantly higher, significantly faster given the same transaction volume.

What I'm considering is it's usability as a currency. Obviously if you're making a large transaction, you want to wait a significant amount of time/confirmations. However, if, say, you want to go buy coffee with bitcoins and your local coffee shop, if I were the merchant I would need to wait at least till that transaction had been included in a block. Since the amount used will be pretty small, (like 1-5$) numerous confirmations would generally not be necessary. But if the blocks are at times 40+ minutes apart, who's going to wait that long just to get their coffee? Not me!

I believe Satoshi set the block target time to 10 minutes for a very good reason.

Ill give you the answer right here...

 Because Bitcoins are expensive for most people, lets face it, when someone invests or buys something like this, they do not want to have a balance of 0.250304  etc... they want to have whole numbers... why? its just the way it is, we dont want to have a dollar bill that actually reqads .0354 dollars.. we want whole numbers.. I know it sounds stupid, but studies and common sense say thats what we like to see and hold.

 Therefore, Litecoins provide most people who cant afford, lets say 50 or 100 Bitcoins, but they can afford 50 or 100 Litecoins, the silver to Bitcoins gold... People can have a prettier whole number to hold onto with Litecoins.

 

This argument doesn't hold water. Merchants like this would have to accept unconfirmed transactions with both Bitcoin and Litecoin, as they are both too slow for this sort of transaction.

That was a pretty bad argument.

Bitcoin was hardly worth anything two years ago.

Who knows how high Litecoin can go?


This just contradicts your argument that longer confirmations = more security.

One confirmation in LTC is better than none for BTC.

Yes, to most it will sound like a bad argument, and some will not understand it. But it is what it is, for example... people want to invest in precious metals, but people who cannot afford Gold, buy Silver..... same here.

 BTC was cheap, yes, but now its not.. lol, right now LTC is cheap, I dont see it ever going near BTC value, but I dont want to be hasty because people said BTC was going nowhere, and said LTC was a crapcoin. 

Hmm, I think that was exactly my point, why I started at Litecoins after a wrong attempt at Bitcoins. I directed my GPU's at bitminter with the easy-to-go Java client an earned something around 0.0001284 BTC. Believe me, that made me not very happy.....the amount is still parked at bitminter, as its not worth to use the payout.
So I changed to LiteCoins and earned a few coins within a few days....TaTa !!!!!

Beware, I'm a late starter in this and may not be aware what was 2 years ago. I just care what is NOW.

Ok, after 3 or 4 Months I'm back at BitCoins, but with much different hardware. And let a few leftover GPU still mine LTC.

The same merchants isn't going to wait up to 10 minutes (and 5% chance of longer) either would they?  They would either accept 0-confirm or use off blockchain transactions.

Litecoin is not superior than Bitcoin and Bitcoin is not superior than Litecoin. They are both very similar crypt-coins.

The differences are that Bitcoin came first, has huge media coverage and high public acceptance. But all these can be true for litecoin also in next few years.

So why not invest in litecoin instead where reward/risk ratio is higher than bitcoin.

This is why I believe LTC will be successful in the short term (a couple years).

ASICs and their distribution on the bitcoin network can't be guaranteed to not be centralized at some point.

This is uncharted waters in bitcoin so no one can say for sure that bitcoin will not get attacked via a large asic manufacturer.

Time will tell.

Litecoin could be a safe harbour for (Bit)coiners one fine day.

As BTC diff keeps going up some of the time between blocks is getting ridiculous. I've seen over three hours between blocks. It's ridiculous. I like transacting in litecoin. Confirmations happen quickly, and I've yet to have that stressful moment where you send someone money and 6 hours later there's still no confirmation.

Also, I'm able to mine scrypt coins much more profitably on my measly 4.5mh scrypt GPU farm.

Learn how difficulty works and why what you wrote was just silly.

LTC is simply the first crapcoin, following by FeatherCoin, CHNCoin, WorldCoin, GLDCoin ...

Keep talking you will change nothing  ::)


+1

Could be, but I bought my very first Bitcoin with Litecoin. So, mission accomplished !

do i have to say this in every fucking thread? without litecoin and other altcoins, bitcoin mining would cease to be profitable. alt coins are necessary evils because they spread the hashing power out accross multiple networks, allowing everyone to profit in some way shape or form. without litecoin and altcoins. you could multiply the difficlut by 5 and decrease your profit by 50 percent. those are just guestimates of course.

You are right  :-[. LTC and most of current altcoins (except PPCoin) have no value or technical advantages over BTC but they help keep people less focus on BTC mining. Therefore BTC diff rate does not grow as fast as it can.

If you think Bitcoin is just about mining and profit, then afraid you've completely missed the point.

Let's turn this question upside down, what value does Bitcoin add over Litecoin or PPCoin?

When you think about it, the answer is not much. What gives Bitcoin much more 'value' is that it's more widely known, more widely used and merchants accept it much more. It's not the technical specifications, it's the community support it has built up with people campaigning for merchants to accept it and seeking to drive publicity upwards. That's why it's $100 and not litecoin. And that is why Litecoin is $2.7 and not Feathercoin. And so on.

In the coming months you are going to see Litecoin go through the same baby steps Bitcoin took and slowly start gaining more publicity outside of this niche subforum. Litecoin going on mtgox will enable a litecoin payment processor to work efficiently and will in turn lead to a surge of businesses that accept bitcoin also accept litecoin.

basically litecoin is only valued by all those who think they missed the btc train.

so yeah they must keep pumping it along.

FIFY

+1

Both Litecoin and Bitcoin have their downsides  but in the end is all down to profit for all miners, investors, speculators. If the majority stays with Litecoin/scrypt coins they will go where they make money. Actually now without owning any asic, staying in Litecoin/scrypt coin  boat is more profitable, and  when it will hit Gox they will profit even more in short term compared to BTC.

This topic is very much alike many others on  forum where some medium-big BTC stahes already fearing the exodus to scrypt coins is devaluating their richness dreams even more Smart money doesnt care if it is called BTC or LTC or shitcoin, all they care is profit..it's like poker.

Well, it seems to me, based mostly on anecdotal evidence, that in the pre-asic era I never saw blocks take 3 hours. And it seems that as diff continues to climb the variance between block times will get worse. Just a hunch, but it seems to be how things are playing out.

The biggest and really significant weakness of BTC is SHA-256, that is ASICs (which are a very genuine threat feasible for any dedicated attacker, getting a design and building a semiconductor fabrication plant can be had for a few $M). All renowned cryptographers agree that scrypt is far superior. Also the hashing algorithm can never be changed for BTC because that would require resolving the entire historical blockchain to achieve the same level of security LTC brings from the start. SHA-256 coins are rightly dead, and BTC is the only one still living off its initial and very major publicity until it will be replaced by a superior competitor (quite likely LTC or possibly PXC) just like Netscape Navigator, Yahoo Search, Friendster, Myspace, or any other generally innovative tech with execution flaws was. Doesn't take a genius to see that.

Also an imo ideal compromise between block time and network scalability (those altcoins with 60 seconds blocktimes and less couldn't ever scale to even what the BTC network is now).

So we should make 1,000,000 altcoins and end poverty.  You don't really believe what you wrote do you?

It is fairly easy to make a scrypt ASIC the only factor is cost.  However the scrypt used in LTC (and clones) was modified to make it about 10,000 less memory hard then the recommended default value.  LTC scrypt uses about 32KB of memory, a token amount in ASIC design.  LTC likely will never become popular enough to warrant the kind of investment but if it does ASIC builders will move to that chain as well.

Your last line is a false statement.  Please provide this extensive list of renowned cryptographers who believe scrypt is far superior.  Scrypt has been far less extensively studied than SHA and thus has a higher risk of a cryptographic flaw.  Of course SHA could also be flawed but other than maybe MD5 or AES there aren't many algorithms with more peer review.   Extensive and long peer review is mandatory to ensure cryptographic strength.

The first paper on scrypt was published less than 5 years ago and that is a tiny amount of time in the field of cryptography.  Also LTC (and clones) use a modified version of scrypt which is significantly less "memory hard" by a couple orders of magnitude.  The LTC developers are not world renowned cryptographers, there has been no extensive peer review of the effect of these modifications.  There has (AFAIK) been a single academic paper on the potential risks.

Simple version:  In cryptography tried and true is superior to new and flashy.  In time scrypt "may" become the defacto standard for key derivitive functions but that day isn't today.

I think you're putting to much weight on what he's saying and therefore missing the point.
A few alt-coins is a good thing, considering it spreads everything out more evenly.
Creating a million shitcoins as is the case today, you will only have a million weak, useless pieces of crap that does no good to no one.

Also, having two or more "strong" alt-coins provides competition. With three strong dev-teams there's bound to be a lot more cool innovative ideas than just one "super-strong" dev-team spinning away on a single track.

I wonder if you would be saying the same thing if you had 50000 BTC tucked away.

I agree in theory however that wasn't his point however with the exception of NMC and PPC there hasn't been any real innovation.    His point was about mining being profitable.  That implies by simply adding a continual supply of new coins/chains you could ensure all mining is always profitable.  Like I said just make a million of then and end global poverty.

can you prove it is less security than?

I see. You're absolutely right.


Less than what?

Of course it is all about cost, that is my point. You cannot get a likewise efficient (this is the keyword here) LTC ASIC design and a manufacturing plant for a few $M. Despite of the scrypt memory requirement relaxation in LTC we are still talking about 4 or 5 orders of magnitude. Nobody came ever close to an efficient LTC ASIC even in theoretical designs, so much for "token amount".  :D


Your statement is false, MD5 for example has the most extensive and longest peer review, and is the notoriously most flawed of all the above, as was pointed out by renowned cryptographers years ago (see Wikipedia). I will give you the people involved in the design and subsequent discussions of scrypt and I'm quite sure you will recognize some of them. But as it just takes one counterexample to demonstrate my statement is false while you (and by extension I) cannot extensively prove a negative, I challenge you to provide just one single renowned cryptographer who doesn't believe scrypt is far superior, good luck.


In cryptography you rely on what's currently endorsed by most cryptographers, and that algorithm for hashing or key derivation is currently scrypt. SHA-256 is broken both theoretically by definition (see Wikipedia) as well as in practice because of ASICs, and so is BTC.

since the conversation has tipped to algo's and security, i'd like to point out that Gost-cipher and Whirlpool-T have yet to be broken.

As has my treasure hunt: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=242523.msg2572358 ;)

Probably means we should create a coin based on it?

WeavCoin

:D

But MOST of us don't have 50000 BTC tucked away.

See here is where most of the large holders screw up in there thinking.

When asic came out they were priced very high in BTC, and most people didn't have that many, so only a select few got them.

Up went the diff on BTC to the point GPU miners could not make a profit. Now since GPU miners make up about 80%+ of the miners what did you think they were gonna do, sit by while the old guard has steak to eat, while they get bread crumbs.  They are moving to the scrypt coin and nothing can be done about it.

BTC are only worth something because people say they are.

Well the 80%+ is getting ready to say BTC is NOT worth anything anymore. Hence LTC is rising.

The old guard has not relized the the BTC train is entering the last station. You must either change trains or stay at the station.

So, the GPU miners are starting to vote with thier feet.

Now that it is too late, the old guard, ie large BTC holders, seeing what is happening are starting to panic. They will try anything to keep their riches.

But when they are the only one left in BTC with their shiny asic what will they do?

I keep hearing how in the crypto coin world the great thing is how it takes 51% to change things. Well the 80% is starting to speak, and the old guard just hates it.

Ya reap what ya sow. They had it good, but got TOO greedy, and the rest are tiring of it. If they had let it spread out more this would not have happened imo.

So what ya gonna do old guard? Don't think there is much ya can. Have fun with your hoard of coins soon not to be worth much :o

Got to get to work but I would point out SHA-2 (commonly called SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512) has not been broken, not even theoretically.

An attack on a reduced round version of SHA-2 has been found what this means is that SHA-2 uses 64 rounds (the input is passed through the same algorithm 64 times).  IF SHA-2 only used 42 rounds a faster than brute force attack would be possible.  However I would point out that the time complexity of such an attack is 2^251.  A brute force preimage attack on SHA-2 requires 2^255 operations so the "attack" is 2^(255-251) = 2^4 = 16 times more faster than brute force.   That still requires more time and energy than our solar system has to achieve a collision.

Lastly SHA-2 being partially broken (i.e. much faster than brute force attack) is not a concern when it comes to mining.  If miners using a modifed algorithm implementing the attack could mine 10,000 faster then it would simply mean difficulty would rise by a factor of 10,000.  If SHA-2 is broken completely then the issue isn't mining it is the privacy of the public key however LTC (and alll? alt-coins) use the same address structure.  This is less of a threat as addresses are the double SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 hash of the public key.  It is unlikely both algorithms would be broken sufficiently to provide a credible threat.

The largest cryptographic threat to BTC (and by extension all alt-coins as they have copied this portion of the code bit for bit) is ECDSA.  Public key cryptographic is much harder to predict the likelihood that the cipher will remain secure.  Unlike hashing algorithms public key cryptography relies on an "unknown".  The strength comes from the fact that there is currently no feasible method of solving certain math problems.  If that assumption turns out to be false then the cipher will be vulnerable.  Through either cryptoanalysis or quantum computing I full expect ECDSA (and many other public key systems) to be broken wide open within my lifetime.  An alt-coin using an alternative public key system would provide an "insurance" policy of sorts but AFAIK none exist.

I've waited for over an hour for 2 confirmations before.

Lets assume all this is true (which it isn't).  LTC uses a weakened version of scrypt one which ASICs can be produced cost effectively so what happens when BTC "dies" and LTC become mainstream.  The global mining revenue shoots up into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year which justifies the development of LTC ASICs?

Trouble is where do all the GPUs go when the LTC diff goes sky high and then unprofitable?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=196138.0

Here is 1 good reason why Litecoin is needed.  Bitcoin already admits it is not a preferential coin for small transactions.  If Bitcoin ever did become the million dollar coin everyone would like it to become, your morning coffee purchase would not be able to transferred due to it being dust.  LOL at people who figure Bitcoins can be down to the satoshi level.  If/when the bitcoin network gets even busier, they will have to knock the dust down to an even larger factor.

Another reason Litecoin might be hyped is because it's not Bitcoin.  That can be a huge bonus right now while the US Gov't seems to have the Bitcoin network as it's main target.

A cryptographic system by definition is theoretically broken if an attack faster than brute force is known.

Stay with LTC because BTC only becomes unprofitable for GPU due to the fact that cost-efficient ASICs are feasible for BTC in the first place.. The point is that cost-efficient ASICs are unfeasible for LTC.

Vested interest.

Despite the scrypt memory requirement relaxation in LTC we are still talking about 4 or 5 orders of magnitude of higher cost. Nobody came ever close to an efficient LTC ASIC even in theoretical designs, so the point is the development of LTC ASICs is by orders of magnitude less justified than the development of BTC ASICs and therefore won't happen before LTC gains in price as much.  

Which doesn't exist for SHA-2 because it uses 64 rounds.  The attack was on a 42 round variant not used by anyone.  The attack doesn't work (even theoretically) against the actual SHA-2.


5 orders of magnitude really?
So BTC ASIC costs say $1M NRE and $5 per chip.
LTS $10B NRE and $500,000 per chip.

Really.  I mean that is just wrong that is common sense stupidly wrong.

An LTC ASIC can be produced today however the tiny amount of global mining revenue doesn't warrant it yet.  The efficiency gains are lower but the costs are not so high as to be a barrier.  Bitcoin ASICs didn't start looking cost effective until the exchange rate (and thus potential global mining revenue) was high enough. 

If Bitcoin was worth a $1M then the dust threshold would be 1 satoshi (or roughly 1 US cent).  The dust threshold is a function of the min fee miners accept.  If miners are willing to accept transactions paying a 2 satoshi fee or less then the dust threshold would be 1 satoshi.

The min fee for low priority transactions is actually higher (in terms of purchasing power) on LTC network.

BTC min fee 0.00001 BTC = ~$0.01 USD
LTC min fee 0.02 LTC = ~$0.05 USD

So morning $1.99 coffee would have a 0.5% effective fee using BTC, 9.5% effective fee using LTC, and a 15% effective fee using a credit card. ;)

OK I stand corrected, it only applies to reduced rounds instances of SHA-2. Still practical with ASICs, which is the original point.

Yes, 4 to 5 orders of magnitude for a likewise efficient (this is the keyword here) LTC ASIC was the concensus among people who tried last time I checked, or do you know of any even theoretical designs that suggest otherwise.

Death and Taxes, i have throroughly enjoyed your posts thus far in this thread. could you speak on what it would take to say implement whirlpool-t into a cryptocoin system? perhaps gost-cyphers 128 bit hashes could be used as public keys. what do you think?

You made the claim and now are sticking with $10B NRE and $50,000 chips so don't ask me to prove a negative and certainly not for something that foolishly dumb.  Show that a LTC ASIC would cost $10B to design (more than the entire cost of Intel new foundry) and $50,000 per chip.  That is what the words "5 orders of magnitude" means.

well...

consider this:

mining litecoin IS VERY EASY...

anyone who can build a rig can start mining RIGHT AWAY...

VERSUS

MINING WITH BITCOIN...

Well yeah it is true you can mine bitcoin with rigs... but with how much? you cannot compete with ASICS vs simple rigs...

plus you have to wait a decade to get your ASICs

Proving the negative means showing it (an equally efficient ASIC) currently cannot be done for less, exactly what you are asking me for when all you have to do is the opposite: provide just one single theoretical design that contradicts my statement.

Changing hashing function is very simple. It is literally several lines of code.

Actually you're behind a bit.  LTC min fee dropped a week or so ago to 0.02 LTC still not as low as Bitcoin, but a notable difference from 0.1 LTC.

As stdest pointed out you simply need to replace a few functions.  Now I don't think there is much value in doing that (as I have indicated about LTC) however if one were designing a novel new cryptocurrency it would not necessarily need to use the cryptographic primitives that Bitcoin uses:
proof of work: SHA-256
public keys: ECDSA
addresses (hash of public key): RIPEMD-160 & SHA-256

As for GOST there is no technical reason it could be used.  I am wary of using algorithms without extensive peer review.  In cryptography you are essentially trying to prove a negative.  Prove that this algorithm can't be broken.  Well you can prove it CAN be broken but you can never prove it can't be.  The closest thing we have is peer review and analsysis.  If a tens of thousands of experts all over the world, working for years can't break your algorithm the likelihood that it can be broken in the future is lower (but never zero).

Not sure if it was a typo but public keys are not hashes.  Public keys require public key cryptography like ECC OR RSA which uses mathematical properties which allows one to verify publicly but only create privately.  Bitcoin (and clone) addresses are the HASH of the public key.  There is no technical reason GOST couldn't be used there.

Private key =  random (or deterministic) x bit number for ECC (other algorithms may differ but generally the private key is a secret and random number, RSA for example uses a pair of random prime integers to create the private key)
Public key = calculated from private key using a public key cryptographic system (RSA, ECC, etc)
Public Address = hash & checksum of the public key

Fixed.

Generally you cannot derive the public key from the private key in RSA

i aprpreciate you taking the time to respond to my post. i actually am not that well versed in hashing functions or in the technical aspects of bitcoin. i'm just a curious person and i'm pondering the feasability of creating a cpu only coin using a different hash algo.

I think the fee has been lowered already

Till the diff shoots up. Then what?

Agreed.

The same is somewhat true for bitcoin, but of course if we decided not to assign monetary value to our assets, bitcoin (and all money) would be quite unnecessary. The fact that we do assign arbitrary value to things is part of what makes money (and especially bitcoin) work. So its tiresome to see people whinging about individuals with 50,000 btc, as if that's proof that bitcoin is a failure. On the contrary, large holders is a sign that bitcoin is healthy and does work as intended. As extremes are not good, I, no less than any froth-at-mouth litecoin advocate, don't like to see excessive concentrated wealth. But its not the end of the world.

In my understanding , ASIC will be broadly available till the end of a year, people can sell GPUs and switch to ASICs.
Other thing about ASICs is that the race just begun as ie 55nm ASIC are already produces and are much more powerful then BFL/AVALON chips, so people trowed their money on BFLs AVALONs and are stuck as pre-orders are not shipping (BFL), batch 3 of avalons are not on due and they are accepting refunds.., people not able to pre-order/buy those have a chance to skip first era of ASICs and jump straight to second era ...
LTC I dont see any benefits over BTC.
My main concern is not difficulty / hashing power, but central point of failure on both of them.
If US Gov can shutdown Bitcoin Foundation , who is going to continue dev and support of BTC (Single point of failure ) this applies to LTC and others.
You can argue that they can be relocated to some other country, but w/o US non of them will survive

 

Each one of those features differences you mention is significant,  you just don't get it that's all. The botnet point is wrong, it takes a lot of GPU tuning to mine scrypt, CPUs are useless, it's much easier to mine Bitcoin with a botnet. The BTC 10min block time is terrible.

Why is having a low block orphan rate terrible?

No longer true in the ASICS era.  The BTC network is approaching 20 TH.  All the scrypt coin hash rates combined, if redirected to BTC, would only be about 2 TH.

With respect to BTC mining, GPU's have become irrelevant

Strawman question.

LTC has an incredibly low orphan and stale rate. Basically every coin with a block rate over 45sec has a low stale rate.

No, with N=1024, r=1, p=1, you end up with a 128 KB scratch pad.  You can reduce this logarithmically by a factor of two by using the lookup_gap method of only the fly scratchpad reconstruction, but you also increase the computational effort exponentially by factors of two -- hence why scrypt is said to have time-memory trade-off (TMTO).

I trust Colin Percival's math on this one, and if you read the paper there are no obvious attack vectors beyond the already discovered TMTO.  By using a smaller value of N you should not compromise the security of the ROMix/sCrypt algorithms, at least not in theory.  Security geniuses like Solar Designer have been hammering away at sCrypt for a while and haven't discovered much else that can really be done with it.

TMTO does show that ASICs will have some advantage in power consumption and speed, but good luck achieving a 50 fold increase in speed while reducing power consumption 100 fold like we've seen with Bitcoin.

Litecoin will be here to stay for this reason alone, and there are no shortage of people willing to send thousands of dollars to the devs to keep the network operational and running smoothly.

Having transacted tens of thousands of USD in LTC and BTC, I can say that, at least from my experiences, LTC is much better to use.

With BTC, I've run into confirmations taking 2+ hrs based on the law of averages amongst 6 confirmations. Comparatively, with LTC, the same averages yield much less variance, which is vastly more beneficial.

For most, its a simple difference, but very important for transactions, and pulling the funding out of crypto and into fiat. I've swallowed hundreds of USD in losses due to market swings because I couldn't pull out BTC fast enough. Whereas with LTC, this has never been a problem.

And you have the 51% security issues with BTC vs. LTC. Go look at the BTC blockchain. Its been so close to being forked and 51%'ed recently, its insane. Bitcoin purists don't want to admit it, but hitting 6 blocks in a row for a medium-sized ASIC company would be much, MUCH easier than doing the same on Litecoin.

I sometimes wonder if satoshi didn't bail because he saw BTC getting too big to be safe. He left before it was even finished.

This first crypto-currency and low-capacity block chain are  lovely proof of concept and wonderful educational tools.

Ready to secure a 1b market cap? Its doing OK so far. By 10b we will have "account creation" FPGAs and maybe ASICs hunting for key collisions. Knowing there are 1b USD + accounts it might be nearly as enticing to brute force for keys as it is to SOLOmine for the network.

Able to become the "world currency" like some idealists here seem to hope?  not ever. Not even possible for the bitcoin blockchain to support 1% of global commerce.  The backbone model has more sustainability but it will never be more than one of many options.

Litecoin, a copy of bitcoin but more wasteful to secure (on purpose).  More wasteful to secure but just as easy (well simple if not easy) to attack.

Where do you see that going?

When did this catastrophic near miss attack happen then? and by whom? First I've heard of it.

Until either of them is broken, I see them both staying.  There is plenty of room for both BTC and LTC and one doesn't necessarily take anything away from the other.  The market will sort through the clones and value them accordingly.

I've always thought that BTC will be able to function as a "gold standard" for future crypto-currencies.  LTC can serve the intended role of "silver" in that regard, and I think it's beneficial that mining LTC is currently more CPU/GPU friendly for the second generation of miners/supporters.  I think we will see future micro-payment networks that will reference this generation of crypto-currencies to establish base values, but we have a long way to go before prices stabilize and global trust in peer-to-peer currencies is sufficient.

Exactly the same 51% attack issue exists in LTC, the main difference is you have less time between confirms to pull it off. Both coins will probably get hit by it one day as large pools start to centralize the hashing power.

If everyone solo mined it wouldn't be an issue, but most people point at a stratum proxy which is very simple to redirect to wherever you want, redirecting the entire pool's hasting power in an instant.

Hm... Can't wait to see the articles in Bitcoin magazine about Litecoin when it goes to Gox.

Mining is about the initial distribution of the coin. If you want to distribute something and make it a success, it NEEDS to be accessible.

Right now, even if you pay thousands of dollars and wait 1 year, it doesn't even guarantee you'll get an ASIC. It means that the next 50% of Bitcoin distribution (since we are around half-way there) is going to go into the hands a few elites. Litecoin mining though is easily accessible and the distribution of coins will be into a lot more hands. It means that there is less new people getting BTC through mining and more people getting LTC through mining. Bitcoin has the advantage right now, but reducing the number of points of entry into the economy is not a way of developing an healthy economy.

Exchanges are ok, but I'm not sure they can compensate right now for the current lack of mining accessibility. It's easier to try out this "new coin thing" downloading free software to test with your GPU than going to a private website where you need to send real money and identification to have the luxury of trying out this "new coin thing". And I'm not even talking about exchanges shutting down (Bitcoin-24? Bitfloor?) or simply having high fees (Virtex...).

Overall, I don't see why people are surprised that putting heavy "regulations" like the ASIC requirement is slowing down the market. Putting high barriers of entry slow down any market, it's the intended effect. Litecoin is simply a clone of Bitcoin with less "regulations" on its market. Since a lot of people around here like it when there is less regulations and barriers, Litecoin is like a breath of fresh air and it adds to the hype.

And who exactly is doing this "regulation" of the market?

monkey market makers maken move$$$..lol

It "might not be". It is mind-numbingly "impossible" to get a key collision. Using an ASIC for this? You might as well use a Nvidia GTX 440, the relative odds are not much worse, and its a heck of a lot cheaper. You are not understanding the scale of difficult that is at play here.

Its like you buying 100 lottery tickets instead of just 1, and banking on winning the big one . . . . . with the odds of winning at 1 in a million million quadrillion.

Wait till quantum computers become mainsteam.

Every known algorithm could be broken, who knows.

With the speed that processing power is increasing these days, it's not insane to say that SHA-256 might be broken in a few years.

You do know encryption algorithms can be upgraded....right?

Besides...

SHA-256 can't be brute forced in your lifetime if the entire universe's matter were used to build a perfect supercomputer.

It would have to be some kind of bug in SHA-256.

Except you just can't upgrade the entire BTC blockchain, you'll need a new coin.

Besides, every algorithm can be broken.

If you create an algorithm that is not just impossible to break at the time of creation, but also thousands of years in the future, then you'll win the Noble Prize.

That is the downside of crypto. Every time an algorithm get's broken, a new one has to take its place.

Take a look at Moore's law and how fast processing power is increasing these days.

Sorry, but you're completely wrong.

Also, Moore's law will not continue forever. We can't break the laws of physics. We've done great for 40 years or so. But there is a limit....

Last 40 years: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Transistor_Count_and_Moore%27s_Law_-_2011.svg

Quantum computers are coming out now.

What do you think the processing power is going to be in a few years? Decades?

Don't be blind to how fast the world is advancing.

By the time SHA-256 is broken (if); by then there will exist an even more secure encryption algo, and the ability for bitcoin to switch to if needed.

You're looking at the past, not the future.

And looking at the past helps predict the future.

You know there's a reason why they teach kids history in school and why people study history.

Events in history usually repeat themselves, and you can find patterns that help with predictions.

But if you feel that way, then alright.

We teach history in order to learn from peoples mistakes, not repeat them.

Imagine I had two rabbits in a cage, and they multiply at 200% a year, how many years will it take to cover the earth 3 feet deep in rabbits?

Nobody in particular. It's the result of introducing a disruptive technology with limited access into the SHA-256 mining market. It's crazy hard to enter it while it's really easy to get kicked out of it. Sure, the difficulty number goes higher, but I strongly doubt the total number of miners is growing.

This is the problem with Bitcoin

A few guys lucky enough to get early Avalon units and all those BFL units that never shipped are minting money while everyone else is being diluted

No way to compete with these guys other than to boycott BTC until such time that ASICS are widely available for purchase at reasonable cost

GPU miners are understandably angry at the non-availability of ASICS units.  I don't blame them for widely disseminating the superiority, real or imagined, of LTC

Control of the network by a tiny fraction of ASICS miners is, I dare say, a real and severe liability for BTC - almost as bad as fiat.  This will be resolved eventually but the situation right now is extremely painful

It will never be resolved. By time ASICswould be available and affordable to anyone or close to it, there will be small group of people who is already going to control a huge portion of bitcoin value.

Bitcoin community is pretty much reflecting the real world, fiat one, one that is supposedly hate a lot.

here's my arguement: i <3 litecoins

If the POW algorithm is broken, you don't need to "upgrade the entire blockchain" and you don't need a new coin.

You checkpoint, and re-template.  If you can distribute the client ahead of time and target a block for the template change, it wouldn't even technically be a fork.  Even though it's popular to call such changes "a hard fork" right now.

If the ECDSA is broken (address crypto), new coin time.

Not necessary. 
Develop a new address type based on an alternate public key system. 
Bitcoin addresses have versioning prefix these new addresses would have an alternate prefix. 
Get miner support for verification of new address type. 
Release new client which will verify transactions involving new address type but not allow their creation.
Once sufficient % of miners and nodes are on the new client release a new version which allows creation of new address type.
Users download new client and transfer their balance from old (deprecated) ECDSA based addresses to new addresses.

Now this assumes there is sufficient time but the history of cryptographic breaks has been slow with the time from theoretical flaw to real world exploit measures in multiples years (often decade or more).

When was the last time that there was a multi-billion dollar "prize fund" broken into small pieces and made available to anyone who had

    A) an internet connection

    and

    B) understanding of the exploit

with no need for entry, confirmation, or waiting around for prize distribution at all?

Not to be combative with you at all. 

I just think that's pretty hilarious. Someone, knowing they would never get it all to exchanges before the whole blockchain was written off, might share their tools just for shits and giggles.  Whether they did or not, The entire market cap of BTC would probably vaporize faster than you can say "C++ For Dummies" because absolutely not a single soul would relinquish a penny of fiat for it after that.

Not "moved to bank accounts" or "safe in exchange accounts" or anything. Just freaking vaporized.  If this is a few years down the road, it could be the first "fully distributed" economic event on a par with a whole first world economy crashing.

I've had some amusing thoughts about the amount of money that is probably brute-forcing ECDSA into rainbow tables  right now.  I'm tempted to start. But an announced flaw in the crypto would start a rush we may not even be able to envision. 

I've never really thought that through in context before.  It's always all chatter about securing the blockchain, heh.

I can't shake the picture of a bunch of rednecks sitting in a fishing boat with beers and laptops trying to sort out cryptography and programming "reeeeeeeaaaaaal quick".

Good luck creating that rainbow table.  You should be able to start spending other people's BTC about the time the universe experiences heat death

:)

Let me point out that sometimes you find a block in the second hash.

Let me add that every day as you map another tiny percentage of the available address space, thousand of people are out there adding addresses as well.

People seem to think of this as a "race to the finish line" but it's not at all.  It's a "treasure hunt" within a very large but finite space and people are burying new trunks of gold every day.

I don't have to space to store more tables than I could generate in a day or two.  I'm just saying.

Maybe we need a new game in town.  We can call it the "AWS Free Micro Instance Lottery" with a new drawing every .000000001 seconds and you get to play for the first year free. Prizes range from nothing to what, say 10m? 100m?  Are all of the satoshi bitcoins in one account?

It's real popular it's just, you know, sort of like the fight club...

EDIT: I wish I could get stats on how many new AWS micros come on line in the next 48 hours....

Your clueless.  This so called "large but finite space" is so large that ....

if you converted all the matter in our solar system into a giant super computer and used all the power output of our sun for the next 4 billions years until it burned out you couldn't count to 2^256.   This assumes the computer operated at the themodynamic limit.  In essence a perfect solar system sized super computer.  That is just counting 1, 2, 3, .... 2^256.  You could maybe at absolute perfect efficiency get to ~2^216 which would mean you have counted through less than 1/100,000th of 1% of possible private keys.

It's not mine, sorry.



I'll bite.  Since you know exactly how long these sort of things take, tell me how many hashes it will take to find the next block in the bitcoin blockchain.

Come on man it was a joke.  My AWS micro is busy with something else right now.  But if you troll me into defending it, I will.  It's not impossible.  Improbable never stopped us yet.

+1