Bitcoin Forum

I see a lot of people here wishing Litecoin would just go away; why? I thought libertarians believed in free markets and competition? Litecoin is really surging right now, and if it ends up overtaking Bitcoin, what's the problem? Bitcoin was the first attempt at a cryptocurrency, and it is rare for first attempts to succeed. Maybe the future belongs to Litecoin, and Bitcoin will simply be remembered as  a beta test.

Yes, competition is good.
No, alts are inflationary.

LTC is essentially a BTC fork with faster confirmations resulting in a less secure network. However, bitcoin payment processing companies can use off the block transactions for instant confirmations. I'm not saying LTC is useless. It just doesn't do anything bitcoin doesn't accept for send money slightly faster at the expense of security. But as the masses adopt, they will almost certainly be using simplified services that allow for off the block transactions.

I don't wish LTC would go away, I think it is and always will be a secondary to BTC. If anything, something like peercoin should prove to be more competition, as it is actually based on proof of stake AND proof of work, instead of just copying bitcoin and making a slight modification.

In the future an alt currency with real benefits over BTC could certainly be developed. Just hasn't happened yet.

 ???

Please explain...

And yet is has already magicked a 1 billion USD market cap from nowhere, with scarcely a hint of media attention.

The differences between LTC and BTC are important.  I for one am very glad that both are around.  Only a very few altcoins are worth watching, LTC in particular.  I'm not too bothered about the pump-and-dump junkcoins - they really are a flash in the pan IMHO.

Litecoin was supposed to be impossible to mine with GPU and ASICs - but the first is already not true and the second is likely to be not true soon. Nearly all of the coins are copycats with little genuine changes - just the meaningless 'faster confirmations'. But I do believe that there will be genuine new algorithms - PPC with proof of stake is a likely example (even though I have read lots of criticism of its algorithm - but I don't know what to trust - there is lots of trolling around alt-coins).

Why are they pump and dump? In a free market surely anyone can in good conscience start their own currency?

I'll have to be brief, I'm in the middle of painting my bedroom, apologies. If you require further explanation I'll post more later or tomorrow....

Most people agree that cryptocurrencies are a new asset class, and bitcoin is the first to become established. While bitcoin is technically inflationary until the last coin is mined, this is offset by the increase in it's adoption/capitalisation. Once the last coin is mined there will be a fixed amount of bitcoins, and bitcoin inflation will stop, no more bitcoins can be created. The growth of altcoins increases the money supply within the crypto asset class, and therefore leads to crypto-inflation. The more the crypto-coins of any kind that are created, the less each individual coin of any kind is worth, it represents a smaller fraction of the total wealth in it's asset class. For me, and for many believers in sound money, the fixed supply of bitcoins is one of the (many) key advantages bitcoin has over the farce that fiat has become. Alt-coins are a threat to this.

You see?

Never a truer word said.  FWIW the hashing algorithm employed by Litecoin is highly resistant to ASICs.  ASIC simply means "application specific".  Until memory/bus architecture undergoes a revolution of its own, the ratio of GPU to ASIC performance for SHA-256 (i.e. Bitcoin) will always differ hugely from the ratio of GPU to 'ASIC' performance for Scrypt (i.e. Litecoin).  This is important because it means the playing field for mining LTC will be much more level and for much longer.  That in itself has potentially far-reaching implications.

Litecoin is not superior to Bitcoin.  It is however a very healthy complement to it.

Litecoin and all other altcoins are a good thing. The whole idea of creating a decentralized crypto-currency is to introduce competition to fiat/government currency. So IMO it would be hypocritical to celebrate the Bitcoin for challenging existing currency while simultaneously bashing altcoins for challenging Bitcoin.

Also, I feel that the issues of security, inflation and speed of transfer are basically unimportant in the grand scheme of things because using crypto-currency is entirely voluntary. No person or group of people is claiming the authority to FORCE anyone to use any specific coin. Therefore, if one is not satisfied with the fundamental characteristics of any coin or class of coin, they can simply refuse to use it. This is not true with the current monetary system which certainly is forced upon us by a central authority through legal tender laws and the like.

Having said that, time will allow the market's preference to weed out the less desirable coins and to gravitate toward the ones it values. We will likely see advancements in the future that could make our current perception of digital money seem weak by comparison. The coin that overtakes Bitcoin my not be dreamed up for many years, or never dreamed up at all, or maybe people will refuse to change and will instead cling to worthless pieces of paper that are created out of thin air by a group of tyrannical psychopaths.

The point is, it's important to have a choice! =)

Fiat was created in good conscience, then once everyone is psychologically conditioned to trust it's value they removed the hard assets backing it and are free to print themselves unlimited money. Creators of alt coins all have the vested interest of pre mining themselves money then hoping it becomes adopted.  I have seen this criticism leveled at PPC.

This seems like dodgy ground for someone supporting a currency where over 5% of the entire monetary base is owned by the creator.

I find this idea that alts are inflationary a flawed concept. You people do realize that BTC and LTC are digitally more different than the digital version of the USD and the EUR (which makes up most of their supply and is thus the largest factor influencing their exchange rate), right? The only way computers can differentiate between USD and EUR is that each of their digital coins has DIFFERENT LETTERS to identify them. That's about the only difference between the digital version of the USD and the EUR. Yet, most would agree that it's ludicrous to say that the EUR inflates the supply of the USD, even though we can say that these currencies fall in the same asset class (government issued currency).

Fact of the matter is that even slight differences such as a name can make coins lose fungibility. And it's this aspect that determines if a coin can inflate the supply. New coins must be 100% FUNGIBLE with the old coins in order for the new coins to inflate the old supply. If these coins are seen as different, they will be essentially seen as alternates and will achieve their own exchange rate with their own unique behaviour. Perception is everything.

Remember that price inflation results from how we PERCEIVE the scarcity of the money supply and based on that perception do we decide if the coin is valuable or not. People tend to forget that money is all in the mind. It's entirely a psychological concept. SOME people believe that altcoins inflate the supply. If a lot of people believed this, altcoins would indeed be inflationary, because belief is what ultimately decides how we value scarcity. But the average person would disregard any digital currency that's not called Bitcoin.

Average person: "Litecoin? What the hell is that? No, I don't know that coin. I don't want it. I rather stay with that thingy that's been all over the news."

Different perceptions lead to essentially the coins being seen as two seperate currencies (thus losing fungibility) and these coins achieving vastly different exchange rates and having diverging supply and demand. If there exists only 10 BTC in existence (with no monetary inflation) and someone comes along with 10 000 LTC that has yearly inflation of 2%. The average person would still see BTC as being scarce, because they BELIEVE the coins to be different. Try asking the average person what LTC is. If they don't even know what it is, how can they ever perceive LTC increasing BTC's supply thus creating the PERCEPTION of reduced scarcity of BTC? It's a ridiculous idea.

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not bashing alts or championing bitcoin over other crypto-currencies. I'm not even saying I don't approve of alts, I am very much in favour of freedom and choice. I do believe that inflationary currencies are a bad idea, and having multiple competing crypto-currencies does lead to inflation within crypto. If no one bought LTC then BTC would be worth more. I'm merely identifying a problem, not trying to impose a solution.

I like your nick very much.

But hang on, how can a different currency be deemed inflationary to Bitcoin? The much ballyhooed 21 million Bitcoin limit and all that. Are you suggesting that given that all these alt coins are basically identical to Bitcoin  their existence effectively inflates the Bitcoin pool?

If that is the case, there goes the scarcity argument as now there are effectively a limitless supply of Bitcoins.

It is scarce. Because I perceive it to be so and because most others do so as well. It's only a very small minority that equate altcoins with bitcoins. Perception is everything.

How do you known it is a small minority.

It may be a very  small minority amongst people with a vested interest in Bitcoin, but what about the wider public?

I agree completely, money isn't real, it's a tool for allocating goods and services, nothing more.

Let's take a very simple example. Let's say there are only two equal sized countries in the world and they both use the same currency (and only that currency) which has a fixed supply of 1 trillion units. Each of those units represents one trillionth of the total wealth of the world. One day one of the two countries decides that it will create it's own currency, also with a fixed supply of one trillion units. There are now twice the amount of currency units in the world, but the real wealth of the world hasn't doubled. Each currency unit now only represents a two-trillionth of the total wealth of the world, the original currency has been devalued by 50%. How this is perceived by people makes no difference, you can't perceive a new loaf of bread into existence when you only have one (without getting lost in metaphysics at least). Having an exchange to barter the two currencies with each other makes no difference, you have still doubled the total number of currency units, and thereby halved their value.

Of course the situation in the real world is infinitely more complex, and while crypto remains a tiny fraction of the world's money it's easy to imagine that there is the capacity for unlimited growth, but in reality the world is finite, the universe is finite, I think my fundamental point stands. If I'm missing something then I'd love to be enlightened.

Read my reply to Kleptoid and try answering the question I posed to him. If people don't even know what the heck LTC is, how can they even perceive reduced scarcity? Because that's essentially what is necessary for price inflation. The person must BELIEVE that the scarcity of BTC is reduced by LTC. That can't happen if they aren't even aware of it.

Not the bitcoin pool, but the crypto-currency pool, yes, that is exactly my point.


No, there is a limitless supply of crypto-coins, the supply of bitcoins remains the same.

Given that Bitcoins also belong to the set 'crypto-coins' the distinction is moot.

If person A has never heard of LTC it doesn't change the fact that person B has, bought a billion dollars worth of LTC instead of BTC, so the market cap of BTC is a billion dollars less than it would otherwise have been, making each bitcoin worth a bit less. Inflation. Person A doesn't need to perceive LTC, only person B does. Of course this example assumes person B would buy BTC if LTC didn't exist, but I think that's likely :)

If a tree falls in the forest then it is only required that someone hear it in order for it to make a sound, not that everyone hears it.

Why? I'm not sure you'd be saying that if there were a quadrillion altcoins each with a market cap equal to BTC, which would be next to valueless in that case. I don't understand what's so hard to understand here. If I'm the one doing the misunderstanding then I would really like someone to explain it to me in a way that makes sense.

Ah, now I uderstand your viewpoint. If your example were actually played out in the real world, I would agree that price inflation would occur, even if the currencies were seen as essentially being two seperate currencies. However, this would occur, because these two currencies would be seen as having SIMILAR properties. They would still be seen as two different currencies, but their exchange rates would exhibit similar behaviour. They wouldn't neccesarily have the same exchange rate, but they would react to situations similarly.

However, I must add a few caveats to this situation. Even though price inflation would indeed occur, the fact that these would be seen as different currencies would still remain. Having 100 different currencies with the same properties would lead people to believe that there would be more wealth in the economy and would thus lead them to raise their prices. But CONFIDENCE would still remain in these coins, because they are still seen as being seperate coins. A person must actually believe that the supply has been abnormally expanded for a person to lose faith in a currency. Thus having 100 different currencies with the same properties would indeed lead to price inflation, but the slight differences between the coins would be enough for the average person to believe that a single currency's supply has not been abnormally expanded (yes, belief is everything).

In case of BTC and its altcoins, I would say the benefits of competition outweigh the negatives of the inflation. The market tends to have only a few succesful competitors anyways, so even if the market is flooded with altcoins, only a few would actually be moderately succesful, thus limiting the extent of price inflation. Not to mention that BTC and its altcoins are deflationary currencies and are seen as that way. Because of that, any price inflation that occurs will likely be negated by its deflationary aspects. A person must BELIEVE that the supply of a currency has been abnormally expanded, for that currency to collapse. I say such a scenario only occurs if we actually allow BTC and altcoins to be printed like dollars. The existence of altcoins does not create this belief in the people.

And keep in mind that it´s good for the market to have alternatives. There is no one size fits all solution to everything. The market has niches. Not to mention that we need proper backups in case BTC gets hacked. It serves nobody if there´s no proper coin after BTC that can take up the scepter.

Litecoin is just a guy creating an inferior Bitcoin so he can be an early adopter of something, along with a whole bunch of other people hopping on to be early adopters as well. Why would it do anything except go away?

Great post! Also I like the name "Bitarchist". I might start describing my political position like that, to confuse everybody even more :D

I'd love to support an "alt" or service that brought something genuinely new to the table.

I'd still love to hear an explanation for that analysis; it's very hard for me to understand its basis.  You might like to do some further research into the differences between the two and the broader implications of those differences.  Without substantiation it's hard not to consider the "Litecoin's just a cheap clone" arguments as anything other than FUD. :)

Actually litecoin is crashing hard now. Lost half its value already.
Besides that bitcoin and libertarians are two things that are not even remotely connected.
I don't know about the early stages but today there are 2 types of people into bitcoin.
Speculators and speculators.

Some of us still genuinely believe in Bitcoin's future significance and are here to support and, yes, invest in it.  :P

Bitcoin has crashed plenty of times, so not sure what relevance that has.

Phew, thanks, I was beginning to think I had got something terribly wrong :)


People may believe that, but they would be wrong. Paying more for the same thing is what happens with inflation.


In the absence of coercion by a state or other entity, confidence plays a major role in the adoption of a currency, and that in turn effects it's market cap and value. Good money drives out bad, that's a lot of what bitcoin is about. Confidence also has an exaggerated effect of the value of a currency when that value is driven primarily by speculation, as is currently the case with crypto-currencies.

I really do agree that belief plays a major role, money is not real, but the market also prices in fundamentals, regardless of what people believe. A lot of people seem to believe bitcoin is a decentralised PayPal, but regardless of that belief it's acting a lot more like virtual gold. If belief was _all_ that mattered then QE would actually work, rather than just being a way of transferring wealth from the economy as a whole into the banks. QE would be causing massive inflation if the new money was actually being circulated in the economy, but instead it's being used to cancel bad debts, being lent back to the government, and to some extent is being hoarded by the wealthy elite. Belief has little to do with it in this case.

It may very well be the case that the benefits of competition outweigh the dangers of diluting the crypto wealth pool, that's why in my original post in this thread I started by saying competition is good. I'm not arguing the relative merits of specific coins, I don't know enough about all the alts to feel I can do that with any authority.

There was a thread a while back where someone was proposing an altcoin that was backed by bitcoin, conceptually it would exist within bitcoin, and contribute towards it's market cap. I think that was a scam, but it was an interesting idea, and it would be a way to have alts without causing the problems I have outlined.

I'm pedantic, I have a pathological need to define things in unreasonable detail. What I have said may have little importance unless crypto goes mainstream in a ridiculously big way :)

Oh yea I saw your other post on that other thread, only I forgot to post on that thread because I was too busy buying Bitcoins. Oh yeah and its also probably due to the fact that people have seen this same reasoning a million times and choose to repeatedly ignore it due to their greed and irrational hope that somehow they can go back in time to 2009 if they 'believe' hard enough.

As for substantiation how about you look at the actual differences between the 'Litecoin protocol' and Bitcoin.

- There are more Litecoins.
- There is faster confirmation time.
- Litecoin uses Scrypt rather than Sha256
- It doesn't use the same coins as Bitcoin.
- It doesn't use the same miners as Bitcoin.

Both of the first two are basically equivalent to changing a constant in the Bitcoin source code. Oooh, how creative.

The first change isn't really a change at all, its equivalent to shifting over the decimal in Bitcoin, so it can safely be disregarded. It makes 0 difference to the economics or the security of the coin.

The faster confirmation time may have been slightly relevant originally, but now we have offchain transactions & ways to predict double-spends. Sure those force people to take on marginally more risk, but a shorter confirmation time increases the risk of a transaction being reversed as well. May as well keep the network secure for those willing to wait a whole 10 minutes.

Scrypt is a SIGNIFICANTLY less-tested encryption scheme than sha, an encryption scheme used almost exclusively for hype-seeking altcoins. Sha on the other hand is used on pretty much every website with a password. There's a reason why. If sha was broken tomorrow (which is ridiculously unlikely) Bitcoin would be the least of our problems. This makes Litecoin vastly inferior to Bitcoin. Also, the supposed advantage of scrypt (no GPU mining) proved an epic fail, showing just how little we know about Scrypt and just how far it is from gold standard that is sha.

The fact that it doesn't use the same coins as Bitcoin makes it inflationary and in fact a concept that has the potential to undermine cryptocurrency as a concept. Litecoiners say "well, Litecoins are more distributed than Bitcoins are." And if Litecoins became hoarded, because people were stupid enough to believe they were worth something, then what, you'd be in favor of dropping Litecoin and building a new unoriginal Bitcoin clone to serve as "the new thing?" Its ridiculous. Then some people say "oh well we're not even going to do anything we just want to be the silver to Bitcoin's gold, etc... etc...". Which is effectively saying "oh yea we just want to make copies of Bitcoin that anybody can make worth at least a fraction of Bitcoin." Seems legit, you criticize the Federal Reserve, but you want to be able to print your own money in whatever quantity you like, only its only "silver" not "gold." Either you're stealing from owners of Bitcoin, or you're inflating the money supply, something which cryptocurrencies are supposed to be able to avoid. If litecoin can do it, then BBQcoin can do it, or anything else, because let me tell you, Litecoin is the most inferior of the bunch for the reason stated above.

Oh yeah and it uses different miners so it can't benefit from the security of the Bitcoin network and has to make due with an inferior network because intelligent Bitcoin miners aren't stupid enough to waste an assload of resources on a coin doomed to fail while simultaneously inflating the currency he himself has been generating thus far.

So yeah, seems like a great idea.

No, belief has everything to do with it. The problem is that the FED's belief does not take into account how their policies influence collective belief and how it influences their behaviour. It does not matter what the minority believes. It matters what MOST of the people believe. And sometimes that belief cannot be expressed in words. The shopkeeper raises his prices, because he subconsciously notices that more money is flowing throughout the economy. Little does he know that this money is coming from money printing and is not actual real wealth. But he believes it is wealth nonetheless and he doesn't even think to put this belief in words, but he decides to act on this subconscious belief anyways. Only in the future will this shopkeeper notice how erronous his belief was, but he might never even understand where his error lay or that he made an error at all.

The fact that A belief does not correspond with what is actually taking place and that these beliefs are unable to see the chain reaction caused by their actions does not negate the argument that people's actions are ultimately influenced by what they believe.


Yes, I do think that in THEORY we could inflate BTC to oblivion by forcing people to use more and more altcoins (but only through force). When an altcoin is forced on the people and a new altcoin is introduced consistently with short intervals, the people would notice consistent price inflation and confidence would indeed be shaken. Only under such a scenario do I foresee a collapse of the currencies without printing the traditional way. But in practice, only a few altcoins would be chosen by the market. They would cause only temporary price inflation, but their deflationary nature would soon takeover and we would have overall deflation for each of the succesful coins. The existence of succesful altcoins would indeed steal marketcap away from BTC, but this shouldn't be a problem, because while the added supply of a new currency has actual effects on people's beliefs, ultimately they would still believe that scarcity exists despite this. And THAT belief would lead ultimately that deflation overtakes price inflation with the result of overall deflation.

That's my 2 cents. :)

Ah I see, thanks.  It boils down to the fact that you feel scrypt is an inferior and/or inappropriate choice when compared to SHA-256.  I do appreciate the explanation.  I'm much less certain about the future though so I'm choosing to back both. 8)

I've never really understood the Highlander (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_(film)) approach to cryptocoins. ;)

Oh how surprising you choose to ignore the rest of my post entirely. Refreshing.

Not really a relevance. It was more of a comment for the timing of this thread. Anyway it seems that litecoin recovered already

Oh sorry, but I didn't generally disagree with most of that.  :)

It seemed to me that the only important bit where we really disagreed was that you felt that Scrypt rendered it useless/irrelevant and, as a consequence of that, the whole Litecoin project would serve us all better by simply not existing.  Scrypt may not be as ubiquitous as SHA-256 but I personally think it's not such a bad choice. 

Your argument seemed predicated on the assertion that there should only ever be one cryptocoin and that's just something about which we fundamentally disagree. :)

I thought that it had been established that the reaper miner was actually used long before it was publicly released and that during the time before it was released there was at least one group mining a coins like mad using gpu's while everyone was getting 20-30 khash/s per cpu.

FTC FTW :P

Speaking of alts, someone bought 1m PPC today. http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/btce/ppcbtc

Ok, litecoin uses scrypt which needs memory, no asics blah blah blah.

What about its scalability? Doesn't scrypt actually inhibit it?

I mean litecoin-qt (theoretically running on every litecoin user's computer) gets the transactions and verifies them before accepting.
If scrypt is a resource hog, how will litecoin scale to what it claims to do well ie every day microtransactions????
It's a resource hog upon a resource hog.


Anybody knowing better?

Most libertarians just think they like competition but they really don't...

ppc for me is the best cryptocoin for the future. It addresses one of the main problems with bitcoin really nicely. It has bigger strengths than bitcoin that's for sure.

There's not much to be impressed by from the altcoins so far except theoretical possible little advantages or hedges. If a good one comes that revolutionizes what Bitcoin can do, I say bring it on! But it would take a few years to establish a track record, and by that time Bitcoin will be so far ahead that it likely won't matter.

A few alt-ledgers will always exist because there are things you can do with two ledgers that you can't do with one. But total inflation will be very, very limited. Just look at http://coinmarketcap.com - all the other coins COMBINED scarcely make up 10% of Bitcoin's market cap.

I believe alt-coins will be the gateway drug to Bitcoins.  Although, I can't really say that any of the coins I've seen so far are terribly innovative beyond BTC, which is really surprising.  Exceptions would be NMC (domain name system), XPM (prime number discovery), DVC (contributing to open source development), MSC (distributed exchanges and betting built on top of BTC).  XBT looks extremely promising as well.  I think any coin which has ties to something outside of itself will become highly coveted.  In that respect, Bitcoin is quite lousy.  Then again, so are fiat currencies in general.  It is unfortunate that we have to replace one faith based system with another.  However at least this is an improvement.  Once inexpensive, room temperature superconductivity is cracked, as well as high density power generation and storage, I believe energy will be the next currency.  That's something you can actually put to use.

Good luck with your dreams.  If you want to have any chance of seeing them, first something has to be done about the fact that GE and other major corporations are sitting on all the patents for any form of energy production that can't earn them revenue streams.  There are several technologies that were first demonstrated in the 60s that could generate more power than a home could use for decades with no maintenance or fuel.  Each of the inventors of these technologies met with an offer they couldn't refuse.  As long as the patent system allows this (and they will because the companies will spew B.S. about it not being economically feasible for them to fully develop it yet), we won't see anything that could hurt their bottom line in the light of day.

That said, there are still places on this Earth that believe that you shouldn't be able to own ideas.  Likely, those areas will become advanced enough to reinvent some of these things long before we see patent reform or a company make a move against their bottom line.

I wonder why is there no real competition to ebay.  $65 billion company. Wouldn't you think that someone could come up with a superior product, maybe chisel away 2% of that and create a billion dollar company? I continue to own bitcoins and lean on the 'ebay' effect -- less than perfect product, but everyone uses it by default.

Thanks! I also thought it was good! =)

Not a chance. Bitcoin has its faults, but Litecoin doesn't improve on them in any significant way.

1. Energy costs. If anything, Litecoin's scrypt uses far more energy.
2. Scalable. Litecoin has faster blocks, thus greater overhead and less scalable.
3. Security. Scrypt is less widely used and analysed, thus SHA is likely more secure.
4. Anonymous. Litecoin's blockchain is just as susceptable to tracking.
5. Microtransactions. Litecoins tx are just as heavy.
6. Fast confirms. There's a need for 2 second confirmations, not 2.5 min. Litecoin isn't fast enough to be different.
etc.

Someday another cryptocurrency will play a key in complementing Bitcoin's faults, but it's not going to be Litecoin.

And yet despite all that it is rocketing.

I don't find that to be wrong. I mean mining is a competitive game anyway and it is competitive on all levels

I wonder how many people actually understand the differences between Scrypt and SHA-256 and what these differences might mean in the long term.  Far too many people dismiss Scrypt without really understanding why they're doing so IMHO. :)

Altcoins are like training wheels for people not ready for Bitcoin.

Patents.

No US company can operate an auction site because dead simple things like basic auction mechanics are patented by eBay.

Yes, there is a network effect too, but the reason we have so few huge tech companies is because software patents let them patent processes that any programmer would come up with given the same requirements.

eBay really has online auctioning patented?

I'm on my phone so I can't easily swamp you with good references, but a quick Google turned this up: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/04/20/ebay-wins-patent-online-auction-process/

Can you show me those patents?  Also, once they expire, anyone can manufacture based on them.  If there is any tech suppression happening, it is well before the provisional patent filing stage.

Also, I do agree that our patent system is incredibly broken (like damn near all laws, bought and paid for by <insert special interest here>).

Patents are patently retarded. Let's just a grant MONOPOLY to a single company as, like, a reward for being innovative. You'd have to have the most comic-book notion of how innovation actually happens to go along with this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PVI6V6o-4

patents are just a scheme which allows the turning of information into a commodity, which can be bought for money. And guess what? Our current monetary system needs an influx of more and more stuff you can buy for money, otherwise the built in monetary inflation of the system starts producing price inflation as well. What a scam!

I don't think there's anything wrong with patents, I think a company should reap the benefits if they pour a lot of their resources into R&D. But patent trolling and generally any abuse of the system is very abhorrent behavior and should be reigned in.

false , Litecoin is more secure then bitcoin

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1cssqr/the_math_why_litecoin_is_more_secure_than_bitcoin/

He completely ignores that the cost for the hardware to get x% of the bitcoin network is about 10000x the cost the get x% of the litecoin mining.

First, there are magnitudes more computing power behind Bitcoin, which makes Bitcoin far, far more secure than any other cryptocurrency.

Second, even if the premises of that post is true and 2.5-minute confirmations are more secure than 10-minute ones, it would be much easier to change Bitcoin to 2.5-minute blocks (which is a relatively trivial change as long as the majority of miners agree) than to switch to Litecoin losing tens (probably hundreds) of million dollars invested into the Bitcoin network security.

Litecoin going to continue to inflate versus btc. Already 2x more coins, and will grow at a nice steady clip. Also:
http://ltc.block-explorer.com/address/LTpYZG19YmfvY2bBDYtCKpunVRw7nVgRHW

Litecoin and other alts provide an alternative to Fiat when "cashing out".

Instead of exchanging for government toilet paper you can trade it for say an undervalued alt coin.

I'm expecting states to create local premined PoS cryptocurrencies as legal tender for the masses. Bitcoin will be exchanged for them as the World Reserve Currency on officially sanctioned exchanges. Colored coins will be issued by brokers for use by certified investors. There will be no purpose for any other PoW coins.

Patents in some cases are dangerous like in the pharmaceutical businesses where companies don't initiate research if the potential outcome-drug don't qualifies as easy to be patented.

Pure speculation from people believing fair LTC price is 25% of BTC  :)

The main benefit over BTC would be the Scrypt hashing algorithm, for which mass production of ASIC's is less feasible, at least not by a factor of 1000 over GPU's like we're seeing on Bitcoin at the moment.

This means litecoin stays out of the hands of chinese chip monopolists, and into the hands of the well distributed userbase of graphics cards.

I dont believe in this. Even factor of 10 in effeciency over GPU will make graphics cards mining unprofitable. It is only matter of time

You don't have to "believe in it".  I would suggest it would be very unwise to dismiss it without further research however. :)

Litecoin is fine, the problem is the other 25-hundred other useless alts. I think they are distracting and confusing newbies who would otherwise just accept the utility of Bitcoin - the original crypto-coin. I think that these new altcoins are too eager for market cap and not providing any new utility. Maybe after the crash of the mad rush, we will start to see some interesting innovations around the concept of crypto-currencies - I am dreaming of an blockchain-based traffic system or recycled mining yadda-yadda.

If you are on the alts thing then you can't just say litecoin is fine but others are not. You either believe that there must be only bitcoin or there isn't any logical limit to one or two more altcoins.

Litecoin is just as bad if not worse than all the others. At least some of them actually tried to do something that might be considered an improvement over Bitcoin.

Enormously flawed reasoning in that paper. Confirmations are confirmations. Read Satoshi's whitepaper. There is no time component to confirmation security. The paper incorrectly compares 6 bitcoin confirmations to 24 litecoin confirmations. An entirely invalid comparison.

Ok. Perhaps Litecoin is not so fine. But it does seem to be 2nd most in demand. The problem I see is the too much choice which leads to confusion, and the fact that so many of these are obviously scams (I don't think that's the case with LTC).