Bitcoin Forum

Considering the similarities between the two and the fact LTC offers little "improvements" (which many would dispute are improvements at all), does anyone seriously consider Litecoin having a place in the world? We all hear that Litecoin is silver to Bitcoin's gold--and while this may sound plausible, it really makes no sense. Litecoin acceptance in the marketplace is dismal; it's only real hope is that one of the major (other than BTC-e) exchangers accept it. But even then, why would anyone use LTC over BTC for transactions?

Are we supposed to assume that, in the future, people will use their silver (Litecoins) for small purchases and Bitcoin for larger transactions?

LTC appears to offer very little (if anything) to the marketplace. Its sole benefit appears to be pump and dump. LTC was going up in value and will undoubtedly grow in value over time; but beyond speculation, there is little benefit to this coin in the marketplace.

Competition in cryptocurrenies are a good thing (let the market determine the best coin) but LTC is not that coin.

Who here agrees or disagrees and why?

Your answer seems extremely biased. IF (notice the IF) you are assuming that cryptos are to be used in everyday transactoins, then Litecoin makes more logical sense than Bitcoin. Litecoin offers MUCH faster transaction times. That alone is a huge plus for any merchant who is considering accepting crypto as payment. No one wants to wait 20 minutes for a transaction to go through, regardless of what fee they avoid. In addition, because both Bitcoin and Litecoin are deflationary, the cost of services and commodities will only continue to drop in comparison to the price of the coin. Since there can only be 21 million BTC in existence ever, it seems pretty ridiculous that a merchant would except payment of BTC. Looking forward, the deflation on the coin would be too great to the point where no one is going to pay .000002 for a cup of coffee. This is why the 4x greater market cap of Litecoin makes more sense regarding your argument of cryptos as an everyday currency. There are a lot of people in the world  :o

However, in my own personal opinion, if you are comparing Bitcoin and Litecoin to gold and silver then you should not expect it to behave as an everyday transactional currency. Like gold or silver, the intrinsic value comes from utility in the form of being able to move HUGE amounts of money quickly and easily with miniscule fees attached. While that may not seem like that big of a utility function, it is. Break out of the mindset of person to person and start thinking business to business. The faster a transaction can happen, the faster life can go on. It's all about progression.

There are plenty of other reasons why Litecoin could be considered more useful, but in reality they compliment each other. Also remember that Litecoin is half the age of Bitcoin.

Unique imrovements could be implemented in the litecoin protocol that make it increasingly distinct from Bitcoin. The same can be said of course of Bitcoin - so essentially it's true value just like that of Bitcoin at this time is undiscovered.

Protocol changes that work for one won't necessarily be in the best interest of the other and vIse versa. So the idea that they will continue forever forward implementing the exact same features is a short sighted view.

I probably would say this as I'm invested in all 3, but here goes "tomatoes" at the ready

Bitcoin
Litecoin
Quark

In that order will become the dominant force in cryptocurrencys or shouldn't we now call them "virtual commodities"

litecoin is used by ignorant people who think they missed the boat on bitcoin, and think litecoin is a suitable alternative.

in fact bitcoin has many boats, and everyone can get in, even if you're the last person on earth to board the bitcoin boat you'll still profit from its benefits.

No, it doesn't.  Faster block times do not equate to faster confirmations.  To decide if a transaction is "confirmed," you need to analyze the difficulty of a double spend attack at each block height.  Faster blocks are accomplished by having lower difficulty - so you need more blocks to get an equivalent chance of protection against double spend.

yes, i think litecoin has a place.. but as of now, i consider it a purely speculative asset. BTC is speculative too, but it has much more infrastructure and support from its holders.

i think litecoin will have value once or if bitcoin gets so big that there's enough room for another player.

      so weird, why are people so threatened by litecoin?  i personally think ripples are a shit currency, but i've never felt strongly enough to make a thread on it.  i think it goes against human nature to have just 1 be all end all of anything, be it religon, government, money, it doesn't matter we are too individual to just go with one thing.  Since its easy to liquidate bitcoin into litecoin or vice versa both blockchains are strengthened from attack by governments/thieves/lawyers. Theres one gazillion alt coins out there but since crypto is still a completely free market only a handful have been picked to be of value.  Litecoin's spendability makes it #2 hands down if only for that reason.  I personally originally got into litecoins because it was the first alt coin to say "we want this coin to compliment bitcoin" vs all the others that were "we are better than bitcoins!".    Also its fallacy to think that litecoin needs a big exchange in order to survive.  Its done pretty well for the last 2 years without anything bigger than btc-e.com.   I'd say in the future there will be even more coins that have value, although i'd say namecoin has the best spot to take #3 but not so much bc of its function, more because bitcoin miners also mine namecoin.  
   But yeah really i don't understand the hate.  

Haha sure I understand what you're saying, but if you were to send a litecoin to me right this instant, I would receive it faster than if you were to send me a bitcoin. I was more making a point to the OP

I do not hate Litecoin. I own Litcoins.I am all in favor of competition between cryptocurrencies. However, I do not see Litecoin as a competitor to Bitcoin. Very few outside of the crypto world are aware of Litecoin. The recent surge in the Bitcoin price has brought more attention to Litecoin, which is fine. However, very few merchants accept them. Now in time this may change. But even if it does, do we really need two currencies which are very similar being used for the same purpose?

Litecoins can be used for small transactions--but so can Bitcoins in macro and micro transactions.

Right now, I see two purposes of Litecoin:

1. That which applies to all digital currencies--to bypass central authorities and send money or transact without borders.

2. To speculate.

But is this enough to support Litecoin in the future?

Litecoin is mostly useless, because 2.5 minutes still is too long for any point of sale transactions. There are ways to allow instant transactions by building services on top of Bitcoin, and that is what will happen. You are right that the "bitcoin is too expensive" argument makes no sense, because of the divisibility of Bitcoin. mBTC is the silver to BTC's gold.

Litecoin's popularity is mainly driven by the following factors, as far as I can tell:

(1) Being Scrypt-based means it captured the users who wanted to mine with CPUs just because they thought mining was cool and wanted to mine something, driving adoption.
(2) People who felt they missed out on the rise in value of BTC wanted to feel like they still had a shot to get in on something on the ground floor.
(3) The "silver to BTC's gold" marketing gimmick is very clever and catchy, although meaningless, causing all media outlets to repeat it whenever they do a story on Litecoin.
(4) Unlike with other altcoins, the founder is credible and actually has skills.

The problem is that if you look at how many smart people are working on Bitcoin infrastructure how many people are working on Bitcoin startups, compared to Litecoin, and look at the lead in adoption that Bitcoin already has, it's clear that Litecoin will not overtake Bitcoin. And since Litecoin offers no real benefits over Bitcoin, the only place for it to go is to zero or very near zero. Look at the Bitcoin 2013 conference videos on youtube and look how many extremely talented people are backing Bitcoin. Then try to find anyone impressive other than Charles Lee (edit: and Warren Togami, the lead dev) who is backing Litecoin.

The whole "Bitcoin vs Litecoin" makes absolutely no sense. Or at best, about as much sense as the "silver to Bitcoin's gold" analogy. The two are completely separate and do not compete nor were they designed to compete with each other (IMHO they're more complimentary than competitive). I'm surprised that people ITT have thus far neglected to mention that Litecoin can offer an additional layer of obfuscation for other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. In fact it's probably the only other chain that has sufficient volume to support this role and that alone makes it unique among alt chains and valuable in itself.

Why Litecoin and other copies of bitcoin will never reach the bitcoin marketcap. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect)

The only altcoin that can eventually take off is an altcoin that have interesting features for the end users that can't be added to the bitcoin protocol (mining algorithms and blockchain organization are not interesting for the end user). This is not going to happen by tomorrow because of 2 things badly needed to work as a currency: Trust + Network effect. Those two fundamental things need a lot of time to get achieve. Bitcoin will get to it full potential before any better altcoin to take off because they will need to pass the same "time" test.

If there were any shred of truth (or sense) to this, it would have happened by now. But thanks for letting us know what we should or shouldn't find interesting :)

I don't see anyone dumping their litecoins even after its price went from 2$ to 40$. Obviously there is a lot of speculation around it but certainly not a pump and dump scheme.

The end user is the one who will create a market of any coins. Care to explain me why my grandma would prefer to use a better efficient blockchain if she just can't understand WTF is that?

All I see here , is a bunch of bitcoin users scared that one day Litecoin will overtake Bitcoin and had to make a thread about it . What you scared bitcoiners don't understand is everytime you mention litecoin in a good or bad way it grows , so thanks for that . I'll put my money in a coin where I know who created it .

I own some litecoin too as a speculative instrument. I'm not scared of anything, it's just plain facts about market behaviors. I can give you an example: FIAT. Fiat has the worst money creation process ever for the benefits of the society AND the environment, thus, everyone is using it because of trust and network effect.

They are not complimentary, because LTC doesn't add anything substantial over BTC. If one of them has the network effects and trust, the other one is useless.


A BTC mixing service can achieve the same thing with less risk.


Charles Lee is smart enough to realize that most of the PR he does for Litecoin makes no logical sense, so it seems pretty clear that his primary motivation for advocating Litecoin is financial. I think he knows that eventually it will all come crashing down, but he wants to ride it as far as he can. He's probably been slowly cashing out.

yes because Mastercard is so much different then Visa , so therefore Mastercard is useless.

1 world 1 currency(bitcoin) , exctaly what the NWO wants

Visa and Mastercard use the same currency BTW. It's like comparing Bitpay and Coinbase. Also, the NWO wants a centralized currency, not a decentralized one that they are not in control. The free market wants a one world currency. That is why there is no (almost) place for plain bitcoin copies (in an end user perceptive).

apart from the very early adopters everyone else i guess that has more litecoins than bitcoins. But still litecoin overtaking bitcoin is kinda impossible.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

For something the be complimentary it needs to provide something the other can't and vise versa. It's not the case with bitcoin and litecoin.

So you're saying they're direct competitors then? In what way?

Well it would be the fact that people has choice to which coins they can own. And perhaps litecoin could serve as an entry level to the cryptocoin world because of the price is cheapo.

Yeah in a way, but it is an unfair competition. Litecoin will always suffer of network effect because it was created after bitcoin.

Maybe. I don't think the actual altcoins will all crash and burn. Some of them will probably find their niche and I think litecoin is one of them. But again, I can't see any good reason it will get the same market cap of bitcoin.

Litecoin offers a liquid blow off valve for Bitcoin.  

Like Coblee said, this is like NASCAR...Litecoin is just drafting Bitcoin until the last lap

edit to say they are COMPLEMENTARY because the litecoin dev team even adds new value to the bitcoin protocol in times of need: see recent events

Coblee seems to like slogans a lot. I was aware of the silver to bitcoin's gold but that nascar thing is new to me  ::)

What?  I have no idea what you are talking about.  Transactions are near instantaneous in both Bitcoin and Litecoin.  Why would you receive a Litecoin transaction faster than Bitcoin?

Well the first obvious reason is 6 confirmations as opposed to 10. I would also encourage you to wipe your wallet.dat file (save it obviously) and then reopen both bitcoin and litecoin wallet. See which data comes through quicker.

I think competition is a good thing, because it drives development.
To answer your question regarding Litecoin, I'm maybe allowed to go far afield.

As cryptocurrencies are still young, it is hard to answer such a question by transfering experiences from other areas.
Bitcoin has for sure started something (successfully; there have been other attempts before) which might not necessarily end with Bitcoin, long-term.
Short-term I expect the main use for Litecoin in speculation ;)
But Litecoin is a good example for the evolution that has begun with the "Bitcoin idea".

Litecoin is mainly different in its hashing algorithm.

Meanwhile there are new concepts which differ from Bitcoin in more than just a hashing algorithm.
Primecoin for example has introduced a completely different proof-of-work (Cunningham chains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain)) and Peercoin has introduced a working implementation of the concept of proof-of-stake (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake), which has been integrated in some new creations (e.g. NVC, CGB and others).

And those will not be the last improvements or evolutionary steps.

In some years there might be both a kind of backbone currency (which is used for not so frequent but relatively large transactions) and one or more other currencies that allow for a high number of transactions.
As far as I understand the protocols no currently available cryptocurrency would be able to handle really huge amounts of transactions per time - not even Litecoin or Primecoin, because block spacing is one thing, but a high total amount of transactions requires a high bandwidth - regardless of the number of blocks you try to put the transactions in.

So long-term I give Litecoin worse chances than Primecoin, Peercoin and Novacoin, because they offer more "features" than just an altered hashing algorithm.
But who knows which ideas come next?

As I have no working crystal ball, I can only guess what will happen. And as Bitcoin is much better known than most other cryptocurrencies will be in near future, I guess Bitcoin will keep its place in the world for the next years.

But for the later years it is even harder to make a prediction.
With dropping coinbase rewards and legions of ASIC miners it is hard to guess what will happen once the main reward for taking part in the PoW process is gathering transaction fees. Will the value of BTC high enough to feed the legions of ASIC miners with only transaction fees?
That might be the time, when PoS can have an advantage over PoW by securing the network without the need for huge calculation power (or whatever kind of securing mechanism will have been developed until then ;) )

...but just like in the competition between Video 2000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_2000) and VHS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS) you can't say that something will succeed because it is better or more soundly developed (I consider Video 2000 the better concept). Sometimes the winners are the ones that are earliy / well-known / widely spread...

So I guess:
Bitcoin is here to stay; Litecoin maybe not.

Just keep both.

I own about 50% Bitcoin and 50% Litecoin. The fact is that Litecoin isn't going away so this conversation is rather moot. It's further compounded by the fact Litecoin is the number one traded crypto in China and is likely to become the dominant crypto of choice in China due to a variety of reasons already spoken about to death in other forums. That's the tipper for me. Game of numbers and China typically wins.

But I agree, I don't understand why people get so militant about it - it's kinda sad really. Choice is always a good thing, and often there doesn't even need to be a reason for choice, other than the fact there is a choice. This is the way the world works.