Bitcoin Forum

Ok guys lets solve this once and for all.

I have read various posts/papers about this topic but I would like this sorted. I will word this as simply as possible.

So I have read that the time that has passed since the transaction was made is more important than the raw number of confirms. This would imply that a 4 confirmation LTC transaction is identical in terms of security to a 1 confirmation BTC one (ie. 10minutes have passed for both). Obviously this makes sense when you think about it in terms of computational power and sustaining a 51% attack over time (ltc confirms are 4x easier to re-write as you only need to sustain the 51% for 1/4th of the time of a BTC attack).

So basically LTC confirms are 1/4th as 'strong' as BTC ones, so far so good.

But lets suppose 1 minute has passed since your transaction. LTC shows 1 conf and BTC shows 0, is there any difference here? Is this an advantage for LTC or is it an illusion?

Yes.  1 confirm is significantly higher "security" than 0 confirm.  That would be the area LTC has an advantage.  Honestly 5 min vs 10 minutes isn't much of a difference to warrant a seperate blockchain. 

If it was 30 seconds vs 10 minutes and had some innovation like having a second "super difficulty" which was 10,080x higher that the nornal block difficulty would create a ledger block you might have something very useful for smaller & realtime transactions.   Once say 8 ledger blocks were created (roughly 2 months) you could drop the prior blockchain and work from the ledger block which was 8 blocks deep.

I am not saying LTC should be modified to do this I am just saying that a niche exists but LTC doesn't fit into that niche much better than BTC.