Bitcoin Forum

I'm a total newbie and non-techie/non-gamer.  Love the idea of cryptocurrencies. 

Please excuse my ignorance, but why does anyone want litecoins?  I know you can sell them for bitcoins, which is what I plan to do.  But who would want to buy my coins and why?

Thanks in advance for info.



Bitcoin address:   115stzbruWvMSsVFo4JgumMR7KUziMaQer
Litecoin address:  LbdvgPAmdUDz8qhuseGdaa5CtCZBK4P3KA

Because they act as an alternative to Bitcoins. As the analogy goes, gold is to silver as Bitcoins are to Litecoins. I suspect once ASICs hit the market and GPU Bitcoin mining becomes obsolete, Litecoins might rise in popularity since people with GPU miners will switch to mining Litecoins.

I think people buy litecoins to sell them to even bigger idiots.

EDIT: I'm not sure, though. There might be something to it. Maybe at some point litecoin will have some sort of an advantage (although I can't think of one now)

Disclaimer: I still hold some LTC since the early days of litecoin.

You could argue the same about bitcoin.  Bitcoin is just a more mature and more used alternative to litecoin.  Yes more merchants accept bitcoin but litecoin proliferation is growing and it's still under one year old. 

you cant really do anything with it right now except sell it or hoard it.

regardless of what the majority of the closed minded bitcoin oligarchy have to say, if bitcoin is to survive in the future there will HAVE TO BE competitors to challenge it. all true innovations sprout copycats and rivals, some of which might even supercede the original.

if there are no other successful cryptocurrencies then the idea is not going to have any legs and bitcoin will eventually fade away.

so far litecoin is the only real challenger (and it aint much of one right now to be honest). needs more services to accept it..

In theory diversification, but in practice litecoin offers very little of this.

Litecoin has, as far as I know, zero unique features. They just changed some of bitcoin's numbers around. Faster confirmation times is the main selling point, which isn't much of one.

You can say that bitcoin and litecoin both are bought by people willing to sell to bigger idiots, it's true. I do it with bitcoin (I'm a bigger "idiot" than the people who discovered bitcoin in 2009, lots of people have still never heard of bitcoin). But the whole point of bitcoin is missed whenever that argument is made.

The greatest value of bitcoin, imo, is it's revolutionary protocol. It is potentially very useful to people who do not speculate at all (in other words it can be useful to people who only plan to hold bitcoins for a few hours). It can be used for transmitting money internationally for cheap and for chargeback-proof payments, to name a couple of things. Litecoin offers NOTHING new in this regard, besides the negligible allure of the idea that if were I to buy a latte in some futuristic world with bitcoins, the coffeeshop could have waited for 75% less time if they had only used litecoins (2.5 minutes is still a long time to be standing at the front of the line at a cash register). Bitcoin has this problem (it can hardly be labeled as such, at this point) nipped in the bud with zipconf and future services.

So yes, it is a much more glaring "pyramid scheme," if you will, than bitcoin is. I realize I could be an "early adopter" of litecoin right now. But I think litecoin is utterly pointless. They have a snazzy slogan, the whole silver thing, which makes sense on the surface. But really, litecoin's allure is actually the misguided notion that by buying litecoins now "while they are cheap," you can be an "early adopter" again, since you missed the boat on bitcoin. It's just pump-and-dump bullshit, man.

It'll putter around for a while, maybe a few years. You could probably profit some on it if you time your moves right.  But it's so unoriginal that it's painful.

i sell them for bitcoins.

For one thing, it provides great opportunities for traders in the cryptocurrency world. Who doesn't love volatility?    ;)

Beyond speculation, what you want to do entirely depends on what you and the other party want to exchange. For example, you could buy silver from me  ;D  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98607.0

I still remember when I bought a few hundred dollars worth of bitcoin using Coinpal @ 30c/btc, my friends laughed at me: "what are you going to do with THAT?"

Right now, there aren't many sellers price their goods and service in LTC because it's new and price fluctuates a lot. All currencies are backed by either (governmental) violence, or consensual confidence. The longer Litecoin survives, the more confidence it musters, and the wider adoption it will enjoy.

Of course there's always risk of failure and losing all its value, everybody knows that and the current price reflects the risk to a large degree.     

BTW, after having a few transactions, I do find Litecoin kind of sexy, it's faster, simpler to mine from any PC but more difficult to do as a "professional miner" on a larger scale. Litecoin users seem to be more lighthearted and optimistic too.

its not all true what you guys say.. there are more and more services that take LTC

https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/List-of-Litecoin-related-services

^ and this is just some of them, many is not added yet ^

I started to mine Litecoins... It doesn't take much energy to mine them, practically it's free. And who knows, maybe its price goes up? I make profit. But if it's not, then I didn't lose much.

in terms of popularity it seems like its bitcoin or bust

litecoin is mostly supply based (people just want something to do with CPU time) rather than demand based

Speculation is another reason. I got 1000+ while the were closer to 0.001 and now they're closer to 0.004; I also bought some at 0.007 before they dropped. Of course the same kind of speculation can be done with Bitcoin, but the variance and current increase in popularity may attract speculators.

Used to also be good for CPU mining. They're still better than SHA-256d currencies for CPUs, though. I think GPU hostility probably made more laypeople eager to mine and adopt it but that's just me.

I think litecoins will catch on once bitcoin mining is unprofitable unless you are using an FPGA.

where can you buy LTC ?  only BTC-e ?

The only other exchanges for litecoins that I know of are bitparking (https://ltcexchange.bitparking.com/main) and Vircurex (https://vircurex.com/). Oh, and there's probably a #litecoin-otc IRC channel too.

thanks.
ill prolly pick up a few thousand. what the hell, ya never know

Is it still possible to mine litecoins with a regular computer?

Only good use for litecoins would be to buy some bitcoins.

How so? Isn't competition a good thing?

You can mine any existing coin with a regular computer.

I'll get some LTC just in case it becomes more valuable in the future.  ::)

Well.. People don't want them (anymore).

I'm trading LTC on Vircure (https://vircurex.com/register?referral_id=603-854) (btw. you pay less fees from this link)

I set up a Vicurex account yesterday and traded out a few BTC for Litecoins.  The main purpose was to exercise the Vicurex account and get a feel for it.  The trade went off without a hitch, so far so good with Vicurex.

Well, the chances of getting any bitcoins on a regular pc without a high end gfx-card is almost zero. What about litecoins. I've tried mining on my laptop. I get about 2,5khz/s. How long would it take me to mine a block approximately?

Solo mining? From 1 second to infinity I guess. :o
There are many ltc pools micro mining friendly.

I cpu mine sometimes with my laptop ~8,5kh/s plus cpu minig with fw cores on my pc ~13kh/s. it mined quite a lot.

People are strongly encouraged to send their unwanted LTC to this recycle bin address:
  LcxFbYsEHrP7gFEuY9fdJkvWWYdsiUjKyx
 ;D

Good one:)

I will eco-utilise all used coins
My scrapyard:
LTC LVQDTJqYPVZjYmHkqAUUzwDuihRaToDGGo
BTC 1MnNvLbtCpFeXA6RqFgwWTSrQAxEKwNBQz
DVC 1Lo3gwABnS1731vDLWHujKsTuxuQvfeSVE
I0C jWBQNCPHzYGtns9Bt8HddkHaA3H6iTbLjQ
IXC xmXJwSNt8tyMWsQU2ZNvbU56L6nCi2a9tS
LQC vugDSD6UTWyNK1hmZA3UKTn3WAUxNe8cup
NMC N6yka72kRYF7djQAT44Wwy4wRZoVgfJ6ac
SC sYDhFJtfUjxipTuyzdqHJnymhnrjcsTG1N

 ;D

Really? LTC currently run for roughly 0.004 BTC each. At 12 USD/BTC that's just under 5 cents each. Take into account that both chains are showing no signs of weakness and that LTC topped off at over 0.007 BTC each and you have a reason to want them. If nobody did then they wouldn't even be traded...a week or so ago volumes of BTC/LTC trade on Vircurex alone were topping 40 BTC a day (I didn't check BTC-e.) Even if it's little more than speculation fodder (which I think it is more than) it is being adopted.

What competition? Litecoin is a parasite.

Either way all litecoin users are also bitcoin users.

I was thinking about average time. There was such a counter for bitcoin a while ago I seem to recall.

4251.5232 hours at the current difficulty with 2.5 kH/s.
Source: http://allchains.info/calc.html

My laptop knocks off 13 kH a second, I have access to quite a few other computers, and I don't even bother pool mining LTC. I found out pretty easily it wasn't worth it to lag all my processes and waste electricity. Would I have mined under those circumstances back when Reaper didn't exist? Yes, and I did earn a fair amount. The difficulty is reaching new highs, though, and it seems to be GPU or bust.

If you have a dedicated rig with good GPU's, go for it, but otherwise, I think buying them is the best option.

Thanks for the info, and the link.
I think I'll switch to folding@home or something instead. That way it's not just wasted power. =)

I don't know that it's wasted power exactly.  The way I see it, there's something like a domino effect going on: FPGAs are uprooting GPUs for the sha256d proof of work, while GPUs have just made their debut on the scrypt proof of work.  As for whether CPU-mining LTC is worth the trouble: look at the marginal power cost if the machine was going to be on anyway, or at the total power cost if not.  Should they ever hit the market, ASICs might well clobber current FPGA board owners, though since the scrypt proof of work requires much more memory, those board owners might be SOL (barring the Butterfly Labs metamorphosis trade-up offer).

An Atom D525 has a marginal power cost of only about 3W over idle for 5.5 kH/s, which (while small) is a net win.  Extrapolating current values, that's an expected payback of 18.62 LTC a month, which should cover even fairly outrageous energy pricing if the machine is otherwise left on anyway.  On the other hand, that same desktop with SSD and nVidia ION graphics has an active-idle draw of about 20W at the wall; this makes it a net loss even at 0.075 USD/kWh if the machine is not required to be left on.  (You can squeeze ~1 MH/s out of the ION mining BTC, but that's not enough to change the equation.)

Then there's always the gaming potential of a good GPU.  Let it mine for you when you're not keeping it busy blowing the living daylights out of something.  ;)

if people don't want them, why are the diff doing up every time there is a diff change?

People definitely do still want them, however people don't want them as much anymore I suppose.

sure they still will, they just don't wont to buy them ;)

are there any clients that can do btc, ltc, and nmc?  i tried one that did btc/nmc, but it required that the official clients were installed.

You can always use e-wallets like Vircurex (link in my signature)
It supports Bitcoin, Namecoin, Devcoin, Litecoin, Liquidcoin, Solidcoin, I0coin, Ixcoin

I haven't seen much action around Litecoin as far as real usefulness goes.  In that respect, it seems like a ponzi scheme where new investors pay for the returns of current holders.  There is no asset and there has been no attempt that I've seen, to actually use Litecoin for commerce.  There are a number of businesses that actually transact in Bitcoin.  It therefore has some value outside of its exchange rate.  I will admit, however, that I think a lot of Bitcoin's value is also driven by speculation.  It's not a stable market yet, but it has a lot better positioning than Litecoin.

it depends on if one sees btc/ltc/etc. as the utlimate solution of e-currency, or just another step toward something like PerfectCoin.
IMHO, litecoin has been remarkably successful compared to other coins that failed, right?   ???

Yes, but that's not saying much. Namecoin is more successful in my opinion, depending on how success is measured (not price).

I'm all for competition I suppose, but litecoin is certainly not that. It's a gimmick fork.

So far we've seen more than half a dozen alt-chains, which one is not considered gimmick?  none?

Namecoin is less of a gimmick than the others. But, yeah pretty much.

What do you do with a namecoin? I have a few :)

The same as LTC:)

so exchange for BTC and be done with them?

Actually I've saved some to buy domains in the future.

Okay have fun :)

Namecoin has some "real use" (buying .bit domains), however slim that use might be, taking the view that any commodity must have (had) a "real use" before being used as money to "bootstrap" the value, namecoin should be more apt to be used as money than bitcoin.

Bitcoin managed to bootstrap it's value some other way (10,000 BTC Pizza?), so I think above view has to be abolished or at least somehow modded.

All the AltCoins are good, they each teach us some thing or other and maybe some other good will come from one at some point. I doubt (at the low level of innovation of the to-date invented OtherCoins) any of them will be a serious competitor to bitcoin. Niche-product? Yes, maybe. Playground? Definitely. Objects of speculation? Yep, but for a very small group of people.