Bitcoin Forum

Hi Team,

I'm about a week into researching Bitcoin. I really think Bitcoin has great opportunities for growth and own 203.

My question is about Litecoin...how or why is there a point to Litecoin if Bitcoin turns out to be THE cryptocurrency?

It's a HUGE deal for a site (in my mind) to say that they accept Bitcoins for payment. Why or what influence these same sites to accept Bitcoin and Litecoin?

I just don't see the point of Litecoin, because I don't understand the point.

Especially with something like Bitcoin leading the way. In my opinion Litecoin doesn't have much of an advantage for the AVERAGE person. Sure I've heard that it's faster for confirmations...but I feel that for most people those extra 5 mins or so doesn't really matter.

What are your thoughts?

Quicker confirms, yes. Also, no ASICs, at least not yet, so GPU mining remains viable. Litecoin is also an excellent hedge if you wish to trade bitcoins without reverting to bankster paper. Some retailers do accept both coins too.

I'm a fan of both BTC and Ł. Heck, even namecoins may find their niche one day.

litecoin does not have to be better than bitcoin to be successful. it does not even need to be as good. it can ride on bitcoin's coattails. now that it has a market cap that is over 1% of bitcoin's market cap, I don't see it going away.

Because people will always to seek security & also opportunity. That's why the other competitive or just supportive things come to exist, as long as they are more secure, has potential to grow. Anyway, don't you think the world is too boring if there's only one dominate thing?

Taking it away from technical considerations and on to tangible commodities, can the same thing be said of silver?

"Why is there a point to silver if gold turns out to be THE precious metal?", would sound like a strange question to ask.

For me, Litecoin is to Bitcoin as silver is to gold.

I like this comparison - very effective. I will use this! Thanks Deslock  ;D

This is why I love LTC also. Also there are more and more merchants accepting LTC everyday. I accept it on my businesses website (http://www.allthingsluxury.biz). I might add proudly.

No problem, FatMagic... spread that idea far and wide. :-D

That s the LTC slogan  ::)

The slogan should be changed to "Litecoin: For butthurt GPU miners."

Disclaimer: I wrote cgminer.

The Bitcoin wiki is very harsh to Litecoin, did anyone try to edit yet and see if the changes stick?

Litecoin needs his own wiki, or a general cryptocurrency wiki

if only mtgox were to support LTC ^^

Create your own Gox.

How about "the coin for everybody not just elitist pricks."

Is "Litecoin is to Bitcoin as silver is to gold" some sort of official slogan for LTC? I've seen nothing like that on Litecoin.org, or anywhere else for that matter.

it used to be there back in the day  ;)

the Litecoin part of the Bitcoin wiki gets heavily edited by Luke-Jr* every time someone tries to put some truth there, the "Litecoin community" gave up on editing it..
the Litecoin section should be removed and Litecoin have its own wiki





*known hater of alt-chains

Well yeah ... except that the Bitcoin wiki itself is a joke due to that retard filling it full of his personal warped opinions and FUD.
So I wouldn't think it would be worth caring about the content - the retards edits in there indeed makes Bitcoin look like a joke.
... and whoever the fool is who runs the wiki, obviously has some sort of inferiority complex that they let that crap go and wont stop it.
There's no way I'd recommend anyone to read it.

LTC is still being used for a pump and dump - so yeah those people certainly aren't pricks ............

Bitcoin will probably hit it's maximum transaction limit by early next year. At that point in time, we'll need alt coins to be able to reliably transact.

- The hashing algorithm Scrypt makes it considerably more resistant against ASICs.
- Faster confirmations. We live in a 'time poor' world, getting something done quicker is a definite advantage.
- It's always good to have an alternative. Remember the bitcoin hardfork recently? If Litecoin stays one version behind Bitcoin we will have Litecoin as a back up and Bitcoin as a test network.
- Competition is always good in economic markets
- Gives people who missed out on Bitcoin early adoption a second chance
- Ultimately, scarce things are given value by people. Litecoins are provably scarce and people are giving them value and creating services around them... at the end of the day that's all that matters.  :D

Ummm.... speaking of the hardfork, has a version of Litecoin been released yet that fixes the problem?

If it's a rhetorical question, that's OK.

If not, I am worried.

Devil's advocate time.  ;)

In what way is it "considerably more resistant" ? Are you arguing that manufacturing cost is the reason there are no litecoin ASICs for sale right now?

Very misleading. Confirmations coming twice as fast offer half as much security. This is not an advantage.

Copying Bitcoin doesn't automatically make you competitive. And "good" in what ways, for whom or what?

No one has missed out on Bitcoin early adoption. But this reasoning is definitely a not an argument for Litecoin. "Litecoin is good because sour grapes."

Scarcity alone is a pretty weak argument for value. But by this argument, why not continue to branch the bitcoin code in insignificant ways a million times over. You can make the amount of coin for each one even more scarce than LTC or BTC. By your logic, each copy should become valuable.

There may be very good reasons to invest and support Litecoin. I don't see them in your post.

 ;)


No. The Scrypt algorithm was designed so that it is difficult to efficiently parallel compute it. In fact it will take a computer science breakthrough to accomplish this. See the wikipedia page on scrypt - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt. Sure GPU's and FGPAs will give an advantage, but it will never be dramatic due to memory constraints of the algorithm. This has been well discussed on this forum.


Not misleading, it is faster. I see no-one complaining about security problems and hundreds of thousands of litecoins get traded everyday.


It's not a 'copy' it's an evolution. Competition being good for markets is simple econ 101. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_(economics)


Come on man... Bitcoins are going for almost $90 a coin. It's all relative, subjective, opinion etc but I think most people would prefer to be an early adopter who got in at under a dollar compared to an 'early adopter' who got in at almost 100 dollars.


Except I don't argue anywhere in my post that scarcity alone is an argument for value. Re-read what I typed out. Or I can bolden certain words you have missed.

They are trying to tune up experimental technology which has some flaws (some of them are know, some are yet unknown). That's why litecoin and other altcoins pop up.

This doesn't really answer my question. What does that have to do with making it "resistant" to building an application specific chip for it? More importantly, why would an end-user care? If the only reason to use LTC is to help disenfranchised miners, sorry, I'm not buying.

The point of confirmations is security. It doesn't matter that it's faster to get a confirmation if the confirmation means proportionately less security than a BTC confirmation. So this is not an advantage.

You're not addressing my point. Copying Bitcoin and changing the number of confirmations doesn't make it competition. So far it's just a mutation, not an evolution.

This is the same argument people were using at 1$, 5$, 10$, 20$, and even 47$. It's still short sighted, and not an argument for a different coin. People who buy into BTC now can be rewarded for the exact same reason that people who bought in before were. We are nowhere close to Bitcoin market saturation. We are all still early adopters.

Looks that way to me.

A lot of what you're saying in your responses is focusing on word play/ semantics. For example, when I say Litecoins are considerably more ASIC resistant, you are trying to interpreting that literally as me saying it's not possible to build a chip to solve the hash. I don't know if you're trolling or not, but obviously you can build a chip to run any conventional algorithm. The point is how much of an advantage that chip gives you over miners who can only afford gpus or miners who just want to use their desktop computer to get some extra coins. Bitcoin ASIC's give the holders an enormous advantage over non-holders, with Litecoin unless a computer science breakthrough occurs there will be no similar devices which afford the users ridiculous computational advantages.

You're saying faster confirmations aren't an advantage because of the trade off of 'security'. I'm not noticing any security issues with Litecoin and I don't see anyone else complaining and hundreds of thousands are traded everyday. All I am noticing is my transactions don't take an hour to confirm  :D

LOL at saying no Litecoins aren't an evolution they are a MUTATION. Ok buddy, I will let you keep on arguing that lol. Fact of the matter is Litecoins use a different algorithm which has benefits and have faster confirmations which also gives benefits. Really not seeing how they are identical. Do you realise if two things have differences they can't be the same? Do you think gold and silver are identical because they are both made from metal?

About early adoption, according to you if I invest in Apple stock today I am still an early adopter. It's pointless debating it, because it's a matter of opinion what is early. All we can say for sure is, getting in at 50 cents is a hell of a lot earlier than getting in for 88 dollars. Let's asume the high point of bitcoins and litecoins will be one thousand dollars. What sounds better, a 1,000% return on investment or a 20,000% return on investment? (mental maths there so approximate figures)

My last point, I said: Litecoins are provably scarce and people are giving them value and creating services around them... at the end of the day that's all that matters.

+1

I don't disagree with this sentiment, but you need to keep in mind that litecoin has 4x cap of bitcoin so the 50 cents is really $2 if you want to compare it to bitcoin and judge which one is a better value in the long run.

The numbers are indeed off, it's 1,000% vs 200,000%

Not trolling, not arguing semantics, and not sold. Guess I'll stick to BTC until you guys can come up with some better reasons.

List of things people do that I have no problem with:

1.  Do not exercise and eat junk food
2.  Smoke cigarette, drink alcohol, use marijuana
3.  Take financial advice from Internet forums and buy penny stocks
4.  Use Bitcoin
5.  Use Litecoin

It's called personal freedom.   

The point of Litecoin is if Bitcoin is'nt THE cryptocurrency

Why in the world would anyone not buy a handful of litecoins at .50 cents after all this isn't an issue of every Bitcoin holder waking up in the morning and thinking I'm selling all my btc for Litecoin, did litecoins recent 10 fold rise impact bitcoin?I think not, is Bitcoin really so fragile that it would fall on its back and kick its legs in the air if litcoin went up another 10 fold?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_circulating_currencies

Why people are currently using 182 different currencies around the world?

I think this is a really important point that a lot of people miss when arguing about the future value of litecoins. Now mind you, I mine litecoins and I'm invested in LTC, but I don't really expect them to overtake bitcoins. I really think that litecoins will be silver to BTC's gold. But, maybe I'll be wrong  ::)

No need to argue, these coins need the supporters & a better software base, if one coins' software is improved further (that means it becomes more secure, support faster & more transactions), it will have more value.

I agree. I suggest everyone to try it. Believe me, LTC is here to stay.

What is the point of Japanese Yen if USD is THE world currency?


It's a big world. The more money the merrier.

Not rhetorical: it needs to be fixed, or your blockchain can easily be forked.

Beware of Altchains that are abandoned or neglected by their developers (activity at https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/commits/master doesn't look healthy to me... and now y'all are going to accuse me of spreading FUD, so I'll go away and shut up).

Not really. That's THE biggest issue that has prevented me from investing more into LTC. Many others have same feeling.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" can only help you go that far ...

I think that would hold true if a Litecoin was identical to a Bitcoin. But Litecoin has properties that give it an advantage over Bitcoin (fairer mining, faster confirmations). So 1 LTC = 0.25BTC may not be the eventual outcome. Of course, I don't hold a crystal ball and can only speculate like anyone else... time will tell :D

It's still an open question is BitCoin will turn out to be THE cryptocurrency, only time will tell on that one.

However LiteCoins are just a copy of BitCoin. If BitCoin gets replaced by something it's not going to be with a copy of itself.

LMFAO......so true.

I am the butthurt GPU miner!! 

Okay, but that's not an excuse for using LTC to treat your rear, coin police says it's not innovative enough.
 

What's the point of opening this topic if you already think Bitcoin is THE cryptocurrency?

LOL @ "coin police"

+litecointip bitcool Ł0,50

;D

It may or may not be innovative enough, however the innovation belongs to ArtForz and tenebrix, not litecoin.

https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/wiki/History-of-cryptocurrency

Same for me. As far as I know coblee abandoned the project some months ago. Then Greedi called himself lead-dev and made some minor text-file-changes in the repository. Coblee came back in February and said he'd continue developement. But nothing really happend since then. I'd be really happy about some new info from coblee about the development-progress.

reading between the lines from the forum posts below doesn't improve my confidence either:
http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,1169.0.html
http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,973.0.html
http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,1424.0.html
http://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,1521.0.html

I still like litecoin, but as soon as enough people realize that there's no more progress it will be doomed to fail.

Not really a copy. They did some tune ups, but the model is the same.

Do you realize how stupidly biased you sound? "Its not ASIC resistant. Also, since its ASIC resistant, its vulnerable."

I think you read too much dumb posts and can't make an opinion for yourself so gave two opposing reasons....

what's the point of euro if usd is THE currency?
what's the point of in-n-out if McDonald's is THE fast food?
what's the point of silver if gold is THE bullion/investment?
what's the point of diaspora if facebook is THE social network?
and i could go on, and on, and on....
The world is never that simple, things are rarely outright better in all possible ways without some sort of disadvantage. you have to make trade-offs.

Do we want a higher network hashrate at the cost of it being concentrated in the hands of fewer people (asic, fpga, other custom hardware), or a somewhat lower network hashrate spread out amongst a much broader variety of people (gpu, cpu, other "normal" hardware)?
Do we want to try to make custom hardware much less advantageous at the risk that someone might find a way to make them cost-effective anyway?
Do we want the developer to keep tinkering with the code at the risk (as shown in bitcoin) of causing unforessen consequences? if not, do we then want people thinking he might have abandoned the project ?

All this guff about resistance to better hardware is just plain rubbish.

When the scrypt algorithm was first used I argued that it would be reasonable to do it in GPU.
It was hotly argued that wasn't possible - it was supposedly only possible on CPU.
Well ... that was clearly wrong :P

The resistance is only the fact that the income from LTC mining is dismal.
If there is enough monetary force to make people invest in the production of faster hardware, then it will happen.

While LTC is a failure, value wise, it wont happen.
If one day it becomes valuable, it will happen.

While I don't consider myself any kind of core developer, I can say that no new version of the Litecoin-QT/litecoind client has been releases since the fork. Since we are on 0.6.3, the boundary between 0.8.x and 0.7 or before does not exist on the network. From what I can understand, there are limitations in BDB that will be solved (and now in the right way) when a 0.8.x-based client is released.

The plan that I've heard expressed is to stay one version behind Bitcoin for the time being.

How can you say "this is what I said" when its clearly quoted in that same message. I targeted exactly that. The fact you said nothing is resistant. Because it is resistant. Not immune.

Sure your last message makes more sense and is what you should have written. However, IT IS NOT what you have written. The fact you somehow kinda wanted to dodge that should make you understand where stupid comes from.

It was my understanding that we avoided the problem by simply never upgrading the software beyond 0.6.3c.  Your userbase makes for a better testnet than our userbase because it's larger.

My impression of the bug leading to the fork was that 0.8.0 allowed the mining of blocks greater than the allowable size in the older clients, and that the adoption of 0.8.0 by half the network was what led to the fork.  If I'm wrong, please correct me (you'd be the one to know).

If 0.8.1 works well, we will probably see an update to the client for it later this year.

Edit: Reading https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0050 , I see this may affect Litecoin
Can we use a file called DB_CONFIG in the Litecoin data dir that contains
To temporarily fix this until we update to 0.8.1?

If so I will give the heads up to pool ops

The potential issue is larger in scope than merely the accidental fork we witnessed between 0.8.0 and previous versions on March 12th.   There exists a difficult but possible "reorg attack" that can cause litecoin-0.6.3 nodes to hardfork from each other.  All current Litecoin clients have this self-consistency issue.  This necessitates Litecoin to prepare for a Bitcoin May 15th-like hardfork (http://bitcoin.org/may15.html).

coblee earlier did express a desire for Litecoin to remain "one version behind Bitcoin" as a conservative maintenance strategy.  However, since a hardfork for the BDB issue is required anyway, he seemed to agree to upgrade directly to 0.8.x in the next release.  He wanted to wait and see what happens after Bitcoin's May 15th hardfork before proceeding.

If unable to rebase 0.8.x and be fully confident in it soon, Litecoin should consider releasing a new build of 0.6.3 with a similar hardfork patch that increases the set_lk_max_locks limit for all users on a particular future date.  The risk would be very small for such a minor patch release since the testing was already done for Bitcoin.

No!!!!

The DB_CONFIG workaround effectively forces a hardfork from the default BDB limits of all Litecoin clients.  Everyone has to do this at the same time in order to ensure that they keep up with the blockchain.  Note that the Bitcoin alert (http://bitcoin.org/may15.html) tells miners to NOT do it until May 15th for this reason.

Edit: Coblee decided to just wait for 0.8.x to fix this problem.

define "better hardware". if by "better hardware" you mean custom hardware like fpga and asic then you are wrong.

scrypt requires memory. period. there is no known way to get around this (besides various time-memory tradeoffs which are probably possible, but this is expected and doesnt really give any advantage to anyone). the person (he has since left the scene) who picked the parameters for scrypt in litecoin missed a few things, and claimed (and this led others, including the main dev afaik/iirc to do the same) that gpu mining would not be economical in litecoin. this obviously turned out not to be the case, but just because someone thought (or led others to think) the scrypt parameters they picked provided things it didnt does not mean scrypt is flawed.

scrypt was MADE to make parallelization much, much less economical (again because of the memory requirements) and as far as anyone knows publicy, this is still the case, and it will continue to be the case until someone either comes out with a paper, or publicy prove they are able to pull it off by doing it in practice.

i expect custom hardware to have an advantage over gpu mining but it will not be anywhere even close to the scale in which it happens in bitcoin.

The coin envy in this thread is outrageous. I mean really guys, we are changing history here, let's all get along at least... The more cryptocoins the better if you ask me. Decentralize the decentralization.

I believe in a world full of different levels of computing power, other cryptocoins such as Litecoin will remain very viable alternatives to Bitcoin, as the difficulty level for mining and cost of Bitcoins will continue to rise. Perhaps smaller less popular cryptocoins will become popular in less developed nations where not everyone is running 2+ AMD video cards, or ASICs to mine coins, and they can actually mine for or invest in those coins. I could even foresee other cryptocurrency being developed in the coming years, possibly not even a fork of Bitcoin that will further challenge fiat currencies around the globe.

Honestly, if the Bitcoin developers did not want to see alternative coins being created from Bitcoin, then they shouldn't have released the source code. That defeats the whole purpose though right? Very simply put, continuing to bash other alternatives to Bitcoin is not helping the cryptocurrency movement as a whole at all. It makes it look very immature and childish as a community, and defeats the purpose of open source software. Some people don't like certain aspects of Bitcoin, so they change something and release it as XCoin. That's how open source works!

I believe the true nature of the original Bitcoin software was an "experiment" right? The experiment seems to be very successful, as it has not only created a currency worth $90+ USD per Bitcoin currently, but it has also spawned a whole subset of emerging alternative cryptocurrencies on top of that. Why don't we all just sit back, enjoy the damn ride already, and PLEASE quit whining about who's coin(dick) is the biggest. Who is to say that Bitcoin will be the first and the last successful cryptocurrency? That would be a very narrow-minded viewpoint, especially coming from technically savvy individuals.

Long live all cryptocurrencies and the freedom to choose which one you want to use!

People are fighting Internet Explorer-Netscape Navigator wars here  ::)
Fully agree with your post!

Very well said, infoporter.

+litecointip infoporter Ł0,50

Some people here didn't get the message that should make them at least a bit nervous.

Litecoin's source hasn't been updated for > 8 months now (except for some minor little things). The current litecoin-core contains vulnerabilities which have to be fixed as soon as possible. At the same time we have no sign of life from the only person who seems to be capable of doing this (coblee). Is he still interested in maintaining and updating the source? If not: who will do that work instead?

Presumably whoever wants to collect the bounty or bounties?

Which reminds me, what exactly are the current bounties for such things?

-MarkM-

Litecoin will be updated to 0.8.1 soon. Like wtogami said, I had originally planned to stay 1 major version behind Bitcoin so that we don't get bit by a bad release. But as it turned out, the 0.8 hard fork just made it clear that there was an issue with old releases that could cause a hard fork even without 0.8. So wtogami and pooler will be helping me with rebasing the Litecoin code to 0.8.1. I do want to wait til May 15 to make sure that Bitcoin is able to handle the potential hard fork. Since the Litecoin community is much smaller, we should have even less of a problem. But it's better to be safe.

Nice one.  8)

Grats!! So glad to hear this

I hear 0.8 and 0.8.1 are faster then 0.7.2 and nicer on your hard drive is this true and if so how much faster is it when you sync the whole blockchain?

Very nice. Thanks for the update.

Um ... isn't current = pre release 0.7.0? ...

Speaking of  "experiment", it's not always about technical innovation.  p2p crypotcurrency is such a revolutionary idea, there are many other aspects need to be tested as well.  For instance, in coin generation (a.k.a money creation) process, there are 3 models being used:
  1. Ripple -- 100% centralized
  2. Bitcoin -- increasing moving toward capital-intensive, wealthy miners
  3. Litecoin -- mostly smaller, non-dedicated mining participants.  

I guess a few years from now, we'll know which model works best, this is an experiment demonstrating the (non)importance of the perceived "fairness" of mining process in people's minds, and how it will affect a cryptocurrency's adoption.

Changing sha256 to scrypt may not be that innovative; but to answer the above question, it can only be known by real-world "experiment".  

Yes, people need to keep their minds (and eyes) open.

Fuck you!  NCSA Mosaic 4 eva!

Time will prove if coins remain or not.

Only if you don't believe in Bitcoin, you open topics like this one.

Has there been any litecoin updates?

Gold and silver have different properties and uses that make them desirable in their own way.

i.e If I have gold, I might require silver to do something I can't do with gold.

BUT if I have bitcoin, what would I require litecoin to do?

Lets change tack a little here, change emphasis, change "subject" as in who is the principle.

If you have bitcoin, what would I require something that I have to do?

Well for starters, I might require it to be useful in convincing you to give me some of your bitcoin! :)

Similarly if I have bitcoin, what would you require something that you have to do?

Aren't you the slightest little bit interested in obtaining some of this stuff that I have, this "bitcoin" stuff?

;)

Or are you proposing that everyone buy bitcoin with bitcoin rather than coming up with some other thing they can do or sell in order to obtain some bitcoin?

-MarkM-

I don't know is english is your first language, but that was very hard to read and it didn't really make sense.

I'm a supporter of litecoin, I'm simply saying that the gold and silver analogy is rubbish.

I cannot buy gold using gold as my thing with which I do my purchasing.

What I buy and what I use to buy it with usually in general need to be different.

I cannot buy dollars with dollars.

So, if I am interested at all in dollars, I need something other than dollars to buy dollars with.

Euros, Yen, Francs, anything that is not the same dollars I want to buy.

Same with bitcoins and litecoins. To buy bitcoins I need something other than bitcoins.

Litecoins are particularly suitable because they have similar means of transmission, can be handled using similar tools and so on.

Using litecoins to buy bitcoins sure beats trying to use fiat to do so!

Maybe it was similar with silver and gold. If you wanted to buy some gold you needed something other than gold.

So the search was on to find something that is not gold but which people who like gold, and have gold, might find tempting enough that they might be willing to sell some gold for it...

-MarkM-

You missed the important point that you need to have something to buy it with that you can acquire ...

Would it make sense if you has US $ and needed CN RMB and bought FR Francs to do that?

I don't have any Litecoins, but I am starting to see how they are an improvement to bitcoin.

Bitcoin seems to be advancing rapidly into an arms race of specialized chipsets that make previous models obsolete in less then a year (as in not competitive on the hash/energy rate)

This means that miners will have to be more and more capable of taking on large risk and larger capital expenses, which is forcing the small guys out, and forcing all miners into pools.

The result of this is that the political power over the blockchain is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

This is bad.

Bad to the point of eventually all power will be in the hands of a few very rich people, and they will be able to lead the rest of the community by the nose.

With litecoins, it is still within everyone's reach to independently mine, and when you mine, even if you have less fancy equipment, the energy you put into hashing will be about the same as the bigger guy along a fairly linear measure.

This is great news, because trying to change the direction of the currency would go up against a much larger population of miners that will need to be convinced.

Take a look at http://blockchain.info/ and see how few pools there are that write all of the blocks. This is a lot of power in a few hands, and that is dangerous.

I suspect that that explains altcoins in general.

We want something we think the person who has the bitcoins might be tempted by.

So we look at the nature of what he is known to like. Bitcoins. Is there anything similar?

If not, well, how does he even get them? Where do they come from?

Ahhh, he hashes them up with his computer.

Okay then, our prospective customer likes things hashed up by computers.

Maybe we can hash something up that we can tempt him with?

Etc.

Similar with gold. Where did he get it? Is there something similar we can get from some similar source?

-MarkM-

First of all, the gold-silver analogy is completely pointless. You see, the thing is we have only so much metals in the universe, while we can have an infinite amount of *coins. You don't see 5 new metals popping up every day, but you do see daily influx of new crapcoins. The only good thing is they're mostly pump and dumps, and they soon die out. If every one of them got accepted, we'd already have hyperinflation and they'd all be worthless.

The second thing is the confirmation speed. The 10 minute block idea was designed because it was a reasonable tradeoff between speed and network security. The 2.5 minute block is not some genius twist, it's just sacrificing security for speed. You could make transactions confirm in 1 second if you want to, but there's a reason why nobody does that.

Third, even though scrypt is ASIC resistant, it's not ASIC immune. People used to think it was GPU immune, and it turns out it wasn't. Now, while it is reasonable to assume that a potential litecoin ASIC will not have such a performance gap over a GPU as a bitcoin ASIC, the diminishing returns and cost of electricity will still make GPU's obsolete.

Finally, mining consolidation will happen one way or another. The talk about standard hardware being available to anybody while ASIC's are an extremely difficult to get commodity is incorrect. To earn any serious money, you have to invest heavily into top-notch GPU's. An average BFL ASIC isn't that much more expensive than a top range GPU, but it does bring in more money. To effectively mine litecoins will soon actually cost more in hardware than to effectively mine bitcoins.

Nope :P

The "silver" thing is just marketing fluff.  The reality is Litecoin is #2.  I don't exactly know how it became #2, but I have one theory.  The one thing Litecoin does better than Bitcoin is keep storage and memory overhead low due to its strong anti-spam protections.  We are now working on modernizing the Litecoin client to match bitcoin-0.8.2, with lower fees and exciting changes coming in subsequent releases.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=215773.0
Please see the Litecoin Core Development Fundraiser Thread.