I can state with fair certainty that he does not.

Indeed.  There is no real need to name that unit.

1) It's already in use in exactly this fashion....

2) It's not too long as a spoken word....

3) It IS a geeky in joke.

The name for 0.0001 BTC has been largely decided long ago, it's either a Millibit or a Gavin.  The smallest unit is a satoshi after the creator, and this one is after the second most important figure in the creation and development of Bitcoin; Gavin Andreson.  Much like how the most important presidents, according to someone, are presented on the currency of the US, the most important being the smallest denomination.

This is not a video game.  The value in quake knockofffs was original maps and cheaper access to the platform, but in the end it was still just entertainment.  People do and will take real money/value much more seriously.

Nope.  Dinosaurs were precursers to modern birds.  A horse sized chicken would stand up fine, and then eat you.

For now...

ShamWowCoin!

Namecoin is a differnet animal.  It attempts to deliberately serve a niche market (domain name services) in a novel way, and does not attempt to compete with Bitcoin as a general medium of exchange.  All the others are trying to compete with Bitcoin in it's own world.

But you guys keep forgeting that Bitcoin is not static, it has solutions to those problems, even (relatively) secure zero-comfirmation transactions.  The alt-coin section of this forum exists, in part, because anything that pops up that is particularly novel can be incorporated into the exiting bitcoin codebase, if desired.  There is also an entire class of transaction types in Bitcoin that have not even been implimented yet, like blockchain enforcable contracts, that really don't have any equivilance in any alt-coin I've explored.  For an alt-coin to ever challenge Bitcoin for the top spot, either and unfixable flaw in Bitcoin will be discovered or an alt-coin develops with a novel advantage over Bitcoin that, for whatever reason (technicall, political) cannot be intergrated into bitcoin itself.  Small tweeks aren't going to cut it, it's going to have to be something as big a leap as Bitcoin's blockchain was to precursers such as hash-cash; or it will always be a distant second.

Did you bring a shotgun?

I didn't.  I still think they apply to LTC, and find it unlikely that LTC will ever have more than a niche use, particularly if it ever grows valuable enough to justify the development and manufacture of ASICs for Scrypt mining.  And don't tell me that it can't happen, it most certainly can.

The reduced block interval isn't novel, and would prove to be a hiderance in the long run.

That doesn't mean that it's not profitable to trade in the meantime, nor that it can't work, I just don't think that the market will ever have a greater than niche place for it.

Trust me, I don't need the tip.

Nope, the algos are modular; both on the blockchain hashing side (currently 2 cycles of SHA256) and the address keypair side.  The code includes "hooks" that would permit another hashing algo to run alongside (and eventually replace) SHA256.  I'd wager that another algo will be in use alongside SHA256 by 2020, as SHA-2 type algos are not particularly resistant to quantum computing.  Also, the protocol deliberately provides an upgrade path for bitcoin addresses.  That is why all current addresses start with a "1" character, as they are all address type number one.  (there is another address type used only for testing, that starts with an "a" I believe)  Future addresses could use different algos, or have other definitive features that make them incompatible with the current address format; which would call for a new addresss identifier, and thus that first character would be different.  There is already an early proposal to make an address type that would still use the same algo, but use a modified value variable to hold sub-satoshi value sets; as an example.

Litecoin doesn't offer anything novel either, IMHO.  A shorter interval will permit greater transaction throughput on the low end, but still fails the promise of 'near instant' transaction confirmations.  In the long run, cutting the interval to one fifth of Bitcoin's will ultimately run up against network propogation delay times, resulting in exponentially increasing rates of orphaned blocks.  Using a GPU resiliant POW function (scrypt) is only a temporary restriction, since it's main limiting factor is deliberately high memory usage, and cache memory available to GPUs will continue to increase.  And ASICs can still be developed with sufficient cache memory to crush CPUs, which would happen as soon as the value of LTC were to increase enough to justify the initial research investment.  In the meantime, the huge memory requirements make an android smartphone version of LTC almost as difficult as a GPU miner.

And if I happen to be wrong about the value of Scrypt as a POW algo, Bitcoin could simply take that idea if LTC were to ever start claiming significant amounts of the market share.

Harder, since as soon as quantum computing becomes a semi-real threat, Bitcoin can & will switch to quantum resistant algos.

Well done.  That's the 'subtle' one.

Anyone else like to take a shot at the less subtle one?

Put your hand down crary, your nickel should be forthcoming.

It might just prove that there is a sucker born every minute, even on the bitcointalk.org forum.

Definately 20 chicken sized horses.  Chickens are omnivores, and one the size of a horse would be a velociraptor; whereas all horses are herbavores.  I would much rather be fighting many small herbavores than one very large one that would consider me a potential meal.

Crary, I need more detail.