I do think that there will be a bunch of speculation on BTC, but I don't actually think it'll adversely impact alts to a great extent for some reason.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is anticipation of a price drop that is counteracted by a rising alt price. However, once there is stability with BTC, I think that's when there will be a significant crash with many alts.

Sorry for the lack of response; I was more referring to infrastructure in terms of the usability of LTC (such as merchant acceptance). Multi-payment processors and quicker adoption of other coins in various crypto-currency marketplaces have quickened, so it's beginning to take away from that secondary strong suit that LTC has had.

As for ASICs, I really do see it becoming like it is with BTC; LTC will likely be the standard sCrypt ledger and I don't anticipate it falling by the wayside to any other sCrypt alt.

My apologies for the confusion, I tend to bucket advancements in market penetration as part of the infrastructure and hardware infrastructure as part of security.

Never! Just keep hodling them.

Okay, seriously...Like someone mentioned, this is pretty much gambling.

There are tons of formulaic approaches that people take, but sometimes simply listening to your gut when it seems like something might happen works too. Although buy low, sell high is the intent, sometimes when you miss a pump and the long-term trend is negative, you have no choice but to take some losses. Just don't "panic" sell if you can help it.

I was more looking for how you derived that 25% stake overtakes the risk assumed by holding a PoS coin and selling at highs and staking at lows. You just gave me the effective interest rate of a nominal interest rate compounded n-thly.

Whenever I've looked at staking via a market perspective, I look at it as akin to a derivative pricing model so that's what my request was more geared towards. So if someone places bands at upper and lower options, I could take the partial derivative (i.e. kinda like in Black-Scholes fashion) of [δσ/δt-(1/(σ(T-t))][(r/σ^2)] where σ is compounded volatility, t is the starting time of staking, T is the time where stake is sold, and r is the given effective interest rate, and look for where the intersect between perceived risk and reward lies. When I've priced using "slower" models, I get stake at 15% being reasonable to overtake the assumed risk. For "faster" models, this drops slightly to 12%.

Could you expound on your methodology for showing that 25% is the point where risk and reward meet?

I do agree that holding coins for stake is implicitly a risky business due to the nature of volatility in the crypto-currency scene being doubly compounded by the amount of time needed to create stake.

I am curious how you derived 25% as your set point. If you are willing, could you share your mathematical rigor behind this?

This is very true, relatively speaking, LTC is the only other ledger that is at least significantly secure, especially with ASICs (excluding the possible pool issues). Frankly, the security already established for Bitcoin and the growing security for Litecoin are going to be difficult to beat (and that's what it'll take to overtake either coin). It seems that people keep forgetting that the alternate crypto-currency scene is a fringe of an already fairly fringe scene; so what is great for them isn't going to necessarily be great for a majority of others.

It surprises me that so many people here think that an anon coin or a coin with a ton of nifty features is the bee's knees. Last time I checked, using those other protocols still requires a significant amount of technical knowledge or familiarity. Do we honestly think the majority of people would look for something like that as the alternative to bank-owned fiat? As I see it, the place for improvement is not in anon or new algorithms or nifty new features, but in ease of use and ready accessibility (such as in a improved GUI experience like someone had already mentioned).

However, infrastructure is significantly more limited than it is with BTC and a lot of other alts are quickly catching up. LTC still has a sizable edge, but that gap is closing rather than expanding.

However, with a technology so new and relatively "fragile," even one significant security flaw will implicitly mean death. Think about it, when was the last time you've heard of the central system of a bank or brokerage being broken in to? By this I mean, someone directly siphoning funds from the internal system, not someone doing an XSS exploit and retrieving user information; the later is akin to someone getting their PC hacked which happens quite regularly in the crypto-currency realm.


Although I can see where you are going with this, it's akin to saying a scripted language or specific productivity program becoming obsolete. Despite there being many choices, the big guns have by and large stood fast (major adoption or transitions between programming languages rarely happens, and although there have got to be at least 5 alternatives to MS Office, MS Office is by and far the kingpin despite spending years between significant enhancements even during this time of swift pace).

That said, I know full well that saying this frankly more to Bitcoin than to Litecoin; and appealing to the "longevity" of Litecoin is a mummer's farce. But it is also indicative of the "trust" that more and more places are placing into a select few crypto-currencies.


This is very true; with the way technology in the crypto-currency scene has evolved, we are heading to a point where a swath of coins will be easily available for processing. The problem is the relative volatility which will either hinder user's acceptance in dealing with certain coins or with the payment processor's risk.

Although it is "silly" to focus only on SHA-256 and sCrypt, they have leaps and bounds more security analysis than many of the newer coins that just pastes a bunch of other algorithms with significantly less security vetting. In either case, an invested network is harder to bring down, but it isn't impossible (after all, parts of the crypto-currency scene reminds me of the .com bubble in the early 2000's).

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I'll be honest, your assessment on a lot of the other points are quite fair and well-reasoned. I actually see the volume of LTC actually being too high for comfort at times. And just like the BTC Association, does anyone particularly care about Litecoin's? Finally, the only plus side I see with the faster confirmation times is that it aligns with LTC's vision of being the transactor to Bitcoin's slower times; but on that point, there are a plethora of other coins that can take that place.

Nonetheless, with the investment and security built and developed in LTC, I more think it's on a medium-term decline rather than on it's death bed. Over a year and a half ago, there was a much bleaker prospectus for Litecoin with significantly less development and infrastructure; combining everything, I don't see Litecoin on it's way out. If anything, LTC grew much too fast during the November rally and things are just evening out.

Yeah, it's a tricky problem to tackle. The idea of captcha-style verification is novel, but enabling it into a trustless sytem would be a significant hurdle to overcome.

I was wondering when someone would mention PoA. I don’t see this being implemented into Bitcoin, so there is a chance for another established alt to take it up. [Frankly, I wouldn’t trust another lame “clonecoin” with this implementation, even if it did it well. It’d essentially be another piece of crapshoot hype.]

Anyhow, with the capped hash proposal, you’ve hit it on the head. A proposal like this falls prey to the PoW uniqueness problem. The “instamining” would just shift from those with power-heavy farms to those with clouds with multiple distinguishable connections (i.e. botnets).

Yeah, saw this on Deadspin. Nice news for Bitcoin, after all, BitPay could have called it the BitPay St. Petersburg Bowl. Glad they took the stronger route for Bitcoin in general.

Funny how, that was the main draw for the article, but the article was mostly on a BitPay and the owner's past.

I wonder how many people are actually going to get tickets for this game with bitcoin though? I can see a fair amount of overlap between sports and bitcoin (for example, gambling sites), but I wouldn't be surprised if most of the intersection don't go to games (for example, gamblers).

No thoughts on the addendum I made to my original post? I'm very curious about what others think about that idea.

I'm glad you looked it up. Very interesting power struggles and dynamics.

Yeah, I had been lurking since those days, although I didn't get overly involved in the forums until just prior to the first run-ups stemming back to November 2012.

As a note, there is an interesting discussion (well, more like a troll battle) that is currently going on in the Alt-Currency parent board regarding LTC and coblee (the creator or LTC) spoke to it. He actually alludes to the fact that when LTC was chosen, there were battles with parameters and algorithms (because at the time, there was a nifty little battle with deriving an FPGA and ASIC-resistant chain); sounds familiar?

Link to coblee's post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=648429.msg7304748#msg7304748

A month ago, the same type of trend line existed for virtually every coin (with the exception to some of the "pump" coins that had only been around for a few weeks at the most). I guess at that point it wouldn't have been cognitively dissonant to assume that every coin (including BTC) was ready to die huh?

Let's make this an exercise instead?

You should check out the BRIX (i.e. Tenebrix/Fairbrix) wars from all the way back in 2011; it'll not only give you the answer to that, but also give you a lot of perspective. You might need to do a bit of searching, but it's there and it's worth doing the research for it.

This is somewhat true, but then again, MINT was just a clone with a shortened PoW phase. Looking at the big picture, PPC is doing fine. It doesn't have much liquidity issues and maintains a very high market cap and strong volume; but that's because PPC has various implementations to enhance circulation. It would seem that NOBL is set up to allow for circulation. Unlike so many other coins that are just made with "features," NOBL actually has infrastructure. Hopefully though, the PoS mechanism is done within reason (no BS high stake rate, or low stake initiation periods).

On a side note, it's always so surprising that people don't know where the origins of various long-time algorithms come from. It's kinda like how everyone thinks LTC was the first sCrypt coin.

Yeah, the sentiments here are mostly true. Easier said than done.

Maybe the OP is trying to get more people to speculate on alts since more and more people are learning to be wary of alts and he needs to replenish the growth of his BTC.

Yes, it's normal for the six block thing to happen multiple times in a month. I know, crazy huh? That's the funny thing about probabilities and proportionality. When something has a .05% chance of happening, something in a lot of people instinctively think that is super rare. But over the scale of thousands of events such as a month of which there are around 4,300 10-minute events, that .05% event has an expectancy of occurring about 2 times.

As a side note, we would expect a 7-block event once every ~3 months, an 8-block event every ~2 years, a 9-block event every ~2 decades and a 10-block event ~2 "lifetimes" (about 187 years). Mind you though, this is assuming "normal" block propagation times (which we are running faster than at the moment).

Please provide me a source documenting TH/s sCrypt ASICs. I have not heard about this at all. A 1TH/s miner would be well over 3 times the magnitude greater than the Titans that KNC are scheduled to deliver during Q3. And their second batch that is slated for end of Q4 will most likely only be a ~25% hash improvement. With the geometries involved in making their Titan I can’t possibly see a sCrypt miner with 1TH/s power in the same form factor as a Titan even in the next three years. And if something like that comes out, that’ll solidify the place of sCrypt coins in the cryptocurrency world.

As for “larger profit margins” I agree and disagree. I agree that the luckiest few that get miners first will be able to enjoy significant profit parity; but as more and more people get ASICs, that parity dwindles substantially as ASIC becomes the norm. In the end, the ones who suffer are the GPU miners who refuse to get ASICs. And frankly, I’m not all too sorry for that; just like all businesses equipment and hardware has to change with each new iteration. I know some will argue for the hobbyists, but let's be honest, name me one other hobby that returns as much as coin mining for relatively little effort? People should feel lucky that they have been able to have such a handsomely rewarding hobby like this for this long. Anyhow, getting back on track. Security should be a trumping factor in the worthiness of a public ledger. As for what GPUs should move on to? The next algorithm basically. It’s a cycle that in my eyes will keep happening until there is once again too much saturation in algorithms. By then though, I don’t see 99% of the coins that exist today still being around.

The more and more I look at this, the more I see GPUs just being the gateway to determining what will be the next algorithm to secure. And maybe at the end of the road, GPUs can go back to doing what they were designed to do: rendering video and displays.

Why? I hear a lot of the people in this forum (which let's face it, is riddled by tons of FUDsters) say this, but if an ASIC is released for X11 or sCrypt-n or any of those "alternative algorithms," how would it substantively impact the sCrypt mining scene?