Did I really donate 3BTC to you? Can I have it back?

It's weird that you would remove Litecoin because you didn't get any donation in LTC. Have you considered that a lot of Litecoin users prefer to spend BTC in the past year because they feel like LTC has more upside?

Anyways, including Litecoin was only a few line changes. I'm quite disappointed that you would do this to make a statement. I guess I won't be using CoinMap anymore.

This is Charlie Lee at Coinbase. I can confirm that we are indeed in the SF financial district. The HQ pictures are not staged. lol

The reason why we don't publicize our actual address is for the exact reason mentioned in this thread. Like someone said, banks and jewelry shops have been robbed for a lot less money. We have implemented security measures (cold storage, key splitting, ninja guards, etc.) to prevent rogue employees and armed gunmen from stealing the bitcoin we have stored for our users, but people don't know that. After hearing stories of how BitStamp lost 19,000 BTC, a crazy guy might just think it's worth the risk to come rob our office. And if they manage to get through our security to get to our office and find out that we aren't able to access the bitcoin, they are not going to be very happy. You can all imagine that this is NOT a situation we want to ever see ourselves in.

We'd rather be safe than sorry!

And to answer some of your questions.
A) We never claimed to be licensed in CA. The press did. I guess they just assumed we were. They also incorrectly claimed that we supported 25 states, when in fact we only supported 23 states + Puerto Rico at launch. We just started supporting Nebraska today.
B) The coinbase.com/lunar site was just a fun way to tease people on the internet and to create some buzz.
C) We've had USD wallets on Coinbase for 1.5 months now. You could have easily gotten money on our system and bought coins before we released the exchange. And if you had money in your USD wallet at launch, you would have been able to use our exchange immediately.
D) Our VC money is not meant to be used to speculate on Bitcoin price nor is it sane for us to support the Bitcoin price. We do not control the price. The market does.
E) It's not a fake address. We receive mail at that address.

Happy 3rd Birthday Litecoin!

I'm interested to see where this leads. Although it would have to be a very compelling and obvious win in order to risk changing Litecoin's PoW at this late stage of the game.

You would do this with a miner vote. Basically implement this in the new clients. And have it in code such that when 95%+ of blocks mined in the last X blocks have this bitcoin hash data, then miners will enforce that every single block from then on must include bitcoin hash data. So this could take a long time (or never) but it will be relatively safe to do because when the fork happens, the majority of the miners are already running the latest code. And the minority would realize that they are on the wrong fork fairly quickly and would have to run the new code. Non-miners would be unaffected.

But like I've said, there's no good reason for miners to put in the extra effort to include bitcoin block data.

The reason why this idea did not take off originally was because people think that there was zero benefit to Litecoin and possibly no benefit to Bitcoin either. To do this, Litecoin miners have to maintain both the Litecoin blockchain and the Bitcoin blockchain. It will also require a hard fork on Litecoin for this to work. It's basically Litecoin holding on to a lifevest for Bitcoin in the rare case that Bitcoin will need it and use it.

It's an interesting idea. I will spend some time to think about it more and see if doing this without a hard fork is possible. You basically have to somehow create incentives for Litecoin miners to also keep track of the Bitcoin blockchain. It may be as simple as checking a few bitcoin block explorers, but why would miners want to do that for no benefit... unless they are forced to by a hard fork.

I haven't had time to read this whole thread yet. I did skim the first post and would like to quickly address some points.

CoinHoarder, I'm sorry that you felt that I somehow had something against you. There's no club that you aren't part of. Likely, the reason was that since I supported you in person, I didn't see the need to post a reply to your thread. When you decided to stop doing your coin, I think I posted saying that's unfortunate. I don't check the litecoin forum as much as I should, so I must have missed your other posts. Coinographic's post caught my eyes recently, so that's why I posted. I'm not more excited about his coin than smoothie's coin or your coin. In the end, people shouldn't care whether or not they get my support or not. This is a community after all.

As for me not appearing that much for a while, I was busy with real life. I had Greedy help me with a lot of stuff. Turned out, that trust was not well placed. So I had to come back and be more active and try to clean up the mess. And this too should not matter that much. Do you judge Litecoin based on whether or not I'm still active? How about Satoshi and Bitcoin?

TheMage pointed me to this thread. I figure I should correct some facts.

Yes, it was my brother, Bobby, who claimed the most of the Chinese exchanges are faking their volume. Given the depth of the order books, it's very likely that this is the case. But this affects both Bitcoin and Litecoin. It may be true that it affects Litecoin more than Bitcoin as OKCoin's LTC volume is ridiculously high. And it looks like coinmarketcap.com's volume does not include OKCoin: http://coinmarketcap.com/volume.html#ltc

The reason why Litecoin's launch is fair is because it was publicly announced AND binary/source publicly distributed days before the launch. At launch time, almost everyone that cared about alt currency at that time was ready to mine litecoins the second I released the config params for the genesis block. So maybe Litecoin has a small instamine, but those instamined coins were distributed as fairly as possible at the time. Sadly, NONE of the copycat altcoins that came after Litecoin copied this critical feature of Litecoin. Most of these newer coins were launched to a small community or just the devs and were instamined by that small group. Others we premined.

And people like to spread FUD about the fact that someone was GPU mining litecoins at the start. A while ago, I did a difficulty analysis of the Litecoin start and showed that it was extremely unlikely that someone was GPU mining. The hashrate and subsequent increase matches the thousands of CPUs that were mining Litecoin at that time. If someone can find that thread, please post it here. I've said this many times, and I will state it again. I did not GPU mine Litecoin at the start and for that matter, I have NEVER GPU mined Litecoin at all. I did have 8 GPUs back then and was mining Bitcoin with it until I retired them early last year. Actually, if you want proof, you can ask Roger Ver. He was hosting my GPUs at his memorydealers warehouse. And I had them set up to mine bitcoins and left them there mining bitcoins and never touched them until 2013. And I don't have any vested interest in ASIC hardware. The reason for not switching PoW algorithm is because the risk of hard fork.

The reason why I chose Scrypt for Litecoin is more so because Litecoin needed to be mined by a different class of hardware than Bitcoin than it is because it was ASIC-resistant. I never believed Scrypt was ASIC-proof. The ASIC-resistancy was important though and it helped delay ASICs for as long as possible. The reason why that was important was because you need the coin's early miners to be as decentralized as possible. Why? Because in the beginning, the miners are the users. These will be the people that support the coin and help spread it. If the coin started with only 100 people able to mine it, then it won't go anywhere. As the coin matures (like Bitcoin and now Litecoin), the user base is no longer the same as the miner base. And having a more centralized miner base is not a big problem. Security of the coin is determined by how much money is spent protecting it. And ASICs helps with security because it makes it easy for people to pour a lot of money into mining hardware. But remember, centralization of miners does not mean the coin is centralized. The user base of the coin is still decentralized. If the miners decide to make a change in the software that people don't like, the majority of the user can choose to not accept the new version. Sure, with 51%, a miner can double spend his own transactions, reject other blocks, or do transaction withholding attacks, but it would be financial suicide to do that. So this is why I welcome Scrypt ASICs. I think the value of the security it brings outweighs the mining centralization that comes with ASICs.

So why is Litecoin valuable today? Here's what I think justifies Litecoin's maketcap and why it will stay #2 behind Bitcoin for the foreseeable future:

• Litecoin's trade volume dwarfs most other coins.
• Litecoin is supported by a huge number of exchanges. No other altcoin comes close.
• Like the comparison or not, Litecoin is silver to Bitcoin's gold. Having a cryptocurrency trading pair is important for arbitrage reasons. Litecoin is playing that role today. It's hard for another coin to take over that role.
• Litecoin is supported by payment processors like GoCoin and, if I can help it, Coinbase. Payment processors are critical in the path towards mass adoption.
• Litecoin is accepted by a huge amount of merchants. Look at http://coinmap.org/
• Litecoin has ATM support.
• Litecoin is protected by its own network of hardware dedicated to Scrypt mine. And Litecoin's hashrate dwarfs that of other Scrypt coins. The amount of money spent protecting Litecoin will increase substantially with Scrypt ASICs.
• Litecoin runs on well tested codebase. Because it is basically Bitcoin with a few changes.
• We have a great dev team and an awesome Litecoin association.

Some of the altcoins come close with respect to some of these points: nxt (devs, hardware), dark (trade volume), doge (merchant processor, atm, devs)
But no other coin really comes close to having all of these features.

And of course, Bitcoin is by far ahead of Litecoin. I never expected Litecoin to overtake Bitcoin. I always envisioned it as be used side by side with Bitcoin just like silver and gold. As we are already seeing, Bitcoin will not be able to handle all the transactions required for a global payment system. This is where I see alt currencies can help. You need other cryptocurrencies protected by different hardware networks to help with the transaction load. Naturally (because of the price of Bitcoin), the more expensive transactions will be on the Bitcoin network. It's more secure but it also has a higher fee. This will push cheaper transactions to other networks. I think there will be 3 currencies that will be used for 3 types of transactions: buying expensive things like houses/cars, buying gifts/meals/drinks, and microtransactions/tipping. And today, these 3 currencies will be Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin.

My guess is he's mining at a lot of pools at the same time and withholding blocks. When he finds a block at one pool, he would move all his hashes to that pool to increase his payout percentage. And then release his valid block after 10 minutes or less. This way, he can increase his expected payout.

It wouldn't be hard to catch this if the pool is paying attention.

I have never GPU mined Litecoins... ever.

About the community, are you active in the USD community?

Well, I'm sad to see that you are going ahead with this plan. And using the 65% vote of a tiny poll as the reason. I would have to assume this is a FUD attempt by a group that is trying to destroy Litecoin or by a misguided group that has no vision on what's good for Litecoin. Either way, the Litecoin development team will fight hard against it. Though it's a super waste of our time and resources.


Agreed. If this FUD attempt can bring down Litecoin, then Litecoin is not strong enough. And if this rogue development team can overthrow us, then we don't deserve to be running Litecoin development. This is an open decentralized currency, so time will tell.

Hey X11 team, would you be willing to make a post to respond to our posts? https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=18166.0
Specifically:
- Who are you and why are you hiding behind the user Beeker?
- X11 is possibly less ASIC-resistant than even Scrypt. So why X11?
- Would you just switch algorithm again when ASIC is ever built for X11?
- Are you not concerned about splintering the Litecoin userbase with this controversial change?
- How do you plan to convince the exchanges to switch to your fork when you don't have the support of the Litecoin developers, the Litecoin Association, and have no influence within the community (I'm assuming this since we don't know who you are), and have no control of litecoin.org and other litecoin websites?
- Are you willing to not use the name Litecoin/LTC so as to not cause mass confusion?

Looking forward to your reply.

And when you do reveal yourself. Please please convince us why your development team will do a better job than the current Litecoin development team moving forward. What kind of development work have you done on Bitcoin, Litecoin, or any other alts. And lastly, if your motivations are to save Litecoin, than why have you not contributed to the Litecoin codebase previously and joined our team?

Here's our response: https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=18166.0

Here's our response: https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=18166.0

Here's mine:

I'm going to be at the Miami Bitcoin conference this weekend. Will be giving a talk on the history of Litecoin. Come check it out and say hi.

Litecoin 0.8.6.1 released with lower min transaction fees of 0.001 LTC.
Please see: http://litecoin.org/upgrade

Thanks for this great update, pointbiz!
https://liteaddress.org/ updated: https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,6762.0.html

Liteaddress has been updated with BIP38 encrypted paper wallet support:
http://liteaddress.org/

You can use http://blockchain.info/q/addressbalance/1blahblah or http://blockchain.info/q/getreceivedbyaddress/1blahblah
But be careful as that returns a number in satoshis, so you have to divide it by 100000000