Litecoin is not immune to ASICs but ASICs won't give a hashrate boost on mining Litecoins as much as it does for Bitcoins. You are right, as Litecoin price goes up, ASIC litecoin miners will inevitably come out when it becomes profitable.

I don't agree that "Increased hash rate == increased network security". When ASIC bitcoin mining is widely available, if you have the same number of people mining, the network won't be more secure just because the hashrate is higher. It's all about how much $ it takes for an attacker to come up with enough hashrate to 51% the network. ASICs might eventually increase the network hashrate 50x but that does not mean the network is 50x more secure if it costs the same amount of money for someone to successfully attack the network.

Take for example, if someone found a way to optimize the miner software to be 10x better hashrate and it works on CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs. Then all of the sudden, the next day EVERYONE uses the new miner software and the network hashrate jumps from 50 thahs/s to 500 thash/s. Is the network now ten times more secure?

The warning is because some pools were using bitcoin pool software that generated blocks with v2 instead of standard Litecoin v1 blocks. It's just a version number increase and is harmless. Your client/pool is still on v1 and when it saw so many v2 blocks being created, it thinks that your software is outdated. For now, please just ignore the warning. All this will be fixed when I've updated the client to 0.8.1

SRoulette, it sometimes doesn't actually send out your transaction to the network. When that happens, you have to do a rescan. I'm not sure if this bug has been fixed in Bitcoin yet.

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.

I guess they realized how dumb those odds were.

http://www.finextra.com/News/FullStory.aspx?newsitemid=24665
http://www.paddypower.com/bet/novelty-betting/current-affairs/bitcoin-betting/Bitcoin-value-at-end-of-2013-4993413.html

I wished they accepted bitcoins. A 10/1 odds for btc price less than $100 at the end of the year is a no-brainer bet for those holding bitcoins.

And of course no sane person would take the 9/4 bet on btc price higher than $500 as buying bitcoins would make more sense.

I've patched Electrum for Litecoin here: https://github.com/litecoin-project/Electrum
Though I have not used it in a while so I'm not sure if server support is still there.

Racist but funny!

Seriously, are we really discussing that Łitecoin is pronounced "whitecoin" in Polish? And we should change the name because of that? I'm guessing both the Wii and the iPad were utter failures because of their names. And nothing came of a company with a stupid name like "micro" "soft".

If you go, I can finally put a face to your name. 

I will be at the Bitcoin 2013 conference (http://www.bitcoin2013.com) this May in San Jose.
They've invited me to be on the panel to talk about alt chains. (http://www.bitcoin2013.com/bitcoin-2013-panelists.html)
If you are also going, come say hi.

So are you agreeing or disagreeing?

Because...


is pretty much the same as...

FYI, gold/silver ratio is about 55/1 right now.

There was no proof that the Litecoin chain bloating was done by a Solidcoin supporter. I only suspected it becuase they were so anti-Litecoin. And I don't remember of any Solidcoin chain bloating attacks. But there were some attacks on Solidcoin that caused the clients to crash. This was before Litecoin launched IIRC.

I've tried a few times and couldn't get this to work. First time, I just put the bootstrap.dat file there and tried to run it against my current blocks. It didn't like that and got stuck.

The next time, I deleted all my block data and tried it again. This time it got stuck at block 211551 (iirc) and wouldn't load any block after that. Looking at the debug.log, I see that my peers are trying to give me blocks higher than that but my client keeps rejecting them for some reason.

The third time, I tried the same thing again. This time, when it got to block 155088, it gave me a database corrupt message and the client quit. Restarting the client does the same thing:
init message: Importing blocks from block database...
LevelDB read failure: Corruption: block checksum mismatch

I'm running this on a Mac if that makes a difference. Seems like 0.8 is buggy.

If I already have some block data and want to replace them with this, do I need to delete my blk*.dat files? How about the blocks or chainstate directory?

Yes, we will likely be reducing fees for the next release. But for now, don't send transactions with any output less than 0.01 litecoins. Those are considered spam since that's $0.0007. Each transaction less than 0.01 ltc will force you to pay an addition 0.1 ltc in fees.

Also, don't send such huge transactions. Large transactions (in bytes) will require fees.

Actually, all credit goes to Someguy123. While I was trying to figure out what was going on, I didn't even think of backing up the forum. I guess I was just too naive to realize that Greedi can just all of a sudden disappear and take all his servers down. The second Greedi mentioned leaving, Someguy123 immediately went to backup everything. And he barely managed to do before he lost admin access! Though Greedi did send a last message saying he wasn't trying to screw Litecoin over, but who knows what he was really thinking. I thought I knew him well too.

Not quite. The small difficulty is because it takes longer to produce each scrypt hash when compared to Bitcoin's sha256 hash. It's about 1000x difference when you compare the same GPU mining bitcoins and litecoins. So a 500 mhashs/s network hashrate is about equivalent to 500 ghashs/s for Bitcoin.

I just did a calculation for your Avalon. If network is 500 thash and your electricity is $.48, you're ROI is 8.7 months. Not as bad as you'd think, but still not very good. But we are using very high electricity costs.

So my point is at 500 thash, you may not want to buy an Avalon, but there will be plenty of people with lower electricity costs that would keep buying BFL machines and still see ROI of a few months. And those machines will likely go down in price before the year is over.

I'm not sure how you are doing your calculations. From my calculations, ROI is much better.
Using http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator

Let's take the SC Mini Rig as an example, and assume their specs are correct.
$30,000, 1.5 thash/s, 1500 Watts

With the current difficulty of 3275464 and network hashrate of 23.4 thash/s, 1.5 thash/s produces 230 btc/day and uses 36 kWh/day, which costs $10.80 (if electricity costs 30 cents). At current exchange rate of $27/btc, you'd make $6200/day. ROI = 5 days!

If difficulty is 10 times of today (i.e. 234 thahs/s network hashrate), you'd still make 23 btc/day, which is $610/day after subtracting electricity. ROI = 1.6 months!

If difficulty is 50 times of today (i.e. 1.17 phash/s network hashrate), you'd make 4.6 btc/day, which is $114/day after subtracting electricity. ROI = 8.7 months

This calculation assumes that btc/$ doesn't change and difficulty doesn't change, but you get the picture. No where near as bad as you claimed.

Seems like ASIC miners are about 50x more efficient than FPGA miners in both $/hashrate and $/watt.
50 * the current network hashrate of 24 terahashs/s is 1.2 petahashs/s. So when will we get there?

Note: a petahash is 1000 terahash