That was back in January, but it's interesting.

I think the biggest problem I sometimes have with Charles in his public presentations is that he's almost too humble. He'll say something like, "My biggest achievement is convincing people Litecoin has value" and while it's said for the humor value, it's actually really damaging from a marketing standpoint. It says to people, "I basically conned you into thinking Litecoin is worthwhile" and draws attention away from all the legitimate reasons why Litecoin DOES have value.

So that and the "silver to gold" analogy are things I kinda wish he'd abandon, in his public speaking. Charles needs to get to the point where he firmly believes that Litecoin deserves (and has earned) its seat at the table and should be seen as a complement to Bitcoin, not as "Bitcoin Jr." or "Bitcoin Lite."


Charles suggested that months ago and Jackson Palmer (along with most of the Dogecoin community) shot him down. I think the perception was that by merged mining with Litecoin, they were accepting defeat...which they kind of needed to do, to survive.

LOL...read through the thread. There have been AMPLE reasons stated.

Nothing is happening? You say this why...because they aren't hard forking every couple of months to throw the latest gimmicks into the protocol, which wouldn't improve it in any measurable way?

You don't fix what ain't broke.

Energetic user base? I can name no fewer than ten other altcoins I've looked into that had an "energetic user base" that fell flat on their faces within months of their launch. Litecoin has been around for three years...and is STILL #2 by a mile. The only coin to have breathed the rarified air of Litecoin was Auroracoin, which was probably the biggest pump & dump that crypto-currency has seen, yet.

Dogecoin's got perhaps the most vocal and active user groups in crypto. It was launched in December 2013 - it's only been around for six months and it's already bleeding out, in spite of all the social media and marketing. Dogecoin has collected virtually none of the new ASIC hashrate to itself and the price has been on a steady slide, with no signs of ever reversing course.

Meanwhile, look at Litecoin. Still, after all this time, the #2 market cap coin and attracting virtually ALL of the new ASIC hashrate to itself. Nobody should fool themselves, these Scrypt ASICs were made in support of Litecoin.

There isn't a coin out there that's closing the gap. Darkcoin has made price gains but that's because it is the PERFECT pump and dump story. It's got an extremely small float (easier to manipulate the market) and it has a story (anonymity)...but its primary feature is not desirable to most and will prevent widespread adoption. The market where one would think it'd be highly desired - the Silk Road - has not adopted it...because there's no need. So in light of this information, I think it's clear that it's just another in the constantly revolving door of pumps to hit #3 before they're dumped. But there will be Litecoin, still. It was there before, and it'll be there after.

People need to look at history.

Bitcoin's first ASIC hardware started shipping in January of 2013, when the price of Bitcoin was around $14 and virtually the only places you could spend it were the Silk Road and Wikileaks.

When the Winklevii (read: smart money) noticed the huge amount of money that was about to flow into dedicated hardware infrastructure for Bitcoin, they bought in big. They weren't alone. Tons of venture capital groups and investors started to take notice of it. Price boom. Increased media exposure. More price boom. Growth in adoption. All of this coming from the vote of confidence of ASIC manufacturers and miners. The block reward halving which lead to miner hoarding didn't hurt.

So here we are, and Litecoin is in almost exactly the same position Bitcoin was at to start 2013. Except that Litecoin doesn't have the negative press of the Silk Road/black market ties to overcome, it doesn't have to leap all the hurdles of policy and P.R. that Bitcoin did. In a lot of ways, Bitcoin has cleared a path for it. So the barriers that Bitcoin faced aren't all there, anymore. The only real hurdle Litecoin faces is getting itself off of Bitcoin's coattails.

If history repeats and the smart money follows the infrastructure money, we're going to see a lot of positive changes coming Litecoin's way over the next 12-18 months and beyond. I also don't think it's always going to be a year to a year and a half behind Bitcoin...at a certain point, when the public is educated enough about digital currency, the two can co-exist peacefully. But in this current climate of the "get rich quick" mentality, with people hoping for (or trying to create) bubbles in alt coins to profit from, Litecoin is a rock.

So, remove the Litecoin logo from your avatar and call it quits, man...because it sounds to me like you're now just trying to convince yourself that Litecoin is destined to fail and are coming up with baseless arguments to support that hypothesis. Unfortunately, the conditions that exist right now, with money flowing into Litecoin infrastructure in the multi-millions (and soon hundreds of millions), are likely to lead to a lot of growth next year. I can assure you that Litecoin will not be slowed by your decision to bail out on it.

You are basically saying that what's good for the goose is NOT good for the gander and what has happened in Bitcoin, with smart investment money following infrastructure money, is not going to happen in Litecoin...for reasons you can't really articulate. But the fact remains that when significant money is put into Litecoin's backbone and the network is perceived as very secure, that is going to attract a lot of attention from many corners.

Litecoin has a far, far greater chance of success than any other digital currency in existence that isn't called Bitcoin, right now. As for saying that somehow the price relative to Bitcoin is an indicator of market enthusiasm for Litecoin...take another gander at Coinmarketcap and get back to me.

Yeah, and you know where Bitcoin was accepted at the start of 2013? The Silk Road...aaaand, that's about it.

Are you not aware that a large amount of the improvements to Bitcoin actually COME FROM Litecoin's developers? Warren and Charles have been contributing to Bitcoin development for years. To say that Litecoin merely copies Bitcoin features is erroneous.


It isn't about difficulty. It's about investment. The smart money always follows the money...and the amount of money being poured into dedicated hardware for Litecoin infrastructure right now is very significant. There are a lot of reasons for it, from miners hoarding until it's profitable to increased media exposure attracted to growth, venture capital investments, etc...

As for your comment about Bitcoin's network effect...it is Litecoin's network effect that has kept it in the #2 spot for so long and nobody is even close to dethroning it. So you can't have your cake and eat it, too - Bitcoin has a network effect, true...but so does Litecoin.


The reason for the sharp decline in Litecoin's price relative to Bitcoin can be marked with a giant flashing neon arrow at the first couple weeks of May, when the Innosilicon A2 Terminator 80Mh/s systems started shipping. This gave a small group of miners an outsized share of the block rewards, due to the huge proportion of hashing power they added to the network. They proceeded to dump their coin (presumably in a mad dash toward ROI before competitors came on the scene) and miners, not always being the most educated on the dynamics of markets, were content to just keep dumping into weakness. This was combined with a strong rally in Bitcoin, which traditionally sees investment capital leave Litecoin into Bitcoin, to take advantage of the move up. Recently the ratio took a jump in Litecoin's favor when the rally petered out.

Once ASIC hardware takes over the network and it reaches a relative equilibrium of hashrate ownership close to what it had when it was GPU-driven, the dumping mentality should not be as pronounced. You are just failing to observe the reasons for the drop and you aren't seeing that the money that's being poured into Litecoin infrastructure (regardless of how much fiat capital is in it) is actually a giant vote of confidence, and people should be following that money.


I'm not convinced of that. Satoshi cut all ties and disappeared the instant that Gavin Andresen said he was meeting with the CIA about Bitcoin. He hasn't had a thing to do with it since, hasn't been an advocate of it, has not come out of hiding except to say that he is NOT Dorian Nakamoto. A guy like that, who takes such pains to ensure his privacy and who has divested himself of all relationships related to Bitcoin, doesn't strike me as particularly trustworthy. I'm not going to put my faith in the assurances of some random person who cannot possibly know Satoshi's mind or intentions.

Though in fairness, you write this as ASICs are just now starting to take over the network. We're going to have a much different looking picture at the end of 2014. When you look at Litecoin's network difficulty and hashrate, it dwarfs all other alts.

Litecoin's network will never have the hashrate or difficulty that Bitcoin does, because of Scrypt. That limits the amount of hashrate that can be squeezed out of ASIC hardware, relative to power consumption. But in relative terms, Litecoin's network over the next year will likely grow to become just as secure as Bitcoin's is, today...if the current momentum is any indication.

Bitcoin looked stagnant for a long, long time before ASICs hit it, and more attention started getting drawn to it. That attention came from the investment being made in its infrastructure. That vote of confidence was essentially what catapulted it into the consciousness of venture capitalists and investors. So the premise that Litecoin is somehow dying a slow death, while hundreds of millions are being poured into hardware infrastructure seems a tad premature, to me.

Updated the spreadsheet to reflect this.

Don't forget to update the spreadsheet when you get paid (or announce it here), folks. It's helpful to track this stuff.

My feeling is that the real innovation will happen on a user interface level (not just wallets but also services), rather than at the protocol level...although some things may need flexibility with the protocol's core development and if its worth making significant changes at the protocol level, then you proceed accordingly. To that end, I still think that the Litecoin developers and platform are going to be able to remain a lot more flexible and amenable to this stuff than Bitcoin. I think as a result of so much weight being heaped upon Bitcoin, it's going to become pretty inflexible...and that opens up avenues for Litecoin to explore.

I'm not in Litecoin because I believe it has the potential to take over Bitcoin's spot...I still think that's wholly unlikely. However, I'm a BIG believer in choice, and not having only one point of failure.

I always liken it to the situation we have with the internet, today. We have protocols that drive the network that have forced developers to shoehorn things into it that perhaps it's not best suited to...streaming media would be a biggie. If we had started with multiple networks, one could have evolved to specialize in streaming media and now you would possibly have a much more efficient way of getting video/audio across the network, more bandwidth (or less required bandwidth) and who knows what else it may have opened up, to have an alternative. The point is, having a choice breeds innovation.

At the protocol level, Litecoin has some significant differences that may ultimately lend it to applications that Bitcoin doesn't. It is insulated from certain issues in the Bitcoin core development, because it is a separate team (although they work closely with the Bitcoin developers) and they have a different design philosophy, in many ways. Bitcoin is going to be under tremendous political pressure from developers and elsewhere to be this or that, whereas Litecoin has less pressure to accommodate. So no...nobody's going to convince me that it isn't a big positive that we have Litecoin around.

I'm not sure I buy that argument. Bitcoin has had many crossroads where consumer confidence was shaken in it and it recovered because people were made aware that it was not a weakness in the protocol or software, but something external. It might be crippling to Bitcoin to have Satoshi knock the price into the dirt by selling off his hoard, but I don't think it means the end of digital currency...it's a technology whose time has come. Just because the stock market has suffered numerous crashes and people have lost a lot of money in it, that hasn't stopped the stock market from continuing to march forward.

I just think anyone who is in crypto in a serious way needs to really look at the fact that Satoshi HAS such a hoard...and to me, Litecoin is the alternative.

As for multi-coin payment processors...the number of coins they accept will be limited by liquidity and almost no other cryptos have sufficient liquidity to support significant commerce.

I love how people say Litecoin has a "lack of innovation" and then in the same breath would hail Bitcoin for its innovation. They deride Litecoin for not being accepted very many places, where a year ago Bitcoin could barely be spent anywhere, either.

Are gimmicks what we really want in a coin? Or do we want security, liquidity, adoption and dependability? Because the market is FLOODED with gimmicks that only end up serving as a story for pumpers & dumpers to sell people on, jacking up the price until it gets annihilated by the whales who pumped it. All you need is a good story. Auroracoin had a good story and it attracted the idealists in droves. People were claiming it was going to overtake Bitcoin, when it temporarily exceeded Litecoin's market cap. Then it got slapped into the dirt...as predicted. Right now, the new "story" coin is Darkcoin. Unfortunately, its innovation is something that will prevent it from ever seeing widespread adoption and the fact is, the segment of the population it SHOULD attract - the TOR underground - has no interest in it. So the support is not there for its current price; hence, it's a pump waiting to be dumped.

Litecoin, right now, is almost exactly where Bitcoin was at the beginning of 2013 when the first ASIC hardware started shipping for it. It was at about $14 to start 2013. The only real difference is, Litecoin isn't being used to conduct black market business on TOR. But the fact that we're about to see hundreds of millions of dollars poured into dedicated ASIC hardware infrastructure for Litecoin tells me that it isn't "dying a slow death," but has been given a substantial vote of confidence...one which can potentially attract the kind of attention to it in terms of business development and venture capital in 2015 and beyond, that Bitcoin has begun enjoying this year.

All other digital currencies are fighting for table scraps, right now...and it's going to take more than just gimmicks to change that.

Honestly, haven't we seen Bitcoin declared dead enough times to know better than to do this with Litecoin? Don't be distracted by the fact that there are 200+ altcoins out there scrambling for attention...it hasn't changed Litecoin's position in the market, at all.

Sometimes I think people mistakenly judge a coin's success by how vocal or active the social media "communities" in support of them are...and that's a fallacy. Personally, I care where the money is going...and the money is going into Litecoin, right now.

As ever, for me, the motivation to be in Litecoin 50/50 with Bitcoin is simple...Charles Lee and Warren Togami are public figures who aren't sitting on a million inactive coin that they could potentially demolish the market with on a whim. Nobody really knows who Satoshi is, but he's an eccentric recluse who's got a million Bitcoin to his name and if he decided to end his experiment, he easily could destroy every bit of confidence anyone has in Bitcoin by dumping it all at once. This, to me, is Bitcoin's biggest weakness.

Litecoin is pretty much exactly where Bitcoin was to start 2013. The only difference is that Litecoin doesn't have a Silk Road conducting transactions in it.

ASICs built Bitcoin's infrastructure into what it is, today and attracted the interest of businesses and venture capitalists. Litecoin is just now entering that phase of its growth. It's the only other coin that has attracted investment into the development of dedicated hardware infrastructure, on this level...and that will draw attention to it, the same way it did for Bitcoin.

Those declaring Litecoin "dead" are either thinking wishfully because they only want Bitcoin to succeed and nothing else (a sentiment motivated primarily out of their own greed and the belief that Litecoin pulls capital out of Bitcoin), or are just blind to the numbers (and history).

I'm a big supporter of both. I believe that one will ultimately be proven to be better than the other in certain areas and they'll end up specializing. My personal feeling is that Bitcoin could end up being better used for long term savings/investment and very large transfers, while Litecoin may be better for everyday commerce. Time will tell.

In looking at the spreadsheet as things develop, the pattern of repayment is pretty obvious. People with small amounts owed (less than half a Bitcoin) are being refunded while those with higher amounts (which are harder to pay off) must wait a while.

There's a concept in debt repayment that's promoted by Dave Ramsey called the "Debt Snowball" wherein you attack your smallest debts first, which then gives you an increasing amount of money with which to repay larger debts faster. Seems like the admin is largely following that philosophy and so once the little guys are repaid, we should start to see some acceleration into the mid-pack repayments. I'm glad gise87 decided to maintain this for us, very useful.

New page, new spreadsheet link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lSUi0_1bqe0sv5XI4EvXWPcWI7fwnJbFQY-kMsYxp10/edit?pli=1#gid=1324696940

True, and given that I assume a couple of the sub-20 BTC people on the spreadsheet WERE above 20 before refunds from the legacy balance (as I was originally 27), we probably have six of those seven already represented in the spreadsheet.

I agree, I think a priority list is something he should definitely post and would be helpful in letting people know A) he's aware of what they are owed and B) where they are in the queue. Whether he'll do that, I don't know...but it has been suggested. Right now, we have our spreadsheet and we can get a lot of information by tracking the payments there.


Although he also claims to have a LOT of requests that were sent via e-mail, outside of the forums (and presumably not represented by the spreadsheet). So it's difficult to say with any certainty.

It won't necessarily just be that he uses it as an excuse. There are all kinds of people out there who are owed money and he's already received threats, as has his family. To use the information we have means a criminal investigation, prosecution and jail time...and that doesn't include restitution. Look at what has happened to all of the people who lost money in Mt. Gox - they have a ton of coin left, yet that coin is frozen and will be for the foreseeable future, due to the investigation, bankruptcy, etc...

At the moment, he is paying people back...I don't know how great his means are for paying it back, but apparently not real great considering the current pace. So we're going to be waiting...but in the end, waiting a while is better than not having any chance of getting paid back at all.

As a result of being active and participating in the sleuthing that took place, I was here when the admin appeared to start taking names and amounts. I was probably the second post after his and one of the first 5-6 people to contact him. Because I have been here from the beginning, I have been PM'd a ton of information, in the hopes that I would organize something. It's my opinion that letting him make restitution is a better option at the moment...that may change but until it does, I am content to stay the course. So I'm sorry if you found out late and are going to have to wait longer than others who contributed information to the thread and investigation...but in my view, your primary interest is in changing the repayment scheme to best serve you, in the guise of creating "fairness" where none can exist. it is what it is and you have this thread, and the regular posters in it, to thank for even having the possibility of being repaid. One or two in particular who I won't name. So just be thankful that repayment is happening at all, because if not for these guys who are being paid first, nobody would be getting a dime back, in all likelihood.