Hi,
Is Bitcoin the only real game in town at the moment, and for the foreseeable future? I've read that Litecoin is essentially the same architecture with some tweaks. Is there any point to support it? What about other cryptocurrencies? ...
Yes, there is a reason to support Litecoin.
I've posted my thoughts on this often, but I'll reiterate them. In the earliest days there was only Bitcoin and a growing number of supporters. Since Bitcoin is not centrally controlled the opposite is true: no one owns anything about it. The code behind its implementation is open source. Anyone can view, modify and use (or re-use) the code and protocol. After Bitcoin began to gain notable value, around $1, it didn't take long for imitators to pop up. I believe the first was IXCoin.
Many of us in the community at the time predicted such as inevitable, but were not worried about it. The reasoning was that although anyone could easily copy the implementation of Bitcoin, they could not easily copy adoption and support. This is because there is nothing to stop a competitor challenging the new competitor, ad infinitum. Rather than always chasing the newest copy it only made sense to stay with the one with earliest market lead, which would have greatest network effect, number of holders, businesses accepting etc. To beat an established coin a competitor would need to bring true value in some way, something the established coin didn't have.
Our prediction proved correct. IXCoin gained little value and never any real traction. More alt-coin versions popped up, some deviating much more widely from Bitcoin than IXCoin which changed little. One was Litecoin. This coin seemed to be the first where the creators truly tried to improve how Bitcoin worked. You can read up on the differences, but among the main ones are a lower time between blocks and different hashing algorithm (Scrypt) to change who could most efficiently mine the coins.
Litecoin gained little traction, just the same as the other alt-coins. People just didn't see any coin as offering enough of a compelling reason to leave Bitcoin. I was among the group that pooh poohed all alt-coins and paid them little attention.
Then came the community disruption of the announcement of a new Bitcoin Foundation. Needless to say the apparent move toward centralization of power in a community believing supremely in decentralization caused a huge uproar. I was among those strongly raising objections with concerns over unchecked power. This issue challenged the entire project with talk of hard forks and more.
It was during this period that it dawned on me alt-coins could serve a real purpose and have a value Bitcoin never could: by providing alternative. If there was only to be Bitcoin forever, then any single group with growing influence and power could steer it for better or worse for all involved. I saw alt-coins as solving that problem. As a natural part of the free market Bitcoin relied on they could regulate unwanted behavior as free markets do, by providing options and competition. I outlined all this in a post here:
Solution to The Bitcoin Foundation (the announcement)I vowed to promote Litecoin, which had the most traction at the time, and it has gone from about $0.04 to about $2.30 currently, down from an all time high of around $5. I continue to believe alt-coins like Litecoin can provide value and strengthen the cryptocurrency community overall. I don't believe it's possible for every new coins to have similar success as that means infinite inflation. I do however think there will be a select few coins valued above all others, until such time as a new coin offers something truly unique and valuable in some other way.
