litecoin doesnt have to go through proof of concept it was 7 cent a couple weeks back, it has already made considerable ground and will continue to do so more and more people will adopt it as a way of moving money into the relatively new exchanges..and of course more retailers will accept it as more customers choose to interact with it. I personally prefer to use ltc because of the faster sending times and the quicker sync times
I also prefer to hold ltc because I believe that it has more opportunity for market gains. I believe that it is much more likely that ltc goes from 4 to 8 than btc from 125 to 250
Looking at Litecoin vs Bitcoin technically I think the pros in general are mostly outweighed by the cons. It has a shorter 1 confirmation time for transactions, but that 1 confirmation is less secure than 1 from Bitcoin. Most seem to feel that faster 1 confirms are not often needed in most transactions so where Litecoin edges out Bitcoin is in a fairly niche scenario and comes with the downside of more/faster blockchain bloat.
Personally I don't see anything that Litecoin has that will be significant enough to battle the first mover advantage Bitcoin enjoys. Now that it's been invented and open source almost all the value of any given coin is it's adoption network (speculators, merchants, users etc.), barring the innovation of a vastly superior coin.
It looks to me like the development resources are going to Bitcoin not Litecoin. The VC money is going to Bitcoin and not Litecoin. The news articles are about Bitcoin and not Litecoin. And new merchant announcements are for Bitcoin and not Litecoin. Of course I don't have proof of this but this is my gut feeling based on what I see here, on Reddit and other places. Do you have any data to show that this isn't the case and Litecoin is being adopted at a greater rate in any of these areas?
I do agree with potentially having greater opportunity for market gains in the short term. If there are 100 Bitcoin accepting merchants for every 1 Litecoin, then Litecoin only has to be accepted by 2 merchants for every 100 merchants that accept Bitcoin for Litecoin adoption growth by percentage to be higher. However in this scenario Bitcoin still has 100 more places you can use your bitcoins while Litecoin only has 2.
However for larger scale adoption I think the general populace needs at least 2 things we don't have yet. Easy to acquire, set up and use hardware wallets (people will never secure their PCs well enough on their own, it's a losing battle and has been for decades). The second is associating keys with easy to read domain or email style names. The visibility of crypto keys must be hidden from the user entirely, most people can barely work their email and will move on to other things the second they have to try to understand or remember or manage a 64 long string of seemingly random characters. Innovations like these will almost certainly come to Bitcoin first. Afterwards Litecoin will likely copy what works, however being second won't help since now Bitcoin continues to have first mover advantage and will continue to dominate crypto currency market share.
My thoughts at least but Litecoin might surprise me. I don't have anything against the coin and hold a small amount for speculative purchases. Also not terrible to have backup blockchain in case something catastrophic happen to Bitcoin it's possible it could be patched in Litecoin in time and be the fallback crypto currency.
