What is the point of Litecoin if Bitcoin is THE cryptocurrency?

[PrintCoins]

I don't have any Litecoins, but I am starting to see how they are an improvement to bitcoin.

Bitcoin seems to be advancing rapidly into an arms race of specialized chipsets that make previous models obsolete in less then a year (as in not competitive on the hash/energy rate)

This means that miners will have to be more and more capable of taking on large risk and larger capital expenses, which is forcing the small guys out, and forcing all miners into pools.

The result of this is that the political power over the blockchain is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

This is bad.

Bad to the point of eventually all power will be in the hands of a few very rich people, and they will be able to lead the rest of the community by the nose.

With litecoins, it is still within everyone's reach to independently mine, and when you mine, even if you have less fancy equipment, the energy you put into hashing will be about the same as the bigger guy along a fairly linear measure.

This is great news, because trying to change the direction of the currency would go up against a much larger population of miners that will need to be convinced.

Take a look at http://blockchain.info/ and see how few pools there are that write all of the blocks. This is a lot of power in a few hands, and that is dangerous.

[markm]

You missed the important point that you need to have something to buy it with that you can acquire ...

Would it make sense if you has US $ and needed CN RMB and bought FR Francs to do that?

I suspect that that explains altcoins in general.

We want something we think the person who has the bitcoins might be tempted by.

So we look at the nature of what he is known to like. Bitcoins. Is there anything similar?

If not, well, how does he even get them? Where do they come from?

Ahhh, he hashes them up with his computer.

Okay then, our prospective customer likes things hashed up by computers.

Maybe we can hash something up that we can tempt him with?

Etc.

Similar with gold. Where did he get it? Is there something similar we can get from some similar source?

-MarkM-

[efodix]

First of all, the gold-silver analogy is completely pointless. You see, the thing is we have only so much metals in the universe, while we can have an infinite amount of *coins. You don't see 5 new metals popping up every day, but you do see daily influx of new crapcoins. The only good thing is they're mostly pump and dumps, and they soon die out. If every one of them got accepted, we'd already have hyperinflation and they'd all be worthless.

The second thing is the confirmation speed. The 10 minute block idea was designed because it was a reasonable tradeoff between speed and network security. The 2.5 minute block is not some genius twist, it's just sacrificing security for speed. You could make transactions confirm in 1 second if you want to, but there's a reason why nobody does that.

Third, even though scrypt is ASIC resistant, it's not ASIC immune. People used to think it was GPU immune, and it turns out it wasn't. Now, while it is reasonable to assume that a potential litecoin ASIC will not have such a performance gap over a GPU as a bitcoin ASIC, the diminishing returns and cost of electricity will still make GPU's obsolete.

Finally, mining consolidation will happen one way or another. The talk about standard hardware being available to anybody while ASIC's are an extremely difficult to get commodity is incorrect. To earn any serious money, you have to invest heavily into top-notch GPU's. An average BFL ASIC isn't that much more expensive than a top range GPU, but it does bring in more money. To effectively mine litecoins will soon actually cost more in hardware than to effectively mine bitcoins.

[kano]

...
The second thing is the confirmation speed. The 10 minute block idea was designed because it was a reasonable tradeoff between speed and network security. The 2.5 minute block is not some genius twist, it's just sacrificing security for speed. You could make transactions confirm in 1 second if you want to, but there's a reason why nobody does that.
...

Nope

[wtogami]

The "silver" thing is just marketing fluff.  The reality is Litecoin is #2.  I don't exactly know how it became #2, but I have one theory.  The one thing Litecoin does better than Bitcoin is keep storage and memory overhead low due to its strong anti-spam protections.  We are now working on modernizing the Litecoin client to match bitcoin-0.8.2, with lower fees and exciting changes coming in subsequent releases.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=215773.0
Please see the Litecoin Core Development Fundraiser Thread.