What is the main difference between litecoin and bitcoin?

[knight22]

I'm just trying to figure out what is the main difference between litecoin and bitcoin.

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[Etlase2]

Nothing worth noting.

[bitcool]

The difference is you won't find many bitcoin haters on this forum, but plenty of ltc haters.
 

But why?

[markm]

Bitcoin you can merged-mined at the same time as namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, i0coin, ixcoin, and coiledcoin, so you get all those other types of coin as little perks on the side. Litecoin does not permit merged mining, not even alongside bitcoin, so it is kind of out alone with its own little cadre of miners hoping the botnets choose to just exploit it for profit instead of attacking it for profit (by rejecting everyone else's blocks like Luke Jr did to coiledcoin and someone or someones did to BBQcoin (which is another out there on its own refusing to co-operate with others in merged mining variety of coin)).

-MarkM-

[DiCE1904]

Says right on the Litecoin website:

The Litecoin blockchain differs from its Bitcoin counterpart in that it tries to have smaller blocks, and generate them four times as fast as the Bitcoin network allows. This means that merchants get faster confirmations for their online products.

Miners will generate 50 coins per block. In light of our faster blocks, to properly mimic Bitcoin's generation trajectory, the amount of coins generated gets halved every 840,000 blocks. For those of you doing the math, Litecoin is scheduled to produce roughly 4 times as many coins as Bitcoin, about 82 million litecoins.

Litecoin manages to maintain the unique traits and attributes of Bitcoin, while adding to the mixture CPU-specific mining and a 2.5 minute block rate. This means that Litecoin doesn't have to compete for the used up computational cycles of your graphics card if you're already mining Bitcoins, but can work independently on your processor.

Apart from all those that I find to be a plus, I love the community like when people came together for LTC when that 51% scare was about to go down. The devs are pretty cool aswell and I like the idea that litecoin can be used as silver to bitcoins gold.
If you mine with GPUs litecoin is also good for you since the development of LTC mining on FPGAs is still just an idea and not put into practice yet  

Alot of people also speculate that when ASICs hit the bitcoin market, the big GPU miners who don't sell their equipment and get ASICs will move to litecoin and bring growth to the network and with the growth venders will also come. But what do I know.

[unclescrooge]

It's a way for those who came in "late" in bitcoin to try to be the very early adopters for a currency they hope will be successful.

Too bad for them it won't happen as litecoin doesn't bring anything to bitcoin

[ShadowAlexey]

It does has advantage of having another hashing algorithm, which is his biggest advantage.
And this hashing algorithm makes all asics or fpga very expensive...

[Greedi]

It's a way for those who came in "late" in bitcoin to try to be the very early adopters for a currency they hope will be successful.

Too bad for them it won't happen as litecoin doesn't bring anything to bitcoin

i just lol'ed

[bitcool]

It's a way for those who came in "late" in bitcoin to try to be the very early adopters for a currency they hope will be successful.

Too bad for them it won't happen as litecoin doesn't bring anything to bitcoin

The first sentence has some truth to it, the 2nd sentence is entirely personal opinion. And I failed to see any cause-effect relationship in the logic.

Why does a alt chain have to bring something to bitcoin to be successful? isn't that a bit self-centered and arrogant?

[markm]

In some situations brining something away from bitcoin is actually better.

For example consider all the rules and regulations around fiat, and how many people keep trying to get bitcoin to be widely thought of as "a real currency". Imagine the rules and regulations bitcoin could inherit from the fiat world if those people succeed.

So, having coins that are farther away from fiat, by not being bitcoin; while being easy to interact with bitcoin due to having similar lack of reversable transactions, similar PRC calls to talk to its daemons and so on, is great. When regulation hits bitcoin so that litecoin is maybe next on the firing line it will similarly be good that there is yet another something else that is not litecoin as well as being not bitcoin...

-MarkM-

[Etlase2]

Mark, while the sentiment is nice, I doubt any legislation will be written strictly defining bitcoin, it will be something that can be applied to any cryptocurrency. Laws are always written much more broadly than necessary, this is an issue that comes up very frequently, at least in the states.

[markm]

Mark, while the sentiment is nice, I doubt any legislation will be written strictly defining bitcoin, it will be something that can be applied to any cryptocurrency. Laws are always written much more broadly than necessary, this is an issue that comes up very frequently, at least in the states.

Unfortunately you are probably correct. All games featuring goldpieces, silverpieces, or any other kind of in-game currency will be attacked by the lawyers of such games as can afford to get themselves a "license to allow the world represented within a game to include a representation of currency" so all the super mario or whatever games where the chracter collects some kind of valuable will be legal but all the free open source games like Freeciv which feature currency/gold will be illegal.

I hope though the the sheer idiocy of such a proposal will help keep that time away for a while yet.

Pretty much any MUD, for example, includes a representation of currency. How is MUD gold to be distinguished from World of Warcraft gold? Hopefully quite a conundrum for the regulators...

-MarkM-

[unclescrooge]

It's a way for those who came in "late" in bitcoin to try to be the very early adopters for a currency they hope will be successful.

Too bad for them it won't happen as litecoin doesn't bring anything to bitcoin

The first sentence has some truth to it, the 2nd sentence is entirely personal opinion. And I failed to see any cause-effect relationship in the logic.

Why does a alt chain have to bring something to bitcoin to be successful? isn't that a bit self-centered and arrogant?

Because one of the main feature of a currency is its value/usefulness, ie how many use and accept it.

Bitcoin has the success it has because it brings something entirely new compared to existing fiat currencies.

In term of adoption, think of Bitcoin as Ebay: it may not be the best, far from it, but it is by far the largest.

Or maybe I'm entirely wrong, who knows. Don't mind

[markm]

So the British pound must bring something to the U.S. collar? As must the Yuan? And the Yen? Etc?

-MarkM-

[unclescrooge]

So the British pound must bring something to the U.S. collar? As must the Yuan? And the Yen? Etc?

-MarkM-

You're talking about currencies that are forced upon people by their local governments, I'm obviously talking about adoption by people that would actually have choice.

Not so long ago, there wasn't a lot of different currencies in the world, beside gold and silver. Then the governments stepped in...

But I really don't want to dismiss alt coins, it's just my feeling that they don't bring much. But as I said, I could be wrong

[markm]

But alternative currencies are forced upon people by their location, skills, tools, situation, the rules under which they are operating and so on.

Consider a character in a MUD that only implements "gold pieces" as currency. You either quit that MUD or make do with "gold pieces".

Consider World of Warcraft. You either quit that game or make do with "WoW gold".

Consider EVE online. You get a choice, whoopie, you can make do with the currency or the approximately as negotiable "permit to play for X amount more time" coupons.

Consider a farmer with a combine-harvester living in wheat country. He has to make do with wheat or quit being a farmer and look for some other currency to buy his government fiat / pay his taxes with.

And so on...

(Consider someone with oodles of GPUs and no ASICs...)

-MarkM-

[Transisto]

The LiteCoin hashing algorithm is heavier (Scrypt), not sure about the coin themself though.

[bitcool]

Because one of the main feature of a currency is its value/usefulness, ie how many use and accept it.

Bitcoin has the success it has because it brings something entirely new compared to existing fiat currencies.

In term of adoption, think of Bitcoin as Ebay: it may not be the best, far from it, but it is by far the largest.

Or maybe I'm entirely wrong, who knows. Don't mind

First mover advantage definitely is an important factor, but EBay can't compete with Taobao and Google can't compete with Baidu (I hate it) in China. Oh, did I forget to mention AltaVista? 

If Bitcoin world is becoming a big-money ASIC-ruled Disneyland, there will be people choose to stay in the more down-to-the-earth GPU land, where Litecoin rules.

[xchrix]

litecoin is fun to play with because there is so much to do right now
in bitcoin world there is nearly everything you need. in litecoin world i had to do my own charts at www.ltc-charts.com because there werent some good one

[YKTSSR*]

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