Long story short, LTC is only worth messing with if you're a miner, or maybe a developer that wants to be a HUGE fish in a microscopic pond. But who would ever put their money in such a currency, unless you had a ready-to-gamble-it-in-Vegas-anyhow level of risk aversion?
Right now, it's true. A couple of miners (like me), couple of speculators, some small traders and some small projects makers. It's small, not too long ago, I had 6% of the whole LTC network in my basement.
But I think the future of crypto-currency is not by trading in the same blockchain, it's by trading between multiple blockchains. Different groups can now issue their custom currency based on what they need. Bitcoin have a general value right now, it's the default crypto-coin. But it's possible that in many years from now, crypto-currencies will be created for a more specialized value of specific domains. For example, I've talked about it in another thread, you could create a FFCoin, that could be used in the next Final Fantasy MMORPG as a currency. The "mining" is done by players playing the game and the game uses FFCoin for all transactions in that virtual world. FFCoin comes with the same security that Bitcoin offer, but is customized for the MMORPG experience. If that happen, you could easily trade Bitcoin and FFCoin, while keeping the two economy separated.
We are far from that now, I completely agree. I see Litecoin as the first step of that FFCoin(or whatever they could be called). Right now, it achieved two important things.
- The mining is completely separated from Bitcoin (no merged mining) but it still have a pretty strong network for an alt-coin.
- It's economy is also largely separated from Bitcoin, their respective prices are mainly independant from each other. It means that if BTC price moves, LTC keep it's value and is largely not affected by BTC price movement.
The real value of crypto-currency is not Bitcoin, it's the concept of it. Bitcoin is simply a bunch of parameters for the crypto-currency concept. We don't use Bitcoin because of the "perfect" parameters, we use Bitcoin because of the concept behind it. Changing the parameters is simply a way of adapting that concept to different needs.
Consider I support Litecoin simply because it uses the basic concept behind it. I don't support PPCoin, Solidcoin or any coin that try to change the crypto-currency concept for no good reasons.
