LTC price justification

[interlagos]

+1 to BlackBison

The other thing why diversity is important which isn't always brought up in discussions is that altchains help alleviate initial distribution problem - more different coins getting in the hands of more different people is a very good thing for overall cryptocurrency ecosystem.

PS: on the side note - Litecoins rock!
Just compare ASIC mining community and GPU mining community in size and make your mind

[phelix]

Because  there is no premine, it uses different algorithm, it lasted the longest time among all alternatives, and there always should be alternative to btc.

no... Namecoin was the first alternacoin and is still up

[tatsuchan]

I think using an analogy like silver to Bitcoin's gold works just fine.  LTC has great uses in a cryptocurrency system.  BTC, and other types of coins, can get along just fine with some failing and some becoming the gold standard.  Why wouldn't we have a Gold/Silver/Bronze system in our cryptocurrencies?  If a new technology came out that made a p2p coin better, why not use it?  I think many people are angry and scared that newer currencies will devalue existing ones.  They're right, it will.....but short term.  If Bitcoin can succeed, there is no reason others won't.

[bitcool]

***Gold has a literal finite number of atoms in existance and you cant get any smaller than a single atom of gold ....
 

There are already projects contemplated to mine asteroids.

[pyra-proxy]

***Gold has a literal finite number of atoms in existance and you cant get any smaller than a single atom of gold ....
 

There are already projects contemplated to mine asteroids.

And those still make use of the literal finite number of gold atoms in existence.... until you start arguing about fussion but that's a whole new world....

[foggyb]

Am I the only one that sees a hideous crash in the not so distant future?

Besides the "Litecoin is silver to bitcoins gold" analogy (which I personally think is crap), what is the additional functionality a/o reason to support this currency over bitcoin?

Looking to snap up cheap litecoins? 

[tacotime]

Also note ASICs haven't come out yet, which is the major driving force for ltc adoption

[SaltySpitoon]

I like the analogy, Litecoins are quarters to Bitcoin's dollars. But yeah, the concept is, Litecoins were made to be less valuable, and used coincident with Bitcoins so when/if Bitcoins are billions of dollars each, or whatever people think they will become, you can use a larger more friendly fraction of a Litecoin, in place of a small fraction of a Bitcoin.

When Litecoin was first created, it wasn't used by all Bitcoin users, but the majority of them liked the idea. Now Litecoin is sort of branching off on its own, and there is now a Litecoin community forming. There is a slight resentment about that between some people now.

I believe it had to do with the fact that LTC used to be CPU only, so it wasn't competing with BTC in any way. Now that there is GPU mining for LTC, there is competition between LTC and BTC. I believe when ASICs come out, things will stable out a little more.


Just remember people, this thread is about LTC prices. Feel free to compare it to other coins to support your ideas, but lets not go too far off track and lose the point of the thread.

[MooC Tals]

Am I the only one that sees a hideous crash in the not so distant future?

Besides the "Litecoin is silver to bitcoins gold" analogy (which I personally think is crap), what is the additional functionality a/o reason to support this currency over bitcoin?

Well if you wanted to know there are differences in the two as for ltc it was created to give shorter transaction times for one and as a side effect it is very similar to bitcoins structure. I could be wrong here but other cryto's have fundamental differences that make them more vulnerable to problems that the btc has withstood.

I think it also has a higher cap too.Other than that their identical. Oh and it was also designed to be FPGA resistant at first but I think that was circumvented.

I'm not a professional in these matters however I have been doing alot of reading about this and maybe not as much as other here.

However the main reason for the creation was quicker transactions for smaller trades.

[SaltySpitoon]

Am I the only one that sees a hideous crash in the not so distant future?

Besides the "Litecoin is silver to bitcoins gold" analogy (which I personally think is crap), what is the additional functionality a/o reason to support this currency over bitcoin?

Well if you wanted to know there are differences in the two as for ltc it was created to give shorter transaction times for one and as a side effect it is very similar to bitcoins structure. I could be wrong here but other cryto's have fundamental differences that make them more vulnerable to problems that the btc has withstood.

I think it also has a higher cap too.Other than that their identical. Oh and it was also designed to be FPGA resistant at first but I think that was circumvented.

I'm not a professional in these matters however I have been doing alot of reading about this and maybe not as much as other here.

However the main reason for the creation was quicker transactions for smaller trades.

You are on the right track there. There will be a total of 84 Million Litecoins, 4x as many coins as Bitcoins. And LTC are GPU, FPGA, and ASIC resistant. By GPU resistant, I mean, where GPU mining is about 20x more efficient BTC mining, it is only 10x as efficent LTC mining. This still sounds like a lot, but at that rate, CPU's are still relevant to LTC mining. FPGA and ASIC mining on the other hand is a challenge that will be very difficult for Litecoin due to hardware requirements. Litecoin mining is much more memory intensive than Bitcoins. A good GPU mining rig for BTC will be just fine with 1-2 GB of ram, whereas the same GPUs can require 4+ GB in order to mine LTC. For this reason, the onboard Ram in current FPGAs and ASICs do not have the bandwidth needed to mine LTC. In theory this can be solved, but at this point, it's very expensive if feasible at all, and just wouldn't be cost effective.

[interlagos]

Another strong point of Litecoin is that you have a performance of an SPV/lightweight node with a benefit of a full validating node at the moment. The whole Litecoin blockchain downloads from scratch within minutes!

Some might argue that it's not used as widely as Bitcoin and it will likely change in the future.
However Litecoin has a great chance of adopting Bitcoin optimizations earlier in its evolution without ever getting heavy, hence the name.

Regarding proof-of-stake in general and PPCoin in particular, there is at least one flaw that hasn't been addressed. Mining is ultimately what gives coins scarcity. The computing resources on the planet are limited and therefore cannot be inflated to infinity, only redistributed between different tasks.

Without mining in the long run nothing will prevent multiple proof-of-stake schemes to be created out-of-thin-air and exist simultaneously. They all can be "mined" with stakes from the same computer.
The rate of adoption might become the only limiting factor in this case and it might actually work.
The upside is that nobody has to bother with setting up hardware and therefore more people can participate in stake-mining thus strengthening the distributed nature of the system.
Only time will tell which coins end up in the winners category.

PS: The above inflation argument doesn't apply to merged-mining as all merged-mined coins are at the mercy of the biggest chain and can be shutdown by large pools at will.

[Fjordbit]

In particular, bitcoin cannot be relied upon as the sole representative of crypto alone due to one potentially catastrophic design fault: satoshi chose the wrong hashing algorithm- SHA, when with hindsight it should have been something like scrypt right from the beginning.

This opens it up to a serious attack vector due to future technological advances. For example, if BFL or one of the other guys does indeed make a working ASIC then this opens up the 51% attack. Now I don't care about your usual poor 'it wouldn't be in their interests to 51% btc blah blah blah'. The weakness exists. Period.

Scrypt is a bad choice for protecting against 51% attacks. A fairly small botnet could easily have the hashing power required to perform 51% attacks on the litecoin chain. This doesn't requires breaking into companies' places of business or future technology, it just requires something like this to be pointed at it, and litecoin will be blown out of the water.

But none of this really has anything to do with value. The value needs to come from the ability to trade with it. I think the biggest thing that could lead to adpotion of litecoin would be a major bitcoin pay solution (e.g. BitPay) include an alternate address for namecoins where you could pay to that and the pay solution does the translation on the market. This would open up litecoin to a lot of vendors and make it worth having.

[lebing]

The only worthwhile alternate coin is PPCoin.

Unless there is Win install available, it's going nowhere. None of 20+ miners I know of, including myself, will ever bother with compiling.

There is no reason some altcoins can't have a future, unless bitcoin doesn't have one.

Exactly.

I get there is no reason why they can't have a future - the question is why should they?

Having just one currency means there is single point of failure. Having just one currency inevitably leads to ultimate concentration of
power, and with humans, that means ultimate corruption, abuse and tyranny.

It's actualy hillarious to see someone supporting alternate currency but at the same time not realising why there should be alternatives
to that alternate currency. Why are you in Bitcoin? Once you find the answer, you'll have answer for your own question above.

Or you really think Bitcoin is fail-proof?

I agree that there should be a back up - and of course its not fail proof. That being said, I don't see the point in speculating on it. It seems to be quite active and people look to promote it all of the time. This is not only tiresome, but makes all alt currencies look bad.

[ElectricMucus]

Ok, I'll try to make myself appear more attractive in the future  

You are aware of the concept of a hot spare?

[lebing]

Ok, I'll try to make myself appear more attractive in the future  

You are aware of the concept of a hot spare?

How about a moderately lukewarm spare 

[Brunic]

A hedge can be a powerful reason. How can you hedge against Bitcoin while keeping your assets in the virtual world? Currently, if you want to hedge against BTC, you need to keep fiat money. But since fiat money devalues over time and Bitcoin tends to get more value over time, it's not a great method.

Litecoin is really similar to BTC, making it so that if you trust Bitcoin, you can easily trust Litecoin. There is two characteristics to Litecoin:
-The speed
-The algorithm

The speed is a neat feature, irrelevant today, but could give it a nice advantage as time passes and network technology get better and better.
The algorithm is the main strength of Litecoin right now. Why? You hedge when you want to play safe, so you need security. You can 51-attack Bitcoin, you can 51-attack Litecoin, you can 51-attack Bitcoin AND Namecoin, but you cannot 51-attack Bitcoin AND Litecoin. You have to choose. The processors attacking Bitcoin can't be used for Litecoin at the same time. If somebody steal the whole ASIC shipment of BFL tomorrow, Bitcoin can be killed on the spot, but it's going to do nothing on Litecoin, they can't even be used for that algorithm.

Also, LTC and BTC prices seems to have their own market. When BTC price move, LTC price doesn't necessarily follow. It reinforces the position of LTC as a hedge tool.

I know, LTC is still small, and it's not the ultimate hedge. But in the current situation, if you want to keep your assets in the crypto-currency world, it's the best around here.

[ElectricMucus]

Ok, I'll try to make myself appear more attractive in the future  

You are aware of the concept of a hot spare?

How about a moderately lukewarm spare 

Whichever you prefer, at current difficulty and prices that's not a bad description at all!

[lebing]

A hedge can be a powerful reason. How can you hedge against Bitcoin while keeping your assets in the virtual world? Currently, if you want to hedge against BTC, you need to keep fiat money. But since fiat money devalues over time and Bitcoin tends to get more value over time, it's not a great method.

Litecoin is really similar to BTC, making it so that if you trust Bitcoin, you can easily trust Litecoin. There is two characteristics to Litecoin:
-The speed
-The algorithm

The speed is a neat feature, irrelevant today, but could give it a nice advantage as time passes and network technology get better and better.
The algorithm is the main strength of Litecoin right now. Why? You hedge when you want to play safe, so you need security. You can 51-attack Bitcoin, you can 51-attack Litecoin, you can 51-attack Bitcoin AND Namecoin, but you cannot 51-attack Bitcoin AND Litecoin. You have to choose. The processors attacking Bitcoin can't be used for Litecoin at the same time. If somebody steal the whole ASIC shipment of BFL tomorrow, Bitcoin can be killed on the spot, but it's going to do nothing on Litecoin, they can't even be used for that algorithm.

Also, LTC and BTC prices seems to have their own market. When BTC price move, LTC price doesn't necessarily follow. It reinforces the position of LTC as a hedge tool.

I know, LTC is still small, and it's not the ultimate hedge. But in the current situation, if you want to keep your assets in the crypto-currency world, it's the best around here.

This is potentially a great reason - though I haven't yet figured out how to view litecoin prices over long periods of time. Anyone have a link?

[tacotime]

http://www.ltc-charts.com/period-charts.php?period=ytd&resolution=day&pair=ltc-btc&market=btc-e

[Brunic]

http://www.ltc-charts.com/period-charts.php?period=ytd&resolution=day&pair=ltc-btc&market=btc-e

It's interesting to see that on October 12, the volume jumps to a all-time record of 1.2 millions LTC. It's the same day that pirate was supposed to be able to pay back his lenders. In the case where pirate fulfill his responsibilities, the chance of having a BTC drop were high. It seems some people tried to hedge against this. 

Or it could be just a coincidence.