LTC hash spike = BTC miners mining LTC and exchanging for BTC

[smoothie]

^ For all of you hoping LTC is going to "skyrocket" think again. 

[killerstorm]

OK, why the fuck it went from 0.06 to 0.08 recently?

[crazy_rabbit]

^ For all of you hoping LTC is going to "skyrocket" think again. 

Unless of course, those BTC miners are mining so Many LTC they see the value in holding for now. BTC miners remember the .08 BTC/USD days quite well.

[GenTarkin]

Yeah, its all gonna come crashing down once all the mined coins are sold off... then it will slowly die off due to lack of any real economy outside of speculation.

[tacotime]

sad pandas didn't buy at 0.005

[annette786]

BTC did well because for everyone that mined it (and leaked coins into the market), more awareness was created by demand from investors finding out about bitcoin.  Simply put, more bitcoins are being purchased than mined.

So will alts get the same demand from the act of mining them?  It seems like anyone finding out about mining alts already knows about bitcoin.

[Brunic]

More people mining is not going to crash the price, since the supply of LTC stay the same, it is only shared with more individuals. We will have more people trading smaller quantities, so it doesn't change a lot.

More people mining is the best thing that can happen to LTC, because the better the currency is distributed, the more value it hold.

Also, LTC is a pretty good back-up in the case where BTC is under network attack or legal attack. SHA-256 has been created by the US government, what if they decide that their algorithm can't be used for crypto-currency and declare that use illegal?

Bitcoin is currently centralized on itself. There's only 1 crypto-currency, and in this economic world, it's a point of failure. If somehow, we're able to have X stable crypto-currencies, there's no point of failure anymore. Trading between different blockchains is a lot more secure than trading only in the same one.

[DiCE1904]

More people mining is not going to crash the price, since the supply of LTC stay the same, it is only shared with more individuals. We will have more people trading smaller quantities, so it doesn't change a lot.

More people mining is the best thing that can happen to LTC, because the better the currency is distributed, the more value it hold.

Also, LTC is a pretty good back-up in the case where BTC is under network attack or legal attack. SHA-256 has been created by the US government, what if they decide that their algorithm can't be used for crypto-currency and declare that use illegal?

Bitcoin is currently centralized on itself. There's only 1 crypto-currency, and in this economic world, it's a point of failure. If somehow, we're able to have X stable crypto-currencies, there's no point of failure anymore. Trading between different blockchains is a lot more secure than trading only in the same one.

Well put Brunic

[Bitcoin Oz]

We need another cryptocurrency not reliant on hashing algorythm the USA thinks it owns. LTC value is rising because of the actions of certain US based bitcoin devs who believe the US = the rest of the world

[killerstorm]

We need another cryptocurrency not reliant on hashing algorythm the USA thinks it owns. LTC value is rising because of the actions of certain US based bitcoin devs who believe the US = the rest of the world

LTC still uses SHA-256 even though proof-of-work is based on scrypt:

 * transaction hashes are double SHA-256
 * scrypt itself uses SHA-256 on some steps

[tacotime]

^^ Stream cipher is salsa20, block cipher is 2x SHA256.  Together they make up a scrypt core.  The scrypt core is used for validating the blockchain.  Transactions are ECDSA as with bitcoin.

[bushstar]

^ For all of you hoping LTC is going to "skyrocket" think again. 

People seem to be split on this and there are some very good reasons to believe that it will indeed keep going up for the time being. Let's see what happens in four and a half hours when the difficulty goes up by 75%.

[smoothie]

More people mining is not going to crash the price, since the supply of LTC stay the same, it is only shared with more individuals. We will have more people trading smaller quantities, so it doesn't change a lot.

More people mining is the best thing that can happen to LTC, because the better the currency is distributed, the more value it hold.

Also, LTC is a pretty good back-up in the case where BTC is under network attack or legal attack. SHA-256 has been created by the US government, what if they decide that their algorithm can't be used for crypto-currency and declare that use illegal?

Bitcoin is currently centralized on itself. There's only 1 crypto-currency, and in this economic world, it's a point of failure. If somehow, we're able to have X stable crypto-currencies, there's no point of failure anymore. Trading between different blockchains is a lot more secure than trading only in the same one.

No one said the price was going to crash.

The point was: Miners who switched to LTC only want more BTC for their time (cost to mine). Hence selling pressure.

Again so we are clear Crash =/= Selling Pressure.

 

[BitCoiner2012]

I don't much mind why the price spike, but glad I was around for it. I am interested in LTC, so I'll be following new developments more closely than before. I will be interested to see what the difficulty actually does in a few days.

[ElectricMucus]

Since LTC mining pretty much always pays better than BTC mining historically there were always people who mined LTC and sold them or BTC.
Now LTC is even more efficient so more people make the switch.

But ultimately the decision to sell or keep the LTC doesn't depend on the efficiency of obtaining them but on whenever somebody thinks LTC would be useful to them or not. And this usefulness is directly proportional to the amount of people using them. And everybody who holds LTC even for a momen is a user already.

If anything this will increase the price since it is fundamentally related to the amount of users.