Litecoin IS Bitcoin

[dballing]

I'd appreciate everyone's thoughts on this!

I've been in love with Bitcoin since 2011, but I've always been bothered by the founder's stash (around 6.5% of total supply currently). Bitcoin has every attribute that I've ever wanted in a digital currency except for that one thing. This means that every ounce of energy through word of mouth, programming, mining, marketing, infrastructure etc etc benefits him directly (in a big way as network value increases). I can ignore the massive 52gig blockchain, 10min confirm times (sometimes 40+min), 7 trans per sec limitations, etc etc, but the 1 million BTC is worrisome. He's worth half a billion currently, but if Bitcoin dominates the world someday he will become a trillionaire off of our continual energy put fourth into the network. How the hell am I the only one bothered by this? Am I living in the twilight zone right now? We are leaving one top down dominated financial system for another top down system with Satoshi at the top this time. Bitcoin maximalists tell me he deserves it, but I disagree after a certain point and that's why I'm hedged into Litecoin. Maybe we can do what ethereum founders did and fork Bitcoin to use his funds for more core developers and marketing??? ROFL!

Would love to hear people's thoughts or maybe everyone will continue to be awkwardly quiet on this topic? Bow to your new god, Satoshi Nakamto (whoever that is).

[1713249305]

1713249305

[chennan]

Thing is, is that Satoshi can't move his coins without the market collapsing completely.  People would argue other wise, but that's the problem with a coin (same with litecoin) having poor amount of fungibilty.  If anyone can see what goes in and out of Satoshi's wallet, then when he moves it somewhere else, they will automatically assume the worst and think he/she/they/it is going to completely dump everything and crash the price which causes uncertainty.

So in other words... no, even if that entity still exist on this planet and has the ability to sell off those coins, I don't think Satoshi would until Satoshi wants to "kill" bitcoin.  Because there isn't as big of a holder as a million litecoin (I don't think at least), there still remains a problem of fungibility.

So essentially you are dealing with 20mil bitcoins instead of 21mil

[bathrobehero]

I'm not bothered by that at all. I mean I don't even think those coins have an owner anymore (someone with a private key) and even if there is, why wouldn't the owner moved it (or just a fraction of it) long ago when the price was crazy high? But even if one day the coins would move (which would likely mean getting sold) I think people would just take a big sigh and be glad that it's no longer there and the price would quickly rebound. Basically, I think Satoshi's stash is priced in to the current price.

And - as much of a cliche as it sounds - I do think Satoshi would deserve it because he really did gave us something we can all be thankful for.

But even if he still has the keys, he more than likely realized that he'd be a dumbass if he moved the coins. Unless he'd move them to an obvious burn address which would be fucking hilarious.

[dballing]

Thing is, is that Satoshi can't move his coins without the market collapsing completely.  People would argue other wise, but that's the problem with a coin (same with litecoin) having poor amount of fungibilty.  If anyone can see what goes in and out of Satoshi's wallet, then when he moves it somewhere else, they will automatically assume the worst and think he/she/they/it is going to completely dump everything and crash the price which causes uncertainty.

So in other words... no, even if that entity still exist on this planet and has the ability to sell off those coins, I don't think Satoshi would until Satoshi wants to "kill" bitcoin.  Because there isn't as big of a holder as a million litecoin (I don't think at least), there still remains a problem of fungibility.

So essentially you are dealing with 20mil bitcoins instead of 21mil

Yes, but in another thread I wrote about what I would do if I were Satoshi. I would not touch the coins until the entire world has integrated into Bitcoin and built a dependence. For example, how we have become dependent on Google and if they shut down their search algo for a year we would all be screwed/feel the effects. We can all watch the coins in his wallet true, BUT if he only moved like 1000 BTC from one wallet to another 10 years from now I REALLY don't think people would freak out much. It would definitely catch attention and be all over the news, but to say the entire network would implode overnight doesn't seem realistic either. I think it depends on what he actually did and how he did it.

To say that he will never touch the coins is foolish. Hording that many would not occur for no reason (there is future intent) because he could have funded Bitcoin core devs (before disappearing on us). Andreas has even stated many times that the original Bitcoin core code was a hairball and had to be fixed (so Bitcoin is a collective effort). He's clearly more intelligent than your average person and has extensive knowledge in SOOOO many fields (IE game theory, economics, history, cryptography, programming etc etc). Satoshi also might be a think tank (group of people) rather than just one or two men, so keep that in mind as well. Private keys are probably triple encrypted in deep deep cold storage right now and he clearly doesn't need the money to live for the moment.

Regardless, the stash whether moved or not is an Achilles heel for the network. If he's dead then BTC essentially has a 20MM coin limit... lol, but believe me he would have a multisig inheritance structure in place for the coins.

Your response has demonstrated to me that this is an unknown variable. I can't confirm whether he is dead or not... what is intentions are... and what he will do in the future...

An analogy for this would be a community building a rocket ship to the moon with a giant "backdoor" at the base of the rocket. We don't know what that backdoor does or if it will ever be used, but we ignore it and we all keep working on this rocket and hope for the best... ? While there is another rocket sitting right next to it without that "backdoor" and 4x the capacity then everyone poop poos it...

[YIz]

Having this much money in the hands of one unknown person is somewhat scary, but any movement of coins from his wallets will cause the market to drop in price, so he would likely just dump them all at once once the price is very high, or maybe he doesn't control the private keys anymore, but I doubt it.

Maybe he's even one of the users in bitcointalk, and he's watching this thread to see what people think 

[GreenBits]

For the record, there was no premine with BTC, to the best of my knowledge there were other people mining at the beginning. Since this was literally the first crypto, you have to assume that wouldn't be too many people. Like, mining was a new and alien concept at this point. So, whike the coins may be concentrated, it's due to a really small user base in the beginning.

[losh11]

But how would you know which addresses are held by Satoshi? He could withdraw 500,000 coins and no one would know if it was him or someone else who withdrew these early coins. Of course it wouldn't be the first 500K coins mines, but coins mined after the first 500K coins.

[YIz]

But how would you know which addresses are held by Satoshi? He could withdraw 500,000 coins and no one would know if it was him or someone else who withdrew these early coins. Of course it wouldn't be the first 500K coins mines, but coins mined after the first 500K coins.

He could theoretically hold more than we think he does, and by the way, are you the famous LTC dev who offered this guy a 10K bet?

[losh11]

and by the way, are you the famous LTC dev who offered this guy a 10K bet?

not this guy...

[GreenBits]

Having this much money in the hands of one unknown person is somewhat scary, but any movement of coins from his wallets will cause the market to drop in price, so he would likely just dump them all at once once the price is very high, or maybe he doesn't control the private keys anymore, but I doubt it.

Maybe he's even one of the users in bitcointalk, and he's watching this thread to see what people think 

No one seems to get that Satoshi would have absolutely no incentive to harm the price of bitcoin. I'm pretty sure he would even come forward before moving said coins. Besides, I don't think any single orderbook could eat all that sell.
Let alone the fact that no exchange is going to let that happen, for profit reasons as well as KYC/AML concerns. These coins move, they are getting frozen until much 'splaining has been done. This is the most watched wallet series in crypto.

[dballing]

For the record, there was no premine with BTC, to the best of my knowledge there were other people mining at the beginning. Since this was literally the first crypto, you have to assume that wouldn't be too many people. Like, mining was a new and alien concept at this point. So, whike the coins may be concentrated, it's due to a really small user base in the beginning.

This is a matter of tomato vs tomaato. Dash for example had an "instamine", Ethereuem had an "instamine/IPO" and while BTC was not technically a "premine" it might as well be. It has the same effects as a premine because if something is launched and for a year he is the only miner (not so much at the end of the year) due to no one knowing of it's existence that is hardly a fair launch. The genesis block was launched into the wild and while we all could of started mining that day it was beyond our awareness. LTC at least was announced here 2 years after the BTC launch which seems a bit more fair to me.

I don't dislike Bitcoin or Satoshi... I just feel like soooooo many people are unaware of this unknown variable. All the BTC fanatics ignore it and continue the RAH RAH chanting giving this zero thought.

[TheMage]

As someone who works directly with Litecoin, I will say that I am also a Bitcoin community member as well. In my opinion, we all are a part of the Bitcoin community to some extent.

With that said, I feel that Satoshi does deserve the coins that he mined (as well as every cent they are worth). My only concern is what OTHER people do if they were to see Bitcoin days destroyed from his wallet.

[dballing]

Having this much money in the hands of one unknown person is somewhat scary, but any movement of coins from his wallets will cause the market to drop in price, so he would likely just dump them all at once once the price is very high, or maybe he doesn't control the private keys anymore, but I doubt it.

Maybe he's even one of the users in bitcointalk, and he's watching this thread to see what people think 

No one seems to get that Satoshi would have absolutely no incentive to harm the price of bitcoin. I'm pretty sure he would even come forward before moving said coins. Besides, I don't think any single orderbook could eat all that sell.
Let alone the fact that no exchange is going to let that happen, for profit reasons as well as KYC/AML concerns. These coins move, they are getting frozen until much 'splaining has been done. This is the most watched wallet series in crypto.

Good sir, not all transactions have to take place through an exchange... With this kind of cheddar I would do it off exchange (similar to the Tim Draper auction). He could relinquish 10% of his stash 10 years from now to any entity he wants and we'd have no clue who was involved.

[GreenBits]

For the record, there was no premine with BTC, to the best of my knowledge there were other people mining at the beginning. Since this was literally the first crypto, you have to assume that wouldn't be too many people. Like, mining was a new and alien concept at this point. So, whike the coins may be concentrated, it's due to a really small user base in the beginning.

This is a matter of tomato vs tomaato. Dash for example had an "instamine", Ethereuem had an "instamine/IPO" and while BTC was not technically a "premine" it might as well be. It has the same effects as a premine because if something is launched and for a year he is the only miner (not so much at the end of the year) due to no one knowing of it's existence that is hardly a fair launch. The genesis block was launched into the wild and while we all could of started mining that day it was beyond our awareness. LTC at least was announced here 2 years after the BTC launch which seems a bit more fair to me.

I don't dislike Bitcoin or Satoshi... I just feel like soooooo many people are unaware of this unknown variable. All the BTC fanatics ignore it and continue the RAH RAH chanting giving this zero thought.

That's the point. It was the first. No one knew to mine btc as it was so bleeding edge it wasn't really a thing. Like, by definition this isn't a premine, the eidos of crypto mining was born on the day he started the Genesis block. It was only beyond the public awareness because no one really cared, not as a caveat of access.

Having this much money in the hands of one unknown person is somewhat scary, but any movement of coins from his wallets will cause the market to drop in price, so he would likely just dump them all at once once the price is very high, or maybe he doesn't control the private keys anymore, but I doubt it.

Maybe he's even one of the users in bitcointalk, and he's watching this thread to see what people think 

No one seems to get that Satoshi would have absolutely no incentive to harm the price of bitcoin. I'm pretty sure he would even come forward before moving said coins. Besides, I don't think any single orderbook could eat all that sell.
Let alone the fact that no exchange is going to let that happen, for profit reasons as well as KYC/AML concerns. These coins move, they are getting frozen until much 'splaining has been done. This is the most watched wallet series in crypto.

Good sir, not all transactions have to take place through an exchange... With this kind of cheddar I would do it off exchange (similar to the Tim Draper auction). He could relinquish 10% of his stash 10 years from now to any entity he wants and we'd have no clue who was involved.

Then they won't be publically known, and therefore will not influence the price. Any one orderbook eating these coins is just that, a singular orderbook. If it crashes, there will be others. I'm agreeing with you.

Also, anyone buying this magnitude of coin avec fiat will absolutely need to know Satoshis identity. It is illegal to make a transaction of this size without federal reporting; KYC will rear its head

[TheMage]

Having this much money in the hands of one unknown person is somewhat scary, but any movement of coins from his wallets will cause the market to drop in price, so he would likely just dump them all at once once the price is very high, or maybe he doesn't control the private keys anymore, but I doubt it.

Maybe he's even one of the users in bitcointalk, and he's watching this thread to see what people think 

No one seems to get that Satoshi would have absolutely no incentive to harm the price of bitcoin. I'm pretty sure he would even come forward before moving said coins. Besides, I don't think any single orderbook could eat all that sell.
Let alone the fact that no exchange is going to let that happen, for profit reasons as well as KYC/AML concerns. These coins move, they are getting frozen until much 'splaining has been done. This is the most watched wallet series in crypto.

Good sir, not all transactions have to take place through an exchange... With this kind of cheddar I would do it off exchange (similar to the Tim Draper auction). He could relinquish 10% of his stash 10 years from now to any entity he wants and we'd have no clue who was involved.

Even off chain it still is reflected in bitcoin days destroyed. So it will be very well known within hours if not seconds if this happened.

[dballing]

If it's not a "premine" then what would you call it? Maybe we could call it a "one year mining head start due to lack of awareness advantage"? Regardless, early adopters are HEAVILY compensated and ideally that curve would have been more gradual. I'm not complaining, I just want to be apart of the most "fair" system there is.... CONSIDERING how badly we're all getting fucked by our current global monetary system.  

I'm posting this more so because many Bitcoin maximalists hate on Litecoin and refer to it as a scam/copy... while many altcoiners call it a useless clone. Litecoin has it's place and it's not going away just as with Bitcoin. People care more about profits and have lost sight of the fundamentals. I can break down issues with soooooo many pumped coins it's ridiculous... and this is my only issue with Bitcoin, so it's not a perfect coin either.

Most likely the future will have a handful of widely used and accepted coins. I believe BTC and LTC will definitely be in the mix.

[GreenBits]

If it's not a "premine" then what would you call it? Maybe we could call it a "one year mining head start due to lack of awareness advantage"? Regardless, early adopters are HEAVILY compensated and ideally that curve would have been more gradual. I'm not complaining, I just want to be apart of the most "fair" system there is.... CONSIDERING how badly we're all getting fucked by our current global monetary system.  

Early adoption, as you have said. The early bird gets the worm, in this case, a large clusterfuck of creamy, delicious value. This is about as fair as it's going to get; early bitcoin adopters took the ultimate risk with adoption. This was the first crypto. There was absolutely no guarantee this would ever come to fruition.

This is the level of reward associated with that level of risk. Had bitcoin failed, all that time and resource would be gone with no recompense.

Also, I have no beefs with LTC. I'm really ambivalent, I actually like the sphere as it is, with a ton of competing assets. Im more concerned with the electronic value store part of it; the underlying technology means little to me if the price is stable, the network is sound, and the confirms are fast. If TRUMPCOIN became bitcoin overnight, I would shrug, and begin using TRUMP. I apologize if it seems I have been attacking LTC, certainty not my intention. It's one of the good guys

And yes, banks are the god damned devil, as is PayPal.

[q835197677]

LTC so far, it seems that there is no innovation, and I personally think that the price of LTC is significantly higher than the value of LTC

[losh11]

LTC so far, it seems that there is no innovation, and I personally think that the price of LTC is significantly higher than the value of LTC

LTC was not designed with the idea of being conceptually different from Bitcoin, thus most of the codebase is similar to Bitcoin. But we have some differences against Bitcoin that maybe be advantageous. For example we have a tx fee system which makes the Bitcoin tx spam attacks too expensive to carry out.

But you should take a look at the roadmap for Litecoin Core on litecoincore.org.

Litecoin Core Roadmap 2016

Developers: Warren Togami, Charlie Lee, Adrian Gallagher, pooler, shaolinfry, Xinxi Wang, Kunal Jaiswal

Websites - https://litecoin.org/, https://litecoincore.org/

Twitter - @litecoincore

Litecoin Core is the Litecoin reference client. Featuring ‘full node’ capabilities to fully download and validate the Litecoin blockchain as well as wallet functionality to manage transactions. Litecoin Core is the most feature rich client out there and contains all the protocol rules required for the Litecoin network to function. This client is used by mining pools, merchants and services all over the world for its rock solid stability, featureset and security.

Litecoin Core v0.13.x will be a major release featuring many protocol level improvements, code optimizations, the ability to roll out several soft forks at once and the greatly anticipated segregated witness innovation. Some of the most notable features include:

Faster signature validation using the libsecp256k library developed by Bitcoin Core developers.
Wallet pruning to reduce block size storage.
Memory usage improvements including better mempool filtering of transactions.
Inbuilt Tor control socket API support if Tor is running and also stream isolation for Tor communication.
Functionality to reduce upload traffic.
Segregated Witness to allow for greater transaction output and mitigation of transaction malleability.
ZMQ support - ZeroMQ is a high performance asynchronous messaging library, aimed at use in distributed concurrent connections. Litecoin will support ZMQ for broadcasting block and transaction data.
Hierarchical Deterministic wallets - Litecoin Core will support hierarchical deterministic wallets also known as HD wallets.
Obfuscated blockchain data Several antivirus applications detect the Litecoin stored blockchain data as a malware threat. Litecoin 0.13 will obfuscate the blockchain data to rid these false positives.
This update will also see the Inclusion of several BIPs to prepare Litecoin for upcoming innovations to do with the Lightning Network and create/use more complex smart contracts, these include:

BIP9 - This BIP allows multiple soft fork changes to be deployed in parallel.
BIP32 - This BIP allows Litecoin Core to support hierarchical deterministic wallets.
BIP68 - This BIP allows relative locktime enforcement through sequence numbers.
BIP111 - This BIP extends BIP 37, Connection Bloom filtering, by defining a service bit to allow peers to advertise that they support bloom filters explicitly. It also bumps the protocol version to allow peers to identify old nodes which allow bloom filtering of the connection despite lacking the new service bit.
BIP112 - This BIP is a proposal to redefine the semantics used in determining a time-locked transaction's eligibility for inclusion in a block. The median of the last 11 blocks is used instead of the block's timestamp, ensuring that it increases monotonically with each block.
BIP113 - This BIP describes a new opcode (CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY) for the Litecoin scripting system that in combination with BIP 68 allows execution pathways of a script to be restricted based on the age of the output being spent.
BIP130 - This BIP adds a new message, "sendheaders", which indicates that a node prefers to receive new block announcements via a "headers" message rather than an "inv".
BIP133 - This BIP adds a new message “feefilter”, which serves to instruct peers not to send “inv”s to the node for transactions with fees below the specified fee rate.
BIP141 - This BIP defines a new structure called a “witness” that is committed to blocks separated from the transaction merkle tree.
BIP143 - This BIP contains the logic for signature verification for version 0 witness program.
BIP144 - This BIP contains the logic for new messages and serialization formats for propagation of transactions and blocks committing to segregated witness structures.
BIP152 - This BIP add compact block relay to reduce the bandwidth required to propagate new blocks.
The Litecoin Core developers aim to have this version released by September/October.

Litecoin shares the same P2SH address format as Bitcoin (addresses beginning with a 3). This has caused some confusion for Litecoin users. We will look into introducing a unique P2SH address prefix.

In the longer term, we will do extensive research and development into flexcap blocksize limit.

On the other hand, Litecoin 0.13 will not include some controversial additions to BTC such as RBF (replace-by-fee).

EDIT: added missing 'not'.

[YIz]

LTC so far, it seems that there is no innovation, and I personally think that the price of LTC is significantly higher than the value of LTC

LTC was designed with the idea of being conceptually different from Bitcoin, thus most of the codebase is similar to Bitcoin. But we have some differences against Bitcoin that maybe be advantageous. For example we have a tx fee system which makes the Bitcoin tx spam attacks too expensive to carry out.

But you should take a look at the roadmap for Litecoin Core on litecoincore.org.

Yeah you are certainly the litecoin dev now. haha.