Anyone Thinking Of Dumping Bitcoin In Favour of Litecoin?

[carborundum]

When Bitcoin mining becomes only for those rich few that can afford an ASIC, the GPU miners will turn to Litecoin.

Litecoin will have a wider base of miner enthusiasts and its popularity will grow and surpass Bitcoin.

ASICs will kill Bitcoin, the future currency has to be for the masses to be involved with not a new central bank of ASIC elite!

[phantastisch]

When Bitcoin mining becomes only for those rich few that can afford an ASIC, the GPU miners will turn to Litecoin.

Litecoin will have a wider base of miner enthusiasts and its popularity will grow and surpass Bitcoin.

ASICs will kill Bitcoin, the future currency has to be for the masses to be involved with not a new central bank of ASIC elite!

Go ahead. There will be a Litecoin Asic. And it will be more expensive and more Elite.

[Vuxil]

Uh...how about when ASICs hit economies of scale and everyone has one?

[jgarzik]

Increased hash rate == increased network security.

Also, litecoin is certainly not at all immune to ASIC.

[mr_random]

When Bitcoin mining becomes only for those rich few that can afford an ASIC, the GPU miners will turn to Litecoin.

Litecoin will have a wider base of miner enthusiasts and its popularity will grow and surpass Bitcoin.

ASICs will kill Bitcoin, the future currency has to be for the masses to be involved with not a new central bank of ASIC elite!

Go ahead. There will be a Litecoin Asic. And it will be more expensive and more Elite.

Except if you want a speed boost there is no way to efficiently parallel compute the Scrypt algorithm without throwing loads of money at it to the point it becomes prohibitively expensive. This is proven mathematically in the Scrypt paper - http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf (Litecoin uses Scrypt for this reason)

People will bring out ASICs and FGPAs but unless there is a computer science breakthrough the performance increase won't be dramatic on a per dollar basis. Simply not possible.

[mr_random]

Increased hash rate == increased network security.

True but Litecoin has found a sweet spot where users can get a high hashrate using GPUs without unfair ASICs offering ridiculous perfomance enhancements.

[BadBear]

When Bitcoin mining becomes only for those rich few that can afford an ASIC, the GPU miners will turn to Litecoin.

Litecoin will have a wider base of miner enthusiasts and its popularity will grow and surpass Bitcoin.

ASICs will kill Bitcoin, the future currency has to be for the masses to be involved with not a new central bank of ASIC elite!

Go ahead. There will be a Litecoin Asic. And it will be more expensive and more Elite.

Except if you want a speed boost there is no way to efficiently parallel compute the Scrypt algorithm without throwing loads of money at it to the point it becomes prohibitively expensive. This is proven mathematically in the Scrypt paper - http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf (Litecoin uses Scrypt for this reason)

People will bring out ASICs and FGPAs but unless there is a computer science breakthrough the performance increase won't be dramatic on a per dollar basis. Simply not possible.

So only the rich can afford it? That sure sounds like a better plan than making it affordable and available to the masses.

[mr_random]

When Bitcoin mining becomes only for those rich few that can afford an ASIC, the GPU miners will turn to Litecoin.

Litecoin will have a wider base of miner enthusiasts and its popularity will grow and surpass Bitcoin.

ASICs will kill Bitcoin, the future currency has to be for the masses to be involved with not a new central bank of ASIC elite!

Go ahead. There will be a Litecoin Asic. And it will be more expensive and more Elite.

Except if you want a speed boost there is no way to efficiently parallel compute the Scrypt algorithm without throwing loads of money at it to the point it becomes prohibitively expensive. This is proven mathematically in the Scrypt paper - http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf (Litecoin uses Scrypt for this reason)

People will bring out ASICs and FGPAs but unless there is a computer science breakthrough the performance increase won't be dramatic on a per dollar basis. Simply not possible.

So only the rich can afford it? That sure sounds like a better plan than making it affordable and available to the masses.

No you misunderstand and didn't read the link. If someone spends 10k on a Scrypt Asic it won't give them a 100 times performance boost over someone rigging together 10k's worth of top graphics cards.

Some performance boost will be gained but the algorithm was specifically designed so a government entity for example couldn't crack a Scrypt hashed password by simply throwing more money at the hardware because it will become exponentially more expensive. Again, read the paper it's all in there.

[Vuxil]

Again guys, the ASIC shortage will be just short-term scarcity. Eventually more ASICs will be out on the market than people want, economies of scale are hit, and then we can have a healthy distributed ASIC network. This could actually help us, because it forces any entity wanting to attack the network to invest in ASICs instead of being able to use traditional hardware. What other way could it turn out?

[cbeast]

I am mining LTC for the suckers speculators that will trade them for BTC, because I only have GPUs. I suspect MTGOX is accepting LTC for the same reason, not because it has any inherit advantage over BTC.

As far as who mines LTC vs. BTC goes, energy efficiency will determine the strength of the network. Energy efficiency is what determines the evolutionary survival of just about everything.

[wormbog]

If 10 scrypt miners w/ video cards have 10x the chance to find a block as an individual user, then the system scales linearly. The same can be created with an ASIC with a bunch of parallel units and memory.

Anything that can be accomplished with general-purpose hardware can be accomplished more efficiently with a custom ASIC. And memory is getting cheaper by the day.

[Vuxil]

As far as who mines LTC vs. BTC goes, energy efficiency will determine the strength of the network. Energy efficiency is what determines the evolutionary survival of just about everything.

I agree, which is why I only mine PPC now  

[mr_random]

I suspect MTGOX is accepting LTC for the same reason, not because it has any inherit advantage over BTC.

Mtgox is accepting them because they are currently missing out on a 0.6% fee of millions of litecoins that are traded daily. They are a business and they care about making money... at the moment btc-e is making tens of thousands of dollars per day from these litecoins, and they are still small.

[hanzac]

Litecoin is suitable for small payment, bitcoin is suitable for big bid. So they can co-exist with less competition.

[cbeast]

I suspect MTGOX is accepting LTC for the same reason, not because it has any inherit advantage over BTC.

Mtgox is accepting them because they are currently missing out on a 0.6% fee of millions of litecoins that are traded daily. They are a business and they care about making money... at the moment btc-e is making tens of thousands of dollars per day from these litecoins, and they are still small.

MTGOX is the primary exchange for new investors. Adding LTC, NMC, NVC, IXC, etc., will just make BTC look cheap and reinforce the notion that we should all just wait and see which one will be the best.

[Luno]

Same logic applies to llitecoin as it to bitcoin: Buy with fiat, don't sell a valuable asset to buy another with possible the same or less potential.  Bitcoin is world wide mainstream now, at least in hype. It's like selling your apple stocks back in 98 for $48 and buy AOL.

[mr_random]

Adding LTC, NMC, NVC, IXC, etc., will just make BTC look cheap and reinforce the notion that we should all just wait and see which one will be the best.

That's how you view because you're still stuck thinking there should be a single dominant cryptocurrency (BTC). The cryptocurrencies offer different advantages... PPCoin being energy efficient, Litecoin using Scrypt, Bitcoin having the most traction and most secure network... it might not ever be the case of one being 'the best'.

Also, investors care about different things. With a range of cryptocurrencies they can invest in a portfolio and spread their risk, or put it all into a risky cheap crypto. And so on.

[cbeast]

Adding LTC, NMC, NVC, IXC, etc., will just make BTC look cheap and reinforce the notion that we should all just wait and see which one will be the best.

That's how you view because you're still stuck thinking there should be a single dominant cryptocurrency (BTC). The cryptocurrencies offer different advantages... PPCoin being energy efficient, Litecoin using Scrypt, Bitcoin having the most traction and most secure network... it might not ever be the case of one being 'the best'.

Also, investors care about different things. With a range of cryptocurrencies they can invest in a portfolio and spread their risk, or put it all into a risky cheap crypto. And so on.

You are right. Highly intelligent and educated investors do that, but not people with large amounts of money.

[coblee]

Increased hash rate == increased network security.

Also, litecoin is certainly not at all immune to ASIC.

Litecoin is not immune to ASICs but ASICs won't give a hashrate boost on mining Litecoins as much as it does for Bitcoins. You are right, as Litecoin price goes up, ASIC litecoin miners will inevitably come out when it becomes profitable.

I don't agree that "Increased hash rate == increased network security". When ASIC bitcoin mining is widely available, if you have the same number of people mining, the network won't be more secure just because the hashrate is higher. It's all about how much $ it takes for an attacker to come up with enough hashrate to 51% the network. ASICs might eventually increase the network hashrate 50x but that does not mean the network is 50x more secure if it costs the same amount of money for someone to successfully attack the network.

Take for example, if someone found a way to optimize the miner software to be 10x better hashrate and it works on CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs. Then all of the sudden, the next day EVERYONE uses the new miner software and the network hashrate jumps from 50 thahs/s to 500 thash/s. Is the network now ten times more secure?

[cbeast]

Increased hash rate == increased network security.

Also, litecoin is certainly not at all immune to ASIC.

I don't agree that "Increased hash rate == increased network security". When ASIC bitcoin mining is widely available, if you have the same number of people mining, the network won't be more secure just because the hashrate is higher. It's all about how much $ it takes for an attacker to come up with enough hashrate to 51% the network. ASICs might eventually increase the network hashrate 50x but that does not mean the network is 50x more secure if it costs the same amount of money for someone to successfully attack the network.

Take for example, if someone found a way to optimize the miner software to be 10x better hashrate and it works on CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs. Then all of the sudden, the next day EVERYONE uses the new miner software and the network hashrate jumps from 50 thahs/s to 500 thash/s. Is the network now ten times more secure?

If that strawman is the best example you can come up with to play devil's advocate, then no. But do you really think that a network composed of <1% of the global GPUs is invulnerable to a virus attack? Bitcoin was nearly attacked this way, but the perps instead decided to profit. Maybe LTC will not be so lucky.