Why Litecoin?

[Delicieuxz]

Litecoin definitely has advantages to Bitcoin. Faster transactions is huge.

[bitcool]

LTC has a trust issue with me.  It's website litecoin.org still has no real names listed on it.  ....

Just like bitcoin two years ago, there was no public figure in its initial stage.

LTC was suppose to deter GPU's as well as ASIC's but GPU's are the dominant way of mining.  And ASIC-proof?  If LTC does continue to garner interest, an ASIC will easily pop up having the BTC manufacturers cut their teeth with BTC ASIC's.  Then where's the difference?  LTC could end up acting as counterfeit BTC.  Building a cryptocurrency based on deterring specific technology like GPU's and ASIC's to make mining easier defeats one of the founding premises of BTC -- that is, BTC's mining technology is based on the concept of Moore's Law.  BTC does not target specific technologies; only that processing speed will follow along the difficulty of solving the increasing blockchain size.

If that's premise of Bitcoin, it's sad, because it means eventually big money will take over the control of BTC future.

Before we find an algorithm proportional to human brain activity,  LTC is  more people-friendly than BTC.  

[FuzzyBear]

I wonder if the aim of some is to spread FUD at such a time simply to keep the new joiners to the cryptoworld in the dark and missinformed. But we all entitled to our own opinions i suppose.

This couldn't be further from the truth, my question was why keep throwing all these alt-coins in to the public (instead of keeping them here on these boards for mental masturbation and theoretical talk) since the public is what we want to legitimize, and the more options(?) they see, the more confusing and convoluted this whole thing (which is already confusing and convoluted to the general public) becomes.

Hell yeah i hear ya, I don't talk to anyone else about the details behind Terracoin and PPCoin when i introducing them to cryptocurrencies.... and only if they are interested after discussing BTC will i mention LTC.

I think the forum has suddenly seen a massive increase in new members, and whe BTC out of their price range and mining capabilities they looking straight to the altcoins to make their fortune as they believe has been done with BTC for all the early adopters.

I think ur original post was good and u are looking for the answers to differences between LTC and BTC, and want clarification to eloquently  be able to explain differences to the average Joe on the street... agreed it is hard enough explaining BTC, but the nature of it (being open source code, run on a P-2-P network, was all speculation at the start) kinda opens itself up to natually rolling the conversation round to LTC and new altcoins... but the knowledge of the differences between alts and the history of the alts seems lost to many... even with the very useful sticky post here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134179.0

[viboracecata]

litecoins have faster confirmations.

[Hexadecibel]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bcr1s/why_is_difficulty_set_to_10_minutes_per_block_why/

This is why we have 10  minute confirmation times.

LTC is garbage.

[matauc12]

The less secure thing is funny and shows how biased the haters are. So 2.5min is too short apparently, so why not 30mins? Or 2 days? So 10mins is magically the perfect number? The less secure element of it is its 4times less secure for a 0.000000001% occurrence (arbitrary number but close enough).

[tacotime]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bcr1s/why_is_difficulty_set_to_10_minutes_per_block_why/

This is why we have 10  minute confirmation times.

LTC is garbage.

Did you even read this?

In addition to what everyone here is mentioning, I do have one more pro and one more con to name regarding changing the block frequency.
Pro: confirmation times are, in fact, faster. Nicolai's comment makes it sound as though faster blocks would be perfectly counterbalanced by less hashpower per block, leading to no change in average amount of security per minute. But that's not accurate.
Somebody did a math paper on this recently, and demonstrated that even with less hashpower per block, each block remains an exponential step forward in security. Thus, say 10x 2.5 minute blocks (25 minutes total) provide more security than 3 or even 4 10 minute blocks (30-40 minutes total).
That gain isn't huge to shave 25% off your time to desired security level while quadrupling orphan rates, but there is another con yet to be discussed as well.
Con: shorter confirmation times mean less effort for Finney Attacks. It's easier for an attacker to pre-mine a block with such an artificially low difficulty and then time a transaction with you immediately afterwards without publishing their block so that if you trust their 0-conf, they then publish their block spending the balance elsewhere.

Again, redditors missing out on cash are the most upset. 

[tonto]

Can litecoin be mined on top/beside bitcoin with the same hardware, without harming the bitcoin hashrate?

[FuzzyBear]

Can litecoin be mined on top/beside bitcoin with the same hardware, without harming the bitcoin hashrate?

No if u use your GPU for mining BTC, you can not use the same GPU to mine LTC at the same time

You can mine LTC with your CPU though at this point and not affect your BTC hashrate

If u LTC mining on GPU, it uses more memory on ur PC, so best NOT to mine on CPU as well, as you will notice a slowing in ur gPU hashrate.

[huggybear]

I think if we want any of these to "win" (as in go mainstream), I think we should just focus on the one (bitcoin).

i think this is blinkered,  the main factor here is not the name but rather the idea behind the name

Litecoin is not silver to bitcoin gold.  Silver is silver because it has other properties of gold.  There are no advantageous characteristics of litecoin to bitcoin.  Litecoin was created when some individuals felt that they missed out on the early mining opportunity of bitcoin and its still hanging around. 

says the person joined on February 01, 2013, 05:17:36 AM

that was also my first thought but why not.

Why Litecoin? Becauce it appreciate the most faith of all altCoins and have a consistently grown Community.
Whether the difference between btc and ltc will be sufficient, have got to decide the user, not a few people those don't suits ltc.
But it looks like this. For me, it suffices thats ltc is a trustable coin.


if you don't like litecoin, don't buy it. its total easy

[FuzzyBear]

I think if we want any of these to "win" (as in go mainstream), I think we should just focus on the one (bitcoin).

i think this is blinkered,  the main factor here is not the name but rather the idea behind the name

Litecoin is not silver to bitcoin gold.  Silver is silver because it has other properties of gold.  There are no advantageous characteristics of litecoin to bitcoin.  Litecoin was created when some individuals felt that they missed out on the early mining opportunity of bitcoin and its still hanging around. 

says the person joined on February 01, 2013, 05:17:36 AM

that was also my first thought but why not.

Why Litecoin? Becauce it appreciate the most faith of all altCoins and have a consistently grown Community.
Whether the difference between btc and ltc will be sufficient, have got to decide the user, not a few people those don't suits ltc.
But it looks like this. For me, it suffices thats ltc is a trustable coin.


if you don't like litecoin, don't buy it. its total easy

Fuzzy love for a fellow bear

[gyverlb]

In addition to what everyone here is mentioning, I do have one more pro and one more con to name regarding changing the block frequency.
Pro: confirmation times are, in fact, faster. Nicolai's comment makes it sound as though faster blocks would be perfectly counterbalanced by less hashpower per block, leading to no change in average amount of security per minute. But that's not accurate.
Somebody did a math paper on this recently, and demonstrated that even with less hashpower per block, each block remains an exponential step forward in security. Thus, say 10x 2.5 minute blocks (25 minutes total) provide more security than 3 or even 4 10 minute blocks (30-40 minutes total).
That gain isn't huge to shave 25% off your time to desired security level while quadrupling orphan rates, but there is another con yet to be discussed as well.
Con: shorter confirmation times mean less effort for Finney Attacks. It's easier for an attacker to pre-mine a block with such an artificially low difficulty and then time a transaction with you immediately afterwards without publishing their block so that if you trust their 0-conf, they then publish their block spending the balance elsewhere.

Again, redditors missing out on cash are the most upset. 

Seriously quoting a quote who isn't even publishing his source "Somebody did a math paper on this recently". Who did this, what is his/her background and where can we find this paper?

And I'm not anti-LTC, I'm actually quite happily mining LTC with all the GPUs I nearly sold. As a miner I don't care why a coin is valuable, I mine and sell the most profitable. But as a coin user using it for actual purchases and some investments I want to know why a coin is better for me and faster confirmation times without actual, real-world benefits won't convince me...

[tacotime]

Seriously quoting a quote who isn't even publishing his source "Somebody did a math paper on this recently". Who did this, what is his/her background and where can we find this paper?

And I'm not anti-LTC, I'm actually quite happily mining LTC with all the GPUs I nearly sold. As a miner I don't care why a coin is valuable, I mine and sell the most profitable. But as a coin user using it for actual purchases and some investments I want to know why a coin is better for me and faster confirmation times without actual, real-world benefits won't convince me...

From the reddit thread: https://bitcoil.co.il/Doublespend.pdf

[gyverlb]

Seriously quoting a quote who isn't even publishing his source "Somebody did a math paper on this recently". Who did this, what is his/her background and where can we find this paper?

And I'm not anti-LTC, I'm actually quite happily mining LTC with all the GPUs I nearly sold. As a miner I don't care why a coin is valuable, I mine and sell the most profitable. But as a coin user using it for actual purchases and some investments I want to know why a coin is better for me and faster confirmation times without actual, real-world benefits won't convince me...

From the reddit thread: https://bitcoil.co.il/Doublespend.pdf

Always useful to get the source: the original quoter didn't understand the paper's implication in Litecoin's specific context where some assumptions aren't valid.

The paper demonstrates that with a sizable portion of the network hashrate, only the number of confirmations matters, not the time constant (the average delay between blocks) for the confidence you can have in a transaction not being overridden by a double spend.

But... as the paper explains:

The time constant might be relevant, if we assume that the attacker cannot sustain his
hashrate for a prolonged period of time. In this case, even majority hashrate does not
guarantee success, as the attack could take more time than available. However, it does
not seem likely that an attacker would go through the trouble of obtaining enormous
computational resources and only maintain them for a time short enough to make this
consideration relevant.

The part about acquiring enormous computational resources is relative. It is is truly difficult for Bitcoin because you must acquire ASICs to be a credible threat now. It's not true for Litecoin: botnets are rent you pay them by the time spent using them and botnets are effective threats as scrypt is CPU-friendly.

So if Litecoin had used sha256d its faster blocks could have been an advantage because botnets at best have access to GPUs, not FPGAs and ASICs, but as a CPU-friendly hash is used, botnets becomes the obvious choice for people shady enough to try double spends. In this particular context attacks' costs are proportional to the time constant and the whole argument falls down: a short one is indeed less secure.

There is another problem: block propagation. Assuming Litecoin didn't change Bitcoin block size settings with 2.5 minutes blocks you need 4 times the bandwidth needed by Bitcoin (it could be solved by restricting block size to 1/4th of Bitcoind blocks, but this is a protocol hard fork). Satoshi is believed to have chosen these values so that the lowest network bandwidths would still be able to use Bitcoin.

[comboy]

My logic:

Assuming LTC is superior to BTC, then if LTC succeeds, then after some time there will be yet another cryptocoin superior to LTC. And we'll be switching between those, maybe even  using some common API and reusing most of the software. This would however mean that you cannot use cryptocoins for value storage, and you still have to hide your silver if you don't want gov to steal money from your bank account.

Bitcoin can be used as a value storage and it can have tons of abstractions above, enabling it to have instant transactions. There is no way I'm waiting 5 seconds for any confirmations when buying something in the future. Decentralization is expensive, and even for light it takes more than 100ms to go around the earth (global currency). So my bet is whatever the winning cryptocoin would be, there will still be many centralized payment processors on top. And since we would have them, confirmation time would not be that crucial.

[bitcoiners]

Why Litecoin?

At op, your mom that's why.  She's trading flesh for my ltc.

I'm not here to talk you into ltc.  I don't care if you invest or not.  GFY.

How's that?

[Peleus]

If the logic is litecoin is superior due to the 2.5 minute conformation times, would not a new coin with 1.25 minute confirmation times be even better than litecoin?

[tacotime]

If the logic is litecoin is superior due to the 2.5 minute conformation times, would not a new coin with 1.25 minute confirmation times be even better than litecoin?

Not necessarily, the faster the confirmation time the more orphans you get and the more power inefficient your chain becomes.  You also double the amount of bandwidth in the network.

[mycketbra]

Not at all trying to be cheeky, but time to plug qqqed's site!

www.whylitecoins.com hehe

[Vorksholk]

Litecoins bring a few interesting points to the table, namely:
-Scrypt algorithm: If SHA256 is at some point cracked or a reduction function is created for it, scrypt should still be fairly safe (although I understand scrypt has some ties into SHA family algorithms)
-Transaction time: Blocks are mined faster, confirms happen faster. Some will argue that 10min is perfect, some love 2 minutes.
-Hedging against Bitcoin without Fiat: Awesome


Just like people don't have an issue with Euros and USD coexisting, there is no reason that we can't have more than one crypto currency. However, many people are against the idea of multiple currencies for a few reasons:
-Random spam (BBQ coins?)
-Diverges people from a main coin
-Many Bitcoiners feel that it threatens their coin
-Multiple currencies make the learning curve harder for entry into cryptocurrencies

Due to the nature of the Scrypt algorithm, Litecoins are resistant (not immune) to ASIC and FPGA design, and bridge the gap a bit between CPU mining and GPU mining.