Why Litecoin?

[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?

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.

So.... Why not bitcoins to relieve these advantages?

Point being you've got bitcoins, and you've got litecoins, and you've got litecoin.... but faster. I'm not sold on litecoin hitting anything special with the 2.5 minute mark. If shorter confirmation times were really important there would be a coin making it even shorter. If it's not, litecoin will not take over bitcoin. Hence.... I think bitcoin will be the long run winner.

[beckspace]

Litecoin is inevitable.

It means that the technology behind Bitcoin is so strong and massively hard to break, that sub-mining gear is more than enough to secure a second crypto-currency.

And in the future, a third, a fourth, etc.

[samurai1200]

ITT, a whole lot of people who don't understand why the Scrypt algorithm was chosen. Vorksholk was approaching the reason in his last post.

Here's a little insight, try to extrapolate some reasoning yourselves:

http://roycebits.blogspot.com/2009/05/colin-percivals-scrypt-new-chapter-in.html

[Notanon]

At the rate computing power is improving across the board along with overall improvements in broadband connectivity, I can imagine an alt-coin with 5 or 10 second transaction and confirmation times being used in place of Visa and Mastercards for small face-to-face EFTPOS transactions, as a sort of bronze or copper to Litecoin's silver and Bitcoin's gold. Could end up using Bitcoin's for large transactions like buying a house or a car and Litecoin's for things like TVs and fridges. At least, that's how I would see things settling at some point down the track.

[shinkicker]

Oh look, another one of these threads. We have not seen to many of these before.

[gyverlb]

ITT, a whole lot of people who don't understand why the Scrypt algorithm was chosen.

A lot of people know why and it seems quite a lot know why it wasn't a good idea too.

[Stephen Gornick]

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.

A bank vault's door needs to be just as thick to protect $10M worth of currency inside as it does to protect $1.5 Billion.

Litecoin is extremely vulnerable to a 51% attack due to the vulnerability of its pools to being DDoS'd, and due to there being significantly less mining capacity needed to reach 51%.

[samurai1200]

Litecoin is extremely vulnerable to a 51% attack due to the vulnerability of its pools to being DDoS'd, and due to there being significantly less mining capacity needed to reach 51%.

Legit question: How is this different from Bitcoin in its youth?

I'm going to do a little calculation for my own sake... and probably to my own LTC-holding peril!

The current network hashrate is 5.6 GH/s. Litecoin Scrypt is said to be (and anecdotally has been found to be) 1000 times more difficult to hash than SHA256 (serialization, memory hardness). So to compare to Bitcoin, that is the equivalent processing power/equipment to 5.6 TH.

50% would be 2.8 GH/TH worth of equipment, all done without ASICs. The most reasonable way to accrue this kind of power is through renting a botnet. Let's assume the average person's computer (as part of a botnet) could do 100 kH/s (most would be CPU, some would be gaming rigs). To get 2.8 GH/s, that is a 28,000 slave botnet. From various articles online I have seen that such a botnet might cost $200 x 28(thousand) = $5600/hr (for a "world mix").

That is not an unreasonable amount to a nefarious character who has a high profile target in mind. But botnets are fickle things. A world mix would see lots of downtime at the bot-per-bot level, such that you may get 80% efficiency. Also, I may have been overly generous with the 100kH/s average estimate.

A lot of people know why and it seems quite a lot know why it wasn't a good idea too.

95% of this thread is people talking about confirmation times. It is my view that the security issues are founded but may be somewhat overblown, but I don't know much about the mechanism and logistics on carrying out timing attacks on the network.


Disclaimer: my crypto holdings are about 30% LTC, 70% BTC.

[johnyj]

Lite coin is a backup solution when bitcoin failed, if that ever happens. And for all those miners with GPU mining rigs to have some fun

[valessiobrito]

At the current state, the Litecoin is oversold. The price of Litecoin has dropped sharply and there is a lot of market overreaction and panic selling. Almost every investor holding LTC coins is considering going short. Actually, the oversold condition only lusts for a very short while before the market breaks and the bearish forces are overcome by bullish forces. This is the best time for traders to buy the LTC at the current low prices. If one buys Litecoins at the current price, a rise in the prices would result to profits.

[childish]

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. 

This is exactly right. 

with Litecoin continuing to improve will be very profitable and make good profits and increase. and with the advantage and level of development of Litecoin, able to make its own advantages to make it a superior coin and become its own pride in the future.

[chits]

Lightcoin was always the younger brother of bitcoin and a lot of people have invested in lightcoin, when he was still worth a penny. We can say that a lot of whales hold their money in Lightcoin and I think they are interested in the price increase of this coin.

[ace4549]

Actually the company of litecoin is great company because even though they are not like bitcoins and etehreum in this industry through its performance, they can manage to give a great service as well.

[Zack Lee]

So I realize there are some other forks of bitcoin, but I occasionally see people trying to throw litecoin into a bitcoin conversation with the public, and that only further confuses folks away from getting into bitcoin.   I think if we want any of these to "win" (as in go mainstream), I think we should just focus on the one (bitcoin).
 
Also, some of my own minor ignorance, but why litecoin?  What purpose does it serve, right now, other than seemingly a competing coin? 

so I chose Litecoin Because this coin had decreased mala than that I chose to invest in Litecoin because this coin will be good again when everyone is back stable then I am sure Litecoin will be good and can be profitable and many people who invest in this Coin and wait back to stable