litecoin seems to be doing better, maybe that dirt road will turn into a runway before long.
Litecoin is garbage. LTC does not offer anything innovative over bitcoin, and the first thing any LTC nut exclaims is "herp! its got lower confirmation times! derp!" Well there is a reason behind 10min confirmations times. Pertinent discussion from Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bcr1s/why_is_difficulty_set_to_10_minutes_per_block_why/[–]seweso 22 points 6 days ago
Smaller also means more chance of collisions and thus forks. Its build to create a good consensus about what is the longest chain. And it needs to account for slow connections. Bitcoin wants to reach the smallest outreaches of the earth. It should even work when an entire country is connected through a dialup line with the rest of the world. That's the goal.
Other services on top of bitcoin can provide faster confirmation times (like with green adresses).[–]NicolaiS1993 15 points 6 days ago
Faster block generation time = more orphaned blocks = longer (orphaned) blockchain forks = you would need more "confirms" (blocks) to trust a transaction.
So "faster block generation time" != "shorter confirmation times". You do not get the same level of security for one bitcoin confirm (10 min) and one litecoin "confirm" (2.5 min).
Also; more blocks = more bloat (you don't "feel" this in the bitcoin forks, simply because they are not as used as bitcoin).On top of that, since LTC is "Asic Proof" LTC will be the playground for botnet operators and the proliferation of malware as it grows. Specialized hardware is beginning to push those people out of Bitcoin.
Edit: Here's a really good snippet from the above discussion:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1bcr1s/why_is_difficulty_set_to_10_minutes_per_block_why/c95pnbt"I've always seen claimed by Litecoin fans that this change was for better, and it's the first time that I read some other arguments against Litecoin that "It's just a copy with nothing more" (which was already a very good argument for me)"
"Personally it is just a copy with nothing more, you just have to qualify the "nothing".
A faster blockchain doesn't help in any real scenarios. 2.5 minute blocks (with more uncertainty) are in no way going to facilitate different kinds of transactions to 10 minute blocks. If you could pull off 10 second blocks (NOTE: This is ridiculously unviable) then maybe it'd be interesting for point of sale.
The different hashing is a silly idea of making things "equal" for miners. Whomever made litecoin wanted to stop GPU miners from having control, so they put in a memory hard hash instead of the SHA256 hash. But then of course it transpired that people can do this on GPUs, so they rebranded it to be ASIC resistent.
In reality the more dedicated miners like ASICs result in a safer block chain because in the Litecoin world, someone could build a really expensive but functional FPGA or ASIC at some point and completely take over the market.
The artificial limits that Litecoin imposes on mining growth due to the mistaken notion of 'fairness' ultimately cripple miners' ability to secure that blockchain as effectively as Bitcoin's.
So yeah my TL;DR is that Litecoins were created because of mining jealousy, and are being perpetuated by speculator jealousy and greed. Litecoin offers nothing fundamental that is of any value to a merchant or customer, and would actively add to costs where merchants must support competing identical standards.
People want alternative blockchains to succeed for some legitimate purposes, and attach to litecoin in the mistaken belief that Litecoins offer something different. But for the most part, Litecoins just exist because a handful of people 'missed the boat' and wanted to create an alternative pump and dump scheme."
