Don't hate me too much, but I think litecoin is superior to bitcoin

[jasonjm]

I am new to the whole scene, been using both for a few months now.

Why i think litecoin is better - in order of importance, and all in my opinion:

1) much faster transaction times, much much faster
2) litecoins are not nearly as concentrated in such a few hands as far as i can tell from my short research.
3) harder to mine litecoins with ASICS (never say never, it will one day be done, but they will be slower ASICS compared to bitcoin), therefore mining should hopefully stay more distributed to the general public instead of a few heavy hitters.

comments?

[Atruk]

I am new to the whole scene, been using both for a few months now.

Why i think litecoin is better - in order of importance, and all in my opinion:

1) much faster transaction times, much much faster
2) litecoins are not nearly as concentrated in such a few hands as far as i can tell from my short research.
3) harder to mine litecoins with ASICS (never say never, it will one day be done, but they will be slower ASICS compared to bitcoin), therefore mining should hopefully stay more distributed to the general public instead of a few heavy hitters.

comments?

Where's the litecoin sports books?

[jasonjm]

I am not making the argument that litecoin is as accepted as bitcoin, because it clearly is not even close

What I am saying is I think it is superior for the above reasons.

Bitcoin is the 1st and therefore has the head start out of the gates.

[Lethn]

I'm all for currency competition Don't see why we can't have both Litecoin and Bitcoin, what I don't want to see is paper money still being widely used in the next few years, I do think there are problems with Bitcoin compared to Litecoin but they'll either get fixed or something even better will come along.

[drawingthesun]

1) much faster transaction times, much much faster

The only issue here is the blockchain increases in size and bandwith 4 times faster

2) litecoins are not nearly as concentrated in such a few hands as far as i can tell from my short research.

No idea about this one?

3) harder to mine litecoins with ASICS (never say never, it will one day be done, but they will be slower ASICS compared to bitcoin), therefore mining should hopefully stay more distributed to the general public instead of a few heavy hitters.

Incorrect, because GPU's have a hard time with scrypt, a dedicated ASIC will create a larger gulf between ASIC and GPU, and if Litecoin becomes profitable enough to create ASIC, they will come.

---------

Apart from that I do like Litecoin, I should buy some more maybe.

[drakahn]

I am new to the whole scene, been using both for a few months now.

Why i think litecoin is better - in order of importance, and all in my opinion:

1) much faster transaction times, much much faster
2) litecoins are not nearly as concentrated in such a few hands as far as i can tell from my short research.
3) harder to mine litecoins with ASICS (never say never, it will one day be done, but they will be slower ASICS compared to bitcoin), therefore mining should hopefully stay more distributed to the general public instead of a few heavy hitters.

comments?

1) is faster really better? is one fast confirmation in LTC as 'safe' as one confirmation in bitcoin?
2) Not a function of the coin
3) Same was said about gpu mining, if it is worth it to build an asic, an asic will be built, and there is no reason to think it will be slower than a bitcoin asic

[nwbitcoin]

The replies show that the OP hit a nerve!

I agree with the OP, but only on the basis that every following altcoin is going to be better than bitcoin in some way - or there would be no point in creating it!

My money for a real difference is PPCoin, but maybe someone will bring out an altcoin with every sensible advantage of everycoin and that is the one that goes to $10000!

[d'aniel]

I am new to the whole scene, been using both for a few months now.

Why i think litecoin is better - in order of importance, and all in my opinion:

1) much faster transaction times, much much faster
2) litecoins are not nearly as concentrated in such a few hands as far as i can tell from my short research.
3) harder to mine litecoins with ASICS (never say never, it will one day be done, but they will be slower ASICS compared to bitcoin), therefore mining should hopefully stay more distributed to the general public instead of a few heavy hitters.

comments?

(1) isn't true.  You need so much work burying your transaction for it to be "confirmed" - i.e. have a desired probability that it will not be reversed.  This isn't measured by number of blocks, but time and total network hash rate, and Bitcoin has a _much_ higher hash rate.

(2) clearly isn't true either, as there are _many_ more bitcoin users currently.

Regarding (3), there are advantages to requiring miners to use specialized, single-purpose machinery.  Dissuading botnet mining is one.  Another is that it makes miners have more "skin in the game", causing them to care about the health of the network that much more - their mining equipment becomes worthless in the event of failure of the mining algorithm.

Edit: by "failure of the mining algorithm" I mean an attacker obtaining a significant majority of the hashing power.

[jasonjm]

I though litecoin algo was much more ram intensive, so whilest building an ASIC for litecoin is possible, it would be much more costly, and not quite as quick because of the ram requirements?

[Akka]

Can people stop talking about transaction time, when they are clearly meaning Confirmation time.

That's a misunderstanding we really have to work at.

Transactions are basically instant (in the order of seconds) in both Bitcoin and Litecoin and are faster as every other System available.

What you mean is confirmation time. The Time until your transaction is basically impossible to charegeback or be in anyway fraudulent.

Guess what, with a credit card this time frame is about 180 days. Yet I have never been asked anywhere to wait this 180 days until my transaction is "confirmed".

[jasonjm]

yes confirmation time

what are the odds of a transaction being reversed in bitcoin or litecoin?

lets say you accept a transaction from someone with zero confirmations, but you can see the transaction....

what can go wrong at this point?

can a transaction be faked? ie I am guessing you really do need to wait for one confirmation at least?

what are the odds of someone being able to fake a transaction that somehow manages to get one confirmation?

[Timo Y]

1) much faster transaction times, much much faster

That advantage is largely illusory. Transaction times are not faster. Only Confirmation time is faster.

However, it's not the number of confirmations that matters for double spending protection. It's the cumulative difficulty of confirmations.

If you decrease the time between confirmations by a factor of 4, you need 4 times as many confirmations for the same double spending security.

The only situation where Litecoin offers a speed advantage is a high trust scenario where merchants only require 1 confirmation  for minimal security, and where the security provided by 1 confirmation greatly exceeds the security they require, but at the same time 0 confirmations is not secure enough.

Such situations are rare.


As for the slow confirmation times of zero fee transactions, Litecoin would suffer from the same problem if it had similar volumes to Bitcoin.

2) litecoins are not nearly as concentrated in such a few hands as far as i can tell from my short research.

Doesn't bother me. I think that people like Satoshi, Gavin, and Mike Hearn deserve every penny of their wealth.

Litecoiners are profiting from their work.

3) harder to mine litecoins with ASICS (never say never, it will one day be done, but they will be slower ASICS compared to bitcoin), therefore mining should hopefully stay more distributed to the general public instead of a few heavy hitters.

I agree, but this is both an advantage and disadvantage.  

Too centralized, and mining can be corrupted by monopolies.  Too democratic, and mining can be corrupted by social engineering.  I'm not sure whether Bitcoin, Litecoin, or ppcoin strikes the right balance.

[Mike Hearn]

Heh, for what it's worth, I'm not a millionaire or anything. Probably neither is Gavin given his comments about diversifying out of Bitcoin. Maybe Satoshi is, if he were to sell

It's not quite true that if you quarter block intervals you need 4x as many blocks to get the same security. I used to think that too, but the maths don't work out that way because blocks form a Poisson distribution. Our resident mathematician Meni Rosenfeld wrote a paper that tries to explain this here: https://bitcoil.co.il/Doublespend.pdf  - but basically 4 blocks in 10 minutes gives you more security than 1 4x harder block in 10 minutes.

Now that said, Akka is exactly right that the 10 minute interval is somewhat misleading. The real competition is credit cards which settle far, far slower. So why 10 minutes and not 2.5, well, it was a tradeoff between wasted work and block propagation speeds. Imagine a future where Bitcoin is very busy and the network is very wide and blocks are very large (and we have an optimised protocol, but still). Let's say it takes 1 minute for a block to globally propagate. This is sort of similar to how quickly BGP propagates and the BGP mesh is a comparable very large broadcast network. So now you waste 10% of all your work due to chain splits. With a 2.5 minute interval you're wasting nearly half your total work!

[virtualmaster]

I have some litecoins and I consider it a good experiment.
However some negative points about litecoin:
- they are too many litecoins and it is not so well suited to conserve value like bitcoin
- litecoin is overvalued at the moment probably because many frustrated bitcoin miner(asic related) went to litecoin mining and many buyer forget that now 8x more litecoins are produced than bitcoins
- litecoin is wasting much more energy than bitcoin with mining (asic mining is more energy efficient)
- attacks against the litecoin network is more easy with bot-net or Google-cluster systems
Especially bot-net attack are very dangerous because the attacker doesn't need to reveal his identity and it is not necessary to have his own network. An asic 51% attack like in bitcoin is less likely because it needs a high investiture and the attacker needs to reveal his identity.

[JoelKatz]

yes confirmation time

what are the odds of a transaction being reversed in bitcoin or litecoin?

lets say you accept a transaction from someone with zero confirmations, but you can see the transaction....

what can go wrong at this point?

can a transaction be faked? ie I am guessing you really do need to wait for one confirmation at least?

what are the odds of someone being able to fake a transaction that somehow manages to get one confirmation?

In other words, you have no idea what the risks are or what it takes for a transaction to be reasonably considered irreversible, yet you have the opinion that Litecoin does this faster than Bitcoin, specifically "much much faster". Does that sum things up? An uninformed opinion is not of very much value.

[Hei_]

1) much faster transaction times, much much faster

That advantage is largely illusory. Transaction times are not faster. Only Confirmation time is faster.

However, it's not the number of confirmations that matters for double spending protection. It's the cumulative difficulty of confirmations.

If you decrease the time between confirmations by a factor of 4, you need 4 times as many confirmations for the same double spending security.

The only situation where Litecoin offers a speed advantage is a high trust scenario where merchants only require 1 confirmation  for minimal security, and where the security provided by 1 confirmation greatly exceeds the security they require, but at the same time 0 confirmations is not secure enough.

Such situations are rare.


As for the slow confirmation times of zero fee transactions, Litecoin would suffer from the same problem if it had similar volumes to Bitcoin.

2) litecoins are not nearly as concentrated in such a few hands as far as i can tell from my short research.

Doesn't bother me. I think that people like Satoshi, Gavin, and Mike Hearn deserve every penny of their wealth.

Litecoiners are profiting from their work.

3) harder to mine litecoins with ASICS (never say never, it will one day be done, but they will be slower ASICS compared to bitcoin), therefore mining should hopefully stay more distributed to the general public instead of a few heavy hitters.

I agree, but this is both an advantage and disadvantage.  

Too centralized, and mining can be corrupted by monopolies.  Too democratic, and mining can be corrupted by social engineering.  I'm not sure whether Bitcoin, Litecoin, or ppcoin strikes the right balance.

+1

[amincd]

Remember bitcoin can adopt faster block times.

[kokjo]

Remember bitcoin can adopt faster block times.

no.

[amincd]

It can technically do any thing, if there is community support for it.

[amincd]

Imagine a future where Bitcoin is very busy and the network is very wide and blocks are very large (and we have an optimised protocol, but still). Let's say it takes 1 minute for a block to globally propagate. This is sort of similar to how quickly BGP propagates and the BGP mesh is a comparable very large broadcast network. So now you waste 10% of all your work due to chain splits. With a 2.5 minute interval you're wasting nearly half your total work!

Does propagation time increase linearly with block size? If so, wouldn't the larger block size of more infrequent blocks result in just as much propagation time as a portion of the time between blocks?