Why Litecoin?

[gst]

During the last weeks I've read dozens of forum posts from people suggesting to use Litecoins instead of Bitcoins. Several of them also here on bitcointalk, but none of them provides technical evidence of why Litecoin should be better (or even comparable) to Bitcoins. My personal opinion is that Litecoin is inferior from a protocol and implementation point of view and that other alt-currencies (such as PPCoin) would be a much better alternative than Litecoin. I've listed my reasons for this assumptions below. I'd be interested in counter-arguments to my points and in a discussion about the benefits of Litecoins.

In my opinion those are the main disadvantages of Litecoin:

• Litecoin doesn't provide significant technological advantages in comparison to Bitcoin. My first question when seeing an alt-currency is "Why should I use this?". Some alt-currencies have good answers to this question. For example, PPCoin's proof-of-stake mining looks extremely innovative making PPCoin a possible candidate for a Bitcoin 2.0 network. Litecoin, in comparison, is just a relatively straightforward copy of the Bitcoin code. (I know about Scrypt and the shorter confirmation times. However, those are just minor changes and neither of them provides any major advantages.)
• The client code is essentially unmaintained and based on an outdated Bitcoin version. In one of the most recent Litecoin commits the authors even had to remove a warning from the source code, preventing the client from reporting that it is obsolete. None of the newer security and performance improvements of the Bitcoin code made it into Litecoin.
• The price is purely driven by speculation. There are currently next to zero applications for Litecoins. The only thing one can do with them is buying them on an exchange and hoping that they can be sold for more money at some later point. If I'd felt like gambling I'd rather use Satoshi Dice with Bitcoins instead.
• The fact that Mtgox announced it will support Litecoins sounds like a red herring. If they support one alt-currency they are likely to also support some other alt-currencies. So why invest in overpriced Litecoins, when there are other alt-currencies that are cheaper and provide real technological advantages?

So for the Litecoin supporters: Which advantages does Litecoin have? And is there any client software that's actually maintained?

[1714949039]

1714949039

[1714949039]

1714949039

[CoinHoarder]

Litecoin to me is useful and valuable to me in a lot of ways.

1. Diversification of one's cryptocoin portfolio. Someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.

2. Litecoin being built upon Scrypt makes it stronger than most other ALT currencies, especially the ones that are SHA-256 based. If you look into the problems TRC is facing, you will see that ASICs are hoping on their chain and sending difficulty into the stratosphere. They then go to hash something else, leaving the TRC block chain moving at a snail's pace and transactions taking hours to days to confirm. All SHA-256 based ALT coins (that do not have Scrypt) will suffer from this problem until they are fixed.

3. Litecoin is useful to the crypto currency ecosystem in the way that it's useful to have Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Card... or Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, and Chase. Sure, they all do the same thing, but they all do the same thing a little bit differently. Also, if one were to fail, there are others in existance so all commerce would not screech to a halt across the nation. It is good for Bitcoin to have a competing entity that is similar but not the exact same to itself. For the benefit of free market competition, each currency will always be striving to stay ahead or to catch up to one another, at the end of the day mutually improving both currencies by default.

4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.

5. Because blocks are found 4x faster, difficulty adjusts more quickly.. about every 3.5 days. This is useful because it controls the rate of the minting of Litecoins, and makes sure that they stay provably scarce for some time to come. Again, this is valuable because it stabilizes the network and deters high powered hashers from shooting difficulty into the sky and then leaving the network at a crawling pace for a longer period of time (than if blocks were solved at the same pace as Bitcoin.) This feature is not all butterflies and fairy tales, it also provides the opportunity to manipulate network speed, but as the network grows this will become less and less of a problem.

6. Then there is the "there's nothing to do with your Litecoins" fallacy. These people just don't do their research, there are plenty of things you can do and buy with Litecoin as of this instant. New merchants and services are popping up everyday, and I think this will continue to happen well into the future.

7. The Litecoin community is growing at an exponential rate. Similar to the growth of Bitcoin, as the community grows then so will Litecoin. Litecoin is already far too big and the people that believe in it are too invested in Litecoin for it to fail at this point. Litecoin can at this point proudly say that they are king of the ALT coins. It can no longer be brushed aside as a scam/pump and dump/whatever, it has real value and people are starting to see that.

8. Like Bitcoin, there was no Litecoin pre mine. There was the genesis block, and 2 blocks to confirm the genesis. This is valuable for obvious reasons... no one wants to support scammers, and for a crypto currency to become highly adopted this is a necessary feature.

9. Not everyone was so lucky to be around when Bitcoin was first started and able to buy them for pennies. The possibility of becoming an "early adopter" is very appealing to new crypto currency users. A ton of "noobs" have recently appeared in the last wave of Bitcoin mania and I've noticed that a lot of them overwhelmingly support and/or already use Litecoins.

10. As Bitcoins become more valuable over time, this will further push the poor and "working class" away from it. Some can no longer afford to buy one Bitcoin even at today's prices. People like to get more for their money, and when buying at today's exchange rate people can get more Litecoins than Bitcoins. If the same services and merchants start accepting Litecoins, then what is the purpose of paying $100+, $200+, or $300+ per bitcoin?

11. Litecoin has the advantage of doing everything after Bitcoin. By sitting and waiting in the shadows for people to bring to light exploits and bugs on Bitcoin, these problems can be fixed before there is much of a problem or before someone exploits it. Bitcoin would obviously be exploited first if there was something to exploit, because of the bigger market cap and it is more valuable for someone to exploit Bitcoin first rather than Litecoin.

12. Litecoin derives its value in the same way that Bitcoin does. It is provably scarce and its value is held up by supply and demand. Bitcoin had proven that this in itself can hold up an economy and even make it thrive. As long as there are new services and merchants accepting Litecoin (as there are), then demand should not go away. And... we all know by now that supply stays constant, thus giving Litecoin value.

13. It's anonymous.

[mmitech]

Litecoin to me is useful and valuable to me in a lot of ways.

1. Diversification of one's cryptocoin portfolio. Someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.

2. Litecoin being built upon Scrypt makes it stronger than most other ALT currencies, especially the ones that are SHA-256 based. If you look into the problems TRC is facing, you will see that ASICs are hoping on their chain and sending difficulty into the stratosphere. They then go to hash something else, leaving the TRC block chain moving at a snail's pace and transactions taking hours to days to confirm. All SHA-256 based ALT coins (that do not have Scrypt) will suffer from this problem until they are fixed.

3. Litecoin is useful to the crypto currency ecosystem in the way that it's useful to have Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Card... or Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, and Chase. Sure, they all do the same thing, but they all do the same thing a little bit differently. Also, if one were to fail, there are others in existance so all commerce would not screech to a halt across the nation. It is good for Bitcoin to have a competing entity that is similar but not the exact same to itself. For the benefit of free market competition, each currency will always be striving to stay ahead or to catch up to one another, at the end of the day mutually improving both currencies by default.

4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.

5. Because blocks are found 4x faster, difficulty adjusts more quickly.. about every 3.5 days. This is useful because it controls the rate of the minting of Litecoins, and makes sure that they stay provably scarce for some time to come. Again, this is valuable because it stabilizes the network and deters high powered hashers from shooting difficulty into the sky and then leaving the network at a crawling pace for a longer period of time (than if blocks were solved at the same pace as Bitcoin.) This feature is not all butterflies and fairy tales, it also provides the opportunity to manipulate network speed, but as the network grows this will become less and less of a problem.

6. Then there is the "there's nothing to do with your Litecoins" fallacy. These people just don't do their research, there are plenty of things you can do and buy with Litecoin as of this instant. New merchants and services are popping up everyday, and I think this will continue to happen well into the future.

7. The Litecoin community is growing at an exponential rate. Similar to the growth of Bitcoin, as the community grows then so will Litecoin. Litecoin is already far too big and the people that believe in it are too invested in Litecoin for it to fail at this point. Litecoin can at this point proudly say that they are king of the ALT coins. It can no longer be brushed aside as a scam/pump and dump/whatever, it has real value and people are starting to see that.

8. Like Bitcoin, there was no Litecoin pre mine. There was the genesis block, and 2 blocks to confirm the genesis. This is valuable for obvious reasons... no one wants to support scammers, and for a crypto currency to become highly adopted this is a necessary feature.

9. Not everyone was so lucky to be around when Bitcoin was first started and able to buy them for pennies. The possibility of becoming an "early adopter" is very appealing to new crypto currency users. A ton of "noobs" have recently appeared in the last wave of Bitcoin mania and I've noticed that a lot of them overwhelmingly support and/or already use Litecoins.

10. As Bitcoins become more valuable over time, this will further push the poor and "working class" away from it. Some can no longer afford to buy one Bitcoin even at today's prices. People like to get more for their money, and when buying at today's exchange rate people can get more Litecoins than Bitcoins. If the same services and merchants start accepting Litecoins, then what is the purpose of paying $100+, $200+, or $300+ per bitcoin?

11. Litecoin has the advantage of doing everything after Bitcoin. By sitting and waiting in the shadows for people to bring to light exploits and bugs on Bitcoin, these problems can be fixed before there is much of a problem or before someone exploits it. Bitcoin would obviously be exploited first if there was something to exploit, because of the bigger market cap and it is more valuable for someone to exploit Bitcoin first rather than Litecoin.

12. Litecoin derives its value in the same way that Bitcoin does. It is provably scarce and its value is held up by supply and demand. Bitcoin had proven that this in itself can hold up an economy and even make it thrive. As long as there are new services and merchants accepting Litecoin (as there are), then demand should not go away. And... we all know by now that supply stays constant, thus giving Litecoin value.

13. It's anonymous.

+1

I own both of Bitcoin and Litecoin, I will explain why people are afraid of litecoin , just because they do not own any or/and they are afraid to try to buy some because they think it will fail in one point . just to explain something at this moment LTC network is at 14,000,000 Kh/s and it is rising everyday . so just to tell people if you do not believe in something just keep away of it, if it is hard for you to understand the technical part than it is the same like a Christian asking why Islam or a Muslim asking why Judaism, they worship the same god but that's how things works.

 

[virtualmaster]

+1

I own both of Bitcoin and Litecoin, I will explain why people are afraid of litecoin , just because they do not own any or/and they are afraid to try to buy some because they think it will fail in one point . just to explain something at this moment LTC network is at 14,000,000 Kh/s and it is rising everyday . so just to tell people if you do not believe in something just keep away of it, if it is hard for you to understand the technical part than it is the same like a Christian asking why Islam or a Muslim asking why Judaism, they worship the same god but that's how things works.

They are not really valid arguments just some emotional assertions.
And exactly that is what became litecoin.
I also had a good amount of litecoin and promoted it among friends at the beginning but I sold them all as they became overvalued.
Litecoin is not a currency of technical innovation but a mass currency especially as bitcoin became more asic mined and the miners went to litecoin.
Now they are a lot of aggressive spammers among them and they think they can promote it posting litecoin everywhere and I've  got a more negative impression.
Beside of this they openly promote porno sites, drug markets so if this continues it will become the most evil currency.
At the moment litecoin is trying to become successful by sucking blood from bitcoin and making everywhere false assertions that litecoin would be superior to bitcoin.
But masses are not predictable and other new currencies appear.
How many miners will go to feathercoin and to mincoin ?
One day when this currencies will enter trading all users which want to remain legitimate will go away from litecoin and only drug dealers and porno providers will remain.
------------
However I must say as positive that at least litecoin is open source, decentral and has a clear structure what cannot be said on ripple, novacoin and ppcoin.
Novacoin is open source but still has a lot of obscure practices. Nobody knows exactly how it works and how many coins will be.
Ripple is obscure, closed source, centralized and inflationary.
PPcoin is open source but still centralized with checkpoints and they try to obscure how many ppcoins will be. They have a limit of 2 billions ppcoins which they say will not necessary be achieved but they have a very obscure formula which calculates the block reward which is 450ppcoins/block at the moment.

[mmitech]

+1

I own both of Bitcoin and Litecoin, I will explain why people are afraid of litecoin , just because they do not own any or/and they are afraid to try to buy some because they think it will fail in one point . just to explain something at this moment LTC network is at 14,000,000 Kh/s and it is rising everyday . so just to tell people if you do not believe in something just keep away of it, if it is hard for you to understand the technical part than it is the same like a Christian asking why Islam or a Muslim asking why Judaism, they worship the same god but that's how things works.

They are not really valid arguments just some emotional assertions.
And exactly that is what became litecoin.
I also had a good amount of litecoin and promoted it among friends at the beginning but I sold them all as they became overvalued.
Litecoin is not a currency of technical innovation but a mass currency especially as bitcoin became more asic mined and the miners went to litecoin.
Now they are a lot of aggressive spammers among them and they think they can promote it posting litecoin everywhere and I've  got a more negative impression.
Beside of this they openly promote porno sites, drug markets so if this continues it will become the most evil currency.
At the moment litecoin is trying to become successful by sucking blood from bitcoin and making everywhere false assertions that litecoin would be superior to bitcoin.
But masses are not predictable and other new currencies appear.
How many miners will go to feathercoin and to mincoin ?
One day when this currencies will enter trading all users which want to remain legitimate will go away from litecoin and only drug dealers and porno providers will remain.
------------
However I must say as positive that at least litecoin is open source, decentral and has a clear structure what cannot be said on ripple, novacoin and ppcoin.
Novacoin is open source but still has a lot of obscure practices. Nobody knows exactly how it works and how many coins will be.
Ripple is obscure, closed source, centralized and inflationary.
PPcoin is open source but still centralized with checkpoints and they try to obscure how many ppcoins will be. They have a limit of 2 billions ppcoins which they say will not necessary be achieved but they have a very obscure formula which calculates the block reward which is 450ppcoins/block at the moment.

your argument is not valid as well,  people bought Drugs weapons watched porn and all this shit existed even before BTC was introduced so OK go ahead and cancel USD and Euro and.... because this is what they used to use so it is evil, and tell your company that you wont accept FIAT as a payment because you can buy all evil listed things above with it.

-and when you say that LTC didn't introduce any improvement over BTC than you are just being ignorant or you do not understand what encryption and Block generation means .

-When  Avalon deliver all the remaining units, BTC mining will be exclusive to a few people on the network which will hold allot of coins , this will kill the spirit of BTC that was intended the very first day, remember that even now it is not cheap for the working class people and medium  class to buy some BTCs if buying 5 BTC  will be taking the half of your pay check in rich countries not to mention the poor ones.

-LTC give the chance to any one who own a GPU,CPU in other word a PC to get some, if not you can just buy it, even if it hits 100$ it will be always cheap comparing to BTC that will be more than 1000 $ .

-even if they make a prototype like ASIC for LTC it wont improve the hash rate but maybe the power consumption , this is what a proof of of work we are talking about .


-but again if we wont talk about the technical deferences between BTC and LTC because as miners and developers we know what are they , but in the future not everyone will ask about these things because people will use it as an investment or paying system as it was intended to be. so from the economic side it is like if you are asking why we have allot of different banks and paying systems if we can stick to just one ?

- LTC is already mainstream you should worry about other ALTS rather than worrying about BTC and LTC, because it is here to stay this is my point of view

[St.Bit]

So for the Litecoin supporters: Which advantages does Litecoin have?

Bitcoin will never be the one and only crypto currency. Todays 95% marketshare of BTC won't last long, so when investing in crypto you get far higher returns (at much higher risk) on altcoins than BTC. LTC is the most common altcoin and already established as BTC's little brother. When btc holder start diversiving they will rather buy LTC instead of every other altcoin.

Litecoin doesn't provide significant technological advantages in comparison to Bitcoin.

So there is no new risk. Nobody knows if PPC's POS will work for ever, but cloning a already "proven" technology is safer than inventing new one. I liked the idea of DVC but it failed and everyone invested it it will loose. It's a good idea to risk some money at new crypto, but that isn't for diversiving more than 5% of your portfolio. And the rest goes to ...?

Scrypt will be a total different mining enviroment. Once it's really established there will be specialized chips for BTC and specialized chips for scrypt. This makes LTC more independent (=better) and protects it against big goverment attacks. PPC would be ideal for that, but it isn't ready yet.

Bitcoin isn't superior enough to altcoins to justfy a 95% market cap. It might not go down in Fiat/BTC, but in Altcoin/BTC it's doomed to fall.

[cdog]

(copy&pasted from my response to another thread)

Litecoin serves a huge function in the crypto-currency world, because Scrypt based hashing is orders of magnitudes more secure than SHA256.

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1cssqr/the_math_why_litecoin_is_more_secure_than_bitcoin/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt

LTC serves as a hedge against any issues with BTC, both in terms of bugs with the software and any sort of attack on the network.

Also Litecoin finalizes the 100% anonymity promised by Bitcoin. I think CrazyRabbit made this point very clear, that BTC transactions can be traced fairly easily even if you use a coinmixer. But if you go into another currency, its 100% impossible to trace further transactions.

For these reasons Im very pro-Litecoin and I think it serves to strengthen the cryptocurrency economy rather that weaken it.

[TheSwede75]

Litecoin to me is useful and valuable to me in a lot of ways.

1. Diversification of one's cryptocoin portfolio. Someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.

2. Litecoin being built upon Scrypt makes it stronger than most other ALT currencies, especially the ones that are SHA-256 based. If you look into the problems TRC is facing, you will see that ASICs are hoping on their chain and sending difficulty into the stratosphere. They then go to hash something else, leaving the TRC block chain moving at a snail's pace and transactions taking hours to days to confirm. All SHA-256 based ALT coins (that do not have Scrypt) will suffer from this problem until they are fixed.

3. Litecoin is useful to the crypto currency ecosystem in the way that it's useful to have Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Card... or Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, and Chase. Sure, they all do the same thing, but they all do the same thing a little bit differently. Also, if one were to fail, there are others in existance so all commerce would not screech to a halt across the nation. It is good for Bitcoin to have a competing entity that is similar but not the exact same to itself. For the benefit of free market competition, each currency will always be striving to stay ahead or to catch up to one another, at the end of the day mutually improving both currencies by default.

4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.

5. Because blocks are found 4x faster, difficulty adjusts more quickly.. about every 3.5 days. This is useful because it controls the rate of the minting of Litecoins, and makes sure that they stay provably scarce for some time to come. Again, this is valuable because it stabilizes the network and deters high powered hashers from shooting difficulty into the sky and then leaving the network at a crawling pace for a longer period of time (than if blocks were solved at the same pace as Bitcoin.) This feature is not all butterflies and fairy tales, it also provides the opportunity to manipulate network speed, but as the network grows this will become less and less of a problem.

6. Then there is the "there's nothing to do with your Litecoins" fallacy. These people just don't do their research, there are plenty of things you can do and buy with Litecoin as of this instant. New merchants and services are popping up everyday, and I think this will continue to happen well into the future.

7. The Litecoin community is growing at an exponential rate. Similar to the growth of Bitcoin, as the community grows then so will Litecoin. Litecoin is already far too big and the people that believe in it are too invested in Litecoin for it to fail at this point. Litecoin can at this point proudly say that they are king of the ALT coins. It can no longer be brushed aside as a scam/pump and dump/whatever, it has real value and people are starting to see that.

8. Like Bitcoin, there was no Litecoin pre mine. There was the genesis block, and 2 blocks to confirm the genesis. This is valuable for obvious reasons... no one wants to support scammers, and for a crypto currency to become highly adopted this is a necessary feature.

9. Not everyone was so lucky to be around when Bitcoin was first started and able to buy them for pennies. The possibility of becoming an "early adopter" is very appealing to new crypto currency users. A ton of "noobs" have recently appeared in the last wave of Bitcoin mania and I've noticed that a lot of them overwhelmingly support and/or already use Litecoins.

10. As Bitcoins become more valuable over time, this will further push the poor and "working class" away from it. Some can no longer afford to buy one Bitcoin even at today's prices. People like to get more for their money, and when buying at today's exchange rate people can get more Litecoins than Bitcoins. If the same services and merchants start accepting Litecoins, then what is the purpose of paying $100+, $200+, or $300+ per bitcoin?

11. Litecoin has the advantage of doing everything after Bitcoin. By sitting and waiting in the shadows for people to bring to light exploits and bugs on Bitcoin, these problems can be fixed before there is much of a problem or before someone exploits it. Bitcoin would obviously be exploited first if there was something to exploit, because of the bigger market cap and it is more valuable for someone to exploit Bitcoin first rather than Litecoin.

12. Litecoin derives its value in the same way that Bitcoin does. It is provably scarce and its value is held up by supply and demand. Bitcoin had proven that this in itself can hold up an economy and even make it thrive. As long as there are new services and merchants accepting Litecoin (as there are), then demand should not go away. And... we all know by now that supply stays constant, thus giving Litecoin value.

13. It's anonymous.

+1

I own both of Bitcoin and Litecoin, I will explain why people are afraid of litecoin , just because they do not own any or/and they are afraid to try to buy some because they think it will fail in one point . just to explain something at this moment LTC network is at 14,000,000 Kh/s and it is rising everyday . so just to tell people if you do not believe in something just keep away of it, if it is hard for you to understand the technical part than it is the same like a Christian asking why Islam or a Muslim asking why Judaism, they worship the same god but that's how things works.

 

All analogies aside there is one, and only one reason why anyone mines or buys LTC. It's more profitable then BTC @ current hash rates/diff. LTC has almost no main stream adoption, and was it not for the 'new wave' of teenagers GPU mining it would never had amounted to anything.

[gst]

Litecoin to me is useful and valuable to me in a lot of ways.

1. Diversification of one's cryptocoin portfolio. Someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.

I'm not holding crypto-currencies because I'm investing, but because I think they're a good idea to conduct transactions over the internet. I bought a set of such currencies (Bitcoins, Litecoins) a long time before all of the hype (see the creation date of my user account, started buying Bitcoins well before I created the account) and I didn't really expect them to rise in value that much. "Investing" in currencies is just stupid, because that's basically a Ponzi-scheme. That's even true for Bitcoin to a given degree now, but at least there you have actual usage of the protocol to offset the speculation. If you want to "invest" in something invest in Bitcoin/Litecoin related companies instead of bubbles.

2. Litecoin being built upon Scrypt makes it stronger than most other ALT currencies, especially the ones that are SHA-256 based. If you look into the problems TRC is facing, you will see that ASICs are hoping on their chain and sending difficulty into the stratosphere. They then go to hash something else, leaving the TRC block chain moving at a snail's pace and transactions taking hours to days to confirm. All SHA-256 based ALT coins (that do not have Scrypt) will suffer from this problem until they are fixed.

That's only a very temporary advantage. While Scrypt has the advantage that it is "memory-hard", technology changes still have the same effect on Litecoin as on Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies). Once ASICs are the primary hashing technology in the Bitcoin world it's hard for adversaries to come up with more effective solutions (unless they can spend lots of energy). With Scrypt on the other hand you'll be facing the same problems, but just at a later time. And the attack described by you above would also be possible against Scrypt, as you could use a Botnet instead of an ASIC for this. OTOH, once ASICs are the standard in the Bitcoin world Botnet attacks aren't feasible at all, as the hashing rate that can be reached with them is much lower than what a few ASICs deliver.

3. Litecoin is useful to the crypto currency ecosystem in the way that it's useful to have Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Card... or Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, and Chase. Sure, they all do the same thing, but they all do the same thing a little bit differently. Also, if one were to fail, there are others in existance so all commerce would not screech to a halt across the nation. It is good for Bitcoin to have a competing entity that is similar but not the exact same to itself. For the benefit of free market competition, each currency will always be striving to stay ahead or to catch up to one another, at the end of the day mutually improving both currencies by default.

Visa and Mastercard are different technologies, but they still use a commonly agreed on currency. You already have that in the Bitcoin world: A common currency and dozens of different client implementations. You don't have that in the Litecoin world - there you can only choose one from two outdated and unmaintained clients.

4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.

Waiting for 6 transactions (or whatever) is just an arbitrary number. You correctly noticed that the same transaction amount for Litecoins is less secure than for Bitcoins. So why not just wait for less transactions when using Bitcoins?

7. The Litecoin community is growing at an exponential rate. Similar to the growth of Bitcoin, as the community grows then so will Litecoin. Litecoin is already far too big and the people that believe in it are too invested in Litecoin for it to fail at this point. Litecoin can at this point proudly say that they are king of the ALT coins. It can no longer be brushed aside as a scam/pump and dump/whatever, it has real value and people are starting to see that.

The only reason why the community grows is because previous Bitcoin miners find out that there equipment is suddenly useless and therefore try to earn money with Litecoins instead. The fallacy here is that miners don't really matter much when it comes to the utility of a currency. The community that would need to grow are the actual users conducting transactions via Litecoin and this community is still extremely tiny.

9. Not everyone was so lucky to be around when Bitcoin was first started and able to buy them for pennies. The possibility of becoming an "early adopter" is very appealing to new crypto currency users. A ton of "noobs" have recently appeared in the last wave of Bitcoin mania and I've noticed that a lot of them overwhelmingly support and/or already use Litecoins.

So you say that Litecoin is a classical bubble? People just buy it because they assume that its value will rise?

10. As Bitcoins become more valuable over time, this will further push the poor and "working class" away from it. Some can no longer afford to buy one Bitcoin even at today's prices. People like to get more for their money, and when buying at today's exchange rate people can get more Litecoins than Bitcoins. If the same services and merchants start accepting Litecoins, then what is the purpose of paying $100+, $200+, or $300+ per bitcoin?

The exchange rate is just an arbitrary number and doesn't affect real-life utility. The Zimbabwean dollar is not a better currency than the US dollar, just because you need billions of them in your pocket to buy a breakfast. But if there's really a psychological reason behind this it might be time for the Bitcoin community to switch to mBTC or all the way to Satoshis as currency unit.

11. Litecoin has the advantage of doing everything after Bitcoin. By sitting and waiting in the shadows for people to bring to light exploits and bugs on Bitcoin, these problems can be fixed before there is much of a problem or before someone exploits it. Bitcoin would obviously be exploited first if there was something to exploit, because of the bigger market cap and it is more valuable for someone to exploit Bitcoin first rather than Litecoin.

In practice (if you look at the source code) Litecoin is basically a copy of an old Bitcoin version and has not been updated for a very long time. In other words: Almost all of the attacks applicable against Bitcoin are also applicable against Litecoin. In addition, all the security issues that have been long fixed in the Bitcoin have been mostly ignored by Litecoin (so Litecoin is still vulnerable to them). Litecoin users are claiming that Litecoin is "more modern" than Bitcoin, but the truth is that it is basically outdated and unmaintained.

[gst]

(copy&pasted from my response to another thread)

Litecoin serves a huge function in the crypto-currency world, because Scrypt based hashing is orders of magnitudes more secure than SHA256.

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1cssqr/the_math_why_litecoin_is_more_secure_than_bitcoin/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt

So the first reddit links provides a very dubious calculation based on some Javascript calculator that's on some random website. And the second link discusses Scrypt as key-deriviation function, where it provides considerable benefits over other function. But as proof-of-work requirements are considerable different from key-derivation requirements those benefits don't really apply to Litecoin.

LTC serves as a hedge against any issues with BTC, both in terms of bugs with the software and any sort of attack on the network.

Bugs with the software? Litecoin isn't some new software, but just an outdated Bitcoin client. Look at the source code.

[St.Bit]

Dear gst,

"Investing" in currencies is just stupid, because that's basically a Ponzi-scheme. That's even true for Bitcoin to a given degree now, but at least there you have actual usage of the protocol to offset the speculation. If you want to "invest" in something invest in Bitcoin/Litecoin related companies instead of bubbles.

Sorry, but that is plain stupid. (Sorry for hard words)

1)Ponzi-scheme
Bitcoin and Charles Ponzi have nothing in common. It might be called stupid to invest or fraudulent , but a Ponzi scheme is a specific kind of fraud. It doesn't fit ...
 
2)There are no real companies involved in Bitcoin yet.
Bitcoins market cap is so low that I wouldn't even consider investing in a stock of that size. But even if, there is just mt.gox to consider. The most professional bitcoin companys full name is Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange ...

3) Investing in currencies is stupid
If you belive BTC will be used at a "way to pay online" it has to grow to at least 1000USD in order to be even noticed by big companies. Amazons sales per year are more than 30times bitcoins market cap so there must be enormous growth untill it could handle such volume.

Even if BTC couldn't be used for legal trades it's likely to be used on drugs. BTC is so much better than cash so it will be used to pay for a share of todays 500billion/year turnover on illegal drugs, so there must be enormous growth untill it could handle such volume.


If you'd belive that BTC will totaly fail it'd be ok to say so, but you said you belive in crypto for online transactions. It seems you haven't understood BTC economics yet and that is the basis for all serious "LTC is better than BTC" argumentation. Technicalities beyond "it's different" don't matter at all.

BTW: I don't agree on your argumentation on technicalities either, but that 'd be an awful long post.

PS: I'd recomend you to think more about btc economics. When you reach a certain level you will get the LTC idea on your own. And that includes "LTC is better than other altcoins". Any questions?

[skull88]

4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.

Waiting for 6 transactions (or whatever) is just an arbitrary number. You correctly noticed that the same transaction amount for Litecoins is less secure than for Bitcoins. So why not just wait for less transactions when using Bitcoins?

That is true, but one of the reasons I saw usefulness in Litecoin and why Litecoin would be a good 2nd crypto was the faster confirmation. 1 confirmation for Litecoin isn't as secure as 1 from Bitcoin, for large amounts it doesn't matter, you need to wait just as long. But if you buy a bottle of water, the security isn't that important, you easily can take the risk to just wait for 1 confirmation, so waiting 10min or 2,5min waiting is for small purchases a big deal.

For me Bitcoin = larger purchases and Litecoin = small purchases were the security of 1 confirmation is enough.
It will never be bitcoin 2.0, it never was supposed to be, for me the differences were big enough to adopt it. Besides ppcoin (which imo could be bitcoin2.0 but we'll see how this experiment turns out) there isn't really another alt I adopted.

Beside of this they openly promote porno sites, drug markets so if this continues it will become the most evil currency.

You seem to forget that silkroad was pretty good for the marketing of Bitcoin, some users also thought that Bitcoin would be seen as bad because of this.
The reality is, any currency is used to buy drugs and porn, everybody knows this, if we would deny any currency that is used for buying these things, we wouldn't have a currency at all.

[samson]

Litecoin is being pumped at the moment.

Whoever is doing this will do it to PPCoin one day too. They are already controlling the prices with bots on the exchanges.

[tgsrge]

I'm not holding crypto-currencies because I'm investing, but because I think they're a good idea to conduct transactions over the internet. I bought a set of such currencies (Bitcoins, Litecoins) a long time before all of the hype (see the creation date of my user account, started buying Bitcoins well before I created the account) and I didn't really expect them to rise in value that much. "Investing" in currencies is just stupid, because that's basically a Ponzi-scheme. That's even true for Bitcoin to a given degree now, but at least there you have actual usage of the protocol to offset the speculation. If you want to "invest" in something invest in Bitcoin/Litecoin related companies instead of bubbles.

It's speculation. Pick literally anything. Someone, somewhere at some point in time has used or tried to use it for speculative purposes. It's also no more of a ponzi than holding any other asset before bigger amounts of capital inflow rushes in. As for bubbles, in any market, there will always be bubbles.

That's only a very temporary advantage. While Scrypt has the advantage that it is "memory-hard", technology changes still have the same effect on Litecoin as on Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies). Once ASICs are the primary hashing technology in the Bitcoin world it's hard for adversaries to come up with more effective solutions (unless they can spend lots of energy). (...) And the attack described by you above would also be possible against Scrypt, as you could use a Botnet instead of an ASIC for this. OTOH, once ASICs are the standard in the Bitcoin world Botnet attacks aren't feasible at all, as the hashing rate that can be reached with them is much lower than what a few ASICs deliver.

Asic (and whatever new other viable methods of mining that might surface) miners will be heavily commoditized. You wont be able to use botnets to 51% the network anymore (atleast until everyone and their mother has an asic in the future), but you will have even fewer individuals/entities controlling a bigger % of the total network hashrate....which is obviously not really that good of a thing if you give it some actual thought.
(if scrypt custom hardware resistance holds) It essentially boils down to a higher network hashrate at the hands of a few vs a more widely distributed, but somewhat lower network hashrate.

With Scrypt on the other hand you'll be facing the same problems, but just at a later time.

So instead we should make no attempt ever at fixing anything, no matter how broken it might be? Ok.

Visa and Mastercard are different technologies, but they still use a commonly agreed on currency. You already have that in the Bitcoin world: A common currency and dozens of different client implementations. You don't have that in the Litecoin world - there you can only choose one from two outdated and unmaintained clients.

Dont fix it if it's not broken.

Waiting for 6 transactions (or whatever) is just an arbitrary number. You correctly noticed that the same transaction amount for Litecoins is less secure than for Bitcoins. So why not just wait for less transactions when using Bitcoins?

It's more complex than that. i have not sanity checked this at all,  but it might be somewhat helpful in clarifying that.

The only reason why the community grows is because previous Bitcoin miners find out that there equipment is suddenly useless and therefore try to earn money with Litecoins instead. The fallacy here is that miners don't really matter much when it comes to the utility of a currency. The community that would need to grow are the actual users conducting transactions via Litecoin and this community is still extremely tiny.

1) If someone is pushed out from somewhere, they will take their things and partially or otherwise move on to greener ($$) pastures if they think that's in their interest. Your point being?
2) What fallacy?
3) For the time being, i believe thepiratebay frontpage is "mainstream" enough

So you say that Litecoin is a classical bubble? People just buy it because they assume that its value will rise?

So instead people should buy something if they think the price will drop? Sounds like a very interesting concept...you should patent it.

The exchange rate is just an arbitrary number and doesn't affect real-life utility. The Zimbabwean dollar is not a better currency than the US dollar, just because you need billions of them in your pocket to buy a breakfast. But if there's really a psychological reason behind this it might be time for the Bitcoin community to switch to mBTC or all the way to Satoshis as currency unit.

??
Non sequitur.

In practice (if you look at the source code) Litecoin is basically a copy of an old Bitcoin version and has not been updated for a very long time. In other words: Almost all of the attacks applicable against Bitcoin are also applicable against Litecoin. In addition, all the security issues that have been long fixed in the Bitcoin have been mostly ignored by Litecoin (so Litecoin is still vulnerable to them). Litecoin users are claiming that Litecoin is "more modern" than Bitcoin, but the truth is that it is basically outdated and unmaintained.

Dont fix it if it's not broken. Or at the very least not until you know you wont break it more *cough*hardfork*cough*. it tends to help with building confidence

Litecoin is being pumped at the moment.

Whoever is doing this will do it to PPCoin one day too. They are already controlling the prices with bots on the exchanges.

as if bitcoin was/is any different

[seleme]

Litecoin is different than Bitcoin in some ways and came early enough so I can deal with it's existence unlike with all these new twattish altcoins.

However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.

Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future

[seleme]

Litecoin is being pumped at the moment.

Whoever is doing this will do it to PPCoin one day too. They are already controlling the prices with bots on the exchanges.

Lol, PPCoin is pumped and dumped 3879 times so far. Though it is third most important coin for me because it does have some new ideas it's only purpose currently is pump and dump.

[CoinHoarder]

Litecoin is different than Bitcoin in some ways and came early enough so I can deal with it's existence unlike with all these new twattish altcoins.

However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.

Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future

Actually, I currently have less than 50 Litecoins. All my LTCs are wrapped up in Bitcoin ASIC pre-orders and/or I was broke so I had to sell them!

I just believe in it as a currency and a store of value, more so than any other ALT currency.

[seleme]

Litecoin is different than Bitcoin in some ways and came early enough so I can deal with it's existence unlike with all these new twattish altcoins.

However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.

Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future

Actually, I currently have less than 50 Litecoins. All my LTCs are wrapped up in Bitcoin ASIC pre-orders and/or I was broke so I had to sell them!

I just believe in it as a currency and a store of value, more so than any other ALT currency.

I do think that litecoin is better than bitcoin if for nothing than due to fast confirmations. But I just don't think it's a wise idea to market any altcoins before bitcoin is fully established. MtGox plans to add litecoins in this phase are completely idiotic imo.

[skull88]

Litecoin is different than Bitcoin in some ways and came early enough so I can deal with it's existence unlike with all these new twattish altcoins.

However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.

Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future

Actually, I currently have less than 50 Litecoins. All my LTCs are wrapped up in Bitcoin ASIC pre-orders and/or I was broke so I had to sell them!

I just believe in it as a currency and a store of value, more so than any other ALT currency.

And this is why it has a future, enough Litecoin users don't have them to become rich overnight.
Somewhere there is a topic with the richest litecoin wallets, and there aren't lots of really big wallets.

Most will actually see it as a currency and want to use it that way.

 

[allthingsluxury]

I am a strong supporter of both bitcoin and litecoin, although I personally favor litecoin due to some of the strong points listed above.