Here's some of the reasons I think LTC is a worthwhile investment. The price increase is a result of other folks sharing similar views.
- Capable of four times as many transactions as Bitcoin in a ten minute period. Frankly if payment processors had adopted Litecoin in the past year current Bitcoin block discussions would be irrelevant (and likely the price of both coins higher). Anyone who has watched these discussions understands the immediate advantage of a network with larger transactional capability.
- Faster confirmation times. The only people who don't think this is important have never spent a single coin or they have patience that the average person does not possess.
- Blocks are not full.
- The faster block time of litecoin reduces the risk of double spending attacks.
- Anti-spam.
- Fast well established network. Current Hashrate is 7,153 GH/s. Since scrypt is memory intensive it is known to be approximately 1000 times slower hardware wise in comparison to SHA256. Fair comparison to the Bitcoin network requires multiplying that hashrate by 1000 (7,153TH/s). The fact is for most of Litecoins history the hashrate has been relatively high and secure. Those comparing it to the Bitcoin network without considering this 1k factor are either being disingenuous or just ignorant of the facts.
- Continuous development look here at number of releases in past few years:
https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/releases - Upcoming new features and active development look here for whats happening in 2017:
https://litecoincore.org/- Longevity. Many coins have temporarily eclipsed litecoin as they were marketed for the purpose of increasing the fiat accounts of a small group and emptying the accounts of new users. Unfortunately this has been detrimental to crypto-space in general.
- Great community. Definitely helps when consensus is needed.
- Unlike bitcoin, it is possible to make changes to litecoin.
- Fully supported by GoCoin a growing merchant payment processor used by thousands of merchants
https://www.gocoin.com/ as well as other processors such as coinpayments, Asmoney, Alfacoins and Coinify.
- Liquidity. You can sell thousands and not crash the market. Maintains value. Look at the chart here indicating volume in the last 24 hours relative to other coins
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/litecoin/#markets in fact volume has remained high month after month for years.
- The speed, liquidity and value of Litecoin is useful to traders seeking arbitrage opportunities between exchanges.
- Now on coinbase and will be on bitstamp on Monday.
- Fair release. In a crypto world of premined and ICO releases many appreciate this fact. The code was released well before the Genesis block was mined and everyone knew when it would be going live; therefore, individuals could anticipate and get their miners and software ready.
- It's primary function is to be a cryptocurrency.
- Still mineable in many western countries even after electrical costs are factored in. Here in Canada my Titans still make a profit long after shutting my Neptunes down.
- Many low value coins can be merge mined with it increasing profits for miners.
- It will always maintain the integrity of the blockchain (no hard forks for special interests).
- Recently activated segwit on it's network with virtually 100 percent consensus.
- The possibility of utilizing side chains for smart contracts without the possibility of corrupting the original non-turing complete blockchain.
- Potential of using the Lightning Network as a method of increasing transactional capacity.
- Security.
