Why is litecoin hyped so much when it doesn't add any value over bitcoin?

[DeathAndTaxes]

As BTC diff keeps going up some of the time between blocks is getting ridiculous. I've seen over three hours between blocks. It's ridiculous. I like transacting in litecoin. Confirmations happen quickly, and I've yet to have that stressful moment where you send someone money and 6 hours later there's still no confirmation.

Also, I'm able to mine scrypt coins much more profitably on my measly 4.5mh scrypt GPU farm.

Learn how difficulty works and why what you wrote was just silly.

[digicoin]

LTC is simply the first crapcoin, following by FeatherCoin, CHNCoin, WorldCoin, GLDCoin ...

[Liquid]

Litecoin is different from bitcoin in following ways, however none of them is particularly useful and on the contrary are only less worthy.

84 million vs 21 millions: since bitcoin is divisible upto atleast 9 decimals and also micro BTC can be used for dealing with low amounts

faster blocks 2.5 minutes vs 10 minutes average: 6 confirmations of bitcoin are not equivalent of 6 confirmations of litecoin, so litecoin payments are usually confirmed after many more confirmations. It also wastes mining power because in litecoin, most of the time miners may start work with non-best blocks.

scrypt vs sha-256: since scrypt can be relatively efficiently run on CPU/GPU which means botnets can easily control a lot of hashing power. Also, scrypt is relatively less analyzed and used than sha-256, so it may not be more secure tha sha-256.

Technically, bitcoin does what litecoin in an equal or better way. Also, bitcoin testnet can be used to experiment with new features.

Why do we need litecoin that actually has monetary value?(around 2.7USD per LTC now) Is it just promoted by a group of people who missed the bitcoin get-rich boat?

Bitcoin is novel concept and early adopters rightly earn their rewards for the risk they have taken.

Keep talking you will change nothing 

The biggest downside of BTC that I see is ASICs.

This is why I believe LTC will be successful in the short term (a couple years).

ASICs and their distribution on the bitcoin network can't be guaranteed to not be centralized at some point.

This is uncharted waters in bitcoin so no one can say for sure that bitcoin will not get attacked via a large asic manufacturer.

Time will tell.

+1

[LukePFS]

LTC is simply the first crapcoin, following by FeatherCoin, CHNCoin, WorldCoin, GLDCoin ...

Could be, but I bought my very first Bitcoin with Litecoin. So, mission accomplished !

[r3wt]

do i have to say this in every fucking thread? without litecoin and other altcoins, bitcoin mining would cease to be profitable. alt coins are necessary evils because they spread the hashing power out accross multiple networks, allowing everyone to profit in some way shape or form. without litecoin and altcoins. you could multiply the difficlut by 5 and decrease your profit by 50 percent. those are just guestimates of course.

[digicoin]

You are right  . LTC and most of current altcoins (except PPCoin) have no value or technical advantages over BTC but they help keep people less focus on BTC mining. Therefore BTC diff rate does not grow as fast as it can.

[Buffer Overflow]

do i have to say this in every fucking thread? without litecoin and other altcoins, bitcoin mining would cease to be profitable. alt coins are necessary evils because they spread the hashing power out accross multiple networks, allowing everyone to profit in some way shape or form. without litecoin and altcoins. you could multiply the difficlut by 5 and decrease your profit by 50 percent. those are just guestimates of course.

If you think Bitcoin is just about mining and profit, then afraid you've completely missed the point.

[mr_random]

Let's turn this question upside down, what value does Bitcoin add over Litecoin or PPCoin?

When you think about it, the answer is not much. What gives Bitcoin much more 'value' is that it's more widely known, more widely used and merchants accept it much more. It's not the technical specifications, it's the community support it has built up with people campaigning for merchants to accept it and seeking to drive publicity upwards. That's why it's $100 and not litecoin. And that is why Litecoin is $2.7 and not Feathercoin. And so on.

In the coming months you are going to see Litecoin go through the same baby steps Bitcoin took and slowly start gaining more publicity outside of this niche subforum. Litecoin going on mtgox will enable a litecoin payment processor to work efficiently and will in turn lead to a surge of businesses that accept bitcoin also accept litecoin.

[kelsey]

basically litecoin is only valued by all those who think they missed the btc train.

so yeah they must keep pumping it along.

[anderl]

basically bitcoin litecoin is only valued by all those who think they missed the fiat currency btc train.

so yeah they must keep pumping it along.

FIFY

[kelsey]

basically bitcoin litecoin is only valued by all those who think they missed the fiat currency btc train.

so yeah they must keep pumping it along.

+1

[juve4v]

Both Litecoin and Bitcoin have their downsides  but in the end is all down to profit for all miners, investors, speculators. If the majority stays with Litecoin/scrypt coins they will go where they make money. Actually now without owning any asic, staying in Litecoin/scrypt coin  boat is more profitable, and  when it will hit Gox they will profit even more in short term compared to BTC.

This topic is very much alike many others on  forum where some medium-big BTC stahes already fearing the exodus to scrypt coins is devaluating their richness dreams even more Smart money doesnt care if it is called BTC or LTC or shitcoin, all they care is profit..it's like poker.

[diatonic]

As BTC diff keeps going up some of the time between blocks is getting ridiculous. I've seen over three hours between blocks. It's ridiculous. I like transacting in litecoin. Confirmations happen quickly, and I've yet to have that stressful moment where you send someone money and 6 hours later there's still no confirmation.

Also, I'm able to mine scrypt coins much more profitably on my measly 4.5mh scrypt GPU farm.

Learn how difficulty works and why what you wrote was just silly.

Well, it seems to me, based mostly on anecdotal evidence, that in the pre-asic era I never saw blocks take 3 hours. And it seems that as diff continues to climb the variance between block times will get worse. Just a hunch, but it seems to be how things are playing out.

[weav]

The biggest and really significant weakness of BTC is SHA-256, that is ASICs (which are a very genuine threat feasible for any dedicated attacker, getting a design and building a semiconductor fabrication plant can be had for a few $M). All renowned cryptographers agree that scrypt is far superior. Also the hashing algorithm can never be changed for BTC because that would require resolving the entire historical blockchain to achieve the same level of security LTC brings from the start. SHA-256 coins are rightly dead, and BTC is the only one still living off its initial and very major publicity until it will be replaced by a superior competitor (quite likely LTC or possibly PXC) just like Netscape Navigator, Yahoo Search, Friendster, Myspace, or any other generally innovative tech with execution flaws was. Doesn't take a genius to see that.

Also an imo ideal compromise between block time and network scalability (those altcoins with 60 seconds blocktimes and less couldn't ever scale to even what the BTC network is now).

[DeathAndTaxes]

do i have to say this in every fucking thread? without litecoin and other altcoins, bitcoin mining would cease to be profitable. alt coins are necessary evils because they spread the hashing power out accross multiple networks, allowing everyone to profit in some way shape or form. without litecoin and altcoins. you could multiply the difficlut by 5 and decrease your profit by 50 percent. those are just guestimates of course.

So we should make 1,000,000 altcoins and end poverty.  You don't really believe what you wrote do you?

[DeathAndTaxes]

The biggest and really significant weakness of BTC is SHA-256, that is ASICs (which are a very genuine threat feasible for any dedicated attacker, getting a design and building a semiconductor fabrication plant can be had for a few $M). All renowned cryptographers agree that scrypt is far superior.

It is fairly easy to make a scrypt ASIC the only factor is cost.  However the scrypt used in LTC (and clones) was modified to make it about 10,000 less memory hard then the recommended default value.  LTC scrypt uses about 32KB of memory, a token amount in ASIC design.  LTC likely will never become popular enough to warrant the kind of investment but if it does ASIC builders will move to that chain as well.

Your last line is a false statement.  Please provide this extensive list of renowned cryptographers who believe scrypt is far superior.  Scrypt has been far less extensively studied than SHA and thus has a higher risk of a cryptographic flaw.  Of course SHA could also be flawed but other than maybe MD5 or AES there aren't many algorithms with more peer review.   Extensive and long peer review is mandatory to ensure cryptographic strength.

The first paper on scrypt was published less than 5 years ago and that is a tiny amount of time in the field of cryptography.  Also LTC (and clones) use a modified version of scrypt which is significantly less "memory hard" by a couple orders of magnitude.  The LTC developers are not world renowned cryptographers, there has been no extensive peer review of the effect of these modifications.  There has (AFAIK) been a single academic paper on the potential risks.

Simple version:  In cryptography tried and true is superior to new and flashy.  In time scrypt "may" become the defacto standard for key derivitive functions but that day isn't today.

[temor]

do i have to say this in every fucking thread? without litecoin and other altcoins, bitcoin mining would cease to be profitable. alt coins are necessary evils because they spread the hashing power out accross multiple networks, allowing everyone to profit in some way shape or form. without litecoin and altcoins. you could multiply the difficlut by 5 and decrease your profit by 50 percent. those are just guestimates of course.

So we should make 1,000,000 altcoins and end poverty.  You don't really believe what you wrote do you?

I think you're putting to much weight on what he's saying and therefore missing the point.
A few alt-coins is a good thing, considering it spreads everything out more evenly.
Creating a million shitcoins as is the case today, you will only have a million weak, useless pieces of crap that does no good to no one.

Also, having two or more "strong" alt-coins provides competition. With three strong dev-teams there's bound to be a lot more cool innovative ideas than just one "super-strong" dev-team spinning away on a single track.

[Buffer Overflow]

The biggest and really significant weakness of BTC is SHA-256, that is ASICs (which are a very genuine threat feasible for any dedicated attacker, getting a design and building a semiconductor fabrication plant can be had for a few $M). All renowned cryptographers agree that scrypt is far superior. Also the hashing algorithm can never be changed for BTC because that would require resolving the entire historical blockchain to achieve the same level of security LTC brings from the start. SHA-256 coins are rightly dead, and BTC is the only one still living off its initial and very major publicity until it will be replaced by a superior competitor (quite likely LTC or possibly PXC) just like Netscape Navigator, Yahoo Search, Friendster, Myspace, or any other generally innovative tech with execution flaws was. Doesn't take a genius to see that.

Also an imo ideal compromise between block time and network scalability (those altcoins with 60 seconds blocktimes and less couldn't ever scale to even what the BTC network is now).

I wonder if you would be saying the same thing if you had 50000 BTC tucked away.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Also, having two or more "strong" alt-coins provides competition. With three strong dev-teams there's bound to be a lot more cool innovative ideas than just one "super-strong" dev-team spinning away on a single track.

I agree in theory however that wasn't his point however with the exception of NMC and PPC there hasn't been any real innovation.    His point was about mining being profitable.  That implies by simply adding a continual supply of new coins/chains you could ensure all mining is always profitable.  Like I said just make a million of then and end global poverty.

[hope2907]

My main reason for prefer litecoin (or a faster coin) over bitcoin is simply the confirmation time. When I have to wait over an hour after a transaction is initiated in order to use that amount, it's simply impractical and completely unnecessary. litecoin takes much less time. (though something like worldcoin would be more ideal).

Why wait an hour then?  You are accepting less security just starting accepting Bitcoin with 2 confirmations.  Tada 66% faster.

can you prove it is less security than?