In case you missed it and were distracted with trying to prove me "wrong" or whatever lol:
Wow, you certainly did promise a long write up. I am impressed (and not being sarcastic either)!
Coinhoarder, as you know i've personally never had anything against you or any other community member at all. But im sure you can expect a reply from me as well hehe. You took a long time to post this, and deserve and equal length and thought in a response
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I know there are a lot of threads for this already, but I wanted to start a new one as I felt the past ones did not give thorough reasons, and were somewhat trollish in nature. I have been a hardcore Litecoin supporter for the past couple years, and I do not think it is going away anytime soon. I am trying to think more long term than that, and Litecoin seems poised to die a slow death if it continues down the same path. The onslaught of copy and paste coins, followed by the onslaught of innovative coins, has changed the way I think about Litecoin. I can no longer recommend it as a good investment at this point in time. I have lobbied for Litecoin harder than even Bitcoin, and my decision to no longer support Litecoin was not an easy one. This post will be brushed aside as FUD or as me being a “hater”, but I hope you read what I have to say and think about the points I bring up, I assure you I have thought long and hard about them.
First of all, I congratulate you for posting something good to read rather than "Litecoin is dead cause I say it is" that I see from the normal trolls
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I feel like the argument that “Litecoin has the best development team” is quite disrespectful to the many other talented and devoted developers of other alt coins. You might as well call them all idiots. In fact, there are many developers that are going above and beyond what the Litecoin developers are doing. Litecoin has decided that it is content to simply follow in the steps of Bitcoin, something I tried hard to lobby against. Litecoin is merely developing things that Bitcoin has already made, such as Electrum and Android wallets. I will give them (well… Warren) a bit of credit for improving some security issues on both Litecoin and Bitcoin, but they do not see the glaring issue in that the end users don’t actually ever see these improvements. Nor do they particularly care… what I mean by that is… Have any of you ever had a problem because of a security issue in the Litecoin/Bitcoin client? I would be surprised to hear one person tell me yes they have, as after using it for years I haven’t and most cases that pop up seem to be user error.
While I personally feel that Litecoin has some of the best and the brightest, I certainly do not doubt the efforts and skills of other developers at all. There are a many of them that are talented and at first glance a few of them really want to try to make improvements upon this young moment (i.e cryptos).
With your second part you seem to contradict your statements. At first you congratulate the LTC dev team for making improvements with security and in the same breath mention that you never heard of security issues and therefore end users dont care. Come on man.....if there were any serious security issues with the BTC or LTC clients then it would be a huge issue with the entire crypto movement. Security at this point in the game is the number one item that needs to be taken care of more than anything else. I would like to use an analogy that if there was any serious security issues with a bank (like if a bank was robbed) and there was no FDIC to fall abck on, peoples money would be truly lost. Therefore there would be a heck of a lot less people that go to that bank. End users care about security, just see how many of crypto people out there really care about security on exchanges after the entire empty gox fiasco. Security is key!
Crypto currency users/investors want new and improved features, this is something they can actually see and use, and that adds value to the currency in their mind. I think merely following in Bitcoin’s footsteps is possibly a path to becoming obsolete. We already have Bitcoin, we don’t need another currency that is almost exactly like it except for a few changed parameters. By staying three steps behind Bitcoin in the crypto currency wars, they are positioning themselves to be obsolete if Bitcoin is ever supplanted by a new crypto currency that is much better. I made a hard push to get Litecoiners behind the idea of implementing new decentralized features, such as asset exchanges and decentralized applications, and I was completely ignored by the developers and dismissed by most of the Litecoin faithful. This is how the “best development team” operates? Completely ignoring their user base and someone that has gone out of his way to support Litecoin time and time again? You would think there is no value in the ideas of creating Dcorps/Dapps the way I was dismissed, but as you can see with the money flowing in on projects like BitsharesAGS/Swarm/Etcetera, a large portion of the crypto currency community agrees with me.
With your first part, crypto currency investors are really two types of people out there. So lets get that out of the way first.
1. The long term investors
2. the short term investors (i.e. the pump and dumpers)
Claiming there is one type is really not helpful to the conversation. This is the same as penny stocks versus investing in Microsoft, google, and other major companies. In the end, yes they both produce a net profit, but the means and the thoughts associated with them are two different worlds. As far as the crypto market is concerned, there are really two choices in terms of long term investment, and those are BTC and LTC (which you have admitted throughout your post as far as a current leader albeit you claim it is dying a slow death).
"We already have a Bitcoin", yes we do, its called Bitcoin. We also have Litecoin as a strong community and supporter to the crypto atmosphere as a whole. I really am impressed that you stated "if bitcoin is ever replaced", this tells me you are at least a reasonable person to discuss things with. With that said, right now with market adoption and brand Bitcoin is light years ahead of everything else, mainly because it is "the first". the advantages of having Litecoin in addition to bitcoin are quite a few, and it goes well beyond the technological aspects and into sociological, security, and human nature aspects.
1. Its a separate blockchain, God forbid anything happens to Bitcoin, Litecoin is a well known "backup"
2. We do not do a copy and paste of its code, from my understanding we are 2 versions behind bitcoin in case an implementation goes wrong
3. Litecoin is the oldest successful alternate to Bitcoin
4. Litecoin had one of if not the most fair launch ever, this is to include other different POW coins (I can elaborate on this in another post if someone were so inclined)
5. There is more, but the point is its a "trusted brand", evidence can be seen as in the trade volume and coupling to BTC. Essentially the trade volume is due to the fact that LTC is being used as arbitrage between BTC/LTC. It's trusted enough that people program bots to use it and its a safe number two with a possible future increase.
6. There is more, but hopefully I proved my points
As far as your thread about incorporating all these cool neato fantastic wiz bang features that all these other coins have I have a challenge for you. I would love to see you make the same threads here in Bitcointalk and get Gavin to respond to it stating he will work on it. If you really feel that strongly, you can certainly launch a campaign to do the same here. I would expect your results to be the same. This is because the devs recognize that all these gimmicks are really nothing more than gimmicks (with the exception of the new POW coins, but that would require a folk for LTC and I will address forks later on here)
And BTW you do not speak for the entire user base, while I respect your opinions as I always respect our community members you certainly do not speak for me.
This is not the only case where the developers have done as they pleased, many voiced concerns about ASICs coming online and ruining the decentralized nature of the network, making people pay for hardware that will never ROI and sadly has little to no resale value, and suscept the Litecoin mining community to pre-ordering hardware they may never even see (or at least they likely will never see on time before the difficulty skyrockets like what happened with Bitcoin.) After a year and a half of investing in ASIC mining technology, running group buys, and hosting hardware, I can honestly say it is a fool’s game. The original batch 1 Avalons broke even and made a hefty profit, and almost every ASIC offering since then has fallen short of simply allowing their customers to break even. I will no longer support ASIC mining or the companies that make them, and when that sentiment is shared by a large group of people (I know I’m not alone,) it can be a very dangerous thing and lead to centralization of the network. I am worried for both Bitcoin and Litecoin in those regards… when a crypto currency becomes centralized, what is the point really? Satoshi would not approve.
I...agree with you on this point. I have 1 asic, and this is one that was donated to me from lightning asic as a test unit (I was the lucky recipient of one of the worlds first scrypt asics, disclosure now, its complete crap lol).
This as mentioned by many members, Waren, and even Coblee himself have stated that there is no good way to take care of this issue. The con is that the network itself is somewhat centralized (but way better than how BTC is now), but the pro is in fact a stronger network, which you agreed on in your postings. In addition, in order to avoid this it would have required a hard fork, which would have the possibility of undermining the entire coin itself.
It's really a choice, do we want more capital poured into Litecoin and continue to pour in via infrastructure, or do we hard fork and let investors know that it isn't as "safe" as they wanted it to be. If you think about it, from a capital perspective, who the heck would invest in something that people could change on a whim and completely demolish your investments?
Although I do somewhat worry about it, but there is no good answer at this point other than letting the coin evolve into what BTC has become.
Litecoin’s trade volume and market cap dwarf those of other alternative crypo currencies. Although this is true, I feel like this is very dangerous reasoning for determining the future of a cryptocoin and should not be a large factor of your decision. Have you ever heard of the banks that are “too big to fail”? This is the kind of reasoning this reminds me of. Does anyone remember when Facebook came out of nowhere and made Myspace obsolete? Blockbuster got killed by Netflix and Redbox. Dell, once a leader in the IT sector has fallen behind its competitors. Kodak’s stock price is about 96% lower than it was in 1997 due to the advent of personal printers, improvements in software, and file sharing. Microsoft was at the forefront of technology at one point, and now they are playing catch up when it comes to search engines, internet video, ebooks, smartphones, and tablet PCs. Motorola was huge when mobile telephones first came out, yet they failed to focus on smartphones with new features and rapidly lost market share to companies like Apple, LG, and Samsung. Sears got huge by sending out catalogs and allowing customers to order things from home, but failed to capitalize when ecommerce became much more popular to consumers. A Sony Walkman used to be today’s iPod. Yahoo… Toys R Us… need I say more?
For this section, I like to do the grandma test. Go call your grandmother and ask her about Bitcoins (or any other older person). More times than not statistically speaking, you will get a "what is that" answer. The crypto eco-system is so very new, that all of these gimmicks at the end of the day really dont matter. What matters is being safe and brand recognition, which LTC have both of which is light years ahead of other alts (with the exception of dogecoin and Bitcoin). I mention this because you are talking about VERY WELL established companies that are uplifted by new comers. But how do you uplift a new comer by another new comer? Maybe sometime in the future, when BTC and LTC are accepted worldwide and I can pay my phone and electric bill with them, these new payment systems would be awesome! But also by that time, BTC and LTC will already be accepted by these companies.....so I really fail to see the argument here.
Due to rapid technological advancements and the competition being innovative and forward thinking (seeing a pattern here?), companies can become obsolete very fast and I see no reason why this does not (or could not) hold true with crypto currencies. The network effect is very powerful, however I feel like the network effect is exponentially more powerful for Bitcoin than it is for Litecoin. It is Bitcoin that is in the news all day every day, not Litecoin. Although Litecoin does get more attention than most other alternative crypto currencies, I feel this is because they are the guys to beat right now. As you can see in the last paragraph, this could change quickly and this is not a good argument for Litecoin holding its number two spot.
See above please
. Although I agree that Litecoin isnt "marketed" as much as Litecoin, but I personally plan to see this change.
Although Litecoin may be accepted by more exchanges and merchants than other alternative crypto currencies, the more innovative and valuable ones are sure to follow. Multi coin payment processing is going to become more popular as more coins come out. Having a different payment processor for every crypto currency is just not a smart way of doing things, and the ones that only accept one or two crypto currencies will be less popular with merchants over time. If someone wants to buy something from me with Sex Coin, I am going to want their business as I can simply exchange the Sex Coin for whatever coin I would like. If the consumers have more options to pay, the more likely they are to purchase something. I am sure that I sold a few extra physical Litecoins because I used coinpayments.net which accepts something like 30+ crypto coins. I had it setup to automatically exchange the coins that I didn’t want. It was stupidly easy and got me a little extra business. What merchant wouldn’t want this? They will choose the payment processor that supports the most coins, and the most stubborn payment processors will be slowly phased out. Exchanges make money by people trading crypto currencies (duh, right?). There is no reason they will not keep adding coins to trade alongside other coins to increase their profit. By not adding new coins, whether it’s a scam coin or not, they are leaving money off the table and it makes no sense.
Lets work backwards, if your claim about companies (exchanges and payment processors) is true, then please tell me why certain exchanges will not accept nothing but Bitcoin. And even with that, there are a few major ones (BTC-China) that only accept BTC and LTC (before you go into the Bobby Lee and Charlie argument, I will state that Bobby, while being CEO, can't make these types of decisions solely. It requires the rest of the founders to be on board which were reluctant for a long time).
As far as acceptance, I will go with a somewhat good analogy. Betamax and VHS. Betamax was hands down the better technology, but they didnt have a controlling market share nor did they have the marketing that VHS had.
The Litecoin is silver to Bitcoin’s goal is simply a marketing slogan, nothing more nothing less. You could just as easily say Xcoin is silver to Bitcoin’s gold, and it wouldn’t be an incorrect statement. This thinking is similar to the “Litecoin is too big to fail” dogma, as we’ve seen with many of the technology giants that have been surpassed by innovative and forward thinking competition, this could change very quickly. I don’t look at Litecoin having ATMs as being a huge deal, as most people are looking to install Bitcoin ATMs. For Litecoin to compete with Bitcoin in the ATM space, they need to hope that Bitcoin ATMs are made to support Litecoin. If Bitcoin ATMs can be made to support Litecoin (and duh they can), then there is nothing stopping them from supporting other crypto currencies.
The only people claiming the "Silver to BTC's gold" are mainly trolls (I know you arent a troll, but others are). We have even had people in the community say we need to get away from this slogan because LTC can stand on its own two feet.
As far as the ATM's, they are really nice to see. But lets be honest....because cryptos as a whole are new who REALLY uses these? They are a niche market right now that may explode in the future, but right now are just a gimmick.
The rest of this paragraph can be related to betamax versus VHS again.
Yes Litecoin’s network speed dwarfs that of other Scrypt coins, and it is likely much more secure than those. However, I think it is silly to focus on only Scrypt coins. There are other innovative and valuable alternative crypto currencies that are not Scrypt-based. Some of the newer & most popular ones you can’t even mine them at all (like PoS coins). Making that a reason to be better than another ALT coin that does not have mining is like Mike Tyson fighting a baby. You can’t mine those coins, so how is Litecoin being the most secure Scrypt coin a good selling point? Maybe it is a good selling point versus all other Scrypt coins, however most of those are crap and everyone knows it.
I think you mean network hash rate in the first sentence (I'll just assume thats what you mean)?
The problem with PoS coins is that these still arent a great way for distribution. Sure they alleviate the power issue, but you cant distribute these properly. IPO's are nice, for initial investors, and if you had a great marketing team you can get more people to buy, but its still a bad way to distribute. If the distribution can be solved, that coin will blow out LTC and BTC.
Litecoin is not a back up to Bitcoin. If a huge flaw is found in Bitcoin and someone attacks it, Litecoin is likely to share that flaw. I always thought Litecoin would be a good backup if Bitcoin somehow was flawed because of it using a different algorithm. After learning more about this, I do not feel that is the case anymore. The encryption algorithm is the least likely place that a huge vulnerability will found. Cryptography is studied in academia much more so than Bitcoin’s source code, and the best and brightest are studying it... cryptography is no walk in the park. Short of quantum computing, which is unfeasible in the next 30 to 40 years, the encryption algorithm will not be the weak link. Furthermore, since Litecoin feels so apt to follow in Bitcoin’s steps, a huge percentage of the code base is shared by the two. If one goes down, the other is likely to follow. You may say… well if Bitcoin dies then all crypto currencies are doomed, but I am not so sure that is the case. Where other companies have failed, others have gone on to innovate and change the industry forever, even becoming bigger and better than their predecessors. Crypto currencies will certainly take a hit if Bitcoin dies, however it will not be the end of this movement I am certain of that.
I already stated that the code used is I think 2 versions behind in case there was a serious flaw. With the amount of talent in both coins I seriously doubt there is any issues however. But the added advantage is again all the devs work together to help both coins.
FYI quantum computing will be coming sooner than 30-40 years..........
And if BTC dies it may not kill the movement, but we will see a SERIOUS setback as a whole. To state otherwise is just ignorance.
As to the Litecoin Association being a good reason to support Litecoin… are you kidding me? Have you seen all the drama and mess the Bitcoin Foundation has had going on... I’m sure everyone has. I would venture to say that at this point the Bitcoin Foundation is hurting Bitcoin more than it is supporting it. When people form centralized foundations for decentralized technologies, it goes against the original spirit of decentralization and crypto currencies for which Satoshi set precedent for. As to Litecoin having a better community than any other alternative crypto currency, I beg to differ. I never felt welcomed, and was often chastized for my opinions. Although Coblee was very nice when I met him at the Bitcoin 2013 conference, he literally ignored me after that. Even when I was pleading to the developers to comment on adding new features to Litecoin. Honestly, before Litecoin jumped up in price in November/December 2012, Coblee was nowhere to be seen in the Litecoin community. Once the price started to rise he suddenly showed up and started making an effort. I have no problem with that, but I couldn’t help but notice the coincidence. Anytime I tried to bring up controversial opinions or suggestions I was met with opposition mostly from early adopters. Furthermore, I feel like the Litecoin community is a big “click” and the really early adopters are much more likely to support each other on controversial matters than new users, and this is alarming considering Coblee is in this group. For instance, Coblee seemed genuinely excited and even encouraged me to make my physical Litecoins at the Bitcoin conference in 2013, even stating that he wanted one! He completely ignored me after this, only replying to one of my controversial posts when the ASIC debate was at its peak. I have seen him supporting Smoothie and his ventures, and even the new “Coinographic” guy, but he never once supported me publicly- only privately in conversation and then ignored forever. Again, this brings me back to there being a Litecoin “click” that is hard to get into… I couldn’t even after spilling blood, sweat, and tears for them.
This really hurts man and you know better. I as a main member of the Litecoin Association you know very well that we operate in a completely different atmosphere than the Bitcoin Foundation. The LA, unlike the TBF, are not associated with the developers. We are here to educate and help both LTC and cryptos as a whole. This can be shown by the MANY initiatives we are involved in from charities, to community projects, to marketing and public education. None of us are paid for our work at all. And we have raised thousands of dollars to help quite a number of people and organizations. The LA also hosts and pays for Litecointalk on top of that. We have raised funds for the development team as well, who in turn donated to the P2Pool developer which helps BTC and other coins that use the code.
As far as your business and interactions with Coblee, I can't really comment at all since for obvious reasons I wasn't involved in all of that.
Faster block times are no longer a good selling point, as there are other coins with faster block times that don’t have a huge problem with stales etcetera. Anywhere in between a minute and two and a half minute block time does not suffer from the things that Litecoin says will happen if they go any faster, at least not to the point where it is a huge problem. Everyone knows by now that Litecoin confirmations are less secure than Bitcoin confirmations. Furthermore, many Bitcoin payment processors process payments without any or as little as 1 confirmation, making some Bitcoin payments instant. I don’t see this as good as a feature I had originally thought, as many coins have come out that were faster and didn’t completely fail. Along this same line of thinking, the statement that Litecoin had a fair release… how is that even a feature? That is just default common sense for any developer developing a crypto currency if they want it to succeed. Not having a fair release is a sure way to death, as was learned with the alternative crypto currencies that came before Litecoin. Since Litecoin was released, I feel like there were numerous even more fair releases than Litecoin. So again, this argument lost its appeal to me.
Not really sure what the argument here is. You used the argument that we are a copy of BTC, now you are saying we are BTC with a few extra incentives (faster block times). So small innovations like this arent work mentioning and instead used as a argument AGAINST BTC?
"Everyone knows by now that Litecoin confirmations are less secure than Bitcoin confirmations." --> This statement is pure bullshit and has no basis what so ever. I am not even sure where you came up with this. As a matter of fact, there was a coindesk article that stated a company has found a way to REVERSE BTC payments, which has a much lesser chance of succeeding with LTC.
As far as the release, Ive addressed that and can elaborate in another post if you really need me too (ive already typed it up in two or three posts here in Bitcointalk, as well as Coblee addressing it).
For those of you that think this may be FUD, I can tell you I currently do not have a balance above zero in any crypto currencies, and this is my non biased opinion of Litecoin and why I have stopped supporting it. Again, I must stress it was a hard decision as I have been supporting it for so long, and even got some of my friends and family invested. I am starting to regret that now, I am going to have to point them to this paper as I would feel horrible if they are left holding the bag. I can only really suggest Bitcoin at this point, anything else is really risky and it’s too early to tell who will rise to the top. I suggest putting a small percentage of your coins into projects you find interesting or innovative. It is going to take something truly innovative to supplant Bitcoin, and by coincidence Litecoin as well since they are content blindly following Bitcoin. I have a feeling this day will come sooner than we all think.
I dont really consider it FUD (except the LTC confirms you stated in the last part, I have no idea where you came up with that), but it is in no way unbiased. You claimed you were "shunned" by the community because some people didnt agree with you trying to get gimmicks incorporated into the Litecoin code base (which again would require a hard fork, which I again have addressed). And you have some sort of feud with smoothie, which im not touching with a 100 foot pole because thats between you and him.
All in all good post and I appreciate the time you put into this. But this is really nothing that I have not seen nor addressed before. I took extra time in addressing you because you put a tremendous amount of non-trolling effort into this.
As for your last few comments, you are really doing you family and friends a disservice by not getting them involved with LTC. The coin itself will increase in value BUT more importantly it can and will be used as an alternate form of currency to fiat, as Bitcoin is meant too.
I hope that some of my comments have made you have a change of heart. You know that I personally work very hard for LTC and cryptos, and this infighting of coins does NOTHING for all of us at all.
