people often forget, that you can actually use litecoin. it works
ltc can be bought with fiat money, traded secure, and can be sold for fiat money. there is also no big loss in this circle, because ltc has enough volume even for huge transactions.
anyway it wont be easy for ltc to keep the #2 coin behind btc. all the altcoins poping up right now
have some fancy feaures and gimmicks which may be useful in the next years or decades.
that's why ltc has to focus to be more simple than btc and more easy to use.
Please define "fancy features" and "gimmicks".
There are clear problems that Bitcoin has and there are projects who try to solve them, those are real issues:
1) Scaling (Which Cryptonite tries to address)
2) Privacy (Which XMR and DRK try to address; Stealthaddresses for example are easy to implement and have a real world value for every merchant, Bitcoin is conservative and limited op-return to 40 bytes and decided so far to leave it out of Bitcoin-QT but why doesn't Litecoin implement it at least? Why not at least improve the Bitcoin base?)
3) Centralisation
4) Userfriendlyness (Which XMR tries to address and prolly a lot of others)
5) Decentralised ways of trading smart contracts and co (Bitshares, NXT, Ethereum...)
6) PLACEHOLDER - there are prolly more.
So far Litecoin doesn´t even use the 0.9 branch of Bitcoin without any clear reason; why is that? It mitigates/limits important problems like the tx mallability issues (still not completly solved tho).
According to the Litecoin Devfund:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AnlrnfU-U6E-dGlKcXJTYXhLV3hPczF4bjVpTTBRTWc&output=htmlThere´s a balance of roughly 1800 LTC still, why don´t they get used to hire someone that tries to work on certain issues mentioned above? Or at least someone who ports over the current Bitcoin codebase.
If you take a look at the Github:
https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/commits/master-0.8compared to Bitcoin and other projects it seems pretty much dead, most commits are just merged Bitcoin PRs anyway:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits/masterPeople say Bitcoin is slow on development and conservative, but well, daily commits and a ton of work is getting in there every single day. I can´t see the same for Litecoin which says itself that its silver to Bitcoins gold.
Feel free to flame me - but that´s how i see it.