Litecoins--Dead or Alive?

[Blaztoize]

I don't believe Litecoins to be anywhere near dead.. In fact, I personally feel that they are the most viable alt-currency currently available-- They just need an appropriate avenue. Don't fret, expand its usability, and watch it be a success. Provide LTCs with a purpose and the realized value will come.

[Tomatocage]

@Coinhunter (vorksholk)

They're just as useful as Solidcoins!

I don't know if he's Coinhunter, but he is a suspected/probable scammer and has an alt account called Never2sleep.  Dude got called out in this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77327.0

[Vorksholk]

To get a few things straight (although I don't think this will help anything):
1.) I am not coinhunter, I don't support solidcoin, I have never even used solidcoin.
2.) I am also not never2sleep, I lent him bitcoins and he returned them quite quickly. After that whole issue, I moved on to investing in more ensured things (relatively speaking), at the momeny hash king's bitcoin deposits.

As well, even if I was either of these people, I am only trying to ask whether Litecoins are a viable currency and whether people accept them, and I got my answer, thank you . Do you think there would be any demand for a text-based RPG that uses litecoins as an internal currency? Litecoins seem like a perfect choice because of their relative ease of mining/producing, and since they are cheap, they'd be an interesting currency for truly micro-transactions, and could be used as the true or secondary internal currency that players trade in. Just an idea that I've had rolling around for a bit of time now.

And BitcoinEXpress: why would I be a scammer? I have never scammed anyone... as well @BitcoinEXpress, not sure if your response was sarcastic, but LTC at the moment seem much more useful than Solidcoins.

[Rothgar]

Vorksholk,

That is a lovely idea.

Rothgar

[Vorksholk]

@Rothgar: you are talking about the text-based RPG? Thanks Do you know any kind of thing to link an amount received in LTC to a wallet to a certain address to writing a file? This is the one major roadblock I see in the way of the project...

[Rothgar]

I too am running into this type of issue.  I just need the website to verify that funds have been sent.  I want to keep the wallet on a separate machine.  I figure that I will need the server to run a full client to verify payment. 

Does anyone else have an answer to these type of questions?

[localhost]

if I rent a VPS to mine the litecoin, will the VPS service provider ban my account?  It's using KVM.

I good provider shouldn't ban you maybe if you was taking up too many resource's on the VPS?  Anyway it probably makes a lot more sense to use the money you would spend on the VPS to buy litecoin at an exchange.  You'd probably get more LTC at the moment.

A good VPS provider doesn't sell more CPU power than he has... In my country, at least, that's what VPS providers do (I saw offers in other countries where it wasn't the case at all indeed) - so a VPS is really just like a tiny dedicated server. No crappy random burstable RAM and CPU, you just get what you pay for.

As for the original question, yeah I think it's quite dormant. Steadily losing value and no recent news as far as I know. Also, hashrate has dropped quite a bit despite the release of a GPU miner.

[pla]

Does anyone else have an answer to these type of questions?

Someone else may have a stock storefront they can point you to, but I can tell you how I'd implement it...

You have the game running on server X.  You have litecoind (preferably stripped down to only accept the two RPC commands mentioned below) running on server Y (And although X could equal Y, that just begs to get hacked).

When someone goes to make a payment, you invoke the getnewaddress RPC call (remote this however you like - I'd probably go for a simple webservice wrapper rather than expose "real" RPC to the network), and tell the customer to send however many LTC to that address. 

Once a minute or so, you invoke listtransactions (you could hook this in a cleaner way and thus avoid polling, but seriously, not a lot of overhead here on the wallet-side) with only a tiny change to the litecoind source, but I'll presume from the nature of the question that you want to minimize custom coding here) and compare it against your list of outstanding payments.  If you have a match, credit the customer for their purchase.  Note that you can do almost all of that on Y and send a message (via Email for all it matters) to X on receipt, rather than having X and Y chattering constantly for no reason.
 
And as a matter of good practice, you really shouldn't keep more LTC on Y than you could stand to lose; Manually send its balance to a "real" account, preferably on a normally-offline machine, on a reasonably frequent basis (daily?).

Also, hashrate has dropped quite a bit despite the release of a GPU miner.

I would say instead that it dropped because of the GPU miner, which stripped it of at least part of its raison d'etre as a GPU-hostile alternative to BitCoin.  That said, you still don't have quite the disparity between CPU and GPU mining as you do with BitCoin, so I for one continue to have a lot of hope for LTC (or at least, only slightly less than I do for BitCoin, which too sadly seems to have jumped the shark already).


/ Sorry if this posts more than once, it gave an error on my first try...

[Rothgar]

Thanks pla, that was really helpful!!!

[markm]

Do you think there would be any demand for a text-based RPG that uses litecoins as an internal currency? Litecoins seem like a perfect choice because of their relative ease of mining/producing, and since they are cheap, they'd be an interesting currency for truly micro-transactions, and could be used as the true or secondary internal currency that players trade in. Just an idea that I've had rolling around for a bit of time now.

I have been finding that litecoins and bitcoins are both not very popular for games compared to the coins you can merged-mine since the merged-mined coins seem more "free", they are something people just get automatically as a side-effect of mining, instead of being the main product that "justifies" the cost of mining.

Basically once you get p2pool set up to mine bitcoins, you can add a whole bunch of other coins too as "freebies", and people mostly seem to prefer to use such "freebies" for games rather than their main coins for which they have to justify electricity costs and maybe also equipment costs.

-MarkM-

[Vorksholk]

Pla: thank you Not sure exactly how to implement this, but that logic will help alot

markm: I haven't really seen litecoins used for virtually any gaming aside from 1 or 2 sites, bit coins seem of course more frequent, but still not "common". Yea, I see what you mean, litecoins would be more for products not currency in a virtual game?

[markm]

I think it has to do with how much trouble it is to go cash them in at an exchange compared to how useful they are in the game. At some low value per coin the huge number of coins you would need to make the whole taking them to an exchange thing worthwhile starts to look like a lot of game goodies, and just spending them in the game seems easier and more worthwhile than going through all the exchange hassle for a few cents, especially with coins that are not perceived as really having any use outside of the game.

It will be very interesting to watch clans grow up around each coin, each trying to offer better in-game goods for the coin they are championing than the clans who back other coins are offering, as that could make the relative values of the various coin types change quite a bit in the game as compared to on the exchanges. On the exchanges people are mostly looking to maximize the fiat value of their holdings, whereas in games maybe people will, at least with the cheaper coins, be more interested in what specific goods the clans accepting a particular coin have on offer.

-MarkM-

[El Cabron]

35cents