Definitely, Litecoin is not a Bitcoin contender. When they say "Litecoin is silver to Bitcoin's gold", it clearly show they can't or they don't have interest in to be a Bitcoin contender or surpass the Bitcoin leadership.
There are a lot of threads here claiming Litecoin is dying or is dead. I disagree. Litecoin is still alive, it's still maintained, it's in the #3 at market cap and its acceptance is much larger than any other altcoin. But I agree in an important aspect: Litecoin suffers of a lack of vision. Claiming it doesn't need development and it just need adoption clearly show this.
They need to show why they are here. They can say they use Scrypt instead of SHA-256, they have a fast block generation and related thing. OK, this in 2011 was some innovation. Also, they had a fair launch, with no premine (in opposite to ixcoin and Tenebrix, for example). But, and after this? Just sit and watch Bitcoin development, see if the magic of network effect works and merging some commits from the upstream? They're going to nowhere and eventually will be surpassed by another altcoin.
In my opinion, contenders to Bitcoin today should have some of this characteristics: annonymity / privacy, scalability (some way to avoid blockchain bloat), sustanaibility of mining, or other instruments to difficult attacks against the network.
Pretty good post, but a few corrections for the "legendary" trolls here
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1. Really its the number 2 marketcap, ripple does not count because their company owns the vast majority of coins (Auroracoin effect going on here).
2. There is a vision, the whole "doesnt need development" that Charlie said on twitter was out of context. What he means is that Litecoin does not need serious changes to the core. But we do need more third party applications and development. See number 4
3. LTC devs work with BTC devs, and we adopt the same core security measures as bitcoin does which is more important then additional features that can be implemented via 3rd party.
4. bitcoinist.net/litecoin-association-appoints-new-development-team-director/
5. Too tired to post anymore
6. Night all!