What do you do with a litecoin?

[madwaloo]

I'm a total newbie and non-techie/non-gamer.  Love the idea of cryptocurrencies. 

Please excuse my ignorance, but why does anyone want litecoins?  I know you can sell them for bitcoins, which is what I plan to do.  But who would want to buy my coins and why?

Thanks in advance for info.



Bitcoin address:   115stzbruWvMSsVFo4JgumMR7KUziMaQer
Litecoin address:  LbdvgPAmdUDz8qhuseGdaa5CtCZBK4P3KA

[Durendal]

Because they act as an alternative to Bitcoins. As the analogy goes, gold is to silver as Bitcoins are to Litecoins. I suspect once ASICs hit the market and GPU Bitcoin mining becomes obsolete, Litecoins might rise in popularity since people with GPU miners will switch to mining Litecoins.

[molecular]

I think people buy litecoins to sell them to even bigger idiots.

EDIT: I'm not sure, though. There might be something to it. Maybe at some point litecoin will have some sort of an advantage (although I can't think of one now)

Disclaimer: I still hold some LTC since the early days of litecoin.

[matthewh3]

I'm a total newbie and non-techie/non-gamer.  Love the idea of cryptocurrencies. 

Please excuse my ignorance, but why does anyone want litecoins?  I know you can sell them for bitcoins, which is what I plan to do.  But who would want to buy my coins and why?

Thanks in advance for info.



Bitcoin address:   115stzbruWvMSsVFo4JgumMR7KUziMaQer
Litecoin address:  LbdvgPAmdUDz8qhuseGdaa5CtCZBK4P3KA

You could argue the same about bitcoin.  Bitcoin is just a more mature and more used alternative to litecoin.  Yes more merchants accept bitcoin but litecoin proliferation is growing and it's still under one year old. 

[BlackBison]

you cant really do anything with it right now except sell it or hoard it.

regardless of what the majority of the closed minded bitcoin oligarchy have to say, if bitcoin is to survive in the future there will HAVE TO BE competitors to challenge it. all true innovations sprout copycats and rivals, some of which might even supercede the original.

if there are no other successful cryptocurrencies then the idea is not going to have any legs and bitcoin will eventually fade away.

so far litecoin is the only real challenger (and it aint much of one right now to be honest). needs more services to accept it..

[ethanblack]

In theory diversification, but in practice litecoin offers very little of this.

[finkleshnorts]

Litecoin has, as far as I know, zero unique features. They just changed some of bitcoin's numbers around. Faster confirmation times is the main selling point, which isn't much of one.

You can say that bitcoin and litecoin both are bought by people willing to sell to bigger idiots, it's true. I do it with bitcoin (I'm a bigger "idiot" than the people who discovered bitcoin in 2009, lots of people have still never heard of bitcoin). But the whole point of bitcoin is missed whenever that argument is made.

The greatest value of bitcoin, imo, is it's revolutionary protocol. It is potentially very useful to people who do not speculate at all (in other words it can be useful to people who only plan to hold bitcoins for a few hours). It can be used for transmitting money internationally for cheap and for chargeback-proof payments, to name a couple of things. Litecoin offers NOTHING new in this regard, besides the negligible allure of the idea that if were I to buy a latte in some futuristic world with bitcoins, the coffeeshop could have waited for 75% less time if they had only used litecoins (2.5 minutes is still a long time to be standing at the front of the line at a cash register). Bitcoin has this problem (it can hardly be labeled as such, at this point) nipped in the bud with zipconf and future services.

So yes, it is a much more glaring "pyramid scheme," if you will, than bitcoin is. I realize I could be an "early adopter" of litecoin right now. But I think litecoin is utterly pointless. They have a snazzy slogan, the whole silver thing, which makes sense on the surface. But really, litecoin's allure is actually the misguided notion that by buying litecoins now "while they are cheap," you can be an "early adopter" again, since you missed the boat on bitcoin. It's just pump-and-dump bullshit, man.

It'll putter around for a while, maybe a few years. You could probably profit some on it if you time your moves right.  But it's so unoriginal that it's painful.

[betatest512]

i sell them for bitcoins.

[bitcool]

For one thing, it provides great opportunities for traders in the cryptocurrency world. Who doesn't love volatility?   

Beyond speculation, what you want to do entirely depends on what you and the other party want to exchange. For example, you could buy silver from me    https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=98607.0

I still remember when I bought a few hundred dollars worth of bitcoin using Coinpal @ 30c/btc, my friends laughed at me: "what are you going to do with THAT?"

Right now, there aren't many sellers price their goods and service in LTC because it's new and price fluctuates a lot. All currencies are backed by either (governmental) violence, or consensual confidence. The longer Litecoin survives, the more confidence it musters, and the wider adoption it will enjoy.

Of course there's always risk of failure and losing all its value, everybody knows that and the current price reflects the risk to a large degree.     

BTW, after having a few transactions, I do find Litecoin kind of sexy, it's faster, simpler to mine from any PC but more difficult to do as a "professional miner" on a larger scale. Litecoin users seem to be more lighthearted and optimistic too.

[Greedi]

its not all true what you guys say.. there are more and more services that take LTC

https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/List-of-Litecoin-related-services

^ and this is just some of them, many is not added yet ^

[MegaBrutal]

I started to mine Litecoins... It doesn't take much energy to mine them, practically it's free. And who knows, maybe its price goes up? I make profit. But if it's not, then I didn't lose much.

[btrash]

in terms of popularity it seems like its bitcoin or bust

litecoin is mostly supply based (people just want something to do with CPU time) rather than demand based

[Sherkel]

Speculation is another reason. I got 1000+ while the were closer to 0.001 and now they're closer to 0.004; I also bought some at 0.007 before they dropped. Of course the same kind of speculation can be done with Bitcoin, but the variance and current increase in popularity may attract speculators.

Used to also be good for CPU mining. They're still better than SHA-256d currencies for CPUs, though. I think GPU hostility probably made more laypeople eager to mine and adopt it but that's just me.

[bradmurmz]

I think litecoins will catch on once bitcoin mining is unprofitable unless you are using an FPGA.

[bitarrow]

where can you buy LTC ?  only BTC-e ?

[Winterfrost]

where can you buy LTC ?  only BTC-e ?

The only other exchanges for litecoins that I know of are bitparking and Vircurex. Oh, and there's probably a #litecoin-otc IRC channel too.

[bitarrow]

where can you buy LTC ?  only BTC-e ?

The only other exchanges for litecoins that I know of are bitparking and Vircurex. Oh, and there's probably a #litecoin-otc IRC channel too.

thanks.
ill prolly pick up a few thousand. what the hell, ya never know

[AntiCap]

Is it still possible to mine litecoins with a regular computer?

[Prattler]

Only good use for litecoins would be to buy some bitcoins.

[AntiCap]

How so? Isn't competition a good thing?