Topic: Bitcoin vs LiteCoin vs ... other cryptocurrencies (Read 2565 times)

As long as you know the truth. It's up to the free market, period. All this 'I'm not him, but I KNOW what was in his heart' nonsense needs to just disappear.

This depends on what equipment you already have vs. how much money you want to invest in mining. Also, important are your goals for mining. Are you trying to gain mining experience? Are you doing it as a way to make money?

I would say getting into mining is very challenging now because some large very organized companies continue to push the level of competition up. If you have cheap power and want to start today you could probably use your GPU or buy one today and be mining Litecoin pretty quickly. Buying a Bitcoin ASIC is a bit more challenging but I hear some folks are shipping units they have in hand. The thing about Bitcoin mining is that the ASIC revolution is really just getting going so making money off your ASIC investment is going to be hard. Litecoin is more of a long-term game because it just boils down to electricity and hardware costs. Hardware that is unlikely to be supplanted for a year or more.

Which one should we mine as a starting miner?

Yes, there is a reason to support Litecoin.

I've posted my thoughts on this often, but I'll reiterate them. In the earliest days there was only Bitcoin and a growing number of supporters. Since Bitcoin is not centrally controlled the opposite is true: no one owns anything about it. The code behind its implementation is open source. Anyone can view, modify and use (or re-use) the code and protocol. After Bitcoin began to gain notable value, around $1, it didn't take long for imitators to pop up. I believe the first was IXCoin.

Many of us in the community at the time predicted such as inevitable, but were not worried about it. The reasoning was that although anyone could easily copy the implementation of Bitcoin, they could not easily copy adoption and support. This is because there is nothing to stop a competitor challenging the new competitor, ad infinitum. Rather than always chasing the newest copy it only made sense to stay with the one with earliest market lead, which would have greatest network effect, number of holders, businesses accepting etc. To beat an established coin a competitor would need to bring true value in some way, something the established coin didn't have.

Our prediction proved correct. IXCoin gained little value and never any real traction. More alt-coin versions popped up, some deviating much more widely from Bitcoin than IXCoin which changed little. One was Litecoin. This coin seemed to be the first where the creators truly tried to improve how Bitcoin worked. You can read up on the differences, but among the main ones are a lower time between blocks and different hashing algorithm (Scrypt) to change who could most efficiently mine the coins.

Litecoin gained little traction, just the same as the other alt-coins. People just didn't see any coin as offering enough of a compelling reason to leave Bitcoin. I was among the group that pooh poohed all alt-coins and paid them little attention.

Then came the community disruption of the announcement of a new Bitcoin Foundation. Needless to say the apparent move toward centralization of power in a community believing supremely in decentralization caused a huge uproar. I was among those strongly raising objections with concerns over unchecked power. This issue challenged the entire project with talk of hard forks and more.

It was during this period that it dawned on me alt-coins could serve a real purpose and have a value Bitcoin never could: by providing alternative. If there was only to be Bitcoin forever, then any single group with growing influence and power could steer it for better or worse for all involved. I saw alt-coins as solving that problem. As a natural part of the free market Bitcoin relied on they could regulate unwanted behavior as free markets do, by providing options and competition. I outlined all this in a post here:

Solution to The Bitcoin Foundation (the announcement)

I vowed to promote Litecoin, which had the most traction at the time, and it has gone from about $0.04 to about $2.30 currently, down from an all time high of around $5. I continue to believe alt-coins like Litecoin can provide value and strengthen the cryptocurrency community overall. I don't believe it's possible for every new coins to have similar success as that means infinite inflation. I do however think there will be a select few coins valued above all others, until such time as a new coin offers something truly unique and valuable in some other way.

Well he's not going to admit it, but ultimately that's what it was.  I was there from day one and read about it, etc.  It was greed, pure and simple, and hoping for some luck.

Alt coins add value to bitcoin because there are thousands of bitcoins tied up in alt coins that cannot be sold for fiat.  The more they get spread out, the more they are going to be worth.  Oh, and litecoins were not created for someone to get rich.  Do a little bit of research.

litecoin was created because someone got pissy that he missed the early days of mining bitcoins and wanted to create his own gravy train.
 
litecoin misses the whole point of bitcoin.  It creates coins faster and more of them over the course of its lifetime, but again, because he was hoping to get rich.  I guess it's working out for him. 
 
Bitcoin's 10 minute block was a reasonable time so that slower networks could still participate and not get hosed in transactions.  Sure, transactions are a little slower as a result, but compared to transferring fiat out of a bank, it's a far sight better.  litecoin misses the point, and as a result convolutes and obfuscates new people coming to the bitcoin world.

That article is filled with errors and misconceptions, it's actually quite funny to read. I quote
"litecoin is the first scrypt coin" (um no, tenebrix is)
"alt coins can not succeed" (define success? litecoin is worth more than $2 per coin, and also it has a lot more coins outstanding than bitcoin, I'd consider that pretty successful)

I just learned about namecoin; I knew about it when I first learned about Bitcoin months ago... but not till recently did I really understand it. Reading the thread about satoshi's words on bitdns. I was quite amazed... shared cpu power, resources, etc. Wow what a thought. none of these new cryptocurrencies need to be competing for security all the currencies with similar POWs could be securing themselves, but it is quite amazing when they get attacked by powerful ASICs.

I'm figureing that namecoin was incorporated into Bitcoin for network rerouting at somepoint. right now it's not that useful since we still have to go through the normal openDNS system to get into the .bit domain. but I do think this thing is crazy, incorporating it on top of bitcoin, guarantees network security.

I personally think that there are indeed some alt-coins that add "real" value above Bitcoin, but most do not.  The most interesting for me is Namecoin which truely adds useful additional features to Bitcoin, but also PPCoin or Primecoin at least try to innovate in interesting ways (not just changing some parameters).

Plenty to read...

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/2013-08-22-mises-circle-the-problem-with-altcoins-why-none-can-succeed-279860

Hi,
Is Bitcoin the only real game in town at the moment, and for the foreseeable future? I've read that Litecoin is essentially the same architecture with some tweaks. Is there any point to support it? What about other cryptocurrencies?

There's a list here. Bitcoin is by far the most liquid. Anything else look promising? Is flooding the market with cryptocurrencies going to devalue the ones already in existence?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies

Apols if this has been answered/discussed elsewhere, feel free to point me to other threads.

Thx!
TheVault