TheMage pointed me to this thread. I figure I should correct some facts.
Yes, it was my brother, Bobby, who claimed the most of the Chinese exchanges are faking their volume. Given the depth of the order books, it's very likely that this is the case. But this affects both Bitcoin and Litecoin. It may be true that it affects Litecoin more than Bitcoin as OKCoin's LTC volume is ridiculously high. And it looks like coinmarketcap.com's volume does not include OKCoin:
http://coinmarketcap.com/volume.html#ltcThe reason why Litecoin's launch is fair is because it was publicly announced AND binary/source publicly distributed days before the launch. At launch time, almost everyone that cared about alt currency at that time was ready to mine litecoins the second I released the config params for the genesis block. So maybe Litecoin has a small instamine, but those instamined coins were distributed as fairly as possible at the time. Sadly, NONE of the copycat altcoins that came after Litecoin copied this critical feature of Litecoin. Most of these newer coins were launched to a small community or just the devs and were instamined by that small group. Others we premined.
And people like to spread FUD about the fact that someone was GPU mining litecoins at the start. A while ago, I did a difficulty analysis of the Litecoin start and showed that it was extremely unlikely that someone was GPU mining. The hashrate and subsequent increase matches the thousands of CPUs that were mining Litecoin at that time. If someone can find that thread, please post it here. I've said this many times, and I will state it again. I did not GPU mine Litecoin at the start and for that matter, I have NEVER GPU mined Litecoin at all. I did have 8 GPUs back then and was mining Bitcoin with it until I retired them early last year. Actually, if you want proof, you can ask Roger Ver. He was hosting my GPUs at his memorydealers warehouse. And I had them set up to mine bitcoins and left them there mining bitcoins and never touched them until 2013. And I don't have any vested interest in ASIC hardware. The reason for not switching PoW algorithm is because the risk of hard fork.
The reason why I chose Scrypt for Litecoin is more so because Litecoin needed to be mined by a different class of hardware than Bitcoin than it is because it was ASIC-resistant. I never believed Scrypt was ASIC-proof. The ASIC-resistancy was important though and it helped delay ASICs for as long as possible. The reason why that was important was because you need the coin's early miners to be as decentralized as possible. Why? Because in the beginning, the miners are the users. These will be the people that support the coin and help spread it. If the coin started with only 100 people able to mine it, then it won't go anywhere. As the coin matures (like Bitcoin and now Litecoin), the user base is no longer the same as the miner base. And having a more centralized miner base is not a big problem. Security of the coin is determined by how much money is spent protecting it. And ASICs helps with security because it makes it easy for people to pour a lot of money into mining hardware. But remember, centralization of miners does not mean the coin is centralized. The user base of the coin is still decentralized. If the miners decide to make a change in the software that people don't like, the majority of the user can choose to not accept the new version. Sure, with 51%, a miner can double spend his own transactions, reject other blocks, or do transaction withholding attacks, but it would be financial suicide to do that. So this is why I welcome Scrypt ASICs. I think the value of the security it brings outweighs the mining centralization that comes with ASICs.
So why is Litecoin valuable today? Here's what I think justifies Litecoin's maketcap and why it will stay #2 behind Bitcoin for the foreseeable future:
- Litecoin's trade volume dwarfs most other coins.
- Litecoin is supported by a huge number of exchanges. No other altcoin comes close.
- Like the comparison or not, Litecoin is silver to Bitcoin's gold. Having a cryptocurrency trading pair is important for arbitrage reasons. Litecoin is playing that role today. It's hard for another coin to take over that role.
- Litecoin is supported by payment processors like GoCoin and, if I can help it, Coinbase. Payment processors are critical in the path towards mass adoption.
- Litecoin is accepted by a huge amount of merchants. Look at http://coinmap.org/
- Litecoin has ATM support.
- Litecoin is protected by its own network of hardware dedicated to Scrypt mine. And Litecoin's hashrate dwarfs that of other Scrypt coins. The amount of money spent protecting Litecoin will increase substantially with Scrypt ASICs.
- Litecoin runs on well tested codebase. Because it is basically Bitcoin with a few changes.
- We have a great dev team and an awesome Litecoin association.
Some of the altcoins come close with respect to some of these points: nxt (devs, hardware), dark (trade volume), doge (merchant processor, atm, devs)
But no other coin really comes close to having all of these features.
And of course, Bitcoin is by far ahead of Litecoin. I never expected Litecoin to overtake Bitcoin. I always envisioned it as be used side by side with Bitcoin just like silver and gold. As we are already seeing, Bitcoin will not be able to handle all the transactions required for a global payment system. This is where I see alt currencies can help. You need other cryptocurrencies protected by different hardware networks to help with the transaction load. Naturally (because of the price of Bitcoin), the more expensive transactions will be on the Bitcoin network. It's more secure but it also has a higher fee. This will push cheaper transactions to other networks. I think there will be 3 currencies that will be used for 3 types of transactions: buying expensive things like houses/cars, buying gifts/meals/drinks, and microtransactions/tipping. And today, these 3 currencies will be Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin.