I have gone back and read through this this thread and looked at which accounts have which opinion on Litecoin.
A very interesting pattern emerges:
Old Forum User Accounts: Generally think Litecoin is here to stay.
New Forum User Accounts: Generally think Litecoin is going to be dead by the end of the year and (insert coin) is going to replace it any moment. None of them can agree on which coin is about to be the new #2 though.
This just shows us that new people who missed getting Litecoin cheap wish it were not number two, were not here for the launch, and do not understand how established LTC truly is, they only talk about features, and are frankly projecting their desire to be made rich by (insert coin) into a prejudice against Litecoin.
Anyone else care to speculate why new accounts think Litecoin will die and old accounts think it will live?
I'lll speculate:
1. Older accounts remember when there was bitcoin, litecoin, and very little else. They probably don't follow the alts as closely as those of us who've gotten involved in the last six months amidst the flood of new coins.
2. Older accounts are more likely to be personally invested in LTC and thus have a vested interest in defending it.
3. Those of us who are newer to the scene and learning as we go, are learning current news/information, not what was available 3-5 years ago. And that orients us toward the innovations among altcoins.
4. Mining the last few months has been more profitable with multipools mining alts, than X11 with Darkcoin and so forth. So most newer miners have a vested interest in these newer alts doing well, compared to LTC/BTC.
I don't mean to sound like I'm hating on LTC (have a few myself somewhere), but really, in all this thread I just don't see a defense of LTC being mounted besides brave words and inertia. Betting it will be #2 in 6 months? Come on, you have a 4X advantage at the moment. How about betting that LTC will still be 4X the #3 coin in 6 months? That would be a better test, whether LTC is holding relative to the competition or slipping.
Anonymity. Smart contracts. Decentralized Markets. Advanced wallet features. Faster confirmation times. No transfer fees. Merchant services. Debit cards. You can poo-poo these if you want, but in a competitive marketplace like we see in cryptocurrency, a plain-jane LTC cannot compete against the likes of Blackcoin, NXT, Cinni, CRY, Pesetacoin, Silkcoin and the rest. Humble little Piggycoin will trump LTC in enough time if the current trajectory holds.
LTC needs to give people a reason to hold it beyond comparing its' confirmation time to BTC. Do you understand the gales of laughter emanating from readers every time someone brings that up? Look at the block times of 99% of the alts and realize your Mark II altcoin, while an improvement on the Mark I bitcoin model, is a dinosaur compared to the latest models.