Topic: Don't hate me too much, but I think litecoin is superior to bitcoin - page 2. (Read 3479 times)

That's a contradiction! 

There's plenty of point in creating altcoins even if they don't have any advantages over Bitcoin - the creator has a chance of becoming a billionaire if it works! Other than that, I don't see the advantages for the community.

Almost any change can be done without messing up old blocks. In fact, I can't easily imagine one that couldn't be done that way.

I also wonder about this. I don't think it linearly increases, but it can be close enough. Also, what is Litecoin's additional overhead?

All in all, I don't think shorter confirmation times make a practical difference, as long as they aren't near-instant (below 20 seconds?).

+1

Akka:  The Voice of Reason!

by removing the 1MB limit you are not messing up all the old blocks. huge difference.

By that logic, removing the 1 MB max block size, which is going to happen and was advocated by Nakamoto, would make it something other than bitcoin.

According to the bitcoin wiki, the prohibited changes to bitcoin's protocol are:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

• Increasing the total number of issued bitcoins beyond 21 million. Precision may be increased, but proportions must be unchanged.
• Changing the bitcoin distribution algorithm such that the subsidy at any given time period is decreased without miner consensus and 3 years notice, or increased beyond improved precision of halving (lossy beginning with block 1,890,000).
• Any rule that adds required, explicit centralization. For example, a change requiring that all blocks be signed by some central organization.
  

A technical improvement that doesn't change the 21 million coin limit and helps bitcoin better meet its initial design goal of being a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash" which "would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution" does not change what makes bitcoin important and valuable.

no. it would create a hard fork, and would no more be bitcoin. it does not matter how many uses is or what they call it, its not bitcoin.

Does propagation time increase linearly with block size? If so, wouldn't the larger block size of more infrequent blocks result in just as much propagation time as a portion of the time between blocks?

It can technically do any thing, if there is community support for it.

no.

Remember bitcoin can adopt faster block times.

+1

In other words, you have no idea what the risks are or what it takes for a transaction to be reasonably considered irreversible, yet you have the opinion that Litecoin does this faster than Bitcoin, specifically "much much faster". Does that sum things up? An uninformed opinion is not of very much value.

I have some litecoins and I consider it a good experiment.
However some negative points about litecoin:
- they are too many litecoins and it is not so well suited to conserve value like bitcoin
- litecoin is overvalued at the moment probably because many frustrated bitcoin miner(asic related) went to litecoin mining and many buyer forget that now 8x more litecoins are produced than bitcoins
- litecoin is wasting much more energy than bitcoin with mining (asic mining is more energy efficient)
- attacks against the litecoin network is more easy with bot-net or Google-cluster systems
Especially bot-net attack are very dangerous because the attacker doesn't need to reveal his identity and it is not necessary to have his own network. An asic 51% attack like in bitcoin is less likely because it needs a high investiture and the attacker needs to reveal his identity.

Heh, for what it's worth, I'm not a millionaire or anything. Probably neither is Gavin given his comments about diversifying out of Bitcoin. Maybe Satoshi is, if he were to sell

It's not quite true that if you quarter block intervals you need 4x as many blocks to get the same security. I used to think that too, but the maths don't work out that way because blocks form a Poisson distribution. Our resident mathematician Meni Rosenfeld wrote a paper that tries to explain this here: https://bitcoil.co.il/Doublespend.pdf  - but basically 4 blocks in 10 minutes gives you more security than 1 4x harder block in 10 minutes.

Now that said, Akka is exactly right that the 10 minute interval is somewhat misleading. The real competition is credit cards which settle far, far slower. So why 10 minutes and not 2.5, well, it was a tradeoff between wasted work and block propagation speeds. Imagine a future where Bitcoin is very busy and the network is very wide and blocks are very large (and we have an optimised protocol, but still). Let's say it takes 1 minute for a block to globally propagate. This is sort of similar to how quickly BGP propagates and the BGP mesh is a comparable very large broadcast network. So now you waste 10% of all your work due to chain splits. With a 2.5 minute interval you're wasting nearly half your total work!

That advantage is largely illusory. Transaction times are not faster. Only Confirmation time is faster.

However, it's not the number of confirmations that matters for double spending protection. It's the cumulative difficulty of confirmations.

If you decrease the time between confirmations by a factor of 4, you need 4 times as many confirmations for the same double spending security.

The only situation where Litecoin offers a speed advantage is a high trust scenario where merchants only require 1 confirmation  for minimal security, and where the security provided by 1 confirmation greatly exceeds the security they require, but at the same time 0 confirmations is not secure enough.

Such situations are rare.


As for the slow confirmation times of zero fee transactions, Litecoin would suffer from the same problem if it had similar volumes to Bitcoin.



Doesn't bother me. I think that people like Satoshi, Gavin, and Mike Hearn deserve every penny of their wealth.

Litecoiners are profiting from their work.


I agree, but this is both an advantage and disadvantage.  

Too centralized, and mining can be corrupted by monopolies.  Too democratic, and mining can be corrupted by social engineering.  I'm not sure whether Bitcoin, Litecoin, or ppcoin strikes the right balance.

yes confirmation time

what are the odds of a transaction being reversed in bitcoin or litecoin?

lets say you accept a transaction from someone with zero confirmations, but you can see the transaction....

what can go wrong at this point?

can a transaction be faked? ie I am guessing you really do need to wait for one confirmation at least?

what are the odds of someone being able to fake a transaction that somehow manages to get one confirmation?

Can people stop talking about transaction time, when they are clearly meaning Confirmation time.

That's a misunderstanding we really have to work at.

Transactions are basically instant (in the order of seconds) in both Bitcoin and Litecoin and are faster as every other System available.

What you mean is confirmation time. The Time until your transaction is basically impossible to charegeback or be in anyway fraudulent.

Guess what, with a credit card this time frame is about 180 days. Yet I have never been asked anywhere to wait this 180 days until my transaction is "confirmed".

I though litecoin algo was much more ram intensive, so whilest building an ASIC for litecoin is possible, it would be much more costly, and not quite as quick because of the ram requirements?