It may be indeed useless, or it may be not. Nice to hear your opinion on the matter. Mine is not so certain.
You don't need to thank me for my opinion, I'll give it whether you like it or not.
I'm not saying that I think Litecoin is a bad investment; I'm saying that from a purely technical standpoint it has nothing to differentiate itself from Bitcoin except the hash algorithm difference, which lends itself to weakness. (An algorithm inefficient on standard hardware opens up the currency to an easy 51% attack by custom hardware designed to use that particular algorithm) If you have evidence against that, please say so.
Lots of people mines with CPUs. You may not consider this "serious" mining, but it happens, and at least for those people, there should be some value in doing it.
"No one" was hyperbole, I understand that people do actually mine with CPUs.
"There should be some value in doing it"? Value is not brought in by miners; miners are brought in by value. The existence of CPU miners doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea to create a currency that allows them to feasibly profit from CPU mining.
More miners means more people, more human resources if you prefer, doing something they found valuable. That's the way anything becomes valuable.
It can, I agree, but not in every case. I mined Litecoins for awhile because it made financial sense. I thought the concept was useless and I sold every Litecoin I mined immediately. If you think that adds value to the currency, please explain.
In fewer words, it's the GLBSE, and there's a darn good reason for that.
So, just because bitcoin is hardcoded on the name, we should make separate projects for any other currency? Ok, fair with me, but I think it would be almost trivial to integrate other cryptocurrencies on the existing infrastructure, and it certainly would aggregate value to it.
Don't over-analyze that statement, it was just a tl;dr summary. Could other currencies be integrated? Yes. Would it aggregate value? I'm not so sure.
I know that all of us who are longing bitcoin would like that someday all the value in the universe would be measured in bitcoin, but sadly this isn't going to happen. There will always be lots of units of measure and people will be choosing arbitrarily between them.
And I think that a more complex cryptocurrency ecosystem would be beneficial for bitcoin as a whole. I tend to see it as in the free software ecosystem. Just because linux exists and is the kernel chosen by the big majority of people, that doen't meant that we should abandon projects like gnu/hurd, *bsd and every other competing kernel. On the contrary, the existence of alternatives and competition makes the big projects even more valuable.
Oh, I certainly hope Bitcoin doesn't get to that point, at least in it's current state - it's far too vulnerable to attack. I agree entirely with the idea of competition, but your analogy is misfitting. *BSD and gnu/hurd provide advantages that Linux does not. (Trust me, I use the former. FreeBSD is more secure, often faster, and significantly more stable than Linux in my humble opinion.) However, I fail to see (and if there are any please enlighten me) any advantages Litecoin provides relative to Bitcoin. Competition is incredibly valuable - spin-off schemes with no advantages are not.
Perhaps it could be based off of a running 48 hour average? 