lol...
Litecoin has now caught up to bitcoin's run-up. Remember when btc tripled, but ltc hadn't budged? It just made the whole move in a week.
I don't know how I feel about litcoin... By design it's max value is 0.25btc. But I'd discount that AT LEAST 10-fold since there can't really be two valuable crypto-currencies unless they have very different properties, which ltc and btc obviously don't. So that's 0.025btc/ltc. It's at 0.0093btc now. And 10x may be generous. 50x might be more accurate.
The nice thing about Litecoin gaining some traction is that it's like a lifeboat. It functions almost exactly the same as Bitcoin, only on a smaller scale, so there's no need to take the arguably greater risk of converting to fiat for arbitrage.
Oddly enough, Litecoin should gain some credibility when GPU miners shift over to it precisely
because it's so similar. In doing so, it should also act as a stabilizing asset pool to Bitcoin volatility. Bitcoin's silver, indeed.
Edit: And if Ripple does what it proposes, the major Bitcoin exchanges may have much smaller roles to play; they'll be more of a gateway between fiat and cryptocurrencies, with the latter being easily traded around the Ripple network without ever needing to leave.
