It's amusing that some people who predict a lower price of LTC can't do so without pumping up another alt coin.
There's been a lot of chat about other coins and that is precisely why those coins will not rise any time soon; hardly anybody saw this LTC surge coming and that's why it paid so well! No-one was predicting $1 for LTC until recently let alone $10, $20 or $50. Many are making such claims and yet this run has already begun to stagnate, trade volume is dropping, it's off it's highs and has experienced some crazy downward swings, people are placing big orders for new hardware and the difficulty is sharply rising. Mining profits have already begun to take a huge dive.. if you're buying at these levels to hold and purchasing equipment to mine at the same time, you're about to get fucked twice.
The opportunity to make easy money has long passed. Even if you got in at 50c, you were catching the tail end of the surge despite how good of an entry price it appears to be. 50c buy and a $5 sell is 10 times return on your investment - still an excellent return by any stretch but those who got in earlier - let's say 5 cents given that's when I purchased in January, the return has been much higher. I began selling at $1 and had dumped everything by the time it reached $3. Yes, I sold early but no-one can predict tops or bottoms and a 30x to 60x return on my investment is much better than having bragging rights about selling at $5.50+ despite a few people calling me dumb and stupid in the trollbox these past few days.
This rally is running out of steam and no amount of people suggesting the possibility of it trading on gox will stop the slow down. It's naive to think people on gox are unaware of alt coins and it's very easy for them to xfer btc to btc-e to purchase ltc. It's not going to send the coin above $5 in the next few weeks and should gox even list it this month as was stated in IRC, that rally will likely be short lived and not return near as much as this run up has.
Fact is, very few people were interested in litecoin prior to last week. I purchased some coins in January and then some hardware in Feb with the view that perhaps, just maybe, I would be lucky enough to pay the cards off in 6-12 months. At the time I thought it was probably a stupid decision and a waste of money - despite it looking genius now, it was blind fucking luck. Of course, the hardware is now fully paid for and then some lol.
This is my prediction for the next week to 6-12 months - take it or leave it. Personally, I don't think LTC will ever see the light of day on gox and my prediction relies upon that.
In the short term, LTC will begin to trade lower and lower in price and volume. It will experience a few more sharp drops and then everyone will make a final dash for the door causing the price to tank below $1. It might experience a dead cat bounce before heading lower. Despite the lower price, the difficulty will increase and continue to rise as many people receive their new hardware they have purchased over the past week.
Faced with a shit return on mining (in comparison to before this week), they'll continue to mine because they have nothing to lose at this point - the money on hardware has already been spent and the memory of $5.50 LTC laser etched into their minds. They'll mine in the hope that another surge will occur in the future and they'll make their big money then! This ignores the fact that there are many more people out there now thinking the same thing. They'll ignore the fact that the people who get in at the very end, who buy at the top and don't get a chance to sell, will be waiting to offload any time to price spikes just to claw back whatever money they can.
People will begin to forget about Litecoin, others will finally accept they missed the boat, sell whatever coins they have remaining at ask price and move on. Difficulty will have dropped significantly from it's highs and Litecoin will once again begin to look attractive to mine purely on the speculation that it would be very profitable should it experience a sudden yet highly unlikely surge in demand.
Saving this for posterity.
