As I write this, LTC Cap has doubled to $107,000,000 = not dead.
There is not a single good reason to put 2 times more money into LTC miners' pockets. Did LTC difficulty followed the trend, e.g. did miners
went out and bought enough hardware to double their LTC hashrates? No! So it is all, as said few times earlier, about speculation which as
an side-effect makes current LTC miners richer. They make 2 times more money than before and that's it. In a same way (speculation) LTC
market cap could be increased to $10+ billions but without real use of LTC the only ones profiting are smart speculators and miners. Pretty
much like mining UNO while difficulty is 10k or less and dumping it on exchange, or buying it for cheap and then putting sale orders at 200%
of buying price. One can make nice profits there ... and?
LTC is nowhere near dead but it is becoming less and less useful every week.
That is what matters. At some point, if LTC usefulness drops
even lower, other altcoins will come to light as a way better alternatives to BTC. PrimeCoin = 1 minute block time, neither SHA nor Scrypt,
mining it actualy produces useful side-effects, actively developed by known dev. All in all, when compared with XPM, LTC is an old tech. All
aces LTC community were pulling all this years (different algo, faster, more coins total) are no longer important. There are much better deals.
Difficulty has nothing to do with the price of a coin, not for Bitcoin and not for Litecoin. Difficulty however will catch on with the price because a lot of the Litecoin miners where actually mining with a loss so a lot of them quit, the second group will come back and in the meantime the first one deserve the extra value.
Less and less useful? Compared to which alt coin exactly? Bitcoin and Litecoin are actually the only coins I ever used to pay things with. Never had the option to pay with any other coin. You expect to see Primecoin next month on all major exchanges, payment processors build for it and merchants accepting it? Litecoin is on it's way for all that but you think that magically out of the blue people will think "nah, old tech lets switch to another coin". I guess I better also sell all my Bitcoins before the others realize it is old tech.