A great coin because:
- Capable of four times as many transactions as Bitcoin in a ten minute period. Frankly if payment processors had adopted Litecoin in the past year current Bitcoin block discussions would be irrelevant (and likely the price of both coins higher). Anyone who has watched these discussions understands the immediate advantage of a network with larger transactional capability.
- Faster confirmation times. The only people who don't think this is important have never spent a single coin or they have patience that the average person does not possess.
- The faster block time of litecoin reduces the risk of double spending attacks.
- Anti-spam.
- Fast well established network. Current Hashrate is 1,643 GH/s. Since scrypt is memory intensive it is known to be approximately 1000 times slower hardware wise in comparison to SHA256. Fair comparison to the Bitcoin network requires multiplying that hashrate by 1000 (1,643 TH/s). The fact is for most of Litecoins history the hashrate has been relatively high and secure. Those comparing it to the Bitcoin network without considering this 1k factor are either being disingenuous or just ignorant of the facts.
- Continuous development look here at number of releases in past year: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/releases
- Upcoming new features and active development look here for whats happening in 2016:
https://litecoinassociation.org/data/roadmap.pdf - Longevity. Many coins have temporarily eclipsed litecoin as they were marketed for the purpose of increasing the fiat accounts of a small group and emptying the accounts of new users. Unfortunately this has been detrimental to crypto-space in general.
- Great community.
- Fully supported by GoCoin a growing merchant payment processor used by thousands of merchants https://www.gocoin.com/ as well as other processors such as coinpayments, Asmoney, Alfacoins and Coinify
- Liquidity. You can sell thousands and not crash the market. Maintains value. Look at the chart here indicating volume in the last 24 hours relative to other coins http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/litecoin/#markets in fact volume has remained high month after month for years.
- The speed, liquidity and value of Litecoin is useful to traders seeking arbitrage opportunities between exchanges.
- Now on coinbase.
- Upcoming release to include a on-chain adaptive block size scaling solution. This will substantially increase the transactional capacity of Litecoin.
- Fair release. In a crypto world of premined and ICO releases many appreciate this fact. The code was released well before the Genesis block was mined and everyone knew when it would be going live; therefore, individuals could anticipate and get their miners and software ready.
- It's primary function is to be a cryptocurrency.
- Still mineable in many western countries even after electrical costs are factored in. Here in Canada my Titans still make a profit long after shutting my Neptunes down.
- It will always maintain the integrity of the blockchain (no hard forks for special interests).
- Security.
All of that is useless if the price doesn't increase and hold.
People are not buying coins for those reasons, but for making money.
LTC is poor money maker, which is why it will eventually die despite all of its technical features/superiority ...
GET IT !?!?
And soon it will be sub $3
the $3 does not matter. It is the ratio of LTC to BTC which is currently at 0.00660 LTC to BTC ( er my prejudiced scrypt miner viewpoint don't ya know
) ..which is just dandy for me (at 3200mh LTC mining)
Thus IF the price dumps...then likely difficulty will go down I will make more LTC and it all evens out in the wash. The real 'catch' is does LTC have a "niche'
(that niche right now is 'speculation' mainly by chinese traders...as long as that hangs together....I should be golden.)
..also at your sub $3 price prediction likely no other asic makers will make more machines at that price point and any such would likely take 6 more
months to get up to speed on such a project....thus even more slack for current asic miners of the scrypt flavor mining LTC
(besides the current knc titans in use and the A4 coming out..that may/will add to difficulty of LTC mining)
So heck imho IF the A4 does come out and say they kick out them like 'toasters' and the difficulty goes up 2x and my profits dump by half.....so be it.
On the other hand, if the A4 comes out and they kick them out as 'toasters' and the difficulty goes up 2x and the PRICE goes up with its usual 0.00600 attachment
of LTC price to bitcoin price.
(got to love them china LTC speculators that use my KNC Titan scrypt miner railroad)
..well if BTC goes to say $750 usd the at 0.00660 (now) LTC ratio that is $4.95 usd
LTC....I can live with that even if the LTC difficulty doubles by that point in time. It still floats the boat nicely.
So IF you believe that the "niche' LTC has occupied with adoption and speculation (especially in China) and acting like the old saw "LTC silver to BTC gold" this will
all hang together in the future as it has for the last 2 years...hell even for 1 more year.....it all does just fine imho from my 'evil scrypt miner' perspective.
(I move 90% of LTC to BTC to be fair on my bets to those reading this post....fair for you to know this fyi)
HOWEVER.....IF we see $4.95 LTC imho we will then see a bunch of folk dusting off the asic chip design for scrypt and imho again we could very well see another
btc type crypto difficulty surge on LTC of epic proportions....but SO FAR the sweet spot the last ...heck ....2 years.....has been great for asic scrypt miners (if you
have them) and again it would take 6 months to pull up competitors scrypt machines anyway and out the door.....so you have that buffer as well.
There may be a crash at the bottom of the hill. on this 'runaway sled' .but till then ...just watching the crypto scenery as it goes by...but .damn am I making good time
To sum up, my KEY point is ...as lame as folk may think the use is....LTC does have a 'use' or 'niche' as a speculative coin....thus it needs the LTC foundation and
coding and infrastructure (mining etc) to keep that whole POW coin LTC endeavor going.
This also is true of BTC...ADOPTION IS ALL....or heck find your 'niche' ...without that ...there would be NO crypto imho of any flavor.
Anyway back to the sledding and watching the cyrpto scenery flash by....