Litecoin is notable because it was the first alt-coin.
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^ False.
Namecoin was the first altcoin of any note (IIRC, there were a few sort-of-altcoins before Namecoin, but Namecoin is effectively the first alt).
I personally would not consider any other altcoin to be even remotely safe to use and would never consider doing as much
Litecoin is PoW; specifically scrypt instead of bitcoin's sha256.
While Namecoin had an explicit purpose that was different than Bitcoin's, Litecoin was more of a technical and market exercise to see what would happen if you tweaked a few parameters and launched a new chain. Obviously (or at least, it should be obvious), the parameter tweaks (supply, conf-time, mining alg) don't matter in the longrun. I think that's becoming more and more obvious, finally, even to the fairly thick-headed among us.
