i think what gives litecoin a bright future is that because it's one of the only (viable) alt out there that uses scrypt, it means that these new asics can't be used to exploit the otherwise low hashrate on the alt networks.
someone coud easily 51% an alt network based on SHA256 with -one- of these ASIC's, let alone two or three.
food for thought.
ur logic also makes a good case for PPC and the "proof of stake" concept... and agreed TRC is very vulnerable to an attack by anyone with an ASIC, but just food for thought... it could aid the development of the coin... as ASICs are already developed for the coin and hence people could mine it with ASICs at the speculative angle and protect the network from attack... someone generally needs a reason to attack a coin as well if they are to divert their hashing power away from the BTC chain (i can understand attacking a coin the community does not like due to premining or that the dev is scamming people).. but I think if a coin is to see a future it has to have fair startup, constant development (both patches to the code, and open source code for services), adoption by exchanges and pools... and probably a few other things that people are screaming at me for not mentioning
yet something like BBQcoin interests me in that there we have a chain that was 51% attacked yet is still alive and churning out blocks, it is essentially the TRC of LTC... and it is a great learning ground to play with low hashrates and mining setups. Allows people to play around with sending coins and transactions and the wallet.dat files etc.. and it is "a bit of fun" quoted by the original dev.
Ok so where am I going with this... essentially i'm in the thoughts that I think that we place a LOT of emphasis on bit and alt coins being worth $$ value and LTC I think falls into the same category as Ixcoin to a degree in this area... the community is somewhat made up of miners that enjoy the lower difficulty moments and high exchange to BTC rate so are keep to cash out LTC into BTC... yet there is a wide fan base that speculate that LTC will be worth more as BTC goes up (thus protecting the network and its value somewhat), and it is just that there is a higher ratio of investor speculators and market players to dumpers for BTC in LTC as opposed to IXC which is solely due to merge mining and lack of devs and investors.
Yes LTC offers a different hashing algorithm, but it is solely trying to be a currency coin copy of BTC. Crypto currencies for me are adopted by the minority of the world atm and all the altcoins offer insight into what can be done with a network of sharing, public openness of the blockchain yet maintaining a level of anonymity. I think we are still in the very early days, and a comparison that comes to mind is Napster. The way it was the music sharing software idea that changed the way we get, listen to and share music. But it was not long before people realised that you could share more than just music, soon the movies, books and other files, programs and games were suddenly available to share between each one another. Namecoin is a good example of what else one can do with the blockchain, and I think we will see more of what can be done with the blockchain over the course of time. BUT (and correct me if I'm wrong) It would take a hard fork of LTC to use the blockchain for other things right? is that not a limitation of LTC that it is only a currency copy like BTC...?? and all currently started currency blockchains? Am I correct in this thinking? Please do feel free to enlighten me as I learn seem to learn something new every day