LTC "can" be more profitable than BTC. The LTC difficulty keeps swinging up and down as people jump on the bandwagon when the diff is low, and then jump off when the diff adjusts and it's not profitable anymore.
If the price of alt-coins like LTC would go up, then obv more people would stick with it, even thru a higher difficulty. The problem is that the LTC price isn't going up. It's staying the same. I read that as follows: No one wants LTC. If price drives difficulty (as it has been proven), and the price of LTC is remaining constant, then the LTC market can't handle hundreds of users switching their GPUs. People have been thinking for months that when ASICs hit, they'll switch to LTC, but they don't realize just how unprofitable that will be when everyone switches, and the price remains the same. Pumping the difficulty 10x won't increase the price any.
Sorry for my ramblings. Does that make any sense to you?
Totally makes sense. Would you happen to have any links on hand to threads showing the statistical significance/correlation of price:difficulty? Not that I'm doubting you, I'd just like some of the better threads from someone who would know.
Sure.
Excellent writeup of why
Price drives Difficulty. Originally written for BTC, the applies to LTC.
3 Month chart of LTC price, in
USD &
BTC. The BTC reward half happened right at the slight bump you see in the middle, but it quickly corrected itself.
Litecoinpool has a
Litecoin Difficulty Chart, but only goes back 2 weeks. You can still see the up-down-up-down in the difficulty. It's been like this since the reward half almost 2 months ago, but has leveled out some.
