Topic: What do you do with a litecoin? (Read 4729 times)

Namecoin has some "real use" (buying .bit domains), however slim that use might be, taking the view that any commodity must have (had) a "real use" before being used as money to "bootstrap" the value, namecoin should be more apt to be used as money than bitcoin.

Bitcoin managed to bootstrap it's value some other way (10,000 BTC Pizza?), so I think above view has to be abolished or at least somehow modded.

All the AltCoins are good, they each teach us some thing or other and maybe some other good will come from one at some point. I doubt (at the low level of innovation of the to-date invented OtherCoins) any of them will be a serious competitor to bitcoin. Niche-product? Yes, maybe. Playground? Definitely. Objects of speculation? Yep, but for a very small group of people.

Okay have fun

Actually I've saved some to buy domains in the future.

so exchange for BTC and be done with them?

The same as LTC:)

What do you do with a namecoin? I have a few

Namecoin is less of a gimmick than the others. But, yeah pretty much.

So far we've seen more than half a dozen alt-chains, which one is not considered gimmick?  none?

Yes, but that's not saying much. Namecoin is more successful in my opinion, depending on how success is measured (not price).

I'm all for competition I suppose, but litecoin is certainly not that. It's a gimmick fork.

it depends on if one sees btc/ltc/etc. as the utlimate solution of e-currency, or just another step toward something like PerfectCoin.
IMHO, litecoin has been remarkably successful compared to other coins that failed, right?   

I haven't seen much action around Litecoin as far as real usefulness goes.  In that respect, it seems like a ponzi scheme where new investors pay for the returns of current holders.  There is no asset and there has been no attempt that I've seen, to actually use Litecoin for commerce.  There are a number of businesses that actually transact in Bitcoin.  It therefore has some value outside of its exchange rate.  I will admit, however, that I think a lot of Bitcoin's value is also driven by speculation.  It's not a stable market yet, but it has a lot better positioning than Litecoin.

You can always use e-wallets like Vircurex (link in my signature)
It supports Bitcoin, Namecoin, Devcoin, Litecoin, Liquidcoin, Solidcoin, I0coin, Ixcoin

are there any clients that can do btc, ltc, and nmc?  i tried one that did btc/nmc, but it required that the official clients were installed.

sure they still will, they just don't wont to buy them

People definitely do still want them, however people don't want them as much anymore I suppose.

if people don't want them, why are the diff doing up every time there is a diff change?

I don't know that it's wasted power exactly.  The way I see it, there's something like a domino effect going on: FPGAs are uprooting GPUs for the sha256d proof of work, while GPUs have just made their debut on the scrypt proof of work.  As for whether CPU-mining LTC is worth the trouble: look at the marginal power cost if the machine was going to be on anyway, or at the total power cost if not.  Should they ever hit the market, ASICs might well clobber current FPGA board owners, though since the scrypt proof of work requires much more memory, those board owners might be SOL (barring the Butterfly Labs metamorphosis trade-up offer).

An Atom D525 has a marginal power cost of only about 3W over idle for 5.5 kH/s, which (while small) is a net win.  Extrapolating current values, that's an expected payback of 18.62 LTC a month, which should cover even fairly outrageous energy pricing if the machine is otherwise left on anyway.  On the other hand, that same desktop with SSD and nVidia ION graphics has an active-idle draw of about 20W at the wall; this makes it a net loss even at 0.075 USD/kWh if the machine is not required to be left on.  (You can squeeze ~1 MH/s out of the ION mining BTC, but that's not enough to change the equation.)

Then there's always the gaming potential of a good GPU.  Let it mine for you when you're not keeping it busy blowing the living daylights out of something. 

Thanks for the info, and the link.
I think I'll switch to folding@home or something instead. That way it's not just wasted power. =)

4251.5232 hours at the current difficulty with 2.5 kH/s.
Source: http://allchains.info/calc.html

My laptop knocks off 13 kH a second, I have access to quite a few other computers, and I don't even bother pool mining LTC. I found out pretty easily it wasn't worth it to lag all my processes and waste electricity. Would I have mined under those circumstances back when Reaper didn't exist? Yes, and I did earn a fair amount. The difficulty is reaching new highs, though, and it seems to be GPU or bust.

If you have a dedicated rig with good GPU's, go for it, but otherwise, I think buying them is the best option.

I was thinking about average time. There was such a counter for bitcoin a while ago I seem to recall.