MtGox is the biggest exchange and I think they could play a big role in whether cryptocoins remain limited to 21 million or if their circulated supply continues to increase with the adoption of very similar blockchains that have their own coins.
Since MtGox is dependent on Bitcoin's success, it could be in their best interest to give up on the small amount of business they could get from supporting Bitcoin-altchains, in exchange for boosting Bitcoin.
Ethically, I think it's fine to ask an exchange to support Bitcoin exclusively, because providing exchange services to additional blockchains requires giving them precious screen space on the exchange site.
Giving screen space on MtGox to litecoin reduces Bitcoin's exposure to give it to a blockchain that is completely unoriginal, in being technically, an almost exact copy of Bitcoin, has very little actual real world use - with much fewer merchants supporting it than Bitcoin - and undermines the whole concept of Bitcoin-based cryptocurrency by discrediting one of its most attractive features: that there will only ever be 21 million coins.
I think all of the requests they get from litecoin miners has encouraged them to come to the decision to support litecoin though. In every Facebook post they make about their future plans, you see a number of people commenting, asking them to support litecoin, and each comment getting a lot of likes.
The people who want litecoin to do well are individually more motivated than the much larger number of people who don't want Bitcoin to be diluted by altchains, so are more likely to make publicly visible statements.
The addition of Litecoin or any other number of altcoins to the exchanges won't make any difference to combating arbitrage. That's because the arbitrage arises from friction caused by moving fiat around and not bitcoins.
For instance you can buy a bitcoin on Bitstamp for $101 and sell it on Gox $110 at the moment. A perfect arbitrage opportunity you might think but withdrawing USD from Gox is difficult and that's the reason behind the price gap. Adding altcoins into the mix won't change that.
+1
OP is just trying to raise litecoin visibility in the main forum. Move this thread to the garbage section where it belongs.
-1.
The post you responded to completely missed the point regarding arbitrage, which is that now instead of waiting a really long time to transfer USD from Gox to Bitstamp, one can simply transfer LTC to bitstamp.
Any difference in the price of BTC between exchanges is likely to apply to the price of BTC-alts as well, since price differentials are caused by factors that will affect all cryptocurrencies equally, making it unlikely that they would ever be useful for taking advantage of BTC arbitrage opportunities.
No, it won't happen. You might realise the reasons why but only if you sell your LTC and give yourself some time to evaluate situation in cryptocoin
and real worlds. For as long as you are holding LTC you will stay LTC biased. It is eventual profit of some sort that is blinding you from realising the
truth there. You might go as far as writting a tome of books about why LTC will be successful but it will contain nothing but crap with very little or
no connections with reality.
One can never realise the truth if he or she is holding onto something because that which he or she is holding onto distorts perception of reality.
HAHA, WHAT? Did you seriously just make the most n00b mistake of all?
1) Go sell ALL your bitcoins. Every last one.
2) THEN come back here and preach to us about how you can't talk about [LTC doom and BTC destiny] while simultaneously holding the coin.
Actually, the people who own BTC have no reason to be biased against BTC-alts if profit is their motive. If they really wanted to only profit, and had any reason to think BTC-alts had a future, they could easily trade their BTC for a BTC-alt, then join the hypers in claiming there's space for BTC 2, 3, 4 and 5.
They could then enjoy all of the profit that comes with coins they bought at 0.001 BTC each going to 0.01 BTC. Not investing in BTC-alts is missing out on an opportunity to make very big short term profits, whereas investing in them is not.