Topic: Why is litecoin hyped so much when it doesn't add any value over bitcoin? - page 2. (Read 4555 times)

You do know encryption algorithms can be upgraded....right?

Besides...

SHA-256 can't be brute forced in your lifetime if the entire universe's matter were used to build a perfect supercomputer.

It would have to be some kind of bug in SHA-256.

Wait till quantum computers become mainsteam.

Every known algorithm could be broken, who knows.

With the speed that processing power is increasing these days, it's not insane to say that SHA-256 might be broken in a few years.

It "might not be". It is mind-numbingly "impossible" to get a key collision. Using an ASIC for this? You might as well use a Nvidia GTX 440, the relative odds are not much worse, and its a heck of a lot cheaper. You are not understanding the scale of difficult that is at play here.

Its like you buying 100 lottery tickets instead of just 1, and banking on winning the big one . . . . . with the odds of winning at 1 in a million million quadrillion.

monkey market makers maken move$$$..lol

And who exactly is doing this "regulation" of the market?

Mining is about the initial distribution of the coin. If you want to distribute something and make it a success, it NEEDS to be accessible.

Right now, even if you pay thousands of dollars and wait 1 year, it doesn't even guarantee you'll get an ASIC. It means that the next 50% of Bitcoin distribution (since we are around half-way there) is going to go into the hands a few elites. Litecoin mining though is easily accessible and the distribution of coins will be into a lot more hands. It means that there is less new people getting BTC through mining and more people getting LTC through mining. Bitcoin has the advantage right now, but reducing the number of points of entry into the economy is not a way of developing an healthy economy.

Exchanges are ok, but I'm not sure they can compensate right now for the current lack of mining accessibility. It's easier to try out this "new coin thing" downloading free software to test with your GPU than going to a private website where you need to send real money and identification to have the luxury of trying out this "new coin thing". And I'm not even talking about exchanges shutting down (Bitcoin-24? Bitfloor?) or simply having high fees (Virtex...).

Overall, I don't see why people are surprised that putting heavy "regulations" like the ASIC requirement is slowing down the market. Putting high barriers of entry slow down any market, it's the intended effect. Litecoin is simply a clone of Bitcoin with less "regulations" on its market. Since a lot of people around here like it when there is less regulations and barriers, Litecoin is like a breath of fresh air and it adds to the hype.

Hm... Can't wait to see the articles in Bitcoin magazine about Litecoin when it goes to Gox.

Exactly the same 51% attack issue exists in LTC, the main difference is you have less time between confirms to pull it off. Both coins will probably get hit by it one day as large pools start to centralize the hashing power.

If everyone solo mined it wouldn't be an issue, but most people point at a stratum proxy which is very simple to redirect to wherever you want, redirecting the entire pool's hasting power in an instant.

Until either of them is broken, I see them both staying.  There is plenty of room for both BTC and LTC and one doesn't necessarily take anything away from the other.  The market will sort through the clones and value them accordingly.

I've always thought that BTC will be able to function as a "gold standard" for future crypto-currencies.  LTC can serve the intended role of "silver" in that regard, and I think it's beneficial that mining LTC is currently more CPU/GPU friendly for the second generation of miners/supporters.  I think we will see future micro-payment networks that will reference this generation of crypto-currencies to establish base values, but we have a long way to go before prices stabilize and global trust in peer-to-peer currencies is sufficient.

When did this catastrophic near miss attack happen then? and by whom? First I've heard of it.

I sometimes wonder if satoshi didn't bail because he saw BTC getting too big to be safe. He left before it was even finished.

This first crypto-currency and low-capacity block chain are  lovely proof of concept and wonderful educational tools.

Ready to secure a 1b market cap? Its doing OK so far. By 10b we will have "account creation" FPGAs and maybe ASICs hunting for key collisions. Knowing there are 1b USD + accounts it might be nearly as enticing to brute force for keys as it is to SOLOmine for the network.

Able to become the "world currency" like some idealists here seem to hope?  not ever. Not even possible for the bitcoin blockchain to support 1% of global commerce.  The backbone model has more sustainability but it will never be more than one of many options.

Litecoin, a copy of bitcoin but more wasteful to secure (on purpose).  More wasteful to secure but just as easy (well simple if not easy) to attack.

Where do you see that going?

Having transacted tens of thousands of USD in LTC and BTC, I can say that, at least from my experiences, LTC is much better to use.

With BTC, I've run into confirmations taking 2+ hrs based on the law of averages amongst 6 confirmations. Comparatively, with LTC, the same averages yield much less variance, which is vastly more beneficial.

For most, its a simple difference, but very important for transactions, and pulling the funding out of crypto and into fiat. I've swallowed hundreds of USD in losses due to market swings because I couldn't pull out BTC fast enough. Whereas with LTC, this has never been a problem.

And you have the 51% security issues with BTC vs. LTC. Go look at the BTC blockchain. Its been so close to being forked and 51%'ed recently, its insane. Bitcoin purists don't want to admit it, but hitting 6 blocks in a row for a medium-sized ASIC company would be much, MUCH easier than doing the same on Litecoin.

No, with N=1024, r=1, p=1, you end up with a 128 KB scratch pad.  You can reduce this logarithmically by a factor of two by using the lookup_gap method of only the fly scratchpad reconstruction, but you also increase the computational effort exponentially by factors of two -- hence why scrypt is said to have time-memory trade-off (TMTO).

I trust Colin Percival's math on this one, and if you read the paper there are no obvious attack vectors beyond the already discovered TMTO.  By using a smaller value of N you should not compromise the security of the ROMix/sCrypt algorithms, at least not in theory.  Security geniuses like Solar Designer have been hammering away at sCrypt for a while and haven't discovered much else that can really be done with it.

TMTO does show that ASICs will have some advantage in power consumption and speed, but good luck achieving a 50 fold increase in speed while reducing power consumption 100 fold like we've seen with Bitcoin.

Litecoin will be here to stay for this reason alone, and there are no shortage of people willing to send thousands of dollars to the devs to keep the network operational and running smoothly.

Strawman question.

LTC has an incredibly low orphan and stale rate. Basically every coin with a block rate over 45sec has a low stale rate.

No longer true in the ASICS era.  The BTC network is approaching 20 TH.  All the scrypt coin hash rates combined, if redirected to BTC, would only be about 2 TH.

With respect to BTC mining, GPU's have become irrelevant

Why is having a low block orphan rate terrible?

Each one of those features differences you mention is significant,  you just don't get it that's all. The botnet point is wrong, it takes a lot of GPU tuning to mine scrypt, CPUs are useless, it's much easier to mine Bitcoin with a botnet. The BTC 10min block time is terrible.

In my understanding , ASIC will be broadly available till the end of a year, people can sell GPUs and switch to ASICs.
Other thing about ASICs is that the race just begun as ie 55nm ASIC are already produces and are much more powerful then BFL/AVALON chips, so people trowed their money on BFLs AVALONs and are stuck as pre-orders are not shipping (BFL), batch 3 of avalons are not on due and they are accepting refunds.., people not able to pre-order/buy those have a chance to skip first era of ASICs and jump straight to second era ...
LTC I dont see any benefits over BTC.
My main concern is not difficulty / hashing power, but central point of failure on both of them.
If US Gov can shutdown Bitcoin Foundation , who is going to continue dev and support of BTC (Single point of failure ) this applies to LTC and others.
You can argue that they can be relocated to some other country, but w/o US non of them will survive

 

Agreed.

The same is somewhat true for bitcoin, but of course if we decided not to assign monetary value to our assets, bitcoin (and all money) would be quite unnecessary. The fact that we do assign arbitrary value to things is part of what makes money (and especially bitcoin) work. So its tiresome to see people whinging about individuals with 50,000 btc, as if that's proof that bitcoin is a failure. On the contrary, large holders is a sign that bitcoin is healthy and does work as intended. As extremes are not good, I, no less than any froth-at-mouth litecoin advocate, don't like to see excessive concentrated wealth. But its not the end of the world.

Till the diff shoots up. Then what?