Why litecoin? Because you can't mine on p2pool without fees killing you (I have mined with 2*7950's diff/10 and sending 10LTC costs me another 10LTC in fees). Because you need a GPU farm to make real money, just like an ASIC farm in bitcoins. Because it's mining profitability is still lower than bitcoin regardless of ASICs. Because it's a ripoff that lags behind bitcoin "in order to ensure stability".
There, I hope I answered your question.
Topic: Why Litecoin? (Read 8770 times)
- The price is purely driven by speculation. There are currently next to zero applications for Litecoins. The only thing one can do with them is buying them on an exchange and hoping that they can be sold for more money at some later point. If I'd felt like gambling I'd rather use Satoshi Dice with Bitcoins instead.
I think this is a misconception. I started purchasing Litecoin because I have a monthly bill with Bytesized Hosting and they accept Litecoin. I bought them to spend and, to some extent, people like me are helping to drive the price up.
I wanted to chime in with my Ł0.02 too, so I wrote this article:
http://coin.furuknap.net/why-litecoin-has-a-place-in-the-cryptocurrency-community/
.b
http://coin.furuknap.net/why-litecoin-has-a-place-in-the-cryptocurrency-community/
.b
I like Litecoin because: transactions are faster (and that makes a huge difference); the blockchain is currently smaller; and it's unlikely mining will be controlled by a dozen ASIC-wielding maniacs. (If the price of entry into a crypto is too high, that's hardly secure.)
I don't like Litecoin because: botnets are much more likely to mine; I don't have a local LTC exchange; Litecoin Explorer doesn't have as great an API as Blockchain.info, making it harder to accept LTC payments; the client still requires 0.1 LTC default tx fee (changing with 0.8.1 I hope).
I don't like Litecoin because: botnets are much more likely to mine; I don't have a local LTC exchange; Litecoin Explorer doesn't have as great an API as Blockchain.info, making it harder to accept LTC payments; the client still requires 0.1 LTC default tx fee (changing with 0.8.1 I hope).
I own both Bitcoins and Litecoins, however, my personal preference goes toward Litecoin. My personal reasons for this have to do strictly with how coblee has released it. Pre-announced, and in the fairest way possible. I also have great respect for coblee for how he and his team are supporting it and how he has dealt with various issues in the past.
While Bitcoin is original and truly amazing, my only issues with it are things like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37333.0;all
Now, like all Bitcoiners, I realize that there was no other way, and I don't really mind. However, this makes me feel that Litecoin is more fair. Plus, there is still ~2.5 years left till halfing occurs, so there is plenty of opportunity for newcomers (who were brought in by the media attention to Bitcoin) to acquire it or mine it.
I also know that 0.8.1 is in the works, however, a lot of aspects of working on the client are complex and from what I gather, the developers working on this do not want to rush things and observe how Bitcoin network handles May 15. They are concerned for the health of the Litecoin network and do not want to end up with something like this: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-successful-double-spend-us10000-against-okpay-this-morning-152348
While Bitcoin as a currency/community can handle this due to it's huge support, something like this happening with a smaller cryptocurrency has a potential of destroying it. If not, it would certainly give enough weapons to the hostile part of the Bitcoin community to attempt to discredit it.
I support both networks and I think that communities should stop fighting over this. If your original purpose of this post was to find out which cryptocurrency you should use, I would say that you should use both.
While Bitcoin is original and truly amazing, my only issues with it are things like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37333.0;all
Now, like all Bitcoiners, I realize that there was no other way, and I don't really mind. However, this makes me feel that Litecoin is more fair. Plus, there is still ~2.5 years left till halfing occurs, so there is plenty of opportunity for newcomers (who were brought in by the media attention to Bitcoin) to acquire it or mine it.
I also know that 0.8.1 is in the works, however, a lot of aspects of working on the client are complex and from what I gather, the developers working on this do not want to rush things and observe how Bitcoin network handles May 15. They are concerned for the health of the Litecoin network and do not want to end up with something like this: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-successful-double-spend-us10000-against-okpay-this-morning-152348
While Bitcoin as a currency/community can handle this due to it's huge support, something like this happening with a smaller cryptocurrency has a potential of destroying it. If not, it would certainly give enough weapons to the hostile part of the Bitcoin community to attempt to discredit it.
I support both networks and I think that communities should stop fighting over this. If your original purpose of this post was to find out which cryptocurrency you should use, I would say that you should use both.
I am a strong supporter of both bitcoin and litecoin, although I personally favor litecoin due to some of the strong points listed above.
Litecoin is different than Bitcoin in some ways and came early enough so I can deal with it's existence unlike with all these new twattish altcoins.
However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.
Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future
However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.
Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future
Actually, I currently have less than 50 Litecoins. All my LTCs are wrapped up in Bitcoin ASIC pre-orders and/or I was broke so I had to sell them!
I just believe in it as a currency and a store of value, more so than any other ALT currency.
Somewhere there is a topic with the richest litecoin wallets, and there aren't lots of really big wallets.
Most will actually see it as a currency and want to use it that way.
Litecoin is different than Bitcoin in some ways and came early enough so I can deal with it's existence unlike with all these new twattish altcoins.
However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.
Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future
However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.
Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future
Actually, I currently have less than 50 Litecoins. All my LTCs are wrapped up in Bitcoin ASIC pre-orders and/or I was broke so I had to sell them!
I just believe in it as a currency and a store of value, more so than any other ALT currency.
I do think that litecoin is better than bitcoin if for nothing than due to fast confirmations. But I just don't think it's a wise idea to market any altcoins before bitcoin is fully established. MtGox plans to add litecoins in this phase are completely idiotic imo.
Litecoin is different than Bitcoin in some ways and came early enough so I can deal with it's existence unlike with all these new twattish altcoins.
However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.
Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future
However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.
Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future
Actually, I currently have less than 50 Litecoins. All my LTCs are wrapped up in Bitcoin ASIC pre-orders and/or I was broke so I had to sell them!
I just believe in it as a currency and a store of value, more so than any other ALT currency.
Litecoin is being pumped at the moment.
Whoever is doing this will do it to PPCoin one day too. They are already controlling the prices with bots on the exchanges.
Whoever is doing this will do it to PPCoin one day too. They are already controlling the prices with bots on the exchanges.
Lol, PPCoin is pumped and dumped 3879 times so far. Though it is third most important coin for me because it does have some new ideas it's only purpose currently is pump and dump.
Litecoin is different than Bitcoin in some ways and came early enough so I can deal with it's existence unlike with all these new twattish altcoins.
However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.
Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future
However, you can bet that 99% of litecoin strong backers are those that hold significant quantities of it. Just like it is a case with other altcoins as well as with biggest bitcoin bulls.
Barely anyone cares about anything further than his wallet size. If his wallet is loaded, that coin is amazing and has great future
I'm not holding crypto-currencies because I'm investing, but because I think they're a good idea to conduct transactions over the internet. I bought a set of such currencies (Bitcoins, Litecoins) a long time before all of the hype (see the creation date of my user account, started buying Bitcoins well before I created the account) and I didn't really expect them to rise in value that much. "Investing" in currencies is just stupid, because that's basically a Ponzi-scheme. That's even true for Bitcoin to a given degree now, but at least there you have actual usage of the protocol to offset the speculation. If you want to "invest" in something invest in Bitcoin/Litecoin related companies instead of bubbles.
It's speculation. Pick literally anything. Someone, somewhere at some point in time has used or tried to use it for speculative purposes. It's also no more of a ponzi than holding any other asset before bigger amounts of capital inflow rushes in. As for bubbles, in any market, there will always be bubbles.Litecoin is being pumped at the moment.
Whoever is doing this will do it to PPCoin one day too. They are already controlling the prices with bots on the exchanges.
as if bitcoin was/is any different Whoever is doing this will do it to PPCoin one day too. They are already controlling the prices with bots on the exchanges.
Litecoin is being pumped at the moment.
Whoever is doing this will do it to PPCoin one day too. They are already controlling the prices with bots on the exchanges.
Whoever is doing this will do it to PPCoin one day too. They are already controlling the prices with bots on the exchanges.
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4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.
Waiting for 6 transactions (or whatever) is just an arbitrary number. You correctly noticed that the same transaction amount for Litecoins is less secure than for Bitcoins. So why not just wait for less transactions when using Bitcoins?
For me Bitcoin = larger purchases and Litecoin = small purchases were the security of 1 confirmation is enough.
It will never be bitcoin 2.0, it never was supposed to be, for me the differences were big enough to adopt it. Besides ppcoin (which imo could be bitcoin2.0 but we'll see how this experiment turns out) there isn't really another alt I adopted.
Beside of this they openly promote porno sites, drug markets so if this continues it will become the most evil currency.
You seem to forget that silkroad was pretty good for the marketing of Bitcoin, some users also thought that Bitcoin would be seen as bad because of this.The reality is, any currency is used to buy drugs and porn, everybody knows this, if we would deny any currency that is used for buying these things, we wouldn't have a currency at all.
Dear gst,
Sorry, but that is plain stupid. (Sorry for hard words)
1)Ponzi-scheme
Bitcoin and Charles Ponzi have nothing in common. It might be called stupid to invest or fraudulent , but a Ponzi scheme is a specific kind of fraud. It doesn't fit ...
2)There are no real companies involved in Bitcoin yet.
Bitcoins market cap is so low that I wouldn't even consider investing in a stock of that size. But even if, there is just mt.gox to consider. The most professional bitcoin companys full name is Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange ...
3) Investing in currencies is stupid
If you belive BTC will be used at a "way to pay online" it has to grow to at least 1000USD in order to be even noticed by big companies. Amazons sales per year are more than 30times bitcoins market cap so there must be enormous growth untill it could handle such volume.
Even if BTC couldn't be used for legal trades it's likely to be used on drugs. BTC is so much better than cash so it will be used to pay for a share of todays 500billion/year turnover on illegal drugs, so there must be enormous growth untill it could handle such volume.
If you'd belive that BTC will totaly fail it'd be ok to say so, but you said you belive in crypto for online transactions. It seems you haven't understood BTC economics yet and that is the basis for all serious "LTC is better than BTC" argumentation. Technicalities beyond "it's different" don't matter at all.
BTW: I don't agree on your argumentation on technicalities either, but that 'd be an awful long post.
PS: I'd recomend you to think more about btc economics. When you reach a certain level you will get the LTC idea on your own. And that includes "LTC is better than other altcoins". Any questions?
"Investing" in currencies is just stupid, because that's basically a Ponzi-scheme. That's even true for Bitcoin to a given degree now, but at least there you have actual usage of the protocol to offset the speculation. If you want to "invest" in something invest in Bitcoin/Litecoin related companies instead of bubbles.
Sorry, but that is plain stupid. (Sorry for hard words)
1)Ponzi-scheme
Bitcoin and Charles Ponzi have nothing in common. It might be called stupid to invest or fraudulent , but a Ponzi scheme is a specific kind of fraud. It doesn't fit ...
2)There are no real companies involved in Bitcoin yet.
Bitcoins market cap is so low that I wouldn't even consider investing in a stock of that size. But even if, there is just mt.gox to consider. The most professional bitcoin companys full name is Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange ...
3) Investing in currencies is stupid
If you belive BTC will be used at a "way to pay online" it has to grow to at least 1000USD in order to be even noticed by big companies. Amazons sales per year are more than 30times bitcoins market cap so there must be enormous growth untill it could handle such volume.
Even if BTC couldn't be used for legal trades it's likely to be used on drugs. BTC is so much better than cash so it will be used to pay for a share of todays 500billion/year turnover on illegal drugs, so there must be enormous growth untill it could handle such volume.
If you'd belive that BTC will totaly fail it'd be ok to say so, but you said you belive in crypto for online transactions. It seems you haven't understood BTC economics yet and that is the basis for all serious "LTC is better than BTC" argumentation. Technicalities beyond "it's different" don't matter at all.
BTW: I don't agree on your argumentation on technicalities either, but that 'd be an awful long post.
PS: I'd recomend you to think more about btc economics. When you reach a certain level you will get the LTC idea on your own. And that includes "LTC is better than other altcoins". Any questions?
(copy&pasted from my response to another thread)
Litecoin serves a huge function in the crypto-currency world, because Scrypt based hashing is orders of magnitudes more secure than SHA256.
http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1cssqr/the_math_why_litecoin_is_more_secure_than_bitcoin/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt
Litecoin serves a huge function in the crypto-currency world, because Scrypt based hashing is orders of magnitudes more secure than SHA256.
http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1cssqr/the_math_why_litecoin_is_more_secure_than_bitcoin/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt
So the first reddit links provides a very dubious calculation based on some Javascript calculator that's on some random website. And the second link discusses Scrypt as key-deriviation function, where it provides considerable benefits over other function. But as proof-of-work requirements are considerable different from key-derivation requirements those benefits don't really apply to Litecoin.
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LTC serves as a hedge against any issues with BTC, both in terms of bugs with the software and any sort of attack on the network.
Bugs with the software? Litecoin isn't some new software, but just an outdated Bitcoin client. Look at the source code.
Litecoin to me is useful and valuable to me in a lot of ways.
1. Diversification of one's cryptocoin portfolio. Someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.
1. Diversification of one's cryptocoin portfolio. Someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.
I'm not holding crypto-currencies because I'm investing, but because I think they're a good idea to conduct transactions over the internet. I bought a set of such currencies (Bitcoins, Litecoins) a long time before all of the hype (see the creation date of my user account, started buying Bitcoins well before I created the account) and I didn't really expect them to rise in value that much. "Investing" in currencies is just stupid, because that's basically a Ponzi-scheme. That's even true for Bitcoin to a given degree now, but at least there you have actual usage of the protocol to offset the speculation. If you want to "invest" in something invest in Bitcoin/Litecoin related companies instead of bubbles.
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2. Litecoin being built upon Scrypt makes it stronger than most other ALT currencies, especially the ones that are SHA-256 based. If you look into the problems TRC is facing, you will see that ASICs are hoping on their chain and sending difficulty into the stratosphere. They then go to hash something else, leaving the TRC block chain moving at a snail's pace and transactions taking hours to days to confirm. All SHA-256 based ALT coins (that do not have Scrypt) will suffer from this problem until they are fixed.
That's only a very temporary advantage. While Scrypt has the advantage that it is "memory-hard", technology changes still have the same effect on Litecoin as on Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies). Once ASICs are the primary hashing technology in the Bitcoin world it's hard for adversaries to come up with more effective solutions (unless they can spend lots of energy). With Scrypt on the other hand you'll be facing the same problems, but just at a later time. And the attack described by you above would also be possible against Scrypt, as you could use a Botnet instead of an ASIC for this. OTOH, once ASICs are the standard in the Bitcoin world Botnet attacks aren't feasible at all, as the hashing rate that can be reached with them is much lower than what a few ASICs deliver.
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3. Litecoin is useful to the crypto currency ecosystem in the way that it's useful to have Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Card... or Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, and Chase. Sure, they all do the same thing, but they all do the same thing a little bit differently. Also, if one were to fail, there are others in existance so all commerce would not screech to a halt across the nation. It is good for Bitcoin to have a competing entity that is similar but not the exact same to itself. For the benefit of free market competition, each currency will always be striving to stay ahead or to catch up to one another, at the end of the day mutually improving both currencies by default.
Visa and Mastercard are different technologies, but they still use a commonly agreed on currency. You already have that in the Bitcoin world: A common currency and dozens of different client implementations. You don't have that in the Litecoin world - there you can only choose one from two outdated and unmaintained clients.
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4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.
Waiting for 6 transactions (or whatever) is just an arbitrary number. You correctly noticed that the same transaction amount for Litecoins is less secure than for Bitcoins. So why not just wait for less transactions when using Bitcoins?
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7. The Litecoin community is growing at an exponential rate. Similar to the growth of Bitcoin, as the community grows then so will Litecoin. Litecoin is already far too big and the people that believe in it are too invested in Litecoin for it to fail at this point. Litecoin can at this point proudly say that they are king of the ALT coins. It can no longer be brushed aside as a scam/pump and dump/whatever, it has real value and people are starting to see that.
The only reason why the community grows is because previous Bitcoin miners find out that there equipment is suddenly useless and therefore try to earn money with Litecoins instead. The fallacy here is that miners don't really matter much when it comes to the utility of a currency. The community that would need to grow are the actual users conducting transactions via Litecoin and this community is still extremely tiny.
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9. Not everyone was so lucky to be around when Bitcoin was first started and able to buy them for pennies. The possibility of becoming an "early adopter" is very appealing to new crypto currency users. A ton of "noobs" have recently appeared in the last wave of Bitcoin mania and I've noticed that a lot of them overwhelmingly support and/or already use Litecoins.
So you say that Litecoin is a classical bubble? People just buy it because they assume that its value will rise?
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10. As Bitcoins become more valuable over time, this will further push the poor and "working class" away from it. Some can no longer afford to buy one Bitcoin even at today's prices. People like to get more for their money, and when buying at today's exchange rate people can get more Litecoins than Bitcoins. If the same services and merchants start accepting Litecoins, then what is the purpose of paying $100+, $200+, or $300+ per bitcoin?
The exchange rate is just an arbitrary number and doesn't affect real-life utility. The Zimbabwean dollar is not a better currency than the US dollar, just because you need billions of them in your pocket to buy a breakfast. But if there's really a psychological reason behind this it might be time for the Bitcoin community to switch to mBTC or all the way to Satoshis as currency unit.
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11. Litecoin has the advantage of doing everything after Bitcoin. By sitting and waiting in the shadows for people to bring to light exploits and bugs on Bitcoin, these problems can be fixed before there is much of a problem or before someone exploits it. Bitcoin would obviously be exploited first if there was something to exploit, because of the bigger market cap and it is more valuable for someone to exploit Bitcoin first rather than Litecoin.
In practice (if you look at the source code) Litecoin is basically a copy of an old Bitcoin version and has not been updated for a very long time. In other words: Almost all of the attacks applicable against Bitcoin are also applicable against Litecoin. In addition, all the security issues that have been long fixed in the Bitcoin have been mostly ignored by Litecoin (so Litecoin is still vulnerable to them). Litecoin users are claiming that Litecoin is "more modern" than Bitcoin, but the truth is that it is basically outdated and unmaintained.
Litecoin to me is useful and valuable to me in a lot of ways.
1. Diversification of one's cryptocoin portfolio. Someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.
2. Litecoin being built upon Scrypt makes it stronger than most other ALT currencies, especially the ones that are SHA-256 based. If you look into the problems TRC is facing, you will see that ASICs are hoping on their chain and sending difficulty into the stratosphere. They then go to hash something else, leaving the TRC block chain moving at a snail's pace and transactions taking hours to days to confirm. All SHA-256 based ALT coins (that do not have Scrypt) will suffer from this problem until they are fixed.
3. Litecoin is useful to the crypto currency ecosystem in the way that it's useful to have Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Card... or Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, and Chase. Sure, they all do the same thing, but they all do the same thing a little bit differently. Also, if one were to fail, there are others in existance so all commerce would not screech to a halt across the nation. It is good for Bitcoin to have a competing entity that is similar but not the exact same to itself. For the benefit of free market competition, each currency will always be striving to stay ahead or to catch up to one another, at the end of the day mutually improving both currencies by default.
4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.
5. Because blocks are found 4x faster, difficulty adjusts more quickly.. about every 3.5 days. This is useful because it controls the rate of the minting of Litecoins, and makes sure that they stay provably scarce for some time to come. Again, this is valuable because it stabilizes the network and deters high powered hashers from shooting difficulty into the sky and then leaving the network at a crawling pace for a longer period of time (than if blocks were solved at the same pace as Bitcoin.) This feature is not all butterflies and fairy tales, it also provides the opportunity to manipulate network speed, but as the network grows this will become less and less of a problem.
6. Then there is the "there's nothing to do with your Litecoins" fallacy. These people just don't do their research, there are plenty of things you can do and buy with Litecoin as of this instant. New merchants and services are popping up everyday, and I think this will continue to happen well into the future.
7. The Litecoin community is growing at an exponential rate. Similar to the growth of Bitcoin, as the community grows then so will Litecoin. Litecoin is already far too big and the people that believe in it are too invested in Litecoin for it to fail at this point. Litecoin can at this point proudly say that they are king of the ALT coins. It can no longer be brushed aside as a scam/pump and dump/whatever, it has real value and people are starting to see that.
8. Like Bitcoin, there was no Litecoin pre mine. There was the genesis block, and 2 blocks to confirm the genesis. This is valuable for obvious reasons... no one wants to support scammers, and for a crypto currency to become highly adopted this is a necessary feature.
9. Not everyone was so lucky to be around when Bitcoin was first started and able to buy them for pennies. The possibility of becoming an "early adopter" is very appealing to new crypto currency users. A ton of "noobs" have recently appeared in the last wave of Bitcoin mania and I've noticed that a lot of them overwhelmingly support and/or already use Litecoins.
10. As Bitcoins become more valuable over time, this will further push the poor and "working class" away from it. Some can no longer afford to buy one Bitcoin even at today's prices. People like to get more for their money, and when buying at today's exchange rate people can get more Litecoins than Bitcoins. If the same services and merchants start accepting Litecoins, then what is the purpose of paying $100+, $200+, or $300+ per bitcoin?
11. Litecoin has the advantage of doing everything after Bitcoin. By sitting and waiting in the shadows for people to bring to light exploits and bugs on Bitcoin, these problems can be fixed before there is much of a problem or before someone exploits it. Bitcoin would obviously be exploited first if there was something to exploit, because of the bigger market cap and it is more valuable for someone to exploit Bitcoin first rather than Litecoin.
12. Litecoin derives its value in the same way that Bitcoin does. It is provably scarce and its value is held up by supply and demand. Bitcoin had proven that this in itself can hold up an economy and even make it thrive. As long as there are new services and merchants accepting Litecoin (as there are), then demand should not go away. And... we all know by now that supply stays constant, thus giving Litecoin value.
13. It's anonymous.
1. Diversification of one's cryptocoin portfolio. Someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.
2. Litecoin being built upon Scrypt makes it stronger than most other ALT currencies, especially the ones that are SHA-256 based. If you look into the problems TRC is facing, you will see that ASICs are hoping on their chain and sending difficulty into the stratosphere. They then go to hash something else, leaving the TRC block chain moving at a snail's pace and transactions taking hours to days to confirm. All SHA-256 based ALT coins (that do not have Scrypt) will suffer from this problem until they are fixed.
3. Litecoin is useful to the crypto currency ecosystem in the way that it's useful to have Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Card... or Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, and Chase. Sure, they all do the same thing, but they all do the same thing a little bit differently. Also, if one were to fail, there are others in existance so all commerce would not screech to a halt across the nation. It is good for Bitcoin to have a competing entity that is similar but not the exact same to itself. For the benefit of free market competition, each currency will always be striving to stay ahead or to catch up to one another, at the end of the day mutually improving both currencies by default.
4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.
5. Because blocks are found 4x faster, difficulty adjusts more quickly.. about every 3.5 days. This is useful because it controls the rate of the minting of Litecoins, and makes sure that they stay provably scarce for some time to come. Again, this is valuable because it stabilizes the network and deters high powered hashers from shooting difficulty into the sky and then leaving the network at a crawling pace for a longer period of time (than if blocks were solved at the same pace as Bitcoin.) This feature is not all butterflies and fairy tales, it also provides the opportunity to manipulate network speed, but as the network grows this will become less and less of a problem.
6. Then there is the "there's nothing to do with your Litecoins" fallacy. These people just don't do their research, there are plenty of things you can do and buy with Litecoin as of this instant. New merchants and services are popping up everyday, and I think this will continue to happen well into the future.
7. The Litecoin community is growing at an exponential rate. Similar to the growth of Bitcoin, as the community grows then so will Litecoin. Litecoin is already far too big and the people that believe in it are too invested in Litecoin for it to fail at this point. Litecoin can at this point proudly say that they are king of the ALT coins. It can no longer be brushed aside as a scam/pump and dump/whatever, it has real value and people are starting to see that.
8. Like Bitcoin, there was no Litecoin pre mine. There was the genesis block, and 2 blocks to confirm the genesis. This is valuable for obvious reasons... no one wants to support scammers, and for a crypto currency to become highly adopted this is a necessary feature.
9. Not everyone was so lucky to be around when Bitcoin was first started and able to buy them for pennies. The possibility of becoming an "early adopter" is very appealing to new crypto currency users. A ton of "noobs" have recently appeared in the last wave of Bitcoin mania and I've noticed that a lot of them overwhelmingly support and/or already use Litecoins.
10. As Bitcoins become more valuable over time, this will further push the poor and "working class" away from it. Some can no longer afford to buy one Bitcoin even at today's prices. People like to get more for their money, and when buying at today's exchange rate people can get more Litecoins than Bitcoins. If the same services and merchants start accepting Litecoins, then what is the purpose of paying $100+, $200+, or $300+ per bitcoin?
11. Litecoin has the advantage of doing everything after Bitcoin. By sitting and waiting in the shadows for people to bring to light exploits and bugs on Bitcoin, these problems can be fixed before there is much of a problem or before someone exploits it. Bitcoin would obviously be exploited first if there was something to exploit, because of the bigger market cap and it is more valuable for someone to exploit Bitcoin first rather than Litecoin.
12. Litecoin derives its value in the same way that Bitcoin does. It is provably scarce and its value is held up by supply and demand. Bitcoin had proven that this in itself can hold up an economy and even make it thrive. As long as there are new services and merchants accepting Litecoin (as there are), then demand should not go away. And... we all know by now that supply stays constant, thus giving Litecoin value.
13. It's anonymous.
+1
I own both of Bitcoin and Litecoin, I will explain why people are afraid of litecoin , just because they do not own any or/and they are afraid to try to buy some because they think it will fail in one point . just to explain something at this moment LTC network is at 14,000,000 Kh/s and it is rising everyday . so just to tell people if you do not believe in something just keep away of it, if it is hard for you to understand the technical part than it is the same like a Christian asking why Islam or a Muslim asking why Judaism, they worship the same god but that's how things works.
All analogies aside there is one, and only one reason why anyone mines or buys LTC. It's more profitable then BTC @ current hash rates/diff. LTC has almost no main stream adoption, and was it not for the 'new wave' of teenagers GPU mining it would never had amounted to anything.
(copy&pasted from my response to another thread)
Litecoin serves a huge function in the crypto-currency world, because Scrypt based hashing is orders of magnitudes more secure than SHA256.
http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1cssqr/the_math_why_litecoin_is_more_secure_than_bitcoin/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt
LTC serves as a hedge against any issues with BTC, both in terms of bugs with the software and any sort of attack on the network.
Also Litecoin finalizes the 100% anonymity promised by Bitcoin. I think CrazyRabbit made this point very clear, that BTC transactions can be traced fairly easily even if you use a coinmixer. But if you go into another currency, its 100% impossible to trace further transactions.
For these reasons Im very pro-Litecoin and I think it serves to strengthen the cryptocurrency economy rather that weaken it.
Litecoin serves a huge function in the crypto-currency world, because Scrypt based hashing is orders of magnitudes more secure than SHA256.
http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/1cssqr/the_math_why_litecoin_is_more_secure_than_bitcoin/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt
LTC serves as a hedge against any issues with BTC, both in terms of bugs with the software and any sort of attack on the network.
Also Litecoin finalizes the 100% anonymity promised by Bitcoin. I think CrazyRabbit made this point very clear, that BTC transactions can be traced fairly easily even if you use a coinmixer. But if you go into another currency, its 100% impossible to trace further transactions.
For these reasons Im very pro-Litecoin and I think it serves to strengthen the cryptocurrency economy rather that weaken it.
So for the Litecoin supporters: Which advantages does Litecoin have?
Bitcoin will never be the one and only crypto currency. Todays 95% marketshare of BTC won't last long, so when investing in crypto you get far higher returns (at much higher risk) on altcoins than BTC. LTC is the most common altcoin and already established as BTC's little brother. When btc holder start diversiving they will rather buy LTC instead of every other altcoin.
Litecoin doesn't provide significant technological advantages in comparison to Bitcoin.
So there is no new risk. Nobody knows if PPC's POS will work for ever, but cloning a already "proven" technology is safer than inventing new one. I liked the idea of DVC but it failed and everyone invested it it will loose. It's a good idea to risk some money at new crypto, but that isn't for diversiving more than 5% of your portfolio. And the rest goes to ...?Scrypt will be a total different mining enviroment. Once it's really established there will be specialized chips for BTC and specialized chips for scrypt. This makes LTC more independent (=better) and protects it against big goverment attacks. PPC would be ideal for that, but it isn't ready yet.
Bitcoin isn't superior enough to altcoins to justfy a 95% market cap. It might not go down in Fiat/BTC, but in Altcoin/BTC it's doomed to fall.
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