No opinions? I will show for the opposing side and debate myself. I use Bitcoins and Litecoins and find them both equally useful. Some arguments I use in Bitcoin's favor are not necessarily my true opinion, but I am only trying to represent both communities properly. It is a combination of fact, opinions I hold personally, and a summary of opinions that I've read in the past. I'll let you guess which ones those are.
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.
All of the ALT crypto coins dilute the value of Bitcoin by diverting attention and developers away from Bitcoin itself. Thereby weakening the network at the same time, because of miners switching to different coins and not supporting the Bitcoin network. Some or most of all ALT coins are scam coins or pump and dump schemes, you call that smart investing?
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.
The Scrypt Proof Of Work Protocol is less efficient than SHA-256, mining hardware for Litecoin will never hash as fast as it does on SHA-256 when mining on Scrypt. Not only is it less efficient, but Scrypt uses more a lot more resources and works your vRAM and system RAM a lot harder than SHA-256, thus making mining equipment wear out faster, produce more heat, and the cost of electricity higher. Bitcoin does not have to worry much about network fluctuations, because it is so strong and hashing at a fast speed. ASICs will only strengthen this once they are widespread.
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 existence 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.
Litecoin is just a copy cat of Bitcoin, there are no benefits of having it and it has no real value. Again, Litecoin is only a distraction from Bitcoin and possibly a drawn out long con type of pump and dump scam. Litecoin competing with Bitcoin? Bitcoin is ages ahead in development in all categories... merchants, software, mining hardware, user base, value, et al. It is foolish for you to say Litecoin is "competing" with bitcoin.
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.
You struck on the main problem with Litecoin's block quickness, it does in theory make it transactions 1/4 as secure than a Bitcoin's transaction. Not only this, but it causes a long and convoluted block chain. There are four times more blocks, four times more orphaned blocks as well, this is very inefficient book keeping. Litecoin's block chain will keep growing 4x faster than the Bitcoin block chain, making it much larger. It may take weeks to download the block chain one day.
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.
Again, the Bitcoin network is much faster and bigger than the Litecoin network, thus making it more stable. Quick difficulty adjustments as you mentioned can be manipulated by people that have really high hashing power, this is not an advantage. Bitcoins difficulty adjustment rate has proven that Bitcoins can be provably scarce in the long run, I don't get why Litecoin had to change that?
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.
There is a lot more to do with your Bitcoins than your Litecoins. To even compare the two would just be laughable. Bitcoin is much more widespread accepted by merchants and services. It also has a higher FIAT market cap dwarfing all ALT currencies combined. You are banking on new merchants and services to continue to be developed into the future to ensure the success of Litecoin. It is all speculation.
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.
That's nice that Litecoin is king of the scam coins, but Bitcoin is the king of all crypto currencies and all other crypto currencies are inferior. When Litecoin had its tremendous ground breaking rise in value in such a short time period by going up to $5, Bitcoin was $255 steps ahead as it peaked at around $260. Investing in Litecoin is like playing pitcher machine baseball professionally.
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.
I will be adding to this list in the near future.
Cheers,
Ch
More to come later, I'll edit this.
... I'm tired of typing.