Topic: Why Litecoin will always be a top 2 Crypto - page 2. (Read 8165 times)

But we are not discussing the merits of Bitcoin now, are we? That will take another thread and a thousand.

Litecoin positioned itself as the 'silver' to Bitcoin's 'gold', and you have to admit that allowed Litecoin to prosper in the slipstream. Just look at the historical correlation between fiat value. It also doesn't hurt that most of Litecoin's whales are also Bitcoin whales.

However, while Bitcoin's public perception has leaped by the order of several magnitudes, has Litecoin done the same? Has Litecoin distinguished and cemented itself as, to borrow your analogy, the younger brother? Or is it merely a displaced and dare I say, undeserved sense of entitlement?

Consider the community. Take a look at, say, Peercoin. Have you visited their forum? For example, look at the stark difference in how the Litecoin and Peercoin communities handled the video making campaign. Consider the funding, fervor and professionalism. What about Reddit? Look at say, Darkcoin. The first page is filled with new threads from the last 24 hours. Litecoin, on the other hand, has threads that dates back a week. You may find this hard to believe, but some of the third-tier altcoins today have communities that is far more vocal and louder than Litecoin. If you don't believe me, take a look at say, Minerals, and you will see what I mean.

Consider development. Bitcoin has a thriving development community that features some of the best and brightest. As a non-programmer, I sometimes spend hours reading through the threads here - it is that interesting. Ditto for Nxt, Darkcoin, etc. What about Litecoin? I was literally shocked reading this Litecoin wiki entry by Warren Togami explaining why Litecoin is rejecting X11: https://litecoin.info/X11 . The level of wrong and opinions-disguised-as-facts here is something one would expect from people like you and me - not the Lead Dev of LTC.

Finally, a great indicator of Litecoin's presence within the general public. Here's some screen caps of Google's related keyword search data for

• Bitcoin: https://i.imgur.com/YoC0jvL.png
• Litecoin: https://i.imgur.com/KrVax0U.png
• Dogecoin: https://i.imgur.com/0m6msJ2.png
• Darkcoin: https://i.imgur.com/m3Xnpme.png

Things that you noticed from the above:
• Litecoin lags significantly behind Bitcoin - by as much as 30 times less
• Dogecoin generates higher related search queries
• Darkcoin generates up to a third of Litecoin's search volume, just several months after launching - and rising.

Bear in mind, the search terms used fits the profile of people from outside of crypto, and thus, is a great comparative indicator of the level of brand awareness for the four coins.

Let me be clear that I am not a bagholder of any of the coins mentioned above - almost 95% of my cryptos are in BTC. Let me also be clear that I am not likely to return and respond to this thread. I don't usually spend too much time writing - I prefer to read and/or make money.    However, this needs to be said: Litecoin does not have an automatic claim to be the silver to Bitcoin's gold. It has to work and earn that position. While Charlie Lee is definitely an incredibly brillliant, brilliant man, he is not a messiah capable of orchestrating community-wide PR, development and adoption campaigns. Scrypt has lost its shine, and you cannot just depend on giant miners to secure the network (or the goodwill of Coinotron to not launch a double spending attack). Neither can Litecoin just coast along behind Bitcoin.

The sky is definitely not falling - but it is going to rain, and denying it won't turn the dark clouds away (boy, I am so good at making awful idioms).

Well, take a look at Bitcoinwisdom's record of hashrate changes.

First of all, you had the Gridseed ASICs that started shipping out in late January and early February. The network started seeing some pretty significant jumps there as those deployed. In fact, it appeared that a lot of GPU hashrate started leaving the week prior, with the difficulty adjusting down over 20%, twice in a row...only to be followed by a 34% jump the next adjustment.

Jan 30th - 94,496 MH/s

So then came February as the Gridseeds shipped out around the globe. You'd see adjustments with large drops, followed by adjustments with large increases and by the end of February, we were almost right where we started the month. But my theory is that a good chunk of the GPU mining had transitioned.

Feb 28th - 90,059 MH/s

Then came March...and the new "blade" form factor along with other Gridseed-based products. March just SCREAMED "accumulate" to me as the miners that were transitioning from GPU to ASIC poured money into it. The difference in network hashrate was huge.

March 30th - 162,551 MH/s

Most of April was slow...until the very last week, where the network jumped over 50,000MH/s. Why? Innosilicon's A2 Terminator-based systems with 80MH/s performance that dwarfed the Gridseed hardware.

April 29th - 203,086 MH/s

From the end of April until today, since the launch of the Innosilicon systems, we've seen only FOUR decreases and none above 5.5%...the rest have been increases, as those Innosilicon, Zeusminer and Silverfish systems proliferate.

Today - 357,790 MH/s

So before ASICs: 90,059 MH/s
After ASICs: 357,790 MH/s

That's an almost 300% increase in network hashrate (unless my math is wrong, definitely not unheard of), in four months since the first ASICs launched.

Now, consider that the largest form factor ASIC you can currently buy is 80MH/s...and the next salvo of hardware being shipped is likely to be Alpha Technology's Vipers in mid to late July, at 250MH/s each, followed within a month or two by KNCMiner's 250MH/s systems (and then their 400MH/s systems a month or so later).

So yeah...my guess is, we're going to see a total tenfold increase in network hashrate thanks to ASICs, by the end of the year. Of course, there will be losses as miners decommission their Gridseed equipment due to lack of profitability, etc...but the size of the incoming hashrate will dwarf it.

Granted, a factor in the difficulty adjustments is the movement of multipools, but I think there are clear mile-markers with ASICs you can point to (and I don't think multipools have THAT great of an impact on Litecoin).

This is a compelling narrative.

When do the ASICs start kicking in... when will we see 10 fold increase in hash rate?

That was back in January, but it's interesting.

I think the biggest problem I sometimes have with Charles in his public presentations is that he's almost too humble. He'll say something like, "My biggest achievement is convincing people Litecoin has value" and while it's said for the humor value, it's actually really damaging from a marketing standpoint. It says to people, "I basically conned you into thinking Litecoin is worthwhile" and draws attention away from all the legitimate reasons why Litecoin DOES have value.

So that and the "silver to gold" analogy are things I kinda wish he'd abandon, in his public speaking. Charles needs to get to the point where he firmly believes that Litecoin deserves (and has earned) its seat at the table and should be seen as a complement to Bitcoin, not as "Bitcoin Jr." or "Bitcoin Lite."


Charles suggested that months ago and Jackson Palmer (along with most of the Dogecoin community) shot him down. I think the perception was that by merged mining with Litecoin, they were accepting defeat...which they kind of needed to do, to survive.

What about introducing dogecoin into litecoin blockchain?

Charlie Lees recent Litecoin Presentation @ BTC MIAMI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le5ByHtssnc

More Litecoin News:

http://www.coindesk.com/hive-adds-litecoin-support-new-web-wallet/

/Slow clap


This is a great analogy. The big brother is young and the younger brother is younger. 

One could argue that Bitcoin survives because of seniority, and seniority is the reason for Bitcoin acceptance, so why not?  Maybe Litecoin is boring because there is no Silk Road, there is no MtGox (that one was close), almost no lost and stolen coins.  Those are likely THE reasons Bitcoin ascended, and are no longer valid arguments, but they played the major parts of making it.  So, both Bitcoin and Litecoin are changing fundamentals, is that a bad thing?

All I see is that both BTC and LTC are growing up, older brother is still young, younger brother is even younger, and the other alts are babies.  BTC and LTC are innovations that are still not understood and/or used worldwide, and I'm still waiting for the next really useful mainstream innovative coin that survives longer than pump&dump (it will happen one day, of course, I'm not saying everything sucks).  And to have a good pump, energetic user base is created on newer coins when needed.

Energetic user base? I can name no fewer than ten other altcoins I've looked into that had an "energetic user base" that fell flat on their faces within months of their launch. Litecoin has been around for three years...and is STILL #2 by a mile. The only coin to have breathed the rarified air of Litecoin was Auroracoin, which was probably the biggest pump & dump that crypto-currency has seen, yet.

Dogecoin's got perhaps the most vocal and active user groups in crypto. It was launched in December 2013 - it's only been around for six months and it's already bleeding out, in spite of all the social media and marketing. Dogecoin has collected virtually none of the new ASIC hashrate to itself and the price has been on a steady slide, with no signs of ever reversing course.

Meanwhile, look at Litecoin. Still, after all this time, the #2 market cap coin and attracting virtually ALL of the new ASIC hashrate to itself. Nobody should fool themselves, these Scrypt ASICs were made in support of Litecoin.

There isn't a coin out there that's closing the gap. Darkcoin has made price gains but that's because it is the PERFECT pump and dump story. It's got an extremely small float (easier to manipulate the market) and it has a story (anonymity)...but its primary feature is not desirable to most and will prevent widespread adoption. The market where one would think it'd be highly desired - the Silk Road - has not adopted it...because there's no need. So in light of this information, I think it's clear that it's just another in the constantly revolving door of pumps to hit #3 before they're dumped. But there will be Litecoin, still. It was there before, and it'll be there after.

Its only a matter of time, not sure if within this timeframe

if it is a minter game，ltc is the winner
if it is not a minter game，ltc will be dead soon.

By the reasoning of point 1 everybody can just make a clone of some ASIC difficult algo and it is supposed to be better than LTC?

Do you really feel the need to make yet another thread? lol

Seriously, this is not needed. Just post on the 20+ page thread or one of the other unmoderated threads.

I think so too. Litecoin has seniority, but can that alone guarantee its future relevancy?
Perhaps I am wrong, but there are a number of more innovative coins with more energetic user base. I see them closing the gap with Litecoin with each passing day.

This thread is self moderated but no threads have been deleted - if I do delete posts, it will be only FUD 1 liner comments and you can see any deleted posts here:

https://bitcointa.lk/threads/why-litecoin-will-always-be-the-number-2-crypto.332288/

The other thread 'Litecoin is Dead' which you can see here (5 pages):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=658541.0;topicseen

has been heavily edited - pages of posts deleted as you can see below (7 pages - 2 whole pages of posts deleted by Darkota):

https://bitcointa.lk/threads/litecoin-is-officially-dead.331214/page-5

I am all for discussions but when people edit self moderated threads to meet their agenda - then it should be clear for people to see!

yes, distributed among 70-80 people initially.  Which sounds bad, but it was available for trade immediately after and you could pick up large sums of it even if not in the original group.  Also, the end result distribution doesn't look much different than BTC.

So there seems to be hoards of Litecoin threads, Either vehemently for it or against it claiming 'official' death. Most of these threads are self-moderating so as to reinforce the views of the original poster. Which is bullshit nonsense.

So here is an unmoderated thread (by myself at least, Forum mods still apply) where you can freely discuss. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-litecoin-dead-actual-discussion-no-moderation-663590

My personal views on Litecoin are that it has very little reason to hold the #2 spot anymore.

The majority of the reasons it ascended to the #2 spot are no longer valid arguments.

Sure it was 'ASIC proof', We all know how that worked out.
Sure it wasnt BitCoin. But there is 100's of 'Not BitCoins' now.

It was innovative until 9000 other people did it and improved or experimented with the formula.

The one thing that is still a valid reason for it to retain #2 is seniority and perhaps derivative works

Another interesting way to look at coins would be to rate them by Algo, of all coins using a specific Algo, which is top for each. Now rate each algo by relevance or importance. And that is your new 'top coins'

Isn't NXT premined 1 billion?

This is pigs flying in the sky hopes and I hope it happens.