IMO, it's all temporary burnout due to Mt Gox's unfulfilled stated ambitions.
Seems to me it makes a perfect little sidekick for BTC, I see buying coffee or article subscriptions or MP3s with LTC, fast(er) microtransactions. There's always going to be "disputed territory" between the two of them, but I think there's stuff that BTC doesn't necessarily want to bend itself over backwards to accommodate, that litecoin will.
BTW "7950s in milkcrates" jab, hah, took only 6 months to be a snob about it. At last peak in spring, with all the transaction volume that entailed, most of BTC was running on that kind of thing, apart from the 5 people that got B1 Avalons by then.
Anyway, I'd think it would be trading at 7 or 8 bucks by now if the Mt Gox stupidity had not ensnared it. It probably will be about there a month after the first Gox bubble and crash, or Gox claim no way no never no how on LTC, and release it from the bonds of uncertainty.
Sign up for my cryptofinance newsletter for only 6 BTC for a year ..... (Kidding)
Flash
Litecoin is NOT for microtransactions. If you want microtransactions you either want an offchain tx processor or another alt coin.
Agree - and that other altcoin is Devcoin, which is perfect for microtransactions. Devcoin was deliberately developed with the decimal place moved (so 50000 coins generated each time instead of 50), and the transaction fee set to just 1 DVC. That makes the transaction fee $0.0000561, which is practically nothing, whereas Litecoin's transaction fee is a comparatively hefty $0.10.
It's interesting to compare the two coins - Devcoin was launched in August 2011 and Litecoin was launched in October 2011 - so they are near siblings, but they've taken completely different approaches.
The Devcoin community has focused on trying to reward doers (developers, writers and so on). Devcoin now owns an asset (Devtome) which is monetised with bitcoin advertising and Amazon affiliate promotions, which means hopefully a steady stream of dollars earned which then get converted into bitcoins and then devcoins. On the spending side, you can
buy amazon vouchers for devcoin. The Devcoin community has mostly ignored the speculative element, apart from moaning about it from time to time.
The Litecoin community seems to have spent an inordinate amount of energy on MtGox acceptance - maybe because they see speculation against the dollar as a way to acceptance.
The speculative element can be destructive - IMO, having lots of alt-coins traded solely against Litecoin on Cryptsy is one the main reasons for the price dropping.
Think - all those alt-coin miners really want to cash out into BTC. But Cryptsy forces them to buy Litecoins, which they then immediately sell for bitcoins. Cryptsy takes two sets of transaction fees, but Litecoin suffers a persistent selling pressure that wouldn't exist of the altcoin miners could trade directly into Bitcoin. Back in June there were maybe 4 altcoins being traded for litecoin, and now it's about 20 - and you can see the effect.
If the Litecoin community can step away from all the speculative element, and find a true raison d'etre (and it's not microtransactions, nor is it about ways of fixing parts of the crypto-economy that bitcoin neglects, such as ways to earn coins apart from mining - Devcoin has bagged both those elements). It has to be something else, something unique that no-one is offering.
(Disclosure: I hold some litecoins, just wanted some, "just in case")