So I imagine we'll all agree that there's a lot of new people getting in to Bitcoin over the last few months. We see new people posting threads daily here. I feel the price of Bitcoin (even though purchases can be made to increments of 1 bitcoin) may make people feel priced out of it for use as a worthy investment. Litecoin, on the other hand, is still trading a a price that is affordable by most.
Do you think Bitcoin will suffer from price competition from Litecoin? Assuming new purchases are mostly conducted in the spirit of investment rather than currency, when would this momentum have an impact on Bitcoin?
I will rather see the newcomers go for something like ETH aka Ethereum as it is backed up by big companies such as microsoft - for people blockchain and its use is not that big of a deal if they see the price moves and tend to fell that it can be another bitcoin if we talk about the price. Litcoin might get some traction specially since it is on coinbase so people tend to feel that it is safe, but on the other hand I don't seethat the price of litecoin moves up until they don't get some good news out there.
But again I might be wrong as these are pure speculations.
It won't impact Bitcoin at all. People that have the feeling of not being able to afford a whole BTC unit, are insignificant to the market even in large numbers. Point is that people should understand that Bitcoin is highly devisible by nature, and also that you can shift away from the BTC unit to the mBTC unit. 1BTC is nothing more than a GUI unit measure that equals 100,000,000 satoshis. In that regard, it would make more sense for people to set mBTC as their main unit configuration. Instead of 1BTC, you'll have 1000mBTC sitting in your wallet. Instead of buying 1 unit of BTC that costs you +$2800 right now, you'll buy 1 unit of mBTC that costs you just $2.8 at current levels. Only negative aspect that I see here, is that the fees got significantly out of control. It would mean that in order to transfer 1mBTC, you'll be including 1mBTC just in fees. That's why I can't wait for the implementation of Lightning Network - miners need to get kicked off their influental seat.
But still for new people (that don't know the fixed cap of coins) they want to own full bitcoin as it is on psychological side. Even if Lightning Network gets activated we won't see the improvments right away as light/hardware/online wallets etc. need to implement the Lightning Network feature in them so that we would be able to use it even if we don't have core installed.