Litecoin clearly topped on the 20th, and has been crashing. In fact, all the alt coins seem to have followed the same script. I think this is important - it means the speculative juices have maxxed out on those markets. Bitcoin is bigger and taking longer, but I fail to see why it won't eventually follow suit.
Another interesting thing that I've noticed is this tendency for people to claim that "bitcoin does well when bad things happen in the world". This same argument has been used for gold. And yet, so far, the charts tell the opposite story: bitcoin does well when stocks and general financial speculation are high (such as the high in 2011, which perfectly matched the high in the US small caps/large caps ratio), and goes down when speculative fever does. So far when the economy worsens, people want cash, and not gold or bitcoins.
Things could change for sure, but I'm just pointing out the hard, cold evidence thus far doesn't match the kinds of fundamental arguments I'm hearing based on past market activity. They sure sound good and logical on paper though, I won't argue with that
You can't buy shit with Litecoin or any altcoin.
Bitcoin actually has an economy based around it (albeit, still somewhat fledgling).