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Litecoin now trading for $5.78
- IgorPartola 14y agoI cannot be the only one thinking "WTF is Litecoin?" https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin I wonder if there is any value in seeding another XXXXXcoin based on one of these algorithms. Have 2+ instances of the same network...
- tocomment 14y agoI think an interesting experiment would be to create a coin that can't be converted to USD or other currencies. Just to see what happens. (But I can't think of a technical way to make such a coin.)
- niggler 14y agoSome enterprising person will provide that service (for a fee, of course)
- trumbitta2 14y agoUnless you add a license of some sorts stating that it is illegal to exchange it for real currencies. Then someone will do it regardless, but at least they will be prosecutable.
- illuminate 14y ago"they will be prosecutable" Will they now?
- dfgonzalez 14y agoI don't think there's any value and the differences between BTC and LTC are not substantial (IMO). But my guess is that being the second immediate P2P currency will give traction to LTC and some people who came late to the BTC party will jump in rising the value for a while.
- yebyen 14y agoIt is just different enough to be separately viable at the same time; the blockchains are incompatible down to the hash level. Second it rewards people with lots of hardware and not specialized hardware, which is where Bitcoin is going crazy right now, because a few players have got their hands on something that the rest of the network won't have for some weeks or months to come (ASIC). ASIC miners for bitcoin are not viable for litecoin because the litecoin scrypt hashing process is memory dependent, not CPU-bound like bitcoin / SHA256. My information comes not from any technical expertise but from interpreting what I'm told by people who have done more research than me. Maybe someone could explain better?
- nwh 14y agoThe central premise for Litecoin using scrypt was that it was not able to be mined on GPUs, this was quickly proved wrong and the statement retracted. There's no technical advancement in LTC, it's just a weaker bitcoin clone.
- yebyen 14y agoGPUs these days have alongside their massive collections of ALUs, large tracts of fast local memory. That's why they are viable for LiteCoin mining. ASIC implementations for Bitcoin will be based on SHA256, built with not a lot of internal memory that can be accessed without traveling across another bus. Those implementations will not work with LiteCoin or scrypt, which is memory bound. GPUs have lots of memory. It's no technical advancement over Bitcoin, I agree, but it is gaining acceptance (the prices have maintained parity with Bitcoin growth) and it seems that your current investment in LiteCoin mining will remain relevant for longer than old Bitcoin hardware, just because ASIC developers working on Bitcoin problem all see LiteCoin as just a weaker Bitcoin clone. That's not an argument against LiteCoin.
- danmaz74 14y agoBut I guess that when the BTC bubble will bust, LTC will do the same...
- rplnt 14y ago> Have 2+ instances of the same network It's different network where mining is done with different algorithms. As far as I know hardware for bitcoins is useless for litecoin (and vice versa).
- itistoday2 14y agoComparison between Bitcoin and Litecoin: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Comparison-between-Bitcoin-and-Litecoin https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Comparison...
- lmm 14y agoWhat I want to see is a bitcoin-like currency with a fairer generation curve, one that would follow traditional inflation and not disproportionately reward early adopters. E.g. mining could have constant difficulty, so that the cost of a million CPU cycles in this currency would be more-or-less constant. Are there any efforts in this direction?
- fakeer 14y ago>>follow traditional inflation and not disproportionately reward early adopters Otherwise it will, too, reduce to a currency of the geeks, by the geeks and for the geeks.
- lucaspiller 14y ago> mining could have constant difficulty, so that the cost of a million CPU cycles in this currency would be more-or-less constant As I understand it, in Bitcoin the difficulty goes up so that the rate at which new coins are mined stays pretty much the same. The issue though is that each of the different mining architectures (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC) can do a magnitude more amount of work than the previous could. As such the difficulty goes up, so now there is the problem that unless you've got the fastest hardware you probably aren't going to get anything (as a solo miner anyway). If the rate at which they were mined was kept constant I'd guess all Bitcoins would have already been mined - in that case you'd still have the early adopter problem, but magnified even more.
- pepijndevos 14y agoWhat if you'd limit coins by time instead of cycles? You'd still need some crypto magic to keep people from playing with time, but in general, most people agree what the time is.
- Retric 14y agoThe rate of Bitcoin production drops in half every few years. It's a jagged curve designed to end-up producing a fixed number of bit-coins.
- Nursie 14y ago
- Ixiaus 14y agoLitecoin makes use of Colin Percival's (cperciva) excellent scrypt hashing library to make mining on commodity CPU/GPU's feasible and therefore non-competitive with BitCoin mining (you can mine both at the same time). That's its primary plus; other plusses are quicker confirmation times and a larger number of coins to be generated (the reward is halved every 840,000 blocks).
- ritonlajoie 14y agoIs there a crypto coin that doesn't need to be mined ? Say, one coin = $1 USD and would still benefit from anonymity those coins provide ? edit: for those who reply with 'the 1 dollar coin is worth 1 dollar', well, actually you can't buy online anonymously with it, like on the silkroad. You don't benefit from internet payements like you do have with bitcoins. The question would be : is that possible to have a virtual currency indexed on a fiat currency that would have the same benefits of the cryto ones we are using ?
- khuey 14y agoMany of the proponents of these currencies believe that a currency governed by mathematics is better than a currency governed by fiat. Since the government can print as many USD as it wants there's no way to fix an exchange range unless the cryptocurrency allows unlimited money supply increase, which clearly has to be controlled by some central authority.
- Liongadev 14y agoIf it is not mined, who gets the starting coins?
- solox3 14y agoThe inventor.
- jmorton 14y agoThere is a coin worth $1 USD that doesn't require mining and can be exchanged anonymously. Is the cryptographic aspect a hard requirement? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_coin_(United_States) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_coin_(United_States)
- gabipurcaru 14y agoI think it is a hard requirement; nobody keeps tight track of $1 coins because it's hard to trade a few million dollars using just that. A cryptographic currency wouldn't have this issue.
- iSnow 14y agoI can't help it but feel that the current boom in P2P-currencies is not healthy. 1) There are some people out there sitting on fortunes in *coin. If and when they sell, the boom goes bust 2) If that does not happen, or even if it happens for some time, the future of a currency with no inflation seems to be limited - as long as there is any interest by merchants, it will always gain against fiat money. This upward pressure makes those currencies fight with gold for the role of a long-term asset but makes them impractical as a day-to-day trading vehicle. Remember the 10,000 BTC pizza? That pizza would now be worth $1.4M - this is absurd and even if we switch to micro-BTC, such a trend leads to hoarding, not spending. A P2P-currency with a built-in Tobin tax or demurrage would be more interesting. edited out the factor of 100 in the pizza.
- wwwtyro 14y ago$1.4M, not $140M.
- iSnow 14y agoMeh, my bad, a little factor of 100 goes a long way.
- cinquemb 14y agoYou are entitled to voice your opinion, but… 10K BTC would be worth ~$1.4M and the pizza will still be worth relatively the same as it was before. Unless $GS and friends are actively long pizza futures (since it is a vegetable now), then it might be a little more expensive than it was before. People seem to be focusing too much on market cap and not on the ever increasing companies and people using it to transact for services. Dont hear much talk on here about EURUSD, USDJPY, USDCNH ctrl+P operations, i wonder how healthy that is?
- Nursie 14y ago"Once again, the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor!" (Sorry, you saying the pizza will still be worth relatively the same as it was before reminded me of this)
- codesuela 14y agoApril 1st, Time: 00:00 - Price 0.82 USD April 3rd, Now - Price 5.45 USD http://www.litecoinpool.org/charts http://www.litecoinpool.org/charts yup, looks legit :) I believe this one we actually will see pop
- nickpinkston 14y agoI'm interested to see if a flurry of crypto-currencies develops into a bubble with all the craziness that could mean. I'm not sure on the defenseability of BitCoin to filtering by ISPs as could perhaps be mandated by the government. If driven underground what would the reaction be?
- Nursie 14y agoMy main thought is that it doesn't really matter if its filtered by ISPs, or if it's impossible to shut it down because they can't stop the hackers, man... If the government of the US decides it's illegal and declares businesses and individuals accepting BTC to be trading illegally, then the value will undergo a significant collapse as it's now no longer the way of the future but just a secret internet thing (in the US). If a few other countries follow along then all dreams of BTC as the new global internet currency and transfer medium fail. Bitcoin may not be the easiest thing to shut down due to its P2P nature, but that doesn't mean it can't be effectively destroyed by people in power.
- jcfrei 14y agoI've particiapted in the litecoin trading for about 3 days now and the price development so far has been unreal. what's notable is that whenever I take a look at the orders book buyers outweigh sellers by a ratio of at least 2:1. Currently there are open buy orders for 154724 LTC (that is >850'982$, as of 3/4/13 - 15:41 CET). I'm currently gambling on mtgox supporting litecoin on its exchange.
- zoba 14y agoWhere did you buy the litecoin? And also, how did you transfer money into that exchange? I'm currently looking at BTC-e.com for the exchange, and OKPay for money transfer, but... OKPay just feels wrong. They are asking for photos of my drivers licence and utility bills - seems weird.
- jcfrei 14y agoI've used OKPay. The verification via photocopy is actually pretty common among those exchanges. MtGox has the same requirements. However the trip MtGox -> OKPay -> Btc-e is quite costly and there might be cheaper alternatives.
- mtct 14y agoOk, now the question is... ... how I can make my own crypto-currency?
- jmorton 14y agoIf you'd like to mine Bitcoin, this is a pretty good guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJUx_suP_CpjSEdSi8_z9U/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJU...
- hazov 14y agoAsk the litecoin guys in litecoin forum, they forked bitcoin, they can explain things to you.
- itistoday2 14y agoAny currency as volatile as Bitcoin or Litecoin is right now is worthless, because it's too unstable to do meaningful business transactions with.
- thomaslutz 14y agoIs it just me or is BTC-E (Cloudflare error) and MTGOX (was not able to login) currently under heavy load?
- yaddayadda 14y agoNot just you ... "Website currently unavailable The website you are trying to access is currently unavailable. Please try again at a later time. If you are the site owner, here is a help resource to help resolve the issue."
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- hazov 14y agoSo this is getting flagged (20 minutes ago it was in the top 30 now it's in the middle of the 70), I have a theory that's mainly by avid bitcoin users. Anyway after the Bitcoin boom I did my research about cryptocurrencies (and after discovering I bought 3000 BTC in 2009 for US$ 1, I still have them) and my opinion is that: 1) Some miners are moving away from BTC mining since it's mainly dominated by ASICs these days, litecoin is theory ASIC proof (did not read why, only what I read). 2) Users had build an identity around Bitcoin which involves political and economical beliefs (/r/bitcoin has links to /r/Libertarian /r/Austrian /Anarcho_Capitalism). 3) Because of that you'll see in bitcointalk.org or /r/bitcoin talk about government and fears of it and some belief that bitcoin can present an alternative reality to current state of fiat money[1]. 4) In /r/bitcoin any citation to litecoin get people either heavily questioned or downvoted, it shows that although the users are libertarians/austrians (there probably someone there who is one but not the other, or is neither) they do not see as good the idea of multiple cryptocurrencies fighting each other, which was Hayek's free currency system all about. 5) In the end I believe more cryptocurrencies will appear with different mining algorithms, some will try to be more fair in their mining mechanisms and others just like Bitcoin 6) I believe Bitcoin has only two possible futures, one it will be the cryptocurrency, if that's what's happen and people began to accept it instead of using it as an investment medium then each coin is now undervalued by hundreds of dollars, however if people use more than one cryptocurrency (or none at all) price and demand will set the dynamics, but in this case I believe the current bitcoin price will go down. [1]: I doubt that, if Bitcoin do substitute current money it would not be different than what we have with the exception that I believe governments from large countries would fork Bitcoin and put large ASIC farms to apply the 51% attack to control their own cryptocurrencies, just like what happens with current fiat money, these govenments will probably only allow taxes to be paid in their own currencies. Also like current money BTC would be anonymous with the exception that the transactions chain permit governments to see all transactions that happened (since this is necessary by the currency), coupled with double book accounting for businesses this would for me create a very different world than what people believe bitcoin will lead. EDIT: I do not see how political beliefs are at all important if you use/mine a cryptocurrency or not, really the political aspect of bitcoin users gets me baffled, although I see how it developed the impetus for the currency initial diffusion.