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Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
- nazgulnarsil 13y agoJust a FYI: Litecoin does NOT confirm faster than bitcoins. Based on how the core bitcoin protocol works (which litecoin does not alter), a halving in confirmation time is also a halving in reliability of the confirmation.
- pat2man 13y agoWell I think the argument is that the reliability is increased by using scrypt instead of SHA256 which makes it harder for someone to control more than 50% of mining and that the result is about even.
- gigq 13y agoIn practice it doesn't seem to matter. For example btc-e.com who accepts both bitcoin and litecoin for trading makes you wait 3 confirmations for bitcoin and 6 confirmations for litecoin. So you are correct that 1 litecoin transaction is not as reliable as 1 bitcoin transaction but they are not making you wait 12 litecoin transactions. Given that btc-e has a lot to lose on double spend attacks I think it's a good measure of how these two currencies are playing out in the market.
- nullc 13y agoThe propagation times are very important here. You can get away with faster if and only if the network communications latency is low enough. If blocks are too fast you start getting very large reorganizations. Today litecoin has almost no transactions, so its lower interblock time is not a problem... Yet.
- hvidgaard 13y agoHow is that? My understanding is all it does is slightly reducing the time it takes to successfully make a 51% attack, and slightly increase the risk of orphaned blocks. The reduction in time to perform a 51% attack is countered with just a few more conformations.
- makomk 13y agoNot really. The design of Bitcoin assumes that an attacker doesn't control more than 50% of the total mining power. If that's true, the level of protection provided by N confirmations decreases exponentially as N increases and is essentially independent of the confirmation time. This is all in Satoshi's original whitepaper. If an attacker does control 50-plus percent of the total mining power, you're basically screwed. Increasing the total confirmation time doesn't increase the cost of a 51% attack by enough to be worth attempting.
- mikemoka 13y agoI can't be convinced that bitcoin is anything but inevitable, and I think that it will, at some point in the near future, solve its apparent problems by means of a company born from its very ecosystem
- dragontamer 13y agoBTC is going to have issues as long as it takes a significant period of time to confirm a BTC transfer. I'm seeing reports of people trying to buy coffee, but the BTC transfer takes so long to confirm that the customer is long gone before you know whether or not the BTCs really transferred. Nothing can stop this either, it is innate to the system. BTC confirmations will take on the average 10minutes, but can last much longer in practice. Attempts to mitigate this issue only result in rebuilding credit-cards / accounts / virtual money systems on top of BTC... which then begs the question... why not just use a Credit Card as always? Litecoin tries to solve the problem by making the block discovery process much quicker (among other things). These "virtual coins" will need to go through several revisions before they're really useful.
- marcell 13y agoCredit card transactions can be reversed weeks/months after they are made. This is necessary to combat fraud, and is part of the reason why fees around 2% exist. In contrast, bitcoin transactions are infeasible to reverse after a few hours. That said, anything on the order of minutes is obviously too long to wait for certain types of transactions. Litecoin, with a target of 2.5 minutes between confirmations, does nothing to solve this. Bitcoin/P2P cryptocurrencies will need a solution for this problem if they are to be used for in person sales at retailers.
- LyndsySimon 13y ago> Credit card transactions can be reversed weeks/months after they are made Exactly. The instant approval from the credit card company is a close analogue to a signed transaction. Both prove that the person has the funds available and that they have the authority to authorize the transaction. The 40-minute confirmation delay is roughly equivalent to the 6 months or so that it takes before credit card transactions become irreversible. At approximately one block mined every 10 minutes, after 40 minutes there would a 4-block-long chain including the transaction. The idea that someone with the resources necessary to discover 5 blocks before everyone else in the network could discover one block would bring them to bear to steal a cup of coffee is insane. If I'm selling convenience goods - say, under $100 - I'm fine with zero-confirmation transactions. If we're talking $100-$1000, I'd wait until the network confirms it once. If I'm selling you a house, then I'll buy you lunch while we wait an hour or so for 6 confirmations.
- yapcguy 13y ago"Creator" of Litecoin - is this some kind of joke? Litecoin is a trivial fork of Bitcoin. Litecoin uses scrypt instead of SHA256 for proof-of-work and the total number of coins is 84 million instead of 21 million. That's it!
- t0 13y agohttps://github.com/litecoin-project?tab=members https://github.com/litecoin-project?tab=members
- enraged_camel 13y agoHow does it feel to be so embarrassingly ignorant all the time?
- Simucal 13y agoWhat are some other differences?
- yapcguy 13y agoSo if I fork Bitcoin by changing the hashing algorithm and tweaking a parameter, am I suddenly a "creator" too? Get real. This is an insult to Satoshi Nakamoto.
- eru 13y agoSure. The problem will, of course, be to get anyone to assign any value to your fork.
- bdcs 13y agoCharlie Lee is well aware of this. He created Litecoin to stop endless requests to change bitcoin to a faster confirmation time, even though the benefits are scarce.
- yapcguy 13y agoCoinbase touting their new hire as a "Creator" is a bit much. Nothing wrong with what Charlie has done, good luck to him.
- Sealy 13y agoI hope that this does not have a detrimental affect to the future development of Litecoin. For most, Litecoin to Bitcoin is seen as what Silver is to Gold. Silver in this sense is credited with its ability to stabilize the price of gold. My opinion is that if there is to be a future for digital currencies there must be more then one option available. Currently Litecoin is the leading alt-coin based on Market cap (which is linked to its value) Disclosure: Bullish on both BTC and LTC
- eru 13y agoHow does silver help stabilize the price of gold?
- bredren 13y agoHey, this is pretty awesome. I changed from Authy to Google for my 2 factor on, which made things more convenient. Passion for crypto and ability to measurably improve Coinbase. It will be interesting to see if support for Litecoin takes hold at Coinbase.
- gigq 13y agoIs anyone else surprised that the creator of Litecoin needed to take a job? Given that the market cap of Litecoin is 53 million I would have expected the creator to have mined a good amount of that in the early days. Of course he may have just wanted to take the job and not needed it but I would have assumed he would have worked on something for the Litecoin ecosystem.