5 ms·

Litecoin nears $10 - up from $4 a day ago

27 points by samwilliams 13y ago

fenollp 13y ago
LTC is a ponzy scheme, unlike BTC. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin#Pump_and_Dump_Scheme https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin#Pump_and_Dump_Scheme
- genericacct 13y ago
  No, they all are, and frankly, I am putting the following line in my hosts file until you all grow up a little and go discuss your toy currencies somewhere else 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
  - chrisvineup 13y ago
    Aww did you sell your bitcoins early :S
  - jamesrom 13y ago
    Someone needs to grow up, that's for sure.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sambdala 13y ago
    "Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest."
  - dingaling 13y ago
    > 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com That's quite inefficient. Your browser ( and any other apps ) will attempt to connect to your legacy IPv4 localhost, time-out and fail, assuming you don't have a web server listening there. Better to black-hole with an unroutable address. Try [::].
    - kybernetyk 13y ago
      Will it really be a timeout? I thought the OS will send back a RST packet on ports it doesn't listen.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- chrisvineup 13y ago
  When MT-Gox accept it this should legitimise it either way...
  - nisa 13y ago
    It is on their TODO list but they don't have a date and it's not coming in the near future... so it's not clear if this will happen.
- mrspeaker 13y ago
  Why "unlike BTC"? (serious question!)
  - lingben 13y ago
    not ponzi but 'pump and dump' and that label is apt for bitcoin as well
  - javert 13y ago
    A Ponzi scheme is well-defined. Bitcoin is well-defined. The definitions are not the same.
    - teraflop 13y ago
      That doesn't answer the question. LTC is also well-defined (it's almost identical to BTC) so how is it a Ponzi scheme if Bitcoin isn't?
      - javert 13y ago
        If by LTC you mean Litecoin---litecoin is not a Ponzi scheme, either. Like BTC, it does not fit the definition. Even if the creators of BTC or LTC were intentionally setting out to defraud people, it would not be a Ponzi scheme.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  Don't bother with that article on wikipedia. Like so many, it doesn't pass the sniff test and completely fails wikipedia's own guidelines on impartiality. It contains complete weasel wording like "Additionally, people often complain". It reads like it was written by a bitcoin promoter.
  - schrodinger 13y ago
    that's not wikipedia.
    - JohnTHaller 13y ago
      Ah, sorry about that. I saw the standard formatting and had just assumed.
QuasiAlon 13y ago
Interesting to see spillover effects from the bitcoin drama over the past few days
hayksaakian 13y ago
I love it. Diversification of investments is awesome.
- lingben 13y ago
  Exactly. Recall the lessons of the Dutch, they bought both blue and red tulips.
  - nutate 13y ago
    Oddly that mania lasted less than 12 months. Bitcoin has been on the rise for years, is used for more than decoration and won't rot...
- shubb 13y ago
  But Bitcoin is a gamble not an investment - its value may be 1000% or 1% of its current value next year, and neither of us can really predict that. Sure I own some (I made like 100% so far), but its a lottery ticket. I'd say that investing in a high growth startup is a gamble, but investing in 100 is an investment. Which links to your diversity of investment thing. If you invested in 100 startups in the same niche, for instance 500 bitcoin exchanges, that would not be diversified. You would be betting on the same business model. If crypto currencies are discredited - the buyers today get burned by the big crash and never come back, or laws change to make it too inconvenient to bother investing in (all the exchanges are pushed into he black market), then the litecoin price will dive like bitcoin and stay there.
  - mikro2nd 13y ago
    > its value may be 1000% or 1% of its current value next year, and neither of us can really predict that True enough, but then we could say much the same thing for the fiat currency of your choice. (Except maybe the CHF? ;)
    - sentenza 13y ago
      No. All significant 'real world' currencies are tied to the economy of a nation-state or nation-state-like entity. Bitcoin et al are free-floating in that regard. To see how this makes a difference, consider what would happen if one of the early adopters were to sell 100K bitcoins right now.
mrspeaker 13y ago
Is it still worth unleashing a miner on my lappy to go spelunking for Litecoins, or has that ship sailed too?
- ck2 13y ago
  On a laptop forget it, difficulty is way too high.
  - ddd1600 13y ago
    How about a brand new MacBook Pro w solid state memory?
- sentenza 13y ago
  When the whole bitcoin craziness started, I decided to go with Pascal's Wager and participate in a small way. (Note that I'm very sceptical on the whole cryptocurrency thing.) My assumption was that, if bitcoin doesn't blow up for technical reasons, then there must also be some merit to the runner-ups. So I started mining litecoin with my little quadcore desktop machine. That was five days ago and already I notice that my bang-for-the-kilowatthour is decreasing rapidly. Everybody and their grandma is mining litecoin, and the smell of impending speculative crash is getting stronger. Don't stress yourself over losing out in the gold rush. This bubble, like thousands before, will pop and you'll be there to give joking explanations of what happened to less technically inclined friends.
yitchelle 13y ago
Noob here. Are the various crypto currencies floating around exchangeable via a trading exchange of sorts?
- dcc1 13y ago
  btc-e does https://btc-e.com/ https://btc-e.com/
- ngpio 13y ago
  BTC-e is the most popular. I believe Vircurex[1] handles the largest number of cryptocurrencies. [1] https://vircurex.com/ https://vircurex.com/
jackgolding 13y ago
Is there a cryptocurrency index anyone has made?
- QuasiAlon 13y ago
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jackgolding 13y ago
Is there a cryptocurrency index anyone has made?
shomyo 13y ago
Who cares.
oleganza 13y ago
It's going to be interesting. There's inherently no technical difference between LTC and BTC (block intervals are not drastically different in practice, and nominal count of coins is meaningless). Network effect-wise, Bitcoin has much more hashing power (and thus resistance to 51% attack) than Litecoin, but it is also more valuable one, so it also does not matter much. I don't buy there's any "diversification" in holding both LTC and BTC. The technical and legal risks are mostly the same. To me, in the long run, it's more profitable to put 100% of your money in the most liquid of them, which is currently Bitcoin. Simply because people want one money: one most marketable, most widely accepted asset. LTC is still valuable because we are in a very early speculation phase and most folks got used to presence of both gold and silver, and there's very strong incentive for recent Bitcoin miners with video cards to pump up LTC (as that's the only thing to mine on their equipment right now) and sell out for Bitcoin while they can. Either Bitcoin or Litecoin must pop, there's no economic reason for them to stay in some balanced relation. I bet even gold will largely lose wealth as it's moved to Bitcoin, but then gold has very different risks and features, so it may find its balance with Bitcoin.
- neomindryan 13y ago
  > there's no economic reason for them to stay in some balanced relation. Actually, there might be. The fee needed to get a bitcoin transaction into the blockchain is determined by a market, and it is a flat number, not a percentage of the transaction. If bitcoin succeeds, it may not be practical to use it for smaller transactions.
  - oleganza 13y ago
    It's neither a flat number, nor a percentage. Fee is not hard-coded in the protocol, everyone can decide on the fee himself. Users decide how much they want to pay and miners decide how to prioritise transactions. The fee is freely floating in both LTC and BTC, no difference here. The only practical difference is liquidity and it is produced only by network effect which tends to create "one of a kind" winner in a competition between very similar networks.
    - 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jnbiche 13y ago
Part of this rise is likely due to the proposal of Mike Hearn, a core developer and Bitcoin Foundation officer, to start "redlisting" (marketing-friendly word for blacklisting) wayward Bitcoin addresses. How someone who has been around the Bitcoin world for so long doesn't understand the importance of the currency's fungibility is beyond me. If you make one person's Bitcoins worth less than another person's Bitcoins, then we all lose.
- primitivesuave 13y ago
  Hearn only proposed there be a discussion on the matter, he definitely didn't seem like he was pushing either way.
  - jnbiche 13y ago
    Yes, he proposed the idea for the second time in a year "just for discussion". And the first time he proposed it, he definitely and very explicitly argued in favor of it. If he's more subtle this time, it's because he's learned this is an issue that is deeply important to most long-time Bitcoiners, since it's an assault on one of the most fundamental of Bitcoin's properties.
- olalonde 13y ago
  Wouldn't redlisting be possible with litecoin too?
  - jnbiche 13y ago
    Sure, but there are no influential core Litecoin developers repeatedly proposing that they do it to Litecoin.
brador 13y ago
Litecoin could be the spark that causes the Bitcoin crash. Hear me out. Method: litecoin gets major news push as the "new Bitcoin", people sell out of bitcoins into litecoin causing Bitcoin prices to crash overnight. Needed: a very fast way to move from bitcoin holdings to litecoin. If someone makes that it's game over for bitcoin.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jnbiche 13y ago
  > Needed: a very fast way to move from bitcoin holdings to litecoin. There are many very easy ways to quickly move from Bitcoin to Litecoin. On btc-e.com, for example, you can sign up and be trading Bitcoin>Litecoin within an hour or less (the time needed for Bitcoins deposits to clear).
  - brador 13y ago
    Right, so now all we need is the mainstream news push.
jamoes 13y ago
In my opinion, a better way to price LTC is in BTC. So, I prefer the LTC/BTC chart: http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/period-charts.php?period=1-year&resolution=day&pair=ltc-btc&market=btc-e http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/period-charts.php?period=1-... Looking at it this way: LTC is now up to 0.014 BTC, up from a recent low of 0.01 BTC, and down from a high of 0.0449 BTC back in April.

27 points by samwilliams 13y ago

LTC is a ponzy scheme, unlike BTC. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin#Pump_and_Dump_Scheme https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin#Pump_and_Dump_Scheme

genericacct 13y ago
No, they all are, and frankly, I am putting the following line in my hosts file until you all grow up a little and go discuss your toy currencies somewhere else 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
- chrisvineup 13y ago
  Aww did you sell your bitcoins early :S
- jamesrom 13y ago
  Someone needs to grow up, that's for sure.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Sambdala 13y ago
  "Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest."
- dingaling 13y ago
  > 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com That's quite inefficient. Your browser ( and any other apps ) will attempt to connect to your legacy IPv4 localhost, time-out and fail, assuming you don't have a web server listening there. Better to black-hole with an unroutable address. Try [::].
  - kybernetyk 13y ago
    Will it really be a timeout? I thought the OS will send back a RST packet on ports it doesn't listen.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
chrisvineup 13y ago
When MT-Gox accept it this should legitimise it either way...
- nisa 13y ago
  It is on their TODO list but they don't have a date and it's not coming in the near future... so it's not clear if this will happen.
mrspeaker 13y ago
Why "unlike BTC"? (serious question!)
- lingben 13y ago
  not ponzi but 'pump and dump' and that label is apt for bitcoin as well
- javert 13y ago
  A Ponzi scheme is well-defined. Bitcoin is well-defined. The definitions are not the same.
  - teraflop 13y ago
    That doesn't answer the question. LTC is also well-defined (it's almost identical to BTC) so how is it a Ponzi scheme if Bitcoin isn't?
    - javert 13y ago
      If by LTC you mean Litecoin---litecoin is not a Ponzi scheme, either. Like BTC, it does not fit the definition. Even if the creators of BTC or LTC were intentionally setting out to defraud people, it would not be a Ponzi scheme.
JohnTHaller 13y ago
Don't bother with that article on wikipedia. Like so many, it doesn't pass the sniff test and completely fails wikipedia's own guidelines on impartiality. It contains complete weasel wording like "Additionally, people often complain". It reads like it was written by a bitcoin promoter.
- schrodinger 13y ago
  that's not wikipedia.
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    Ah, sorry about that. I saw the standard formatting and had just assumed.

QuasiAlon 13y ago

Interesting to see spillover effects from the bitcoin drama over the past few days

hayksaakian 13y ago

I love it. Diversification of investments is awesome.

lingben 13y ago
Exactly. Recall the lessons of the Dutch, they bought both blue and red tulips.
- nutate 13y ago
  Oddly that mania lasted less than 12 months. Bitcoin has been on the rise for years, is used for more than decoration and won't rot...
shubb 13y ago
But Bitcoin is a gamble not an investment - its value may be 1000% or 1% of its current value next year, and neither of us can really predict that. Sure I own some (I made like 100% so far), but its a lottery ticket. I'd say that investing in a high growth startup is a gamble, but investing in 100 is an investment. Which links to your diversity of investment thing. If you invested in 100 startups in the same niche, for instance 500 bitcoin exchanges, that would not be diversified. You would be betting on the same business model. If crypto currencies are discredited - the buyers today get burned by the big crash and never come back, or laws change to make it too inconvenient to bother investing in (all the exchanges are pushed into he black market), then the litecoin price will dive like bitcoin and stay there.
- mikro2nd 13y ago
  > its value may be 1000% or 1% of its current value next year, and neither of us can really predict that True enough, but then we could say much the same thing for the fiat currency of your choice. (Except maybe the CHF? ;)
  - sentenza 13y ago
    No. All significant 'real world' currencies are tied to the economy of a nation-state or nation-state-like entity. Bitcoin et al are free-floating in that regard. To see how this makes a difference, consider what would happen if one of the early adopters were to sell 100K bitcoins right now.

mrspeaker 13y ago

Is it still worth unleashing a miner on my lappy to go spelunking for Litecoins, or has that ship sailed too?

ck2 13y ago
On a laptop forget it, difficulty is way too high.
- ddd1600 13y ago
  How about a brand new MacBook Pro w solid state memory?
sentenza 13y ago
When the whole bitcoin craziness started, I decided to go with Pascal's Wager and participate in a small way. (Note that I'm very sceptical on the whole cryptocurrency thing.) My assumption was that, if bitcoin doesn't blow up for technical reasons, then there must also be some merit to the runner-ups. So I started mining litecoin with my little quadcore desktop machine. That was five days ago and already I notice that my bang-for-the-kilowatthour is decreasing rapidly. Everybody and their grandma is mining litecoin, and the smell of impending speculative crash is getting stronger. Don't stress yourself over losing out in the gold rush. This bubble, like thousands before, will pop and you'll be there to give joking explanations of what happened to less technically inclined friends.

yitchelle 13y ago

Noob here. Are the various crypto currencies floating around exchangeable via a trading exchange of sorts?

dcc1 13y ago
btc-e does https://btc-e.com/ https://btc-e.com/
ngpio 13y ago
BTC-e is the most popular. I believe Vircurex[1] handles the largest number of cryptocurrencies. [1] https://vircurex.com/ https://vircurex.com/

jackgolding 13y ago

Is there a cryptocurrency index anyone has made?

QuasiAlon 13y ago
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

jackgolding 13y ago

Is there a cryptocurrency index anyone has made?

shomyo 13y ago

Who cares.

oleganza 13y ago

It's going to be interesting. There's inherently no technical difference between LTC and BTC (block intervals are not drastically different in practice, and nominal count of coins is meaningless). Network effect-wise, Bitcoin has much more hashing power (and thus resistance to 51% attack) than Litecoin, but it is also more valuable one, so it also does not matter much. I don't buy there's any "diversification" in holding both LTC and BTC. The technical and legal risks are mostly the same. To me, in the long run, it's more profitable to put 100% of your money in the most liquid of them, which is currently Bitcoin. Simply because people want one money: one most marketable, most widely accepted asset. LTC is still valuable because we are in a very early speculation phase and most folks got used to presence of both gold and silver, and there's very strong incentive for recent Bitcoin miners with video cards to pump up LTC (as that's the only thing to mine on their equipment right now) and sell out for Bitcoin while they can. Either Bitcoin or Litecoin must pop, there's no economic reason for them to stay in some balanced relation. I bet even gold will largely lose wealth as it's moved to Bitcoin, but then gold has very different risks and features, so it may find its balance with Bitcoin.

neomindryan 13y ago
> there's no economic reason for them to stay in some balanced relation. Actually, there might be. The fee needed to get a bitcoin transaction into the blockchain is determined by a market, and it is a flat number, not a percentage of the transaction. If bitcoin succeeds, it may not be practical to use it for smaller transactions.
- oleganza 13y ago
  It's neither a flat number, nor a percentage. Fee is not hard-coded in the protocol, everyone can decide on the fee himself. Users decide how much they want to pay and miners decide how to prioritise transactions. The fee is freely floating in both LTC and BTC, no difference here. The only practical difference is liquidity and it is produced only by network effect which tends to create "one of a kind" winner in a competition between very similar networks.
  - 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jnbiche 13y ago

Part of this rise is likely due to the proposal of Mike Hearn, a core developer and Bitcoin Foundation officer, to start "redlisting" (marketing-friendly word for blacklisting) wayward Bitcoin addresses. How someone who has been around the Bitcoin world for so long doesn't understand the importance of the currency's fungibility is beyond me. If you make one person's Bitcoins worth less than another person's Bitcoins, then we all lose.

primitivesuave 13y ago
Hearn only proposed there be a discussion on the matter, he definitely didn't seem like he was pushing either way.
- jnbiche 13y ago
  Yes, he proposed the idea for the second time in a year "just for discussion". And the first time he proposed it, he definitely and very explicitly argued in favor of it. If he's more subtle this time, it's because he's learned this is an issue that is deeply important to most long-time Bitcoiners, since it's an assault on one of the most fundamental of Bitcoin's properties.
olalonde 13y ago
Wouldn't redlisting be possible with litecoin too?
- jnbiche 13y ago
  Sure, but there are no influential core Litecoin developers repeatedly proposing that they do it to Litecoin.

brador 13y ago

Litecoin could be the spark that causes the Bitcoin crash. Hear me out. Method: litecoin gets major news push as the "new Bitcoin", people sell out of bitcoins into litecoin causing Bitcoin prices to crash overnight. Needed: a very fast way to move from bitcoin holdings to litecoin. If someone makes that it's game over for bitcoin.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jnbiche 13y ago
> Needed: a very fast way to move from bitcoin holdings to litecoin. There are many very easy ways to quickly move from Bitcoin to Litecoin. On btc-e.com, for example, you can sign up and be trading Bitcoin>Litecoin within an hour or less (the time needed for Bitcoins deposits to clear).
- brador 13y ago
  Right, so now all we need is the mainstream news push.

jamoes 13y ago

In my opinion, a better way to price LTC is in BTC. So, I prefer the LTC/BTC chart: http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/period-charts.php?period=1-year&resolution=day&pair=ltc-btc&market=btc-e http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/period-charts.php?period=1-... Looking at it this way: LTC is now up to 0.014 BTC, up from a recent low of 0.01 BTC, and down from a high of 0.0449 BTC back in April.