I never really got the appeal of Litecoin. It was basically just a copy and paste of Bitcoin with only minor alterations made to the source code (like changing the PoW for Script which never really defeated ASICs and a few other small changes.) It made no major innovations that can be named and even to this day it still lacks several of the major bug fixes that made it into Bitcoin (there are still patches missing from like ~2014 that result in the software being even harder to use for devs than Bitcoin.)
This is not coming from a Bitcoin Maximalist, by the way (not presently a fan of Bitcoin either.) Just thought I'd point out how bizarre it is that Litecoin even has a price at all when the software is functionally similar to Dogecoin. It's only real claim to fame is that it copy-pasted the code earlier than most other cryptocurrencies and hence now survives as a zombie currency backed by the souls of all the bag-holders foolish enough to invest in it (much like how Yahoo continues to survive to this day.)
Can we all just agree that Litecoin is a way over-hyped and silly excuse for a cryptocurrency? Silver to Bitcoin's gold? I can't think of a single problem that Litecoin actually solves compared to ... well, anything. At best: you could say its a speculative instrument tied to the cancerous block size debate. But other than that - is good marketing really worth the price of $21 USD a coin? I can see a lot of people getting screwed by this when the currency inevitably crashes again ...
Today, Litecoin has locked in support for Segwit, and in about a week it will be possible to create Lightning Network transactions using Litecoin.
This is largely due to the efforts of the creator, Charlie Lee, who was able to build consensus among the community to activate Segwit.
Contrast this with the inability of the Bitcoin Community over the last few years to get any improvements added.
You may think this is a bad thing because Litecoin has a more centralized authority governing it, or you may think it's a good thing because Litecoin has a way to improve itself, but either way I'd argue Litecoin has very recently become more than what you described.
This. As the price indicated, it was 1/10 the value of itself from the Chinese bubble while Bitcoin has reached all time high now until it realized its use as a good real world test of the Bitcoin's newer features when Bitcoin struggled to apply those due to political and financial conflict within the community but Litecoin went ahead being a much smaller community and is the first to have it activated.
Being almost identical to Bitcoin actually increased its value as its results can be a good indication for Bitcoin as well.
As a cryptocurrency, it's pretty much of no use but as a real world play ground for newer features for Bitcoin, it's pretty optimal and it just proved it has a room to stay than being irrelevant.
Well, if it's useful for all those reasons, and it can be traded for a useful cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Ether and now USD and to do everything a cryptocurrency can do then its useful . . . right?
You basically just said it's Bitcoin's more progressive, more nimble cousin.
> It was basically just a copy and paste of Bitcoin with only minor alterations made to the source code (like changing the PoW for Script which never really defeated ASICs and a few other small changes.)
The original announcement of Litecoin [1] shows that it is closer to being a Tenebrix clone.
It was Tenebrix, a coin which has long since faded into obscurity, that introduced Hashcash with scrypt as an alternative PoW. Also, with others already having reduced the block interval time, there appears to be little if anything innovative about Litecoin.
Markets gonna value what they want to value... I think it is good to have different options for people. Overall I think cryptocurrencies are undervalued - 40 billion market cap is nothing when thinking about the potential. However what cryptocurrency should have which percentage of the crypto economy is a much more difficult question.
Cryptocurrencies are valued as low as they are _because_ of the question of which cryptocurrency should have which percentage of the economy. It's arbitrary to make new ones. Even as increased adoption of cyptocurrency _in general_ is highly likely, the adoption of _any particular coin_ is still full of uncertainty.
> now survives as a zombie currency backed by the souls of all the bag-holders foolish enough to invest in it
Honestly, most of the world's economic trust is backed by similar bag-holders, just without the use of proof of stake algorithms. Yes, one could argue that hard goods are an amount of tangible trust that can represent value, but most of the value in today's systems comes from human backed trust, which itself is irrational. Take the Fed for example.
A bag-holder, by any definition, is simply an individual that believes a given fact, irrationally. Here, the irrational belief is that cryptocurrencies like Litecoin can give way to rational desirable outcomes in the future. This is based on a mostly rational assumption crytpocurrencies are designed to provide a rational and clear means by which value can be established among those who participate in a group using the technology. For example, if I send you 1 Litecoin, then everyone in our group can immediately come to the rational conclusion you now have control of 1 Litecoin, assuming you control the private key to that address, of course. In other words, we agree to use this thing because this thing appears to be rational.
It only becomes irrational when we start talking about adding fiat currency values into the mix. Those values themselves are based on human established trust, so must be irrational by definition. Again, I point at the Fed. The way the Dollar's value is calculated, in part, is by analyzing 100K different products sold on the markets. Who picked these items? Who decided how much they are worth? What ruler was used to measure their worth?
Either we can continue down the path of handling irrational beliefs the old way, by electing group leaders (or leaders electing themselves) to speak for the group and it's collective value, or we can adopt new ways of instantiating trust by letting computers do it in a way that can be proved to be almost, but not quite, completely rational.
> Can we all just agree that Litecoin is a way over-hyped and silly excuse for a cryptocurrency?
No. As I've pointed out now, the belief that our current economic systems "make sense" is irrational. I think it's far better if we all agree that something needs to be done about it, that something might be slightly irrational in the short term, and that cryptocurrencies, like Litecoin, may present a rational means by which we measure value in the economy of the world, moving forward.
As is clear from its current market cap, it would seem others agree with me, and disagree with you.
Note: I use the terms rational and irrational frequently nowadays. When I use the terms I am referring to the concept of either an "unknown amount of work ahead" or a "known amount of work ahead". Programmers may liken this concept to the the P versus NP problem. While not equivalent, they both represent an idea that an unknown or overly large amount of work can be "collapsed" into a known amount of work, and thus calculated at a given cost.
This is not coming from a Bitcoin Maximalist, by the way (not presently a fan of Bitcoin either.) Just thought I'd point out how bizarre it is that Litecoin even has a price at all when the software is functionally similar to Dogecoin. It's only real claim to fame is that it copy-pasted the code earlier than most other cryptocurrencies and hence now survives as a zombie currency backed by the souls of all the bag-holders foolish enough to invest in it (much like how Yahoo continues to survive to this day.)
Can we all just agree that Litecoin is a way over-hyped and silly excuse for a cryptocurrency? Silver to Bitcoin's gold? I can't think of a single problem that Litecoin actually solves compared to ... well, anything. At best: you could say its a speculative instrument tied to the cancerous block size debate. But other than that - is good marketing really worth the price of $21 USD a coin? I can see a lot of people getting screwed by this when the currency inevitably crashes again ...