Litecoin now trading for $5.78

by shiftpgdn • 13 years ago

35 60 13 years ago

I cannot be the only one thinking "WTF is 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• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Some enterprising person will provide that service (for a fee, of course)

dfgonzalez• 13 years ago

I 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.

yebyen2• 13 years ago

It 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?

danmaz742• 13 years ago

But I guess that when the BTC bubble will bust, LTC will do the same...

rplnt2• 13 years 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).

itistoday22• 13 years ago

Comparison between Bitcoin and Litecoin: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Comparison...

lmm2• 13 years ago

What 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

What 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• 13 years ago

The 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.

Nursie4• 13 years ago

> 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 rate halves every so often, the creation of new bitcoins slows over time, to the limit of 21 million.

The limit is imposed by choice, if you kept creation proportional to some factor of the network rather than ever-decreasing and with a solid cap, you could change the game.

I agree that processing power is not necessarily the best factor to relate it to.

rplnt2• 13 years ago

You don't care who owns all the gold by which was all the currency once backed.. why would you care who generated bitcoins? This might be a very sloppy comparison since I have no idea how gold-currency worked, but my point stands. Bitcoin shouldn't be about mining, it's about exchange (for goods and services, not dollars). It really doesn't matter from your perspective how the coins were once mined. You just acquire them (as you acquire money now) and spend them. That's all. Yes, there are and will be people who made fortunes out of this scheme. But that should not affect you.

Nursie4• 13 years ago

Depends really. If they're getting fat off my economic output then that bothers me. If, by my participation in the BTC economy, my economic activity fuels a rise in the price of the coin, then the early adopters are effectively profiting from my actions. This bothers me.

lmm2• 13 years ago

>You don't care who owns all the gold by which was all the currency once backed.. why would you care who generated bitcoins? This might be a very sloppy comparison since I have no idea how gold-currency worked, but my point stands

Actually, the need for an alternative currency to silver was a significant driving force in my country's history (it resulted in us creating a modern banking system ahead of many of our contemporaries, the effects of which are still visible today) - and this need existed primarily because so much silver was controlled by Spain, our enemy.

>Yes, there are and will be people who made fortunes out of this scheme. But that should not affect you.

Maybe it shouldn't. But as a human with a sense of fairness, I object to creating immense fortunes for those who did a relatively small amount of programming, or simply got lucky.

jareds• 13 years ago

As someone who just started mining litecoin on a mid range CPU about 10 days ago and has scene my payout per day decrease as the price has spiked I agree.

Ixiaus• 13 years ago

Litecoin 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).

kaoD• 13 years ago

The downside: lower security (tradeoff for confirmation speed).

nwh2• 13 years ago

> quicker confirmation times

As the block time is half that of BTC, you need twice as many to gain the same stable blockchain. The confirmation time is the same.

ritonlajoie• 13 years ago

Is 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• 13 years ago

Many 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• 13 years ago

If it is not mined, who gets the starting coins?

solox3• 13 years ago

The inventor.

jmorton3• 13 years ago

There 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)

gabipurcaru2• 13 years ago

I 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.

meepmorp• 13 years ago

Is there a crypto coin where the mining work isn't a useless waste of energy?

Bitcoin mining (and maybe litecoin, dunno) doesn't do anything useful in the process of using all those hardware and electrical resources. No protein folding, no SETI, no looking for mersenne primes - just a bunch of crypto work that gets you bitcoins. It'd be nice if you actually had to produce some knowledge to get the coins.

gabipurcaru2• 13 years ago

How is finding the digits of 2^57,885,161 - 1 useful?

dchest• 13 years ago

This the common mistake. Mining does useful work: validating transactions.

anywhichway• 13 years ago

To index to a fiat currency it requires a market maker. Some person or group that will guarantee that if you have $1 they'll give you a unit of currency and if you have a unit of currency they'll give you $1. To meet the demand for this currency it would require the market maker would need to be able to print money, otherwise the price could naturally increase without a way to stop it. Also, to be able to survive a run on the bank, for every unit of currency they issue and take in $1 they would have to keep that $1 in reserve in case everyone tries to cash out at once.

Letting a central authority print money that had no obligations to the general public is dangerous. Also the market maker would likely spend some of the money they take in. If there was ever a run on the bank they would just shut down the currency and keep the money that was paid in, which would make a run on the bank more likely.

This is very similar to online casinos that let you buy chips, but instead of offering gambling services, they would offer annonomous transaction services. Some casinos have just shut down and kept all the money or if it becomes a legal problem (as any solid fully annonomous currency would) could be shut down by their local government.

There is just no good reason to trust a currency that requires a central authority that can print money and that you don't trust and there is no reason to trust that they'll use the printing power responsibly.

iSnow4• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

$1.4M, not $140M.

iSnow4• 13 years ago

Meh, my bad, a little factor of 100 goes a long way.

cinquemb3• 13 years ago

You 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?

Nursie4• 13 years 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)

iSnow4• 13 years ago

>10K BTC would be worth ~$1.4M and the pizza will still be worth relatively the same as it was before

I can't see how you arrive at this. No-one is going to buy a pizza for 10K BTC anymore, so clearly the worth has changed.

danmaz742• 13 years ago

Accepting BTC is not the same thing as fixing prices in BTC. Who is fixing prices in Bitcoin?

And if eg the Eur/USD conversion rate had changed +/- X00% in 3 months you could be sure that you would hear much talk about that here (and everywhere).

codesuela• 13 years ago

April 1st, Time: 00:00 - Price 0.82 USD

April 3rd, Now - Price 5.45 USD

http://www.litecoinpool.org/charts

yup, looks legit :) I believe this one we actually will see pop

nickpinkston• 13 years ago

I'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?

Nursie4• 13 years ago

My 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.

jcfrei2• 13 years ago

I'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• 13 years ago

Where 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.

jcfrei2• 13 years ago

I'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.

mtct2• 13 years ago

Ok, now the question is...

... how I can make my own crypto-currency?

jmorton3• 13 years ago

If you'd like to mine Bitcoin, this is a pretty good guide:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJU...

mtct2• 13 years ago

No, I've asked how make my own crypto-currency, not how make bitcoin

hazov2• 13 years ago

Ask the litecoin guys in litecoin forum, they forked bitcoin, they can explain things to you.

itistoday22• 13 years ago

Any currency as volatile as Bitcoin or Litecoin is right now is worthless, because it's too unstable to do meaningful business transactions with.

thomaslutz• 13 years ago

Is it just me or is BTC-E (Cloudflare error) and MTGOX (was not able to login) currently under heavy load?

yaddayadda• 13 years ago

Not 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."

hazov2• 13 years ago

So 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.

Litecoin now trading for $5.78

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