The Pirate Bay is now accepting Litecoin donations

by a3voices • 13 years ago

40 43 13 years ago

a3voices3• 13 years ago

Mtgox, the most popular Bitcoin exchange site, plans on supporting Litecoin soon[1]. Also interesting is that Litecoin now has a Wikipedia article[2] dedicated to it.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/potent-ddos-attacks-...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litecoin

edit: removed comment about Litecoin being the only other cryptocurrency with a Wikipedia article

Flimm• 13 years ago

Based on the Wikipedia article, it seems to me that Litecoin is only an iterative improvement on Bitcoin. Why are people choosing to use it?

a3voices3• 13 years ago

Well one possible reason is that speculators enjoy the drama of new currencies that compete with Bitcoin, and the trendiness of investing in them.

haakon• 13 years ago

True or not, the word is that Litecoin was created so that people who were bitter about not having been amongst the earliest of the early Bitcoin adopters can have a new chance at a steep value increase. It's not even clear to me that Litecoin is an improvement at all, it just contains certain tweaks.

gus_massa• 13 years ago

PPCoin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPCoin

a3voices3• 13 years ago

My bad, didn't know this did as well!

GigabyteCoin5• 13 years ago

I am fairly certain they're adding "all" of the crypto currencies.

Litecoin, Namecoin, PPCoin, Terrracoin, etc...

zizee• 13 years ago

This is the second Litecoin article I have seen today. Is there enough space for two cypto currencies? What problems does Litecoin solve apart from giving a second chance to those that missed out on the easy early mining of bitcoins?

abrkn2• 13 years ago

"Litecoin provides faster transaction confirmations (2.5 minutes on average) and uses memory-hard, scrypt-based mining proof-of-work algorithm to target the regular computers and GPUs most people already have." http://litecoin.org

I remember that the original goal was to encourage CPU mining and Litecoin failed at this.

nwh4• 13 years ago

Not to mention, with faster (easier) confirmations you need more of them to form the same cumulative proof of work. If anything, Litecoin is magnitudes weaker due to the slower hashrate compared with Bitcoin.

vader1• 13 years ago

In the long run there is probably room for even more than two crypto-currencies, as long as each of them is unique enough to have its own set of advantages and disadvantages.

Litecoin however is merely a fork of Bitcoin with changes to a few trivial properties, I can't imagine it ever gaining as much traction as Bitcoin itself.

GigabyteCoin5• 13 years ago

>Is there enough space for two cypto currencies?

Check out btc-e.com and vircurex.com

There are about 8 alternative currencies that I track daily at the moment.

Tmmrn• 13 years ago

https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/wiki/History-of-cryptocurre...

abrkn2• 13 years ago

If you're interested in obtaining some Litecoin, I've developed an open source exchange. The exchange also issues LTC IOUs on Ripple for those on the bleeding edge. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=174643

GigabyteCoin5• 13 years ago

There is also btc-e.com and vircurex.com

Kiro• 13 years ago

Time to start hoarding.

GigabyteCoin5• 13 years ago

The price already spiked last night and is beginning to drop again on btc-e.com

pfisch• 13 years ago

This is a bad idea. Makes bitcoins seem less legitimate as a form of currency.

Also as far as I can tell this only helps out people mining coins, which is not at all the purpose of these currencies.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

Is there some objective reason to make bitcoins seem legitimate?

I guess there is the value provided by a decentralized transaction system, but at this point, competition seems like a better idea than picking a winner.

kzrdude• 13 years ago

how is bitcoin viable if it doesn't cope with competition?

tptacek• 13 years ago

It's not, and it doesn't.

digitalmagus• 13 years ago

Ah right, because the creation and competition of 100+ other fiat currencies, makes the dollar seem like less of a currency. Executive summary: Bad logic.

GigabyteCoin5• 13 years ago

Why should TPB care about Bitcoin?

TPB cares about donations.

Wilya• 13 years ago

Being open to donations in Litecoin isn't a very big risk to take. They could also accept donations in HN karma or WoW gold if the infrastructure enabled them to do so. It's not like it costs them anything.

When people start accepting payments in Litecoin, it will be noteworthy.

evilduck• 13 years ago

Agreed that its not a huge risk, but you can't spend HN karma. Litecoins can be converted to cash though, so there's at least some difference between the two.

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

There's actually a marketplace for reddit account that have high karma. It wouldn't surprise me if such a thing existed for HN accounts also.

Aqueous3• 13 years ago

Litecoin seems to solve the wrong problem with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's mining difficulty is calibrated fine for having a fixed limit. It's the fact that Bitcoin and Litecoin both stop at a fixed amount of units that makes them ultimately deflationary currencies that don't reward spending.

BitCoin is unique in that you can get an exact, real time measure of how the 'economy' is doing, whereas with the American economy these measures are extrapolated based on statistical work. Somebody should fork bitcoin and create a monetary policy adjustment algorithm that responds to changes in the transaction rate and prints more money (i.e., adjusts mining difficulty) in response. They should also remove the fixed ceiling.

nwh4• 13 years ago

I'm not sure why people have a problem directly with the fixed bitcoin limit. Unless there are some radical changes in medicine in the next few years, none of us will ever live to 2140 to see it.

Aqueous3• 13 years ago

The fixed BitCoin limit means the rate of production of BitCoin is also fixed, or changes in a determined way. It can't be decreased or increased in response to changes in the rate of spending. I think a monetary policy algorithm might actually adjust the rate of production of the coin upwards to counteract deflation.

wnight2• 13 years ago

Of course, otherwise people will treat bitcoins like oil, another scarce resource, and not use either. Land too is limited, which is why it's never sold. /s

What this talk of the future value of things requires is a full understanding of opportunity cost, etc. If all you ever did was buy food, you'd get more if you didn't buy today and bought tomorrow, assuming food prices remained stable and your BTC increased. But you need food today.

Similarly, you might want to start a business which would be more profitable than waiting for bitcoins to appreciate.

vlasta2• 13 years ago

I agree that someone should fork bitcoin and fix the mining problem. But screw transaction rates, the mining difficulty shall be determined by the nodes (people) participating in the network. Periodically, every node votes and a (weighted) average determines future mining difficulty. It may be a technical problem, but it may also be the right solution. And it will make the bitcoin more democratic.

alttab• 13 years ago

This kind of sounds like people setting interest rates. I've heard that's gone well for us... Twice.

dualogy3• 13 years ago

Actually Litecoin MIGHT jsut solve "the deflation problem":

More specifically, having a number of BTC clones of "varying degrees of 'dilution'" in constant competition might, via emerging floating "exchange rates" (from arbitration traders), "balance" what the missing "monetary overlord" cannot technically pull off. Could that be? Ever-evolving store-of-value versus medium-of-exchange demand in the network may be ever-shifting to the various currencies based on their intrinsic un-changable core "policies" (inflationary Freicoins vs. deflationary Bitcoins) and other market dynamics, no?

I'm no game theorist right now so I can diagram it out but hey, something to think about, no? It just "might" contribute to "easing" the "problem".

Also, I do love me some "quotation marks".

jordanbaucke• 13 years ago

Apply all your arguments 'for' or 'against' Litecoin and apply them to 'Gold' vs. 'Silver'. Imagine if anyone would be willing to accept one versus the other as a 'store of wealth' (gold/silver that is)

In the end, neither has any 'intrinsic value' in the modern age. Sure we can 'make things' out of gold/silver, but we can't eat it or shoot it at each other: making it more or less as worthless. Yet people "expect" that neither will be worthless in a breakdown of society.

In the end it's all human emotion. If Bitcoin is what they say it is ... than why would it care about 'competition' - the gold in the ground doesn't.

wnight2• 13 years ago

Actually, societal breakdown is where bitcoin doesn't work.

Without communication all chains are forked. And when networked, with vastly different computing ability left over it'd be incredibly easy for the leader to manipulate.

dualogy3• 13 years ago

> Sure we can 'make things' out of gold/silver, but we can't eat it or shoot it at each other: making it more or less as worthless

Or---priceless! Hoarding them historically never (or hardly ever) interfered with anyone's livelihood or industrial endeavours, yet because of their arbitrary ("useless") nature could "absorb" / proxy per-unit any measure of wealth applicable at a given time and place-----which is another valuable property in addition to the usual "scarce, indestructable-but-divisible etc." list of benefits.

jere• 13 years ago

From the litecoin front page:

>The Litecoin network is therefore scheduled to produce 84 million litecoins, which is 4 times as many currency units as Bitcoin.

This seems like a completely useless and arbitrary statistic for highlighting the advantages of a currency.

dualogy3• 13 years ago

Oh I can totally see where this will be going from now on. It does set a useful precedent!

Next up: "LiterCoin---will never exceed 168 circulation units!"

LitestCoin---336 max, guaranteed!

Way to dilute this originally neat "digital gold" idea. So turns out, while you can't clone BTC, we can copy ideas infinitely, unlike say some heavy-weight metals rooted firmly in the tangible physical plane :)

Now people will argue "but BTC have all the first-mover network effects!". Yes, for a time but things move lightning fast on this web we all love, and don't the "thoughts of many nations" about "high-value proofed against the elements, politics, technology and time itself" develop over millenia---generations and generations of attempts to cheat, "corner", fake or "resource alternatives" a unit only to always admit defeat in the face of the one superior element?

That is, for those looking for a "hard, deflationary, non-dilutable" asset. Those will, looking harder, easily find a better one of "ancient world-class proportions". Those looking for "soft, inflationary, dilutable" transactional currency of course won't be looking into BTC and its upcoming hundreds of clones anyway.

Let's face it, not every alternative clone will even make it to a major exchange but many do! LiteCoin was scheduled for MtGox, many other multi-currency exchanges let you trade (and thus arbitrage) various BTC clones ad infinitum. "Currency wars" to follow? ;)

And a couple of them will easily see the same early adopter patterns of BTC. Look as LiteCoins are already valued at $3!

Three bucks for the 2nd-in-line digital crypto-currency. And that's just early adopter geeks happy they have a new toy they can still mine with consumer-grade hardware (ha, gonna play with that myself I think!) and cash out when convenient. Nothing wrong with that, mind! It's all shots and giggles until someone giggles and shoots. Or so the saying goes.

And who will defend BTC's "network effect" from such dilution, other than a few temporary DDoS kiddies? Let the next-in-line currencies trade on MtGox for a time, bitspend bitpay etc. will find no problem accommodating them --- perhaps at some point a "basket currency" evolves? Let's call them "eSDR".

The BTC folks wouldn't like it but the other clones would love it. But none have diplomats, soldiers or bureaucrats behind them as we know ;) and it would be the minimum to at least move those crypto-currencies from "highly volatile hot speculation item" to "desired usage in commercial transactions". Arbitrage might do the rest? After all, intrinsically we know a BitCoin is not 4x as "valuable" as a LiteCoin (or 44x as of right now) but roughly equivalent once they're basketed and arbitraged.

But hey, it's late and my thinking is probably by far not as sound as that of crypto-currency aficionados.

I love the idea in principle, but the world knows:

- those who want a truly hard, non-dilutable unit (for long-term preservation) have a better choice available that will survive whatever trends the next years of techies pop out at an ever-increasing pace.

- and those who want a "soft" unit for mid/short-term transactions (before it can possibly devalue substantially) have a unit that is backed by contract law and your usage of it "defended" by, say, "the world" (if begrugdingly).

Don't get me wrong: I love all the buzz and biz around BTCs these last few years. Truly I'm into what all the aficionados pull off, and whatever winnings they "made". But not sure all "desires of human nature" from a either a transactional-currency/medium-of-exchange or a long-range store-of-value are truly reflected by the thing.

That said, it spawned useful technology even outside the realm of payments, such as http://dot-bit.org/Use_cases

One could argue -- "the world has many fiat currencies in competition, why not the same for digital crypto-currencies"? Hey, that's true! Actually that's pretty neat. But as the LiteCoin example shows, dilution can "evolve" easily. Not a problem as every party choose their currency of choice. But also completely unnecessary, as the whole world could trade&exchange on seashells tomorrow and no-one would be worse off. Different prices for the same products exist throughout the Euro-zone depending on I guess a trazillion of unknown factors, for example, and it works, so no biggie. Cool, let's have a hundred competitors as only a handful of choices will likely gain long-term momentum. And then everything changes with the next big crypto-3.0 thing in 2015 but that don't need to phaze us as long as we cash out beforehand ;D

Hey, come to think of it... this LiteCoin could be something, I should invest! This could be the "EUR" to the "USD", this could still be big! ;P

The Pirate Bay is now accepting Litecoin donations

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