Updated list of why Litecoin is and will continue to do well:
- Capable of four times as many transactions as Bitcoin in a ten minute period. Frankly if payment processors had adopted Litecoin in the past year current Bitcoin block discussions would be irrelevant (and likely the price of both coins higher). Anyone who has watched these discussions understands the immediate advantage of a network with larger transactional capability.
- Faster confirmation times. The only people who don't think this is important have never spent a single coin or they have patience that the average person does not possess.
- The faster block time of litecoin reduces the risk of double spending attacks.
- Anti-spam.
- Fast well established network. Current Hashrate is 1,643 GH/s. Since scrypt is memory intensive it is known to be approximately 1000 times slower hardware wise in comparison to SHA256. Fair comparison to the Bitcoin network requires multiplying that hashrate by 1000 (1,643 TH/s). The fact is for most of Litecoins history the hashrate has been relatively high and secure. Those comparing it to the Bitcoin network without considering this 1k factor are either being disingenuous or just ignorant of the facts.
- Continuous development look here at number of releases in past year: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/releases
- Upcoming new features and active development look here for whats happening in 2016:
https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/3z2ta1/ama_official_litecoin_developers_and_litecoin/ - Longevity. Many coins have temporarily eclipsed litecoin as they were marketed for the purpose of increasing the fiat accounts of a small group and emptying the accounts of new users. Unfortunately this has been detrimental to crypto-space in general.
- Great community.
- Fully supported by GoCoin a growing merchant payment processor used by thousands of merchants https://www.gocoin.com/ as well as other processors such as coinpayments, Asmoney, Alfacoins and Coinify
- Liquidity. You can sell thousands and not crash the market. Maintains value. Look at the chart here indicating volume in the last 24 hours relative to other coins. http://cryptocoincharts.info/coins/graphicalComparison In fact volume has remained high since last June while maintaining a stable price.
- Soon to be added to coinbase.
- Upcoming release to include a on-chain adaptive block size scaling solution. This will substantially increase the transactional capacity of Litecoin.
With Bitcoin Lightning Network with the smart contracts and sidechains eventually being adapted, there's just no need for Litecoin.
One coin with one dev team is a complete and utter disaster waiting to happen. Imagine the crazy idea that bitcoins dev team come under the control of big banks and they decide to turn it into a high fee settlement layer with off chain scaling. Then we would all be glad there's a similar alternative that's chosen on chain scaling as Satoshi intended - litecoin -
"silver to bitcoins gold" "more Bitcoin than Bitcoin"