Quote from: Steveia on December 08, 2013, 01:07:16 AM

Considering the similarities between the two and the fact LTC offers little "improvements" (which many would dispute are improvements at all), does anyone seriously consider Litecoin having a place in the world?

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Competition in cryptocurrenies are a good thing (let the market determine the best coin) but LTC is not that coin.

Who here agrees or disagrees and why?

I think competition is a good thing, because it drives development.
To answer your question regarding Litecoin, I'm maybe allowed to go far afield.

As cryptocurrencies are still young, it is hard to answer such a question by transfering experiences from other areas.
Bitcoin has for sure started something (successfully; there have been other attempts before) which might not necessarily end with Bitcoin, long-term.
Short-term I expect the main use for Litecoin in speculation Wink

But Litecoin is a good example for the evolution that has begun with the "Bitcoin idea".

Litecoin is mainly different in its hashing algorithm.

Meanwhile there are new concepts which differ from Bitcoin in more than just a hashing algorithm.
Primecoin for example has introduced a completely different proof-of-work (Cunningham chains) and Peercoin has introduced a working implementation of the concept of proof-of-stake, which has been integrated in some new creations (e.g. NVC, CGB and others).

And those will not be the last improvements or evolutionary steps.

In some years there might be both a kind of backbone currency (which is used for not so frequent but relatively large transactions) and one or more other currencies that allow for a high number of transactions.
As far as I understand the protocols no currently available cryptocurrency would be able to handle really huge amounts of transactions per time - not even Litecoin or Primecoin, because block spacing is one thing, but a high total amount of transactions requires a high bandwidth - regardless of the number of blocks you try to put the transactions in.

So long-term I give Litecoin worse chances than Primecoin, Peercoin and Novacoin, because they offer more "features" than just an altered hashing algorithm.
But who knows which ideas come next?

As I have no working crystal ball, I can only guess what will happen. And as Bitcoin is much better known than most other cryptocurrencies will be in near future, I guess Bitcoin will keep its place in the world for the next years.

But for the later years it is even harder to make a prediction.
With dropping coinbase rewards and legions of ASIC miners it is hard to guess what will happen once the main reward for taking part in the PoW process is gathering transaction fees. Will the value of BTC high enough to feed the legions of ASIC miners with only transaction fees?
That might be the time, when PoS can have an advantage over PoW by securing the network without the need for huge calculation power (or whatever kind of securing mechanism will have been developed until then Wink

)

...but just like in the competition between Video 2000 and VHS you can't say that something will succeed because it is better or more soundly developed (I consider Video 2000 the better concept). Sometimes the winners are the ones that are earliy / well-known / widely spread...

So I guess:
Bitcoin is here to stay; Litecoin maybe not.