If? It is a given that at least half the pools and big farms (a lot of them nowadays) won't be paying. So the 20% will be more like 10% for the masternodes, =what they were expecting anyway. But it will be a disproportionate weight to the "fair" pools.

The whole thing to appease investors with "ok guys no hard forks" and bagholders of masternodes with "ok guys you'll get 20%" is sketchy. I know I'm harsh but I like things to go right

Price is price. It'll go up, down, sideways etc. Let it be. All the price attention is having an impact in development.

Development must proceed as planned so we can have the final product, nice and polished - no matter if it takes 1-2-3 or 5 hardforks and no matter if investors are bitching that they are losing masternode income because the implementation is late. Do they want to have masternodes of a coin that is GOOD or do they want to have a masternode of a coin that is doing hack-arounds?

The masternode protocol works, the masternode payments work (we saw them - it's not vapor), it's just that there is something introducing instability which has to be debugged and sorted out. If the origin is difficult to trace, then perhaps a different mechanism can be used for doing the payments (not voluntarily)

We also need improvements in DarkSend. The competition (MRO) is integrating I2P (as we've said) and XC will be using encrypted communication between nodes (as it has been said of DRK's future plans as well).

I know this sounds like a mom's "to-do list" to the child until she gets back home, but priorities are priorities, and price or reaching litecoin immediately are not a priority. If the code is sorted out and the product delivered in final form, LTC will start rolling down. Too fast of a price rise with a half-baked product is problematic.

LTC can't compete anyway in fundamentals like inflation (10x the BTCs to absorb LTC production compared to DRK) or innovation so they will be dead anyway by debasement. #2 is a given. Preserving #2 is not due to the competition. Who is gonna buy 300k USD of LTCs per day? It'll go 0.019 -> 18 -> 17 over time. It doesn't look that "hot" of a property. Only buys will be for cost-averaging buys at 0.025+.

Having said that about the #2 competition, the anonymity competition actually looks pretty lame (BCN and clones too many issues, XC mostly vapor for now but that could change a few months ahead as they seem to have the prospects of delivering a product similar to what Evan has at like 70-80% completion). But we can't base our strategy on others failing or being pumps & dumps that are "threatening" us due to pumps => we must excel and take the market. Then bring V2 for "fatality". Otherwise the risk is there for more serious contenders appearing.

My 2 duffs.