Re: Litecoin is officially dead

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I liked how LTC was faster to send, then BTC.
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Then it was a fundamental misconception about proof-of-work-based consensus blockchain systems that tripped you up. None of Litecoin's tweaks (conf time, supply, mining alg) offer any real benefit over bitcoin. They're all just irrelevant tradeoffs. Faster confs yield a chain that re-orgs more, so you need more confs to be as secure; supply magnitude is not relevant at all given divisibility; and mining algs all converge to the same long-run least-cost-producer dynamics.

Forgive me, but Litecoin was attractive to a lot of people who didn't really think things through, and were primarily letting the "hey, maybe I didn't miss *this* boat!" mentality get in the way of thinking deeply about why a coin like Litecoin should or should not retain long-run value relative to bitcoin.

It's a shame that it's taken this rash of new coins to make people realize that Litecoin ultimately doesn't offer very much to the crypto-ecosystem, but so be it.

I think you're wrong.

K. I'm not.

Quote from: Este Nuno on July 31, 2014, 06:19:06 PM

These things are supposed to function as currencies. For someone who considers one confirmation sufficient for a regular sized transaction a short block time is much, much better than the incredibly slow configuration of Bitcoin. Waiting 40 minutes or even an hour for a confirmation is not acceptable when there are faster alternatives.

Yes, if you're buying a house you might still want to wait the same total amount of time to feel 100% secure against double spends. And yes, hashes will be wasted and blocks will be orphaned. But these things are supposed to be currencies. Currencies that are used every day to buy groceries, and pay your internet bill. One confirmation is sufficient for any transaction that's not large enough that you'll want to take extra measures.

By that logic, 0-conf is also fine for day-to-day transactions, and indeed that's what every physical btc-accepting retailer I've ever used does. I don't see a rash of double-spends against coffee shops as particularly likely.

As to litecoin specifically, there's essentially no use-case where a statistical 2.5min avg conf is acceptable but a statistical 10min avg conf is not.

No, because 0 conf transactions are susceptible to a whole other category of double spend attacks. (Race attacks, Finney attacks ect.)

And yes, the use case is when 1 confirmation is considered acceptable. Which is the case in a very large amount of transactions.

There are lots of transactions that are going to be fine on 0 confirmations. But I've waited countless times up to an hour for many transactions to complete that only require one confirmation.