
Litecoin now trading for $5.78 - shiftpgdn
https://btc-e.com/exchange/ltc_usd
======
iSnow
I can't help it but feel that the current boom in P2P-currencies is not
healthy.

1) There are some people out there sitting on fortunes in *coin. If and when
they sell, the boom goes bust

2) If that does not happen, or even if it happens for some time, the future of
a currency with no inflation seems to be limited - as long as there is any
interest by merchants, it will always gain against fiat money. This upward
pressure makes those currencies fight with gold for the role of a long-term
asset but makes them impractical as a day-to-day trading vehicle.

Remember the 10,000 BTC pizza? That pizza would now be worth $1.4M - this is
absurd and even if we switch to micro-BTC, such a trend leads to hoarding, not
spending.

A P2P-currency with a built-in Tobin tax or demurrage would be more
interesting.

edited out the factor of 100 in the pizza.

~~~
cinquemb
You are entitled to voice your opinion, but…

10K BTC would be worth ~$1.4M and the pizza will still be worth relatively the
same as it was before. Unless $GS and friends are actively long pizza futures
(since it is a vegetable now), then it might be a little more expensive than
it was before.

People seem to be focusing too much on market cap and not on the ever
increasing companies and people using it to transact for services.

Dont hear much talk on here about EURUSD, USDJPY, USDCNH ctrl+P operations, i
wonder how healthy that is?

~~~
iSnow
>10K BTC would be worth ~$1.4M and the pizza will still be worth relatively
the same as it was before

I can't see how you arrive at this. No-one is going to buy a pizza for 10K BTC
anymore, so clearly the worth has changed.

~~~
cinquemb
For some perspective: in the mid 90's, i could buy a gallon of gas for about
$1. Now it will cost about 4x that. Do i expect to show up at a gas station
now with 4 dollars and get 4 gallons worth? No.

Is it that hard for one to think: "Oh i have 1BTC now and it is worth $10000.
It used to be worth $.001 when i bought a pizza. The pizza is still valued at
$10, now I will spend ~.001BTC since that is what it is worth now. quel
chance!"

The worth of the pizza has stayed the same, the worth of the BTC has gone up.

Come back next week and we'll practice paying for pizza in Euros! (unless you
live in cyprus of course :P)

~~~
iSnow
>Oh i have 1BTC now and it is worth $10000. It used to be worth $.001 when i
bought a pizza

Most likely the guy who got the pizza now thinks "gee, that other guy is now
sitting on a BTC treasure that could buy him a house, a car and a lot of nice
holidays. I got a pizza".

BTC and $ (or €) are competing for value - and as long as the BTC story is
intact, it makes more sense to hoard BTC and spend $$. When there is
inflation, it makes sense to invest or consume your money, with BTC this does
not make sense if you can hold off your purchase for a while.

I therefore would not be surprised to see a tremendous spike in the BTC
valuation but I have no idea what the distant future would be - it can only be
a hard crash or the stifling of the BTC economy.

Edit: see also: <https://medium.com/money-banking/2b5ef79482cb> This is
actually a serious problem, if you’re trying to put together a currency,
rather than a vehicle for financial speculation. If the currency of a country
ever fluctuated as much as bitcoins did, it would never be taken seriously as
a medium of exchange: how are you meant to do business in a place where an
item costing one unit of currency is worth $10 one day and $20 the next? [...]
If millions of people started using bitcoins on a regular basis, the soaring
value of bitcoins would actually be disastrous. You’ve heard of
hyperinflation: this would be hyperdeflation

~~~
cinquemb
only if it were possible to spend dollars on the silk road…

been using btc for the past 2 years, and will continue to do so because no(or
very very small) processing fees :D

those who want to get caught up on speculation/hoarding will do so. those who
appreciate and value the utility btc offers over cash/credit/debit will
continue to use them.

------
IgorPartola
I cannot be the only one thinking "WTF is Litecoin?"

<https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin>

I wonder if there is any value in seeding another XXXXXcoin based on one of
these algorithms. Have 2+ instances of the same network...

~~~
dfgonzalez
I don't think there's any value and the differences between BTC and LTC are
not substantial (IMO).

But my guess is that being the second immediate P2P currency will give
traction to LTC and some people who came late to the BTC party will jump in
rising the value for a while.

~~~
yebyen
It is just different enough to be separately viable at the same time; the
blockchains are incompatible down to the hash level. Second it rewards people
with lots of hardware and not specialized hardware, which is where Bitcoin is
going crazy right now, because a few players have got their hands on something
that the rest of the network won't have for some weeks or months to come
(ASIC).

ASIC miners for bitcoin are not viable for litecoin because the litecoin
scrypt hashing process is memory dependent, not CPU-bound like bitcoin /
SHA256. My information comes not from any technical expertise but from
interpreting what I'm told by people who have done more research than me.

Maybe someone could explain better?

~~~
nwh
The central premise for Litecoin using scrypt was that it was not able to be
mined on GPUs, this was quickly proved wrong and the statement retracted.
There's no technical advancement in LTC, it's just a weaker bitcoin clone.

~~~
yebyen
GPUs these days have alongside their massive collections of ALUs, large tracts
of fast local memory. That's why they are viable for LiteCoin mining.

ASIC implementations for Bitcoin will be based on SHA256, built with not a lot
of internal memory that can be accessed without traveling across another bus.
Those implementations will not work with LiteCoin or scrypt, which is memory
bound. GPUs have lots of memory.

It's no technical advancement over Bitcoin, I agree, but it is gaining
acceptance (the prices have maintained parity with Bitcoin growth) and it
seems that your current investment in LiteCoin mining will remain relevant for
longer than old Bitcoin hardware, just because ASIC developers working on
Bitcoin problem all see LiteCoin as just a weaker Bitcoin clone.

That's not an argument against LiteCoin.

------
Ixiaus
Litecoin makes use of Colin Percival's (cperciva) excellent scrypt hashing
library to make mining on commodity CPU/GPU's feasible and therefore _non-
competitive_ with BitCoin mining (you can mine both at the same time).

That's its primary plus; other plusses are quicker confirmation times and a
larger number of coins to be generated (the reward is halved every 840,000
blocks).

~~~
nwh
> quicker confirmation times

As the block time is half that of BTC, you need twice as many to gain the same
stable blockchain. The confirmation time is the same.

------
lmm
What I want to see is a bitcoin-like currency with a fairer generation curve,
one that would follow traditional inflation and not disproportionately reward
early adopters. E.g. mining could have constant difficulty, so that the cost
of a million CPU cycles in this currency would be more-or-less constant. Are
there any efforts in this direction?

~~~
lucaspiller
> mining could have constant difficulty, so that the cost of a million CPU
> cycles in this currency would be more-or-less constant

As I understand it, in Bitcoin the difficulty goes up so that the rate at
which new coins are mined stays pretty much the same. The issue though is that
each of the different mining architectures (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC) can do a
magnitude more amount of work than the previous could. As such the difficulty
goes up, so now there is the problem that unless you've got the fastest
hardware you probably aren't going to get anything (as a solo miner anyway).
If the rate at which they were mined was kept constant I'd guess all Bitcoins
would have already been mined - in that case you'd still have the early
adopter problem, but magnified even more.

~~~
Nursie
> As I understand it, in Bitcoin the difficulty goes up so that the rate at
> which new coins are mined stays pretty much the same.

The rate halves every so often, the creation of new bitcoins slows over time,
to the limit of 21 million.

The limit is imposed by choice, if you kept creation proportional to some
factor of the network rather than ever-decreasing and with a solid cap, you
could change the game.

I agree that processing power is not necessarily the best factor to relate it
to.

------
ritonlajoie
Is there a crypto coin that doesn't need to be mined ? Say, one coin = $1 USD
and would still benefit from anonymity those coins provide ?

edit: for those who reply with 'the 1 dollar coin is worth 1 dollar', well,
actually you can't buy online anonymously with it, like on the silkroad. You
don't benefit from internet payements like you do have with bitcoins.

The question would be : is that possible to have a virtual currency indexed on
a fiat currency that would have the same benefits of the cryto ones we are
using ?

~~~
meepmorp
Is there a crypto coin where the mining work isn't a useless waste of energy?

Bitcoin mining (and maybe litecoin, dunno) doesn't do anything useful in the
process of using all those hardware and electrical resources. No protein
folding, no SETI, no looking for mersenne primes - just a bunch of crypto work
that gets you bitcoins. It'd be nice if you actually had to produce some
knowledge to get the coins.

~~~
dchest
This the common mistake. Mining does useful work: validating transactions.

------
codesuela
April 1st, Time: 00:00 - Price 0.82 USD

April 3rd, Now - Price 5.45 USD

<http://www.litecoinpool.org/charts>

yup, looks legit :) I believe this one we actually will see pop

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jcfrei
I've particiapted in the litecoin trading for about 3 days now and the price
development so far has been unreal. what's notable is that whenever I take a
look at the orders book buyers outweigh sellers by a ratio of at least 2:1.
Currently there are open buy orders for 154724 LTC (that is >850'982$, as of
3/4/13 - 15:41 CET). I'm currently gambling on mtgox supporting litecoin on
its exchange.

~~~
zoba
Where did you buy the litecoin? And also, how did you transfer money into that
exchange?

I'm currently looking at BTC-e.com for the exchange, and OKPay for money
transfer, but... OKPay just feels wrong. They are asking for photos of my
drivers licence and utility bills - seems weird.

~~~
jcfrei
I've used OKPay. The verification via photocopy is actually pretty common
among those exchanges. MtGox has the same requirements. However the trip MtGox
-> OKPay -> Btc-e is quite costly and there might be cheaper alternatives.

------
nickpinkston
I'm interested to see if a flurry of crypto-currencies develops into a bubble
with all the craziness that could mean. I'm not sure on the defenseability of
BitCoin to filtering by ISPs as could perhaps be mandated by the government.
If driven underground what would the reaction be?

~~~
Nursie
My main thought is that it doesn't really matter if its filtered by ISPs, or
if it's impossible to shut it down because they can't stop the hackers, man...

If the government of the US decides it's illegal and declares businesses and
individuals accepting BTC to be trading illegally, then the value will undergo
a significant collapse as it's now no longer the way of the future but just a
secret internet thing (in the US). If a few other countries follow along then
all dreams of BTC as the new global internet currency and transfer medium
fail.

Bitcoin may not be the easiest thing to shut down due to its P2P nature, but
that doesn't mean it can't be effectively destroyed by people in power.

------
itistoday2
Any currency as volatile as Bitcoin or Litecoin is right now is worthless,
because it's too unstable to do meaningful business transactions with.

------
thomaslutz
Is it just me or is BTC-E (Cloudflare error) and MTGOX (was not able to login)
currently under heavy load?

~~~
yaddayadda
Not just you ...

"Website currently unavailable

The website you are trying to access is currently unavailable. Please try
again at a later time. If you are the site owner, here is a help resource to
help resolve the issue."

------
mtct
Ok, now the question is...

... how I can make my own crypto-currency?

~~~
jmorton
If you'd like to mine Bitcoin, this is a pretty good guide:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJU...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJUx_suP_CpjSEdSi8_z9U/edit)

~~~
mtct
No, I've asked how make my own crypto-currency, not how make bitcoin

~~~
jmorton
Oh, well here's the original paper that describes the system in detail:

<http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>

------
hazov
So this is getting flagged (20 minutes ago it was in the top 30 now it's in
the middle of the 70), I have a theory that's mainly by avid bitcoin users.

Anyway after the Bitcoin boom I did my research about cryptocurrencies (and
after discovering I bought 3000 BTC in 2009 for US$ 1, I still have them) and
my opinion is that:

1) Some miners are moving away from BTC mining since it's mainly dominated by
ASICs these days, litecoin is theory ASIC proof (did not read why, only what I
read).

2) Users had build an identity around Bitcoin which involves political and
economical beliefs (/r/bitcoin has links to /r/Libertarian /r/Austrian
/Anarcho_Capitalism).

3) Because of that you'll see in bitcointalk.org or /r/bitcoin talk about
government and fears of it and some belief that bitcoin can present an
alternative reality to current state of fiat money[1].

4) In /r/bitcoin any citation to litecoin get people either heavily questioned
or downvoted, it shows that although the users are libertarians/austrians
(there probably someone there who is one but not the other, or is neither)
they do not see as good the idea of multiple cryptocurrencies fighting each
other, which was Hayek's free currency system all about.

5) In the end I believe more cryptocurrencies will appear with different
mining algorithms, some will try to be more fair in their mining mechanisms
and others just like Bitcoin

6) I believe Bitcoin has only two possible futures, one it will be the
cryptocurrency, if that's what's happen and people began to accept it instead
of using it as an investment medium then each coin is now undervalued by
hundreds of dollars, however if people use more than one cryptocurrency (or
none at all) price and demand will set the dynamics, but in this case I
believe the current bitcoin price will go down.

[1]: I doubt that, if Bitcoin do substitute current money it would not be
different than what we have with the exception that I believe governments from
large countries would fork Bitcoin and put large ASIC farms to apply the 51%
attack to control their own cryptocurrencies, just like what happens with
current fiat money, these govenments will probably only allow taxes to be paid
in their own currencies. Also like current money BTC would be anonymous with
the exception that the transactions chain permit governments to see all
transactions that happened (since this is necessary by the currency), coupled
with double book accounting for businesses this would for me create a very
different world than what people believe bitcoin will lead.

EDIT: I do not see how political beliefs are at all important if you use/mine
a cryptocurrency or not, really the political aspect of bitcoin users gets me
baffled, although I see how it developed the impetus for the currency initial
diffusion.

