Litecoin now trading for $5.78
btc-e.com
btc-e.com
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.
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?
(Sorry, you saying the pizza will still be worth relatively the same as it was before reminded me of this)
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.
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)
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
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.
And if eg the Eur/USD conversion rate had changed +/- X00% in 3 months you could be sure that you would hear much talk about that here (and everywhere).
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...
Then someone will do it regardless, but at least they will be prosecutable.
Will they now?
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.
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?
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.
It's different network where mining is done with different algorithms. As far as I know hardware for bitcoins is useless for litecoin (and vice versa).
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).
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.
Otherwise it will, too, reduce to a currency of the geeks, by the geeks and for the geeks.
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.
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.
Actually, the need for an alternative currency to silver was a significant driving force in my country's history (it resulted in us creating a modern banking system ahead of many of our contemporaries, the effects of which are still visible today) - and this need existed primarily because so much silver was controlled by Spain, our enemy.
>Yes, there are and will be people who made fortunes out of this scheme. But that should not affect you.
Maybe it shouldn't. But as a human with a sense of fairness, I object to creating immense fortunes for those who did a relatively small amount of programming, or simply got lucky.
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 ?
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.
Letting a central authority print money that had no obligations to the general public is dangerous. Also the market maker would likely spend some of the money they take in. If there was ever a run on the bank they would just shut down the currency and keep the money that was paid in, which would make a run on the bank more likely.
This is very similar to online casinos that let you buy chips, but instead of offering gambling services, they would offer annonomous transaction services. Some casinos have just shut down and kept all the money or if it becomes a legal problem (as any solid fully annonomous currency would) could be shut down by their local government.
There is just no good reason to trust a currency that requires a central authority that can print money and that you don't trust and there is no reason to trust that they'll use the printing power responsibly.
April 3rd, Now - Price 5.45 USD
http://www.litecoinpool.org/charts
yup, looks legit :) I believe this one we actually will see pop
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.
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.
"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."
... how I can make my own crypto-currency?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gw7YPYgMgNNU42skibULbJJU...
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.