Litecoin nears $10 - up from $4 a day ago
ltc-charts.com
ltc-charts.com
I don't buy there's any "diversification" in holding both LTC and BTC. The technical and legal risks are mostly the same. To me, in the long run, it's more profitable to put 100% of your money in the most liquid of them, which is currently Bitcoin. Simply because people want one money: one most marketable, most widely accepted asset.
LTC is still valuable because we are in a very early speculation phase and most folks got used to presence of both gold and silver, and there's very strong incentive for recent Bitcoin miners with video cards to pump up LTC (as that's the only thing to mine on their equipment right now) and sell out for Bitcoin while they can. Either Bitcoin or Litecoin must pop, there's no economic reason for them to stay in some balanced relation. I bet even gold will largely lose wealth as it's moved to Bitcoin, but then gold has very different risks and features, so it may find its balance with Bitcoin.
Actually, there might be. The fee needed to get a bitcoin transaction into the blockchain is determined by a market, and it is a flat number, not a percentage of the transaction. If bitcoin succeeds, it may not be practical to use it for smaller transactions.
http://blog.oleganza.com/post/43849158813/this-is-how-block-...
127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com
That's quite inefficient. Your browser ( and any other apps ) will attempt to connect to your legacy IPv4 localhost, time-out and fail, assuming you don't have a web server listening there.
Better to black-hole with an unroutable address. Try [::].
Even if the creators of BTC or LTC were intentionally setting out to defraud people, it would not be a Ponzi scheme.
How someone who has been around the Bitcoin world for so long doesn't understand the importance of the currency's fungibility is beyond me. If you make one person's Bitcoins worth less than another person's Bitcoins, then we all lose.
Looking at it this way: LTC is now up to 0.014 BTC, up from a recent low of 0.01 BTC, and down from a high of 0.0449 BTC back in April.
My assumption was that, if bitcoin doesn't blow up for technical reasons, then there must also be some merit to the runner-ups. So I started mining litecoin with my little quadcore desktop machine.
That was five days ago and already I notice that my bang-for-the-kilowatthour is decreasing rapidly.
Everybody and their grandma is mining litecoin, and the smell of impending speculative crash is getting stronger.
Don't stress yourself over losing out in the gold rush. This bubble, like thousands before, will pop and you'll be there to give joking explanations of what happened to less technically inclined friends.
Method: litecoin gets major news push as the "new Bitcoin", people sell out of bitcoins into litecoin causing Bitcoin prices to crash overnight.
Needed: a very fast way to move from bitcoin holdings to litecoin.
If someone makes that it's game over for bitcoin.
There are many very easy ways to quickly move from Bitcoin to Litecoin. On btc-e.com, for example, you can sign up and be trading Bitcoin>Litecoin within an hour or less (the time needed for Bitcoins deposits to clear).
Diversification of investments is awesome.
I'd say that investing in a high growth startup is a gamble, but investing in 100 is an investment.
Which links to your diversity of investment thing.
If you invested in 100 startups in the same niche, for instance 500 bitcoin exchanges, that would not be diversified. You would be betting on the same business model.
If crypto currencies are discredited - the buyers today get burned by the big crash and never come back, or laws change to make it too inconvenient to bother investing in (all the exchanges are pushed into he black market), then the litecoin price will dive like bitcoin and stay there.
True enough, but then we could say much the same thing for the fiat currency of your choice. (Except maybe the CHF? ;)
Bitcoin et al are free-floating in that regard. To see how this makes a difference, consider what would happen if one of the early adopters were to sell 100K bitcoins right now.
The values of "Real world" currencies is quite (not totally) decoupled from the intrinsic value of the issuing state's economy. See Zimbabwe for a recent object lesson - still plenty of economic activity and trade going on in the country, but hyperinflation happened anyway. "Real world" currencies are much more tied to emotional attachments (or lack thereof) to the currency and faith in its issuer.
If you've ever tried your hand at forex speculation, you'll be very (perhaps painfully) just how much the relative values between fiat currencies is driven by emotion (and the stop-loss orders of other speculators.)
In theory, analysts and professional traders incorperate everything they know into bids for shares, so that the current share price 'prices in' everything publicly known about a share at the current time.
I quite often talk to people who have a share portfolio, and buy mining shares because they think international demand for mining is going to rise. But the share price already reflects that because pro investors and analysts though to it first.
So really, when you buy a share, unless you have some extra information, you are making a bet on variations due to things no one knows at the time - it's simply a gamble.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a terrible idea to buy shares - if the economy grows, the FTSE grows with it. If you buy luxury goods manufacturers and insolvency companies, you can hedge. But if you, as a private individual, think you can make money day trading (in your lunch break) against the highest paid experts in the world, well you are kinda nuts.
A friend put together a database of tick data for every currency pair in the world, for a spread of different brokers. He examined the data, and found that at last in the 3 hour / day interval, it appeared statistically random. You can bet on a random variable if you like, sometimes you will make money. I prefer to put what little money I have in passive funds, and hope it beats inflation^.
^That said, I'm cashed out and 400% ahead following this bitcoin bubble. lol