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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

Litecoin is just a me-too bitcoin clone. I see it as analogous to PhpOnTrax, Groovy on Grails, or Castle vs. Ruby on Rails. Although, it is actually worse than that as it is mostly a fork stealing the original codebase and repurposing it for spurious reasons, I believe.

For some reason, with open source projects like this, the real innovations usually continue to flow from the original project, not the clones.

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It's a smart way to diversify your portfolio, at least it was before they went up to $40 today. I bought $40 worth at $4 based purely on my gut feeling that Snowden is going to drop a bomb on bitcoin.

Could you elaborate on the Snowden bit? Do you think Bitcoin is being monitored (or was designed) by the NSA?

I have no evidence other than the fact that bitcoin has yet to be mentioned. There was a recent story regarding the american government tracking money transfers though.

One thing that litecoin definitely solves is the mysterious creator problem, which in a market so heavily driven by psychology is more important than bitcoiner's admit.

I think litecoin will do better in the long run because of faster transaction times. I can't buy a soda with bitcoin because I would have to stand around for too long.

If people opt to pay with a digital currency, it will be LTC.

It doesn't have faster transaction times, only confirmations. Do you even know why confirmations take time? Security.

Anyone who understands this new technology knows that Litecoin doesn't have any significant improvements over Bitcoin.

Besides, you wouldn't wait 10 minutes, but you would wait 2.5 in average? I know I wouldn't, nobody would. That's what 0 confirmation trades are for, and you can do that with Bitcoin just fine.

If you want to gamble you should as well put money on Tenebrix, Infinitecoin, and Vaginacoin. I've heard they are great.

Why is longer wajting time for a block more secure? Isn't the security given more by the number of miners?

The large majority of transactions are completely safe with zero confirmations. For those less common situations that require additional security, it generally doesn't matter much if you have to wait 2.5 mins or 10 mins, especially considering it takes a couple litecoin confirmations to achieve the same level of security provided by a single bitcoin confirmation.

myspace, facebook

Litecoin is much less innovative than either of those.

A better analogy is me downloading the ark source that runs Hacker News and launching mycombinator.com with "bigger upvote icons."

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