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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

Litecoin != Bitcoin. My argument doesn't apply to Litecoin, because by design it doesn't have the same vast disparity between the performance of the best available mining hardware and your average PC. In fact, if anything Litecoin is another reason why botnet miners are unlikely to drive out professional Bitcoin mining - it's much more profitable to mine Litecoin.

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They're both nearly identical cryptocurrencies with a lot of the very same problems.

> it's much more profitable to mine Litecoin.

Only because its younger than bitcoin. Making bitcoins was trivial a couple years ago. Considering both have a maximum number of coins, this dicussion is academic. Once that max is hit then its just traded as any ugly market commodity.

Litecoin uses scrypt, a memory-intensive hashing function, whereas BtC uses SHA, which is merely computationally expensive. It was specifically designed to be difficult to mine with ASICs, so as to lessen the advantages of professional ASIC mining farms and give relative power back to all the guys who built GPU mining rigs back when that was cutting-edge.

The unfortunate side-effect of this is that LtC botnets are far more viable relative to the total network hashrate than BtC botnets, as the difference in power between commodity computers and ASICs as far as hashing is concerned is far less for LtC than BtC.

No, litecoins algo (http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html) is easier to mine on a general cpu (see https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoi...)

Litecoin is about to be overthrown by dogecoin.

Shows how little this site knows about how normal users perceive currency.

Keep your butts, keep your LTC, and your peer cons. You guys missed the moonboat and now real users are going to dictate the future of currency.

Doge coin has arrived to crash the alt coin market and rise above to save the people from all the greed and scum that has overtaken the bitcoin inindustry. Yes I'm looking at you hacker news. Why do you all just care about money so much?

Yeah why care about your currency? Care about the one I espouse, that is not about money!

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