Litecoin (LTC) Discussion Thread [An Investment for You?]

A little background on Litecoin:
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Charlie Lee, the former head engineer at Coinbase, created Litecoin in 2011. Since then Charlie has left coinbase to fully focus on his project.

So what is Litecoin?​

"Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. Litecoin is an open source, global payment network that is fully decentralized without any central authorities. Mathematics secures the network and empowers individuals to control their own finances. Litecoin features faster transaction confirmation times and improved storage efficiency than the leading math-based currency. With substantial industry support, trade volume and liquidity, Litecoin is a proven medium of commerce complementary to Bitcoin." - Litecoin - Open source P2P digital currency


-The best way to put it is that it is basically Bitcoin, but with faster transactions, lower fees, and is only valued at less than 1% of BTC. Litecoin is often referred to as "The silver to Bitcoin's Gold" due to the fact that with BTC larger transactions fees and slower network, some users may rather hold their BTC as a "savings" account, much like people do with gold. LTC on the other hand allows for quicker transactions at nearly no cost, and acts as the "silver", meaning it, like silver coins from back in the day, can be used for smaller transactions.

Think about it this way. If you have BTC and wanted to buy a cup of coffee (billions are drinken everyday), why use BTC? The transaction fee and time to confirm would only be bad for your wallet, and slow for the business. This is where LTC comes in. Litecoin can preform this transaction of joe faster and cheaper, making it a win/win for the customer/merchant. However, if you wanted to say, send a $6,000 worth of BTC to a family member on vacation in Japan, BTC would be the way to go, since its network is more secure and better suited for these large transactions. Although LTC could handle this cheaper and faster, it may not be AS secure as Bitcoins network, but can still be used... which brings me to my next point...

I suggest anyone who finds this concept interesting to read Charlie Lee's vision for Litecoin, The lightning network, and Segwit in correspondence with BTC.
https://segwit.org/my-vision-for-segwit-and-lightning-networks-on-litecoin-and-bitcoin-cf95a7ab656b

"But some people say LN on Bitcoin will kill any reason to use Litecoin. If people can do instantaneous transactions on Bitcoin, why would they use Litecoin? My gut feel is that this is not the case. Even with LN, Bitcoin still cannot service every person in the world. I think the calculation was that at 1MB blocks, LN and SegWit on Bitcoin can service 500M users. LN nodes will charge a fee for LN txns going through them and that fee will be relative to the Bitcoin network fee. So Bitcoin LN txns will be more expensive than Litecoin LN txns. It may make economic sense for a LN txn to go via Litecoin and back to Bitcoin to get the cheapest rate. Lightning makes this possible because it allows the two LN to be interoperable. I don’t know that this use case will be economical or not, but we won’t know until both LNs are built and running.

Think of it being two highways: Today, Bitcoin is packed full of cars and Litecoin is empty. Even with Bitcoin packed, the cars are not coming to use the Litecoin highway today because it’s not connected and it’s inconvenient (centralized exchanges and slow on-chain transfers) to go across. LN will build bridges over the highways. But a side benefit is that these bridges will connect both highways together. Maybe the bridges on Bitcoin are enough such that cars will still stay on the Bitcoin highway. My bet is that the convenience and the cheaper tolls on Litecoin highway will convince cars to cross over and use Litecoin. But we won’t know until both are built.

Another benefit is atomic cross-chain transactions via LN. Two users can trade BTC and LTC instantaneous and without risk. Efficient decentralized exchanges are now possible. Or what if a merchant accepts only BTC but you only have LTC. You can now pay LTC and exchange them instantly through a LN exchange node and send BTC to the merchant. That’s basically decentralized ShapeShift. One last thing I thought of recently is the ability to balance lopsided payment channels on both lightning networks. There are probably millions of other cool things that SegWit and LN open up that we have yet scratched the surface of."


If you read the article you will notice a very important theme, which is that LTC is not here to REPLACE BTC, but rather to work alongside it. You always here "BTC is king and will always be", but there are still dozens and dozens of cryptos out their promising something better, or something niche, but Litecoin is offering a real way to keep BTC relevant as a store of value, asset, and currency for Larger and more secure transactions, while LTC will soon be able to take some of the traffic off the bitcoin network and allow uses to make those quick and painless transactions cheaply and when needed.

Which then brings me to the idea of Atomic Swaps:​

"Previously, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee proposed the possibility of performing atomic swaps between litecoin and bitcoin upon the integration of the Bitcoin Core development team’s transaction malleability and scaling solution Segregated Witness (SegWit). On-chain atomic swaps completely eliminate the necessity of intermediaries and third-party service providers such as trading platforms"

First-Ever Atomic Cross-Blockchain Swap Between Litecoin and Decred Completed

Why is this huge? Well this would for one, basically hurt shapeshift's business and allow for users to switch to whichever coin they want to pay with or trade with. For example, say I am a huge PotCoin holder, and I want to buy an item on amazon with BTC (whenever they finally decide to add it), but don't have any? Well this is where atomic swaps come in. I can simply swap my PotCoin for the amount = to it in BTC, allowing a easy transition between coins whenever they need.

This would help open the door for BTC and LTC savings/checking idea.
-Hold BTC and watch gains much like a savings. Every time you spend from that savings, you get penalized (high network fee and low transaction times). So, you simply atomically swap some of your BTC for Litecoin as needed, and use Litecoins super fast and near free transactions as if you were spending using a debit card from your checking account?

Look, Litecoin is considered "stable" by nearly everyone in the community, but fail to see the fact that its yearly chart is great, and it's actually one of the few alts that actually solves a problem and isn't just another "shitcoin". Maybe most of you will never touch Litecoin due to the fact that its price remains flat and there aren't much short term gains and high volatility, but Litecoin has been going strong for 6 years now and has a bright future ahead of it with Confidential Transactions in the works, which may kill any reason for Bytecoin and Monero 9may still be relevant in a few years), and much more.

With a strong and active dev team, some of the greatest minds in crypto on the project, and a real companion to BTC, I see LTC as a great long term investment and hopefully even short term.

As I type this, the Current Price is 53.70 (decent time to buy), and hope to see it back to around 100 by December.

 

Price update:

$62.82