Talk:Litecoin

There is nothing on this discussion page about this article at the moment. Use it. Reasonable informed edits will be allowed through until a consensus is reached and the page unlocked. That is comments that are neither pro or anti litecoin, but are neutral and objective. Genjix 10:01, 28 November 2011 (GMT)

Objectivity please, missing citation

There are two criticisms in the article, that I believe are not objective:

• Mining Monopoly - while I heard claims that Litecoin is volnurable to botnets, I never heard anything about a single monopoloy, or anyone possibly building a "single piece of specialized/custom hardware to overtake all the commodity mining systems combined". Can we have a citation for this, or remove it if no citation is found?
• Pyramid Scheme - The article states, as if it is a fact, that "Litecoin effectively functions as a pyramid scheme". This is hardly objective. Litecoin could possibly become say 1% of the total Bitcoin market, and could indeed function as "silver". The same arguments in FAQ#Is Bitcoin a Ponzi_scheme apply here.

Can we fix this?

Ripper234 13:43, 13 January 2012 (GMT)

• Mining Monopoly - This isn't Wikipedia. Independent research is acceptable. Litecoin's scrypt is not (and cannot be, by definition) resistant to custom mining hardware. It is, however, resistant to all commodity hardware. This leaves a huge gap in mining capabilities between commodity hardware and custom hardware, which enables even a single person designing custom hardware to easily gain a 51% attack over all other miners. Bitcoin's double-SHA256 performs well on commodity GPUs, which serve as a "tier" between CPUs and custom hardware.
• Pyramid Scheme - If you can make this more objective without being wrong, feel free. However, the fact is that Litecoin functions as a pyramid scheme because it has no long-term viability like Bitcoin does. It cannot function as "silver" or any other kind of currency because it cannot survive. Therefore, late comers do NOT benefit from it. Bitcoin is only exempt from the 'pyramid scheme' claim because of its long-term function as a currency.

Luke-jr 17:12, 16 January 2012 (GMT)

I believe the way to make the "pyramid scheme" section more objective is to remove it altogether. Meaningful criticism does not begin by assuming as a premise that all obstacles are insurmountable and that the currency is an inevitable failure. (Also, for clarification: did you delete my previous comments on this page because they were considered to not be objective?)

Angus 23:35, 17 January 2012 (GMT)

• Redundancy - Simply stating personal axioms is not helpful. There are several assumptions that are neither explained, supported by an argument or citation. The phrase, "...and Bitcoins much greater size..." has no context. What is meant by Bitcoin's size? Does this refer to the its userbase?

• Vulnerability to mining monopoly - "a malicious entity needs only produce a single piece of specialized/custom hardware to overtake all the commodity mining systems combined." There needs to be citation to back this up or a solid "homegrown" argument. What are the economics of this type of attack?

• Pyramid scheme - Without further context, the choice of the words, "Pyramid scheme", is simply not applicable, as there are no promises being made, investments being soliciated, etc. Regardless of the the ultimate fate of Litecoin, the term "pyramid scheme" is simply not applicable. As for the fate of Litecoin, the case of its inevitable demise has simply not been made within the confines of the article.

Dooley 09:05, 9 February 2012 (GMT)

The "Mining monopoly" section is actually totally and utterly false. scrypt is not in fact designed to be inefficient on commodity hardware; if you read the original scrypt paper it's actually designed from the ground up for efficient implement on standard CPUs. One of the main design goals of scrypt was actually to limit the benefits an attacker using custom hardware could gain over people using off-the-shelf hardware. The designers of scrypt did this by cleverly making its performance dependant on memory bandwidth rather than processing power. Since the high-speed cache RAM on modern processors already takes up most of the die space, you won't be able to get much of an improvement over them by creating custom chips. In theory the best attack would be to find off-the-shelf processors whose balance of computational resources and cache fit scrypt-as-used-in-Litecoin perfectly, but that probably still wouldn't gain you a huge amount, especially as Intel has a big process advantage over the competition. - Makomk (talk) 16:32, 4 July 2012 (GMT)

redundancy

It would be useful if a counter-argument to this criticism were mentioned. It does add something bitcoin doesn't have - it uses CPUs rather than GPUs to mine. --Rebroad 17:59, 21 February 2012 (GMT)

"Pyramid Scheme"

I concur that the "3.3 Pyramid Scheme section is highly subjective and not worthy to be here. Also why is this page protected? Barbarousrelic (talk) 19:48, 26 July 2012 (GMT)