Talk:Litecoin

=========== suggested updates

" They wanted to make a cryptocoin that is considered silver to Bitcoin's gold" Litecoin was designed to be for smaller, faster transactions - balancing the risk/reward equation in a way that allows for a faster block discovery time. It was designed to be a stand alone currency - rather than the "Silver to bitcoin's gold" as many critques suggest. In many ways this mirrors times past when people would carry silver in their purses rather than gold - to reduce the risk with a "lower value" coinage - this might be where the reference originates.

• Pyramid Scheme - Litecoin is no more a pyramid scheme than any cryptocoin is where mining pools are the most common form of mining. As such this section is irrelevant to the litecoin specific pages and might better be suited for the wiki page about cryptocoins.

• (Slight) Premining - should be changed to Premining - removing the (slight) and just describe what was premined.

• Litecoin uses Scrypt as a proof-of-work scheme. Scrypt adds memory-intensive algorithms to reduce the efficiency of GPUs down to the level of CPUs. This is good in the short term, but is almost certainly harmful if Litecoin were to gain widescale adoption

Should be changed to:

• Litecoin uses Scrypt as a proof-of-work scheme. Scrypt was selected due to the way it was designed - which balances the memory/rate at which it can be used to "brute force" hashes. The default implementation of Scrypt is memory-intensive but at a higher rate of hashing. This can be adjusted to reduce the memory used at the expense of the rate of hashing. Due to the way that Scrypt brings memory into the equation wrt hardware - it makes it difficult to implement on FPGA's & ASIC type hardware. As the litecoin blockchain becomes more widely adopted - we expect the efficiencies gained through properly designed hardware to encourage FPGA & ASIC manufacturers to develop suitable hardware that can be used with the Scrypt algo used by litecoin. This broadly follows what we've seen with other blockchains such as bitcoin.

• Faster, Smaller Block Chain

The Litecoin blockchain differs from its Bitcoin counterpart in that it tries to have smaller blocks, and generate them four times as fast as the Bitcoin network allows. This means that 1-confirmation (low value) merchants get faster confirmations for their online products, but increases the network overhead.

should be tweaked: This means that 1-confirmation merchants get faster confirmations for their online products. There are 2 side effects to the network overheads and the number of "open" tx on the network: 1) Due to the faster block discovery time there will be less outstanding tx on the blockchain compared to other blockchains like bitcion - assuming the avg block folds in 500 tx as assuming the number of outstanding tx is 1500 - it would take litecoin 7.5 mins to fold in an provide a single conf to the outstanding tx. On the bitcoin blockchain this would take 30 mins. Due to the variability of block discovery in any single retarget period - outstanding tx pile up and take a number of new blocks to clear any backlog. Recently on the bitcoin network 2500 outstanding tx has been fairly common (Dec 2012) - this means it takes bitcoin 50 mins (5 blocks) to clear the backlog. On the litecoin network this would take 12.5 mins. 2) Due to the way nodes on the network calculate tx fees - the larger the number of outstanding tx - the greater the fees. Due to this - some cryptocoin blockchains have had to compromise their design & implement extra logic to allow "backdoor" tx - where a mining pool will accept lower fees for tx. Litecoin haven't yet had to consider such an approach due to its robust network design. It's the belief of the litecoin developers that implementing the backdoor logic for lower tx fees compromises the core ideas behind part of the network design - where block reward halves as the blockchain grows. Ideally the rewards from tx fees should cover any reward decrease.

=================

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)

Redundancy isn't a bad thing, imo. Cf: Nassim Taleb's comments about redundancy and fragility, or simply check the wiki page Redundancy_(engineering): "In engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the case of a backup or fail-safe." I think that the complementary nature of Litecoin should be embraced and used exactly as a complementary currency. As it stands the current page on Litecoin is entirely subjective and missing all the key points, I realise a lot of it is on the talk forums but it would be worth having it here. --Esoteric (talk) 23:10, 15 October 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)

Litecoin has Android miner which Bitcoin doesn't

Litecoin has Android miner which Bitcoin doesn't https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93276.0 This should be good for people without a decent computer or GPUs but have android phone. If I use my old CPU to pool mine bitcoin I can get nothing as all my work stale share but for Litecoin I ill get a little. So I'd like an alternative arithmetic doesn't only consider GPUs or ASIC but also fit for the old hareware to have a litte share. Also I want to edit the page but I can't find the edit button. Is there permission requirements? How to edit that page? Merrykid (talk) 04:01, 3 December 2012 (GMT)

I completely agree. We should also point out that Litecoin is much better suited for mining in a web browser. The article is locked, I don't see why. Can an admin give a good explanation for why the article is locked? --Chawlindel (talk) 23:59, 15 December 2012 (GMT)

Android miner is not relevant, and is likely to destroy the phone anyway. It certainly doesn't make Litecoin any better. The article is locked due to repeated vandalism by pro-Litecoin trolls - it's been a while, so maybe it's time to try unlocking it? --Luke-jr (talk) 23:08, 16 December 2012 (GMT)

Judging from the editing history, you (Luke-jr) is the one that has been a Litecoin-hater troll. Since you apparently can't discuss which is the better instead of just deleting every post which is pro-litecoin, I think we should compromise. Have one pro-litecoin section and one against-litecoin section. Then discuss all subjective bullshit on the discussion page. You (Luke-jr) behave like a 3-year old baby with admin rights. Can you stop doing that? Otherwise, this page needs to follow some kind of Wikipedia-policy. --Chawlindel (talk) 08:09, 18 December 2012 (GMT)

Edit request

Bitcoin no longer offers 50 coins per block. Dree12 (talk) 02:32, 10 December 2012 (GMT)

It's kind of absurd that this article is locked. I think it's very non-objective and we should let readers see Litecoin's opinion. We should add the Litecoin Wiki to external links. We should also give readers a direct link to the Comparison between Bitcoin and Litecoin article on Litecoin Wiki. --Chawlindel (talk) 23:51, 15 December 2012 (GMT)