What is the point of Litecoin?

[Comdrpopnfresh]

I understand it bars the ASIC-ruled BTC from playing a role in negating the mining efforts of those with non-ASIC systems, however, why bother?

I do understand that the drastically smaller valuation of LTC vs BTC means that hardware efforts toward LTC mining can provide a larger benefit, given the room for BTC-vs-LTC upward growth. However, this sort of implies a future success, better valuations, and "market-share" that will attract hardware-optimized (FPGA,ASIC, etc.) solutions which will negate LTC even existing.

I cannot start mining BTC again at a "profitable" level , yet I do not really see an allure to LTC mining... If LTC "makes it", there will likely be something thereafter. I understand the underpinning of BTC, but don't know much about how dynamic it is: can the maximum currency units be altered, etc.

My point is this: Instead of alternatives to a digital currency that is an alternative to fiat monies... why not a digital currency that is dynamic enough to disallow ASIC mining and wan upward bound on total volume? Given the volatility of BTC, there has got to be a greater occurrence of abandonment, and thus lost BTC units than with any other currency... And why fuel a hardware arms-race to better mine, rather then a recurring, dynamic, implementation that forgoes resource-intensive development altogether? If bitcoin it to be for the masses, should it not be able to be mined by the same?

 

[Mark R]

This was one of the main aims of litecoin. The litecoin hash algorithm was specifically selected because it is extremely expensive to build into FPGA or ASIC, but is well suited to general purpose PC hardware.

BTC uses the SHA256 hash, which requires a lot of integer computation power - GPUs have this in abundance, but also have powerful FPUS, lots of RAM and very fast RAM interconnects. A sha256 ASIC can be made hundreds of times as powerful as a GPU for the same cost, because SHA256 is very simple and can be easily parallelized hundreds of thousands of times.

LTC uses scrypt. Scrypt doesn't just need hugely more ALU than sha256, it is specifically designed to be massively bloated on RAM, with no way to optimize out the RAM requirement. You need 128 kB of RAM to run an scrypt hash. RAM is very expensive on FPGAs and ASICs. Scrypt can be parallelised on modern GPUs with many GB of RAM and hundreds of GB/s of interconnect between the RAM and the GPU core. ASICs are still probably feasible, but it's not just a matter of slapping 20 100pin ASICs on a board with a supervisory microprocessor, as it is with BTC. For LTC, you'd be looking at 2000 pin ASICs with 32 GB of GDDR5 RAM on extremely complex PCB. Feasible, yes. Expensive, extemely. Better than a GPU, yes. Spectacularly better, probably not.

There are other factors that LTC make LTC slightly more desirable. LTC has a much faster block generation rate, giving faster, more secure transfer "clearance", LTCs themselves are more finely divisible and more numerous.

Both BTC and LTC are dynamic to an extent, but it would require everyone to upgrade their software in order to continue participating. For example, it would be theoretcially possible to upgrade BTCs to be more finely divisible, but the new software would not function correctly until >50% of participants in the BTC network were also running it. In other words, it's probably not practical.

 

[mkrohn]

why ask questions? plug in, make money. Buy a trunk load of 7950's and get crunching!

 

[Chiropteran]

What I find interesting is primecoin seems to be a better litecoin than litecoin is. That is, when litecoin was released it one of it's features was inability to GPU mine it. However, over time GPU mining software was developed and now litecoin is mostly mined via GPU, as CPU can only mine litecoin at a slower rate.


Primecoin, unintentionally perhaps, has proven to be very hard to mine on a GPU. Some efforts were made to write a GPU miner, but they have failed to produce something that is actually a net gain to use over simply CPU mining.

If nothing else, I find it interesting that there is BTC mined with ASIC, litecoin mined with GPU, and now primecoin mined only with CPU. There are alternative currencies that can be mined via each of the types of hardware, but those three are the winners currently.