As usual, headlines are exaggerations. Being sensationalist nets more views becuase it piques people's interest in the subject. What I mean for this post is that there's much less need for litecoin if the crypto-community can just create a bitcoin spinoff with all the benefits of litecoin this quick. I remember the early days when litecoin was one of the only competitors, and it had some significant differences with bitcoin:
Litecoin Key Advantages or Differences:
It mines faster: Blocks every 2.5 minutes instead of 10 minutes
It uses a different hashing algorithm (Scrypt vs SHA-256), making it harder to develop custom hardware and thus it will maintain decentralization longer with individuals mining with their single computers and normal graphics cards. Mistakenly they used to call it "ASIC-Proof." in reality it was just memory intensive and needed a different style of ASIC to mine with. - Since other coins have created their own custom algorithms that are profitable to mine with a consumer grade CPU and GPU.
Now #3 is one benefit I noticed personally:
Litecoin can make key development updates or changes because it has a smaller community and userbase and thus less parties (and funds at risk) to appease before applying any software changes.4X more total supply of coins, thus making the perception of an easier to acquire (lower price inherently due to more supply) for the little guy to want to invest or own some.
Most of litecoin's advantages get superceded with the currently proposed Bitcoin SegWit2x fork Available at b2x-segwit.io - If Only Litecoin had simply taken the name "Bitcoin Silver" or waited until 2017 to fork off...
SegWit2X v2.0?
It was news to me, learning on bitcoinist.com that the fork is BACK since December 16th:
The announcement was made on December 16th, with the fork date set for December 28th. Some Segwit2x futures markets are still live on some exchanges, and this attempts to finish the project that was started. HitBTC and YoBit are already supporting the fork, saying that the people who’ve purchased B2X tokens receive their coins.
Though the New York agreement failed before (supposedly the promoters backed out) other hard forks were successful; especially Bitcoin Cash which at peak was near 1/4th of bitcoin's price, easily surpassing Litecoin in market cap currently $47 Billion vs $14 Billion.
Currently I see Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Dash all competing for the same market: To be what bitcoin was supposed to be, easy unrestricted micro-transactions; to be an actual currency! Now that bitcoin has failed in the short and mid-term (with hopes only for long-term success lowering day by day as transaction fees creep up) these coins are threatening bitcoin's network power and could takeover within 6months (because these markets move fast) to 5 years from now. I don't see litecoin as a legitimate threat to bitcoin (core)'s hegemony. Not with a coin like Dash having at least half a dozen clear game-changing benefits over it and already being well established.
I'm Wrong
How can I say we don't need litecoin when there are 1,000 of cryptocurrencies with market caps and trading volumes that are just copycats of other coins? Well you got me. We'll still use litecoin, just not as much. And probably the future of litecoin's price will be 1/10th of what it could have been if this kind of fork proves successful.
I could be totally wrong and litecoin could be added to facebook in 2018. There's always that.
Other Reasons for Litecoin to Underperform
- Bitcoin Cash: 8MB Blocks and a community that supports increasing the blocksize
- Litecoin's creator Charlie Lee apparently sold all his supply - shows a lack of faith (whatever his reasons) to savy-investors that he's not personally invested in his creation, so it's future normally would mean less to him than if he had a personal stake like he always had.
MORE:
Additional Article from Coin Telegraph 2017-12-26:
Hard Fork, Take Two: SegWit2x Will Return Dec. 28, Says Founder
'Official' Website with Feature-List