I thought I would make this post with a hopeful look to the future, hopefully not to distant though. Just some food for thoughts
In Litecoins earlier days it definitely had a good run in terms of price and caught the attention of many crypto enthusiasts. These opinions are my own and may or may not be correct (that's the disclaimer out of the way)
So what happened exactly?
I believe firstly LTC was hindered early on by ASIC technology, in the sense up to that point anyone with a (good) graphics card could earn real cash just by running a script, it helped the network and created broader distribution. When ASIC came along to LTC the unprofitably for the everyday GPU miner began so most simply ceased mining it. ASICs tend to use more power also so coins were hitting exchanges in order to pay running costs combined with the relatively low market cap at the time and not the greatest of liquidity
After this cloud mining was pretty much the only viable way of mining without personally owning a ASIC and lots of these contracts were terminated due to the price decline that produced a negative ROI, and I suppose many people lost faith to at least some degree
If we look at the situation today Litecoin is very profitable as far as ASIC is concerned, more so than BTC 13.5TH/s at 1350w will produce 0.004 per day at current conditions.
A Litecoin ASIC running 800w at 500MH/s will mine the equivalent of just under 1LTC per day.
OR 0.02 in BTC
So at this moment in time it is highly profitable, however I believe as more competition emerges in the mining world Litecoin will be getting ever closer to its true value couple that with block reward halving. Only time will tell
Peace out and much love