Litecoin is up 16% in the last 24 hours.
A lot of people (including myself) have discredited Litecoin as a network that has nothing to offer the cryptosphere. What's the point of it? It's basically just a Bitcoin clone with less secure blocks and a different hashing algorithm (Scrypt). Who cares?
- It doesn't have smart contracts.
- It doesn't have privacy features.
- Many other networks are faster and more scalable.
So what's the point of Litecoin?
When I first started taking crypto seriously in 2017 I was extremely bullish on Litecoin, to the point of hyping it up so much that I have a friend who put more money into that project than all my holdings combined. After a while I started to doubt Litecoin's usefulness (crashing from $300+ to $22 will do that). Also, with all the research I was doing there was so much potential elsewhere in the cryptosphere.
However, I'm glad my friend ignored me and just stuck with Litecoin.
It has a lot of value, in fact, I used it just the other day.
Bittrex
I was moving some money around on Bittrex the other day, and moving Bitcoin OR Ethereum to an outside wallet cost around $5 at the time. Meanwhile, Litecoin only cost 0.01 LTC ( < 50 cents ). Surprisingly, Binance lets you do it for x10 less than that (0.001 LTC). Litecoin on-chain fees are extremely cheap.
Bittrex points
So apparently when you make a trade on Bittrex and pay the associated fees, you get points for doing so, and you can use those points to make free trades later. Apparently, I have a lot of points saved up that I was really paying attention to, so I used a few of them to trade into Litecoin for free and move it around for 50 cents instead of $5. I basically saved myself $9 just by transferring my money into Litecoin before moving it off the platform (2 transfers).
To capitalize on these points, you have to make a limit order rather than a market order, but I tested it out, and you can post a limit buy order higher than the current sell price, effectively turning into a market order but still making the trade for "free".
That's not even the real value of Litecoin.
It's not about timing the market, but rather time in the market. Litecoin is the second oldest cryptocurrency by quite a huge margin. When Bitcoin fees go x10-x100 because of FOMO mania and corporations using it to transfer millions around the globe, what's going to happen? Users are going to be looking for cheaper options, and that's Litecoin.
Maybe you're thinking they should use something else like Hive that has zero fees. However, that's not what a lot of these people are going to be looking for. They're going to be looking for a project that they understand and trust, one that is very similar to Bitcoin and has good security but just has much more affordable fees. Again, that's Litecoin.
What about Bitcoin Cash & other Bitcoin Forks
I have no faith in projects like BCH and BSV. They are not secure. Because they all use the SHA-256 algorithm, these networks are much easier to attack using mining farms that were previously allocated toward Bitcoin itself.
Thus far, we haven't seen a lot of attacks of this nature. The cryptosphere is largely cooperative and allows these forks to exist without seeing the need to attack them like you would expect in a traditional corporate dog-eat-dog world. However, what are we seeing today?
https://bitcointreasuries.org/
We see that corporations themselves are adding Bitcoin to the corporate balance sheets. Bitcoin maximalism will soon be synonymous with being a cutthroat corporate dickhead. This Kumbaya period will eventually end when the legacy economy jumps ship into Bitcoin. The gloves will come off, and there will be a much larger chance of Bitcoin forks getting attacked by the corporations/banks entering Bitcoin itself and lashing out at the "competition". At that point, using SHA-256 to secure your network may not be a viable option.
The silver to Bitcoin's gold.
I've always thought that these analogies were pretty dumb, but I'm starting to come around. Litecoin really is just a less secure but cheaper blockchain to use. Even though it's less secure than Bitcoin, it remains more secure that every other blockchain in my opinion. The reason why many think it is a dead project (it doesn't do anything unique) is exactly why it is so secure. Ethereum has a huge premine and smart contracts make the network dangerous (as we've all seen). So even as the #2 by market cap, it is still much less secure than Litecoin. Don't even get me started on Ripple's XRP.
Halving event.
Litecoin's most recent halving event came in August 2019. Over a year later, we are in the pocket of liquidity running dry and active price discovery taking place. Once the pool of liquid assets is gone any amount of buying pressure pushes the price way up. We could easily see some fireworks over the next few months. Truthfully, I thought it would have happened already, but it clearly hasn't. May this COVID Christmas be good to us.
Conclusion
Litecoin is far from a dead project. It has good security and superior fees compared to Bitcoin. It's the second oldest cryptocurrency in existence, and that means a lot for networks that are public and constantly under attack worldwide as they secure their associated honeypots.
Development continues
The dev team is trying to add privacy features and a handful of other utilities/connections. Litecoin isn't going anywhere. In fact, I think it's going to surprise a lot of people over the next few years.