Recover to what? It's already at $2.91, which is higher than it was before. Until some compelling event to drive demand occurs, the price will all be speculative.
The bubble to $50 was due to Bitcoin's meteoric rise after the fall of the silk road. It seems like a perfect storm of media attention, alleged bots, and lack of selling lead to that run up. Since LTC was priced as a derivative of BTC, it (and all cryptos) saw their value go up exponentially.
Could that happen again? Sure - so long as there is something creating demand, then the price will rise since supply is limited. I doubt it will happen soon, but if I could see the future I'd of mined hoards of litecoin and fractions of a cent and sold them for thousands in profit.
LTC has consistently shown enough backing by miners and traders to survive as an alternative cryptocurrency. Scrypt ASIC-resistance may have fallen, but it does have the advantage that scrypt miners need a coin to mine or their equipment is useless. LTC is the leader of the pack of hundreds of altcoins, see Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations. But in a world where network affects dominate, bitcoin is the unstoppable gorilla. Especially once we work out how to peg sidechains to the bitcoin blockchain, bitcoin will be the only store of value of real significance. Today, BTC has 35 times the market capitalization of LTC, and that ratio will probably get higher. Whether to support altcoins or not has been pretty controversial in the bitcoin community. As bitcoin becomes broadly adopted, however, it also becomes subject to scrutiny and attention, taxation, and government rules and regulations to potentially run afoul of. There will always be a market for altcoins that are more obscure, or just more fun, like Dogecoin or Clams, among many others.
