Litecoin: The sleeping volcano

And when it will explode

Bitcoin has always been the big brother to Litecoin, but that is slowly changing.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. — Steve Jobs

Litecoin is much faster to adopt promising new technologies without fighting and debating over it for years. It is true that most of this technology was developed by Bitcoin developers and not by Litecoin developers. One example of this is Segwit which was first implemented on Litecoin before it came to Bitcoin. Segwit is an extremely interesting technology, but it is not the focus of this article. Litecoin has started it’s own Litecoin Improvements Proposals Repository and will start to implement unique features not found in any other coin. LIP-001 is being worked on by Charlie Lee.

I'm proposing an upgrade to Litecoin with a soft fork that will let miners signal their min accepted fee in the block header. This will let a fee market develop without having us decide what the min fee is. Will also make it easier for users to estimate fees. More details later.

LIP-001 is just the beginning of a new era for Litecoin.

Other important milestones for Litecoin moving forward is support for cross-chain atomic swap. Litecoin has already successfully done this with Decred and with Bitcoin in an off-chain atomic swap test conducted by Lightning Labs. Cross-chain atomic swaps enables the end-user to seamlessly pay with Litecoin even if you only bought Bitcoin. This is huge for Litecoin as it can fully realize its potential of a true payment coin. Bitcoins blocktimes are not really suitable for everyday purchases even less so with the high fees. Litecoin has an order of magnitude cheaper fees and faster blocks.

When will Litecoin explode?

Litecoin will explode on April 1st when Facebook announces their custom payment processor and integration into their products.

Just kidding. It would make for a good Aprils Fools tweet from LTCFoundation albeit unprofessional. 2018 will be a good year for Litecoin and I expect the growth in usage to increase with a number of new merchant processors launching their products. LitePay is the most promising with some of the Litecoin Foundation members as investors. They will also offer a Litecoin card and wallet.

The price will likely continue to stay in the range of 0.01–0.02 BTC to LTC ratio for the coming year. This means that if Bitcoins price continues to go up Litecoins price will naturally follow. If we do get a breakout from 0.02 the way is short to 0.05 which will price Litecoin at $420 at current prices.

2018 will really be the year all cryptocurrencies including Litecoin will be under heavy scrutiny from regulators from all countries. What regulations they will introduce and where they will be introduced are impossible to predict. A beacon of hope is Japan which is taking a very positive stance and we must hope all other countries will follow in their example.