Litecoin is now ahead of bitcoin cash in the cryptocurrency rankings, based on their market cap. This is as important as the snow of last year – literally nobody cares.
Bitcoin Cash communities are infamous for their toxicity and inferiority complex with forced narratives about how BCH is the original bitcoin and how much better it is than the real BTC. Now, imagine what happens when you take such toxic and bickering environment and split it into two smaller tribes with completely opposite philosophies and perspectives on the future.
Relative to BTC, Bitcoin Cash was
- 0.250 (1/4) on 2017-11-12, about the time the DAA was fixed;
- 0.080 (~1/12) on 2018-11-15, just before the ABC/SV fork; and
- 0.025 (ABC) + 0.023 (SV) = 0.048 (~1/21) today, 2018-12-15.
So, relative to Bitcoin, and counting both sides of the split, Bitcoin Cash lost 81% of its value in the last 13 months. Roger Ver seems to be unloading his bags as well since the price sunk well below the $100 and BCH is now even cheaper than ETH ($80 to ETH’s $84 at press time).
The controversial owner of the web portal Bitcoin.org and Bitcointalk, an anon named ‘Cobra Bitcoin’, has voiced his opinion on the subject:
The reason Bitcoin Cash is in such a dire situation and getting flipped by BSV and LTC is because the "thought leaders" of its community betrayed it. People like Roger Ver and Jihan didn't sell their BSV, they kept it. When BCH split off from BTC, it traded at 10% of BTC's value.
— Cøbra (@CobraBitcoin) December 15, 2018
He goes on to say that after the BCH-BTC fork, BTC believers actually dumped the BCH coin as they deemed it worthless whereas the public faces and leaders of BCH community didn’t do the same with BSV which is the reason for the current high ranking of BSV, right below BCH. He concluded that Roger Ver and Jihan Wu, the aforementioned faces of BCH project, are at fault for giving the power to Craig Wright to fork away from them. Cobra also predicted BCH going to $20 and below.
Today, the long invoked, flappening (LTC taking over BCH on coinmarketcap) has happened which caused some juvenile joy in LTC community and even more bitterness and resignation in BCH camp. The flappening is completely irrelevant as it is in essence one zombie coin outpacing the other. As this observer points out:
“https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/activeaddresses-ltc-bch.html#1y
BCH always had low amount of active addresses. Low amount of transactions. Low median transaction value. Judging by the blockchain stats it might still be overvalued and seeing that a profit oriented company, bitmain, has a large part of its capital in BCH I would be seriously concerned about BCHs future as they can only delay taking the losses for so long. It seems that in the big picture BCH only lives from a small community of extremist fans.”
The gist of the post: BCH is even worse fundamentally than the pointless coin named litecoin.
As for Litecoin, here is a refresher on our piece about it from earlier this year, nothing has changed except LTC looks even more dead than at that time:
To reiterate what I already wrote earlier, since nothing has changed around Litecoin:
Litecoin [LTC] is one of the coins that suffered biggest hit by the bear market. The overall market cap has dropped below $2 billion and seems the shedding is not over yet.
It is a well known fact that Charlie Lee sold at the peak of LTC price and tweeted a very good advice to the rest of the holders: On December 12th, 2017, Charlie Lee sent out a tweet telling people not to get too excited with the unsustainable bull run. Charlie warned about the pending multi-year bear market and that anyone who could not handle Litecoin (LTC) dropping to $20 should not buy it. While many attacked him as a FUD instigator, his reasons for making these assertions were rock solid and since LTC is now hovering just aboe $30. Charlie explained that every time the crypto market rises up too fast, it overshoots its real value, which leads to a huge correction, and a price consolidation. Charlie’s predictions have come true.
Charlie is not active in LTC for quite some time – it has been years since he contributed to the development of the once second largest cryptocurrency, that is now ranked at number 7 on CMC rankings.
Being dubbed the silver to Bitcoin’s gold, Litecoin was introduced in 2011 as a quick fix that was supposed to solve some problems typical of Bitcoin. With new projects flooding the market in the recent years, Litecoin’s role seems to be thing of a past – LTC is the odd man out and nobody can bring about a solid argumentation for Litecoin’s purpose in the future. And the reason I think Litecoin is dead is not because of its price – it dropped together with the whole market and not by its own fault. The reason is lack of unique value proposition – it is just blunt copy of bitcoin with couple of parameters changed.
It was that back in 2011 and it is that still in 2018. This lack of vision and will for separation from bitcoin and creation of your own niche will cost Litecoin its existence.
Litecoin can do everything Bitcoin can and it is often called a testnet for bitcoin. But who needs a multi-billion testnet – who needs two identical projects as one is enough and this is a winner takes all battle.
Litecoin depends on Bitcoin. This is not just a hypothesis, this was Charlie’s vision from the project’s inception.
LTC enjoyed the treatment as a bitcoin’s little brother – technology was similar so exchanges and wallets could easily integrate it where ever they integrated bitcoin. This gave it exposure and liquidity which drove its price up especially as many would use it for faster transactions between exchanges or wallets as it had faster transaction time than bitcoin. In the meantime, there are many other coins that can be used for this purpose that are even faster and cheaper, almost free (Nano for example).
With Coinbase and other exchanges adding new projects, the top 10 market caps being dominated by some very diverse and colorful coins and a general lack of media attention and focus on Litecoin unless it makes some significant price movement, I’m not sure what would motivate new comers do the research necessary to learn about Litecoin’s potential.
So if Litecoin’s utility as a micro-payment solution is now in question, where does it stand? I suppose it could be the “silver” to Bitcoin’s “gold”, but if Bitcoins are (basically) infinitely divisible and act as a good store of value, then what does Litecoin do?
As Bitcoin network keeps being optimized and upgraded with new innovations like Lightning Network, use cases of Litecoin will disappear and so will its reason to exist.
Litecoin doesn’t have the name recognition that Bitcoin has. It does have a fantastic advantage to make improvements to itself much faster than Bitcoin does, but with the rise of so many other projects that have base codes that are already more fit for micro-transactions and scaling, has Litecoin missed the train? I would say yes.
LTC will continue to drop as investors move towards projects that are more realistic in their goals. If anyone replaces fiat, it is going to be bitcoin and not litecoin. Litecoin’s boon and curse has been its mirroring of bitcoin – they enjoyed the ride in the past but with every market contraction, we will lose projects that have no reason to exist, like Litecoin.
