Another proof that the best times of Litecoin (LTC) are behind

"A good time to remind you $LTC it's completely useless. Chain transactions are a joke. The last 5 blocks are all smaller than 30kb, the network is completely empty. It is not used for payments, it is not used at all. "

A good time to remind you $ LTC it's completely useless. Chain transactions are a joke. The last 5 blocks are all smaller than 30kb, the network is completely empty. It is not used for payments, it is not used at all. https://t.co/tnQd8eXWrh

– Paul Everton (@realpauleverton) December 20, 2018

This was a reaction to the news that Coinbase has moved about $ 5 billion worth of cryptographic tokens as part of their system upgrade. As Frank Chaparo of The Block reported,

"The $ 5 billion represents 5% of all bitcoins, 8% of the total supply of ether and 25% of all litecoin".

This news was commented on by Jackson Palmer, founder of Dogecoin and well-known cryptographic commentator, while asking if people who left their private keys in centralized central units defeated the fundamental principle of cryptocurrencies.

Litecoin is in a terrible form

Litecoin online chain metrics are less naive than ever. The blockchain recorded only 21k transactions in the last 24 hours, which is 10 times less than the bitcoin and 150x less than EOS that is leading the market in the tx numbers.

Not only that, but the size of the blocks are, as evidenced by Paul Everton, well below 30kb means that there are simply no transactions on the network to fill the blocks so that the miners collect the block prizes by extracting almost empty blocks.

Bitcoin and Litecoin had the same block limit of 1 MB. After the first litecoin and then the segwit activated bitcoin, now they have again the same block limit of 4 MB.

However, this only determines the maximum size that the blockchain could have by now. We do not need to store data for unused block space!

Because the block header makes up only 80 bytes of data, the transaction data is the limit of the blockchain. It turns out that even if Litecoin had nearly three times more blocks (1,420,460) than Bitcoin (522,429) due to its faster interval, Litecoin had far fewer transactions. Lately, the Litecoin blocks have had an average size of 31 kB, while the Bitcoins have had about 815 kB in the last month.

Litecoin's hashrate is also down, just like the bitcoin one. At its peak, LTC had about 350 Terahashes that protected the network. That number is now almost twice as small – 150TH.

For a cryptocurrency that was to be the frequent, small-scale alternative transaction to BTC, Litecoin could not recover in terms of volume as it only had 43 million dollars in volume onchain. Compare it with $ 1.8 billion BTC or $ 1.6 billion BCH.

Besides the volume, the median value of the transactions also shows that practically no one uses it for the intended purpose: small transactions, such as the purchase of coffee or foodstuffs. The median value of the transactions was $ 49 a bitcoin $ 69.

Here is another very detailed essay on Litecoin of Multicoin Capital, they also see no real purpose for the existence of LTC.

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To repeat what I have already written previously, since nothing has changed around Litecoin:

litecoin [LTC] It is one of the most affected coins in the bear market. Total capitalization has fallen below $ 2 billion and it appears that the shedding is not over yet.

It is a well known fact that Charlie Lee has sold at the peak of the LTC price and tweeted a very good advice to the rest of the owners: December 12^th, 2017, Charlie Lee sent to Tweet tell people not to get too excited about the unsustainable rush to the bull. Charlie has warned of the bear market that has been going on for many years and anyone who can not handle Litecoin (LTC) down to $ 20 should not buy it. While many attacked him as a FUD instigator, his reasons for making these assertions were solid and since LTC now hovers around $ 30. Charlie explained that every time the crypto market goes up too fast, it exceeds its real value, which leads to a huge correction and price consolidation. Charlie's predictions have come true.

Charlie has not been active in LTC for some time – years have passed since he helped develop the cryptocurrency, once in second place, which is now ranked 7th in the CMC rankings.

Considered the silver for Bitcoin gold, Litecoin was introduced in 2011 as a quick solution that would have had to solve some typical Bitcoin problems. With the new projects flooding the market in recent years, the role of Litecoin seems to be a thing of the past – LTC is a strange man and nobody can lead to solid argumentation for the purpose of Litecoin in the future. And the reason why I think Litecoin is dead is not due to its price: it fell together with the whole market and not by its own fault. The reason is the lack of a single value proposition – it's just a blunt bitcoin copy with a couple of modified parameters.

It was in 2011 and it is still in 2018. This lack of vision and willingness to separate from the bitcoins and the creation of its own niche will cost Litecoin its existence.

Litecoin can do all that Bitcoin can do and is often called testnet for bitcoins. But who needs a multi-billion testnet – who needs two identical projects as one is enough and this is a winner takes all the battles.

Litecoin depends on Bitcoin. This is not just a hypothesis, this was Charlie's vision from the start of the project.

LTC appreciated the bitcoin's little brother's treatment: technology was similar, so exchanges and wallets could easily integrate it where they had never integrated bitcoins. This gave him an exposure and a liquidity that pushed his price high, mainly because many would use it for faster transactions between purses or wallets, since it had faster transaction times than bitcoins. 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 that add new projects, the 10 major markets are dominated by very different and colorful coins and a general lack of media attention and attention to Litecoin, unless they make a significant price movement, they are not sure of what motivates newcomers to do the necessary research to know the potential of Litecoin.

So, if Litecoin's utility as a micro-payment solution is now in question, where is it? I suppose it could be silver for Bitcoin gold, but if Bitcoins are (basically) divisible to infinity and behave like a good store of value, then what does Litecoin do?

As the Bitcoin network continues to be optimized and updated with new innovations such as Lightning Network, Litecoin's cases will disappear and so will its reason for existence.

Litecoin does not recognize the name Bitcoin has. It has a great advantage in improving itself much faster than Bitcoin, but with the increase of many other projects that have basic codes that are already more suitable for micro-transactions and scalability, Litecoin has lost the train? I would say yes.

LTC will continue to decline as investors move towards projects that are more realistic in their goals. If someone replaces fiat, it will be bitcoin and not litecoin. Litecoin's blessing and curse was his reflection of the bitcoin: they enjoyed the race in the past but with every contraction of the market, we will lose projects that have no reason to exist, like Litecoin.