Why care should be taken now anyway

During the old season, coins like Litecoin (LTC) shine. Why the “crypto silver” is still an extremely bad investment for Hodler.

It’s the old season. In the slipstream of Bitcoin, the workhorse, Altcoins in particular are doing their best. Litecoin in particular has proven to be a worthwhile investment: Within the last 7 days, the Bitcoin fork made 16 percent growth and stood at 225 US dollars by the editorial deadline.

The price increase could well continue in the medium term. If you look at the growth of new addresses in the Litecoin cosmos, for example, you can see that the curve has recently been pointing upwards. So LTC seems to be trending.

The old season refers to market phases in which Altcoins perform better on average than the industry leader Bitcoin. Traders then jump on the already galloping horses in the hope of a quick profit – and ignore BTC. The resulting volume could be a reason for Bitcoin’s cancer run for some time. Most of the time, old seasons are short-lived.

Bitcoin remains a bank

After all, only Bitcoin is suitable as a really reliable store of value in cryptoversum, and so Litecoin was also an extremely bad investment in the long term. Even after the brilliant bull weeks, LTC is still a beaten 60 percent behind its all-time high of 360 US dollars in December 2017. A look at the overall chart is disillusioning.

If you measure LTC in BTC, it looks even grimmer. Litecoin was able to outperform its big brother Bitcoin by 12 percent in the last 14 days. If you apply a longer period of time, LTC is heavily in the red compared to BTC. Within the last 12 months alone, LTC posted an underperformance of almost 40 percent compared to Bitcoin.

Hodler rely on BTC

Litecoin is probably a prime example of why Bitcoin has long won the race for the dominant crypto currency. After all, founder Charlie Lee set out to revolutionize Bitcoin in 2013 – after 8 years, you can say with moderate success. Even then, Bitcoin’s long block time was a thorn in the side of critics. How are you supposed to compete in a global financial system with a block of ten minutes each and an average transaction throughput?

Lee forklifted BTC and made some significant interventions in the process. So shortened “SatoshiLite“, As the founder is called on Twitter, the block time to 2.5 minutes and thus also quadrupled the number of maximum possible units to 84 million LTC. Of course, Litecoin achieved its set goal: The transaction fees are on average many times cheaper than those of BTC. But the devil is in the details.

Crypto investors value Bitcoin not because of its transaction speed, but because of its properties as a store of value. In other words: the narrative of digital gold has prevailed. It is simply irrelevant how large Bitcoin’s transaction throughput is, since the cryptocurrency is primarily used as a vehicle for saving. Details such as the amount and distribution of full nodes, the hash rate, general acceptance and the credibility of the 21 million BTC limit are viewed by the market as overriding properties, and BTC simply has the edge.

Bitcoin may not be suitable for buying the proverbial cup of coffee. At 1.3 billion US dollars, Bitcoiners transfer more than twice as much value as on Litecoin. And that’s what matters in the end.

Disclaimer: The price estimates presented on this page do not constitute buy or sell recommendations. They are only an assessment of the analyst.