Well, there's another vote of confidence in Bitcoin. It seems to be a battle of good and bad press. Ultimately, I don't think it matters. The votes are in and the people have said they want virtual currency. If it's not Bitcoin, next man up.
Side note, check out namecoin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin. It's based on SHA-256.
scrypt uses the SHA-256 algorithm for hashing the blocks, but the caveat is that it also uses a high number of read/writes to RAM. In fact, there is very nearly parity to the number of compute cycles to read/writes cycles. Here's the paper on it: http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf.
In order to build an ASIC miner for Litecoin, one would have to build a circuit that had a massive number of CPUs encrusted with a fairly massive amount of fast RAM. As this more or less describes a video card, whoever designs an ASIC for Litecoin will have a nice challenge in front of them.
Edit: Working URLs
Also, revising the core of Bitcoin in any significant way will be prove at least as hard as replacing IPv4 with IPv6.
I've been considering buying a Litecoin or two just for the fun of it. I have greater faith in Bitcoin for sure, but unless a technical flaw destroys it, I don't see exactly why Litecoin should disappear.
Not enough money in the world to support too many networks of the necessary size.
You're talking as if multiple new currencies are not possible when it clear that they are. People who use currencies don't care about the market, they care that products are priced in that currency and are relatively stable.
The market will eventually level out as usage grows, anything new is going to be volatile but there's clearly room for more than one player as long as they're not identical and offer different value propositions then they'll be taken up if only to hedge against the weaknesses of their competitors.
Bitcoin has flaws, it's terrible wasteful of energy as if proof of work were the only possible solution to creating coins. Other coins offer different less wasteful ways of minting new coins, that's going to have a market regardless of bitcoin's success.
Note: SHA-256 and scrypt are the building blocks of most cryptocurrencies. SHA-256 is to UDP as scrypt is to TCP? Dunno.
...except that bitcoin doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not the exclusive currency of anyone, and never will be.
Bitcoin doesn't affect economies.
No currency exists in a vacuum, this is a meaningless point.
> It's not the exclusive currency of anyone, and never will be.
You don't and can't know that.
> Bitcoin doesn't affect economies.
It will if it gets mass adoption, so again an irrelevant point since we're talking about its future, not its present.
This is because if only people with specialized hardware could mine, the network could be more vulnerable to 51% attack from a well-funded team, versus when every person with a graphics card can mine.
See https://litecoin.info/Comparison_between_Litecoin_and_Bitcoi...
Selling shovels during the gold rush is not something much safer than drilling for gold itself. It is safer, but not a 100% certain business.