If litecoin had the same market cap as bitcoin, would the fees be roughly the same?

I see a lot of discussion about litecoin having low fees, and that has been my personal experience as well. I know the fees directly correlate with how full the transaction “pipeline” is at any given time & realize this is not a straightforward yes/no question.

Generally speaking, does litecoin have features that will allow it to scale better as the value increases compared to bitcoin? Does the litecoin “pipeline” have a higher capacity?

Your thoughts?

Things would not differ significantly. Marketcap is a bad measure here (too) as LTC has more coins. The blocks are somewhat faster, but nothing significant. The same concept has the same problem if the main layer is saturated. If I remember well, years ago Charlie Lee @coblee had some proposal to optimize the fee market. I can’t remember it being implemented, but it might have been. Still, who bids higher, gets in the block. Bids can go higher if the transacted value is higher. It is really quite simple.

This question had just been asked on Reddit.

Marketcap does not matter. It is the number of transactions that does. Litecoin has roughly about half the transactions of Bitcoin, yet much lower fees:

  • Bitcoin - transaction fee / weekly average - usd 6.40 per transaction
  • Litecoin - transaction fee / weekly average - usd 0.03 per transaction

As everyone can see Litecoin is a prime coin, with faster and much cheaper transaction time.

Also current fair values

  • Bitcoin - weekly avg - usd 18 958
  • Litecoin - weekly avg - usd 196
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It does not matter what the value is, it matters how many inputs are in the transaction. A transaction could have 300 inputs from many mining payments, or it could have 1 input. The fee is quoted in satoshis per kilobyte of data in the transaction.

That’s true, of course, but if the block space is saturated then small transactions cannot compete, because their relative fee will become super high. So it would come naturally that for the same value transacted a lower number of large transactions will happen instead of hundreds of small ones.

Yes, definitely. I have no doubt about that. If you look at the forex market, you will see that there are many currencies that stand at the same level. The same can happen in the crypto market also.

My understanding is the Mimblewimble extension block will help with scaling as well, I believe this is accomplished with the “cut through” protocol embedded, correct me if im wrong, but im not certain what the block size increase will be effectively… and i think it’s measured in weights similar to segwit.

I think it would be like that only. In the forex market, nearly all the major currency pairs are given the same value and so is the case for minors and exotics.