LTC has been around much longer than say, Ethereum. Millions of dollars flow each day through both LTC and Ethereum markets. Ethereum’s market cap is much larger than LTC. However, some crypto owners value LTC over Ethereum, and vice versa for others. It’s fair to say, and indisputable, that they both have value.
What if the market overwhelmingly decided that LTC was just as valuable (in terms of “price” alone) as Ethereum, and that Ethereum’s value itself really isn’t affected by LTC? Well, 1 LTC could then reasonably be priced at around $174.53 in today’s dollars.
Beyond that, you can reasonably assume that both (and really all) of these markets are still considered “young” and that their caps will grow.
Is this realistic? You bet it is. You need to look no further than BTC to see proof that this can happen (whose market dominance is tanking by the way…)
this has to be the smartest thing I’ve ever read in crypto.
I didn’t even consider that LTC, if valued the same as eth, could just steal Eth’s new price like that! It’s like a shortcut to the new eth price. My gawd!!!
You don t consider market cap in your analysis, do you? And by the way: “I heard a rumor on reddit that btc is just using ltc as a test run.”… It is not a rumor, it is a fact, and it is very good for LTC relative BTC, not the other way around as BTC market cap is 16 times that of Litecoin…
You can only do what you do. Don’t worry; I sold about 200 LTC at $4 because I was annoyed at how segwit was being rigged by bitmain and ftcpool. Then of course it went to 30. But the trick is I did what I did with the best information I had at the time.
And now it’s keeping me from buying in a bit at $30 because doing so would invalidate my decision to sell at 4. Life’s like that… Fortunately I saved a bit for the hell of it so something appreciated.
You have done so many good things for the LTC home mining community, I wouldn’t even be able to fit it all into one post! People have literally hit more LTC blocks thanks to your efforts.
Thought: have you considered doing repair work for LTC instead of BTC, or maybe you are already accepting LTC? Realizing of course that you could just swap on an exchange. This little coin won’t forget what you’ve done for it!
Thank you! I’m really glad to have helped out miners over the past few years, hopefully will be able to continue going forward. In a lot of ways litecoin makes a lot of sense for general transactions, I think it has a pretty good future ahead of it…
As for fixing miners, I do take both LTC and BTC, and some people prefer to pay in one or the other. In the back of my head, this repair work has been an neat experiment in seeing if we can use these coins for actual business transactions (I work for LTC, I receive it as payment, then have to convert some of it into cash for parts/taxes/shipping, that sort of thing). It does work, and I’m looking forward to see more people doing services for cryptocurrencies.
One big problem with it though is that converting LTC to cash requires running it into BTC, then out to cash via ATMs. For some stuff (taxes) you have to do that, although most parts these days can be gotten from vendors who accept BTC.
That’s the other reason why I had to move it around. I’ve been talking to some of the ATM owners to see if they will start supporting Litecoin for deposits/withdraws, will be interesting to watch that unfold…
that’s pretty cool :). but how is that feasible when let’s say they pay with LTC and it’s at $30, then when you want to withdraw for parts, it’s $28? It just seems totally unfair to me.
I also post on reddit and these forums helping people out!
but ya, let’s say I buy up LTC for whatever price one day. . . that’s like a huge loan and I give LTC value. I might not sell it for a few days to a week or something. So for that whole time I support LTC <3. I mean it’s not like my money’s not doing anything when it’s in LTC.
Well, that’s a toughie: What I try to do is keep my prices constant over the short term, but adjust them during serious price spikes/sags. So for example for the longest time repairs were based on a $600/bitcoin price, which I held from 400 (I was losing money but believed in bitcoin) to 800 (I was making extra money which compensated for the $400 times) but still was paying taxes on the effective $600 rate.
Once it blew past I adjusted my prices to reflect the increased value. Which I thought about for awhile as the miners are now worth more, and since they mine in lite/bit coin one could argue that the end user is making more therefore I should make more on the repair. But there is this weird fairness thing in my head, so I reduce the crypto price to reflect the new value of the coins.
Paying taxes is a bitch on all of this, you have to pay employment+income taxes on the repairs as you sell them (minus costs for parts, testing power, tools, consumables, capital purchases depreciated over an X year timeframe) and taxes in the US have to be paid in dollars, but I’m really trying to see if you can do a fully on board business. Note you have to pay the taxes on the amount received at the time received so if bitcoin tanks and you didn’t sell a bit of coin from each repair to cover the taxes you may have to sell a LOT at tax time (in which case you can write off the loss over several years but that sucks a lot) or come up with the cash. This nailed a lot of people in the stock option days, when people got options, the markets crashed, and they found they owed a lot in taxes on their now-worthless stock. Oops.
Then there is taxes on appreciation/depreciation when you sell the coins for money (which you can help with a FIFO strategy vs LIFO although I guess you could do unique lots as each bitpenny is unique but that would be hell on wheels) but using LIFO the ups and downs tend to cancel each other out in terms of net gain. However if you sell a big block you need to pay STCG instead of LTCG on latest assets held less than a year, so choose wisely.
It’s complicated but I’m giving it the best go I can. Eventually people should feel comfortable using coins for normal expenses, hopefully by then the tax and accounting ramifications will become more sane.