My guess is that the there are a lot of newbies now on Coinbase (#1 app in the Apple AppStore). They are buying the cheapest “bitcoin” without actually understanding what they are buying. This has increased demand for the cheaper of the only three options in Coinbase thus increasing price.

Yes, and I've cashed out handsomely as a result of being lucky enough to predict exactly this.

For clarification: I bought some $1000s worth of LTC when it was under $100 shortly after the Futures news hit. It was pure gamble on my part and I could have easily lost instead of the other way around.

I also bought a few ETH coins when it was around $400 but haven't cashed those out yet. I'm predicting my LTC gains will be wiped by ETH losses.

Eth is at $630 right now, so unless I'm misunderstanding something, you'll have made money.

Can't sell it because not all my coins are in my account yet, and no guarantee there won't be a rush to sell due to instability.

christ you must have made ridiculous money with this

Well, ridiculous in the sense that the whole phenomenon is absurd or relatively to what some people earn in a year, sure.

But I only made about 2.5x my wager, which wasn't much (less than $10000, more than $1000).

Also, as noted, much of a LTC gains could easily be eaten up by ETH losses. BTC is too expensive for my gambling taste.

To me, this kind of comment drives home the insanity of the crypto craze right now.

Complaints of "only" making a 2.5x return.

Or proposed strategies elsewhere in this thread of buying a coin, selling half "when" it doubles, not "if".

I wasn't complaining. The "only" was in response to suggesting I made "huge" amounts of profit. I didn't gamble that much, and so I didn't make that much even with the return. My profit was less than my paycheck. 2.5x is better than anything I've ever made in equities (in fairness 90% of my strategy there is selling covered calls on dividend paying stocks) and far and away my best gamble on a percentage return basis. I doubt I'll ever be as lucky as that again.

But I agree it does highlight how insane the crypto craze is.

I locked in gains with LTC a few weeks ago like a rube thinking there was going to be a correction :( Locked in some good gains but missed on 70 thou plus USD....sigh...gotta keep trying though right?

That isn't the way to look at it. Suppose LTC breaks $1000, or even $500. I'll have "missed out" on a lot. But I locked in gains, so I'm net ahead. Timing gambling like this is a fool's errand, in my view.

100 pc agree, it's hard not to fall into the FOMO trap.

If this* isn't the very definition of a public bubble, I don't know what is :)

* Neophytes buying whatever they can put their hands on, because... mania

This is supported by the fact that there is $50-$100 difference between gdax/coinbase and other exchanges. This happened with BTC last week too: on gdax the price hit ~$19000, and remained close to $15000 on the others, before reverting.

Before this latest gain, Korean exchanges were consistently priced 5-10% higher than all others. Now it's reversed. I don't think it signals anything.

I think there's a more nefarious reason. Some guys with deep pockets buying just to increase the price. I want to call it pump and dump, but same happened to bitcoin and it's still afloat.

> They are buying the cheapest “bitcoin” without actually understanding what they are buying.

I doubt people really understand what they are buying whether it's bitcoin or litecoin. If you think you do, well, then most people do. Don't look at "crytocurrency" as the future "payment method", invest it like an asset. Go in low, come out high.

I invested in litecoin because I believe the market is undervalued. It's like a blue chip but will continue to rise for a while. If litecoin is to continue to rise, my bet is stopping at 600 then stabilized until bitcoin pops again. Litecoin in my view will never pass Bitcoin, but it's nonetheless a fun investment to play with.

Could you explain for someone not in to crypto?

It's currently the best way to withdraw out of bitfinex.

LTC creator was on the news Monday

The same thing that will cause the "sudden rise in other cryptocurrencies" over the next few months = people seeing Bitcoin is stagnating, learning about other cryptocurrencies, and then converting their Bitcoins into those.

In Litecoin's case it's also because it's one of the very few cryptocurrencies that has been adopted by virtually all exchanges, and it has faster transaction times than Bitcoins (for which transaction times and fees are a big problem currently, after the big recent influx of users/investors).

Retail investors having little to no knowledge of Crypto, let alone having any position around Litecoin. A friend of friend invested around $15K in LiteCoin on purely speculation. This is not even in the US.

I have been asked my a few friends and family members about investing similar amounts in Crypto, not knowing much about it.

People want piece of the action. The return period is small, LiteCoin up 90% just in the last 24 hrs, up 10000% in the last year. These are bonkers results if you just want to play the market and cash out.

My understanding is that they are making some significant new releases which will allow for very fast transaction times and support for contracts. I have been expecting a big breakout from LTC but then again this all could have happened for other reasons. I'm not sure how I could really prove that this was the cause.

It's trying to settle itself as the silver of bitcoin's gold. Since it has solved the scalability issues bitcoin is now facing since its inception, the expectation is in the future people will use bitcoin only for big transactions and storing value, and litecoin for paying coffee.

It hasn't solved scalability issues though. Litecoin will face the same issues if it is used as much as Bitcoin.

because it's strictly better than BTC. Faster and cheaper transactions.

The tech is identical, it's simply used less than BTC so doesn't face the same stress of scaling.

The tech is not identical. Litecoin uses Scrypt and has shorter block times. There may be other differences too.