Litecoin developer Charlie Lee shocked many community members last month when he said “Litecoin does not need development right now.” Rather, he said, the coin needed users, liquidity, and merchant acceptance to succeed in the long term.However, the coin has struggled to achieve any of those aspirations, and the bitcoin price decline has weakened faith in the cryptocurrency industry as a whole.Consequently, investors have begun losing faith in altcoins, and in turn the litecoin price is bottoming out.Also read: Litecoin and Dogecoin to Join Forces for Charity The litecoin price declined consistently throughout 2014 and has continued to fall during January.As recently as June, the litecoin price exceeded $10.During the past month, the litecoin price declined from $3 to $1.40–an alarming decline for one of the industry’s most prominent coins.Connor Black, CEO of digital currency service Harborly, told CCN he believes the litecoin price decline is a by-product of the bitcoin price downtrend.

Even though litecoin’s largest trading pair is USD, bitcoin’s vastly superior market cap (among cryptocurrencies) governs the direction of the litecoin price.A major problem with the Litecoin price is the currency’s failure to distinguish itself as little more than the speculative younger brother of Bitcoin.Looking at this last year you see that Bitcoin and Litecoin have had strong price correlations, with Litecoin usually trending further in either direction.When Bitcoin falls Litecoin plunges, and when Bitcoin rises Litecoin soars.Indeed, altcoin market caps have (generally) evaporated at an even more alarming rate than bitcoin’s.However, Black believes litecoin can regain its swagger if the bitcoin price improves and the cryptocurrency community recognizes Litecoin’s benefits.For Litecoin to get back on track, the digital currency community needs to recognize some of the big benefits Litecoin can offer.One benefit being that Litecoin transactions are about 4X faster than Bitcoin’s.

This can be utilized with great success from casual spending to remittances, ensuring faster service time and less exposure to market volatility.Disclosure: The author is not invested in Litecoin Chart from OKCoin; other images from Litecoin and Shutterstock.Litecoin fell by some 20% earlier today after segwit’s network share decreased to around 63% following rumors that Antpool was to bring in new hash-power to maintain segwit below its activation threshold of 75%.This follows a confusing series of events where Charlie Lee said BW was not going to signal for segwit, BW said they had not yet decided, Wang Chun, co-founder of F2Pool, said he was re-considering signaling for segwit, Lee said F2pool will actually keep signaling.Price fell from around $12.50 to $8.70 as traders seemingly speculated the coin was going no-where without the segwit hype.Now, uncertainty has increased even more as litecoin developers say they are to go ahead with a flag day fork otherwise known as UASF.Xinxi Wang, a Litecoin developer, apparently confirmed they will merge a flag-day soft-fork, saying “we will do it.

We’ve done quite a lot and showed our sincerity and humbleness.” Charlie Lee, Litecoin’s founder, publicly stated: “if you support SegWit on Litecoin, talk to your wallets and exchanges about supporting UASF.” Suggesting that for the first time ever in the cryptospace, developers may unilaterally decide what feature is to go ahead.bitcoin athensHow exactly a flag-day soft-fork would work is not clear as it has never happened before.cambio bitcoin usdVitalik Buterin has said it has all the disadvantages of a hard-fork, but none of its benefits.bitcoin esportsJihan Wu has said it would lead to a split into two or three coins.koop bitcoin onlineAs such, many saw it simply as a bluff, but a pull-request has been opened.bitcoin imitators

If the maintainer does merge it, it may considerably change the dynamics as the miner’s role would be put into question.Some who currently signal segwit may change their mind, while others may resist it to avoid the precedent.litecoin price to riseThe coin, therefore, may split and in the case of segwit transactions they may even be re-spendable by miners, creating chaos.bitcoin in escrowConceptually, a flag day soft-fork denies a voice to nodes as those who do not upgrade have no choice in the matter.best bitcoin wallet yahooFor miners, there is no such thing as a soft-fork.britain bitcoin taxAll forks are hard-forks as far as miners are concerned.If miners are split, two chains will be created as has been the case many times for bitcoin when soft-fork upgrades go wrong.

When there are two chains in this sort of situation, transacting is strongly discouraged because there will be chain re-organization.That is, the blocks and money spent in one chain will, at some point, metaphorically vanish with only blocks/txs in the winning chain counting.Since litecoin would be bringing bitcoin’s politics to its currency, in this sort of situation we may expect a hashpower race.Those against segwit, for example, may start with less hashpower, but might pour in money, and even overtake the segwit chain.Exchanges, here, would have significant say, but if they declare the longest chain is irrelevant, then the entire currency is put into question as we would need to ask why require miners at all instead of replacing it with developers who administrate a database?In short, the whole thing is a mess.Conceptually, if it is indeed merged, we would not really be able to say any longer that the currency is decentralized as the maintainer would have significant power to change whatever parameter with no or very weak mechanisms to keep its potential abuse in check.