Bitcoin and Litecoin are both based off the Bitcoin code base. There are key differences in both currencies which makes them useful for different things.
In their present conditions, each is good and bad for the following:
Bitcoin Positives include:
- Store of Value
- Increasing Adoption
- Secure Blockchain
- Wider business adoption
Bitcoin Negatives Include:
- 1MB Block Size – This will hamper mainstream adoption as a currency
- Cannot handle high volumes of transactions without extremely high fees – risk of pushing out the little guy
- Lack of community consensus on dealing with scaling issue
- Not yet as well known as visa or mastercard
- Mining Centralization
Summary of Bitcoin:
In it’s current form it is a great store of value for savings and other large transactions, but is beginning to falter as a regular currency as the blocks are too small and no consensus on deploying a fix is present.
Litecoin Positives include:
- Faster TX Confirmation
- Deployment of segwit solves scaling issue
- Lower fees
- More suited to small day to day transaction
- Community has it’s ducks in a row re. consensus changes
Litecoin Negatives Include:
- As of 06-01-2017 1 mining pool has 50.6% hashrate
- Less promoting of the coin and adoption
- Mining Centralization
It is looking like Bitcoin will become a long term store of Value and Litecoin becomes the coin used for day to day transactions. Both are equally as good as each other and are good for different things. Bitcoin could become a mainstream currency, but unless the consensus rules allow scaling it will remain an investment tool and a store of value.
It is also good to have multiple blockchains to store value.