While I believe Bitcoin will always be around and in the top 3-4 coins, you can't dismiss Litecoin. Below I will breakdown many of the reasons I'm partly hedged in LTC.

Irrefutable Breakdown:

• The LTC founder announced the coin in a fair manner back in 2011 after many were aware of the technology and potential.Whereas Satoshi may have announced Bitcoin, but no one knew of the potential so he was able to accumulate a million BTC without any real competition. This makes for a more fair distribution of the LTC network rather than exponentially enriching a small few.

• Many diehard Bitcoiners dismiss Litecoin as simply a clone with a few tweaks. While this may be true, the LTC founder had the luxury of observing BTC in action and was able to make a couple beneficial tweaks. One being the that the confirmation times were too conservative and two, upping the supply so that it could be more abundant. In addition, he had the foresight of avoiding the issue of competing for Bitcoin miners so he changed the algo from Sha-256 to Scrypt.

• Considering that Litecoin is a completely independent network (extremely similar to Bitcoin) secured by a different algo, anyone interested in BTC can hedge their risk of also being in LTC. A good analogy would be keeping all your money in one bank instead of two or three. Another analogy would be that there are 4 major credit card providers and not just one. This could hold true for crypto or at the very least the duality we see with Coke vs Pepsi, Walmart vs Target, McDonalds vs Burger King ... etc etc.

• Face to face transactions based on my own experience with Bitcoin have proven to be frustrating. I know you don't technically have to wait for a first confirmation, but in doing so I've experienced a wait time greater than 10 min and up to 40 min. Without the use of third parties facilitating the transaction I'm sure many have had this same issue at least once. As an experiment, I tested this with Litecoin and while still not as fast as I'd like it to be, it was a much more enjoyable experience.

• Doge which has the potential to become another popular coin is scrypt merged mined with LTC for security reasons. This means brand exposure and adoption of Doge could inadvertently bring additional exposure to LTC. In addition, LTC (along with BTC) is a deflationary currency/asset while Doge is an inflationary currency/asset which could bring about a good synergy in the future.

• Charles Lee (or Coblee) is a well-known founder in the crypto community whereas Satoshi is anonymous. Coblee is very consistent about attending as many crypto-related events as possible which help furthers LTC exposure/adoption.

• Charles also currently works as the engineering manager at Coinbase which could arguably be considered the biggest BTC corporation in the US. Coblee has made the claim that he will eventually (when it's the right time) push for LTC adoption at Coinbase. Coblee also has a brother named Bobby Lee who works as the CEO of BTCChina which is arguably the biggest BTC corporation in China. Despite BTCChina already supporting LTC I would assume it will always be supported since they're brothers.

• The Bitcoin image in 2013 was definitely tarnished thanks to the MtGox fiasco along with other prior bad associations such as drugs, hacking, and money laundering. I polled several friends/family and asked, "Have you heard of Bitcoin? What do you think of it?" and the responses were alarming. "Bitcoin? you mean the internet money thing that the CEO hacked so he could steal everyone's funds?" Granted, that's not what happened, but people don't understand this technology and may have misinterpreted the news. I'm still patiently waiting for Bitcoin to recover, but when I asked about Litecoin they didn't know what that was (fresh brand with no negative associations).

• I could go on, but I've got to go so I'll stop there.