Litecoin has just activated Segregated Witness (SegWit) after voting successfully on it a few weeks ago. What this will do is take the validation parts of a transaction, which we only need at the initial point of verification, and discard them, making transaction size about 60% smaller. This will allow many many more transactions to fit in a single block and speed up confirmation time considerably. The reason the price is about to go up, is that people have been staying away from Litecoin (except for those who realize it's about to go to the moon) because they're waiting for SegWit to use it. Now that SegWit is activated, the Chinese and other heavy cryptocoin users will start buying in to make transactions using Litecoin, which will be much faster than Bitcoin after this release. What we will see is a spike, and not much (if any) of a regress. Some say it could go to $100, some say it will simply double. Some go so bold as to say that it will replace Bitcoin. I don't think that will happen, but my prediction is that it will at least double.
Now, you may be saying "Hey, this spring has already sprung". And you are sort-of correct, but this one only sprung recently because the major banks announced they were going all in on it (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/75-banks-now-ripples-blockchain-network-162939601.html). This rollout won't complete until 2018 due to the time it will take the banks to fully switch international transactions over to use Ripple. Once that happens, the sell orders will be snatched up and the price will skyrocket. I predict we will see ripple above $1 by the end of 2017, and $2 by the end of 2018.
Everytime I see this coin, I think "Wait, what is this one, the symbol for strength?" The reason is that it's extremely similar to Ripple in technology. In fact, Stellar was a fork of the original Ripple protocol. According to Merkel, "Stellar is mainly designed to target individuals and focuses strongly on technology, rather than making a name for themselves among financial institutions". (https://themerkle.com/ripple-vs-stellar/) So for Stellar, banks are not the reason it will spring up, but everyone who hates banks and centralization. Stellar is the very antithesis of Ripple, and thus, when Ripple takes off, so will Stellar, albeit not as much. The reason for this is twofold:
Gotcha! This one has already sprung, and I don't expect it to climb much more without more good news. Ethereum is probably the most promising of these coins for the future (more on that in another article maybe), but I don't expect its price to rise anytime soon. At least not sharply. The reason it just sprang is the Ethereum Alliance (http://entethalliance.org/) is growing fast. But that price rise is theoretically over. The volatility still in play is the pending vote to switch from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). I wrote a small piece about the difference between these two in my first article on steemit (https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@alavan/the-blockchain-is-the-most-revolutionary-technology-since-the-internet-itself). But the short version is that this switch will eliminate mining, and use how much ETH you have on the table to determine consensus (because if you lie, you lose it). The problem is that miners will be the ones to vote on the switch (unless there is another hard-fork), and they have no reason to support something that will eliminate their profit. Another hard-fork will likely be a detriment to the price of Ethereum, so I would't want to hold a bag on this right now.
Ethereum is very profitable mining though, so if you have a gaming graphics card, set it to mine, and you can make about $60 per month with a decent card in a decent pool.
This has been Alavan,
Thanks for reading
