What makes your coin valuable? Litecoin

In my younger days before the financial crisis; a friend and I made the decision to take out a rather large business loan in order to purchase a wholesale bakery. The business consisted of 3 full time employees and my partner and I who co-owned it and worked there. The wholesale side of the business consisted of large orders to local stores and we also expanded into direct to the public sales from the factory.

I have, now the mania around cryptos is beginning to subside, spent more time pondering their usefulness. This brought me to study how I would have utilized them if I were to own this business now.

Credit/debit transactions are expensive and the retailer is responsible for this burden. These are not exact sums from my books because they are long gone but please use them as an example of charges we faced:

Merchant Service Charges -
Debits Cards (0.25% to 0.35%)
Credit Cards (0.7% to 0.9%)
Terminal Hire (£14 to £16 per month)
Authorisation Fee (1p to 3p per transaction)
Minimum Monthly Service Charge (£10 to £20 per month)
Set up Fee (£50)
PCI compliance (£2.50 per month)

Charges can easily become difficult to manage because you are charged for each transaction, no matter how small. Please refer to the example shown below, based on £600,000 per year turnover across 35,000 transactions and split evenly between debit and credit cards. I have also chosen to use the minimal charge for everything:

Debit card at minimum charge (£62.50)
Credit card at minimum charge (£175)
Terminal Hire (£15)
PCI compliance (£2.50)
Total (£255)

For a new business, these fees are a strain on innovation and hold back younger people from becoming successful entrepreneurs. This also does not take into account the fact that the bank took 1 month to provide us with a working terminal, which went against the conditions of the loan agreement. However, pre-financial crisis banks were a different beast than they are today, they were a law unto themselves.

Now let me take you into another reality. In this world crypto currencies are common place and transactions take place between people in decentralized systems; in this case using Litecoin. Charlie Lee recently Tweeted that planned upgrades to Litecoin could send transaction fees to 0.0001LCT:

In this reality my business has now made a gain of approximately £3060 per year. This money could cover a significant portion of our energy expenditure, or for example a new loan to increase output and make efficiency savings.

So, why Litecoin? Well Litecoin is the closest linked crypto to Bitcoin, the most widely adopted coin of them all. Should only one coin survive, it will be Bitcoin, and Litecoin couples with it beautifully as Silver to Bitcoins Gold. If any coin is going to succeed as a payments option it will be based on the most widely adopted tech. Nothing is guaranteed but Metcalf's Law suggests this will happen. The idea of Atomic Swaps between Bitcoin and Monero (Both coins will be covered in this series) on the horizon makes Litecoin an even more valuable asset.

Another new coin will not help, we need to adopt this tech into our daily lives or it is pure speculation. I often refer to Western Union which is not used for buying coffee etc but please bare with me for this example. If Western Union is valued at 9.3 Billion dollars for transferring money inefficiently and at high costs, consider if Litecoin could get even a small portion of the daily transactions, it is surely a massively undervalued investment option.

For these reasons as a (Former) business owner, Litecoin is worth it's weight in Gold.... Well Silver :-)