Why we switched to Litecoin as our main cryptocurrency
You may have heard about Paralelní Polis — a black building in the center of Prague, where we make good coffee, have a coworking space with paper furniture, a bunch of 3d printers, organize meetups and lectures and to top it all: we accept only bitcoin.
Since the start, Paralelní Polis had one clear rule: we do not accept fiat currencies. Bitcoin as a digital payment system is a great tool to achieve financial independence and freedom. We were happy to use it, introduce it to new people, and to explore the numerous possibilities that this innovative technology has to offer.
Bitcoin Coffee is an inspiring place where you can meet developers, artists, entrepreneurs, have a cup of delicious coffee and talk about the constant rising value of cryptocurrencies or whatever topic that comes to your mind. This place has one clear mission: to show all the incoming people that using cryptocurrencies is easy and it is the future of banking.
Rise of the fees
Within the last two years, we have seen the rise of bitcoin transaction fees. One of the main arguments to use bitcoin — get rid of regular banking fees — is now gone and standard fee for simple bitcoin transaction is as high as 40CZK(~1.5USD). There is no longer debate about usage for microtransactions because this makes even casual retail transactions so expensive, we cannot recommend bitcoin. Using cryptocurrencies should give regular users advantage, but bitcoin does not.
We even had to develop our own application for members and regular customers, which would buy credits for bitcoins and then spend those credits to avoid bitcoin fees.
The SegWit dilemma
We had hope when the Segregated Witness soft-fork arrived and miners started signaling activation. But after stagnating miner support, political debates in the bitcoin community and still rising fees, our hope is lost.
Even now, when UASF (User-activated soft-fork) is imminent, we are worried to use bitcoin. If the support for UASF is low, the chain split will happen and all the bitcoin transactions made after August 1st will be basically untrusted until the situation is resolved — for more about the dangers of UASF, read here. This is unacceptable for any business running on bitcoin.
A new hope
Litecoin has been on our radar for quite some time. We weren't sure if we wanted to switch to another cryptocurrency and what it would mean to us and to our customers. Will our customers believe in some other cryptocurrency that they have not even heard of?
Apart from having 4x quicker block-time, Litecoin has recently activated the Segregated Witness upgrade. Right now it is more technologically advanced, developers and services are able to deliver new scaling solutions like the Lightning Network. It's easy to switch because of its similarity to bitcoin. Now is the time.
Conclusion
We are very grateful for our partnership with General Bytes, our payment solution provider, which makes accepting Litecoin easy and the adoption should be seamless for our customers.
We will still accept bitcoin, but we can no longer recommend it as a payment system — it's more of a store of value. We encourage everyone to start accepting Litecoin, as it is now one of the main ways to regain financial and economic freedom. For more on this topic, we would like to invite you to our annual Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis 2017 which will be about financial liberation.
