> now survives as a zombie currency backed by the souls of all the bag-holders foolish enough to invest in it
Honestly, most of the world's economic trust is backed by similar bag-holders, just without the use of proof of stake algorithms. Yes, one could argue that hard goods are an amount of tangible trust that can represent value, but most of the value in today's systems comes from human backed trust, which itself is irrational. Take the Fed for example.
A bag-holder, by any definition, is simply an individual that believes a given fact, irrationally. Here, the irrational belief is that cryptocurrencies like Litecoin can give way to rational desirable outcomes in the future. This is based on a mostly rational assumption crytpocurrencies are designed to provide a rational and clear means by which value can be established among those who participate in a group using the technology. For example, if I send you 1 Litecoin, then everyone in our group can immediately come to the rational conclusion you now have control of 1 Litecoin, assuming you control the private key to that address, of course. In other words, we agree to use this thing because this thing appears to be rational.
It only becomes irrational when we start talking about adding fiat currency values into the mix. Those values themselves are based on human established trust, so must be irrational by definition. Again, I point at the Fed. The way the Dollar's value is calculated, in part, is by analyzing 100K different products sold on the markets. Who picked these items? Who decided how much they are worth? What ruler was used to measure their worth?
Either we can continue down the path of handling irrational beliefs the old way, by electing group leaders (or leaders electing themselves) to speak for the group and it's collective value, or we can adopt new ways of instantiating trust by letting computers do it in a way that can be proved to be almost, but not quite, completely rational.
> Can we all just agree that Litecoin is a way over-hyped and silly excuse for a cryptocurrency?
No. As I've pointed out now, the belief that our current economic systems "make sense" is irrational. I think it's far better if we all agree that something needs to be done about it, that something might be slightly irrational in the short term, and that cryptocurrencies, like Litecoin, may present a rational means by which we measure value in the economy of the world, moving forward.
As is clear from its current market cap, it would seem others agree with me, and disagree with you.
Note: I use the terms rational and irrational frequently nowadays. When I use the terms I am referring to the concept of either an "unknown amount of work ahead" or a "known amount of work ahead". Programmers may liken this concept to the the P versus NP problem. While not equivalent, they both represent an idea that an unknown or overly large amount of work can be "collapsed" into a known amount of work, and thus calculated at a given cost.