Bitcoin Forum

I remember the day well: February 10th, 2009. Back then, there was a consensus amongst stock punters that TARP and the Fed bailouts had worked. A surprising many of them had mixed feeling about the bailouts' propriety, but pretty-much every punter agreed on their efficacy. Starting in November of '08, coalescing in December and solidifying in January, the sentiment was that Bailout Nation had turned the tide of the vicious bear market of '08.

Until that fateful late-morning when Tim Geithner Himself gave a speech. About TARP (http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/10/markets/markets_newyork/index.htm?postversion=2009021017).

To a naïf like me, then mercenary enough to be interested only in a profitable punt, the speech sounded pretty good. But not to the vets: not to them! And boy, were they quick. Quick enough to kickstart a blizzard of selling that made for a four-week bear market within a bear market. It didn't end until March 9, 2009, when the S&P 500 bottomed out at 666 and change.

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Right now, or so I hope, the crypto-2.0 markets look a lot like that scary February. So I hope.

Fact is, I was lulled by a Cryptsy-based altcoin index which indicated that the altcoin tide had turned earlier this year. Never mind that Cryptsy is full of 1.0 alts which benefitted from the old-is-new-again resuscitation fad. That index, plus the big BTC finally turning the tide, had me figurin' that the dark days were over for 2.0 and 2.0-related coins.

Of course, I made the classic mistake of trying to catch the falling knife. With one glaring exception, and one not-so-noticeable exception, the last month has been 2.0 hell.

Just below, in the spirit of a good-old-fashioned mutual gripe session, is a Polo-powered round-up of the blizzard woes of Crypto 2.0. Happy HELLoween!


BITSHARES (BTS): Oh, Lordy. To think I was publicly patting myself on the back for buying 10,000 below 1500 satoshis. I shoulda known: those heady, exciting >2500 days when BTS had elbowed aside Etherium as the #1 volume leader on Polo was the time to abandon the Bitship. After 100,000 TPS turned into 100 TPS "for now," it was all aboard for the bear train. Express trip to new lows! 1300 on your left!

If there were any more handy time for "sell on the [just before the] news," Bitshares was it.

DASH (DASH): Of course, 0.01 will hold up. Sure it will. (Now, 0.00723 and wobbling.)

RIPPLE (XRP): Wowie...just wow. The days when Ripple was a bargain below 3000 satoshis have vanished like 1500. It's now bouncing up to 1483.

MONERO (XMR): More 2.0 crow to eat. Remember the pumpathon here when it had sunk to 0.002? That did mark a turning point, in a way: it did manage to lumber up to about 0.00225. But afterwards, it went downie-bye. Currently 0.00129.

COUNTERPARTY (XCP): If it was a "50% off" bargain at 0.005, it's giggity-giggity a golly-sakes bigger bargain at 0.00305!

BOOLBERRY (BBR): Sometimes the bear shows mercy...or absent-mindedness Boolberry has had a nice bounce, up to 4712 satoshis. Never mind what its longer-term chart looks like: a nice bounce is a nice bounce.

BITCOINDARK (BTCD): Currently 0.00256. Ouch...just, ouch.

GEMZ (GEMZ): Well, it still does bounce off 5000 satoshis!

BURSTCOIN (BURST): More mercy, or forgetfulness, from the bear. It's holding more-or-less up at 14. "Like BURST at 40, the warriors are blown away by the wind."

QORA (QORA): Revamped revived, retooled, and ready...to reintroduce itself to levels seen when everyone was standing around waiting for something to happen.

FACTOM (FCT): Hi, IPO price! Long time no see! Aren't you glad I'm back?


And of course, I saved the most depressing one for last................


NXT (NXT): Of all the above, this one's been the biggest kneecapper. Even back in the dark days of later last year, NXT still held up. Back then, I was blithely assuring everyone that below-5000 satoshis was a bargain.

Good one on me, I tell you. NXT is now less than half of that 5000 "bargain." Its current 2275 has reintroduced it to prices from two weeks after it was launched.

Jeez, this one's a real kneecapping capstone for the 2015 HELLoween Tour. 


Those Exceptions:

Go figure. Not all that long ago, Etherium was being gnawed on like the others. 0.0015...oww.

But just when it confounded zero-sum thinkers everywhere in altcoin land, it leapt upwards and became a plausible "demand-hog" once again. Talk about a hard-bouncin' trick! And if ETH bestowed a treat on ye, congrats. :)

The second exception, oddly enough, is the under-the-radar coin that I'm still associated with. Unlike all those others above, with the exception of Etherium later, HORIZON (HZ) managed a nice rickety-rocket rise from ~30 to 55. As the luck of the damned would indicate, it's since reintroduced itself to the low 30s. But, for whatever reason, the 30 level is holding up quite nicely.

Nicely as of now, me pretties: nicely as of now...

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Well, that wraps up the gripeathon for me. Got any 2.0 gripes of your own? Might as well share 'em on this thread. Happy HELLoween!
   

haha, celebration time ... horizon slides out of the S-bend and back into the bowl!! Still in the toilet bro!

good try, but no cigar my friend ... another 6 months at least before the cream floats to the top

I have two main gripes this halloween.  
  
a.) I just discovered that with signature spam, dedicated peeps can make minimum $30 a week, and if they run multiple accounts they can likely make $100 to $200 a week.  That's pretty nuts considering I met some very intelligent young 20-somethings in Dubai during my time there who were literally slaving away for that salary a month.  
  
One Nepalese kid taught himself Arabic in 6 months.  During his down time as a waiter/servant for the military officers there he read the financial section of the daily newspaper.  Occasionally an arrogant prick pilot would come in there and chew him out about some bullshit, like how the hot tea was a degree or two off, or any number of menial issues that weren't really issues - anything so these guys could have someone to boss around.  But this Nepalese kid didn't mind; he took the abuse, and just boded his time, reading and absorbing everything he could.  
  
I told him he needs to start learning about cryptocurrency, Monero, and Bitcoin, and wrote down some websites for him to visit.  He could leave that shitty gig, go back home to Nepal, learn how to write interesting English content, and literally make 4x what he was making there on this website alone.  It infuriates me that he was likely many times smarter than the jerks who were bossing him around, and humble and wise enough to know he had to take the abuse for the sake of his future.    
  
I hope he gets into it, and I remind myself every day about the ultimate altruistic goal of this endeavor: so that the world moves to a true meritocracy where privileged imbeciles naturally sink back down into the depths while bright talent, no matter where its born, has the same chance of success as anyone else.

b.)  Monero price continues to slide, despite the technology (imho) literally being the best out there.  I'm not with it for any other reason than I see that its true digital cash using the best programming and mathematics in the history of civilization.  If there were something better out there, I would be supporting that, but there's not.  It's a shame the price doesn't currently reflect that fact, but as I always say: don't worry what the herd is doing.  Don't mind the yellow and burnt patch of Earth they are fighting over - find the green grass, the real opportunity, and graze in peace while you can.  The others will surely figure it out eventually, and you will find yourself in an enviable position.    
  
OP, I enjoyed reading your analysis of all your alts.  I'm not into NXT, but I do find them interesting, especially their ability to absorb some of the vanity blockchains we see.  I feel like the crypto-world as a whole has endured a long multi-year winter... but a new spring is coming soon for us all.   :)

i hate every coin you mentioned OP.
Most are IPO crap.. toxic crap that will get you dumped on too (sound like what happened to you)

Happy Halloween!

All of the following is just my opinion, but...

It isn't that V coin is a scam, W coin is a gimmick, X coin was instamined, Y coin is PoS, or Z coin was launched by an IPO. The whole industry is in a funk. As soon as Bitcoin breaks out of its funk, which will happen sooner or later, the major players in the ALT coin scene will benefit from that bull market. The real question is which coin will stand the test of time and emerge among all of the alt coins over the next 5 to 10 years, but even still there are profits to be made by making an investment today in most of the industry leaders.

At this point I think it is too hard to tell which coins will come out on top, and alt coins are a total crap shoot. You should treat cryptocurrencies as people treat normal investment portfolios. You have your low risk coins- the more established coins such as Bitcoin and Litecoin. Then the high risk alt coins. Ideally, your cryptocurrency investments should be heavily in BTC, with a smaller percentage (depending on your risk tolerance) spread out among alt coins you believe will have value in the future. If you are investing in ALT coins, then I suggest you spread out the investment among the leaders in each subset of ALT coins. Some in decentralized programming language coins, some in a few DACs focused on certain markets, some in privacy focused coins, some in feature-rich coins, some in a data storage coins, etc...

I actually think BTC/LTC are a bad long term investment (10+ years), but I do think the have a few more "pump" cycles left in them which I see as pretty much guaranteed profit.  I see ALT cryptocurrencies eventually overtaking them due to their lack of innovation, development, and willingness to evolve with the rest of the industry. However, at this point in the game they are probably the "safest" investments in cryptoland.

2.0 coins have been mostly hype so far and not only not truly solving the technical issues they claim or target, also afaik not amassing significant usership. Who knows what the killer app for 2.0 is yet? So it is basically a game of musical chairs to on who is first to jump out of the latest rise into the next rising thing and who is late to follow. Bitcoin blasted off and the news on 2.0 coins has been coming fast and furious past months, so it was time to sell the news and buy Bitcoin.

Monero is busy implementing value hiding improvement to Cryptonote rings (yet afaik it will use 850% more space than my comparable design because their "very successful, massive developer resources" coin can't afford $21,000 to implement the better design) and yet even when that is done they still can't give you an iron-clad IP obfuscation (relegating you to I2P or Tor which are both very likely honeypots for the NSA and tax agencies and who ever they intentionally and unintentionally leak their data to, such as hackers and what not). I mean anonymity isn't even a very wide scale target market, but heck if you can't even give me IP obfuscation then the rest of the anonymity is unmasked any way so what is the point? I need a 100% solid anonymity otherwise I better not even use it, and end up incriminating myself in the process. I mean if you are going to do anonymity it doesn't really help if you can only serve a fraction of a very small market, because you can't even do anonymity completely. Sorry because I've been pushing for anonymity and still hoping we will get to a robust solution, but we are a long ways away from such a robust solution that I can trust enough to even rely on.

My point is not to pick on Monero. I do understand they argue for business privacy (and not for use against the NSA) but that market isn't adopting crypto-currency yet so they aren't yet at the stage of needing privacy for that which they are not compelled to use any way. My point is what are these people smoking that they can't even see reality properly  ??? If you are going to attempt something, then at least have your plan on how you will hit a market sweet spot that is large enough to give you the actual usership momentum needed to really make an impact. There probably are significant markets for anonymity in terms of Silk Road type activities, if you can make it really solid but that is a huge undertaking (anonymity is unmasked in numerous side channels). Down the line it could be critical for fungibility. But next month? I doubt it.

I probably take some of the blame for all of that. My incessant emphasis on anonymity in 2013 and 2014, probably somewhat contributed to the mass mania into the likes of Dash (I don't know to what extent I influenced that, as you had others such as Gmaxwell pushing CoinJoin and Mike Hearn created a rukus with the redlisting crap so there was a push towards wanting anonymity for fungibility).

Lately I see several derogatory comments about jl777/Nxt (in other threads) but at least I know he (and I understand he is not all of Nxt) has been trying to work on the issue of a network for the IP obfuscation and generally wanting to make anonymity really complete. He claims to have written 100,000 lines of C code cumulative for all his various crypto projects. I haven't checked into all that, but I know he has bounced some of his anonymity ideas off of me. I was sort of too ill in August and Sept to really help the way I would normally. Haven't caught up with him yet on where he is with all that.

Everybody has an opinion about who the scammers are and who are the upstanding devs and community folk. I really don't know. I suppose I would need to expend much more time researching that than actually coding and so I guess I will remain somewhat naive or ignorant of all that goes on in crypto land (which is probably better than knowing too much as curiosity killed the cat).

I hear ya...I feel the same way about NXT, actually. That's why my heart's been bleeding as NXT has been falling.

To be frank, Monero and NXT don't really compete. Not in the important, long-term sense. So I don't mind at all saying that you're right. Monero's current trip to Downsville is not reflective of its tech or its potential.

Sadly, that's just part of the frustrationthon that comes with asset markets. There's a very loose link between technological excellence and market price. When you think about it at the high-abstract level, the foregoing makes sense: after all, those huge huge gains do have to come from a huge huge gap between an asset's perceived value and its real value. But of course, "we" only see the real value in retrospect. ;)

Anyhoo: as I said, it's just a gripe fest. Great to hear you're sticking with the alt you're sure will win in the long term. And it's even nicer to see you help out a fellow who seems held back in an artificial slot that's not reflective of his true talents and skills. :)

"You live and learn, or you don't live long." - Lazarus Long (Robert A. Heinlien)

At least they are trying, without ALT coins the technology would never evolve. ALT coins are paving the way for the future of cryptocurrency through the utilization of many small experiments. Most experiments will fail in terms of being a valuable investment, but as far as advancing blockchain technology they will mostly be useful in the grand scope of things. People are no longer changing a few parameters and calling it a day. There is a ton of innovation across the cryptosphere and I only see that accelerating with time, which can only lead to good things.

@CoinHoarder
That is what you think..
First thing i check with a coin is it's initial distribution.
And if that is not the first thing for you guys then i have to wonder about you guys.

2nd for me would be who made it.
And once again you guys don't seem to care in the slightest.
Sure you brag about the dev being shit hot etc.. AFTER your a bag holder.

I have asked for years guys on chat boxs on Polo and Cryptsy etc these questions above
and the only response i ever got was screw you.. you're trolling and / or "i don't know"
what would be a more appropriate question(s) to ask about a new coin (before investing) then ?

fast forward to now and look around ..this is what you get.

and don't forget investors greedy ponzi fans YOU may not care.. but the general public obviously does.
which is why this crap has been a ghost town for a good 2 years roughly.

seems the world agrees with me in the face of verbal diarrhea from Bitcointalk spamming bag holders.
the world has spoken up loud and clear.. so go ahead and argue with the population of Earth.
pro investors from the stock market want to invest in some sketchy ass GitHub stolen IPO shit coin ?
..of course not.
YOU guys may want to.. but your lower standards are not normal here guys.

And don't forget how i have posted gazillions of times how you newer guys have ruined the scene
and things were VERY different when i started..
for example Ripple was launched and laughed out of the forum (and now ?)
ORB was laughed off the forum then when the crowd came Cryptsy slipped it back in
(previously the chat box demanded Cryptsy remove it not an hour after it was added)

When was the last time you seen that ?

You reap what you sow guys.. enjoy.

CoinHoarder, agreed about experimentation is necessary.

Investors need to be realistic though on moving past the cacophony of features laboratory to the breakthrough synergism that will propel new user markets.

I think we are too eager to wet our pants on featuritis tech envy.

the other shorter answer to the OP i would say is... GREED
Plain and simple.
So called investors don't care in the slightest in "features"
They came here to make money.
So what happens when everyone here came to make money ?
..look around.

@Spoetnik

I don't think just because a cryptocurrency started from an IPO it is doomed to fail. A large percentage of the biggest and most successful companies have been launched by IPOs. Bitcoin was effectively instamined over the course of a few years and no one seems to care. There were a lot of people that were in the right place at the right time, and I don't think you should fault cryptocurrencies fully based on that.

You points as to a coin's intitial distribution and who started it should be important factors in any investment decision in cryptocurrencies. However, they are just a couple factors in a sea of factors as to how cryptocurrencies gain value. Network effects, solving problems for specific use cases, advancements in prior technologies, the amount and size of the competition in ALT "sub-ecosystems", volume, features, ease of use, marketing, community, competency and dedication of developers, the supporting infrastructure, etc... should all be taken into consideration.

The hard part is determining the "secret sauce", as to what out of those factors is more important and what is least important. I think that's why everyone butts heads around here so often. Everyone has their own idea of what the "secret sauce" is, but in reality no one knows the exact ingredients or exactly how to make it. No one is right and no one is wrong, as there is no was to tell the future and thus tell what the "secret sauce" is. So, I'll concede that I may not be right about certain dynamics or what coins are the best investments, but I will say that you do not know if you right or wrong either.

Spoetnik I've had a very similar realization recently as I was doing the research about how to avoid having your coin project classified as an "investment security" (and thus potential problems with the SEC down the line), the key appears to be predominantly obtaining users who want the tokens because they want to build an ecosystem and use it, not attracting speculators. I don't have anything against speculators (they provide a market function), but if you aren't building a product with 1000s if not millions of users, then you don't really have anything yet but an investment speculation.

As a developer of other kinds of end user software in the past, I was accustomed to serving users and not investors.

Speculators are limited to what the developers provide to them to speculate on. If developers are only targeting speculators and not users (which seems to be mostly the case in the altcoin arena), then all that can exist is greed and cat fights. Whereas if some developer(s) are demonstrating they can open large new user markets, then everyone will be too busy trying to emulate that and speculation will shift to a market information function on adoption. Whereas right now we mostly have is speculation providing market information function on reputation factors that can influence other speculators, e.g. premines, instamines, plagarism, etc..

I am confident that if there is a altcoin with 1 million actual users attained in the first 1 year and even if was 90% premined, the speculators would be stampeding over each other to buy it (assuming someone couldn't easily fork and take the usership away with a more "fair" distribution).

IMO we are largely focusing on the wrong data points, due to having the wrong goals. Any way that is my opinion and I will learn a lot over the next months so perhaps my opinion will change. So we will see...

I agree. Most ALT coins will end up being horrible investments in the long run. However, I think there are a few "pump cycles" left in them... as soon as Bitcoin rebounds then you will see a large influx of new users much like the previous bull markets. These guys won't have the in depth knowledge of all of the cryptocurrencies like we have. Thus, they will buy anything they read or hear is the next best thing like a bunch of sheep. All ALT coin bagholders will come out of the woodwork and put on their best song and dance for the newcomers. I think most major ALT coins will see profits during this rebound. Probably some will make more profit than others, but I really don't see anything wrong with investing in most of the major ALT coin players at this point as far as a 1 to 3 year investment (or whenever the next bull market starts.) Beyond a few years the water gets really murky.

The general public does not want to invest even in Bitcoin, much less in pink sheet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTC_Markets_Group#OTC_Pink) (penny stocks) speculations.

If any of these altcoins want to target the general public then it must be as users, and they need to grow by about 1000 times more usership (not investors) than they have. Dogecoin perhaps the lone exception at its high point.

Altcoin area is quiet because Bitcoin fever has been on the downtrend since 2013 (when I called the top and said it would decline to $300 and later I have said it will decline to $150 and then before summer I said it would bounce to as high as $315 then decline and then as high as $380 and then make final lows below $150 this Spring. No joke I made all those predictions in advance so now we can see if the latest one will be true again). Bitcoin will finally bottom in Spring, so we can change direction on the trend of declining speculation interest.

And this is because Altcoins are just for speculators only. We are not building new user markets. Perhaps GetGems is an exception.

I also think we will get some shift on user adoption in either 2016 or 2017 as well. I don't yet know for sure what the "secret sauce" is, but I think someone will produce it and drive usership. It might be Lightning Networks on Bitcoin.

Oh, you've been down that road too! I remember: more than a year ago, when Nxt unveiled its Asset Exchange, I got so jittery about that issue I actually bought a hard-copy version of the complete securities laws of Ontario, Canada where I live.

[ I also got knocked as a 'FUDder' over my jitters, but that's a different story. ;) ]

Here's one angle I find intriguing, tho' I'm aware that my Canuck is showing as I write this. How about using Asset-Exchange technology to heed the law instead of getting around it? Using it as a convenient mechanism to obey the law rather than exploit a loophole? Case in point: Normally, in Canada's jurisdictions, you need to write and issue a prospectus to raise money from investors: a time-consuming and expensive process. However, there are two exemptions - one of which I'm using for two Assets on the Horizon Asset Exchange:

1. If you run an "investment club," with no more than twenty-five members (buyers of an Asset) and run it without compensation over and above what you're entitled to from your shares, you don't need any paperwork. That's how I'm running two HZ Assets that essentially shadow two Nxt Assets. There are times when I toy in my head about buying some shares of an ETF listed in Canada. Unlike the American exchanges, the Canadian exchanges still offer physical certificates and the share registries of Canadian companies reflect that issuance in their listings. Under the investment-club rules, I could buy some shares in a Canada-listed ETF that tracks the S&P 500, order up the physical certificate, have the name [Nxtblg] appear in the ETF-manager's registry of shareholders so that anyone can confirm that I have the shares, issue a HZ Asset 100% backed by those shares with instructions on how to check that I own the underlying ETF, and run an S&P 500 "investment club" by paying 100% fair value of the ETF's dividends in HZ. I can't do much about the 25 limit, as yet, but in all other ways I'm heeding the law.

2. If you sell equity in a private company (unlisted on any stock exchange) to not more than 25 holders, you can do so in an informal no-paperwork way as well. This exemption is trickier: in addition to the 25-holder maximum, the shares can't be sold or transferred "without the consent of a majority of [current] shareholders." But a combo of Nxt's polling feature and transaction-phasing feature, the latter of which can act as multisig, could enforce that rule with a little client-wallet jiggering. (HZ will also have these features soon.)

I think #2 is the way to go. With #2, you get an Asset Exchange with this compelling use case for small businesspeople: a convenient, hard-to-mess-with feature that makes it straightforward to heed the law. In Canada, I'm sure there are lots of small businesspeople who would love to have a capital-raising solution that's both straightforward and worry-free because it obeys the law rather than dekes around it. Running a small business is worrisome enough without the side worry about securities regulators swooping in to cause you trouble!

I had to learn it the hard way, but I agree with your approach - although Spoetnik has an important point too. The Boom-Town aspect of this here jungle has been a "sink" in a way, diverting not only capital but also attention to get-rich-quick trades instead of the long (and hard!) chore of building up the ecosystem.

After my hard-way hazing, I've come to the conclusion that the best thing we can do for the altcoin ecosystem is to start thinking like hobbyists. Hobbyists with dreams, hobbyists with a shared vision, hobbyists with the hope of getting rich (the hard way!) somewhere down the line, but hobbyists all the same. We need to think like folks who, at bottom, are in it for the brag.

Imagine a middle-aged man with his tyke of a boy on his knee, showing his son the original Usenet message from Linus Torvalds announcing Linux. "Now I was on Usenet myself back then, but I didn't hear about Linux for a couple of months...." Nowadays, that's a real "war story" - that ties in very well with getting the kid a Raspberry Pi 2 for Christmas. :)

As a matter of prudence, perhaps we should think of how experience with altcoins can lead to a job. After all: when Patrick Byrne started up Medici, did he hire people with fancy computer-science degrees from the best universities? No, at least not by intention. He hired programmers who had real-world experience programming and running Counterparty!

And that requires being more interested in respecting creativity than shooting down the competitors' investment(s).

Our problem is we are targeting investors and not the users.

We forgot to spend most of time on the code and let the speculators do what they do. And spend most of our time interacting with users and developers.

I know what my plan is as a lead developer.

Enough talk. I think the point is clear now.

Sounds like we are on the same page here guys for the most part..
i read all your replies and found the talk interesting although long (not complaining about post length though)

I have a question to pose to some of you though..
If you had never invested in any of the coins the OP mentioned (all of them pretty much IPO coins)
Would you do it now ?

That is MY perspective here guys.. i am not stuck bag holding NXT or Monero etc.
And it seems to me many of you out there picked one of those coins, not because they solved a problem or there was a need
well there was a need actually.. a need for something to invest in LOL

What does the future hold for the Altcoins we have now ?
I can't choke back the assertion that even the top 5 will go anywhere or accomplish anything major (like adoption)

You guys are running out the clock on the game clinging to this hope that some big crowd of new users
is coming and their just around the corner.. problem !
people gradually get sick of waiting (it's been years now of decline)

I posted loooong ago we need some acceptance that things are not working out.
I created a Poll and most people voted that this stuff is going well.. many cited the experimentation angle is good routine.
we can argue about that i guess but i wanted to repeat my old point..
if we admit this direction were all going in is wrong then we can stop and take the right course.
like an addict admitting he has a problem LOL

Everyone is hoping to catch the next big thing.

The liquidity (float) is so low on these altcoins, that is easy for those who own a lot to pump up the price by buying from themselves. Most of the liquidity is fake. Thus bag holders buy into this fake price rise, so the whales can dump their worthless tokens.

So the next big thing is mostly a facade and hype.

Most of you are not expert enough traders to outwit the way this game is played.

If you see something that looks like Bitcoin's early days where users are starting to adopt it and use it, that might be a genuine "to da moon" speculation. Real usership drives real liquidity.

There will be greater fools. But with a real phenomenon like Bitcoin, it is genuinely possible to cash out and buy a $1 million castle as Rpietila did. Hey I was richer than him in 2009. He bought 10,000 BTC for < $10, and become a multi-millionaire.

This might still be possible. If it is going to happen again, it will be something within Bitcoin's ecosystem or it will be some very unexpected something that bests Bitcoin in some significant market segment (this isn't likely though because there are a lot of resources that will be brought to bear if Bitcoin is seriously threatened).

If something is going to go gangbusters, you'll have a good feel for it early on if you have eyes peeled wide open, your radar on, and your powers of discernment dialed in.

Now for the optimistic part. There is a lot of experimentation going on now. Look at Iota, "blocklist", my work, Factom, Blockstream, Ethereum, Bitshares, Nxt, CounterParty et al, Lightning Networks, Aeon, Monero, eMunie, etc.. These are all serious efforts by serious developers (don't ask me which are fraudulent, because I don't know).

Out of all that experimentation (and many I didn't mention or I am not aware of), something significant might surprise us. It isn't entirely useless.

Spoetnik just accept that greater fool speculation has been around since the dawn of human civilization, so just accept it as natural.

Peace.

all those great dev's you talked about got lazy and gave up on the real work that needs to be done
and then went on to do one thing..
Launch another IPO coin .. don't we already have a few thousand too many ?

Get it yet ?
Why IPO a coin ?
Because mining is exploitable ?
uhhh do i have to state the obvious ?
Maybe rather than spending YEARS making "Markets" or "Anon" features
dev's should work on a new pow system to launch with ..after all why start another coin when an abandoned one can be recycled ?
They all deny it but they launch their own coin and avoid TestNet because they are fucking greedy.
ALL of them From Bitshares to NXT to NEM to Dash.. every fucking one of them.. greedy and full of shit !

I posted years ago a few topics on using your ethernet card for example for a proof of work system.
So what has happened ?
IPO coins.. and laziness and "features" to boost popularity of investment tokens. (AK: digital ponzi scheme tokens)

If one of these so called great coins did that it would be adopted fast.
When a good thing shows up it's undisputed and *obvious.
When we have a successor to Bitcoin we will know it !

And after all isn't that what it's about ? Building a better version of Bitcoin ?
Creating a digital currency that is used as one (not a ponzi token to get rich quick / and dump on others)
So if the goal is to improve on Bitcoin then how are the top 10 on CoinmarketCap doing ?
the most important part of Bitcoin to improve is what ? Initial distribution ? Mining ?
So what do all these so called great coins do ? They all launch an IPO  ::)
..in an unregulated scam market.. #FAIL

We have plenty of shitcoin spindoctors.. i think if your still here trading your greedy, dishonest and / or delusional.
edit:
sorry or a sad ass bag holder ..trapped :(

I agree with the sentiment, but I have to point out that buying from yourself is a zero sum game. You'd only raise the traded volume that way. Raising the price directly requires buying up sell orders, or you can do it indirectly by placing huge buy walls -  although you'd better be sure that no bigger whale won't just dump on you.

Not an absolute truth. One can potentially influence market psychology by selling for higher prices to yourself in high volume, thus causing more buyers to enter the market. Sellers would be wise to hide their sell walls and go with the pump. An untraceable anonymous coin that can be infinitely recycled without detection (or a whale of distinct coins) is required.

Indeed it probably all works better when the whales (and the lead developers) are coorperating. Lead developers can help drive a pump by announcing new plans (or kill a pump by putting out some negative information).

Disclosure: I did not buy any BBR nor Aeon in advance (nor at any time) of making statements that might have caused the recent spikes in their prices. It didn't even enter my mind, because I don't think like a speculator. I am a geek who spends my mental energy solving engineering challenges.


My development efforts will be an attempt to try to hit the user adoption sweet spot. We'll see how that ends up. I think it is a lot easier to sell an IPO and pump the token prices. Actually I don't see an entire difference between an IPO and mining, because mining is limited to a select group of professionals. The distinction I would prefer to make is between distribution to speculators and distribution to users.

Close, but in business one targets REVENUE from a very specific market niche...
Based on a COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE in what is often a Zero Sum Game with your competition...
While in Alts people substitute bullshit metrics like Twitter followers/Slack registrations/lines of alpha code/absurd claims...
And these bullshit metrics are flaunted constantly... and somehow people actually take this seriously.

I'm going to start calling out these shysters in the most direct way.

In the entire NXT ecosystem I have yet to see ANY Financial Statements produced by an accredited accountant...
While in the real world pretty much the first thing you do is hire an Accounting Firm.

Just building "cool" tech as a "solution" to no specific, existing problem is a complete waste of time and money.

As I've said many times before...
The ONLY use case for anon Gen 2.0 platforms and their currencies is the Deep Web...
So you must provide a user-friendly SERVICE to the 50,000,000 people that use torrents, anon VPNs, encryption, gambling, etc...
Instead of fantasizing/bullshitting about taking on Wall Street and banks.

50,000,000 is the number of unique daily visitors to Pirate Bay circa 2010...
No one here has successfully given these people ANYTHING they WANT... and thus you see coin prices in a Death Spiral.

Bullshit.. and this why we have a gay mess because you all think like that.
and if this idiotic crap was ok like you say then it would not be a scene bleeding to death.
The demand speaks loud and clear and is undeniable.

You want to know what the difference is ? I'll fucking tell you. ;)
Some little prick can mine 600 billion coins in his mom's basement before an IPO coin launch basically.
But when it comes to to mine he only has a few GPU's in the house.
You sleazy greedy dick heads out there do it for one reason.. YOUR OWN financial advantage.
You all want to be Satoshi and sit on 600 billion coins on day one..
So when NXT etc. takes off 2/3 years later it makes you rich.
You guys have the fucking balls to say that mining *can be exploited ? (or that IPO/ICO coins are more fair ?)
Well guess what ? So can launching an IPO  ::)

You guys see no difference with IPO's simply because it's an advantage to YOU !
You make excuses and bullshit so you can cover up you advantage and make it seem fair.
And IPO's open the door for far more exploits than any mined coin ever could !
A lot easier to run scams when you have cash in your hand vs having to go mine to get it..

Which is why you guys thought hey this IPO coin Ripple launched was great.. waaaaaaaaaaaaaay later.
and you guys then decided all coins should be launched like that..
Then you went on to make 1,000's of them ..all IPO/ICO's

When Ripple launched it was flamed and bounced out of this forum on it's ass for that exact reason.
now look around.. corrupt greedy fuckers making dumb ass fucking IPO excuses.. to protect YOUR advantage.

Some how mining is not fair ? Why because some guys have more GPU's ?
So fucking what.. how fair is it making an IPO coin where the dev has ALL of the fucking coins ?

Gimme a break ..you guys as always are greedy and full of shit and spin stuff to cover up your bs.
And the proof of that is the fact there is maybe 50 of you left here trading to each other.. everyone else left long ago
the worlds financial communities laugh at this scammy dumb bs.
Why do you think ?
Let me guess it's some other coin that is the problem right ? Not the one i am bag holding  ::)
If that was the case the pro's would be here investing in those coins you guys spam about that you think is ohhh sooo legit.
But they are not here.. are they ?
Just a handful of bag holders here hanging on in desperation making pitiful excuses for scammy IPO launches.

 
  
I think I have been pretty clear that most of the recent volume with Aeon has been predominantly me entering my position.  I made the Aeon speculation topic about a month before I entered into a position, mentioned several times that I would, and then on the 30th before I began buying I made a fun picture just to let everyone know that shit was about to get #rekt: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1197508.msg12834456#msg12834456  
  
Additionally, I've disclosed it is my intent to own & save about 1% of Aeon for the long term.  The problem is that the volume and action are slow low right now that anyone at all buying/selling it affects the price pretty severely.  
  
For example, about 30 seconds after I post this, I'm going to buy 4 bitcoins worth of Aeon (a lot, but not really).  That is going to move the price from 6000 to 8000 satoshis, just as my previous buys have been the factor in moving the price from 4000 to 8000 satoshi over the last few days.  Most importantly, it will be amusing to me, and probably piss off a few of the people patiently waiting on their (very reasonable) bids to fill.   :D :D :D :D

Serious developers know how to rent CPUs cheaply. For 10 BTC, you rent enough CPU power to mine out the low difficulty at the start. But what they also do is have their buddies doing the same things, a select group of professionals dominate. And of course keeping the launch confusing and low key also helps to keep the difficulty low. We even have dead coins that were originally distributed by PoW mining, that have been rejuvenated where some guys bought up the supply of the coins and relaunched it with more respected developers and new plans and coding, e.g Aeon. So there again not a very wide user adopted distribution, instead more of an investment clique.

Btw, you assumed I was arguing against mining, but in fact I was not. I was arguing against professional mining and for mining that is well distributed to users.

And more saliently, my point to you is that eliminating IPOs is not a panacea.

The problem is not whether developers find some way to reward themselves for their risk, $100,000 of man-hours invested (in smooth's case on Aeon by the time he is done), and iniative, but whether that reward is consumerate with the user adoption attained or whether it is just another greater fool investment scheme. No one is going to have time to complain if for example a developer has 90% of the coins and has generated a 100 million user adoption and changing the world (yet I am nearly certain no developer can retain that many coins and reach even 1 million user adoption). Everyone will be too busy jumping on that train. No one even really cares how much of the coins the early miners of Bitcoin got.

"developers find some way to reward themselves for their risk" ?

Oh god not this again.. i have talked about that specific issue lots over the years.. nothing changes.

reality check.. your not entitled to one fucking cent coin cloners.
as i've said before if you can't afford to launch and support a new world wide digital currency then don't launch it.
don't force money out of everybody's pocket unfairly then make excuses for it.
to me that is like robbing a bank because you deserve to have money to start a business.

if Microsoft wants to launch a currency they can they have the money.
If some 20 year old computer nerd in mom's basement wants to start a currency he makes an IPO then adds it to Cryptsy.
It's a crock of shit..
Take Blocknet for example the guy said he had 75% of the code done before launch.
and that he needed just shy of 1 million usd in coins for an IPO coin launch on Poloniex etc.
To finish the other 25% of code i was guessing at the time so i asked him.. know what he said ?
You know why he said he needed that much money ? ..and i quote word for word..
"to ensure it's a success"
Ya sure i guess you can claim a success when we give you 1 million usd for your Github.zip you downloaded and modded.
And all that fucker did is worm around playing game and crying FUD and Troll .. with his hand out ! $$$

People IPO coins because of a lack of a better system such as mining..
and that is a pitiful excuse !
Why does the coin need to be launched so badly that it has to be done so unfairly and insecurely ?
IS there some nagging feature that soooo important that it just has to come to the public asap no matter what ?
hmm let me see if i like around what will i see ?
A "me too" coin that tacks on Markets or Anon features years after it's launch.. yeah that REALLY needed to come out asap LOL
AND let's not forget that these coins are usually launched with no features but bare bones code.
a shitty coin is launched then as much as possible is tacked out onto it later
after dev's had a chance to sit on billions of coins acquired just after or just before launch.
a sneaky clever ploy that is over used here.

then let's look at the investor side of things..
Who out there in the stock market would like to trade and make money.
Well imagine this ? You own every usd dollar made while you trade usd dollars in financial markets LOL
You know why credit card companies can charge 30% interest for loans ?
every heard of the saying a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush ?
imagine all of the ways that dev's DO exploit things while holding ALL of the coins ?
Simply holding vast amounts of money in my pocket for only 24hrs is worth a lot.

Straight up plain and simple you guys are full of shit.. ALL of you !
You all support 100% premined coins (IPO's) in the altcoin scene and it sickens me.
you can't spin it around and make excuses for it.. the reality is if it was ok to do big players would be here investing in them.
but they don't ..they are not stupid.

Let's enshrine that statement. Remember you wrote that. Don't forget it when I prove you wrong.

My point was not that some developers don't take the money and run. My point was that developers can take the money and run with mining or with an IPO. To single out IPOs as the only mode of cases where developers take the money and run, is myopic. I gave you specific examples where developers have locked up all the coins in a coin that was mined.

Also your statement that developers should be able to finance the development of the coin is orthogonal and does not address my point. My point was that developers will want to get a ROI on that investment they've made. No one invests without an intention to get a ROI. Now it is possible some may invest and expect their ROI to come from an indirect result, such as some benefits they receive from the ecosystem. You claim that developers take the ROI too soon and run away before delivering a suitable result. I don't disagree with that, but it is orthogonal to the point I made.

You seriously lack logic skills, so I think I will stop replying. I don't have time to argue with someone who doesn't even realize when they are building a strawman or moving the goal posts and not even addressing the points I made.

Your emotional tirades or the style in which you write seems very irrational. Can't you write calmly with correct sentence structure, paragraphs, etc..

You are preaching dogma. How about addressing the facts. I already provided examples where mined coins were just as concentrated in terms of ownership as IPOs.

Hey I am not planning to do an IPO nor a crowdfund. So I have no vested interest to defend IPOs. I am just defending objectivity because you are letting religious fervor overpower your rationality.

Most currencies are created to collect bitcoin for developers