Bitcoin Forum

Assume for this question that whatever caused bitcoin to fail (for example, crypto crack) did not also apply to altcoins (I know that in reality that this isn't realistic).

My prediction is that in the short term altcoin prices would crash too, but in the long term they would absorb the old market cap of bitcoin and (one of them) would head towards world domination. 

My feelings are that as long as you diversify your crypto holdings, you are practically certain to become extremely rich in the future.

Why should we discuss something that is known that is not going to happen, as you said in your post?

I think a scenario where the sha256 is broken but other algos not would be more realistic

i am not a fan of altcoins, but i do think the money in bitcoin will flow into an altcoin that has been here and working without problems. erik voorhees said that litecoin can be seen as a bitcoin back up.

There is no possibilities of crypto crack like you mentioned.

By imagination in that kind of situation, but bitcoin prices will fall but I believe they will not reach zero.
Again by imagination if it goes to zero, then alt coins also go to zero.
End of world.

This is unlikely to happen so there's actually no point in discussing this.
Bitcoin will never go to $0 overnight.

Ok well how about if bitcoin fails and takes down most altcoins with it, what would happen to the remaining unaffected altcoins? Like Monero which I understand works in a completely different way?

I see bitcoin as the main coin, if bitcoin collapses, everything will go down with it. But why would you want to assume or speculate about something negative?
I would like to see some realistic stuff around here that's actually reachable.

I posed this hypothetical to discuss exactly what you stated. Which is the belief that cryptocurrencies live and die with bitcoin.

Why exactly do you believe this?

If bitcoin fails than no other crypto can survive that is the main truth.

There's no way to answer this question and no point in even engaging in the hypothetical.  If bitcoin failed, they'd all fail.  If bitcoin got cracked, everyone would give up on crypto I think.  It's not likely btc is going to zero anytime soon.  As long as there are degenerate gamblers and people who need drugzzz, it'll be around and will have a market value.

If a certain technology is losing the battle, no matter how, then another technology will take over its place. It's that simple.

While sha2 is plenty secure for >99% of the world, it's still only a matter of time before it is broken. At such time, Bitcoin would take a devastating hit. One that it may never recover from, but assuming devs went to work quickly or already had a backup plan in place, it would be fairly straightforward to switch hashing algos out to sha3 or something more fitting. This then brings up another problem... Our current squadron of miners are set up to mine sha2 and sha2 ONLY. Miners will be pushed out of business immediately and new mining programs would have to be written so GPU's could fill the void if at least temporarily.

Initially, Alts would absolutely take a hit as well, but once it is realized that most of the current survivors are of a different algo (scrypt...etc) and/or method (PoS...etc) for verification, The stronger, more trusted alts would recover. There will be no capital flowing from Bitcoin to the alts since Bitcoin is now broken and no one would buy it,so very little volume would actually get executed before it fizzles out of existence. The tiny amount of capital that does make it out of Bitcoin would either move to an alt (roll the dice on which) or be removed from the system for good. Don't expect LTC or ETH or XMR or DASH to rocket to $400 overnight, It won't happen. This all assumes trust for some computer program isn't lost completely.

@thread
You speculate for both positive and negative possibilities. This prepares you for whatever is thrown your way. You can set a plan in the (however unlikely) event that something does go awry. NEVER, not even for one second, assume that Bitcoin is immune to outside threats, NEVER! After all, it is just a computer program that was written by some guy, which uses an encryption algo that was written by some other guy at some agency. Windows, Linux and OSX are also written by some guy and none of them, even with dispensable amounts of capital, are flawless.

That could be one possibility (a minimal one) since if altcoins crash too and get back up, Bitcoin could and would certainly do this process a lot faster as it's something that a lot of other crypto coins aside all together  are still less in general against the might Bitcoin so I have some conflict predictions about the outcome.

In the eyes of the world bitcoin and alts are one and the same. I don't think it would be a case of chuckling to oneself and heading straight over to polonium to start again. Most would be wiped out and stay wiped out.

of course, as a mother of altcoin bitcoin, so if the price of bitcoin down, maybe the price they will also shake, but that will change if there is a coin that is better than the bitcoin  :)

According to me if bitcoin will crash immediately (within a night) beginning tomorrow all the altcoins will gain value immediately. Will have exactly the same value had before the crash. But compared to another point of reference altcoin. Almost every exchange has more than one point of reference (except bitcoin) used to change with other (most of those) altcoins listed on eachiof those. That (or those - because can be even more than one) will play the primary role as point of reference for all the remaining altcoins (even for those which are not listed with that altcoin as a point of reference). Then will begin a new era. An era where will be not more any supremacy on the digital coins. Will be a continuous fight between all the projects which have their coin (and only between those will be the fight to have the future supremacy) since the moment when one of those (the best one) will have the biggest impact on the reality. The respective coin will have that time the place of bitcoin in our time.

Surprised that no one has called you a troll yet. I agree, as great as I think BTC is, something could always happen. If Bitcoin collapsed somehow overnight, I don't think we would enter an age of Litecoin or any other coin. Rather we would see a fragmentation of the market sort of like smartphones (which are now slowly becoming less diverse/experimental & all of them have similar features)

I think you are right that they would crash initially. However, I don't think they would shoot back up, or if they did it would take a long time (like years). If bitconi got hacked, people would SERIOUSLY lose their trust in the idea of non-centralized cryptocurrency. I think it would be extremely hard to recover from something like that.

Very few altcoins are real,most of them are hype scam Dogecoin is very stable and is keeping  his price to usd
btc up,doge down,btc down doge up

Can't be a troll for speaking truth. The comment about "some guy" is simply a generalization. To the layman, who cares who developed sha256? It's just some guy! The main point being, no computer program ever, has been 100% flawless out of the box. Bitcoin included. Bitcoin is a brilliant concept with excellent execution and impeccable timing, but it is still a computer program written by a human being.

People here know I'm no troll. I contribute realistic and valuable content in nearly every post I make. Even if it's not always what people want to hear, It's things that need to be said

The core devs are working on more urgent problems right now. But I would certainly hope that at some point once some more basic issues (e.g. scalability) are worked out, attention will turn to this and other doomsday scenarios. If we have backup plans in place that everybody knows about ahead of time, then the blockchain can survive. For example: perhaps next-gen miners could be constructed able to do sha2 but also handle the switch to sha3 were that to occur. Hell, we could even plan for WW3 with EMPs if we had a bunch of miners on land and in space designed to withstand such an occurrence. (Independent power supply, electromagnetic shielding, ability to shut down and reboot on their own, etc.)



I'll vouch that you're no troll. You outline some bearish market scenarios that I don't want to hear but I'm better off if I do.

I think that they will survive, especially these coins that are crypto 2.0, of course the value will be much lower but they will survive at least.

All altcoins will crash with bitcoin to prices near 0 as well.

Good marketing, showing how the coins differ from bitcoin (fixed flaws that caused crash) may then provide a real opportunity for one or two altcoins to rise from the ashes.

Luckily this scenerio will never ever happen, especially not overnight.