Bitcoin Forum

I am sure this is not the first time this question has been asked but I cant find a closely related thread and I searched a few different times.

Anyway, its a simple enough questions. Keep in mind the question is "how many" not "what coins".

I know theres plenty of bitcoin maximalists out there that think theres room for only one coin.

Personally, I could see there being room for a few:

Bitcoin - It was first, and I think it will always have users
One primary transaction coin - Coin with a high transaction rate (transactions per second) and low fees.
A privacy focused coin or two
I think some countries may decide to make their national currency a crypto, but, not any time soon, and they will almost certainly stuff it up (make the fees too high and all the fees go to their own wallet or something silly)
Maybe a few specialty coins, (ie, Storj for storage), however, I think its more likely such services would be provided and paid for using an already existing currency focused coin, but the service could use their own tokens for the purpose of allocation ratios for that currency coin.

So, long story short I think:

4 - 6 coins + national crypto's if any

I think once it has become "obvious" what coin is going to be the primary transaction coin most of the alts will die out (i know they don't really disappear, but their market cap will drop to 1% or something of the main coin)

I think this is a question for the market to decide, we all know we are in a free market economy and anyone is free to create his own coin. I still have my reservation on National cryptocurrency, if Central banks get this wrong especially China, it may be the start of their economy collapse.

Of course the market is going to decide the answer, I certainly wasn't suggesting we somehow attempt to limited the number of coins :)

I am just curious as to other peoples opinions as to what they think that market decision will be.

I fully believe that if a country attempts to create a new crypto currency for their national currency they will stuff it up and it will fail as well, but I think its plausible one may try.

I think it would work well if done right, but I just know they wouldn't be able to help themselves but do something silly like keep themselves in control of the coin emission rate, add high transfer fees that go not to the miners, but to their own national wallet (for "taxes" to "maintain the system" of course... not because of greed), add in some kind of "centralization" to allow them to confiscate wallets and send the contents to their own national wallet (because, terrorists) and things like that. Im sure one or more of those would get in.

Given that there are about 200 countries in the world, I would be absolutely gobsmacked if we somehow managed to get over 250 major cryptos at the same time.

I would go for 10 000 coins or more.

But the notion of "coin" is maybe different in my mind: it means something like "block chain", that is: suite of recorded transactions.  I would count each payment channel on a lightning network as a coin in that respect.  You start a coin by opening a channel and giving it value with a bitcoin collateral.  You end up destroying the coin, and releasing the collateral.

What does number of countries have to do with number of crypto currencies?  There are 6500 languages actively spoken in today's world.  Does that impact crypto development?

I would rather argue for infinity minus one :)

I estimated it to be like 10 perhaps. There is a lot of alt coins right now, but I think for trading online markets maybe 1000 but it should be depended on the market cap. And I think if a country of nation has its own crypto-currency, for purpose of like establishing sovereignty or patriotism should fail in the long run, they can still use bitcoin.

so 10 + national crypto (if it fail go back to bitcoin) for me.

No limit and it will never end.

Bitcoin will need a few improvements between now and then to be a national currency :)

Could possibly happen though i'm not technical enough to know what kind of transactions per second bitcoin could get itself to without compromising the coin.

The more altcoins we have, the better it is, as long as they are legit. Any coin can turn to a major coin, it all depends on the management, development, philosophy.

If a developer wants to create a coin who will bring something new, like a new code, new language, new algo, new services, then his project will earn a decent amount of respect equal to the amount of work spent. A respected coin means it is a coin supported by a community, it means that a fraction of the crypto population want to use this coin for any reason, this creates a demand, it is not a demand for market but a demand for development, as long as the demand is satisfied, the market will grow, as long as the market grows, the value grows with it. This is the basic road for a legit project.

Regarding the ridiculous amount of scam/shit coins, we may end with 5-6 major coins only, and i would be sad if we can't provide more.

I can keep track of about 5 at the same time. 

In fiat currencies there are about 5 major currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CNY, JPY) I would only expect about 5 crypto currencies to be very sucessful if crypto is adopted worldwide.

The hundreds that are around now are generally junk, and will remain so.

I think there could be a limited amount of cryptocurrencies and people would still be investing in more than those just because they want to feel superior to others when saying that they have other kind of cryptocurrencies even though they worth nothing...

i am not sure about this as we can see there will be many more of altcoin that will be release and maybe we can see more than 700 altcoin as this is list in the coinmarketcap for now. because there are maybe many people wants to create their own coins and attract the investor to come with them and make the journey success like other coins.

Sinologists could point out the cultural borders in between the CNY area and us, but BTC completely gapless bridget over into china. Could not even imagine how they would paint the BTC on silk paper. My bet: it's allready an official Hani.
By the way your list is lacking RUR, and there is that border line between the USD influenced culture sphere and the RUR area, and BTC bridged over that gap, too. No cold war remnances hindering it.
From these observances I would take "national currency" from that list, merely the technological differences are valued by market forces.

this is a good question.

i think if they stay as merely over-hyped trading tokens then few thousand.

if we're to have proper usable p2p currency options i think 5-20 different types is ideal. if crypto does go mainstream as a proper usable currency then the pack will be thinned to that.

i think comparing it to how many fiat/national currencies is comparing apples to oranges. but people still can't get their head out of the fiat world.

Infinity minus one is still infinity (if you know the math well :P)


I think that there are enough space that everybody can experiment and create new altcoins as many as they want, the issue is that if they could have enough users to use that coin and how long will that project be running because we see how fast most of altcoins go from a high price to one satoshi or zero because they wanted only to pump and get richer to create then another altcoin and use the same old tricks.

You asked for major cryptocurrencies i would say 10 then the rest compete for recognition to be promoted to the big league, and those among the big 10 get relegated if the fail to perform.


the whole idea of cryptocurrencies is to bring about decentralization and aid financial freedom, and having a national crypto would take away financial freedom people need and enjoy. Though adopting the idea of national cryptos will no doubt kill most atlcoins!

Agreed. The brain can only stored 7 working items in it's short term memory too, so probably less than 7

I don't agree on that, and even if it was true any one can make simple scripts to keep track of their favorite currencies, i know that many developers and traders are doing it.

What would be these major currencies we are talking about ? BTC, LTC, ETH, XMR?, DASH?, ZCASH?

I know that at least the first three are one of them regardless of what people think about litecoin, they are still in the top 10, Dash can fall, their are not stable for now. ETH have been imposed as a major currency, but i think they still have to get ride of ETH's shady past relations with mafia. XMR, i don't really know what to think about it, it is a popular currency and may be considered like that. ZCASH, well, my personal though about this is that it is a scam or ponzy coin, and it may reveal to be one as it's outing happened recently.

Both ETH and ZCASH show glacier calving effects, breaking into more pieces. ETC, Z Classic and more. Would shovel them into the longdrink glas of Major Failure if they cannot outperform their self generated competition.
The race between BTC and LTC seems over, stable distance between both. XMR vs. DASH ralley ongoing so far no clear victory announceable. Time will tell.

Ok, but this returns only 4 Majors :

1- Bitcoin
2- Litecoin
3- result of ETH/ZCASH
4- result of ETC/ZCLASSIC
5- result DASH/XMR

Are these the only cryptos we know about ? how about lisk, wave, nxt, PPC ...

We'll see if this doesn't happen to bitcoin too...

My idea is, the more, the merrier. 

Bitcoin has the highest marketcap yet only a few million people know about it and less are actually using it, as long as developers control the fate and the network of any coin non of them will really take off like bitcoin did.
For sure we don't need a coin for people fishing or a coin for people cooking or a coin for an ice cream flavor.
We don't need a coin for smoking or a coin for sex etc.
If a coin is to be considered a currency then we should know that currencies are not a joke to be played with by a selected group of coders/developers.
Moreover we do need just bitcoin to scale for a high population level, 10k transactions per second.
Other coins/tokens like ETH or ICN could work as well as other useful tokens but not more than 20 in total.

All users need then to get 2 MB/s continuous block chain data, all over the world.

Ah, you mean, BANKING on top of bitcoin ?  Like they did with gold IOU ?

Jesuit Fuck'n Crystals!

a N00b with a brain!!

Yeah, only the top12-16 will resonate with the general clueless.

There are +25 solid block chain experiments.

The key being will it survive.  Some have already.

The confusion is in ASSETS that are leading the pack.
The question is which chain will they adopt?

The best platforms are still OMNI or XCP.

After that your best guess??

  

Why should be a country basic cell? Why not family or even a person?  I know someone made a coin for her daughter 10th birthday. She have own coin. She can get new one for her 20th birthday.


We can have finite number of cryptocoins, but you will need almost infinity time to count them all.

i'm more for only 3 major currency to keep the confusion as it lowest as possible, people already don't know how to use bitcoin let alone 5 or more, i can say thta bitcoin can work togethere with other 2 good currency like ethereum and zcash/monero, that have features that bitcoin is missing, and maybe ar ebetter for micro transaction where bitcoin is troublesome because too expensive

Personally I think Dash/XMR are not exactly in direct competition.

I think XMR is significantly more private, and more likely to be used for less legal trading. I think Dash is going for the mainstream with ease of use and instant transactions.

I think XMR is competing with CloakCoin, ZCash, ShadowCash and all that lot at the moment, dont really think Dash has a direct competitor with the finances it has available for marketing and promotion, currently.

A family currency would not be a major currency.

I didn't really specify in my OP what a "major" currency is, but lets assume its got at least US one billion 2016 inflation adjusted dollars market cap.

NXT retired, NXT 2.0 beeing ARDOR. This information is still valid?

PPC has brought us POS staking but the strange similarity of this list of 5 is they are all POW based, markets are happy about deflationary concepts. Which is just completely wrong from the fundamentals, since mining AND staking can produce the exactly same amount of newly generated coin supply (inflation). Just that stakers dont give a damn and dump, versus miners tend to hodl.

LSK is on my watching list. Can't tell much about WAVES, sorry.
Would add Byteball if it makes it onto any major tradesite. And now we derailed from "world has room for" onto "which place to reserve in your bags" :D

@Febo: two coins each human beeing, and the deflationary limited supply concept is dust in the hot desert.

I know about NXT, it is just that i used to call him like that, now it is ARDOR, still valid.

You know, Black coin uses some algorythms to manage the total available coins, it is not fixed in the blockchain, so it can change, they let people stack at a fixed %, and adapt the total coins to keep the inflation rate around 1%, even if it is not a stable rate, the inflation is contained to ~1%, you should check them.


I did this because a lot of people thinks that DASH and XRM are in competition, mainly because of some guys on the forum arguing that XMR will beat DASH, but i know that both currencies are different, either in algos, development, philosophy.
I like the idea behind dash, but i don't think he will survive at the next update, their code is clean, quick to sync, not laggy like some coins. But the features brings him on a dangerous path i think.
For XMR, well, i don't hear that much from him, i don't know what is happening to this coin, nor the development path, but i don't really support full privacy coins because they attract shady users, and it can harm crypto-currencies reputation.
But i understand that people needs privacy, this is why i think that a simple TOR wallet is enough, the transactions don't really have to be annonymous.

BLK's third anniversary has been a dissaponting event, usually such hallmarks give an Alt some fresh wind in it's sails. The 1% appear smallish if you add the counter party risks of a technology that could run into unforeseen trouble any day.

DASH vs. XMR and "shady reputation" did the small denomination, worn out dollar paper bill lost on reputation? Because it sometimes collects up into carrying bags in high count? Money, in itself, has no moral nor rep. Big money for sure not. If some day a campaign pops up that tries to attack crypto on that level we all need to gang up and answer with comparisons taken from classical money worlds.

to be fair 5 is enough to have a good competition between existing cryptocurrencies.
(1) Bitcoin (2) Etheum (3) Monero (4) DASH (5) zcash

Top5 for none sycophant buttmuchers:

1- LTC
2- ETC
3- Doge
4- PPC
5- ??

it is not possible to say "how many" but it is possible to say that there will be more than 1 for sure.
and whoever says bitcoin is going to always be the only one is an idiot. although saying bitcoin will always be the only one among the current existing altcoins is true and there is no doubt about it.


these i agree with.


they will try and may even get it to work but it will be centralized so even if successful that coin falls under the category of fiat.
it is like saying banks created a new thing called "credit card" some day and it is successful!

Good points.

Personally I think people should be entitled to privacy. I think the media/government demonizing everyone that wants a bit of privacy and labeling them as criminals and terrorists is criminal in itself. Why should (and these are examples not real) my neighbor be able to know if I have to buy adult diapers because I suffer incontinence? why should criminals know I buy ammunition for my legally held firearms that they may wish to steal? Why should the meth head down the road know I am suffering from cancer and am prescribed the extra special pain killers?

Slightly more tinfoil hat, but, what happens when its the gov that are the terrorists? Should North Korean citizens have a right to privacy from their government because they will be executed for saying something against the government in their own house but those in the western world do not?

So, a bit of a rant, but, IMO privacy should be the default, governments can find other ways to catch terrorists and criminals.

4 to 6 and some other national cryprocoins? No. The whole market for cryptocoins is very small for 4 to 6 coins. 1 to 2 coins is just enough right for now. Bitcoin dominates the whole market but it is showing that there is room for another one. I speculated that litecoin was it but I do not see it fighting for its fair share like ETH, DASH and XMR are.