Bitcoin Forum

With the rise of LTC and more recently FTC, why do these alt coins have value? I can only think of 2 possible reasons:

1) There is something fundamentally better about an alt coin and it will eventually overtake BTC. Thus the coin has value because people are speculating that a specific coin will overtake BTC.

2) Multiple coins can coexists and may even be used for different niches within the market. For instance, LTC may be used for in person (online) transactions due to it's speed.


Thoughts?

well several factors
they are not bitcoin, people wand to diversify
for scrypt coins it is a safe haven for gpu/cpu miners
in the case of namecoin its preventing web sites from being taken down
Because they might be worth more in the future
in a lot there are already services

The coins represent work done, even if  it only the work of thousands of people that are involved in getting you your electricity to run the coin mining machine, it's still work done by people somewhere in the process of creating the alt coin.

Because free market. People gives value to things and they trade those things.

People who mine altcoin is called speculators. They mine altcoins just because they think

+ Mass market will accept BTC and then other altcoins even if they are copycats or counterfeit money
+ Merchant will be able to manage BTC and altcoins easily because they love complexity when dealing with multiple currencies, multiple exchange rates with their fluctuation
+ Exchange altcoins into fiat money will be as easy and fast as exchanging BTC into USD
+ Getting rich is easy and should be fast

Nothing is wrong with it. They can do anything they like (if it is legal).

It's pretty simple, really: anything that is scarce has a non-zero value.

The value beyond that - the explanation for why different altcoins have different values - is entirely speculative. Everyone wishes they got in on Bitcoin early, so they try to catch the next wave by dropping a bunch of money on coins that have zero purchasing power. And of course the developers starting the most recent altcoins - especially pseudopremined garbage like mincoin - are hoping to get rich by building up a pile of coins before all the speculative money flows in and makes them worth something substantial.

It's fun to watch it go. And a long as altcoins provide the opportunity for more mining profit than Bitcoin, I'm quite pleased with the situation.

Because people keep clicking this link:

https://vircurex.com/register?referral_id=801-154

and buying coins!

3) The world is full of fools [X]

Mincoin is not garbage, it's the rarest and fastest coin out there! One day it will trade higher then bitcoin that's for sure.

Many nations have their own currency, there are how many, hundreds maybe, of fiat currencies, so it actually makes sense there should be at least as many cryptocurrencies.

Once upon a time it was hoped that every nation in Freeciv (http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=freeciv) would have its own currency, so that every nation currently on Earth and even many that were only once upon a time on Earth, and some that on Earth are regarded as fictional, would each have a cryptocurrency ready and waiting to adopt any time it decides that it has had enough of fiat.

Since now not only the Russians but also the Chinese have launched a coin of their own I guess it is getting to be time to go check out the planets of the Galactic Milieu (http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieu) and find out just how much territory the Russian and Chinese civilisations control out there. (Both were rather large at one point as I recall, although not as technologically advanced as the Martians, Brits and Canucks...)

-MarkM-

No it won't the design is garbage it will dies like all the scrypt based coins, unless someone invents low power ASIC's to mine them. The coins that win in the end will be low power fast transaction, with no requirement to store a local copy of the entire block chain. Scrypt was designed to be a power waste, it was intended to prevent brute force attacks, not for coins.

PM me when 1 MNC =  0.1 BTC i'll sell you some at good price!

I bet you got some of that pseudopremine, huh?  ::)

Their purpose is to water down and inflate BTC. Any alt-coin which is produced over 21 million (as in less scarce than BTC) serves only to water down BTC. Litecoin is basically a watered down BTC and is worth less compared to BTC because too many total Litecoins will be created.

Litecoins could have been a success if only 11 million were created.

They are right it will trade higher than Bitcoin and it may turn out to be better than Bitcoin but because it was designed in such a way it's not something I would prefer over Bitcoin. PPC on the other hand has a good chance to take Bitcoin if Proof of Stake is proven to work.

Right now Proof of Stake has security issues but if they solve those it will be the next best thing to BTC. The total worth of a coin is based on the total number of coins produced and the ease of producing them. Litecoin is only worth at best 20% of Bitcoin so why is it useful if it's only 25% of a Bitcoin?

Until a coin actually is worth 150% of a Bitcoin it's not a future oriented altcoin. Mincoin is actually the first coin to be worth more than a Bitcoin but the problem with Mincoin is it was practically premined out of the gate and doesn't seem to offer any actual value beyond a pump and dump profit motive.

This is ridiculous. Why does a successful altcoin have to ever be worth more than Bitcoin? If it's much less scarce than Bitcoin (like Litecoin or Feathercoin, for example), each individual coin will have less value even if the sum total of all coins is worth more. That's fine. We know that there will be 4x as many Litecoins, and 16x as many Feathercoins. So, really, if we want to compare their value to Bitcoin, we want 1 BTC to equal 4 LTC or 1 BTC to equal 16 FTC.

Or, if you want to be even more technical, we can compare market caps directly - the total value of all outstanding coins.

To give you an idea:

The total number of outstanding BTC is 11103125.
The market cap of LTC is 560474 BTC.
The market cap of PPC is 52086 BTC.
The market cap of FTC is 15668 BTC (Estimate, calculated myself).
The market cap of MNC 1170 BTC (Estimate, calculated myself, may be off by 10 or 20% because nobody trades them and the order book has a huge gap between asks and sells).

So you can confidently say, regardless of how many coins it takes to add up to a Bitcoin, that BTC > LTC > PPC > FTC > MNC.

Why does bitcoin have value?

Because people give it value.

If there is a demand for somthing, and the supply is limited, it should have worth.

I had a similar discussion with someone at work a few weeks ago. nothing in the universe has value without a being declaring it has value.  A bar of gold to the last person on earth is worthless, but a companion is priceless.

But why does FTC have demand then? It now has over 1 millions $$ in 'demand.'

Because the first idea isn't always the best, IE; Yahoo, Myspace, bitcoin etc.

I think they have very little value, but the price is determined by what people will pay for it.

People will pay for it for speculative reasons, but very little else at the moment.

Bitcoin has it's own value it is because it is in the line up of cryptocurrency. A one of a kind of money which can converted into anything you wanted either goods or any.

That is true too, people give value because they can see an assurance of bitcoin.

It is just a win-win situation if their is a demand then supply will follow. Bitcoin is really in demand then supply is getting closer to wants of people.

They have values because they have a product or services on it, or they have a good capability like Bitcoin, examples of these are waves and ethereum, the many coins with good features and capability I think the better for the community people and companies have a better option now.

They are rare and everything rare is expensive. You can get a lot of profit from mining them. Mining some altcoins is more profitable than BTC. People hope to get rich and media are contributing all the hype around new currencies so prices climb up.

Why do alt currencies have value?
Because they have a better chance of making x5-x10. Bitcoin is no longer capable of this.

I'm with the second statement. There can be multiple coins but they should be for different niches.
There can be two coins competing in the same niche but one would subsequently come up as a leader and kill the other one.

There are all kinds of projects behind these coins and they give them value, because with coins you are or will be able to purchase some goods or/and services on a certain platform. So such a coin can be used as a means of payment and as an investment. How much such a coin costs depends on the state of the market, of course, and on the supply and demand of this coin - how much it is used on a platform.

The altcoin is worth it when it explodes
It is quite saturated now.
ICO sprouts much, pulling more coin at the same time the altcoin sect competing.

Some are giving dividends, some are giving some befits for holders, there are many reasons for having value.

As we have seen, the attempt to implement LitePay team LTC failed. I will not invest my money in them, I do not believe in their success.

I guess all has value because we agreed among ourselves that it does. People who don't know that gold has price treat it like garbage. So it is our agreement and desire to get rich on coins that attaches value to them.

They have value because they are normally promising chains that have certain technological improvements that can result in an interesting application some day.

Because of the demand for the coins regardless of why people are looking for them. Maybe they see something promising from a coin or maybe because they're just speculating. I don't follow litecoin very well but as I know this coin has been around for a long time hence something good maybe exist with it.

I like Eth the most.

There are each genre of projections peak these coinage and they jump them bill, whereas with coinage you are or desire be clever to obtain any choices or usefulness on a bound platform.

The price of any asset including cryptocurrencies is determined by the ratio of supply and demand. Hence the cost of a particular coin. In my opinion cryptocurrencies should have regularities of their development so that we can predict how the price will change.

Most coins depend on Bitcoin and Ethereum and their price depends heavily on them. However, there are some shitcoins.

what gives a currency a value? maybe you can start by answering that yourself and then you realize that it has to have some purpose/output or there is no value

Every "good" altcoin has its peculiar usage. If we eventually find an altcoin whose usage outweighs the of bitcoin, we can possibly be looking at it overtaking bitcoin. Presently, we have some coins in the market and some upcoming ones with real value.

Other altcoins trying to solve different reasons. For example EOS is something similar to ETH but do it in some other way and have different code base. Or Dash versus Monero and Zcash. Or Storj versus Sia. Some of them will succeed while other will fail but we need this competition right now.

The use or usage of an altcoin gives it the value it has. Although, this also depends on that particular usage. I could remember coming across a coin, whose value is dependent of medical data used in research. The high demand for these data, gave it the value it has.

Altcoins have value because people use them, it is that simple. Human factor is the most important factor when it comes to the driving force behind the value of any coin. Though your evaluation seems legit I do think that you are wrong. There is something fundamentally good about altcoins but they are not better than bitcoin, they cannot overtake bitcoin. As long as people continue to use a coin, it will continue to have value.