Bitcoin Forum

Alt-coins like Litecoin and Feathercoin are finally hitting the mainstream media and it's clear that your average journalist has no idea about the issues involved, leading them to make ridiculous statements like this:


http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/16/litecoin

For these clones to gain any attention at all due to the hard work and revolutionary ideas of Satoshi Nakamura is offensive. For them to be hailed as superior for making minor, unproven adjustments is ridiculous. For insta-mined scamcoins like Feathercoin to be given glowing portrayals is scandalous:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/25/bitcoin-successors-litecoin-freicoin

We must look to the comments on this article to find any semblance of knowledge:


We also find that the general public has questions that are not being answered by these "journalists", who likely do not know the answers themselves:


It is clear that your average journalist is not properly educated enough to inform the public about the "importance" of these alt-coins (which is almost none). From PPCoin (which is actually somewhat innovative) being barely given a mention in favor of discussing Freicoin's silly demurrage scheme, to Feathercoin being discussed more than the coin it shamefully copies from, to the words "Franko" and "WorldCoin" ever being printed in a "respectable" publication, it is obvious that the media is looking to trumpet the story of a "better Bitcoin" or "Bitcoin successor" regardless of the actual facts. They are too used to Apple releasing another iWhatever every six months.

The Bitcoin community must not allow these airheads to take the lead in educating the public about alt-coins. We must make sure that people understand why these coins are slightly interesting from an experimental perspective at best and complete rip-offs at worst. Having dozens of cryptocoins get mainstream attention will harm not only Bitcoin but the entire idea of cryptocurrency by diluting the ecosystem and confusing people.

Bitcoin must establish itself as the "one true brand" and make the public "accept no substitutes" until a truly revolutionary successor comes along. I suggest education along these lines as a task for the Bitcoin Foundation and other community members. The Bitcoin community has held back for far too long against alt-coins in the spirit of "openness" and "competition". Those times should rightfully be over. We now risk more than some forum nerds getting burned by a pump and dump scamcoin, turning into a scandal that harms the entire cryptocurrency community. Even for slightly interesting coins like PPC and LTC, any improvements they make that prove to be useful can be implemented into Bitcoin if necessary. The cryptocurrency community must focus on uniting primarily behind one standard to drive adoption. Some suggestions:

1. Educate journalists about why most alt-coins are scams and clones. Remind them that any innovations they pioneer can easily be ported back to Bitcoin.

2. Boycott services and exchanges that use or promote worthless scamcoins, clonecoins, and pump and dumps.

3. Get some hash power and 51% attack a few of the smaller coins out of the ecosystem. "Developers" need to start thinking about whether their coins are worth releasing.

Any other ideas?

How do you think you'd implement scrypt in bitcoin?

It would require a hard fork but it could be done.

Why don't you let the free market decide?

not possible.
every asic owner would continue hashing sha because of their investment cost. and we all know asic hash > gpu hash.
who would mine the scrypt fork if they're already doing ltc?

ltc is the bitcoin fork with scrypt.

Where did I call for the government to ban any coin? "Free market" doesn't mean "freedom from criticism" or "freedom from backlash". I am calling for members of your beloved free market to give the public proper information.


"If necessary" means "if SHA256 is completely broken to the point of not securing the blockchain" which is the only real reason that one would desire scrypt. ASIC owners have no ROI if Bitcoins are worth nothing.

if sha 256 is broken. the the blockchain unsecured. then the coin is dead.
nobody would even bothering forking it to scrypt if there is already an existing alternative that is exactly the same but not broken and without any early adoptee incentive.

You're absolutely right. All of the merchants, users, miners, and holders of Bitcoin, a currency with more than a billion dollar market cap, will just say "It was a nice try guys. It's a shame it didn't work out." instead of making a simple and easy change to get the blockchain running again. Don't be silly.

oh okay, so get to work trying to fork bitcoin to scrypt. good luck with that.
I guess both our scenarios are just as likely as the other.

I'm not going to fork Bitcoin to scrypt because it's not needed. Your scenario that people will abandon Bitcoin and the billions of dollars in system because of any technical issue is highly unlikely.

If you don't like it, don't mine it. I don't see what the problem is.

Quote from: anti-scam on Today at 08:22:10 PM
Even for slightly interesting coins like PPC and LTC, any improvements they make that prove to be useful can be implemented into Bitcoin if necessary.

thanks for the circular discussion then.

It's more like "What do you think the value of gold would be if Alchemy was real and you could turn lead into gold"

0$, because it has no scarcity.

Did you miss where I said "if necessary"? I don't see why such a minor point is such an issue for you. Did you invest your entire savings in Litecoin?


That's why scarcity would have to be reestablished, which it would be in the financial interest of many people to do.

no, I think there is room for many coins.
people mine and accept what they want.

but your argument is circular.
*we can adapt to scrypt if needed*
*it'll never happen we won't need to*
Quote from: anti-scam on Today at 08:22:10 PM
Even for slightly interesting coins like PPC and LTC, any improvements they make that prove to be useful can be implemented into Bitcoin if necessary.
I'm not going to fork Bitcoin to scrypt because it's not needed.

ne·ces·si·ty  (n-ss-t)
n. pl. ne·ces·si·ties
1.
a. The condition or quality of being necessary.
b. Something necessary: The necessities of life include food, clothing, and shelter.
2.
a. Something dictated by invariable physical laws.
b. The force exerted by circumstance.
3. The state or fact of being in need.
4. Pressing or urgent need, especially that arising from poverty.

I never said it would never happen. I said that there's no need. Please look up the definition of the word "if".

the argument is circular,
You state X qualities can be added to Y product
You state X qualities aren't needed because Y product will never reach Z event.

argument is circular because you state Z event won't happen so X qualities aren't needed therefor Y product has no need to take X qualities.
but your opening statement is Y product can take X qualities.

which won't happen because Z state won't occur which brings us back to.....

I never said that. I said "it's not needed". "It's" means "it is". "Is" does not mean "will". I did not say "it will never be needed". Please look up the difference between the present and future tenses and quit spamming my thread with your lack of understanding of the English language.

scamcoins will eat themselves, no need to bite.

They may eat a few clueless average joes too. That's the problem. Cryptocurrency doesn't need the bad publicity.

+1 Very well put.

Alt-coins are extremely important if you knew anything about economics then you'd understand that, you lost my interest the moment you claimed they weren't, I guarantee if Bitcoin hadn't been released open source it would have been a failure or it would have been worth as much as Second Life Linden Dollars are currently. We have needed currency competition ever since central banking came along and people tried to control currencies in order to control everyone else now we have a system that even it's creator wouldn't be able to undo easily because the code is already out on the internet now.

Just like you do with anything in the Bitcoin market, when it comes to scam artists, just use your common sense and look at things carefully.

Just wondering, why nobody so far mentioned namecoins in the discussion above.  IMHO, these are in fact the most interesting altcoin, although PPC also has some real innovations.  LTC is in my opinion "just popular" but not really innovative.  (I hold some LTC though, so I still believe it may be somewhat useful.)

If you know so much about economics than explain to me what alt-coins bring to the table.


In practice .bit hasn't shown itself to be much more useful than the DNS system implemented by something like I2P. I don't think Namecoin will go anywhere. It's technically very interesting but running a whole blockchain just for DNS is kind of silly. Namecoin isn't meant to be used as a "real" currency anyway.

That is quite bad, I hope coins like feathercoin don't ever make it to mainstream. Is litecoin good or just another clonecoin?

Litecoin was one of the first alt coins to be created, but using scrypt and a few other minor differences like conf time, total amount of coins, etc. The reason LTC is where it is now, is because of how it was released. It was a bunch of Bitcoin users in IRC bouncing ideas off of each other, and figuring out how they wanted to deal with things, so early Litecoin had the support of the Bitcoin community more or less, so it was allowed to grow to where it is now. What really seems to separate the "scam coins" from the coins with at least some hope, is

A) How they are released. If there is a premine, the likelihood of success drops significantly, although minor success has been had with premine and then using those premined coins for bounties
B) The Dev team. In the case of Solidcoin, the idea was innovative, and almost solid, but the dev rubbed people the wrong way. Picked fights with Bitcoin, abrasive in general.
C) Transparency, the majority of coins that have done well were release well ahead of time, so there wasn't a group of insiders who began mining the day it went public, a week before anyone knew about it

Although people don't think about it much, Solidcoin did compete with Bitcoins during the earlier days to a sort of significant amount. Solidcoin introduced the concept of funds showing up to your wallet as soon as they were sent, but just showing as 0 confirms, something that was adopted by Bitcoin shortlyish after.

Altcoins are somewhat useful, or the ones with some sort of innovation anyway, because features eventually get added to Bitcoin, or if they have no significant features the coins tend to die. I remember pre solidcoin, buying Bitcoins from this Pirate40 guy on BTC-OTC with Moneypak, and having to wait 20 minutes before knowing if he had even sent the BTC or if I was out $200, a feature that killed bitcoins for me, for a little while anyway.

IMHO it has lot of potential.  Just think about the domain seizures the US already made - there, namecoin is the protection that bitcoin is for your money in case of Cyprus style events (in some sense).  It may even happen that the US (possibly coordinated with other players) are cracking down on bitcoin sites some time in the future, and there .bit domains could come to a rescue.  Of course, that may be unlikely, but it could be.

Furthermore, namecoin's potential is not just in domains.  You can use it for arbitrary storage of values, for instance to associate in a safe and decentralised way some contact details to an online identity.  In particular, your bitmessage address or GnuPG public keys or something like that.  This is not very established (or well-known) yet, but a feature that is interesting in my opinion and which might take off in the future.

what.the.fuck.

It's called currency competition, I already explained that in my post.

just for your information, do some research about SHA256 and Scrypt, Scrypt is indeed more complicated and secure than SHA256, maybe it is not widely used as SHA256 because it is newer, but I have to say that SHA256 will be outdated soon and maybe scrypt will be the lead for few years till a newer technology appears and takes over, do not be ignorant and emotional about it. this is how tech works.


even if somehow we decide to implement a new encryption or any other improvement there will be always people against it which will lead to two forks, this is the disadvantage of decentralization, look at issues developers are having to convince miners about the block size, minimum transaction, in fact devs cant agree with each-other , I am only afraid about this killing Bitcoin.


in fact if Bitcoin dies no ALT will survive, everything with vanish with it.  

I believe that LTC and NMC will take a spot behind BTC, but other crap coins will die soon, history have proved that, just worry about bitcoin because no ALT will make it without BTC.

Complicated does not equal secure. ASIC-resistant does not equal secure. Bitcoin has a vastly higher hash rate than Litecoin.


Competition is not necessarily a good thing if it's all crap. Have you ever heard of the video game crash of the 80s?

scrypt is harder to compute than SHA-2, but IMHO that tells absolutely nothing about its 'security'.  In fact, I presume that SHA-2 as a general purpose hash function has seen much more scrutiny than scrypt, and I believe it is less likely a collision or preimage attack in SHA-2 is found than on scrypt.  For mining, it probably doesn't matter at all except we see a catastrophic break, since if a faster way of mining is found (for instance because some insights allow to generate small hashes easier than brute force) the difficulty will just adjust.  Note also that SHA-3 is on its way, which is the logical follower to SHA-2, not scrypt.

The point of scrypt is that a single hash is much more costly to compute, and that this makes GPU mining still feasible with it.  Furthermore, scrypt advocates believe that this makes it harder to launch a 51% attack on scrypt, because an attacker would have to buy tons of GPUs instead of "just" building a custom ASIC production facility to outperform all general purpose computing hardware easily.  However I'm not sure this argument is really valid, in particular with ASICs getting hopefully more and more distributed to lots of different people in the future.  Thus I don't really see any reason why scrypt should be 'more secure' (for what purpose, by the way?  hashing can be used for lots of different things, not only cryptocurrency mining) than SHA-2.

It may be harder for an ASIC owner to attack, but who says it's not easier for a botnet owner due to the lack of competition from ASICs? You raise a good point.

well SHA256 is integrated into scrypt as well. So beside SHA256 it uses the intensity of memory . correct it me if I am wrong ? so additionally it is safer maybe harder to break. this is only my understanding I am not an expert, correct it me if I am wrong.

Congratulations, you don't know how Bitcoin and its clones works

I am no expert in the field, but you seem to know allot about it, lighten me please ...

http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf

Educate yourself. The question isn't even whether scrypt is more secure but whether SHA256 is secure enough. If it is then scrypt is just a waste of computational resources in the pursuit of "fairness".

Calling for a 51% attack is hardly letting the free market decide. It's just letting a couple well heeled individuals or groups dictate their desires to the rest of the market.

Personally, watching what's been going on in the last couple of months, I am frankly not so enthused by bitcoins' becoming overrun by ASICMiner. This is hardly the democratic system that drew me to Bitcoin, and I doubt that anyone current bitcoin enthusiast would agree that this concentration of power is good for the system, or that they would have even become excited about Bitcoin in the first place if the network looked the way it does now back when they joined. But because people have a few coins (or many coins, doesn't matter), they're swearing loyalty to the "system" that benefits them. Hence talk of 51% attacks rather than competing on their own merits. Which, frankly, doesn't seem all that different for US Dollar/Fiat Currency system so mainy claim to abhor, except in this case they've become the ones with vested interests.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

SIgh....

I love the fact that you are all internet engineers, and all knows so much about everything. I did read that sheet, and I do not think that I have to read it again at this moment, but I would like to educate my self more, in fact I really would like you to explain how scrypt is a waste of computational resources, can you dig deeper into this, because my knowledge is limited and you seem to know allot about this subject, can you take 10 mins to explain it in a way that a dummy like me would understand ?

This looks strangely like the beginnings of centralisation to me.

People who have a lot invested in Bitcoins are concerned that other coins will damage the market, and as such wish to take action against it. Whether that is through "educating" the public on the "risks" of altcoins, or through 51 % attacks or destabilising through pump and dump schemes, this is an example of people clubbing together in order to act to protect their interests in the market place (Oh, Hello proto-state, when did you get here?!).

If you believe in the free market, or libertarianism, or "anarcho-capitalism", then surely you'd accept the market will select the best coin and run with it, be it bitcoin, litecoin, whatevercoin.

Just because you have an investment in bitcoin doesn't make it the best coin, hell, just because bitcoin is the best coin doesn't mean it will be the winning coin, look at Microsoft ffs.

But then of course, that won't happen, because you have the resources from your bitcoin investments which allow you to collectively dictate and control the market. Oh look at the dream of decentralised capitalism sail off over the horizon of obvious.

*Awaits huge shit storm of abuse*

You just witness the natural conglomeration of power that will always happen in a free market until it's not that free anymore.
A lot of people invested in Bitcoin->they want to protect it->they will do stuff against competition

The free market is not democratic.


You said yourself that it requires more resources. That's its claim to "security".


So you want a free market where anybody is free to create a crappy Bitcoin clone but nobody is free to tell the public that it's not the latest and greatest thing?

Personally, no, I think free markets are bullshit, precisely because of the consolidation of wealth and power that capitalism produces. The top 10 bitcoin addresses, as of 06/20/2012, controlled 4% of ALL (as in all 21million) bitcoins, according to forbes.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/22/the-bitcoin-richest-accumulating-large-balances/ (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/22/the-bitcoin-richest-accumulating-large-balances/)

Interesting fact, but that alone isn't alarming. Afterall, lets say the marketcap of Bitcoin is $1.5 billion (I know, i could go look it up, but I'm lazy!).

4% of that (the amount that's controlled by the top 10 addresses is $60 million. 10% of that (each addresses share, supposing that they're equally distributed, which they aren't) is $6 million. That's interesting, but that's all it is. Afterall, they could be owned by early adopters, people who bought their way in (ie, the Winklevosses), etc.

But I fully agree with the free markets being crap. This recent financial crisis was the result of "free markets" (ie, less regulation letting banks screw things up). If not for government intervening in the free market, we'd likely have a couple monopolies to choose from, and that'd be it.

Free markets would mean that we'd buy our gas and oil from Standard Oil, we'd buy our computers from IBM, and we'd go online through AT&T phone lines connected to AOL (afterall, the free market didn't create the internet, public spending did) and we'd probably bank at JP Morgan. The government has actually done great things in regards to breaking up the results of a free market letting the market be a platform for new competitors to blossom.

Bitcoin is the ultimate "free market" experiment. Like I said, I was originally excited about it. But more and more, I'm feeling that it anything, it's just going to provide a blueprint for a future cryptocurrencies of some good ideas and some poor ideas.

To get back to the topic at hand though, that's what most of the alt-coins are, in my mind, and they deserve just as much chance to get a foothold as Bitcoin did. 51% attacks are childish and reek of doing just the same thing that the Bitcoin community abhores when the government does it.

So, yes, use your freedom of speech to explain the virtues of Bitcoin, both on its own and against other challengers. But don't use it to simply advocate attacking other altcoins in the name of Bitcoin. Afterall, a few years ago, any argument that people currently use against Alt-Coins was just as applicable to Bitcoins.

Really? So Bitcoin is the exact copy of a previous software/concept except 3 modified lines?

+1

Bitcoin is not bigger than the free-market.

If the free-market chooses to use another coin besides Bitcoin, then so be it.

That is my view on it.

free market capitalism will decide all coin successes and failures, if a coin is a scam the market will eventually expose it as such, if a coin has qualities which outvalue bitcoin then the market will find them, and bitcoin will lose its crown

centralisation and monopoly are what we're trying to oppose, arent we ???

sure, anyone invested in bitcoin (as i am) want to protect the value of their investment, but there are limited options here - first, you stand by your decision to be in bitcoin, and praise it and give it the good publicity it deserves, or second, if youre concerned about the whole thing collapsing, or about another coin overrunning bitcoin, then GET AN EXIT STRATEGY, stick to it, and take your fiat and invest it in something else, eg fiat investments, gold, silver, gems, or another crypto coin if you want

investors are not children, finance is for grown ups, of course its dog eat dog, its called competition, and only competition ensures current market leaders, like bitcoin and litecoin, continue to strive for excellence, what competition also does is provide opportunity for others to have a shot at achieving their dreams of a successful investment, and developing a great product

dont knock the alt coins, damn it, go mine them all, let them flood into your wallets for next to nothing or dirt cheap, if they amount to nothing so what? nothing ventured nothing gained, but you'll be laughing if one or two of them eventually make you a millionaire, and really who knows what the market will do, ANY coin could become the "big thing" especially once more and more people on the planet (thats 6-7 billion people folks) start discovering bitcoin, and its army of little friends

who knows what coins will appeal to whom, let the market decide, and if the journalists are too dopey to understand this then EDUCATE them, bitcoin foundation - does it/did it, have a PR dept, press releases, etc ???, if so, bitcoin should not be getting a bad name

If you are talking about PPCoin and such, fine.
But scams or scamcoins don't provide any healthy competition, they just screw up new users, which isn't helpful in any way.

If Bitcoin goes down, well then, that is the nature of the game, some win, some loose. 

Theoritically, Litecoin mining with scrypt/GPUs is more secure than Bitcoin mining with ASICs. Simply because more people have access to GPUs and would be willing to invest in one for the purpose of mining... as opposed to ASICs, where only people with a lot of money, who are very serious about investing in mining would ever have one. For now, LTC can have a higher number of people securing the network at the cost of higher difficulty.

No, Bitcoin brought new ideas to the world, for certain.

The arguments commonly trotted out arguments against Litecoin (let alone the other Alt Coins) center around:

A) They were created to enrich the early adopters
B) They're no good because there's no where to spend them

Both of which were used (and are still used, to lesser extents) against Bitcoin. Which makes it funny that Bitcoiners shrug off those arguments against their favorite cryptocurrency, yet launch them at any others.

Many of us do think that many alt coins provide interest twists on Bitcoin's precepts that do bear investigating, rather than simply being blown out of the water by a 51% attack.

For instance:

Litecoin has both faster confirmations (much more suitable for retail/in-person transactions), and an algorithm that SHOULD be more resistant to ASIC miners becoming such dominant forces in the ecosystem. I've seen many posts saying that Scrypt could be targetted by ASIC's, and if that's the case, maybe Scrypt isn't the end-all solution. But that doesn't mean that there aren't memory-hard algorithms that bear investigating, if enough people think that ASICMiner will represent potential point of failure/target of attack once they've succeeded in vanquishing GPU miners from the network entirely.

PPCoin has a completely different reward mechanism altogether, which doesn't depend nearly as much on consuming electricity.

Friecoin's demurage feature is a mechanism for encouraging those with coins to spend them through the economy rather than holding them in anticipation of rewards for simply doing that. It, in effect, encourages Friecoin to be treated as a currency rather than a commodity.

Lastly, no coins have tried this yet, but a coin without a cap on number of coins issued would be an interesting twist as well. People talk about the "benefits" of Bitcoin's having a fixed limit of coins to issue, but the fact is, we can't call that a benefit as yet, because we have yet to get to a time where there are no new coins being issued. If the transaction fees inside each block aren't enough to incentive miners, the end of new coin issuance might be the end for Bitcoin.

(Funny, to realize that this huge reply is in follow up to a one sentence barb! Oh well...)

My main complaints with the alt-coins is that most of them don't really bring anything new of value to the table, nor do they really have the developer support needed to do so.

Sure some have done some interesting things like scrypt but what does that really do for the currency? How does it make it better?

It's just copypasta coding playing with a few parameters and then pump and dump.

Maybe they aren't all like that but it sure seems most of them are.

Us debunking BTC-alt hype IS the free market. We are the free market too. The free market doesn't mean one doesn't act, and lets the false marketing claims of smaller copycat competitors go unchallenged. As long as we don't use force to compel them to stop using their product, anything we do is just as much a part of the free market as the promotion of BTC-alts.


Congratulations, you're making the same arguments those who want to ban Bitcoin are making.

The only reason those with a lot of bitcoin are rich is that others are CHOOSING to use a payment network in which they hold a large stake. How do you suggest we remedy that? Make it illegal to own a cryptocurrency in which a small group happen to own a large amount? If people want to use a currency that rewards early adopters or big investors, that's their choice. To say "free markets are crap" suggests you don't want people to have the freedom to choose.


The arguments against BTC-copycats are that:

1) They're not, as it's claimed, 'ASIC proof'.
2) Being 'ASIC proof' is not an advantage anyway, since without ASICs, there will still be a way to develop specialized hardware/facilities to perform a particular algorithm much more efficiently than what a casual miner could access.
3) The small changes made to Bitcoin's code to create them do not come close to making up for the disadvantage they have in being smaller networks of users/merchants/exchanges. While BTC was also negligible in terms of supporting economy when it came out, it had huge technical differences from fiat.


I personally am not suggesting a >50% attack. It could risk dividing the Bitcoin community, could prevent a future BTC-alt that is truly innovative (as opposed to the hyped up copycats on the market now), and could eliminate what could be a valuable source of experimental data.


2.5 minutes is no where suitable for retail. Retail will always require either zero-conf txs or trusted 3rd party verification. Those claiming otherwise have big stakes in the useless coins.

Being resistant to ASIC miners doesn't mean being immune to them. If specialized hardware is difficult to produce for a particular hashing algorithm, the result will likely be that when one is eventually developed, its manufacturer will be the sole maker of the hardware for a long time, before a competitor finally emerges with enough resources to create a competing product. This is a force for centralization of mining, not decentralization.

Why? How do you know Satoshi wouldn't be on the alt-coin supporter side?

Satoshi left "Bitcoin" for whatever reasons. I think it's because he had put as much as he could into it in terms of core design. The rest he simply didn't know. He may have had ideas, but ones which could be debated with a broader development audience. I think Satoshi felt Bitcoin's fundamental design was strong enough to be released into the free market, which could then prove the model successful, in need of change, inherently flawed, or whatever the case would be. An example is the block size issue. There is still no solid consensus on it, and Satoshi didn't give specification. The 1MB limit was only included because Satoshi couldn't think of anything better at the time (to prevent flooding), although his writings show he didn't intend this to be permanent.

One thing people who take a solid position, whether it be for or against alt-coins, have to admit is they simply don't know whether they are right. They arrive at some conclusion based on their assessment of things, but no one can say definitively what the "correct course" for Bitcoin is, because Bitcoin is a completely novel world experiment.

It makes no sense to say there is "one true Bitcoin" because that isn't defined anywhere. All we have is a protocol released by an anonymous, brilliant mind (assuming Satoshi is one person). A protocol is a way of doing things, like dancing.

I believe Bitcoin is a product of the free market, which came about because the Internet (a rare free market) enabled the market to produce something to compete with the current inefficient money system. How well Bitcoin, this way of doing things, does depends on how things develop in the free market. So far the free market has produced Bitcoin alternatives, which I don't think is an accident.


If an adjustment (like using a stronger hash algorithm) is superior, it doesn't matter if it's a minor one. I'm not saying whether any alt-coin now demonstrates this. I'm only pointing out "minor, unproven" adjustments can be considered superior and not be ridiculous.


I agree with this.


How do you presume to be qualified to make that statement? It's only your opinion.


I disagree. Differing opinions (which will never change) is the reason (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=240053.msg2558918#msg2558918) I believe alt-coins have a critical role to play. Protocol changes are hard because you have to gain consensus or risk economic, confidence damaging hard forks. Take the block size issue. There isn't consensus on it, and there is still fork risk because some still have very different opinions on how to change it (or not change it). Say changing the hashing algorithm is proposed. Which algorithm do you change to? Suppose SHA-3 is ready and one group wants that, but another some Scrypt derivative? What if you want to change Bitcoin's block time away from 10 minutes? Some people may want 5 minutes (for block size & latency), and some 2 minutes, and some say no change. Every opinion can be deeply held and immovable, where forcing any particular route risks forking.

Technical changes are easy to propose, but not at all easy to implement. The few protocol changes we have had met resistance, and none were fundamental to design, and the participating group size was quite small. This only gets harder as more opinions come on board, and the type of change more significant.


Can you elaborate on this? I'm not familiar with the video game crash of the 80's.

I believe Bitcoin is a product of the free market, which came about because the Internet (a rare free market) enabled the market to produce something to compete with the current inefficient money system.

I believe bitcoin came about because the NSA and/or other clandestine government agencies needed a way they could move assets about without oversight or tracking. But I like conspiracy theories.

I believe.......   [redacted because my beliefs are of miniscule consequence to reality]

bitcoin is.  
litcoin is.
a few others might be.

Tons of bullcrap businesses were flooding the market with bad games. Quality of product was horrible and the customers lost faith. The market cleaned itself from the crap by bankrupting businesses and gave a lot of place for Nintendo to come by, transform the video game market and revive it like no other before.

To give you an idea how video games reputation was completely at the bottom, when Nintendo came in the USA to sell their console, they bundled it with a toy robot (named R.O.B) so they could convince distributors that their console was a toy, not a video game and that they were a toy making business, not a video game business.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983

Crashes can be good. It helped Nintendo become one of the most profitable business per employee in the world and become this absolute beast of a company that is still dominant today in a market where tons of competitors failed in the last 30 years.

What I find funny is people that continue to make the comments that LTC is worthless because there are limited places you can spend them.  BTC was in the same boat not long ago, and I am pretty sure no matter how many sites BTC is accepted, anyone would be a fool not to think that exponentially more places accept fiat.  Should we be saying BTC is worthless because according to the marketplace only a small number of places accept BTC?

A bad argument to try pushing upon people, especially ones that are on your side.  It's funny, it's very common to see Bitcoin users constantly call for all alts to be destroyed, yet when you go to other forums, never once have I seen people wanting to overthrow Bitcoin and take over as the king of the cryptocurrencies.  Makes it seem like you're scared of losing that title.  

Instead of spending all this time trying to push down other cryptocurrencies, why not spend that time and energy trying to recruit some places to actually accept your coin.  That would benefit BTC alot more then trying to rally a 51% attack on all alts would.  Plus the last thing BTC needs right now is more negative press.  Serious businesses won't venture into a currency that looks more like the wild west then a functioning business platform.  

Thanks for the info and link. :)

I'm old enough to remember that era, but I wouldn't have been aware of any market forces. I also remember R.O.B.!  That thing may still be in my parent's attic. Very cool introduction by Nintendo. Duck Hunt and R.O.B were the days, some serious fun.

I totally agree crashes can be good. I don't see the problem there. The market got flooded, bankrupted those that produced crap, and what emerged was something with superior value/quality, as evidenced by Nintendo's success.

The blockchain idea doesn't need to be reinvented. Just as the little arrow for a mouse pointer seems to be well adopted across all operating systems. I know, vastly different amounts of work went into both of those, but point is that Bitcoin presents some great ideas that other people are now wanting to build upon


To me, scrypt democratizes the network. Which means more than just coins are spread around from generation more than they are currently. It means that the network is trully distributed. Think about it - in a few more months, what will the difficulty be? And suppose the price of bitcoin has stayed the same - how many GPU's will be out there mining when it's a losing proposition for the owners? And as much as people say that ASIC's will be distributed, right now, the simple fact is they're not. So you lose all the GPU miners, and then either an attacker goes after ASICMiner or ASICMiner simply has difficulties outside their ability to control and is forced offline for a week, two weeks. How will transactions be confirmed during that period? 

Seems to me that sticking with SHA and the accompanying ASICminers is far worse for the overall security of the network than Scrypt (or something along the same lines as it) that has the effect of keeping the GPU crowd involved means that the network doesn't have a single player who, if taken down, can cause detrimental effects across the entire network.

Instead of looking at things as they now are and how they've been, let's look forward along the trajectory we're on and see where that takes us. It's taking us to an incredibly centralized network with one or two single points of failure. Not good at all. Not something that any of us ever would have become involved in if we knew that going in, I'd bet.

^ You're kidding yourself if you think scrypt won't be mined by only ASICs/highly-specialized-rigs if it ever becomes a big enough business. Mining is a competitive activity, and therefore will be dominated by specialists over time. That's the nature of 'proof of work', and it's pointless railing against it.

The average persone doesn't care about mining. Hell, I don't care about mining. Differences in ability to mine isn't going to make a difference to anyone but miners and if the majority of your users are miners then your currency is a failure.

You don't know Satoshi, just as I don't.

But I know he released his paper and his source code so that we could all learn from it and build on it.

And I do know that the title of his paper was "Bitcoin: A Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System".

Personally, I think he would be much more offended the centralization of the network than he would that others are doing with his open-source project just as was intended, give the license he used. Afterall, he chose to use the MIT license that allows others to not only make their own derivative works, but to make them closed source if they so choose.  He'd also probably be offended that rather than use his system the way he originally devised (as the means to spend money) most participants in the ecosystem simply hoard their coins hoping their value will continue going up and up.

So, let's not get all religious and say we're fighting for Satoshi's honor - he/she/they chose the license that it was released under, and even more importantly, if it TRULLY irked them that much, he/she/they are more than capable of saying so.  

Exactly. The entire impetus for the BTC-alts is to give miners who find BTC too difficult to mine a source of income. Providing earnings to miners is just a means to an end though, which is to provide security to a currency. It's not supposed to be the end purpose of the cryptocurrency.


This is just anti-Bitcoin FUD. Spending in the BTC economy is growing exponentially.

Now, if an alt-coin offered a truly novel way to recover lost coins from hardware failure or something, that might be an improvement.

For example, that guy early on who had 900 coins, sent 1 to himself and lost 899 because he restored from backup and 899 was change not backed up - maybe an alt coin could come up with a way to flag change and other things such that they could be recovered if lost because a key is lost. e.g. he owns the sending key and the receiving key for the 1 and the 899 was flagged change he could recover it.

There are things like that, perhaps other currencies could work on solutions to those problems. Are they? Not that I see.

It's my pleasure. I spent a lot of time reading about this company, Nintendo is like my "dream girl" of a business. ;D

What they did during the Nintendo era and the Wii era is absolutely amazing from a business point of view. They've been making money for 30 years in probably the most competitive and cut-throat market in the world while taking on two technological behemoths in Microsoft and Sony. Businesses like Time Warner, Apple, Phillips, Electronic Arts, Nokia and Sega have all tried and failed to stay in that market.  

It's even more awesome when you consider that they don't sell TV or OS on the side. Their only revenue is through video games and derivatives products. Nintendo is one bad-ass business that you can learn a lot from.

Anyway, I'm out, I don't want to hi-jack the thread.  ;)

It's more profitable to tweak a couple of Bitcoin's parameters, give the new BTC-based blockchain a new name to obfuscate the fact that it's a near-clone of Bitcoin, and then hype up the differences to earn a lot of money on easily acquired and useless clonecoins.

Scrypt may not be the be-all, end-all answer, but it's a step in the right direction, I think. And so long as its even a moving target (changes being made to the algorithm on a consistent basis), that alone would be enough to keep the "specialists" away - changes to the algorithm that just makes it so that software miners need to update to the latest version won't have any problems with getting adopted - but with Bitcoin, the ASIC crowd will be rabidly against any slight tweaks simply because those changes could have the effect of putting their specialized hardware out to pasture.

The over-riding point is, as platform/system that's likely be attacked time after time (either by hackers, banks or governments), the centralization that ASIC's are causing is not a good thing. It's changing the network from being a peer-to-peer one to, basically, a client server network. I have to think that the currency itself would be far more secure if the mining was as widely distributed as possible, otherwise, it'll just be too easy to take down should an interested party decide to do so.

Satoshi Nakamoto gave bitcoin as OPENSOURCE software.. /thread

That is a good point, with the current setup, too small of a group (the miners) have too much control over the network.

It's futile to try to stop specialists from taking over the production of hashes, for the reason I mentioned: it's a competitive enterprise and specialists outperform generalists in any set activity. Even continually changing the mining algorithm wouldn't help, because then you would have specialists who are good at regearing FPGAs, or creating new ASICs, to quickly adopt a new algorithm. You would also have the element of manipulating/guiding the selection of the 'next' algorithm, which insiders could use to get an advantage over more casual miners.

Also, scrypt could make mining MORE centralized, not less, by increasing the cost of setting up a production line to manufacture specialized mining hardware, and thereby decreasing the number of manufacturers of specialized mining hardware.

So you see no problem that all scrypt coins go to litecointalk, right?

I see.

"Resistance is futile".

I don't care so much about "specialists" taking over the hashing, after all, that's essentially everyone with a graphics card that doesn't play games (myself included). But specializing versus centralizing are two different things - and centralization is what has happened. And again, I have to believe that even if Scrypt isn't it, there is or should an algorithm that is sufficiently expandable so that it can stay a step ahead of specialists attempting to centralize. I wonder what Ron Rivest, Adi Shamier or Bruce Schneir would say on that topic.

I really don't see how you can argue that Scrypt could make things MORE centralized - again, in another couple months, GPU miners will be out of the game completely leaving only ASICMiner, Butterfly Labs' customers and the few lucky owners of Avalon equipment as those able to mine.

I know that people with vested interests in the system remaining the same due to significant investment in equipment that can't be repurposed will be opposed to any thing that would upset that balance. But outside of that, I can't think of an argument to defend the status quo, as it shaping up to be.

One one hand, we could have a network with tens if not hundreds of thousands of participants all taking part in mining/verifying transactions - very hard to attack.

On the other hand, we could have a network where the mining/verification process is done mostly by a single entity. Right now, they've been kind enough to stay at below 51% of the network power, but who knows - maybe one day they'll have so much spare capacity they'll just ask and say "hey, you all trust us right? Mind if we put this extra capacity online?". Either way, with 40% of the capacity of 51%, they become an extremely juicy target for someone looking to disrupt the networks operations. And this is a network with lots of friends in the common people, but lots of enemies that are well armed - banks, governments, etc.

What good is having a high hashing power for the network if it's a single target that can be taken down with ease?

Yes, resistance to the nature of competition is futile.


Where is the evidence that it's centralizing?


How about instead of four different ASIC makers, and more SHA256 ASIC makers coming soon, you have only one scrypt ASIC maker, with no more on the horizon for years to come. That would make things more centralized. By increasing the cost of setting up a production line to manufacture specialized mining hardware, scrypt can result in a fewer number of manufacturers of specialized mining hardware.

In other words, relatively small companies can develop their own line of ASICs for SHA256, whereas that might not be the case with ASICS for scrypt.

The currency is also a failure though if you don't care about the miners, especially in a Proof of work system like Bitcoin.  The coin's security doesn't have anything to do with how high the hash rate is.  It has to do with how much of the hashrate is sitting in different pools.   For example, This is purely fictitious, but if ASICMiner's output went up to 1 Petahash/sec, and all the other miners decided they were turning their miners off because the cost of electricity was costing them more then they made, would Bitcoin's security be higher or lower then it would be if the hash rate was 100 Terahash/sec and there were thousands of small pools mining away?  

The answer is the 100 Terahash/sec network would be vastly more secure, because in the first case, ASICMiner has more the 51% of the network's hashing power and can do anything they want with the coins.  Or someone could attack ASICMiners network, then with their miners being the only ones left on the network, they would have full control of the coins in the Blockchain.  The reason scrypt is around is to try to keep the network power spread to as many miners as possible, as it makes 51% attacks that much harder to complete.  This isn't saying scrypt is ASIC proof either (or 51% attack proof), as I know people are already trying to design a scrypt based ASIC miner.  But if/when that happens then scrypt based PoW altcoins will be in the same boat.  One great innovation is the Proof of Stake (POS) security some of the altcoins are testing out, as it makes taking over the chain that much more difficult, as you need to not only take over the hashing power of the network, but also have the majority of the coins age to attack it.  Things like that are some of the innovations having alt-coins bring to the table.

Well, the thing with bitcoin was it rocketed up in value way too fast, and that drove people to fund specialists to create ASICs.

If litecoin doesn't go up that fast, and scrypt mining always stays on the edge of "just barely profitable", then it won't have that same problem that lead to sha256 getting ASICs. There will never be enough of an incentive to pay for specialists to take over scrypt mining.

That won't prevent investments being made to develop ASICs. If producing hashes earns $1 billion a year in revenues, then investors will look at ways to produce hashes more cost-effectively than the competition, and that will lead to specialized hardware and professional mining operations.

It's not only that. It's harder to optimize for Scrypt mining, which is the whole point. Scrypt intentionally "gums up" the works making computation costly by requiring, specifically, large amounts of memory.

SHA-256 ASICs had a relatively low barrier to entry. All you have to do is analyze the problem then custom tailor a chip to optimize the solution process. It's like going out and finding the smartest kid in school to ace a test. If you don't have the smarts you can hardly compete.

However, the Scrypt analogy is you have to not only be the smartest, but also the longest distance runner, for example. It adds another dimension to the problem, making relevant others who may not be the smartest (ASIC wise) but who may for example excel at running.

Altcoins have a great purpose : Do you think the bitcoin blockchain should be responsible for EVERY SINGLE TRANSACTION ANYONE WANTS TO DO ONLINE?

If you're moving 50 cents worth of coins, it's a waste of blockchain space to do it on bitcoin.  And some day transaction fees might make it a bad/dumb idea to move small amounts of money when the TX fee required is large

to this end there is purpose for at least one alt coin.

Also - Open challenge to anyone capable of it

If you really want a coin where GPU mining is optimal and ASICs will never be produced for it -- please create a cryptographic hash function based around the rendering of Crysis