Bitcoin Forum

I have a question. Why do you think nobody made a variation on bitcoin, let's say bytecoin or something?

Also, do you think it would be a good idea to have many cryptocurrencies? How would the cryptonomic environment behave with more than one currency?

I think it's better at this point in time to have only one p2p currency that everyone can get behind.  The only way to wean ourselves off national currencies is to have a widely-accepted p2p currency, and that won't happen if they start forking this early.  In the future, however, I think it's an excellent idea and may even become necessary for security and survival reasons.

It will certainly happen, but to do so the initiator will have to gather miners around him, otherwise his block chain will remain very weak compared to bitcoin's.

This has been discussed several times in the forum.  Most of us think that there's nothing wrong with competing currencies, whether they are cryptographic or not is not the issue.  Competing currencies are good for the economy.

It is difficult for just "somebody" to gain enough trust on the interwebs to just start a fork of bitcoin.
A value of currency is directly proportional of trust that people put in that currency.

Currently, people trust Satoshi. To start an alternative currency, you have to gain trust and build your reputation, which is very difficult. And before that, you need to convince people why they should use your currency, not some other currency.

This contradicts other stuff I read. I thought it didn't matter who started it and that we didn't have to trust Satoshi.

The Satoshi's goal was he made his project open source with a target community.

I think it is a great work. Others new P2P currencies must to do something like that to try success.

It matters, because he is the original bitcoin inventor and he has IMHO the best vision for this project.
Is there somebody else i could trust more ?

+1

I don't trust satoshi, I trust the math behind bitcoin.

Even given that, a new chain could use his client (and future clients) with a tiny modification, right? If someone wants a chain with 5 minute blocks and 210M coins and other people want it too I don't see how the pseudonym of the first suggester matters. Imo, those are pointless changes to use as a reason to abandon a chain that has an economy behind it, but maybe there are some more important changes that could be made.

The only reason I would trust Satoshi at all is because he came up with a system where we didn't and don't have to trust him.

Agreed, this is a small paradox/loop, but it works.