Title: Lack of Innovation in Alt-Coins. Post by: viltareo on July 02, 2013, 02:40:13 AM Greetings. Since this is my first post and I am in newbie jail, I thought I would attempt to contribute some discussion with meat rather than a token "hello world".
I have had a passing interest in Bitcoin for a number of years, mostly as an appreciation for the genius of the concept, but have not done much more than install the client. Personally, I don't have much interest in joining the arms race of mining and I see Bitcoin as version 1.0 of the crypto-currency idea so I don't see the reason to invest my own money into it either. I have read the original whitepaper and have a good understanding of the technical details and mathematical basis of Bitcoin. The concept itself has sparked some ideas in my own mind and lead me to some in-depth study of related material. I read the Zerocoin paper a few months ago and that has spun me into a number of papers on "zero-information proofs of knowledge." My favorite paper on the topic is "Elliptic Curve Based Zero Knowledge Proofs and Their Applicability on Resource Constrained Devices" (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.1626v1.pdf) Looking through the alt-coins on this site I'm a little surprised by what I see as a lack of true innovation. 95% of the alt-coins out there are small tweaks on the original: speed of block creation, number of coins issued per block, inflation/deflation rate, hash algorithm. Did I miss anything? The only coin I see that offered something truly new was the proof-of-stake concept in PPCoin. Why is it that there is not much realized innovation? Was Satoshi simply a genius? Or did he have some security background that the community at large just does not generally possess? What are the innovations that would need to be done to have crypto-currency 2.0? What are the problems with Bitcoin's technical capabilities and algorithms that most need addressing? Here are a few of my own thoughts:
I'd be interested in continuing this discussion here or in private if someone wants to bounce ideas back and forth. I do have some proposals for solutions for reach of these issues that I've raised. - Viltareo |