Bitcoin Forum

ı dont know guys just dont feel lıke alt coıns are that great.


thınk about ıt , ıf people see all these random coıns poppıng up on the medıa after bıtcoın what wıll they thınk?


"oh shıt man thıs shıts to complıcated better go play my playstatıon"

or

"oh no man , they saıd ıt would be one currency, one currency to rule them all!"


ı thınk ıf you push all these shıtocurrencıes out the door ıt wıll gıve bıtcoın a bıt more strength.


but ı dont know who knows.

wouldnt ıt be better to take the dev from the new coıns and put them ınto bıtcoın ınstead of havıng all these scattered ants runnıng around? what about the fat mutant ant that got fed too much green radıoactıve spınnach? what about popeye ant?

People have strong negative emotions about missing the bitcoin price increase. That is of course a huge mistake, because by playing with altcoins they will most likely miss on future bitcoin price increases. A good example of this is the tanking LTC/BTC.

Why not just 1 web site? Why not just 1 Fiat money? Why not just 1 stock trading platform?

Why because if the market can support it, it will. If not, well I think we know.

A monoculture will eventually fail, that is reason enough to keep alternatives.

If if there were some innovation with new coins, and not just a copy / paste of the old coins :)

well thats the thıng. theres all these copycats.


but ı suppose ıt ıs somewhat good because ıt wıll be lıke gold and sılver. you can use them both seperately sıde by sıde. you would use one for long term ınvestment and one for mıcro transactıons (bıtcoın ısnt great for small transactıons)

I agree. Until we see an altcoin with some real innovation they just come across as get rich quick schemes.

Nonsense. if someone hacks SHA256 and mines all the remaining BTC in a day, the value will plummet and the scrypt coins will take over.

BTC = gold
LTC = silver


There are maybe 5 - 10 interesting altcoins.
Some of the others died, or will die soon.

Nonsense. if someone hacks SHA256 and mines all the remaining BTC in a day, the value will plummet and the scrypt coins will take over.


[/quote]


Which is not gonna happen before I die.

Tell me your secret. How do I do 'i's without the dot?

ıt ıs awesome, was the only thıng ı was thınkıng about whıle readıng thıs post aswell

as to the OPs question, alt coins are for normal people who cant mine bitcoin anymore

Please tell, maybe if we can all remove that dot, these alts will disappear too  ;)

ım ın turkey rıght now. the keyboards are shıt here. shıt. wıth the dotless ı.


ı can do a normal i but ıts on the other sıde of the keyboard ı cbf adjustıng my typıng hand for that. nobody got tıme fo dat

Copy and paste the character "ı" and put ıt everywhere, when you need ıt.

More like gold, silver, beads, pebbles, kernels of corn, acorns etc. It has value if people allow it to have value. Trade you my ZET for a new cow.

I'm ordering a TurkIsh keyboard rIght now

Yessss ı ı ı ı ı       ı

Peter Pıper pıcked a peck of pıckled peppers

ıll sell you turkısh keyboards for bıtcoın?  :P

Don't have any Bıtcoins, I only hold alts and only use Bıtcoin to turn ınto cash.

Just because it came first doesn't mean it is the best thing that can exist.

I personally feel that Bitcoin was never intended to survive, but merely start the creation of a better currency.

This.

No great power has ruled forever!

Oh dear.

You do realise all altcoins still use SHA256 don't you?
Scrypt is only used in block generation. The addresses are still calculated in part using SHA256 to convert the ECDSA public key to the addresses you and I see.

Oh dear
You do realize I was talking about block generation!


How about something easier for you to understand.

Say someone invents a new super ASIC that's thousands of times faster then the best ones currently on offer. They set up a farm, grab 99% of the net hash rate, attack the block chain a bit,  let the difficulty rise to a hundred times higher than it was, then switch the farm off. Bitcoin is stuck at a crazy high diff and effectively ruined, transactions grind to a halt, game over.

Or someone with a lot of money can amass a huge ASIC farm and 51% BTC.

Those who missed out on the initial gains of bitcoin are hoping lightning will strike again.  They will probably be disappointed.  You never know.

For sure, a disruption of the BTC network can come in a number of ways, a smart investors doesn't keep all their eggs in one basket, be it BTC, alt-coins, fiat, gold,  stocks, houses etc.

Sadly I don't have eggs they break too easily D:

If someone "hacks" (as inaccurate and unrealistic as that is) then every single Crypto-currency is screwed as they use SHA-256 in the address generation.  So you could find another public key which hashes to the same address and steal all the owned coins of every coin that exists.

There is no defense in diversity if all the codebase are 99% copied from one. 

If you want my opinion all the asics have made bitcoin inaccessible to the masses, to the point that the easiest way to acquire btc is to pay cash for it, which in my opinion renders the entire idea of decentralized currency

you could see how altcoins could appeal to the masses that way.

So someone has the ability to make hundreds of millions of dollars by obsoleting all other ASIC technology overnight.  They could make the hundreds of millions of dollars by mining coins themselves or they could make it by selling next gen tech to miners.  Instead they spend millions of dollars to develop the tech, build out a massive farm and then lose all the money by ruining the technology and coin.

Yeah that seems likely.

There are so many ASICs being produced right now that in a few years they will be extremely cheap.  In fact it is cheaper to get a small ASIC than it is to setup a whole computer with GPUs.  Just wait...

To me alt coin mining is like "pretending"


Getting that feeling of hoarding worthless virtual coins that don't look like they will be worth anything. It's gambling!!!


Don't gamble just collect eggs and put them in baskets. Seriously guys.

A similar effect would occur if people that poured $millions into ASICs, had put the money into GPU farms. The problem is not ASICs, it's people with more money to invest in mining hardware will always take most of the BTC. An ASIC can cost way less than a GPU and they are available to anyone that wants them, eg a block erupter.

fair enough


actually, it's more like a stock exchange at this point. most all of them can be converted to bitcoins in the end.

That's why I'm glad there are altcoins in crypto. If something happens to BTC, I'm done.

Altcoins let investors hedge their funds.

Imagine Nasdaq only had one kind of stock on there. Who would invest in that?

There are several Altcoins out there that aren't copy and pastes, most deal with the notion of interest on coins e.g. Peercoin (PPC) uses Proof of Stake mining and assigns those who participate interest on their coins that they use for PoS mining.
There's also Freicoin which uses the idea of demurrage which functions like a negative interest i.e. the longer you hold onto it, the fewer coins you'll have, which promotes market liquidity and spending.
And finally there's Primecoin, although it doesn't function that differently to Bitcoin from a user's perspective.

Then there are Alts that aren't based on Bitcoin such as EMUnie.

There's quite a lot of choice out there if you're looking for it, and it's not all shifty copycats.

I'm currently writing a book, it's called

"My brief sexual encounter with cryptocurrency"

      "A story about a love affair that just wouldn't end"




            "New York times: Best seller!"

I agree with this.


For anyone who may only have 1-2 hundred bucks to invest, it really doesn't make all that much sense to buy bitcoins and hold them. The rates of return might be ok longer term or they may not be.
Whereas the rates of return are much greater for the new coins starting up, and someone with 1-2 hundred bucks can amass a large pile of coins, instead of just one measly bitcoin.

Buying the new coins, you might get 10x, 100x, 1000x your money or more, and I think it is more likely to occur than if buying bitcoins.

Why not stick to regular keyboard?

From trader's perspective, you can only see limited rise or fall with bitcoin in a day (lets say 20% market change is huge for bitcoin while 200% in a day happens once or twice in a year). And then there are altcoin, that are mostly losing value, but some of them produce 1000% in a matter of week. IFC, FRK, GDC + some other pumped coins. So if you want to earn quick buck (or lose quick buck), you can gamble on alts.

And alts are faster to transfer from one exchange to another.

Why not pick up your free on the side merged coins while you mine bitcoin?

Why bother NOT grabbing free namecoins, devcoins, groupcoins, ixcoins, i0coins, coiledcoins and geistgeld on the side along with your bitcoins when you mine?

Not doing so seems kind of like mining gold while throwing away all the silver, copper, and other metals lying there with the gold, you are digging anyway, why not pocket them too as well as the gold?

-MarkM-

Because all those coins you mentioned add so little to the profitability, you are better off mining another coin.


Bitcoin 100%

Namecoin 1.3%

Devcoin 0.03%

ixcoin 0.8%


where as something like Zetacoin will give you 140% let alone one of the scrypt coins which will give you several hundred percent over BTC.


Merged mining SHA256 is a waste of time as you shouldn't be mining Bitcoin in the first place if you are smart.

For small miners the best coins are the ones that aren't even on exchanges, as once they get onto exchanges the difficulty goes up way high.

Lets see what prices i0coin and groupcoin go to when they get on exchanges (again in the case of i0coin) before assuming that the much larger numbers of coins per day you get of the merged coins no pools or hardly any pools bother to merge before assuming many thousands of coins per day that aren't yet on an exchange is a worse deal than a pittance of coins that already haver their difficulty driven high by large mining farms / many miners.

CPU mining BBQcoin last year was way the heck more profitable even using only one core than my GPU or (part of the year) two GPUs were mining anything, even mining BBQcoin since if they had mined BBQcoin they would have driven its difficulty up spoiling the nice easy mining the people CPU mining it with only one core each were doing all year...

So no thanks I will keep raking in the coiledcoins and geistgeld with the other merged coins until I see whether the i0coins and groupcoins from the last year or few turn out to have been a profit or not...

-MarkM-

If you trade Alt coins, then you will know you can increase the amount of Bitcoins you own by a factor of 2x 4x, or even 10x, in a matter of days or weeks.

Many of these coins are completely worthless as currencies, This I agree with. But as a means to multiply your holdings in Bitcoin, very easy if you are willing to take the gamble.

If you only hold Bitcoin and do nothing with it and just sit back and watch the price rise and fall, you still have the same amount of bitcoins.
If you sell Bitcoins for fiat on a top, and buy back cheaper, yes you will increase the amount of Bitcoins you own, but is Bitcoin going to go up in value, say x10, like an alt, in a matter of weeks, without mass panic?.....no

Trading alts is high risk, and if you are not careful you can lose a lot of your equity. But the reward for me outweighs the risk, and as long as you spread your stake over a few coins, and do your research on each one to make sure they have good user support, and a good development team behind them, you can further minimise that risk. Also try to never sell for cheaper than you bought. Eventually the price should come back up. If you did your research properly.

There are a few Alts out there which I think are serious contenders for the main stage ahead, as I don't think Bitcoin will prevail alone. I hold these Alts for the long term, these include LTC, PPC and CGB.

LTC because of it's popularity.
PPC because it holds a steady value, and is reliable.
CGB because it is rare, and IMO could increase 10x 20x 50x in value in the near future, and it has one of the best development teams among all of these new alts.

This to me is why alts are so popular, not because of innovation, or what they can do as a currency. Only as a means to satisfy our own ingrained greed, and hope for a more comfortable financial future.

Just because bitcoin went up in value doesn't mean alt coin will.

If the majority are mining altcoins with the only intention of exchanging for Bitcoins in the future. Surely that is unsustainable and the whole altcoin thing with collapse?

yeah ıts lıke usıng a gırl that you dont plan on marryıng.

you fuck her as much as you want, occasıonally sleepıng wıth bıtcoın on the sıde but you sleep wıth all the alt coıns and you mıght even get a nasty STI from ıt all.

careful guys dont play wıth whores

Haha ok  :D You are fucking your wife, and everyone else is fucking her too. No wonder she is so slow tired.

Whores are fun, I like fun, they're risky, you can have your pick of many, find your ideal girl and pump her till you're tired, then dump her.

You carry on pounding away at your haggard old tired wife, and you beat that ass til that ass don't move no more.  ;)

The only innovative alt-coins have been PPCoin (first PoS) and Primecoin (first scientifically useful hash).  All the others could be written by any script kiddie.  Having said that, Litecoin, Novacoin and Digitalcoin all have a persistent following.

The coin cap of bitcoin could eventually kill it. People won't spend millions a year on mining hardware and power if mining isn't giving a decent return. Transactions fees could work but they could also drive people away if the fees got too high.

I doubt bitcoin will last in the long term, 10+ years. Most alt coins will tank long before btc though, every litecoin clone as well as litecoin are doomed imo.

What will happen is the value of bitcoin will be high enough that the transaction fees will be plenty to cover the miners. Higher volume(worldwide use) will cause there to be a TON of transaction fees.

If 1 bitcoin is $1,000,000 and you can mine 0.00001btc per day which would be what you should expect for just transaction fees. lol
That would net you about $10 a day. There is no way to go into detail and estimate what the speed/cost of mining hardware will be at that point but bitcoin will compensate either way.
Profitability drops, miners stop mining, difficulty lowers and the same amount of bitcoin from transaction fees is spread out over less miners.

Anyway, we have a long time to debate this b4 it actually happens. lol

Why?

Clearly Bbitcoin is better than nothing at all, so there will always be people sustaining the network, no matter what hashrate. You also have "collectible" and "sentimental" values attached to it, now that it's been around the "block" a bit.

Unless you have proof that isn't going to be the case?

The Bitcoin network costs ~$150M a year to run.  Either way you pay for it.  Users (collectively) pay for the cost of securing the network by inflation or by transaction fees.  The cost is real.  One could hard fork Bitcoin so that it has continual block subsidy at 12.5 BTC after the next subsidy cut, and eliminate all fees (possibly using a tx POW to prevent denial of service).  This wouldn't make Bitcoin free.  The network has a real operating cost and users would pay for it in the form of inflation.

It is also a fallacy to say fees have to be "too high" in order to support the network.  Not necessarily, it all depends on tx volume.  At $150M a year that works out to $2853 per block.  To keep the current level of network strength miners need to be compensated ~$2853 per block. You could have $2853 in subsidy (inflation), $2853 in fees or more likely some combination of both.  Miners don't care.  Either way the miners are supported by the same amount of annual revenue.

The larger the network the lower fees can be.  Assuming no block subsidy the fee per tx would be
@ 1 tps = $4.76 per tx
@ 7 tps = $0.68 per tx
@ 50 tps = $0.10 per tx
@ 5,000 tps = $0.01 per tx

If you want to look at it terms of Bitcoins.  Today miners are compensated an average of 0.12 BTC (120 mBTC) per transaction by a combination of subsidy and fees.  That is relatively high but the marginal cost per tx is very low (maybe 0.01 mBTC) so the network can support significantly higher volume without significantly higher cost.  How high?  Well that is a matter of some debate but at a minimum 10x to 100x is pretty conservative.  At 10x current volume that would put the cost per tx @ 12 mBTC and would be lower than many other payment systems.  At 100x it is more like 1 mBTC and Bitcoin would be the lowest cost transaction system in the world.


Of course due to the relatively high subsidy the network is likely stronger than it needs to be (based on the value of economic tx it protects).  So there is plenty of time before fees have to become even a majority of miner's revenue.  It does show the genius of Satoshi system.  The network has real cost and if users directly pay that real cost solely in tx fees the project would be nonviable from day one.  Instead miners are subsidized to support the network while it grows.  Your claim is only true in the network remains relatively small even after a couple decades.  Then again if the network remains relatively small after a couple decades then Bitcoin likely is a failure. A high subsidies wouldn't change that fact.