Bitcoin Forum

What Features would you like most in a new Alt-Coin?

Pick the two feature most important to you.

If you need background to learn what the options even mean, here are some pointers:

Zerocoin
http://zerocoin.org/

Purely P2P Crypto-Currency With Finite Mini-Blockchain
http://www.bitfreak.info/files/pp2p-ccmbc-rev1.pdf

Transaction Messaging is the ability to add notes/metadata to transactions

Optimum target block time
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=260180.0


I know many folks are feed up with Alt-coins. The main reason seems to be that is most of them offer nothing truly innovative or of practical utility vs Bitcoin.

However... there are two technologies that if both added to a new coin, would make it competitive with Bitcoin in terms of simple utility. I'm specifically talking about Zerocoin and Finite Mini-Blockchain, which would solve what I consider two major problems with Bitcoin. (Lack of proper built-in anonymity and an endlessly growing block chain)

One of the main concerns about Zerocoin is that it would only make the Blockchain grow even faster. The Finite Mini-Blockchain proposal  solves that issue by automatically aging and rolling old transaction off the Blockchain.
 
Feel free to post you comments in this thread!

We don't really need altcoins as long as btc is working fine.

Something like Finite Mini-Blockchain could be nice also for Bitcoin.

none, I don't need any altcoins, bitcoin is fine the way it is.

I think the possible of adding a message would be nice.

Some altcoin have transactions comments enabled

Read the homepage and it definatly seems alot pro Big Brother. Not my cup of tea.

Yah, so far, at least to me, bit coin is fine and the altcoins seem like noise.

To some extent I agree with the the notion that Bitcoin is "good enough". MOst Alt-Coins ARE noise. It seems like nearly all of them are simply clones with only superficial changes in things like target block generation time and difficulty targeting strategy slightly tweaked.  Most are totally pointless as they contribute NOTHING to the state of the art.

However...  Bitcoin really is NOT perfect, nor good enough. The lack of real anonymity makes it worse than say, physical cash. The super conservatively long block time makes it slow to confirm. The endlessly growing, spammed up Blackchain is a hassle.

Anonymity isn't just about "being anonymous" so much as privacy protection. Europe has very strict privacy laws, and in spite of all the spying they do on their own citizens, the US has strict privacy laws when it comes to banking and financial info also. The openness of the Blockchain is a double edged sword. On the one hand it creates an easily audit-able permanent record, but it also leaks information many people with perfectly legitimate uses for cryptocurrency would probably really prefer to not leak.

The endlessly growing Blockchain is also a bit of an annoyance, which is why I think the Finite Mini Blockchain proposal is such a great idea. There is no practical reason to keep the entire block chain forever. Anyone who REALLY wants a copy of every transaction ever could maintain it themselves.  The maximum size of the rolling Mini Blockchain could be tuned to never exceed some reasonable size, like one or two gigabytes. Mobile devices can handle keeping their own copies in that case, and mobile users wouldn't need to use web wallets (not a fan of web wallets myself, due to third party risk) If you read the paper it outlines how the long term health of the new-style Blockchain is maintained. Very good ideas from the author, BTW.

Zerocoin could be added into Bitcoin, but adding Mini Blockchain is more than a checkpoint or a hard fork. The implementation is sufficiently different enough from the "classic" Blockchain, it would probably require a new coin.

You can probably guess my favorite two features...