Bitcoin Forum

I've been believing in bitcoin since I heard about it about 2 years ago and seen its value rise and fall dramatically.
But I haven't heard of most of the alternate cryptocurrencies until recently.
Some of them have really weird names, like SEXcoin.
I have no idea what are these for.

Most of the time just pump and dump to get creator of the altcoin quick BTC. Saying creator is bit misleading as it is modifying few lines of public code only  :)


But in some altcoins a lot of work is put to be fair

I don't understand all the hate for altcoins, yes, some of them are definite scams, but some of them are being totally honest about what they are, this is free market competition at its finest, here are some tips for spotting worthwhile currencies:

. Is it open source? This means programmers will be able to go through it and find any sneaky code or problems

. Do the devs post updates regularly and check over their own code?

. Depending on your ideology, whether it is deflationary or inflationary this could be a good/bad thing so make sure to check the absolute amount of coins that can be made

. Are the devs trying something new? If you don't know anything about the code behind it like me it's a good idea to ask people to give a fairly dumbed down version, PPCoin is an example where it has things like proof of stake and uses less power than other coins

. Check price rises, are the prices going up for a reason? Due to volume or difficulty where a lot of people are mining? Or has the dev in question just gone and made it artificially high by putting even less overall coins than Bitcoin, that's always something to check, always check trade volume on a coin

. Are they investing in infrastructure? If they are getting stores to accept it and getting up payment processors or getting payment processors to accept the coin that means they have an idea of what they're doing and the currency has a chance of becoming more than just a pump and dump for miners

alt coins ruin the idea of a limited supply currency, if one takes off... its a bit like turning on the printing press.

Bitcoin has the most computing power, first mover advantage and a bit more trust.

I guess eventually some alt coins will have a serious place in the market for various reasons... but bitcoin will be number 1 for quite some time I imagine.

There are no good alternate cryptocurrencies yet.
There are some more or less interesting experiments and tons of scamcoins.

Some altcoins bring innovation to the cryptocoin landscape, and bitcoin is no longer the only one. I also think that there will be some psychological limits to the value of bitcoin, and that's where a lot of people will start turning to altcoins like LTC and FTC.

PPC, XPM and Litecoin.

Others coins are just "pump and dump" coins.

I've never really understood the point of having so many crypto currencies. Surely to get the general public to accept BTC we should be focusing on one?

Yes, why not? They are same as Bitcoin something like Window and Macintosh :)

I do trust in alt-coins but only some. Primecoin :)

Maybe litecoin?

Primecoin looks promising too...

Litecoin primecoin
Anoncoin has promise