Bitcoin Forum

I want to get into this thing. I think that bitcoin has quite a few flaws and that some other currencies address a few of those flaws. Is bitcoin too popular to be overtaken? Is there room for multiple coins to have value (in the long run)? I imagine most of the established ones will stay around in some form or another, but will any alt coins ever become mainstream?

I guess this is a loaded question, but I'd like to hear some perspectives. I'm thinking an alt coin is a better gamble because it would have larger growth opportunities, but bitcoin might still give a really good ROI.

I doubt it.

What kind of flaw bitcoin has by your opinion ? I did not noticed any...

Im my opinion Bitcoin will be the leader in the crypto-currency world for a long time. Would take a lot for an alt to get to where bitcoin is today.

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Yah. 

Something that scales to millions of transactions per second and has easy/cheap transfers of vending-machine size transactions  is gonna win.  But whatever it is (and it might even be a redesign of Bitcoin), it won't work exactly like Bitcoin works now.

Will something replace Bitcoin (or coexisting in a niche untapped by Bitcoin)?  Maybe.

Is that something the altCoins which are clones of Bitcoin with a few parameters changed?  Not a chance.

Care to mention those flaws and which currencies are addressing them? Some alt coins claim that can handle in a better way some scalability issues but i have yet to see any real flaws in bitcoin whatsoever.

Yeh, bitcoin has momentum. None of these clones are going to overtake it even if they offer minor improvements. Something may come along and overtake bitcoin, but it will have to offer something much better or at least different.

Yep, that's my take on it. 

To do the things Bitcoin doesn't do all that well (speed in transactions per second, low latency, micropayments, scaling to tens of millions of full nodes) will require an alt with a fundamentally different design.  These just aren't things you can do with the same basic design of Bitcoin. 

But an altcoin that could do all of them would overtake Bitcoin.

eMunie will replace Bitcoin!

Nope, but maybe there is a slight chance (0.00001%) that ltc will take over. Thats if something goes wrong with bitcoin and the same thing doesnt happen to litecoin...

I highly doubt litecoin will go anywhere.

Even the developer thinks it's overvalued, and hasn't spent any time furthering its development beyond the few hours he spent creating it.

Most altcoins will be about pump-n-dump. If you can get on the early release of new coins for the next few months one might be able to convert that into something worthwhile, i.e. bitcoin.

Expect Bitcoin to have heavy adoption in India and China with specialized ATMs dispensing and accepting it.

There are corporate brains frothing at the mouth for these trillion dollar opportunities.



 

Agreed. It would take a lot to overthrow the relatively well established Bitcoin.

Not saying it can't happen, but it definitely won't happen overnight.

Another coin might come close but it will be pretty hard to overtake it.

i think it can be easly. for example, there are essential holders of big amount of btc. they can create new currency, or choose existing alt coin, and invest all btc to this alt coin. it would down btc rate and up alt coin rate, so situation would change

they will come close but will not be able to threatened bitcoin

in a year years  looking back im still beting bitcoin will be  gold by a wiide  margin to whatever coin  s silver / takes 2nd place

I think in the long term "crypto" currency game that bitcoin probably won't actually prevail to be the winner.  There will most likely end up being a couple main players (hopefully including bitcoin) in the end.

I saw a video on YouTube called "What is an altcoin" and this guy was talking about a "new" kind of coin and was talking about how the old coins are like a structure for bitcoin and the new ones will be like flower pedals bringing new people to bitcoin. So it's not a competition it's a family.

I agree that the crypto-currency scene isn't really a competition and that coins will depend on each other later to possibly give more support.

I highly doubt any alt coin will overtake BTC.

BTC is the original, it has momentum, and there are no advantages alt coins have over BTC.

An alt coin *will* take the top spot from bitcoin.  But it won't happen quickly, and unless we see an alt more innovative than we've seen yet, it won't happen at all.

It'll take a coin that offers *MAJOR* capabilities that Bitcoin doesn't have.

I think coins will all be friends soon very very soon

I think some perspective would be helpful. Here are the market caps of some cryptocurrencies (from http://coinmarketcap.com):

https://i.imgur.com/rYbX8k9.png

Here they are again without Bitcoin:

https://i.imgur.com/WUVas0R.png?1

And without Bitcoin or Litecoin:

https://i.imgur.com/Miq1Tdt.png

Where did you get these graphs?

Things are weird as bitcoin is in a speculative slump itself, but I always believed litecoin is over-evaluated in respect to its exchange with btc as of lately. Litecoin is attractive because its easier to get in to, but the same problems they solved will become their own once they get bigger. My hope is for litecoin to fail as its syphoning off bitcoins market cap. People aren't used to crypto coins yet, we shouldn't be dividing ourselves...

Oh if you didnt know, I wasnt being sarcastic, I found them really cool!

Someone should share Doge Coin on 4Chan

I don't know how to use 4Chan but I am pretty sure that Doge Coin would catch on there

The problem is that all other currencies are valued in BTC. To get into the game, people have to buy BTC and exchange it for something else. As soon as there is an easy way to buy altcoins directly, without having to go through BTCs first, you will see BTC lose market share.

I bet 10,000 coin attempt might become magically the one overtaking Bitcoin, making Mr.Unknown who created the coin with his 1 day of work wealthy

Once a big company like Google, Apple or PayPal launches their own crypto-currency, it will definitely be able to overtake BTC. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.

All the other altcoins... Nah, I don't think so...

Easy Answer: Nope.
Hard Answer: Nope.
Complex Answer: No-pe.

I don't have anything against alt-coins, but as long as they don't solve a mayor flaw in Bitcoin it won't happen.

Probably not, BTC is the leader and will be unless there are some very good improvements over btc

I think that when bitcoin protocol will no longer considered strong, other cryptocurrency will be adopted ... i think that probably the community will push for the best cryptovalue basing on generation methods, like PoW or real utility of mining (ie. primecoins)

Realistically bitcoin would have to have some major flaw that destabilizes it before it would be threatened by any coin after the ammount of interest in the brand name has received.

I honestly don't see that happening at all. I would assume companies like Google, Apple, Paypal, they would be the ones to oppose to anonymous transactions and if they were to take that aspect of the crypto-currency away, then there would be no demand.

Tesla on the other hand, they are not liable for their cars after the point of sale (I am sure they somewhat are but you all get my point) and they would probably not expect a returning customer so anonymous transactions work for them.

Not the greatest comparison but that is like saying if Tesla were to launch their own crypto-currency, they would dominate the automotive industry.

I do not suppose any of the 'alt' currencies will overtake Bitcoins because of the current adoption rate of the current Bitcoin. The adoption process does take time. Authorities and banks are making decisions about the Bitcoins because of its winning terrain. They are not talking about any of the alternate currencies yet because of the low market vs the BTC market (potential).

I don't think that any Alt-currency will overtake Bitcoin. BUT, currencies such as Litecoin, Peercoin and others are absolutely able to catch up and have a considerable value in Fiat. Anyway, this whole crypto-thing is quite young. So I suggest to just see where the market goes !  ;) :)

Bitcoin is young, maybe in puberty now and altcoins are babies. This whole crypto thing is totaly new experience for human kind so nobody can't tell what will happen in next 5 years. BTC can fall down and some baby altcoin would be able to replace it because...noone can tell now the reasons, noone can imagine what the future brings

I think, in order for all the alt currencies to gain ground, first, need to stop calling them alt currencies. Like they are are an alt currency from bitcoin.
They will never gain any ground if the people who are promoting them degrade their value by comparing them to bitcoin.
Secondly, these other currencies need to stop having their value based upon the value of bitcoin.
If that continues they will never been accepted as a serious alternative. They need to gain ground on their own. Push for them to be used in marketplaces.
It will only gain value when you put faith into it.

Don't know too many of these other "E-Currencies" that can be utilised in as many places or ways as Bitcoins at the moment. Although it would be good if one of the other mineable coins that hasn't already been overrun with big mining outfits comes up to the plate.

Your right, but the only use of altcoins is just buy/sell for Bitcoin. This is why I think all altcoins will fail

The best option is to just modify bitcoin to improve the bad parts of it.

No, current alt currencies will never ever replace bitcoin, they don't bring anything new to the table (or if so, not that important to motivate a switch)
bitcoin and many others can certainly coexist together, for different scopes (commodity, currency, mixer, etc.)
sometimes it doesn't matter if a technology is superior, there is a barrier and this barrier is set quite high at the moment


agree

There isn't a need for millions of transactions per second anyway. Not for many years to come

Unless BTC overtakes usd there is no way its going to get close. How many transactions per second are happening right now?

millions of transactions per second is 100.000x more than Bitcoin can handle with 1 MB block.
Bitcoin is store of value instead, like gold

Maybe the Core team should improve that to allow many more per block.

All what is need is increasing block size, so one line change I guess

No, why not make everything more efficient rather than increasing the block size. That would be better than using the lazy way to fix it.

But you cant compress the transactions much, it is almost like recompressing the same file again

I would prefer litecoin's faster confirmation times. Of course there are even faster coins too.

But to crush bitcoin - it should have some discerning quality - like eversmall blockchain size or something like that.

Also imagine if multiple world economies would say bitcoin is a no-no, and , say, dogecoin gets a pass, with no taxes attached... It would skyrocket in a day and stay there.

 ;)no idea

These world economies would say decentralized cryptcurrency is a no-no instead  ;)

??? I dont seem to follow you. They could make it so that after block x the compression is different.

tx are mostly hashes which are by their very nature random and thus generally not compressible.   If you want to try an experiment yourself take a list of hashes and attempt to compress it with various file compression tools. You will find either the compression savings are tiny or possibly the compressed size is larger than the original. There is no effort being put into compressing the blockchain and that would be ultimately useless.  There is effort in pruning the blockchain by removing txs which are no longer needed.

What transactions per second has to do with btc overaking usd? And what btc overtaking usd means anyway?
Btw visa can peak at around 10k tps if i 'm not mistaken.

BTC overtaking USD meaning that more people use BTC over USD (probably the whole population of the US needs to use BTC to reach that many transactions per second). Also I meant how many bitcoin transactions per minute.

So there is no way to compress it? I heard that compressed addresses use less space in the blockchain? What does that mean?

Unless there is a vulnerability in bitcoin, I don't think any will ever overtake bitcoin. Bitcoin needs faster transactions though.

No but there are ways to prune it.  The pruned database is currently ~12% of the size of the full historical database that % will drop over time.   

Compressed keys are public keys where only the x component is listed.  The y component can be recreated as needed.   There is no reason to use uncompressed keys, likely Satoshi was unaware of the advantage of compressed keys at the time Bitcoin was first created.  Today all wallets use compressed keys by default, support for uncompressed keys only remains as "legacy" support for existing active uncompressed keys.

So are pruned db's used right now?

No not fully.  There are some issues to resolve it is on the "to do" list.  At the client level the wallet does maintain a pruned copy of the database to speed up transaction verifications but the full copy is still shared with other nodes.

Not a chance.

There are alts that have promise, but none will take over bitcoin.

Alts with promise:

* PPCoin
* Primecoin
* Namecoin
* Litecoin (not for any real reason, just because it's second on the list).

I think they will definitely rival Bitcoin maybe getting to Litecoin's level but people seem to see Bitcoin as the sort of 'mastercoin' for now, it will take some pretty clever people and unique thinking to get past Bitcoin and improve on it but I think any currency dev that at least tries and stays active will let the currency they made hold some sort of value.

I dont think any coin can overtake bitcoin. As i see it they are all valued by it.

maybe.. but it definitely won't be for a long time

Well,it's hard to say something like that.Sure there may be some kind of competition between bitcoin and other coins but I think that bitcon as well as some of the other coins would be put in use and each will have its use.

Very unlikely some altcoin overtake Bitcoin. Altcoins are usefull just for testing purposes how Bitcoin could be improved, and if something will be usefull, Bitcoin implement it. Do not forget Bitcoin has most devs working on software improvements

Alt coins may compete with bitcoin and some of them may have the chance to come to the level of bitcoin,but bitcoin may as well be in the first place and go up.So we'll see what will happen.

Not a chance, Bitcoin was the first. Only Licecoin can equal to it, because it's slightly diffrerent technology. I think alt cryptocurrencies will exist to specific purpose only.

Not overtake Bitcoin, but altcoins can be used to mine with my CPU and GPU profitably. So definitively altcoins will be usefull

DogeCoin maybe will!  :)

https://i.imgur.com/FlqdWCj.jpg

Just see this, only 9 days old still have more active users on reddit than peercoin and litecoin, ofc bitcoin have a lot more user because it is the biggest, but DogeCoin is more popular at reddit then tha 2nd and 3rd biggest cryptocurrencies!

Why DogeCoin could be a big hit:
-Because there will be more than 100billion coin, and people often more like to see a currency with nearl 1$ = 0.01 or 0.1 or 1 than 1$ = 1000 rate like bitcoin etc...

Useless feature. You can use mBTC instead for price 0.75 USD / mBTC
Bitcoin smallest unit is Satoshi, talking about Bitcoin coins is misleading because physical coin is not divisible but Bitcoin is to 8 decimal places

i have plans for new kind of coins, dat can be more popular, than bitcoin, yeah

It seems Dogecoin might make the hit after all thanks to the Chinese coming in.

http://dcgcrew.com/dogecoin/

Invest a little in both. There is potentially a lot of money to be made in backing one of the up-and-coming alt coins. Just do some research and see what makes a particular coin stand out from the rest. I think a good development team and community behind a particular coin is worth a lot.

I don't think I'm under any illusion on getting rich. I looked into BTC years ago and like many couldn't be bothered with it after mining a few thousand coins. Kind of regret not doing it further but hey, shit happens.

So why not invest a little in alt currencies? What have you got to lose? Like this dodgecoin shit, mine for a few days, get a few thousand coins and sit on it. If it takes it, wahey, if not, you've lost maybe 20mins of your time and a weekend's worth of CPU time?

I lolled.

This is the safest way to invest, mining some coins out of every new altcoin. You can not loose much this way especially if you enjoy it

And seriously guys yesterday there was a small time window when Dogecoin was #1 on Coinmarketcap.com (yes, above Bitcoin!)
If interested I can share the screenshot.

Unless there is a vulnerability in bitcoin, I don't think any other alt-coin will ever overtake bitcoin. Bitcoin needs faster transactions though.

btc is the foundation of all other coins. without it, there wouldn't be a coin to hold the alt market together

So nice that we agree...   ;D

if they invent a coin called "CryptoCoin" it will overtake even Bitcoin simply because of the name

people *hate* saying Bitcoin
it sounds like something a nerd would say


the closest one that even *sounds* like a reputable business is FastCoin

And "Crypto" doesn't sound nerdy at all. Fuck logic!

New transactions are almost instantly propagated over the Bitcoin network (max few seconds )

I agree with an earlier poster that once altcoins can be bought without converting to bitcoin first, things will change.`

There is absolutely no way anyone can predict whats going to happen with such a monumental paradigm shift in the way humans trade with each other, especially after using such a corrupt system from pretty much it's inception.

One scenario I don't think anyone has given any real thought to is the possibility of not just half a dozen, but literally 50,60 or even 100 currencies all co-existing together......worldwide. What currency some teenager uses 10 years from now could be based 100% on what his/her friends use or simply which logo appeals to them or any number of crazy reasons.

People might trade these 50, 60 coins on the same scale as today's "real" currencies are now.

I think it might be time for "Hello Kitty Coin"

Quarkcoin is slowly making its way up. They have multiple algorithms (6 to be exact), and the transactions are super fast. It is gaining a lot of interest, but it was pre-mined A LOT.

I dont think it is possible, people like to use only one currency

everything but Hobo Nickels

screw them i'm no hobo i work

Interesting point you make. Hello Kitty Coin is also a nice idea but what about trademarks? Otherwise could be made into playmoney for kids to but candy and stuff :)

I also literally lold at this.

I wonder if there will ever be a coin that offers something revolutionary and/or new that isn't just hot air?

Dogecoin ftw!
It'll take BTC by storm.
Any time now...

There is Bitcoin and others, but we can quote LTC and DOGE even if they're far away the bitcoin cap'

What about master coin? It is a coin that goes through the bitcoin network.

Alts create a great ecosystem that tests various coins/ideas/performance. We quickly see what works, what fails, what needs to change. I think Alts are a key part to the crypto industry in general, but I don't see how they will over take btc.

I think no alternative currency will overtake bitcoins.

I think you're right, unless something comes out that is far better than Bitcoin and offers something genuinely new and innovative.