Bitcoin Forum

Greetings, like many others here, I have some Bitcoins but want to hedge against a potential collapse in 2014 (or beyond) by buying a few key Altcoins while they are still cheap.

Here are a couple of ideas for the most likely Altcoins to be adopted in response to various BTC collapse scenarios.  Feel free to add to the list or correct or whatever.

1) Sha 256 cracked somehow:  People switch to the top Scrypt coin = Litecoin.   

2) A 51% Attack is successful on Bitcoin:  People adopt the top Alt that is 51% resistant = Peercoin?

3) Mining Begins to Consume too Much Energy:  People switch to the top energy efficient Alt = Peercoin?

4) Sha and Scrypt are both cracked:  People switch to the top CPU-mined Alt = Primecoin?

5) Governments/Central Banks aggressively ban all aspects of Bitcoin in most countries:  People switch to the best Anonymous Alt = Anonymous Coin or Zerocoin for Bitcoin?

6) Governments/Central Banks crack down on exchanges:  People stay with Bitcoin but trade through local exchanges or emerging distributed exchanges (emunie?).

7) Governments/Central Banks crack down on Bitcoin as currency but not as store of value:  People stay with Bitcoin and possibly adopt coins designed to be scarce, such as Cryptogenic Bullion (limit of 1,000,000 coins).

8) Transaction confirmations begin to take too long: People adopt the next fastest coin:  Litecoin is next in line?

9) Scrypt is cracked:  People stay with Bitcoins

10)  Regional Alts begin to emerge for economic powerhouses:  People switch to Alts like:  Deutshe EMark for Germany, Chinacoin for China...etc?

11)  Extreme fluctuations (for whatever reason) cause demand for a coin with stable prices:  People switch to top non-fluctuating coin =  Stablecoin??? or is there even an Alt that is designed to be stable?


etc...

Bitcoin is the mothership, if it collapses all the others will have a very hard time. They are all Bitcoin forks.

This reminds me of the film The Day After Tomorrow, where all the wealthy northern countries had to plead for asylum in poorer southern states. Shifting to a different coin would be an epic sudden transfer of wealth. Imagine all the bitcoiners crowding at the borders of litecoinland. There will be tears. There could even be blood.

If we had to change coin architecture I don't think it would be a shift to an alt coin. The alt coins will excel, but those who hold bitcoins will come together to implement the necessary changes to bitcoin in a way that preserves everyone's holdings.

I think probably Litecoin. It's the next biggest market and the "silver" to Bitcoin's gold ;)

This is what governments have already started to do, and this is how people respond.

And Bitcoin can be morphed if necessary.

For number 5, you should also include StableCoin, as their decentralized mixed transaction feature will allow for anonymity as well.

Yes, that makes sense that if a flaw in Bitcoin is found that it doesn't necessarily mean the end.  Things could be tweaked and fixed.  Even a bit of down time wouldn't be the end of the world.  That's actually encouraging.  I was in kind of in all or none thinking, that if a flaw was found that the whole thing would fall apart but not necessarily so it sounds like.  Nice.

I'd go for Anoncoin - in my mind the alt coin with the most potential!

No, faster blocks doesn't mean faster confirmations.  Number of blocks burying your transaction and the difficulty of those blocks is a factor.  6 quicker blocks means 6 easier blocks means your transaction is not confirmed as securely.

emunie is not a BTC fork

What you will need is Blakecoin  ::)

Blake-256(optimized) faster than Scrypt and SHA-256D  ;D

The modified blake-256 hashing algorithm Blakecoin is the fastest and it is already on the FPGA so is the most energy efficient power wise and hash rate compared with Bitcoin/SHA-256D

The algorithm was written as a candidate for SHA-3, Based on round one candidate code from the Sphlib 2.1 library and reduced the round function to 8 rounds.

Why Blakecoin beats other coins in the long run:

• The modified blake-256 algorithm hash rate is just under 3x faster on the GPU and just over 2x on the FPGA compared with Bitcoin
• The reward for mining Blakecoin does Not decrease over time it only increases with block height and difficulty
• No restriction on any platform as Blakecoin does not include artificial *Security* that slows down possible mining hash rate and reduces power efficiency
• Already has planned use for Blakecoin as a currency storage between MMO systems with prototypes in development

Blakecoin is the fastest !

• 5.1GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 7990
• 2.2GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 7970
• 1.4GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 6970
• 1.3GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 5870
• 1.6GH/s on a ZTEX USB-FPGA 1.15y Quad Spartan-6 LX150 Development Board (using < 40w of power)

Tweaks:
Removed some of the double hashing from the wallet for increased efficiency and reduction in collisions  8)

Blakecoin is still a fork of Bitcoin but due to some changes in the hashing would be a little more resistant to some issues in the way Bitcoin does its hashing both network and mining  ;D

if anything were to crack, like maybe because of the advent of quantum computers, I suspect the first thing to crack is the private key in the wallet, since a powerfull enough quantum computer with enough Qbits could crack the privates keyes using Shor's algorithm.

All the wallets use the exact same public/private key system, so all the coins would be at risk IMHO

if ecdsa over SHA-256 could be cracked last thing to worry about would be your wallets as a lot of systems use this hence why it is in the OpenSSL library

but it is a weakness and a valid point public/private key systems are a weak link in most online and p2p systems

To solve issues like this I did research things like MQQ (multivariate quadratic quasigroups) which I quite like and can be used in a MPKC (multivariate public key cryptosystem)

this paper gives a good balanced view of MQQ and its use as a MPKC
http://www-polsys.lip6.fr/~jcf/Papers/CANS2010.pdf (http://www-polsys.lip6.fr/~jcf/Papers/CANS2010.pdf)

this is also quite good
http://www.mini.pw.edu.pl/aaa80/Presentations/Talks/Christov.pdf

this could be used to replace the public/private key systems if a problem was found  ;D

also you could see the use of a SAT solver for the POW/POS mining but have yet to see more than just a test case on Bitcoin, if a true SAT Solver on the GPU came out for Bitcoin the difficulty system for POW would not work correctly and POS is based on POW so that also would have issues
http://jheusser.github.io/2013/02/03/satcoin.html  (http://jheusser.github.io/2013/02/03/satcoin.html)

why?  because the higher difficulty would only help to limit the potential inputs of the search