Bitcoin Forum

I'm concerned that there are so many "alt-coins" that are just complete silliness.  Why mine coins that are just nonsense?  Bitcoin has established itself at completely legitimate in people's eyes.  Even a danger, in other people's eyes!  Litecoin is #2.  But, beyond that... I mean, I'm buying Devcoins and buying/mining Dogecoins, but how does a "coin" gain any legitimate traction?  I mean, who wants to trade Sexcoins and Cryptogenic Bullion and any other number of "coins" that seem to pop up on a weekly basis.  Why?

Is this something akin to collecting baseball cards?  How does something like Mastercoin, which just popped up a few days ago, I think, get worth over $100 so easily?  What gave it such a reputation to be worth that much?  Who stands behind it?  Why should I want it?  Will it even BE here, to trade, months from now?

What gives one coin more USD value over another?  Why are people creating new coins all over the place?  Why are people even trading them?

Isn't this all supposed to be about creating/validating a legitimate crypto-currency; alternative to the US dollar or other government-based currency?  I mean, Dogecoins are cute and potentially worth more than fractions of a penny, but people are creating things like mousecoins and catcoin and hotcoin, etc... it's getting ridiculous!

Maybe what I'm trying to figure out is...

What is the ultimate purpose of creating coins with a bazillion different names, many worth a few cents, some worth dollars, yet all seemingly similar (SHA256 or Scrypt-based) in their design?  Why are people creating them and what is the ultimate value IN them?  Unless people will trade real-world items for these multitudinous currencies with such diverse (and some crazy/silly/nonsensical) names, and the trade value is legitimate in the seller's/buyer's eyes, what is the point?

I mean, I have 100,000 DOGE now.  What can I buy with that?  If DOGE ever hits $1.00 USD, I could buy a real-world house... but at it's current value (0.00059 USD), could I buy something worth vastly more than $59 USD?  Do crypto-currencies hold value in their own realm, and not just in their representative real-world dollar value?  Is this not the goal?

Is not the creation of a bazillion different "currencies", with funny, silly and/or even ridiculous names, just a pointless venture?  At worst, is it actually destructive to the efforts of actually creating a legitimate alternative crypto currency?

Just trying to make sense of all this "coin creation" going on.

Some of them are serious attempts at alternative currencies to bitcoin.
Some of them are pump and dump schemes.
Some of them are just for fun.

People are exploring the capabilities of the new technology, just as people explored the capabilities of the internet with the first websites on geocities.

The reason alt coins are generating interest is because bitcoin's price has leaped, and because the common man can't mine bitcoin anymore due to its vastly increased hashing difficulty. Scrypt coins have put hashing back in the hands of the coin hobbyist. A currency is only as valuable when people use it. Well, tons of people are using alt coins now because they're cheaper, able to be mined by GPU, or just plain fun. Will they be around in 10 years? 20 years? Who knows? This is the start of a new era. Creative uses of the new technology enabled by Satoshi's paper are to be expected.

Strong agree with the OP.

Too many nonsense coins coming up purely for the profit of the devs.

Unfortunately - due to this being decentralised currency - it can't be prohibited.

After watching catcoin being released, all of the value in new coins are now established in the first few hours of mining.

people are releasing coins and spamming hype everywhere to pump up the value of the coin they're heavily invested in from t=0.  once they see a 10x, 100x etc. return purely from hype, they dump it , and buy yachts or bitcoin or something.

99% of these coins are doing nothing but making the first few people rich.  everyone else is left holding the bag.   99% of these coins are not worth holding, and not worth the hash rate to mine them.

Yet another thread bashing alt coins.

Welcome to the free market. Even more funny is not one person is forcing you to invest time nor money onto any of these coins. Isnt that great? If more alts is what people want, by golly, give it to them. That is what free market is all about, and it also draws newbs into the mix. If it was not for an alt, which i have as my avi here, and owe many thanks to, I would not be here still mining let alone invested a few K into mining.

Anyways, you are not gonna get much sympathy form me. Your not going to change NOTHING so you might as well get that into your head.

^^ THIS ^^


^^ AND THAT ^^

I started mining Dogecoins because they were fun. Then the entire world jumped on, and my mining turned to nothing.

I also mine print Bernankoins because they're just fun. Lacking serious mining equipment, Bernankoins are printable with just a CPU.

I have holdings in Bitcoins and other crypto currencies as well. But I can't mine Bitcoins, and I can't mine Litecoins... so... The new coins are fun to play with.

If they're never worth anything, they were fun. If they do turn out to be useful or worth something, hey, all the better.

We're just seeing a lot of people experimenting. That's to be expected. People that don't want to play around and have fun should avoid alts. But there are serious miners out there that are profiting from them, even when the coin has nothing substantial to offer.

2014 will be a very interesting year.

I am not bashing alt-coins.  But, when I see something I don't understand, I want to understand it, rather than dismiss it or ignore it... or worse, hate or resent it.  I've invested actually money into Devcoin/Dogecoin.  I mined 6.22 Litecoin and quit after a seeing my electric bill hit $130, having spent several hundred dollars upgrading my Dell computer to mine them more efficiently.

I was pleased that my interest in Litecoin seemingly paid off, when Litecoins went up from $3/ea, to $40/ea.  I had over $220 at one point!  I was literally squealing with glee!  Then it all came crashing down... bummer.

I'm investing into Devcoin/Dogecoin because they are so fractionally low!  I figure, if they even hit a mere $1.00 and I own a lot of them, I could be fairly well off!  This is all based on the people who became millionaires, owning hundreds or a thousand or more of Bitcoins, when it hit $1,200/ea.

So, I'm not doing it for pure "fun" (I don't have enough "expendable income" to throw at "fun"), but more financial reasons.

However, I also wouldn't mind seeing this experiment in "alternative currency" hit it's stride and it becomes a real thing, not just a new fad.  I believe Bitcoin/Litecoin are definitely legit opportunities.  But where do Devcoin/Dogecoin (or others) fit, in the grand scheme of things?

Devcoin seems legitimate in it's direction... to give to Developers.  Open source initiatives, etc.  However, is Dogecoin just a cute, short-term fad?  Well, it doesn't have to be...

What if it were a currency that you could use to buy pet supplies?  Or help animal shelters?  Or a dozen other animal-oriented things?  In other words, let the Shibe Inu be the representative of all animals!  Domesticated and wild!  Give this coin some real, legitimate direction!

The question is... how do you buy things with Dogecoin, that must first be bought with real dollars?  How does a business find USE in Dogecoin, so they are willing to accept it, since they can then buy other things (to sell) with it?  How does a VIRTUAL currency gain legitimate traction in a REAL world that is based on buying/selling in Dollars/Euros.  How does the realm of the virtual currency find it's OWN space in this world?

Or is it simply a matter of changing people's minds towards the intangible and making it worth more than the bits and bytes of it's existence?  I mean, people once traded stones and shells and beads for money... is this just a matter of getting enough people interested and willing to trade "something" for "something else", once again?

In summary, I don't want to invest into something that won't give me something in return.  Pool mining Dogecoin is fun, agreed.  But at some point, my electricity bill will go up and I'll have to decide at what time to stop.  "Fun" doesn't pay the electric bill.  I could no longer afford to keep mining Litecoins.  The hobby became too expensive.  Then Litecoins skyrocketed and my investment looked like it was paying off.  Will it return to that level or go beyond?  Who knows.  But I want to be able to say investing into these coins was actually worthwhile, in the end.

/thread

best post

I stop mining Litecoin, when I saw that Dogecoin is making so much more profit. But what I do is, mine Dogecoin, then exchange it to Litecoin. Because I can get more litecoin this way, then mining litecoin itself. Because the value of Dogecoin is higher, so I can exchange it to bitcoin then litecoin.

Is there any way to determine which coins are serious and which are schemes and which are just for fun?  I sense Mastercoin, given it's sudden appearance and high dollar value right off the bat, is a scheme.  Bitcoin IS serious.  Litecoin is trying to be taken seriously.  Devcoin seems serious.  Dogecoin seems like fun.  But can a "fun" coin also be a profitable investment?

Ugh ... dogecoin was made to be a "joke", and prove how easy it is to scam everyone. Within a couple days 12B+ coins had been mined (6.5%). Of all the coins I have to say that dogecoin is the worst, nastiest scam of them all. I feel very sorry for newbies that came on board and thought "oh hey I can buy 1 million dogecoin for 0.1 BTC - what a deal!".

The answer is to do your research. Find the Mastercoin thread on bitcointalk and read the entire thing. I've read it; it took me 2-3 hours. I know the creator's personality pretty well at this point. I know who was involved with the project, who dropped out, what difficulties they faced, what design decisions and tradeoffs they made, how the original shares were distributed, and at what price. I don't own Mastercoin, but if I did, I'd at least know what I was getting into. 

Your "sense" is worthless without actual research, and you can't trust people here either because a lot of them have agendas to push. So go do your own homework and form your own conclusions.

pick your coin based on your investment strategy.

I have no idea why dogecoin is profitable, but that's the only reason i'm mining it.  in fact, dogecoin has been a top 5 most profitable coin all week.  i'm swimming in dogecoin but i know exactly when i'm leaving dogecoin.  

I have no idea why people are mining catcoin, because there's no economic reason to back it.  this is a textbook example of irrational investors trying to get rich quick.  take a look at this coin look at exactly what not to do with a release.  

most people mine based on emotions (i like mining x coin!).  unfortunately, this strategy tends to make people hold onto investments far longer than they should.  this makes people with entry and exit strategies very rich.  

take a look at their market caps (e.g. coinwarz), profitability, and determine yourself how much of a future any x coin might have.  plan your strategy around this determination.  

If you are having fun mining, go nuts.  but if you are trying to make money, take the emotion out of it and select based on your investment strategy.  personally, what i do with money is more fun than actually mining coins.

... this is where we make the Cryptogenic Bullion - a great investment choice ihmo.


   :D

I'm mining Dogecoin right now (I have over 1,000 DOGE at the moment).  I've bought 100,000 DOGE and 200,000 Devcoins.  Does anyone here have reason to think either of these, as fractionally low as they are right now, will hit even $0.01 USD anytime in the coming months?  Do you think they will ever be worth $0.50 or more in a year or so?

I'm looking to be invest into no more than 1,000,000 of each.  I have no interest in becoming a multi-millionaire, unless they somehow go over a dollar on their own, but if they reached even a $0.25, I'd be a very happy person.  I'm looking to be able to buy some properties/houses with my investments, to spread out my income stream.  I'd like to have just enough, that I never have to worry about money matters anymore.  Not so much that I'm flooded with money... that causes stress of a different kind... just ask how many multi-million dollar lottery winners are still happy people, if they're not already broke.

Blame this perspective on Bitcoin.  If I hadn't been thinking "If only..." over all the people who are now rich, because they bought in early, I wouldn'tr even be here.  I'm happy my 6.22 Litecoin collection is going back up in value again (over $20/ea now!)... my current investment in Devcoin/Litecoin is now almost $300!  That's not even including my collection of DOGE!

Assuming Bitcoin/Litecoin have hit their practical limits ($1,200/ea and $40/ea), do you think DOGE and Devcoins might reach a threshold of just $1.00 anytime soon in the future or...?

One approach is to find a "serious" exchange, one that doesn't just list every new scamcoin that comes out but, rather, makes some kind of serious attempt to only list "serious" coins. So far I had thought Vircurex seemed to be doing the best job of filtering out the crapcoins, and even there I have to wonder about some of their choices.

Today I just read a post in which someone mentioned some other exchange and claimed that it usually does not list coins that have not first already been listed by Vircurex. So I plan to examine that one to see if that is true and to see whether it made the same judgement calls that I have as to which coins that somehow got onto Vircurex seem kind of dubious choices. Maybe I will find that it does not list those coins that are on Vircurex that I "have to wonder about", in which case I will probably look deeper into who runs it, have they ever been hacked, what happened when they were hacked, whether they handle eight decimals (since some exchanges are rather broken when it comes to decimals) and so on and so on.

TL;DR if you can find an exchange whose admins seem well in alignment with your own judgement as to which coins might be worthwhile, maybe sticking to that exchange letting its admins in effect do your "due diligence" for you, that could save some time and brain-sweat and research. Filtering out the crap for you is a good and useful service, if they actually do it and do it well.

P.S. You can get a discount on fees at Vircurex by signing up using a "referral URL", so here is such a URL in case you would like to use it:

https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=597-1636

-MarkM-

EDIT: Note though that adding a blockchain-based currency to an exchange is relatively simple, all the coins based on bitcoin code use pretty much the same remote procedure calls to control them so the code an exchange already uses for one can can very easily use another. Things like Ripple, Mastercoin, NXT, and Open Transactions are not simple hot-plug things an exchange can plug in interchangeably so those might take longer to get onto established exchanges than you might prefer to wait. (But letting a reputable exchange filter the bitcoin-type coins for you frees up more time you can spend doing due diligence on all those other types of systems.)

The best thing in crypto-currency is that it's a free market, you are your own Financial adviser and you decide which coin you want to invest based on the community support and the new features of the coin. But there will be a stage where the market will be moving away from BTC/LTC clone to something that brings innovation with a new source code not just a copy and paste coin. It's already happening with MSC, Nxt and VSC.

The TIPS / FEDORA issues have been resolved, not sure if the other pools have experienced the bliss and euphoria of fast findblock perf. to the cron! http://fed.notnull.org/ (http://fed.notnull.org/)

KITTEH coin http://kit.notnull.org/ also had a strange findblock issue, but the lag is gone now. onward!  http://kit.notnull.org  (http://kit.notnull.org)

HTC / HOTCOIN still running solid, pool is running about 15% of net hash rate.  http://hot.notnull.org/ (http://hot.notnull.org/)

DMD http://dmd.notnull.org/ - what's your opinion on this one? the pool is up, but no one cares, is this a waste?  Also http://phs.notnull.org/ (http://phs.notnull.org/) another waste?
CAT http://cat.notnull.org/ (http://cat.notnull.org/) is looking dead as a door nail, come get your coins if you have any at notnull.org [CAT]
QRK http://qrk.notnull.org/ (http://qrk.notnull.org/) what's your opinion on this one? the pool is up, but no one cares, is this a waste?

Nothing is worse than getting a pool up and no one using it, well that's an exaggeration, there are way way more worse things. Let me know, but for now, good night, and may your sharpest picks make coin!

Does anyone think that all this alt-coin creation will eventually sift out the real deals from the frauds and/or actually establish a real eco-system, where they actually have value, apart from the real-world currencies they compare to?  Any idea as to how long this will take?

I don't think the cryptocurrency market operates coherently: at least it doesn't currently make sense to daytrade based on traditional signals.    

There is no trend i can bank on for altcoins.  the cryptos will be either worth a shitton, or nothing at all.  for me, some diversification is prudent, but i am basing my investments mainly on market cap becuase there is so little other information.  

I like to invest based on how i live:  I have never done well with daytrading, and i do not sit well with get-rich quick schemes.  I am a saver, so my strategy is more like 'get rich slowly', which works with my tolerance for risk.  my overall strategy is to mine and hold for 5-10 years.  The only thing i can depend on for cryptos is "they won't be accepted everywhere, but i also can't see bitcoin being accepted nowhere".  the problem is, i can easily see things like earthcoin, terracoin, catcoin, etc. being accepted nowhere, and gradually slipping into irrelevance.  

I see cryptos the same way the forum separates them:  BTC, and everything else.  I consider a BTC investment to have long-term options most of the alt coins do not have.  

 previous performance is no indicator of future returns, and hindsight is 20/20.  

don't base your position on what's happened in the past:  determine how much risk you can take, and invest accordingly for the duration you feel is most profitable.  I think BTC is 'less riskier' than all of the altcoins, so if you are investing in cryptos but do not tolerate risk well, stick with BTC.  If you are more accommodating to risk, reconcile that most of what you invest in is completely gambling.  IRL, i don't have more than 25% of my equity on loose stocks; i consider that to be gambling too.  if you are a gambler the normal caveat applies:  don't spend what you cannot afford to lose, and don't chase lost money.

because the number of altcoins available varies wildly between coin types, i also don't invest based on number (e.g. 1 million), but i look at how much of the total economy i could control.  e.g. owning 21 bitcoins means I own one millionth of the total bitcoin economy.  

because there is no coherence in how BTC fluctuates, i don't actually think there is a practical upper (or lower) limit for BTC.  1.0btc could reach 40k, or it could be $5.  the main thing retaining the value is the 25 people that own 50% of all bitcoins.  rich people are actually keeping the altcoins more stable than they really should be, if that's any kind of indicator as to how borderline these 'investments' are.

I think Altcoin potential is similar to that found in penny stocks:  it is far easier for a penny stock 5¢ -> 50¢, than for google to go from $1200 -> $12,000.  in fact, any one of these altcoins, as long as they go up, can create the same rate of growth.  

becuase i consider altcoins to be penny stocks I treat them as gambling.  My altcoin $$ is money I can afford to lose.  

my mining strategy mirrors my investment strategy:  i have determined when i break-even on hardare, and devote as many rigs to keep me on my break-even schedule.  Only after that passive income is mined do i start mining riskier coins.  Even if the coins are worth nothing, i will have paid off my hardware and electricity costs a long time ago. 

I see a problem with perception where people are fixated on 1CAT=$0.01 or 1DOGE=$1.    there is no market force that will center any of these currencies to the dollar.  i believe a strategy that says "hold dog until they're worth a penny each" is shortsighted.  the idea that these coins 'should be worth x' based on difficulty, scarcity, etc. is a self-limiting belief.  

instead, a more prudent investment strategy would be 1DOGE=N, invest X amount of money for Y amount of time, and exit when 1DOGE=2N.  i don't care what N is, only that it doubles.  if you've doubled your money in Y amt of time, then you can compare your DOGE investment to what you would make in stocks, bonds, or mutual funds.  To invest well in cryptos, you must be able to compare it to your other investment.  


 

Saying that rich people are supporting their coin's value above what it "should" be is like saying rich nations are upholding their local fiat currency at values higher than it "should" be. The central banks of nations buy and sell their currency to try to keep it in a range they feel comfortable with, why shouldn't the central core of holders of any other currencies do the same?

-MarkM-

Not exactly, because a nation's goal is to keep the currency, the economy, and the country stable.  currency is indexed to mediate international trade, and to balance exports and imports.

For cryptos, there is no need to index anything because nobody is dependent on coins to run their economy the way UK depends on the £, or US depends on the $.  it can go up to $1000 and down to $400 in a week, and nobody would give a shit.  otoh, if the US dollar fluctuated 60% in a week, there'd be bank runs.  

the US will be here in a year, but there is no guarantee whatsoever the value in DOGE will be here in a year.  plan accordingly. 

Becuase there are no securities laws that protect investors in cryptos, nothing prevents any whale from actively manipulating the market to suit their own goals.  

Only a long-term investor would want to keep growth steady, and retain value over the long run.  How do you assume that the majority of BTC owners aren't selling off their coin a week or a month before you decide to?   

This goes for basically everything except for BTC and LTC, which have market caps too large for a pump-and-dump.  but DOGE?  WDC?  PPC?  all can, and have been manipulated.  

That is why I try to start out by piling up buy offers starting at one satoshi and (where feasible) proceeding satoshi by satoshi upwards from there.

So far I have had to jump five satoshis or even 25 satoshis or more at a time for some coins such as IXCoin and I0Coin; really DeVCoin is the only coin I have been able to get this "price floor" concept well-started.

DOGE looked interesting partly because like DeVCoin its price is few enough satoshis that placing buy orders at each satoshi of price all the way up looked like it might be feasible.

-MarkM-

I will only look at my investment based on USD, because i treat crypto investment as i treat all my other investments.  I live on USD, so it makes the most sense to me that way.  

If i have to work with micro-amounts of currency, e.g. i'll deal with kilodoge or megadoge instead of 1doge=0.0000000557USD.  it's the same, but my brain is wired for USD, not µBTC.

one day we might be able to transact goods for doge on the high street.  but that's not today, so i work in common use currency.  

Touche'

This new recent pump coins are mean't to be a bubble as fast as they can and then owners of millions of coins dump them in favor of BTC or LTC.

I would like to be smart enough to also put together an half assed altcoin and ride this craze in style, but I'll stick with doge poker for now =P

Ah well then yes we differ a lot in that.

Constantly devaluing coins such as dollars are not really my idea of a good investment, part of why I like bitcoin is that maybe eventually it will let me no longer have to hold constantly-depreciating assets such as fiat...

(If I wanted currency that constantly depreciates I would be using Freicoin, which has "demurrage".)

-MarkM-

It sounds like you're in for the long haul, and that's your investment strategy.  That's fine, but that's not mine.  

I have about 60-70 years of life to live, and I believe for a significant portion of my remaining years, so called 'fiat' currencies will still be the dominant method of transaction.  I am not ideologically committed to this position, but being as pragmatic as possible for 2013.

also, as an aside, i think anybody that uses 'fiat currency' in a derisive way is lol.   It's just a polarizing, adolescent way of looking at finance, and it's hypocritical to be paid in 'fiat currency' and use 'fiat currency' to live.  I bought my mining rigs with 'fiat currency'.  My education was paid for with 'fiat currency'.  the reason i'm here in a first world country on a computer with an internet connection talking with you is because of 'fiat currency'.  

Then again, i am investing in cryptos because i want to make money.  If you are investing in cryptos because of ideology, more power to you, brother.

I use CAD in local supermarkets and corner stores and gasoline stations and suchlike, I just do not consider it the best place to store wealth aka a good place to invest.

I buy it as I am forced to aka as I need it, albeit with some padding to try to avoid getting painted into a corner where I need more of it sooner than I am likely to be able to buy it at a good price.

For example just recently I decided to go ahead and re-wire my country-house, and got myself into some time-pressure whereby I am not sure I will be able to buy CAD at one thousand CAD per bitcoin or better so I am somewhat pressured to consider buying CAD at higher prices than that if I am to have enough CAD on hand soon enough to match the electrician's anticipated availablity-to-do-the-work date.

Basically though that mostly means I did not have enough padding; I "should" have secured the requisite CAD first, so that I was sure I was getting it at a "nice" price, before starting to get pinned down to any particular schedule as to when to go about rewiring the house.

-MarkM-

Ultimately, we agree on the same ideals.  money is too important to leave up to the harper government.  

however, i have about 3 dozen video cards i gotta pay for.  

I'm certainly a hedger; i will have some position in BTC and a few others long term because the long term odds are intriguing, but i view the majority of my work right now as a 5-10 year investment.  

However, if i need to liquidate for a house reno, i'd plan a month, or year in advance and dollar-cost-average to CAD.  For me, the money is made in the investment rather than currency arbitrage.  I also was brought up to have cash on hand for a rainy day, because it will always rain.  in 2013, i'd shit bricks if the rainy day fund was dependent on bitcoins.  

The rainy day fund is in cash right now because in 2013, I don't believe there is coherence in the value of BTC (i.e. there was no way to know if BTC would have skyrocketed past $1200 when you were doing the elx, or crashed shortly thereafter.)  I believe that waiting 10 years will iron out risk of day-to-day fluctuation, and that the overall value in BTC will rise.  I am not built to daytrade. After i'm done mining, i won't be checking the price of BTC daily or weekly anymore.  I think that not every country will recognize BTC, but it's unlikely that NO country will recognize BTC.   This should happen within a 10 year timeframe and help stabilize BTC.  It needs to be used as a currency, and not a speculation vehicle. (hi dogecoin!)

I know i won't get the best price, but i'm in it for the long haul.  that means i can sleep easy, and that's a good compromise for me.  

going back to altcoins:  The Altcoin market is a totally different ballgame than BTC.  parodies of parody coins are being churned out.  speculators (IN THIS THREAD!)  have openly talked about making mad stacks by starting their own crypto.  anybody can do it.  this will devalue all but a handful of coins in the future.   Nobody has a clue which ones will survive, but some feel the need to spend effort to promote the coin they're positioned heavily in.  

Currently, auto-switch mining pools are making all of the altcoins irrelevant.  If i can make 70-90% on an auto-pool what i could get speculating on a single coin (e.g. 100% on doge), i'd rather do that and let the machines run unattended for months.  I don't like picking at investments.  I think the auto-pools are the distilled, anonymous, dystopian future of all alt coins.

but dogecoin will be around because hey

Yeah but DOGEcoin isn't secure, not even as secure as Litecoin.

If it overtakes Litecoin in hashing power, reliably not just a moment at a time as it appears on some topsite for a moment, then maybe it will become "the" scrypt coin. But that might rest mostly on whether DOGE miners buy more scrypt-ASICs than Litecoin miners do and whether migrant miners aka blockchain-gangbangers buy more such ASICs than either-or-any coin's "native" miner-population.

That is a lot of why I buy ASICs: I cannot rely on joe sixpack to include all my coins in his merged mining, so I have to become a major miner myself (or come up with software for a pool that will distribute all the various coins to the miners) if I hope merged mining is going to turn out to be a good and robust way of securing more than just one chain (the parent chain; bitcoin) and thus allow the coins that moved to Open Transactions in order to avoid the insecurity of the blockchain format to move back to being blockchain-based.

-MarkM-

mainly i prop doge up as a joke, as the currency was originally intended.  I also am positioned in litecoin, but i think litecoin is obsolete but they don't know it yet.  

I find ASICs really interesting becuase they are disruptive technology.  they also spell the end of my GPU farm, but not as quickly as they did for BTC.  still, i feel the optimal time is now to add new hardware, before the ASICs gain widespread use.  who knows how many litecoin variants will be around by then, or the difficulty of mining coins that give good returns.  there isn't enough money in the world to live up to 99% the ongoing speculation for any of these altcoins.  this is where the bubble is. 

by end of 2014, BTC will be out of reach for the basement miner.  the difficulty arms race may turn the last few blocks into a multinational joint venture.    on Scrypt coins I don't think i want to chase the same thing with ASICs, so i'm putting the money into hw now rather than in the future.  

Dogecoin is a SHT wanna be

Basement miner yeah, unless they have an underground river or fast flowing sewer under the house.

Rooftop though should last longer, having access to sun and/or wind...

Next after re-wiring is solar and wind gear...

I want some kind of controller that can fire up more and more mining gear as the sun or wind increases, and tone down as they decrease, to save on batteries and on grid power.

(Use the power while it is coming in aka store it as coins instead of storing it on the grid or in batteries.)

-MarkM-

I think petahashes and yottahashes will be done in developing countries that offer subsidised or free power for tech speculators, and sooner than expected.  A handful of desktop asics, no matter how they're powered, will not generate fractions of coins in the near future.

That is why it is my country-house that I am re-wiring no a place in town. Rooftop is too small, with the coutry-house as I fill up it's land I can acquire more land.

Though a hot spring in Iceland sounds good too, or even a cold one.

Subsidies though ouch, trust governments to mess with things one way or another eh?

On the bright side though maybe government-operated and government-financed mining operations might be less likely than others to attack chains instead of mining them. Maybe. Maybe the various attacks will simply be cybercrimes like various other cybercrimes, full prosecutable under the law if you can track down who is doing them.


-MarkM-

That's not a government thing.  that's a crony capitalism thing.   It's also a developing country taking control of their own technological advancement. and i think it's going to happen in 2014.  

Governments aren't going to step in to control bitcoin; they don't need to becuase of the protocol.  they're going to make sure everything's trackable, just as the protocol outlined.  e.g. it's ironic Catcoin chose "cryptographic ANONYMOUS transfer" as a motto.  

Also, i don't really see attacks on the bitcoin blockchain in 2013, only on altcoins.  the altcoin culture is taking free market with no regulation to its maxima.  Every time there's a pump and dump, a few people get rich, and many people lose.  The problem is, every person that speculates on currencies 'to the moon!' will have to sell it off to someone else, and everyone wants to be the person that benefits from the pump.  it's a zero sum game:  the value has to come from somewhere.  it's not coming from Cameron Winklevoss.  The ultimate failing of an unregulated market are these pump and dump ripoffs.  

By comparison, the amounts taken from hashcows and dogewallet are infinitesimal compared to how much has been fleeced by a lot of altcoin speculation.  Theft is a crime, cyber or not.  i'm more concerned by the active manipulation of the altcoin market that cross into unethical behaviour, but are not illegal.  Even as an investor, i have a hard time tolerating blatant manipulation.