Bitcoin Forum

IMO The point of cryptos:

A new kind of easy to use and access digital cash.

A new kind of freedom where you can use your money without having to pay big brother a cut.

A chance to revolutionize currency.

A chance to have a say in how the money system works and be part of the system.

A chance to make the world a better place by lowering the costs of goods and services, re-invigorating global manufacturing and more evenly distributing wealth.

What we are getting:

Greed

Theft

A stack of shitcoins which have no intention of ever being used for anything but a simple ponzi scheme

A diluted market where the points above are being muddied to levels that those coming into cryptos don't even know what they are!

Now individual countries and groups are running their own shitcoins scams.

Government controlled coins, pre-mine etc....


How to fix this before a potentially great thing gets killed off?

Well ... it is hard to fight with those things that you pointed but I agree with you.

He must just hope that the "good side" will be stronger than other one.
Make support. Be aware and share good information with others :)
 

Regards!

It does not usually seem to take long for a shit coin to die. I doubt many of the worst coins will be here in a months time, so the good ones should be OK.

Free market will solve all issues. Stay calm and carry on.

The new coins are a joke everyday we get a country coin now !? Siliconvaleycoin ? give me a break

Greed, theft and so on aren't exclusive to cryptocurrencies; these just offer another avenue for it to come through, and that is to be expected.

Still, it is quite an exaggeration to state that the point of cryptos is being destroyed. In fact, I would say the opposite: they haven't ever been more popular, and increasingly more people realize there are viable alternatives to the current system. This seems to me to be the most important aspect.

Herein lies the problem of cryptocoins as a whole. When there is no regulation, you get a rogue free market. I am not saying we should regulate crypto currencies, but something needs to be done.

The problem in my opinion is not the number of new pump coins showing up, it's the exchanges that keep getting hacked and failing. The lack of security, the lack of care and due-diligence when it comes to running a proper cryptocurrency exchange.

Even though most exchanges are making good money, it seems the money being made from commissions and fees is not being invested back into the business itself. In the real world, all businesses operate on the principle of once your overheads are covered, you invest a little of the excess back into the business to help it grow further (or you take investment). Some of these so-called secure exchanges are running on the likes of Linode or DigitalOcean virtual private servers, don't understand basic server management, don't have hot to cold storage processes in place and keep everything in the one location.

All serious crypto coins need to work together and create the ultimate decentralised currency software that anyone can run. But it's a double-edged sword here, because won't that mean more people will be able to start running exchanges if you give the software away? Yes, but they're doing that anyway and look at the results? At least if there is a seriously tested, developed and constantly updated exchange, we can make it that extra bit harder for exchanges to fail because they're a sole point of failure.

Everyone needs to band together; Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and Infinitecoin in particular collectively have just as much community and resources as a company like Google does. I think we need to organise some kind of online meetup amongst cryptos, a plan and solution needs to be developed and acted upon.

Sometimes you need a dramatic headline to get sufficient attention my friend! I see it worked!

If miners stopped responding, then shitcoin devs wouldn't create bad new coins, so...
Blame the miners!  :P


Only support the coins that meet your high standards.
The others will fade away soon enough.

the good ones will stay. the bad ones will be gone soon.

What you really mean is

How to fix this before a potentially great thing grows to 10x more?

Its going to grow but negative people in general will see cryptos failing. Negative FUD spreaders

The market has been contracting for a couple of months now due to a lack of new money coming and the issues I listed. It was once near 15 billion.

That would be due to bitcoin prices then

Man, I hear ya BUT you cannot protect people from themselves.




Agreed.

Free market would be great but is it really possible to make it "free"?

Yes, nobody is forcing anyone to buy coins or trade at a particular exchange. If an exchange keeps getting hacked people will stop trading there. If a coin is shit people will stop buying it.

free market will only solve the issues if it operates under enlightened self interest.

since the crypto market is mainly motivated by only selfish interest, you're pulling the wool over your own eyes.

Exactly. Cryptos are too important and grand an idea for them to possibly be destroyed by petty looters.

Selfish interests are no threat to cryptos. Selfish persons that are able to view the long term know that their interests will gain value only if the person is benefical to them, if he acts in a way that actually gives them value.

The only small threat are short term gamblers who want to get rich in one night on a new crypto and lose it all in a week. This is not selfishness, but plain desilusion. These actions are not sustainable, and those who engage in it will ultimately wallow in their own filth while the truly selfish persons will prosper.

The crypto market wasn't started with motivations of selfishness or greed!

If it was it wouldn't be open source and wouldn't have been able to grow as it has!

Lets keep the conversation on point, what can be done to improve the crypto market and limit shitcoin scams?

Open-source does not mean devoid of greed, it means that everybody has an equal chance at being greedy, and that's wonderful.
What can be done to improve the crypto market and limit shitcoin scams? That will happen on its own quite soon, when the noobs will have been burned enough times that they'll decide they don't want to be scammed anymore ;) Really, free market will take care of this.

+1

sadly too be replaced by 10x more bad ones  :'(

Cryptos are still young, they have to pass through their phase of messy childishness!
They'll mature one day, if we keep putting our trust in them they will grow.

The free market will sort things out. It was naive to imagine that the good would come without the sin the humans bring wherever they go. But Adam Smith's invisible hand will save the day. That is, if self-appointed fascists don't wreck things first in their efforts to impose their will on others who are interested in altcoins they disapprove of.

Educate, but don't coerce. Let people think for themselves. That's all I ask.

yes always the default answer to those who are apathetic.

That's not apathetic. That means thinking that we, who are the free market, have enough rationality to steer the cryptos in a profitable way in the long term.

profitable?

The way I see it, even though there are many copy-coins in the market that bring nothing new other than a name. The market will cater towards the cryptos that have the most development and growth potential.

Isn't this what happened during the tech boom in the stock market which resulted in a tech stock crash(at least in the US)? If I remember correctly all these new cryptos all started after DOGE right when it exploded in popularity? Hence we got the Catcoin, Moon, Flappy, Corgi, etc, etc.

Every new market has a period where everyone tries to copy one another as they see potential money. When no new money is coming in and miners can't sell there mined coins. It all evens out with "natural selection" where the strongest survive.

...everybody has an equal chance at being greedy, and that's wonderful.
You are wise, and able to explain your ideas well.

Quite likely it is the other way around, scammers raking in huge fortunes on insane scams and using bitcoin to cash out to fiat since their scamcoins usually do not trade directly with fiat. So whatever coin (probably bitcoin and/or litecoin) they use to cash out their ill-gotten gains to fiat gets its prices suppressed as they don't much care about getting a good price, its faster to clone more scams than it is to wait to get a "good price" for whatever you use to do your cashing-out through...

-MarkM-

Unless exchanges become more reliable, cryptos simply won't get greater public acceptance. People like to say crypto problems/falling prices are due to scams... and yes, if you mean exchanges 'losing' money ... but as far as coin devs scamming people, I really doubt there is any correlation to falling prices or 'killing off' cryptos. Let the market decide which coins live, and which fade away.

Solid12345 made a great post in that shitcoin killing thread, probably the only one even worth reading ... will repeat it here --

Seems an abuse of the term developer. Usually they are far far from being developers. If they were developers they could develop something actually useful, probably useful to a lot of currencies/coins, way more useful than yet antoher garbage crapcoin they do not have enough hardware to secure nor, usually, any actual intent or even desire to secure it.

If you are a developer pick a secure coin and develop stuff for it. All the secure coins can also make use of it. There is no need for more coin types just for more actual things developed which actually make coins useful.

For example you could develop a secure exchange system, in which no-one's balance can be changed without their own private keys on their own machine signing off agreement with the change of their balance, like Open Transactions does.

-MarkM-

If you ask me if there are way too many useless coins coming out... yep, of course. As for saying there is no need for any more coins at all, I don't agree, as I believe it's usually easier to make a new coin if it has a lot of new features, than fork older ones (will vary of course depending on what is added). And it's human nature to prefer to put one's hard work on their own project, rather than someone else's coin.

Junk coins will fade away on their own. Ideally big exchanges wouldn't even list junk coins, but we have no control over that. As to what is a junk coin... what is a scam... what is a good coin... again, let the market decide.

scrypt asic will kill all the shitcoins, well it already is

People are still posting in the ixcoin
each ixcoin is still worth money!

I think only one of those were the real point why we are getting into altcoins.

Thefts and greed were long before altcoins, it is nothing new. We have same problems everywhere else. We can't believe in utopia and run away crying when not everything is perfect.

I agree, no system is perfect. We can make it better by learning from mistakes.

Assuming people can't protect themselves and by some ways doing it for them seems quite fascist to me.
I say let them learn from their mistakes, that's the only way we can build a free and prosperous economy.

Check its hash power. Way more than Aurora's I expect.

Insecure blockchains are stupid, its like a bank without a vault, planning to keep people's money in a wet paper bag labelled "free money".

-MarkM-

Insecure blockchains are stupid, its like a bank without a vault, planning to keep people's money in a wet paper bag labelled "free money".

Best comment in this thread so far ^!

Also Mark is right scammers are cashing out of bitcoin and sucking the liquidity out of the market!

One scam coin dies another 5 replace it. IMO All the pre-mine country based coins are the biggest scam yet you can bet your ass that the owners of the pre-mine are the dumpers causing the drastic drops, then as Mark said they are converting to btc and cashing out. Then you throw in some false rumors by anonymous source causing panic in China and you get what we have right now!

Not many posters have put forward any options of how to address the current flurry of scams.

Saying "The free market will sort things out." is clearly not so as things are deteriorating and scams are increasing 10 fold under the current market environment.

  

By my opinion people cannot protect themselves.

They are gamblers or they are manipulated by scammers or big players. Protecting them is not fascistic. "Free market" is never free but it might be fascistic (or social-darwinistic).

Good way to selfprotect is not to buy everything new and mostly very overpriced. I don't know where does that mania of buying something new and very overpriced comes from?   

I think I should open new simple topic :)

There's nothing wrong with social darwinism, it's the only thing that triggers evolution ;)

Its so wild can we all tell each other that the alts will never go anywhere.. You are all wasting money STOP.. I promise you that you all can pay your taxes in USD!

I'm quite sure most people who are into Bitcoin did not buy them to pay their taxes ;)

But, but, America, america, fucn amerii thts wht matters righttttt....

Countries are overated :D

All is lost. Botnets have driven prices almost below profitability, mass asic farms starting everyday, vertcoin isn't the answer asic got that to...all down hill from here.
POS is the only way to go now, Blackcoin, Mintcoin, AndroidsTokens. Less energy, faster transactions, no 51%, no mining which = no dumping,
its all up hill if they have good communities and devs. Seems they faster technology comes out the faster it becomes outdated  :'(

True in part but what about coins that are about to be completely mined? Where do they sit in your logic?

How does "no mining = no dumping"?

What percentage of the pre-mine is held by the principal of the coins you mentioned? 

Well, I posted my idea for a solution...  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=541165.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=541165.0)

ebliever has a point, and you do too. I think the trouble is, we're relying on emotionally-charged buzzwords like "free market" and "greed" that conflate more than one issue.

When a new frontier generates sudden wealth, there'll always be a boom-town mentality: always. The history of every gold rush and oil boom shows it.

What's interesting about those booms is that they always attract rough-hewn characters who rise to the fore when the boom goes into top gear. Which makes sense: when wealth comes quickly, impulsiveness pays off. "Buy now or pay double" is insane in a quiet marketplace - no-one thinks that when they buy bread, except in hyperinflation - but it's a rule that works when the marketplace is volatile and what you're buying is going "to the moon!" Also, "rush this thing out or we'll be beaten!" makes sense in a hothouse of turbulent innovation but nowhere else.

The trouble with the cyber world isn't the "free market," it's that boom-town mentality combined with de facto anarchy. No sensible definition of the free market lets in outright theft: I don't mean the buzz-word "theft," I mean literal theft. Incidents where cybers are, quite literally, stolen by malicious hackers.

Related to the theft problem is an influx of people providing services who don't know what they're doing. A lot of what's called "theft" falls into this category. When combined with people coming in who don't know anything except how to use a wallet and how to hit the "buy" button on an exchange, it's inevitable that there'll be a lot of accidents waiting to happen. What else can we expect in a boom-town environment that puts a cash value on impulsiveness?

To make things even more confusing, even the smartest and most careful thinkers miss wrinkles and exploits that can only be revealed by field tests and real-world experience. Even the geniuses have limited CPU power in their wetware. Add that to the boom-town mentality and you get that limited CPU power conflated with outright incompetence. That's part of life when real-world field tests combine with quick money.

"Do something!" Another buzzword. Yes, life would be easier and we'd all be less embarrassed if the government would step in and whack the people we think act egregiously. The fact is, government officials aren't interested (outside of money laundering) and for good reason. A regulatory framework, or even a set of statutes, depends upon a stable pattern of business in the industry. One where best practices are reasonably clear-cut, and where there's a solid database of bad practices that can be clamped down upon. The reasonableness is crucial because people are good at seeing self-interest behind any purportedly idealistic reform. In this context, "reasonable" means "obvious to the point where who benefits doesn't matter." After all, people who aren't brawlers have a vested interest in the assault laws.  ;)

Case in point: airline safety regulations. They don't grate because the regulators have the knack of coming up with safety regulations that make sense. Note, though, that those regulations make sense in the context of a mature industry. Imagine imposing a regulatory framework or set of statutes on the biplane stage...

In the absence of government interest, we're basically on our own.

P.S.: "Let the free market sort it out" is another way of saying "experience is a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." (Benjamin Franklin) The former has the advantage of being more polite.  ;D

Well i hope you proceed with this idea, and create an initiative that shows a coin is legitimate, almost a certification for cryptos.

You could create a symbol that is added to a coins website or similar that shows the coin has been audited and meets the criteria of a legit crypto.

One test you missed though would be a determination of a coins capacity to be adopted as a currency!

As far as looking to create more coins, like seriously don't we have enough?

Perhaps pm me and we'll talk some more!

Any type of currency will have the shadows of greed and theft linked to it.