Bitcoin Forum

How do you cope with the fact that altcoins are entirely insignificant on a broad scale (at this point and time)?  Do you really believe that one altcoin besides Bitcoin would/could have a real stake in going mainstream?  Will there ever be an altcoin/coin that is used by 10 million, 100 million or 1 billion people or more?  call me naive but I honestly don't think there will ever be, I think it's not going to happen.

only thing I could think of would be eg. Ethereum or so used by 100M people all over the world maximum and thats about it in my view.  I don't really know, I'm a realist, not really crypto ideologist-optimist kinda guy as lotta folks here seem to be. I think Cryptocurrency--even Bitcoin--is not very significant in our world today.

Litecoin has a good chance.

Man I love your sarcasm  ;) :D ;D

100 million users.  Bitcoin only has an estimated 500,000 to 2 million users.  100 million users would probably result in a capitalization of $1 trillion.  The reason Paypal's capitalization isn't that big is because they just process payments, they're not a commodity like a coin is.

Why Ethereum?  More likely it'll end up as another Ripple or worse yet (more probable) another Mastercoin.  Don't worry, Vitalik can probably get another job somewhere within Goldman Sachs' or he can start a boy band.


Really the internet back in the late 1980s was bigger than Bitcoin currently is.  Bitcoin doesn't seem to be expanding its' userbase due to all the bad PR surrounding it.

I think the Anglophone world is too hostile towards cryptos, most room for growth will be in East Asia and Eastern Europe.  NODE and NEM seem like good contenders for that.  NEM last I check is led by a Japanese developer and a lot of their active community members are Asian.  NODE is Ukrainian and Ukraine is crazy about BTC (5000 bank terminals accept BTC).

As much as I would like to see a quality altcoin succeed, I do not think there is a market for an altcoin when bitcoin is so cheap. May be when bitcoin hits $1000 again, we may need an alt to handle small transactions.

Hi.  Is this sarcasm or are you being serious?
Argument NEM: Argument NODE:
Sorry but unless you're sarcastic both of these arguments don't make any sense to me. Care to elaborate?

Why Ethereum you say? Frankly I don't think it's a great project myself. What I see, though, are faces, funding and a plan, points that the "public" cares about. Mass adoption means pleasing the public, not pleasing nerds. It's a huge difference.

In Eastern Europe's case - that region is full of tech examples where domestic startups are more popular than their American counterparts.  Use of VK and Yandex exceeds use of Facebook and Google in that region.   Bitcoin around the world is often regarded as being American (even a lot of people think Satoshi is a pseudonym and/or a Japanese American in California).


You seem to be butt hurt over something and I don't know what exactly.  As I said before - Bitcoin only has 500,000 to 2 million users, this is nothing in the grand scheme when this technology will likely have billions of users someday and Bitcoin in the past two years has had very complacent development and marketing.

Maybe you are right. It is really hard to predict.
And I think Bitcoin is something like a dead coin walking. I am hoping that it is lasting as long as another coin is getting ready for mainstream. Bitcoin is extremly important to build the infrastructure for other coins.
Ethereum is besides NXT the only project which is handled big enough and professionel enough to succeed.
But maybe another coin will come to join the party. But at the moment there is none.
My guess at the moment is, it will be a battle of Ethereum and NXT.

TaunSee, not at all, I'm trying to understand peoples' vigorous optimism about a cryptocurrency scene that is extremely insignificant as of now (I consider myself a part of this scene as I do own coins and post here). That's not being butthurt, don't know why you would think that way unless you dislike my topics' content.

Why do you think this way? What makes you so convinced one day billions will use cryptocurrency? what leads to this great hope?

Thanks for elaborating by the way

Well.. are you talking about the whole scene or just the alternates?  As I said twice now I think Bitcoin only has 500K-2M users.   This is compared to payment processors like Paypal which are almost 150 million.

Digital currencies will be bigger some day as there are utilitarian uses for them.  

Some altcoins are VERY innovative, and bring a lot to the the table versus BTC. The vast majority however, only serve as a vehicle to gain or lose BTC.

This argument was and has been used on Bitcoin. Some altcoins will survive and make waves.

People are prepared to try new inovations on alt coins that the bitcoin developers would never consider trying on bitcoin. Eventually someone might create an alt with innovations that become as popular as bitcoin. That alt might become mainstream.

+1 to these two posts

The most innovative coins will win out. Just like how the most innovative businesses crush less innovative businesses. Cryptocoins are open source and thus there is no patent they can seek, or proprietary secret formula, that would make them safe from not having to improve upon themselves and innovate and yet still expect to be successful.

It will be (and is) a very competitive market. For every 100 alt coins that are released maybe 1 will be a success. You should only invest what you can afford to lose in alt coins and diversify your portfolio amongst the most promising cryptos, while leaving the majority of your crypto investments in Bitcoin.

My 2 satoshis

So the coins that are likely to succeed are those with:

1. Trusty developers. This is the most important one. Without trust, the coin is doomed. (check out this thread for POD ratings: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=568166.0)

2. Features. Does the coin offer something else than bitcoin? Does it have any unique features that makes it stand out? Does it have a solid roadmap for upcoming releases? Does the devs live up to their promises?

2. An active community. If noone has faith in the coin or is interested in it besides making quick money, it will never grow.

3. Marketing. To reach a bigger audience it needs marketing. This can be both from the devs or the community.

I chose my coin investments by those criterias. Trying to "game" the market and make a quick buck is just gambling, and it is mostely rigged by pump and dump groups.

I chose XST as my primary coin to invest in, but you may have your reasons and biases for choosing your investments. What is clear is that if bitcoin fails, for security or other reasons, altcoins will quickly become very very popular and only the most promising ones will be adopted.

You should look beyond simply a developer you can trust. There is a difference between a developer with an IQ of 110 compared to 140. There is also a difference in between a skilled developer with decades of programming experience compared to someone with just a college degree in computer science. Furthermore, I look for developers that are heavily invested in their projects as they are more likely to be dedicated to them, and ones that do not overextend themselves across multiple projects a la jl7777.

Your points as to features are good, I would also add ease of use and improved features upon Bitcoin.. not necessarily new features although that is good too if they are innovative enough to stand out as you said.

I agree communities and marketing are very important, but perhaps less important than the above two factors (in my opinion), as if your ideas, innovation, and implementation are solid then the community and thus marketing is sure to follow. I think most marketing is formed by communities and the best form of advertising is by word of mouth, so communities and marketing are mutually inclusive and after effects of solid innovation and implementation.

Also a few more things I think are important:

Making sure that it has a fair and decently distributed release. Innovation can overcome this (ripple), but it will be a permanent black eye that people will always use against the crypto and it takes revolutionary innovation to overcome.

Possibility of achieving a network effect. If another larger crypto is already doing on what you plan to do, it will be tough to overcome their network effect. Also, finding cryptos that are doing something really different are more likely to succeed off of achieving their own network effect.

Does the crypto solve a problem in society or a problem in other cryptocurrencies that could cause it to have value in the future and overcome a larger cryptocurrency's network effect? I don't think minor changes/improvements are enough to overcome network effects.

Maybe these things were covered in your more generalized statements, but cryptocurrency analysis can never really be extensive enough. I am sure I am forgetting a few things.

Great Empire of Earth, an 240 * 10¹⁵ km³ empire centered about Earth, has an official state money, Great Empire Coin.

GE coins are issued gratis, becoming a liability of those first utilizing them.

Nobody in alts is really trying to overtake BTC, this is a bit of a stigma. What we are doing here is competitively developing upon and expanding the bitcoin architecture. Bitcoin is very static.. it can't really be changed anymore. Altcoins? Yeah they die and improve every day. It's more risky and volatile yes.. but some of them are doing really well and coming up with incredible innovations. It's more about the innovations than the price.

An altcoin may not overtake BTC, but I can promise you the next big Crypto company will come out of alts.. not BTC. And when a method is developed to apply a better, more seamless purpose to cryptocurrency that actually draws the masses in again.. yeah that'll be alts.

You should do some research into what is actually going on here. I suggest starting HERE (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=795723.0).

Ironically I was just talking (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=795723.msg8959263#msg8959263) about people exactly like you in that thread.

I would not imagine emp. Limakasidios so trifling as to establish a coin for non-use.

I think there are still a lot of things (security being one of the bigger sticking points) that are going to have to change for alt coins to gain mass adoption.

there are two economically accepted theories of value regarding cryptocurrencies. they both do not rely on technical development etc pp but on network effects. 

the more classical theory, imo the more sound one is that the greater network eats the smaller network and bitcoins role will even be more dominant in the future than it is now.

the second theory is that with this very easy to build decentralized networks, people can give value to things which they see valueable and we probably have a few hundred small but legitimate coins in the future - maybe one example for this is dogecoin.

I tend to believe that the first theory makes more sense because the utility of the network grows with the number of users - but what do I know about the future.

If you look closer you can see one existent niche which will probably not be filled by bitcoin. bitcoin is a decentralized transparent ledger, the maybe second biggest network will be a decentralized private ledger ;)

Altcoins are the best IT field of today.

yes, there will be these coins of massadoption, but it won't be the super innovative ones everyone hopes.

I agree with you that technology will have little to do with it.  I know what I believe will lead to mass appeal, but I'm curious as to what you think a particular coin needs to do to win the race to mass adoption?

has better chance then even bitcoin, core users here might hero worship btc creator, but the whole anon dev thing doesn't wash with joe public.

Depends on what you mean by mass adoption. I seriously doubt that any currently existing altcoin will get anywhere close to the number of users that Paypal has. There will be niche markets for certain things like anonymity, but not for general purpose transactions. There's simply no reason for the average individual to switch over from a centralized payment system.

I think there is a big need for an instant, no fee, transfer to anyone at anytime p2p payment system, just none exists in any meaningful way yet.

Looks like a scam now.

It's important to point out that just a couple of years ago bitcoin was nothing, no one used it, it was bug riddled, worth less than a dollar. But over time things improved and look where bitcoin is now. Whats not to say that at some point in the future a couple of the better alts will follow a similar path?

to come to massadoption it needs to appeal to the masses. Simplicity is a great part of that. Look at doge as good first example.

For massadoption the coin needs to:
-be simple
-be fun (not all of them - there is room for others too)
-be secure and reliable
-be fair
-be easy to handle
-not hardfork often

the coin that can be handled by the most stupid person with not much risks is the one that wins the race. Innovation, algorythms aswell as anonfeatures is extremely overrated

Agreed.

Maybe on an international scale, but a lot of countries have interbank domestic transfers already instant and free.

It actually really makes Bitcoin look worse in a country where you can just send money to your friends that way.

Bitcoin would have been better had it come out a few years before it did. Probably would have had a much better chance of being mainstream by now.

There are only two "coins" for me.

Bitcoin is the first one and altcoin is the second one.

Bitcoin is like the engine of crypto. And alts are like the gas.
(they will be always together.....in the future they maybe change their names, but the position is going stay)

It all depends on the approach the developer is taking to tackle the issue. I personally think NOXT with its public developer is going to be making inroads in a proper direction in that regard.

ANN here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=841741.0;all

Bitcoin is already "mass adopted" by techno-geeks, teens, etc...
And 100% of the 100s of Tier 2/Third World money transmitters.

https://www.egopay.com/exchange

BTC, LTC are universal.

The target market is saturated with this klunky 2009 technology (5 years = 100 years in internet time).

Anyone with credit cards and PayPal and a middle class lifestyle...
Has absolutely no use for all the hassles and bullshit that comes with Bitcoin.

When your accountant is talking about Bitcoin to prove he's hip...
All the actual hipsters are looooong gone.

The only game in town is now whether a full-blown "financial system" like NXT can gain traction...
By providing actual value as opposed the current pure speculation.

My guess is that only platforms that provide Tor grade anon or better...
Will survive the coming massive FinCEN crackdown on anon actors peddling unregistered securities.

But which altcoin? Altcoins are just the natural byproduct of something like bitcoin as it can be easily replicated and tweaked and people look to capitalize on it, though without innovation they're largely useless.

crypto is too complicated for most people, it will never reach mainstream. BTC and all alt coins are a fad where we are making money short term

i think Litecoin has a chance along with bitcoin.

It's heavily fallen in price this year. I'm wondering if it will continue falling next year.

Most altcoins were not even existing one year ago, so comparing them with BTC makes no real sense.
Some altcoins do have a big community - for example Dogecoin, which also did great steps for awareness and adoption - some are focused mainly on adding new features, gambling that features may make people need that coin.

This year was an explosion of new coins. Even somebody really interested in the altcoin scene can't keep up to really get involved in all of them, or at least all the promising ones.

Some do have potential, but it's hard to say now which ones will actually survive for 1-2 more years. And only then we can talk about big things, like adoption.