Bitcoin Forum

nah, I don't thinks so. There are just too many altcoins out there, mostly useless and the bitcoin is, well bitcoin, the main cryptocurency and the mostly used one. Bitcoin will have it's glory soon enough. :D

You do understand the Blockchain? You do understand Bitcoin is like an app on the Blockchain? Bitcoin is the currency to be used on the Blockchain for payments when the other apps, services and smart contracts are incorporated into the Blockchain. Bitcoin is going nowhere but UP in value over time.

Smart Contracts are from 1995, old news.

Edit: Bitcoin is the currency designed to be ran on the blockchain. No matter what's added. End of story.

Ok, I still don't really get what you're trying to convey...Yes we know Bitcoin runs on the blockchain, so does many other coins.

The thing is, there is absolutely no point of using an alternate blockchain when you can do the same things using the one that is used by most people, the one that has the most accessibility and the most hashing power. Network effect is stronger than you might think.

There's a misunderstanding there, "there is absolutely no point of using an alternate blockchain when you can do the same things using the one that is used by most people". That statement makes me believe that you think all altcoins are simply copy,clones of Bitcoin? If so, I would have to say that's entirely wrong. From what I've seen in that space, there are large #'s of coins that do not use the Bitcoin sourcecode at all and are made from scratch. In fact, even the 100% Bitcoin clone coins from years ago(2011-2012), improved upon Bitcoin in simple things like confirmation times and algo's used.

Yes, altcoins have a lot of thing behind the curtains that are different from bitcoin but not for the end user and this is what matters the most.

1) Satoshi Nakamoto owns a reported 1,000,000(1million) bitcoins. Does anyone else see the huge huge problem with this?

2) The Bitcoin Foundation, or the board representing Bitcoin, is full of illegal activity with dozens of former foundation members resigning from their positions this year. Charlie Shrem, a (former?) foundation member, has been invicted on April 10, 2014 on accusations of "operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, money laundering conspiracy and willfully failing to file suspicious activity reports with banking authorities". He was using Bitcoin to help users of the illegal drug marketplace, Silk Road, buy drugs with Bitcoin, as well as operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, (former) Bitinstant and Brock Pierce (current) foundation member, is an accused Child Molester.

3) Bitcoin is centralized. It is controlled by the mining pools. For instance, just a few months ago, Ghash.io caused quite a scare in which even Peter Todd, a core developer for Bitcoin, announced that he would be selling 51% of his Bitcoin's due to Ghash.io controlling and approaching 51% of Bitcoin's entire hashrate, which would easily allow them to commit a 51% attack on Bitcoin, thereby killing the currency by basically printing duplicate Bitcoins.

4) The most damming evidence of Bitcoin's certain death as of right now(excluding Satoshi's huge 1million Bitcoin stash) however, is Willy. Willy was a bot used on the MtGox exchange from since back in 2012. Willy was illegaly using false fiat funds to buy large quantities of Bitcoin's every hour for days and months on end, which was what led to All of Bitcoin's previous bullruns, as well as dumps when Willy reversed the trend and started selling Bitcoins. Basically, Bitcoin's entire price rise history and dumps, is due not to the traders, not to the news, but to a bot using fake money to buy bitcoins and sell them at a profit. Based upon that information, one can only guess that Bitcoin will never see a $1000+ price per coin again. http://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report-proof-of-massive-fraudulent-trading-activity-at-mt-gox-and-how-it-has-affected-the-price-of-bitcoin/

No. I think Satoshi well deserve his stash for taking a lot of his time creating bitcoin. Otherwise there would be no bitcoin and even no altcoin at all.


The bitcoin foundation has no authority over the bitcoin protocol so they can do whatever they want. End of story.


There is no incentive for any mining pool to undermine the network because of the economic and social forces behind it.


The volatility will fade out when market users will out number the total of trader. Until then expect a lot of volatility and manipulation.

If any of your points was fatal ones. Bitcoin would be already dead. Also, altcoins don't even address these.

If an altcoin has a serious advantage over bitcoin, we can most likely implement that feature into bitcoin and just fork it. But with the strength of the bitcoin network the new coin would have to have a serious advantage.

I got your reason altcoins will succeed right here.

http://[Suspicious link removed]/lnoekb9

It appears all you know about Bitcoin is from blogs you have read on the internet. You definitely do not know the economics, finance, legal issues and mining facts involved with Bitcoin. I would say you may have been involved with Bitcoin for a couple of months, if not just a couple of weeks. Posts like yours reminds us all how far we have made it in this Revolution. You should really learn some basic facts about what's really going on here and you may finally get it.

Since this is probably really all about altcoins, here's the speech:

Bitcoin itself had in the past been vulnerable to very similar things that you said happened and now see happen with altcoins these days, but fortunately THAT WINDOW IS NOW CLOSED.

Part of the definition of the bitcoin protocol includes the checking of the proof of work put into various block chains, and then choosing the one with the most work. Bitcoin has more proof-of-work in its blockchain than any other competing cryptocurrency, and so by definition it must be the one chosen, and all others ignored.

Altcoins are all very similar to Bitcoin: there is a block chain to store transactions, a consensus mechanism to build the block chain, and a cryptographic protocol to register transactions. Some prominent examples are PPCoin, Primecoin, Litecoin, and Freicoin.

Some altcoins incorporate interesting new ideas, but there is an essential feature of Bitcoin which they all lack. It is not a matter of its technology, but rather of history and community. Quite simply, a medium of exchange that is more widely accepted on the market is more useful than one which is not. This is known as the network effect. An initial imbalance between two nearly equal media of exchange will benefit whichever is more widely accepted until a single one overwhelms the rest. There is no limit to this effect: ultimately one would always expect a single currency to overcome all its competitors.

Because it was started earlier and has had a greater opportunity to grow and attract users, Bitcoin has a market larger by a wide margin than all the markets of all the altcoins put together, and this makes it vastly more useful as a currency. To defeat Bitcoin, an altcoin would require not just superior technology, but such vastly superior technology as to be an advance over Bitcoin comparable to the advance Bitcoin represents over fiat currency. Furthermore, a truly great innovation would much better serve people by being incorporated into future versions of Bitcoin rather than by requiring them to switch to something else. Indeed, the people who have proposed new ideas that are actually good, such as Zerocoin and mini-blockchain, did not develop their own currencies around them, but have simply described their usefulness as features.

The Bitcoin community is not just overwhelmingly larger but of overwhelmingly better quality as well. Bitcoin is surrounded by real entrepreneurs working hard to create new and useful services for Bitcoin. Altcoins are surrounded by loud-mouthed pretenders with irrational hopes of duplicating Nakamoto's success. This does not mean that there is anything intrinsically wrong with altcoins: the problem is simply that once Bitcoin exists, then there is no additional value, from a monetary standpoint, of creating knock-offs. Can anyone really expect to create something of value by rereleasing Bitcoin under a new name and with a few tiny changes to its source code? What makes Bitcoin great cannot easily be duplicated. Thus, while the Bitcoin community matures and grows as more and more entrepreneurs are attracted to its potential, the altcoin communities can only whine for attention.

For a new currency to take bitcoins place it would have to represent a significant improvement over bitcoin, or bitcoin would have to first FAIL before this could happen. So the question is not will bitcoin become obsolete, but will (your proposed new coin) overtake bitcoin? I don’t see any reason to believe that Altcoins represents a fundamental new innovation with meaningful improved functionality.

In physics, we learn about the concept of entropy. Entropy is often described as “chaos”, “randomness”, or “disorder”. To simplify quantum mechanics as much as possible, imagine a basket with a line drawn down the middle, and throw some balls into the basket. If all the balls are on one side of the line, that is an ordered state and has low entropy. If the balls are spread across both sides then it has higher entropy.

Now, let us take the concept of entropy and apply it to cryptocurrencies. We can imagine each cryptocurrency created has a possibility that some value can be placed within it. If all possible value is placed in bitcoin, and none in litecoin or altcoin, then this is a low entropy state. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that entropy in a system should always increase. So we should expect the total cryptocurrency value to be spread among all the possible altcoins.

Going back to our example of balls in a basket, one can easily get all the balls onto one side of the line simply by tilting the basket. This represents the concept of enthalpy, or energy within the system. Just as gravity pulls the balls onto one side of the basket, enthalpy can pull things into a higher entropic state. The most proof-of-work has been put into bitcoin, and so it takes higher energy to put any value into an altcoin.

From an entropy standpoint, there will always be alternate currencies, and the value assigned to them will always be greater than zero. But from an enthalpy standpoint, bitcoin is favored over altcoins, so the total value of each altcoin will remain very low compared to bitcoins.

1) Satoshi Nakamoto owns a reported 1,000,000(1million) bitcoins. Does anyone else see the huge huge problem with this? If Satoshi's bitcoin wallet or addresses were hacked or taken control of by a relative, friend, or others and they decided to even sell a fraction of the coins, coupled with the already uncertain market, Bitcoin's price will plummet to less than $1 per coin. Honestly, Satoshi owning 1million bitcoins has doomed Bitcoin from the start. This is one of the Major reasons why so few legit organzations are out there accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment and another reason why most people looking at Bitcoin think of it as a ponzi scheme(which it is) or scam.

2) The Bitcoin Foundation, or the board representing Bitcoin, is full of illegal activity with dozens of former foundation members resigning from their positions this year. Charlie Shrem, a (former?) foundation member, has been invicted on April 10, 2014 on accusations of "operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, money laundering conspiracy and willfully failing to file suspicious activity reports with banking authorities". He was using Bitcoin to help users of the illegal drug marketplace, Silk Road, buy drugs with Bitcoin, as well as operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, (former) Bitinstant and Brock Pierce (current) foundation member, is an accused Child Molester.

3) Bitcoin is centralized. It is controlled by the mining pools. For instance, just a few months ago, Ghash.io caused quite a scare in which even Peter Todd, a core developer for Bitcoin, announced that he would be selling 51% of his Bitcoin's due to Ghash.io controlling and approaching 51% of Bitcoin's entire hashrate, which would easily allow them to commit a 51% attack on Bitcoin, thereby killing the currency by basically printing duplicate Bitcoins.

4) The most damming evidence of Bitcoin's certain death as of right now(excluding Satoshi's huge 1million Bitcoin stash) however, is Willy. Willy was a bot used on the MtGox exchange from since back in 2012. Willy was illegaly using false fiat funds to buy large quantities of Bitcoin's every hour for days and months on end, which was what led to All of Bitcoin's previous bullruns, as well as dumps when Willy reversed the trend and started selling Bitcoins. Basically, Bitcoin's entire price rise history and dumps, is due not to the traders, not to the news, but to a bot using fake money to buy bitcoins and sell them at a profit. Based upon that information, one can only guess that Bitcoin will never see a $1000+ price per coin again. http://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report-proof-of-massive-fraudulent-trading-activity-at-mt-gox-and-how-it-has-affected-the-price-of-bitcoin/

A little info about me: I'm a decent sized Bitcoin holder, having a little under 1,000 bitcoins as of right now. I bought most of them in late 2012 and sold quite a bit more around mid 2013. Anyway, at the beginning I entertained the thought that Bitcoin will truly change the world and become a revolutionary, unstoppable force. But, after really looking at both sides of the story, I realized that Bitcoin is doomed to fail no matter how much media exposure it gets. I know what I type below seems hypocritical, with myself owning Bitcoins, but I can't hold it in any longer and watch all the brainwashing go on in this forum. I truly do not believe that Bitcoin will stay on top the next coming years, for the reasons listed below, it's(Bitcoin's) entire history has been falsified. I have recently turned my attention away from Bitcoin and into Altcoins, which believe it or not, lack the faults that Bitcoin has below and improve on nearly everything that Bitcoin can't.

Basically I've come up with a few basic reasons why everything we knew about Bitcoin, price wise, has been false, and that the entire market is 100% manipulation and games.

1) Satoshi Nakamoto owns a reported 1,000,000(1million) bitcoins. Does anyone else see the huge huge problem with this?

2) The Bitcoin Foundation, or the board representing Bitcoin, is full of illegal activity with dozens of former foundation members resigning from their positions this year.

3) Bitcoin is centralized. It is controlled by the mining pools.

4) The most damming evidence of Bitcoin's certain death as of right now(excluding Satoshi's huge 1million Bitcoin stash) however, is Willy.

A little info about me: I'm a decent sized Bitcoin holder, having a little under 1,000 bitcoins as of right now. I bought most of them in late 2012 and sold quite a bit more around mid 2013. Anyway, at the beginning I entertained the thought that Bitcoin will truly change the world and become a revolutionary, unstoppable force. But, after really looking at both sides of the story, I realized that Bitcoin is doomed to fail no matter how much media exposure it gets. I know what I type below seems hypocritical, with myself owning Bitcoins, but I can't hold it in any longer and watch all the brainwashing go on in this forum. I truly do not believe that Bitcoin will stay on top the next coming years, for the reasons listed below, it's(Bitcoin's) entire history has been falsified. I have recently turned my attention away from Bitcoin and into Altcoins, which believe it or not, lack the faults that Bitcoin has below and improve on nearly everything that Bitcoin can't.

Basically I've come up with a few basic reasons why everything we knew about Bitcoin, price wise, has been false, and that the entire market is 100% manipulation and games.


1) Satoshi Nakamoto owns a reported 1,000,000(1million) bitcoins. Does anyone else see the huge huge problem with this? If Satoshi's bitcoin wallet or addresses were hacked or taken control of by a relative, friend, or others and they decided to even sell a fraction of the coins, coupled with the already uncertain market, Bitcoin's price will plummet to less than $1 per coin. Honestly, Satoshi owning 1million bitcoins has doomed Bitcoin from the start. This is one of the Major reasons why so few legit organzations are out there accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment and another reason why most people looking at Bitcoin think of it as a ponzi scheme(which it is) or scam.

2) The Bitcoin Foundation, or the board representing Bitcoin, is full of illegal activity with dozens of former foundation members resigning from their positions this year. Charlie Shrem, a (former?) foundation member, has been invicted on April 10, 2014 on accusations of "operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, money laundering conspiracy and willfully failing to file suspicious activity reports with banking authorities". He was using Bitcoin to help users of the illegal drug marketplace, Silk Road, buy drugs with Bitcoin, as well as operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, (former) Bitinstant and Brock Pierce (current) foundation member, is an accused Child Molester.

3) Bitcoin is centralized. It is controlled by the mining pools. For instance, just a few months ago, Ghash.io caused quite a scare in which even Peter Todd, a core developer for Bitcoin, announced that he would be selling 51% of his Bitcoin's due to Ghash.io controlling and approaching 51% of Bitcoin's entire hashrate, which would easily allow them to commit a 51% attack on Bitcoin, thereby killing the currency by basically printing duplicate Bitcoins.

4) The most damming evidence of Bitcoin's certain death as of right now(excluding Satoshi's huge 1million Bitcoin stash) however, is Willy. Willy was a bot used on the MtGox exchange from since back in 2012. Willy was illegaly using false fiat funds to buy large quantities of Bitcoin's every hour for days and months on end, which was what led to All of Bitcoin's previous bullruns, as well as dumps when Willy reversed the trend and started selling Bitcoins. Basically, Bitcoin's entire price rise history and dumps, is due not to the traders, not to the news, but to a bot using fake money to buy bitcoins and sell them at a profit. Based upon that information, one can only guess that Bitcoin will never see a $1000+ price per coin again. http://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report-proof-of-massive-fraudulent-trading-activity-at-mt-gox-and-how-it-has-affected-the-price-of-bitcoin/

the fact of the matter is all Altcoins are copycat, gimmicky pump and dump schemes.

You obviously haven't done your homework.

Aren't Altcoins derivative from this first coin?  Homework done.

Some are (copycat), some are far from it. Homework not done.

The quality of the people involved with the sdiechain whitepaper shows that at least some prominent knowledgeable Bitcoiners recognize that altcoins technology is pretty interesting and even superior in many aspects to Bitcoin.
Just as no one knew where bitcoin would be a couple of years ago, no one knows where altcoins will be over the horizon. And the horizon is not that far away

I always think about ipv6 and ipv4 in this comparison.

I don't think this comparison is valid or interesting.
Bitcoin is more like a higher layer protocol over TCP/IP, I like comparing it to UUCP that had limited applications. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=831879.msg9299545#msg9299545)

IIRC Gavin recently observed that a better analogy would be ethernet replacing token ring.

That's physical level. Shouldn't we best search for software level analogies? Crypto currencies are software after all.

LOOOOOOL - @ alt coins, is your brain all mush or something W T F.. I like to call them Altcopies... they are all just copies off each other with a very nnumbers changed in the code.

Do you realize how many big names are invested into bitcoin and banking on it to thrive not only survive- In fact, have you heard of Blockstream? I can see this destroying the need for altcoins or even ethereum, counterparty, colour coins.. We only need the power, network effect, publicity and scarcity of Bitcoin , this can support the entire planet no problem, once we have people developing on top and along side it we wont need a whole heap of copied BS inflating the world of cryptocurrency.

Again, homework not done. Most altcoins are copies, but not all of them.

There are not so many big names actually investing in Bitcoin yet, and what they invest in is mostly payment platforms and businesses, not bitcoins? Do you know why? Because payment platforms and infrastructure is easily adaptable to any crypto currency, and it's up to users to decide which one will be the leader, or perhaps even several leaders. Smart money invests to take profits in whatever users decide to be the currency of choice, smart money will skim their cut in any case. They like to invest in businesses generating profits, a large share of that investing goes into mining bitcoins. But do they keep those bitcoins or sell for fiat? The price action should tell us.

If an altcoin has a serious advantage over bitcoin, we can most likely implement that feature into bitcoin and just fork it.

Blockchain technology is the future of financial systems. In my opinion, when all of this becomes mainstream, there will be several cryptos that will get their piece of the market. Bitcoin will be one of them, but not the only one! Nobody should bet against the innovation, never!!  :)

Can you imagine the politics  :)

Yes not all but the concept all came from bitcoin if it wasn't for bitcoin these coins will not be here. We don't need altcoins, the only reason why ppl invest in altcoins is because they are cheap and they think its going to take off like bitcoin and they are going to become rich with fiat. Its all BS in my eyes.

Offcourse innovation is the only way but the whole point of scarcity is scarcity, we don't need a whole new coin just because it has 1-3 extra features that people want, again this is why blockstream has gotten the ball rolling, they understand exactly this. Everything can be added to Bitcoin itself. And Innovation is the KEY, just wait and see. People have even nicknamed blockstream the altcoin killer lol

I don't think this comparison is valid or interesting.
Bitcoin is more like a higher layer protocol over TCP/IP, I like comparing it to UUCP that had limited applications. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=831879.msg9299545#msg9299545)