Bitcoin Forum

I've been taking a look into litecoin there seems to be a consensus that it would compete for the attention of current Bitcoin users as such its a bad thing, isn't there an argument in favour of having more than one crypto-coin, I would have thought that for anyone that hadn't heard of Bitcoin the idea it wasnt a one trick pony in that there's a few competing coins would add weight to the fact these are the future and here to stay rather than something that looks like a one off ongoing experiment for enthusiastic techies.

Is it likely bit pay etc. could offer checkout in any alt-coin of choice?

http://i846.photobucket.com/albums/ab22/1973mb1973/fc9c05098885ed9e80379dc0863ee7e1_zpseb14786e.jpg

IMO, atm Bitcoin is pegged to Mtgox USD, and Litecoin is pegged to Bitcoin.

Competition is ALWAYS healthy

If there is to be 4 times the number of litcoin does that suggest that litecoin may achieve a quarter of bitcoins price, or is that totally dependent on merchants being able to accept both litecoin and Bitcoin and is that impractical?.

Yes, competition is good.  The Bitcoin community should work hard at making Bitcoin as good as it can be to ensure the network effect takes hold and makes it as difficult as possible for an alt-coin to gain market share.  This doesn't mean that an alt-coin would ultimately have to cease to exist, it just means that Bitcoin should capture the bulk of the new adopters of digital currencies such that Bitcoin enjoys a better growth rate (and hence, appreciation in value) than these competitors.  The altcoins could still exist and serve some niche markets.

Yes, but not in the way you think.  Here's some insight into our thought process on this question: Bitcoin is currently the most secure method of electronic payment on the planet.  The network of miners is what provides that security and today it vastly exceeds that of any altcoin.  Bitpay will use the most secure and private payment method available for the actual transaction.  But that doesn't mean you couldn't use Litecoin, you just need a wallet that can automatically exchange Litecoin for Bitcoin just prior to a transaction.  Should something disastrous happen with Bitcoin and Litecoin became the most secure method of payment, we would transition to using Litecoin for the payment mechanism (and then you would need to exchange your Bitcoins for Litecoins just prior to conducting the transaction).

So, when I think about Litecoin (and the other alt coins), I think of it in terms of:
- providing that competitive pressure to Bitcoin that you allude to
- being a contingency solution should something disastrous happen to Bitcoin
- being of some utility for people that might like to have transactions that aren't visible on the Bitcoin blockchain

bitcoin is pegged to the mtgox.com dollar price so miners can calculate their electricity costs to ensure profit
litecoin is pegged to the btc-e.com dollar price so miners can calculate their electricity costs to ensure profit
this is proven by the BTC price rise causing the bitcoin/litecoin direct trading prices to drop on btc-e.com, while the litecoin/dollar prices rise. and litecoin enthusiasts are happy, not sad.

yet ASICs will make it even harder to grab new adopters to bitcoin. i believe new adopters would use litecoin as their training ground, before investing huge wealth into ASIC's..


those three points i totally agree with.

and seeing as you work for bitpay. Can i just highlight the great PR skills bitpay has to this website just-eat.com (http://just-eat.com) and leave it as food for thought. although they do not have USA offices and services, they do have a regional HQ in canada, which should be close enough, and as you will see a wealth of business around the world once you get the foot in the door
 ;D

As for litecoin being competitive or not, litecoin is exactly where bitcoin was when bitcoin was 14months old. its still new, but it is the only alt coin to survive this long without being hard wired to bitcoin (nmc).
many consider bitcoin as a teenager, still young with things to learn, trying out drugs and hacking computers for fun as most teenagers do. litecoin is the step brother who is still just a todler. yes they bicker and fight for attention and they don't have the same dad (satoshi/coblee) but when they grow up, who knows bitcoin could become drug dependant and stick with his drug fuelled ways or change his ways and succeed. and litecoin could either follow the same path, or learn from the step brother and find a different route in lfe.

plus there is an increase of services and people using litecoin everyweek. so watch this space.
http://www.litecoingames.com/ (http://www.litecoingames.com/)
that link is to sway away troll replies that no one is using litecoin for anything else but mining. there are other links, but ill leave the fun of finding them to anyone interested.

Competition is good, but i don't think litecoin is competitive.  :)
Could you tell me about how competitive it is ?

Is there a wallet that can make on the fly conversion between LTC and BTC? That makes sense rather than merchant services needing to deliver LTC options.

That's quite interesting, from what your saying a new user should use Bitcoin first and foremost and certainly any interest in litecoin shouldn't come at the expense of Bitcoin.

This certainly might not be what you were indicating , but you mention something disastrous happening to Bitcoin-If wallets could make conversion from BTC - LTC , could an alt. coin act as a back-up or fail safe in a worst case scenario for Bitcoin that was hard wired in whereby all btc could instantly be transferred to the next most used coin. Then just rename it Bitcoin  ;D

While I think it is good that competition is allowed, I don't think that adoption of litecoin or a number of other bitcoin clones would be a good thing. (If somebody invents a currency that is actually superior to bitcoin in some aspects, and it has its own niche, then sure).

I think my reasoning why this would not be a good thing is probably not very original.  If 2 more or less identical currencies are being used, what is to stop people from using hundreds or thousands of coins.  Since this would only dilute the wealth, in effect the currencies themselves become worthless.

I think in this case "competition" is a word which we are programmed to like, like "freedom", "democracy" etc. .  Just remember that these words that are positive in the majority of the situations can be negative too.  Absolute freedom would give me the freedom to shoot my neighbour without getting punished for it, minorities can be bullied democratically etc.

With the cat is out of the bag and the entire world developing their own digital currencies and payment services, the next few decades will see a currency struggle unlike any in history with private institutions becoming banks and lenders and incorporating technologies such as Ripple through social networks.

Bitcoin will always have a place because speculators (and miners) continue to back it. With the threat of competition inevitable, I'd guess that it'd be time better spent making sure Bitcoin can keep up with it's future competitors. They're coming you know.

In my personal opinion, I used to think alternative currencies as just another money and fame grab for the authors, but in discussing the dynamics I think we absolutely need them. Many aspects of this project are still unproven, and as such we cannot discount the benefits of other project currencies and the wealth of experiences they can bring.

That's just my two cents.

It's better to check LTC pricing against USD than Using LTC/BTC. Think btc-e will be offering LTC/GBP soon

It's all really about new users as I would find it hard to believe a Bitcoin enthusiast woud wake up and think I've had enough of Bitcoin I'm moving to (insert alt. coin here).

I do see the point that it's what an alternate offers that woud give it value as I agree an exact photocopy of Bitcoin aka "Bitcoin 2.0" would only dilute bitcoins value.

It's maybe the phrase "litecoin is silver to bitcoins gold" (not sure who coined it) , that caught  my attention.

It is useful to be able to store value in bitcoins and use that as collateral to borrow something else to actually spend.

It is a pain having to have that something else lack the convenience of cryptocurrency, thus it is good to have several cryptocurrencies to choose among when picking what to borrow. You are looking for one that is not climbing in value as fast as bitcoins are, basically.

Thus I do not see multiple cryptocurrencies as "competition" so much as "symbiosis" or "enhancement". Using bitcoins as collateral to borrow bitcoins does not seem to make as much sense as borrowing something else, with which if more bitcoins is what you actually want you can then buy more bitcoins. Having to use fiat as that second asset is not as nice as using another cryptocurrency.

-MarkM-

Why?  Why would you hold currency that doesn't increase in value as fast as bitcoins, even if only for a small amount of time, especially when you can spend your bitcoins just as easily.

Borrow devcoins, buy bitcoins with them, use the bitcoins as more collateral to borrow more devcoins, buy bitcoins with them. When devcoins experience a dip to half or even a third of their value as measured in bitcoins, as has happened lately, snap up the cheap devcoins to pay back the loans.

Basically it makes no sense to borrow the, or one of the, fastest-appreciating assets with which to buy things, if instead you can borrow something that goes up in value slower or even drops in value.

Given that devcoins are now at about a third of the price they were at a few weeks or months ago, while bitcoins have increased maybe 30% or 1/3 in value over the same time, it makes a lot of sense to have been borrowing devcoins to spend instead of spending bitcoins,

When devcoins seem to be about as low as they are going for now would maybe be a great time to buy up a bunch to pay back the loans. This plan was massively profitable for those who did it, compared to spending their bitcoins.

-MarkM-

I like freicoin and Litecoin precisely because it allows the discerning cryptocurrency enthusiast to immediately identify who the fools are.

Competition ends up killing almost everything, it is bad for any particular thing at all in the longest run, but competition is certainly good for people/humanity.

Only a fool would latch on to that sound bite.

Silver became "Gold's Silver" simply because of the constraints of physical metal.  It was not efficient to try to use Gold in transactions of modest value.  Bitcoin doesn't have that problem.  Unlike gold where a 0.1 gram coin would have huge cost overheads combined with difficulty in assaying Bitcoin works equally well in transactions of thousands of coins or less than a single Bitcoin.

"Bitcoin is Bitcoin's Silver" is a more accurate soundbite. 

That being said there is potential for alt-coins but the current crop of Bitcoin clones (including LTC) have no improved utility.

The first scenario is that Bitcoin fails and something superior replaces it.  For example after a massive 51% attack the idea of a POS coin (possible POW combined with POS) will be seen as potentially superior.

The second scenario is an alt-coin carving out a profitable niche.  Bitcoin has three major niches where it creates the potential for a superior alternative.  High speed transactions, microtransactions, improve anonymity.  However building a coin around one of these would require real research not just replacing SHA256 with another algorithm.  Also no simply changing the block target time to 60 second or 30 seconds wouldn't acheive much either.  I am talking REAL research, real out of the box thinking, coming out with a comprehensive system to bring VALUE to users.  

So greater fool's theory?

Person A has xCoin.
Person B has BTC but would prefer to not spend them.
Person B uses BTC as collateral to borrow xCoin.
When xCoin tanks Person B profits by repaying the loan in devalued coins.

This is a zero sum transaction.  For every % that Person B profits it is at the example of Person A.  Person B only profits because Person A (the greater fool) didn't realize that he could simply sell his xCoin for BTC and even if he wanted xCoin later rebuy them using the BTC which has gone up in value.

It is hardly a strong basis for a currency that it has utility because the holders of the currency are idiots who can be exploited by outsiders. :)

""Bitcoin is Bitcoin's Silver" is a more accurate soundbite.  " ..... no

bitcoin is bitcoin. its not 2 different elements, just one. bitcoin is gold bars and satoshis are gold coins/nuggets.. both still forms of gold.

the whole gold and silver idea arrived from the term mining... which in itself is where the paradox begins. because people then feel bitcoin is a commodity purely because of the 'mining' term.

in actual fact bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are Assets. not commodities. you cannot eat, drink, melt, bend, or create anything else out of crypto-currency. so it is definitely not a commodity. its more of an Asset like a piece of art. once created i stores value and its only use is for changing ownership, and storing value.

so i said it in another thread.

bitcoin is a van Gough and litecoin is a Picasso. oth fighting for popularity to gain value when trading ownership.

now thats a sound bite more accurate to use

Consider someone who has a million or a few million bitcoins sitting arouind, and is thinking of buying a mansion or estate.

If they buy it with bitcoins, chances are a heck of a lot of those bitcoins will jit the markets, suppressing the price, and thus the perceived value to many people, of bitcoins.

Suppose instead they used their bitcoins as collateral for a loan, and bought the mansion with what they borrowed.

Again, chances are whatever they bought the mansion with would end up back on the market. If they use fiat, the fiat market is maybe huge enough that just one less than a hundred million dollar mansion or estate won't make a blip on the market.

But if there were enough alternatives out there so that one could use one(s) that are not as vast markets as the fiat markets, maybe their market(s) might blip, suppressing the price allowing the mansion-buyer to pick back up what they borrowed cheaper than the price is was valued at when they bought the mansion, thus effectively getting them the mansion cheaper than it would have been otherwise.

Meanwhile their bitcoin might be up another 25%, which they would have missed out on if they had parted with them...

A problem this scale reveals of course is that bitcoins are so cheap still that one cannot likely buy more than a few such relatively cheap estates without blipping the market.

(If "why not mortgage the estate itself" comes into it think shiploads of cocaine instead of estates maybe.)

-MarkM-

Hmm maybe it is more like bimetalism where the rich get to exploit everyone else by see-saw-ing back and forth between "Van Gogh is the best" and "Picasso is the best", having a choice gives them mobility so if the poor end up with 51%+ of any one thing the rich can pooh-pooh it as common and shift their focus to something more exclusive, as in something the rich own the majority of.

Maybe in a way no so very different from building factories out west to sell housing near them to workers who have to migrate from the east, meanwhile buying up the houses left behind in the east, then later move the factories back east and sell the houses there they bought cheap back to the working class that has to again migrate to "where the money is"...

-MarkM-

Litecoins android to Bitcoins apple  ;D

I think it's worth noting that Bitcoin is not proprietary technology so notions of competition may not fully apply. Its stakeholders are all the people who are interested in a free currency - so if someone comes up with a significantly better solution, we should have no problem shifting to that.

If Bitcoin develops in such a way that it retains its decentralized nature and its technical integrity, I'm not sure I see the advantage in having a diverse set of crypto-currencies - but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Wow how wrong is this.

Car Industry: Ford, Toyota, Honda, Kia...etc.

Drinks: Pepsi, Coke...

...


Right...competition kills almost EVERYTHING.

 :D :D :D

Yeah I guess that is why other car makers than Ford came about and are still alive right? Because they provided improved utility. They drive and transport. They do the exact same thing. Oh right now speed is an issue when driving right?

Oh well then Litecoin has faster confirmations...

You don't need improved utility to have something exist and be successful especially when it comes to free market choice.

People have traded sea shells as money in the past. That did not stop them from using sea shells even though gold and silver existed.

Free markets determine the viability of something's use when it comes to exchange not DEATH AND TAXES.

Those will all be gone and it will be because they were out-competed.

I don't know what insane position you think I hold if it requires that nothing currently exists.

All those things you mention replaced things you probably never heard of. B brand buggy whips and yummy Y brand fizzy pop probably.

Competition keeps things in order. If there is only 1 vendor or one currency then the people who control that good or currency will have ultimate power. No incentive to be competitive to get users to use it.

Absolutely. I don't mean that it's a bad thing that competition eventually kills everything. That means that the stuff that currently exists always tends toward awesome because of competition.

You may want to reword your original statement. It is misleading.

That is a very simplistic statement. The real world doesn't always function like a capitalist cartoon.

I don't actually think that competition (from other cryptocurrencies) is healthy for bitcoin during the embryonic stage of the project. 

Here is why: There is a limited number of people in the world who are able to donate their time and energy to grow the bitcoin project, AND who are believers in cryptocurrencies.   If we have several competing cryptocurrencies, some of the talented people working on bitcoin right now will be diverted to alt-currencies.  This will increase the risk of ALL cryptocurrencies failing, for example through an attack by a bitcoin enemy.

We are more likely to succeed if we all pull in the same direction.

Once bitcoin becomes widely adopted, by all means, bring on the competition.

But right now, this community is still too small, bitcoin is still too vulnerable, to be able to afford divisiveness.

Yep. Do it like Larry Ellison http://www.cnbc.com/id/49194482/How_Larry_Ellison_Actually_Funds_His_Lavish_Lifestyle and unlike all the shipple selling themselves into debt slavery by taking out mortgages.

This is a smart way to "monetize" bitcoin fortunes for those marathon runners among bitcoiners.

However, nothing new here. Google "stock loan" or "securities based credit line" or "stock backed lending". This is actually the smart way of buying high value property as opposed to various mortgage products.

The idea is that instead of having a mortgage AKA "buying one house for yourself and two houses for the bank"  you borrow money using your stock portfolio as a collateral.

A typical "stock loan" is readily available for amounts above 100k$, you pledge your portfolio as collateral in exchange for some amount of money, you keep whatever dividends your stocks brings, you pay whatever interest rate is agreed until the loan is repaid. Usually such loans are not callable by the lender but debtor can walk away from the deal at any time and stop paying any interest without repaying any capital but sacrificing the portfolio. The creditor usually hedges all risks associated with such a deal using options. Think about it, dividends are (hopefully) paying lion share of interest, you keep your stocks and get back control of them after you will have paid out the loan. If stock drops to 0 or to some other low value you can walk away from the deal at any time without any further liabilities.

I would say this is the way to buy a house for those who have 100k$ in liquid assets. Of course this could be combined with traditional mortgage (at lower interest rates due to large LTV) if "top up" is needed.

Just to illustrate here is a simplified example.

You buy 430k$ worth of Realty Income Corp (NYSE:O), 10000 shares, 43$ each. It pays 5% dividend. You use this portfolio to get 400k$ loan at a fixed 3% interest. You buy yourself 400k$ house outright without any further lending. eventually dividends pay off the loan and you get your stock back. Or at any time (if stock tanks big time, for example) you just walk away and keep your house and have no any debts. Alternatively, if your stock rises significantly you can settle the loan for a portion of your portfolio and walk away with the rest of it.

Essentially, this way one turns the power of compound interest from one's enemy to one's friend, offsets interest with dividend, offsets inflation with stock price appreciation, lets lender to offset risks of stock depreciation.

Now enters Bitcoin. Imagine that a few years down the road Bitcoin trades on various financial exchanges just like all other currencies, there are liquid bitcoin ETF's which are optionable and these options are rather liquid with about the same liquidity as a typical S&P 500 stock (or simply liquid Bitcoin options).

Once the above conditions are in place it is likely that Bitcoin's market cap is around 1 billion USD (I use today's dollars i.e. ignoring fiat inflation for simplicity). Let's assume that 1 BTC worth about 1000$, for simplicity again.

I guess a typical deflationary Bitcoin loan in 4-8 years time (for Bitcoin owners) would be like the following:

You own 430 Bitcoins. You pledge it as a collateral for 400k$ at 3% interest. You buy a house outright. Every month the lender sells 0.1-1 BTC and/or you pony up some cash to pay the interest. Few years down the road your loan is paid up, you keep the house and , say, 430-N BTC that worth about the same amount of USD as your 430 BTC when you have bought the house.

So just have 1000 BTC and in a few years you will be able to use such or a similar scheme to buy yourself a house outright and keep most of your bitcoins in the process.

All you need for this to be a realistic scenario is a bunch of BTC and 1000$ exchange rate. At this point options on BTC and therefore "BTC collateralized lending" will be available.

Here is a bit of my wisdom for you: keep your bitcoins until you can buy a house (or an yacht or whatever) like that. Also note how no tax event is triggered in described above scenario. Note how one could become a tax exile for a year or so and move out his bitcoins out of a punitive taxable jurisdiction. Estate planning opportunities will be great for those who can keep their bitcoins untouched for a while.

 

BTC have already too much competiton from other fiat currencies and it has not gained enough ground yet

If I recompile bitcoin right now to start a new block chain with a new genesis block, using all the same rules as bitcoin, the worth of my new "Walter coins" will still not be equal to the worth of bitcoins, even though they are "identical" in the sense of using the same rules.  In fact, I'll bet a "Walter coin" wouldn't even be worth a Satoshi.

So yes, we could in effect have infinite coins, but they would not all have the worth of bitcoin.  Over time, some might become more valuable, and some coin might even take the crown from bitcoin.  But they will not dilute bitcoin (or it successor/s) down to being valueless.

You are exactly right.  We should shut down testnet.

I think it is, and the different set-ups can have different advantages too, namecoin for example.

Also, people will be able to start their own currencies at will, for projects, cities etc.

Thanks to Vladimir for a very informative post!

First, anyone comparing crypto-currency competition to business competition is making a false analogy.

Second, no. It's not healthy.  LTC really doesn't do anything different than BTC except offer desperate miners another chance at printing their own money.  LTC discourages adoption as people think "Oh, I see. This is all a chance for people to try and get me to buy in X currency and then, when it is convenient, switch to Y currency and tell me to use that. Yeah, no thanks."

Just stop, ok?

The possibility of an alternate cryptocurrency is very healthy for Bitcoin. It makes sure nobody gets complacent.

If another cryptocurrency actually sees significant adoption I think that should be treated as a failure. Bitcoin should work well enough that nobody needs to switch to an alternative.

I'll stop if you pay me to stop, in BTC. :)

Jesus H Christ, the stupidity in this thread is fucking astounding. Competition between businesses in a market is healthy. Competing standards ARE NOT. Lets look at the web as an example - would we benefit from N incompatible versions of HTTP?

Decentralized cryptocurrencies are not businesses (DUH). We don't benefit by having many of them. We do benefit from competition among the goods and services built on top of it. Sure, we should have multiple competing exchanges. We definitely want competing solo and pool miners.

If anything, having a single cryptocurrency benefits us through the Network Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect) (where the intrinsic value of the currency goes up as more people use it).

But Litecoin, et. al. along with all the people who promote them can kiss my taint.

So an alt. coin is simply taking the cryptocurrency pie and slicing it up into a smaller portion stealing thunder fom Bitcoin and it's value diluting its user base. Competing standards are always a bad thing. and in no way would a rival alt. coin and user base generate greater awareness of cryptocurrency and draw an even greater number towards both ultimately benefiting both.

bitcoin does not already own the world. so alt currencies are not taking a slice of the bitcoin pie and they are not diluting its userbase. bitcoin is a crumb of the 7billion population which already use multiple different currencies. saying bitcoin is the one and only currency is not really grasping the whole picture.

it's like the ancient egyptians saying they are the only thing of importance in the world and no other country will succeed and prosper. and anyone found not following egyptian rule will die. hmmm and look what happened to ancient egypt after its glory days. people moved away as their freedoms and choices were limited, leaving with their own principles and idea's for a better life and thus, new cultures were born.

the general thoughts of bitcoiners is with one hand they want freedom away from government control and they want freedom of trade, and choice which is great.
...but then saying bitcoin is the only other choice.. [facepalm]

treat each currency like their own country. some flourish, some die out, some go to war with each other, some form life long trading partners.

in short competition helps. competition is only bad if your on the losing side and you have no benefit/nothing of value to give to win back and succeed. in the end winners don't fight. they learn to respect each other and work together, sharing idea's and learning from mistakes.

It's been proven that cooperation is always better than competition.
If ressources (hardware, poeples, etc) applied to LiteCoin were applied to Bitcoin instead, Bitcoin would be stronger !

Scientific study proves otherwise..

Your call is the result of the capitalist minset that has been pushed to us for generations !

??  Stuff are made cheaper and cheaper, year after year.. I dont call it "Tends toward awesome"..

The broad organization of society today is based on multi-level human competition: nation-states compete against each other for economic/physical resources; corporate market entities compete for profit/market-share; and average workers compete for wage providing occupations and hence personal survival itself.

Under the surface of this competitive social ethic is a basic psychological disregard for the well- being of others and the habitat. The very nature of competition is about having advantage over others for personal gain and hence, needless to say, division & exploitation (of both human and environment) are fundamental attributes of the current social order. Virtually all so-called “corruptions” which we define as “crime” in the world today are based upon the very same mentality assumed to guide “progress” in the world through the competitive value.

Altcoin *are* co-operation, or at least attempts at making something that can be co-operated alongside bitcoin, especially the merged-mined chains that co-operate in doing more with the same hashing-power.

Blockchain based currencies can be traded among much more conveniently than trading any of them with fiat, in fact at any point where you touch fiat you tend to run into all kinds of problems, so really it is the proliferation of fiats that the altcoins are competing against, fiat users already use something other than bitcoin, altcoins just give them something other than fiat to use if they persist in not using bitcoins.

Trading can be fun, the more altcoins there are the more interesting trading scenarios forex games can present without resorting to fiat and with the currencies they trade being usable across platforms just like bitcoins.

-MarkM-

I'll take competition over a monopoly any day.  If a technology such as Bitcoin is as good as we all think it is, it will stand up to the competition just fine.  If it fails to something superior, that's the way it should be.

Competing currencies would be the best thing that ever happened to money and world markets, what other way are we going to discover what the best method of exchange is? It's great that they made Bitcoin open source because even if Bitcoin does ever get taken down there will be a bunch of other more improved and updated currencies to use.

Competition may not be good for bitcoin, but it is good for us (bitcoin users).

FTFY : Competition may not be good for bitcoin, but it is good for us (bitcoin alt crypto-currency users).

Whatever opinion everyone has on litecoin, I suggest that calling it a pyramid scheme - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin - does a disservice to both Bitcoin and litecoin as its a likely starting point google search for anyone new to the whole thing, basically if litecoin is so similar and had of come first it would have been bitcoin that was labeled the pyramid scheme as described here.

Using a Bitcoin logo as the header could use a re-think too.

The whole idea behind alternate coins was to test new properties. Namecoin was a great idea, but just didn't get traction. I don't see any other alternatives offering anything unique and beneficial to distinguish them from Bitcoin. Competition has favored Bitcoin so far.

Sometimes "uniqueness" is not being different but being a secondary choice.

With every good thing there are choices.

Coke/Pepsi

Ford/Toyota

Myspace/Facebook

McDonalds/Burger King

I consider them your backup currencies to be honest, in case someone discovers a serious flaw with Bitcoin or it turns out Satoshi Nakamoto is really our evil overlord and intends to conquer the world with Bitcoin :P

I doubt a flaw in bitcoin wouldn't be present in litecoin too...

Bitcoin has had a lot of time and money pumped into marketing. I don't see anyone spending millions marketing Litecoin. Maybe someone should give it a shot!

Competition would be healthy for cryptocurrency...not sure it'd be healthy for bitcoin though.  Which is fine because I don't care as much about bitcoin as I care about the cryptocurrency movement in general.  Depending on how smooth the next bitcoin fork will be, several alts may be born.  If bitcoin starts hitting that 1MB limit & a fork never takes off, then I can see an alt that fixes that issue taking off.  But for the time being, bitcoin is still working fine for me, and I personally won't switch until these issues start becoming more of a problem.

+1

thanks (sacasticly) to Luke Jr for trying to make lite coin look bad

https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Litecoin&diff=prev&oldid=35713 (https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Litecoin&diff=prev&oldid=35713)

luke JR has a personal grudge against litecoin and has been at it since late november 2011 putting in false and vindictive comments about litecoin.

why??

because he knows litecoin has potential. i dont tell people to read the wiki on litecoin because its now one mans fud files and no longer a source of truth.

instead i give out free litecoins and let people try it out for themselves. if they done like it, they can always stop using it.

luke Jr has obviously missed out all the social values of bitcoin and only cares about the financial value of bitcoin. thats why he creates the fud.

i dont care which digital currency goes mainstream and takes over the likes of paypal and other payment processors that have geriatric banking restrictions. as long as one does, and has a good reason in doing so.

there are too many anonymous people wanting bitcoin to stay anonymous so they can continue doing dodgy dealings, there are too many profiteer's not wanting a world invasion which will cause a stablised price.

so for me litecoins is the perfect candidate for mainstreaming.

let bitcoin be the amsterdam currency for drugs, guns and prostitutes, along with cheap electronics. and let litecoin be for everything else.

openly trading with each other. lots of people talking about making a bitcoin have red and green addresses depending on what its used for. well litecoin can be the green address.

it is when you got one guy spreading fud saying its in the name of freedom but then saying don't spread your wealth anywhere else. lol

if bitcoin gets out from just the 'amsterdam currency' niche market great. but at the moment the majority of bitcoiners are not helping themselves out beyond those markets.

having the freedom to choose which to push forward, should be just that, a freedom. no competition at all and a mindset of staying in a niche market wont help bitcoin at all. they need competition just to give them more incentive to thrive and to expand, else in 4 years time they will be saying "we have value because of silkroad" as their only defence that there is a constant supply and demand.

There are two coins that do: Litecoin and Novacoin. The primary value they provide over Bitcoin is they are not Bitcoin.

Just for argument's sake pretend for a moment the Bitcoin Foundation became highly corrupted and subject to selling out to the highest bidder, perhaps even the government. That organization, to date, is made up of some of the most influential and powerful individuals and businesses in the Bitcoin community. As Bitcoin grew so could the power and notoriety of the Bitcoin Foundation, and with this the potential for complete disaster if there was only Bitcoin in the marketplace.

Alternatively, look at the most recent uproar over the discussion for change of block size. Like the creation of the Bitcoin Foundation this had potentially major implications for Bitcoin, and accordingly threatened to divide the community into those for and against it. Unfortunately, by involving the protocol itself the large economic damage caused by a messy fork would be secondary to damage in confidence of block chain based currency working at all.

If Bitcoin is the only show in town then as Bitcoin goes so goes the idea of crypto-currency overall.

On the other hand having other coins that exist apart from Bitcoin give the marketplace something else to evaluate, and provide another avenue of choice to express discontent; that's always healthy.


I don't think you fully appreciate the differences.

First, being a clone is a compliment showing how valuable the original protocol implementation is. However, a key difference is time between blocks being reduced from 10 minutes to 4 minutes on average. This means network transactions confirm more than twice as fast on average for litecoins than bitcoins. If you don't think fast confirmation time is valuable to the marketplace, especially as it grows, I'm not sure how to explain to you that it is.

The other difference is there is roughly 4 times as many litecoins as bitcoins. Economically this is less significant, but not entirely without effect. In general, theoretically, the more currency in existence the more widely it is likely distributed, meaning a larger overall potential marketplace.

Last, Novacoin unlike Litecoin provides a very real intrinsically valuable aspect over Bitcoin, which is the inclusion of proof-of-stake (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake) in addition to proof-of-work (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work) to guard against 51% attacks.

This explains why these two coins, out of all the ones in existence past and present besides Bitcoin, have notable and increasing value. The free market seems to agree with this or something similar which is reflected in the litecoin and novacoin prices, now $0.14 and $0.50 respectively. Anyone remembering Bitcoin in the early days might recognize the similarity in early price point.

Cooperation is better than Competition..  That's why I do not embrasse competition of any kind !

I don't have time to respond point by point. I'll just say your perspective is just that, how you're viewing things from only your perspective. I'm talking about implications for the broader market. As I noted the market seems to agree with my view, which can be seen in the free market price of those two coins.

The transaction is likely valid on both forks, so will end up finding its way into blocks on both, right?

http://youtu.be/l4CZfLmUJV4 - any opinions on this viewpoint stated here ( 3mins in )

In my opinion competition is always healthy. It helps drive innovation and change.

Cooperation is even better :P

Alt-coins: For people who want to see both their bitcoins and alt-coins become worthless!

Anyone who has spent 5 seconds thinking about it realizes that if LTC or whatever scam-coin succeeds then all crypto-currency fails.  Anyone who disagrees has simply hoarded their LTC and is hoping you'll be stupid enough to buy it from them.

/thread

So if BMW wins in terms of car sales, all car sales will plummet and the industry will die? Better rethink this over.

Litecoin is the noise to Bitcoin's signal.

People keep making this analogy. People who make this analogy are not good at analogies.

Competition is very healthy even at this stage because we are in new territory.  Nobody knows if and when the system is going to turn on crypto currencies, and having bitcoin in the lead, with Litecoin a safe distance behind, does mean that if Bitcoin makes a fatal turn, Litecoin can take another path.

There is also a very strong US centric focus on bitcoin, which really doesn't work well in the rest of the world.  Maybe Litecoin will be the preferred option in Europe, and that will be its niche - but for now, lets just let the market decide!

Why would this be helpful to anyone? "Hey everyone, you now have to pay extra fees to some exchange in order to send money to each other."  So, now the LTC scammers are trying to tell you that, in addition to trying to negate the non-inflation aspect of bitcoin, that its also beneficial to negate the low fees/easy to send aspect to?  Please stop listening to these people.

The best coin will succeed. There is no need for one single coin only. In that respect, the analogy applies.

I would rather say, that the US has a very strong centric focus on competition, which really doesn't work well for the rest of the world.

Bitcoin was born in a competition of ideas, but the process of its development is highly cooperative.

Sigh. So, let's say that there are 100 people in the world that want cars. Like, tops (simple explanation here).  Let's say that one car company sells all those 100 their cars.  If a new company starts, then yes, the value of the first company will be diminished.  Now, in the real world the market is continuing to expand and the first company has many opportunities to make new products, expand the market, ect.  None the less, the one thing we CAN say is that people are pretty convinced of the value of the car and will continue to want one, no matter who sells it to them.   Hell, if I buy a car and two weeks later the company I bought the car from goes under, it's still a car that works. It drives me places.

And that is where your terrible analogy falls apart.  LTC is a poor, script-kiddies copy of BTC in every important way. It does nothing significantly different than BTC.  At the same time, there are people investing and working hard of getting people to adopt crypto-currency as viable, sustainable, and important.  You know what undermines this? LTC.  People are smart enough to realize that if any two-bit script-kiddie can just make up an alt-coin that actively devalues their investment, they're not gonna buy it.  Who wants to play the "Oh, this new crypto-currency is better so you better dump everything right now and switch!" game?  What good is an investment in LTC if, one-year from now, super-LTC gets released and does everything regular LTC does but maybe slightly different.  What good is an investment in super-LTC if Mega-LTC comes out a year after that and does things just a little different.

And that, sir, is why your analogy is terrible.  

That isn't really what I meant.

Crudely, anything with a big US flag on it, is generally hated in the rest of the world! Ok, a huge over simplification, but it stands to reason that anything that is too closely linked to a part of the world, will tend to have its lovers and haters.

Politics is something you can't ignore when it comes to business! ;)

I do disagree with the idea in general that BTC is "US central" as in when anyone thinks of BTC they think its for Americans.  I'd be interested in any evidence to the contrary outside of "most people on bitcointalk.org" are Americans.

Litecoin is an ALTERNATIVE to BTC. That isn't a bad thing unless you are scared that bitcoin will lose value because you have a huge stash of BTC.

Freemarket = Competing currencies.

Litecoin has happened and will continue to be alive as long as people believe it has value. Just like bitcoin.

You can send instant payments globally with both systems. One is just faster.

The evidence is stacking up in the media.
MTGox is moving to the US
Wall St is starting to fund Bitcoin ventures
Coinlab, Bitpay and even Butterfly Labs are all big name bitcoin companies with strong US connections.

I know that there is a bitcoin hedge fund being set up in Malta, and obviously Kim Dotcom in New Zeland, but everything else that is happening to bitcoins seems to be happening in the US

I'm not saying its a bad thing, I'm just saying that some people might find that enough of a reason to look elsewhere!

Not even going to read the post, competition is good for everything, no questions, no exceptions.

A lot of Bitcoin services seem to be focused primarily on the US market and there's definitely a significant amount of distrust towards American business outside of the US.  I'm not sure how that will relate to Bitcoin in particular, though, apart from people being worried about Bitcoin and Bitcoin services being more vulnerable if they are US-based/US-focused.  It's not likely the US government will be trying to gain advantages for Bitcoin via free trade agreements any time soon in the same way that it currently tries to bully other countries in respect of other industries.

That there are currently no crypto-currencies which are competitive with Bitcoin doesn't mean there won't be in the future or that having multiple, competing crypto-currencies isn't desirable.  Bitcoin isn't some sacred cow or holy grail.  It's an experiment and there are lessons to be learned from its evolution to date. 

laissez-faire.

...is French and literally means "let [them] do", but it broadly implies "let it be," "let them do as they will," or "leave it alone". - wikipedia.

Either competition will under deliver on what is promised and will fail, or will identify a market deficiency in the existing ethos and will thrive.

Bring on the competition, for even if it fails, it may succeed in strengthening the status quo.

How can a society progress if it is entrenched in orthodoxy? And how can orthodoxy be changed without newcomers?

Cheers!

Somehow bitcoin's price has contrived to stay insanely low for a ridiculously long time, and even now somehow something keeps suppressing it, so it is a good thing growth has started to pick up in one or more of the many alternatives. Maybe if something contrives to squash litecoin's exchange rates like seems to be happening with bitcoin yet naother contender will take up the position of being the growth coin.

The more the merrier, maybe we will find out how many it is going to take to be just too many moles for the suppressors to whack.

-MarkM-

I honestly think just due to this explosion, that it will be like bitcoin as gold litecoin as silver and then bronze... who knows devcoin? Namecoin? But I think that is going to be the main way it will / should work. I think the problem is with acceptance it needs to start getting accepted by more e-commerce vendors. That way it will have less of a bad name for black market activities. Problem is government will want you to start tracking and taxing it, WHICH is why I promote the freedom on the internet. We have been pretty good until this point, SOPA and PIPA and things of that nature is going to bring world war 3, not korea or anything else.

If I start an e-commerce site I would love to accept all 3, and have different rates just like any currency in any game or any other 3 tier system.

It is looking like it might end up simplest to just let people pay via Ripple, so they can use any currency they like.

-MarkM-

I can see Bitcoin working more for expensive purchases (i.e. LED TVs, fridges, computers, etc.) as time goes on and Litecoin working more for smaller purchases, like movie tickets and so forth, mainly due to the faster block generation timeframe. Given one of the recent threads where people are complaining about microtransactions inflating the block size, perhaps Litecoin and other alternate currencies would help Bitcoin in this way by diverting micropayments to them, leaving large transactions and trades more the domain of Bitcoin.

As for Ripple, would be interesting to see if they do adopt Litecoin as a form of payment as well (last time I checked, there didn't seem to be that option available).

Anyone can make Litecoin useable inside Ripple just by issuing LTC IOUs.

Actual websites that let you turn those IOUs in for actual coins on the blockchain, and turn coins on the blockchain into those IOUs will have to wait for the Ripple server source code, or at least the ability to set a Ripple account up to require destination codes so the webpage will work, but that is just a convenience thing, until then you can still buy IOUs over the counter and sell then back for coins over the counter.

-MarkM-

I see. It'll probably be a while before I use Ripple for anything (in the middle of dealing with some personal debts, so watching my spending atm), so will wait and see on that.

I don't believe that it is competition for Bitcoin, since it uses almost all of the same code, and the same security model and technology. Ripple is competition to Bitcoin since it is fundamentally different from it from a technological and functional standpoint.

Litecoin and other POW Bitcoin-variants are just new bitcoin blockchains with new names and a couple of superficial changes to how it works. They are an attempt to increase the bitcoin-like-currency money supply, which hurts peer-to-peer currency as a whole by reducing the integrity of the scarcity of its money supply. Without supply scarcity, a currency can't hold value, which makes it less useful.

their is a reason why people dont play cpu based games anymore  :D

It's always nice to see someone else who gets it.

The fact that we are debating this topic, and this forum has a alt-chain section show the tolerance and inclusiveness of this community.

In Nazi Germany and Communist China, people are not allowed to talk about competition, they have more important things to worry about, such as Mr. "BIG", taxes and death.

So world of warcraft gold and eve online currency and second life lindens and such all become more and more valueless as more and more such things come into existence?

The more MUDs there are, each with their own variety of MUD-gold or MUD-currency, the less second life lindens are worth?

This seems like crazy talk. Surely as more and more virtual currencies and game currencies are observed to be exchangeable with fiat currencies the more all virtual currencies and game currencies gain in credibility as potentially of value?

If even BBQcoins have value, as evidenced by someone paying 100+ litecoins for 40,000 BBQcoins, then heck, darn near any such thing could turn out to have value, and if even far-fetched ones have value surely the granddaddy of them all, bitcoin, must be supremely valuable?

-MarkM-

It's all about supply and demand. A new world that uses a virtual currency also adds to the demand for goods that can be purchased with virtual currencies.

But I might be a bit of a contrarian because I think looking at the price of a virtual currency (in units like dollars per bitcoin) is useful only so long as it accurately measures adoption of the currency. If other factors push the price of the virtual currency up or down, we shouldn't care. Bitcoin's success will depend on how widely adopted it is. To the extent price measures that, then it's a measure of success. But to the extent it doesn't, it isn't.

In fact, to the extent a higher price means more speculation, that can be a bad thing. Speculative bubbles can burst which can cause sudden drops in price. Those drops increase the risk of using the currency as a means of exchange which drives adoption down.

We should care about adoption of Bitcoins as a means of exchange. That's what will determine Bitcoin's long-term success, or lack of it.

That is part of what I am hoping to explore with the Galactic Milieu (http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieu)...

Basically if you look at totally differently scaled games one sees a vast range in scale of what a given number of dollars will buy; in clubs and swords era villages games you might only be able to buy some swords and clubs, whereas in galactic armada games you might be able to buy entire armadas.

I am interested in seeing what happens when galactic armadas fly around in galaxies in which some planets have clubs and swords villages on them... If it is learned how many millions of swords and clubs it takes to build a ship, of which thousands might form an armada, yet swords and clubs are worth a few bucks, imagine how expensive, in bucks, a galactic armada might be...

-MarkM-

To those who still think bitcoin is only a blockchain, a product, or a currency, you need to wake up.

Bitcoin is bigger than that, it's a technology, a techno-social experiment, all alt-chains fall under this umbrella.

This discussion is part of the experiment too  ;)

This is literally the worst analogy I've heard yet. Congrats.

Totally agree. To most people, p2p-backed virtual currencies is concept they've never heard of. It's hard to wrap their minds around the fact  a currency can exist  without government's backing.

The more p2p virtual currencies there is, the more people will become aware of this concept.

Better the worst analogy than the worst prediction: you have been saying LTC will crash for months now. Hows that working out for you?

Lol. I haven't said LTC would crash.  I've just said it was a terrible idea.

Now LTCers are just making stuff up about me because they can't argue a use for their BS.

Apologies if I made an error there mccorvic, there are hundreds of anti-LTC dead bodies lying by the wayside over the last 12 months so excuse me if I can't remember exactly what you said  ;D

Eh, maybe you mistook one of my claims that if LTC reaches any REAL modicum of success, i.e. more than just emo-sad GPU miners use it, then the whole SYSTEM will crash. BTC and LTC both.  Though I don't know if I specifically ever used the word crash.

How can you possibly think that mccorvic? I just cannot believe hardly anyone gets how 2 competing cryptos will likely lead to faster progress through competition etc. Of course there are negatives, but I believe 2 competing dev teams will push the crypto concept much further much faster, than just a potentially lumbering, arrogant btc team with no real incentive to innovate or take any risks that might jepoardize their own personal btc treasure hoards.

No, because WOW gold and Second Life Lindens are different currencies for different virtual worlds. Bitcoin variants are almost clones of Bitcoin, and would have the same use as bitcoins, thus increasing the bitcoin-like-currency money supply.

It would be like a company creating a WOW gold II, that can be used as currency in the WOW MMOG, and people accepted it. It would effectively double the supply of WOW gold, and reduce the value of each gold coin. If parties could create unlimited numbers of WOW gold variants that could be used in the WOW world, and the WOW servers accepted them as of equal value, then the economy would experience rapid inflation, and the currency would become less useful, if not totally useless.

Unless it also brought in new players or increased interest from existing players. It's all about supply and demand.

More importantly, I think we all know that Bitcoin's key to long-term success is increased adoption as a means of exchange. Deflation harms that because it means that prices need more frequent adjustment. A small amount of inflation (assuming it is gradual and small, rather than sudden and huge) would actually be a good thing. It would also help to drive out speculation, which would decrease the risk of a bubble collapse. Collapses are disastrous to adoption because they make Bitcoin risky as a means of exchange. So anything that drives off speculation is good for Bitcoin's long-term success.

That's true, but I think promoting the adoption of new bitcoin-like blockchains might reduce interest, because it would undermine interest in holding bitcoin-like-currency in general.


I think it's an open question whether deflation harms its success. Deflation creates speculative interest, which increases the number of bitcoin holders, and increases the market cap, which increases the purchasing power of the bitcoin holding economy (which creates merchant interest).

I also think it's an open question whether price deflation makes a currency less useful due to volatility. If the rate is predictable, it can be planned in.

This is absolutely correct.  No one will want to participate in peer-2-peer currency, or whatever phrase you like, if they know any child can make an "alt-chain" whenever they want that can effectively devalue their savings. 

The Galactic Milieu (http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieu) game has lots of currencies.

Take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

Are you suggesting that if the Martians had not given blockchain technology to the Brits, the Canucks, General Mining Corp, General Retirement Funds, whoever is behind bitNicKeLs, and the (galactic) United Nations the Martian BotCoin would be worth seven or more times as much?

The Brits, Canucks, United Nations and so on would have happily driven up the value of the Martians' currency for them instead of promoting their own?

Au contraire, I think the players who play the ministers of finance or whatnot that engaged in all that stuff are correct that it is the very fact that each currency has huge reserves of many other currencies available with which to back their coins that helps them all be valuable.

If no one backed bitcoins with any dollars or yen or botcoins or BBQcoins or Litecoins or gold or platinum or nickel or whatever, bitcoin likely would not be worth as much as it is worth today.

-MarkM-

The field of alt-chain coins is littered with dead bodies. If one can survive, something must be done right.

You too can create a alt-chain and try to devalue my savings  ;) ...  let's see how that goes.

It takes many ingredients to make a 4-course meal. Those other assets are not as liquid as Bitcoin, but I would not say they are all desireable ingredients, unless you are French.  ;)

Well, thus far NO alt-chain has survived.  If you think LTC has already achieved any success level outside of the equivalent of a penny-stock you be crazy.  I'm talking about IF LTC reaches any main stream ears.  People will be able to extrapolate and come to the logical conclusion.

Again, LTC offers nothing new or interesting over BTC.  It is just in the midst of a PR surge by a few people wanting to get the price up a bit so they can swap back to BTC.  If you think the faster-but-less-secure confirmations is the reason to go to LTC, then explain why you won't dump and switch to the next coin that is even faster than ltc. Or dump and switch to the next alt-coin that is even faster than the last?

Go GeistGeld! Ten second blocks! Or maybe its 15 seconds. Something like that.

And merged mined, so unlike Litecoin it can share/recycle the same hashing power used by Bitcoin.

If only I had a few more gigs of RAM...

-MarkM-

I think the advantage in Bitcoin being FOSS isn't that infinite clones can be created, but rather the the public can see how it works and that it cannot have secret changes made to it the can weaken the system.

I can't follow the logic that having a ton of alt-coins somehow make everything even out.  No one will want to try and manage 15 different wallets, on different exchanges, and watch the prices of each as one temporarily becomes more popular.  No one except wanna be day-traders at least.  If you're goal is to just create a trading mini-game for yourself with no RL consequences, then yea, that'd work.  If your goal is for our little digital currency to be actually useful, used, and valued then this game is counter-productive. 

I think an apt analogy is aluminium.  When first used, it was very rare and very very valuable.  That was until a way to create aluminium from aluminum oxide and the value plummeted as the potential supply exploded.  Aluminium only has value now for its actual, practical uses.  BTC does not have the advantage of having a particle use.  LTC, at best, is attempting to prove all the haters right when they say "BTC has no value as there is nothing backing it."

Thats incorrect, it has lots of stuff backing it.

The order books on umpteen exchanges, for one.

That alone adds up to a whole lot of dollars, yen, litecoins, ppcoins, botcoins, britcoins, GBP, etc etc etc.

You might as well say dollars have no value, or GBP has no value.

You might be right, but people go on buying bread, hookers and blow with the stuff regardless of your 'wisdom'.

-MarkM-

Wow, you kinda just stop reading and or didn't really think before you posted.  I'll wait for someone to actually respond to what I wrote.

Okay then here's re the fifteen wallets:

Ripple.

No one need care what currencies other people use, they just pay with what they use and get paid with what they use, automagically.

-MarkM-

Ripple is a terrible idea for a multitude of reasons.  Even then, it still doesn't do anything to address the issue we're debating.  No one would give me an IOU for a box of stale Crunch Berries even if I claimed it was the currency I wanted to use.

Of course they would, there would be nothing else they could usefully do with such an IOU, giving it back to you, its issuer, would be the only way to get rid of the darn thing. So whenever they want something from you, they fork over their dollars or bitcoins or whatever, it Ripples through the system, and you end up receiving the stale Crunch Berries IOUs your mom and pop or whoever had trusted you for. If your Crunch Berry currency you issue is the only currency you accept its the only darn thing you can end up with when someone tries to buy something from you as you chose it as what you wanted to use as your currency.

-MarkM-

That's why I think this analogy breaks down.  While conventional currencies has the limitation of localization and a specific area of use, BTC doesn't.  The fact that when I go to France I would have a hard time using USD and, thus, Euros would have value to me.  The Internet is the Internet.

I know some people will say that different segments of the Internet could use BTC while others LTC and the rest Durpcoin or whatever.  This would actually devalue all the coins.  One, it negates the "no inflation" aspect of bitcoin because, well, these new coins all create de facto inflation.  They are all pumping out infinite digital coins that some people accept.  Second, it negates the "low fees" aspect of bitcoin as you'd have to pay an exchange somewhere down the line to just transfer your BTC to some other coin.  Finally, it negates the "easy to use" as the fact that i just had to explain all this in a tl;dr paragraph proves it thus. 

The final argument is then "Well, you can just accept both!" But why?! Why accept two when I can just accept BTC and get all the same benefits without any of the hassle I mentioned above?

A lot of people do still use local currencies though, so you might as well set up to only use one payment processing system and have that be one that just gives you the Crunch Berries you prefer and insulates you from everyone else's cocoa puffs, dollars, yen, francs, or whatever the heck they use.

-MarkM-

I can't tell, are you still arguing for Ripple?

If so, I consider BTC that payment processor.  I think that Ripple is just trying to add an extra layer of complexity that, frankly, won't work.

Actually I am maybe even arguing for having everyone else use Ripple but appending to Ripple the actual gateway functionality.

Basically I am thinking it'd be nice if I could say yes I accept bitcoins, not bitcoin IOUs, please do go ahead and use Ripple to pay me but tell Ripple to pay me bitcoins, not bitcoin IOUs.

Maybe this would be accomplished by having a gateway account that sends me bitcoins, and I tell people my gateway account so they Ripple to it and it automagically cashes in the bitcoin IOUs it receives into actual on the blockchain bitcoins.

(Or devcoins, or litecoins, or whatever crunchy berry coins of the day I happen to like.)

Maybe like "I accept bitcoins, 1mybitcoinaddressvcfdhyj, send care of Ripple account rip22135hkfdjhlmml if you wish".

Or maybe even add to ripple a way to register a bitcoin address with it, so it knows to which gateway account to send any bitcoin IOUs whose destination is my bitcoin address.

-MarkM-

Currently the alt-coin variants more or less copy the whole bitcoin idea, that makes them not attractive at all

If some currency will be a powerful competitor to bitcoin, it must solve some main drawbackes of bitcoin:

1. Early adopter problem

Early adopter problem has caused many people think that bitcoin is just a scam designed by those programmers. If one alt-coin will equaly benefit late adopters (e.g. you always get the most benefit when you first join the game), then that coin will immediately attract lots of users

Actually after some thought, I think this is more like an inflative money's character. An inflative money continuously devalue which hurt existing holders, but it does not hurt new money makers, they do not have any money from the beginning, so get money is much more beneficial for them than existing holders

Anyway, try to reduce the benefit of early adopters in the long run is the key here


2. Price stability problem

The fixed supply nature will cause bitcoin price to rise quickly and this caused high risk for merchants and consumers

This issue is closely related to the first problem, if the late adopters could get the same benefit as the early adopters, then the price will not swing that wildly


3. Scalability problem

An increased user base will cause increased memory, bandwidth and storage requirement, in order to scale very well, it should not handle all the local transactions in one network


Due to these 3 limitations (or features) of bitcoin, it will very likely become a store of value, not a medium of exchange. But currently people do not have a real good way to store value, there is a demand for such kind of commodity


For a medium of exchange, I think the best candidate should have a fixed base exchange price pegged to average standard living costs on the planet, and an unlimited but variable supply based on that exchange price (If coin price increase, difficulty goes down so that more coin can be generated per day). And it should be able to scale very well

Video - Bitcoin Report Volume 28 (Trading Crypto-currencies)

http://youtu.be/4RYtXEoZnTE

Gold money James Turk - competing currencies (general)

http://youtu.be/UqXdV5n5db4

Let's first start with your initial argument: 'Anyone who has spent 5 seconds thinking about it realizes that if LTC or whatever scam-coin succeeds then all crypto-currency fails'.

First of all, it contains a contradiction. If all crypto-currency fails, then LTC would fail as well, but that did not happen since your statement poses the element that LTC (or whatever scam-coin) shoud have succeeded for your statement to apply. But let's leave that as it is.

The analogy made with the car industry is to bring forward a though experiment why an industry as a whole would fail if one of the market players provides for the best solution at a given time? That industry collapse is not happening. It is quite the opposite: the industry has developed just fine under heavy competition. Weak companies vanished while strong companies flourished. The current players have to remain improving themselves and their products or lose out to the competition. The beneficiary is the customer. I fail to see why LTC succeeding would mean the end of crypto-currency.

That was the analogy made.

That's also were it stops, because a car is a single object that can be used stand-alone. You are quite right there. Crypto-currencies can be made in thousand variants but in order to be useful, they need to be used by a certain number of people. There is no use sending a McCorvic_Coin if you are running the only client of McCorvic_Coin.

But that still does not explain why the victory of LTC would mean the end of crypto-currency.

Wait, another bad analogy coming up: fiat-currency. We have tons of them, also in different varieties. Did not collapse, although we are getting there  ;D The simple fact that more than one type of currency exists, does not warrant the collapse of currency itself. The only thing that matters is use by people. Probably, sufficient use by people. I won't get into the history of fiat money and the practical matters thereof, but we can safely conclude that there are many types of fiat currency floating around without a collapse of fiat currency. So that does not seem to support your argument either.

Still digging a little deeper, I think that Bitcoin is actually meant to have competition. And that is where the analogy with the car industry, albeith limited; I give you that, comes up again. Competition can make or break Bitcoin. If it breaks Bitcoin, something else will take over. Bitcoin must be subject to competition (and be improved) because its source code is freely available. If Bitcoin cannot survive competition, it would not have lasted until today. The very essence of its existence proves that it can handle competition fine (until now). LTC may take over (although I doubt it; not innovative enough), and if so it will be because the people have chosen so by their actions.

People will chose their crypto-currency of choice with their feet. It could be Bitcoin, but also Litecoin, Namecoin or PPCoin. Many practical matters will influence these choices, as is the case (duck: another analogy...) with me using euro instead of USD, while it is no problem for me to exchange these two currencies if needed. Preferences shift over time: it happens all the time and this will not be different for free market phenomenons like crypto-currency. It is not a given that such shift in preference will lead to the collapse of crypto-currency as a whole (one will be less valued over time and the other valued more).

The important features that Bitcoin as granddaddy gives us (near free, decentralized, uncontrollable and instant payments all over the world) will live on now that the cat is out of the bag. Whether Bitcoin will survive or not is not the question. In my perception it is not which coin will survive that is at stake, but finding a good, wide spread and long lasting use for crypto-currency's unique features. Like in getting your mom to use them (and yes, that is a very long road ahead :D )

I would very much like Bitcoin to succeed, but if better coins appear, nothing is holding back the public (including me) to jump on another train. The first who can manage to develop a coin that has the additional feature of instant payment (without 6 confirmations needed) while being as secure as Bitcoin, has a real prospect of having a winner within reach. Either Bitcoin assumes this innovation, or is left for dead. It's nature in the digital realms....

The public does not always chose the best solution and may chose LTC's features in the end over Bitcoin. That's not for us to decide but by the one's making a crypto-currency a success: its users as a whole.

If you liked this contribution, you may donate any excess Litecoins to the following address: LcjnwSZHMTASjtR2gNSxwfXueceEm8Ggb2

In view of recent events I've come to the conclusion, even if it's only for the bold portion above, supporting litecoin is essential, it's similarity to Bitcoin is a stregnth not a weakness.

Agreed, bitcoin has reached a maturity/complexity level that politics has become a big concern, there is no existing clear governance structure. The increase of mining power after ASIC release forced many people out the game. LTC on the other hand are relatively young, and GPU is available everywhere, it does not have those problems right now

Imagine that one day, bitcoin forked into two chain because of the conflicting interest of different involved parties, while LTC keep a promise of never change the existing protocol (ironically, it is because no developers are messing with the code ;D), I guess LTC price will bypass BTC

Then BTC will become a medium of exchange that can satisfy increased transaction volume with larger and larger block size, the price stays stable. And LTC becomes a store of value that could not handle too much transaction but the price is rising 50% per month, everyone is eagerly waiting in line to get their transaction in queue  ::)

Why would people invest in a crypto-currency that can't even run it's own network and approve transactions? If it got to the point where the transaction list was so far backlogged that people could't even spend their money, I'd say that crypto-currency has pretty much failed.

I sent some 'dust' today resulting in 100 pieces for a 0.36 BTC transfer. Took hours to complete 6 confirmations. If small payments are a problem, there is a future problem that needs to be sorted out.

I understand the concept of 6 confirmations, but preferably it remains within the 10 minutes time frame and never takes longer.

Competition motivates people a bit, but the biggest motivation in human life is cooperation (just think about relationships). You can't start a successful business without any employees and it won't be successful without partnerships.

The reason is simple: price rise 50% per month, because limited supply, no one change the protocol, stable like a rock. People will bid up the transaction fee to make the processing faster

Exactly! If it gets too popular, nobody will want to use it. Just like restaurants that are so crowded you can't even get a table -- nobody goes to those.

Well, nobody who is nobody does... :) :D

-MarkM-

Competition makes anything better. Competition promotes excellence and prevents any one company (or person or idea or whatever...) from becoming the rule-maker for everyone. Competition promotes stability in prices and prevents gouging. It allows for the best stuff to float to the top.

I hope litecoin gives bitcoin a run for its money. They, and we, will be better for it.

Competition makes everything better.

Better more crypto currencies than fiat monopolies

A better analogy would be a telephone network that only allows a global maximum of 10 calls to take place at any given moment and refuses to increase capacity no matter how many subscribers it has or how much they are willing to pay to make a call.

Bitcoins have no value to someone who isn't actually able to use them, just like a telephone isn't useful if you can't actually call anybody.

Well, this would make the telephone calls extremely valuable, at least until someone else built a better telephone network.

If the capacity of the network is limited, transaction fees will be bid up. Only the "most important" transactions will go through. The network will still be extremely valuable so long as there *are* important transactions. But it will also be vulnerable because there will be a large area of need (admittedly lower in value per-transaction but still a huge amount in total) that it won't be serving.

I have yet to hear this theory articulated by anyone who doesn't have a conflict of interests in this area. Nor has anyone ever been able to give me an example in the real world where making a service deliberately less useful causes its value to increase.

I think we must be talking past each other. I certainly don't think that making a service less useful will increase its value.

Say there was a drastic car shortage and the price of cars went up to $100,000. There are some people who need a car badly enough that they'll pay $100,000 for one. Thus, the price/value of a car will go up. However, the total value of all cars will go down. And, of course, the car market will be vulnerable because cars will be overpriced -- any substitute for a car could take a huge chunk of the market very quickly.

This is "good" in two ways. Anyone who needs a car badly enough will still get one and the price of cars will go way up. But this will make the market as a whole vulnerable.

Honestly Litecoin is ridiculous, Its no better then Bitcoin and just something that will sidetrack the Bitcoin economy. Im sure the creator is sitting on Billions of Litecoins so if the price does ever achieve something hes a millionare.

Gosh you LTC haters need new material that has facts.

LTC is better in that it is FASTER. I hate having to wait 1 hour to send coins. Litecoin is super fast. go get a cup of coffee come back and its transferred.

In the technological arena...faster has value...more than you might think.

It is not faster. This is a myth.

The reason you wait 1 hour is because you want to make sure there are sufficient computations behind your transaction that the chance of it being reverted is low. If you want the same security with Litecoin, you need the same number of computations, not the same number of confirmations. That is, it takes just as long (assuming the hash rate is the same, long if it's less).

You can't just defend against the most likely threats. If you make a habit of that, the less likely threats will suddenly start happening an awful lot more. You might get away with it for awhile, but I wouldn't suggest it.

You need sufficient hashing power after your transaction, not some magic number of confirmations. Some crypto-currencies dishonestly and deceptively promote "faster confirmations" as if that meant your could rely on a transaction sooner. In fact, it just means you need more confirmations to acquire sufficient proof of work after your transaction to secure it.

Litecoin wiki - bad news for Bitcoin ? - interesting video ?

http://financialsurvivalnetwork.com/2013/03/bitcoin-calls-litecoin-a-pyramid-scheme/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bitcoin-calls-litecoin-a-pyramid-scheme

Thank you for pointing this out.  I have been quietly thinking that this is an issue for several alternative cryptocurrencies (including my preference, TerraCoin).  I notice that some processors wait for more confirmations in TRC than they would for BTC, and I assume that is because they are aware of this issue.

Who is to say how much time to "secure" a transaction is SUFFICIENT? You? I think not.

So my coins getting transferred to and from the exchange is a myth? No buddy, I disagree, it is reality.

I would rather put my faith in a less secure (lower hash rate) network that is decentralized as opposed to something that is centralized in currency creation like RIPPLE.

Litecoin > Ripple

I refuse to trust one single entity in the currency creation process. I may as well just use the Federal Reserve system if I wanted that.

READ MORE: Why Ripple is a scam -----> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=147789.msg1574024#msg1574024 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=147789.msg1574024#msg1574024)

I'm not offering any opinion about how much time it takes to secure a transaction sufficiently. I'm only explaining what units it has to be measured in -- how much effort it takes to undo it.

Huh?

If all else fails, change the subject. And, of course, do so as hysterically as possible. I'm not even trying to compare Litecoin to Ripple as I don't think that makes any sense.

I'm comparing Litecoin to Bitcoin and pointing out that a claim of "faster transactions" is simply bogus and is based on the misconception that 6 is some magic number of confirmations. People use 6 confirmations as a "magic number" with Bitcoin because they believe 6 confirmations provides sufficient *hashing power* on top of the transaction. Someone who believes 6 confirmations is necessary for Bitcoin would, assuming they understand the issues involved, likely not find 6 confirmations sufficient in Litecoin for transactions of comparable value.

If I have a "SlowCoin", which generates a block per 60 minutes, does that mean 1 confirmation will be sufficient? It seems 51% attack would be much easier that way. I have to say your conclusion is counter intuitive.

The fact that each block is based on previous hash and a nonce has nothing to do with securing the block chain?

"Sufficient confirmations" means the resources needed to successfully orphan the branch containing a given transaction are more expensive than the transaction itself.

6 confirmations is a number that somebody pulled out of their nether regions back when the network was small and people were still CPU mining, and nobody has since then come up with a better answer to the question.

No, one confirmation would not be sufficient because there's a potential for two blocks to be found at the same time. The first confirmation is "special" because that indicates your transaction was chosen over any conflicting transactions and all that's needed is for that block to win for your transaction to win.

However, with faster confirmations, the probability of two blocks being found at very close to the same time (within the network's propagation time and miners 'switch over' time) is higher. So the faster confirmations are, the less "special" the first one is. With your SlowCoin, getting one confirmation would worth much more than it is in Bitcoin because the probability of two blocks being found close in time is much lower.

If you assume six Bitcoin confirmations is the confidence level you want, you're looking at 60 minutes on average to get it. If you imagine an alt coin with faster confirmations, you could have your first confirmation sooner, reducing the time to reach the same security level if you assume the same hash rate. It's only the time to first confirmation you can improve, and your cost of doing so is that the first confirmation is less valuable.

If you do the math, you get that's it's possible to reduce the time to "full confirmation" (with the above assumptions) by about 8-12%. 55 minutes average instead of an hour doesn't seem like much to celebrate.

Yes it is healthy.

In fact Bitcoin must set a trend: The break of the proprietary money system.

New networks can span and it will all depend on marketing principals. You gamble you lose.

Imagine new networks created on these peer to peer principles . Much better democracy in the new monetary system. Break from the slavery.

A better analogy is Solidcoin is Apple to Bitcoin's Android.

PS: If it were not for Bitcoin, I would seriously consider taking a short position on Apple stock.

competition is always a good thing unless you have a monopoly.

It's not quite necessarily so. You can have unusual cases where competition is actually bad, at least for short periods of time. One of those cases is a significant risk for crypto-currencies.

With crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and the various alt coins, the usefulness of the currency as a means of exchange is dependent on how many people accept that currency. If you have lots of competition, it may result in each currency being better, however, it can also result in no currency ever getting significant adoption because that adoption is spread over more currencies.

So competition can lead to a case where no currency reaches critical mass, which can be worse for almost everyone.

This is one of the reasons Bitcoiners are hostile to alternative currencies. If they reduce Bitcoin adoption, they can reduce the chances or delay the time when any currency make a major impact. The tradeoff is that when a currency does make a major impact, it will likely be a better currency. If alternative currencies push Bitcoin to be better, that's a pure win.

True.  It'd split whatever one currency would've been worth with several different kinds.  Which isn't too bad, but considering the end user might have to wind up using several different wallets for several different crypto-currencies, it'd get a little annoying.  Some people might refuse a highly popular currency all together just because they don't want to be paid that way.  Because of this, I don't believe any two currencies will ever duel side by side, at least when there isn't a #1 currency already in place.

Then again, considering social barriers, it could be possible; one nation speaking language X would prefer XCoin, while another nation speaking language Y would prefer YCoin...

No, competing crypto currencies will rather split nations on demographics, politics and even religion, based on different solutions of the initial distribution problem. E.g. CatholicCoin, with initial distribution by the Roman Catholic Church to each of its members (maybe not the best example when I come to think of it, as they are very conservative....

I don't think so. The value of the initial distribution of a crypto-currency is very low relative to the value of the currency as a means of exchange (assuming the currency is successful). And the value of the currency as a means of exchange is dependent on broad adoption.

If the currency doesn't achieve broad adoption, the initial distribution doesn't matter much because the total real value of all currency of that type in existence will never be significant.

For example, the early adopters of Bitcoin mined about 2 million Bitcoins at a time when Bitcoin was worth, at most, $2 apiece. That puts the value of the initial distribution to the early adopters at $4 million. That's microscopic compared to the current total value of Bitcoin.

This was my first thought when I found out about Bitcoin. What's to stop others just copying it and devaluing it?

Well, power and influence. Nobody is going to choose to use something that adds no extra utility over bitcoin's established value.

However if I was Amazon I'd be modifying the source code and uploading a new block chain to their cloud right now to create Amazon coins that I can give away free to normal customers to start with, allowing them to spend them later or offer them as gifts with a guaranteed minimum value. Just open an exchange where people can buy or sell them as gifts and voila, people will start pouring money into Amazon coins knowing that they will always be able to spend them on books and DVDs and with the possibility of them going up in value too. All at no risk to Amazon.

Repeat for eBay, Apple etc., and bitcoin starts to look like dirty money.

The only thing an alt coin could offer is the legitimacy of knowing who you are dealing with as oppose to bitcoin's anonymity. Trusting some mysterious stranger on the other side of the internet with no recourse if something goes wrong is not something ordinary consumers are going to accept.

Maybe it's not so much competition as mutual support ... or it will become that way.

I keep thinking that there will presently be a whole spectrum of meme-coins: JesusCoin, AllahCoin, Marxistcoin. ArtCoin, GreenCoin, etc ... so that people will tend to use the coin that fits their belief systems, supposing that others who do the same are somewhat like themselves.

All these currencies will float against each other, reflect the real vitality of different aspects of society, and be offered also in mutual bundled coin products.

How could it NOT go that way?

Competition is bad.

The reason being with something as copy and tweakable as open source software, its way too easy to make clones. In fact someone should programatically generate every possible combination of coin generation time, block size, hash size, coin limit, deflation, and inflation rate etc, just to prove the point.

If there were 10,000 different slightly varied bitcoins they would all be worthless. The only thing that gives bitcoin worth right now is that sufficient people are using just one version of it.

https://btc-e.com/exchange/ltc_btc

All in all litecoins rise from a couple of cents to over $1 over the last couple of weeks has been the most amazing ride, every bit as exciting as its big brother Bitcoin. Well done LTC  ;D

Sure there could be some heart wrenching volatility as we saw in Bitcoin but hey what a ride
Ps. more litecoin Dev. Updates coming in may !!  ;D

Long live crypto coins.

http://i846.photobucket.com/albums/ab22/1973mb1973/b1c43db3e7c89cb7aae695dd481b0c69_zps776c0579.jpg

The crypto trains getting a little crowded  ;D

http://i846.photobucket.com/albums/ab22/1973mb1973/2709589c222bd6997e11d07d25eea093_zpsb7de0c9a.jpg

From mt gox Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/MtGox - point 6 of interest in relation to Litecoin.

Dear Mt. Gox Customers and Bitcoiners,

The reaction since yesterday’s statement regarding the temporary suspension of U.S. dollar withdrawals has had mixed reactions, and raised more than a few questions about why we had to take this step right now. Rather than be subject to inaccurate speculation we’d like to clarify some points here. Due to pending matters we are unable to get into everything in great detail, though we’d certainly love to and are looking forward to the opportunity.

1) The problem with the U.S. withdrawals (and even other currencies for that matter) is that our bank can no longer handle the volume of withdrawals. They struggled in the last two months, and the increase due to the Dwolla separation has made it increasingly more difficult. The pressure we brought onto the bank’s resources finally gave in, and we are now working with them to find an alternative method (hence the suspension). We would have preferred to give notice if we were able to, but it was sudden for us as well.

2) We are now working with new banks and alternative methods for transmitting money to our customers. This does not mean we are stopping entirely within the next two weeks, but it will be slower than we would like. We are literally going to use our manpower to process withdrawals ourselves, manually. This will take more time, but we are dedicated to doing as many per day as possible. We announced a suspension in order to manage expectations while we deliver at a temporary reduced rate. Our goal is to have a new system set up in the next weeks with clarity for both the banks and for our customers.

3) Our previous release was rather vague, but for a reason. Mainly, we don't want to upset our bank! They do great work, but our kind of business is completely new to the banking industry. Processing international wires does not just involve pushing a button. It requires real manpower processing everything individually, even in this modern computer age. While Bitcoin's power lies in its ability to transfer fast and securely through software, the rest of the financial world does not operate like that (contrary to popular opinion). Money is surprisingly analog in many ways, and scarily digital in others.

4) Every customer’s funds are safe, sound, and accounted for. In fact, in our dealings with the Japanese financial regulators we have been assured that we are not under local pressure or suspicion and can operate as usual within normal legal frameworks.

5) Mt. Gox is certainly not a martyr, but it would be hard to argue that we aren’t "taking one for the team" as far as Bitcoin is concerned. We are a big target, and are absorbing the frustrations of Bitcoiners, regulators, banks, and a media that still doesn't quite understand what Bitcoin is. This is a job we are happy to fill, and not just because we are compensated for it. Our hope is that, once Bitcoin finds its place, we will be able to say that we made a difference in sorting it all out in the early days. New exchanges, business models, merchants, traders, and consumers are rising up to innovate and create a whole new way of doing business. A lot of lawyers are getting new cars in the meantime too.

6) As risky as it is to invoke the name of Litecoin (LTC???), we must apologize for not keeping everyone up to date. The fact is that the current situation means a continued delay, but for good reasons. We’re looking at July right now, though that depends on a few things. Mainly, we want to do things correctly from the beginning.

7) The new trading engine is finished, is smokin’ fast, and is currently undergoing bench tests. We’re looking forward to deploying it very soon.

While not the most in-depth update we'd like to give, we hope that it has at least clarified a few things. In the next few weeks we are planning to do another AMA on Reddit when we’ll hopefully be able to answer many more questions and also shed some light on what’s been going on at Mt. Gox these past months. Thank you for your patience and support.

Yes, I've been waiting for Mt.Gox to add Litecoin as it will move it into the mainstream (for cryptocurrency) I believe. I don't think people realize how much support there is for Litecoin. Many think it's only a speculative play fueled by speculators late to the Bitcoin party. However, I've often tried to point out why I think it has fundamental value and a big support role to play for cryptocurrency. The number of users with LTC is huge due to its 4x faster inflation rate and that only means lots of market pressure for adoption.

I think it's also worth pointing out point #5:


There are a lot of Gox bashers, but that company has been hugely key in Bitcoin's progress to date (core devs, often unpaid, of course are another story!).

Competition is almost always a healthy thing.

competition is always good. even if there are 100 different alt coins competition is always good.

what is not good is people sitting on forums WAITING for critical mass, as if it magically will happen naturally. the whole point of competition, much like sports competition... is alot of sweat and hard work.

if your just going to stand there at the start line and think your going to win purely because you have alot of backers, means nothing.. you have to actually respond and do something to ensure you win..

its never about how much money is thrown at a champion, its about how hard they work to succeed. we need a proper focus on infrastructure such as simplifying merchant tools, developing easy methods to incorporate bitcoin technologies into existing business models, and to actually get out of the basements and actively promote bitcoin outside of forums and you tube videos which are only seen by the already initiated.

Why wait for the Catholic Church to launch such a monster coin when we can do it.

Is anybody interested in launching a catholic coin?  I don't have much money but I do won all the catholic coin domains.  Let me know.  Such a coin would be a huge benefit to so many needy people and it would be an instant hit given the coin would automatically have a huge following.

Mormon coin would work too but I'm not Mormon. 

Anybody interested?  Any programmer with spare time?  Anybody with spare cash?  Lol, the latter is a touch one.

whether or not competition is healthy seems to me to be a bit of a pointless question.  the open source nature of bitcoin means there will ALWAYS be competition.  that was pretty much a given from day one of bitcoin, as long as it didn’t turn out to be a total flop.  it was just a matter of time before people started compiling the original source code and tweaking it before new block chains were started. 

of course competition is good.  if crypto currencies become mainstream bitcoin won’t be able to handle the transaction volumes all by itself.  we need multiple crypto currencies.  we’re already seeing clear leaders and laggers in the crypto currency race.  so i wouldn’t worry about bitcoin being watered down too much.  the bad crypto currencies actually accentuate the benefits of the good ones.

various security strategies mean a single attack method would not be successful in bringing down all crypto currencies.  different development teams mean it would be near impossible for them all to succumb to bad government influences (transaction tracking, etc.) or just bad programming mistakes. 

the old saying “don’t keep all your eggs in one basket” applies to crypto currencies just like anything else.  no one wants a single attack or programming error to make their favorite crypto currency worthless.  it’s best to spread the wealth around.

To say competition is healthy is silly.  It's only good for consumers not for the companies involved.  Pretty common sense.

But it looks like bitcoin is now going walstreet which will be mainstream USA after that sometime next year.  If that happens all alt coins will skyrocket.  All of them cause there would be a shortage of alt coins for about 1 year.



ETF for Bitcoin coming which will change the whole idea or alt coins which will bring in the masses and wallstreet.  Hang on, it's gonna all start very soon:



http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/first-name-in-the-first-fund-for-bitcoins-winklevoss/?_r=0

Is competition healthy for bitcoin? Yes, in the same way that we want competition in the exchanges, competition in mining pools, competition in crypto discussion sites, and just about everything else. Competition is absolutely essential. It is what drives innovation. And whether we like it or not, it is here to stay.

Competition in the Eco system is good and all competition is good for consumers.  But competition for any coin is not good.  I'm not sure why anyone would think having 1,000 competing coins would be better than having say 3 total coins for people to choose from.  Bad for them good for the coins.  Since we're buyers of coins we don't want too much competition.

I think for driving use and adoption of Bitcoin over the medium to long term, price stability is what you want. Increasing prices make hoarders happy and drive speculation, but if you want Bitcoins to be adopted as a means of exchange (the gold standard for broad adoption) you need a fairly stable value. If nothing else, rising prices drive fear of a sudden drop which stunts adoption as a means of exchange.

Nice photo ;D

Is per the title, competition is always healthy for everything...

What effect will scrypt ASIC's have? Will scrypt ASIC's farms mine out alts and sell for btc boosting its price and hold litecoin or simply dump all the alts including litecoin in favour of Bitcoin.

Was bitcoins sharp rise anything to do with the introduction of ASIC mining or simply a happy coincidence.

Competition is healthy, but Litecoin is no competition to BTC in any way. It offers NOTHING new or different from moment when they allowed ASIC's to enter their lands. Real competition will come from others like Darkcoin etc.

Competition is healthy, but I dont see much at the moment.

I think at least Doge is good for Bitcoin - and cryptocurrencies overall.
Why? People who know about doge meme learn about dogecoin.. And then they might use it and learn about Bitcoin. I've met some people who knew about Dogecoin but hadn't heard of Bitcoin at all. And as Dogecoin is just 'a joke' and people seem to realize it too, they might still get interested in the more serius cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin when they see how cool the whole system is.

Competition is good as long as the competition doesnt become better than you  :D.

Competition is the antidote to centralization.

Competition is always a good thing.

The only time it is not a good thing is when the competition is undercutting your prices (really not possible to get TX fees much lower to make a difference) or when the competition has a monopoly.

Competition is good for everything. Simply.

When there is competition , consumers will benefit most of them the time .

If there is a monopoly , the consusmers are stucked without any other alternative choice.