Bitcoin Forum

With Bitcoins worth going increasingly higher and getting excepted in more places, which ALT-coin is really going to be able to keep up?

Now I know a lot of people are going to say Litecoin but that coin does not really bring in anything new, client wise. Now I know that we need it to be similar to Bitcoin as that is what the user base is used to.

Terracoin and PPcoin both have been put on BTC-E but have seen little to no action.

This begs the question, do we really need ALT-coins?

Now I am saying this from a neutral perspective and I have used in some way for form most of these coins, I am just wondering what everyone else thinks and feels.

Terracoin, no action... where have you been?

I mean in the long term, can you not see the exchange manipulation going on?

THey see no action because they bring no real difference to the portfolio, and the market itself can't sustain the price for them. You don't really need more generic altcoins as much as you need currency used for specific functions, a group of functions, and/or pushing the envelope with innovations.

PPC and TRC are already dead in the water.

We need altcoins for miners that can no longer participate in BTC mining and newbies who were not here when BTC was $5 USD a coin

Bear in mind PPCoin's were going for 2 cents 3 weeks ago.

We'll know more when we how people react to Litecoin being on mtgox.

No Alt-coin will 'make it' any time soon. BTC has to gain massive traction (100x larger then what is going on now, like where everybody knows what it is) before a fork of it even has a chance of success as well. Todays alt-coins (yes, even your precious ltc and ppc) are doomed to only being worth investing in for profits. They won't be accepted as a currency majorly, besides a few gambling sites and web hosting sites.

Not saying I don't like LTC, I love its fast transaction times. I'm mining it right now, but only for the reason above, to profit on it later.

The only alt-coin that will survive the test of time is Namecoin, or maybe a fork of Namecoin, just because of its nature.

I say a fork of namecoin because namecoin is in the shitter right now.

Nobody really uses Namecoin, though...

I edited my post. A fork of namecoin with some major changes to fix its problems might do better then the namecoin we have right now.

One of the best things about altcoins is they are mostly still "under the radar", for example how many miners even merged-mine namecoin, how many also merge devcoin, how many also merge ixcoin? Not a lot, right? Yet enoguh that all of those are a bit difficult for a newbie to mine at home easily.

But I0coin, GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, aha, so few people include them in their merge that they are ridiculously low difficulty. Hopefully there will be some under the radar coins for years yet, so that newbies always have some coin that they can quetly mine at home for at least a few months before the big miners spoil the fun by driving the difficulty up.

However, a lot of those low difficulty coins are basically waiting for ASICs, they have been waiting a year for ASICs, they would have built huge FPGA farms if they had not constantly been told an ASIC would be shipped in four to six weeks.

So once people really can buy an off the shelf ASIC, shipped the same day you order it kind of off the shelf, maybe the main change will be people will no longer realistically be able to mine the easiest, under-the-radar coins using CPUs, GPUs or even (except litecoin type coins) FPGAs, and instead will need to buy themselves a $150 or so (cheaper than many/most GPUs) ASIC device for the fun at home tiny little hobby-miner experience.

By then the people who are mining BBQcoins, GRouPcoins, Tenebrix, CoiLedCoins, GeistGeld and such with CPUs right now might  well be quite well-to-do!

-MarkM-

There are already coins people can mine quietly at home, like Freicoin or, even better, Novacoin.

Markm has a good point. All these coins need is to be setup for merged mining on and placed on an exchange.

The problems with altcoins is that they are all really doesn't address any problems that bitcoin have or put it in other way - they don't introduce something new to the market. And all of them are just forks of the original bitcoin which kind of diminishing their value because it is evident for all that this is just a bitcoin + some feature X that in most cases doesn't  necessarily makes a big difference.  And really what all creators of this altcoins is trying to do is to get some buck by selling the currency to someone who were too late to the bitcoin buble. I just wondering why is this still works in 2013. The only altcoin  that I could think of that has some really different and interesting properties is PPCoin, but it's still just a little bit modified bitcoin.
What really promising is Ripple, but it's not a "coin" at all.

Coins that are using say 10% to foundation that in turn uses it to keep price more stable, plus scrypt and team who are keen to promote it to actual merchants. Plenty of innovations to come imo :D

Interesting read that mentions the batch of original "altcoins..." With the exception of LTC, PPC and NMC, you don't really hear about any of the other ones any more...

guldencoin (nlg)