Bitcoin Forum

In the past also (more particularly by late 2013 after bitcoin hit $1k for the first time), every Albert and John started their own cryptos as some people cracked down step by step guides for creating new altcoins (before it was a services by few people with some big payments). Still, bitcoin managed to beat them all and managed to gain value over the time.

But, after ethereum based tokens started evaluating, we did see lots of ICOs and then their tokens started impacting bitcoin's dominance in total crypto matketcap. I always do have second thoughts like if ethereum was not introduced or at least not if it was not heavily bumped, litecoin must have been the king of alts till now. But, now it seems if there were less successful altcoins then people would not have deviated their money into alts but they might have kept their money within bitcoins, which might have helped bitcoin to have value at least up to the level of it's today's fair value.

Is it time to regulate altcoins/tokens/ICOs ? Because, they are misleading investors and by-which making hurdles on bitcoin's progress.

Here is one recent article which will give you an idea on why we must work on regulating altcoins and ICOs:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/st-louis-federal-reserve-report-increased-supply-of-altcoins-will-decrease-btcs-value

I think there are arguments to be made both ways. A lot of alt-coins are scams or junk and they bring a bad reputation to crypto as a whole. But a few have pioneered new ways of utilizing the blockchain and increased the awareness and application for cryptocurrencies. I believe overall bitcoin is better off with alts but some cramping down on scams etc would only benefit the whole.

I believe a lot of people had the though process of "BTC is too expensive" i best buy a cheaper alt-coin.

Like saying, Berkshire Hathaway Stock is too expensive, i best buy a crappy penny stock.

Can not believe the amount of people who bought into this Ripple (XRP) shit!

There will be a sort of regulations on ICO's in the future. Even if not in a legal sense (which could be still possible) there will be self-regulatory stuff. Investors will take a look at any ICO that comes out in a much stricter ways from now on. There was over a billion dollars a month invested into new coins coming up early in 2018 whereas there is barely 300 million right now, that number keeps going down all the time and not because some coins are underfunded, some coins are still getting funded whereas some are not getting any funds at all, that is the difference now.

People do care about where their money goes and they check the ICO much more carefully, they check who is making the coin, the team, the roadmap, the features and everything in between and invest accordingly, so even though there is no legal regulations for now, people are smarter about investing.

When the market was pumping many felt they had no time to do a detailed analysis about the ico in which they were investing since every coin was going up at the time, now that the bubble has disappeared then they have more time to evaluate if a coin is any good, it also helps that many of those investors suffered huge losses and they are not wiling to go through that process again if they can avoid it.

Many institutions are calling for the alt coin regulation for a long time and some of the countries have taken actions against the inflow of money as there were a ton of scam projects and the flow of money was huge, one of the main reason for the current downfall is the bitcoin cash and SV power battle and there were some hacks in some of the exchanges, these are the main reason for the market slide, i hope that the market wont slide down further.

i'm in favor of free markets. if idiots wanna pour their money into crap ICOs, power to them. i've made a lot of money trading the irrational mania in the altcoin/token markets, and i'd like that to continue.

introducing nanny state regulations on top of existing laws won't stop idiots from giving away their money. i can assure you of that! it could kill exchange liquidity (the lifeblood of traders) though, depending on the route regulators take.

There is a core of truth in that, but Berkshire Hathaway also has a cheaper second stock (BRK.B) that hovers just over $80 per share.

In the end, the high unit price in Bitcoin doesn't matter since crypto by default is highly divisible, which isn't the case with stocks, so they split to have it become more affordable overall. If people still don't want to buy into Bitcoin because they consider it too expensive, then they are fools and deserve the shit they put themselves through by investing in utter crap coins.

XRP is pure trash, so are all the fools thinking that it is decentralized. It's a security and needs to be categorized as that.

Though, there are many annoying altcoins which in the normal sense is not even supposed to exist  but developers still creates them for personal gains. But I won't say that they are the cause of Bitcoin price crashing because Bitcoin controls them not the other way round.
Though, it's disheartening how many people put their money into some ICO just for the sake of 'quick gains'.

the second thing that makes the price of bitcoin fall is ico scam and the decline in the quality of ico, most new coins (95%) after entering into the exchange the price drops very far from the price of ico, of course this will make investors disappointed.

i do really agree with your opinion to regulate ICOs/Altcoin right now, we need very strict regulation for developer implementing their idea by issuing new project and altcoin. Unconsciously, the emergence of new altcoin which is few oh them bring successful to crypto enthusiast are leads to this bear market situation, especially fake ICO with irresponsible team offering huge profit for new investor. Evaluating scam ICO will begin from this regulation, so i hope no more ICO with the same project in the near future.

This was foresee some time ago and we are to accept this as part of human development!  We always trying to do new things and have control over them.  If it is only bitcoin that is in exist it will be very difficult to buy it by now and the many altcoins and tokens share it capitals and that bring it dominant to a bearable minimal.  If we should only have bitcoin and few coins the early adopters could have been a billionaire today but it was not so.

Why are altcoins misleading investors?

I understand how misleading, or rather deceiving, ICO's can be. We all know that. But I wouldn't equal altcoins with ICO's as they are doing essentially the same thing which Bitcoin is doing. In other words, I don't quite understand why altcoins should be regulated differently from Bitcoin, or that they should be regulated while Bitcoin should not. Or have you actually meant to say that they should in fact be banned as they are "making hurdles on bitcoin's progress"?

I think the closest reason why bitcoin went down was that people who had a lot of bitcoins before the peak happened gathered their coins while it was really low however had no reason to sell when it was just couple hundred dollars. The ones that sold was easily eaten by the buy walls we had and the price kept going. However, people who bought or get into bitcoin while it was less than 100 dollars had no reason to keep bitcoin when it reached 20 thousand dollars and that harsh big sell dropped the price significantly.

Altcoins that came out during those times were one way of people running away from bitcoin and investing their money into stuff that they believed was the beginning for a great new coin and they would make thousands of dollars from simple investments but that was the breaking point not the starting point.

Yes.

I think the exchanges should not have more than 20 tokens for trading. If they cut most of these coins, market will surely be more healthy.

It is not true. Alts give Bitcoin a a market a use case. Yes of course this market will not be like it seems since most alts are useless and their real value is way lower as it is now.  But still they adds to Bitcoins economy without any alt Bitcoin would be worth less as it is right now.

It cuts both ways actually

While it can be said that altcoins pick up where Bitcoin leaves with respect to some of them, this is definitely not so with respect to the "supermajority" of them. I mostly agree with people who say that altcoins dilute Bitcoin's value. So, while, on one hand, altcoins may attract more people than Bitcoin alone and raise overall cryptocurrency awareness, especially when prices are growing, on the other hand, it works in the opposite direction as well, when prices are falling and people losing their investments

That wouldn't be a big deal if all coins fell proportionately, but this is never the case as Bitcoin in these circumstances is the least suffering cryptocurrency. In this way, if people were invested in Bitcoin alone, their losses would not be so high and the whole market wouldn't be bleeding so much

I don't think altcoins lead to Bitcoin's price going down. The altcoin market has brought in a lot more money, so it has expanded the investment space of crypto. While it also takes some money from Bitcoin I think the overall effect has been net positive for bitcoin, in that if it wasn't a whole industry and instead just Bitcoin by itself it would garner a lot less interest for trading and investment.

But, just think about what an investor will do when he is not having any other options for investing but having only bitcoins. I guess this is what being emphasized here. I agree that altcoins are bring more new people into crypto space but not sure how many of them also adopting bitcoins for some reasons. I do see people invest into some altcoins and then encashing them into BTC or ETH but not sure how long they will remain as a crypto adopter but most of them will go for converting back into their fiats.

Here, we must note those only new investors who got chances to know about decentralized system and bitcoin's limited supply features may remain as a long term crypto holders and all others are treating this space as an alternate investment opportunity when they plan up short term profit gaining.

The effect was positive on the way up

And became strongly negative on the way down. Most altcoins, in fact almost all of them but a few chosen ones, were mere pump and dump schemes. So while they sucked in plenty of money when the market was on the rise, there was no buying back when the market turned down. In short, it means that the money invested in altcoins was lost, most likely lost for good

This effectively means that the initial expansion (or explosion) of the crypto space ended with an even stronger contraction (implosion, like a start collapsing into a black hole), and it in fact remains to be seen if we wouldn't have been better off without all these shitcoins flooding the market all these years

to me, altcoins are mainly about maximizing speculative gains. so i actually like them for the same reason i like penny stocks. buying blue chips means most of the speculative gains have already been realized. all you can expect is a reasonable return---not explosive exponential gains as a company goes from zero to hero. my biggest trades by far (%-wise) have always come from gambling on lower cap coins, not bitcoin. i store value in bitcoin, but there are much more profitable bets to make elsewhere.

I know what you are saying. Great gains to be made if you're willing to take the chance. Coming back to it, i think my Berkshire Hathaway to Penny Stock Scale was too extreme.

However, It doesn't change the fact alot of people tried to "invest" not "gamble" on other Digital Currency/Token/ICO/Shit. Hence, taking $$$ away from BTC and ultimately not experience BTC for what it was meant to be a "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

We have many shitcoins:

Jesus Coin (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/jesus-coin/)

Bitcoiin (B2G) (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoiin/)

Bitcoin Plus (XBC) (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-plus/)

eBitcoin (EBTC) (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ebtcnew/)

Bitcoin Token (BTK (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin-token/)

bitcoin2network (B2N) (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin2network/)

Trollcoin Trollcoin (TROLL) (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/trollcoin/)

RussiaCoin (RC) (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/russiacoin/)

PutinCoin (PUT) (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/putincoin/)

You obviously refer to shitcoins and the coins in between as the volatility of major altcoins are not that different from Bitcoin's to actually make a valuable difference from a trading perspective. Personally, I'm using Litecoin myself as a vehicle for speculation, and sometimes, it is more profitable to trade Bitcoin's volatility as Litecoin at these times looks like being dragged behind Bitcoin's price action. Indeed, it is easier to manipulate Litecoin's price overall because there is less trading volumes and you should in fact expect it to be more volatile in general. But I wouldn't write off Bitcoin completely in this regard. It can be volatile as hell too

On the other hand, ZCash, for example, has been a dead horse recently in terms of price action (neither here nor there)

One of the main reasons I think Bitcoin maximalists that say all alts will go to 0 are wrong, is the fact that just as penny stocks that don't offer anything of substance but are still traded, all these shitcoins with no substance will get traded by gamblers trying to make money out of the pump and dumps, so you will see them come and go while Bitcoin is #1 at any rate. Non-PoW coins that is, every PoW altcoin will get attacked, so it will be just the PoS or any other system that isn't PoW which is by default inferior to Bitcoin's security as far as we've seen.

see above where it says "lower cap coins"? that's where the biggest gains are, yes.

but even mid and large cap altcoins are significantly more volatile than bitcoin. let's look at the 2017 data for ethereum vs bitcoin (coinbase prices):

ethereum:

bitcoin:

similar? i think not! :P

It should be evident to anyone with a half functioning brain that you are making incorrect comparisons

First, you are comparing a well-established coin with a fresh start (well, maybe not so fresh but you get the point). Further, this is not what volatility is essentially about. If some shitcoin rose 1000% in a month's timespan, it is not volatility. Volatility, as the word itself suggests, is more about oscillating prices in a certain range. In other words, to see volatility of an asset you should remove the long-term trend from its price action

And last but not least, I don't say that major altcoins are less volatile or on par with Bitcoin. They are indeed more volatile overall, but the difference is not that great. And sometimes (which is my point exactly), Bitcoin's volatility can surpass that of major altcoins. And I gave you an example of that, when Litecoin's price had been dragging behind the price of Bitcoin