Bitcoin Forum

Many older "respected" alts are extremely low now.
Are you following the crowd and selling/waiting or are you buying while prices are low?

Buying/Mining new promising alt coins. Those older alts failed, just look at primecoin etc..

But prime coin was for science and was going to fix water and food shortage world wide.  Magical prime numbers can fix everything.

Primecoin is a botnet coin. Of course it gets dumped cheap, its miners don't have any meaningful expenses to deal with in mining it.

-MarkM-

Sadly, the predictions about one coin being the sole survivor is looking like its coming true. There are still some intrepid investors buying primecoin but I don't know how long they'll continue to. The trend is definitely down and a zero value conclusion is a real possibility. I think even the botnets will eventually give up mining XPM too as its difficulty rises.

This was intended as a general question not about your favorite alt coin(s)


Please define "promising", do you mean hoping it gets on Cryptsy?

A promising coin is one that seems like there might be some chance its blockchain can and will actually be secured.

Namecoin for example might have promise if there is any chance that merged mining will become more widespread as margins on mining get tighter. At some point with profit from mining being harder and harder to make, the extra percent or fraction of a percent that one can get by merging could become pretty much the only profit miners are likely to make, at least those who don't have the cheapest electricity on the planet. So maybe merged mined coins, or some of them anyway, might someday have hash rates closer to those of bitcoin. That is more promise than any other coins so far it seems.

Basically some day it might happen that very few bitcoin miners are able to eke out any profit at all except by merging, since only mining bitcoins would not counter the profitability edge that people with slightly cheaper electricity have.

Even then though that would only make up for a rather small difference in electricity cost, unless some of the merged coins also enjoy a price increase relative to bitcoins so they contribute a larger percentage to a merged miner's income.

Thus I am buying I0Coins, DeVCoins, and even - although the question of whether pools will continue to merge them once they are not being minted anymore is a worry - IXCoin, and plan to start also buying NaMeCoin when I have enough bitcoins on the exchange to start into buying that relatively more expensive coin; and am of course merging all eight merged mined coins in my mining.

I would probably also be buying GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld if they were on any exchanges. (Though I can of course by dGRP from users of my Open Transactions server.)

-MarkM-

thing is there are few promising new alts, everyone is just hoping on the latest pump scam coin then moving to the next, if that was put into the genuine alts that have a purpose then we'd see longterm future in the genuine alts (be it old school alts or newer).

harder to find the none shitcoins in all the mess so everyone just hops on the popular shitcoin and hopes not to be left the bagholder.

Merged mining helps because you do not have to abandon the coin(s) you are already mining in order to also help secure more blockchains also at the same time in other words to also mine other coins at the same time.

This jumping from coin to coin is an artifact of the failure of the coins to implement the ability to merged mine as a secondary chain.

If the new coins could be merged mined each one a miner starts mining they can keep on mining at almost no cost "forever" so newer coins coming out would not need to undermine the security of the existing ones by luring miners away from them. They would simply compete on features for a place in the merge, then just keep on chugging along forever like Namecoin, Groupcoin, Devcoin, IXCoin, I0Coin, Coiledcoin and Geistgeld.

-MarkM-

I spent more money buying Goldcoin (GLD) during the past 3 months than at any other time.

I agree with this 100% the CPU coins favor the select few with access to many pcs mining on other peoples electricity and other dishonest mining methods. 

Im selling most of my coins quickly to USD as Id rather have what I can get now guaranteed rather then wait and see.

That should see I was buying price, now the price is higher than the then buy price, then I sell, and buy. No confidence in the long-term.
What do you think?

then you haven't bought much  ::) and if you have then what u r really saying (as dev) is it should be worth even less  :o

What do you think of proof of stake coins and their methodology in securing their blockchains?

No. I continue to buy Goldcoin because I believe it will become a highly successful cryptocurrency.

I'm just sticking with my original plan to continue averaging into the currency over time.

The last I heard, no one had actually implemented any of the methods of implementing proof of stake that seemed at least theoretically to be potentially able to be secure.

That is why ppcoin for example is a hybrid; proof of stake is not secure, and even being hybrid it still apparently needs a centralised potential-attacker who gets to control which branch of the chain to promote as being the "real" one. (Some kind of central bank or whatnot that gets to create checkpoints that the clients blindly accept as correct, or something like that? Much like realsolid's solidcoin except its maybe not a bunch of special nodes doing it but just one guy/company?)

-MarkM-

Selling near the bottom when things look "hopeless" (and buying high when things look great), isn't that why most traders lose money?

I net a weekly profit and choose not to speculate on the market much longer then that.  But yes buy low sell high.  I feel the market is not at it's lowest, that seems to be your speculation not mine.   So wouldn't I sell.....and yes I know that is still speculating on the market longer then a week so fuck myself.

PS I never buy, I mine.

Hopefully none. BTC has the SHA-256 realm and just let it remain that way; other coins can be made to be merged-mined as it should be for something with strong infrastructure.

Anyhow, yes you did. I guess what I'm trying to say is that even the merged-mined coins like NMC/DEV just doesn't seem worth getting at the moment since BTC is still "struggling." I'd still rather get more BTC while it is in its dip, rather than divesting what I have in BTC to get alts. Don't get me wrong, I think that the merge-mined coins will go up (and in fact will likely gain significantly more value than coins in the scrypt realm), but I'd rather see the correlative TA first before taking that risk. I guess I'm just a smidge risk-adverse at the moment.

Heh, I guess in response to the thread question, I'm holding; but if I had to choose between sell or buy, I'd buy.

I just saw where the USD markets are listed on Cryptsy. That should help some more cash flow into the alts!  :)

https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/2

Cryptsy is most used Platform and US Based platform so this movement will help Bitcoin and Alt coins.
More flow of Fiat in Bitcoin and altcoins will help crypto development.

I did see that too.
Let's hope they have clearance to start those very soon.

+1 ha ha

To your Question

Yes definitely buying quality now.

There are a few out there, I see Bitcoin fading away post crisis but it will be as good as any Quality during USD collapse / revalue.

Not going to be able to push the old centralized = secure much anymore soon I dont think, it was always going to just be a matter of education,  I think we are starting to see real small investors come into the market.

These people are becoming much more educated.

This free market evolves very quickly.

It has nothing to do with centralisation, it has to do with securing multiple chains with the same hashpower so that mining one chain does not require abandoning the other(s).

The current tendency is "divide and conquer": dividing up the miners so that no coin has enough miners to be secure.

Defenders need to defend all targets, attackers only need to attack one at a time. The only way to feasibly defend is thus not to divide up the defense force between targets but to defend them all at once with the same force.

-MarkM-

Definitely most altcoins have a lifetime attached to them, but not all. Best to go with the newest coins and wait for their value to appreciate than buy older ones that are expensive.

I think the LETS systems are good, there are some benefits to them over cryptos, they don't require much resources, no need to worry about block chains, they are just centralized.

I saw one online LET for Australia called ozcoin, www.ozcoin .tk it looks very simple.

cyclos offers people free websites to run their own online currency.

It seems decent enough. Most of these crypto coins, there is not much of a worry of governments banning them anymore so I can see them being ok to be centralized. A lot of the ultcoins are really still centralized, the authors have complete control over updates and can force people to use their updates if they still want to use the coin.

 
  

Or buy old ones that are cheap. Some have patiently worked for years preparing themselves to be secure before going onto an exchange; miners with that kind of patience seem less likely to just dump all those years of work for a pittance, whereas miners who simply instamined for a day a coin whose starting difficulty was way too low or that had extra-high block rewards on its first blocks (often alongside having ridiculously low starting diffculty so those superblocks could be instamined) have proven to be almost unable to resist the temptation to insta-dump the moment they hit an exchange and instamine another such scamcoin abandoning the one that got onto an exchange.

-MarkM-

From a purely financial perspective, I feel that the markets right now are too tenuous for people to buy. So for now, I wouldn't necessarily say sell, but I probably wouldn't buy.

A lot of this is due to the price of BTC. I think once BTC starts showing signs of a prolonged rally, then it'll be another good time to buy some coins, but there is usually a very small window between those times. There is only a slight delay between the time BTC goes into a prolonged rally and altcoins following suit.

Exactly, that is why the time to buy is on the way down and at the bottom (on the way is so you definitely at least got some somewhat cheap even if you don't guess the exact bottom), not once they start going up. Once they start going up you want to already have your sell orders in place waiting to sell at a profit the coins you already bought back when it was going down. (And while it is going up, people buying your sell orders, place your buy orders ready for the next down-turn.)

The trick is to figure out which are the serial up-down-up-down coins and which are only going down because they are merely a dump not a blockchain with serious miners devoted to securing it.

A big clue there is that miners who do not have to abandon one coin to mine another can well afford to continue securing the coins they already mined while still being free to mine new coins. Thus the appeal of the merged mined coins. Look at DeVCoin for example, it has gone down many times but keeps on skyrocketing back up again too.

Basically those coins continue to have hashrate securing them even when they do go down in value, so are well positioned to go back up after each wave of useless garbage that lacks hashpower gets dumped into oblivion.

-MarkM-

Yes there are alot of older coins out there with active devs that are indifferent to the coins price vs USD they are the ones to keep an eye on, and the most likely to survive a prolong bear market.

merged mining is not true POW ，  >:(

Indeed, now the price tends to make people so embarrassed, don't know how to choose.

Not just devs, miners. Unless you want centralisation, in which it is the devs that decide which transactions happen or did not happen rather than the miners?

-MarkM-

Yes, that's exactly why. Thanks to the way we're wired up, "Buy low, sell high" is the stock-market-maxim output of a hash function. The maxim itself is easy to understand and remember. But to apply it, you need to "de-hash" it...which is damned difficult and takes a lot of time.

Fact is, we're wired up to assume that the past, present and future are linked together in a more-or-less linear way - which works so well in everyday life, we more-or-less take it for granted. Moreover, we fall into the habit of assuming that heeding the consensus is a reliable shortcut to finding truth, which works as long as the consensus' members are more-or-less honest  :) . The price of an altcoin, or of any investment, is a kind of consensus estimate of its future prospects. One that's, naturally, reinforced by people voicing their opinions directly.

To "buy low, sell high" entails bucking those two habits explicitly, which is a tough habit to learn.

Moreover, there's a special psychic risk that comes with buying low and selling high: the risk of buying a dog and feeling like an idiot when it tanks. As we know, it's a lot easier to act like a jackass when everyone else is (or wishes they could.) Acting like a jackass alone, in  a way that doesn't tap into the crowd's secret desires (and buying unpopular investments never does), is a time-tested way to get yourself singled out and even picked on by the group.

Let's face it: there's a special kind of sting that comes with buying a dog that the consensus thinks is crap, finding out that it is crap and seeing that the consensus was right. That's when the "I told you so"s really get to a fella.

And that's the psychic risk you shoulder when you buy low, sell high. Add to that the fact that post-bubble investments take a long time to recover, so the fear that you're the village idiot for buying in hangs over your head for a long time.

Who was buying a house in 2010?   

As I have a small rig, I am mining the more profitable altcoins and sell them.
While I keep Bitcoin, PPC and NXT for a long term investment.

That's fair, it just that this time, around I don't have confidence that any of these alts are necessarily going to go up again. Maybe MEC and DGC could go up again as an example, but there has been so much negative press around a lot of these older altcoins too. I just don't have enough confidence to even say with serious miners that a coin will go up again. A lot of people in this scene have turned to a fickle type of panic mode so I think a lot of serious miners will start switching either to newer coins or to LTC. And if that is the case, it makes it very difficult to instill confidence in me that any of those alts will go up in price.

I would rather wait to see signs of life in the BTC market as a prompt to check for signs of life in those older altcoins and use some sort of correlative TA to determine what to get. Sure the profits won't be as much, but for me, the risk would be much more acceptable.

Part of me wants to say with the advent of new hardware, a lot of that hashrate will go the way of LTC or newer coins where is it "easier" to make a profit. Anyhow, before I ramble on too much, I just don't have any confidence that any of these coins will necessarily trend upward again. That's why I'm personally going to take the correlative method so that I protect myself from a lot of that risk.

What new crapcoins do you imagine SHA256 ASICs are going to move on to?

I already mentioned that I won't consider the merged mined family of scrypt coins worth risking until I see litecoin and DOGE being merged mined together or one of them becoming so insignificant it no longer seems a serious fragmentation of the scrypt space, didn't I?

-MarKM-

Try then instead to do the buy low sell high only with your profits.

Obtain your initial profits to work with by, instead, buying on the buy side and selling on the sell side, of the order-book, growing a pile/range of orders each side of the gap in between the two sides of the order book, back and forth like a bot at low profit, and gradually growing the range over which your orders on both sides deviate from the gap in the middle.

Basically that is to start off by feeding on variance / volatility but over time building such a range of orders on both sides of the book that you have orders all the way up to above previous highs and all the way down to below previous lows.

At that point you will not only be buying low and selling high but also be buying all the way down and selling all the way up, moving the proceeds to the other side of the order book each time someone takes you up on one of your offers, at a slight margin each time of course.

This of course works best when there is some volatility initially. Eventually it should lead to less and less volatility as you grow - all using profits of course, having long ago gotten back out your initial capital plus more and more profit over time - into a more and more significant "market maker" aka "liquidity provider" in that pair.

-MarkM-

Thanks for your take. You're obviously experienced with a different trading strategy entirely: market-making, or the kind of trading that pros licensed to trade on the commodity exchanges do. Floor trading. That's an entirely different animal, as the name of the game is to keep neutral about the long-term value about the vehicle in question. Bull-biased and bear-biased traders get cleaned out of Chicago Board of Trade so often, "be neutral" is Newble Lesson #1.

Psychologically, I'm a different kind of animal. As you may have guessed, I'm the type who gets a kick out of buying a vehicle that's out-of-favour but with good long-term prospects. Switching over to floor-trading mode would involve a real psychological retooling for me. That said, you do have my respect for knowing thyself and sticking to what works for you. That's hard to come by, even in the conventional investment arena. It took me a while before I could figure myself out enough to see what style I should stick to.

Needless to say, my psyche makes me hapless at momentum trading. Some people can pull it off, but I ain't one of them.

No wonder you're obsessed with what makes for a secure blockchain. It's just plain impossible to floor trade an investment that's on its way to the graveyard - especially in an environment like this where it's effectively impossible to short sell.

Anyways: glad to make your acquaintance, sir. Congrats on finding your niche.

i bought btc, then swapped to gpucoin and am now sitting on them till they mature.

Well I do actually have a bias, I trade coins that I want to try to ensure go up, and failing that want to raise the floor of over time.

Coins I hold lots of in my off the exchanges wallets and thus have a vested interest in trying to prevent from becoming value-less or of less value.

So my bias it toward filling the buy side of the order book, piling up more and more and more buys trying to eventualy have so many buy orders in place that if all the coins of that type that I do not own were sold to my buy orders I'd own them all, and maybe then some.

The and then some is that even if I manage to have enough offers to buy them all at one satoshi per coin, I would keep going, heading toward being able to buy some of them at more than one satoshi and still be able to buy the rest at one satoshi; and eventaully to be able to buy some at 50, more at 49, even more at 48 and so on all the way down and still buy them all before hitting one satoshi. Then onwards to being able to buy them all before hitting two satoshis, and so on onwards and upwards slowly raising the lowest price that coin can reach if sold to me.

I like DeVCoin for this not only because I helped develop DeVCoin but also because its price has tended to be a small enough number of satoshis that I can put an offer at each and every satoshi of price despite having to type in the offers manually due to the API not allowing me to have thousands upon thousands of offers (across all the coins I trade).

I don't like leaving gaps between offers because bots tend to fight over individual satoshi changes of price so simply flooding all possible prices leaves them less space to fiddle around with, to sneak in between my offers etc.

-MarkM-

Hopefully none. BTC has the SHA-256 realm and just let it remain that way; other coins can be made to be merged-mined as it should be for something with strong infrastructure.

Anyhow, yes you did. I guess what I'm trying to say is that even the merged-mined coins like NMC/DEV just doesn't seem worth getting at the moment since BTC is still "struggling." I'd still rather get more BTC while it is in its dip, rather than divesting what I have in BTC to get alts. Don't get me wrong, I think that the merge-mined coins will go up (and in fact will likely gain significantly more value than coins in the scrypt realm), but I'd rather see the correlative TA first before taking that risk. I guess I'm just a smidge risk-adverse at the moment.

Heh, I guess in response to the thread question, I'm holding; but if I had to choose between sell or buy, I'd buy.

Devcoin is/was good for trading. It went lower than I expected the last month or so.

It went to 27 satoshis again like the previous low period didn't it?

Usually though it seems best to place at least some buy and sell orders far beyond the lowest or highest you expect to ever see, so that if there is a big surprise in either direction it will be a pleasant one. :)

-MarkM-

Buying AirCoin, because I already dumped too much on it and only way to lower the point at which I can cashout without losses is to invest more at current (hopefully) floor price.

not cheap enough.all those shitcoins and copycats worth nothing.

This was a difficult decision, I feel or look at the market, when our choices are not necessarily correct, but can reduce the loss of their own.

Okay, I stand corrected.


Are you responsible for putting in (or insisting upon) Devcoin's merged-mining capability? What does Devcoin have going for it, end-user-wise?

Just holding DOGE, LTC, PPC.
You, too?

Unthinkingbit was the DeVCoin designer, he wanted merged mining because he wanted a secure blockchain and because he did not want all the coins to go to miners, the entire point was to create coins that someone else other than miners can get. Specifically, developers of free open source software, hardware, art and so on.

One thing I have been trying to provide that end users should like is actual "backing" for the coin: ever-growing heaps of buy-orders ensuring that anyone who wants to dump is able to dump, and hopefully at an ever growing price-floor.

-MarkM-

I'm selling all scrypt coins, buying 100% PoS and mining alternative algos (X11, groestl, q2c).

MYR looks like a good one to get into.
I think POS coins would be the future because of their low energy consumption.
Exciting times ahead.