Bitcoin Forum

Im not sure if there is a topic out there like this but I haven't seen it if there is.

With so many coins out there now and many of them being scam coins, I am interested in what everyone thinks makes a good coin.

What I want is the attributes you look for, not specific coins.

great dev thats consistent and active in thread, support from community, roadmap, good dev team to complete their tasks on time.

Coin name (consumer branding), community size & involvement, plus creative, innovative, and competent development.

I like a coin with age. Also coins with limited supply.

Innovation
Age
Sustained support and improvement
Community

Three things:

Real word services, real world services and real world services :).

Maybe I'm boring with this "real world services" stuff but even the worst shitcoin could go to "da moon" if you can buy something useful for it... and the technologically best coin can worth shit if you can't use it for anything sensible.

Age shows the dev didn't just want to make a quick buck. Value comes from community.

Everyone has their own definition of what a good coin is.

I made my definition into FRK, MicroGuy made his into GLD (which is still the superior coin imho :P). Every dev you ask has different goals. Some want short term profits, some just want to learn about btc, some are using their coins as just a smaller piece to a larger puzzle.

I like longevity, stability, age (although frk wasnt always 2 years old :P obv), transparent developers, innovation, activity, and over all friendliness. This space at times can be incredibly hostile. So its refreshing when the dev team arn't elitist dicks.

You might be interested to look at CoinGecko (https://www.coingecko.com/en). CoinGecko evaluates coins based on developer activity on Github, community strength on Reddit & Facebook & Twitter, trading volume on major exchanges, public interest on Bing & Alexa, and market capitalization.

https://i.imgur.com/65x2DdX.png

All good points :) It seems that the going consensus is age, innovation and active development team. I would tend to agree. I saw community in there too. I'm not sure I agree with community contributing to quality of  coin tho, simply because I see that many times people in the crypto world get bored with coins very fast and move on. This doesn't make a coin a bad coin. I feel that when it comes to currency( any kind of currency), value should be based on its attributes and not on trendy fads.

Get into projects who's dev are visible and active in the public eye, they attend meetings, give interviews, visit conventions and have decent connections in the industry. This shows they are confident about their product with the goal to succeed.

If they have funds it should be stored in multi sig with a reputable company who does this like Koinify because they choose to cooperate only with projects who they seem to be promising and will actually sit around the table and investigate what you have to offer before accepting to work with you, through them the devs get paid on milestone vesting, paid per development. This keep the incentive much higher. These are positive indicators to invest and if succeeds the return is much higher than the average project. Gems is a good example

good points that people might not look for. thanks for you input   :)

u might wanne try and look into cann ( nice idee ) still risky ( but price is low )

Thanks for the tip but the purpose of this topic was just to have a conversation about what people think are good coin charactoristics, not coin suggestions. thanks for your input tho :)

Nothing else than a healthy community.
Good or bad dev, it doesn't really matter. What matters is the idea.

Just my opinion although

dev is active
coin is for buying real world medical cannabis ( 1 coin is 1 gram ) 1 place only atm

things like this make a great coin

real world assets ( real idee ) active dev  ( non scam one )

Thanks for all your input people :) Some very good points of view. Keep them coming!

-fair start - good initial distribution (no ico, presale, flashmine, instamine, premine, ito, ipo or other greedy crap)
-needs to be OS
-community
-scarcity (low inflation)
-hashrate
-honesty (clean, not a scam)
-good brand
-devteam
-innovation

in that order

-fair start
-secure
-innovative
-people actually use it
-people get paid with it

other than that and its a waste of time

a innovative idea, good team and big community behind this
security is must

Keep them coming :)

I agree.  With 80% of coins gone within the first 30 days of launch, age is definitely important.  As far as CoinGecko goes, you have to take these ranking sites with a grain of salt.  If you told a financial analyst what CoinGecko used for ranking criteria, you would be laughed out of the room.  I'm sure not all developers are active on Github. Community strength based on how much is posted on a forum or on Twitter may mean the coin hasn't found it's way into the hands of everyday people who don't have the time or desire to post anywhere.  What exactly does +1, page after page, contribute to a coin?  Some coins pay to post and that is usually evident in the quality of the posts.  

The list on CoinGecko is very similar to the ranking on CoinMarketcap, give or take a few places.  I would like to see an evaluation system that can see beyond CoinMarketcap and social media and find the sleeping giant that everyone missed.  Note: CoinMarketcap is still beneficial for checking stability of coins from date of launch (minimum 6 month chart).

Innovation should target and / or impress the masses, not the just current crypto followers.  Ease of use (for everyone), mass adoption, and security, should be some of the driving factors behind any innovation.  I'm not downplaying some of the amazing things being developed, but will they take a particular currency to the next level, or will they be copied by a hundred other coins?

A successful coin needs trust, stability, and store of value.  It needs a development team that has many years of real world business and financial experience.  The team must have a good long term business plan and the knowledge and capability to take the currency mainstream.  A very solid foundation must be built before it can be used as an everyday currency.  Otherwise, it is the equivalent of moving into the penthouse apartment before the first 35 floors are built.

shursight is right with this comment:  "...many times people in the crypto world get bored with coins very fast and move on."

Greatness takes time.

A good dev team, and a plan for the coin. And its not complete without an active community. Without a community, there is no coin.

Yes, you need a large and supportive following.  What I'm saying is that there should be more to it than counting the pages of a coin's thread on Bitcointalk as a means to determine a quality coin.  If 400 of the 500 pages are complaints, wallet problems, +1 a long text, goofy pictures, demands for updates, etc, how is quality found in that?  It's too bad there wasn't a way to rate quality posts!  If a coin has a large following of people that are new to crypto, getting them to post is like pulling teeth.   Being active on Facebook and Twitter doesn't guarantee quality.

Without new people being brought into crypto, it won't survive, so I would think this should be an important factor as well.  What has the coin done to bring new people from outside the industry into it?  We need everyone to make this successful and to do that everyone has to feel like they fit in some how.

Maybe these coin analysis sites need to delve much deeper into what is actually going on within the currency / community, before they rank them.  What do you think?

I think a good coin has a team with motivation, skills or the aptitude to learn new skills, and constant ideas. The team needs solid goals. The coin also needs a supportive community in which everyone can be a contributor to the success of the coin, and it should always try to attract new members and fans. The coin should also have a real-world purpose. It can't be just stuck within bitcointalk or a closed community. Having a really awesome coin with state-of-the-art features are great, but the coin probably will have trouble with adoption if it focuses too much on the tech. There will always be a way to improve on an existing coin.

Also, I don't think experience matters as much as the drive to learn and to actually accomplish things. It's more important to understand what experience provides and why it's beneficial than having experience itself. That way, anyone can continually be in a learning state. So, it's very possible a new person could be more valuable than an "experienced" person on a team.

Good points.  I don't think a lot of cryptocurrency experience is necessary if you have the drive to learn, but having the business and financial expertise to operate on the world stage as a currency, can't be acquired easily.  The following article may not be totally relevant to what we are talking about, but I think the overall picture is the same.

http://www.coindesk.com/firstmark-director-bitcoin-needs-entrepreneurs-understand-money/

I completely agree. There has to be experienced people who really understand their field especially in regards to finance/business and how it relates to cryptocurrency to get things moving, especially before a release. I can't argue against the fact that experience does look good on paper and may attract investors or more serious players.

Interesting discussion here! I have been trying with a group of people to keep coins afloat that were dropped by their devs. Since the amount of dropped coins is so high, we decided to take over the support of one coin mainly.

It is a lot of work to keep the community active and keep innovating. People pressure you to go with the latest fad, but until now, we have been resisting that.

Looking at the things you guys mention, I think the dev, the community and the longevity are the most important. Things like services and extra features require a lot of time from the developer and usually come with an ICO or a premine. This in turn leads to people running off with the money and keeping the BTC to pay off bills. The incentives are all wrong.

We'll just keep supporting our coin and see it as a long term thing. In a year or so, we can reevaluate how successful we are.

Because there are a lot of people, who thinks - thay can make a good coin -and they make it. So there are a lot of crypto coins out there - and sometimes limited users of them. Even if crypto coins users are in hundreds of thousands, even then it is not so easy to expand the crupto coin - must be also demand from users for the coin.

Good luck with your coin! That's pretty awesome what you are doing by trying to revive a coin.

I think that if we realized how similar the ultimate goal is between coins, we would see coin communities joining forces and making stronger coins in the end. Even I, as someone who loves and promotes HYPER, would like to see combined community efforts. It's hard to get out of the mindset of "my coin is the best! I don't care about other coins because I know they are worse!". And if everyone does that, it's a bit disheartening. Coin communities that can get along should consider working together. Don't just waste time dreaming away. Get off your asses, and make things happen!

Working together is very important indeed. I am helping out with a couple of coins right now of which I like the dev, the coin idea or the community. The main thing that is wrong about the current system is that people that invest in coins think the developer owns them something. They forget they did not buy from the dev (except with ICO of course) and just spend money on an idea. I think many devs get disheartened once people start fudding or keep asking what the next step will be.

Perhaps, what we're missing is a true decentralized coin without a dev, where the community gets to add to the github. That is one of the main reasons Bitcoin is so successful.

easy to use
app for everyones mobile device
popularity
much innovation
good support

Coins are popping up everywhere all the time. Devs create the coin based on what they want in a coin without really giving any thought to how the coin can gain a community. What would be good to see is building a community to back a coin concept first, before the coins development. That way it would build anticipation and would give the coin a better chance of success.

Great Dev's
That's what makes a good coin.

I dont understand why you keep making new coins, feels kind of a waste of time,, all of them die anyways

Slight misunderstanding.  Everyone is discussing what the qualities are of a good coin, not how to make a new one.  :)

Take a look at Saffroncoin.
Price is so low right now. It can only rise .
Dev always delivers. (check the thread ) (not moderated since begining)
SFRDirect will be released soon (in the matter of days (at max) ). Decentralized Exchange.
It is shortterm investition. But it is one of the best investment oportunities right now.
 

take a look at peercoin, 2+ years running and 15 million market cap. Long term sustainablity and dedicated dev team+ sunny king  ;D

I agree totally with many of you. A good dev team means a lot. If they are dedicated, they will keep innovating and making their coin better. In turn the coin should gain credibility.

We at Sativacoin (STV) believe that a strong community is fundamental to a coin's success. With our recent community takeover, we have tried to establish trust with the community because the value of our coin will follow. The top coins on coinmarketcap serve as inspiration to us in our work everyday, and we hope that one day we can attain a spot there as well  ;)

Arnel
Pastafarian

New Sativacoin thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=874071

Very good! :) I'll check it out.

In this day and age the time of quick buck coins is in, most dev's just keep pumping the same kind of coins out just with features we have all seen before, as soon as there is buy support dumps happen then people move on & the next coin comes into play leaving the bagholders "Hoping" for some retribution, it's just one giant ponzi scheme for copy/paste devs.

These Pump & Dump groups are the main cause of the Altcoin problem, they get everyone on the edge of their seat with price then boom, no-one knows what just hit them.

In the last 6 months there has been very few coins that have survived the altcoin boom, in saying that there is actual "competent" Dev's out there that are working towards their cause & showing commitment and sticking with their coin.

I can tell you of a few but that would be Biased.

Just DYOR (Do your own research) on the coins features, developers skills, commitment & to also make sure they aren't hiding behind a shill account (if they were that keen on their own coin they would make a name for themselves globally, everyone knows what Bitcointalk is...)

I can't agree more. That's why I feel that a coin needs to have some age.  If a coin survives its IPO and dev team sticks with it, then the coin has a chance to grow. Choose coins that have some age plus have a dedicated dev team. :)

I am done with any altcoin that isnt offering something different.
coins should be considered companies inside of the bitcoin space.  if it doesnt have a useable feature, such as a phone, and ability to anonymously mix coins, a way to enter into the crypto world without using bitcoin, or something of the like it is useless.

ill leave all the other coins to the pump and dumpers to make money off all the gamblers hoping to make it big of the next bitcoin.