how do you think at the end of 2015 will any altcoin overtake ltc to claim the 2nd place? and if you want to diversify btc investment is it ltc or some other coin to go with  Follow the money, I mean the trading volume (coinmarketcap dot com) |
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Litecoin has one main problem: the devs and community have no plan how to further develope the coin. Just gamble. The price is low.
What innovation has gold and silver provided for thousands of years? Exactly! Being true to its original core values - staying shiny and scarce. Maybe some product or invention provided more value at some point due its innovative properties and usefulness, but stability and predictability has always won in the long term. EDIT: True innovation will come from enthusiasts all over the world free in their quest to figure out the most energy efficient solutions for computation. These may include advancements in electronics beyond silicon, deeper understanding of cryptographic hash functions as well as new energy sources, which will eventually find their application in other areas of human life. Note that there is still more than half of all litecoins under the digital crust of our crypto-earth, and that's after 3 years of operation! Litecoin is a long shot, and its silver analogy to Bitcoin's gold is more or less correct. So the price might get interesting in the future. |
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I'm not familiar with nxt assets, I was referring to POS in general. Having ANY POS whatsoever discourages spending and thus kills adoption. Having no POS encourages spending, because your money will be worth less than it is tommorow. Alt-coins are supposed to be just that, coins, a currency. If you dont want your currency to devalue you invest it somewhere(get interest at a bank, buy stocks w/e), you shouldn't expect the act of holding to be rewarded.
Please explain. I think more correct assessment is that by holding PoS coins you are eligible to receive interest, while PoW coins don't give you any interest explicitly, but rather from scarcity/inflation mechanisms, which may vary from one coin to another. EDIT: Even though on the surface two schemes might seem somewhat similar, they are fundamentally different: PoW - neutrality, freedom of innovation, hacker mentality, equality of opportunity, game of skills PoS - entrenched interests, corruptible humans, oppression, inheritance of wealth, game of luck Pick your flavor of the future. |
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Yes, you need to invest in both cases, only with PoW you can invest your intellect and time to create a breakthrough in mining technology (basically in your garage), while in PoS system you need to convince the incumbents to sell their stakes to you. See the difference?
I'm now thinking that something like proof of activity or proof of importance might be more relevant in the long term. Considering the decline in the number of Bitcoin's full nodes, if you're rewarded for just running a node that's already a step in the right direction, however the exact algorithms need to be studied more closely.
building otherwise useless hardware can hardly be the reason to call pow superior Shooting alien monsters in a video game is pretty much useless too, but that's what sells graphics cards. And manufacturers are fighting with each other, exploring various options to make them even faster. Who knows maybe PoW mining will create enough incentive to finally get humanity beyond silicon electronics. Maybe we will see advancements with graphene or photonics sooner with PoW than without. What about an incentive to develop new sources of energy, solar or geothermal, PoW might be that incentive. The bottom line is that with PoW a neutral algorithm judges the innovation, in PoS - corruptible humans and entrenched interests do the judgement, and so far they have been instrumental in suppressing anything that challenges them. Even though on the surface two schemes might seem somewhat similar, they are fundamentally different: PoW - neutrality, freedom of innovation, hacker mentality, equality of opportunity, game of skills PoS - entrenched interests, corruptible humans, oppression, inheritance of wealth, game of luck |
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One of the advantages of PoW over any PoS variant is that it encourages innovation. New generations would be welcome to come up with advancements in science, new technologies and even attempt to crack SHA256 or Scrypt in order to gain an advantage with PoW systems and get into the money flow. PoW encourages hacker mentality (in a positive sense), with PoS however, if you don't own a stake in an entrenched system, you are out of luck. Would you like old, filthy rich psychopaths to run the society in the future? Choose PoW, protect the children! With PoW you need to invest to "get into the money flow", the same holds true for PoS. PoW and PoS have a tendency to favor early adopters assuming that a coin is successful. No real difference, is there? Yes, you need to invest in both cases, only with PoW you can invest your intellect and time to create a breakthrough in mining technology (basically in your garage), while in PoS system you need to convince the incumbents to sell their stakes to you. See the difference? I'm now thinking that something like proof of activity or proof of importance might be more relevant in the long term. Considering the decline in the number of Bitcoin's full nodes, if you're rewarded for just running a node that's already a step in the right direction, however the exact algorithms need to be studied more closely. |
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One of the advantages of PoW over any PoS variant is that it encourages innovation. New generations would be welcome to come up with advancements in science, new technologies and even attempt to crack SHA256 or Scrypt in order to gain an advantage with PoW systems and get into the money flow. PoW encourages hacker mentality (in a positive sense), with PoS however, if you don't own a stake in an entrenched system, you are out of luck. Would you like old, filthy rich psychopaths to run the society in the future? Choose PoW, protect the children! |
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It can be used to hedge yes
It also is a pretty regular component of spread betting in all manner of ball sports esp football and cricket
CFD is really never used for sports betting, sports betting is still gambling and involves the uses of point spreads and betting that a team will win by a certain criteria. CFD on the other hand is essentially a futures contract with the exception that neither party intends to take possession of the goods that the futures contract is derived from The main difference in the UK between CFD trading and spread betting is that CFD's are treated as investments, whereas spread positions are seen as pure gambles by the tax authorities.
CFD profits and losses are taxable/tax allowable, spread betting profits are tax free but losses are not allowable against other income.
This is how the tax man draws a line between defining a 'calculated' risk and a pure gamble.
Interesting. Thanks! |
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Oh I see, yes that's true. The hash chosen (SHA-256) was picked because it is easy to perform, which aids in verification as well as allows manufacturers to more easily enter the market. Anyone can enter the mining business, since manufacturing ASICS is not as difficult as it would be with other algorithms.
It was hoped that this would lead to greater competition in the mining space to avoid 51% attacks, although I'm afraid that centralized mining is almost a foregone conclusion at this point.
Even though it is likely that mining will likely become more centralized in the future (via large corporate mining farms), the miners will still have an incentive to mine honestly as the reward will be greater for doing so over the long term. I would also say that it is realistic to say that ASIC manufacturers will eventually be able to develop new machines at a cost low enough so they can sell ASICs to "retail" customers at prices low enough so they can expect to ROI in the future which would cause the network to remain decentralized Totally agree. You can't declare that centralised mining will kill Bitcoin without considering that the very people who would want to avoid too much centralisation are the miners themselves! The system is necessarily self-regulating in that sense. The more centralised mining becomes, the less secure Bitcoin is and the less valuable bitcoins are. When value is impacted, the miners will respond. I can easily imagine huge mining corporations spinning off separate mining entities to avoid becoming too large themselves. Good point. Also mining usually operates at the fringe of the profitability threshold, thus the cost of screw-up is quite high encouraging miners to play by the rules, or risk losing ROI. |
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All space heaters sold from now on should be bitcoin mining machines....
True enough I guess, as Bitcoin's valuation grows, the market will recognize this as an oportunity. I also thought about equipping hardware wallets with mining chips, like those used in small USB miners. We will see how it goes, the fight for decentralization isn't over! |
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Oh I see, yes that's true. The hash chosen (SHA-256) was picked because it is easy to perform, which aids in verification as well as allows manufacturers to more easily enter the market. Anyone can enter the mining business, since manufacturing ASICS is not as difficult as it would be with other algorithms.
It was hoped that this would lead to greater competition in the mining space to avoid 51% attacks, although I'm afraid that centralized mining is almost a foregone conclusion at this point.
I think hashing (SHA-256, Scrypt) is the most suitable type of workload, which satisfies one important condition - it must be hard to find the result, but very easy to check if the result is correct. That was probably number one reason why scientific computation didn't qualify for PoW as checking for correctness would require significant amount of re-computation on other nodes. As to the question of mining centralization, it does seem like major players are getting bigger over time, however they are still spread out on the surface of the planet, so the problem might not be as acute as some prefer to paint it. Who knows maybe Bitcoin is destined to become a new international settlement system and various governments controlling mining farms on their own land is Bitcoin's intended destination. It would still be an improvement over fiat monetary system we have now as long as governments don't collude, and today they are eager to demonstrate some competition (US/Europe/Russia/China). So I would be interested to see how PoW mining scenario plays out in a long term, while keeping an eye on a more lightweight and much more decentralized solutions for end-users. |
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PoW is a way of binding a protocol to time, otherwise there is no way for other computers in the network to know where blocks should be placed in the chain.
Points in time can not be trusted among peers, and therefore time needs to be substituted with blocks and a timestamp.
T1 -> T2 -> T3 -> T4
Block1 -> Block2 -> Block3 -> Block4
The blocks are submitted with a timestamp that approximates with the former, but could vary by up to 70 minutes. The timestamps are greater than the median of the previous 11 blocks and less than 2 hours after.
The important part is the blocks (hashes) guarantee that the timestamp always happened after the previous block, so it's trivial to build a blockchain in the correct order as long as blocks are not being spammed over the network. Blocks are not spammed because the difficulty is adjusted such that blocks are only mined once every 5 minutes, which gives the entire network enough time to propagate the block.
If the time is too short, valid blocks are not included in the blockchain; these are called "orphans".
Thanks for your contribution. What you are describing is how the blockchain is formed and the role of PoW _within_ that context. I can't argue with that. The question I attempted to answer in this thread, however, related to usefulness of PoW _outside_ of that context. And it seems that when it comes to PoW-based money systems, the inherent _outside_ uselessness of PoW actually translates to neutrality and universality, which are essential properties of any money system contributing to its stability and longevity. |
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At some point we will no longer recognize Bitcoin for what it used to be, and the idea of keeping any promise would vanish into oblivion. Would you trust the money system that is constantly changing not keeping the original promise? Sounds a lot like today's politics to me.
You have to take into account simple economics and numbers. They don't lie. Bitcoin and other PoW coins are not efficient to mine - if the numbers don't work out and they are not profitable, eventually there will be no more value in these coins. Simple as that, numbers and facts don't lie. Well, the system was designed to be self-balancing, so no worries with the numbers here. If it's not so profitable to mine, then miners will switch their rigs off, which in turn would lead to decrease in difficulty until it becomes again profitable to mine, and so on. I think the question of PoW vs PoS is more fundamental. Would you like work to create money or would you like money to create money? I don't have a very good answer to that, but the latter sounds a lot like what we have today with fiat and the former sounds like what we should have in a resource-balanced economy. Also, check out this thread about PoW, it might be somewhat relevant: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=855520.0 |
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I guess that continuing with the original idea that was put in place by Satoshi is an excercise in discipline.
If we start changing and adjusting the system at our whim then the hard limit of 21 million coins might be the next target and so on.
At some point we will no longer recognize Bitcoin for what it used to be, and the idea of keeping any promise would vanish into oblivion. Would you trust the money system that is constantly changing not keeping the original promise? Sounds a lot like today's politics to me.
Time will tell, but so far the market favors stability.
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Thanks for the answers!
So the fact that engaging in a "game of skill" is more welcome by society, than exercising "pure luck" might be considered an incentive for individuals to evolve and develop skills. I don't have problem with gambling/betting, nor do I engage in these activities, just thought that exercising luck is a valid experience and if one wants to get lucky, one needs to respect the luck of others.
This actually might apply to the debates about fairness of distribution of coins in crypto-currencies. I often see people attempting to devalue one coin or another just because some got lucky by making a bet early in the game, not realising that one day they might get lucky as well. Even in the game of skill, there is always an element of luck.
Cheers!
A CFD is far from a 'game of skill' it is a legitimate way for people to hedge their risks of various prices of moving in certain directions. It is a way for non-financial companies to lock in their costs at certain levels over long periods of time so they can properly plan and budget Yeah, apparently I haven't thought this through before asking. I'm not a financial guru, so this gambling analogy was the first thing to come to my mind. |
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I often hear people's arguments that PoW hashing is utterly useless outside of the context of PoW system itself and
it would have been nice to do some scientific computations instead.
There have been attempts in the past to employ different types of workloads like protein folding and prime number searching as a basis for PoW with varying degrees of success. And while technical challenges of marrying scientific computations with PoW scheme were the main obstacles for creating a robust implementation, I now think that ideological challenge might be just as big.
If we consider any useful work as a value producer and money as a universal value transmitter between different useful types of work, then introducing unnecessary bias into the money system by favouring one type of useful work over another would reduce universality of money, which in turn would hamper its longevity. Any particular type of useful work might become obsolete over time, while introducing the need to alter the money system to reflect that would only contribute to its destabilisation.
So, to sum it all up (TLDR):
The perceived uselessness of PoW hashing is actually a desired feature (not a bug) as it results in neutrality of the money system towards any type of useful work, which contributes to its stability and longevity. In other words, in emptiness there is all the usefulness.
PS: this is not a discussion of PoW vs PoS as there is an inherent difference in those systems (work creates money vs money creates money), but rather an observation that certain PoW properties might have a deeper meaning than it seems on the surface.
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The best innovation that Litecoin offers compared to other alts is paradoxically the lack of it, which leads to stability and predictability - one of the most important characteristics of any money system.
I like the fact that Litecoin stays with 0.8.x code base (plus important patches on top), as it takes conservative approach for its development and security model (don't fix if ain't broken) - again more stable, predictable and robust network.
Also keep in mind Litecoin's 4x higher speed and capacity for transaction processing without needing a hard fork in the near future (or at all) and if it comes to a hard fork, Litecoin can always learn from Bitcoin's experience, prepare in advance and improve on it.
Later start of Litecoin contributed to a more even distribution of coins among market participants and its current high inflation rate means that this process is still ongoing, resulting in somewhat depressed price and thus reducing barriers to entry. No quick pump and dump here...
Add to it amicable name and a tribute to Steeve Jobs encoded in Litecoin's genesis block and you get all it takes to be a success. Litecoin's current trading-volume / market-cap ratio reflects just that.
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Interestingly I just listened to yet another episode of the audio book about dutch pirate and his daughter by the name "van der Velde", only to come to this forum half an hour later and bump into a thread about a girl with the same surname. Whoa, what a coincidence! Anybody knows more about "van der Velde"? |
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Thanks for the answers!
So the fact that engaging in a "game of skill" is more welcome by society, than exercising "pure luck" might be considered an incentive for individuals to evolve and develop skills. I don't have problem with gambling/betting, nor do I engage in these activities, just thought that exercising luck is a valid experience and if one wants to get lucky, one needs to respect the luck of others.
This actually might apply to the debates about fairness of distribution of coins in crypto-currencies. I often see people attempting to devalue one coin or another just because some got lucky by making a bet early in the game, not realising that one day they might get lucky as well. Even in the game of skill, there is always an element of luck.
Cheers!
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Hi guys,
As I understand it, with CFDs one doesn't own an underlaying stock, but rather makes a gamble on wether its value would increase or decrease, thus taking the risk of losing even though the stock itself might do just fine in the long term.
How is that different from making bets on flipping a coin and why one form is allowed, while other is not?
Cheers!
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