This is basically my point.  I was never intending to argue a BTC vs credit card thing.  Is BTC "good enough"?  In some cases yes but in others no.  My point is that if there is going to be an electronic currency that takes on the sort of universal adoption I am envisioning, BTC and LTC will not be it because of this alone.  If it comes down to a merchant feeling like they have too much loss to double spends they have 2 choices, stop accepting the currency or make the customer wait.  As I pointed out, there are situations where waiting is not really an option.  Which means they can take the losses or stop accepting the currency.  So everything else being equal, any currency which does a better job and provides better assurance at a faster rate will win in the marketplace.


Yes but it is a mishmash and there are fees involved all over the place.  Anyone who comes along with something simple with less fees that has universal adoption will win a lot of business.

It shouldn't need saying but it does: no premine

I started a thread along similar lines: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=244792.0

It needs to confirm quickly.  I place the outside limit at about 2 minutes although I am sure there is room to debate it.  That wouldn't necessarily have to be 100% confirmation in 2 minutes but something like 95% or better.

I believe it should use SHA-256 for reasons I outline in my thread.

I like what you did there!  But face to face transactions is not where the real problem of credit card fraud exists, that is by far and away a problem with internet transactions using credit cards.  Also, in a face to face credit card transaction the merchant can require photo ID and compare signatures if they want, affording another level of protection for themselves.

But as far as electronic currency and face to face transaction, if I was at the grocery store for example with a basket full of food, that would not be an inconsiderable amount for the merchant to potentially lose and I most certainly would not have time to stand around waiting for confirmations, stuff could be melting. BTC and LTC are simply not suitable for this kind of transaction in their present form.  But you are right, it comes down to how often double spends cost them money.  But human beings while generally not very smart, tend to be very clever, and if they can figure out how to get away with double spend scams even on an irregular basis they will.

Just as an aside, have you ever tried to reverse a credit card transaction?  First the bank will demand that you work it out with the merchant, which while fair enough, doesn't always work out.  If you go back to the bank and say that didn't work they make it a pain in the arse for you to get your money back.  You can sometimes do it, but it isn't remotely easy.  Depending on how exactly the transaction went down, the merchant can minimize the likelihood of having it reversed.

Maybe the real problem with this thread is that I'm dreaming to even imagine that a decentralized pseudo-anonymous electronic currency would ever be adopted for the kinds of circumstances I am talking about.  Maybe we are doomed to an electronic currency issued by something more like the world bank or goldman sachs.

Well I’m not sure I understand where you are coming from digitalindustry.  I am not speaking to debt or wage slavery or any of that exactly.  Western culture is based on consumption; people want to spend their money.  And they want it to be easy to do.  And countries like India and China aspire to join the world of conspicuous consumption.  With that in mind, I think it is a no brainer that someone will eventually provide an electronic currency that allows it.  A one size fits all solution for the entire planet for spending your money.  Same money, accepted everywhere.  To some extent you have this already with credit cards but not quite.  And with conversion fees in the background when used to make purchases in various currencies it is unsatisfactory for the consumer.

You already see trends in this direction with the euro and discussion of the amero.  Eventually there will be a universo or whaterever it is called.  The point is that there is time for that currency to arise naturally out of a place like this where experimentation in alternate forms of electronic currency is already taking place, or it can be handed to the consumers of the world by the existing power structures.  If the latter happens, you can be sure it will have built in methods of control allowing Interpol or the like to seize funds, allowing transactions to be tracked and reversed and whatever else those kinds of people want.  If however it arises from this community here, it can retain elements of the other alternative currencies being experimented with like anonymity and decentralization.

My point is that the community should be looking at altcoins with an eye for whether or not they actually have the potential to fulfill the need of a global electronic currency, and if they do not they should be sent back to the drawing board.  At the same time the discussion about what exactly those needs are should be better and better defined so we can stop seeing an endless parade of pump and dump crap coins and instead see a better and better refinement of coins designed to fill the real world need.


BTC and LTC are both unsatisfactory for face to face real world transactions.  If you cannot be sure of the validity of your payment for close to an hour (or more really) then you are unlikely to hand over whatever I am paying you for.  If that happens to be lunch or a cup of coffee, that is clearly unworkable.  Both of these cryptocurrencies are benefiting from being first, but they both fall short of the real world requirements of an electronic currency that could attain global adoption.

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I guess I had hoped for more interest in this topic.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=242174.0

I had planned to wait and see what was said before really laying it out there but since no-one had anything to say I’ll just lay it out here.  Some form of widely adopted electronic currency is coming, that much is certain.  It has to be something that is suitable for face to face purchases.  You could theoretically get adoption of bitcoin or litecoin for online merchant purchases where the slow confirmation is not a deal killer.  But if you wanted to pay in electronic currency for in store purchases, slow confirmation will not cut it. Which means bitcoin and litecoin will never be the ubiquitous electronic currency of the masses.

And while I am on the subject of the masses, most people don’t care about the technical details (even if they could understand them). They just want something simple that works.  And you can be sure that the powers that be will eventually provide that.  You will get a centralized currency controlled by the world bank or some other existing power structure and it will satisfy the needs of the masses and the merchants but mostly it will satisfy the needs of those in power.  In which case everyone will agree that decentralized crypto currencies like bitcoin and litecoin serve no legitimate purpose and only serve the needs of criminals, and then I think everyone can guess what will happen next.

So if we want the universally accepted electronic currency to also include elements like being decentralized and anonymous then we need to create it now before we wind up with UN COIN or WORLD BANK COIN.

So what is required is an electronic currency with transactions that have a very high degree of confidence in less than 2 minutes.  What that means in terms of finding a fast block time that doesn’t cause a massive amount of blockchain bloat in the long run and a lot of orphans in the short run, I don’t know.  But you can be sure that confirmations that take more time than that are just too long to be useful.  If I am travelling and I wake up in Thailand and want to pay for breakfast before catching a plane to Japan where I want to pay for dinner, then I need an electronic currency that allows me to pay at the register, which means it needs very fast confirmations.

My personal opinion is also that SHA-256 is the best choice as an encryption algorithm based on the fact that bitcoin is already responsible for widely disseminating ASIC gear based on that hashing algorithm.  Every algorithm is potentially open to having ASIC’s built to work on it.  If a new coin based on scrypt (or anything else for that matter) really takes off, it is not clear that some kind of ASIC gear monopoly would not develop around it.  It is a good bet that an ASIC monopoly on a new SHA-256 based currency would not happen.

So that’s basically my spiel.  Either we can watch a decentralized currency that meets the needs of the real world arise to become the electronic currency of the planet, or we can wait and inherit a centralized electronic currency from someone like the world bank.

I have also watched a remarkable number of altcoin launches in a remarkably short time here so I know a lot of people are probably going to roll their eyes at the suggestion of yet another coin.  However I think that if done correctly, with lots of advanced notice, no premine, multiple pools setup at launch and so on, then it could start with a huge advantage and a much better chance of becoming the universal coin that I believe is coming one way or another.

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+1

This coin needs some enthusiasm and I don't see it arising by itself.  Price is dropping.  Hashrate is not great. 

1Ce2owH5oYzqjW4p8mrbcEcZg4XGccG6VS

Got mine!  Thanks!

I'm in:

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Dev hasn't sold any of those premined coins.

http://sbc.isa-geek.com/address/7eeYSqy8JGp6GbnSChLUsfSeDUdBmYHPxCJ1s

As I already pointed out neither of these is completely satisfactory as an electronic currency.  Since some form of widely adopted electronic currency is inevitable it seems like a good idea to sort out the characteristics that currency needs to have.  And as for whether or not my fiat bank would ever allow me to convert to electronic currency right on their website, count on it.  It is a matter of time.  The question is only what form that currency is going to take.

....aaaaaand we're back

woot!

I think most of us can agree that there is a glut of altcoins.  But I suspect that most of the people who frequent this part of the forums can also see that bitcoin itself does not have what it takes to really deliver on the promise of what an electronic currency needs to be.  Both bitcoin and litecoin strongly benefit from being the first of their kind despite their drawbacks.

However, some form of electronic currency is, I believe, inevitable.  Something resembling all of these cryptocoins will eventually arise as a truly global electronic currency.  The problem as I see it now is that this altcoin bloat dilutes the field.  Maybe the coin which will gain widespread adoption exists now, but maybe not.

Imagine being able to log into the website for your fiat currency bank and with a few click sending a payment in cryptocoins to anyone in the world with no currency conversion fees, no taxes, no fees at all other than those imposed by the bank itself (which theoretically you could avoid or reduce by switching banks).
   
I know you are probably thinking that you can already do a version of this with bitcoin and other altcoins and why get the bank involved at all.  The answer is that real widespread adoption will not happen unless something like this happens.  Our grandparents, indeed for some of us even our parents, will never use any cryptocoins the way they are now.  It is true that in some respects the infrastructure for ease of use does not exist and that can be remedied to some extent with new crypto coin start-ups.  But the cryptocoin that really gets used as a currency the world over, the one that really gains widespread adoption, has to be easy for the noobs.

In order to be useful for a currency, confirmations have to happen faster than they do for bitcoin.  This I think, goes without saying, but you will never see the sort of ubiquitious adoption of bitcoin as an electronic currency that I am talking about for that reason alone.  And because the world needs some kind of universal electronic currency, there absolutely will eventually be one form that does get the kind of widespread adoption I am talking about. 


Community Coin

With these issues in mind I thought it might be worth creating a coin that the community actually wanted BEFORE it was even released.  Some of the issues that would need to be sorted are block sizes, block times, confirmations, difficulty retargets, hashing algorithm, etc.  If these factors are determined in advance in a way that the community agrees makes the coin look like a potential candidate to be a real contender as a worldwide electronic currency then the hype will exist before the coin.  This should remove the need for a dev premine (to support the coin with giveaways, faucets and whatever else, blah, blah, blah) because theoretically the coin is already popular before it is released based on the fact that the community discussed it and helped create it to begin with.

If it was done right I could see a release that already included multiple pools for people to mine on, promises from cryptsy or other exchanges for early inclusion, and so forth.  The idea being that the interest in the coin exists to such a level before it is released that the release is basically guaranteed to see widespread support.

I am not capable of creating an altcoin so this is not me offering everyone a chance to help me make “my” altcoin.  This is just an idea I wanted to float to address a problem I perceive in the proliferation of altcoins.  It also seem possible that after some conversation about the ideal characteristics needed for a coin to gain widespread adoption as an electronic currency an existing coin may be discovered to already have the needed characteristics in which case maybe we can focus community awareness on that and support the coin or coins that have real potential.

Wondering on that one myself.

Ahh but that is not the determining factor.  It is a matter of how low the hash value is.  MicheleTegon is winning.  See the first post in the thread where Doc is listing them.

That's weird I am sure I saw it there just a couple of hours ago.