well it offers a pretty good feature! it made scamming people easy.
before people had to do a lot of work to make a new altcoin from scratch, put a lot of time to change some stuff in the code of the previous one they copied and start a stand alone coin and advertise it.

these days the same people are just making some smart contract with little effort unlike before and earn more money from its ICO just because they advertise it as "connected to ethereum".
and it is a two way street which benefits both skeezy people, the ICO and the ETH price since people are forced to buy ETH

does what better? the only thing that litecoin does Differently is having faster blocks which is leading to a much higher orphan rates and the fact that because it has a much much smaller network it could activate SegWit way easier than bitcoin can.
and this "real developer" has been copying code from bitcoin from day 1. although the developers team of LTC is solid but that doesn't change this fact

i completely agree but not because of what you said above but because in a market when shitcoins such as ethereum with lots of bugs scams and a premine the biggest premine of all called Dash can get their price up, LTC is super-under-priced!

you don't even know what a premine is

a very good question.
but it is kind of a general question though. does anybody even understand any of the altcoins?
when it comes to bitcoin, there are many who understand it at least know enough about how to use it properly. but when it comes to altcoins all anybody knows or cares about knowing is 1 number, the number representing their profit which comes from the pumping price rise.

more than 80% of the people you see around here who are saying ethereum is good and better than bitcoin have never even withdrawn ethereum from their exchange wallet. in other words they don't even know what an eth address looks like! let alone begin to understand anything about it!

and don't get me started on its price and how the bubble is going to pop:
https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-804c9a906d36

i don't know why people are so weird about taxes when it comes to bitcoin. i get that none of us are happy about paying taxes but why is it always different when it comes to bitcoin!
people pay taxes on literary anything you can think of with no complains but when it comes to paying taxes on owning bitcoin, using bitcoin, trading, etc they all start protesting vigorously!


it is the same as asking you to report all the properties you own!

so far people have shown that they are only waiting in an altcoin so that their prices go as high as possible to dump them. and at the first sight of any kind of market disturbance they leave the altcoin market high and dry. this has already happened multiple times in the past too.

any altcoin is worth investing. you should just find the time to buy and the time to sell them.

as for IOTA, it doesn't seem to have much of a price history and people are mostly calling it scam, eve if it is not right, i don't see it getting anywhere. also price seems to be falling.

as for XRP it seems to have a very hard time keeping the price above 10000 satoshi. the huge supply seems to be putting some extra sell pressure on the market. we have seen some small jumps but they are too small a profit to interest me for an investment.

it is always a good idea to both look at the bigger picture and also look at some percentages.

we are up 150% from the start of this year.
we are up about 500% compared to last year.
price broke the $2000 resistance and started rising at a very fast speed and reached $2900 in a very short time. now we are down only 13% from that top.

you see when you look at things through a different eyes they look pretty different and normal

dropping below $2000? i don't think so. if it happens it is not longer correction it is a big ass dump with no return, at least for a very long time.

and evidently it is not going to happen either. the $2200 was barely broken and it could not last for long. now we are back up to $2511 at this moment. and although we don't know how long it can last but unless some other terrible news comes out i don't see any more big drops.

it is funny how all these news sites are publishing articles talking about potential AFTER the rise happened! talk about a poor article eh!

it is the same with bitcoin, price rises from $1000 to $1250 they all start praising it (8btc included) and quote people we have never heard of telling us how awesome bitcoin investment is and how it is heard to $5000, or $50,000!

and when price comes down from the ATH of $2900 to $2500 the same sites start quoting some other people we have never heard of who are saying how bitcoin is garbage, how it was a bubble and how it is headed to $500, $200 etc

first of all this is the main board dedicated for discussion about bitcoin. altcoin discussions or trading discussions have dedicated boards. please use the button at the bottom of the page to move the topic.

secondly the anonymous coins hype is a bit old. people have proven that they are only interested in these coins for the money they gave them in a temporary period of time which they were being pumped.

these coins offer some good features though. i am not denying that. specially monero. but if you want to invest then look for coins that have a better potential of rising. Monero's rise seems to be more solid and slow. and Zcash seems to be a shaky coin with a high chance of a big dump. not sure about PIVX yet.

i usually never follow any of the altcoins apart from their charts because i believe that is the only thing i need to know since i am just an investor!

for IOTA i see it has only been alive on exchange for 2 days and only on bitfinex for some reason. and in this 2 days it has already dropped ~43%

i don't know about anybody else but i prefer to get in when price is either rising or showing signs of rise.

try reading this board and the speculation board. it does wonders, i promise...

what you are saying about altcoin hype leading to bitcoin rise makes sense but i can't wrap my head around one thing.

lets assume your scenario was right.
people buy bitcoin with fiat and bitcoin price goes up.
they use that bitcoin to buy altcoins, so altcoins prices go up in alt/btc market.
then they stop doing that and take the bitcoin + profit and sell on btc/fiat market and price crashes.

this is what you are describing right?

but here is the thing. i see two types of altcoins, those on top which have both alt/btc and alt/fiat market and those small coins.
the small coins don't really get new money, it is a fixed amount of money that travels from one to the other and never exits other than from time to time the pumpers taking out the profit only. so i don't see this affecting bitcoin price that much.

about big altcoins if what you say is true, their prices in alt/btc market should drop because as we said people stopped using the BTC they bought in day 1 and now are selling that. but this is not happening!
for example LTC/BTC price has gone up about 10%
ripple went from 9K to 11K satoshi
NEM is still around 7700-8000 with little drop
ETC is still the same
Dash is still 0.066-0.067
ETH is probably the only one that dropped a bit.

in my opinion this shows the BTC has not left altcoin market for some reason it is the fiat that is exiting because all the altcoins i named are dropping hard in fiat value.
ETH -16%
XRP -13%
NEM -15%
LTC -6%
DASH -13%

doesn't look like it though!
the problem with these exchanges is that they only provide servers powerfuil enough for a certain number of users which they usually get.
when there is a fast rise or fast fall like this the traffic grows and obviously they can't handle things anymore.
there is also DDoS attacks.

and on top of that it is possible they have ran out of funds again because people also buy and withdraw at times like this at the bottom and the exchanges go dry. it is easier to say we are down than to say we cant cover withdrawals.

no it wasn't.
"The first search engine created was Archie, created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal."

the same story with bitcoin.
bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency. there have been a couple of other projects, small ones, working and then bitcoin came and pushed them away.

i think it is not impossible thing to happen!
this is true about all technologies. one day they are the new thing, the next day they improve to match the future, .... then some day another technology comes and replaces them.

that is like circle of life.

the correct question is when and with what?
and the answer is not for the near future because currently nobody is working on developing a crypto currency

life goes on and those who invested will be left with worthless tokens while other people will invest more money in new scam ICOs until they realize this is the same scheme as premining altcoins and they stop trusting ICOs all at once.

and then scammers will start thinking about new ways of making money from the gullible.

no we don't all know that!
i don't know if you realize this but things are very different in different countries. and you forgot to mention which country you are talking about. for example where i live (which i don't mention it either ) the real estate market has been down for at least 6 months with prices falling even.

it usually is an economical thing and is directly related to how developed or underdeveloped the country is. in developing countries the real estate is usually hot and price are rising. some even consider it a good investment. which is why i am going to buy my first house real soon - thanks to bitcoin price rise i have enough money to do it now!

what is ethereum? a platform for smart contracts
what are smart contracts used for? to create new ICOs.
what are ICOs? new altcoins, with nothing to offer but a way for the developer to get some quick money for doing practically nothing
how can one buy into these ICOs? only with ETH tokens!
is there any other usage for ETH? No!

so yeah ethereum's market cap is pretty real... and it has lots of real world applications... also transaction fees are super cheap on average of $1.4

umm, it is not exactly two it is one and that is higher fees because blocks are full.

this has been the argument aka debate over block size and how we can reach an scaling solution.
can it happen? i believe it can. but things are slow.

not fees don't go up with price. in past fees were high if you can find a transaction which occurred in early days of price being less than $100 you can see high fees in BTC and it was lowered before price reached $1000.
the same thing should have happened now but since blocks are full it can not.

am i reading this right! bitmain is essentially saying the rest of the hashrate is going to bee boobs while they mine (their version of) bitcoin for 72 hours = 432 block = 5400BTC and then expect others to build on top of it?!!