Shame - a good idea gone to waste

Virtual currencies
101. A virtual currency is a form of unregulated digital money that is not issued or guaranteed by a central bank and that can act as a means of payment. Virtual currencies have come in many forms, beginning as currencies within online computer gaming environments and social networks, and developing into means of payment accepted offline or in ‘real life’. It is now increasingly possible to use virtual currencies as a means to pay for goods and services with retailers, restaurants and entertainment venues. These transactions often do not incur any fees or charges, and do not involve a bank.

102. In recent times, Bitcoin has changed the character of virtual currencies by setting the scene for a new generation of decentralised virtual currencies. Bitcoin started off amongst consumers in the online world who were looking, amongst other things, for a means of payment for the internet age that did not rely on any central Government or central banks.

103. Supported by heavy media coverage, the use of Bitcoins has spread rapidly: in 2013 alone, the number of users is said to have grown from 45 000 to more than 400 000. An increasing number of retailers, both online and in the real economy, have started to accept Bitcoins as a means of payment that does not incur any exchange rate fees and which does not usually involve a bank or any charges that may be placed on a transaction.

104. The EBA decided to issue, in December 2013, a warning to consumers regarding the risks related to virtual currencies, i.e. the risk of losing money on the exchange platform, the risk that money could be stolen from the digital wallet, the lack of protection when using virtual currencies as a means of payment, the fact that the value of virtual currency owned can change quickly and even drop to zero, the fact that transactions in a virtual currency may be misused for criminal activities, including money laundering, and the fact that individuals holding virtual currency may be subject to tax liabilities in their countries. Several national supervisors followed suit and published statements on their own websites and/or crossreferenced
the EBA warning or one of its 22 translations.

105. However, the question yet to be addressed is whether virtual currencies can and ought to be regulated. To that end, the EBA will establish a cross-sectoral taskforce in H1 2014, with the aim of finding an answer to this question. The analysis would see the taskforce identifying not only the risks for consumers of using virtual currencies as a means of payment, but also risks that may arise
- for regulators in achieving their anti-money laundering objectives, given that the anonymous nature of virtual currencies is conducive to this type of activity;
- for investors from using virtual currencies for speculative purposes or from buying investment products that are based on virtual currencies (e.g. ETFs using Bitcoins as an underlying asset); and
- for societies more widely, as a result of virtual currencies being used for criminal activities, such as the anonymous purchase of illegal goods, including drugs and weapons.

You might be interested in knowing that https://www.swaphole.com/ has a BC market
Advantage: STOP LOSS! And trailing stop (even better than stop loss) is possible to
Disadvantages:
  - stop loss/trailing stop is requires ten times more expensive fees - but I believe the added security is worth it
  - you have to find out the best acceptable percentage of loss (I'd start with 10%, but in case of a flash dump-pump, you could lose momentum and have to buy back at a slightly higher price, hence losing BC)
  - no traffic whatsoever on the BC market atm
  - new exchange, they are registered in Australia and say they worked in real life trading before but out of that, they could be the next cryptorush
  - no permalink like https://cryptrader.com/charts/mintpal/bc/btc or https://www.mintpal.com/market/BC/BTC

I opened up an account but did not deposit any money yet.

I look at 3 things to determine a coins future viability. Technical aspects,  cult following,  and x factors.

Blackcoin's biggest problem is all of altcoinland's biggest problem right now: When something shows potential, getrichquickers hop on with crazy panic buys and whales manipulate them out of their money. It's happened so many times already with so many coins.

Hilarious reading back through the last few pages. [...]

Listen to yourselves.

lol centralized?? what on earth are you talking about?

Surtout n'achetez jamais pendant une PUMP. C'est la garantie de perdre.

I already said in the past how I consider altcoins as the promising-yet-undervalued part of the cryptocurrency ecosystems. Altcoins are frowned upon, as "profitors", trying to steal honest people money out of BTC.

I beg to disagree. Altcoins follow a Darwinian evolution. And everywhere Darwinian evolution is at work, make sure to keep an eye.

Altcoins are very similar to Linux distributions. Much like Linux distributions are based around a core (the Linux kernel), the altcoins gravitate around a basic concept (the blockchain). Granted, the altcoin ecosystem has its share (or even more than its share) of scams. It also has a lot of sincere-but-failed attempts. And, finally, several lessons, successes and innovations.

Here, I will try to list them:
Lessons

• Initial distribution issue is of paramount importance. A currency considered as unfair won't succeed (except if it Bitcoin, for historical reasons)
• No IPO, no premine. These two are free entrances for scammers. Sometimes IPO and premine are sincere (like NXT, maybe), but the market doesn't know
• No PoW (or Groestl PoW/PoS). Proof-of-Work is bad for the environment, particularly the oldest one (SHA-256); like Accelerando's Charles Stross said it, "Mining BtC has a carbon footprint from hell" (read bitcarbon.org). Plus, I read that in order to sustain its price, PoW requires more coins every day (a criticism of Dogecoin) - I don't understand this argument, but this is a recurring one. Pure PoS (proof-of-stake, i.e. interests)has proved reliable (although I think it had not yet been cryptographically proven), but the issue of initial distribution still occurs. One way around it is Fast PoW (MintCoin and later BlackCoin, only five weeeks and one week, respectively), but the shorter the PoW phase, the less fair it is; the longer the PoW phase, the more polluting it is and the more it encourages rich mining rig owners. PoW has its shortcomings, what about the alternative? At least, use a less consuming hash algorithm, like GroestlCoin does with Groestl (less energy-demanding than X11 or Keccak, themselves less energy-demanding than Scrypt, itself less than SHA-256); the added value of Groestl is that the "richer advantage" (owning several GPU) is less interesting with Groestl; so fairer.

Successes

• The simple answer is: look at http://coinmarketcap.com/ after filtering out the heavily premined coins. I will give only some
• LiteCoin: the original "for the rest of us" currency. The idea was that BTC had moved in the realm of the riches, since SHA-256 is only minable with expensive purpose-made machines (ASIC). Litecoin moved to the Scrypt algorithm.
• Blackcoin. Nugh said. +7400% in one month (due in no small part by the fact that people want to leave the "bitcoin trap" now that the price is falling). Before reaching the 10k satoshi barrier, it suffered heavily from price manipulation, which in turn lowered the confidence of all but day-traders. It remains to be seen if it will continue that way. Any sane mind would say it cannot. But a sane mind would not be on the crypto world.

Innovations

• PoS. Initiated by PeerCoin, turned into a power of its own by MintCoin (and later BlackCoin but in much smaller way), PoS avoids the environemental issue of PoW (see above). Pure PoS production would tend to favour high interest (like PoScoin, GhostCoin and MintCoin do with 50%, 50% and 20% annually respectively). Other coins consider PoS should not "compensate" for PoW but just be a nice addition for a coin that has a value of its own (this is the route BlackCoin is taking, with a x74 increase in one month, almost Bitcoin-like)
• Proof-of-Transaction. FlutterCoin's innovation is to reward people for actually spending the money. That's an interesting idea: after all, a money has long-term value only if it is being spent. This has similar implementation in real economy, where people receive fiat for buying something in fiat, effectively becoming a discount.
• Merged mining. To enforce security, some coins are created on top of other - this also lowers the environment footprint of the coin to almost zero (out of the cost of the parent coin, of course). Dogecoin is taking this route.
• Plugable coins. Similar to merged mining, some coins are meant to be extensions of another coin. The best-known is Mastercoin.
• Non-currency use of cryptos. Namecoin is the best-known of them, but not the most versatile. Namecoin plans to be used as a decentralised DNS. But other new use of the blockchain technology are being considered. NXT is definitely the most talked about, with smart contracts (also a Mastercoin possibility), coloured coins (coins that the sender may be sure it will be used for what he wanted it to be), decentralised voting, cost-cutting for directories maintenance (this is what the real banks are the most interested about at the moment)
• Greater anonymity. Give an IBAN to someone, this person won't know how much money you have and the history of your bank account. Give a cryptocurrency address to someone and this person will now everything. This may be both a good thing (sousveillance) and a bad thing (loss of privacy). That's why some currencies like Darkcoin, Anoncoin and Zerocoin have improved upon this.
• Resilience to concentration. As mentionned earlier, ASIC are a plague for the "rest of us" who can't afford them. Litecoin was the original "anti-ASIC" coin. Unfortunately, ASIC are coming to the Scrypt algo. The answer was double-sided: on one hand, move to other hashing algorithms (I already mentionned why Groestl is the most interesting one for the moment); on the other hand, use difficulty retargeting, since ASIC, being so specialised, cannot adapt to such a change - this was the reason for the initial success of Vertcoin, the first "anti-ASIC" coin. This lead to Kimoto's Gravity Well and later on Darkcoin's Dark Gravity Well. Notice that these anti-ASIC strategies are simple useless for pure PoS coins: no mining, no problem Other attempts at getting a fair distribution are Faircoin's 100% quick giveaway and FaucetCoin's long giveawat by the use of faucets.
• Multipools. Less an innovation than a strategy. A multipool automatically switches mining from one PoW coin to another and usually autosells in a given currency (BTC most of the time, but there are a BlackCoin and a MintCoin multipool). It is a parasistic attitude, in that such multipool destroy the value of the said coin and is pretty similar to what happens in life science (botany and zoology particularly): a predatory behaviour and more exactly an apex predator attitude, with all the risks involved in it (an apex predator can die because it exhausted its food ressource). Think also of the ecology of vulture and lions in the wild: when a gnu is dead, common vultures come but cannot pierce the skin. Greater vultures with stronger peak can pierce and they feed. Once they are full, they leave and the common vultures can take the rests... until the lion come and only after he left will other animal be allowed to eat what is left of the gnu. Here, multipools are the lions - they usually do not come first, but when they come, the come in force. That's why several coins resorted to Fast PoW: PoW is over before any big player had a chance to notice. In real world economy, there is a proverb for this: "giant or dwarf". Giant survive, dwarf get unnoticed and everything is between is getting crushed.

To sum it up, the innovations are about lessening the environmental footprint, increasing fairness of distribution, encouraging spending and exploring non monetary uses. Except for the last two, these are domains where the historical Bitcoin falls flat and shows no sign of getting any better.

Altcoins, the future of bitcoin!

i dont know when its time to sell shiiiit just got real

The hardest part about this coin is knowing when to exit :/ never?

If you want to be rich by investing in BlackCoin or any other promising coin read about this simple investing system:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345065.0

TL;DR:
1. Buy coins for as much money as you can afford to lose
2. Wait for the price to double
3. Reward yourself by selling 10% of your coins
4. Go to point 2

If at any stage something bad happens to the coin you should still have plenty of cash.
Don't sell all your coins - don't repeat mistakes of the people who were selling bitcoins for 1$ or worse.

Good luck

Slow and steady is for Mintcoin, no offence.

PoS is a better system. Requires less energy, has faster confirmations. It is imply the next step in cryptocurrency. Bitcoin popularised cryptocurrency like Naspter popularized p2p networks, but there are technological advancements that need to be made. Blackcoin will not be the last step, but it is the next step.

Production at work today... little to none?

How will the devs use premined MINT? They say nothing about this, this is very strange and alarming.

What connects the exchange MintPal www.mintpal.com with MINT? Exchange and coin were launched at the same time. I hope MINT isn’t purely speculative.

I discussed about a future of cryptocurrencies in this thread (My view on the future of Crypto Currencies), and mgburks77 give the link to interesting thread also (Bitcoin adoption slowing; Coinbase + Bitpay is enough to make Bitcoin a fiat).

Clear that cryptocurrencies 2.0 must have a several options:
1.   Resistance of GPU- and ASIC-mining. Not a “clean” fork.
2.   Resistance of the threat 51%.
3.   Privacy and data protection – it’s named “truly anonymity” in community. Sender’s and receiver’s data should be encrypted maximum.
4.   Decentralization. Low concentration of funds in large exchange. Not speculative.
5.   Apps to better part platforms (Windows, Linux, MAC and mobile of course). Native wallet.
6.   Strong devs (with background). Tech. support.
7.   And philosophy! It should not be speculative cryptocurrency, devs must want to change an economic and this world.

Most of this options are declared in some cryptocurrencies.
I decided to conduct an experiment. I chose the 5 cryptocoins and I will follow them during the month. I will install wallets, mine and trade them and see on changes (devs, community, courses, rumors etc).
I will be glad to get advises and comments!

So my choices is (alphabetical):
1.   Bytecoin (BCN) – https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=512747
2.   Darkcoin (DRK) – https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615
3.   Fluttercoin (FLT) – https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=509499
4.   Kimocoin (KMC) – https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=524216
5.   Mintcoin (MINT) – https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=450381

I will start tomorrow. Stay tuned!

But the if BC crashes hard (not saying it will), then will MINT to an obvious alternative to buy, and that could make the price go up.

Do you think POS Coins will overtake the market in the next weeks?

Mintcoin looks surprisingly good!
Top 10% in market cap, top 10% in trading volume and #33 of 221 in 24h change @coinmarketcap.
Very stable and sound in these hyped times

Posting official documentation on the mintcoin.cc page as well as photos of the devs would make it look more professional imho. 

glad to hear that!  let us make mint a more useful coin than other coins.

I'm starting to get really anxious about losing my Blackcoin to some hacker.
What's the best idea to secure them?
Put the wallet.dat on a USB and delete them on my computer?

I'm starting to get really anxious about losing my Blackcoin to some hacker.
What's the best idea to secure them?
Put the wallet.dat on a USB and delete them on my computer?