On the contrary.  A "legal" transaction is in principle one where both parties agreed upon to trade (that is, where not one party is holding a gun against the head of the other one).  Whether a third party wants to know about that, or worse, want to reap in part of the deal (taxes), has nothing to do with intrinsically "legal" affairs.

If you look carefully, the current market cap is essentially made up of two "pumps" of about $4 million, one at the very beginning, and one a few weeks ago.

Monopoly is always a bad idea.

What always surprises me is that new altcoins start new block chains, instead of forking off bitcoin.
Of course, in as much as altcoins are meant to profit from the initial seigniorage, that's understandable, but given that one of the main difficulties of a cryptocurrency is the fairness of its initial distribution, and that bitcoin has, because of its origins, one of the better initial distributions, it would seem to me that when creating a new altcoin, instead of starting a new block chain with all the hassle of trying, again, to obtain a fair "initial distribution", using bitcoin's distribution at a certain point (the forking block, eventually in the past) solves this issue way way better than "doing it over again".

If that's the case, altcoins are just "alternative bitcoins" and one cannot really say that they "overtake" it.  They would simply be forks of the same original chain.

The fork could be entirely radical, with different emission schemes, different mining, different rules: the only thing that is taken over from bitcoin is the initial distribution at the moment of forking.  One could even eliminate Satoshi's stash if that's considered a potential problem.

Nobody has done this as far as I know, and I don't know why (except for the obvious reason that this doesn't allow for an initial scammy premine or ninjamine).  the boundaries between "bitcoin" and "altcoins" would be much more blurred then.  All bitcoin holders (in the past) would then automatically become new coin holders too, which would create an initial community much larger than what one could hope with a new chain.   For the fairness and the quality of the new coin, I cannot think of a better way to start it than fork it off bitcoin, but I never saw this happening.

This.

That's what the fuzz makes you believe.  ZEC has a minuscule market cap compared to ETH, so its influence should have been insignificant.
Hell, the dip that monero and dash took was larger than the entire market cap of ZEC.

You mean, ETH is a Turing-complete and hence unprovable smart contract system, and ZCASH is an optionally fungible and anonymous crypto currency ? 

But you can say that about bitcoin too.  Its real usage (to buy stuff) is so small, compared to daily volume and market cap which is MAINLY "trading", that it is almost negligible.

There *is* some bitcoin usage, for sure.  But it is very small compared to the numbers that are supposed to indicate its size.  Probably, with bitcoin, the percentage of "real use" is larger than for most altcoins, but it remains minuscule.

There is not $ 50 million of "buying stuff" with bitcoin daily.  At all.  It is somewhat difficult to find the bitpay volumes daily with recent numbers, it seems that the daily volume is of the order of $ 1 million or less, representing less than 2% of volume.  Dark markets are somewhat larger than bitpay.  If we are broad, we can say that 10% of bitcoin's volume is actual usage to buy stuff.  All the rest is trading/gambling.  Actually, most of it is with exchange IOU, because the CHAIN volume is about 4 times smaller than the exchanges volume.

3/4 of bitcoin's trading doesn't need any block chain, but only an exchange web site.

For most alt coins, the situation is worse, agreed.  But nevertheless, MOST of crypto, including bitcoin, is gambling on exchanges and its usage "in real life" is minuscule.

Again, those plots are misleading.  They only indicate the obvious: bitcoin was the first, and rose from essentially NOTHING to something, which allows for a HUGE rise.  Altcoins don't have the ambition to start from "nothing".  If ICO's were at the same level of value as bitcoin was in the beginning, it would mean that the whole market cap would be, say, $10,- or so.  And yes, I'm pretty sure that an ICO with a total market cap of $10,- can also display huge rising numbers: if the market cap rises to $1M, then a factor of 100 000 is reached, better than bitcoin on that plot.

The point is, nobody starts out at $10,- market cap as an alt coin, because now, people KNOW that crypto can carry some value.  When bitcoin came out, that was an open question.  Most people thought that something like that could NEVER carry some real world value for strangers (amongst friends, yes, you can pretend...).

This is why, to be fair, in comparing bitcoin to the others on that plot, you should take a starting point of bitcoin when knowledge that it could hold value was known widely, and when competition existed already, which is why I propose beginning of 2013.  Then bitcoin's curve is not so exceptional.

Bitcoin was exceptional when it was the pioneer.  Nobody can be a pioneer after the first pioneer.  That's what those plots indicate.

The pizza sold for 10 000 bitcoin wasn't "a merchant with infrastructure" either, I think.

This study is interesting, but misleading, if one takes it as support for "bitcoin is real, and altcoins are shit".

The initial period of bitcoin can show tremendeous value increase, because bitcoin was the very first crypto currency, and initially, nobody thought that the CONCEPT of a crypto currency could even work, so it started out as essentially worth NOTHING.   The rise from "nothing" to "something" is in fact infinite, and it is because the curve for bitcoin doesn't actually start at "nothing" that you can even put bitcoin on the chart.

But one can only discover ONCE that crypto currencies can function and get value.  That was bitcoin.  No crypto currency EVER after will start at "nothing".  People now KNOW that it can obtain serious market caps.  So no other crypto currency can display a rise from essentially nothing to something, showing several orders of magnitude increase like bitcoin can in its first years of existence.

But EVEN BITCOIN will not have such value increase any more.  These crazy rises are over.  Only the first one could display that, not because it went HIGH, but because it started SO LOW.

Like the other thread said: "nobody's buying pizza for 10 000 coins any more".

So the study should be done over, but taken as a starting point for bitcoin, not its starting point which was UNIQUE as being the very first crypto currency, worth nothing, but rather, say, when there were already a lot of coins around, and we can compare bitcoin to the rest with equal knowledge.  Say, beginning of 2013 or something.

An altcoin can never start out like bitcoin started out, because when an altcoin starts out, there is already the knowledge that crypto currencies can have value, and one expects the altcoin to have already a market cap.

It would be interesting to plot the bitcoin line, but taking its "starting point" as 1/1/2013, and compare it to the others.  I'm sure bitcoin still beats many, but it wouldn't be that spectacular.

Bitcoin isn't very far off either.

The best way to write a smart contract would be in a non-Turing complete language.

There's absolutely no reason why a *contract* would need a way to express potentially infinite loops or arbitrarily complex state trees.

Amen.

But there is a sure way not to get scammed by an ICO: issue one yourself

That's true, but that is because these people are also not "users" of the coin, but just gamblers, eh, investors in the coin.  In other words, they don't use the coin as a currency (like bitcoin) or to set up a genuine contract, say, renting a bike (like ethereum), they are only interested in the coin increasing its market price (or in it decreasing its market price when shortable).
These gamblers (most of the crypto volume and market cap actually) don't even need a block chain: they only need IOU on the web sites of exchanges.

That would have been true if ZEC didn't screw it up and made anonymous transactions compulsory, instead of an option.

But (to lesser extend) that's even true for bitcoin.  The part of "real use" of crypto is minuscule as compared to the market cap, mainly sustained by traders on exchanges.

If there's one thing I think that bitcoin totally failed, it is what is called here "anonymity".  Bitcoin has a cruel lack of anonymity.  People are not yet feeling it, but it will blow in their face if ever bitcoin gets adopted beyond the circle of a few geeks and a lot of traders.

Now, when one says this, there are always reactions of "true anonymity is impossible" and "do you really think that the government is not watching you" and so on.   It is absolutely true that perfect anonymity cannot be attained, but that's not the point.  The real point is that bitcoin like open ledger currencies are WAY, WAY WAY less anonymous/private than all the payment methods that we've been using up to now, whether it is cash, gold, and *even* bank accounts.

The problem is that people associate "anonymity" with "crime" but that's not the point.  First of all, SOME crime must be possible, because this is the only way for society to evolve, and it is the only way to have hope to overthow dictators.  If law enforcement is perfect, no evolution of society is possible, because the smallest deviation from the norm will immediately and totally be eliminated by that perfect law enforcement.  If the law enforcement against homosexuality in the UK before the 50-ies were perfectly enforced, then there wouldn't have been any homosexuals out of prison that could have plead for the recognition of the rights of homosexuals.  Probably with (soft) drugs, things will go that way too.   So the fact that "anonymity" can help some crime to escape law enforcement is a good thing in itself.

The real problem with open ledgers is that all of your financial history is there for everybody to read, if they obtain some very partial knowledge of your transactions, by chain analysis.  Never in history there has been such a LACK of privacy and anonymity.  Never in history, just any mortal on earth could trace back how a coin got into your hands from its creation.  Even bank accounts don't allow for that.  Every bank only knows part of the history, and keeps it private from others up to a point.  At no point, such a terrible lack in anonymity and privacy occurred for intrinsically private matters relating to financial transactions.

What "anonymous" coins try to do, is to make it simply somewhat more difficult and to return partly to the usual situation where not everybody has access to all financial motions of everybody.  That's on a totally different level than trying to be absolutely anonymous when financing a covert terrorist organisation trying to develop secretly a new nuclear or biological weapon (which will indeed be very difficult to do - and happily so).

There is a huge NEED for somewhat more anonymity, fungibility and privacy in "block chain money" because the way bitcoin is doing it, is totally an open book for everyone to see, which is terrible.

And so you can with DASH, with XMR, ...


I think this is a fallacy in the reasoning.  It doesn't "cost" you 100x to use zcash than it costs you using zcoin.  You could just as well say "why do I have to go further in kilometers than in miles to go from here to there".  The unit is simply different.

I think that what you are describing is a genuine use of zcash/zcoin.  But it remains a very small part of the volume and hence market cap (because of demand) of these anonymous coins.  For most people, there doesn't even need to be a block chain or any node software: they only keep their "coins" as IOU on exchanges.  The big failure (as of now) of most of crypto.

Indeed.