So those "criticisms" could have been made when bitcoin was only 8 months old eh? What's the difference? Bitcoin was vulnerable then and who knows what may happen in the future to change the status quo of digital currencies. No, Bitcoin did not have a preexisting currency with all the same features to compete with. Nor does Bitcoin have the growth-paralyzing proof-of-work known as scrypt. So then when bitcoin say goes to $100 or even $1000 and then the price drops to say $20 then if someone got in at $1000....as the quote says "and continually be beneficial to adopters no matter when they begin using it." What basis is there to expect that will happen? (I already presented my case for why Litecoin is almost guaranteed to fail) But Luke, it doesn't really matter if Litecoin is a slightly tweaked copy of Bitcoin. No one criticizes small countries for printing their own currencies even when there are already other currencies out there. No one complains when this countries small currency isn't as counterfeit proof as the American Dollar (or what-have-you). Bitcoin and Litecoin are sovereign unto themselves as the group of people who believe/invest in them. ... I prefer to compare crypto-currencies to chemical elements we discover. We first discovered Bitcoin. We studied its properties, figured out it was stable and found a good number of ways we could use it in our lives. Some of us said "Bitcoin works for me, I will use it and I don't need anything else", while others kept searching for new elements. As time went by, through the series of experiments (Tenebrix, GeistGeld, Fairbrix, Liquidcoin) which were all unstable isotopes and decayed quickly, we then discovered Litecoin. It turned out to be quite stable even though it wasn't obvious at a time. We now know that it has certain characteristics different from Bitcoin that might make a difference in the future. Thus some of us decided to use it as well. I believe in the future there will still be search for new elements, there will still be experiments and I'm sure there will be new stable elements we haven't even thought of yet! |
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Considering 4x block rate and 1mb block size limit Litecoin will be capable of handling 4x more transactions than Bitcoin before hard fork is required. With current Bitcoin blocks approaching 256kb it can only grow 4x before it would hit that limit.
It's better to spend time on scalability of Bitcoin than attacking other chains.
At some point Litecoin might serve as a backup chain while Bitcoin will be choking on 1mb 10min blocks.
EDIT: this post isn't meant to ignite Bitcoin/Litecoin flame war and is not directed at anyone personally.
Just an observation of facts about two chains that might make a difference in the future.
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This project is important as it might attract Occupy people to P2P crypto-currency in general.
Once they get the idea, they will have better understanding of the technology and will be able to choose the coin they like.
The initial particular characteristics of the coin are not that relevant, what's more important is that this is the coin designed specifically for them by NASA engineers!
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Is the litecoin development still active? I believe the lastest commit was like three months ago.
I'm working on getting the latest Bitcoin fixes into Litecoin. Stay tuned. Coblee, since you're adding latest Bitcoin fixes, might be worth integrating the one which optimizes block propagation time. I think it's called "signature verification cache" and was added into 0.6.3 by Gavin. Maybe it's not critical for Litecoin now, but considering the higher block rate and how slowly people upgrade their clients, it's likely that Litecoin will face this problem sooner than later, so better start preparing now! |
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Freicoin would probably work if it was the only medium of exchange and representation of value.
In this condition large hoarders would be forced to mine instead of just sitting on their capital.
I don't know if more miners is good or bad, depends on who controls the mining HW market.
But since it's not the only currency out there people would be more inclined to convert freicoins into something more stable.
Of course if somehow conversion or exchange of freicoins is made hard or cumbersome then it might develop into economy of its own.
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Yeah I noticed that too...
If you did, why did you phrase your post in such a way that implied some kind of achievement? They paid money to get on the news; move along. Because I liked it, and I like to troll too!  |
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It just struck me that at 4x higher block rate and 1mb per block limit for both chains the Litecoin network should be able to handle 4x more transactions than Bitcoin before hard fork is required! So not only Litecoin transactions are faster to confirm, it has 4x more throughput in terms of cleaning the backlog of unconfirmed transactions. Add to this ASIC resistant hashing algorithm, fairer original coin distribution and now I see why they call Bitcoin an experiment. It's simply cleaning up the road for the Litecoin!!! * Ok not sure if serious or just trolling  |
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Yeah I noticed that too...
By the way, maybe they should convince BFL to keep BTC and negotiate with fabs to pay for ASICs in BTC!
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Nice!
Funny how just a few days ago I thought that we needed a similar pizza story for Litecoin and today I saw this thread advertised at weusecoins.com in the news section on the right!
Way to go for Litecoin!
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Two questions. 1. Will you offer a discount for large buy orders? If so what is the discount.
2. Ever thought of creating a subsiduary of bitpay to offer options? Sounds like you have a big enough stake in the market to offer such things. This will boost your payments business being able to guarantee a certain payout at a small fee.
at this point, large orders actually put more stress on us than small ones. We have a much more likely risk of losing money on large orders. So unfortunately there isn't a discount. I am very familiar with options trading and how they work. I just wish someone else would do it. we've got our hands full at the moment. Check out bitcoinOPX.com, they will gladly do it for you! |
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Options would be good if they are done correctly. They would provide a proper hedging mechanism to buy time to sell the coins in an efficient manner.
However, options contracts are only as good as the counterparty.
Markets are being very efficient today. It's over the weekends where the bias is lopsided to the downside. Sellers can add liquidity over the weekend, but buyers cannot!
It would actually be more stable for bitcoin if the markets would close for the weekend. People are used to the 24/7 operation, but the fact is it puts downward pressure on the price if only one side of the trade can put up money.
Agreed. If 6.30 holds for a day we should see a reversal to the upside throughout the week. *not* agreed at all! ok … partially agreed. If we had a monopoly, I would love to have order settlement once per 24h or once per week. Why should the price change faster than I can settle a purchase? As we will never have a monopoly, people will put their money where they can react in case of significant news and therefore the exchanges would only stop 24/7 upon being regulated. (Actually a pause in price-making would definitely not increase stability as users would get nervous against that deadline on Friday. Also the exchanges would need extra capacities for the unnatural activity spikes.) I only agreed with highlighted text that the price tends to go down on weekends due to inequalities in bid/ask liquidity. But I don't think that closing exchanges for a weekend is a good solution. It doesn't seem compatible with vibrant 24/7 Bitcoin economy. By the way I only learnt about "banking days" and "non-banking days" when I first transferred some fiat to the BTC exchange! And I thought it was totally silly that I cannot do electronic transfer on a weekend in the age of the Internet. If some exchanges become regulated they will be wiped out by 24/7 competition. |
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Options would be good if they are done correctly. They would provide a proper hedging mechanism to buy time to sell the coins in an efficient manner.
However, options contracts are only as good as the counterparty.
Markets are being very efficient today. It's over the weekends where the bias is lopsided to the downside. Sellers can add liquidity over the weekend, but buyers cannot!
It would actually be more stable for bitcoin if the markets would close for the weekend. People are used to the 24/7 operation, but the fact is it puts downward pressure on the price if only one side of the trade can put up money.
Agreed. If 6.30 holds for a day we should see a reversal to the upside throughout the week. |
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After giving it a bit more thought, I believe options is a right thing to do in case if BFL agrees to wait for example 1 month for the funds. In this case you create option contract for each large chunk of BTC (10k USD equivalent) where you guarantee to sell it at a fixed price during that period. You sell those contracts for a certain price. Now people who are willing to invest in BTC but don't have enough funds right now might be interested to buy these option contracts hoping that when they accumulate 10k USD within a month they will get a good price at the end. If however the price goes down they wouldn't have to buy your BTC at higher than market value, but they already paid for the option contract so you get free money for just a guarantee to sell an asset at a fixed price for a period of time. More discussions and examples are here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84092.0In the end it all depends on whether BFL is willing to wait to liquidate BTC efficiently or they need USD right now, which they shouldn't if the story about VC deal is to be believed. |
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Not sure if it's correct way of doing but maybe using options at bitcoinOPX.com is the way to go in this case.
From the explanation of options I read somewhere it goes like this:
- you need to sell an asset X at a certain price (lock price of those orders)
- you sell option contract to sell asset X at this fixed price within a month.
- if asset price goes up you still get your fixed price plus the payment for the option contract
- if asset price goes down you still have your asset plus the payment for the option contract
So it seems like win win for everybody, and asset X in this case is BTC.
I'm not an expert in this, sorry if it's totally off.
EDIT: it only makes sense for the buyer if he/she doesn't have enough money now but will have in a month.
So he/she can buy option contract from you to buy BTC at fixed price within a month.
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I just thought that Bitcoin Server Wallet might be a better name for Bitcoin-Qt. But that will only make things easier to understand for people familiar with computers. Then in the description we may compare Bitcoin Server Wallet to a bank in a financial world without formally calling it a bank to avoid legal issues.
Anyways I heard discussions among devs about separating full nodes and SPV nodes sometime in the future. So we will probably make it more clear by then.
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This might help alleviate some confusion people are having with blockchain download time.
It's not a small utility program to send and receive bitcoins as many newcomers might think.
It's a full-fledged Bitcoin Bank node with certain requirements for HDD space, processing power and security.
And then if they don't want their own bank they are free to choose lite clients or e-wallets.
What do you think? Having to maintain the blockchain is nothing compared to what's needed to have your own fiat bank, this should buy us some time.
The bitcoin "official" client is software that enables people to manage themselves money deposits and transfers, just faster and cheaper than their bank does. Loading and maintaining an up-to-date local database of transactions is the only fixed price to pay to the p2p network (aside from the tx fees that are a variable cost). Exactly, when people are nagging about blockchain download they should understand that what they are doing is akin running a bank in fiat world and not something like using PayPal. |
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No. People do not want to run their own bank. They want banks to be banks.
It's ok, then we should let them know somehow that by using official client they will be attempting to run the Bitcoin Bank node! Currently they might think it's something small and simple like maybe a BitTorrent client. It is not! |
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