When I registered in late 2013, most of the coins being released were based on Litecoin but with a different name/logo and slightly different specifications (e.g. different coin supply, faster/slower block generation, etc.). The first altcoin I tried mining was Kittehcoin, followed by Coinye. Looking at the announcements board, it seems that there aren't quite as many altcoins based on Litecoin anymore and the popularity of the scrypt algorithm seems to have dropped for new coins. I'm guessing this is due to scrypt now being dominated by ASICs.

Is there still any interest in coins based on Litecoin? And if not, then what is the coin that most altcoins are based on these days? Peercoin? Blackcoin? Darkcoin?

It's only a matter of time before even the poorest of nations have widespread access to smartphones and good computers. Moore's law is a wonderful thing. In 2010, it was pretty damn near impossible to find a smartphone for under $200 here. In fact, this was the phone I bought in 2010:



I was able to buy it for $200 and it was selling for $250 elsewhere. It had a tiny resistive touch screen, 240x360 resolution, no Android, no wifi, and wasn't even a smartphone despite its looks:

Despite this, it was one of the cheapest phones with a touch screen at the time.

Today, that same $200-250 will get you this magnificent beauty:



That's a 5" HD screen with quad cores, 8 MP rear camera + 2 MP front camera, and running the latest version of Android.

Even the $80-100 phones are pretty good (in fact, this is my current smartphone):



And here's what $30-50 will get you (still better than my 5 year old $200 phone):



The latest Raspberry Pi is 6 times more powerful than its predecessor, features 1 GB of RAM and a quad core processor, will run the latest Windows 10, and only costs $35. I've seen tablets with HD screens and dual core processors go for under $80.

As I said, it's only a matter of time.

That 1.2 LTC was worth almost $60 not too long ago.

Anyway, I doubt CEX.IO is a scam. They're one of the oldest and biggest cloud mining companies (although I guess Mt. Gox was the oldest and biggest exchange too until it went down). Last time I heard, they switched off their miners due to the falling BTC price. Are they back in business now?

There are decentralized exchanges in development and I think there might be some already working, but I personally think that centralized exchanges like Bter and Cryptsy are here to stay. They're simple and user friendly, they work with no technical expertise required, and you don't have to install anything on your computer to use them. And if you don't use them as banks and you're not into day trading then they're actually not that bad security-wise. Just put your coins in, swap them for some other coins, then withdraw.


That wouldn't be a cold wallet though right? I mean, if the machine containing the cold wallet is connected to the Internet, then it's not really a cold wallet. The moment a machine is connected to the Internet, it can be infected by viruses or trojans. So that rules out email. Malware can spread via USB drives too. In fact, the Iranian nuclear program had some of their centrifuges destroyed by malware that spread via USB drives:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

Relevant part:

Litecoin is technically very similar to Bitcoin so apps for Bitcoin and anything that is built on top of Bitcoin could also be adapted for Litecoin as well. Whether or not services such as Coinbase choose to incorporate Litecoin is their choice, however. A few exchanges have considered adding LTC trading. Among these were Mt. Gox and BTC China. Payment processor Coinkite also supports Litecoin and Blackcoin in addition to Bitcoin. Some ATMs do too I think.

I'm curious to know what sites they link to for getting "free bitcoins". If it's just faucets, then obtaining enough to pay the 0.07 BTC fee would take months, if not years. Last week, I was able to earn just little over 10 cents using Freebitco.in despite using it pretty much 24/7. According to Preev, 0.07 BTC is currently worth $17.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. As others have already said, the members who gave you negative trust aren't in the default trust list, so it won't be visible. There are lots of trustworthy hero members with negative feedback from accounts that aren't in the default trust list. e.g. Tomatocage (highly trusted escrow):



Stunna (owner of Primedice):



Even Satoshi (inventor of Bitcoin) has a couple:

If you look at some of the threads here using Google's cache and turn off all images, you regularly see posts made by a hero account called "1424241872" which has 1,424,241,872 posts.

I'm curious. Who or what is this, and what is the purpose of this odd account? And why does it only show up on Google's cached pages but never elsewhere?

Continuing on from this thread; So I was able to find another chart that looks to be from the same website. I have no idea what these charts are doing in my hard drive so perhaps some insight into their content might provide a reason for why they are there. Anyway, this one seems to show the mining difficulty from Jan 2013 to Jul 2014. Is the trend correct? What is the reason for the spike in difficulty in early 2014? Was it due to the introduction of ASICs?

For example, the top shows an average compact late-model car. It's available to rent at a discounted rate for $35 per day which works out to $245 per week minus fees. Such a car would typically cost about $20,000.

The bottom shows a house. It's available to rent for $70 per week which works out to $10 per day minus fees. Although rather small, there is no doubt that this house would be worth much more than the car above.

Why is this so?

Aubrey de Grey is definitely the one to follow if you're interested in this type of stuff. There is also a forum called Longecity where people discuss radical life extension and strategies to combat aging. You might also be interested in Kurzweil's thoughts on the Singularity too. In his books, he talks about the accelerating rate of technological progress and the convergence of biology, computer science, and nanotechnology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

Finally, there is also cryonics which can serve as a backup plan. There are two providers in this field - Alcor and the Cryonics Institute.

I'm sure many people here already know this by now but looking back, it seems that I was right to be cautious since Bter recently lost a large chunk of their users' funds due to an unusual cold wallet hack. What happened to Bter could happen to any other exchange or service that claims to hold/invest your bitcoins - whether it be MyBitcoin, inputs.io, Mt. Gox, or the countless cloud mining/ponzi schemes that pop up everyday, etc. Even if a site claims to offer a positive ROI by paying interest, it's highly likely that the actual expected ROI is negative once the possibility of a hack or scam is accounted for. Moral is; Keep your coins off exchanges people!

When I typed in "is the bitcoin" in the Google search bar, this is what I saw:



Assuming that search suggestions reflect the most popular search queries, it's interesting to see what the general public thinks of Bitcoin today. Some of the search queries seem reasonable and it seems that Bitcoin's comparison to ponzi schemes isn't going away anytime soon, but "mark of the beast"? Really? And what does it mean by "one world currency"? And why are so many people interested in the trademark status of the Bitcoin logo anyway?

I've noticed that along with Bitcoin, the earliest altcoins all have relatively low total coin supplies. Bitcoin, Namecoin, Ixcoin, and I0coin all have 21 million coins. Litecoin has 84 million. Peercoin, Primecoin, Tenebrix, and Fairbrix have supplies that are technically unlimited however the rate of inflation is low enough that Peercoin currently only has 22 million coins and Primecoin has about 8 million. I couldn't find any numbers for TBX and FBX but I think they have the same thing going on.

Feathercoin has 336 million total coins - exactly four times Litecoin's supply and Freicoin has 100 million. According to this article, BBQcoin has a total coin supply of 88 million although I get different numbers elsewhere. Terracoin has 42 million. All four coins were launched after Litecoin.

Then fast forward to late 2013-2014 and suddenly coin supplies start to go up dramatically. Dogecoin has 100 billion and is technically unlimited. Kittehcoin has 100 billion too. Many of the scrypt clones that appeared during this time (e.g. Flappycoin) had very high coin supplies. NXT has 1 billion coins as well as most of its clones. Both NEM and Qora have ~10 billion. Then there are coins like Pennies/CENT and Colossuscoin which had hundreds of billions and sometimes even trillions of coins.

Auroracoin and Darkcoin buck the trend as both only have ~21 million coins. Ethereum and Counterparty also have smaller coin supplies too. Bytecoin has a high-ish supply while Monero's is quite small in comparision so it's really more of a general trend than a strict rule.

Somewhat relevant (notice how many older coins there are between Freicoin and Bitcoin at the bottom of the chart):

From reading his webcomic, it seems that he is an expert in not only programming:

http://xkcd.com/163/

and computer science:

http://xkcd.com/399/

but also physics:

http://xkcd.com/505/*
http://xkcd.com/849/

astrophysics:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/129/

rocket science:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/85/

advanced mathematics:

http://xkcd.com/1310/

statistics:

http://xkcd.com/696/

and cryptography:

http://xkcd.com/936/

*Note:


It seems that he is now writing full-time after a brief stint at NASA. A bit unfortunate I guess since he's no longer contributing to science but it seems to be what he enjoys most (plus his comics are pretty popular!). William James Sidis was also very similar. He was a genius in mathematics and cosmology but later chose to focus on his hobby of collecting street car transfers instead.

Litecoin seems to follow Bitcoin's price trend but in a much more exaggerated manner. When the BTC price rose by nearly 100 times between January and November 2013, the LTC price rose by almost 700 times during the same timeframe.

When Bitcoin's price dropped from $900 to $300 in 2014, Litecoin's price dropped from $25 to $2.

What other opportunities have yielded as much profit as Bitcoin did between 2009 and 2013? Apple stock? Uranium futures? I don't think any of them come even remotely close to Bitcoin.

I guess Litecoin and the NXT IPO have yielded greater profits percentage-wise but they're pretty much in the same boat as Bitcoin.

GHash.IO did have over 50 percent of the total mining power at one point, although it is no longer true now.

What OP is describing is a Sybil attack. The immediate precursor to Bitcoin - Nick Szabo's Bit Gold, was vulnerable to this exact problem as it relied on the percentage of honest vs. hostile nodes to enforce the correct version of the blockchain. Satoshi improved upon this design by making hash power the determinant of network authority. His other major innovation was the adjusting difficulty algorithm.

Bitcoin isn't truly anonymous but rather pseudonymous although it can be close to truly anonymous if you used mixers. In addition to Litecoin and Dogecoin, I would have thought that adding an anonymous coin such as Darkcoin or Monero as a payment option would be a good idea. Also, it is possible to trace IP addresses if the site in question utilizes Flash or Javascript which means that your identity could be discovered via a hack, subpoena, or search warrant even if you mixed your coins. This is true even if you used Tor or a VPN service to hide your IP.

What really matters is the size of the hack in proportion to the exchange's total funds. They lost 7,170 BTC which is worth $1.75 million. When Poloniex was hacked, it only lost 900 BTC worth $50,000 which represented 12 percent of all customer funds. However, Bter is also a much larger exchange than Poloniex. Bitstamp was able to survive a $5 million hack - and quite easily too. Had the same thing happened to Poloniex, it would have killed the exchange outright.

Last year's NXT hack was also in the same ballpark in terms of severity but fortunately they were able to recover most of the NXT. Also it's certainly strange to see that the cold wallet was targeted in the most recent hack since a properly secured cold wallet should be immune to this type of breach.