Really? So given the OP started this other thread awhile ago, it's now clear he's just trying to hype/promote his favorite coin. How stupid can you be.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1927144

Solarcoin is actually on my BTT watchlist as a coin I want to go and analyze when I get the chance. I've looked at it in the past but not too in depth.

I have 4 bins I put coins into.

1. Don't bother touching.

2. I don't believe the coin has any future so I only day trade. That doesn't mean doing a trade every day necessarily but very short term trading.

3. Has enough to it that it "could" go somewhere so I day trade to accumulate. I also might do a bit of day trading for profit.

4. Long term investment (hold for years). Have yet to find anything to go in this bin simply because all coins are too volatile and tend to move down towards a mining cost price (POS coins tend to go towards 0 as people hoard which reduces liquidity and network security).

I would be happier if it dropped back down around it's previous floor of around 3500 or so. It's been around the 8000 mark for many months so that could be a new floor, at least for awhile. Not liking the big swings though although the fact that it's mostly flat and not declining is a good thing. If you're willing to watch it like a hawk, it looks like you could buy at 8000 and make some really good profit when it pumps, just don't get greedy. Without going and seeing what's going on with the coin it's hard to say. If there's been nothing going on that corresponds to those swings, then it's more likely someone manipulating the market and they could pull the rug out at any moment. A lot of money can be made with the volatility of that coin but you need to limit your risk so that if suddenly it dives, you end up with no loss (overall) or very little.

Regarding greed. When I first got started, I lost some money on a coin where I got caught on the wrong side of a PnD. A very well known PnD guy was involved. So I followed him into other coins so I could trade and make my money back. Was pretty easy as you knew it would eventually pump. But people would get greedy and want 5x, 10x etc and they ended up losing. The guy would laugh at them and ask why the hell they got so greedy and he was absolutely right. If you're in early enough and get 2x in a pump on a coin that has no real history, get out. Far better to take that then end up losing. I will note though that some PnD guys actually start to dump before a coins price gets to 2x as they know they'll catch more people in their dump. Just look at the charts and make a judgment as they typically tell you all you need to know.

I'm not sure. I was looking at a bunch of coins recently including that one and I spotted some really high trade volumes (with no real change in price), a couple weeks before their pump started.

If they are required to run the network, then they're a point of failure. That's assuming of course, they are just like masternodes in other coins. If they're something else completely but for some reason they're using the term masternodes, then if could very well be ok.

And yep, it's always good to review a white paper. Not just for information on how it will all work, but a white paper that's written more as a marketing tool tells you a lot as well. A "real" white paper will include a whole lot of technical content with a variety of formulas, analysis of attack vectors etc.

The next time some PnP group decides to fleece all the morons.

You're looking to double your money on a coin that's already in the middle of a pump? Throw the dice and pick one. Seriously.

If you want to be smart, you go and look at the 1 year/all time charts of a bunch of coins. When a coin price is flat at the bottom, then you can buy and wait for the next pump. If you really want to be smart about it, you watch for a sudden large increase in trading volume that exists for a few days and then goes away. Typically, those don't result in any significant change in the coins price because the people doing it know what they're doing. Within a few weeks, the coin will get pumped and you can often get 5x out of it. Some will go as high as 10x but not all so it's best to get out early. The key to not losing money is not to be greedy and especially play the "if I'd only stayed in longer" game. No one ever remembers how many times they would have lost money if they'd stayed in longer.

I haven't looked into Xtrabytes in details at this point but it's just a gimmick. That article starts off saying P2P is not the best and they're going to have a Chord network. Guess what. Chord is just one of several protocols for P2P networks. So it's just a gimick to make people that don't know better think it's some how revolutionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer)

Couple other things from that article.

If they have in fact come up with something that solves many of the POW and POS issues with their POSign, then yes, that could be a very big thing. But until you get many of the real cryptographers to review it and give their analysis of it, there's no way to know.

That article says Masternodes are involved. When I hear that, I immediately know it's not trustless and has the risk of those being shut down someday. If the network needs those nodes in order to do anything, then it's point of failure and a risk. Given what I watched happen with spammers and hosting in the earlier days of the internet, its just a matter of time before all coins using some sort of masternodes starts getting shut down and pushed into a few of countries that you would never trust. Frankly, if POSign is great, I don't have a clue why anyone would throw in masternodes unless their only interested in the cash they generate. No one that is serious about crypto curency views masternodes in a favorable light.

Again though, I don't know all the details of the coin but from what i do know, I would rate it as just a coin to perhaps "day trade" but not long term invest.

Why don't you go ask the actual digibyte people in their thread.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=408268.0

There is zero reason for them to use some 3rd party coin as a token. It's nothing to create some "token" that the users can buy for money and they want to tie the value of that token to a far more stable currency like the USD as opposed to something volatile like a crypto coin. This is already established practice in both the porn (primarily cam sites) and game (primarily f2p) companies.

Sexcoin is worthless as is any "Game" coin. Having done work for companies in both industries, I can say with a certainty that they have zero interest in those sorts of 3rd party things. Just go look at porn company billing as it exists today. How many actually accept even bitcoin? Very few. I had implemented that for some companies in the past and they eventually removed it as the additional headaches wasn't worth it to them. IF they could implement something for very little money and it presented them zero overhead and someone else just sent them a check every so often, then someone might be able to convince them to do that. Another case where they might be worth something is if the coin starts up their own porn/game companies and uses the coin. But even then I can guarantee you they'll eventually add bitcoin (and/or some other very popular alt coin) making the other coin worthless. I've seen that happen on another coin already.

Regarding the "Incentivized Nodes" in the roadmap. Will the network/coin continue to operate without them. i.e. in the case where all of them are taken offline for whatever reason?

The "year" part? yeah lol.. I have the same thing in my wallet. I haven't bothered to bring it up as it seems pretty minor.

Still waiting for an answer to these two questions.

The thing about history, is that we can often use it to justify our point of view but it doesn't mean it's true. I don't view the history of those coins in the same way. While true that history can teach us some lessons, experience typically trumps that.

Anyone that is going to clone a coin in order to become the #1 crypto currency is going to pick the best one. All of them have plenty of flaws so it would almost be a waste of money at this point. So really, anyone cloning some other coin isn't going to be doing it to be the #1 crypto currency, they're going to be doing it for the money making opportunity and will be short lived.

Dash. I don't view it being #1 as being due to it being closed at the start. I see it more as being that no one has truly tried to topple it. Why would they want to. They can already clone it, use things like the "scam" issue, use an IPO, fire up a bunch of masternodes etc etc and make more than enough money. Milk it for as long as they can and then just let it die off. Rinse and repeat. With it's masternodes, Dash doesn't have the tech to be the #1 crypto currency so it's a non starter for anyone serious about becoming that.

Monero. I don't view them as killing of Bytecoin because of it having been open source. Like you said, no one knew about it. They simply didn't have a team behind them that could make it a success. They could have been closed source for a year or two and it wouldn't have mattered. Monero still could have come along and taken over. It's been awhile now so I can't remember but I vaguely remember some sort of controversy or something regarding Bytecoin as well. Boolberry came out at the same time and for awhile was giving Monero a run for their money. It was competing marketcap wise, people were all over the forum hyping it. But where are they now. At the end of the day Monero won purely I believe on the quality of their devs. I've had some in depth technical conversations with them and they know their stuff inside and out and they are dedicated to crypto currency first and foremost. That alone is enough to build a strong community around the coin and instill confidence and loyalty in everyone involved.

I had mentioned experience above. Years ago i worked for a multi billion dollar company who's products are used around the world. While there, I worked with a product manager who was extremely successful at what he did. He would look at competitors products and pick out ones he believed the company could sell and that he could design to be better. And that's exactly what he did multiple times. They were essentially "clones". The tech wasn't superior over all, some aspects were better and some worse. Marketing was on par, sometimes less, sometimes a bit more. Distribution was on par, sometimes worse, sometimes better. But he had a knack for knowing just how to design his versions of the products so they were a far better user experience. Small things were better then in the competitors. Some things were completely done away with (that consumers believed they needed) and replaced but that led to a more enjoyable experience. In every instance his products ended up becoming #1 with the most market share even against companies that had been #1 for years. In his most successful product, we went up against a company probably 50+ times as big. Their distribution was far superior. They could dump far more into marketing. But the product was superior and became #1 and still is to this day. So it doesn't matter if some coin is established or not or how they achieved it. If someone wants to topple them, they can do it with a superior product. That's what experience has taught me and why I say that the history of those coins doesn't matter.

Now here's the thing. Even if Enigma is some sort of revolutionary tech, it doesn't matter because all the user is concerned about is anonymity which they can get in multiple coins. Enigma will only be a real benefit if it provides some other technical benefits. Mimblewimble (assuming flaws aren't found) is revolutionary in it's simplicity and it provides some technical benefits (there are some flaws though). But as I said, it doesn't really matter because they're all just anonymity and in the end it's the user experience that will be more important.

At this point, Cloak has been close source since day 1, something like 3 years now. New team has been working on things for roughly a couple years. If all that time has not been enough for it to have a good following of supporters and "establish" it, then nothing will. Success isn't going to be had by trying to hide things away which means you'll always be viewed as being on the fringe and not a serious crypto currency. It's only going to really have a chance to succeed if it gets out from under it's rock and competes head to head with the leaders.

Anyway, you're absolutely right with at least one thing though. We each have our opinions and only time will tell lol.

You seem to be missing the fact that they are all open source and they are the competition. It doesn't matter what the history is, that's the current state and if you can't compete on the core fundamentals of crypto currencies then you might as well not even try. If this was some other type of product, then sure. But it's fundamentally a crypto currency and it's focus needs to be on that in order for it to truly succeed.

I also don't have a clue why anyone would think others would want to clone Cloak before it has a chance to really get itself going again. Oh sure, there will be some that do it and almost all of them will be scams. But people are more interested in cloning Dash because they see dollars signs in the masternodes. Things like ZCash are the flavor of the day for cloning but the tech is far from being truly usable as a crypto currency due to various performance issues as well as the issue of the trusted setup. Its highly doubtful that any clone will make any real technical advances with those ones.

I will say though, that a crypto currency based on Mimblewimble has the potential to beat every anon coin out there. That's based on what I know of it so far and assumes anyone doing a coin based on it doesn't introduce various forms of centralization or require trust. The truly "scary" part for anon coins should be that some core bitcoin developers are looking at it and doing some work with it.

In crypto, if you want to be taken seriously, you need to be open source.

Monero - open source
Dash - open source
Zcash - open source
Zcoin - open source
NAVcoin - open source
Shadowcash - open source
Bytecoin - open source
PIVX - open source

That's just some of the competition. Notice how I listed anonymous coins and not some others that are heavy on gimmicks and ignore the core fundamentals of being a solid cryptocurrency first and foremost. If you can't exceed what they do then you might as well close the doors and walk away.

The whitepaper you can download from the site has some information on these things. But it's lacking a lot of technical aspects (full discussions of attack vectors with probabilities etc) IMO when I compare it to others. My hope is that when they're almost ready to release source code and have a code review done, they'll expand on the whitepaper.

Can someone point me to a link to a whitepaper for this coin? Can't seem to find it or maybe I'm just blind.

Is the full nodes "influencing" some miners to do something they weren't going to do, i.e. to fork, which brings about the situation of the market deciding the outcome them having power or not. And if you say it isn't, why do you not define it as such. Nothing else in your response had anything to do with this question nor has any bearing on an answer to that question.