The entire cryptocurrency market is so small, it could all be considered as "one exchange" right now given the tiny amount of trading thats needed to shift the price.

I've bought stuff on Cryptsy and even on BTC-e when there's been low volume and later looked back at the graph and seen the blip where I bought.

ok - it would be nice if NxT were on more exchanges. I don't think you'd see much complaining from the NxT people at that prospect. But it doesn't change the fact that the coin is being freely traded on the one exchange where it's currently available. It's still relatively cheap. I don't see any signs of irregularity - you can pick up quite significant portions of the total coins base for relatively low amounts of BTC given whats on offer in terms of 2nd generation functionality from the coin.

There are also plenty of coins which are only available on Cryptsy or only available on Coins-e. That isn't a reason to distort a statistic which should be a straight product of quantity and price. People are buying the coin. That means it has a value. It's not the job of the market cap statistic to "interpret" and censor that value. It's its job to report it and nothing more. Traders have a responsibility to furnish themselves with a range of statistics and background about a coin before making an investment. Market cap is just a tiny part of the data that make up that full picture.

If there's any reason that NxT shouldn't be on there it's that the coin is still in alpha development stage and not even properly launched yet. Apart from that it's just another coin with its associated advantages and pitfalls and should be listed correctly - free of colour coding or any other "censoring or spin"- along with all the others.

Nobody is 'manipulating' this statistic.

It's just that Coin marketcap is an inadequate statistic on its own to get a comprehensive picture of a coin relative to other coins.

Thats not a reason for distorting this statistic and giving it all sorts of "flavours". It's a reason for introducing other measures (such as say total traded volume since inception).

By definition, market cap is number of coins times price - so that means 'big' coins will have a higher market cap. It's correct that they should be high on the list. It doesn't mean they're better or more desireable, it just means they have a bigger market cap. Its like saying "the US has a bigger GDP than Iceland, so its a better country".

No. It's just got more people.

Likeways, its understandable that NxT has a bigger market cap than Primecoin - because it's simply issued more coins. It doesn't make it more investible - XPM might be a better investment. Market cap doesn't tell you anything about that.

People should stop moaning about 'manipulation' of market cap and just learn to read statistics. It's not a league table in a race, it's a table of statistics. Treat it as such.

Hopefully not before they dump your posts having become unprofitable to read.

Am getting sick of every single coin being labelled a "scam" just cos its fashionable to do so and no-one can be bothered to research it.

There's also a whole heap of hypocracy going on from people who scream "scam coin" at "instamines" while hoovering up 6 figures worth of every new alt they can scramble onto at ground level.

"Scam coin" syndrome is something that affects all cryptocurrencies full stop - every single one of them. They are all hoarded by early adopters and that's how the general public who have had nothing to do with cryptos until now will see it. If you think that some are "fairly distributed" and others are not then you're making up your own delusional crypto-ethics as you go along while being clueless as to the real statistics that are actually going to affect its future growth.

For example, there are many reasons why it's a good idea for some coins to have a very large monetary base early on - not least the fact that until recently there are only about 0.001 of any type of reasonable alt coin available for every person on the world.

Secondly, the fact that a coin is 100% POS and has built-in anti-hoarding properties, likeways affects its viability independently of whether its 'premined'.

Far from being a "Scam", the future for large base "instamine" coins is at worst unknown and at best prosperous. Nobody's going to lose bigtime on any of them unless they are idiotic enough to invest their entire BTC holdings in the wrong one at the wrong time. While at the same time, some of them introduce powerful and visionary new features which are actually likely to give them long term value independently of their speculative price.

It's not only that - its also a pretty amazing coin.

If you want to highlight "scam" coins for reasons of distribution, then start with Bitcoin.

No one can buy it - its too expensive
No one can mine it - its too expensive
It's poorly distributed and full of large initial holders waiting to "dump" on the market.

With NxT on the other hand, you can still pick up a fairly massive amount of coins for a tiny amount of Bitcoin. It has an upside just as big as Bitcoin and almost no downside at the current price.

If that's your idea of a "scam" coin then I'll have some more of them thanks.

Top comment !!!

I completely agree. Starting a sentence with "so" implies some continuity of a dialogue that the listener hasn't been aware of..kind of "ah, you haven't heard about this, I'll just bring you up to date". At best it's ridiculous grammar and at worst it's an attempt to dismiss the legitimacy of the questioner's challenge and is patronising as f*ck.

It annoys the f*ck out of me as well and the Winklevoss's are the worst culprits.

On a related note, listen to them try to explain Bitcoin - instead of just saying "its peer to peer money that doesn't need a bank as a counterparty", they go on about cryptology and C++ programming !?!

http://www.businessinsider.com/winklevoss-twins-explain-what-bitcoin-is-2013-11

If I was only generating 148 BTC in revenue per week and was doing the amount of damage to my customers goodwill that Cryptsy is, I'd sure shut down to limit the damage and give myself a chance to sort things out without a 4000 angry traders breathing down my neck.

I'd let people have access to their coins and remove them if they wanted, but I'd politely announce a temporary period of trading downtime due to the unforeseen tsunami of registrations.

That's what coinex seem to have done and I don't really see any alternative.

LoL. I'd like to hear you say that with 100 BTC sitting in limbo.

Negative balances are interesting - that's not something that will "work itself out". Neither is that fact that one side of a transaction can update a balance while the other side doesn't.

I don't want to be slamming them for this - I'm sure there is a lot of sweating and paddling underwater going on. I'm just saying that there are some fundamental logic flaws in the design of that trading engine and that's not something thats going to get fixed anytime soon.

One of the things I noticed last week that was a massive red flag to me was BigVern tweeting that they were "coding up" a fix for the deposits problem and it would be on in a "few hours".

They are firefighting.

Those are the worst possible circumstances to be writing code in because you cut corners all over the place and end up adding bugs into the mix (if that's whats happening).

For example, I don't remember this negative balances thing being an issue before - as far as I know that's a new thing. So I don't subscribe to the idea being promoted on this thread that "they'll get it fixed just be patient". That isn't how software development works, specially when revising highly critical systems dealing with money that can't even validate a positive account balance before executing a transaction.

I don't think it will get better - I think it'll get worse until they do something to buy the proper time needed to step back and calmly upgrade the engine, test it, and relaunch it.

I don't mean close the website for access or withdrawals, I meant close all *trading*. You cannot trade under those conditions, plus as I say, the trading engine is comprehensively broken.


Sure it takes time to fix the problems, but they're never going to fix them while the trading's actually active because they'll be overwhelmed with support work.

Regarding the "Audit accounts" button, it just adds fuel to the fire because I've seen it bring back one side of a transaction and not the other - for example, one of my last transactions was LTC for NET. No balances updated, then after clicking the audit button, the LTC went to minus and the NET stayed at zero. Half an hour later I clicked the "Audit" button again and then the NET came through. So now I have to get back in the market and reverse the earlier transaction I did cos I've overshot. This is madness - at least I've got some mental track of roughly where I am but some people must be going round the bend.

Since I made my last post an hour ago, I balanced out my account by buying back NET to resolve the negative balance.

Now I check it 20 minutes after than and I'm now 10 LTC in the RED !!

Since then the market's tanked on the NET side so I'm now having to get back in at a loss to cover the LTC overdraft - and even then I've no idea if I'm at the end of the backlog or not. I might get it settled and then another one comes flying in to blow me back into the red.

As a professional software contractor, my conclusion about the whole Cryptsi thing is - yes they can be forgiven for having growth problems. But they cannot be forgiven for keeping the site open when such widespread and critical faults are KNOWN to exist with the trading engine.

The issue isn't that the trading engine is slow, it's that it:

[1] - displays wildly incorrect balances over long periods of time.
[2] - reports user actions as having executed when they haven't
[3] - reports incorrect order book information to traders, causing them to mis-price their orders

They know this is going on and because of that site should be closed for trading immediately.

I just had an absolutely MAD trading session in the last few minutes.

I was trading LTC/NET. My orders weren't going through and so I cancelled and re-instated them at a new price. The trading engine acknowledged the cancellations with the "Your order #87687687 was cancelled" etc.

I left everything alone for a while and suddenly all my cancelled orders started COMING BACK FROM THE DEAD AND EXECUTED ALONG WITH THE NEW ORDERS !!!   They left my NET balance with a massive great negative and my LTC balance through the roof.

Now I'm trying to get back into the market just because I don't want to leave my account in debt.

This sh*t really is crazy. No self respecting professional would leave a business running that was so fundamentally faulty. They KNOW the site doesn't work - leaving it open for business for unsuspecting customers is bordering on criminal. I won't say it *is* criminal because that's a matter for lawyers, but I don't think it's professional. It needs to be closed down with immediate effect and the trading engine replaced wholesale.

There is fundamentally bad business logic going on with the code - for example, no backstop validations for overspending, reporting transactions complete to the user that aren't (e.g. "your order has been cancelled"), decrementing balances before the transaction has completed. This engine has been written in a hurry - or at least it feels like it - and now it's just going to kill the site.

Everybody watch this.

All is explained.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHUPPYzzZrI

Sorry porc, that's not the "real" endorsment that stands behind gold at all.

At any rate, it doesn't work in modern trading environments because it's a hunk of useless metal that can't travel through wires.

It looks to me like you're trying to convince yourself that BTC has no "value" and not doing a very good job of it. It constantly amazes me how people can keep banging their head off the ***it has no value, it's all an illusion*** wall while year after year markets continue to confound this appraisal.

Be advised that BTC is now trading for around $1000 PER Bitcoin. If you think that's "nothing", be my guest but the market is not conforming to the porc dictionary of value-based commodities. Maybe it'll drop to zero one day and then you'll be vindicated but don't hold your breath or you'll be doing a lot of typing on forums like this one.

Maybe "getting a life" might be a better option in the meantime.

The technology behind cryptocurrencies and it's value as a financial tool to society has nothing to do with politics, tulips, its market price or any other of these arbitrary and ill-defined criteria constantly being trawled up in these debates.

In particular the comparison with tulips and constant obsession with it's market price is a total distraction from the technical innovation which cryptocurrencies bring to modern finance which is clear and unambigious.

That is that they facilitate direct asset transfers between peers *without the need for a counterparty*.

The only "tool" that society has had up till now which can do this is Gold. It's not a question of value and whether or not Bitcoin / Gold etc have *value*. Its a question of *function*. Monetary function.

For example, I cannot just "email" you electronically  $1000. I need to go to a bank and ask them to do it. Even when the bank does it, they are not actually "transferring" anything of value - they are just changing a number in one account and incrementing it in another. The number that ends up in the receivers account only has "value" because of the counterparty endorsement it has. It has no intrinsic value of its own - if it was just a number I typed into a spreadsheet it would have no market value.

Gold on the other hand, has a market value whether it's sitting in a bank vault or buried in a mountain. It does not require counterparty endorsment - only market endorsement because it is a non-counterfeitible generic form of money.

Bitcoin is likeways independent of counterparty endorsement. I *can* email you (or transfer to your "wallet") $1000 in Bitcoin without requiring a counterparty. It therefore performs a monetary function - the same one that gold does - and that is why it has market value, the same as gold did. Porc's nonsense about shiny metals and attractiveness are not the reason Gold can function as a store of value. The reason for that is that is has the right properties that enable it to perform a certain required function in a non-barter economy.

An electronic trading platform on the scale of the internet has a need for a form of money that can perform the same function that gold did in the pre-electronic era. Public-Private key cryptology is the obvious basis for such a technology and hence cryptocurrencies were born.

Again, cryptocurrency's viability has nothing to do with their market "value" - it has to do with their technical function. Markets later decide what that function is worth to the economy. Please drop all this nonsense about price, tulips, crashes and shininess of metals - the macro economic impact of cryptocurrencies on the future of finance goes way beyond any of that and will likely be felt for centuries.

I can assure you, the clocks will not be turning back now that this stuff has been invented.

So you're saying that money derives its value from "aesthetics".  I don't think thats what they teach in business school.


Well that is kinda what people generally do with money. It's not any use for anything except....exchange ! (Or, as you put it "dumping it on the next guy").

http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/12/bitcoin-compared-to-3d-printing-by-hendry/


Are you my old teacher by any chance ? You sound familiar.

I think you mean it doesn't have value "for you".

That's not the same thing as it having not value "for markets"

You appear to have started this thread from a sense of frustrated cognitive dissonance - i.e. you can't understand why something that you personally can't see any value in can be traded for so much money. Although your sense of confusion has been amply induldged on here, it isn't really our problem.

I suggest you buy at least 1 bitcoin right now as insurance. That way you won't have to be standing with your pants around your ankles in 12 months time when the price is at $10,000 ranting about why it has "no value"

You're talking about "currency" here, which can be a very distinct definition from "money". Bitcoin is money - unlevered "base" money in the sense that it isn't backed by anything (which is what gives it it's value, same as gold). Currency is something which proxies for money and is traded on a day to day basis for goods and services.

That fact tends to put some people in a state of cognitive dissonance which is why they start threads like this on discussion forums. (The words "horse" and "stable door" spring to mind).

Bitcoin's future does not revolve around being accepted at retail outlets any more than Gold's does.

Maybe you should go and trade some Bitcoin on the open exchange markets for a while - you'll soon find out it has value !

porc -

Your appraisal of Bitcoin from the outset is flawed.

You've based your conclusions on the wrong observations - observations which are incidental to the fundamental nature of "money" and not central to it.

Cryptocurrencies are a *token*. A token of value. Their utility value to the economy is in functioning as a form of money. They have no other utility value. Conversely, there is no other technology available to man which can fulfil this function in an electronic trading environment. For this reason alone they have value.

The fact that they are not spendable in Tescos or Wallmart is incidental to this. I can't spend a lump of Gold either.

Lets now look at the non-electronic environment and see how it compares.

In the "physical" world, Gold is basically a physical Bitcoin. Its primary use is a "token" or "placeholder" for value. It has very little utility value other than this function - to operate as a peer to peer form of money that does not require a counterparty - i.e. the physical equivalent of a "Bitcoin". It is not backed by anything, has few industrial uses to speak of, but has certain properties (basically scarecity and resistence to counterfeiting) which allow it to function as money.

Since it is not backed by anything, we say it has "intrinsic value" - or put another way, it represents the last element in a call chain of trust.

In an electronic trading environment such as the internet, there is a need for a transmittable entity which can perform the function of money that gold did in the physical. Banks do not actually transmit "money" - they just increase a number in one account and decrease it in another. There's no sense in which anything is actually "transmitted" in this process and since the whole operation is so arbitrary it requires a huge amount of counterparty involvement to give "value" to those arbitrary numbers.

Bitcoin on the other hand is the genuine article - it is a uniquely identifiable electronic entity which is transmittable through the public network without the need for a counterparty.

If you don't appreciate the collosal implications of this for money, the banking system and the economy in general, then fair enough. Nobody realised that travel agents were dead in the water the day the World Wide Web was invented either. But those implications are academic - not a question of subjective value, market value, popularity or whether you can "spend" them or not.

The most succinct explanation that distinguishes cryptocurrencies I've seen:

*********** they are the ONLY peer to peer system of electronic money that exists which does not require a counterparty ***********

(A counterparty is a "man in the middle").

What banks send to each other is not money - it's just numbers in an account. You're not actually sending anything, just reducing a balance at one end and increasing it at the other. So they are like a cryptocurrency exchange where you can never take your funds "off the exchange" at the end of the day.

Because banking is such an arbitrary operation (just changing a number in an account) it requires a huge counterparty infrastructure to give that number any value.

That counterparty infrastructure is toast now that cryptocurrencies have been invented.

Thanks - I was wondering about that as well. I noticed the Litecoin hardware specs are in KHz, so that explains why.

I'm not really interested in mining Bitcoin - that looks like being for pros only.

Thanks for the help !