Right now any cryptocurrency can be attacked by a rich entity. There is no way to prevent this except to hope the network hash rate on the honest network side can remain superior by it becoming increasing cost prohibitive to challenge it.

So why is it perceived that something like Bitcoin can achieve network supremacy? Ponder that answer, seriously. Consider also how people are reacting to ASICS. My own belief is that as Bitcoin adoption grows so too will the resources available to defend it, not just by incidental market mining, but strategically coordinated network defenders. Governments are powerful entities with lots of money, resources, and state of the art technology.

Any specialized/custom hardware produced to target bitcoin OR litecoin would also be available to the honest network. As far as merged mining that is not a problem if both currencies gain mainstream adoption, for example. Just think about the math for a minute. World government regimes number in the hundreds, but regular people number in the billions. It wouldn't take long for any cryptocurrency to have seriously cost prohibitive attack hashing rates once usage numbered in just the tens or hundreds of millions. It doesn't take the hash rate of the entire world to be cost prohibitive to attacks.

I've also explained in that post how a new model of currency usage (storing limited wealth in cryptocurrencies) reduces or eliminates the effectiveness of any 51% attack.

There is clearly significant concern about TBF. I'm surprised I haven't gotten more positive feedback on my counter defense to Bitcoin Foundation power, by using litecoins in the marketplace as well explained here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=115303.0

I think people just don't understand what I'm proposing.

Geez, I've got a lot of work to do.

DeathAndTaxes, I consider you one of the smartest people on this forum (and that's saying something) yet you completely miss the point. Let me try to explain.


I know exactly why metals evolved as currency. (And note some are quite valuable, like platinum, but not used as currency) The comparison of litecoins to bitcoins has nothing to do with the comparison of gold to silver except that a person would expect these cryptocurrencies to be "joined at the hip" price wise where one always leads the way, just as happens with gold and silver.

General consensus is gold rates higher than silver for aesthetics, while both are used for jewelry and similar application. There is also about 10 times as much silver mined annually as gold. These factors, among others, result in gold maintaining a significant price lead over silver. Central banks hold gold as a reserve, because people have valued it as money for thousands of years. For this reason it's often helpful to compare the value of a thing, anything, to gold to determine its true value. Silver exchange rates rise and fall in relative lockstep with gold with little variance.

So how does this relate to Litcoin/Bitecoin? Simple, the comparison is both cryptocurrencies are essentially the same thing with slight differences. Litecoin is comparable to Bitcoin in every way in terms of usage, but there will be about 4 times as many of them total. That means whatever price the market assigns to bitcoins could also be assigned to litecoin, but divided by 4.


Wrong, sorry. It's not hypothetical; it has already happened, many times in fact. Alt-coins have already developed and it's arguable that any of them solve a deficiency in Bitcoin.

What I believe you meant to express is that alt-coins in the future might launch and garner real market value. However, this is also off the mark. Alt-coins exist right now with real market value. It's measured in the low cent range, but it's value nonetheless. (remember early Bitcoin)



True.


I didn't suggest that it would, and it doesn't have to. I guess I haven't considered that most people are only familiar with one currency dominating a market since this is what most of the world is familiar with.

However, a better market actually involves one with competing currencies where market participants can hold one or more and use one(s) that suit them best in ways that suit them best, whether as a store of value, for transactions, special use cases, or even political reasons (what I suggest for litecoin, and how some view gold vs fiat). This doesn't mean any currency must uproot any other, but rather that they exist simultaneously and have fluctuating values relative to one another.


Real utility does equal value, but what you fail to consider is there are various forms of utility, not all of which are technical. Value can come about various ways. The value I suggest Litecoin could have has nothing to do with technical superiority to Bitcoin. In fact, it would serve the purpose I suggest if it was identical in every way to Bitcoin except its name and the fact that it's a different coin/network.

Interestingly enough I hadn't given alt-coins to Bitcoin much thought before now. I had a neutral to slightly unfavorable view of alt-coins which I described in an eBook I wrote called How to Grow Bitcoin. I said such spinoffs were inevitable and okay, but warned against anyone duping non-technical users into thinking a valueless spinoff was a coin with value, like Bitcoin.

When IOCoin launched, which I think was the first one, I barely read the forum post. I knew no alt-coin would really go anywhere because it would have to pull users/resources from Bitcoin, which being first to market had natural momentum.

Other alt-coins launched and I gave them the same disregard. I think that was true of most of the community, as evidenced by the near zero exchange rates.

What I hadn't really paid attention to was that later alt-coins actually tried to improve upon Bitcoin in some way. I knew there were differences, but in my opinion the properties Bitcoin already has are good enough to gain widespread mainstream adoption. For something to pose a serious challenge it would have to have a significant improvement over Bitcoin, something Bitcoin didn't or couldn't offer. Surely something with that kind of technology, I thought, wouldn't come for a long time.

I heard about the launch of SolidCoin, but didn't bother to look into them. As I understand them now they attempt to obtain value based on power consumption without a hard limit on total coins. I don't see how that would be a significant advantage.

Litecoins, however, seem to be more interesting. Litecoins do everything the same as Bitcoin with a few changes.  First, they are optimized for CPU mining, meaning more people might participate since everyone has a CPU but not everyone has or will invest in GPUs. Next, the blocks are mined faster resulting in faster confirmation times than Bitcoin. Last, there are about 4 times as many coins in total than Bitcoin, probably meaning better overall distribution.

There are already about as many Litecoins as Bitcoins due to their faster block creation rate. Their exchange rate from my understanding was in the $.03 range, more recently in the $.04-.05 range, and within the last couple days in the $.05-.06 range, leading to talk of bubbles on btc-e.com chat.

I think the market was already giving some traction to Litecoin as it attempted to fulfill its stated mission to become the silver to Bitcoin's gold. However, I think such progression was going to be slow, because there still wasn't a good enough reason for mainstream Bitcoin users to adopt litecoins over bitcoins. And obviously nobody else in the world knows of any of these cryptocurrencies.

But I think this "Bitcoin Foundation" event can be a catalyst for litecoin adoption. Litecoins can now offer a clear and significant reason for mainstream Bitcoin users to adopt it which Bitcoin can't offer, which is the ability to diminish market power overall of a power-consolidating Bitcoin foundation. It offers a choice. It's an entirely different system incompatible with Bitcoins, but with all the same desirable properties. There is no reason LTC couldn't be used everywhere BTC could. There is no disadvantage to using them, yet they offer tremendous wealth opportunity - as Bitcoin does - due to the fact most of the market that would eventually adopt them hasn't yet.

What if the changes are not to the protocol?

Let me give what I think may be a good example. We're talking literally about money are we not? How many people on earth use money? Almost all of them. That's near 7 billion people.

Now, say TBF becomes powerful, widely popular, and corrupted. Millions, even billions of people download the software client from TBF because that's what's popular (see Windows). What if the Bitcoin client followed the protocol with no changes, but also gave a convenient screen listing businesses that accepted the currency... You click 'restaurants' and a list appears, 'dentists', a list appears, 'wedding photographers', anything, but what order is the list in? And how are listings shown? This is just a separate tab on the client so it has nothing to do with BTC operation, but it does have to do with power/influence over what million or billions of people think are the recommended businesses to go to all around the world. You don't think that's too much power for one organization to have?

Well, I wouldn't say fundamentally flawed, but the purest free market without regulation would be uneven at times in places.

Not that I disagree, but also note competing against a popular branch is an uphill, likely losing battle because of resources dedicated to it. That's largely the fear against power consolidation with a Bitcoin Foundation. Often it's more effective to fight for changes than go off alone.

Well, no cryptocurrency really dies as long as at least two or more people use it. What can happen is it can become less likely people ever adopt it, though. For example, if a cryptocurrency had only 2 people with 70% of the coins it would be unlikely anyone else would adopt it.

I only recently looked into Litecoin, but quickly realized it had the most traction of all the other alt-coins presently. It has the highest market exchange rate after Bitcoin. It was in the $.04-.05 range when I looked into it 2 days ago, but it's now in the $.05-.06 range, about a 20% increase. Apparently it was once $.03. The alt-coin section of this forum is dominated mostly by Litecoin discussion/projects, as is the trading chat on btc-e.com. So I would say no it's not dying, but growing and of course that can speed up or even explode anytime.

Regarding a LTC foundation how DARE you even suggest it  

J/K   Of course that thought had crossed my mind. Yes, any alt-coin might gain a foundation just as Bitcoin has, but it wouldn't matter because concentration of power would be divided; and the more alt-coins with market prominence the more chance to escape from and/or divide centralized power.

First point: regarding Atlas posts and associated content, whether you agree or disagree and regardless of his style I think you have to respect his or anybody's concern for Bitcoin. Where would Bitcoin be if people didn't care about it? Nowhere. And everybody is capable of contributing something - it's not all programming. People are different. Not everybody contributes/behaves the same way, and that's actually a strength.

That said, I have to agree with the devs course on this. Bitcoin has to be functional first and foremost or nothing else matters. It's not that the devs don't want the best possible user experience, it's that they have to address technical challenges by priority to keep things working. As experts on doing just that it's hard to challenge any dev decision without offering a specific viable alternative.

I do like getting such concerns out for discussion, though. That's healthy, because that's sometimes how inventive solutions can be found.



I love seeing valuable comments like this from users with low post counts. It means things are growing, including human resources available to Bitcoin. I think you're right about backing off the full client as user adoption grows. Really, with Bitcoin everything gets easier once tons of people use it, because more resources of all forms are available to contribute to its success.

Well obviously I can't keep posting if people stop replying...

Have you not been paying attention? This is a discussion about Bitcoin, actually the concept of cryptocurrencies itself, and its ramifications and possible course as determined by the free market.

What's the matter, afraid of a little competition for Bitcoin? If people have no interest in the thread it will die away.

Thanks for the recognition, Charlie

Actually I don't see what I'm doing as being of my own creation. I think it's a natural progression of the market, and I'm simply fulfilling a role.

I actually think Bitcoin value would explode either way eventually but TBF could accelerate it.

Now here you touch on a very important point, which I discussed in the OP.

It's the basis for the thread, in fact.

Up to this point most of the community imagined Bitcoin would slowly gain acceptance creeping into the mainstream, at which point its value would explode. What's interesting is nothing like Bitcoin has ever existed in the history of the world, so nobody knows exactly how things will play out.

As people learned more about how Bitcoin worked the topic of other versions of coins starting came up. Since the code is all open source and nobody controls anything, then why couldn't other coins start up trying to win support and enriching early adopters?

It wasn't long before such alt-coins did begin. The first was actually Namecoin if I remember correctly, and its purpose was not wealth creation or storage, but rather decentralizing distribution of naming rights to address government control/censorship of Internet TLDs.

Many people asked your exact question. What would prevent people jumping to other coin versions? The answer is nothing, really, except alternates would have to win support against coins having the advantage of already being established. And since there is no limit to the number of alternates that could be created they would all challenge each other as well. The result would be that adoption of any new coin wouldn't happen simply because it was new and offered the chance at early adoption. A coin would only gain favor for some specific reason, something existing which established coins didn't offer.

Soon other wealth purposed coins did pop up, like IOCoin and IXCoin, but these offered no real reason for adoption other than the early adopter play, which as explained isn't enough. So such versions went nowhere. But then other coins started that actually did seek to offer some specific benefit of use besides early adoption. Of these Litecoin has gained the most traction, as it has some neat aspects like CPU focused mining, and faster confirmation times. It was designed to be the silver to Bitcoin's gold. Vircurex.com I think gives good indication of coin traction because you can compare exchange and hash rates to see market preference.

But none of the "specialized" coins has really done much to date either. The community has only had eyes for Bitcoin. In fact, I myself only looked into what Litecoin actually did a couple days ago when I made the connection for usage as regards TBF. Any coin needs a catalyst for adoption, and I think this is it for Litecoin. Now there is a compelling reason for Bitcoin community members to adopt it: it can check the power any Bitcoin Foundation might garner over Bitcoin.

Most people probably assumed alt-coins would enter the market a some time far into the future, once Bitcoin was established and more thought went into specialized coins. So nobody paid much attention to them. However, I think the time is now for at least one of them - Litecoin.

As for the dangers of people switching from coin to coin you mention, that's what I address in my OP in the "An Unexpected Development" section. Please re-read that to understand what I mean

I plan to soon offer a Cryptocurrency Index with live exchange rates, a first step which should help the community understand what I envision.

You know what the fail and lame comments remind me of? The typical reaction to people first hearing about "Bitcoin". We're seeing how that's turning out.

The exact same paranoia was posted in 50 plus pages? I think many distinct points were made actually. And besides, we're talking about future events. Who can exactly predict and articulate the future?

What could opponents to the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 have said at that time? Could not all of their objections been hand waved away as "paranoia"?



Of course early pages would be expected to start off positive. It was meant to be a positive announcement was it not? Heck even I can see the advantages of having such an organization. I've never disputed that. But as dialogue continued and objections were raised opinions could have shifted. This reminds me of the forum poll on the topic. That poll started fairly early in the debate. To my knowledge you can't go back and change answers, yet that poll still shows clear reservation to TBF was held.


Yes, I agree exactly with your last sentence. It's the "along with" other factors that raises concern.

I don't think you have an accurate view of likely outcome...

What you have to realize is things change. In the future Bitcoin may be far more widely adopted than now. There may be no bitcointalk.org and cozy little community which is all we've ever known at this stage in Bitcoin's progress. This may be a future where TBF is a large and powerful global corporation and with recognized brand name and many legions of followers. Now supposing the "something bad" starts to happen. Your answer is, no problem hard fork, right?

Okay, how do you go about that? Are you going to do it? Alone? Is someone else going to do it? Are multiple people going to do it, at different times? And if any one of these happen how will others know about it? Say there are 14 different hard forks. How is anyone going to know which one to follow?

The minute you jump on one of the Bitcoin 2 forks your coins have zero value, because they are not accepted anywhere.

What gives money value is that it is widely accepted. Once something you have to trade as money is not accepted, it ceases to have any value (if it ever had any).

A Bitcoin 2 would not magically materialize, uncoordinated, and have people miraculously know to follow that particular fork. That's why waiting for forks after something bad happened wouldn't work.

On the other hand by supporting a different Bitcoin version now at this stage, when the original Bitcoin is not widely accepted, the second version can grow along with the original one grows. Make sense?

Sorry for the delay in response. Was watching the presidential "debate". It's like watching a slow motion train wreck; you just can't look away. Typing replies now.

Well, you're essentially saying the same thing I am. the only difference is your fork happens after something bad happens, but my version happens before.

That's fine. You're part of the market, and free to have an opinion. But the market is larger than you (and me), and if it thinks I'm right then that's how things will play out.