I think it's important to understand what is going on. This is only my opinion, but feel free to correct or add anything.

IMO altcoins got popular for these reasons:

• lots of newbies with regret and (incorrect) thinking in style "I missed the boat with bitcoin, what is the next big thing"
• pumps & dumps are much easier done with altcoins and on newbies
• GPU miners lost their profits when FPGAs and ASICs arrived and had to switch to something else. They suddenly became incentivized to promote altcoins
• all cryptocurrencies are currently more than 90% speculation. The network effect, that Erik Voorhees is talking about, is only semi-valid at the moment. When Bitcoin price will reach its full potential and the system becomes more like a transactional currency, network effect will cause the value to (finally) concentrate in one currency
• hype-price feedback

I see these reasons as the "perfect storm", the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But it is also not sustainable. Newbies will learn the fundamentals, suckers from pumps & dumps will learn from their mistakes, the mining aspect will lose power (professionalization), built infrastructure will make Bitcoin more usable for day-to-day transactions.

TL;DR: don't fall for altcoins, unless you really understand the reasons for owning them

I have an idea! If anybody has an hour or two to spare, he can create:
- I0coin (= Ixcoin with 0 pregenerated blocks)
- IBcoin (= Ixcoin with all pregenerated coins intended for bounties). Bounty block would be the first one, it would generate 200k coins or whatever Ixcoin is offering (with all bounty coins public), after that generation would mimic Ixcoin.

Either way, I think people would jump from Ixcoin in notime (or realize the absurd idea of Ixcoin)

Profile of new members has changed. For the last two days nobody mentions mining anymore (at "Introduce yourself"), except one 2 month lurker. We may not get as many new members as in June, but source of interest in Bitcoin has changed. Now they talk about "money systems", economics etc., which might be a good thing I believe.

[Bitcoin mining]

The investment bank worked with HPC solutions provider Maxeler Technologies to develop an application-led, HPC system based on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology that would allow it to run complex banking Bitcoin mining algorithms on its credit book faster. 

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3290494/jp-morgan-supercomputer-offers-risk-analysis-in-near-real-time/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22426.0

Hi there!

I've read as much as I could for the last day or two, but one question is still bugging me and I would like to get it answered before I invest money into this. And the question is:

how is bitcoin protected against transaction flood by anyone not liking the whole bitcoin philosophy, e.g. governments around the world, unable to collect taxes from it. As far as I know, most bitcoin clients have the whole transaction database loaded, which is currently about 700MB on my computer. This is a lot for an early phase project. Wide adoption could quickly generate gigabytes of transactions a year and malicious distributed attack could probably do it even faster. Since every client is meant (is it?) to have all transaction history it would soon become a resource hog and impractical for most desktop computers.

Thanks!