That's what I was thinking, but I didn't want to sound too presumptuous...

The public ledger is a system that allows PUBLIC to agree on a single database.
The cryptography added to it allows to preserve anonymity.

But, as you wrote, banks don't really need the blockchain: they have their databases systems already, their protection against hackers, etc.
Even though I think the distributed database with thousands of signatures is probably much more resilient to hacking than a centralized system.

But, yes, I think exactly the same: banks don't need the blockchain and the more I think about it, the less I can find something useful for them to come up with.
But seeing that many bankers and economists took 3/5 years to simply understand HOW bitcoin works, it's very much possible they are so stupid that they will try to come up with their own ShitCoin altogether...

Thank you for your time, dude.
Your reasoning makes sense.
Only, I think it would be ok for companies to keep a pc going 24/7, but I, as a private, would never do that.

But why would they want to have transparent ledger?
People go to bank for privacy also.

I'm considering to buy some DogeCoin and a couple other altcoins, in small number.
They could be a good investment, you never know.
But I won't be putting on them more than 50$.
I don't care about 50$ gone, we waste so much money in useless craps already... but I want to warn those that put thousands of dollars into altcoins: read my post carefully and if you don't find a logic fallacy... save your money! Because when Bitcoin will begin to enter mainstream, and altcoins will remain at the bar... they will crumble down to zero in DAYS.

I am interested in the discussion, that's why I'm posting here.
And my opinion is that altcoins are, AT THE MOMENT, worthless crap.
I also explained WHY I think so, and there's quite some logic behind it.
Please let apart Hitler, nothing to do with LOGIC ARGUMENT.

And these are your "arguments":


Promising altcoins.
You understand?
There's no promising altcoins, because the biggest problem with cryptocurrencies AT THE MOMENT is to blow them into mainstream, and the best way to do it is to make ONE of them so well reputed that people will ADOPT it.
That is Bitcoin.
When this will happen, MAYBE some altcoins will take off as well.
MAYBE!
Because once Bitcoin will be usable everywhere, why in hell should anybody implement other cryptocurrencies into their shops???

Not because I LOOOOOVEEEEE Bitcoin or because people are stupid or because Bitcoin is technologically the best.
It's just because the world moved that way, and now Bitcoin is implemented on a certain number of shops and services, while altcoins are NOT.
If you still think altcoins are promising, while you can't spend any of them anywhere, and there IS one cryptocurrency that CAN be spent to buy goods already, and thus is getting consistent reputation, you are only victim of COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.
You refuse the reality that ONE cryptocurrency is working, while the others are redundant (at the moment).




Can you see WHO loves something?
It's you, not me.
You talk about "crypto fans" that prefer altcoins.
I don't "love" Bitcoin because it's better than the other cryptocurrencies, I love it because it's THERE and it's the best chance to FUCK BANKS that we have at hand.
AND, its position in the market is better, AND its diffusion is better, AND its reputation is better. BY FAAAAAAARR!
So I'm not going to WASTE money on something I don't think will have a future.
That's all.




Shit argument?
When all your precioussssss altcoins will value 0.0000000000000000000000000003 $ you will remember the smell of my arguments.




If tomorrow Dogecoin gets larger than Bitcoin, I'll move onto Dogecoin.
This for the simple reason that, again, if more shops will implement Dogecoin as a crypto to buy stuff, that is the best reputation a currency can have.
People that ACCEPT that currency, make reputation for that currency.
All the rest is valueless.

You can design the best currency in the world, but if people won't start to use it because they can't UNDERSTAND it, then that currency will be worthless.
And, oh, looks like I am talking about... CRYPTOCURRENCIES, BITCOIN INCLUDED!
But at least Bitcoin is pushing through!

And you don't create reputation from thin air. Bitcoin took YEARS to come where it is now. So don't expect that a coin made by a bank will boost somewhere, for several reasons. First of all because it's of a fucking bank. Second, because EVEN IF a bank would be so good at promoting their coins, there wouldn't pass much time before people would know about Bitcoin and just right move onto that, dumping the bank's coin.
See, you are just dreaming.
More innovative. More this. More that. AND with larger userbase. LOL.

From here, I hope you can understand that my ONLY point here is RATIONALITY.
I don't refuse that Bitcoin is 99% more reputable than all the other currencies put together.
I don't refuse that Bitcoin is ALREADY usable to buy stuff.
I don't refuse that Bitcoin has the largest userbase.
I don't refuse that Bitcoin is the train on which 99% of people are jumping in and WILL probably jump in in the future.
I'm just being REALISTIC, thus, RATIONAL.




Wrong again, dude.
I AM about the idea... BLOCKCHAIN IS THE IDEA!
And it's already there, working, implemented... SPREADING! In Bitcoin.

All you want to do is keeping dreaming.
You LIKE, or LOVE, more some altcoins, so you keep dreaming that one day, for some unknown reason, some of them will skyrocket to the moon.
I wish you so, but I don't TRUST it.




I only have ONE Bitcoin. Unluckily I don't have more money to invest now, but I'd surely do if I could.
And if I want to INVEST, I invest into something I think will get more value.
Not into something I WISH will get more value... even though, in this case, I also WISH Bitcoin will get more value, because I WISH banks get fucked up.

Really, dude, if you like to PLAY with altcoins, that's good, you have your fun, but if you want to INVEST money in them, in the hope they will return you something, try to be more rational.
Go read about COGNITIVE DISSONANCE and stop dreaming about your wishes.

It may be due to my limited understanding of english, but I can't get what you wrote.
If tomorrow KICKSTARTER would add Bitcoin option, what would be wrong about that?
Why should they add StartCoin instead?

Nobody has any idea???

This is something I find bad as well. You can recover much more easily your bank account access, this is sure.
But as you wrote, this is not a real problem: people will just have to learn to backup their stuff.
I think this will be more and more automatic in the future.




Also this is true. But it's not a downside of Bitcoin itself, it's a downside of public reception.
Bitcoin adoption is growing. Slowly but steadily.
And we can bet in some good bumps in the future, when Banks will acknowledge that Bitcoin is not a scam or a ponzi (I still see some people comparing Bitcoin to a Ponzi).
Reputation is everything for Bitcoin. One adoption will get mainstream, this "problem" will be gone.




Malware can steal your bank account credentials.
You can be robbed of fiat currency at gunpoint.
Bitcoin is no different in this from other money at all.




It's true that you need to know how to use computers to be completely at ease in using Bitcoin.
That will probably come with next generations.
People that are today past 50 years old are mostly cut out of the thing, they have to put quite some effort in understanding this stuff, unless they are IT specialists or using PCs since they born.




You can, in some countries.
That goes with the shops anyway: the more Bitcoin will spread and get better reputation, the more countries will HAVE TO implement it as a media to pay taxes.






My points about downsides of Bitcoin:

1) lost bitcoins will not be recovered... EVER. You lose your keys, they're gone. This will, in the long range, bring to a scarcity.
Even worse: if governments ban Bitcoin, they can decide that any of these that will be recovered will be transferred on accounts of which keys will be thrown away.
That would be a quick way to destroy Bitcoin in its essence.

2) Bitcoin is NOT ENOUGH to cover the whole Earth wealth. Once you divide it by 21 million, there's not enough granularity to use it for everyday transactions.
Total Earth Wealth / all satoshi: $4'500'000'000'000'000 / 2'100'000'000'000'000 (21'000'000.00000000) = 2.14$
If the whole Earth would adopt Bitcoin, there won't be enough to go below 2$ value.

3) looks to me that transaction times are too long for everyday shopping. 1 or 2 confirmations should happen in less than 1 minute imho. Hope this gets better when more nodes will be added to the net.

I refer to this news just as an example:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/114954/bnp-paribas-to-add-bitcoin-to-currency-fund-within-weeks

I would like to know how exactly a bank can take advantage in a distributed ledger based on the blockchain.

Let's hypothesize that a bank makes its own blockchain.
The bank itself will have to set up nodes for its blockchain?
Because why I, a private citizen, would want to set up a node for the bank?
For money? But if I work for the bank, I can tamper the ledger at their command, or let somebody do it.
So it's legitimate to think that their ledger will be private: only bank computers will be able to access it.
But for what?
I can't understand this.
Banks ALREADY have their infrastructure to transmit money.
They ALREADY have their IT infrastructure to keep track of how much money a person/company holds by them.
If they build a blockchain, this doesn't mean anybody will value their "coin" in any way.
They will still have to change the currency from country to country.
They will still charge the user for operations (they want to earn money), which is more expensive than Bitcoin, that charges nearly nothing.

The only thing they will have will be a PRIVATE registry, and because it's private, they could change it any time they want, so it won't have any OFFICIAL value at all.
I won't trust that ledger, because it can be reversed and tampered because the bank owns ALL the nodes.

Even when there would be some volunteers to hold a node for bank XXX, they would be suspect.
They could be corruptible, they could take money to tamper the ledger.
It's the fact itself that private banks want to make private ledgers that makes no sense to me.

And as for PUBLIC LEDGERS... we don't need a bank to do that for us: if a thing is useful, people will hold up nodes for it.

So, please, somebody tell me a GOOD SERVICE that a bank can have from a blockchain that will not be supported by the public at all, because I can't find anything of use for them.

Bitcoin is boring?
OK dude, I stop reading here, enough nonsense.
Hold on your altcoins and enjoy

And actually you can ONLY use Bitcoin to buy stuff (I may have problems with english grammar, but the sense of the sentence can be caught easily), you can only save your altcoins in wallets in hope that somebody later will implement payment with them.
Good luck with that.

Agree. Scams work because there are people that fall for them.
But situation will get better with time.
Bitcoin will become more adopted, everybody will know it, while altcoins will become just "stuff out there" and only very few people will fall in them.
The situation at the moment is many people think "Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, altcoins are as well, so they COULD have some value".
This is not COMPLETELY wrong, but it's LARGELY wrong.
Only very few altcoins will have a future. My options are on LITECOIN, ETHEREUM, DOGE, RIPPLE system, but all the rest will burn in the next 5 years.

The more Bitcoin will become solid, the more altcoins will lose reputation.
Maybe not now, not this year, but the next year, when STILL only Bitcoin will be really useable, when you will be able to BUY STUFF only with Bitcoin, altcoins will begin to disappear, probably with a big boom altogether in a couple of weeks.

It's interesting... having the chance to add granularity by one zero or two will surely come in handy in the future.

I don't think so, and that's exactly why I opened the thread.
If the whole world will ideally begin to use Bitcoins, there won't be enough for everyday use.
1 satoshi will end up worth 100$ or so, and you can't really go shopping with that smallest coin.
I repeat: it's NOT an actual problem, but it MAY become in the future, even more when we consider that with time, Bitcoins are lost inevitably in different ways.
So the count is not even on 21 millions, but less.

What about if in the future somebody will make a service that will couple up a ledger with the Bitcoin ledger, and in the first ledger an IDENTITY is stored: name, sirname, born date, etc, and ONE Bitcoin address, that certifies that THAT PERSON is owner of THAT BITCOIN ADDRESS?
This WILL probably built up on the infrastructure by somebody, I am sure

Just leave altcoins alone... the only thing that will be working in first instance is Bitcoin.
This, for the simple reason that you can ACTUALLY BUY GOODS WITH BITCOINS.
It's the most advertised and spread cryptocurrency and will probably stay like that for 5 years, maybe 10.
999 altcoins on 1000 are useless crap, you can't buy anything with them, no matter how better they are technically: if there's no adoption, it's just an experiment.
And the main hurdle for cryptocurrencies at the moment is having them adopted, and the focus is of course on Bitcoin.
Just keep your money or buy Bitcoins.

And that's why I think that altcoins are worthless at the moment.
You want to pay with a cryptocurrency?
Bitcoin is implemented, altcoins are not.
Very easy.

Not everybody is a technician, programmer or so much enthusiast.
I am not a programmer, though I know quite a lot on the matter, I am not an economist, and I have many other hobbies to waste my time onto
So I only watch cryptocurrencies as an investment, and so my other hobby is try to predict their behaviour.
So, I can add all your enthusiasm and other enthusiasm of ther hundreds or thousands of boys around the planet about cryptocurrencies, and working on more altcoins, still I don't think they will make such a difference.
They would kick ass much better if they would try to promote Bitcoin... it would be SO NICE to see shop after shop after shop exposing a label BITCOIN ACCEPTED... I would so much love it.
But really, if you LIKE to be INVOLVED in the development, just do it: the only thing that matter in life is have PLEASURE out of it.

And while thinking to this, I may have come up with a method to help Bitcoin adoption, I'll keep the test up in the following month and see how it goes.
If it works, I'll post a topic here on the forum... this COULD become a BOMB to help Bitcoin adoption around the world.

Ye well if you use them and you "feel good" by having billions of coins, good for you

My discussion was in case of investment: you don't want to put 10000$ into altcoinX just to have billions of them, and find one day that Bitcoin skyrocketed and your altcoinX value is now 0.000000000004 BTC each.

But yes, I may be completely wrong in my prediction... still, if you can't find any logic fallacy, that's the best there's around at the moment, and if you can find more variables to add to the equation, I'll be glad to implement them

Just my opinion, dude.
But why would I use Mooncoins when I have to make this machinery around to spend them, when I can use Bitcoins straight into the Amazon website?

Btw, future IS predictable. Only, far future is not. But you predict future with each your move.
Based on the variables I know now, that's my opinion

Hold your Mooncoins, maybe they will explode in the future... or maybe they will crumble to zero... who knows. Don't follow my reasoning: I am nobody.

Why would one use StartCoin instead than Bitcoin for crowdfunding?
Like with anything else: why one would use any altcoin instead than Bitcoins?
Money is a SYMBOL. If we all agree to use this symbol (Bitcoin) then that's everything we need.
All other symbols are just redundancy if they don't offer anything technologically different... and even then, if nobody implement other altcoins to be accepted by the shops, those altcoins value is... nothing.