I am an IT guy, I can figure out what things can be done and I am aware of some of them, but I cannot figure out who will want to do them, when you can work for companies that never get bankrupted and be paid in a gold backed currency. No entrepreneur can compete with these companies, close to governments, whom own the resources, never get bankrupted and trade internationally. So cryptos will be for the excluded ones.

That said, I will browse your links. Thanks for them.

Thanks for your comments. I am afraid of seeing one thing as current society evolves. I am afraid of seeing a new world reserve currency raising anytime soon, maybe backed in gold. I see governments separating people's currencies from government's currency, and cryptocurrencies being the resource of the poor people, those that did not get a chance for a government paid job. So, to properly understand where cryptoworld fits, it is required to understand where the rest is moving to.

For example, are you aware that there are political initiatives which will allow big companies no getting bankrupted anymore? This will be presented in Brisbane in 2 weeks by G-20.....Where does cryptoworld fit here?

It appears all you know about Bitcoin is from staying in the altcoin section too long. You definitely do not know the economics, finance, legal issues and mining facts involved with Bitcoin. Posts like yours reminds us all how far we have made it in this Revolution. You should really learn some basic facts about what's really going on here and you may finally get it.

Here's the speech:(3rd times a charm)

Bitcoin itself had in the past been vulnerable to very similar things that you said happened and now see happen with altcoins these days, but fortunately THAT WINDOW IS NOW CLOSED.

Part of the definition of the bitcoin protocol includes the checking of the proof of work put into various block chains, and then choosing the one with the most work. Bitcoin has more proof-of-work in its blockchain than any other competing cryptocurrency, and so by definition it must be the one chosen, and all others ignored.

Altcoins are all very similar to Bitcoin: there is a block chain to store transactions, a consensus mechanism to build the block chain, and a cryptographic protocol to register transactions. Some prominent examples are PPCoin, Primecoin, Litecoin, and Freicoin.

Some altcoins incorporate interesting new ideas, but there is an essential feature of Bitcoin which they all lack. It is not a matter of its technology, but rather of history and community. Quite simply, a medium of exchange that is more widely accepted on the market is more useful than one which is not. This is known as the network effect. An initial imbalance between two nearly equal media of exchange will benefit whichever is more widely accepted until a single one overwhelms the rest. There is no limit to this effect: ultimately one would always expect a single currency to overcome all its competitors.

Because it was started earlier and has had a greater opportunity to grow and attract users, Bitcoin has a market larger by a wide margin than all the markets of all the altcoins put together, and this makes it vastly more useful as a currency. To defeat Bitcoin, an altcoin would require not just superior technology, but such vastly superior technology as to be an advance over Bitcoin comparable to the advance Bitcoin represents over fiat currency. Furthermore, a truly great innovation would much better serve people by being incorporated into future versions of Bitcoin rather than by requiring them to switch to something else. Indeed, the people who have proposed new ideas that are actually good, such as Zerocoin and mini-blockchain, did not develop their own currencies around them, but have simply described their usefulness as features.

The Bitcoin community is not just overwhelmingly larger but of overwhelmingly better quality as well. Bitcoin is surrounded by real entrepreneurs working hard to create new and useful services for Bitcoin. Altcoins are surrounded by loud-mouthed pretenders with irrational hopes of duplicating Nakamoto's success. This does not mean that there is anything intrinsically wrong with altcoins: the problem is simply that once Bitcoin exists, then there is no additional value, from a monetary standpoint, of creating knock-offs. Can anyone really expect to create something of value by rereleasing Bitcoin under a new name and with a few tiny changes to its source code? What makes Bitcoin great cannot easily be duplicated. Thus, while the Bitcoin community matures and grows as more and more entrepreneurs are attracted to its potential, the altcoin communities can only whine for attention.

For a new currency to take bitcoins place it would have to represent a significant improvement over bitcoin, or bitcoin would have to first FAIL before this could happen. So the question is not will bitcoin become obsolete, but will (your proposed new coin) overtake bitcoin? I don’t see any reason to believe that Altcoins represents a fundamental new innovation with meaningful improved functionality.

In physics, we learn about the concept of entropy. Entropy is often described as “chaos”, “randomness”, or “disorder”. To simplify quantum mechanics as much as possible, imagine a basket with a line drawn down the middle, and throw some balls into the basket. If all the balls are on one side of the line, that is an ordered state and has low entropy. If the balls are spread across both sides then it has higher entropy.

Now, let us take the concept of entropy and apply it to cryptocurrencies. We can imagine each cryptocurrency created has a possibility that some value can be placed within it. If all possible value is placed in bitcoin, and none in litecoin or altcoin, then this is a low entropy state. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that entropy in a system should always increase. So we should expect the total cryptocurrency value to be spread among all the possible altcoins.

Going back to our example of balls in a basket, one can easily get all the balls onto one side of the line simply by tilting the basket. This represents the concept of enthalpy, or energy within the system. Just as gravity pulls the balls onto one side of the basket, enthalpy can pull things into a higher entropic state. The most proof-of-work has been put into bitcoin, and so it takes higher energy to put any value into an altcoin.

From an entropy standpoint, there will always be alternate currencies, and the value assigned to them will always be greater than zero. But from an enthalpy standpoint, bitcoin is favored over altcoins, so the total value of each altcoin will remain very low compared to bitcoins.

I just got back from taking my 3 year old son to the park to play.  Nice seeing BTC back up a little again.  Still a ways to go though.  It's possible...

Heck, I would be happy with $450.00

The reason I say that is because difficulty will be at least 43 billion next time it changes.  Could be as much as 46 billion.

Was it the one about the Ferengi wormhole?  
I replied to that...

Wouldn't it be more profitable to buy BTC outright, than to buy new equipment? Unless/until BTC is worth many decimal points, earning fractions won't cover your electrical cost very well over the coming months, regardless of the upgrade.