The Fair Weather Friends Of Alternative Coins And The Big Bad BTC !

[cinnamon_carter]

Let's take a look at the world of alternative cryptocurrency as of today. Some feel it is 'dying' out. The price of bitcoin is on a roll humping it over $200 USD and instead of the other coins gaining in value almost every alt coin is down in value. In months past there were many new coins being launched and this has slowed down quite a bit.

I named the thread 'fair weather friends' of alt coins since I see this as the primary reason that things are playing out as they are.

To see how we got where we are let's look back in time and retrace the events that led us here.

For a long time a majority of people who both mine and speculate in alt coins were able to 'turn a profit'. Same was once true of bitcoin.

When bitcoin was being mined by gpu's there were tens of thousands of nodes hitting the network with blocks. I read a few days ago that has dropped to
around 2000 nodes currently finding new blocks of bitcoin. The explosion of difficulty with the introduction of ASIC mining has taken away the ability of most to mine bitcoin. Now don't tell me that ASIC did not increase the difficulty less than the introduction of GPU mining did a while back. The only difference is almost anyone can get access to a gpu and almost no one can get access to the lastest ASIC's. If you could buy ASIC's at best buy,microcenter, or new egg for a few hundred bucks the leap in difficulty would have been just as large going from GPU to ASIC as it was going from CPU to GPU.

Now all the people who built these massive rigs or even people with just one or two gpu's were unable to mine bitcoin for a profit or even at all.

Earlier this year alternative coins started coming out at times a few a day. Each week saw new coins being released. Many are still running , some died out. Since so many people out there had equipment to mine with they mostly switched over to mining scrypt coins with their gpu's. I believe a majority of these people were not really mining litecoin, or any other coin to mine that coin but just to convert it /sell it/ exchange it to bitcoin. Nothing wrong with that
if mining one coin is more 'profitable' than another and you are mining for money this is elementary.

Now bitcoin is doing well and it is actually possible to spend it and use it for many things. I think this is great.

Litecoin and other alternative currencies have not been as fortunate in getting support for real world services , yet.

So what remains.

We have one group of people that (probably own ASIC's) who claim bitcoin is the only viable game in town and all alternatives are a waste of time and will never amount to anything.

We have another group of people who had a high level of interest in mining alt coins as long as they were able to turn around and sell them for bitcoin. Now that the market is changing a little bit and they are getting less than they were they are not as excited. They do not see big dollar signs in their immediate sights and are giving up.

The last group of people is the smallest group. The true believers. I like to put myself in this group. I support bitoin and cryptocurrencies including alts because I think over time they are a way to make a better future for the world. I am happy for the mainstream success bitcoin has had but I do not think it wise to just bet the farm that bitcoin is going to be the final and only answer. Over the long haul I anticipate many cryptocurrencies , perhaps many many more than exist now to be around and have real world applications. Even if I am wrong and they all fail I support cryptocurrency because of it's concepts of putting control of things back in the hands of individual people.

I was fooling around with bitcoin a long time ago when it seemed like a game and almost no one knew what it was. I saw the potential for something back then just as I see the potential for other things now. No sure things though.

I just wonder how many true supporters of cryptocurrency there are when you remove the idea that it is a way to make easy money.

Is it ? Even early on electricity costs and equipment costs made it a long haul before you earned enough back to break even.

Also I find living in the United States makes it hard to convert BTC back into cash. Trying to convert other alt coins to cash is next to impossible.

My final point here is that with BTC headed up in world markets and getting a foothold I think it insanity that people are not all over other alt coins right now. This is a time to shine.

How can so many people be so short sighted that the prices of alts vs. bitcoin is down the last few weeks so lets pack it in ?

If anything this is a time for cryptocurrency to expand and grow worldwide. Instead of riding on the wave of success and the buzz created by bitcoin I get the impression people are locking up alt coins up in the closet. To me this is insanity but I am trying to look at the long term big picture. There are so many people (at least in America) who have no idea at all what bitcoin or any of this stuff means. There were just as many people in 1995 who knew there was something called the internet but did not really know what it was or how it worked.

Think of the early days of the web. Excite was the big search engine and Google tried to sell thier company to Excite for 1 million dollars and the CEO of Excite kicked them out of his office not even giving them a counter offer. Did just one search engine survive ? Was it the one people expected to ? What search engines were popular early ? Which are popular now ? Even today with the concerns for privacy you see duck duck go skyrocketing in popularity because of changes to a landscape that a year ago google had a strong foothold on.

My search engine analogy is only one I could argue about the early days of the web and how it's technology changed the world in ways that some people imagined but no one ever knew exactly what was going to happen. The same is true with cryptocurrency.

So my final word here: Please don't be a fair weather friend to alternative coins just because bitcoin is doing well in the markets now.

I hope to hear some replies on this thread. Agree , disagree, lets at least talk it up and BLOW IT UP : not sweep things out of sight.

[QuantPlus]

How can so many people be so short sighted that the prices of alts vs. bitcoin is down the last few weeks so lets pack it in ?

If anything this is a time for cryptocurrency to expand and grow worldwide. Instead of riding on the wave of success and the buzz created by bitcoin I get the impression people are locking up alt coins up in the closet. To me this is insanity but I am trying to look at the long term big picture. There are so many people (at least in America) who have no idea at all what bitcoin or any of this stuff means. There were just as many people in 1995 who knew there was something called the internet but did not really know what it was or how it worked.

Think of the early days of the web.

The Alt Space has grown...
From roughly $10 million to $90 million Market Cap in 6 months.

LTC =........... $50 million
Other Alts =... $20 million
Exchanges =...$20 million
------------------------
...................$90,000,000


People writing this off are

(a) Bitcoin Monopolists

(b) idiots

(c) both.


And this space is currently driven by tiny, amateur Dev teams of 1-3 people...
Roughly 80% of whom are subsistence level scammers...
When serious organizations start launching Alts... this space will EXPLODE.

[Oldminer]

LOL..seen this claim soooo many times before....in a month, 2 months, 6 months from now the roles will be reversed & we will see threads such as 'Bitcoin dead - Altcoins are the future' blah blah. Then we will rinse & repeat. Silliness...

[QuantPlus]

LOL..seen this claim soooo many times before....in a month, 2 months, 6 months from now the roles will be reversed & we will see threads such as 'Bitcoin dead - Altcoins are the future' blah blah. Then we will rinse & repeat. Silliness...

*** This post has zero content. Are you on drugs? ***

The OP was a high quality post...
Please go and sabotage intelligent discussions elsewhere.

[Slingshot]

cinnamon_carter - you have it correct, and your thinking is clear headed and sound.

 For those in this to make a little change and what not there are far better things to involve oneself in for profit, much bigger short term, immediate profits. I can't imagine doing this merely for some pocket change but I suppose for some it's a viable cause.

 As for changing BTC to fiat, and Alt's to fiat those are very easy to do. Extremely easy. I don't know what your referring to there.


 Seems like every time the next up or down wave strikes some get far too nervous. It's the very nature of some. And the very nature of new marketplaces. Relax.

 BTC isn't going to the moon, at least not yet. Nothing ever goes straight up on any intermediate to longer term chart, and hardly ever goes straight down either. China is excited about BTC, or some others. Or both. But there is plenty of greed around as well as loose btc that all this will blow over just as it has time after time.


 The true believers are either going to be correct, or all this including btc ultimately fails. Nothing in between computes.

 It's wrong headed to believe that BTC alone, or with just a few other crypto-currencies will end up dominating while all others fail. At least not for quite some time if prevailing themes continue. There are 7 billion souls on-board. A couple of hundred countries. Anyone that thinks BTC and maybe just one or two other alt currencies can dominate even a large fraction of the world are smoking some really potent stuff (think crack-heads). What? Do you really believe countries governments will merely surrender their currencies at will? Or what by force? And by whom would that be? Yes, these crypto-currencies are legal here, and elsewhere too. But their going to have to share the world for a long time to come, or at least until N-Day. You do remember D-Day right?

 What? so all late comers just have to bend over to the new crypto-lords? Get real. This is all merely beginning. It's BTC that is likely vastly overvalued. Or grossly undervalued. But obviously not at it's true fair value. Not even remotely so.

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"You would be insane to pour a ton of money into alts now. A considerable amount is enough."
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 Yea, well that's not accurate. What is accurate is that one would have to be insane or quite ignorant to trust almost every fiat currency with much of their wealth today. Hard assets is what one should have run to about 13 years ago. But I suppose most missed that memo.



 Buy low. Sell High. Almost everyone get's that wrong.

 Be brave when others are fearful. And fearful when others are brave.


 Sounds so simple, but their both very difficult to do.


 Follow those two rules and you will end up happier than if you don't follow them in the longer term. Much happier.


 Guess what I was doing up until the last few days? And guess what I will be doing when and if things strongly reverse, and believe it or not they usually will.


 So yea, don't dare put all your eggs into one play, or even more than 10% of your eggs into one series of like play's no matter how great it is if you have no other sources of income streams. Take larger risks with smaller bankrolls. But always protect and diversify larger bankrolls. Trust no one. Always Verify.

 Gamblers Ruin, might want to learn that topic a bit. As I recall never wager more than 2% of ones bankroll on any one event, wager, or gamble. And of course have the odds in ones favor or don't do it at all.



Caveat emptor - let the buyer beware!

[cinnamon_carter]

I originally posted this 22 months ago.

After all that has gone on since then honestly things have not changed all so much.

Now there are asic units available for everyone...

There are successful alt coins some have been around a while some are new.

I never anticipated the amount of 'pure proof of stake' coins and the ipo 's which mostly (there are exceptions) have been flash in the pan rip off operations.

Since my original post so many new coins, exchanges, gimmicks, ect were born and a lot died.

Bitcoin was once again recently close to the $200 mark although it has been ticking up.

The launches of new coins seems to have quieted down.

For as much progress in the world of bitcoin & altcoins I suppose it is anyones 'guess' still where this will all end up.

I guess we are still all early and ahead of the curve when you consider that most alts have not yet gained much of a foothold in replacement of old style fake govt. money that instead of being backed up by open source code is backed up by armies with guns.

I wonder how many more years it will take ... quite a few more I suspect than when I started the original thread.....

[Dire]

I think it comes down to - or will come down to - what the uses of the alt coin actually is. If it's just an alt that has no special features than a more well established coin has, then no, I think those alts will die a death.

I think alts with utility have some type of future, but the truth is, if that utility can be paid for with Bitcoin (and in most cases it can) then what's the point of the alt in the case of the utility?