So I understand the advantage of certain alternative cryptocurrencies over bitcoin, but what's the *point* of competition?
Sure bitcoin has it's shortfalls, but if the ideological end goal is going from fiat currency to decentralized cyrptocurrency, wouldn't it make more sense to try to push the universal adoption of the most popular currency rather than attempting to establish other systems? What do the creators have to gain by pushing a new system that they couldn't gain from simply supporting bitcoin, aside from marginal improvements in terms of things like mining protocols and shorter transaction times?
I'll admit that I'm not very familiar with any other *coins, but it seems that things like litecoin have two main advantages: faster times, and different (ASIC proof) hashing algorithims.
1. Blocks are solved about every 2.5 minutes. This means it's FOUR TIMES as fast as bitcoin in terms of sending money (getting confirmations)
2. The Hashing algorithm to 'solve' a block (generate coins) is DIFFERENT than bitcoin and thus the new ASIC hardware coming out for bitcoin won't work on litecoin. User's and millions of people with GPU cards can mine litecoin and be safe (for now) from worrying about being profitable because there's not some super fast hardware coming out that's better than yours
If these disadvantages of bitcoin are
that critical, how long will it be until another currency comes out that has a block solved about every minute? Or how long until ASICs are developed for the litecoin hash algorithm? I'm not convinced that the advantages aren't trivial.
I suppose I'm just unsure of the effects things like litecoin will have on the health of bitcoin in the long run. Part of me wants to say that more competition and decentralization is good, but if it comes at the cost of slowing down the adoption of bitcoin (disadvantages and all), I'm not sure which is the lesser of the two evils.
Regardless, gimme free money
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