TRC's failure is an important indicator of things to come

[warpio]

Terracoin was sustainable up until ASICs had entered the picture. Now, TRC is not worth mining anymore because a few people with ASICs have pumped the difficulty way up. TRC need to be at a much higher value before it will be worth mining at all... sub-$2 levels aren't going to cut it anymore. TRC might still have a chance, if enough dedicated people are willing to pump its price up to sustainable levels.

What does this mean for other cryptocoins? Well for one thing it means BTC can't crash below a certain level without failing completely. What that level is, I'm not sure... and that minimum level will continue to go up as technology advances. Merged mining might be able to sustain a few altcoins at higher levels, but ultimately every sha256 based coin will be tied to BTC's value.

It also means that the scrypt coins (LTC, NVC) and other sort of coins (PPC) are perhaps equally important to the merged BTC mining coins. They are independent from each other, and if one of them crashes and gets taken over by a 51% attack, the others can still thrive. TRC's failure does not mean altcoins are useless, it's quite the opposite.

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[VforVictory]

Sadly, the price of PPC will very likely crash once we cross the difficulty/reward barrier by the end of the month.

Though, perhaps, the failure of TRC is a good thing, since there has been a lot more brainstorming on the forums lately.

[spacegoat]

it seems that they are working out TRC's failure.  we were contemplating what TRC's recent mishaps could mean for BTC as a whole, and realized that someone wanting to shake up the BTC community who had billions to spend(such as US gov) could set a massive ASIC farm onto BTC and do the same to BTC what a few ASICs did to TRC.


but yes I agree, the entire thing has been positive for the security of each coin.

and it seems that terracoin is hashing it out how to be less vulnerable to 51% which, who knows, might come in handy if something like that were to ever happen to BTC.

also, bytecoin will have terracoins solution sets to utilize....  so I have a feeling that terracoin is actually going to be ok through all this.

in the coming weeks a new exchange is opening and featuring terracoin, so that might drive terracoins price up.  its hard to say. 

I bought some terracoins but sold them and rediversified, I've been watching the Terracoin fiasco very interested in them finding a solution.

[nameface]

ultimately every sha256 based coin will be tied to BTC's value.

Sadly, the price of PPC will very likely crash once we cross the difficulty/reward barrier by the end of the month.

Why? And Why?

Since when does the difficulty dictate the price with cryptos? It's all about the speculators, that where the capital comes from.

[drawingthesun]

Since when does the difficulty dictate the price with cryptos? It's all about the speculators, that where the capital comes from.

Your right, there is a difficulty to price relationship. If its not profitable to mine then people will not mine it and the difficulty will reduce.

Look at Bitcoin, as the price increases because of the speculators and traders the difficulty increases. If speculators decided Bitcoin was worth nothing and this was sustained, that BTC was worth $0, all those miners even the ones with ASIC will stop mining, except for the people who think that the coins are going to worth more again.

This is a issue with TRC, a ASIC will come along and because a lot of miners have been mining at a small profit with a GPU, its likely a ASIC miner will want in on the action because they will make so much money, and then they leave back to BTC because they still want BTC and then the TRC network is in disarray

[spacegoat]

eventually 51% asic disarray attacks will be harder and harder to do right?  say terracoin keeps trucking along

[Impaler]

I think what we have here is a classic Tragedy-fo-the-Commons.

Each coins network is a commons and when you jump into it with a lot of hashing power such that your making blocks faster then target speed you make a fast profit before 'polluting' the chain with a high difficulty.  Naturally you then jump to another coin and leave the suckers to deal with the aftermath of the pollution, just like any other strip-mining operation.  There's clearly a flaw here because we all know a purely-profit-motivated unregulated market is supposed to enriching everyone... right

The solution is to either have a VERY VERY rapid difficulty responsiveness, or to somehow restrict new miners from coming in at a rate faster then the network can handle.  The former seems to be the easier to do from a technical standpoint, and it can also handle the downside of a hash-rate collapse.

I worry that if we see the BTC bubble burst we could see an even larger flood of ASICs alt-chain-hopping around.  The BTC value is keeping most of them confined their and the existing size of BTCs network means they don't inflate its difficulty too much.  Present hash growth is about half of the sustained 1/3 magnitude per month that occurred between the beginning of 2010 and the July crash of 2011 which was 6 orders of magnitude over 18 months.