Inflation of coins

[efodix]

Hi guys.

I've been thinking about this one thing...

Bitcoin has its 21M limit, and that's all fine, but...new coins seem to be popping up on weekly basis. The problem is not the inflation of bitcoins per se, but the inflation of alternative cryptocurrencies. Has anyone ever thought about this problem? Ultimately it might turn the whole economy into a hyperinflationary bad investment. The only hope is that most of those currencies won't catch up, and we'll be left with 3-4 *coins. But if they somehow do catch up, this might grow into a pretty big problem.

What are your thoughts on the issue?

[LoneMiner]

What are your thoughts on the issue?

Competition can only be a good thing in the long run in my opinion. Besides, there are many currencies already and the world hasn't collapsed (entirely).

It isn't Highlander where "There can be only one!", there is room for different crypto-currencies to appeal to different people.

[efodix]

Competition is not really always a good thing. What's it worth if you have thousands of currencies and each one is a worthless selloff? The world really does have many currencies, of which two are really relevant, and maybe a few more are somewhat relevant. It, however, has a limited number of currencies, while the amount of possible cryptocurrencies is infinite.

The only hope I see here is that the network effect will result in somehting like 80:20 power law, but it's more of a hypothesis than a confirmed theory.

[bampf]

It seems a lot of these altcoins are designed to be very front heavy so the developers/early miners can pump and dump coins for cash or bitcoin.

[GameKyuubi]

People are going to find the best protocol and stick with it.  Whether that ends up being Bitcoin remains to be seen, but it's pretty unlikely that Bitcoin is both the first AND the best.