A warning about Alt-Coins

[aetos]

SEEMS A COIN A DAY IS BORN

[Fabrizio88]

Do you think it will be only bitcoin?

[Bartalone]

Very useful informations for a starters. Many of them are to think about. Thanks

[yachtsman]

I would love to see any alt coin do well at this point

[halfawake]

Seems to me that Ripple is likely the only one that's different enough from Bitcoin that it might take off.  But of course, all the hardcore libertarians will (or do) hate it because a) there are centralized servers so it can be shut down, unlike bitcoin and b) the founders kept 20 Billion XRP for themselves and thus stand to profit handsomely if it succeeds.

The only reason I like it is a strictly utilitarian reason.  It seems like a much cheaper way to exchange from bitcoins to USD than MtGox.  They charge about a 1/1000 of a cent to transfer between currency, in their XRP currency. 

[hypersire]

I hold both BTC and LTC and now I'm looking to get into XRP (Ripple) as I think it has real potential (as does Google and a host of other VC firms).

[JimCGSavings]

Feathercoin FTW!

Yeah, that one gave me good feeling too. Which just about sums it up for alt coins for me. They all seem to be acts of putting the cart before the horse. Maybe once BTC is accepted by a major player like google Play or Amazon, and gets some gestalt mainstream cred, there'll be a place for em.

[FlyLord]

So, do people not realize that none of these altcoins are useful? Even YACoin isn't exactly innovative. Anyone who reads through the source could would agree ... not to mention all he did was pluck out regular scrypt and pop in scrypt w/keccak512 and ChaCha20/8. For one, writing an OpenCL kernel for it is not difficult and second using a starting N value of 32 makes it extremely FPGA friendly (which is why the hashrate exploded).

And also do people not understand that almost none of these cryptocoins can be considered actual currency? Until a cryptocoin is used widely enough to exhange for goods and services, it's just a digital commodity not a currency. Bitcoin can be considered a currency and Litecoin seems to be making its way there. But pretty much every other coin cannot be used to buy a good or service other than to be exchanged with other cryptocurrencies.

All of these altcoins are *worthless* until they are widely accepted enough to actually be used to buy things with.

With that said, I'll gladly mine them and exchange them for BTC and LTC

[EBM]

BTC will remain by far the largest for many years yet. Institutional investors are actually holding it now - unlike any other coin.

LTC has 2nd place secured because ASICs are making public mining BTC impossible. Commodity hardware mining is important.*

PPC has long-term potential because its computing and energy use goes down over time (very clever). BTC and the rest must always go up. But it's also subject to ASIC trouble.

The rest of the coins are not worth bothering with and many are outright scams, along with the exchanges that deal in them. Very suspicious how BTC-e censors any criticism of Terra, for example.

(*More than anyone knows.)

[Charles999]

what avout world coin?  any hope for it??

[FlyLord]

what avout world coin?  any hope for it??

Very little, all they changed (as far as I can tell) are the block times and some small things here and there. Not to mention 15 Second blocks are waaaay too fast, there'll be a lot of Orphans and higher  opportunities for forked blockchains. Any new coin now needs to actually be somewhat innovative and fix something that's broken or doesn't work well in BTC or LTC (or PPC).

[dromatic45]

So, do people not realize that none of these altcoins are useful? Even YACoin isn't exactly innovative. Anyone who reads through the source could would agree ... not to mention all he did was pluck out regular scrypt and pop in scrypt w/keccak512 and ChaCha20/8. For one, writing an OpenCL kernel for it is not difficult and second using a starting N value of 32 makes it extremely FPGA friendly (which is why the hashrate exploded).

And also do people not understand that almost none of these cryptocoins can be considered actual currency? Until a cryptocoin is used widely enough to exhange for goods and services, it's just a digital commodity not a currency. Bitcoin can be considered a currency and Litecoin seems to be making its way there. But pretty much every other coin cannot be used to buy a good or service other than to be exchanged with other cryptocurrencies.

All of these altcoins are *worthless* until they are widely accepted enough to actually be used to buy things with.

With that said, I'll gladly mine them and exchange them for BTC and LTC

I am just curious what you think about ripple?   Also how do you feel about the same blockchain technology being implemented for something other than currency like voting, stock shares, or virtual game currency.  It seems like there may be applications for alt "coins" or alt-chains than can extend well beyond what this discussion has been limited to.  If we are talking about making another PnD scam coin I am kind of over that though. I see that part of your point.

[EBM]

Ripple just feels wrong. Solves some of BTC's problems, but adds new ones of its own.

[thefendall]

FTC feels like it has good long term potential, a community that seems to want to develop, adjust and move forward.  I understand peoples thoughts that if people think it has value, it does.... thats only partly true, as more coins come out, unless there is enough people to buy them up they spread current market capitalization through all the alts and BTC therefore lowering the value.  keep in mind almost every alt coming out every day is just a copy of a previous one.  I personally havent paid a great deal of attention to any of the new creations, the they have no innovation.  The reason I like FTC (personal opinion) is it does seem to follow LTC very closely, but at 4x the speed.  It has developers taking input and wanting to push it out into the world.

my 2 cents

[wetroof]

I would like someone to explain the new YACoin. it uses a new hashing algorithm - a variation on scrypt, which is claimed to be less friendly to GPU's. It make the n parameter dynamic. n increases over time. the n parameter has to do with memory allocation I believe, and as n increases, then memory requirement increases. I don't know how large n will grow, but it seems to be GPU's are not at a disadvantage. they have comparable cache memory and huge amounts of Dram.

The only reason it is a "CPU" coin that I can tell is because at its release since it used new algo. And there was not a OpenCl / CUDA miner available with the new algorithm implemented so that only people could mine with cpus.

Also it got off to a bad start because difficulty was low and it was abused by FPGA... so it is basically a premine situation which might make adopters wary.

[jomay]

I would like someone to explain the new YACoin. it uses a new hashing algorithm - a variation on scrypt, which is claimed to be less friendly to GPU's. It make the n parameter dynamic. n increases over time. the n parameter has to do with memory allocation I believe, and as n increases, then memory requirement increases. I don't know how large n will grow, but it seems to be GPU's are not at a disadvantage. they have comparable cache memory and huge amounts of Dram.

The only reason it is a "CPU" coin that I can tell is because at its release since it used new algo. And there was not a OpenCl / CUDA miner available with the new algorithm implemented so that only people could mine with cpus.

Also it got off to a bad start because difficulty was low and it was abused by FPGA... so it is basically a premine situation which might make adopters wary.

GPUs work with many parallel cores and threads. The memory consumption of each thread increases as N increases. There will be a point when GPU computing hits a memory bound for mining YAC such that you cannot saturate all threads anymore. Alternatively you would have to tweak scrypt to use more compute cycles instead of memory and get less hashes per clock. I doubt we have reached this point yet, though.

The premine is unfortunate, but less of a problem than the general decline in credibility altcoins have suffered from lately. Why would you buy or trade an altcoin if there is a new release every day? I fear this might even be a plot by BTC-fundamentalists to harm LTC. Most releases were done by totally new forum members.

[Dave Knight]

A good way to think of altcoins is to consider what it would take to launch your own virtual currency. How would they get adopted? What keeps people using them?

Changing people's habits, gaining trust, finding mass acceptance all take time and may never happen. There's a lot of risk in altcoins.

If I were going to bet on a currency to catch on it would be bitcoin. While it still hasn't achieved mass acceptance, it's the leader by a wide margin. Why take a long-shot when you've got a sure thing?

[aceking]

99% of altcoins are just attempts from their developers to get some bitcoins for free. They just want to dump their easily mined crap-coins for bitcoins.
Only litecoin has big chance to survive , other altcoins are useless.
Stick to bitcoin and litecoin.

[jumbo]

Looks like only big organised companies can launch anything really significant to compete with existing ***coins.
Ripple seems to be good enough, but all small groups and their "solutions" are not good.
Idea can be open, but real world implementation has to much non-technical development issues, that only managed product can deal with.
IMHO

[Annillos]

i feel that the only coins should be btc or litecoins period