From 11 coins to 2!.. BTC and PPC win for me and here's why.

[Luckybit]

"BTC works - it really does work well."

This is patently not true.  Any arguments you make after this statement are based on a false fact.  There are plenty of threads arguing against the technical, economic, and moral aspects of bitcoin.  We don't need  to discuss them here.

My question, that you haven't answered, is what are Alt-TC offering that is more than BTC.

I look at it like this:

People love to collect things.  There will always be a market for collecting.  People have money to spend and they might want an alt coin.  Some people have hobbies which cost a lot but really yield nothing but expense.  They don't profit from their hobby, but they do:  get something they value to collect - a coin to collect which may or may not have value.

People have the mindset that an Alt Coin is going to replace Bitcoin.  I hope not, Bitcoin is a quality product, not prefect, but quality.  As long as there is a market for people who love to collect, there will be a market for collecting coins.  Of course, there will be people that will profit from selling those coins to the collectors.

The only coin that is more scarce than Bitcoin is Mincoin. People will only collect coins if the next generation of coins are more scarce than Bitcoins.

21 Million Bitcoins? There are 10 million Mincoins, plus Mincoins are based around scrypt and have fast transactions. Yet no one mentions Mincoins when they talk about alt-coins. It's always inflated overly produced pump and dump coins like Feathercoins. There are more Litecoins than Bitcoins so Litecoins will never be worth as much and their value is forever tied to the value of Bitcoin. If the price of Bitcoin goes down so goes Litecoin because Litecoin is less scarce than Bitcoin.

This is not true of Mincoin. When the Price of Bitcoin goes down Mincoin stays the same. PPcoin also stays the same when the Price of Bitcoin goes down. Scarcity does matter for collectors, we want a limited edition coin to collect.

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[justabitoftime]

"BTC works - it really does work well."

This is patently not true.  Any arguments you make after this statement are based on a false fact.  There are plenty of threads arguing against the technical, economic, and moral aspects of bitcoin.  We don't need  to discuss them here.

My question, that you haven't answered, is what are Alt-TC offering that is more than BTC.

They were created to gain more BTC and LTC. It was never more obvious then with FTC and CHN. PPC is interesting but i'm still not sure on it yet because of it using sha256, I think if they went with another hash it would be way more successful in the long run.

It's funny when things are 'obvious' on messageboards, it's usually off base. Way to completely misunderstand the FTC community. Then again, it's the Internet, everyone is rich, good looking and right.

[Luckybit]

I guess with that logic the whole world should just use the U.S dollar right? lol

I don't understand what you're suggesting.

Bitcoin beats the US dollar in so many ways.

How do Alt-TC beat BTC? Really, why would anyone need another coin?? Why would a merchant want to accept multiple coins.
If it works, then it works. If it runs into difficulty, then we'll need something different.

I don't think it harms to have different coins running on different algorithms with different features. The issue is the release of pump'n'dump coins that serve no other purpose save a quick profit for some, and a loss for many.

It's good to have a coin like LiteCoin that runs along side Bitcoin, as it runs on a different algorithm. If something were to happen to Bitcoin, an attack, or some other unanticipated black-swan type fault LiteCoin could assume the mantle. It's healthy to have a basket of currencies, although it's pretty easy, at least one would hope, to discern the crap ones from the legitimate ones that bring something new to the table.

The problem with Feathercoins, Chinacoins and other pump-dump coins is each new coin seems to up the total number of coins making it less and less attractive to long term collectors. Basically the only reason anyone buys these coins is for short term profits because they have no long term profit capability when theres trillions of them.

Go ahead, collect a few hundred out of the trillions upon trillions of grains of sand on the beach and then sell them in exchange for a pile of feces. It's just pump and dump. The way to make it work and I keep advocating it, the supply of these new alt coins has to be rare enough that you can't just go and buy them all up instantly, or mine millions of them in a day. It should be scarce like say 11 million, 10 million, even 5 million, and it should take a while to mine large amounts.

I think Mincoin has it right but thats just one coin. I think Bitbar went too extreme about it but as a concept it's going in the right direction. People will trade their Bitcoins for coins which are worth more. If a Bitbar is worth 10 Bitcoins now it makes perfect sense to trade 10 Bitcoins for a Bitbar so that if the price of Bitcoins collapses you've put your Bitcoin into the Bitbar. It makes sense to trade Bitcoin for Mincoin each Mincoin is worth twice the value of a Bitcoin long term. This makes sense for long term holders and collectors.

It does not make much sense for speculators who make up the vast majority of the people on exchanges. They want Feathercoin and Chinacoin because they have no intention of investing for 2-3 years, they are thinking 2-3 weeks or 2-3 days. That is the difference between scarce coins and the over produced coins. The over produced coins generate immediate profits because they are mined quickly, instamined or premined, and theres if you mine a billion in a few days then hype it up while you DDOS the exchanges so the price of Bitcoin drops, then yeah you can make a major profit doing that several times until people figure out the script.

A genuine coin offers either new technology, increased scarcity, or both. If the mathematics and psychology are not changed due to increased scarcity, or if the technology isn't new, it's probably a scam coin. Mincoin had new mathematics and psychology of scarcity making it superior to Litecoin in many ways. If Litecoin for example has direct competition it will probably be from Mincoin. PPcoin wouldn't compete with Litecoin it would replace it entirely. Litecoin wont be able to replace Bitcoin because the people who have Bitcoins when 1 Bitcoin is worth $100,000 if we get there, will never trade 1:1 for Litecoins when Litecoins are worth $10,000 or $20,000. The difference between $100,000 and $20,000 is so huge psychologically that there is no way Litecoin could ever overcome it and let's be honest. If Bitcoin were $100,000 Litecoin would probably be more like $3000-4000. It simply will not be able to compete with coin collectors who will sell all their Litecoin holdings for Bitcoin the moment it looks like Bitcoin could reach $100,000. This dump will keep the price of Litecoin from ever getting that high but it also means less people will use it because the value of Bitcoin in dollars will be so far beyond it.

So one thing to consider with all this is what value potential does that coin have in USD? The coin has to compete with USD, not just Bitcoin, not just alt-coins. Someday we may have cryptocurrencies where 1 coin is worth $10 million USD, but that cryptocurrency wont be Bitcoin because the math makes it improbable, and it wont be Litecoin because Litecoin moves the math to the opposite direction, so for long term holders and collectors we will need coins which will have value increase over the years if successful. A $10 million dollar coin is possible if there are only 5 million total that exist. These are the kinds of coins that coin collectors would trade BTC for to buy in hopes that they will be worth $10 million. Just as long as the technology is better than BTC I think it's fair.

[davidpbrown]

When the Price of Bitcoin goes down Mincoin stays the same.

Forever 0.002..

[Luckybit]

When the Price of Bitcoin goes down Mincoin stays the same.

Forever 0.002..

0.003 but I see your point. My point is that new coins have to offer new psychology, new math, new technology, to fit into different niches. People who like to collect coins love limited editions and it's just a niche. Coins will eventually figure out how to fill that niche and these limited edition coins will become incredibly valuable. In my opinion these coins should be treated as the store of value or store of wealth commodities so that other coins can focus more on acting like a currency.

The point is we need coins we can buy or mine which might someday be worth $10 million each if we hold onto them. We also need coins which we can use to make microtransactions really fast. Somehow Mincoin is able to hit the psychology of both these activities by allowing for long term holders to save them hoping they'll be worth more than Bitcoin even though we all know that probably wont happen, but at the same time for actual transactions it's much faster than Bitcoin or even Litecoin. Go and test it out.

The flaw in Mincoin is it does not seem to be under active development. The creator changed the math of Litecoin which altered the psychology drastically and made it more deflationary and I think this is a good thing because we actually needed a deflationary scarce version of Litecoin. But what happens next with it?

PPcoin is also needed because I think long term we all know Proof of Work isn't going to work. Mining isn't going to be profitable for much longer and the writing is on the wall. Transaction fees aren't going to change that either and if Bitcoin tries that route then PPcoin and Proof of Stake coins will be cheaper and will win.

[davidpbrown]

I perhaps should have mentioned FreiCoin.. I don't understand it entirely but it does look to me close to something that the Islamic Banking community might be ok with.. large market there. I expect it would need a tweak or two. I'm not sure why anyone would buy it as investment, so perhaps an Islamic Bank would have to premine and make equivalent for it to work well.

[davidpbrown]

The flaw in Mincoin is it does not seem to be under active development.

Mincoin offers nothing but novelty and the creaters failed to create the excitement at the start - just like they are rebooting SC with no fanfare. Doing it after the fact is much harder and eventually people will tire of it and look to BTC because that can be spent and in reality there is zero difference but for the fraction.

If you're a fan of Mincoin.. where can you spend it? Same for Bitbar and all the other wannabes.. they really need to make themselves useful, which is the big opportunity - making alt-coins real world useful and not just an obscure investment for geeks.

[Luckybit]

I perhaps should have mentioned FreiCoin.. I don't understand it entirely but it does look to me close to something that the Islamic Banking community might be ok with.. large market there. I expect it would need a tweak or two. I'm not sure why anyone would buy it as investment, so perhaps an Islamic Bank would have to premine and make equivalent for it to work well.

Freicoin features demurrage which is an anti-hoarding tax. I like the idea but I don't like the fact that there are 100 million coins. Perhaps if it were much more scarce the idea might make sense because I do think if we end up with a Bitcoin elite as some have termed it, where you have people who become Billionaires from mining or buying Bitcoin, those people should ultimately be made to invest or spend. I don't agree with the rate or numbers chosen by Freicoin to do it. I think for instance Demurrage shouldn't take place until we actually have Bitcoin billionaires. I think also the rate has to somehow be adjusted against something else. To just promote GDP just to promote GDP isn't a good idea because there could be situations where there is nothing useful to buy, and to force people to spend when theres nothing reasonable to spend it on isn't good. Also it might encourage short term investments rather than long term, and also how many coins would you need to have before demurrage kicks in?

If you have a total of 21 million coins like with Bitcoin and you have demurrage to that, then perhaps everyone who has over 50,000 coins should pay the hoarding tax? In this case it starts making sense and I would think it's a good idea if the size of the tax increases with the length of time the coins are hoarded in combination with the amount.

Like if someone hoards only 50 coins but hoards it for 10 years that should not trigger demurrage but if they are hoarding 50,000 coins over 5 years it should.

[davidpbrown]

Unenforceable.. you have no way of counting the coins a person owns.. multiple accounts; multiple wallets even.

[Luckybit]

Mincoin offers nothing but novelty and the creaters failed to create the excitement at the start - just like they are rebooting SC with no fanfare. Doing it after the fact is much harder and eventually people will tire of it and look to BTC because that can be spent and in reality there is zero difference but for the fraction.

Isn't novelty something we want in a niche coin? I admit it does not enhance the technology so from a technologically perspective it's not new (it's just Litecoin with different math), but from a psychological and economic perspective it's very different. You can tweak Litecoin and come up with a better Litecoin and this is still valuable if it's proven to actually be better based on those tweaks. If Mincoin had active development I would be confident in it's long term future, but because of it's tweaks I think it has a niche it's filling which no other Litecoin based coin effectively fills so it's safe for now.

If you're a fan of Mincoin.. where can you spend it? Same for Bitbar and all the other wannabes.. they really need to make themselves useful, which is the big opportunity - making alt-coins real world useful and not just an obscure investment for geeks.

I told you some niche coins are to be collected as a store of value and not as a currency. Gold bars, where do you spend them? You can't spend gold but you can buy it knowing it's value will keep going up over time. So what I'm saying is we need some coins just for that purpose to satisfy long term coin collectors who have an entirely different psychology from the short term speculator types who love Chinacoin and Feathercoin. The long term bulls and long term collectors want more coins like Mincoin while the short term profiteers want more coins like Feathercoin and Chinacoin. The technologists want to see a more secure or an anonymous coin.

I'm of a technologist and long term collector mindset. I'm not into the short term profiteering mindset unless I literally have no other way to make profit. The lack of balance is causing the collector types to contemplate or even go into mining or buying stuff like Feathercoin because when Feathercoin is 400% more profitable than any other coin at the time there is no better option but to mine that. But it doesn't change the fact that no one is going to collect Feathercoins and the niche exists for collectors.

The actual currency which will become mainstream should be Bitcoin, as it's the best technology. The candidates to beat Bitcoin in technology right now would be limited to Netcoin and PPcoin. Litecoin only beats Bitcoin in speed of transaction, but not in security. PPcoin may someday beat Bitcoin in security and Netcoin can improve on PPcoin. I agree more thought has to go into the technology and security side but at the same time the coins have to fill different psychological niches.

Unenforceable.. you have no way of counting the coins a person owns.. multiple accounts; multiple wallets even.

And that is the problem I have with Demurrage. I don't see how it can practically work. It's not going to be very fair to the people who don't have many coins to have to be taxed. I'm not against taxes or transaction fees but when those fees get too high people are going to transfer their wealth to another coin.

[Michael_S]

Hi Luckybit,

your posts are long and frequent, but I fear you have come to a deadlock in all your arguments, especially about that scarcity matter of coins.

In some of the first posts I read from you in another thread it appeared to me that you have a point, but now your arguments appear to me to become less and less reasonable, I see an increasing number of unproven claims in your post in the best case, and even more evidently wrong statements and assumptions.

The only coin that is more scarce than Bitcoin is Mincoin.

"Bitbar" is even more scarce.

People will only collect coins if the next generation of coins are more scarce than Bitcoins.

This statement is completely Illogical and of course untrue, it is neither proven by logic reasoning nor by market experience.

Except from that, crypto coins should be designed for use as an exchange and storage medium, not for collection. If collection coins are requested by the market participants (i.e. not coins to be used for payments), I propose to introduce a coin with a block generation rate of 6 hours per block. (I am mentioning this, because you repetitively make your arguments from the perspective of the collector, not from the perspective of the user, see also further below)

21 Million Bitcoins? There are 10 million Mincoins, plus Mincoins are based around scrypt and have fast transactions. Yet no one mentions Mincoins when they talk about alt-coins.

...which seems to prove your arguments wrong (sorry  ). It seems that Mincoin is the same as Litecoin/Feathercon, with the sole difference of another cap limit. This makes it the best example of a pump&dump scheme. (Avg block generation time in last 24 hours: LTC 2.5 minutes, FTC 34 minutes (!), MNC 1.9 minutes).

You also have to learn that you cannot make psychology theories about people's behavior out of nothing. If people behave different from what you originally thought, you have to question your theories and not try to persuade the world that they should behave acc. to your theories - this is doomed to fail. (I am saying this because my impression is that this is what you are trying to do, perhaps unconsciously - please forgive me if I am wrong [now I am also trying to be a psychlogist  ])

It's always inflated overly produced pump and dump coins like Feathercoins.

So you call Feathercoin a pump&dump, but Minecoin is not, just because the latter has the decimal point shifted by 1 and a half digits? This speaks for itself. Hey, then kilo-FTCs are no pump&dump, but milli-MNCs are a very bad pump&dump scheme!

There are more Litecoins than Bitcoins so Litecoins will never be worth as much and their value is forever tied to the value of Bitcoin.

Yes, there are 4 times more LTC than BTC. But if LTC turns out more useful in some distant future due to shorter confirmation times, this *may* be conceived as an added value and be reflected in exchange rates acc. to supply & demand. But it can also be that LTC never comes close to 25% of BTC value, just because BTC stays ahead in terms of infrastructure/market penetration for merchants, service providers, clients, apps etc. (just like people stay with facebook even if google+ has better features). The value does not only depend on the number of coins.

If the price of Bitcoin goes down so goes Litecoin because Litecoin is less scarce than Bitcoin.

No! Not because it is less scarce. If the price (vs. FIAT) goes up and down in parallel to BTC it's just because both are crypto-currencies, i.e. the same kind of commodity!

This is not true of Mincoin.

Of course it is! It just exists for only 1 month now, so this is much too short to draw conclusions w.r.t. exchange rate on illiquid markets. By the way, the currency mMNC (milli-Mincoins) is less scarce than Bitcoin by a factor of ca. 500, still they always have a fixed ratio to MNC, namely 1:1000, although MNC are more scarce by a factor 2. Acc. to your theroy MNC and mMNC should evolve in different directions, which renders your theory self-contradictory.

When the Price of Bitcoin goes down Mincoin stays the same. PPcoin also stays the same when the Price of Bitcoin goes down. Scarcity does matter for collectors, we want a limited edition coin to collect.

I cannot believe this argument is meant to be serious. And by the way, crypto-coins should be designed to work as a medium of exchange and storage, that's their intrinsic value. If crypto-currencies were there to serve collector's needs, they would be pump&dump ponzi schemes, so every responsible crypto-coin designer should NOT listen to requests from coin collectors! This idea is insane. Is it possible that I am feeding a troll while writing these lines?
I propose all passionate coin-collectors start collecting kBTCs from today on - they are 1000 times more scarce than Bitcoins and collecting them will certainly be fun  

Also my kLTCs go up and down fully in parallel to LTC, although LTC is 4 times less scarce than BTC, whereas one kLTC is 250 times more scarce then BTC (1 kLTC = 1000 LTC, by definition).

Likewise, I have mBTCs (I can even set the mBTC unit in the bitcoin-qt or Elecrum client, and soon you will be able to trade mBTCs also on exchanges!), but this does not suddenly make it a better or worse coin.

I also have a MichaelCoin, which is defined as 1 MichaelCoin = 123.45 BTCs. If you are a passionate coin collector though, I am willing to sell you one MichaelCoin for only 199 BTC!

So all this is just a matter of definition, you are totally over-interpreting the relevance of cap limit of coins.

The point is we need coins we can buy or mine which might someday be worth $10 million each if we hold onto them.

Why? Who is "we"? "we" coin collectors? But anyway - such coins already exist! One of them is the MBTC (Mega-Bitcoin), I call it MBC now, that is defined as 1MBC=1,000,000 BTCs. One MBC is currently worth $100 million each. Unfortunately, I only own 0.00....01 MBCs at the moment, because they are so scarce.

The problem with Feathercoins, Chinacoins and other pump-dump coins is each new coin seems to up the total number of coins making it less and less attractive to long term collectors. Basically the only reason anyone buys these coins is for short term profits because they have no long term profit capability when theres trillions of them.

This is *exactly* the same for Mincoin, it is no less a pump-and-dump coin. Just because the nominal cap limit is shifted by a few digits for one coin, it doesn't make it a fundamentally different coin. But you are suggesting all the time that this does make a fundamental difference, which is really ridiculous.

Go ahead, collect a few hundred out of the trillions upon trillions of grains of sand on the beach and then sell them in exchange for a pile of feces. It's just pump and dump.

Grains of sand have no value as medium of exchange, as opposed to crypto-coins. So they have no intrinsic value unlike crypyto-coins. I think you are again arguing from the collector's perspective, not from the user's perspective, otherwise you wouldn't have come up with this comparison.

The way to make it work and I keep advocating it, the supply of these new alt coins has to be rare enough that you can't just go and buy them all up instantly, or mine millions of them in a day.

You (or "they") cannot just "buy them *all* up". The percentage of *all* coins that one is able to buy up does not depend on where the decimal point of this coin was defined to be located. The cap limit is fully irrelevant when talking about percentage of coins.

Note: The fact that some alt-coins are valued in strange relation to their cap-limits on some exchanges does not mean that the alt-coins are designed wrongly, but it just shows that lots of inexperienced participants are active on the exchange markets at this early stage. This would certainly change once professional trades start benefiting from these irrationalities.

It should be scarce like say 11 million, 10 million, even 5 million, and it should take a while to mine large amounts.

These numbers are purely arbitrary.

I think Mincoin has it right but thats just one coin. I think Bitbar went too extreme about it but as a concept it's going in the right direction.

So Bitbar overdid it... "interesting"  . I think if the block generation time for bitbar would be higher (a few hours on average), bitbar could become the perfect "collector coin"  , similar to gold bars (=the bitbar logo).

People will trade their Bitcoins for coins which are worth more. If a Bitbar is worth 10 Bitcoins now it makes perfect sense to trade 10 Bitcoins for a Bitbar so that if the price of Bitcoins collapses you've put your Bitcoin into the Bitbar. It makes sense to trade Bitcoin for Mincoin each Mincoin is worth twice the value of a Bitcoin long term. This makes sense for long term holders and collectors.

You are again making the false assumption that coins that are less scarce than BTC are falling when BTC is falling (i.e. have a fixed exchange rate towards BTC), whereas coins that are more scarce than BTC are not falling when BTC is falling (i.e. they rather keep their exchange rate towards FIAT currency, not BTC). This theory is far-fetched and clear nonsense. The prices are made on the exchange markets and do not follow the rules you are proclaiming here. Normally I would have expected such argument from a naive person or from a troll, but maybe you are just mis-led by your own ideas and have not yet realized that you have run too long with your thoughts in the wrong direction.



Morover, about another topic, on Demurrage with Freicoin:

Freicoin features demurrage which is an anti-hoarding tax. I like the idea but I don't like the fact that there are 100 million coins. Perhaps if it were much more scarce the idea might make sense

You again hang on to the same error. Whatever the basic idea of a coin is (here it is the demurrage), this idea does not make more or less sense depending on whether you place the decimal point 1 or 2 digits further to the left or to the right.

If you have a total of 21 million coins like with Bitcoin and you have demurrage to that, then perhaps everyone who has over 50,000 coins should pay the hoarding tax? In this case it starts making sense and I would think it's a good idea if the size of the tax increases with the length of time the coins are hoarded in combination with the amount.

Like if someone hoards only 50 coins but hoards it for 10 years that should not trigger demurrage but if they are hoarding 50,000 coins over 5 years it should.

Unenforceable.. you have no way of counting the coins a person owns.. multiple accounts; multiple wallets even.

And that is the problem I have with Demurrage. [...] It's not going to be very fair to the people who don't have many coins to have to be taxed. I'm not against taxes or transaction fees but when those fees get too high people are going to transfer their wealth to another coin.

Your reasoning is arbitrary. One could equally well plead that those owning much should pay less demurrage (in percent terms, not in absolute terms of course) because they are already paying a lot to the community anyway.
I think both extremes are nonsense (apart from being not realizable). With Freicoin, in fact those who own little pay little demurrage, those who own much pay much demurrage. In fully linear relation to their funds. This is the fairest and simplest mechanism I can possibly think of. Effectively it acts like the principle of osmosis (to draw an analogy to biology), and it operates in opposite direction as today's debt interest based system, it means transferring wealth from the rich to the overall community. But I do not want to go into this here any further, it is macro-economical stuff and also rather political.

Kind regards,
Michael

(hope I did not feed a troll here, and if not, hope I could help)

[Adamlm]

BTC works - it really does work well. So, why would a real world merchant need to use another coin? Please, tell me why.

BTC = long term investments, big transactions (like buying a car or real estate)
LTC = everyday use for small transactions.

BTC is just too slow for everyday use with small amounts. LTC wins here IMO.

[davidpbrown]

I'm not sure LTC is any more practical than BTC. BTC using green addresses would work fine. Real world use needs those like WU or gyft, to make it easy to integrate with current fiat spending.. and more than just at a few stores that accept gift cards.. so a debit card equivalent.

We need practical real world solutions, not more alt-coins.. that's also where the real money will be now.

If BTC has issues then LTC will surely follow.. along with all the others; there's always potential for another coin to become the long term solution to all problems but I don't see any beating the simple combination of BTC+PPC just yet.

[Markus11]

ltc isnt associated to btc, if btc fails, ltc will be No1

[Luckybit]

Hello MichaelS, thank you for your response. Allow me to clarify my positions.

There is more to a coin than mathematics and technology. My argument is that we have two variables with the first being the coin price and the second being the coin value. According to my argument the coin price is influenced by psychology and the coin value is influenced by it's technological utility. My argument is that speculation is based around psychology. I argue that appealing to the psychology of speculators is important because it attracts early adopters to the coin just like appealing to the psychology of miners is important to attract them to secure the network.

Bitbar in specific may very well be more scarce than Mincoin but from their website they do a terrible job explaining the technology behind it and it's barely readable. I admit I don't know the technical details of Bitbar because I have not examined the source code. I can understand your view that Mincoin could be viewed as a clone of Litecoin but it can never be a pump and dump coin because it takes far too long to create a large portion of coins from which to dump. I view Mincoin as an experimental coin because at the time it was the first coin to have a smaller amount in total units than Bitcoin by more than half. If you're prone to view this as purely psychological then perhaps it should be considered a long term psychological experiment which can be used in the future as a case study, but I do not see it behaving as a pump and dump coin as it's not even on the major exchanges, it has never been pumped or dumped and has stayed at relatively the same price range. Feathercoin however was pumped almost overnight and ended up on BTC-E in record time and got dumped over the course of a few hours. I was there and I watched the psychology of the people doing the dumping and the psychology of the people doing the buying and the main interest expressed in public was short term profit, while when I look at Mincoin the main interest expressed in public is of long term profit and talking about how Mincoin could someday by worth much more than it is. This isn't the sign of a pump and dump coin and if it was meant to be that then it has failed as a short term investment.

...which seems to prove your arguments wrong (sorry  ). It seems that Mincoin is the same as Litecoin/Feathercon, with the sole difference of another cap limit. This makes it the best example of a pump&dump scheme. (Avg block generation time in last 24 hours: LTC 2.5 minutes, FTC 34 minutes (!), MNC 1.9 minutes).

You also have to learn that you cannot make psychology theories about people's behavior out of nothing. If people behave different from what you originally thought, you have to question your theories and not try to persuade the world that they should behave acc. to your theories - this is doomed to fail. (I am saying this because my impression is that this is what you are trying to do, perhaps unconsciously - please forgive me if I am wrong [now I am also trying to be a psychlogist  ])

Every theory I have comes from obvervation. But if you'd like to prove any of my theories wrong there are plenty of behaviors to observe and case studies to conduct, it's easy to use that behavior as part of a case study. We have charts and records of everything that happened with Feathercoin, Mincoin, or any other coin and we can see the psychology of the panic seller and we can see the psychology of the coin collector, it's all in the charts. Speculation if you view it as a sport, hobby or profession is based around psychology and any successful speculator on this forum will know that.
 
It's also something we can see from the trollbox at BTC-E, or from observing many other virtual currencies and the behavior in that. You're in from a mathematics background but in my opinon if you divorce the math from the psychology then you're not going to understand behavior. Human behavior is not rational, people who are collecting coins are not always doing it for rational reasons, what I'm saying is that the foundation of the Bitcoin economy is not rational and this is why there is volatility. Automated trading has only made it easier to exploit that irrationality but once again it's not rational and no you cannot introduce a coin without appealing to psychology, but this is my opinion. Litecoin appeals to psychology even in the name of the coin, the name is cool and catchy, the logo is cool and catchy, it's got faster confirmation time, it's got more total units, this is all about psychology. At the same time Mincoin does the same thing, it's got less total units than Bitcoin, it's got a catchy name and logo, it's got faster confirmation time, it's marketed as rare.

But really how do you see Mincoin as a pump and dump coin but you see Litecoin as legit? Litecoin was designed to appeal to the psychology of miners who mine it while Mincoin was designed to appeal to the psychology of speculators who collect and trade coins. Scrypt does not enhance the security of the network, it simply allows GPU miners to continue mining and that is about it. SHA256 is better and the use of ASICS do not necessarily hurt the network provided that the ASICs are distributed. So basically the GPU miners wanted a coin other than Bitcoin that they could mine with their GPUs and still make a profit, it was all built around psychology and not some improvement in the mathematics or in the security. If you can see some improvement in the security, tell me how it improves the security over Bitcoin to have faster confirmation time? Tell me how moving away from SHA256 can possibly improve the security? Litecoin is very well marketed.

Yes, there are 4 times more LTC than BTC. But if LTC turns out more useful in some distant future due to shorter confirmation times, this *may* be conceived as an added value and be reflected in exchange rates acc. to supply & demand. But it can also be that LTC never comes close to 25% of BTC value, just because BTC stays ahead in terms of infrastructure/market penetration for merchants, service providers, clients, apps etc. (just like people stay with facebook even if google+ has better features). The value does not only depend on the number of coins.

The success of Facebook is also a result of marketing. Myspace was the better technology but why did Facebook beat Myspace? Facebook appealed to the Ivy league universities at first claiming in order to join Facebook you had to be a member of an Ivy league university. Then they opened it up to all universities next, and then finally they opened it up to everyone. It started as an exclusive club atmosphere. It appealed to psychology and the feeling of belonging to a cool exclusive club to beat Myspace which didn't have that cool exclusive feel. It offered no technological advantage over Myspace, it had no first mover advantage over Myspace, but it beat Myspace entirely on psychology and marketing. Even now to this day it's not better than the competition but it uses psychology to lock people in.

I think you have the attitude that if a technically and mathematically superior coin is created that this alone is all that is needed. My argument is that yes you really do have to appeal to the psychology of coin collectors. A coin really has to seem rare, feel scarce. A coin must have a catchy name that people remember. A coin must have an eye pleasing logo. A coin must fill a psychological niche or several. A coin must appeal to speculators and to miners if it's going to get an army of early adopters to support it. Technology might attract you and me, I really do appreciate technological innovations in Bitcoin, PPcoin, Qubic, Namecoin. But I also appreciate the psychological appeal of Litecoin, Novacoin, Terracoin, Mincoin. The coin to challenge Bitcoin in my opinion will need to be technologically superior while also having the psychological appeal and I think your primary focus is only on the technological innovation. If this in fact is the case then how can you explain why Litecoin is in second place when it's basically a clone of Bitcoin which uses scrypt to appeal to the psychology of miners? It's not really all that different from Bitbar appealing to the psychology of gold bugs, or Mincoin appealing to the psychology of coin collectors, and then you have Terracoin and Novacoin which are speculator dream coins.

Grains of sand have no value as medium of exchange, as opposed to crypto-coins. So they have no intrinsic value unlike crypyto-coins. I think you are again arguing from the collector's perspective, not from the user's perspective, otherwise you wouldn't have come up with this comparison.

I understand the users perspective. The perspective of users is that the is no infrastructure. There is no place to earn Bitcoins, there is no place to easily buy Bitcoins, there are limited places to spend Bitcoins, and all of these options come with risks of losing Bitcoins. It's bad enough exchanges are being hacked, but cryptostocks was hacked, Gox was DDOSed, and the price reflects the psychological attitude of the users. The problem the users are having is infrastructure doesn't exist to make Bitcoin a true medium of exchange and if Bitcoin worked as a true medium of exchange there really isn't much of a need right now for Litecoin. Litecoin isn't more secure than Bitcoin in any way that I can see and it's only a different psychological appeal, but not actually better and even the Silver to Bitcoin gold thing is a psychological appeal. All of the appeal in Litecoin is based around the psychology I'm talking about and if my arguments were so wrong then Namecoin, Devcoin, PPcoin, all should be higher priced than Litecoin because they all have more value  and more innovation than Litecoin. PPcoin is Proof of Stake and is a new protocol. Namecoin is a sort of name based value exchange protocol which will have all sorts of technological appeal. Devcoin is an extremely important coin because it's the one coin which attempts to solve the infrastructure problem.

Why aren't PPcoin, Devcoin and Namecoin ahead of Litecoin? Litecoin appeals to miners and miners are the most powerful group. The next most powerful group in the community are speculators. Ordinary every day users aren't who currently decide the fate of the different coins. Speculators decide to pour their money into one coin or another and it gets pumped and if they pull their money out of any coin including Bitcoin then they price will drop way down and the coin will die in the eyes of the media. Miners are also essential because if they pull out then the network is no longer secure. Appealing to the psychology of these two demographics is critical and my views have not changed but only strengthened.

BTC works - it really does work well. So, why would a real world merchant need to use another coin? Please, tell me why.

BTC = long term investments, big transactions (like buying a car or real estate)
LTC = everyday use for small transactions.

BTC is just too slow for everyday use with small amounts. LTC wins here IMO.

And this ^ is an example of psychological appeal. Adam intuitively gets what I'm talking about.

[saudibull]

Well, I agree to the point that we need to promote the hell out of BTC.......  got a long way to go

[erk]

The trouble with PPC is the developers have dropped the ball, have a read of the main PPC thread on this forum and you will see what I mean, the last few pages are full of discussion about pretty icons for the web site, no important issues like why there is still no p2pool for PPC when Novacoin, a scrypt based PPC fork, has had p2pool support for ages. Nor is there any meaningful discussion on promoting PPC. If there is going to be Proof of stake coiin that survives then its not going to be the from the current PPC group unless some radical change in attitude happens.

[amencon]

I can understand your view that Mincoin could be viewed as a clone of Litecoin but it can never be a pump and dump coin because it takes far too long to create a large portion of coins from which to dump.

The number of coins created is completely uncorrelated to the potential of pumping value into the coin then dumping it for a quick profit.

You can take any coin and label a multiple or fraction of that coin as the common unit to transact in.  Presto you get the psychological effect you are looking for without really having to change anything at all, certainly without needing an entire new coin to be created and marketed etc.  Forget the whole coin cap psychological effect and go back to the drawing board on all your ideas.

The only psychological appeal most alt coins bring is that of opportunity to buy it cheap before it rises and makes you rich.  People aren't jumping en mass on board these coins because of the logo or name or whatever other marketing fluff.

[Luckybit]

I can understand your view that Mincoin could be viewed as a clone of Litecoin but it can never be a pump and dump coin because it takes far too long to create a large portion of coins from which to dump.

The number of coins created is completely uncorrelated to the potential of pumping value into the coin then dumping it for a quick profit.

You can take any coin and label a multiple or fraction of that coin as the common unit to transact in.  Presto you get the psychological effect you are looking for without really having to change anything at all, certainly without needing an entire new coin to be created and marketed etc.  Forget the whole coin cap psychological effect and go back to the drawing board on all your ideas.

The only psychological appeal most alt coins bring is that of opportunity to buy it cheap before it rises and makes you rich.  People aren't jumping en mass on board these coins because of the logo or name or whatever other marketing fluff.

Prove it. And no it's not just the total number of coins created but also the rate of creation that contributes to pump and dump. If you create 50,000 coins a week from one coin then that one coin is going to have a lot of people trying to dump it at the end of the week because the supply will outpace the demand. What I want is for the demand to always outpace the supply so that these coins will have reasonable prices and be released at a reasonable rate and while miners might not be able to get quick profits I think it's better to slow the pace of inflation down. The total cap should be small because of psychological effect but the rate of inflation isn't just a psychological appeal to coin collector instincts but is real mathematics and is in my opinion really bad for markets. The rate of inflation has to be slowed and with Feathercoin and Chinacoin this did not happen and the result is these coins are now over mined, very cheap and psychologically a cheap coin has less people demanding to buy it.

Because why is are people all over Litecoin? It's nothing more than a well marketed coin catering to GPU miners. It's not more secure than Bitcoin. It's got a larger total cap for marketing purposes so people feel richer, it's allows for GPU mining so miners can make money, it has a catchy name and a really nice logo. It's in second place while PPcoin which actually is very innovative, is at best in third place. It's debatable if you think Proof of Stake will work but at least it's significantly different from Bitcoin and for security reasons not just to make miners happy or make speculators happy like with Litecoin and Mincoin.

In my opinion people jump on in mass because of marketing. Coins which have terrible marketing or no logo have less support and PPcoin is perfect example of such a coin with very good technology and ideas behind it and very little marketing which proves technology doesn't market itself.

[sterob]

So, some coins use scrypt.. so what.....

in short, any coin using anything other than SHA that my ASIC cant mine is worthless. They are scam