Coin competition is NOT healthy

[digitalindustry]

So lets get Bitcoin into the mainstream first, then we can afford the luxury of making tweaks and alternate coins.

What is this "we" business?

lol +1

[xibeijan]

This is hilarious.. There is no other way to put it - you are trying to regulate coins.

This is a free market and in a free market competition is very healthy.

I'm just trying to get cryptocoin supporters to join forces except of cannibalizing itself. Of course the 'free market' will behave as it wishes...but wild free markets can also end up shooting itself in the foot and ruining the fun for everyone.

FUD

[anderl]

This is hilarious.. There is no other way to put it - you are trying to regulate coins.

This is a free market and in a free market competition is very healthy.

I'm just trying to get cryptocoin supporters to join forces except of cannibalizing itself. Of course the 'free market' will behave as it wishes...but wild free markets can also end up shooting itself in the foot and ruining the fun for everyone.

DO it by improving bitcoin.  The reason there is competition is because bitcoin does not provide everything people are looking for.  You can thank its weakness to ASIC chips for that.  It was supposed to be community drive but its been it has been hijacked by private groups that have scammed money of of the community to build our miners that never come out.  Meanwhile ASICs seem to magically be hashing the hell out of Bitcoin.

The alts are actually HELPING bitcoin by forcing it to either adapt or die. 

[elessdai]

I think coin competition is not healthy just for competition itself. If don't see how a copy paste coin from bitcoin or litecoin could survive, it's not just change in the reward and block time that will change something enough to make it live. If a copy of bitcoin come, ASIC jump in doing pump and dump and leave with very high difficulty. Same thing happen with new scrypt coin when all gpu jump in to do easy money.

[memvola]

Don't be a part of the problem. That's a solution.

Nonsense. The "please stop" approach only works when you have authority.

Nope.

People discuss what's the best all the time. Reasonable people derive their conclusions from such discussions. Other people can't produce results anyway.

I'm just trying to get cryptocoin supporters to join forces except of cannibalizing itself.

"I don't trust people to act in their own best interest.  Instead of trying to understand their reasoning, I'll use disrespectful terms for their decision, like "cannibalizing," to try to pressure them to do what I think they should be doing."

Disrespecting the market? Wow, that's really bad...

The word "cannibalizing" is very appropriate there, regardless of whether s/he's right or wrong.

[atcsecure]

The ASICS situation is a problem right now for Bitcoin.  A tiny handful of people who were lucky enough to receive preorders are reaping the lion's share of the mining profits.

It is understandable that the tens of thousands of GPU miners, who essentially built the currency and promoted its popularity over the years, want to move on to something new and ASICS resistant rather than reinvest in entirely new hardware from ASICS manufacturers of, in cases, questionable repute.

I would predict Litecoin will continue to rise in value relative to Bitcoin and may well overtake it

Not sure what role the copy-cat currencies play, if any - perhaps temporary coins that briefly facilitate lightning fast transactions; i.e. convert BTC to BBQ, move the coins QUICKLY on the BBQ network to another exchange, and then convert BBQ back to BTC.  That is a silly role, of course, but it is a useful one I have used LTC to move BTC since the confirms are much faster.

Bingo - this a major issue - the ASIC card has had a negative impact on the miners who have been supporting the actual network

[atcsecure]

This is hilarious.. There is no other way to put it - you are trying to regulate coins.

This is a free market and in a free market competition is very healthy.

I'm just trying to get cryptocoin supporters to join forces except of cannibalizing itself. Of course the 'free market' will behave as it wishes...but wild free markets can also end up shooting itself in the foot and ruining the fun for everyone.

DO it by improving bitcoin.  The reason there is competition is because bitcoin does not provide everything people are looking for.  You can thank its weakness to ASIC chips for that.  It was supposed to be community drive but its been it has been hijacked by private groups that have scammed money of of the community to build our miners that never come out.  Meanwhile ASICs seem to magically be hashing the hell out of Bitcoin.

The alts are actually HELPING bitcoin by forcing it to either adapt or die. 

Something is hashing the hell out of bitcoin thats for sure

[anderl]

I think coin competition is not healthy just for competition itself. If don't see how a copy paste coin from bitcoin or litecoin could survive, it's not just change in the reward and block time that will change something enough to make it live. If a copy of bitcoin come, ASIC jump in doing pump and dump and leave with very high difficulty. Same thing happen with new scrypt coin when all gpu jump in to do easy money.

I'll give you $500 and week to either buy an ASIC or a GPU.  Tell me which one you stand a chance of obtaining.  GPUs are not ASICs.  GPUs have a low barrier of entry.  Sure you are trounced by the farmers but that is the free market.  If you can grow your GPU farm from 1 to many by being better than the existing farms you win in the free market.  ASICs have blocked the road for the average user.  You need $20k and a prayer or an established GPU farm that will get you next to nothing in BTC.  Bitcoin needs an upgrade.

[bootlace]

A natural monopoly by contrast is a condition on the cost-technology of an industry whereby it is most efficient (involving the lowest long-run average cost) for production to be concentrated in a single firm.

a couple of tiny little problems - you completely contradicted yourself, you posted the definition of a "Natural monopoly" , too , ah? sound smart?

an example of a natural monopoly type effect is say "Apple iPhone" (pre iPhone 5 and Samsung)

so you are saying that this alt coin spam is in effect a "Natural monopoly" ..

i'll just get you to explain that for me ok...

I copy/pasted the definition from Wikipedia, not trying to be smart at all.. I wouldn't consider the Apple iPhone a natural monopoly back in the day, because them having control of the full smartphone market is not beneficial for the users as they can charge more, stop being innovative, get lazy etc..

For a new internet currency like Bitcoin - it is not very useful to have many competing clones because the purpose of a currency is to be able to conduct trade on as broad a market as possible. Imagine if new forms of the internet popped up every day that required a new form of computer, new DNS system, new usage method, new software to run it. And imagine this happened around the time when the general public weren't even convinced at the necessity of even having something called the internet. Then you might be able to envision what Bitcoin is facing.

[markm]

Mining should tend toward zero profit.

It is the kind of marginal industry in which who-ever can do it more efficiently can eke out what little profit there is and less-efficient operations are doomed.

ASICs are needed, what is killing us is they are taking too long. We were supposed to have them last october. Investment in the mining sector was suppressed massively by having to keep on waiting a little longer and a little longer and a little longer for ASICs that never came.

Now Scrypt FPGAs are possibly on the horizon, hopefully they will be able to ramp up to massively massive mass-production FAST as soon as a viable design is proven by a working prototype. Otherwise Scrypt could find itself in the same suppressed-investment situation while miners wait a little longer and a little longer and a little longer for FPGAs instead of deploying more GPUs.

We need fast ramp up to truly massive mass-production down pat so each new generation of mining hardware can be in miners' hands faster.

-MarkM-

[collapse]

Free market, free result,...

[mr_random]

People are already starting to ignore coins which don't offer anything new. Royal Coin looks like it gained virtually no traction from it's launch. It's getting harder. A coin has to have a new idea now or 'twist' to get momentum... YACoin did that with the cpu mining thing. Not buying any though, I don't see the cpu mining thing lasting long

[Walter Rothbard]

People are already starting to ignore coins which don't offer anything new.

Oh, I've been doing that for awhile, now!

[markm]

People are already starting to ignore coins which don't offer anything new. Royal Coin looks like it gained virtually no traction from it's launch. It's getting harder. A coin has to have a new idea now or 'twist' to get momentum... YACoin did that with the cpu mining thing. Not buying any though, I don't see the cpu mining thing lasting long

CPU mining has lasted years already.

There has maybe even never been a time when there was not at least one, and usually several, coins that a CPU miner could rake in quite nicely.

Maybe though now that BBQcoin has started to pay off those "early adopters" who mined it with CPUs the last year or two it might get harder to mine the remaining coins that are still currently excellent havens for CPU miners.

Nice thing is though that by the very act of coming back to those chains and driving their difficulty up too high for CPU miners, GPU miners precipitate the payoff era, the era BBQcoin has started into, when all those long long months of CPU mining finally pay off handsomely for all the CPU miners.

So actually, CPU mining has been doing really really well all this time. The only reason it might not have seemed that way is that the less attention the larger miners pay to a chain the more lucrative it is for CPU miners. So of course the CPU miners have a vested interest in going for long long long periods of time without the kind of publicity that might bring the larger miners to their chain prematurely. (Premature being a subjective thing, each CPU miner having maybe a different target number of coins they want to mine before that happens and a different number of coins already mined.)

-MarkM-

[willhash4food]

Nope.

People discuss what's the best all the time. Reasonable people derive their conclusions from such discussions. Other people can't produce results anyway.

"Reasonable" is a term relative to the individual and does not apply here. What conclusions one person thinks is reasonable, another may not.

Not everyone thinks in the manner that the OP does. Attempting to sway the masses purely out of words (no specific solutions) is on the same level as Sunday school preacher. Pointless.

[Simran]

There are some factors that make it healthy and unhealthy. It's healthy because it sparks ideas and allows others to share them(Even though most of the new one's have the minimal idea put into them). the unhealthy part is that it affects adoption by merchants. Merchants are one of the essential aspects that make a coin successful. There are too many options, and causes confusion to the merchants being able to choose a coin they'd like to accept. With that, it isn't about the preference of the merchant simply because the merchant might like a coin that has no traction and isn't going to get more sales, that's why they choose a coin with more stability. Another risk the merchant takes is the price falling, with all the coins, nearly all the prices for every coin have been high volatile. This strays merchants away from accepting cryptos.

[markm]

All the merchant has to choose is which payment-processor to use.

An easy solution to any concern about there being lots of fiat and crypto currencies in the world is to choose the payment processor that processes the largest number of varieties of fiat and crypto currencies.

Because ultimately the merchant just wants to get their normal everyday money they normally every day get for their product, without caring what the heck the end-user uses as currency to convince the payment processor to give the merchant what the merchant wants.

-MarkM-

[HorseRider]

Human beings get ill frequently.  don't worry. accept the truth.

[sunsofdust]

Free market, free result,...

+1

Economics 101

[BBQKorv]

I think the competition is pretty healthy. Only the strong ones will survive and that means we don't need to watch the weak ones barely moving anywhere. This problem will solve itself in a little while.

We have already learned quite a bit from the recent coin releases, haven't we? Maybe next coins will get the launch done in a proper way and avoid all the problems and accusitions we have seen over and over again with the current offerings. Brainless copycatting doesn't bring any extra value to the community, and hopefully dies soon.

Now it's time for new innovation and ideas.