Effects of the alt-coin hype on Bitcoin

[ElectricMucus]

I think everybody has now noticed it, we are now at a rate where a new Bitcoin fork comes out every day. Almost all of them seem to include no improvements or tweaks.

Obviously most of them have a short time of hype and then decay into irrelevance quickly.
However during the last period of hype one coin, Litecoin turned out to stand the test of time and gain significant valuation during the past weeks.

Will there be another successful coin come out of this or is it just all a quick pump&dump? At which point would an increasing number of successful alt-coin eat into Bitcoins share?
What do you think?

[smoothie]

I think there will be another.

But it wont be a copy and paste solution and modify a couple of vars.

What the fuck is a FRANKO anyway? lol

[ElectricMucus]

Frankenstein-Coin?

As I remember it, Litecoin took the most popular features, (scrypt and faster blockrate with no pre-mine) to be successful. But I've yet to see such an attempt from this wave.

[BitcoinAshley]

Fortunately, the number of new copypasta forks as of late has started desensitizing people to them.

If a new coin succeeds, it will be one that uses the underlying Bitcoin concept but is written in a different programing language, from scratch, by a highly motivated and dedicated team of developers, who start with a protocol specification or at least extract one early on in the process. The development team/environment will be as decentralized as possible, which will require some thought. It will have few if any external dependencies and magic numbers/training wheels that automatically remove themselves once a certain stage of transaction activity or hashing power is reached. So we don't wait until the market cap is $1bil+ and then start arguing about how a certain magic number would affect the mining/tx economy if removed. Also, it will not use SHA256 due to the government's ridiculously large stash of SHA256 ASICs. Litecoin knows what's up.

It would perhaps include features that are not included in Bitcoin. Bitcoin-qt does not come with coin control interface by default (you have to add it) and there are other features that are commonly requested but will not be added for some time. Client-client messages, MofN transactions, etc.

Based on what I have read in the technical subforum, there is a way to code a lite client that requires 0 trust and only needs a small part of the blockchain. This solves the projected future problem of "the common desktop computer won't be able to store and validate the entire blockchain, so centralized servers will be required, so bitcoin is destined to be centralized." Wrong! Mathematics is complicated and smart people have already figured it out, go read up. But if a new coin is to become popular, it needs to be scalable from the start and that means the full node AND the partial node both need to be complete at release.

[w1R903]

Really, the whole alt coin subforum is a joke now.  It's sad, because if an alt coin is created that makes significant improvements, it will be drowned out by the daily pump n' dumps.

But no, I don't see any of these new forks having any effect on Bitcoin.

[Abandon]

I think that whatever decentralized virtual currency finds away around the delay needed for transactions, will take off. Perhaps even surpassing bitcoin. That is, if bitcoin doesn't adopt the feature itself.

In a way, I'm worried that the bitcoin infrastructure is going to become outdated without significant reform. I'm also worried about the monopoly on bitcoin, and its infrastructure. For instance, there is pretty much only one wallet, and even the things that are hard coded into bitcoin, can be changed without much difficulty if everyone is using the same wallet/nodes. At heart, bitcoin is a democracy with ideals, but democracy is not perfect, and can be corrupted or be unable to adapt.

[adpinbr]

Really, the whole alt coin subforum is a joke now.  It's sad, because if an alt coin is created that makes significant improvements, it will be drowned out by the daily pump n' dumps.

But no, I don't see any of these new forks having any effect on Bitcoin.

I disagree. Hypothetically lets say we had Votecoin. Now in VTC every block is solved by a SSN #. But the only entity that can enter the SSN in order to solve the block is a decentralized community such as us. You would upload your social security card and other documents to receive your Vote coin. the coin can then be entered into a wallet and has the ability to verify a message, thereby allowing id verification instantly anywhere. such a coin would hold value in its utility rather than its fiat conversion rate. so in essence you would be holding a share of a data system, and if say data system would replace other systems the value of your share would rise.

I think these are the kinds ideas that we need to see, but no one develops them cause there isn't ridiculous returns for early adopters and developers AKA no pump and dump

[adpinbr]

Fortunately, the number of new copypasta forks as of late has started desensitizing people to them.

If a new coin succeeds, it will be one that uses the underlying Bitcoin concept but is written in a different programing language, from scratch, by a highly motivated and dedicated team of developers, who start with a protocol specification or at least extract one early on in the process. The development team/environment will be as decentralized as possible, which will require some thought. It will have few if any external dependencies and magic numbers/training wheels that automatically remove themselves once a certain stage of transaction activity or hashing power is reached. So we don't wait until the market cap is $1bil+ and then start arguing about how a certain magic number would affect the mining/tx economy if removed. Also, it will not use SHA256 due to the government's ridiculously large stash of SHA256 ASICs. Litecoin knows what's up.

It would perhaps include features that are not included in Bitcoin. Bitcoin-qt does not come with coin control interface by default (you have to add it) and there are other features that are commonly requested but will not be added for some time. Client-client messages, MofN transactions, etc.

Based on what I have read in the technical subforum, there is a way to code a lite client that requires 0 trust and only needs a small part of the blockchain. This solves the projected future problem of "the common desktop computer won't be able to store and validate the entire blockchain, so centralized servers will be required, so bitcoin will be required to be decentralized." Wrong! Mathematics is complicated and smart people have already figured it out, go read up. But if a new coin is to become popular, it needs to be scalable from the start and that means the full node AND the partial node both need to be complete at release.

+1 abt LTC knowing whats up. If I may ask whats your crypto-portfolio consist of?

[BitcoinAshley]

+1 abt LTC knowing whats up. If I may ask whats your crypto-portfolio consist of?

You may ask, but I don't have to tell you 

JK though - I won't give exact percentages but in order from greatest to least - BTC, LTC, NMC, DVC, PPC, TRC, FTC
The sketchier ones I own a small amount of but not enough to really consider them a legit part of my portfolio.

Important to realize that the less popular a coin is and the more similar it is to existing coins, the more its role is pure speculation. People say "OMG Y u invest in XXcoin, it's just speculation!" Well duh. What do you think I'm doing, trying to order a computer online with PeePeeCoin, which isn't even decentralized? The volatility with these alts is a dream come true for speculators. I'm about to order cat food online with bitcoin but all I'm trying to do with TRC is mad profitz yo. Look at the recent swing and try to figure out how much % gain I made

[Hfleer]

Seems like every 5th member wants their own coin now.

[amencon]

I think that there is a certain percentage of crytocurrency investment money that will go to alt coins.  The alt coins will fight for their piece of this percentage until a coin is created that is vastly superior to BTC based on majority consensus.  Without that event it seems likely that more alt coins will eat into this alt coin share rather than BTC's share.

I base this on the idea that few, uninterested in BTC, would invest in an alt coin.  Mostly it seems like alt coin investors are mostly BTC investors that are diversifying their portfolio a bit in case a certain alt coin "goes to the moon".  So if someone decides to hedge their bets a bit with 10% of their cryptocurrency investments going into alt coins, I don't think 100 more alt coins will change that percentage and if anything the investor will spread that 10% to the different alt coins they think has a chance of making big gains.

[Frozenlock]

Mostly it seems like alt coin investors are mostly BTC investors that are diversifying their portfolio a bit in case a certain alt coin "goes to the moon".

Indeed. I wonder what would happen if Bitcoin were to crash. 

[adamstgBit]

i think all these alt coins will fail...

one day a true competitor to BTC will come along and Really try hard to out do and steal bitcoins thunder, and when that day comes bitcoin's price might drop a little but all the alt coins will drop to 0 including ltc.

[amencon]

Mostly it seems like alt coin investors are mostly BTC investors that are diversifying their portfolio a bit in case a certain alt coin "goes to the moon".

Indeed. I wonder what would happen if Bitcoin were to crash. 

Following the LTC price here and there for the most part it looks like when BTC crashes LTC price does as well.  I'd expect a major BTC crash to hit the alt coins just as hard or harder unless the crash was related to some flaw in BTC not present in certain alt coins.

[ElectricMucus]

Mostly it seems like alt coin investors are mostly BTC investors that are diversifying their portfolio a bit in case a certain alt coin "goes to the moon".

Indeed. I wonder what would happen if Bitcoin were to crash.  

They actually followed suit down from 266. Before that LTC had some inverse relationship with BTC but that changed after it gained significant traction.

i think all these alt coins will fail...

one day a true competitor to BTC will come along and Really try hard to out do and steal bitcoins thunder, and when that day comes bitcoin's price might drop a little but all the alt coins will drop to 0 including ltc.

I think BTC would have to be pretty much threatened by extinction by a competitor which is yet to come for this to happen. Altcoins are in one way part of it, I already brought up the theory that they should follow an asymptotic law and not exceed a certain percentage of Bitcoins market valuation as a whole. The question is how much?

Depending on how you look at it if Bitcoin is a whale the altcoins are the little fish eating excess skin from it and keep it healthy or the parasites living in it...

[crazy_rabbit]

I think Litecoin and Namecoin will stick around (Namecoin if someone can do something interesting with it), but the extreme number of alt-coins these days I think points to a failure of alt-coins. Their value in general is rapidly declining against the bitcoin, which seems to indicate to me that Bitcoin is hitting network effect and the people have decided it will be the sole coin.