Theymos's list of altcoins with some technical merit

[theymos]

Most altcoins are pure pump-and-dump, but there are a small handful that actually have some technical merit. I will list them here, according to my opinion/understanding.

For each one, I will assign a technical merit/innovation score. On the day of its release, Bitcoin would have had a score of 100, whereas a score of 0 would be a pure pump-and-dump built on stupid gimmicks and other nonsense -- I don't list these at all.

Ethereum

The way Ethereum's Solidity works is very interesting. It feels good to use, like magic. When people first see it, it often blows their minds. And there are several useful things that these super-smart contracts enable. However, Ethereum is built on the same technology as Bitcoin, and this technology has serious real-world issues and constraints. So although Solidity feels unlimited and magical:

- You often need to resort to centralization in order to do things, which completely defeats the point.
- Not all, but most real-world uses of Solidity can be done on Bitcoin, though it's more of a headache (like writing in assembly vs JavaScript).
- The Solidity "magic" hides many real-world issues which can still occur, such as reorgs, network-wide scaling issues, various possible attacks, etc. -- this is the cause of most of the various ETH disasters over the years.

ETH makes the power of cryptocurrency and smart contracts very plain to people, and I appreciate that, but it's not actually very good at being a cryptocurrency or securely/efficiently/reliably executing smart contracts.

Additionally, Ethereum ignored years of prior discussion regarding the safety issues of high-power scripts, and as a result of this and other design decisions, it faces serious security and scaling issues which have really started to become apparent as people try to actually use ETH for real applications. I can't see it surviving without major breaking changes or (more likely) an ever-increasing number of centralization band-aids.

Score: 1

IOTA

The tangle design is interesting and potentially useful, though I have several serious concerns about how it will actually work long-term:

 - In order to achieve lasting, stable scalability, something will need to be done to limit bandwidth. Otherwise you still have the problem that everyone needs to download everyone else's transactions in order to be a trustless node, and this simply doesn't scale no matter what else you do. How can you split the network so that one node can trustlessly ignore a lot of the network's total transactions, but transactions are still possible cross-split? Doing something like splitting the graph into a cycle of semi-separate segments might be possible, but it seems very difficult to do this and maintain security+convergence.
 - With a chain, if miners become evil and rewrite the last 6 blocks or something, everyone is going to notice and be affected, and so a unified response (PoW change, etc.) will be fairly easy. But with a graph, maybe an attacker could just nibble at the edges in such a way that 99.99% of users are able to think "well, it's not really my problem". In fact, it may not even be easily provable that an attack happened at all.
 - I am not convinced that a tangle is stable/convergent/secure in all circumstances. Even if it seems to work under all tests so far, it may well fall apart under a clever but not-too-difficult attack, or perhaps even just on its own. The whole idea that transaction volume is what adds security to the tangle makes me uneasy, since an attacker can always produce unlimited fake transactions, while the network will only produce a "natural" number of transactions unless additional measures are taken to generate good fake transactions.

Possibly due to the IOTA devs sharing similar concerns, IOTA's software currently relies on centralized checkpointing.

Score: 0.1

Monero

Monero is the most widely-used highly-fungible cryptocurrency, and it has a good record for being secure/stable. Fungibility is very useful, and the way it is done in Monero is quite good, though it's not actually mathematically private; it is theoretically possible to get some identifying clues from Monero transactions without breaking any crypto, though it's very difficult, especially after RingCT. Its method of anonymization has very severe scaling downsides, however; Monero makes Bitcoin look Visa-scale.

Score: 4

Zcash

Zcash has the same general goals as Monero. Theoretically, it should have slightly better anonymity than Monero, but you have to trust that the key ceremony was completed honestly, and you also have to trust that there are no flaws in Zcash's more esoteric/experimental cryptography.

Creating/validating anonymous Zcash transactions requires several gigabytes of memory, which is very harmful to centralization and anonymity. If you're the only person who goes to the trouble of creating anonymous transactions, then you'll stick out like a sore thumb.

Zcash's underlying technology may have theoretical scaling advantages; probably better than Monero, and perhaps better than even Bitcoin. But I don't think that this is being exploited at all in the current code, and I haven't been able to find an exact quantification of how good it could be.

Score: 1

Unlisted

I have investigated these coins, and give them a score of zero. Note that when a family of coins have almost the same technical features/properties, I give the one which seems "most major" its proper score, and the rest in that family a score of zero. If you very much prefer a clone's economic properties, tiny changes in constants, etc., then it is maybe not unreasonable for you to prefer that clone instead, but in this post I am concerned with highlighting the most prominent examples of major innovation.

 - Bcash - clone of Bitcoin
 - Bytecoin - very similar to Monero, and Monero is bigger / more active, even though Bytecoin came first
 - CounterParty - an even more inefficient/unscalable way of trying to do what Ethereum does
 - Dogecoin - clone of Bitcoin
 - ETC - clone of ETH
 - Litecoin - clone of Bitcoin
 - NMC - mostly a clone of Bitcoin with some not-very-innovative extras tacked on
 - Ripple - 100% centralized
 - zcoin - clone of zcash

Not yet evaluated

I haven't investigated these enough yet to give them scores.

 - BitBay
 - Blocknet
 - Byteball
 - CloakCoin
 - Dash
 - GameCredits
 - Neo
 - PIVX
 - Waves
 - XEM
 - XtraBYtes
 - Zencash

[1715173930]

1715173930

[1715173930]

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[BitcoinBarrel]

Solid coins for sure. What do you think of Dash?

[theymos]

What do you think of Dash?

I've heard that it's highly centralized, but I haven't looked into it in depth yet.

[McWorse]

Would be interesting to have a score for BTC. Do you dare to give one?

[Midas111]

agree on all points except monero would get .1 for unlimited supply

[sui_generis]

agree on all points except monero would get .1 for unlimited supply

Sub 1% yearly inflation really isn't that big of a deal. The coin will still be deflationary, because wallets are lost, coins are sent to incorrect addresses, etc.

[25hashcoin]

Are these the coins you invested in that you will try to push once BitcoinCash overtakes BitcoinCore?

[lakimens]

Would be interesting to have a score for BTC. Do you dare to give one?

BitCoin would have a score of 100, as he said above.

Interesting, but these are all mainstream coins, what about some less known?

[25hashcoin]

Would be interesting to have a score for BTC. Do you dare to give one?

BitCoin would have a score of 100, as he said above.

Interesting, but these are all mainstream coins, what about some less known?

I like ZenCash, which is an improvement over Zcash. Also Ethereum Classic should have been mentioned.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Possibly due to the IOTA devs sharing similar concerns, IOTA's software currently relies on centralized checkpointing.

No. "Checkpointing" is done to protect against 34% attacks which would be conducted by dudes publishing Bible on Bitcoin blockchain. Just wait for IOTA network to become larger.

[vit05]

From 0 to 100 you give just 1 to ETH?

[miffman]

agree on all points except monero would get .1 for unlimited supply

It's a disinflationary coin. It'll act more like real cash than bitcoin.

[DiMiTri101]

So then, what coins do you like and why?

[electricretard]

From 0 to 100 you give just 1 to ETH?

That is what we call "being a maximalist" lol. Boy are those people gonna be surprised, funny how most of them still... well, let's not get into that, wrong thread I guess.

[kelsey]

theymos, i partially agree but you are way to generous with such high scores to the above.

btw which bitcoin do you give 100 to    

curious of your thoughts on litecoin ?

[goin2mars.]

Oh my, excellent allocations

Although I would have given iota at least a .3

[whap]

agree on all points except monero would get .1 for unlimited supply

In 300 years, XMR supply will still be less than Litecoin supply.

[jeffthebaker]

I'm not going to sit here and argue about coins I think are revolutionary (GameCredits) which you probably write off as useless, but I would like to know your thoughts on CounterParty. I'm surprised you don't see it as having any technical merit.

[luey]

How big is your mining farm? 

[ziploc+]

What about

LTC

and

BTH

You must know these coins...

[25hashcoin]

What about

LTC

and

BTH

You must know these coins...

Bitcoin Cash is not an altcoin. It is Bitcoin.

LTC is a useless copycat scam.

[Traxo]

Monero is the most widely-used highly-fungible cryptocurrency, and it has a good record for being secure/stable.

Incorrect. It has a horrible historical record as proven by Andrew Miller a widely respected cryptographer.

As for the increase in minimum ring signature mixin level, the Cryptonote upgrade to RingCT, and the 2014 MNL-001 Monero labs research report, that was all rebutted in great detail.

Monero…Fungibility is very useful, and the way it is done in Monero is quite good,

Monero is lacking the type of fungibility that Bitcoin-SegWit is about to be slayed with. Zerocash technology has the required type of fungibility:

If the outcome I'm positing comes to fruition, it will mean that every fork of Bitcoin is a threat which requires coloring UTXO based upon their age, with older UTXO worth more than newer. Because buyers will value older UTXO more, since less probability of being stolen by a chain reorganization .

This is death to Bitcoin as a decentralized, fungible token system. Cryptonote/Monero anonymity could not help, because ring signatures only attempt to obscure potential sender identity, but do nothing to obscure the timing of UTXO formation. Whereas, the Zerocash zkSNARKs anonymity technology does obscure the timing of UTXO formation!

Its method of anonymization has very severe scaling downsides, however; Monero makes Bitcoin look Visa-scale.

Correct. And after they do the rigorous math to determine what level of ring mixins are required to counteract all threats, the scaling will at least get worse than it already is, if not be totally debunked as a viable anonymity solution.
Besides PoW is not secure on altcoins; and that is worse on an anonymity coin that employs explicit rings, because it makes it theoretically a honeypot (and by theory we mean probably already is and it is impossible to disprove or prove it is already).

Any way, PoW is entirely incentives incompatible as block reward declines and most revenue comes from transaction fees.
And no, Byzcoin didn't fix the insoluble problem.
PoW can only function with perpetual inflation or a mining oligarchy.

Sorry for all the bad news. Reality sucks.

Bitcoin Cash is not an altcoin. It is Bitcoin.

LTC is a useless copycat scam.

When the difficulty "attack" starts on BTC-SegWit, then both BCH and LTC will rise as BTC declines in a spiral,
because BCH doesn't have SegWit thus BCH can't scale offline.

[aeternus]

I'm not going to sit here and argue about coins I think are revolutionary (GameCredits) which you probably write off as useless, but I would like to know your thoughts on CounterParty. I'm surprised you don't see it as having any technical merit.

Well, I do not see anything about counterparty in theymos post, so I do not know how you arrived at that conclusion, there are so many coins and projects that even if you dedicated all your walking hours to read about them I doubt you will get to know them all.

Also I find very interesting that Theymos gave its highest score to monero a coin that I think it has one of the brightest futures.

[Traxo]

- I am not convinced that a tangle is stable/convergent/secure in all circumstances. Even if it seems to work under all tests so far, it may well fall apart under a clever but not-too-difficult attack, or perhaps even just on its own.

Possibly due to the IOTA devs sharing similar concerns, IOTA's software currently relies on centralized checkpointing.

I'm surprised to see you promoting such a scam:

IOTA and its research proposal predecessor DagCoin don’t record any form of objective transaction finality (such as Byteball’s stability points) for the unsynchronized partial orders of transactions in the ledger!

Transactions include some PoW so that tips (leaves) of the DAG branches are extended with probabilistically more cumulative PoW as new descendant transactions are issued, but there is nothing forcing these unsynchronized partial orders to converge on a single-total ordering, i.e. there is no probabilistic finality of transaction confirmation. In fact, (in the absence of IOTA’s “Coordinator” centralized servers) the partial orders will have conflicting orders due to double-spends, and there is no leadership election process nor witnesses set to decide on the ordering of the conflicts.

The (load of misleading technobabble bullshit) theory of their convergence to a single total ordering based on network propagation order (which experts know can never be provably consistent for all nodes without some synchronization algorithm) and/or a model requiring centralized enforcement of the algorithms employed by the payer and payee, which is inherently insecure due to unconstrained divergence. IOTA employs centralized servers named “Coordinator” (apparently not mentioned at least in the early revisions in the whitepaper) to enforce the whitepaper’s Monte Carlo strategy on all participants. IOTA has been challenged numerous times by numerous people (including the guy who challenged the developer @Come-from-Beyond to remove their Coordinator centralized enforcement in order to prove that IOTA will function decentralized, and afaik they have never done so.

That guy was threatened with a lawsuit by the “IOTA Founder” @iotatoken (real name is David Sønstebø) if he would attempt to publish these truths.

[qwizzie]

What do you think of Dash?

I've heard that it's highly centralized, but I haven't looked into it in depth yet.

Maybe it is time you do look into it in depth instead of repeating hearsay. It would be interesting
to have someone analyse Dash on its technical merit, which is after all the focus of your thread.

[xtrump101]

Hi im just curious about xem, id be happy to know what are your in-depth thoughts about it, does it had a solid foundation and worth for investment? And also how do you looked at ETC in 3-5 years from now? Thank you!

[NorrisK]

What is the reason you are suddenly putting so much effort into investigating multiple altcoins?

Just out of curiousity.

[illyiller]

Additionally, Ethereum ignored years of prior discussion regarding the safety issues of high-power scripts, and as a result of this and other design decisions, it faces serious security and scaling issues which have really started to become apparent as people try to actually use ETH for real applications. I can't see it surviving without major breaking changes or (more likely) an ever-increasing number of centralization band-aids.
Score: 1

I'm surprised you gave Ethereum a "1" given that its proposed PoS and/or sharding solutions are, at this point, vapor ware. It's purely a gamble long term because its solutions are unproven, even on paper.

Its method of anonymization has very severe scaling downsides, however; Monero makes Bitcoin look Visa-scale.

This seems to be the major downside of Zcash as well -- which might be why they didn't make anonymous transactions mandatory. The result of that, though, is that it isn't very private. Very curious to see what Tumblebit brings to Bitcoin....

Definitely curious to see your evaluation of other privacy-minded coins. That definitely seems to be the biggest obstacle for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general.

[theheolyn]

What do you think of Dash?

I've heard that it's highly centralized, but I haven't looked into it in depth yet.

Maybe it is time you do look into it in depth instead of repeating hearsay. It would be interesting
to have someone analyse Dash on its technical merit, which is after all the focus of your thread.

Dash has the worst technology:

“no one—who properly understands anonymity technology—uses Dash’s masternode scam honeypot”

There was more discussion here.

If you want really anonymous and untraceable transactions, use Monero.

The anonymity of Monero is in doubt.

[McWorse]

Would be interesting to have a score for BTC. Do you dare to give one?

BitCoin would have a score of 100, as he said above.

Wrong. BTC would have had a score of 100 at the day of release. But now the technic behind BTC is getting older and older. Other coins might have better technic now. The other coins the op mentionend are scored with their current status. So if you want to compare all these coins with BTC, you should compare them under the same conditions: Now, or at the day of release.
That's why I am asking about the score of BTC (now).

[dreaman]

Omg,admin let mco go to moon,had buy more mco before

[tobs]

Would be interesting to have a score for BTC. Do you dare to give one?

BitCoin would have a score of 100, as he said above.

Wrong. BTC would have had a score of 100 at the day of release. But now the technic behind BTC is getting older and older. Other coins might have better technic now. The other coins the op mentionend are scored with their current status. So if you want to compare all these coins with BTC, you should compare them under the same conditions: Now, or at the day of release.
That's why I am asking about the score of BTC (now).

But BTC has indeed that 100+ advantage over anything because of being the first one and the most popular and already established. Cryptocurrencies are even divided into that Bitcoin and Altcoins, already showing which one is important and the rest are thrown into one dump basket. Even if new better technologically coins emerge, people won't transition to these new better coins, so we are now forever stuck with bitcoin being number one no matter if he indeed is the best and most efficient one.

[kryptqnick]

This list is rather interesting, I think we all appreciate what theymos wrote on the coins. And yet can someone explain to me why doge received zero in this ranking? I can't understand it's technical side but what I know of it seems quite convincing not to think of it as a scammy nothing. For example, instant transactions don't let us say that it's a btc clone. This coin is also experiencing inflation which is something different from bitcoin. I also thought it has a code which is safer than btc's, this coin is less likely to suffer from various attacks. Finally, the community of people who really use dogecoin in their life is huge, I heard that among cryptocurrencies only bitcoin has a bigger community. Am I wrong somewhere?

[talkbitcoin]

i am surprised by these scores since they are out of 100! i mean why bother even talking about something with a score of 0.1 out of 100?

in any case it would be great to add your thoughts on Byteball too, since it is the most expensive coin after bitcoin and offers interesting features including anonymous transactions with BlackBytes:
ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1608859.0
Site: https://byteball.org/

[ziploc+]

What about

LTC

and

BTH

You must know these coins...

Bitcoin Cash is not an altcoin. It is Bitcoin.

LTC is a useless copycat scam.

I was asking theymos...but

according to you LTC = 0 and

BTH 100 ? therefore we have 2 100s

BTC and BTH ? there is a difference between those two....

[zabisux]

I really needed to this kind of list from veterans. Thank you so much! I hope this list is gonna be extended by time for further information on different coins as well.

[cryptohunter]

Ive seen some reviews on these but would like to see more. Sadly we have nobody with the required skill level who is willing any longer.

Byteball
pivX vs dash
zcoin
Mrai
xtrabytes

cloak
Blocknet
Bitbay

aeon and bbr -


these to me are the the most interesting designs or twists on old designs.

[fluffypony]

agree on all points except monero would get .1 for unlimited supply

The tail emission is less than 1% when it kicks in, and given that there is natural coin loss it'll tend towards zero or even be deflationary in nature.

More importantly, the tail emission is REQUIRED to prevent out-of-band payments to miners, which can be used to attack the dynamic block size limiter. I have yet to hear a sound argument for why deflation is required for a good MONEY, although I'm sure it's required for a good INVESTMENT. Monero's stated goal is to be the former, not the latter.

[sasaku bitbit]

I think if I found a way to produce the best technical yanag in Theymos then they will give you a maximum results for some of the altcoin that you have, perhaps this would make a good future and deserve. this way would facilitate us in the movement of the coins because they provide interesting surprises

[McWorse]

Would be interesting to have a score for BTC. Do you dare to give one?

BitCoin would have a score of 100, as he said above.

Wrong. BTC would have had a score of 100 at the day of release. But now the technic behind BTC is getting older and older. Other coins might have better technic now. The other coins the op mentionend are scored with their current status. So if you want to compare all these coins with BTC, you should compare them under the same conditions: Now, or at the day of release.
That's why I am asking about the score of BTC (now).

But BTC has indeed that 100+ advantage over anything because of being the first one and the most popular and already established. Cryptocurrencies are even divided into that Bitcoin and Altcoins, already showing which one is important and the rest are thrown into one dump basket. Even if new better technologically coins emerge, people won't transition to these new better coins, so we are now forever stuck with bitcoin being number one no matter if he indeed is the best and most efficient one.

Let's see:

Zuse Z3 = Score 100
Quantum Computer = Score 0.4

Really... ?

Or:

Telephone with hand-cranked magneto generator = Score 100
Smartphone = Score 0.01
(because hackable and using old computer and telephone technology)

Sounds a little bit silly to me...

[lakimens]

Would be interesting to have a score for BTC. Do you dare to give one?

BitCoin would have a score of 100, as he said above.

Wrong. BTC would have had a score of 100 at the day of release. But now the technic behind BTC is getting older and older. Other coins might have better technic now. The other coins the op mentionend are scored with their current status. So if you want to compare all these coins with BTC, you should compare them under the same conditions: Now, or at the day of release.
That's why I am asking about the score of BTC (now).

But BTC has indeed that 100+ advantage over anything because of being the first one and the most popular and already established. Cryptocurrencies are even divided into that Bitcoin and Altcoins, already showing which one is important and the rest are thrown into one dump basket. Even if new better technologically coins emerge, people won't transition to these new better coins, so we are now forever stuck with bitcoin being number one no matter if he indeed is the best and most efficient one.

Let's see:

Zuse Z3 = Score 100
Quantum Computer = Score 0.4

Really... ?

Or:

Telephone with hand-cranked magneto generator = Score 100
Smartphone = Score 0.01
(because hackable and using old computer and telephone technology)

Sounds a little bit silly to me...

It is silly.
First, I have no idea why you would give 100 to BTC?
I'd rather give 100 to LTC, because my transaction passed in under 2 minutes, I wait 2 hours for BTC.

Yes, when BTC was alone, of course it was 100, because there were no others.

[theheolyn]

But BTC has indeed that 100+ advantage over anything because of being the first one and the most popular and already established.

Which is Bitcoin: BTC w/SegWit fork, the 2MB hardfork of BTC+SegWit coming, Bitcoin Cash fork, Satoshi’s protocol original Bitcoin?

Seems Bitcoin became an altcoin.

[illyiller]

But BTC has indeed that 100+ advantage over anything because of being the first one and the most popular and already established.

Which is Bitcoin: BTC w/SegWit fork, the 2MB hardfork of BTC+SegWit coming, Bitcoin Cash fork, Satoshi’s protocol original Bitcoin?

Seems Bitcoin became an altcoin.

It's not immediately clear.

One take regards the ETH/ETC debacle. Let's forget for the moment that ETC itself is a hard fork of the original Ethereum protocol. Versus ETH, it is the original protocol. So what makes ETH the real Ethereum? Is it support from the vast majority of developers (comparable to Core)? Is it majority hashpower (I hope not)? Is it majority economic activity? Is it some composite of these things?

These aren't easy questions to answer...

[theymos]

I added a list of coins that I've investigated and given a score of 0 to, and a list of coins that I haven't investigated yet. I'll look into the uninvestigated ones as I have time.

Would be interesting to have a score for BTC. Do you dare to give one?

These scores are basically how much I think that the coin has advanced the field of cryptocurrency through its innovations. Therefore, the scores don't decay over time. When Bitcoin was first created, I define it as having a score of 100. Now, it has advanced even more, so I'll give it a current score of 106.

I'm not trying to give an "overall technical quality" score here. I don't think that such a score would be all that useful, since anyone can create a "high-quality" altcoin by just cloning Bitcoin (probably with a few minor tweaks). Maybe such coins could survive, and in some cases you might even make money from them, but I don't find them interesting.

agree on all points except monero would get .1 for unlimited supply

That's not a factor that I'm evaluating here.

Incorrect. It has a horrible historical record as proven by Andrew Miller a widely respected cryptographer.

As for the increase in minimum ring signature mixin level, the Cryptonote upgrade to RingCT, and the 2014 MNL-001 Monero labs research report, that was all rebutted in great detail.

I am aware of all of those potential attacks, and I mentioned in my post that Monero is not the black box that it is often assumed to be. (And I went into more detail here.) But despite those issues, Monero is typically far better than any Bitcoin mixer, for example.

I mentioned that zcash is theoretically more anonymous than Monero, but its software is basically unusable for most people right now.

I'm surprised to see you promoting such a scam:

That criticism of IOTA may ultimately be correct, but it's not clear to me. It mentions facts about IOTA which I already know, and then claims that this obviously makes IOTA broken. I am not convinced that IOTA is convergent, which is why I only gave it a score of 0.1, but it strikes me as possible, and a good area for research.

Someone should create an IOTA simulation where there's double-spending attempts, latency, etc. with no coordinators and a large volume of transactions.

And yet can someone explain to me why doge received zero in this ranking?

It's just a clone of Bitcoin with slightly different parameters. Possibly useful in some cases, but it lacks any new tech.

What is the reason you are suddenly putting so much effort into investigating multiple altcoins?

I was thinking of creating a cryptocoin index based on my scores, and see how it'd compare to equal-weight / market-cap-weight / BTC-only indexes. Equal-weight or market-cap-weight indexes massively underweight BTC IMO due to treating no-innovation pump-and-dump coins too seriously. I don't know at this point whether technical merit actually helps the price at all, but it might; personally, I would be very reluctant to invest long-term in something with no real innovation like Dogecoin.

[McWorse]

A hackneyed example:

Archie = Score 100
Google = Score 0.1

Which one had been better for longterm investment?

It is a nice idea, to build up a ranking of innovation. And I hope, that you'll share your insights, if you'll find correlations to the market-weight. I believe: There are some. You can see them everywhere. But what you can also see: Two coins of the same kind, with the same idea and the same solving problems. One of them is going to the stars, the other one drowns. Innovation is a good basement for a start. But no guarantee for a take off. And definitely not a reason for a long and relaxing flight.

A new car is faster, saver, needs less gas, more comfortable. It serves demands.
Don't forget these desires. Don't forget marketing. Both can change quicker, than innovation can follow. The most usefull things are nothing, when noone likes to use them.

[Traxo]

agree on all points except monero would get .1 for unlimited supply

That's not a factor that I'm evaluating here.

Research in 2016 has modelled that PoW (on Bitcoin and any other) diverges into chaos when the block reward declines to insignificant relative to the revenue from transaction fees. Thus no PoW cryptocurrency will be able to survive without perpetual inflation unless it is controlled by an oligarchy. Monero’s tail reward is insufficient because eventually revenue from transaction fees will be significantly higher than the tail reward. There is a new document coming out soon which will explain this in irrefutable detail.

PoW is dying or must become an oligarchy in order to survive. But a new design is coming which will be perpetually deflationary (money supply perpetually decreases) and fixes this problem (without PoW nor PoS), but with some tradeoffs in security-model that some may find objectionable. Yet after we see what happens to the security of Bitcoin over the coming months, minds will be opened as to what is plausible and optimum.

Incorrect. It has a horrible historical record as proven by Andrew Miller a widely respected cryptographer.

As for the increase in minimum ring signature mixin level, the Cryptonote upgrade to RingCT, and the 2014 MNL-001 Monero labs research report, that was all rebutted in great detail.

I am aware of all of those potential attacks, and I mentioned in my post that Monero is not the black box that it is often assumed to be. (And I went into more detail here.) But despite those issues, Monero is typically far better than any Bitcoin mixer, for example.

I mentioned that zcash is theoretically more anonymous than Monero, but its software is basically unusable for most people right now.

Agreed. Your original summary seemed to lack this detail, which I think most readers would not have known if we had not delved into it as we have.

Whether Monero is far better than Bitcoin mixers is also perhaps irrelevant. For the time being since there is no rigorous math model to give us assurance, is an 80% risk of honeypot better than 20% of the transactions deanonymized honeypot? Even if the mixin levels of Monero are increased to insane levels (after some rigorous math to better model what those levels should be), we’ll probably still have a risk of a few tenths or hundredths of a percent of being deanonymized, which is entirely unacceptable for many use cases to depend on.

You only gave it a 4, which seemed large in comparison to the scores you assigned to other altcoin technologies, but I guess relative to the 106 you’ve assigned to Bitcoin, that puts into perspective your extremely low valuation of Monero’s innovation.

I'm surprised to see you promoting such a scam:

That criticism of IOTA may ultimately be correct, but it's not clear to me. It mentions facts about IOTA which I already know, and then claims that this obviously makes IOTA broken. I am not convinced that IOTA is convergent, which is why I only gave it a score of 0.1, but it strikes me as possible, and a good area for research.

Someone should create an IOTA simulation where there's double-spending attempts, latency, etc. with no coordinators and a large volume of transactions.

Why are simulations necessary? They’ve been challenged to remove the centralized server Coordinator, so as to find out if it blows up or not when decentralized. They refuse to do so, because the experts know it will blow up.

The onus is on them. They are running a centralized cryptocurrency, thus they have shown no innovation whatsoever. Anyone can write some technobabble BS in a whitepaper and then create a centralized server driven system and claim they created something. But all they did was reinvent Visa with some BS deception on top.

As for the scam aspect of it, isn’t it well documented already what they did with the ICO, Jinn Labs, and besides everyone knows that Come-from-Beyond originates from the Nxt scam wherein the entire money supply was awarded to 73 founders. IOTA is in the same breed of scams being perpetuated over and over again here. We had Steem with its sneaky mine awarding the new created money supply to a few insiders and then a system where whales can control where the ongoing money supply goes (for the most part). And then masternode scheme (Dash and PIVX) wherein the instamine or ICO buying from themselves so that the masternodes are held mostly by the insiders (which no one can prove or disprove because of ability to Sybil attack the identities of who owns them) who then award most of the newly created money supply to themselves. When doing the math of financial compounding, it is reasonably inarguable that the masternodes of Dash (also probably PIVX) are not predominately owned by the insiders.

Any way, I appreciate your clarification.

[BitcoinEXpress]

Alright, who hacked Theymos account?

He's never been this friendly toward Altcoins!


~BCX~

[d5000]

Overall, I agree partly with the list - I also think IOTA is interesting but still has to prove if it really works, and Monero may be one of the few interesting innovations, but not really revolutionary. I would maybe add Burst (first coin with working turing complete smart contracts after Ripple, and first one with atomic cross chain trading), Nxt (first working Proof of Stake implementation without centralized checkpoints), Nem (improved PoS algorithm called "Proof of importance", not a big deal but may be OK for 0.1 points as it's a very good option for small coins, already in the second list), Bitshares (pegged assets), maybe also Slimcoin (Proof of Burn as distribution method), Decred (interesting PoS/PoW combination) and Sia (smart contract-driven storage management).

As for the scam aspect of it, isn’t it well documented already what they did with the ICO, Jinn Labs, and besides everyone knows that Come-from-Beyond originates from the Nxt scam wherein the entire money supply was awarded to 73 founders. IOTA is in the same breed of scams being perpetuated over and over again here.

The NXT "scam" was open to everyone, the "founders' list" was not limited to insiders. If you want, you can call me a shill, but please read the original announcement thread from 2013 before you make accusations. This "ICO" (one of the first of all) was running about 2 months and everyone could participate, only that it had only limited success. These weren't ERC20 times where even insignificant projects can get easily tens of thousands of dollars.

[Invester]

I sincerely appreciate Theymos going this far to make a kind of merit summary with altcoins. My worry is that it might not cover all or majority of altcoins as we are already reaching almost a thousand altcoins.

I think it would be enough to make this kind of assessment to the top 100 or 200 altcoins. This will be enough basis already whether to invest on it or not. Reaching the top 100 or 200 is already a kind of merit, after all, to be subjected to a more careful scrutiny.

[tobs]

But BTC has indeed that 100+ advantage over anything because of being the first one and the most popular and already established. Cryptocurrencies are even divided into that Bitcoin and Altcoins, already showing which one is important and the rest are thrown into one dump basket. Even if new better technologically coins emerge, people won't transition to these new better coins, so we are now forever stuck with bitcoin being number one no matter if he indeed is the best and most efficient one.

Telephone with hand-cranked magneto generator = Score 100
Smartphone = Score 0.01
(because hackable and using old computer and telephone technology)

Sounds a little bit silly to me...

It is silly.
First, I have no idea why you would give 100 to BTC?
I'd rather give 100 to LTC, because my transaction passed in under 2 minutes, I wait 2 hours for BTC.

Yes, when BTC was alone, of course it was 100, because there were no others.

Yes that's silly indeed and that's what I meant, by saying it has +100 no matter what. We are stuck with bitcoin being the best and hyped no matter what other better technologies emerge out there. Actually I don't even have a clue what has to happen to bitcoin to be overthrown. And I wonder how many of these altcoins mentioned here will ever break out of this underground shadow and there will be other people than ICO holders and few enthusiasts to buy them. It came to that ridiculous point that even if there is a topic here where someone asks what is a good and promising coin to hold, everyone is answering bitcoin like it's already predetermined to succeed.

[Nebell]

This thread is useless.

There's vague info, very few coins, the ratings are ridiculous at best.

It was made by a dude who clearly favors Bitcoin. Let the thread die.

[kelsey]

I will assign a technical merit/innovation score.

technical merit/innovation   you know its all about being a currency, not a mission to Mars, but that's been lost on the out of touch with reality nerdy types behind crypto for the longest time; hell you know shells are still used my more people today on the planet then Bitcoin is  

Bitcoin (and the rest of crypto) has almost zero value as a currency, the sole 'success' of Bitcoin todate is its 'price' increase not its value., and the mechanism for the price increase is nothing more then the Greater Fool Theory;

The Greater Fool Theory states that the price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value, but rather by irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants. A price can be justified by a rational buyer under the belief that another party is willing to pay an even higher price. In other words, one may pay a price that seems "foolishly" high because one may rationally have the expectation that the item can be resold to a "greater fool" later.

So lets all be honest here for a change.

(no bitterness here by the way, just being honest, i've been very lucky as a trader to be in crypto when bitcoin was single digit price, and tis been a amazing run that's dwarfed my real world earnings longtime back, but i still have a dream that p2p currency could have been something).

[monsterer2]

Bitcoin (and the rest of crypto) has almost zero value as a currency...

Seems to me that a trustless, governmentless, unregulatable, peer 2 peer, highly resilient, decentralised method of moving digital cash anywhere in the world has a lot of very real use cases both now and the future.

[Traxo]

I also think IOTA is interesting but still has to prove if it really works

IOTA can prove it doesn’t work at any time by removing the centralized servers known as the Coordinator which is otherwise enforcing the convergence of the chain.

So why would they risk it? Wiser to continue the deception until some other technology comes along that they can copy and transition to.
Those holding IOTA are motivated to help shill and perpetuate the scam. The easy way to corrupt men is to entice them to profit on selling lies. The sad state of humanity.

Nxt (first working Proof of Stake implementation without centralized checkpoints)

The only reason it did not blow up is because the stake in Nxt is centralized.
PoS does not converge if 51% of the stake is not controlled by an oligarchy to enforce that the “nothing-at-stake” converges on a single chain.

I regurgitate this from a rough draft of an upcoming document not written by myself (publicly available on the Internet) where this is explained in more detail.
That document also seems to discredit PoS and PoW convincingly, at least in my non-expert interpretation.

The methodology of this scam evident in both IOTA and Nxt is create some technobabble BS that n00bs don’t realize is irrelevant because the system is centralized.
The functioning of those systems demonstrates nothing about the correctness of said technobabble.
The technobabble is a marketing gimmick.
The marketing side is to entice many men to spread the lies by selling them 1% of the tokens cheap, while keeping 99% for the originators of the scam.

NEM (improved PoS algorithm called "Proof of importance", not a big deal but may be OK for 0.1 points as it's a very good option for small coins

NEM was evidently a scam where the insiders pretended that there were 1000s of users who they distributed the NEM tokens in an air drop.
Those who argue there is no proof of the scam, take note that the insiders refused to use Facebook and other verification, and instead required only a BCT account.
So they were just distributing tokens to themselves via their 1000s of sock puppet accounts.

PoI is just another variant of PoS. It only works because the stake of NEM is centralized.
All of these cryptocurrencies exist to extract money from greater fools to the insiders.
None of these cryptocurrencies are real in any way.

Again I am regurgitating what I have read in a document written by another.

Bitshares (pegged assets)

Pegging is never stable long-term because there is always leakage against any such paradigm via externalities such as shorting. This was explained in a Pastebin.

Decred (interesting PoS/PoW combination)

These result in the worst attributes of each, combining to make something less secure than either alone.

As I recall, Theymos’ prior forays into analogous ideas for merging PoS and PoW were handily rebuked with detailed technical explanation. Perhaps he could revisit those threads to read posts.

As for the scam aspect of it, isn’t it well documented already what they did with the ICO, Jinn Labs, and besides everyone knows that Come-from-Beyond originates from the Nxt scam wherein the entire money supply was awarded to 73 founders. IOTA is in the same breed of scams being perpetuated over and over again here.

The NXT "scam" was open to everyone, the "founders' list" was not limited to insiders. If you want, you can call me a shill, but please read the original announcement thread from 2013 before you make accusations. This "ICO" (one of the first of all) was running about 2 months and everyone could participate, only that it had only limited success. These weren't ERC20 times where even insignificant projects can get easily tens of thousands of dollars.

Public ICOs are a scam, because the insiders buy the ICO from themselves pretending there is more interest and buyers than there really are.
With an ongoing scam ICO such as EOS and perhaps Nxt’s 3 month ICO, the insiders recycle the same ETH or BTC and buy the ICO from themselves over and over again.
Even if BTC didn’t move from Nxt address during the ICO period (and it may have, I have not checked), an insider with sufficient BTC can buy it from themselves.

I see someone is adding transactions non-stop.  Is it a stress-testing or a DoS attack?

Or someone thinking they can take all of the nxt for themselves by doing multiple 10k transactions until they reach 1,000,000,000 in their own account.

73 people who control all the money supply is not a cryptocurrency.
I would characterize that as a private club, except that when it sells on on an exchange, then it is a manipulated system for milking greater fools.
And then @kLee who was supposed to be holding a large portion of the money supply claims it was stolen.
In addition to selling ICOs to oneself, one can also steal funds from himself.
Ask Bitfinex how that works.

The announcement thread of Nxt which you provided a link to, has no technical or specifications in the first several pages.
No one in their right mind would have bought that obviously premeditated sneaky ICO:

So i hand over tons of BTC for a promise that i will get an unproven altcoin, that will probly be worth nothing?

Obvious scam.

Please don't send any money to an account created 4 days ago.

Who when reading that thread will come to the conclusion that Come-from-Beyond is not (or not an accomplice to) BCNext, as evident showing up in the thread from the very start pretending to be a different person offering server resources.
Coincidentally it was a Java program when no one else was coding altcoins in Java, which is the programming language CfB codes in.

http://archive.is/VCka0#selection-277.0-285.316

EDIT (09/05):
David Sønstebø confirmed that CfB was BCNext.

The SEC recently emboldened the scammers and their accomplices with a purposely weak warning, with EU securities regulation also advancing. Note the SEC did point out that those who buy the ICO (and presumably especially those who help shill it) could also be culpable. To wax philosophical, why wouldn’t “Satan” first warn his victims to offer them free will because via their own clear free will can they be enslaved entirely. The weak must be enticed to destroy themselves by their own greed and civilization-destructive (as opposed to constructive) ethics.

[freebutcaged]

Just my few cents mate, the entire open source cryptocurrencies worth zero if you ask me, only a few people are deciding on which coin they should

Put their money and invest heavily, cryptocurrencies are literally like the money printing plates, imagine if US was sharing dollar bills plates with the

Public. regarding IOTA, you call it as a coin currency while it was supposed to be used for something else entirely different. Bitcoin is the one decentralized currency which the community agreed upon adopting and supporting it, if community decides to move to another coin there is nothing

That could stop them,, this is the downside of crypto, anyone at any time could make a clone of any coin and if everyone start investing on the clone
Then the original coin could collapse.

[Midas111]

byteball is really cool and they have their tech rolling strong. byteball has the lowest supply of any coin. you can link your btc to get gbyte airdrops. byteball is the #1 general alt. If btc is gold, byteball is rhodium imo. tenx is the best for cryptocard market, ioc looks great for a micrrocap with their own tech

[ghoom2]

And what do you think of Elastic (XEL)?

[d5000]

IOTA can prove it doesn’t work at any time by removing the centralized servers known as the Coordinator which is otherwise enforcing the convergence of the chain.

Exactly, that's the problem. With Byteball there is a similar problem - it seems not to work without trusted "witnesses". However, there is no proof that it doesn't work, so I give it a minimal chance.

The only reason it did not blow up is because the stake in Nxt is centralized.
PoS does not converge if 51% of the stake is not controlled by an oligarchy to enforce that the “nothing-at-stake” converges on a single chain.

I know about Nothing at stake, and the attack scenarios are very difficult to implement. I've read the whole series the Ethereum team has written about that topic ("The History of Casper"). From what I know it is even more problematic if PoS coins have an uneven distribution, while a PoS currency with relatively equal distribution would normally work as expected. And at NXT most of the original holders only hold a fraction of their original holdings. Distribution may be still uneven but should have improved.

What is true is that the holders of 51% of the stake must behave in a honest way (not trying to cheat minting on several chains at once), but that is not different from mining.

PoS has some disadvantages, because no external resources are "burnt" and so its consensus depends on the blockchain history, but it can be organized in a way the disadvantages aren't relevant for a working cryptocurrency system.

NEM was evidently a scam where the insiders pretended that there were 1000s of users who they distributed the NEM tokens in an air drop.

I didn't like the NEM distribution and I am not a NEM holder. The advantage their system has to "regular PoS" is that it incentives the creation of services like exchanges (these are rewarded a lot more than in PoS because they "use" the currency) , what can be an advantage for a small cryptocurrency. But for a large crypto (thousands of TX per hour) their method isn't very suitable because it incentives blockchain bloat.

Pegging is never stable long-term because there is always leakage against any such paradigm via externalities such as shorting. This was explained in a Pastebin.

Well, until now, it has worked. Can you link me to the Pastebin? (The other text you're referring to would also be interesting. Isn't it Andrew Poelstra's well-known criticism of PoS?)

Decred (interesting PoS/PoW combination)

These result in the worst attributes of each, combining to make something less secure than either alone.

As I recall, Theymos’ prior forays into analogous ideas for merging PoS and PoW were handily rebuked with detailed technical explanation. Perhaps he could revisit those threads to read posts.

OK, in this case I didn't know the details, so if you want you can point me to a text explaining that.

Public ICOs are a scam, because the insiders buy the ICO from themselves pretending there is more interest and buyers than there really are.

That is simply speculation. It may be true for some ICOs but not for all of them. ICOs on blockchain platforms are not trustless, that's true - that's also why someone should check carefully who is selling.

Even if BTC didn’t move from Nxt address during the ICO period (and it may have, I have not checked), an insider with sufficient BTC can buy it from themselves.

This and this suggest the first transaction was on October 29 but to another address controlled by BCNext and from that it was not moved until November 17.

The announcement thread of Nxt which you provided a link to, has no technical or specifications in the first several pages.
No one in their right mind would have bought that obviously premeditated sneaky ICO:

At the beginning, they had suggested to not invest more than a few satoshis.

Who when reading that thread will come to the conclusion that Come-from-Beyond is not (or not an accomplice to) BCNext, as evident showing up in the thread from the very start pretending to be a different person offering server resources.
Coincidentally it was a Java program when no one else was coding altcoins in Java, which is the programming language CfB codes in.

CfB is the coder of the first versions, yes, but that was also announced in the announcement thread. I also believe he could be BCNext (and maybe also Jean-Luc, the anonymous lead developer of the current Nxt team).

But I don't want to hijack this thread for a lengthy discussion if NXT was a scam or not - if you believe that, you can continue to do that. But the "Nxt is controlled by 73 insiders" is a myth that has been divulged very often here and is simply not true, that's why I commented it.

[Soutogu]

Bitcoin (and the rest of crypto) has almost zero value as a currency...

Seems to me that a trustless, governmentless, unregulatable, peer 2 peer, highly resilient, decentralised method of moving digital cash anywhere in the world has a lot of very real use cases both now and the future.

Unless it takes days to receive confirmations and you have to pay an absurd amount of money as fees... I just hope we don't continue going down that road, which will eventually lead to a crash/much lower adoption rates...

What you described is what we, as users, aim and hope for the most... unfortunately there are a bunch of people with more influence and money disturbing the roots of the coin atm...

[semaforo]

NEM (improved PoS algorithm called "Proof of importance", not a big deal but may be OK for 0.1 points as it's a very good option for small coins

NEM was evidently a scam where the insiders pretended that there were 1000s of users who they distributed the NEM tokens in an air drop.
Those who argue there is no proof of the scam, take note that the insiders refused to use Facebook and other verification, and instead required only a BCT account.
So they were just distributing tokens to themselves via their 1000s of sock puppet accounts.

PoI is just another variant of PoS. It only works because the stake of NEM is centralized.
All of these cryptocurrencies exist to extract money from greater fools to the insiders.
None of these cryptocurrencies are real in any way.

Again I am regurgitating what I have read in a document written by another.

Bitshares (pegged assets)

Pegging is never stable long-term because there is always leakage against any such paradigm via externalities such as shorting. This was explained in a Pastebin.

Decred (interesting PoS/PoW combination)

These result in the worst attributes of each, combining to make something less secure than either alone.

As I recall, Theymos’ prior forays into analogous ideas for merging PoS and PoW were handily rebuked with detailed technical explanation. Perhaps he could revisit those threads to read posts.

As for the scam aspect of it, isn’t it well documented already what they did with the ICO, Jinn Labs, and besides everyone knows that Come-from-Beyond originates from the Nxt scam wherein the entire money supply was awarded to 73 founders. IOTA is in the same breed of scams being perpetuated over and over again here.

The NXT "scam" was open to everyone, the "founders' list" was not limited to insiders. If you want, you can call me a shill, but please read the original announcement thread from 2013 before you make accusations. This "ICO" (one of the first of all) was running about 2 months and everyone could participate, only that it had only limited success. These weren't ERC20 times where even insignificant projects can get easily tens of thousands of dollars.

Public ICOs are a scam, because the insiders buy the ICO from themselves pretending there is more interest and buyers than there really are.
With an ongoing scam ICO such as EOS and perhaps Nxt’s 3 month ICO, the insiders recycle the same ETH or BTC and buy the ICO from themselves over and over again.
Even if BTC didn’t move from Nxt address during the ICO period (and it may have, I have not checked), an insider with sufficient BTC can buy it from themselves.

I see someone is adding transactions non-stop.  Is it a stress-testing or a DoS attack?

Or someone thinking they can take all of the nxt for themselves by doing multiple 10k transactions until they reach 1,000,000,000 in their own account.

I appreciate a lot of the commentary and I would not try to contradict anything necessarily but the discussion is about technical merit. XEM is the first altcoin I have ever taken really seriously as a possible major technical advancement. I am still learning about it, but I am suprised there has not been more discussion of it on this thread.


   As I understand it, the founder admitted to using the sock puppet accounts and resigned, but I don't believe that there were thousands of them.

  Being technically superior to Bitcoin does not guarantee adoption. But neither does centralization automatically negate technical merit.

   In some regards XEM seems inferior to BTC- for example, the total number of possible addresses is much smaller and there is the possibility of losing coins by sending to the wrong address. It's still very unlikely, but much more so than with BTC.

    However the POI has interesting implications when considered from an economic perspective. It acta as an incentive to increase the velocity (to borrow from monetary theory terminology) or the speed at which the currency is transacted. The best way to earn XEM through harvesting is to provide a service that sees high levels of circulation. There are built in algorithms that favor the addresses with the most transactions with other addresses- in other words, making it more costly to set up fake accounts to fake 'importance' than the value of the coins harvested in the process.

      The supernodes program seems like it might just be an extended premine scam. A number of XEM are set aside to be awarded to those running supernodes, but it requires having an address with something like 3 million XEM. There is a sizable reserve of XEM that is then awarded to the supernodes, but my calculations showed that this reserve will be exhausted within four years, and I'm still not clear on what the incentive for running a supernode will be after that, perhaps beside ensuring the continued value of of the sizable investment required for setting up.a supernode in the first place.

     The multisignature transactions also appears to be a big deal- ETH smart contracts sort of sound great in theory, but the actual implementation remains... ethereal. As I understand it XEM multisig transactions are essentially a very robust and versatile established protocol for one of the most useful smart contracts imaginable.

    I don't quite understand the namespace and mosaic functionality yet, but it also appears to be an attempt to provide readymade smart contract functionality which can be used for issuing securities. I am not sure how novel this actually is or how it could be used.

     As far as scalability, the experiments conducted by Mijin using NEM technology suggest that XEM tech could support what might be the highest transaction volume of any cryptocurrency to date- please go ahead and correct me if I'm wrong. I don't understand why this is, perhaps someone can explain.

      However, combining a high degree of scalability with the incentive to generate a high transaction volume present in POI could result in a very unique and active ecosystem more suited to microtransactions and more conducive to an active economy, as compared to bitcoin's tendency toward hoarding. I never bought the criticisms of deflationary currencies put forth by mainstream economists, but I do think a concept like XEM is more likely to cut into the day to day economic activity, whereas BTC seems like it might be more likely to remain primarily a store of value and escape from fiat.

   In sum I get a feeling from XEM that I have not gotten from any coin since I first learned about bitcoin. I think there may be elements in XEM that could be part of some major advancements for cryptocurrency. Certainly I think it deserves more discussion.

      

[betudontbet]

So by the look of admin post Monero is the best option to invest regardless bitcoin ?

[rainbow169]

Thanks for the article and many insightful comments here.

Personally would appreciate your thoughts on EOS and NEO. Will the former really provide the scale it claims and the latter a challenger to ethereum? Can't wait to see the score

[wry]

Not yet evaluated

I haven't investigated these enough yet to give them scores.

 - BitBay
 - Blocknet
 - Byteball
 - CloakCoin
 - Dash
 - GameCredits
 - Neo
 - PIVX
 - Waves
 - XEM
 - XtraBYtes
 - Zencash

This was one of the more interesting posts I've read on here in awhile.  I'll hope you'll expedite your review and give your views of the others.

Good luck if you try and go with an alternate index.

Thanks for the forums.

[Traxo]

The only reason it did not blow up is because the stake in Nxt is centralized.
PoS does not converge if 51% of the stake is not controlled by an oligarchy to enforce that the “nothing-at-stake” converges on a single chain.

I know about Nothing at stake, and the attack scenarios are very difficult to implement. I've read the whole series the Ethereum team has written about that topic ("The History of Casper"). From what I know it is even more problematic if PoS coins have an uneven distribution, while a PoS currency with relatively equal distribution would normally work as expected…

What is true is that the holders of 51% of the stake must behave in a honest way (not trying to cheat minting on several chains at once), but that is not different from mining.

PoS has some disadvantages, because no external resources are "burnt" and so its consensus depends on the blockchain history, but it can be organized in a way the disadvantages aren't relevant for a working cryptocurrency system.

I asked for a response to your statement in chat and I received a rebuttal as follows:

His understanding of PoS is mathematically incorrect.

C.f. section 3.1 Nothing at Stake Problem. There is no mathematical way to decide amongst all the potential forks that can be forged within any interval, which is the legitimate one. In PoS unlike in PoW, due to the nothing-at-stake problem because the interval is relative to the autonomous choice of timestamp and nothing is burned, then forgers (i.e. stake-based miners) have the incentive to build their forged blocks on top of every forged block. The choice of of which forged blocks to mine upon is either based on enforcement power (e.g. the grouping of stake with the most stake) else PoS devolves to a “precomputing attack” aka “stake grinding”—which is effectively proof-of-work computation.

For more detail, I quote from the publicly available rough draft of the upcoming shocking document:

Oligarchy if PoS is Functioning

The Dysfunctional if Significant Transaction Revenue section scenario applies always to PoS because there is no protocol dictated block reward;^* thus the only incentive for appending a block is to collect transaction fees. For that reason alone, PoS will not function unless it is an oligarchy.

Yet the nothing-at-stake problem is another reason PoS can only function if it’s an oligarchy.

Block forgers in PoS compete analogously to PoW miners to append their blocks to a chain yet in a nothing-at-stake tragedy-of-the-commons (c.f. also), which without an oligarchy in control of the “checkpoints” entropy^† mechanism^‡ enforcing the leader election process, would in theory devolve to a “precomputing attack” aka “stake grinding”^† (which is effectively proof-of-work computation and rewarded only with transaction fees thus Dysfunctional if Significant Transaction Revenue.

There is no mathematical way to decide amongst all the potential forks that can be forged within any interval, which is the legitimate one. In PoS unlike in PoW, due to the nothing-at-stake problem because the interval is relative to the autonomous choice of timestamp and nothing is burned, then forgers (i.e. stake-based miners) have the incentive to build their forged blocks on top of every forged block. The choice of of which forged blocks to mine upon is either based on enforcement power (e.g. the grouping of stake with the most stake) else PoS devolves as stated. Even if the stake grouping with the most stake is not a majority of the stake, it must necessarily be coordinated (not randomly autonomous) in order to maintain the longest chain—thus fulfills the definition of an oligarchy in control. Algorithmic changes that attempt to penalize those who forge on more than chain are necessarily always going to be flawed and not resolve the issue, because there is nothing-at-stake.

In “theory devolve”, but I know of no documented cases where the theory was falsified in reality (with a deterministic “checkpointing” mechanism^‡ thus enabling oligarchy control to be expressed), because every extant PoS cryptocurrency I know of was distributed to an oligarchy thus avoiding the falsification test! 😲 How convenient. 😏

For example:

• Nxt’s ICO was distributed to 73 “founders”.
• Steem’s studiously premeditated sneaky mine with obfuscated mining instructions which whale-ified the studious.
• EOS’s year-long ICO enabling the issuer to buy the ICO tokens from themselves over and over again recycling the same ETH (probably anonymized though mixers/exchanges).
• Bitshares’ ICO ProtoShares machinations.
• NEM’s distribution to their own sock puppets which was all distributed by one guy and his sock puppets.
• Qtum rant.
• etc…

^* _{It’s pointless to distribute newly minted tokens in PoS because the probability of winning a block is proportional to stake (except worse in Nxt), thus all stake in the system would be debased proportionally by newly minted tokens such that no one would gain nor lose any relative wealth.}

^† _{The requirement for the oligarchy to “deterministically” control said “checkpoints” can be alleviated in so called “provably secure” PoS by employing secure multiparty generation of entropy, but at the cost of the “liveness assumption” that a majority (or “67%”?) of that stake is always online, and for a honest majority of the stake that the network is always synchronous (i.e. 100% reliable network transmission within a upper bounded latency threshold)—either of which seems to be onerous and unrealistic unless the majority of the stake is a tightly controlled oligarchy. The proposed solution to the liveness and synchrony requirements is a delegated PoS (DPoS) option, but which thus reverts it back to a power vacuum which requires an oligarchy. Note PoW in altcoins also needs checkpoints because c.f. the PoW is Not Secure in Altcoins section. Ethereum’s bonded penalties are also flawed, but that is a longer explanation than I can put here.}

^‡ _{Such PoS “checkpoints” become relativistic, proliferate discordantly, and thus don’t have a single-point-of-truth (SPOT) in the absence of an oligarchy with a majority of the stake grouping to agree on them, because the nothing-at-stake tragedy-of-the-commons provides no incentives for emergent (bottom-up) convergence of a majority of honest participants. Alternatives to “checkpoints” which also enable oligarchy control to be expressed, include for example delegated PoS (DPoS)—which is an elected oligarchy.}

Pegging is never stable long-term because there is always leakage against any such paradigm via externalities such as shorting. This was explained in a Pastebin.

Well, until now, it has worked. Can you link me to the Pastebin?

CoinoUSD and NuBits both failed.

I can’t find that PasteBin at the moment. Pegs are only stable with a centralized entity to enforce, due to aforementioned externalities. Centralized entities only remain stable for as long as the maximum profits they can extract from the ecosystem is due to maintaining the system. Once the profits for destroying the system are greater, then some entity grabs the opportunity to do so. This is the economic reality of power vacuums. Which is precisely what all cryptocurrencies are at this time.

Decred (interesting PoS/PoW combination)

These result in the worst attributes of each, combining to make something less secure than either alone.

As I recall, Theymos’ prior forays into analogous ideas for merging PoS and PoW were handily rebuked with detailed technical explanation. Perhaps he could revisit those threads to read posts.

OK, in this case I didn't know the details, so if you want you can point me to a text explaining that.

Here is one of them I found with Google. There were other such threads.

Public ICOs are a scam, because the insiders buy the ICO from themselves pretending there is more interest and buyers than there really are.

That is simply speculation. It may be true for some ICOs but not for all of them. ICOs on blockchain platforms are not trustless, that's true - that's also why someone should check carefully who is selling.

Nothing can be proven because identities are Sybil attackable.

It’s not speculation because the economics of power vacuums dictates that in all such launches where it is not provable otherwise, then 80+% of the money supply went to insiders and the rest to monetarily incentivize accomplices (i.e. all of us) who shill it to the greater fools (the newbies coming into crypto).

Even if BTC didn’t move from Nxt address during the ICO period (and it may have, I have not checked), an insider with sufficient BTC can buy it from themselves.

This and this suggest the first transaction was on October 29 but to another address controlled by BCNext and from that it was not moved until November 17.

But in the announcement thread it said the ICO would be ongoing for 3 months, so he thus apparently moved some funds and was enabled to buy from himself recycling funds already used.

Even if he didn’t move and recycle BTC, he only needs a wealthy accomplice to buy most of the Nxt from themselves, making it appear there is a wide distribution when in fact there is not.

Why are we so gullible? Because we are profiting on the greater fools. Thus complicit as the SEC has warned. This is not a sermon. It is about future blowback by the authorities. It is all being tracked and recorded by the national security agencies which are sharing it all with the G20. They are biding their time and will ponce when they are ready to collapse it all. Right when we need cryptocurrency because the world economy is collapsing, most of us and these scamcoins will be destroyed by our own choices.

The announcement thread of Nxt which you provided a link to, has no technical or specifications in the first several pages.
No one in their right mind would have bought that obviously premeditated sneaky ICO:

At the beginning, they had suggested to not invest more than a few satoshis.

I read in the first pages, they pretended someone was sending 800 BTC. Do I need to quote it?

But the "Nxt is controlled by 73 insiders" is a myth that has been divulged very often here and is simply not true, that's why I commented it.

What is your proof it is a myth?

Okay on not hijacking this thread, but (and intended in a friendly tone) you are making a claim without any proof. I’m relying on economic truths to support my position.

[d5000]

Traxo, I know the Nothing at Stake problem and that PoS is not "objective" in the sense that there isn't, in every moment, a "longest chain" that all participants can identify. What you quoted from your chat is basically what Andrew Poelstra wrote in his well known essay: "On Stake and Consensus" (page 9 and 10, if you want to re-read it).

I wasn't clear enough but that was what I meant with this phrase:

PoS has some disadvantages, because no external resources are "burnt" and so its consensus depends on the blockchain history, but it can be organized in a way the disadvantages aren't relevant for a working cryptocurrency system.

Even Poelstra does not object that:

However,  proponents  argue  that  since  for an honestly-created history, long stretches of blocktime correspond to long stretches of real time, any revision of so much history is sure to contradict the history as remembered by participants in the system. Thus such an attack would be detected, recognized as an attack, and the new history
rejected.
If this is implemented correctly, there is no problem with this, except that it changes the trust model from that  of  Bitcoin. New  users  who  encounter  multiple  histories  are  no  longer  able  to distinguish them on their own; they need to ask existing participants in the network (which may include friends and family, large corporate entities with reputations to maintain, public websites, etc.) which history they know to be the true one. This is not a distributed consensus!

The last remark "This is not a distributed consensus" is the key: PoS is not "objective" in the sense of a mathematical consensus model, but in part "subjective". I invite you to read Vitalik Buterin's article about Weak Subjectivity.

The "shocking document" you cite is much more superficial than Poelstra's and Buterin's documents (and the linked Bitfury document, which is also mostly correct) and completely ignores "altruism-prime", which in my opinion is the most important mechanism why PoS works: because for honest stakers it's more important to keep the value of the coin (in simple terms, "forks are bearish") than to win a bit more transaction fees or block rewards by minting on multiple chains. That is also why block rewards are low or inexistent in PoS currencies, because in a highly inflationary PoS currency stake grinding and forking on multiple chains would be incentivized.

An explanation of altruism-prime:

Altruism-prime is essentially the combination of actual altruism (on the part of users or software developers), expressed both as a direct concern for the welfare of others and the network and a psychological moral disincentive against doing something that is obviously evil (double-voting), as well as the “fake altruism” that occurs because holders of coins have a desire not to see the value of their coins go down.

"Altruism-prime" has been tried to refute with a short seller attack (attacker lends a large part of currency supply, double spends it, short sells it, creates a chain reorganization and profits from re-buying at a much lower price) but this short selling attack is not only very expensive and unpractical, but also possible with PoW and may be even cheaper, if the attacker buys hashing power for a part of his lended coins (for a long lasting 51% attack you need about 5% of the market cap of a currency).

The choice of of which forged blocks to mine upon is either based on enforcement power (e.g. the grouping of stake with the most stake) else PoS devolves as stated.

That is what I meant with "51% (nodes with 51% of "active" stake) must be honest". Honest nodes are different than an "oligarchy".

Even if the stake grouping with the most stake is not a majority of the stake, it must necessarily be coordinated (not randomly autonomous) in order to maintain the longest chain—thus fulfills the definition of an oligarchy in control.

"Coordination" is only necessary to avoid new nodes (or some that have been offline for a long time) being lured into an attack chain. That is done normally by frequent hard-coded checkpoints in every new minor version that don't differ from Bitcoin's checkpoints included in the Bitcoin versions. In some currencies like in NXT, a concept named "TaPoS" or "Economic Clustering" is used, that allows a new user to rapidly check if his node is on the same chain than his friends or his service providers (exchanges etc.).

That all does not prove that an "oligarchy" is needed. The only thing is that there must be a trustable website to download the code, but that is also true with PoW currencies.

For Qtum and EOS (wasn't that the successor of Bitshares?), I can't comment them, because I never followed these coins. Bitshares was a bit shady, that's true, but I liked some of their innovations (but not DPOS, that is truly an "oligarchy".)

CoinoUSD and NuBits both failed.

CoinoUSD is an IOU like Tether, while NuBits is/was (it still exists but is totally irrelevant) a totally flawed model. I was talking about BitUSD.

What is your proof it is a myth?

I've followed the ICO in 2013 and even invested a few satoshis there. Those that participated all were given their "stake". I can't prove that "BCNext" didn't participate, but my point is that from these 73 founders, a lot were respected forum members. Maybe 10 or 20 could have been collaborators of BCNext and CfB and/or sockpuppets, but that is not the point I wanted to make.

(PS: I don't want to hijack anymore, theymos, if you want you can move the discussion about PoS into a separate thread - "Can PoS work?" or something like that.)

[Hyperme.sh]

I appreciate a lot of the commentary and I would not try to contradict anything necessarily but the discussion is about technical merit. XEM is the first altcoin I have ever taken really seriously as a possible major technical advancement.

There’s no technological advancement in terms of the PoI aspect at least. NEM’s PoI is obscured PoS.

I am still learning about it, but I am suprised there has not been more discussion of it on this thread.

I acknowledge you were humble in your post. You’re aware that you are still learning and have a lot to learn. If you study this stuff full time for 4 years as I did, you still will not know everything.

The subtle factors on understanding deeply all the issues is well beyond the capabilities and effort expended by most everyone.

n00bs need someone to explain these issues in great detail and with care to explain them in a way laymen can understand. That is an enormous undertaking. I try to do it, but get only shit tested for doing so.

Theymos has a computer science background, but I'm presuming with high confidence that he simply does not delve into these technological issues on a full time basis. Also apparently he is only in his mid-20s, so he lacks the body of experience and knowledge that someone who has been doing computer science for 38 years has.

As I understand it, the founder admitted to using the sock puppet accounts and resigned, but I don't believe that there were thousands of them.

You have no proof. It is only your belief based on what you want to believe, because you really want to believe it is good. Based on what economic and technological fundamentals which refute the facts that have been presented?

They refused to use Facebook verification and other methods suggested to them. Why would they refuse if they wanted their coin to have some degree of trust in the distribution. Because they know fools will simply believe because the witless want to fall in the woodchipper.

Being technically superior to Bitcoin does not guarantee adoption. But neither does centralization automatically negate technical merit.

Son you need to go to school and learn logic. The first sentence has nothing logically to do with the second. And the second sentence is not a cogent rebuttal to the mathematics and economics I have presented.

However the POI has interesting implications when considered from an economic perspective. It acta as an incentive to increase the velocity (to borrow from monetary theory terminology) or the speed at which the currency is transacted. The best way to earn XEM through harvesting is to provide a service that sees high levels of circulation.

And pay the transaction fees to yourself, because you’re the oligarchy.

Thus PoI is just obfuscated PoS.

It seems though that you have invested a lot of time into refuting PoS as a viable alternative to PoW, and I don't disagree that the same shortcomings could apply to PoI. However, to keep importance high requires consistently transacting with accounts that one does not control ones self. Ultimately, this would seem to result in a net loss if one is not providing real utility to the network.

Technically incorrect. The oligarchy controls the longest-chain (else PoS doesn’t function) and thus they can pay themselves all the transactions fees which they spend from their Sybil accounts. Thus their importance is high and free to them because there is nothing-at-stake.

Note section 7.6.1 Sybil Attack of the NEM white paper is not dealing with the case that the oligarchy spends the transaction fees to itself and is also in control of the longest chain. Their analysis is concerned with splitting accounts to fool the page rank algorithm, which is not necessary for what I am explaining.

Also the section 7.7 Nothing-at-Stake Problem is referring to longer range attacks, which is not the issue I am explaining below.

What blockchain based forum are you referring to?

Steemit.com

IOTA can prove it doesn’t work at any time by removing the centralized servers known as the Coordinator which is otherwise enforcing the convergence of the chain.

Exactly, that's the problem. With Byteball there is a similar problem - it seems not to work without trusted "witnesses". However, there is no proof that it doesn't work, so I give it a minimal chance.

You’re apparently not fully knowledgeable about the technology so please stop spreading incorrect information.

The witnesses of Byteball don’t have to be trusted. They can’t corrupt anything. Properly learn how stability points work. Every majority of witness actions form a quorum and identify a new stability point which advances the total ordering to include recent transactions. Nobody should trust any new spend until it is confirmed by a stability point. There is no way to undo a stability point. The only harm the witnesses can do is if 50% (or I argue it must be 67% for correct security, thus if 33%) stop responding, then the chain is stuck and stability points do not move forward. Byteball added Byzantine agreement on top of a DAG, which is clever but Byzantine agreement although 100% final suffers from liveness failure risk (per the unavoidable tradeoffs in the fundamental FLP theorem). But Byteball has other serious flaws, which are enumerated in my shocking document.

It is entirely illogical to argue that the onus is on us to prove that IOTA will work if they will remove the Coordinator and let it run decentralized.

The onus is on IOTA to stop running a centralized cryptocurrency, because centralized is absolutely meaningless for us.

And I guarantee you it will blow up if they remove the Coordinator, unless they can earn enough money from the scam to dominate the transactions with a centralized Sybil attack in order to force a longest-chain using only their oligarchy controlled transactions. Again this will just be another oligarchy in control.


@Traxo is sleeping. Mods leave @Traxo out of this, he is a real person who is not me. He is Europe and I am in Asia. He is just trying to help the readers understand, but really I’m telling him to just let BCT remain ignorant. So I will sacrifice this BCT account. I can come back any time I want, but it doesn’t mean I want to come back to this shit hole forum where snobbish idiots think they (or Blockstream idiots) know it all. Academics such as this one don’t usually produce correct results!

Traxo, I know the Nothing at Stake problem and that PoS is not "objective" in the sense that there is, at every moment, a "longest chain" that all participants can identify. What you quoted from your chat is basically what Andrew Poelstra wrote in his well known essay: "On Stake and Consensus" (page 9 and 10, if you want to re-read it).

I invite you to read Vitalik Buterin's article about Weak Subjectivity.

I have read it, cited it and Vitalik’s blogs numerous times. And you are still not understanding.

Even Poelstra does not object that:

However,  proponents  argue  that  since  for an honestly-created history, long stretches of blocktime correspond to long stretches of real time, any revision of so much history is sure to contradict the history as remembered by participants in the system.  Thus such an attack would be detected, recognized as an attack…
rejected.

"Coordination" is only necessary to avoid new nodes (or some that have been offline for a long time) being lured into an attack chain. That is done normally by frequent hard-coded checkpoints in every new minor version that don't differ from Bitcoin's checkpoints included in the Bitcoin versions.

You’re referring to longer range nothing-at-stake attacks. Whereas, I’m referring you to the fact that in the short-term there is no objectivity either. It has nothing to do with the fact that offline clients coming online have no objectivity. Rather the point that is being made to you is that even clients which are online have no objectivity, because all of the near-term (even a chain of a single block divergent) forks are potentially valid. And there is nothing burned thus there is no penalty cost to force a winning chain to emerge naturally via random action. The only mathematical way a longest chain converges is if one coordinated group of stake which has more stake than any other group (i.e. an oligarchy), coordinates on which chain it will forge on. Coordination requires trust. Coordination is what PoW purports to solve in a trustless manner. Coordination that has control is the definition an oligarchy. Lack of coordination in PoS is divergent. Thus PoS accomplishes nothing that isn’t attainable with centralization of control, other than obfuscating this fact from witless n00bs.

Andrew Poelstra failed to note that penalizing for signing multiple histories doesn’t resolve the power vacuum that no unique near-term history is distinguished from all the others in the absence of coordination and thus definitionally an oligarchy:

This scarcity may be recoverable by punishing stakeholders who sign multiple histories. For example, if they use Schnorr or ECDSA signatures and are constrained to a specific choice of nonce, they must sign two messages with the same (key, nonce) pair in order to sign multiple histories, and this allows anyone to algebraically solve for their private key.

Also if you refer back to the quote of my document which @Traxo provided, research published in 2016 modelled and simulated that the game theory (incentives incompatibility) of that all block rewards come from transaction fees requires it must be an oligarchy, same as for PoW when the inflationary block reward declines. My document explains this is more detail in the part that wasn’t quoted for you.

I’m teaching you. Or if everyone prefers irrationality here, then so be it.

This forum is a centralized shit hole and all the cryptocurrencies are also.

Edit: even if you (incoherently and incorrectly) think that for example as `t` increases that a single, unique forger will be identified first, it couldn‘t be objectively proven that forger propagated soon enough. Asynchronous networks are the necessarily presumption of the fundamental FLP impossibility theorem which Andrew Poelstra even pointed out in his section 3.4 No Universal Time (the FLP impossibility theorem which btw even Andrew Poelstra originally neglected and was pointed out to him as he noted in a footnote on page 1).

The "shocking document" you cite is much more superficial than Poelstra's and Buterin's documents (and the linked Bitfury document, which is also mostly correct) and completely ignores "altruism-prime", which in my opinion is the most important mechanism why PoS works: because for honest stakers it's more important to keep the value of the coin (in simple terms, "forks are bearish") than to win a bit more transaction fees or block rewards by minting on multiple chains.

My “shocking document” refers to “altruistic prime” more than once and cites Vitalik. But you seem to not understand that Vitalik’s argument is that altruistic prime is an undersupplied good, meaning that defection is the Schelling point. Re-read Vitalik’s blog more carefully. Or read the shocking document as it is also explains this. Here again you assert yet another claim (about superficiality) without any proof. My document is substantial and detailed. You can say anything you want, but words must have meaning in order for anyone who is not a fool (which unfortunately is most people) to take you seriously. The fools always end up in the same crab bucket together drowning each other.

Moreover, you are entirely missing the point. Unlike in PoW, the stakers (aka forgers) for all their “altruistic prime” good intentions can’t mathematically autonomously choose which of the forged chain possibilities is the coordinated one without coordination.

Really son, you haven’t thought this out well, yet you adamantly inject condescending remarks about the superficiality of your teacher. I was trying to be respectful of you, but are you being sufficiently humble and wary of your mistakes?

In some currencies like in NXT, a concept named "TaPoS" or "Economic Clustering" is used, that allows a new user to rapidly check if his node is on the same chain than his friends or his service providers (exchanges etc.).

Transactions as Proof-of-Stake (TaPoS) isn’t a solution to this near-term forking divergence issue. “Economic Clustering” if coordinated is a coordinate oligarchy. If uncoordinated, then it doesn’t address the near-term issue. It is true that TaPoS is effective against the longer range reorganization attacks, but that is not the issue I’m teaching about.

The superficial nature of the "shocking document" can be proven that they have not only repeated the 73 founder myth of Nxt without some kind of comment…

The economics and mathematical facts have been explained to you that PoS does not function without an oligarchy. If you want to remain in denial, that is your problem.

…but also are citing an instamined Proof of Work currency (Steem) that uses no proof of stake at all!

You’re mistaken yet again because Steem is delegated PoS.

Sneaky insta- or quickly mined PoW as my document stated. And delegated PoS as the ongoing consensus algorithm as my document stated. My document also explains why DPoS is always an oligarchy.

You’re all mistakes with hubris. Typical BCT slobbering. Don’t worry, @mprep will come to your rescue, so that all you fools can continue to slobber on each other and feel good about your circle-jerk.

What is your proof it is a myth?

I've followed the ICO in 2013 and even invested a few satoshis there. Those that participated all were given their "stake". I can't prove that "BCNext" didn't participate, but my point is that from these 73 founders, a lot were respected forum members. Maybe 10 or 20 could have been collaborators of BCNext and CfB and/or sockpuppets, but that is not the point I wanted to make.

You have proven nothing. You have not made any cogent rebuttal to the fact that the economic power vacuum insures that the insiders will take most of the stake. You have made no cogent rebuttal to the mathematical fact that PoS must be coordinated by an oligarchy else it diverges away from consensus. So if a PoS is functioning, we know it is an oligarchy.

CoinoUSD and NuBits both failed.

CoinoUSD is an IOU like Tether, while NuBits is/was (it still exists but is totally irrelevant) a totally flawed model. I was talking about BitUSD.

You’re apparently incapable of analyzing how BitUSD and SBD suffer the same analogous flaws as NuBits at the generative essence level of analysis. This requires a level of IQ for abstraction which you may not have. There are hints here.

If you want to get spanked, come debate BitUSD and SBD with me where I am where everything is saved on a blockchain and nothing can be censored. You know damn well I am banned/censored from this forum. You’ll never get accurate information when I am not here.

Or simply ignore me, until you can’t ignore me anymore because I win. Because I’m correct, and Blockstream and all of you are incorrect. Because I analyse this stuff deeply. Much more deeply than any of you or they do.

Of course this post and the entire thread is archived. Censor the facts as you wish on your BCT circle-jerk.

Readers be advised that I will not likely be allowed to continue to reply. So nonsense will follow this post. Besides I have work to do and do not have time for this.

[semaforo]

@hyperme.sh , there was no need for the two statements to have a logical link. They are related by the fact that they are intended to give perspective on factors relating to the valuation and success of a currency.

   I have been skeptical of PoS all along. My background is in economics and politics, however, and not computer science, which is why PoI seemed interesting to me.

     It seems though that you have invested a lot of time into refuting PoS as a viable alternative to PoW, and I don't disagree that the same shortcomings could apply to PoI. However, to keep importance high requires consistently transacting with accounts that one does not control ones self. Ultimately, this would seem to result in a net loss if one is not providing real utility to the network.

   As for the thousands of sock puppet accounts, I don't have proof, but nor is their proof that this morally dubious marketing strategy was so extensive. 1

     Also, you say there is no technical advancement, but made no comment on the multisignature transactions or the mosaic framework.

    What blockchain based forum are you referring to?

[lijoe408]

is your upcoming list ordered? Does that mean you're doing bitbay next?

[shirackjs]

Nice list of altcoins. I am looking forward to your views on Neo and XEM.

What do you think of ZRX?

https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/0x/

[Spoetnik]

I think you leap frogged over the key point of initial distribution.
Which is tantamount to the launch of a currency.
It's like evaluating money based on the graphics on it or anti-forgery features.

Other than that some good insights.
I found the "Bitcoin Clone" comment offensive though.
You gave the same exact comment for Litecoin as you did Doge coin.
That is obscene !
theymos you know well that LTC was launched for a reason and Doge was for another.. $$$
Doge came out during the SCRYPT cloning craze of late 2013 era and was among countless others like Kitteh Coin.
All of them literally a clone with a new icon.
SCRYPT did not exist before LTC did it ?
Lumping them in together is fraudulent. 

And Ethereum ?
Where do i even begin to start ?
It was crooked from day one and rigged and manipulated before it even launched.
Care to explain why Coindesk kept running full page "news" stories about it before it even launched almost daily ?
Suspect it might have had something to do with the 100 BTC blocks bought up on launch day in mid 2014 ?
Lets rewind.. Coindesk ran a story when Doge died off (as i predicted)
They announced that they had been using ASICS to mine Doge quietly.
They said they made about a quarter million dollars and asked the public what to spend it on etc.
Hmmm ETH you say ?

Funny how you all seem to completely ignore the puppet masters playing a rigged game here.
Even when Butters quietly keeps announcing he is dumping yet more of his ETH "holdings"
And where may i asked did he get them from ?
It's been a long time since i looked at the web page list of titles and who is a paid employee.
Reminds me of Ripple and the trillions in premined coins all those guys got with just these few coins.

Here is a reminder.
Bitcoin and Litecoin were not premined.
Get it ?

Who cares right ? 

[bitjoin]

I take from this post to hold bitcoin and mostly ignore alts, i agree .  What about namecoin you could do a review of that also? my understanding was that namecoin did infact offer something unique. Also what about blackbytes - which are linked to byteball and apparently anonymous - they are currently not traded on any exchange.

[Rich_The_Crypto_Lover]

Thanks, this was an incredibly interesting read.

Would love to get your take on more of the currencies you didn't mention. 

[Keihatsu]

why is everyone so dismissive of Zcoin?

although described as a "clone" of Zcash, they appear to be heading in a different direction.

[europesss]

I am glad to hear your voice on different coins, you views help me on investing as I don't have so much time to know every coin .

[maot4]

What about other alt coins like, stratis, Neo,Bitconnect, Omisego surely these also have technical merits.The other question i guess is also how many of current coins are actually decentralised

[SatoNatomato]

IOTA can prove it doesn’t work at any time by removing the centralized servers known as the Coordinator which is otherwise enforcing the convergence of the chain.

Exactly, that's the problem. With Byteball there is a similar problem - it seems not to work without trusted "witnesses". However, there is no proof that it doesn't work, so I give it a minimal chance.

For Byteball, each witness does not have to be trusted, only a majority of witnesses, users have to trust majority of witnesses would not collude or conspire - if they do that, the worst they can do is stall the network or prevent their replacement. Similar to bitcoin users trusting small group of miners or that a single miner would not be able to achieve majority.

[Febo]

Alright, who hacked Theymos account?

He's never been this friendly toward Altcoins!


~BCX~

I would hardly consider 4, 1 and 0.1 out of 100 as an "friendly towards Altcoins".

[bitcoinmaniac52]

How can Bitcoin be 100 and Litecoin which is a clone is 0?
It doesn't take a genius to see how that doesn't make sense.
In fact, Litecoin is BETTER than Bitcoin in many ways, considering Bitcoin continues stealing from Litecoin innovations. (i.e. Segwit, Lightning Network)
Litecoin is basically a testing coin for Bitcoin.
It is almost as though they planned it from the start to be that way.

[bitjoin]

How can Bitcoin be 100 and Litecoin which is a clone is 0?
It doesn't take a genius to see how that doesn't make sense.
In fact, Litecoin is BETTER than Bitcoin in many ways, considering Bitcoin continues stealing from Litecoin innovations. (i.e. Segwit, Lightning Network)
Litecoin is basically a testing coin for Bitcoin.
It is almost as though they planned it from the start to be that way.

I guess his reasoning is anyone can copy bitcoin right now, so are we supposed to give credit for that each time? If we fast forward 20 years or so what are the real chances of litecoin being around? do we really need it? Testing networks worth billions in market cap right now, this space has gone crazy.

[Rinaze]

Good read including all the comments that contributed some insight as well! The score ranging from 0.1 to 106 seems a bit ridiculous though.

Looking forward to the rest and any chance of Sia coins, Golem and Nimiq?

[flag39]

I also think IOTA is interesting but still has to prove if it really works

IOTA can prove it doesn’t work at any time by removing the centralized servers known as the Coordinator which is otherwise enforcing the convergence of the chain.

So why would they risk it? Wiser to continue the deception until some other technology comes along that they can copy and transition to.
Those holding IOTA are motivated to help shill and perpetuate the scam. The easy way to corrupt men is to entice them to profit on selling lies. The sad state of humanity.

Nxt (first working Proof of Stake implementation without centralized checkpoints)

The only reason it did not blow up is because the stake in Nxt is centralized.
PoS does not converge if 51% of the stake is not controlled by an oligarchy to enforce that the “nothing-at-stake” converges on a single chain.

I regurgitate this from a rough draft of an upcoming document not written by myself (publicly available on the Internet) where this is explained in more detail.
That document also seems to discredit PoS and PoW convincingly, at least in my non-expert interpretation.

The methodology of this scam evident in both IOTA and Nxt is create some technobabble BS that n00bs don’t realize is irrelevant because the system is centralized.
The functioning of those systems demonstrates nothing about the correctness of said technobabble.
The technobabble is a marketing gimmick.
The marketing side is to entice many men to spread the lies by selling them 1% of the tokens cheap, while keeping 99% for the originators of the scam.

NEM (improved PoS algorithm called "Proof of importance", not a big deal but may be OK for 0.1 points as it's a very good option for small coins

NEM was evidently a scam where the insiders pretended that there were 1000s of users who they distributed the NEM tokens in an air drop.
Those who argue there is no proof of the scam, take note that the insiders refused to use Facebook and other verification, and instead required only a BCT account.
So they were just distributing tokens to themselves via their 1000s of sock puppet accounts.

PoI is just another variant of PoS. It only works because the stake of NEM is centralized.
All of these cryptocurrencies exist to extract money from greater fools to the insiders.
None of these cryptocurrencies are real in any way.

Again I am regurgitating what I have read in a document written by another.

Bitshares (pegged assets)

Pegging is never stable long-term because there is always leakage against any such paradigm via externalities such as shorting. This was explained in a Pastebin.

Decred (interesting PoS/PoW combination)

These result in the worst attributes of each, combining to make something less secure than either alone.

As I recall, Theymos’ prior forays into analogous ideas for merging PoS and PoW were handily rebuked with detailed technical explanation. Perhaps he could revisit those threads to read posts.

As for the scam aspect of it, isn’t it well documented already what they did with the ICO, Jinn Labs, and besides everyone knows that Come-from-Beyond originates from the Nxt scam wherein the entire money supply was awarded to 73 founders. IOTA is in the same breed of scams being perpetuated over and over again here.

The NXT "scam" was open to everyone, the "founders' list" was not limited to insiders. If you want, you can call me a shill, but please read the original announcement thread from 2013 before you make accusations. This "ICO" (one of the first of all) was running about 2 months and everyone could participate, only that it had only limited success. These weren't ERC20 times where even insignificant projects can get easily tens of thousands of dollars.

Public ICOs are a scam, because the insiders buy the ICO from themselves pretending there is more interest and buyers than there really are.
With an ongoing scam ICO such as EOS and perhaps Nxt’s 3 month ICO, the insiders recycle the same ETH or BTC and buy the ICO from themselves over and over again.
Even if BTC didn’t move from Nxt address during the ICO period (and it may have, I have not checked), an insider with sufficient BTC can buy it from themselves.

I see someone is adding transactions non-stop.  Is it a stress-testing or a DoS attack?

Or someone thinking they can take all of the nxt for themselves by doing multiple 10k transactions until they reach 1,000,000,000 in their own account.

73 people who control all the money supply is not a cryptocurrency.
I would characterize that as a private club, except that when it sells on on an exchange, then it is a manipulated system for milking greater fools.
And then @kLee who was supposed to be holding a large portion of the money supply claims it was stolen.
In addition to selling ICOs to oneself, one can also steal funds from himself.
Ask Bitfinex how that works.

The announcement thread of Nxt which you provided a link to, has no technical or specifications in the first several pages.
No one in their right mind would have bought that obviously premeditated sneaky ICO:

So i hand over tons of BTC for a promise that i will get an unproven altcoin, that will probly be worth nothing?

Obvious scam.

Please don't send any money to an account created 4 days ago.

Who when reading that thread will come to the conclusion that Come-from-Beyond is not (or not an accomplice to) BCNext, as evident showing up in the thread from the very start pretending to be a different person offering server resources.
Coincidentally it was a Java program when no one else was coding altcoins in Java, which is the programming language CfB codes in.

http://archive.is/VCka0#selection-277.0-285.316

The SEC recently emboldened the scammers and their accomplices with a purposely weak warning, with EU securities regulation also advancing. Note the SEC did point out that those who buy the ICO (and presumably especially those who help shill it) could also be culpable. To wax philosophical, why wouldn’t “Satan” first warn his victims to offer them free will because via their own clear free will can they be enslaved entirely. The weak must be enticed to destroy themselves by their own greed and civilization-destructive (as opposed to constructive) ethics.

IOTA people claim they will remove the coordinator once they have enough users who make transactions. At the moment most people are just buying iota and holding, though they can help the network even by sending forth and back because it will cost nothing.

[kelsey]

Bitcoin (and the rest of crypto) has almost zero value as a currency...

Seems to me that a trustless, governmentless, unregulatable, peer 2 peer, highly resilient, decentralised method of moving digital cash anywhere in the world has a lot of very real use cases both now and the future.

I hope you are referring to the Shells I mentioned earlier because no crypto matches the above 

I goto get me more Shells tbh; borderless, decentralised, not created by big banks or gov, deflationary (the way we are killing the oceans certain to be less created over time) 

[Spoetnik]

BlockNET ? ahahha scam coin 

And i love how the noobs know squat about Litecoin.
If it's a clone then go ahead and mine it with your BTC miners then.
Oh wait.... it's SCRYPT ?
Wait WHAT ?

Hmm what is this SCRYPT the penguin speaks of ?

Oh you mean the new hashing algo launched with Litecoin cloned by a thousand others later on ?
Yup.. the one that was implemented for a REASON.
Hence the creation of Litecoin in the first place.

Why ?

Hmmmmmm.. any ideas pajeets ?

Fairness.
The intention was to even the playing field on mining and it actually succeeded in doing so.
At least for a time..
It was about mining guys.  

But ya ya.. it's just a clone, so by all means point your BTC miners at it and go nuts LOL

[lijoe408]

BlockNET ? ahahha scam coin 

And i love how the noobs know squat about Litecoin.
If it's a clone then go ahead and mine it with your BTC miners then.
Oh wait.... it's SCRYPT ?
Wait WHAT ?

Hmm what is this SCRYPT the penguin speaks of ?

Oh you mean the new hashing algo launched with Litecoin cloned by a thousand others later on ?
Yup.. the one that was implemented for a REASON.
Hence the creation of Litecoin in the first place.

Why ?

Hmmmmmm.. any ideas pajeets ?

Fairness.
The intention was to even the playing field on mining and it actually succeeded in doing so.
At least for a time..
It was about mining guys.  

But ya ya.. it's just a clone, so by all means point your BTC miners at it and go nuts LOL

I'm curious, why do you say blocknet is a scam when they have a working product?

[Dart18]

This list is going to spike.  
Theymos got a big name in the crypto world and might pull more investors by creating this.
Thank you and I hope the other list which is not yet researched will be given a chance.
A free advertisement!! Yey!

Now developers, be good and have more features and you might be listed here. 

[monsterer2]

I hope you are referring to the Shells I mentioned earlier because no crypto matches the above 

I goto get me more Shells tbh; borderless, decentralised, not created by big banks or gov, deflationary (the way we are killing the oceans certain to be less created over time) 

Shells are not fungible, or useful in any real sense as a money.

[uelque]

How can Bitcoin be 100 and Litecoin which is a clone is 0?
It doesn't take a genius to see how that doesn't make sense.
In fact, Litecoin is BETTER than Bitcoin in many ways, considering Bitcoin continues stealing from Litecoin innovations. (i.e. Segwit, Lightning Network)
Litecoin is basically a testing coin for Bitcoin.
It is almost as though they planned it from the start to be that way.

I'm sorry to disagree. But maybe you're just too genius not to see it basically for it to doesn't make sense. Based on what theymos said and note, if a coin of family have almost the same technical features, he gave scores to those who seems most major. Well, litecoin is a clone of bitcoin that is why litecoin is zero but it doesn't mean litecoin is nothing compared to bitcoin. Litecoin is zero because he doesn't want to give all of them a merit, he just prefer to give it zero because it is just a clone of bitcoin who is the major. Just as easy as let 0 is equals to clone.

And well maybe litecoin is better than bitcoin. But how are you so sure sir that btc is stealing from litecoin innovation?
Wherein bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency.

[nsasuiteb]

Great analysis but I wonder if a coin is a clone of bitcoin or ethereum, this makes it zero value in any case? Ethereum classic is not a basic clone of ethereum, it brings so-called ethereum's smart contracts and bitcoin's limited supply together

[Lawyer]

Definitely take a look at Skycoin. They've been in development since 2012. They are working to improve upon the flaws of Bitcoin as well as creating a decentralized internet powered by their currency.

https://i.imgur.com/MJnz1CO.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Ky29FCL.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/kUPFmkq.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/ydVnei5.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/r2Hjeoq.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/xKbYsAy.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/23L4GoO.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/qNhny6X.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/ccAymZN.jpg

Bitcoin talk announcement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380441.0
Website: http://skycoin.net
GitHub: https://github.com/skycoin
Development Blog: https://blog.skycoin.net/
White papers: https://www.skycoin.net/downloads/#whitepapers

Skywire Miner: http://www.the-blockchain.com/2017/08/12/skycoin-skywire-miner-hardware-next-internet/

[Tipstar]

Definitely take a look at Skycoin. They've been in development since 2012. They are working to improve upon the flaws of Bitcoin as well as creating a decentralized internet powered by their currency.



Bitcoin talk announcement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380441.0
Website: http://skycoin.net
GitHub: https://github.com/skycoin
Development Blog: https://blog.skycoin.net/
White papers: https://www.skycoin.net/downloads/#whitepapers

Skywire Miner: http://www.the-blockchain.com/2017/08/12/skycoin-skywire-miner-hardware-next-internet/

Wow heard for the first time. Seems like just another coin struggling to get recognized.
The name and logo is very similar to the than skydrive of microsoft. Any runaway employee of microsoft involved?

[gnargnar]

 
hmm looks great.

@Theymos please add Skycoin to your list of candidates.
It fits most of your criterias I believe.

subscribing to this thread

[ICOcountdown.com]

Definitely take a look at Skycoin. They've been in development since 2012. They are working to improve upon the flaws of Bitcoin as well as creating a decentralized internet powered by their currency.



Bitcoin talk announcement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380441.0
Website: http://skycoin.net
GitHub: https://github.com/skycoin
Development Blog: https://blog.skycoin.net/
White papers: https://www.skycoin.net/downloads/#whitepapers

Skywire Miner: http://www.the-blockchain.com/2017/08/12/skycoin-skywire-miner-hardware-next-internet/

Skycoin also doesn't use traditional POW or POS it has a new consensus protocol.

[zoose]

Most altcoins are pure pump-and-dump, but there are a small handful that actually have some technical merit. I will list them here, according to my opinion/understanding.

For each one, I will assign a technical merit/innovation score. On the day of its release, Bitcoin would have had a score of 100, whereas a score of 0 would be a pure pump-and-dump built on stupid gimmicks and other nonsense -- I don't list these at all.

Ethereum

The way Ethereum's Solidity works is very interesting. It feels good to use, like magic. When people first see it, it often blows their minds. And there are several useful things that these super-smart contracts enable. However, Ethereum is built on the same technology as Bitcoin, and this technology has serious real-world issues and constraints. So although Solidity feels unlimited and magical:

- You often need to resort to centralization in order to do things, which completely defeats the point.
- Not all, but most real-world uses of Solidity can be done on Bitcoin, though it's more of a headache (like writing in assembly vs JavaScript).
- The Solidity "magic" hides many real-world issues which can still occur, such as reorgs, network-wide scaling issues, various possible attacks, etc. -- this is the cause of most of the various ETH disasters over the years.

ETH makes the power of cryptocurrency and smart contracts very plain to people, and I appreciate that, but it's not actually very good at being a cryptocurrency or securely/efficiently/reliably executing smart contracts.

Additionally, Ethereum ignored years of prior discussion regarding the safety issues of high-power scripts, and as a result of this and other design decisions, it faces serious security and scaling issues which have really started to become apparent as people try to actually use ETH for real applications. I can't see it surviving without major breaking changes or (more likely) an ever-increasing number of centralization band-aids.

Score: 1

IOTA

The tangle design is interesting and potentially useful, though I have several serious concerns about how it will actually work long-term:

 - In order to achieve lasting, stable scalability, something will need to be done to limit bandwidth. Otherwise you still have the problem that everyone needs to download everyone else's transactions in order to be a trustless node, and this simply doesn't scale no matter what else you do. How can you split the network so that one node can trustlessly ignore a lot of the network's total transactions, but transactions are still possible cross-split? Doing something like splitting the graph into a cycle of semi-separate segments might be possible, but it seems very difficult to do this and maintain security+convergence.
 - With a chain, if miners become evil and rewrite the last 6 blocks or something, everyone is going to notice and be affected, and so a unified response (PoW change, etc.) will be fairly easy. But with a graph, maybe an attacker could just nibble at the edges in such a way that 99.99% of users are able to think "well, it's not really my problem". In fact, it may not even be easily provable that an attack happened at all.
 - I am not convinced that a tangle is stable/convergent/secure in all circumstances. Even if it seems to work under all tests so far, it may well fall apart under a clever but not-too-difficult attack, or perhaps even just on its own. The whole idea that transaction volume is what adds security to the tangle makes me uneasy, since an attacker can always produce unlimited fake transactions, while the network will only produce a "natural" number of transactions unless additional measures are taken to generate good fake transactions.

Possibly due to the IOTA devs sharing similar concerns, IOTA's software currently relies on centralized checkpointing.

Score: 0.1

Monero

Monero is the most widely-used highly-fungible cryptocurrency, and it has a good record for being secure/stable. Fungibility is very useful, and the way it is done in Monero is quite good, though it's not actually mathematically private; it is theoretically possible to get some identifying clues from Monero transactions without breaking any crypto, though it's very difficult, especially after RingCT. Its method of anonymization has very severe scaling downsides, however; Monero makes Bitcoin look Visa-scale.

Score: 4

Zcash

Zcash has the same general goals as Monero. Theoretically, it should have slightly better anonymity than Monero, but you have to trust that the key ceremony was completed honestly, and you also have to trust that there are no flaws in Zcash's more esoteric/experimental cryptography.

Creating/validating anonymous Zcash transactions requires several gigabytes of memory, which is very harmful to centralization and anonymity. If you're the only person who goes to the trouble of creating anonymous transactions, then you'll stick out like a sore thumb.

Zcash's underlying technology may have theoretical scaling advantages; probably better than Monero, and perhaps better than even Bitcoin. But I don't think that this is being exploited at all in the current code, and I haven't been able to find an exact quantification of how good it could be.

Score: 1

Unlisted

I have investigated these coins, and give them a score of zero. Note that when a family of coins have almost the same technical features/properties, I give the one which seems "most major" its proper score, and the rest in that family a score of zero. If you very much prefer a clone's economic properties, tiny changes in constants, etc., then it is maybe not unreasonable for you to prefer that clone instead, but in this post I am concerned with highlighting the most prominent examples of major innovation.

 - Bcash - clone of Bitcoin
 - Bytecoin - very similar to Monero, and Monero is bigger / more active, even though Bytecoin came first
 - CounterParty - an even more inefficient/unscalable way of trying to do what Ethereum does
 - Dogecoin - clone of Bitcoin
 - ETC - clone of ETH
 - Litecoin - clone of Bitcoin
 - NMC - mostly a clone of Bitcoin with some not-very-innovative extras tacked on
 - Ripple - 100% centralized
 - zcoin - clone of zcash

Not yet evaluated

I haven't investigated these enough yet to give them scores.

 - BitBay
 - Blocknet
 - Byteball
 - CloakCoin
 - Dash
 - GameCredits
 - Neo
 - PIVX
 - Waves
 - XEM
 - XtraBYtes
 - Zencash

I'd like to hear what you have to say about Waves right about now.

[BenjaminPeacock]

I like this list and have been looking into the technologies behind these other coins as well. I also have on my radar, Byteball, Dash, PIVX and Waves. I believe PIVX is a fork of Dash and Byteball and IOTA are similar in their approach of the "tangle."

What interests me is the solutions that these technologies will need to come up with in order to be decentralized, private, have fast transaction speeds, etc. I believe Ethereum is looking into an off chain solution, the Raiden network to speed up transaction times.

[Lawyer]

Definitely take a look at Skycoin. They've been in development since 2012. They are working to improve upon the flaws of Bitcoin as well as creating a decentralized internet powered by their currency.

https://i.imgur.com/MJnz1CO.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Ky29FCL.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/kUPFmkq.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/ydVnei5.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/r2Hjeoq.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/xKbYsAy.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/23L4GoO.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/qNhny6X.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/ccAymZN.jpg

Bitcoin talk announcement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380441.0
Website: http://skycoin.net
GitHub: https://github.com/skycoin
Development Blog: https://blog.skycoin.net/
White papers: https://www.skycoin.net/downloads/#whitepapers

Skywire Miner: http://www.the-blockchain.com/2017/08/12/skycoin-skywire-miner-hardware-next-internet/

Updated post with photos.

https://blog.skycoin.net/statement/skywire-miner-hardware-for-the-next-internet/

[NorrisK]

I'm interested in your NEM review.

You put a lot of value in technical merit, I do think there is more that certain coins can bring to the table.

[volyova]

Hi theymos! Just a little message to say that Zcoin is not a clone of Zcash, though that is a common misconception, so don't be too hard on yourself because a lot of people are "labouring under that illusion". But you should def change the OP as it's inaccurate and untruthful. Thanks, love V.

[volyova]

Hi theymos! Just a little message to say that Zcoin is not a clone of Zcash, though that is a common misconception, so don't be too hard on yourself because a lot of people are "labouring under that illusion". But you should def change the OP as it's inaccurate and untruthful. Thanks, love V.

https://zcoin.io/zcoin-and-zcash/ should get you "up to speed".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijBiepK0ws informative video. No need to thank me.

[funsponge]

Cointelegraph, coindesk etc need to stop spread ICO vapourware panic & news and tell people about unique development that has been 3-4 years in the making. These are the altcoins that should get recognition and awareness! Invest in the tech! Not an idea!  For that reason I own Bitbay & from looking at the list now Blocknet

[Kodhead]

Not yet evaluated

I haven't investigated these enough yet to give them scores.

 - BitBay
 - Blocknet
 - Byteball
 - CloakCoin
 - Dash
 - GameCredits
 - Neo
 - PIVX
 - Waves
 - XEM
 - XtraBYtes
 - Zencash

Nice to see BitBay at the top of that list. It's one of the very few cryptos with working tech that's been around for a few years already. As far as I know it's the only one with double-deposit escrow and a fully working marketplace?

Would really like to see how you rate it

[rowenta01]

Most altcoins are pure pump-and-dump, but there are a small handful that actually have some technical merit. I will list them here, according to my opinion/understanding.

For each one, I will assign a technical merit/innovation score. On the day of its release, Bitcoin would have had a score of 100, whereas a score of 0 would be a pure pump-and-dump built on stupid gimmicks and other nonsense -- I don't list these at all.

Ethereum

The way Ethereum's Solidity works is very interesting. It feels good to use, like magic. When people first see it, it often blows their minds. And there are several useful things that these super-smart contracts enable. However, Ethereum is built on the same technology as Bitcoin, and this technology has serious real-world issues and constraints. So although Solidity feels unlimited and magical:

- You often need to resort to centralization in order to do things, which completely defeats the point.
- Not all, but most real-world uses of Solidity can be done on Bitcoin, though it's more of a headache (like writing in assembly vs JavaScript).
- The Solidity "magic" hides many real-world issues which can still occur, such as reorgs, network-wide scaling issues, various possible attacks, etc. -- this is the cause of most of the various ETH disasters over the years.

ETH makes the power of cryptocurrency and smart contracts very plain to people, and I appreciate that, but it's not actually very good at being a cryptocurrency or securely/efficiently/reliably executing smart contracts.

Additionally, Ethereum ignored years of prior discussion regarding the safety issues of high-power scripts, and as a result of this and other design decisions, it faces serious security and scaling issues which have really started to become apparent as people try to actually use ETH for real applications. I can't see it surviving without major breaking changes or (more likely) an ever-increasing number of centralization band-aids.

Score: 1

IOTA

The tangle design is interesting and potentially useful, though I have several serious concerns about how it will actually work long-term:

 - In order to achieve lasting, stable scalability, something will need to be done to limit bandwidth. Otherwise you still have the problem that everyone needs to download everyone else's transactions in order to be a trustless node, and this simply doesn't scale no matter what else you do. How can you split the network so that one node can trustlessly ignore a lot of the network's total transactions, but transactions are still possible cross-split? Doing something like splitting the graph into a cycle of semi-separate segments might be possible, but it seems very difficult to do this and maintain security+convergence.
 - With a chain, if miners become evil and rewrite the last 6 blocks or something, everyone is going to notice and be affected, and so a unified response (PoW change, etc.) will be fairly easy. But with a graph, maybe an attacker could just nibble at the edges in such a way that 99.99% of users are able to think "well, it's not really my problem". In fact, it may not even be easily provable that an attack happened at all.
 - I am not convinced that a tangle is stable/convergent/secure in all circumstances. Even if it seems to work under all tests so far, it may well fall apart under a clever but not-too-difficult attack, or perhaps even just on its own. The whole idea that transaction volume is what adds security to the tangle makes me uneasy, since an attacker can always produce unlimited fake transactions, while the network will only produce a "natural" number of transactions unless additional measures are taken to generate good fake transactions.

Possibly due to the IOTA devs sharing similar concerns, IOTA's software currently relies on centralized checkpointing.

Score: 0.1

Monero

Monero is the most widely-used highly-fungible cryptocurrency, and it has a good record for being secure/stable. Fungibility is very useful, and the way it is done in Monero is quite good, though it's not actually mathematically private; it is theoretically possible to get some identifying clues from Monero transactions without breaking any crypto, though it's very difficult, especially after RingCT. Its method of anonymization has very severe scaling downsides, however; Monero makes Bitcoin look Visa-scale.

Score: 4

Zcash

Zcash has the same general goals as Monero. Theoretically, it should have slightly better anonymity than Monero, but you have to trust that the key ceremony was completed honestly, and you also have to trust that there are no flaws in Zcash's more esoteric/experimental cryptography.

Creating/validating anonymous Zcash transactions requires several gigabytes of memory, which is very harmful to centralization and anonymity. If you're the only person who goes to the trouble of creating anonymous transactions, then you'll stick out like a sore thumb.

Zcash's underlying technology may have theoretical scaling advantages; probably better than Monero, and perhaps better than even Bitcoin. But I don't think that this is being exploited at all in the current code, and I haven't been able to find an exact quantification of how good it could be.

Score: 1

Unlisted

I have investigated these coins, and give them a score of zero. Note that when a family of coins have almost the same technical features/properties, I give the one which seems "most major" its proper score, and the rest in that family a score of zero. If you very much prefer a clone's economic properties, tiny changes in constants, etc., then it is maybe not unreasonable for you to prefer that clone instead, but in this post I am concerned with highlighting the most prominent examples of major innovation.

 - Bcash - clone of Bitcoin
 - Bytecoin - very similar to Monero, and Monero is bigger / more active, even though Bytecoin came first
 - CounterParty - an even more inefficient/unscalable way of trying to do what Ethereum does
 - Dogecoin - clone of Bitcoin
 - ETC - clone of ETH
 - Litecoin - clone of Bitcoin
 - NMC - mostly a clone of Bitcoin with some not-very-innovative extras tacked on
 - Ripple - 100% centralized
 - zcoin - clone of zcash

Not yet evaluated

I haven't investigated these enough yet to give them scores.

 - BitBay
 - Blocknet
 - Byteball
 - CloakCoin
 - Dash
 - GameCredits
 - Neo
 - PIVX
 - Waves
 - XEM
 - XtraBYtes
 - Zencash

"- zcoin - clone of zcash"

No comment..

https://zcoin.io/faq/

Zcoin is not a clone of Zcash ..

Zcoin is simply not a clone ..

At least do your study properly! Thank you!

[aeternus]

What do you think of Dash?

I've heard that it's highly centralized, but I haven't looked into it in depth yet.

Maybe it is time you do look into it in depth instead of repeating hearsay. It would be interesting
to have someone analyse Dash on its technical merit, which is after all the focus of your thread.

Theymos gave its insight of the coins he thought were worthy, he has not looked into dash deeply because I’m sure that he is a very busy individual, there is not a way to keep track of every single project so I think this is an unfair critic to him since Theymos stated directly he has not looked at Dash in depth yet.

[25hashcoin]

Most altcoins are pure pump-and-dump, but there are a small handful that actually have some technical merit. I will list them here, according to my opinion/understanding.

For each one, I will assign a technical merit/innovation score. On the day of its release, Bitcoin would have had a score of 100, whereas a score of 0 would be a pure pump-and-dump built on stupid gimmicks and other nonsense -- I don't list these at all.

Ethereum

The way Ethereum's Solidity works is very interesting. It feels good to use, like magic. When people first see it, it often blows their minds. And there are several useful things that these super-smart contracts enable. However, Ethereum is built on the same technology as Bitcoin, and this technology has serious real-world issues and constraints. So although Solidity feels unlimited and magical:

- You often need to resort to centralization in order to do things, which completely defeats the point.
- Not all, but most real-world uses of Solidity can be done on Bitcoin, though it's more of a headache (like writing in assembly vs JavaScript).
- The Solidity "magic" hides many real-world issues which can still occur, such as reorgs, network-wide scaling issues, various possible attacks, etc. -- this is the cause of most of the various ETH disasters over the years.

ETH makes the power of cryptocurrency and smart contracts very plain to people, and I appreciate that, but it's not actually very good at being a cryptocurrency or securely/efficiently/reliably executing smart contracts.

Additionally, Ethereum ignored years of prior discussion regarding the safety issues of high-power scripts, and as a result of this and other design decisions, it faces serious security and scaling issues which have really started to become apparent as people try to actually use ETH for real applications. I can't see it surviving without major breaking changes or (more likely) an ever-increasing number of centralization band-aids.

Score: 1

IOTA

The tangle design is interesting and potentially useful, though I have several serious concerns about how it will actually work long-term:

 - In order to achieve lasting, stable scalability, something will need to be done to limit bandwidth. Otherwise you still have the problem that everyone needs to download everyone else's transactions in order to be a trustless node, and this simply doesn't scale no matter what else you do. How can you split the network so that one node can trustlessly ignore a lot of the network's total transactions, but transactions are still possible cross-split? Doing something like splitting the graph into a cycle of semi-separate segments might be possible, but it seems very difficult to do this and maintain security+convergence.
 - With a chain, if miners become evil and rewrite the last 6 blocks or something, everyone is going to notice and be affected, and so a unified response (PoW change, etc.) will be fairly easy. But with a graph, maybe an attacker could just nibble at the edges in such a way that 99.99% of users are able to think "well, it's not really my problem". In fact, it may not even be easily provable that an attack happened at all.
 - I am not convinced that a tangle is stable/convergent/secure in all circumstances. Even if it seems to work under all tests so far, it may well fall apart under a clever but not-too-difficult attack, or perhaps even just on its own. The whole idea that transaction volume is what adds security to the tangle makes me uneasy, since an attacker can always produce unlimited fake transactions, while the network will only produce a "natural" number of transactions unless additional measures are taken to generate good fake transactions.

Possibly due to the IOTA devs sharing similar concerns, IOTA's software currently relies on centralized checkpointing.

Score: 0.1

Monero

Monero is the most widely-used highly-fungible cryptocurrency, and it has a good record for being secure/stable. Fungibility is very useful, and the way it is done in Monero is quite good, though it's not actually mathematically private; it is theoretically possible to get some identifying clues from Monero transactions without breaking any crypto, though it's very difficult, especially after RingCT. Its method of anonymization has very severe scaling downsides, however; Monero makes Bitcoin look Visa-scale.

Score: 4

Zcash

Zcash has the same general goals as Monero. Theoretically, it should have slightly better anonymity than Monero, but you have to trust that the key ceremony was completed honestly, and you also have to trust that there are no flaws in Zcash's more esoteric/experimental cryptography.

Creating/validating anonymous Zcash transactions requires several gigabytes of memory, which is very harmful to centralization and anonymity. If you're the only person who goes to the trouble of creating anonymous transactions, then you'll stick out like a sore thumb.

Zcash's underlying technology may have theoretical scaling advantages; probably better than Monero, and perhaps better than even Bitcoin. But I don't think that this is being exploited at all in the current code, and I haven't been able to find an exact quantification of how good it could be.

Score: 1

Unlisted

I have investigated these coins, and give them a score of zero. Note that when a family of coins have almost the same technical features/properties, I give the one which seems "most major" its proper score, and the rest in that family a score of zero. If you very much prefer a clone's economic properties, tiny changes in constants, etc., then it is maybe not unreasonable for you to prefer that clone instead, but in this post I am concerned with highlighting the most prominent examples of major innovation.

 - Bcash - clone of Bitcoin
 - Bytecoin - very similar to Monero, and Monero is bigger / more active, even though Bytecoin came first
 - CounterParty - an even more inefficient/unscalable way of trying to do what Ethereum does
 - Dogecoin - clone of Bitcoin
 - ETC - clone of ETH
 - Litecoin - clone of Bitcoin
 - NMC - mostly a clone of Bitcoin with some not-very-innovative extras tacked on
 - Ripple - 100% centralized
 - zcoin - clone of zcash

Not yet evaluated

I haven't investigated these enough yet to give them scores.

 - BitBay
 - Blocknet
 - Byteball
 - CloakCoin
 - Dash
 - GameCredits
 - Neo
 - PIVX
 - Waves
 - XEM
 - XtraBYtes
 - Zencash

"- zcoin - clone of zcash"

No comment..

https://zcoin.io/faq/

Zcoin is not a clone of Zcash ..

Zcoin is simply not a clone ..

At least do your study properly! Thank you!

Yep. This thread is worthless.

[tribessh]

Do you want technical merit? What about this:

GitHub: https://github.com/skycoin
Development Blog: https://blog.skycoin.net/

That is technical merit, they lack of marketing but they do have software and huge improvements not as many coins lately.

Their project is ambitious yes, but they atleast has been working for years in something they believe it is necessary for the future.
Internet is more an more controlled and manipulated everyday, we must take precautions and start building a decentralised network replacing ISPs, the developers are quiet aware of the numerous backdoors that exists in nowadays servers and smart devices and they want to prevent the fatal consequences of corrupted internet. We must avoid miners to get control over the blockchains, this is the main flaw of the Bitcoins original vision , skycoin has been doing research the last 4 years to solve that problem.

Please, just have a look at the development blog, and tell us your thoughts!

[d5000]

@Hyperme.sh: (AnonyMint?)

So your theory is that in PoS currencies like NXT, whales use a special client to coordinate their choices when the chain forks, and impose these to smaller nodes? Well, NXT's Economic Clustering, as far as I know, is indeed doing something similar ("it shows you where the whales are"), but it doesn't force other nodes to follow their chain. So I interpret it to be different than centralized coordination. For whales (and other nodes, too), however, it may be rational to follow other whales because they're those who most lose in a chain split event.

Of course I'm aware of the limitations of "altruism-prime" and about short term N@S attacks.

I propose you to present your "shocking document" here (in a dedicated thread) once it's ready, I'll read it and then decide if it's convincing for me or not. The first lines Traxo quoted, however, didn't present nothing new for me, these lines are based on documents presented in 2014 or 2015. Maybe however, labeling the document as superficial was premature, but to be able to judge about that, I must read it completely.

(PS: I had already deleted the section about Steem before you answered. Here I made a mistake, it's a long time ago I last dealt with Steem, and you are right, its current iteration is DPOS.)

[zcoinofficial]

@theymos

To clarify Zcoin ($XZC) doesn't use Zcash code in any way! So it is not a clone at all...

We use the Zerocoin protocol which isn't the same as the Zerocash protocol.

While the Zerocoin protocol and a proof of concept software library (libzerocoin) was coded by the same guys who then moved on to the Zerocash paper and Zcash project, the implementation of Zerocoin is not trivial and indeed we're the first project to implement it.

We're in the midst of also improving libzerocoin as well and should be releasing updates soon.

The Zerocash protocol used in Zcash was meant to be an improvement of the Zerocoin protocol and it does achieve
a) smaller proof sizes
b) very fast verification time
c) no need for fixed denominations
d) hides tx amounts
e) allows direct send of z-balances compared to Zerocoin which requires conversion to base coin.

So if that's the case, why are we at Zcoin bothering with the Zerocoin protocol?

a) we retain supply auditability so if coins are minted out of thin air due to a flaw or the trapdoor discovered, it is easy to detect. Zcash's setup combined with its trusted setup allows creation and sending of forged coins which cannot be detected if there's a problem.
b) trusted setup in Zerocoin is far less controversial comprising of two huge prime numbers. There is also research on removing the trusted setup for Zerocoin using Sigma protocol (https://zcoin.io/zcoin-moving-beyond-trusted-setup-in-zerocoin/).
c) Zerocoin private tx are easily created with a few seconds of computation time compared to Zcash private tx which requires a few minutes.
d) We use RSA cryptography compared to new zkSNARKs.

Note that proof sizes and verification times are something that we're actively working on. Sigma allows proof sizes to be in the 1 kb range as well. We continue to evaluate and test.

While we do agree that the Zerocash paper and its technologies are pretty amazing, we do think that pursuing active research and development into Zerocoin should be encouraged and it's thanks to Zcoin and our team that many other coins now are adopting our work and re-looking into Zerocoin.

Supply auditability in a system that allows destruction and creation of coins is pretty important especially when a trusted setup is employed. Also in encouraging anonymous tx use, a few seconds of computation time is much more palatable compared to minutes and also allows weaker devices to continue to do private tx.

I hope this clarifies any doubts you may have that Zcoin is merely a Zcash clone. The truth couldn't be any further and I hope that the OP can be updated.

[Yba Muse]

Theymos, I see that you put Litecoin in the 0 category since it is a clone of Bitcoin.

I am curious of your thoughts on Litecoin after segwit activation & the work the devs are doing on lightning networks & cross chain swaps.

I'm speculating that you will say that Litecoin is not really "innovative" necessarily because the devs are mostly working on tech that was theorized & proposed for Bitcoin proper, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

[Traxo]

So your theory is that in PoS currencies like NXT, whales use a special client to coordinate their choices when the chain forks, and impose these to smaller nodes? Well, NXT's Economic Clustering, as far as I know, is indeed doing something similar ("it shows you where the whales are"), but it doesn't force other nodes to follow their chain. So I interpret it to be different than centralized coordination. For whales (and other nodes, too), however, it may be rational to follow other whales because they're those who most lose in a chain split event.

In chat he wrote afahcs mathematically the client used by smaller nodes would sometimes diverge without some coordination due to propagation variances. So what ever the whales are doing, it has to be some form of coordination which is mathematically different than what is advertised.

He updated his public document as follows:

There’s no mathematical nor algorithmic way to decide amongst all the potential forks that can be forged within any interval, which is the legitimate one. In PoS unlike in PoW, due to the nothing-at-stake problem because the interval is relative to the autonomous choice of timestamp and nothing is burned, then forgers (i.e. stake-based miners) have the incentive to build their forged blocks on top of every forged block. The choice of of which forged blocks to mine upon is either based on enforcement power (e.g. the grouping of stake with the most stake) else PoS devolves as stated. Even if the stake grouping with the most stake is not a majority of the stake, it must necessarily be coordinated (not randomly autonomous) in order to maintain the longest chain—thus fulfills the definition of an oligarchy in control. Algorithmic changes that attempt to penalize those who forge on more than chain are necessarily always going to be flawed and not resolve the issue, because there is nothing-at-stake. Transactions as Proof-of-Stake (TaPoS) isn’t a solution to this near-term forking divergence issue. Andrew Poelstra failed to note that penalizing for signing multiple histories doesn’t resolve the power vacuum that no unique near-term history is distinguished from all the others in the absence of coordination and thus definitionally an oligarchy:

This scarcity may be recoverable by punishing stakeholders who sign multiple histories. For example, if they use Schnorr or ECDSA signatures and are constrained to a specific choice of nonce, they must sign two messages with the same (key, nonce) pair in order to sign multiple histories, and this allows anyone to algebraically solve for their private key.

I explained in more detail along with explanatory condemnation of NEM, Nxt, and IOTA. The leadership election process for PoS is ambiguous. Even if the potential stakers are ranked such that the one with the highest ranking forges the next block, and forgers are penalized for forging on more than one chain, this is a security hole because the highest ranked staker can pretend to be offline and so the next ranked must forge the next block. Then after honest stakers have done so, the higher ranked staker forges a block orphaning those, which creates an ambiguity over who is cheating. Propagation is not objective in an asynchronous network. The Ouroboros^† “provably secure” PoS alternative may solve this coordination issue by creating objective entropy via secure multiparty computation presuming a majority of the stake is honest, but requires a majority of the stake to remain online and the network to remain bounded synchronous for said majority.

And delegated PoS is all about delegating from smaller stakes to coordinated delegates. Whales dictate the elected delegates due to the power-law distribution. Whales can disagree such that they each control a delegate yet still they must coordinate, because DPoS has 1/3 liveness and 2/3 double-spend fault of Byzantine agreement.

I'm speculating that you will say that Litecoin is not really "innovative" necessarily because the devs are mostly working on tech that was theorized & proposed for Bitcoin proper, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

As @Spoetnik alluded to, Litecoin innovated Scrypt for the proof-of-work algorithm, which enabled it to receive much of the GPU mining that were pushed off of Bitcoin by ASICs in 2013 sending the price to $50 and 0.05 BTC.
Also Litecoin was the first major to activate SegWit sending the price to $50+ and 0.021 BTC; and if BTC-SegWit fails (which is not a totally implausible theory), then Litecoin probably remains the major offchain scaling alternative (possibly sending it to $80+/0.03 and beyond).

[Spoetnik]

BlockNET ? ahahha scam coin 

And i love how the noobs know squat about Litecoin.
If it's a clone then go ahead and mine it with your BTC miners then.
Oh wait.... it's SCRYPT ?
Wait WHAT ?

Hmm what is this SCRYPT the penguin speaks of ?

Oh you mean the new hashing algo launched with Litecoin cloned by a thousand others later on ?
Yup.. the one that was implemented for a REASON.
Hence the creation of Litecoin in the first place.

Why ?

Hmmmmmm.. any ideas pajeets ?

Fairness.
The intention was to even the playing field on mining and it actually succeeded in doing so.
At least for a time..
It was about mining guys.  

But ya ya.. it's just a clone, so by all means point your BTC miners at it and go nuts LOL

I'm curious, why do you say blocknet is a scam when they have a working product?

Google it.

[d5000]

@Traxo:

The leadership election process for PoS is ambiguous. Even if the potential stakers are ranked such that the one with the highest ranking forges the next block, and forgers are penalized for forging on more than one chain, this is a security hole because the highest ranked staker can pretend to be offline and so the next ranked must forge the next block. Then after honest stakers have done so, the higher ranked staker forges a block orphaning those, which creates an ambiguity over who is cheating.

Okay, this attack is one I was unaware of. But this kind of attack should only be a problem if the participants are "slashed" for voting on the wrong chain (e.g. "Slasher 2.0" as presented by Buterin), but not if they are slashed when voting on more than one chain (like in the first Slasher version and also in Poelstra's example). In the latter, the attacker cannot create a history where another participant is double-voting and so is punished, so in this sense there is no ambiguity. The nodes should simply follow the attacker's chain because it should have more "chain trust" (or similar "score"), but in that situation he is the "legit" validator so I don't see the problem.

I have to analyze this attack further, however. This is only a first thought on it. It may be wrong.

You guys may think I'm a stubborn PoS (e.g. NXT) shill. But I may even reconsider my position on PoS - in fact, after I read Vlad's blog posts about the Casper history about one year ago, I already got pretty skeptic on it, or at least I thought it would lead to over-complicated (and thus more exploitable) algorithms. The reason I got more optimistic on it were several forum discussions where it seemed that all really dangerous attacks on PoS would depend on very unlikely assumptions (e.g. stakeholders accepting cheap bribes) because of "altruism-prime" being stronger than initially thought.

The Ouroboros^† “provably secure” PoS alternative may solve this coordination issue by creating objective entropy via secure multiparty computation presuming a majority of the stake is honest, but requires a majority of the stake to remain online and the network to remain bounded synchronous for said majority.

Will read about that.

And delegated PoS is all about delegating from smaller stakes to coordinated delegates. Whales dictate the elected delegates due to the power-law distribution. Whales can disagree such that they each control a delegate yet still they must coordinate, because DPoS has 1/3 liveness and 2/3 double-spend fault of Byzantine agreement.

Here I fully agree.

As @Spoetnik alluded to, Litecoin innovated Scrypt for the proof-of-work algorithm [...]

As far as I remember, that was Tenebrix. It was however pre-mined and thus "lost" the race to the "fairer" Litecoin.

[volyova]

@Traxo:

The leadership election process for PoS is ambiguous. Even if the potential stakers are ranked such that the one with the highest ranking forges the next block, and forgers are penalized for forging on more than one chain, this is a security hole because the highest ranked staker can pretend to be offline and so the next ranked must forge the next block. Then after honest stakers have done so, the higher ranked staker forges a block orphaning those, which creates an ambiguity over who is cheating.

Okay, this attack is one I was unaware of. But this kind of attack should only be a problem if the participants are "slashed" for voting on the wrong chain (e.g. "Slasher 2.0" as presented by Buterin), but not if they are slashed when voting on more than one chain (like in the first Slasher version and also in Poelstra's example). In the latter, the attacker cannot create a history where another participant is double-voting and so is punished, so in this sense there is no ambiguity. The nodes should simply follow the attacker's chain because it should have more "chain trust" (or similar "score"), but in that situation he is the "legit" validator so I don't see the problem.

I have to analyze this attack further, however. This is only a first thought on it. It may be wrong.

You guys may think I'm a stubborn PoS (e.g. NXT) shill. But I may even reconsider my position on PoS - in fact, after I read Vlad's blog posts about the Casper history about one year ago, I already got pretty skeptic on it, or at least I thought it would lead to over-complicated (and thus more exploitable) algorithms. The reason I got more optimistic on it were several forum discussions where it seemed that all really dangerous attacks on PoS would depend on very unlikely assumptions (e.g. stakeholders accepting cheap bribes) because of "altruism-prime" being stronger than initially thought.

The Ouroboros^† “provably secure” PoS alternative may solve this coordination issue by creating objective entropy via secure multiparty computation presuming a majority of the stake is honest, but requires a majority of the stake to remain online and the network to remain bounded synchronous for said majority.

Will read about that.

And delegated PoS is all about delegating from smaller stakes to coordinated delegates. Whales dictate the elected delegates due to the power-law distribution. Whales can disagree such that they each control a delegate yet still they must coordinate, because DPoS has 1/3 liveness and 2/3 double-spend fault of Byzantine agreement.

Here I fully agree.

As @Spoetnik alluded to, Litecoin innovated Scrypt for the proof-of-work algorithm [...]

As far as I remember, that was Tenebrix. It was however pre-mined and thus "lost" the race to the "fairer" Litecoin.

Correct, Charlie forked Tenebrix to create "Fairbrix". That was his first attempt at "doing" a coin. This was all before LTC was ever created.

[volyova]

So your theory is that in PoS currencies like NXT, whales use a special client to coordinate their choices when the chain forks, and impose these to smaller nodes? Well, NXT's Economic Clustering, as far as I know, is indeed doing something similar ("it shows you where the whales are"), but it doesn't force other nodes to follow their chain. So I interpret it to be different than centralized coordination. For whales (and other nodes, too), however, it may be rational to follow other whales because they're those who most lose in a chain split event.

In chat he wrote afahcs mathematically the client used by smaller nodes would sometimes diverge without some coordination due to propagation variances. So what ever the whales are doing, it has to be some form of coordination which is mathematically different than what is advertised.

He updated his public document as follows:

There’s no mathematical nor algorithmic way to decide amongst all the potential forks that can be forged within any interval, which is the legitimate one. In PoS unlike in PoW, due to the nothing-at-stake problem because the interval is relative to the autonomous choice of timestamp and nothing is burned, then forgers (i.e. stake-based miners) have the incentive to build their forged blocks on top of every forged block. The choice of of which forged blocks to mine upon is either based on enforcement power (e.g. the grouping of stake with the most stake) else PoS devolves as stated. Even if the stake grouping with the most stake is not a majority of the stake, it must necessarily be coordinated (not randomly autonomous) in order to maintain the longest chain—thus fulfills the definition of an oligarchy in control. Algorithmic changes that attempt to penalize those who forge on more than chain are necessarily always going to be flawed and not resolve the issue, because there is nothing-at-stake. Transactions as Proof-of-Stake (TaPoS) isn’t a solution to this near-term forking divergence issue. Andrew Poelstra failed to note that penalizing for signing multiple histories doesn’t resolve the power vacuum that no unique near-term history is distinguished from all the others in the absence of coordination and thus definitionally an oligarchy:

This scarcity may be recoverable by punishing stakeholders who sign multiple histories. For example, if they use Schnorr or ECDSA signatures and are constrained to a specific choice of nonce, they must sign two messages with the same (key, nonce) pair in order to sign multiple histories, and this allows anyone to algebraically solve for their private key.

I explained in more detail along with explanatory condemnation of NEM, Nxt, and IOTA. The leadership election process for PoS is ambiguous. Even if the potential stakers are ranked such that the one with the highest ranking forges the next block, and forgers are penalized for forging on more than one chain, this is a security hole because the highest ranked staker can pretend to be offline and so the next ranked must forge the next block. Then after honest stakers have done so, the higher ranked staker forges a block orphaning those, which creates an ambiguity over who is cheating. Propagation is not objective in an asynchronous network. The Ouroboros^† “provably secure” PoS alternative may solve this coordination issue by creating objective entropy via secure multiparty computation presuming a majority of the stake is honest, but requires a majority of the stake to remain online and the network to remain bounded synchronous for said majority.

And delegated PoS is all about delegating from smaller stakes to coordinated delegates. Whales dictate the elected delegates due to the power-law distribution. Whales can disagree such that they each control a delegate yet still they must coordinate, because DPoS has 1/3 liveness and 2/3 double-spend fault of Byzantine agreement.

I'm speculating that you will say that Litecoin is not really "innovative" necessarily because the devs are mostly working on tech that was theorized & proposed for Bitcoin proper, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

As @Spoetnik alluded to, Litecoin innovated Scrypt for the proof-of-work algorithm, which enabled it to receive much of the GPU mining that were pushed off of Bitcoin by ASICs in 2013 sending the price to $50 and 0.05 BTC.
Also Litecoin was the first major to activate SegWit sending the price to $50+ and 0.021 BTC; and if BTC-SegWit fails (which is not a totally implausible theory), then Litecoin probably remains the major offchain scaling alternative (possibly sending it to $80+/0.03 and beyond).

@Spoetnik obviously "doesn't know shit". Like theymos...smh, you legends are...pathetically ignorant/under-informed, and what's worse is that you THINK you know everything! Theymos is so embarrassed he won't even respond to his own thread LOL.

[volyova]

So much for the "crypto-heads"...smh PATHETIC. WOT A FUCKING JOKE.

[Aki4real]

*Grabs popcorn and waits until everyone starts promoting the coin they're invested in*

Oh wait.. that already happened? Shit.. ok..

*waits for the coinbashing to happen*

What? I missed that fun as well.. pff ok

Close this topic Theymos, it will turn into a circlejerk of coinshillers. mark my words

[titulng]

sometimes, we are too superstitious in technology

[volyova]

*Grabs popcorn and waits until everyone starts promoting the coin they're invested in*

Oh wait.. that already happened? Shit.. ok..

*waits for the coinbashing to happen*

What? I missed that fun as well.. pff ok

Close this topic Theymos, it will turn into a circlejerk of coinshillers. mark my words

Why should anybody mark YOUR words? You aren't important.

[DarkOps]

So  you're saying that on a scale of 1-100, Ethereum gets a 1?
And nothing gets more than a 4?

 

I'm a BTC maximalist, but this is pretty ridiculous 

Any further info on centralization of DAG based currencies likes IOTA and Byte?

[Ipwich]

Thank you Theymos for this wonderful list, I would just choose Ethereum as it's older and it has a solid platform.
As what I have noticed, there's plenty of projects build under ETH so I will expect it to be more valuable in the future.

[volyova]

Thank you Theymos for this wonderful list, I would just choose Ethereum as it's older and it has a solid platform.
As what I have noticed, there's plenty of projects build under ETH so I will expect it to be more valuable in the future.

What's "wonderful" about it? All the glaring errors? Or the ridiculous scoring "system"? Or maybe you mean theymos's "rigorous" evaluations? Or is ur tongue merely trying to worm it's way up theymos's arse?

[volyova]

I think the latter.

[Periodik]

Thanks for the assessment Theymos. We'll be glad to read more of it. If Bitcoin is 100 I was expecting Ethereum to be around 80sh. I scrolled down and rofl seeing 1. Much more when I saw Iota at 0.1. Monero

[25hashcoin]

Thank you Theymos for this wonderful list, I would just choose Ethereum as it's older and it has a solid platform.
As what I have noticed, there's plenty of projects build under ETH so I will expect it to be more valuable in the future.

What's "wonderful" about it? All the glaring errors? Or the ridiculous scoring "system"? Or maybe you mean theymos's "rigorous" evaluations? Or is ur tongue merely trying to worm it's way up theymos's arse?

Lmao IKR

[SatoNatomato]

Any further info on centralization of DAG based currencies likes IOTA and Byte?

IOTA has not worked a single day without its trusted and single central "Coordinator" node. As judged by the iota developers, it is not safe for end-users to turn it off.  From the DAG part, the "Directions" is done by the Coordinator, that is the entire "consensus algorithm".

When ADK tried to clone/fork IOTA, the main dev of iota claimed without the Coordinator, which is closed source, the value of ADK is zero. Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1216479.msg20619797#msg20619797

For Byteball: It is centralized in that 1 person, main dev, is behind the 12 witnesses since its creation, according to design it is up to the the community/users to replace each one by making a conscious choice. The consensus algorithm is not 100% trustless like Bitcoin, but does require to trust that majority of the 12 witnesses do not conspire. Interesting and novel consensus design.

[HVCC]

Glad to see some BAY awareness 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=890531.5160

Check the BitBay thread for more info!

[Aki4real]

*Grabs popcorn and waits until everyone starts promoting the coin they're invested in*

Oh wait.. that already happened? Shit.. ok..

*waits for the coinbashing to happen*

What? I missed that fun as well.. pff ok

Close this topic Theymos, it will turn into a circlejerk of coinshillers. mark my words

Why should anybody mark YOUR words? You aren't important.

lol, good one

*eats popcorn*

[Gillette]

theymos, nice to see Blocknet (BLOCK) on your interest list. I`m sure you`ll love it! 

[volyova]

theymos, nice to see Blocknet (BLOCK) on your interest list. I`m sure you`ll love it! 

"Theymos" is now ignoring the thread he created.

[cryptohunter]

theymos, nice to see Blocknet (BLOCK) on your interest list. I`m sure you`ll love it! 

"Theymos" is now ignoring the thread he created.

Or perhaps busy reviewing?

I am very interested to hear his opinion on the bitbay market place and the design of the rolling peg.
Also on blocknets atomic exchange
I have always wanted a good review of cloaks enigma
And want to know what all the fuss about XBY is and if it is justified.

[sheld0n]

Thanks a lot for giving your opinions about promising altcoins. I am very interested and looking forward for your reviews of NEM, Waves and Byteball. I am wondering why you delisted Counterparty. Of course, it is inefficient in some way and has not proven good scalability but it is the only and best option for making Bitcoin blockchain open for more use cases. I would not count it out yet.

[Spoetnik]

Why not rename it a review of a few random "schemes" while insulting REAL "currencies"

Why is it legit to ICO / Premine a gimmick token of sorts ?

I should make "ass itchy ccoin"
The smart ass itching platform with a block-chain tacked on with a token slid in..
We'll be rich pajeets !

I came for a currency.. not gimmicky schemes (for profit)

.

[Piston Honda]

dlsag.com ($WBB) will > * shortly 

[Traxo]

Okay, this attack is one I was unaware of. But this kind of attack should only be a problem if the participants are "slashed" for voting on the wrong chain (e.g. "Slasher 2.0" as presented by Buterin), but not if they are slashed when voting on more than one chain (like in the first Slasher version and also in Poelstra's example). In the latter, the attacker cannot create a history where another participant is double-voting and so is punished, so in this sense there is no ambiguity. The nodes should simply follow the attacker's chain because it should have more "chain trust" (or similar "score"), but in that situation he is the "legit" validator so I don't see the problem.

He edited his document to address Slasher:

Vitalik’s analysis of the probability of attacker achieving a double-spend (on his Slasher 1 or 2 designs) is irrelevant to the my point of whether it requires an oligarchy to function. His analysis failed to point out that the entropy for and thus the next signer is chosen by the current (or 3000 blocks back) signer, thus the only chain that wins is the one that the oligarchy signs every block they want to. Always the issue distills down to there’s no objective reference point because of nothing-at-stake. Tangentially, Slasher’s timestampers add Byzantine agreement’s liveness and quorum weakness to PoS, and I can show the double-spend security is thus much worse than Vitalik computed unless most of the stake is always online. The Ouroboros^† “provably secure” PoS alternative may solve this by creating objective entropy via secure multiparty computation presuming a majority of the stake is honest, but requires a majority of the stake to remain online and the network to remain bounded synchronous for said majority.

You guys may think I'm a stubborn PoS (e.g. NXT) shill. But I may even reconsider my position on PoS - in fact, after I read Vlad's blog posts about the Casper history about one year ago, I already got pretty skeptic on it, or at least I thought it would lead to over-complicated (and thus more exploitable) algorithms. The reason I got more optimistic on it were several forum discussions where it seemed that all really dangerous attacks on PoS would depend on very unlikely assumptions (e.g. stakeholders accepting cheap bribes) because of "altruism-prime" being stronger than initially thought.

There is only one provably secure PoS whitepaper that has security proofs dealing with every aspect which those efforts you refer to lack.
Ouroboros states clearly the tradeoffs required to achieve that security.
The requirement that most of the stake has to remain online at all times, informs that PoS does not function in the real world without an oligarchy.
In any power-law distribution of wealth, 50% of the money supply is held by the spenders not savers (i.e. the speculators who have no interest whatsoever in participating in stake forging).

[monsterer2]

There is only one provably secure PoS whitepaper that has security proofs dealing with every aspect which those efforts you refer to lack.
Ouroboros states clearly the tradeoffs required to achieve that security.
The requirement that most of the stake has to remain online at all times, informs that PoS does not function in the real world without an oligarchy.
In any power-law distribution of wealth, 50% of the money supply is held by the spenders not savers (i.e. the speculators who have no interest whatsoever in participating in stake forging).

Agree completely, having read the Ouroboros paper myself.

[eternalgloom]

Thanks for compiling this list Theymos, I'll enable notifications on this post to receive updates

I really appreciate you explaining everything surrounding ETH especially, you've just listed all of the reasons why I've refrained from investing in ETH.
I'm also fairly sure that we'll see some more issues popping up in the future.

Thank you Theymos for this wonderful list, I would just choose Ethereum as it's older and it has a solid platform.
As what I have noticed, there's plenty of projects build under ETH so I will expect it to be more valuable in the future.

Have you even read what he mentioned about ETH?

Additionally, Ethereum ignored years of prior discussion regarding the safety issues of high-power scripts, and as a result of this and other design decisions, it faces serious security and scaling issues which have really started to become apparent as people try to actually use ETH for real applications. I can't see it surviving without major breaking changes or (more likely) an ever-increasing number of centralization band-aids.

[drays]

I was seriously reading the opening post until I stumbled upon this:

- zcoin - clone of zcash

Stopped reading as soon as I saw this. If this is the conclusion made after investigation, it tells a lot about the quality of this "investigation", and makes me very much doubt of the value of all the other conclusions made in that post.

Theymos, please fix this. For an expert in cryptocurrency, its a shame to make such statements... Especially when you wrote you spent time investigating it.

[Filmmmakerr]

Solid coins, Id pretty much agree with everything on that list. Some BCH fan boys will be upset to see it on the 0 list but it really doesn't have any real value behind it.

[OneNattyLitecoin]

LOL. Litecoin @ 0.

Intersted in your thought on NXS.

I don't own any, but think it's pretty solid.

[monocolor]

interesting post. I am interested in his investigation of byteball. I think byteball has a lot new features that are very useful.

[FJNuñez]

The first line sums up altcoins perfectly... "Most altcoins are pump and dump". lol!

[dewanaga]

I think that ethereum will get pump again, just see the price of ethereum increasingly but in the form of USD, because bitcoin the price also rise, hopefully in btc ethereum can go up 50 percent

[DevelopmentBank]

Interesting read. I hope you add your review of Siacoin and other file storage crypto platforms out there.

[Traxo]

interesting post. I am interested in his investigation of byteball. I think byteball has a lot new features that are very useful.

Byteball has the following flaws:

• Centralized consensus: …
• Liveness risk: …
• Unscalable transaction fees: …
• Inadequate validation insecurity: …
• Limited scaling: …
• Not real-time confirmation: …

Possibly due to the IOTA devs sharing similar concerns, IOTA's software currently relies on centralized checkpointing.

No. "Checkpointing" is done to protect against 34% attacks which would be conducted by dudes publishing Bible on Bitcoin blockchain. Just wait for IOTA network to become larger.

IOTA can't function without its centralized Coordinator servers.
The excuse that we should prove it won't work without Coordinator is a delaying tactic of the scam.
They have been challenged to disprove that it's not entirely worthless, and refuse/delay to do so.
While they delay awarding ICO tokens, presumably so that insiders can cash out before the pump & dump scam collapses.

Warning: something new will be launched soon that is so far superior that it is going to make both of these highly inferior DAG coins clearly worthless.
               Both in terms of technology clearly stated (and challenges they will not meet) and also verifiable market adoption that will be orders-of-magnitude greater.

[SatoNatomato]

interesting post. I am interested in his investigation of byteball. I think byteball has a lot new features that are very useful.

Byteball has the following flaws:

• Centralized consensus: …
• Liveness risk: …
• Unscalable transaction fees: …
• Inadequate validation insecurity: …
• Limited scaling: …
• Not real-time confirmation: …

No. "Checkpointing" is done to protect against 34% attacks which would be conducted by dudes publishing Bible on Bitcoin blockchain. Just wait for IOTA network to become larger.

IOTA can't function without its centralized Coordinator servers.
The excuse that we should prove it won't work without Coordinator is a delaying tactic of the scam.
They have been challenged to disprove that it's not entirely worthless, and refuse/delay to do so.
While they delay awarding ICO tokens, presumably so that insiders can cash out before the pump & dump scam collapses.

Warning: something new will be launched soon that is so far superior that it is going to make both of these highly inferior DAG coins clearly worthless.
               Both in terms of technology clearly stated (and challenges they will not meet) and also verifiable market adoption that will be orders-of-magnitude greater.

I would wait to release a better coin. Otherwise the IOTA people will just steal your ideas and claim as their own, since they have connections to other companies, and massive amount of shills, a new coin would not be able to compete. Your new coin would just solve their problems, while they would reap the rewards. Just wait until it dies, when the partners start looking for new partners.

IOTA is specified so poorly, they can tomorrow release an entirely new coin and their fanbois and money would not care or notice. IOTA is selling an idea, not a product, the buyers think they are buying a slice of "IoT crypto market", see how many times the buyers had to re-"claim" their tokens, and how many were scammed out of their "tokens" by that process.

Can you imagine, "Ugh, we have a new idea and a process to claim the bitcoins you own, so all your bitcoins from before are worthless, but you can email the founders to claim your new bitcoins". People swallow that.

[DrkLvr_]

From 0 to 100 you give just 1 to ETH?

That is what we call "being a maximalist" lol. Boy are those people gonna be surprised, funny how most of them still... well, let's not get into that, wrong thread I guess.

I agree the ETH maximalists will be surprised when their rag-tag shitcoin just collapses and stops working entirely

[volyova]

From 0 to 100 you give just 1 to ETH?

That is what we call "being a maximalist" lol. Boy are those people gonna be surprised, funny how most of them still... well, let's not get into that, wrong thread I guess.

I agree the ETH maximalists will be surprised when their rag-tag shitcoin just collapses and stops working entirely

Never gonna happen.

[Traxo]

I would wait to release a better coin. Otherwise the IOTA people will just steal your ideas and claim as their own, since they have connections to other companies, and massive amount of shills, a new coin would not be able to compete. Your new coin would just solve their problems, while they would reap the rewards. Just wait until it dies, when the partners start looking for new partners.

I've been told “they” (it's not my project) will open source the clients, apps, but initially not the “full node”, until their adoption lead is insurmountable.
Because presumably every PoS blockchain such as NEO, Qtum, NEM, Lisk, ETH, etc might want to copy the technology,
although it is dubious whether those other blockchains want to give up their oligarchy control by implementing a technology which renders monopolization of 51% the stake irrelevant.
The expectation is the verifiable onboarding will rocket quickly beyond any BS these scams can prove about their adoption.
If successful, the real ecosystem adoption will render their superfluous partnerships (with “iOScum, Doggle, Suckerbook, Microsordid, ThermosTalk, etc.”) irrelevant, since
the intent is to disintermediate all of them including “Redditard, Githobo, and every other centralized walled garden on the Internet”.

I agree the ETH maximalists will be surprised when their rag-tag shitcoin just collapses and stops working entirely

Never gonna happen.

Agreed. PoS requires an oligarchy to be able to function.
An oligarchy controlled coin can't fail technologically, unless the oligarchy is somehow destroyed.
Vitalik can continue to rollback the chain every time it is attacked.

Yet this is no guarantee that ETH and PoS oligarchy tokens won't die in the market.

[vane91]

I would say that namecoin is nº2 in security after bitcoin and nº1 fighting against censorship. That has to be some merit.

Can't be pumped because of the long release schedule and lack of FIAT>NMC exchanges thought.

It's been consistently the least profitable coin to mine, since the merge mine, however hashrate in the future may surpass btc thanks to stupid bitcoin clones that steal miners from btc.

[Insticator]

Interesting read. I hope you add your review of Siacoin and other file storage crypto platforms out there.

Yee siacoin and burst can mine thru storage it dpends on how large your hard drive capacity was.

[Traxo]

Dash is technological nonsense and a masternode scam.
It only functions as obfuscated proof-of-stake because it's an oligarchy.

[Aki4real]

*throws away leftover popcorn*

Looks like Theymos abandoned this thread?

[Kfostava]

What about Skycoin?

[nial]

Just heard about it, seems like a really good project

[criz2fer]

what do you think of

Tezos

0x
District0x
Aragon
Golem
Dcorp
Decentraland

Waves
Byteball
Neo

After watching the Golem project, it has a potential to create a multitasking activity specially in rendering. I have also tried rendering and it take hours for a simple render. But I think it would have a problem of trust on how to deliver the goods which are right to its services. Hope the Project will gain more attention specially today which have already going to moon.

[2Block]

I think Theymos must have overlooked the ZCOIN info. Maybe mistook it for a different coin? I don't think the he intended this to be a "Pump my current holdings" thread, but why list a coin and not research it? The fact that he has been around for a LOT longer than me, I give him the benefit of the doubt. It appears he has taken his discussions to Reddit, so this thread will prob not be updated.

[SatoNatomato]

I wonder if the iota points should be changed to -998, since they attempted to make their own hash function, digital signature scheme, and made newbie mistakes in both, or even worse wilfully injected backdoors?

[Aki4real]

What about Karmo for charity (opakeco.org)?
Or do all crypto projects based on ethereum get the same score

[kakusnice]

my 2 hidden gems that will have monumental gains in the next 12 months are Bitbay and Blocknet.

Good to see them on the list. I know once you look into them you will see how undervalued they are! especially Bitbay! You will me taken back by how undervalued it is

[Hyperme.sh]

in more than 5 years Which altcoins will make you a millionare ?

[cryptothinker]

[...]
I don't know at this point whether technical merit actually helps the price at all, but it might
[...]

Sometimes I also had my doubts. What happens is that there is a huge number of sh*tcoins out there, with new ones being produced every day... That obfuscates good projects, and slows down innovation in the cryptocurrency space.

But in due time the market will do its job...

[finpunk]

Very cool you mentioned our project at ZenCash...would be happy to discuss any of the technical details or our business strategy and future plans with anyone anytime.

FYI, i'm one of the co-founders, so obviously biased, but we're doing really cool things that do merit consideration:

-first coin to integrate TLS into the protocol for e2e encryption
-implementing e2e encrypted network called "secure nodes" that we pay part of block rewards
-first zk-SNARK coin to build dedicated private messaging services (integrated into wallet and a stand alone version)
-funding academic R&D to anonymize network propagation (DANDELION++)
-implementing a protocol-level game theoretic treasury model that significantly improves on the Dash version

That's just the start. We have a pipeline of R&D, including a major protocol overhaul, domain fronting, IPFS integration, and major usability improvements and partnerships.

[Figatko]

Still waiting, when some other coins will be evaluated? Especially hoping to see BitBay. They announced the new roadmap, quite exciting.

[hello_good_sir]

Honestly Monero is probably the most interesting project that i've personally seen and their goals are quite realistic. Their dev have even said that monero is likely going to fail in the end, which is an extremely realistic outlook in my opinion.

Community is great as well.

I would have given at least 10 in my opinion, but it's really up to you

[CryptosapienZA]

I am glad to see my no 2 coin,IOTA on this list. I think this coin has a lot potential and has real world use cases. Monero and Zcash are on my top 5 coins as well. I must say, I am surprised by litecoin. While I agree that it is aclone but very few people have said this aloud. It seem as though most Bitcoin maximalist were huge fans on litecoin.

[cryptonero]

nice summary review,please review more coins so that we can avoid these shit and copycat coins

[semaforo]

  I have some concepts for a consensus protocol. There seem to be some sharp people on this thread. I hope I can find devs to either destroy the idea or help me develop it.

[CRED.me]

RaiBlocks is a highly flawed design that was debunked by experts (including @gmaxwell Gregory Maxwell Core Bitcoin developer) in 2015:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2672512.msg28733469#msg28733469

Several old timers have been messaging me asking for AnonyMint’s analysis. It’s linked above from 2015.

[evilsign]

How about the coin from the hard fork of bitcoin? bitcoin cash? bitcoin gold? If we look at the price now, I guess this Bitcoin Cash has something "powerful" which can defeat ETH. But about implementation and technical merit in a platform, of course, ethereum still number one rather than another altcoin, include monero. I see this monero more stable than other altcoins but still needed a promotion to make this coin famous.

[popotao99]

We must avoid miners to get control over the blockchains, this is the main flaw of the Bitcoins original vision , skycoin has been doing research the last 4 years to solve that problem.

[Sithara007]

I am not sure whether Theymos checks this thread anymore. If he does, then I request him to please evaluate two coins, in which I am about to invest: Cardano and NEO. Also, I want to know whether he is sticking with his score of 4.0 for Monero or not. That coin is not showing much momentum lately.

[nutildah]

Wonder if Theymos has any new favorites these days, though I highly doubt it.

I think he was a bit harsh on Counterparty -- it was revolutionary at the time of its release, brought about a user-friendly way to develop tokens ("colored coins") that ride on the bitcoin network.

If anything this proves that Theymos doesn't absolutely hate all altcoins, he just thinks they're far inferior compared to BTC.

He was right about BCH -- never came close to flippening BTC.

[theymos]

Wonder if Theymos has any new favorites these days, though I highly doubt it.

I was going to try to evaluate more, but I never got around to it.

Current thinking:

 - Extremely interested: grin
 - Good: XMR
 - Some merit: ETH
 - Possibly some merit, not sure: XLM, TRX, QRL, IOTA

[nutildah]

Current thinking:

 - Extremely interested: grin

Hmm, interesting, never heard of it before.

"Grin has no amounts and no addresses...

MimbleWimble leverages cryptography to allow most of the past transaction data to be removed."

Thanks for the heads up.

[chenhaonan]

Not all altcoins have no hope in the future. Some coins are still very expensive in the future. IOTA's ranking may rise, but investment in altcoin needs to be cautious. The speed at which the altcoin drops is usually very intense.

[vit05]

Wonder if Theymos has any new favorites these days, though I highly doubt it.

I was going to try to evaluate more, but I never got around to it.

Current thinking:

 - Extremely interested: grin
 - Good: XMR
 - Some merit: ETH
 - Possibly some merit, not sure: XLM, TRX, QRL, IOTA

I visit this topic again to see if there was any update about Grin. And I was surprised that you had updated well before it was released. Good to see that you also modified a little your idea about other projects.

Especially your opinion about ETH.