Theymos's list of altcoins with some technical merit

[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...