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June 24, 2013, 06:01:10 PM |
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I think most of us can agree that there is a glut of altcoins. But I suspect that most of the people who frequent this part of the forums can also see that bitcoin itself does not have what it takes to really deliver on the promise of what an electronic currency needs to be. Both bitcoin and litecoin strongly benefit from being the first of their kind despite their drawbacks.
However, some form of electronic currency is, I believe, inevitable. Something resembling all of these cryptocoins will eventually arise as a truly global electronic currency. The problem as I see it now is that this altcoin bloat dilutes the field. Maybe the coin which will gain widespread adoption exists now, but maybe not.
Imagine being able to log into the website for your fiat currency bank and with a few click sending a payment in cryptocoins to anyone in the world with no currency conversion fees, no taxes, no fees at all other than those imposed by the bank itself (which theoretically you could avoid or reduce by switching banks).
I know you are probably thinking that you can already do a version of this with bitcoin and other altcoins and why get the bank involved at all. The answer is that real widespread adoption will not happen unless something like this happens. Our grandparents, indeed for some of us even our parents, will never use any cryptocoins the way they are now. It is true that in some respects the infrastructure for ease of use does not exist and that can be remedied to some extent with new crypto coin start-ups. But the cryptocoin that really gets used as a currency the world over, the one that really gains widespread adoption, has to be easy for the noobs.
In order to be useful for a currency, confirmations have to happen faster than they do for bitcoin. This I think, goes without saying, but you will never see the sort of ubiquitious adoption of bitcoin as an electronic currency that I am talking about for that reason alone. And because the world needs some kind of universal electronic currency, there absolutely will eventually be one form that does get the kind of widespread adoption I am talking about.
Community Coin
With these issues in mind I thought it might be worth creating a coin that the community actually wanted BEFORE it was even released. Some of the issues that would need to be sorted are block sizes, block times, confirmations, difficulty retargets, hashing algorithm, etc. If these factors are determined in advance in a way that the community agrees makes the coin look like a potential candidate to be a real contender as a worldwide electronic currency then the hype will exist before the coin. This should remove the need for a dev premine (to support the coin with giveaways, faucets and whatever else, blah, blah, blah) because theoretically the coin is already popular before it is released based on the fact that the community discussed it and helped create it to begin with.
If it was done right I could see a release that already included multiple pools for people to mine on, promises from cryptsy or other exchanges for early inclusion, and so forth. The idea being that the interest in the coin exists to such a level before it is released that the release is basically guaranteed to see widespread support.
I am not capable of creating an altcoin so this is not me offering everyone a chance to help me make “my” altcoin. This is just an idea I wanted to float to address a problem I perceive in the proliferation of altcoins. It also seem possible that after some conversation about the ideal characteristics needed for a coin to gain widespread adoption as an electronic currency an existing coin may be discovered to already have the needed characteristics in which case maybe we can focus community awareness on that and support the coin or coins that have real potential.
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