Is it time for Bitcoin to bite back against clonecoins and scamcoins?

[amincd]

It is clear that your average journalist is not properly educated enough to inform the public about the "importance" of these alt-coins (which is almost none). From PPCoin (which is actually somewhat innovative) being barely given a mention in favor of discussing Freicoin's silly demurrage scheme, to Feathercoin being discussed more than the coin it shamefully copies from, to the words "Franko" and "WorldCoin" ever being printed in a "respectable" publication, it is obvious that the media is looking to trumpet the story of a "better Bitcoin" or "Bitcoin successor" regardless of the actual facts. They are too used to Apple releasing another iWhatever every six months.

The Bitcoin community must not allow these airheads to take the lead in educating the public about alt-coins. We must make sure that people understand why these coins are slightly interesting from an experimental perspective at best and complete rip-offs at worst. Having dozens of cryptocoins get mainstream attention will harm not only Bitcoin but the entire idea of cryptocurrency by diluting the ecosystem and confusing people.

+1 Very well put.

[Lethn]

It is clear that your average journalist is not properly educated enough to inform the public about the "importance" of these alt-coins (which is almost none).

Alt-coins are extremely important if you knew anything about economics then you'd understand that, you lost my interest the moment you claimed they weren't, I guarantee if Bitcoin hadn't been released open source it would have been a failure or it would have been worth as much as Second Life Linden Dollars are currently. We have needed currency competition ever since central banking came along and people tried to control currencies in order to control everyone else now we have a system that even it's creator wouldn't be able to undo easily because the code is already out on the internet now.

Just like you do with anything in the Bitcoin market, when it comes to scam artists, just use your common sense and look at things carefully.

[domob]

Just wondering, why nobody so far mentioned namecoins in the discussion above.  IMHO, these are in fact the most interesting altcoin, although PPC also has some real innovations.  LTC is in my opinion "just popular" but not really innovative.  (I hold some LTC though, so I still believe it may be somewhat useful.)

[anti-scam]

It is clear that your average journalist is not properly educated enough to inform the public about the "importance" of these alt-coins (which is almost none).

Alt-coins are extremely important if you knew anything about economics then you'd understand that

If you know so much about economics than explain to me what alt-coins bring to the table.

Just wondering, why nobody so far mentioned namecoins in the discussion above.

In practice .bit hasn't shown itself to be much more useful than the DNS system implemented by something like I2P. I don't think Namecoin will go anywhere. It's technically very interesting but running a whole blockchain just for DNS is kind of silly. Namecoin isn't meant to be used as a "real" currency anyway.

[Book]

That is quite bad, I hope coins like feathercoin don't ever make it to mainstream. Is litecoin good or just another clonecoin?

[SaltySpitoon]

That is quite bad, I hope coins like feathercoin don't ever make it to mainstream. Is litecoin good or just another clonecoin?

Litecoin was one of the first alt coins to be created, but using scrypt and a few other minor differences like conf time, total amount of coins, etc. The reason LTC is where it is now, is because of how it was released. It was a bunch of Bitcoin users in IRC bouncing ideas off of each other, and figuring out how they wanted to deal with things, so early Litecoin had the support of the Bitcoin community more or less, so it was allowed to grow to where it is now. What really seems to separate the "scam coins" from the coins with at least some hope, is

A) How they are released. If there is a premine, the likelihood of success drops significantly, although minor success has been had with premine and then using those premined coins for bounties
B) The Dev team. In the case of Solidcoin, the idea was innovative, and almost solid, but the dev rubbed people the wrong way. Picked fights with Bitcoin, abrasive in general.
C) Transparency, the majority of coins that have done well were release well ahead of time, so there wasn't a group of insiders who began mining the day it went public, a week before anyone knew about it

Although people don't think about it much, Solidcoin did compete with Bitcoins during the earlier days to a sort of significant amount. Solidcoin introduced the concept of funds showing up to your wallet as soon as they were sent, but just showing as 0 confirms, something that was adopted by Bitcoin shortlyish after.

Altcoins are somewhat useful, or the ones with some sort of innovation anyway, because features eventually get added to Bitcoin, or if they have no significant features the coins tend to die. I remember pre solidcoin, buying Bitcoins from this Pirate40 guy on BTC-OTC with Moneypak, and having to wait 20 minutes before knowing if he had even sent the BTC or if I was out $200, a feature that killed bitcoins for me, for a little while anyway.

[domob]

Just wondering, why nobody so far mentioned namecoins in the discussion above.

In practice .bit hasn't shown itself to be much more useful than the DNS system implemented by something like I2P. I don't think Namecoin will go anywhere. It's technically very interesting but running a whole blockchain just for DNS is kind of silly. Namecoin isn't meant to be used as a "real" currency anyway.

IMHO it has lot of potential.  Just think about the domain seizures the US already made - there, namecoin is the protection that bitcoin is for your money in case of Cyprus style events (in some sense).  It may even happen that the US (possibly coordinated with other players) are cracking down on bitcoin sites some time in the future, and there .bit domains could come to a rescue.  Of course, that may be unlikely, but it could be.

Furthermore, namecoin's potential is not just in domains.  You can use it for arbitrary storage of values, for instance to associate in a safe and decentralised way some contact details to an online identity.  In particular, your bitmessage address or GnuPG public keys or something like that.  This is not very established (or well-known) yet, but a feature that is interesting in my opinion and which might take off in the future.

[jackjack]

Litecoin is orders of magnitude more secure than Bitcoin, due to its use of a cryptography technique called scrypt,

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-06/16/litecoin

what.the.fuck.

[Lethn]

If you know so much about economics than explain to me what alt-coins bring to the table.

It's called currency competition, I already explained that in my post.

[mmitech]

just for your information, do some research about SHA256 and Scrypt, Scrypt is indeed more complicated and secure than SHA256, maybe it is not widely used as SHA256 because it is newer, but I have to say that SHA256 will be outdated soon and maybe scrypt will be the lead for few years till a newer technology appears and takes over, do not be ignorant and emotional about it. this is how tech works.


even if somehow we decide to implement a new encryption or any other improvement there will be always people against it which will lead to two forks, this is the disadvantage of decentralization, look at issues developers are having to convince miners about the block size, minimum transaction, in fact devs cant agree with each-other , I am only afraid about this killing Bitcoin.


in fact if Bitcoin dies no ALT will survive, everything with vanish with it.  

I believe that LTC and NMC will take a spot behind BTC, but other crap coins will die soon, history have proved that, just worry about bitcoin because no ALT will make it without BTC.

[anti-scam]

just for your information, do some research about SHA256 and Scrypt, Scrypt is indeed more complicated and secure than SHA256

Complicated does not equal secure. ASIC-resistant does not equal secure. Bitcoin has a vastly higher hash rate than Litecoin.

If you know so much about economics than explain to me what alt-coins bring to the table.

It's called currency competition, I already explained that in my post.

Competition is not necessarily a good thing if it's all crap. Have you ever heard of the video game crash of the 80s?

[domob]

just for your information, do some research about SHA256 and Scrypt, Scrypt is indeed more complicated and secure than SHA256, maybe it is not widely used as SHA256 because it is newer, but I have to say that SHA256 will be outdated soon and maybe scrypt will be the lead for few years till a newer technology appears and takes over, do not be ignorant and emotional about it. this is how tech works.

scrypt is harder to compute than SHA-2, but IMHO that tells absolutely nothing about its 'security'.  In fact, I presume that SHA-2 as a general purpose hash function has seen much more scrutiny than scrypt, and I believe it is less likely a collision or preimage attack in SHA-2 is found than on scrypt.  For mining, it probably doesn't matter at all except we see a catastrophic break, since if a faster way of mining is found (for instance because some insights allow to generate small hashes easier than brute force) the difficulty will just adjust.  Note also that SHA-3 is on its way, which is the logical follower to SHA-2, not scrypt.

The point of scrypt is that a single hash is much more costly to compute, and that this makes GPU mining still feasible with it.  Furthermore, scrypt advocates believe that this makes it harder to launch a 51% attack on scrypt, because an attacker would have to buy tons of GPUs instead of "just" building a custom ASIC production facility to outperform all general purpose computing hardware easily.  However I'm not sure this argument is really valid, in particular with ASICs getting hopefully more and more distributed to lots of different people in the future.  Thus I don't really see any reason why scrypt should be 'more secure' (for what purpose, by the way?  hashing can be used for lots of different things, not only cryptocurrency mining) than SHA-2.

[anti-scam]

Furthermore, scrypt advocates believe that this makes it harder to launch a 51% attack on scrypt, because an attacker would have to buy tons of GPUs instead of "just" building a custom ASIC production facility to outperform all general purpose computing hardware easily.  However I'm not sure this argument is really valid, in particular with ASICs getting hopefully more and more distributed to lots of different people in the future.

It may be harder for an ASIC owner to attack, but who says it's not easier for a botnet owner due to the lack of competition from ASICs? You raise a good point.

[mmitech]

well SHA256 is integrated into scrypt as well. So beside SHA256 it uses the intensity of memory . correct it me if I am wrong ? so additionally it is safer maybe harder to break. this is only my understanding I am not an expert, correct it me if I am wrong.

[jackjack]

just for your information, do some research about SHA256 and Scrypt, Scrypt is indeed more complicated and secure than SHA256, maybe it is not widely used as SHA256 because it is newer, but I have to say that SHA256 will be outdated soon and maybe scrypt will be the lead for few years till a newer technology appears and takes over, do not be ignorant and emotional about it. this is how tech works.


even if somehow we decide to implement a new encryption or any other improvement there will be always people against it which will lead to two forks, this is the disadvantage of decentralization, look at issues developers are having to convince miners about the block size, minimum transaction, in fact devs cant agree with each-other , I am only afraid about this killing Bitcoin.


in fact if Bitcoin dies no ALT will survive, everything with vanish with it. 

I believe that LTC and NMC will take a spot behind BTC, but other crap coins will die soon, history have proved that, just worry about bitcoin because no ALT will make it without BTC.

Congratulations, you don't know how Bitcoin and its clones works

[mmitech]

just for your information, do some research about SHA256 and Scrypt, Scrypt is indeed more complicated and secure than SHA256, maybe it is not widely used as SHA256 because it is newer, but I have to say that SHA256 will be outdated soon and maybe scrypt will be the lead for few years till a newer technology appears and takes over, do not be ignorant and emotional about it. this is how tech works.


even if somehow we decide to implement a new encryption or any other improvement there will be always people against it which will lead to two forks, this is the disadvantage of decentralization, look at issues developers are having to convince miners about the block size, minimum transaction, in fact devs cant agree with each-other , I am only afraid about this killing Bitcoin.


in fact if Bitcoin dies no ALT will survive, everything with vanish with it. 

I believe that LTC and NMC will take a spot behind BTC, but other crap coins will die soon, history have proved that, just worry about bitcoin because no ALT will make it without BTC.

Congratulations, you don't know how Bitcoin and its clones works

I am no expert in the field, but you seem to know allot about it, lighten me please ...

[anti-scam]

well SHA256 is integrated into scrypt as well. So beside SHA256 it uses the intensity of memory . correct it me if I am wrong ? so additionally it is safer maybe harder to break. this is only my understanding I am not an expert, correct it me if I am wrong.

http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf

Educate yourself. The question isn't even whether scrypt is more secure but whether SHA256 is secure enough. If it is then scrypt is just a waste of computational resources in the pursuit of "fairness".

[lucasjkr]

Why don't you let the free market decide?

Where did I call for the government to ban any coin? "Free market" doesn't mean "freedom from criticism" or "freedom from backlash". I am calling for members of your beloved free market to give the public proper information.

Calling for a 51% attack is hardly letting the free market decide. It's just letting a couple well heeled individuals or groups dictate their desires to the rest of the market.

Personally, watching what's been going on in the last couple of months, I am frankly not so enthused by bitcoins' becoming overrun by ASICMiner. This is hardly the democratic system that drew me to Bitcoin, and I doubt that anyone current bitcoin enthusiast would agree that this concentration of power is good for the system, or that they would have even become excited about Bitcoin in the first place if the network looked the way it does now back when they joined. But because people have a few coins (or many coins, doesn't matter), they're swearing loyalty to the "system" that benefits them. Hence talk of 51% attacks rather than competing on their own merits. Which, frankly, doesn't seem all that different for US Dollar/Fiat Currency system so mainy claim to abhor, except in this case they've become the ones with vested interests.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

SIgh....

[mmitech]

well SHA256 is integrated into scrypt as well. So beside SHA256 it uses the intensity of memory . correct it me if I am wrong ? so additionally it is safer maybe harder to break. this is only my understanding I am not an expert, correct it me if I am wrong.

http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf

Educate yourself. The question isn't even whether scrypt is more secure but whether SHA256 is secure enough. If it is then scrypt is just a waste of computational resources in the pursuit of "fairness".

I love the fact that you are all internet engineers, and all knows so much about everything. I did read that sheet, and I do not think that I have to read it again at this moment, but I would like to educate my self more, in fact I really would like you to explain how scrypt is a waste of computational resources, can you dig deeper into this, because my knowledge is limited and you seem to know allot about this subject, can you take 10 mins to explain it in a way that a dummy like me would understand ?

[TomHartburg]

This looks strangely like the beginnings of centralisation to me.

People who have a lot invested in Bitcoins are concerned that other coins will damage the market, and as such wish to take action against it. Whether that is through "educating" the public on the "risks" of altcoins, or through 51 % attacks or destabilising through pump and dump schemes, this is an example of people clubbing together in order to act to protect their interests in the market place (Oh, Hello proto-state, when did you get here?!).

If you believe in the free market, or libertarianism, or "anarcho-capitalism", then surely you'd accept the market will select the best coin and run with it, be it bitcoin, litecoin, whatevercoin.

Just because you have an investment in bitcoin doesn't make it the best coin, hell, just because bitcoin is the best coin doesn't mean it will be the winning coin, look at Microsoft ffs.

But then of course, that won't happen, because you have the resources from your bitcoin investments which allow you to collectively dictate and control the market. Oh look at the dream of decentralised capitalism sail off over the horizon of obvious.

*Awaits huge shit storm of abuse*