so....how do these forked currencies work? Wouldn't you have to have someone accept those as well? And since there's like A LOT of variations, it'd work about as well as when each US state used their own currency. That seems extremely detrimental to the original bitcoins. Is there some collaborating math or logic here that links them together in a beneficial way or is it basically competing currencies?
there is an entire planet of currencies.. why dont they have these problems? bitcoin isnt just US.
there is also benefit to competition, there is many flaws with bitcoin, one being wallet encryption. They have been promising this for months. i0coin is coming out the gate with wallet encryption.
Sure they have to be accepted somewhere, they are already accepted on a exchange and they dont even exist yet. Neither namecoin nor bitcoin were accepted at many places.
why would you want money linked?
and yes this is a competing currency, much like the euro competes with the dollar.
it was mainly designed though, as a sort of a joke. It was in response to ixcoin which had become suddenly popular, mainly due to peoples gambling nature. The guy who made ixcoin took 500k coins for himself before releasing it to the public. This isnt good for the currency and is kinda scammy thing to do. So he suggested making iocoin but, where everyone can get on the gensis block, and no one will take a bunch of coins for themselves before it is released.
He thought that if someone would make this, that everyone would see how stupid and scammy ixcoins are. SOme people with programming skills said "hey thats not a bad idea and more than that, we arent going to make this a joke, we are actually going to address flaws in bitcoin, ixcoin and namecoin which have not been addressed yet" Things like address verification, faster block rates, which means faster confirms and transactions, and of course the encrypted wallet to foil trojans.
anyways was a joke, isnt a joke no more, yes it is competing currency but it is a good competing currency and doesnt exist simply to exist.It is very very open, even more transparent than the start of bitcoin. Heck one day it might even replace bitcoin... especially if development doesnt speed up.
