Current landscape of crypto in your opinion?

[sevoque]

Hi all,

I wanted to get some opinions on the current landscape of the crypto world on a a few things and see what people think about where we are right now.

For me personally, after getting back in to crypto say about 8-9 months back, I have never seen anything like what we are witnessing right now in terms of the speed in which new coins are being released. Fundamentally I don't think its a bad thing, but I think that its going to leave newer people feeling very alienated and confused in their understand of what cryptocurrencies do and are.

I know that a lot of the veterans feel that a lot of the newer coins, especially the meme coins are a complete waste of time - as someone who got involved on pretty much Day 1 with DOGE, I can see the benefits it has had to the wider community and non-crypto people and I really applaud it.

Although i've been doing this a while, It's getting to a point now where I feel confused as to where to allocate time/resource/attention with all these new coins being released. There are obviously lots of opportunities to make money and I did REALLY well with DOGE, but with all these new coins coming out, by estimate about TWO a day now, what am I supposed to think about the future of crypto and what the objectives of all these new devs are?

The truth of the matter is, these coins need to have something unique to their predecessors and provide some sort of utility. I don't understand how with over 109 markets available on cryptsy for example, I am able to make an informed decision on anything right now and feel kind of lost. I could always stay in the mind set of just Bitcoin, Litecoin, and strictly one or two other alts. But lets face it, being there on day 1 of a coin and getting to mine some serious numbers to then see that coin hit an exchange, its exciting. But it seems like these exchanges and listing sites no longer have any sort of barrier to entry, and that scares me for the future of the scene. For example, cryptsy literally adds _anything_ and its profit motivated, and I understand, but what is that ultiamtely going to do to Crypto ?

If I'm honest, I don't have ONE particular opinion or school of thought as far as all of this stuff goes right now. I do have my own investing strategies and view altcoins as a vehicle to further my wealth and create something from nothing with. I just feel like there are a lot of people out there who think they can go and create a dollar value out of a nothing coin thats either premined, instamined by them or something to that affect and then make out like a bandit and abandon their projects because their objective all along was to cash out in the quickest time possible, not to add any real value to the community.

FYI - this is not directed at any ONE coin, this is just an overall observation.

Be interested to get some feedback and thoughts

Thanks

Sev

[sevoque]

makes a lot of sense ^

If we continue at this speed of releases each week, something has gotta give.

[sevoque]

bump for replies?

[hendo420]

makes a lot of sense ^

If we continue at this speed of releases each week, something has gotta give.

If you remember the huge altcoin boom after chinacoin was released. (I made alot off of chinacoin, I built my first scrypt rig using my profits)
This was around the time bitcoin hit $266 the first time.

After chinacoin made its boom/bust a ton of other coins came on the scene. Most of them trying to capitalize on the markets greed.

Eventually it died down because people saw that these new coins weren't bringing anything new to the table. The market was fed up with copypasta coins.
some coins were the exception, some, like primecoin and quarkcoin, brought new algos to the table and people really liked that and bought into them.

It went on like that for awhile. And then came Doge. The meme effect in coin form.
It made alot of people alot of money.
This is ofcourse shortly after bitcoin hit an all time high of $1240

So now everyone wants to replicate the effect.

There may be a little money to be made on this meme effect but eventually people are going to see it for what it is, and that is to make the early adopters money. Eventually all of this nonsense will die down again and we will have a nice calm period of very few new altcoins.

Part of the reason that Altcoins are so popular is because Bitcoin went up dramatically. Its no coincidence that the boom in altcoin creation was around both times bitcoin peaked.

[tokyoghetto]

- too many copy and paste devs who release coins with no source, pools or windows wallet
- stupid meme coins
- huge premines with no public ledgers on how premine is being spent
- too many scams, people getting robbed trying to trade Over The Counter because they don't want to wait for an exchange.
- Too many scryptcoins because newbies who are too late to the party want to instamine coins using their overpriced GPUs and don't have enough lunch money left over to buy an Asic.  
-People who whine about premines, but want to instamine. If they missed the instamine, they yell FUD and claim the coin is a scamcoin.
- Retarded Block rewards with early adopter bonuses. That only means that who ever mined the first couple blocks makes the most money when they dump the coin. Everyone else gets screwed, anally.

basically cryptos are going into a hyperinflation stage. Think about Mortgage Backed Securities. Everyone sees everyone else getting rich, so they are just trying to do the same thing. But when you flood the market with too many useless coins, you devalue the entire market.

Granted, the good coins will survive, but a majority of the people here are losing money. Its penny stocking at its finest. I am a miner so I really don't care, I win pretty much 100% of the time in this game. I would like to see cryptos succeed and take down the Fed, but half of you people are mentally retarded.
 

[hendo420]

One good effect of the altcoin craze is it redistributes bitcoin on a massive scale.

What do I do when I mine a new altcoin? Once it hits the exchange I trade it directly into Bitcoin and then HOLD. This is what everyone should do.

Bitcoin and Litecoin are here to stay. 99% of the altcoins will fade into obscurity. Some like Primecoin may stick around, we will see.

[tokyoghetto]

Name:    Nekomata
Posts:    120
Activity:    28
Position:    Member
Date Registered:    December 23, 2013, 03:41:02 PM
Last Active:    Today at 12:07:02 AM

You pumping DOGE because its your first coin?

[sevoque]

These points are really good, especially the one about holding BTC.

Can we not turn this in to a thread which slams a coin/user, would appreciate it.

S

[tokyoghetto]

One good effect of the altcoin craze is it redistributes bitcoin on a massive scale.

What do I do when I mine a new altcoin? Once it hits the exchange I trade it directly into Bitcoin and then HOLD. This is what everyone should do.

its ok to diversify some of your holdings into SOLID ALTS with good devs, strong communities and services. DGC and WDC come to mind.

[tokyoghetto]

Name:    Nekomata
Posts:    120
Activity:    28
Position:    Member
Date Registered:    December 23, 2013, 03:41:02 PM
Last Active:    Today at 12:07:02 AM

You pumping DOGE because its your first coin?

maybe
you don't know everything.

I don't care to know. All you have contributed to this thread is "DOGE is not stupid" when I didn't even mention DOGE in my reply to the OP. So either contribute constructively to the conversation that the OP has started or just keep quiet.

[traderCJ]

99.9999% of the alt coins out there are pump and dump garbage.  Everybody here knows it.  Even Litecoin is a joke.  The name of the game is get in early, get out when the getting's good, and leave some sucker holding the bag.

[hendo420]

One good effect of the altcoin craze is it redistributes bitcoin on a massive scale.

What do I do when I mine a new altcoin? Once it hits the exchange I trade it directly into Bitcoin and then HOLD. This is what everyone should do.

its ok to diversify some of your holdings into SOLID ALTS with good devs, strong communities and services. DGC and WDC come to mind.

I agree that some alts do have merit and could possibly have a future. I personally don't keep any altcoins on hand. That is my prerogative. I may change my mind if I see altcoins start to make crazy leaps in price. I see bitcoin going to $1,000,000 in the not too distant future(less than 5 years) I want as much of it as I can get.

[hendo420]

Even Litecoin is a joke.

Litecoin keeps us GPU miners going, don't diss Litecoin.

Before you say, why not buy an ASIC. I have an asicminer blade. I have had it 3 months and it still has not mined back the bitcoins I spent on it. Yea the value of the bitcoins I mined went up, but so wouldthe bitcoins I spent had I kept them.

[FrictionlessCoin]

Mining can be a very tough business.

So, when a new coin comes out, then there's opportunity to take those poor performing rigs to mine another speculative coin.

The risks are clearly lower for the miner that mines and sells the coins in the open market.

The risks are of course extremely high for the early buyer.

So either you are very early ( meaning by a couple of hours ) or you invest in a coin that has long term prospects.

For a long term investment, I look at a couple of metrics.

(1) Network Hash Rate - how much hash rate is used to secure the coin
(2) Exchange Liquidity - how much is traded daily
(3) Number of Coins in Existence - lower is better
(4) Block Rate - lower is better
(5) Maturity - how long has the coin been around
(6) Developer Support - how active are developers

[markm]

Even Litecoin is a joke.

Litecoin keeps us GPU miners going, don't diss Litecoin.

Before you say, why not buy an ASIC. I have an asicminer blade. I have had it 3 months and it still has not mined back the bitcoins I spent on it. Yea the value of the bitcoins I mined went up, but so wouldthe bitcoins I spent had I kept them.

Thus try not to spend bitcoins on such things.

What I did was spend BBQcoins on them, since they were an almost free windfall (their difficulty was low enough for almost a whole year that they could be CPU mined so I just had a core of one of my remote servers mine them all year).

Sure I had to turn the BBQcoins into bitcoins on the way to cashing them out, but I gritted my teeth closed my eyes and pretended I was spending the BBQcoins, trying to ignore the awkward fact they were in bitcoin form momentarily in the process.

A whole heck of a lot of them got stuck as bitcoins though so I try to view it has having lucked into vast numbers of bitcoins plus also some nice rigs, instead of as having not held on to as many bitcoins as I could have.

Basically I got so many bitcoins from those BBQcoins that it seemed reasonable to diversify.

Plus those BBQcoins had taught me that it is the coins that are not on exchanges that have the largest potential for profit.

Once a coin gets onto an exchange it tends to get harder to mine it. A coin on an exchange might need all your block eruptors all pointed at it to get a few, whereas the ones not on exchanges yet each eruptor could be pointed at a different one and do well, if there were as many such coins as you have eruptors.

Part of why I bought ASICs was there was no place to buy I0Coin and GRouPcoin and CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld so I wanted to merged mine as many as possible before the masses realised they were leaving all of those out of their merge.

As it was, I0Coin got back onto mmpool and then an exchange before I had much time at all to take advantage of its low difficulty. I had hoped for many months of quietly picking it up with all those block-eruptors that I bought.

Bitparking's mmpool also picked up GRouPcoin when it picked back up I0Coin, so I also didn't get much time to pick up GRP at low difficulty with my block-eruptors. But CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld are still nicely under the radar so are coming in all day every day at a nice rate...

-MarkM-

[traderCJ]

Even Litecoin is a joke.

Litecoin keeps us GPU miners going, don't diss Litecoin.

Before you say, why not buy an ASIC. I have an asicminer blade. I have had it 3 months and it still has not mined back the bitcoins I spent on it. Yea the value of the bitcoins I mined went up, but so wouldthe bitcoins I spent had I kept them.

Fair enough, but that suggests the value of these coins is primarily based on people squeezing money out of obsolete mining rigs.  Is this a good foundation for a cryptocurrency?  It is too inherently unstable.  This is precisely why we see pump and dumps across the crypto coin market.  What we need are real Bitcoin-competitive features, not tweaks and copycats.

[FrictionlessCoin]

What are we to do though? There may be good returns on investing in some of the coins early on, but there is likely better
returns from mining. Some of the coins are now starting off priced way too high, and they are looking more like the facebook ipo, with early investors likely to lose alot of money(after they mine more coins, and the supply increases alot, the coin price will fall, but too many early buyers of the coins driving prices to scary heights).

Its kind of like a casino alt-coin scene out there

Yes, many of the new coins are price too high.   But go back and look at historical records for LTC,  always priced too high in the beginning.

[bitdwarf]

I do have my own investing strategies and view altcoins as a vehicle to further my wealth and create something from nothing with.

I just feel like there are a lot of people out there who think they can go and create a dollar value out of a nothing coin

Since you have the same mentality as them, just think when would you stop putting energy into new coins, and that's probably when the creators will think the same.

[occham]

Even Litecoin is a joke.

Litecoin keeps us GPU miners going, don't diss Litecoin.

Before you say, why not buy an ASIC. I have an asicminer blade. I have had it 3 months and it still has not mined back the bitcoins I spent on it. Yea the value of the bitcoins I mined went up, but so wouldthe bitcoins I spent had I kept them.

There HAS to be an alternate to bitcoin over time or bitcoin itself cannot survive.   Businesses and governments cannot and will not be locked to a sole technology in perpetuity.  There always has to be a second and third alternative.   Go back in time and you'll discover that one of the first investments that Steven Jobs secured in Apple after he resumed the CEO job was an 80 million dollar infusion from BILL GATES.   Why would Gates do such a thing?  Because at that point, Microsoft was actually to the point of realistically owning the OS market totally.  MICROSOFT needed Apple to not die and ultimately Linux or they would have been broken up by the Feds.

Right now, the alternate to Bitcoin is basically fiat currency or physical gold as 'token of wealth' and Bitcoin's competitor as a transfer medium is paypal, visa, MC, and western union.  I would argue that, over time, SOME other crypto currency will have to exist.

Bitcoin is the 'Survivor/Big Brother' of Reality TV.  One of the first broadly accepted forms.  The other altcoins are just vying for a share of the stage.  Most suck and will die.  Some will become hits and people will do well.

[markm]

Yes but we don't need insecure "store of wealth" scams.

If the second/alternative currency is to be blockchain-based like Bitcoin is, someone needs to create ASICs for some other form of hashing than SHA256(SHA256(data)), and do so both as hobbyist cute little USB kind of scale devices and as smallest node available devides such as the KnC Neptune.

With such devices, especially the USB ones, on the shelf in massive quantities ready for launch, and no one knowing what the hashing chosen actually was until after a massive launch that hopefully starts it right out of the gate at massive difficulty, maybe it will be possible to get a second choice coin decently started toward being secure, and with enough massive publicity / huge network before its type of hashing gets too fragmented by all the wannabe clones that will doubtless spring up.

Maybe more likely is that the second choice coin will not be blockchain based at all, thus saving it the insanely high cost of trying to secure a blockchain.

("To secure your currency for you, we demand 100% of all of it that will ever be minted, plus also transaction fees on top of that." Is that insane cost or what?!?!)

-MarkM-