Why would i still invest in bitcoin?

[Fraxinus]

There are coins comming out that are better on many things.
Most important in my eyes: speed

There was always the trouble of the long confirmations with btc, so i can't imagine the use of it in daily life will be so easy.
Like buying your bread with btc if you need to wait 5 minutes before its comfirmed.
I never bought anything with btc so i don't have experience with it.

But there are coins with practically instant transaction times, aren't these the coins of the future?
And isn't bitcoin a bit outdated?

[DolanDuck]

I asked the same question on another forum a couple of days ago but had no answers...
btw why they don't modify bitcoin to get faster transactions?

[_gnasher_]

As it's the original. For now, everything is traded in terms of Bitcoins. Almost like gold.

I can't see that changing, but can see other cryptos playing a major role.

[nocoin]

Most important in my eyes: speed

There was always the trouble of the long confirmations with btc, so i can't imagine the use of it in daily life will be so easy.
Like buying your bread with btc if you need to wait 5 minutes before its comfirmed.

Seller don't need to wait for confirmations if you buying something like bread. Check this: http://www.coindesk.com/subway-bitcoin-purchase/

I hit send and within seconds she received confirmation on the iPad that her account had received the bitcoin. It took no longer than a credit card transaction, and it didn’t require my signature.

[Nullu]

Bitcoin by altcoin standards is a lot more stable. Most posts I've seen by other users who advise investing in Bitcoin suggest it as a long term investment. Years. Altcoins are highly volatile in comparison. If you can afford it, investing in Bitcoin when the price takes a dip, and then investing in altcoins at the same time gives you two different forms of investment opportunity. If I had a few thousand, I would feel safer putting it into bitcoin and cold storage than the meagre pennies I get in interest from my bank. At the same time I'd also want to be making shorter term investments in new crypto currencies and knowing when to hold and when to fold.

[markm]

Remember that the same hashing power that secures the bitcoin blockchain can also secure various others at the same time at near zero additional cost.

There are various different speeds of coin merged-mined alongside bitcoin, including one (GeistGeld) that is so crazy fast that some pools think it is too fast to be effectively merged mined, thus too darn fast to be secured.

DOGE recently showed us that almost all the GPU-mined coins could be PWNed overnight just by some stupid internet meme.  DOGE itself only has as much hashing power as a stupid internet meme can, almost overnight, conjure up. So it and all those that have less GPUs dedicated to securing them are all just garbage, toys, sitting there waiting for anon or some internet meme or who-ever or whatever to PWN the lot of them.

So if you want really crazy fast, help determine whether GeistGeld is too fast to work, and if so maybe push to have it slowed down to whatever is the fastest that can actually practically be secured. Meanwhile check out the other merged coins, some more of them are much faster than Bitcoin but not so stupidly fast as to be impractical to secure...

-MarkM-

[BunworthBanshee]

bitcoin I think will always be the coin of choice for storing wealth. while one of the alts may be used more in day to day stuff.

but the main reason, IMO is the same reasons why anybody would invest in gold.

what your saying is like why buy gold when I can just use my copper coins everyday.  

[markm]

Worse, actually. Most are saying not to use copper coins but instead of buy ponzi stamps and try to convince merchants to accept their ponzi stamps, knowing full well they could all be blown away at any time by the next internet meme that happens along.

-MarkM-

[Fraxinus]

Remember that the same hashing power that secures the bitcoin blockchain can also secure various others at the same time at near zero additional cost.

There are various different speeds of coin merged-mined alongside bitcoin, including one (GeistGeld) that is so crazy fast that some pools think it is too fast to be effectively merged mined, thus too darn fast to be secured.

DOGE recently showed us that almost all the GPU-mined coins could be PWNed overnight just by some stupid internet meme.  DOGE itself only has as much hashing power as a stupid internet meme can, almost overnight, conjure up. So it and all those that have less GPUs dedicated to securing them are all just garbage, toys, sitting there waiting for anon or some internet meme or who-ever or whatever to PWN the lot of them.

So if you want really crazy fast, help determine whether GeistGeld is too fast to work, and if so maybe push to have it slowed down to whatever is the fastest that can actually practically be secured. Meanwhile check out the other merged coins, some more of them are much faster than Bitcoin but not so stupidly fast as to be impractical to secure...

-MarkM-

From when on does the security becomes impractical?

[Nullu]

Worse, actually. Most are saying not to use copper coins but instead of buy ponzi stamps and try to convince merchants to accept their ponzi stamps, knowing full well they could all be blown away at any time by the next internet meme that happens along.

-MarkM-

It's all very depressing. I see so many people on these forums investing in dust and thin air. Big amounts of money. It's like the new penny stocks and ponzi scams of the digital age.

[markm]

Remember that the same hashing power that secures the bitcoin blockchain can also secure various others at the same time at near zero additional cost.

There are various different speeds of coin merged-mined alongside bitcoin, including one (GeistGeld) that is so crazy fast that some pools think it is too fast to be effectively merged mined, thus too darn fast to be secured.

DOGE recently showed us that almost all the GPU-mined coins could be PWNed overnight just by some stupid internet meme.  DOGE itself only has as much hashing power as a stupid internet meme can, almost overnight, conjure up. So it and all those that have less GPUs dedicated to securing them are all just garbage, toys, sitting there waiting for anon or some internet meme or who-ever or whatever to PWN the lot of them.

So if you want really crazy fast, help determine whether GeistGeld is too fast to work, and if so maybe push to have it slowed down to whatever is the fastest that can actually practically be secured. Meanwhile check out the other merged coins, some more of them are much faster than Bitcoin but not so stupidly fast as to be impractical to secure...

-MarkM-

From when on does the security becomes impractical?

When the sheer speed of the coin interrupts the miner with new work so often that the miner loses hashing time, so all the many other coins the miner is hashing all suffer because of one insanely fast coin constantly interrupting it.

(It it not practical to not merged-mine because as DOGE showed us a stupid internet meme can overnight conjure up more than enough hashing power to trash numerous crapcoins all at once.)

But high speed has tons of other problems too, unless you don't want home users to be able to mine the coin or you want home users to get nothing but orphans because by the tiem they have had a block passed to them by their neighbor who got it from his neighbor who got it from his neighbor, all validating the block before passing it on, the massive datacentres on passive internet backbones already solved it and maybe the next block too and maybe are darn close to solving yet another...

Bear in mind too that all the brand new scamcoins do not have years of transactions to compare against when validating blocks and so on, they have less than even one year, although the faster their blocks the sooner they would rack up as much transactions if only people actually used them. They have not been seen in real use, all the newbies idiotically going oooh and aaaah at their speed are watching a fake, a pretense, an empty blockchain, devoind of real transaction volume, not what such a thing would be like in real life.

-MarkM-

[Bigeyeone]

Nothing beats bitcoin, because of one thing, bitcoin is the only real crypto currency that merchants massively accept. not even litecoin comes close.

Fast block speed does not matter much and it is a double edge sword, the faster the blocks the longer the blockchain, in the beginning with a new coin that does not matter much but after a while synchronizing becomes a real pain in the ass.

and well for most things you buy on the internet , well they not gonna send them out to you in 10 minutes are they now

and well when you buy a cup of coffee in a restaurant , they can risk that tiny amount without confirmation no problem and they are doing just that infact right now.

the speed of some of the newer coins, is just a sales pitch , that matters very little in the real world.

[zachamo]

Faster transactions poses some challenges..

First off - you'd need to have faster block generation, meaning you'd have to reduce rewards appropriately or significantly increase the supply of coins in the short term. More coins would reduce the value and more blocks with lower rewards has an impact on new user adoption (it already takes forever for a wallet to sync) and also increases the size of the blockchain much faster, meaning soon enough Raspberry Pis and other small memory devices used for miner controllers won't be able to hold the whole blockchain.

Secondly, you'd need to hard-fork the client.. meaning EVERYONE would have to download and start using the new client or they'd end up mining 'old' bitcoin, which would basically be invalid.

I'm sure there are other reasons beyond these.

As for investing in bitcoin, it's all a matter of whether you think the value will continue to increase.. There are plenty of other cryptos out there, but only a few (if any) are liable to last. Bitcoin has the most momentum, is the most commonly recognized, and has the largest community. Will it grow? nobody knows.

[MisO69]

I would invest in BTC long term. I believe that it will keep rising as more countries governments acknowledge it.

I would invest in ALTS long term. Just try to pick a good one and not a DOGE fad coin.

Sunny King's Peercoin and Primecoin are good choices.

Invictus Innovations is doing some very interesting things with Protoshares that will get you shares in their future projects.

More risk? - World Coin, Mega Coin..


Do your research and have fun.

[naturalog]

I claim that bitcoin will be like altavista, lycos etc.
the google of coins hasn't come yet, and even google's glory is finite

[Fraxinus]

Thanks for takung the time to write the info MarkM, was very informative

[digicoin]

bitcoin I think will always be the coin of choice for storing wealth. while one of the alts may be used more in day to day stuff.

but the main reason, IMO is the same reasons why anybody would invest in gold.

what your saying is like why buy gold when I can just use my copper coins everyday.  

I believe that Bitcoin is just a single block chain which can be a single source of failure or bottleneck.  Bitcoin's scalability is questionable. There should be one or two altcoins that helps reduce risks of depending a single network or payment gateway.

[faithdealer]

Worse, actually. Most are saying not to use copper coins but instead of buy ponzi stamps and try to convince merchants to accept their ponzi stamps, knowing full well they could all be blown away at any time by the next internet meme that happens along.

-MarkM-

Doge isn't any more of a Ponzi scheme than Bitcoin is. If you can put aside your soreness over it being based on an internet meme, you'll see that it's a currency with enormous community support and, no, it's not going to be blown away by the next memecoin to show up. Several already have, and none of them have had even close to the same impact as Doge.

Funny how elitist Bitcoin users are. Many have come to be exactly like the "economists" who swear that Bitcoin will definitely collapse because it doesn't have a central bank and the government doesn't control it.

[markm]

More risk? - World Coin, Mega Coin..

Aren't they both GPU-mined coins secured by less GPU power than a stupid internet meme (DOGE) conjured up almost overnight?

Thus basically honeypots suckering people into putting money out where the memesters / anon / whoever can access it any time they want, the main reason they haven't yet probably being the honeypot hasn't quite attracted enough loot yet to make PWNing it be worth enough LOLs yet?

-MarkM-

[markm]

Worse, actually. Most are saying not to use copper coins but instead of buy ponzi stamps and try to convince merchants to accept their ponzi stamps, knowing full well they could all be blown away at any time by the next internet meme that happens along.

-MarkM-

Doge isn't any more of a Ponzi scheme than Bitcoin is. If you can put aside your soreness over it being based on an internet meme, you'll see that it's a currency with enormous community support and, no, it's not going to be blown away by the next memecoin to show up. Several already have, and none of them have had even close to the same impact as Doge.

Funny how elitist Bitcoin users are. Many have come to be exactly like the "economists" who swear that Bitcoin will definitely collapse because it doesn't have a central bank and the government doesn't control it.

DOGE is itself such a meme. It proves how much GPU power such memes can whip up almost overnight. So it demonstrates the vulnerability of all GPU mined coins that have as little hash power as it does or less.

-MarkM-