Problems with Altcoins in general

[grimrog]

I am pretty new to the whole mining and cryptocoin thing, so please be gentle.

However, it has come to my attention that there is a huge disbalance between overall mining power and general market depth. Basicly you can put it like this: once a multipool decides to mine your coin, you're pretty much screwed. See DGC for example, they had a nice rise over the last couple of hours, but as soon as the multipools began switching to it the dumping began. Multipools and profitability calculators have become too powerful, they are just killing the market by sayn' mine this, you'll get rich.

There is a problem with that:
1. Since nobody can tell when a coin is going to rise again, except insider-knowledge of course :-), we are all depending on coinwarz, choose and other sites to tell us what we should mine. By the time the calculators get updated and the majority of miners switch their rigs there are already a couple of hours into the rise, making it more likely that the correction will hit rather sooner than later. They are basicly saying: I dare you, mofo, i double dare you to become profitable. I'll unleash the full power of my influence on you and you can suck the autosell orders, how's that :-) Once the difficulty has adjusted itself, the hoppers start calculating and visit coinwarz again, rinse and repeat... This is basicly making a nice rise over a few weeks almost impossible.

I would like to introduce a method to make mining less of a hassle and flatten the tides a bit.

Every Pool, be it single or multi, should limit their user logins. Since no Pool owner will listen to this, because more miners more revenue :-), i propose that you link your limited logins to the rate of fees and donations your members are willing to pay.

For Example, middlecoin takes 3%+exchange fees and everyone is willing to pay it. Lets say for example h20 would limit the max miners to say 1000 or 10k at a time. The pool would lose the ability to screw the altcoins whenever he starts to mine them.  Pumping and dumping would lose some influence in general since Miners that cant connect are likely to join other pools or the secong most profitable coin instead.
He could then introduce a dynamic way of donations and fees for his pool making a realistic treshold between 5-15%. He would lose some low quality miners due to the threshold itself and and some more because of the limitation. The dynamic fee would still be able to provide for his costs. Miners willing to pay the dynamic fee gain access to a stable pool with other like minded people. He could form a community around that.

On the other hand smaller Multipools and single pools in general could gain some new subscribers.

You can think of this concept like a Loadbalancer for the entire altcoin-world :-)

So, any1 up for discussion?

[stacksmasher]

You are forgetting the real reason pools exist.... the admins get filthy rich!!!

[dogechode]

grimrog, the real problem is that the vast majority of the cryptocurrency economy right now exists solely between miners looking to make a quick buck and investors looking to get filthy rich. I'm not saying either of those are bad goals, but by just churning out coins and selling them to investors who then manipulate the market, we are dooming most of these currencies to die out and not persist.

The real key is adoption. If people start actually using a cryptocurrency like regular money, it will survive and the value of it will surely rise, and not be so easily impacted by investors playing games and miners switching which currency they are mining.

I just started a thread about this here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=434286.0

[poornamelessme]

I'm also new to cryptocurrency, and just started playing with them a week ago. I don't have a PC good enough to mine with yet, and have simply been playing with freebie coins on the markets... sort of like a stock market game, to see how it all works.

From a newbie perspective, it does appear that almost all altcoins are close to worthless in regard to an actual chance of becoming even a semi-used currency for transactions. I don't see any differentiation between most coins, and the majority look like simple money grabs by the developers, with their 'selling' point being a catchy name for the coin itself. Although in many cases even that can be argued, as they often go with names no respectable business would ever want to deal with. I'd think 90% of the alt coins work against cryptocurrency being taken seriously by the mainstream.

Anyway, just wondering if I am looking at it the wrong way or not. I do wonder what will happen with the exchanges as time goes on, as every other day there seems to be yet another new coin out there.... the next big thing... with 100s of billions of coins and basically using the same script + premining as everyone else. And they can't (or I'd think they can't) have pages upon pages of coins on an exchange, as it sort of muddles things even worse.

[dogechode]

Well, one of the real questions that I have had for a while now is, why is there a need for 100+ cryptocurrencies? The answer of course is, there isn't.

Is there room for 2? Or 3? A dozen? Maybe. Much more than that, and it just becomes absurd. I am by no means pointing fingers but look at devcoin or sexcoin for example (two random examples I truly mean no offense to the developers.) Why couldn't a porn star or an independent movie producer conduct transactions using say, Bitcoin? What do they really gain from using a hyper-specific currency that's marketed specifically at their industry?

I think a few new currencies do add value - Litecoin was a good idea because bitcoin is rather scare when you think about it in terms of there only every being 21 million of them in circulation. Florincoin was an interesting idea to me because they added the ability to include a note in transactions (like "payment for Michael Jordan autographed basketball.") Zerocoin may have a use as it will enhance privacy. Dogecoin was one of the first to achieve widespread appeal to the masses by having a cartoon mascot.

But do we need 10 of them coming out every day? Hell no. The oversaturation is damaging the future viability of any and all cryptocurrencies. Pissing in the pool for everyone, so to speak.

[RenegadeMind]

You can think of this concept like a Loadbalancer for the entire altcoin-world :-)

Nope. Bad idea.

You go entirely wrong here:

Every Pool, be it single or multi, should...

Trying to tell other people what to do never works out well. That's how we ended up with crappy government - some asshole thinks he knows how to run everyone else's lives.

"Should" is best coupled with "I", and not with "we" or "you" or "he/she/it/them".