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[ThomasV]

Solidcoin will never threaten Bitcoin.

I do own some bitcoins, and I am not saying this because I want to preserve their value.
When my money is at stake, I am very agnostic and practical; if I really thought that solidcoin had the slightest possibility of replacing bitcoin, I would certainly diversify and buy some.

However, I am not doing it (just as I did not buy ixcoin or i0coin). Here is why:

- Solidcoin would have a future if bitcoin did not exist. Unfortunately, guess what, Bitcoin was invented 2.5 years before, and strong network effects ensure that it will keep its dominant position. Bitcoin cannot be threatened by a clone. I order to suceed, an alternate blockchain needs to propose something really different.
- The differences between SC and BTC are not monetary differences, but instead technical differences of the protocol (difficulty retargetting, time interval between blocks), and modifications of the client, that are wrongly presented as differences of the currency (encryption, buttons). On the monetary side, BTC and SC are exactly the same thing, because they both offer a currency that has a limited supply. In other words, solidcoin is just another Bitcoin clone.
- If another blockchain posed a real threat to the value of Bitcoin, it would be possible to update Bitcoin, as the OP suggests. Such an update is technically trivial, but it needs to be accepted by a majority of miners. If the threat was real, I am sure that such a majority would be quickly found. At this point, however, I do not see this happening. The protocol differences implemented in SC do not provide a real advantage. Developers seem to agree that a 3-minutes interval between confirmations poses security problems, especially in a large network.
- Solidcoin's market cap is currently neglectible compared to Bitcoin. I do not think that this will ever change. Solidcoin's network might stay alive for some time, but that does not mean that its value will take any significance.
- There is no evidence for a real economy sustaining solidcoin's value. The merchants that have decided to "accept solidcoin" were bought with bounties. So much for their objectivity.
- Solidcoin's "early adopters" (I am talking of people who buy solidcoins) are speculators who might dream that solidcoin will experience the same value increase as bitcoin. This is the only thing that sustains solidcoin's value, because there's no economy there. Unfortunately, this will not happen. Again, it could happen only if bitcoin did not exist :-) History happens only once.

so, if you are planning to invest some money in solidcoin, think again. it is a zero-sum game. In order for you to win, someone has to lose.
OTOH, if you are a miner looking for profitability, just be rational and go for it, but do not hold your solidcoins too long or you will be burnt :-)

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[Piper67]

About the only new block chain and cryptocurrency I can foresee any success for in the future, other than Bitcoin, will be an inflationary one backed by BTC. This will serve the dual purpose of having a decentralised currency with a predictable inflation rate - therefore putting to rest the "deflationary spiral" arguments - and a chance at becoming really popular because, being backed by Bitcoin, it won't be seen as competing against it.

[zebedee]

The amount of time is irrelevant, it is the amount of blocks you know have made it onto the block chain that gives you confidence.  Six confirmations is six confirmations, weather it took an hour or fifteen minutes.  After six confirmations there is very little risk that your transaction is going to end up on an orphan block, and as long as difficulty is in balance you are not going to have blocks solved every few seconds.

Yeah Bansal != Satoshi.

[bansal]

The amount of time is irrelevant, it is the amount of blocks you know have made it onto the block chain that gives you confidence.  Six confirmations is six confirmations, weather it took an hour or fifteen minutes.  After six confirmations there is very little risk that your transaction is going to end up on an orphan block, and as long as difficulty is in balance you are not going to have blocks solved every few seconds.

Yeah Bansal != Satoshi.

Hey this guy can code!  And how do you know?

[jav]

Bottom line is this, ten minutes is too long.  If you want to just keep trading these things among yourselves fine, if you want these to actually be widely used in the real world this problem has to be solved.  And no I'm not letting anyone walk off with my stuff with zero confirmations, or even just one confirmation.  And my customer isn't going to sit there for an hour to wait to leave with the stuff he's trying to buy.  Bitcoin with 10 minute confirmations is a niche currency for certain internet transactions, at best.

Are you just stating this as a general problem or are you suggesting that SolidCoin solves/helps with this problem? SolidCoin has 3 minutes between blocks, right? I don't see how that makes much of a difference. The thing is, you still need to take variance into account. Sure, on average you have a block every 3 minutes. But that means that for a 95 % chance of finding a block, you need to wait about 9 minutes (math here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log%281-0.95%29%2F%281%2F3minutes%29 ). Which in turn means, that in 5 % of the cases you actually have to wait even longer than 9 minutes. So what have we really gained?

Sure, there might be situations where "wait for a little while" (SolidCoin) is acceptable, whereas "wait for quite some time" (Bitcoin) would not be. But I can't think of that many situations to see this as much of an advantage.

[JohnDoe]

I believe both Bitcoin and its clones will fail to reach mainstream acceptance because they have a serious economic flaw, which is that deflation severely hurts investment and borrowing. I think a deflationary currency with demurrage will have better luck at stimulating economic growth.

[bansal]

Bottom line is this, ten minutes is too long.  If you want to just keep trading these things among yourselves fine, if you want these to actually be widely used in the real world this problem has to be solved.  And no I'm not letting anyone walk off with my stuff with zero confirmations, or even just one confirmation.  And my customer isn't going to sit there for an hour to wait to leave with the stuff he's trying to buy.  Bitcoin with 10 minute confirmations is a niche currency for certain internet transactions, at best.

Are you just stating this as a general problem or are you suggesting that SolidCoin solves/helps with this problem? SolidCoin has 3 minutes between blocks, right? I don't see how that makes much of a difference. The thing is, you still need to take variance into account. Sure, on average you have a block every 3 minutes. But that means that for a 95 % chance of finding a block, you need to wait about 9 minutes (math here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log%281-0.95%29%2F%281%2F3minutes%29 ). Which in turn means, that in 5 % of the cases you actually have to wait even longer than 9 minutes. So what have we really gained?

Sure, there might be situations where "wait for a little while" (SolidCoin) is acceptable whereas "wait for quite some time" (Bitcoin) would not be. But I can't think of that many situations to see this as much of an advantage.

It's a general problem.  I give credit to CoinHunter for trying to solve the problem at least, but I'm not sure it's the right/best solution.  It's just something the community needs to think about.  I would love to see this solved in Bitcoin rather than a fork, but if it takes a fork then so be it.  At the very least the forks are sparking some debate and possibly leading to improvements.

If you're walking into a store you're going to expect verification in less than a minute, that's what you get with credit cards or cash.  Ten minutes plus isn't going to work.  If I take an order over the phone, pretty much same deal.  The only situation it would work is where I take an order over the internet and ship it the next day.  I have even taken orders over the internet late in the day and quickly packed an order and dropped it off at UPS to try to provide good service, that would even be tough to do.

[hugolp]

I believe both Bitcoin and its clones will fail to reach mainstream acceptance because they have a serious economic flaw, which is that deflation severely hurts investment and borrowing. I think a deflationary currency with demurrage will have better luck at stimulating economic growth.

Yes! Housing bubbles for the win!

[JohnDoe]

Yes! Housing bubbles for the win!

I didn't expect such a stupid knee-jerk reaction from you. How do you propose such a bubble would occur in a currency with finite money supply and demurrage?

[bansal]

I believe both Bitcoin and its clones will fail to reach mainstream acceptance because they have a serious economic flaw, which is that deflation severely hurts investment and borrowing. I think a deflationary currency with demurrage will have better luck at stimulating economic growth.

There is no such thing as a deflationary crypto-currency, anyone can create more of them.  I don't see people going for a currency with demurrage realistically, I can see the deer in the headlights look already trying to explain that to the average person.

[Maged]

If you're walking into a store you're going to expect verification in less than a minute, that's what you get with credit cards or cash.

While you are correct with cash, you are not with credit cards. Credit cards take at least a day to actually confirm. The "instant" verification that credit cards do is no different from a 0/unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction.

[bansal]

If you're walking into a store you're going to expect verification in less than a minute, that's what you get with credit cards or cash.

While you are correct with cash, you are not with credit cards. Credit cards take at least a day to actually confirm. The "instant" verification that credit cards do is no different from a 0/unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction.

No it's not.  An authorization confirms that you have held the funds on the card.  After an authorization you do a capture to actually have the funds transferred, and then they will use ACH to transfer funds to your account, which takes a few days but that's just the time an ACH takes.  The settlement of all your transactions happens at the end of the day, but an authorization guarantees the funds are good.

[wndrbr3d]

I think what makes the alt currencies silly is their transparency in that they only exist because people are trying to get in "early" on something like bitcoin in an effort to make the same money that BTC early adopters did. Thus far, none of these alt currencies offer anything that bitcoin can't in the near future.

So basically you have a bunch of people who are driven by greed. I mean, might as well start investing in Testnet too, right? What's the conversion rate there? 

[Maged]

If you're walking into a store you're going to expect verification in less than a minute, that's what you get with credit cards or cash.

While you are correct with cash, you are not with credit cards. Credit cards take at least a day to actually confirm. The "instant" verification that credit cards do is no different from a 0/unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction.

No it's not.  An authorization confirms that you have held the funds on the card.  After an authorization you do a capture to actually have the funds transferred, and then they will use ACH to transfer funds to your account, which takes a few days but that's just the time an ACH takes.  The settlement of all your transactions happens at the end of the day, but an authorization guarantees the funds are good.

Fixed it for you:

"No it's not.  A Bitcoin transaction confirms that you have held the funds in your wallet.  After a Bitcoin transaction you wait for a block to include the transaction to actually have the funds transferred, and then it will start accruing confirmations, which takes a few hours but that's just the time a Bitcoin transaction takes.  The settlement of all your transactions happens when a block includes them, but a Bitcoin transaction guarantees the funds are good."

[bansal]

I think what makes the alt currencies silly is their transparency in that they only exist because people are trying to get in "early" on something like bitcoin in an effort to make the same money that BTC early adopters did. Thus far, none of these alt currencies offer anything that bitcoin can't in the near future.

So basically you have a bunch of people who are driven by greed. I mean, might as well start investing in Testnet too, right? What's the conversion rate there? 

Everyone is driven by greed, this argument gets a little tiresome.  All these forks tried something different to implement what they felt was an improvement over Bitcoin.  I agree that is many cases this wasn't much improvement at all, but if you are angry that someone is making money, who cares?  Let them make money, how is that hurting you?  If you think an alternate currency is no good tell us why, not just that you don't like the fact that someone besides you is making money.

[Syke]

ITT: people think mining 6 1-minute blocks in a row is as difficult as mining 6 10-hours blocks in a row

Unless I missed something, then that's correct, but only if you interpret it in a certain way.
With the same relative hashpower vs. the rest of the network, over the same # of blocks, chances of finding X blocks in a row are the same, doesn't matter if avg. time/block is 10 seconds or 10 days.
But... wouldn't a theoretical attacker care more about how much time it takes to get a successful double-spend instead of how many blocks?

Yup. Faster blocks mean more attempts can be made, and thus the less secure the chain is.

Either way you would have to put together 51% of the hashpower of the network to pull it off, I guess longer blocks could make the attack more inconvenient, but they would probably still do it if they had the capability.

51% just gives you a high probability of succeeding. 50% can succeed. As can 49%, 40%, 20%, etc., they just have lower chances of succeeding. If someone is intent on double-spending, they will attempt it more than once. Again, the faster the chain, the less secure.

[JohnDoe]

I believe both Bitcoin and its clones will fail to reach mainstream acceptance because they have a serious economic flaw, which is that deflation severely hurts investment and borrowing. I think a deflationary currency with demurrage will have better luck at stimulating economic growth.

There is no such thing as a deflationary crypto-currency, anyone can create more of them.  I don't see people going for a currency with demurrage realistically, I can see the deer in the headlights look already trying to explain that to the average person.

Creating clones of a currency doesn't make the original non-deflationary as they are not part of the same network.

The effect of demurrage on people's purchasing power is basically the same as inflation so I don't see why they wouldn't be able to accept it. Currencies with demurrage have already been successfully introduced by the way.

[bansal]

As can 49%, 40%, 20%, etc., they just have zero chance of succeeding.

Fixed it for ya

[bansal]

Creating clones of a currency doesn't make the original non-deflationary as they are not part of the same network.

The effect of demurrage on people's purchasing power is basically the same as inflation so I don't see why they wouldn't be able to accept it. Currencies with demurrage have already been successfully introduced by the way.

People can start using the other network, and once supply of the original currency gets low there will be powerful incentive to do so.  We are starting to see that already to a certain extent with Bitcoin.  Nobody has studied the long term effects of demurrage.  Savings and loaning out savings are an important part of economic growth, demurrage provides a disincentive for this.  Also again the problem of the average person understanding this, and then wanting to pay just to hold on to their money.  I wish you guys luck, but I just don't see it happening.

[Lupus_Yonderboy]

My, such a strong opinion from an account 12 days old...which early adopter are you the sock puppet for, I wonder?

Awww you are plumming one of them fallacy devices, thats almost clever... I've followed Bitcoin for about a year including lurking on forums and IRCs, but I didn't get into it until recently. Instead of attacking the "sock puppet" try attacking the facts of my message  The OP is pimping SC and debasing BTC, he made a post that belongs with all the rest of the refuse in the Bitcoin Forum > Other > Alternate cryptocurrencies. Thats all.

I didn't see many facts. I did, however see a lot of hateful ranting in your post. The ones who have been most virulently attacking SC have more often than not been 'senior' and 'hero' members. Suddenly we have a new account with the same level of hate. Here I thought competing currencies was a good thing. Everybody seems to point to that when comparing BTC to USD. I am not sure why people cannot accept multiple cryptocurrencies existing together. Fear of a superior product, perhaps? If the alternate chains are so horrid, the market will take care of them and they will die off on their own, without ranting from others about how everyone using them is either an idiot or scammer.

Oh, and since you can only purchase SC with BTC or by mining, I do not follow how it dilutes the value of Bitcoin. If anything it would create a temporary demand for it as people would be exchanging their $ to BTC and then to SC.

I do agree OP could have been a bit more...tactful in his post, but he did ask about the future of Bitcoin.