Alt dilution / market share.

[jubalix]

We must have in the order of 1000 alts now.

even at say 10 thousand each thats 10 million.

Whats increasing faster market cap of alts or BTC?

It seems that one outcome of this is there will be millions if not billions of alts. Everything with a processor runs its own alt.

whats the endgame of this?

[Arcas]

Faster % or faster net value?

[meanig]

Divide and conquer. None of them will ever reach a critical mass because there'll always be a fresh one for the newbs to jump on. I'm already starting to see people shift from Dogecoin to Vertcoin.

[FeedbackLoop]

Right now altcoins are probably good to divert some speculative heat away from Bitcoin!

[Dalmar]

They are the penny stocks of the crypto world. Even the stock market has its pump and dump toy stocks, so why not for cryptos?

[molecular]

We must have in the order of 1000 alts now.

even at say 10 thousand each thats 10 million.

Whats increasing faster market cap of alts or BTC?

It seems that one outcome of this is there will be millions if not billions of alts. Everything with a processor runs its own alt.

whats the endgame of this?

when everyone has his own money, it's not money.

the endgame is one money.

[Edward50]

What I wonder about is in order to buy alts you pretty much need to buy bitcoins. So in a way it is a buy of bitcoins, than a transfer of those bitcoins to someone else.

If alts had their own exchange where I can buy alt-coins with USD and completely bypass buying any bitcoins, I wonder how that would play into the bitcoin price.

I am kind of stumped thinking about if alts help, hurt or do nothing to the bitcoin price. I guess it would depend on how the person who sold the alts holds those bitcoins.
If the seller of alts, just holds the bitcoins and doesn't sell them then it would help the bitcoin price.

It is possible the person buying the alts would have bought bitcoins instead, maybe or maybe not.

Maybe this is why I am stumped because it all depends on how alts change the buying and holding habits of people holding bitcoins.

Either way, I think alts is a help to bitcoins until alts have their own exchanges where you can buy them for USD directly and not have to deal with bitcoins.

I personally held bitcoins for a while until I sold everything a while ago. The only reason I held bitcoins was because of the alts, I would never consider bitcoin an investment at $500+. Because I was gambling with the alts I had to buy bitcoins and always had some to do transactions with.

[seleme]

There is only handful of alts with real trading/investing volume. Others are barely live and get pumped once in 2-3 months.

I don't see anything alts would do negative for Bitcoin and it's price. Quite contrary. Most of them can't be bought with fiat and those bitcoins tied in them would probably sometimes be sold for fiat and that would affect Bitcoin price negatively. Imagine if thousands and thousands Bitcoins that are invested in LTC and other alts would be on the Bitcoin vs USD market now.

[Notanon]

A handful with active communities will stay strong, others will wither and die. Quite a few exchanges enable the purchase of some altcoins directly using either US dollars or Euros, mainly LTC and PPC, such as Crypto-Trade which allows their purchase directly with US dollars. I can even buy LTC with Australian dollars through BTCMarkets if I really wish. No real need to touch the main BTC exchanges at all.

[jubalix]

I don't really have a problem with the lacK of $ to alts straight out access, as BTC can serve as an intermediary.

I think the endgame will be something like this.

there will be millions if not billions of alts.

there will be a mutlti wallet/pos/distibuted p2p that can handle them all (one was already built in 2012 I think that can handle alot of block chains)

sort of like web pages, there ended up being billions of those as well floating around on TCIP/HTTP.

The desire to make an alt comes from 2 directs, missing out as an early adopter, thus the only way to get in at a cheaper price than FIAT, and evolution of alts into something better than what exists.

early adopters of BTC holders are not only forced to diversify, but can afford to, as a % of thier holdings.



Eg a BTC holder with 2000 BTC that diversified even 1 BTC into NXT,doge or LTC would now be see a return on investment far larger tham just holding BTC, and could cover their initial BTC investment 10' or 100's of times over. Sure they would loose alot in other alts, but picking by class is important.

Early BTC holders that don't diversify have their holding diminished relative in % to those that  by those that do, as those that do can buy more BTC.

A few leaders in each class will stand out, eg

sha BTC
Scrypt doge/LTC
POW+POS, PeerCoin
POS, NXT, NEM, Pink,
other Emunie
new hash system, PRIME, Cure,

the rest not so much