rpietila Altcoin Observer

[Anotheranonlol]

One huge problem with all CPU coins and that is bots. What about viruses, etc. infecting computers and having them serve as miners for DRK, MRO and other CPU coins?
Not 100% bad as it does strengthen the network but it can lead to problems later on. I could hear the department of homeland security now. But then again, any
anonymising technology (e.g. darkwallet), will probably cause similar reactions.

IAS

I think cryptonote is great personally. No interest in DRK.

Many cpu- coin holder (mro for example) will claim that there is no such botnet on the network; (even with stats before any public pool existing looking more than a little skewed ) They will say it's mostly individuals, peppered with a couple of sysadmins who have few hundred CPU at their disposal;  and finally those who rent large qty of cloud instances. One thing they will say; 'no botherder wants to add 'alpha' level coin' or 'all botherder want to keep cpu without stressing for more profitable activitys like viagra spam .'

You had to laugh when you saw the first 'optimization' of MRO.

https://github.com/NoodleDoodleNoodleDoodleNoodleDoodleNoo/bitmonero/commit/3cc45e9324a402aee91e2f46861b2ca393d711aa

Yes this was discovered 14 days AFTER launch from independent source. And team is so confident about anti- TMTO with things like above 'slipping' through the net? how many spotted this earlier and made nice profit

It's matter of time for optimized implementations. When it is private, everyone will say not possible .. we're all on equal footing!  then when it becomes public an adjustment period- some will dump, there will be some drama , and then sentiment usually shift to saying 'it's good for the network'.  That's assuming nobody is willing to hard-fork.



above: mandatory chart with squiggly line.  (cpu-coin holder emotional reactions upon discovering cpu coin is no longer cpu only )

 The same happen with Scrypt. many were GPU deniers,  artforz, mtrlt and whoever else had advance knowledge & were laughing. then ASIC deniers while gridchip et al lining their pockets. I  had an argument in december last year with a technically competent guy and senior member of litecoin community who was adamant 'it's not possible' to create a litecoin asic- what can i tell him when the damn unit mining away in front while he was so sure it can't exist. ?

Now people have turned around and seriously claim scrypt pow was never designed to be GPU/FPGA/ASIC resistant  

Allow me to introduce you Tenebrix, a cryptocurrency we (mostly ArtForz, but I contributed the name, some minor tweaks and the logo, as well as windows portability suite and cool genesis motto ) have created to provide the community with a cryptocurrency with solid GPU resistance.

It implements a proof-of-work scheme based on scrypt, a cryptographic construct specifically designed to resist creation of efficient GPU, FPGA and even ASIC implementations. You can find more about scrypt and how it can improve your stamina, masculine appeal and performance here

Tenebrix is intended not only to become the first and the best of CPU-specific cryptocurrencies, but remain so in the future (that's exactly where the Tenebrix Protection Fund will go... That, usability/gui bounties, fixes and my dream of starting up a massive coin laundering "Historical Cryptocurrency Collector" Service )

It's a sort of sunk-cost fallacy anyone who invested into litecoin are exhibiting, considering the original premise is broken and it now offers no tangible benefit over bitcoin. but hey.. asics pushed the price of btc up so ltc will be a microcosm right guys? easiest profit ever,

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[r0ach]

It's a sort of sunk-cost fallacy anyone who invested into litecoin are exhibiting, considering the original premise is broken

Where in the Satoshi whitepaper does it say that Bitcoin is only to be mined with ASIC?  lol?

[dnaleor]

I was an early investor in MRO. What do you suggest, Risto?

My total crypto holdings consist now for 25% of MRO due to the large increase in exchange rate.
I think it's too much.

I started selling 10% when the exhcange rate doubles starting at 4 mBTC/MRO (ammount devided in 20 "batches")
should I increase my selling % ?

edit: the MRO I hold now are pure profit, already have my BTC I invested back...

[Dotto]

I'm only going to address point 10 because it kind of makes everything else redundant.

Anyone that still believes bitcoin was invented by innocent minds, for the good of the people needs to check the whole of history to see whether there is any prior evidence of powerful people trying to stack the game in their favour. I'm sure you won;t have to look hard

Now I'm not saying categorically that it isn't, I'm saying the odds are against it. So if BTC is masterminded by the (govt/rothschild/illuminati/some other rich guys) then we can assume the price increase is equally as orchestrated. The copycat coins can copy so far, but ultimately only BTC has the backing to push it over the top. The others will always remain small players. The people who invented bitcoin invented it the way the did for a reason, what you describe as weaknesses are design features. There isn't the slightest chance 'they' are going to let a competitor that doesn't have these desirable features supercede bitcoin.

That´s interesting you say that, because I naturally think the opposite. BTC as the worst enemy for the TPTB. Could you ellaborate about this?. Could you clue us to some solid info that we are missing?.

[nakaone]

the point with darkcoin is that it has a somewhat first mover advantage - additionally the instamine was distributed quite well see otc for darkcoin. the developer has shown that he is capable of setting the right economic incentives as well as shown talent regarding coding.

for me personally it would be better if mro would win the game, because I simply have more but I think darks position is stronger.

what you called "premine" is not always premine - some people try to solve the byzantines generals problem differently. if you are really interested in 2.0 coins you should read

http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/03/04/chapter-3-next-generation-platforms/

probably there are newer publications but this guy seems to know what he is talking about - from my perspective 2.0 applications make bitcoins useful in the western world - this is where blockchain stuff really gets exciting.

[Anotheranonlol]

It's a sort of sunk-cost fallacy anyone who invested into litecoin are exhibiting, considering the original premise is broken

Where in the Satoshi whitepaper does it say that Bitcoin is only to be mined with ASIC?  lol?

It says that nowhere. It also makes no claims about resisting the inevitable. Satoshi knew CPU was not the final frontier.

Initially Bitcoin was mined with commodity hardware (CPU, GPU). When it became apparent we are on a road to centralisation the playing ground  in the distance no longer looked level. Some people didn't like that.

Therefore huge reason for adding Scrypt as a proof-of-work into a bitcoin clone, instead of straight copy pasting bitcoin with a shorter block interval was to allow for a diversification away from that-  a safe haven if you will. Back to 1 CPU 1 Vote where everyone is on level playing ground.

That's the reason it gained so much favor in the first place.

That was an ultimate selling point. Now that ultimate selling point isn't valid-  in fact it's MORE centralized than bitcoin.

So why invest into litecoin OVER bitcoin? What does it do for me as a random individual that bitcoin doesn't do?  Those are the questions I would be asking.

[wachtwoord]

It says that nowhere. It also makes no claims about resisting the inevitable. Satoshi knew CPU was not the final frontier.

I assume the same but we can never be sure. This is another reason why Satoshi's anonymity and complete withdrawal are so genius.

[digitalindustry]

you could have just said -  "i brought Monero buy it now"

sorry i usually don't Troll other "coin advice threads"

your term "terminal decline" Re Quark proves you are not involve with Alt for a reason, because you substantially do not understand the cycles.

if you have only purchased BTC that's understandable because you haven't really been subject to a free market yet- so here's your official welcome:


"Welcome to the free market !"

I actually think Monero is interesting - I respect Tacos work and always look at anything hes involved in.

[digitalindustry]

the point with darkcoin is that it has a somewhat first mover advantage - additionally the instamine was distributed quite well see otc for darkcoin. the developer has shown that he is capable of setting the right economic incentives as well as shown talent regarding coding.

for me personally it would be better if mro would win the game, because I simply have more but I think darks position is stronger.

what you called "premine" is not always premine - some people try to solve the byzantines generals problem differently. if you are really interested in 2.0 coins you should read

http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/03/04/chapter-3-next-generation-platforms/

probably there are newer publications but this guy seems to know what he is talking about - from my perspective 2.0 applications make bitcoins useful in the western world - this is where blockchain stuff really gets exciting.

Darkcoin is a Quark Clone with a straw-man "anonymity"  but i still like it because i respect the way in which it was carried out.

[AlexGR]

Darkcoin is a Quark Clone with a straw-man "anonymity"  but i still like it because i respect the way in which it was carried out.

There are plenty of Quark clones but DRK isn't one. Different hashtype (11 hashes instead of 5), different coin generation model / different economy, different tech characteristics (masternode payments, per block reward with DGW, darksend), more features to be added (mainstream features) after anonymity development is over, dev commited to evolve the coin over 2 years (jan 14 - jan 16). First 5 months were promising in terms of delivery, another 19 to go in terms of expectation (what he'll bring next). This is a development platform (from which over 25 coins have benefited through copying technical stuff - and more queuing up to copy darksend and masternode payment protocol*).

* Which in itself can provide a lot of potential for services over the network, beyond anonymity.

[digitalindustry]

Darkcoin is a Quark Clone with a straw-man "anonymity"  but i still like it because i respect the way in which it was carried out.

There are plenty of Quark clones but DRK isn't one. Different hashtype (11 hashes instead of 5), different coin generation model / different economy, different tech characteristics (masternode payments, per block reward with DGW, darksend), more features to be added (mainstream features) after anonymity development is over, dev commited to evolve the coin over 2 years (jan 14 - jan 16). First 5 months were promising in terms of delivery, another 19 to go in terms of expectation (what he'll bring next). This is a development platform (from which over 25 coins have benefited through copying technical stuff - and more queuing up to copy darksend and masternode payment protocol*).

* Which in itself can provide a lot of potential for services over the network, beyond anonymity.

heres a hint - we at Quark didn't offer future promises, we are all apart of the community - it is what it is. price goes up and down, we will see.

[Peter R]

The Alt-coin Narrative Cycle

It is a commonly-held belief that Bitcoin is a technology and as such it could be de-throned by a better technology.  Although I disagree, this belief drives the "alt-coin narrative cycle."  The alt-coin narrative cycle represents "the search for the next bitcoin."  I would argue that as we witness the life and death of more and more alt coins that we thought showed "promise," we get closer to accepting bitcoin as highly useful exactly as it is.  

The alt-coin narrative cycle became evident to me with the explosion of Dogecoin in late 2013...

Dogecoin and the Birth of the Narrative Cycle

Dogecoin was created as a joke, but the transparancy of that joke helped build a community behind it.  People rallied around Dogecoin because it was a refreshing change from the dirty feel of the disingenuous alternatives being shameless promoted at the time.  Dogecoin's user base rapidly grew, eclipsing the Reddit/r/litecoin subscriber base within weeks and shortly approaching (but never exceeding) that of r/bitcoin.  The community's work building the Dogecoin tipbot, the doge-dice gambling site, and sending the Jamaican Bobsled team to the Olympics showed that the coin was actually being used.  At this point in time, the technology didn't matter, all that mattered was that the vibrant community was attracting new users.  

But the technology did matter.  And now unless Dogecoin forks to become merged mined with Litecoin (or another solution), the doge will be dead within eight months due to the rapidly dwindling cost of launching a 51% attack.  The market value of Dogecoin (in BTC) has fallen by approximately 75% since reaching its high in February 2014.  

Dogecoin's rise taught us the importance of community.  Dogecoin's fall will reinforce the how carefully every single parameters of a crytpocurrency must be chosen.  

Auroracoin and Community

Aurocoin piggybacked Dogecoin more than most realized.  The dominant narrative had become "community," and what better way to create a large community than by freely giving money to the people of Iceland (who had recently been the victims of the shenanigans played in the traditional financial system)!  Aurocoin even made waves within Parliament, for example, "during a parliamentary debate on March 14, 2014, MP Pétur Blöndal, vice-chair of the Parliament's Economic Affairs and Trade Committee (EATC), emphasized that potential tax evasion through the use of Auroracoin could impact Iceland's economy."  The attention only served to increase the hype.  Additional scrypt hashing power left Dogecoin in favour Aurocoin until the price hit a peak near 0.1 BTC on March 30, 2014 (approx 140,000 BTC market cap).  

But it was all hype.  We learned that you can't airdrop money to an indifferent community and expect it to have value.  Today Aurocoin trades at 0.0006 BTC: it has lost over 99% of its value in less than two months.  

Blackcoin and PoS

We were bored with "community" and the narrative switched to "the wastefulness of bitcoin mining" as a soapbox for proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms.  Experts in the community already knew that decentralized anonymous consensus by PoS was thought to be impossible; no one had a reasonable solution for the "nothing at stake" problem.  Had Dogecoin completely failed by this point and the community had finally realized the importance of technical soundness, I don't think Blackcoin would have garnered attention.  But we are humans and we must learn everything the hard way.  

Blackcoin exploded in price and later Nxt advocates used the attention that Blackcoin was receiving to push there PoS system.  They claimed to have solved the nothing-at-stake problem, using a confidential algorithm that would be revealed at some point in the future.  This became known as the Nxt "secret sauce."  The PoS narrative even captured the hearts of long-term bitcoin supporters such as Stephen Reed who launched a campaign to convert bitcoin to PoS by 2016 in order to "save electricity."

Recently we got a whiff of Nxt's secret sauce.  It stinks.  Now interest in proof-of-stake coins is dwindling.  The market value (in BTC) of Darkcoin has fallen 76% after hitting its peak on April 14, 2014.

Darkcoin and Privacy

Privacy has always been important to the bitcoin community and perhaps it was only a matter of time before this narrative was exploited.  Darkcoin is the first example of this: it is a bitcoin-derived coin that uses master nodes to create giant coinjoin transactions, thereby obscuring the link between sender and receiver.  

Darkcoin has seen enormous growth with a market cap exceeded by only Bitcoin and Litecoin.  This is the power of narrative.  But Darkcoin was illegitimately insta-mined, has closed-source binaries, is not technologically innovative, and has a volatility-enhancing block reward equation¹.   In fact, since Darkcoin transactions are essentially bitcoin transactions with forced coinjoin, I don’t see why wallets like Darkwallet can’t achieve similar benefits with little of the drawbacks.   I predict Darkcoin will collapse, some will call it a scam, and others will say they shouldn't have invested in something they didn't understand.

But instead of seeing the protocol-enforced privacy narrative as narrative, people might look for a more technically-sound alternative to Darkcoin and without the insta-mine black eye.

The Final Narrative

The alt-coin narrative cycle will continue to play out.   In the end it doesn't matter: each cycle that plays out strengthens bitcoin.  It teaches us that the simple, flexible and robust bitcoin protocol coupled with its diverse user-base and large market cap is the most useful, if for no other reason than because it is used most often.  And besides, if, in the distant future, a superior payment technology is identified, the Blockchain Ledger will be forked or spun-off to this new technology.  There will never be a need to "panic trade" out of the bitcoin ledger and into some foo-coin ledger.  Value is stored in the Blockchain Ledger.  


At best, alt-coins are vying for second place.



¹The Darkcoin block reward decreases with increasing network hashrate and increases with decreasing network hashrate.  This tends to further limit new coin supply during rallies (adding to the pump), and increase new coin supply when miners have lost interest (adding to the dump).

[Trolololo]

I'm only going to address point 10 because it kind of makes everything else redundant.

Anyone that still believes bitcoin was invented by innocent minds, for the good of the people needs to check the whole of history to see whether there is any prior evidence of powerful people trying to stack the game in their favour. I'm sure you won;t have to look hard

Now I'm not saying categorically that it isn't, I'm saying the odds are against it. So if BTC is masterminded by the (govt/rothschild/illuminati/some other rich guys) then we can assume the price increase is equally as orchestrated. The copycat coins can copy so far, but ultimately only BTC has the backing to push it over the top. The others will always remain small players. The people who invented bitcoin invented it the way the did for a reason, what you describe as weaknesses are design features. There isn't the slightest chance 'they' are going to let a competitor that doesn't have these desirable features supercede bitcoin.

I'm not one of the guys in charge, so my optimal strategy is play the odds as best I can, and hedge black swans. My investment in BTC is already hedging the black swan. I haven't bet the farm, if BTC fails I'm largely whole and ready to play the work hard(ish), enjoy life, retire comfortable game. If BTC succeeds the retirement is just a bit sooner and a bit lusher.

Hedging the black swan that $[altcoin X of N] is the one true god feels more like a lottery. Like buying a basket of penny shares and hoping one hits big. I'm not saying don't do it (I got a few, a surprisingly high 20% of my total crypto when i figured it out - might need to adjust that!) unlikely any of them will (be allowed to) usurp bitcoin imho.

That's where all hints are pointing to!
+1

[r0ach]

So why invest into litecoin OVER bitcoin?

It's funny reading threads like this where people get outright angry at the existence of Litecoin.  The people with 5 stars by their name won't tell you the reason they're angry about it, but the reason is, they're scared a network won't function solely with transaction fees unless it has a monopoly on the entire market, and even then, it's still sketchy.  What I see happening in the long run is, eventually this model might prove to be faulty, but nobody will be able to gain consensus to change it due to being called Keynesians.  Some lower coin with a minimum block reward that never goes below X units will probably have to lead the way until the top coins are forced to change.

I don't want to be called  Keynesian as much as anyone else, but I foresee the amount of coins lost per year if cryptocurrency ever becomes mainstream to be a huge number.  People will lose passwords or die all the time with encrypted wallets and those coins will be lost forever.  The number lost per year is going to be at least 1% in my opinion, so having a coin supply that always emits new coins by a minimum of 1-2% wouldn't be a big deal.

The real conspiracy theory in this situation, would be if some government entity already knew this model wasn't viable, and tries to lure everyone into a one world currency using Austrian economics as bait, then pulls the rug out on them.  I don't consider always having a small, minimum block reward being a bait and switch, but there's no telling the scope of the bait and switch government regulation could pull off.

There's also the option that the miners themselves are going to vote themselves a raise in the form of minimum block reward, and everything will be quietly settled that way.

[wachtwoord]

The coins are infinitely divisible. No infinite supply necessary.

I'm talking about mining rewards moving to transaction fees only, which has nothing to do with what you're talking about.

[r0ach]

The coins are infinitely divisible. No infinite supply necessary.

I'm talking about mining rewards moving to transaction fees only, which has nothing to do with what you're talking about.

[wachtwoord]

The coins are infinitely divisible. No infinite supply necessary.

I'm talking about mining rewards moving to transaction fees only, which has nothing to do with what you're talking about.

No you weren't. I think you need to read your own post again:

I don't want to be called  Keynesian as much as anyone else, but I foresee the amount of coins lost per year if cryptocurrency ever becomes mainstream to be a huge number.  People will lose passwords or die all the time with encrypted wallets and those coins will be lost forever.  The number lost per year is going to be at least 1% in my opinion, so having a coin supply that always emits new coins by a minimum of 1-2% wouldn't be a big deal.

The amount of coins lost is completely meaningless. I cannot make this any clearer.

[Zer0Sum]

Why do I think altcoins are valid?  Because the financial industry wants to hedge security, and one, single block chain does not give them that.  What if Gavin or some other guy issued an update that imploded the BTC network?  They're just supposed to accept 100% loss?  No, they're not going to do that.  There will be at least 5 big coins because a 20% potential loss is a lot better than 100%. Also, at least two coins have to exist for value of the first to transfer to the second should problems arise.

Great insight.

A diversified LIQUIDITY ecosystem must exist to support all Crypto Assets...
That's why we have 10,000 banks and not one...
In spite of the constantly misapplied "network effect".

Crypto will naturally evolve into a Shadow Version of global Financial Industry.

[Peter R]

So why invest into litecoin OVER bitcoin?

It's funny reading threads like this where people get outright angry at the existence of Litecoin.  The people with 5 stars by their name won't tell you the reason they're angry about it, but the reason is, they're scared a network won't function solely with transaction fees unless it has a monopoly on the entire market, and even then, it's still sketchy.  What I see happening in the long run is, eventually this model might prove to be faulty, but nobody will be able to gain consensus to change it due to being called Keynesians.  Some lower coin with a minimum block reward that never goes below X units will probably have to lead the way until the top coins are forced to change.

I don't want to be called  Keynesian as much as anyone else, but I foresee the amount of coins lost per year if cryptocurrency ever becomes mainstream to be a huge number.  People will lose passwords or die all the time with encrypted wallets and those coins will be lost forever.  The number lost per year is going to be at least 1% in my opinion, so having a coin supply that always emits new coins by a minimum of 1-2% wouldn't be a big deal.

Satoshi had to create a fixed-supply currency to break the "deflation is bad" myth that is accepted as fact by the status quo.  The 21 million coin limit forces a debate on this subject and a re-thinking around the "wisdom of central bankers."  But a hard limit is not strictly necessary: a currency with a money supply that increase or decreases, for example, by less than 1% per year is little different than one with a fixed supply.  What is necessary is for the new currency units to be created by an objective and transparent algorithm on the basis of work performed.  

The mechanism employed to ensure the security of the network in the distant future when the block reward subsidy drops below the transaction fees is unknown.  But one thing is clear: if bitcoin is successful there will be a large vested interest in ensuring continued network robustness.  There are many many possibilities for how bitcoin could deal with the reduced block reward twenty years from now:

  1.  Continued advances in the size and cost of flash and RAM memory, coupled with investment in internet infrastructure, could enable bitcoin to scale enormously and beyond even credit-card-level transactions per second.  The fees earned from transactions could be more than sufficient to secure the network.

  2.  Bitcoin could become more like SWIFT or FedWire, and side-chains or third-party solutions could be used for day-to-day spending.  Transaction fees could increase as required to ensure the security of the network.

  3.  Wealthy bitcoin holders might subsidize their own mining operations.  Advanced detection systems could be deployed to ramp up network hashrate to defend against attacks.  

  4.  International organizations like the IMF might create "bitcoin defence strategies" similar to #3.  Network attacks might be criminalized and offenders hunted down.

  5.  Some combination of the above might happen, or something else I haven't thought of.  


Furthermore, there is little to no direct economic benefit for an attacker to engage in a perpetual 51% attack, and any short-term attack for economic gain can be mitigated by requiring a greater number of confirmations.  Therefore, the only attacks that truly threaten bitcoin are the non-economically-motivated ones (IMO).  

But if you worry about non-economically-motivated attacks in general, then you would live a very fearful life.  People might destroy bridges, explode damns, randomly kick people in the balls, etc.  Think of all the bad stuff that could very easily happen but doesn't.  It is actually amazing: if I spend a day in a big city like New York I might walk past 10,000 people.  If I do that 365 days in a row, perhaps I've walked past 1,000,000 unique people.  All it would take is for 1 of those people (0.0001%) on one of those days to decide to kill me, and they could very easily do so.  I would be a sitting duck!  But the fact is that the vast majority of people can live their entire lives in a big city without ever being murdered despite how easily it would be for anyone to murder them.  

People will argue that it is different for bitcoin because control of money creates power.  But control of communication creates power in the same way and the internet has never really been attacked to the point where it was at risk of becoming unviable.  Bitcoin will be the same way.  The Powers That Be are less organized than we give them credit for.

[Queeq]

Darkcoin and Privacy

Privacy has always been important to the bitcoin community and perhaps it was only a matter of time before this narrative was exploited.  Darkcoin is the first example of this: it is a bitcoin-derived coin that uses master nodes to create giant coinjoin transactions, thereby obscuring the link between sender and receiver.  

Darkcoin has seen enormous growth with a market cap exceeded by only Bitcoin and Litecoin.  This is the power of narrative.  But Darkcoin was illegitimately insta-mined, has closed-source binaries, is not technologically innovative, and has a volatility-enhancing block reward equation¹.   In fact, since Darkcoin transactions are essentially bitcoin transactions with forced coinjoin, I don’t see why wallets like Darkwallet can’t achieve similar benefits with little of the drawbacks.   I predict Darkcoin will collapse, some will call it a scam, and others will say they shouldn't have invested in something they didn't understand.

But instead of seeing the protocol-enforced privacy narrative as narrative, people might look for a more technically-sound alternative to Darkcoin and without the insta-mine black eye.

Peter R, you seem to be Darkcoin hater. I wonder why. Maybe because you invested in Monero and Darkcoin is its direct competitor? Or you simply missed the DRK train? The information you give is based mostly on rumors that FUDsters gladly spread around.

1. Insta-mine: http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#Was_Darkcoin_Instamined.3F
2. Darkcoin is opensourced. Closed source is Darksend part for the development period only. http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#Is_DarkSend_open_source.3F
3. Your link to Darkcoin whitepaper proves it is technologically innovative.
4. Block reward system (Dark Gravity Well) is enhanced version of Kimoto Gravity Well destined to protect the coin from multipools and miners hopping.
5. Darksend is not classical coinjoin. The main difference is that darksend is decentralized. Discussion here: https://darkcointalk.org/threads/coinjoin-in-bitcoin-and-darksend.560/   Also it is not forced, just turned on by default.

Every your statement can be disproved.

I would also like to quote AlexGR post here as it is going to be removed from the original rpietila's thread.

You tell me to respect the host, but it is you that has no respect Rpetila and his readers: instead of being straightforward and nuanced at the beginning of this thread, you came in here trying to promote something that has no future value for the host and his readers. Worse than that, as you are invested into it, it's a shameless promotion to defend your interest at the expand of all of us.

Now I'll stop engaging you because we are all derailing this thread towards altcoins instead of TA.

I merely pointed out a logic fallacy in grouping all altcoins together. Where is the disrespect towards Risto? You are making stuff up.

As to others, they sit on false information regarding Darkcoin, Monero and stuff. Most in here are trully clueless about +/-'s of the anonymous coins out there yet they pretend to be investment experts having found out about them like a week ago, propagating false information.

I have holdings in pretty much every anonymous coin there is precisely for this moment of boom, when everyone was like "anonymity? naaah... too shady" and stuff like that. So give me a break.

DRK is on the verge of collapse anytime, we are all aware of it.

I heard that at 0.003, 0.005, 0.007, 0.01, 0.014, 0.02, 0.026. Traders lost their coins to the rise and expected the dump that never came. They are now waiting to get back in, so let it fall if it must.

Keep in mind some fundamentals, whether the price corrects, flash-crashes, or goes to the moon and beyond:

1. Dark is aiming for the private/anonymous market. If just 1 out of 10 transactions are held privately/anonymously in the future, the anonymous coins will hold at least 10% of the whole cryptocurrency marketcap (so ~750mn out of 7.5bn with running prices). That leaves plenty of room for growth.

2. It provides real-world utility and stuff that people can actually use. Some of the top10 cryptos in coinmarketcap have some "fancy" concepts and features that most people do not even understand what they are / what they do / why they are useful. Privacy is something that everyone understands and has a need for in some degree. People do not want to have their bank statements online, so why would we do that with crypto? Businesses too (for competitive reasons).

2. Low inflation: BTC gives out 3600 BTCs per day. LTC gives out 28.800 LTC per day. DRK produces only 2880 DRK per day - and it will lower 7% next year.

3. Due to low inflation a significantly smaller amount of fiat (or fiat equivalent in BTCs) is required to keep the price stable compared to either LTC or BTC.

4. Due to low production of coins, coupled with the coins held for masternodes, the buying pressure for existing coins escalates.

5. BTC and LTC holders may hedge some of their investments with DRK, as DRK makes its ascent and scares them. Large bagholders of LTC in particular may have problems sleeping well and will either sell LTC or hedge with DRK. This creates a feedback loop that narrows the gap between LTC/DRK as money from LTC flows to DRK, allowing DRK to go to #2.

6. DRK represents a hedge of various forms. For example its security is not dependent on only 1 hash. It is also a bad-news-hedge in the sense that when news like "Bitcoin was banned in X country" hit, it can go the opposite way of Bitcoin. Kind'a like USD/EUR pairs when USD goes bad and EUR goes up and vice versa. Fiat hedging for BTC is unrealistic because it's a binary market. You either have BTC or fiat. But BTC/DRK is an actual hedge inside cryptos. "Bitcoin banned where? Great.. DRK to the mooooooon".

7. The numbers of coins in circulation is heavily in favor of DRK, in terms of scarcity: ~4 million DRKs vs ~12mn BTCs vs ~28mn LTCs.

8. Coin-numbers-adjusted, the price of DRK is 1/7th of LTC and 1/120th of BTC. This is grossly undervalued if one assumes that at least 5 or 10% of cryptocurrency transactions will be performed privately/anonymously and thus the price should move upwards to reflect this fact, even if DRK only occupies a far smaller percentage than now in the private/anonymous market.

9. The possibility of "mining" with masternodes, is like buying a mining ring that is free (you don't actually pay it as you still keep your DRKs) but also not obsoleted with time or new technology. Beats GPU / ASICs investment in both CAPEX and OPEX.

10. DRK is ahead of the competition. The competition has severe weaknesses and "blocker" issues. Zerocoin is the best solution but doesn't exist - and if it does come out, there will be a huge trust issue with the initial key. Bytecoin has good anonymity as a mixer but is based on an unproven/untested blockchain technology and consequently people can't trust much money on it, compared to the 5 years of running of Bitcoin. It's more like a gamble option - not something that you can throw heavy money. It also scales badly, has usability issues and is not interoperable with the bitcoin-based payment systems for merchants etc. These will hamper it for quite some time.

The fact that Cryptonote technology is superior to the current implementation of DarkSend (which will change in next revision), doesn't make it NSA-proof in itself. This means that both coins are private, not anonymous, not nearly 100% anonymous and anything else is snake oil. In essence both DRK + Cryptonote coins will be adequate for privacy, combined with IP obfuscation and "best practices" followed by the user, except if the NSA has other plans. This is like 99% privacy and the 1% to make it 100%, will require extra work from both camps. So the "superiority" aspect of Cryptonote's anonymity is null and void, unless NSA-proofing is achieved. In the meantime, the drawbacks of the whole Bytecoin system are enormous and cannot justify the "costs" for the user or the merchant. So, overall, there is no advantage in going with a Bytecoin system, over a Bitcoin-based system which is proven.

11. DRK has a coder that codes. Darkcoin has become something like a development platform of new features instead of a regular "shitcoin"-clone that offers nothing or that is stagnant.

12. Compared to LTC (which is ahead of DRK), LTC is a technological dinosaur. The LTC camp itself is worried:

https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=19819
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=19955

Additionally, the LTC camp has failed in its primary mission to "sell" ASIC resistance, a point that would improve Bitcoin's "inadequacy". In other words, there is no reason why DRK could not exceed LTC and take #2.

13. Top-100 richlist keeps stacking when weak hands are like "maybe I should cash out": http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/#!rich

14. DRK has first mover advantage as the public anonymous coin which succeeded and initiated the anonymity pursuit in other coins (which are now scrambling to say DRK is scam, is a fail, is this, that, so we should take its place because we are, of course, better). Bytecoin existed from 2012 but nobody knew it until March-April 2014. By then people were already DarkSending money with Darkcoin.