rpietila Altcoin Observer

[orinoco]

We are in the gestation stage still of Cryptos. This is probably going to be huge. People coming on board en mass are going to take some little guys up is my bet.
Remember those AOL CD's everywhere? Many of us computer geeks didn't think it made sense, but it ended up getting the masses involved. My point being
the masses will have a say, just as wall st. will.

Yes, its the masses which interest me.

Further to my post yesterday about broad categories of crypto coin, here's my take on the taxonomy of commerce coins.. in no particular order

1.  Anonymous coin - cash equivalent, and there will always be a segment which wants it.
2.  Trade-facilitation coin - for businesses to use and for large transactions, should IMO provide trade-finance tools such as letters of credit, escrow etc. and be transparent (not anonymous) so disputes can be resolved cleanly.
3.  Gold-standard wealth store (BTC at this stage - can't see that changing for a while/ever) and benchmark currency valuations.
4.  General consumer coins - fast payments suitable for Point-of-Sale payment, lots of coins (pricing in whole-numbers = easier for sheeple), portable to all devices, high liquidity, stable price, good merchant support tools etc.

So my current bets on the above?

1.  MRO probably, maybe DRK  (DRK is technically inferior, but smaller blockchain than ring signatures, so faster)
2. Blackcoin (if they pull off the blackhalo stuff with escrow/contracting/etc. built-in)
3. BTC
4. ?  Good question.. No real contenders yet.. maybe ECCoin? maybe Fedoracoin TiPS? maybe something unreleased?  Or something off the radar?  Not sure LTC has enough coins/speed.  Until the retail infrastructure is more developed, we won't see much opportunity in this space.

I fully expect my candidates to change as new coins appear, or old coins are re-branded.  Interestingly, the problem of fair distribution is one which can be partially solved by time.. unloved coins naturally get sold off and dispersed, which helps correct issues created by hardware mining/premine/IPO/instamining.

On the AOL-cd front, ECCoin marketing people and community are currently talking about re-branding as "E-Commerce Coin" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=503236.msg7093075#msg7093075), which could go along way as far as mindshare with the masses.

[drawingthesun]

The main coins I have high hopes for are, in no particular order:

Bitcoin.
Monero.
Nxt.
Ethereum.

I'm looking at Nem to see if they bring anything new to the table. It'll be an entirely new code base so its worth watching in case something awesome happens there.

I wouldn't be too concerned with Monero blockchain bloat. Darkcoin looks to be adding multi nodes to cope with the "trusting that the nodes aren't logging all the mixing" issue. Evan now wants 10 nodes to route each darksend tx. Essentially darkcoin could easily bloat out trying to compete with Monero but still failing to actually offer true anonymity.

[Its About Sharing]

We are in the gestation stage still of Cryptos. This is probably going to be huge. People coming on board en mass are going to take some little guys up is my bet.
Remember those AOL CD's everywhere? Many of us computer geeks didn't think it made sense, but it ended up getting the masses involved. My point being
the masses will have a say, just as wall st. will.

Yes, its the masses which interest me.

Further to my post yesterday about broad categories of crypto coin, here's my take on the taxonomy of commerce coins.. in no particular order

1.  Anonymous coin - cash equivalent, and there will always be a segment which wants it.
2.  Trade-facilitation coin - for businesses to use and for large transactions, should IMO provide trade-finance tools such as letters of credit, escrow etc. and be transparent (not anonymous) so disputes can be resolved cleanly.
3.  Gold-standard wealth store (BTC at this stage - can't see that changing for a while/ever) and benchmark currency valuations.
4.  General consumer coins - fast payments suitable for Point-of-Sale payment, lots of coins (pricing in whole-numbers = easier for sheeple), portable to all devices, high liquidity, stable price, good merchant support tools etc.

So my current bets on the above?

1.  MRO probably, maybe DRK  (DRK is technically inferior, but smaller blockchain than ring signatures, so faster)
2. Blackcoin (if they pull off the blackhalo stuff with escrow/contracting/etc. built-in)
3. BTC
4. ?  Good question.. No real contenders yet.. maybe ECCoin? maybe Fedoracoin TiPS? maybe something unreleased?  Or something off the radar?  Not sure LTC has enough coins/speed.  Until the retail infrastructure is more developed, we won't see much opportunity in this space.

I fully expect my candidates to change as new coins appear, or old coins are re-branded.  Interestingly, the problem of fair distribution is one which can be partially solved by time.. unloved coins naturally get sold off and dispersed, which helps correct issues created by hardware mining/premine/IPO/instamining.

On the AOL-cd front, ECCoin marketing people and community are currently talking about re-branding as "E-Commerce Coin" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=503236.msg7093075#msg7093075), which could go along way as far as mindshare with the masses.

Interesting list, but what about the 2.0 coins? NXT, Ether, etc. I really think one of these more programmable/platform based coins is going to serve a huge funtion and not a niche.
I would love to say we guessed right with MRO, DRK, etc, but I wonder if the next one is truly to come. And we need to strongly consider the network hashing power. E.g. - LTC as a silver to BTC's gold a cheaper store of value. I mean there are only 12 or so million BTC's right now, and that is nothing. People will want a psychologically cheaper solution.

Eye opening talk here,
IAS

[smoothie]

LOL I guess it was a fake wall. I called it on the troll box and the guy got hit for 10k LTC and pulled it and lowered it.

if this is not a fake wall then we are pretty much at the bottom here.

[tifozi]

coblee in action  

[devphp]

LOL I guess it was a fake wall. I called it on the troll box and the guy got hit for 10k LTC and pulled it and lowered it.

oh, Litecoin, Litecoin, where is that sweet november now

[smoothie]

Monero, my man, why are you tanking?  

Thank you for explanations. My own (unchanged from the time of the provocative question) is that:

MRO's inflation is designed to be very high in the opening months (the only alternative being premine, instamine or IPO - none of which showing much success in the way of distributing the initial monetary base in a fair and functioning way). At present we are generating about 23,000 MRO per day with the BTC value of BTC104. Bitcoin is generating BTC3600 per day.

Since MRO's new supply is 2.9% of that of Bitcoin, it surely needs to be real interesting for the price to rise significantly.

Again, I don't think this is a bad thing. It is just the nature of the fair coin generation function (and the very reason I lost my alt virginity). When Bitcoin was launched in 2009, the price went basically nowhere in the following 1.5 years. But once the inflation had slowed and exchange opened, it started the 6400x moonshot in 1 year.

When MRO is 1.5 years old, about 40% of the supply will have been mined and the inflation has been slowed to 14k MRO/day. At that point it is difficult to imagine that the price would be this low On the other hand, the network security will still be there unlike with the rapidly mined coins.

All scamcoins, pump&dumpcoins, IPO-"coins", 100%premine-coins: you have yet to see your 1.5th birthday.

Excuse my ignorance but what is a "MRO" or "Monero"?

[devphp]

Excuse my ignorance but what is a "MRO" or "Monero"?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0

no stable GUI yet though, it's a new code, GUI is just being developed, only command line wallet is available.

[orinoco]

Interesting list, but what about the 2.0 coins? NXT, Ether, etc. I really think one of these more programmable/platform based coins is going to serve a huge funtion and not a niche.
I would love to say we guessed right with MRO, DRK, etc, but I wonder if the next one is truly to come. And we need to strongly consider the network hashing power. E.g. - LTC as a silver to BTC's gold a cheaper store of value. I mean there are only 12 or so million BTC's right now, and that is nothing. People will want a psychologically cheaper solution.

Eye opening talk here,
IAS

The 2.0 coins are still in the process of proving their technology.. questions abound as to the scalability/security of the algorithms, which hardware combinations they support (using current tech), what their release curve looks like, and how "fair" their release and distribution is.

Ethereum is interesting - but from the brief reading I've had time to do, I think Ethereum's role will ultimately be an application platform that has implict crypto-currency services.  The degree to which it opens up support for other currencies and how tightly coupled it is to its internal "currency" Ether remains to be seen.  Ethereum sounds good - but its well funded and thus well marketed, and how it stacks up technically, as well as how open the platform is, remains to be seen (I haven't looked at the demo they have for download yet).

Also of interest is bithalo (and blackhalo).  There's a developer who has figured something out about the bitcoin protocol and implemented a client which allows non-traditional transactions - she/he's talking plans for all kinds of stuff including 2-party escrow, contracts etc.  Bithalo is on top of BTC (and soon-to-be Blackcoin apparently), so its not  a separate currency (just in case the mod thinks I'm trying to pimp an altcoin!)

Here's a couple of multi-party bitcoin transactions involving one of the test addresses..

https://blockchain.info/tx/e0d081417c92aa6c74336eef4d5285ed1320359d97c8391e6282cf5159dc4486
https://blockchain.info/tx/59e0a90ebe8fa15a9ee828fa67d417d391338b01d87bdfc7d0482b3f74af9932

More in this reddit s/he posted on /r/blackcoin/  just over a week ago.. a lot more posted since, but this link has some interesting comments by him/her in it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/blackcoin/comments/269sgx/almost_done_with_beta/

And a post yesterday by the dev about how futures contracts might work:

http://www.reddit.com/r/blackcoin/comments/2743qq/an_update_and_how_futures_contracts_could_work_in/

[AlexGR]

Could there be a battle in which Ethereum obsoletes NXT?

[orinoco]

Also worth posting this..

http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins

They examined the initial blocks and rate of mining of a large collection of alt-coin currencies to look at how much of total supply was produced early in the coins life.

I picked it up from the monero currency twitter feed.  Monero gets rated as "passes the sniff test".

Of course, whether the fairness is any barrier/indicator of success remains to be seen.  A catchy name and herd behaviour can overcome a lot of skepticism  

[smoothie]

Excuse my ignorance but what is a "MRO" or "Monero"?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0

no stable GUI yet though, it's a new code, GUI is just being developed, only command line wallet is available.

So is this an actual new code base or is it using Bitcoin code somehow?

Meaning did they recode from scratch?

[smooth]

Excuse my ignorance but what is a "MRO" or "Monero"?

Worth reading post #1 on this thread.

[smooth]

Excuse my ignorance but what is a "MRO" or "Monero"?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0

no stable GUI yet though, it's a new code, GUI is just being developed, only command line wallet is available.

So is this an actual new code base or is it using Bitcoin code somehow?

Meaning did they recode from scratch?

Totally distinct code, not a bitcoin code, though it borrows some ideas from bitcoin (the concept of a proof-of-work block chain with a p2p network primarily). It originally surfaced as bytecoin, but that was premined to death and lacking a coherent development team, so the Monero team recognized the potential and adopted it.

[drawingthesun]

Excuse my ignorance but what is a "MRO" or "Monero"?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0

no stable GUI yet though, it's a new code, GUI is just being developed, only command line wallet is available.

So is this an actual new code base or is it using Bitcoin code somehow?

Meaning did they recode from scratch?

Hey Smoothie, it's based on this:

https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf

100% new code, it's probably more different than Bitcoin compared to most of the other alternative coins.

The chain will be about 5 times larger than Bitcoin eventually, but that is the price to pay for proper anonymity that isn't based on a trusted accumulator (zerocash) or based on nodes that see all (Dark, XC)

Have a read of the white paper.

The first implementation was called Bytecoin but it was mined over two years (Ninja style) in secret with unchanging difficulty. Monero is our communities based fresh start.

[devphp]

So is this an actual new code base or is it using Bitcoin code somehow?

Meaning did they recode from scratch?

My understanding is they coded it from scratch, or perhaps took some code from Bytecoin, which is the first coin based on that new algo, but it didn't take off for various reasons. Well, at least big chunks of the code should be coded from scratch, as it's pretty different from Bitcoin and its forks.

[drawingthesun]

So is this an actual new code base or is it using Bitcoin code somehow?

Meaning did they recode from scratch?

My understanding is they coded it from scratch, or perhaps took some code from Bytecoin, which is the first coin based on that new algo, but it didn't take off for various reasons. Well, at least big chunks of the code should be coded from scratch, as it's pretty different from Bitcoin and its forks.

Monero is still 98% Bytecoin (not that Bytecoin!)

Bytecoin is 100% new code and has no lines from Bitcoin or any of it's alts.

The Monero team took Bytecoin and started fresh, because Bytecoin was ninja mined!

[smoothie]

I have lots of MRO buys between this level and 0.002 but seems that I am not the only one.. 

Exactly what exchange are you using? Curious. Most of the exchanges I have seen appear very shady.

[smooth]

The first implementation was called Bytecoin but it was mined over two years (Ninja style) in secret with unchanging difficulty. Monero is our communities based fresh start.

It's not even clear it was two years. (No independent evidence whatsoever of its existence prior to late 2013 is available.) If it really were mined for two years with code implemented as was obviously intended by the design (using AES hardware in Intel CPUs), that would be less than 10 PCs mining it, which is somewhat implausible. It is entirely possible they gened the whole blockchain in a much shorter period of time on a server farm or cloud nodes. The whole thing is extremely shady and totally lacking even if the most basic transparency, which is why bytecoin is essentially dead now, and Monero is thriving.

[drawingthesun]

The first implementation was called Bytecoin but it was mined over two years (Ninja style) in secret with unchanging difficulty. Monero is our communities based fresh start.

It's not even clear it was two years. (No independent evidence whatsoever of its existence prior to late 2013 is available.) If it really were mined for two years with code implemented as was obviously intended by the design (using AES hardware in Intel CPUs), that would be less than 10 PCs mining it, which is somewhat implausible. It is entirely possible they gened the whole blockchain in a much shorter period of time on a server farm or cloud nodes. The whole thing is extremely shady and totally lacking even if the most basic transparency, which is why bytecoin is essentially dead now, and Monero is thriving.

How would you generate the blockchain without mining it properly? You mean faking the timestamps in the header or something?