rpietila Altcoin Observer

[Este Nuno]

OK Rpietila, right now XMR lacks a official GUI(there are GUI's, but not "official") and a resolve to the Blockchain bloat/scale.

Once XMR has an official GUI, and a resolve to the Blockchain bloat/scale, what is your valuation on what XMR's price should be then?

The realistic upper limit on BTC's price is 25% of world's wealth (ie ~5M$/BTC).
The realistic upper limit for XMR is 25% of BTC (ie ~0.25BTC/XMR).

I think the development of GUI is priced in, so it will be a negative event if we fail to deliver it.

Yeah, the GUI pretty much has to be priced in since it's a pretty trivial/inevitable thing.

[darkota]

It's all about Monero when it comes to anonymous coins.

Explain this to me: Why is it that the market doesn't trust Monero if it has so solid fundamentals? Why is it that 100% instamined PoW/PoS hybrids appear out of nowhere, and just by being based on the Bitcoin codebase are able to out-perform the marketcap of Monero in a few days or weeks? This shouldn't even be possible.

4    Darkcoin   $ 34,537,954   $ 7.78   4,439,477 DRK
11    Bytecoin (BCN)   $ 8,974,931   $ 0.000057   156,920,284,106 BCN      
13    VeriCoin   $ 7,597,613   $ 0.283679   26,782,417 VRC
15    XC   $ 6,451,500   $ 1.17   5,515,507 XC
17    Monero   $ 5,080,622   $ 2.72   1,867,647 XMR

LMAO, oh man you are so delusional if you think the market trust DRK over XMR just because its pumped rn.

O yes he does

These figures are just a mirage, with a $ prefix. Nothing more. I wonder did really more than 10 real "$"  ever changed hands there? Faked mining making fake walls performing fake trades that never change hands...

You're wrong there..I've bought and sold tons for DRK and still hold. It's simply that Darkcoin is being pumped/supported by Huge whales. I suspect once RC4 is out/the days leading upto RC4, the support from those whales will tumble.

[damashup]

Would I be right in thinking that the marketcap (used in the context of cryptocurrencies) is a bit of a fiction? For the majority of coins, there simply isn't the liquidity at the current price?

That's both ways. Try to buy 1 million BTC and you see what happens

I guess to that extent I'd include Bitcoin in the fiction.  

Seems strange to speak of 'market cap' on currencies... how many US dollars or pound sterling would I need to buy to affect it's 'value' so dramatically?

Take a coin I like the look of, Boolberry (BBR):

• As of right now, it would really only take 1 order of less than 40BTC on 1 exchange to double its 'market cap' (from 622BTC to 1244BTC, using current supply).
• I don't imagine it would take much more than 20BTC to hold it at that price (or more) for a good few weeks, possibly many months.
• If you place a weighting on market cap, that's a mere 60BTC to add 600BTC of perceived 'worth' to a fledging currency and send it scurrying up the cryto 'charts'... (obviously if I were skilled in the arts of pumping, I could probably increase the market cap by more with less spend).
• This wouldn't say much about the increase in 'value' of the coin, in the court of public opinion. It only says I like the enough to back it to the tune of 60BTC.
• If I owned (which I don't) 10,000 BTC, this would be a mere 0.6% of my holding.

As a (newbie) investor in the 'future of money', not sure I'd put much stock (if any) on 'market cap' (current supply or total supply), not least because it appears very susceptible to manipulation.

[dnaleor]

OK Rpietila, right now XMR lacks a official GUI(there are GUI's, but not "official") and a resolve to the Blockchain bloat/scale.

Once XMR has an official GUI, and a resolve to the Blockchain bloat/scale, what is your valuation on what XMR's price should be then?

The realistic upper limit on BTC's price is 25% of world's wealth (ie ~5M$/BTC).
The realistic upper limit for XMR is 25% of BTC (ie ~0.25BTC/XMR).

I think the development of GUI is priced in, so it will be a negative event if we fail to deliver it.

Yeah, the GUI pretty much has to be priced in since it's a pretty trivial/inevitable thing.

for what it's worth... I remember the time that the namecoin GUI was launched and the exchanrate went up

[btc-mike]

BBR was never instamined. The hashrate almost instantly rose to a high level with plenty of miners after launch. Difficulty at block 50 was in the same area as block 5000. If anything XMR was instamined, 150k XMR was mined in the first week with network hashrate less than 5 KH/s.

cbuchner1 has stated he doesn't have more than 10,000 BBR at any one time, he is selling them off. That is why the price has been kept down. Also it's possible there are other GPU miners.

A lot of BTC has gone in to sustain the 0.001 price of BBR.

He was making 14k BBR per day...I dont think you honestly believe that he is seilling his BBR.....The spread on BBR is pretty bad..

You distortion of facts is bewildering. Christian estimated half of that was the max he made daily, when the difficulty was lower.

I cannot figure out the sheer hatred you have for DRK and/or BBR.

[darkota]

BBR was never instamined. The hashrate almost instantly rose to a high level with plenty of miners after launch. Difficulty at block 50 was in the same area as block 5000. If anything XMR was instamined, 150k XMR was mined in the first week with network hashrate less than 5 KH/s.

cbuchner1 has stated he doesn't have more than 10,000 BBR at any one time, he is selling them off. That is why the price has been kept down. Also it's possible there are other GPU miners.

A lot of BTC has gone in to sustain the 0.001 price of BBR.

He was making 14k BBR per day...I dont think you honestly believe that he is seilling his BBR.....The spread on BBR is pretty bad..

You distortion of facts is bewildering. Christian estimated half of that was the max he made daily, when the difficulty was lower.

I cannot figure out the sheer hatred you have for DRK and/or BBR.

It was a typing error. I meant 7k BBR per day, or 14 BTC worth of BBR at around todays rate.

I don't hate either.

[btc-mike]

BBR was never instamined. The hashrate almost instantly rose to a high level with plenty of miners after launch. Difficulty at block 50 was in the same area as block 5000. If anything XMR was instamined, 150k XMR was mined in the first week with network hashrate less than 5 KH/s.

cbuchner1 has stated he doesn't have more than 10,000 BBR at any one time, he is selling them off. That is why the price has been kept down. Also it's possible there are other GPU miners.

A lot of BTC has gone in to sustain the 0.001 price of BBR.

He was making 14k BBR per day...I dont think you honestly believe that he is seilling his BBR.....The spread on BBR is pretty bad..

You distortion of facts is bewildering. Christian estimated half of that was the max he made daily, when the difficulty was lower.

I cannot figure out the sheer hatred you have for DRK and/or BBR.

It was a typing error. I meant 7k BBR per day, or 14 BTC worth of BBR at around todays rate.

You should be using the exchange rate at that time

[thefunkybits]

This might just be my new favourite thread 

any CRYPTCOIN fans in here?

[AlexGR]

This might just be my new favourite thread 

any CRYPTCOIN fans in here?

I have a few crypts, waiting to see what Mindfox will come up with...

[aminorex]

While the thread is listed as altcoin observer a lot of the posters are very skeptical, or even hostile to run-of-the-mill alts. Many because they are only interested in long-term value potential.  Novel coins will have to prove themselves with a clear and credible value proposition in order to get any respect from me, for example.  My default assumption is that any new coin is either a scam or a folly.

[thefunkybits]

My default assumption is that any new coin is either a scam or a folly.

even if this was 100% correct, it doesn't mean there's no opportunities left for insane profits (3-10X on top of Bitcoin is possible with some alts)

[rpietila]

My default assumption is that any new coin is either a scam or a folly.

even if this was 100% correct, it doesn't mean there's no opportunities left for insane profits (3-10X on top of Bitcoin is possible with some alts)

Or 100x.

But don't you people feel moral restraint in investing in something that you know to be a scam?

(Luckily the obscene profits are available only in such limited investment amounts that I can more easily forgo them  )

[Bagatell]

But don't you people feel moral restraint in investing in something that you know to be a scam?

Tell that to the TBTFs.

[rpietila]

Interpretation of the acronym escapes my imagination. 

[devphp]

Too big to fail?

[Bagatell]

Yep.

[rpietila]

PoS put to rest:

that mechanism is far less than optimal for many reasons and excludes those who don't have mining gear and favours those with higher powered mining gear. It's no different to "rich getting richer" in nxt. In that respect, pow is elitist

This is the problem with proof of stake: it was invented by people who have no idea what problem mining is supposed to solve and have some agenda other than solving that problem.

Mining is not about allocating the issuance of new coins. The fact that they are tied together in Bitcoin is a temporary coincidence. Mining is about solving the problem of distributed consensus - how do a bunch of independent nodes spread all over the planet agree on a precise ordering of transactions when every node must operate with an incomplete view of the network and anybody might be trying to cheat?

This problem has nothing to do with elitism or notions of fairness or populism. Overlaying those agendas into the solution is a great way to not solve the problem.

As nodes on the network continually work to establish a consistent of narrative of what has happened in the netwowk based on their own incomplete knowledge, there will be times where two nodes disagree. Mining is nothing more than a signalling mechanism which provides an objective basis for choosing which version of history to treat as correct, whenever a conflict occurs such that more than one alternative version exist.

The design criteria for what makes a good mining algorithm comes from signalling theory:

Two individuals have access to different information.

They could both gain if they could honestly share this information.

However, their interests do not coincide entirely, and so each has an incentive to deceive the other.

How can honest communication be ensured?

How can honest communication be ensured despite conflicting interests between a signaller and a signal receiver?

Economists and biologists independently proposed that the costs associated with producing signals can provide a solution to this problem. Loosely paraphrased, the solution typically takes the following form.

Suppose that signals are costly, and that for one reason or another, lies cost more than honest signals.

If telling the truth is cheap enough and telling a lie is costly enough, it may be worthwhile to communicate honestly but not to lie.

There's a reason that when Wei Dai proposed b-money in 1998, he didn't even bother to explain why calculations in a proof of work system, "must be easy to determine how much computing effort it took to solve the problem and the solution must otherwise have no value, either practical or intellectual." He assumed this statement would be so obviously true that no explanation was needed. Apparently this is no longer the case.

The signal sent by proof of work is the amount of opportunity cost the miner has paid in order to produce the block. The fact that mining calculations are completely useless outside the signalling system itself is what makes lies more expensive than telling the truth, thus satisfying the conditions for honest signalling. The opportunity cost the miner pays to produce a block only represents a profitable trade for the miner if the network accepts their block. So when it comes to a node in the network choosing between two valid blocks, choosing to accept the block with the higher PoW means choosing the block which produced by the miner who has the most at stake in terms of opportunity cost paid.

Note that if the miner has to use specialized hardware for which there is no possible use other than mining, the signal is even better than performing otherwise-useless calculations on general purpose hardware. Higher opportunity costs = more reliable signal.

Proof of work is a proof of stake system, the only one that actually works.

PoS coins use the number of coins held as the basis for their signalling system. Since coins have an exchange rate, they obviously do not fulfill the criteria of having no value, either practical or intellectual. Thus PoS is not an viable mechanism for honest signalling.

Latter emphasis mine.

[superresistant]

PoS put to rest:

A big text for nothing.
The only argument is :

there will be times where two nodes disagree

and it's wrong. Or at least not even debated.
Disagree what ? He talks like nodes have their own will.

[equipoise]

PoS put to rest:

A big text for nothing.
The only argument is :

there will be times where two nodes disagree

and it's wrong. Or at least not even debated.
Disagree what ? He talks like nodes have their own will.

Disagree by working on different chains for some amount of time.

[ARGpentem]

PoS put to rest:

A big text for nothing.
The only argument is :

there will be times where two nodes disagree

and it's wrong. Or at least not even debated.
Disagree what ? He talks like nodes have their own will.

Disagree by working on different chains for some amount of time.

How about Ripple ? POW is elegant but it is not required to have a distributed consensus.