The extreme price fluctuation feature, or lets face it 99% of forum members wouldn't be here 

I for one can NOT live with any alt coin worth less than .001. Build in to your next coin that price point but the ability for me to instamine a fuck ton of them so I can get one of them CryptsyBackroom(TM) level payouts.

It's the same thing for Bitcoin. If many users think the currency has value, and they use it, and they are relatively loyal to it, then it's safe to say that it is valuable.

To know if a crypto is legit, the most important thing is to study its userbase. If it satisfies the three critera mentionned above, then it will survive.

This is already an interesting discussion that seems to be going in opposing directions.

Is it fair to suggest that many of the needs described so far are those of traders and investors? with little mention of currency users.

Perhaps user first design is required, the given requirements appear to be simple at first: fast and secure.

mymenace makes a good point about focussing on payment gateways, this seems to tie in with user first design, ensuring users can actually use the currency as a currency.

vann, you make note of innovation, is there any specific area you'd be looking to see innovation in?

So far altcoins seem to have focussed on solving: 1) anonymity, 2) altcoin induced problems with mining (new algo's, multipool handling and the like) - do any feature innovation which is useful for end users as opposed to those in the business of making/minting/trading the coins?

I agree and would suggest it is fair to allow miners to make money from their own rigs of course - but only when using the rigs for a good purpose, which would be a coin which puts users first.

BTC was balanced with it's mining algorithm and technology increased over time. New coins can have a huge amount of hashing power available instantly which is where the difference is.

I have a feeling that if other parameters were tweaked on a sha256d or scrypt coin, parameters like starting difficulty, allowed block time deviance, and diff retargeting most multipool issues would be solved.

These days I think in order for a new coin to compete it should with anonymous transactions and coloured coins(asset exchange) at least.

New mining algos or a good PoS system(or a hybrid) is interesting too.

A good non-joke name is also something that I think people underestimate the importance of. Dogecoin was probably a one time thing.

Theoretically or even ideally 3rd parties would build upon it like they do bitcoin but in order for people to use a new coin from the beginning it has to offer some utility I think. It shouldn't be a requirement per se but the altcoin community is definitely hungry for a true anonymous coin. And an asset exchange adds another dimension to a coin.

If a coin has other innovations I guess these things aren't mandatory. But I think the demand for these features is high right now and seeing a coin offering these cutting edge features adds a lot of credibility I think.

merge mined with bitcoin


only need anonymous transactions if we have something to hide, maybe a feature you can turn on and off, e.g. i do not want transactions to show up of any "personal items" my spouse and I buy


+1 to silkcoin and the new wallet, very pretty and functional

This only applies to the united states, here we have to declare crypto to the taxman to be taxed as earnings, e.g. it is a currency

regardless of what the IRS says

if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck it is a duck

e.g. you buy with btc, your sell with btc, you trade like forex with btc, sounds like a currency to me

Thank you for all the feedback, I've reduced it to the items which may warrant some discussion.

1. Swiss Army Knife / Monolithic Wallet
The introduction of all the features you mentioned feels like bloat and the introduction of many attack vectors. Whilst they are all cool/novel things, which would you say are the bare minimum requirements for the coin to have utility?

2. One hash rate only
I need to think about this properly, can you enlighten on why you suggest this, is it so that everyone has a fair chance at creating money, or are there alternative reasons?

3. Merged Mining
If we go past the specification stage and implement this, then the project will be a very long term project and aim to offer a viable alternative to bitcoin. I can see that merged mining could help the miners, and that it could theoretically make the network more secure (a higher difficulty and more hashing). But I worry that it would force fee reduction, making the network less secure, and that such tight association would be sending a message from the off that this is a second class coin, always to be subsidiary to Bitcoin.

Can you comment?