Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[jojo69]

I really do wish these derpcoinz would just go away, it is hard enough explaining BTC to people, they hear about all these other implementations and they just throw up their hands.  It is kind of embarassing the alphabet soup of BScoins.

[1714049865]

1714049865

[1714049865]

1714049865

[tvbcof]

We reached LTC:Silver ozt parity before BTC:gold.

LTC trading for $21.38 on BTC-e and silver $19.97.

Embarrasing for BTC!

Are you bloody kidding me? Ugh. Be careful what you wish for, people.

More than one very successful (from a market-cap perspective) crypto will ultimately devalue them all, if there are no material technical distinctions.

I get in twitter fights with gold-bugs and their ilk all the time, and the best leg they have to stand on (and my only lingering long-term hesitation about bitcoin, for that matter) is the alt-coin argument. I have to lean on "network effects" and "first-mover advantage" arguments to defend bitcoin's market-cap and longevity in this light, and strong non-distinct alts will break that argument.

That said, bitcoin has risen almost 10x recently, and litecoin is catching up to keep its old multiple (~1/40), so that's fine, but much more, and we start to have empirical issues that invalidate important theory.

Maybe the theory is wrong.

My personal view is that alternate crypto-currencies strengthen Bitcoin by discouraging regulatory attack and by offloading some of the load on the core system (or potentially could) which could keep it from needing to outgrow the available infrastructure without mutating in an unhealthy way.

Beyond that, I'm all for competition.  If an alternate grows in because it is focusing on thing that users see as valuable then I see it as a good thing.  If I've been to lazy to do the due diligence require to diversify (which is so far the case) than I have nobody to blame but myself for the loss.

[Melbustus]

There are "material technical distinctions" between LTC and BTC.

No there aren't. Stop it.

1) 4x Supply.
This one should be obviously irrelevant. I won't bother unless you disagree.

2) 1/4 Block times.
First off, there are effectively zero use-cases where 2.5mins is acceptable but 10mins isn't, especially when you overlay the statistical variance on those numbers. They're both terrible for the retail buy-a-cup-of-coffee scenario; 0-conf will have to be accepted for both coins. And for the usual online-purchase scenario, waiting an hour for full conf is just fine.

It's also worth noting that it's unproven how litecoin will perform at scale with the different constants. Orphans may be an issue; and there are convincing arguments for it still taking close to an hour to get full security no matter what the block-time, due to the nature of blockchain-style global-consensus.

3) Scrypt.
Originally supposed to be GPU resistant, and until recently, called "asic-proof" by promoters....neither is true at all. ASICs for litecoin are being built now, with order-of-magnitude improvement over GPU litecoin mining. The arms race will be similar to bitcoin's in the end.

4) "Optimizations"
We'll see what the ltc dev team comes up with, but because the bitcoin and litecoin codebases are so similar, it's fairly reasonable to assume that any materially beneficial improvements made to one will eventually be incorporated into the other.


Note that I think the alt experimentation is great, and I've come to believe that there's value in a strong (but not too strong) technically-similar alt chain as "insurance" to the dominant chain, along with some trading/liquidity benefits. But I'd still hope that if an alt DID get within an order of magnitude of bitcoin, it'd have distinct technical advantages that bitcoin hadn't-yet or couldn't incorporate.

[BitcoinAshley]

I don't think we have to worry about an alt getting within an order of magnitude of Bitcoin.

I know we're all a little confused and surprised at LTC/USD $20+ and NMC at $6+ and heck even FTC doing pretty well. But then again, BTC is just under $1000 so it was only a matter of time before folks remembered that altcoins were fun to play around with using their spare half a bitcoin that they left on BTC-e and forgot about for a year.

As for their technological distinctions, I agree, not much, there is NMC's domain thingy which I think is pretty cool. In general they just act as less-than-useful extentions of BTC with more volatile exchange rates, and as was mentioned, makes things more annoying for regulators. It also may help developers explore different technologies and options. Having multiple fully functioning altcoins with large market caps is a little different than running a few computers on a testnet. Altcoins can help experiment with client features that BTC devs would wait another 2 releases to try with bitcoin. For example, I have a feeling that coin control will be released with litcoin-qt before bitcoin-qt. Feel free to disagree with me here, I don't intend to overstate the effect or usefulness of alt-coins. I just think they aren't as annoying and potentially BTC-disrupting as many folks think.

Disclaimer: I mainly like them because of the mad profitz I've experienced by buying and holding a select few. Color me greedy! What can I say, they are speculative instruments and I speculated correctly.

[vokain]

I don't think we have to worry about an alt getting within an order of magnitude of Bitcoin.

I know we're all a little confused and surprised at LTC/USD $20+ and NMC at $6+ and heck even FTC doing pretty well. But then again, BTC is just under $1000 so it was only a matter of time before folks remembered that altcoins were fun to play around with using their spare half a bitcoin that they left on BTC-e and forgot about for a year.

As for their technological distinctions, I agree, not much, there is NMC's domain thingy which I think is pretty cool. In general they just act as less-than-useful extentions of BTC with more volatile exchange rates, and as was mentioned, makes things more annoying for regulators. It also may help developers explore different technologies and options. Having multiple fully functioning altcoins with large market caps is a little different than running a few computers on a testnet. Altcoins can help experiment with client features that BTC devs would wait another 2 releases to try with bitcoin. For example, I have a feeling that coin control will be released with litcoin-qt before bitcoin-qt. Feel free to disagree with me here, I don't intend to overstate the effect or usefulness of alt-coins. I just think they aren't as annoying and potentially BTC-disrupting as many folks think.

Disclaimer: I mainly like them because of the mad profitz I've experienced by buying and holding a select few. Color me greedy! What can I say, they are speculative instruments and I speculated correctly.

crazy what power one can have simply by holding a decent percentage of a desired finite resource

[tvbcof]

...
Disclaimer: I mainly like them because of the mad profitz I've experienced by buying and holding a select few. Color me greedy! What can I say, they are speculative instruments and I speculated correctly.

A rising tide floats all boats...

[notme]

...
Disclaimer: I mainly like them because of the mad profitz I've experienced by buying and holding a select few. Color me greedy! What can I say, they are speculative instruments and I speculated correctly.

A rising tide floats all boats...

And when the tide goes back out, we get to see who is swimming naked

[tvbcof]

...
Disclaimer: I mainly like them because of the mad profitz I've experienced by buying and holding a select few. Color me greedy! What can I say, they are speculative instruments and I speculated correctly.

A rising tide floats all boats...

And when the tide goes back out, we get to see who is swimming naked

I'll always have a golden codpiece...and I need a fairly good sized one.

Back to Bitcoin, I've always been elephant hunting when it comes to my speculative interest.  I'm not to proud to bag a warthog so I don't go home empty handed, but I still plan to keep enough powder dry to get the elephant as well.

[User705]

We reached LTC:Silver ozt parity before BTC:gold.

LTC trading for $21.38 on BTC-e and silver $19.97.

Embarrasing for BTC!

Are you bloody kidding me? Ugh. Be careful what you wish for, people.

More than one very successful (from a market-cap perspective) crypto will ultimately devalue them all, if there are no material technical distinctions.

I get in twitter fights with gold-bugs and their ilk all the time, and the best leg they have to stand on (and my only lingering long-term hesitation about bitcoin, for that matter) is the alt-coin argument. I have to lean on "network effects" and "first-mover advantage" arguments to defend bitcoin's market-cap and longevity in this light, and strong non-distinct alts will break that argument.

That said, bitcoin has risen almost 10x recently, and litecoin is catching up to keep its old multiple (~1/40), so that's fine, but much more, and we start to have empirical issues that invalidate important theory.

That's one of those issues bitcoin will have to deal with if it is to truly succeed.  It's a fact that it's easily duplicated and therefore isn't as scarce as some proponents like to prophesize.  How the market handles that will determine the future of cryptos in general.  Just like gold cryptos are an outlet for the current developed world government malaise called modern finance.  That may last a long while or it may come to a spectacular end much faster.  If governments are forced by circumstances and citizens to get their act together the need for bitcoin or other cryptos may not be as great as it is now.

[oakpacific]

i dont trust the govt.

Me neither. Before Bitcoin I had no way of acting on that however and I had no choice. Now I'm pretty well hedged with my Bitcoin holdings.

Then again, pretty soon I'm going to have to report my assets to the IRS. Paying tax isn't nice but okay. The worst part is that they know what I have. What if they pull on me what the US pulled on Gold owners in 1933?

Maybe just cash out a small portion and tell them it's all you have?

I'm not planning to cash out all (I have to report market value).

Reporting less than I have would be tax evasion. Don't you think that's something I'll come to regret?

I am not a tax lawyer, but if I were you, I would report everything I would ever consider to sell and thus move into the fiat money system, but claim to have lost the keys to the rest, assuming the taxmen are not silly enough to think that charging me something roughly equivalent to the market fiat value of those bitcoins would make sense.

[oakpacific]

We reached LTC:Silver ozt parity before BTC:gold.

LTC trading for $21.38 on BTC-e and silver $19.97.

Embarrasing for BTC!

Are you bloody kidding me? Ugh. Be careful what you wish for, people.

More than one very successful (from a market-cap perspective) crypto will ultimately devalue them all, if there are no material technical distinctions.

I get in twitter fights with gold-bugs and their ilk all the time, and the best leg they have to stand on (and my only lingering long-term hesitation about bitcoin, for that matter) is the alt-coin argument. I have to lean on "network effects" and "first-mover advantage" arguments to defend bitcoin's market-cap and longevity in this light, and strong non-distinct alts will break that argument.

That said, bitcoin has risen almost 10x recently, and litecoin is catching up to keep its old multiple (~1/40), so that's fine, but much more, and we start to have empirical issues that invalidate important theory.

That's one of those issues bitcoin will have to deal with if it is to truly succeed.  It's a fact that it's easily duplicated and therefore isn't as scarce as some proponents like to prophesize.  How the market handles that will determine the future of cryptos in general.  Just like gold cryptos are an outlet for the current developed world government malaise called modern finance.  That may last a long while or it may come to a spectacular end much faster.  If governments are forced by circumstances and citizens to get their act together the need for bitcoin or other cryptos may not be as great as it is now.

Simple duplicates will not take off, without a powerful network behind it it makes as much sense to buy it as it is to buy Zimbabwean dollars.

[User705]

Wasn't the same argument made when litecoin came out.  I don't think anyone is going to launch an exact copy.  All will or currently have variations on the bitcoin idea.  And we haven't even had a single major corp or government try to do a coin of their own.  What happens if Google or Facebook does a coin.  They've experimented with their own sort of money before but it didn't take off possibly because people inherently saw it as easily manipulated but under a guise of a crypto how fast do you think googlecoin would spread?

[Melbustus]

...
That's one of those issues bitcoin will have to deal with if it is to truly succeed.  It's a fact that it's easily duplicated and therefore isn't as scarce as some proponents like to prophesize.  How the market handles that will determine the future of cryptos in general. 
...

Well, we do have one set of long-standing empirical evidence for how markets treat these things: The precious metals market. Gold, Silver, Platinum, and possibly several other metals share many of the qualities that would make them able to be decent money (in pre-electonic times). Yet gold's premium to industrial-value and total "market-cap" is huge. Silver is just as old and scarce (more scarce actually, right?), but gold is the clear leader, by roughly two orders of magnitude, in the monetary-metals space. So at least in the scarce-metals with similar properties domain, the market chose just one for overwhelming dominance.

[oakpacific]

Wasn't the same argument made when litecoin came out.  I don't think anyone is going to launch an exact copy.

You pretty much said it yourself(except that we have several exact clones already). each coin has its unique features, and is thus uniquely useful in someways, unlike fiats, the success of one doesn't exclude the success of another.

  All will or currently have variations on the bitcoin idea.  And we haven't even had a single major corp or government try to do a coin of their own.  What happens if Google or Facebook does a coin.  They've experimented with their own sort of money before but it didn't take off possibly because people inherently saw it as easily manipulated but under a guise of a crypto how fast do you think googlecoin would spread?

Governments will either do it half-heartedly to prop the fiat scam further(which will fool no one and unlikely to be taken seriously), or if they abandon fiats for cryptos, then it's already "mission accomplished" for us.

About corporations, it has to benefit them in some ways to do so, if they release an open source coin which is decentralized and they have no control, it's entirely possible Bitcoin will incorporate its best attributes and evolve, if they want to take the burden of running and supporting it....well, they are looking for troubles to be honest.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Don't think alt-coins, think alt-ledgers. Then it becomes obvious why altcoins aren't to be feared and there is no significant inflation. There are purposes for alternative ledgers, but they are fairly limited, and you only need one or two for most conceivable uses. The only ones that survive will be those that enhance Bitcoin in some way, such as by providing better mixing for bitcoins or helping with arbitrage.

Bitcoin is the company that makes the holodecks, and Litecoin is the company that manages the jizzmoppers. Jizzmopping is a valuable service, but its value is limited and always subservient to holodeck creation. So stock in either one should do well in percentage terms over the long term, unless of course the jizzmopper management firm is replaced by a better one.

[sgbett]

i dont trust the govt.

Me neither. Before Bitcoin I had no way of acting on that however and I had no choice. Now I'm pretty well hedged with my Bitcoin holdings.

Then again, pretty soon I'm going to have to report my assets to the IRS. Paying tax isn't nice but okay. The worst part is that they know what I have. What if they pull on me what the US pulled on Gold owners in 1933?

Maybe just cash out a small portion and tell them it's all you have?

I'm not planning to cash out all (I have to report market value).

Reporting less than I have would be tax evasion. Don't you think that's something I'll come to regret?

I am not a tax lawyer, but if I were you, I would report everything I would ever consider to sell and thus move into the fiat money system, but claim to have lost the keys to the rest, assuming the taxmen are not silly enough to think that charging me something roughly equivalent to the market fiat value of those bitcoins would make sense.

im not a tax lawyer either. However (in the UK) if i haven't "cashed out" BTC then there is no capital gain to be taxed. Unless I am hugely mistaken!

Most assets are liable to Capital Gains Tax when you sell or dispose of them.

[oakpacific]

i dont trust the govt.

Me neither. Before Bitcoin I had no way of acting on that however and I had no choice. Now I'm pretty well hedged with my Bitcoin holdings.

Then again, pretty soon I'm going to have to report my assets to the IRS. Paying tax isn't nice but okay. The worst part is that they know what I have. What if they pull on me what the US pulled on Gold owners in 1933?

Maybe just cash out a small portion and tell them it's all you have?

I'm not planning to cash out all (I have to report market value).

Reporting less than I have would be tax evasion. Don't you think that's something I'll come to regret?

I am not a tax lawyer, but if I were you, I would report everything I would ever consider to sell and thus move into the fiat money system, but claim to have lost the keys to the rest, assuming the taxmen are not silly enough to think that charging me something roughly equivalent to the market fiat value of those bitcoins would make sense.

im not a tax lawyer either. However (in the UK) if i haven't "cashed out" BTC then there is no capital gain to be taxed. Unless I am hugely mistaken!

Most assets are liable to Capital Gains Tax when you sell or dispose of them.

He is not worried about taxation on his unsold coins, he is worried that IRS may either hold him liable for underreporting his bitcoin holding or acquire the knowledge of the size of his holding, should he chooses to be honest with them, in which case the danger of being forced to turn over his entire holding cannot be ruled out in a 1933-ish "executive order 6102" scenario.

[oakpacific]

i dont trust the govt.

Me neither. Before Bitcoin I had no way of acting on that however and I had no choice. Now I'm pretty well hedged with my Bitcoin holdings.

Then again, pretty soon I'm going to have to report my assets to the IRS. Paying tax isn't nice but okay. The worst part is that they know what I have. What if they pull on me what the US pulled on Gold owners in 1933?

Maybe just cash out a small portion and tell them it's all you have?

I'm not planning to cash out all (I have to report market value).

Reporting less than I have would be tax evasion. Don't you think that's something I'll come to regret?

I am not a tax lawyer, but if I were you, I would report everything I would ever consider to sell and thus move into the fiat money system, but claim to have lost the keys to the rest, assuming the taxmen are not silly enough to think that charging me something roughly equivalent to the market fiat value of those bitcoins would make sense.

im not a tax lawyer either. However (in the UK) if i haven't "cashed out" BTC then there is no capital gain to be taxed. Unless I am hugely mistaken!

Not all countries use the same wealth tax structure. The Dutch law requires you to report all your assets on January 1st of each year and pay 1.2% (30% tax on a 4% hypothetical yield) on it. If you own a house this is excluded (for fucked up unfair reasons). You are allowed to subtract foreign paid other forms of wealth tax (such as foreign dividend-tax).

So exchanging Bitcoins for fiat or not is a non-issue. If my wealth goes up sufficiently and the Dutch system becomes too much of a hassle, Germany is close by (I dislike the language though)

Oops, so you live in Europe?  Apologize for assming you are an American, otherwise I see no reason why you brought up executive order 6102.

The Dutch system, if true, is completely nuts should I say. There is no guarantee on the outcome of an investment, all of your hypothetical values could possibly be wiped out overnight, even for no reason other than you selling your assets to pay the tax, you can't just tax people like that.

[Lewis2]

i dont trust the govt.

Me neither. Before Bitcoin I had no way of acting on that however and I had no choice. Now I'm pretty well hedged with my Bitcoin holdings.

Then again, pretty soon I'm going to have to report my assets to the IRS. Paying tax isn't nice but okay. The worst part is that they know what I have. What if they pull on me what the US pulled on Gold owners in 1933?

Maybe just cash out a small portion and tell them it's all you have?

I'm not planning to cash out all (I have to report market value).

Reporting less than I have would be tax evasion. Don't you think that's something I'll come to regret?

I am not a tax lawyer, but if I were you, I would report everything I would ever consider to sell and thus move into the fiat money system, but claim to have lost the keys to the rest, assuming the taxmen are not silly enough to think that charging me something roughly equivalent to the market fiat value of those bitcoins would make sense.

im not a tax lawyer either. However (in the UK) if i haven't "cashed out" BTC then there is no capital gain to be taxed. Unless I am hugely mistaken!

Not all countries use the same wealth tax structure. The Dutch law requires you to report all your assets on January 1st of each year and pay 1.2% (30% tax on a 4% hypothetical yield) on it. If you own a house this is excluded (for fucked up unfair reasons). You are allowed to subtract foreign paid other forms of wealth tax (such as foreign dividend-tax).

So exchanging Bitcoins for fiat or not is a non-issue. If my wealth goes up sufficiently and the Dutch system becomes too much of a hassle, Germany is close by (I dislike the language though)

Move to Curacao, really nice tax structures if you bring enough money and great weather.

[Lewis2]

There used to be a 'pensionado' structures. It used to be bring something like $300,000.- and hire somebody for cleaning etc. and you pay no vermogensbelasting. There is also something about having to live their half of the year. Still a big tax haven, lot of 2m² offices with a phone and fax.

Not sure what the current rules are. I am no tax expert but have spent some time there. Deffinitely worth looking into if you push serious money around.