Altcoins are killing Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency as a whole

[First.Bitcoins]

As founder of an altcoin, I can only partially agree with the OP. I agree that 99% of the coins are worthless, or worse scams.

There are two kinds of altcoins being developed:

1. Those that think they have some compelling new technology and can replace bitcoin - hardly likely. Those are the ones that crash & burn every week as next week's "technological breakthrough" arrives.

2. Niche coins, designed to fit a specific community - unfortunately those are mostly scams as well, but there are legitimate ones

When Paypal/Bitpay/GoCoin started accepting, not only bitcoin, but Lite and Doge, the market dynamics changed. I think the crypto market will move towards only a handful of coins being used, the overwhelming majority will be bitcoin, but the users will pay with the coin of the community they feel connected too. For example, if they like the Doge community, they will use it instead of BTC.

So the alts that survive will be those who build a real user community, and that is not bad for bitcoin, as these user communities will bring more and more users to crypo. In our case we have introduced many, many people to bitcoin, since they need bitcoin to buy our coin.

Why could these users not just use bitcoin? Because they are not connected to the cause (the revolution of bitcoin, the reaching the unbanked, saving trans fees, etc), but they are passionately connected to their own community.

[1714053325]

1714053325

[po1992one]

I was thinking the altcoins killing Bitcoin about one year ago when the altcoin boom started, but today Im much more confident Bitcoin is really the only one worth holding

[Lauda]

Welcome to free market. Free market decides which is best.

What is best? This is what you call best?
Please. This needs to be stopped or suppressed as much as possible.

[pooya87]

while i agree that Altcoins ate damaging the public view about Bitcoin i don't think they are killing it! but unfortunately they exist and are going to exist and grow like mushrooms everywhere and people are gonna lose money and a minority number are going to gain some money from this rise and falls

[yayayo]

Altcoins are not a threat to Bitcoin. It's true that the vast majority are crap, cloned from previous implementations. But such coins are very short-lived phenomenons. The size of the altcoin market as a whole does not grow significantly - there are a few altcoins that dominate the market and then there are countless crap coins that never achieve significant market share. Funds are basically re-allocated within the altcoin market. Bitcoin is the only crypto with significant acceptance beyond the core of the crypto-scene, which the reason why it leads the market and will continue to do so.

Actually a few altcoins are innovative and show new use cases for cryptocurrency technology (for example namecoin). That is positive and is promoting the cryptocurrency idea.

The free market is a good thing. It enables innovation. Even if the result is 99% crap and only 1% cool it's still worth it.

ya.ya.yo!

[btc-facebook]

Altcoins are so small compared to Bitcoin it is hard to believe that they have any effect at all. Do you have any evidence to support your claims?

All the altcoins as a whole make up ~20% of the market cap of bitcoin (at least they did at the beginning of the year - I believe they have overall gone down in value since then so I am not sure where they stand now).

The reason that new altcoins are allowed to be brought to market is because the market allows them to do so. If the market were to stop accepting new shit coins then new shit/altcoins will no longer be brought to the market. To date I have not seen one altcoin that brings anything useful to the market that bitcoin cannot provide.

I would also argue that each new altcoin takes away value from the other altcoins instead of from bitcoin

[gentlemand]

Anyone who spends fifteen minutes looking up alts and has a reasonable amount of gumption should know that the vast majority are a joke.

Kudos to anyone who makes a decent buck on them. Most people learn their lesson when they're wiped out by manipulators or scammers.

They're not going away and never will, however the sheer volume and endless disaster means they'll eventually inhabit an even darker corner than they do already apart from a few honourable exceptions.

[Oldminer]

The altmarket is the biggest suppression when it comes to Bitcoin mass adoption. To date, there should rightfully only be a handful of altcoins available, specifically, those that actually feature innovations and/or improve upon blockchain technology.

But no, instead we have thousands of 'shitcoins' made strictly, for the most part, to scam investors for a quick buck.

Adding a new currency was initially limited to the governments throughout the world. Now we gave that same power to every capable individual. And we as a whole, have produced one decent 'currency' per hundreds of shitcoins produced per month.


When I was introduced to Bitcoin, i did more research into cryptocurrency. Not long after, without even trying, I basically knew so much about altcoins...specifically, the scams. I heard more news about Altcoin scams than I did about actual bitcoin news.

This is the kind of crap that will ruin Crypto. A huge percentage  of BTC owners dont hold or invest in BTC. They use it to trade via trading against shitcoins. A majority of BTC holders dont really care about if Bitcoin goes 'to the moon'. They just want to choose wisely between a 'short' or a 'long'.

Your average basement dweller can produce a new altcoin in a few hours and dedicate the remainder of the day to create a few graphics, hype up some new 'innovation', and the sheeple traders follow blindly. Next thing you know, hidden premine. Dev earns $5-50k for a days work. And on to the next one.

This is crypto. Only a tiny percentage actually use bitcoin as a currency instead of just a trading token. The majority are only in it for trading against shitcoins.

Shut down all Bitcoin exchanges save only those keeping ONLY BTC/USD, and you will see a true rise to BTC. As long as the alt market is present, Bitcoin will go nowhere but a steady downtrend in terms of value.

The majority of the bitcoin community is the reason why Bitcoin will never be truly become the new currency as some believe.

I'll come back to this when BTC is trading @ $250 ea. by XMAS, and $120 by the end of winter.

RIP Tim Draper.

What a load of drivel 

Oh, & bitcoin is a dinosaur.

[johnyj]

Platinum, silver, copper, nickel, tungsten... they don't kill gold's position as the most popular hard currency

It is not because gold is much more superior than other metal, it is just because the consensus of majority has already built upon gold as the major prof of value, and when it comes to store wealth, people will always select the most popular medium due to best liquidity

[d5000]

Many scamcoins and shitcoins are crashing hard right now. There are only a few left with a "market cap" over 100.000$, the altcoin market has gone into a shakeout phase in the last weeks.

I think the problem is not nearly as big as OP estimates. And the actual bitcoin bear market has nothing to do with it, it's only the last part of the great November 2013 bubble.

[J9901]

Platinum, silver, copper, nickel, tungsten... they don't kill gold's position as the most popular hard currency

It is not because gold is much more superior than other metal, it is just because the consensus of majority has already built upon gold as the major prof of value, and when it comes to store wealth, people will always select the most popular medium due to best liquidity

People need to stop comparing bitcoin & alts to gold & other rare metals.

As i mentioned, any developer can create an altcoin. Im sure One developer out there has made over $100k+ since the beginning of the year from scams alone.

You cant exactly just produce gold, silver, etc with a computer in your basement.

[S.Boxx]

It appears all you know about Bitcoin is from staying in the altcoin section too long. You definitely do not know the economics, finance, legal issues and mining facts involved with Bitcoin. Posts like yours reminds us all how far we have made it in this Revolution. You should really learn some basic facts about what's really going on here and you may finally get it.

Here's the speech:(3rd times a charm)

Bitcoin itself had in the past been vulnerable to very similar things that you said happened and now see happen with altcoins these days, but fortunately THAT WINDOW IS NOW CLOSED.

Part of the definition of the bitcoin protocol includes the checking of the proof of work put into various block chains, and then choosing the one with the most work. Bitcoin has more proof-of-work in its blockchain than any other competing cryptocurrency, and so by definition it must be the one chosen, and all others ignored.

Altcoins are all very similar to Bitcoin: there is a block chain to store transactions, a consensus mechanism to build the block chain, and a cryptographic protocol to register transactions. Some prominent examples are PPCoin, Primecoin, Litecoin, and Freicoin.

Some altcoins incorporate interesting new ideas, but there is an essential feature of Bitcoin which they all lack. It is not a matter of its technology, but rather of history and community. Quite simply, a medium of exchange that is more widely accepted on the market is more useful than one which is not. This is known as the network effect. An initial imbalance between two nearly equal media of exchange will benefit whichever is more widely accepted until a single one overwhelms the rest. There is no limit to this effect: ultimately one would always expect a single currency to overcome all its competitors.

Because it was started earlier and has had a greater opportunity to grow and attract users, Bitcoin has a market larger by a wide margin than all the markets of all the altcoins put together, and this makes it vastly more useful as a currency. To defeat Bitcoin, an altcoin would require not just superior technology, but such vastly superior technology as to be an advance over Bitcoin comparable to the advance Bitcoin represents over fiat currency. Furthermore, a truly great innovation would much better serve people by being incorporated into future versions of Bitcoin rather than by requiring them to switch to something else. Indeed, the people who have proposed new ideas that are actually good, such as Zerocoin and mini-blockchain, did not develop their own currencies around them, but have simply described their usefulness as features.

The Bitcoin community is not just overwhelmingly larger but of overwhelmingly better quality as well. Bitcoin is surrounded by real entrepreneurs working hard to create new and useful services for Bitcoin. Altcoins are surrounded by loud-mouthed pretenders with irrational hopes of duplicating Nakamoto's success. This does not mean that there is anything intrinsically wrong with altcoins: the problem is simply that once Bitcoin exists, then there is no additional value, from a monetary standpoint, of creating knock-offs. Can anyone really expect to create something of value by rereleasing Bitcoin under a new name and with a few tiny changes to its source code? What makes Bitcoin great cannot easily be duplicated. Thus, while the Bitcoin community matures and grows as more and more entrepreneurs are attracted to its potential, the altcoin communities can only whine for attention.

For a new currency to take bitcoins place it would have to represent a significant improvement over bitcoin, or bitcoin would have to first FAIL before this could happen. So the question is not will bitcoin become obsolete, but will (your proposed new coin) overtake bitcoin? I don’t see any reason to believe that Altcoins represents a fundamental new innovation with meaningful improved functionality.

In physics, we learn about the concept of entropy. Entropy is often described as “chaos”, “randomness”, or “disorder”. To simplify quantum mechanics as much as possible, imagine a basket with a line drawn down the middle, and throw some balls into the basket. If all the balls are on one side of the line, that is an ordered state and has low entropy. If the balls are spread across both sides then it has higher entropy.

Now, let us take the concept of entropy and apply it to cryptocurrencies. We can imagine each cryptocurrency created has a possibility that some value can be placed within it. If all possible value is placed in bitcoin, and none in litecoin or altcoin, then this is a low entropy state. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that entropy in a system should always increase. So we should expect the total cryptocurrency value to be spread among all the possible altcoins.

Going back to our example of balls in a basket, one can easily get all the balls onto one side of the line simply by tilting the basket. This represents the concept of enthalpy, or energy within the system. Just as gravity pulls the balls onto one side of the basket, enthalpy can pull things into a higher entropic state. The most proof-of-work has been put into bitcoin, and so it takes higher energy to put any value into an altcoin.

From an entropy standpoint, there will always be alternate currencies, and the value assigned to them will always be greater than zero. But from an enthalpy standpoint, bitcoin is favored over altcoins, so the total value of each altcoin will remain very low compared to bitcoins.

[POWCOIN]

As founder of an altcoin, I can only partially agree with the OP. I agree that 99% of the coins are worthless, or worse scams.

There are two kinds of altcoins being developed:

1. Those that think they have some compelling new technology and can replace bitcoin - hardly likely. Those are the ones that crash & burn every week as next week's "technological breakthrough" arrives.

2. Niche coins, designed to fit a specific community - unfortunately those are mostly scams as well, but there are legitimate ones

When Paypal/Bitpay/GoCoin started accepting, not only bitcoin, but Lite and Doge, the market dynamics changed. I think the crypto market will move towards only a handful of coins being used, the overwhelming majority will be bitcoin, but the users will pay with the coin of the community they feel connected too. For example, if they like the Doge community, they will use it instead of BTC.

So the alts that survive will be those who build a real user community, and that is not bad for bitcoin, as these user communities will bring more and more users to crypo. In our case we have introduced many, many people to bitcoin, since they need bitcoin to buy our coin.

Why could these users not just use bitcoin? Because they are not connected to the cause (the revolution of bitcoin, the reaching the unbanked, saving trans fees, etc), but they are passionately connected to their own community.

+1000 totally agree couldnt have said it better this should've been the last comment

[POWCOIN]

I also see Altcoins as a fair way for every1 to get into bitcoin who missed the boat in the early stage .. cuz altcoins can be exchanged for bitcoin so a low cost miner can gain bitcoin by mining a more profitable altcoin and trade it for bitcoin.  It  a fair way to balance out the imbalance and let a larger % of the population participate in the bitcoin boom yet to come

[johnyj]

Platinum, silver, copper, nickel, tungsten... they don't kill gold's position as the most popular hard currency

It is not because gold is much more superior than other metal, it is just because the consensus of majority has already built upon gold as the major prof of value, and when it comes to store wealth, people will always select the most popular medium due to best liquidity

People need to stop comparing bitcoin & alts to gold & other rare metals.

As i mentioned, any developer can create an altcoin. Im sure One developer out there has made over $100k+ since the beginning of the year from scams alone.

You cant exactly just produce gold, silver, etc with a computer in your basement.

Anyone can dig out some sand or soil from his backyard, which even can be made into silicon/computer chips, but it does not make it any close to a currency like gold

Same for alt-coin, everyone can make cryptocurrency by just running a couple of computer (at least it has to run by the network, so some basic energy input is required for alt-coin to exist, just like digging out sand from the backyard also cost some energy)

Actually those sand can be very useful and expensive after it is made into pure crystal, but lots of energy has to be put into production. This is the same for bitcoin, although the code itself does not cost a lot, but the mining industry injected huge amount of energy thus make it much more valuable than alt-coins

Just like a country, the currency will worth little if the country does not have enough defense against its enemy. Bitcoin network hash power is the defense against any form of attack, both physically and mathematically. The larger this power is, more trustworthy the coin will be

[Sumerian]

I believe that a lot of newbies to Crypto will think that some altcoins are going to replace Bitcoins, I did too. But now I'm in a stage where I think Bitcoin will be the last man standing after all.

[segvec]

BITCOIN remains the strongest and will forever.

[fran2k]

Altcoins are beautiful in the way they mean the economic liberty of the individuals to mint their own currencies.

There is a traders fallacy. As if Forex traders would kill FIAT currencies because they trade 4 trillions a day of them. We need more liquidity into bitcoin, thats one of the main issues, this still is a small experiment.

[Beliathon]

We're in the innovation / experimentation / Infancy phase of this technology. This is natural.

If bitcoin was patented and closed source I would never have been interested. The altcoins we not harm bitcoin long term, just relax.

[dandydavv]

can i ask u something? a few days ago my friend start mining altcoin, it faster than we mining btc and altcoin also increase their price all the time.
is it worth to make some attention to those coin? or we just leave it.
will btc replaced by them someday ?