Nurturing AlternaCoins

[jgarzik]

Alterna-coins are a natural outgrowth of bitcoin introducing a new idea into the ideasphere; the fact that it is open source makes cloning the idea trivial.  Alterna-coins were always inevitable.

If someone can come up with a better bitcoin than bitcoin -- that's great!  Humanity benefits from the competition.

Speaking as a developer, though, contributing patches back upstream would be nice

[phelix]

Because of the insensate network effect no AlternaCoin stands a chance against bitcoin - unless it offers valuable additional features.

hint: check out my signature  

[dacoinminster]

Gavin,

This problem (with out-dated bitcoin code running on alternative chains) is exactly why I have been advocating for so long to build new user currencies on top of bitcoin, much like HTTP is built on top of TCP/IP.

Over and over again we see that once a person truly grasps what bitcoin is and the magnitude of what it could be, they inevitably want to try their hand at making a "better bitcoin".

Rather than fight this instinct, I believe we should embrace it. Once we have tools which users can use to build their own alt-coins on top of bitcoin with no programming required (as I have written about extensively), we will see the explosion in adoption that has always seemed just around the corner.

[coblee]

Alterna-coins are a natural outgrowth of bitcoin introducing a new idea into the ideasphere; the fact that it is open source makes cloning the idea trivial.  Alterna-coins were always inevitable.

If someone can come up with a better bitcoin than bitcoin -- that's great!  Humanity benefits from the competition.

Speaking as a developer, though, contributing patches back upstream would be nice

I've sent a few patches upstream. Well, here's one more:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/1536

Litecoin was attacked with dust spam where the attacker would send a transaction with thousands of outputs of a satoshi each. Yet, they only get charged the base fee. This fixes it by making the fee grow linearly with number of dust spam.

[El Cabron]

Alterna-coins are a natural outgrowth of bitcoin introducing a new idea into the ideasphere; the fact that it is open source makes cloning the idea trivial.  Alterna-coins were always inevitable.

If someone can come up with a better bitcoin than bitcoin -- that's great!  Humanity benefits from the competition.

Speaking as a developer, though, contributing patches back upstream would be nice

I've sent a few patches upstream. Well, here's one more:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/1536

Litecoin was attacked with dust spam where the attacker would send a transaction with thousands of outputs of a satoshi each. Yet, they only get charged the base fee. This fixes it by making the fee grow linearly with number of dust spam.

Awesome. LTC clearly makes BTC strong.

Disclaimer I have healthy investments in both.

[markm]

It would be handy to isolate various coin-specific constants used in the code, such as the symbol displayed, the icon(s) displayed, the word used as label to label that coin distinct from other coins, all the stuff users see, as well as the simple things that change from coin to coin such as genesis block, genesis block hash, all the things multicoin isolated into a config file.

It would be much easier to contribute patches back then because the code being patched would be much more up to date.

-MarkM-

[phelix]

It would be handy to isolate various coin-specific constants used in the code, such as the symbol displayed, the icon(s) displayed, the word used as label to label that coin distinct from other coins, all the stuff users see, as well is the simple things that change from coin to coin such as genesis block, genesis block hash, all the things multicoin isolated into a config file.

It would be much easier to contribute patches back then because the code being patched would be much more up to date.

-MarkM-

+1