❢❢❢ The value proposition of each coin: BTC, DOGE, LTC, DRK, PPC, XRP, NXT, etc.

[Joe200]

So I've narrowed down the infinite list of coins to just these: BTC, DOGE, LTC, DRK, PPC, XRP, NXT, NMC, XMR as "probably not a scamcoin and possibly not a waste of your time". Now, I'd like to figure out the value proposition of each coin. I don't know much about altcoins -- please comment below with the pros and cons of each of these coins. (Date: 2015-01-28.)

BTC. No explanation needed. The first. With the bulk of the market cap. (85%? That's actually lower than I thought it was!)

DOGE.
- Great community. Is that worth anything? Any software they produce can be changed to use BTC.
- Technologically, it's just a clone, meaning it's worthless.
- Has the second highest volume after BTC, making it easy to trade. Maybe people who want to stay in crypto but want to get out of BTC get into DOGE? As pegged crypto (like bitUSD) spreads, this advantage of DOGE will diminish.

LTC.
- Worthless clone.
- Used to have second highest volume. (See DOGE, above.) Now, even that tiny advantage is gone.
- Dead?

DRK.
- OK, now we're getting to something different. Completely anonymous, untracable transactions. This is worth a lot. This is what people think bitcoin has but it doesn't. If bitcoin had this, it would be worth a lot more.
- How well does the anonymous transaction thing actually work? I'd love to hear people's experiences with using Darkcoin.
- Broken architecture?

PPC.
- The first Proof of Stake coin. First mover advantage. Most liquid PoS coin.
- What are your experiences with PPC? Does the wallet have to be open to mine?
- There are now other PoS coins. And there's an improvement on PoS - DPoS. I feel like if PoS will succeed, it will move in the direction of DPoS, meaning bitshares.

XRP.
- Ripple is a completely different approach to crypto than bitcoin.
- Frankly, I don't understand enough about it. Please educate me. Premining, centralization (how much centralization is there?) seem like big turnoffs. Yet, it's somehow got the second highest market cap and it's done pretty well versus BTC.

NXT.
- First(?) "bitcoin 2.0". Most liquid 2.0 coin. First mover advantage.
- PoS, wallet must be unlocked to mine?
- I'd love to hear people's experiences with this.
- How does it stack up against other 2.0 coins?
- People say good things about it.

NMC.
- Namecoin - oldie but goodie. Very innovative for its time.
- I can't believe it is still around. Does anyone actually use ".bit" domains? Is there other data stored in namecoin?
- How many domain registrations are needed to increase the price by some amount?

XMR.
- Anonymity. Does it work? What are your experiences with it?
- We already have Darkcoin, with 10x the volume.
- If Darkcoin is actually broken, then this is the anonymous coin winner.

Honorable mention (BTS).
- A few times while writing this, I was thinking that Bitshares does the same thing only better. BTS is not on my list because its volume is tiny. What do you think about BTS? Pros and cons? Is liquidity an issue? How do you trade a coin with $5k volume?
- Apparently, BTS/CNY has the volume. I was only looking at BTS/BTC before.
- Great 2.0 coin.
- Love the DPoS idea.
- If the pegged assets work, that will add value to BTS (and remove value from something like DOGE).
- Don't know much more about it. Please educate me.

Based on this quick and preliminary review, here are my conclusions. Again, please comment with pros and cons of each coin. I'm sure I missed something.

Value.
- Bitcoin
- Darkcoin or Monero?
- Bitshares?

Possible value.
- Peercoin
- Ripple
- Nxt
- Namecoin

No value.
- Dogecoin
- Litecoin

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[reRaise]

I really love Gemz, for the first time i have the feeling we have finally something which we can share and explain easily to others and especially the barrier of getting users into the network is broken because its ease of use and practical purposes, everything just makes sense. At this moment i don't really care about other coins, just Bitcoin and Gemz cover what i need as an average user.

[Damelon]

NXT.
- First(?) "bitcoin 2.0". Most liquid 2.0 coin. First mover advantage.
- PoS, wallet must be unlocked to mine?
- I'd love to hear people's experiences with this.
- How does it stack up against other 2.0 coins?

Hi,

I can only answer for Nxt, as it's the system I am most familiar with.

- I am not a huge believer in "first mover advantage". It also means you get most of the flack, because chances are you are also the first mover on problems.
- Yes, to forge, you need to have your account (brainwallet) unlocked
- I'm interested in this, too. I'm an old-timer in Nxt, so probably have a lot of blind spots here that should be much more obvious to newcomers.
- I commissioned this chart a few weeks ago, and it's at least checked by the Bitshares community, too. Other communities are welcome to critique, but it seems mostly accurate: http://i.cubeupload.com/J02n9J.jpg

As to the "value proposition": one of the large advantages of Nxt is that it supports a host of transaction types (standard coin transactions, data transfer, "alias" transactions, colored coins etc) that can be used in combination with each other to create entire systems. Taken by themselves they are useful, but the true power lies in being able to use them by easy API calls, so they can be integrated into websites, 3rd party apps etc.

What also appeals to me is that it is not dependent on a 3rd party blockchain, but is self-contained.

[StanLarimer]

Not sure where you got your volume figures for BitShares.  
From coinmarketcap.com we see that most of the time volume is over $200,000 with occasional peaks above $500,000.

Volume so far today is
BTS 103,000 vs
NXT   21,000

[funkenstein]

Lol at your volume analysis.  Also, you should look at hash rates and total work on the chain as those things are verifiable as opposed to other stats which can be manipulated easily.    

[Damelon]

Not sure where you got your volume figures for BitShares.  

Maybe Nxt is just seen as "wet"

I was surprised by that statement, too.

[stonehedge]

XMR.
- OK, now we're getting to something different. Completely anonymous, untracable transactions. This is worth a lot. This is what people think bitcoin has but it doesn't. If bitcoin had this, it would be worth a lot more.

DRK.
- Anonymity Does not work.

Fixed it for you OP.

Good bounties paid for exploits/vulnerabilities found in DRK.  Prove yourself and contact the lead dev and explain how the anonymity doesn't work.  If you're right, you'll make some money.

[StanLarimer]

On the BTC-38 BTS/CNY market alone I could instantly sell $24,000 worth of BTS before I moved the price 10%.

[CryptoTrout]

monero has a decent name but i dont think it will last

[msin]

I was drawn to Nxt because of it's ambitious development road map (nxttechnologytree.com). Another reason I invested was because of the founder BCNext. He released the coin for 21BTC, which was just a symbolic # for him.  He was not about profit and thus his plans for distribution were limited.  People often criticize Nxt because of limited distribution, but to me this was one of the only "fair" distributions in crypto.  Nxt didn't have hundreds of BTC raised for marketing and development.  So it's growth was completely natural, much like BTC.

[pooya87]

what is your reference for trade volumes?

Doge trading volume is still 4th or 5th i think
LTC despite being dead is the second

p.s. nice list, it is short but contains most of the info needed

[fluffypony]

XMR.
- OK, now we're getting to something different. Completely anonymous, untracable transactions. This is worth a lot. This is what people think bitcoin has but it doesn't. If bitcoin had this, it would be worth a lot more.

DRK.
- Anonymity Does not work.

Fixed it for you OP.

Good bounties paid for exploits/vulnerabilities found in DRK.  Prove yourself and contact the lead dev and explain how the anonymity doesn't work.  If you're right, you'll make some money.

It uses a fundamentally broken architecture, and there is no way to fix that except abandon the architecture. Here's a quote from a post I made the other day:

1. We don't even need an attacker with the NSA's scope. Law enforcement like the FBI can easily get the legal right to wiretap masternodes. Many of these masternodes run on virtualised machines, which means the hosting provider can snoop the OS status and memory. Virtually all of them could be under the purview of LEA, and thus long-term monitoring would be invisible.

2. Over and above that, there's massive incentive for masternode operators to make extra money by selling access to their logs. Not every operator is a rational actor, not every operator is a libertarian.

3. As long as operators earn based on what they process there will be an incentive for masternode operators to attack each other. This is a classic case of Prisoner's Dilemma.

The most concerning is 3, as there really is little that can be done to fix that. You can't evenly split rewards, as then there's no longer an incentive for a masternode to be honest (not that there's much incentive for that right now). When this has been mentioned before the knee-jerk reaction is "they'll never do that!" However, one need only take a look at how Bitcoin mining pools operate to see that this is a very real problem. Two references that make for good reading are: Ittay Eyal's "The Miner's Dilemma", and the paper "When Bitcoin Mining Pools Run Dry" by Aron Laszka et. al. This is, of course, quite a well-known issue amongst those in the know: 1, 2, 3

Those #bitcoin-wizards logs are particularly telling. If cryptocurrency researchers can even see the gaping flaws in the architecture then you have a "looks like a duck" scenario. No amount of talking around it will make the fundamentally flawed architecture disappear, and layering complexity on top of the architecture is just going to create a false sense of security, "security through obscurity" as it were.

The Darkcoin developer may be a real nice guy, but he's obviously not a cryptographer. Finding flaws in the actual code is largely irrelevant when the architecture is fundamentally flawed. And if any masternode operator thinks they're somehow impervious, need I point to yesterday's GHOST bug as revealed by Qualys Labs. To quote: "During our testing, we developed a proof-of-concept in which we send a specially created e-mail to a mail server and can get a remote shell to the Linux machine. This bypasses all existing protections (like ASLR, PIE and NX) on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems." Incidentally, this bug has existed since 2000! So we have to start at the assumption that all masternodes are trivially compromised or knocked offline, which means that the architecture is fundamentally broken.

Monero, on the other hand, needs no peers to be online to be able to obscure your transaction. You can completely disconnect from the Internet, and you'll have a utxoset that you can use for mixing the inputs on your transaction. This is apples and pears we're talking about, and I mean that without being disrespectful to the work that has gone in to Darkcoin.

[JessicaSe]

i think dark and XRP are next after bitcoin, with some innovation and new technology behind them
dark is good because of anonymity and limited supply using DGW
and XMR is also performing good they recently raised $30M for their project

[fluffypony]

and XMR is also performing good they recently raised $30M for their project

We...did...? I don't remember raising a cent, last I recall we are significantly behind on donations:)

[Come-In-Behind]

Darkcoin's masternodes are it's biggest points of failure, so Monero's ringsignatures wins.

[Joe200]

I really love Gemz, for the first time i have the feeling we have finally something which we can share and explain easily to others and especially the barrier of getting users into the network is broken because its ease of use and practical purposes, everything just makes sense. At this moment i don't really care about other coins, just Bitcoin and Gemz cover what i need as an average user.

Did GEMZ just start trading on Jan 10? One criteria for my list was that a coin has traded for more than 200 days. Until then, I consider it to be really unproven.

[Joe200]

Hi,

I can only answer for Nxt, as it's the system I am most familiar with.

- I am not a huge believer in "first mover advantage". It also means you get most of the flack, because chances are you are also the first mover on problems.
- Yes, to forge, you need to have your account (brainwallet) unlocked
- I'm interested in this, too. I'm an old-timer in Nxt, so probably have a lot of blind spots here that should be much more obvious to newcomers.
- I commissioned this chart a few weeks ago, and it's at least checked by the Bitshares community, too. Other communities are welcome to critique, but it seems mostly accurate: http://i.cubeupload.com/J02n9J.jpg

As to the "value proposition": one of the large advantages of Nxt is that it supports a host of transaction types (standard coin transactions, data transfer, "alias" transactions, colored coins etc) that can be used in combination with each other to create entire systems. Taken by themselves they are useful, but the true power lies in being able to use them by easy API calls, so they can be integrated into websites, 3rd party apps etc.

What also appeals to me is that it is not dependent on a 3rd party blockchain, but is self-contained.

I'll note that as a "+1" on the list. Though I'm not completely sure that doing everything at once is the winning strategy. Only time will tell.

[Joe200]

Not sure where you got your volume figures for BitShares.  
From coinmarketcap.com we see that most of the time volume is over $200,000 with occasional peaks above $500,000.

Volume so far today is
BTS 103,000 vs
NXT   21,000

I'm on the BTC38 website now. The 24 hour volume for BTS/BTC is 6.107 BTC / 134,659 BTS, which is tiny. For BTS/CNY, the volume is 6,746,522 BTS, which a lot more.

In my original volume analysis, I only looked at the volume of Alt/BTC and converted it to USD. Should I have also considered the Alt/Fiat volume?

Why is the BTS/CNY volume so much more than BTS/BTC? I would trade BTS for BTC or maybe for USD. Is trading it for CNY make sense? How do you get the CNY off the exchange (if you are not Chinese)? Why is the CNY volume so high? What's going on? I'd like to understand this more.

[Joe200]

what is your reference for trade volumes?

Doge trading volume is still 4th or 5th i think
LTC despite being dead is the second

p.s. nice list, it is short but contains most of the info needed

For each Alt/BTC, I pulled data from lots of different exchanges. For each day, if Alt/BTC is traded on multiple exchanges, I take the exchange with the highest volume.

[Joe200]

It uses a fundamentally broken architecture, and there is no way to fix that except abandon the architecture. Here's a quote from a post I made the other day:

Great analysis. Thanks. This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see here. Will change what I wrote for DRK.