Why are no anonymous altcoins being widely utilized?

[Sir Alpha_goy]

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[stonehedge]

Because its overrated and majority doesn't care about it and those who care use cash.

If people "use cash" they will want to "use cash" online too. That is inevitable.

If you say people are comfortable with everything be tracked and traced that's one thing. But once you acknowledge the need for cash, the need for anon online has to be there too, for all the same reasons, and some others too.

I agree with the past few comments that it got ahead of itself and blown out of proportion by speculators.

Basically this:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

That graph looks eerily like DRK over the last year...massive pump before we'd even finished any features!

[hack_]

[smooth]

Because its overrated and majority doesn't care about it and those who care use cash.

If people "use cash" they will want to "use cash" online too. That is inevitable.

If you say people are comfortable with everything be tracked and traced that's one thing. But once you acknowledge the need for cash, the need for anon online has to be there too, for all the same reasons, and some others too.

I agree with the past few comments that it got ahead of itself and blown out of proportion by speculators.

Basically this:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

That graph looks eerily like DRK over the last year...massive pump before we'd even finished any features!

Yes that is the whole point and it looks like a graph of all of the "anonymous coins" that were around back then and are still around. Arguably it looks like Bitcoin too going back about 18 months or so.

[nachoig]

If people "use cash" they will want to "use cash" online too. That is inevitable.

This phrase is the perfect synthetization of the reason why I'm interested in cryptocurrencies. Much thanks, I wouldn't be capable of syntethize this in one simple phrase.

On-topic: I think anonymous altcoins are still something new. The majority of these coins haven't completed 1 year yet.

[d0om]

Why? Laws vary greatly from nation to nation... and not all of them are reasonable.

[tspacepilot]

It seems like there is a big demand for anonymity, and not just for nefarious purposes. The altcoins which offer anonymity, ranging from Anoncoin to the CryptoNote coins, have never really taken off. The ability to make anonymous transactions with any number of altcoins is available, but nobody seems to be using them on a sizable scale.

So, why do no altcoins which feature anonymity have a price over 10 USD? And why are they not more widely utilized? And please, let's not turn this into another "why X altcoin is better than Y altcoin" thread: I would just like to know why none of them have been widely utilized.

Disclosure: I have a handful of each of the CryptoNote coins and Anoncoins, but mainly use/invest in BTC.

Thanks for your opinions.

I think one of the main issues is that altcoins aren't being adopted in general.  I mean sure, there are a few which have found some niche (doge on reddit, ltc has some uses).  But in general there aren't too many people using cryptos and of those who do use cryptos like 99% of are using BTC.  Then there's the questions about the conditions of some of these "innovative" alts which are areally just premined pump-n-dumps.  I think that's my best answer to your question.

[TaunSew]

Bitcoin hasn't been adopted in general - only 250,000 users (addresses are not people).

If you really want to make the Bitcoin evangelicals moody then point out that many alternates have a capitalization and userbase which took Bitcoin years to attain.   

[autodiv]

No cryptocurrencies at all are in wide use. This is a small niche that does not appear to be getting much bigger. The average person does not have a clue about how to use or why to use crypto.

[smooth]

No cryptocurrencies at all are in wide use. This is a small niche that does not appear to be getting much bigger. The average person does not have a clue about how to use or why to use crypto.

All objective metrics show it getting bigger, just at a fairly modest rate.

[TaunSew]

No cryptocurrencies at all are in wide use. This is a small niche that does not appear to be getting much bigger. The average person does not have a clue about how to use or why to use crypto.

All objective metrics show it getting bigger, just at a fairly modest rate.

Your ears and nose get bigger as your  age and some allege they continue growing after you die.   Maybe Bitcoin continues to acquire more users but is otherwise a dead man walking.  The Ottoman Empire of digital currencies, the sick man.

Whatsapp is newer than Bitcoin and has 300 million users.  Instagram is newer than Bitcoin and has 200 million users.  Even on that website instagram people are making literal fortunes and it's not restricted to the people, unlike Bitcoin, who bought back in 2009.  It is a better investment to devote time to instagram than bitcoin.


There's countless countless examples of things newer than Bitcoin which took off.   Bitcoin at 250,000 users over 6/7 years (an eternity in tech) has not taken off and perhaps never well.  Did you know Jed McCaleb was going to get Wells Fargo into Bitcoin but that felled through due to Mt Gox and his association with it?  That is, perhaps, the date of when Bitcoin died and nobody wants to acknowledge it.


http://www.coindesk.com/history-ripple-stellar-tell-all-report/

[smooth]

Whatsapp is newer than Bitcoin and has 300 million users.  Instagram is newer than Bitcoin and has 200 million users.  Even on that website instagram people are making literal fortunes and it's not restricted to the people, unlike Bitcoin, who bought back in 2009.  It is a better investment to devote time to instagram than bitcoin.

There's countless countless examples of things newer than Bitcoin which took off.

These are systems that operate within an established paradigm, all of them incremental improvements (?) over previous ones. You see much the same in other contexts. Facebook (not even the first social network) took around 2 years to grow to 10 million users and 4 years to grow to 100 million users, yet newer systems reach that milestone much faster.

Decentralized finance is a much bigger paradigm shift than yet another social network.

[TaunSew]

Whatsapp is newer than Bitcoin and has 300 million users.  Instagram is newer than Bitcoin and has 200 million users.  Even on that website instagram people are making literal fortunes and it's not restricted to the people, unlike Bitcoin, who bought back in 2009.  It is a better investment to devote time to instagram than bitcoin.

There's countless countless examples of things newer than Bitcoin which took off.

These are systems that operate within an established paradigm, all of them incremental improvements (?) over previous ones. You see much the same in other contexts. Facebook (not even the first social network) took around 2 years to grow to 10 million users and 4 years to grow to 100 million users, yet newer systems reach that milestone much faster.

Decentralized finance is a much bigger paradigm shift than yet another social network.

Wasn't talking about paradigm shifts and Bitcoin built on predecessors.  There are recent estimates that eGold both had a bigger capitalization and userbase than Bitcoin and that was many years ago.  

The idea of digital money and payments goes back to the 1990s and it did not stop PayPal from hitting 150 million users and a capitalization of $40 billion (their capitalization is calculated differently from Bitcoin.   If PayPal was a store of wealth like BTC then PayPal would be $Trillions, after all they dominate internet payments!)


 

[smooth]

Whatsapp is newer than Bitcoin and has 300 million users.  Instagram is newer than Bitcoin and has 200 million users.  Even on that website instagram people are making literal fortunes and it's not restricted to the people, unlike Bitcoin, who bought back in 2009.  It is a better investment to devote time to instagram than bitcoin.

There's countless countless examples of things newer than Bitcoin which took off.

These are systems that operate within an established paradigm, all of them incremental improvements (?) over previous ones. You see much the same in other contexts. Facebook (not even the first social network) took around 2 years to grow to 10 million users and 4 years to grow to 100 million users, yet newer systems reach that milestone much faster.

Decentralized finance is a much bigger paradigm shift than yet another social network.

Wasn't talking about paradigm shifts and Bitcoin built on predecessors.  There are recent estimates that eGold both had a bigger capitalization and userbase than Bitcoin and that was many years ago.

egold was not decentralized, nor was Paypal. Duh, that is the whole innovation of Bitcoin in a nutshell. It has never been done before.

[no141]

If you compare them to todays use of money, you see these anonymous coins, namely Darkcoin, being a replacement for cash. So yes, if you wanted to use cash for a transaction, you should use dark. When people don't care, bitcoin is fine for them. They should care, but they don't. No one should want every purchase traced back to them, I don't care if it is coffee, internet, or giftcards for Amazon. People are letting themselves be tracked more and more and they don't seem to care. People must fight for their freedom to have any.

[thelibertycap]

how are you going to pay for strippers during your business trip without your wife knowing?

certainly not with your bitcoin wallet you buy normally stuff with. mixing bitcoin (with possibly stolen coins) or trying to keep a hidden wallet is too much of a hassle.

this should fully answer OP's question.

just don't tell me you don't go to strip clubs - of course you don't.

[smooth]

how are you going to pay for strippers during your business trip without your wife knowing?

certainly not with your bitcoin wallet you buy normally stuff with. mixing bitcoin (with possibly stolen coins) or trying to keep a hidden wallet is too much of a hassle.

this should fully answer OP's question.

just don't tell me you don't go to strip clubs - of course you don't.

Nobody goes to strip clubs, that's why the parklng lots are always empty and the strip club owners are broke.

[Nxtblg]

egold was not decentralized, nor was Paypal. Duh, that is the whole innovation of Bitcoin in a nutshell. It has never been done before.

Yeah...but the old rules of history say that the more disruptive the technology, the longer it takes for it to be mainstreamed. Case in point: there were primitive televisions working in the late 1920s. AT&T was promising video calls c.1970 and even had a working test system with small teevees at that time. And - a nice one if you're a trivia buff - the first jet boat, the "Sea-Doo," was sold by Bombardier in the early 1970s. It was a gas hog, so it was wiped out by the oil crisis of 1973. The first one I saw was a rusty number in a private junkyard.

I know "disruptive" is a buzzword now, but tech innovations that are truly disruptive follow the old rule: ordinary folks need a lot of time to get used to them. Do you know what killed off AT&T's vidphone? Not the primitive technology. No, it was the client base - at the time, mostly housewives - who balked at the idea that the other person on the other end of the call would see them in their housecoats.

As far as I knew beforehand, the world record for invention -> innovation -> mainstreaming was the steam engine. The first one built, was built by Hero of Alexandria at the time Christ walked the earth....

...but as it turns out, ol' Hero was also responsible for the vending machine!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria

[Rishblitz]

Because most of them don't work or are just knock offs of bitcoin.

[Lorenzo]

Also..... There has been a lot of work on Darkwallet for Bitcoin which basically gives some level of anonymity to Bitcoin. It's already in beta. And if it works, then basically every alt can just port that wallets tech into their platform.

Isn't Dark Wallet a CoinJoin implementation? The anonymity provided by CoinJoin is good (Darkcoin uses a version of it too) but I've read that it's not quite as robust as CryptoNote's ring signatures.

none of you even mentioned bitcoindark. Which I think has something going for it right now.
darkcoin is a scam imnsho, monero is a lame name that I will never use on principal. and the fact the users irritate the piss out of me with all their shilling.

I admit I haven't really kept up with BTCD development these days. Although I do I remember the price exploded when jl777 adopted it. It seems to be trading at much more sensible levels now.

Because its overrated and majority doesn't care about it and those who care use cash.

If people "use cash" they will want to "use cash" online too. That is inevitable.

If you say people are comfortable with everything be tracked and traced that's one thing. But once you acknowledge the need for cash, the need for anon online has to be there too, for all the same reasons, and some others too.

I agree with the past few comments that it got ahead of itself and blown out of proportion by speculators.

Basically this:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

Hmm... You're right. Using a bigger version of that chart, I labeled four points on it (minus the slope of enlightenment) as well as their corresponding points on the DRK price chart.





And here's the same chart for Monero:

The real anonymous crypto (not BTC-based and specially Cryptonote-based like Monero) are being suppressed by the media, both the mainstream media that propagates the fallacy Bitcoin is anonymous as by larges entities in the crypto world that sees them as a threat to their monopoly both financial and code-wise.

Other than Bitcoin and perhaps Litecoin and Dogecoin, all cryptos are ignored by the mainstream media so the fact that articles about Monero aren't being featured on CNN or the WSJ isn't surprising. The reason why the mainstream media calls Bitcoin anonymous rather than pseudonymous is probably because most people don't know what the latter means.

And as I mentioned previously, Bitcoin is probably "anonymous enough" for 99% of people.

Because most of them don't work or are just knock offs of bitcoin.

The CryptoNote coins (e.g. XMR and BCN) aren't based on Bitcoin. They do have problems with blockchain bloating though.