Are Altcoins Undermining Bitcoin's Credibility? 267
An anonymous reader writes The editor of a Bitcoin advocacy site believes the proliferation of altcoins (cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin) is harming Bitcoin's long-term potential as an alternative to traditional currencies. Posting at BadBitcoin.org, a site that seeks to expose online scams that target Bitcoin users, the pseudonymous ViK compares altcoins, including the Internet meme inspired Dogecoin, to a pump-and-dump scheme where developers create their own version of the Bitcoin wallet and blockchain and then "pre-mine" or generate a significant number of cryptocurrency units before the altcoin's official release. Later, when their value has risen, the pre-mined altcoins are exchanged for Bitcoin or in some cases converted directly to cash. While critics of cryptocurrencies in general might find ViK's comments about the altcoin "tulip" mania ironic, the self-confessed Bitcoin fan is nevertheless calling for an altcoin boycott: "The easiest way to stop them is to not participate. We all know that they only have one purpose, and that is to make Bitcoin for the so called developers."
Self Serving Story? (Score:3)
I'm not really a fan of any "altcurrency", but this guy just comes of sounding whiney and self-serving.
Re:Self Serving Story? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just don't agree with him. Bitcoins have some serious issues. If someone develops a digital currency that addresses those issues and makes them more practical for every day use I support it. If I had to wait for 10 minutes to get my starbucks coffee paid for I'd probably decide to just pay cash. I also wonder how quickly the blockchain would grow if bitcoin became more mainstream. Anonymity is also an issue. I think competition between digital currencies will only make them more practical and robust. That can only be a good thing for digital currencies in the long run. If progress is not made digital currencies will never replace conventional ones.
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If someone develops a digital currency that addresses those issues and makes them more practical for every day use I support it.
Exactly. The Bitcoin high priests have already chased off the Zerocoin folks, so their future is far from guaranteed. secp256k1 also looks like it wasn't the best choice.
The blockchain idea is a good one, and will probably outlast bitcoin itself. But middlemen are also needed for any of these systems to handle transactions and arbitrage efficiently.
The OP isn't wrong, though - t
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One ponzi currency claiming the other ponzi currencies are bad for exactly the same reason the first currency is bad is really rather silly. If you want to play in the ponzi currency field, then go ahead but be warned it is legally and criminally dangerous and at least you are accurate in they "are all doomed".
Re:Self Serving Story? (Score:5, Insightful)
Adding to this, a number of existing altcoins do, in fact, attempt to address bitcoin's weaknesses. Litecoin attempts to resist customized hardware mining and also make the blockchain update faster. Primecoin solves a somewhat useful mathematical problem instead of completely wasting computer cycles like Bitcoin does. There are other examples.
Anyway, it only seems natural that as time goes on, better and better cryptocurrencies will be incrementally developed. To ask everyone to use ONLY what's the first iteration of this tech would be silly.
Of course, there are "me-too!" cryptocurrencies as well, typically with only minor 'improvements' and designed to make the creators rich. I'm all for educating people about how they could be taken advantage of. But boycotting? Come on.
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Yeah, this was something which always bugged me about bitcoin - so much energy goes to waste and so much CO2 gets released into atmosphere to support the currency.
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I just don't agree with him. Bitcoins have some serious issues.
Indeed, I'd rate all the thefts of bitcoins to be killing it's credibility more than anything else. If it's seen as substantially less safe than traditional investments...
I might participate in the bitcoin market, but it'd be strictly transitional - buy bitcoins, use them to pay. I'd actually 'own' them for as short of a period as possible.
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You must have missed the part where it said
editor of a Bitcoin advocacy site
This "article" is just another stupid "I like this thing and hate its competitors so you should hate its competitors too" rant.
Re: Self Serving Story? (Score:2, Insightful)
People seem to think the story is already told and Bitcoin has some kind of manifest destiny. Digital currencies haven't even touched 99% of the world's population, maybe more. We have so far to go right now, it's foolish to write anything off, simply because it's not Bitcoin.
Re:Self Serving Story? (Score:4, Insightful)
He does have a point though, and I don't understand why people haven't seen it before.
If you create a currency that is backed by nothing but knowing a very large number, then you can back a infinitely large number of currencies by an infinitely large number of different large numbers (or even the same large numbers). That means that there are inherently infinitely many alt coins out there, and these things are inherently worthless.
It's not really that alt coins destroy bitcoin's credibility, it's that bitcoin itself has no credibility in the first place, and neither do these alt coins.
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They haven't seen it because supporters of bitcoin are blinded by ideology. They can't see that their rejection of "fiat currency" should cause them to reject bit coin as well. Ironically it's because they have faith in bitcoin itself. :)
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It's backed by the fact that you pay taxes with it.
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You have missed the whole point of Bitcoin. And currency. Why do you think gold became an important commodity? The only reason was because they discovered a simple chemical test to determine its authenticity. This means somebody in Australia could take a lump of gold to India, and the local Indian merchant could validate the currency on-site and conclude a transaction. Bitcoin has the same property that you can validate it is a real Bitcoin. However the method it uses requires a widely distributed "director
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The market must be free! (from anything that stands between me and exploiting others more efficiently)
Bitcoin credibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Bitcoin credibility? (Score:5, Funny)
You're just miffed because I have a hotel on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk.
Re:Bitcoin credibility? (Score:4, Informative)
You're just miffed because I have a hotel on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk.
That is a violation of the rules. Houses and hotels must be as evenly distributed as possible across properties of the same group. So it is legal to have a hotel on Park Place, and four houses on Boardwalk, or four houses on each, or four on one and three on the other. But it is NOT legal to have three houses on one and a hotel on the other. Here are the official rules [wikibooks.org].
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Just like a citizen arguing with the government - You forgot they have secret houserules that makes ok for them to do as they do. pointing to the official rules is pointless.
Re:Bitcoin credibility? (Score:4, Insightful)
not to mention that he's doing it wrong: you put your hotel on Boardwalk first, since you get the most money AND the most likely landing there thanks to the "Advance token to boardwalk" cards.
But they aren't the best investment anyway; you'd do better putting your hotels on Orange, then Red/Yellow, then Light Blue... [businessinsider.com]
Tsk, tsk....
Re:Bitcoin credibility? (Score:5, Funny)
I hereby award you the Hermes Conrad award for meticulous technical correctness. It may be collected at the Central Bureaucracy upon reception of a properly filled out, signed, stamped and notarized Award Reception form.
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Make sure that form is stamped five times, otherwise the head bureaucrat will summon the guards to bring him the form to fill out to have you taken away.
Re:Bitcoin credibility? (Score:4, Interesting)
Make sure that form is stamped five times, otherwise the head bureaucrat will summon the guards to bring him the form to fill out to have you taken away.
In Soviet Russia, five stamps summon... oh, forget it.
Actually, I interrupt this Slashdot joke to point out that the number five actually plays a significant role in old Soviet Russia bureaucracy jokes. Quoth Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
The genitive plural of a noun (used with a numeral to indicate five or more of something, as opposed to the dual, used for two, three, or four, see Russian nouns) is a rather unpredictable form of the Russian noun, and there are a handful of words which even native speakers have trouble producing this form of (either due to rarity or an actual lexical gap). A common example of this is kocherga (fireplace poker). The joke is set in a Soviet factory. Five pokers are to be requisitioned. The correct forms are acquired, but as they are being filled out, a debate arises: what is the genitive plural of kocherga? Is it Kocherg? Kocherieg? Kochergov?... One thing is clear: a form with the wrong genitive plural of kocherga will bring disaster from the typically pedantic bureaucrats. Finally, an old janitor overhears the commotion, and tells them to send in two separate requisitions: one for two kochergi and another for three kochergi. In some versions, they send in a request for 4 kochergi and one extra to find out the correct word, only to receive back "here are your 4 kochergi and one extra." A similar story by Mikhail Zoshchenko involves yet another answer: after great care and multiple drafts to get the genitive case correct, including the substitution of "five ÑÑÑfÐ (pieces)" for "five pokers", the response comes back: the warehouse has no kocherezhek.
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Just like in real life, there are no rules for the person with that kind of money.
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According to the official "short game" rules, you may, indeed, build hotels after your third house.
Here are the real official rules [hasbro.com].
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Personal experience has it that the low rent district is the best - purely because no one wants it, and you can go to hotels readily. So you're pretty much dinging everyone early on in the game and getting tons of money out of it.
ANyhow, if the mere existence of alternative coins already devalues bitcoin, then bitcoin has already lost. Because now the value of your currency is dependent on the mere existence of another cur
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Yeah, no kidding. For instance... almost every person I've ever played monopoly with - even from different geographic regions - has generally followed the convention where all fines go into a pot that is collected by anyone landing directly on "Free Parking".
Re:Bitcoin credibility? (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly Bitcoin has enough credibility for people to value it at hundreds of dollars. You may not think much of it, but as long as there are people willing to exchange it for traditional currency or goods and services that's enough to keep it viable.
The attraction of altcoins is that people who got in early on Bitcoin are not rich, simply because they mined vast quantities of it when mining was easy. People who missed the gold rush now see altcoins as offering a second chance. The only problem is that there are so many and most will fail, so you have to pick the right one AND get in very early with significant mining power (initial outlay).
Actually it gets worse because most altcoins were designed to be ASIC-proof, but now ASICs are appearing to mine them anyway so there is yet more expense to stay competitive.
Re: Bitcoin credibility? (Score:2, Funny)
Is there somewhere I can find a bitcoin to Pog to Beanie Baby to Tulip conversion chart?
Re:Bitcoin credibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly Bitcoin has enough credibility for people to value it at hundreds of dollars.
No -- clearly Bitcoin has enough potential for people to value it at hundreds of dollars.
There's a difference. The price of Bitcoin was driven up in the past couple years mostly on the basis of what it might become, not so much what it already is. That's not "credibility" as a currency -- that's potential value as a speculative investment.
You may not think much of it, but as long as there are people willing to exchange it for traditional currency or goods and services that's enough to keep it viable.
Again, that's not why it has most of the value it has today. Most of the growth has been because there have been people willing to exchange traditional currency for it, not the other way around.
Currencies can get their value from at least three components: (1) "inherent" ulility value of the basic material, (2) utility value of the currency as a medium of exchange, and (3) speculation due to investors and people happy to buy the currency because they think other people will ultimately need the currency for reasons (1) and/or (2).
Paper dollars, for example, have almost no value of type (1), but they have a lot of type (2), and the U.S. dollar is popular enough around the world that lots of people view it as a safe enough investment for (3), which keeps its value higher than if it were only the internal currency of the U.S. Gold has some value of type (1) (i.e., applications requiring its properties, like jewelry and applications which use its conductivity and resistance to corrosion), and it functions in limited capacity in (2), but most of the increase in gold's value in recent years has come from (3).
Now take Bitcoin. It has absolutely NONE of (1). Until relatively recently, it had extremely few everyday applications where it could be used for (2), and still there are significant problems to be overcome which will make it easy for average people to deal directly in it as a currency in safe and secure fashion. So the VAST majority (maybe 99% or more) of Bitcoin's value is about (3) -- random speculation as an investment, effectively gambling on the idea that it will eventually become widely adopted.
That's not "credibility" -- yet. Maybe someday every Bitcoin early adopter's dream will come true, and it will pay off and that value will convert from (3) to (2). But I'm not gonna hold my breath, and I'm certainly not going to go out and buy virtual "money" whose value is currently mostly held up by a small number of investors. Say what you will about the "fiat" nature of the dollar or whatever, but you have hundreds of millions of people worldwide that depend on that value everyday, and they all have an interest in keeping it afloat. Bitcoin? I have no idea who holds most of the value, but I know it's concentrated in a much smaller group of people, and I have no reason to think that they won't dump and run screaming if trust in the "magic money" dies next week.
Not credible enough for merchant's to hold ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly Bitcoin has enough credibility for people to value it at hundreds of dollars ...
But not enough credibility for merchants to hold/keep the bitcoins they receive from customers.
Merchants tend to use merchant services offered by various bitcoin exchanges. Basically the merchant does all their pricing and accounting as normal in whatever fiat currency they use, dollars, euros, etc. When a customer indicates they wish to pay in bitcoins the merchant sends sale info to the exchange, the exchange converts the price from fiat to bitcoin and provides a payment address to send bitcoins to. This payment address is the exchange's, the merchant never touches a bitcoin -- lucky for them if they are subject to IRS jurisdiction but that's another story. When the merchant receives the coins they credit the merchant's account with the original fiat amount specified regardless of any particular fluctuation that may have occurred in bitcoin's price.
In short. The merchant prices and does accounting in fiat currency and receives fiat currency in payment. The only thing new is that their payment processor is a bitcoin exchange rather than VISA or Mastercard.
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But not enough credibility for merchants to hold/keep the bitcoins they receive from customers.
I think you're confusing credibility with volatility because their business is making a profit on margins, not playing with currency speculation. Most of the value flows through them as they buy from suppliers and sell to customers, even a relatively small change in value can wipe out their margins. I'm assuming that when I buy something in another country with my VISA then 99.99%+ of the time the store is paid in its local currency, not my currency.
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But not enough credibility for merchants to hold/keep the bitcoins they receive from customers.
I think you're confusing credibility with volatility because their business is making a profit on margins, not playing with currency speculation.
The merchants that are selling thing to customers, they are not playing volatility. They are completely avoiding volatility by using a system that pays them the exact dollar (or whatever fiat currency) amount they expect from a customer paying in dollars. These merchants who accept bitcoins from customers have no faith in bitcoins. And thanks to exchanges the merchants accepting bitcoins need no faith at all in bitcoins.
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ASICs drive out CPUs and GPUs ... (Score:4, Insightful)
What does this even mean? Asic proof?
ASICs (Application-specific integrated circuits) represent specialized hardware specifically designed for a particular task, in this context the ASICs are designed to mine coins. ASICs outperform (both in speed and power consumption) CPUs and GPUs making ASICs far more profitable.
:-) 24/7 mining some coin.
Coin proof-of-work algorithms have some sort of difficulty setting to control the number of coins being awarded during a time period. The more mining horsepower there is the higher the difficulty goes. This rising difficulty level makes the mining calculations take longer. So as the total capability to do work (all the CPUs+GPUs+ASICs) goes up the difficulty goes up. An individual CPU, GPU or ASIC earns fewer coins per hour as difficulty rises but the total number of coins generated remain roughly constant over time.
ASIC-proof algorithms attempt to leverage the fact that ASICs are specialized. They try to incorporate things found in CPUs and GPUs but not in ASICs. The motivation is to allow CPUs and GPUs to profitably mine something. The problem is that the things missing from the previous generation of ASICs used to design the ASIC-proof algorithm have been finding their way into newer generation ASICs.
So the short story is that some alt-coins were partially motivated by CPU/GPU miner that were driven out of bitcoin mining. Newer generations ASICs are now taking over alt-coins and CPU/GPU miners are once again being driven out.
Those great deals you find on ebay for a used high end GPU. It very well may be a GPU that was over clocked and run just below the point of spontaneous combustion
ASIC will always exist... (Score:3)
...but not necessarily have huge advantage.
ASIC-proof algorithms attempt to leverage the fact that ASICs are specialized. They try to incorporate things found in CPUs and GPUs but not in ASICs. {...} Newer generations ASICs are now taking over alt-coins and CPU/GPU miners are once again being driven out.
You can build an ASIC for pretty much anything, and beyond some point, it might be commercially reasonnable to attempt it (if the market is big enough and there are enough people interested into buying hardware, it might be worth trying to design sellable hardware).
Now the question is: is there an actual gain in doing it? And that's where all the details lie in.
Depending on the complexity of the Proof-of-Work algorithm, it might range from
- PoW is dumb easy. Each j
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PrimeCoin & RieCoin (Score:3)
PrimeCoin and RieCoin currently have no known FPGA nor ASIC implementation and the few GPU implementation don't seem to bring the huge leaps in performance that GPU brought to Bitcoin's SHA256.
It's not that they were designed with the purpose of being CPU-only (ASIC-resistant was never the main foal in creating them).
It's that they are based around actual scientific problems that ARE difficult. Designing silicon for them *would* be a scientific improvement.
Re:ASICs drive out CPUs and GPUs ... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think you understand what an ASIC is, even though you tried to define it.
There is no such thing as an 'ASIC proof algorithm' because you simply design the ASIC to handle that situation. Doesn't matter what you put into it, the ASIC gets designed to deal with that problem and does it more efficiently than any generic circuit can. Theres nothing a GPU or GPCPU can do that an ASIC can't. The term 'ASIC' doesn't define a specific type of circuit. GPUs are ASICs who's application is graphics processing, for example. An Intel CPU is an ASIC who's application is general purpose computing!
If you change the algorithm then you aren't making it 'ASIC proof', you're just making it not work for a specific type of ASIC or making it not work well. Its no different than saying BitCoin is 'ASIC proof' because the routing chips in Cisco routers can't do BitCoin hashes efficiently.
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I think you're trying very hard to avoid seeing the point though. The point is to enable regular people to mine coins using their ordinary GPUs, either benevolently to have a democratic currency or as the cynic in me suggests get buy-in from many enough people. After all, an altcoin that only a few with specialized equipment can mine effectively is likely to never get off the ground. Bitcoin was different because it was first and everyone pulled together to create a cryptocurrency. It's very easy to create
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There is no such thing as an 'ASIC proof algorithm' because you simply design the ASIC to handle that situation.
And that is pretty much what I said earlier: ... The problem is that the things missing from the previous generation of ASICs used to design the ASIC-proof algorithm have been finding their way into newer generation ASICs."
"ASIC-proof algorithms attempt to leverage the fact that ASICs are specialized. They try to incorporate things found in CPUs and GPUs but not in ASICs.
What I'm trying to convey is that the de
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There is no such thing as an 'ASIC proof algorithm' because you simply design the ASIC to handle that situation.
This is in theory true, but there are proposed proof-of-work algorithms for which specialized hardware doesn't have a huge edge over general-purpose CPUs. Such algorithms require more memory than the existing hashes, and are designed to be highly sequential, so they don't parallelize easily. At least one altcoin claims to have such an algorithm. [execoin.net]
Any algorithm that requires a significant amount of 64-bit floating point computation and lots of memory, like a big matrix inversion, would be reasonably ASIC-pr
perception switch (Score:2)
so now a BTC thread has a majority of anti-BTC comments, esp AC's...I'm wondering what caused this change...or if it's always been viewed with skepticism but hype warped our perception
i'm telling you, ever since we started seeing BTC on /., and especially after it got big, i tried to provide a counterpoint to the BTC proponents...got modded troll every time
i was cool about it, not trollface...especially not at first, maybe after a months I'd get aggro in a deepthread but
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Seconded. Nothing like an article that makes a false assertion. =D
Are new Soy products going to unseat McDonalds' Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese as the world's tastiest burger?
Or since we're talking about bitcoins, how about this for a tag:
Will the increased discussions about bitcoin finally reveal it as the scam it is?
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Bitcoin has about as much credibility as Monopoly money in my mind. Asking if something can undermine the credibility of monopoly money doesn't really make any sense.
You must have missed the part where bitcoin sells for hundreds of dollars per bitcoin, and is used to buy and sell real-world stuff, and exchanges buy and sell bitcoins. Maybe you're just jealous because you didn't jump aboard while they were super cheap.
Don't get me wrong -- they are an incredibly dangerous investment since their value could go to nothing in an instant. The same is true of several currencies, but they at least have an entire nation that would get ruined if it they were to devalue their cur
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bitcoins only have value as long as they are convertible to dollars and euros. they can cease to have any value in a very short time. they aren not accepted in most places while dollars and euros are
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Why? Because they're rare? So what?
If you now try the "because of their unique physical properties" gambit, I'd put more credibility into copper, lithium and magnesium...
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Well, no, because I have no convenient way of checking either the purity nor mass of any gold I might get, and a metal-backed currency can stop being so at any time. On top of that, gold is soft enough for wear being a problem, but still too hard to cut pieces off as needed, so we'd be stuck with precut gold pieces (coins) which can't be actually trusted to carry their nominal value due to wear and theft.
On a purely technical level, without getting into any e
how meany people are useing Bitcoin just to play t (Score:2)
how meany people are useing Bitcoin just to play the market like stocks?
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How many people are using their savings just to play the market like stocks?!
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No one, unless they are buying stocks.
It's all funny money... (Score:5, Insightful)
All of this is funny money.
Bitcoins are just in your imagination.
USDollars are merely imagined by the USGovernment.
Gold has no real value other than using it for things like electrical contacts, etc.
None of this is real money.
If you want real value, get a basket of eggs, hatch the chicks, raise them up, feed them pasture, your other asset - you are landed I hope - and they'll lay more eggs. Now you're in business and can feed yourself. When you succeed at that start feeding other people and they'll give you something of real value like a pork chop or firewood to stay warm with. What ever you do, don't accept cash, bitcoins, gold or other fraudulent currencies for your eggs. You want real value for your real things.
Re:It's all funny money... (Score:4, Funny)
It's difficult to pay your electric bill with chickens, and hogs.
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It's difficult to pay your electric bill with chickens, and hogs.
True, but it will get you a hooker. (Until they closed the Chicken Ranch.)
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How many chickens did you trade for your computer?
Re:It's all funny money... (Score:5, Insightful)
USDollars are merely imagined by the USGovernment.
Oh they are "merely imagined" by a lot more than just the US Government. And that's why they have actual value.
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The value of the US dollar is a bit like a strapless evening dress on a 70 year old: Kept up by the collective willpower of everyone 'cause everyone fears the worst if it should drop for some reason.
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The US dollar has value because that is what you need to pay your taxes. Everybody needs to pay their taxes, so they need the money. There is demand, so there is a value.
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Oh they are "merely imagined" by a lot more than just the US Government. And that's why they have actual value.
And that "imagining" of new FRN's is also why commodity producers around the world demand twice as many FRN's for their goods as they did a decade ago.
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The problem, of course, is that they're your chickens and land only because people agree so. Property rights are no less imaginary than currency.
The truth of the matter is that "value" is an entirely made-up concept. A chicken has no property of being valuable; all value you ascribe to it is entirely in your own imagination. Which is of course what allows people to value things differently, thus making trade possible. So it's only appropriate that we use a made-up c
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The truth of the matter is that "value" is an entirely made-up concept. A chicken has no property of being valuable; all value you ascribe to it is entirely in your own imagination.
A chicken can be food. A chicken can produce food. Food is one of the basic needs of humans. Therefore, a chicken is about as close as one can get to "inherent value."
Anything that provides fundamental human needs like food, water, shelter, clothing, protection, etc. has more fundamental value than anything else. If a survival situation, these are the things people will ALWAYS need. Pretending that that "value" is "entirely in your own imagination" is denying the basic fact that humans are animals an
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USDollars are merely imagined by the USGovernment.
It's a common misconception that USDollars are not backed by metal. If you don't want USDollars, the government will be happy to quickly give you some lead for it. Also available is depleted uranium and several other metals [wikipedia.org].
hilarious (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone who supports any sort of crypto currency could say the same about bitcoin. Early adopters/(founders?) of bitcoin still control a huge number of bitcoin, so how is that not a pump and dump scheme itself?
I'm not a fan of crypto currencies at all.
Re:hilarious (Score:5, Interesting)
When Bitcoin was launched, Satoshi had only been mining for a day or so. If you had been paying attention to the right forums, you could have started mining more or less at the same time he did and in fact some people (like Hal Finney) did exactly that.
What's more, Satoshi does not appear to have dumped his coins. Nor did he engage in much pumping. Indeed once people started hyperbolically talking about how Bitcoin would bring about world peace, trying to get Wikileaks to accept it and so on he retreated into the background and eventually left. His coins are still there.
Creating something new with no built in advantage for yourself, being totally honest about it, and then when its value soars not selling ..... is pretty much the opposite of a pump and dump scheme.
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1. The United States federal government.
That's good enough for me.
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I know that. You asked who the main investor was, not who it was owned by.
Is this a perfect example? (Score:2)
Of Betteridge's Law?
No seems a perfectly fitting answer.
Hate to be the one to point this out... (Score:5, Insightful)
But they said the exact same thing about Linux distributions in the 90's, after the post Redhat influx of distros. What we learned from that experience, and some of us knew it at the time, was that the more people you have working in their own isolated environments, solving the problems that are important to them... the more innovation you have in the greater Linux space. It's the trickle down effect in open source software, and it's what makes a product or product ecosystem stronger. And we're seeing the same effect in the Bitcoin space. Just look at the proliferation of Scrypt variation, Gravity wells, different variations on proof of work, proof of stake, and others. Like Linux, Bitcoin is more than a bundle of software products, it's an entire ecosystem. To dismiss that, and say that there should only be about Bitcoin seriously misses the way open source innovation works. The rest is all marketing, which is bullshit by definition.
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actually linux only became strong after corporations put in features business wanted, and other corporation monetized it including ways to have vendor lock-in
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You aren't the only one that thinks that: http://www.coindesk.com/need-a... [coindesk.com]. A lot of the altcoins are definitely scams but, there is actually some legitimate work going on that is pretty interesting. Whether or not cryptocurrency ends up becoming mainstream or not is still unclear but, from a computer science standpoint, I think it's all pretty interesting. Maybe it's a fad that will go down in flames or maybe it will stabilize into something that benefits society. Either way, I've never understood all
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This. Exactly what I think about altcoins, the outsourced R&D division of Bitcoin Inc... in an ideal world. The hard truth is that it takes a hard fork for any real change in the Bitcoin network, and it's hard to see a consensus coming up with all the alternatives.
The real (crypto)?anarchist utopia is about different co-existing currencies, may the best coin win, at least for their 15 blocks of fame. Exchanges are a bottleneck for now, as well as old-money investors who get stuck on certain coins. Th
UnderMINING Bitcoins? (Score:2)
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Bitcoin "mining" stopped when Satoshi's second-in-command moved on to other projects. His last name is Finnish for "ore".
Nowadays, we call it "verifying transactions" as it should have been from the very beginning. It's not about being a greedy gold-digger, it's about maintaining a network to provide a service, and it's a job like any other, with a reasonable pay.
Yes and it's been a while (Score:2)
From where I stand, I think the proliferation of altcoins have undermined Bitcoin since around december 2012, when the number of altcoins started to multiply at an insane rate. Even Litecoin, the main Bitcoin alternative, has lost more than half its value since then.
Nah, Bitcoin destroyed their credibility when (Score:2)
they designed a currency that assumes the world's population is constant.
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that assumes that the total real wealth (like mass and energy) of the Earth is constant
Which is also an entirely wrong assumption :)
The Earth gains energy from the Sun, and thus mass. It also loses mass via radiation. I'm not sure which direction the net is moving in, but there is no way its constant.
Bitcoin can also suffer from inflation (Score:2)
Are you talking about Bitcoin's deflationary tendencies? Bitcoin deflation assumes one thing, that people will continue to want Bitcoin, a "commodity" designed to be limited in supply. In other words, for the value of Bitcoin to rise people must remain INTERESTED in Bitcoin. If interest in Bitcoin falls, then the value of Bitcoin also falls, which just a roundabout way of saying "inflation".
I suspect the lack of positive or negative news about Bitcoin is contributing to the current downward trend of its val
Oh Boo Hoo (Score:2)
Gosh, some advocates of a competing currency and libertarian fantasy are now cowed by competition? Say it ain’t so!
I’m rooting for some online cash to become viable, but don’t know if Bitcoin will be it (I suspect not since it has the same liquidity / shock issues as gold standards do) but let’s have a bunch of experiments and see what the market says.
Stability is needed (Score:2)
The programmers need to design a digital Bretton Woods system and enforce a stable exchange rate. For instance, the value of one eMark could be pegged at one five hundredth of a bitcoin, and the various central banks would be obligated to buy and sell bitcoins and emarks at that rate. That way, a miner wouldn't have to worry about backing the wrong computations.
Here's a dumb question... (Score:2)
Why would the market not correct the inflated value of alt currencies, eventually? Aren't heavy fluctuation and scams a feature of immature markets? And doesn't outside interface inhibit correction?
Thank you, Captain Obvious (Score:2)
Gee, you don't say?
Do people confuse them? (Score:2)
I would assume that credibility pollution is not much of an issue since I don't think people confuse all cryptocurrencies as being "Bitcoin". However, I have no actual data so maybe they do. I would assume that the users of these more exotic currencies are a smaller group who know that these are all different.
The bigger concerns I have with these is that they seem rather redundant.
Also, does anyone _actually_ view Bitcoin as "an alternative to fiat currencies and central banks" or more as "a real solution
Wha? (Score:2)
Since when does Bitcoin have any credibility to be undermined?
What credibility? (Score:2)
BitCoin has a problem (Score:2)
As it has grown in populatity, the motivation for the average Joe to participate in block creation has vanished. Personally, I used to mine one or two BTC per month; first on my CPU, then on my GPU; today, it would literally take me about four years on a high-end GPU to mine a single BitCoin - Why bother? Today, only a handful of hardcore dedicated ASIC-based miners control new block creation
The easiest way is to not participate. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why don't we apply this to ALL craptocurrency?
It's a waste of time, computing power, energy and programming time needed to alter payment backends for this e-funny-money.
If nobody participates, they all collapse like the speculating-their-asses-off house of cards that they are.
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Some altcoins are actually interesting (eg huntercoin has a way to mine by playing a bomberman type game).
Geez. And I thought I was easily amused!
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I turned to spirits for investment. I mean, where else do you get 20% and more for your money?
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...has an well-trained group of mercenaries that specialize in identifying, infiltrating, and disrupting social movements which threaten the profits of the ruling classes...
Here you go... [wikipedia.org]
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Yes.
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You think the USD would retain any credibility if everyone and their dog could legally start printing their own money?
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Sure. You can print/mint any currency you want, as long as it's not meant to pose as federal reserve currency. There is nothing illegal about it.
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Hate to break it to you, but the good ol' US Dollar, cash-in-hand, remains the worldwide go-to currency for laundering money.
BitCoin makes international transactions easier, no question there; but as far as its reputation for illegal activities goes, outside the opportunistic Silk Road, it actually has significantly more traceability than a stack of Jacksons.
If you want to launder on a purely domestic
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I read that as iCoin at first. Which would have immediately created a horde of fanbois using it.