Bitcoin is bitcointalk by ASICs scrypt it is far from dead. However, I think this kind of uncertainty could freak out potential institutional investors. Also, it doesn't give any objective references or much evidence as to why Litecoin is comparatively worth less. The tulips comment is out asic line without any evidence behind the claim, which you absolutely did not provide. You can read how to do that flows Truth is a true market requires competition.
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TOKYO, Jan 17 Reuters - Japan's Nikkei share average dropped on Wednesday morning as mining, oil and shipping stocks lost ground, while Bitcoin-related stocks tumbled after the cryptocurrency's value slid on worries about tighter regulations. Namecoin could be really great. That is to finally bridge the gap between exchanges. You can read more on how the creator started the Darkcoin project here: The argument seems to end at "so anyone can mine with their home computer". Maybe read the altcoin section of https:
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Namecoin is also a currency like Bitcoin, scrypt. Once tested bitcointalk Bitcoin will probably adopt asic protocol. Run the latest wallet and allow flows to download the blockchain from the start. What difference does it make that it happened over a period of years - how long did bitcointalk take to produce the first million bitcoins opposed to now? I'll go through and flows out specifically where I think you've let yourself down quite a bit. I think that the best argument for litecoin is you can launder bitcoin scrypt than bitcoinfog. To think that Bitcoin will be the only succesfull cryptocurrency is asic.
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It's a creative way to improve upon censorship resistance. If one of the altcoins so far produced actually did something different, it might be interesting. So far, it's just more of the same with slightly different numbers. Primecoin doesn't really add anything new to the mix, but I'll grant that ZeroCoin and Namecoin are worthwhile. Namecoin isn't really money, but it uses the same blockchain mechanism Bitcoin uses.
The purpose of Namecoin is to create an Internet that can't be censored by governments. So there's a browser plugin you would download, and any time you want to go to a website, you type in the address and your browser would take you there regardless of whether the government seized or blocked that domain.
It would do this by bypassing the domain registry and verifying ownership of websites via a blockchain, rather than a central point of control. It's a pretty neat concept. Zerocoin isn't out yet, but it's basically like Bitcoin without a traceable blockchain. It still has a blockchain, but every transaction has hidden outputs that can't be tracked by someone studying it. So this makes it impossible for people to trace the money as it flows from address to address.
If it works like the developers hope it does, and it's actually useful and worthwhile, you'll likely see Bitcoin upgrade to incorporate this feature.
Oh wow, Namecoin sounds like a very savvy concept. What a great idea. So I guess the incentive isn't for profit, but for privacy. Hmm yeah, if Bitcoin can upgrade to use the Zerocoin protocol - what's the point of moving to Zerocoin in the first place? I think the Zerocoin block chain a current WIP will be important as the test bed for the Zerocoin protocol, so that if a flaw is found it won't damage the Bitcoin network.
Once tested thoroughly Bitcoin will probably adopt the protocol. This is good - it needs to be tested properly, without the potential to damage Bitcoin. It's basically a distributed key-value store.
So what you can do is use some namecoins and 'buy' an entry in the blockchain, for ex: DNS is just a subset of what can be done with it. You may also like Bitmessage and Trrst which are sprouting from the ideas of Bitcoin signatures, blockchain.
Namecoin's problem, OTOH, is adoption. Essentially, name registrations are fixed at a certain cost, and that certain cost is ridiculously low, because barely anybody's using it, but due to that low cost, "domain sharks" have taken most of the good domains, meaning that adoption is unlikely due to the fact that it's difficult to register a good domain Namecoin is also a currency like Bitcoin, however. You could make an argument that Namecoin's really cool features which you mentioned give the currency inherent value.
That value is far surpassed by the value of Bitcoin's network effect, but hey, it's still an inherent value. If it ever became easy enough for end users to use namecoin DNS I think that inherent value would be quite high. It's relatively simple to add. Quick question, would bitcoin really upgrade to include hiding the transaction register?
I think one of the most powerful aspects of bitcoin is you can follow the money. Transparency appears to be the future in every way from corporate power to political power to day to day people. Bitcoin actually helps with that and honestly it would be useful for the world to be able to watch how banks move their money around.
I mean Libor would have been much more transparent if all transactions were public record. Interesting - so how would an update like this look once there are stakeholders with competing interests? Say by the time this happens, bitcoin holders don't just include early adopters, services, merchants, and average folk, but also banks, funds, and highly-regulated exchanges.
So part of the community wants to adopt this privacy-friendly feature, but part of it would rather keep everything traceable to comply with whatever regulatory environment has developed by that time.
Do we see a blockchain fork? After reading more about Zerocoin, it looks like implementation wouldn't make a blockchain fork likely, because implementing Zerocoin wouldn't have an effect on the way bitcoins are mined. However what could happen is that people without a Zerocoin-enabled client wouldn't be able to accept zerocoins, I gather?
Then again, in that case it seems that the pro-Zerocoin faction wins because they can use Zerocoin spends to withdraw vanilla BTC from other Zerocoin users?
In other words as long as there is enough of a market for Zerocoins, there's not much stopping them from complementing Bitcoins. This is all assuming the Zerocoin proposals eventually DO get implemented into Bitcoin clients; for now it looks like the Zerocoin devs are planning to launch a new genesis block. I might be a bit shaky on this, just started digging into Zerocoin.
My understanding is that the miners would also have to be updated, otherwise they would reject the zerocoin transactions as malformed. As well as the domain name usage for namecoin mentioned by others, it can be used for any kind of registered namespace. Trademarks, usernames including using the private key for authentication , definitions of words, postal addresses, electoral candidates and so on ad-infinitum; anything which needs to be globally unique, and shouldn't be centralized. Because of this, it doesn't really compete with bitcoin the same way as litecoin and the others, which is possibly it's greatest strength.
There have been plenty of other attempts to replace the centralized DNS system one of the only centralized parts of the Internet. Because namecoin stems from bitcoin, it goes one step further and replaces the domain name registration system as well. Because it's cryptographically based, the private keys can also be used to replace the ssl certification system too.
Namecoin lets you assign and manage Domain names through coins. So you can connect a namecoin to a domain like mywebsite. Currently, domain names are assigned and managed be central parties, so they can be seized, shut down, etc, just like bank accounts. Namecoin adds the magic and security of bitcoins to domain names, where there's a blockchain that cannot be changed without the privkeys, and everyone checks the blockchain for accurate data.
The hope is that isp's will start running their own DNS servers so that all their clients can access. I don't know much about zerocoin, but I believe it's just like bitcoin, but with some alterations that make it possible to have coins in a wallet without showing who sent them. So there's no taint trail where you can see where coins from a certain address came from and went.
Yes, differences in degree Or if there are differences in kind they are not critical enough to warrant a move for me away from the currency which is acquiring the quickest adoption. What about Keyhotee and Proshares Bitshares? I think it's significantly different than everything out there and very inspiring and interesting.
The idea of owning your reputation, identity and building a decentralized system of trust. Check out invictus website and letstalkbitcoin ep I think Bitshares is unique and interesting but still very conceptual. I'll watch how it develops. Since Bitshares-derived denominations pegged to external state e. The explanations on the Bitshares forums I think they were written by bytemaster, who I think is Daniel Larimer?
On the other hand, Keyhotee is also intriguing and perhaps I don't yet understand enough about the system can existent as a "product sold by" the Bitshares DAC completely independently of whether the business with BitUSD, etc.
Well, some altcoins add a proof of state, which for sure is a security benefit. I'm not sure if I really like the centralization of Bitcoin mining. So some coins like Yacoin. Netcoin has a voting system to adjust PoS minting rewards, which is also an interesting concept. When talking about protocols on top of a blockchain, like Mastercoin, bloat might be an issue and an altcoin might be useful as a vehicle. Maybe read the altcoin section of.
Erik what do you want litecoin to do? Fly, make you a sandwich? It's a cryptocurrency that offers a quicker transaction time on an alternative blockchain. There is ford Toyota BMW mercedes. I'm starting to think that you are so heavily invested in bitcoin that you don't want litecoin to share in the limelight. Most of your post is spot on.
Likely to affect Litecoin similarly. But there is one main reason that Litecoin does deserve some attention, that people always forget to mention:. The distribution of bitcoin is heavily skewed towards the few people who were first figuring this stuff out. The fact that bitcoin was first means fewer people were present for initial mining. By the time Litecoin started, people already had an idea as to how crypto economy might work. And that it's blood is made of Scrypt, instead of SHA, has also allowed for much long term equitable mining.
Do more people own Litecoins than Bitcoins? So Bitcoin is actually more-dispersed than Litecoin is in the population. The technologically-educated people who were early adopters for BTC would also be the same sort of group who would be early adopters for LTC. The mainstream populace will only accept a crypto-currency once the technologically-literate has chosen a currency as the best or one of the best. Well, disbursement isn't based off of how many people own a share. The thing is, from the moment a market for a coin exists, mining becomes just another way to obtain it besides buying it.
The free market ensures that the price to buy a new coin will not be very much higher than the cost necessary to mine it. And these days, exchanges like bter and cryptsy take on new coins almost immediately. This reduced friction means that mining most coins is only marginally more cost effective than straight-up purchasing, especially for people who don't have great equipment already.
Because of this, mining isn't about distribution anymore; it's simply a reward for securing the network. It is wealth-distribution-neutral, and cannot be made otherwise because there's absolutely no guarantee a coin will be valuable in the future most of them will have a value of zero. Risk is always a major factor, otherwise there can be no major upside possibility. Only investing talent can reduce that risk. Investors forego consumption such as a new car in the present in hopes of possible gains.
They're only rewarded if they have exceptional foresight. There's absolutely nothing unfair about it, except that some people are better investors than others Peercoin's security comes from the developer of the system signing every block. It attempts to use a "Proof of Stake" system where ownership of coins controls mining, but the problem with PoS is, ironically, that there is nothing at stake. In PoW when you attempt to mine you must expend energy and so you should only mine on a consensus which is likely to be the surviving one if you want your work to not be wasted.
In PoS the same is not true, and an optimally rational PoS miner will attempt to concurrently mine all forks which he does not hate.
Originally the signed blocks in PPC were supposed to be a bootstrap mechanism until most of the mining was PoS based, but then some clever miner started mining many possible histories and finding ones where he magically got lucky and his coins were the selected stake for all the blocks.
And, any altcoin supporter will likely be downvoted. It's chilling because the overall attitude many people are showing in this thread is that speculating on the monetary worth of certain strings of code is a stupid thing to do. Despite the fact that that is exactly how bitcoin rose to it's current value. I think Litecoin is important for the adaptation of Cryptocurrency in general.
If you don't like Bitcoin, try some other flavor, but at least get involved in the revolution. Also, the price is much lower and I've spoken to a lot of people that do invest in Litecoin because they feel like the Bitcoin boat has sailed.
Now, true or false, it doesn't matter. It has gotten these people involved in the revolution. Hi hi If you don't want to accept litecoin then don't, that's not a reason to trash it you know also bitcoin was Nearly every merchant in the world does that now. Very few accept Bitcoin, and almost no - perhaps actually no - merchant in the world accepts every currency on the planet.
Crazy or not, a lot of people simply don't want a small number of BTC's and are going to LTC's to have a larger amount. Yes, it's a matter of decimal places and doesn't matter mathematically. But it does matter psychologically and there's a lot of that influencing the markets. The fact that most of the people speculating in cryptocurrency don't know shit about investing is apparent and important.
Being a huge bitcoin fan I feel bad about dismissing litecoin. I feel bad because for me, litecoin is just a. It allows for faster arbitrage and it just seems like a nice extra option to BTC if one is being more stable than the other. I think it's just the opposite though. I think have lots of functioning crypto currencies really allows for more stability since each one can test out it's own thing which BTC can then pull from or use.
Other cryptos make mining more appealing too since you can merge mine and that's good for the network overall. I think you're being small minded and there's a lot of room for many currencies in the market. The stench of hypocrisy in this thread is truly laughable And of course these comments are coming from those with very specific interests in Bitcoin. People should remind themselves about how quickly Bitcoin itself was dismissed by certain financial circles.
There's room for more than one crypto currency. This is especially evident in the current value of Bitcoin and the arguments about how to decimalize it. I don't see any practicality from a user or merchant perspective in paying. Personally i think it's pretty close minded to marginalize any of the other currencies out there. To declare that bitcoin is the only one that is worthwhile because no one will accept the others is completely missing the main purpose of why it was created in the first place.
Which is to compete with archaic systems providing an alternative means of value transfer. The more consumer choice the better and larger any market becomes. Not that my opinion matters, but that post does come across as incredibly subjective and almost slightly elitist whilst still missing what I believe to be some of the key reasons why Bitcoin is more successful or a better investment.
Also, it doesn't give any objective references or much evidence as to why Litecoin is comparatively worth less. Also, the points you make against Litecoin, you don't apply to Bitcoin. It could come across as "I know I'm right and I don't have to justify myself in an objective way to you" - if you want to come across that way, that's fine, but some of the pseudo-justification seems improper.
If you want to help this guy learn which as a Bitcoin investor, it's vital for the value of your investment then you should have really explained yourself better IMO. So just to clarify, I understand you don't have an interest in Litecoin, and I agree, I believe Litecoin has considerably less value than Bitcoin IMO, but if someone takes the time to reach out and make a suggestion to you, you should take the time to respond.
If you think that suggestion is poorly informed, you should take the time to inform it properly in an objective way, especially if you're going to post your response on an open forum in a "other people my want to use this approach" sort of fashion. I'll go through and point out specifically where I think you've let yourself down quite a bit. FYI, you don't know me, I've read a lot of your stuff and generally have a huge amount of respect for what you say and how you say it, but I think what you just posted could be improved.
What does that matter? Well there's a huge psychological thing there. You can say zero-conf works for everything, but you provide no references or proof of the security of it. To the Average Bitcoin user, zero-conf is not a good, accessible or recommended idea in general is it? Furthermore, you mention 2. All the things I've seen suggest there's a chance that a shorter block time maybe less secure but it's certainly not a dominant factor and certainly not as simple as saying "quarter time quarter safety.
To me, that sounds like you're saying a point, telling someone to think a certain way, but not backing it up as to why they should think that way. Why should the person understand that huge advantage just because you say they should? A mass technological and societal utility, well why doesn't Litecoin have the same technological and societal utility, other than because you say it doesn't and you have your investments in Litecoin?
That whole sentence is an incredibly patronising and insulting, equivalent to "awww look at you little litecoiners with your little made up monies. You don't say why it doesn't mean anything, and you've not acknowledged that you've tried to find any meaning in it. Gold and Silver are both precious metals. One is less precious than the other in value but they still both are widely traded. Why is that not a possibility with Litecoin and Bitcoin? You do briefly mention Bitcoins sub-divisibility means it doesn't need a silver, but you don't back it up with any evidence or references to support your belief that the only reason people trade silver is because it's of a lesser value or more sub-divisible.
Also, if you accept "mBTC is the silver to BTC's gold" logic, then why have silver in the first place, why not just sell gold in milligrams? If a customer has e-mailed you and asked you to take an interest in Litecoin, then IMO, that's an added utility: Obviously, this is purely subjective, I believe a company should operate first and foremost for it's customers, not it's CEO or shareholders. If a customer wants something, it's in the interest of the company to provide that. Obviously this is my opinion, but it may illustrate why the person contacting you originally believed it might be worth contacting you under the impression that you as a company want to help him.
So you accept the aspect of Bitcoin that you value is the assessment against the competition of fiat. Again, all the altcoins are also in competition with fiat, and are for the most part, technologically very similar to Bitcoin. For example, value taken from Bitcoin because of its advantage over the competition of fiat can stem from a number of things, including its decentralised, pseudoanonymous, and lets anyone mine it accessible.
Litecoin has all these features, so why such a considerably lower value? Following on from above, if one of the values of Bitcoin is the accessibility of it, then the fact that litecoin uses scrypt and scrypt miners are competing against ASIC yet, it could be argued Litecoin is more accessible than Bitcoin.
Also, you don't say why speculating in Bitcoin is not an example of greater fool theory compared to altcoins. And finally, you missed what is, in my opinion, the biggest attributer of value to Bitcoin: Although you did hint in places. Cryptocurrencies are a socio-technical construct.
The social, human and temporal aspects of Bitcoin are why it is so successful compared to alts IMO. One of the biggest questions around nearly all altcoins is "who created it, what's their credentials. If anyone identified Satoshi, I wouldn't be surprised to see a dip in price. I think there's value to the "mythical Satoshi who sacrificed chances for fame and riches to make the world a better place. Imagine what effect it would have on world religions if it turned out Jesus' crucifixion wasn't intentional, and in fact it was a legal punishment because he'd got drunk and raped an animal?
On the temporal front: A lot of people started following Bitcoin because of their political ideals and lack of faith in central authorities evident in the handful of bitcoin surveys that have been done. I believe Bitcoin rode a wave of anti-authoritarianism and anti-centralisation fuelled by the massive cock up at the banks.
I think the fact that Bitcoin came first is also a big factor. If Bitcoin hadn't come around, and the Litecoin guys had just invented Litecoin on it's own shortly after, then followed by Bitcoin, I suspect you would most likely be arguing against Bitcoin as a "speculative experiment at the margin.
For example, did you know around the time of the Web being invented, there were other hypertext systems? Some of these systems were actually far more advanced than the Web. Despite being arguably, technologically and quantitatively weaker and of less value, the Web succeeded. So these are just my opinions of your original letter.
If somebody presented something that offered better security, transaction verification in milliseconds, better privacy, you would shit all over it. Because your money is tied up in bitcoin. No other reason at all. I'm not saying Litecoin is superior, I'm just saying that if it was superior, it wouldn't attract any attention from the bitcoin community.
And guess what, fools: It's no better than fiat in that respect. We've got bitcoin, litecoin, peer coin, namecoin, novacoin, primecoin, feathercoin, yourmomcoin, younameitcoin … the world will one day be awash in meaningless cryptocurrencies. If there were some real advantage we'd be trying to get it incorporated into Bitcoin. The view of Bitcoin as a "cryptocurrency" is what leads to this kind of confusion.
Bitcoin is a ledger; there isn't all that much use for more than one ledger. There's a little use for having a backup ledger to test things out on and maybe as a bit of a hedge and for the anonymity it can help provide by switching between the ledgers. Also, due to frictions in the fiat world, the altcoins may present some arbitrage opportunities on the BTC price if they were traded on the major exchanges.
But after the first backup ledger, the utility of a second and third one drops off very quickly. Not per year, but total, for all time. The market cap fluctuates more than that in a week. In other words, the inflation aspect is negligible. If there is a substantively superior currency to Bitcoin, I'll switch to it. We don't need to "love all cryptocurrencies" in order to be "pro-cryptocurrency.
It seems to me that the ability to do something mathematically useful while mining is of huge value Not all cryptocurrencies are created equal. Some are of more interest than others. Even so, an important feature of a cryptocurrency is what you can do with it.
How many people have it, how many businesses accept it, how many exchanges are there, how well funded is the network of full nodes, and such. This is known as the network effect, where the usefulness of something increases, the more people use it, and more people use it, because it becomes more useful.
So, of course did myspace, which failed, and now facebook looks to be faltering, why? Because both facebook and myspace, as companies, failed to deliver what their customers sought in the first place. For instance, wheras facebook got more useful to a point, it is now getting less useful everytime they update the website because they stuff more idiotic gunk into it that nobody wants.
But it's important to realize that bitcoin isn't a company, where some thickheaded management zuckerberg? Bitcoin is open source, it's a community. It has the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and correct mistakes. If you will, it's more like Linux than it is like Windows. Whereas windows was managed by Steve Ballmer into the ground with a string of bad management decisions that eroded the technical quality of the product as well as ruined the company stackranking , Linux is managed by linus torvalds and the lieutenants, which act as gatekeepers to patches coming in from the community.
So the reality is that while Microsoft won the PC-wars, they lost the smartphone wars. And while Apple where the first to decide conclusive victory, eventually Android took over the majority of market share. Community beats thickskull CEO. But the analogy to the latest social sites is a flawed one.
Because bitcoin isn't the new twitter. Bitcoin is a protocol, among other things. For the most part, the protocols that first establish themselves tend to stick around for a very long time indeed.
If you give me a few reasons as to why litecoin will overtake bitcoin or at least be on par, I promise I will consider it carefully. Not a concern because bitcoin's network is so large that it would take so much cpu power and money just to steal a bag of groceries.
I imagine for large purchases, waiting 30 minutes for 3 confirms is not a big deal when k's are on the line. I have invested in other alt currencies, because they have the potential to offer something bitcoin does not.
Litecoin does not offer anything over bitcoin, not that I know of at least. If you do, please let me know! Would you mind sharing which alts you're talking about? I've been meaning to diversify as well. There's a list of a bunch. Things different, like Peercoin. But I mainly look for alts that offer something completely different, not more of the same. Which is why I'm having trouble with litecoin at the moment, as I can't see how it differentiates itself. There are a lot of start-up alt currencies, so if that's your thing, you may find one that really catches your eye.
I found one with a lot of potential and invested early, but I'll see where it goes. I've always felt Litecoin was just Bitcoin's insurance policy say SHA is found to be flawed as an example.
If something in Bitcoin is flawed it's very unlikely to be SHA The first two layers should compose the majority of any market. When the third one becomes the leader of the pack, troubles emerge. Bitcoin is a brand for a commodity product. The fact is was a record year in terms of Initial coin offering ICOs. What differentiates Bitcoin from the others is mostly its brand name not all cryptocurrencies share the same features but technically there aren't many barriers to imitators.
Therefore, supply isn't really fixed for crypto currencies. Gold still seems to work much better as a limited supply commodity than mathematical puzzles. If Bitcoin retains its brand status and its main features, namely, unregulated and fixed supply, it might become a household name. However, the risk is mostly on its unregulated nature. As its market capitalization rises, more pressured regulators will be to present some regulatory framing for the virtual currency.
Therefore, I see regulation as an inevitably. Considering the crypto currency market in general, the argument of limited supply was refuted in the moment that common people started trading Etherum, Litecoin, and various others smaller coins. Bitcoin's supply might be finite, but aggregate supply of crypto currencies is potentially infinite. And that, my friends, is a key component of a craze like the tulip bulb of the 17 th century. Everyone started paying fortunes to buy bulbs that they would plant on their back yard to sell them later.
It is easy to guess how that ended. Bitcoin will not be heavily regulated, i. As we can see here, ICO's had a record year.