Topic: Altcoins are a prisoner's dilemma and not possible to beat Bitcoin - page 4. (Read 4528 times)

Why is your argument that cryptocurrency can't survive without Bitcoin, "Monero is a niche coin."? (and that's paraphrasing for the rare literalist who will assume I'm making a direct quotation when reading the quoted material above would lead most sophisticated readers to realize that it was paraphrasing).

When I got into cryptocurrency, there was a belief that Bitcoin was anonymous enough and Bitcoin held mid-90% of total cryptocurrency market cap--I'm not saying the two are related BTW, just issuing two facts of the time. Today Bitcoin accounts for low-70% of total cryptocurrency market cap and the Evolution/BTC-e fiasco showed that Bitcoin was not anonymous enough (at least not enough to avoid taint).

My point about stocks is that no one company is big enough to rule the stock market anymore than any one cryptocurrency is big enough to rule cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has some stupendous flaws, and if unproven Eth can get to 1 billion, an actual fungible currency can get to 1 billion.

I'm not against Bitcoin, but listening to Bitcoin supremacist angle and rail against altcoins as if Bitcoin was sacrosanct and untouchable, is to say the least, a bit much. Especially considering that Bitcoin may prove the niche coin (a kind of digital gold perhaps) and the discovery period of cryptocurrency may end with a coin (or maybe more) with substantial marketcaps larger than the coin that was first, but not so adaptable, and certainly not the limitless in its potential.

My guess is that while Eth, XMR, and other coins get auditioned by the market, we will see an even greater shift in the marketcap than the one that took place over the last year. Would it be that surprising if Bitcoin's market cap was in the ten of billions five years from now, but held less than 20% of the overall market cap? Maybe, but I would have never though it would be below 80% a year ago.

Eth adopting PoS makes it a permissioned ledger and not an actual decentralized currency as mentioned in the original post.  It also can't scale to be anything more than a proof of concept with no commercial viability.  It's not progression, it's regression:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-ethereum-paradox-1361602

Factom is a consensus ripoff of Bitshares except turned into a completely centralized company.  I don't know why the coin even exists.  They should have just opened a building for BTC services.

Maidsafe...the only thing I don't know enough about to comment on.  Haven't kept up with it's development.  I have yet to see anything that's an actual threat to Bitcoin so far though.


I knew a random Moneroer would show up eventually.  It's possible Monero or Zcash will occupy some type of niche market, but the anon wars of incrementalism would have to end first, and I'm not really seeing how that's going to happen.  You would need to subscribe to four ideas for Monero to really do something:

1)  Smooth's claim that currency is the killer app of the blockchain (likely plausible)
2)  Anonymity is a mandatory feature set of that app (less plausible)
3)  Governments would not make the anon currency extremely difficult to use while allowing BTC instead, crippling the anon currency market cap
4)  The need to believe on-chain anonymity would be useful in a clearing/settlement network.

If your key feature is not utilized in the likely evolution of the network, you're relegated back to the niche market.  That niche market could be worth billions of dollars though, so I guess it's all relative.  BTC on the other hand could go to trillions as a settlement layer.  There's just not an overwhelming need to make Bitcoin obsolete and switch when both coins operate roughly the same in the end game.  Ring signatures will likely block many further on-chain scaling options to boot.  So yea, it could be valuable, but likely not a threat to Bitcoin.

I'm sure the first company to ever issue stock said to investors, "But if we fail, no one will ever buy a stock again!"

Adapt or die.  

Bitcoin has first mover's advantage and build a solid user base. But it lags behind other altcoins in development or improvement. Many other altcoins has greatly supplemented it with new useful features and real life applications, like ETH, Maid, FCT etc. If Bitcoin is like this forever, I bet it will fail in the end.

Well Roach, i can't see anything to argue with LOL

Spoetnik Approved™

Sure. 

Wanna know something else?  Your bitcoin is probably not going to be worth shit either, one day.  Same with every currency, it rises, falls, becomes obsolete, and dies.  What's important is selling your borgcoin for the next form of currency before it becomes worthless.

Of course altcoins won't beat bitcoin, that's why there called altcoins.  But you can still make money/btc off them, and that's why people use them.  Pretty sure 99% of altcoin users know that their coin isn't gonna 'beat' bitcoin, but they still make a profit using their alts in the short term.

The real kicker.

Unless you were an early Bitcoin miner, everyone could be far better off and more wealthy by abandoning BTC and switching to some random turdcoin.  The problem here is, so many altcoins exist, either with invalid security models or negligble feature differences from Bitcoin, that there can never be convergence on which turdcoin the crowd should abandon BTC for and switch to.  

The next problem is, even if by some miracle of gawd this actually did happen, you would be degrading all credibility of your own crypto as a store of value at the same time.  If a random turdcoin could pass or even get close to Bitcoin, it would mean that at any time your new coin could just as easily be overthrown and go to zero.  This means the only logical move is likely to go with BTC or just stay out of the game period.

Distributed systems like Bitcoin aren't based on perfection, they're based on tradeoffs.  For instance, you could remove mining to save energy and create a closed loop, recursive, PoS system, but without the external entropy of mining, you now have a permissioned ledger and not a real decentralized currency.  It has no real fault or state recovery since it needs to reference the parts that have already failed in order to continue.  With Bitcoin PoW, there really is no terminal failure unless the cryptography itself becomes compromised.  That's why Bitcoin is more valuable than all the alternative methods you see.  A global economy can't go from working to dead at the drop of a hat with no way to fix it.

This means, yes, your Borgcoin is probably not going to be worth shit.