Topic: Coinbase CEO: bitcoin is far ahead! Altcoins are distractions! - page 8. (Read 10465 times)

Litecoin creator's comment regarding this

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/2x2f5z/charles_lees_response_to_brian_armstrongs_recent/

+1

CLAM is a interesting one to watch that is bellow your "radar".

Everyone who had Bitcoin, Litecoin or Dogecoin on May 12th 2014 already has CLAM.

Interesting test of PoS based on PoW.

I don't understand why people dislike Alts.  I mean Bitcoin is a alt currency as well really and it is a good thing that most of these Alts base of their value against Bitcoin.  

Plenty of people buy Bitcoin just to buy alts as well or use Bitcoin to cash out.

Amen to that, Brian. Well said.

Here's the world of alts, all 572 of them. How many still have active blockchain servers running? Below #294, MalibuCoin, the market cap is below $1000. Is anybody keeping the lights on for those losers? Somebody has to keep at least one miner running for each alt to keep its blockchain alive.

Below Bitcoin, Ripple, and Litecoin, it doesn't look good. Below Darkcoin at #5, there's so little volume you couldn't really trade them or use them.

Paycoin, at #10, is now down to 75 cents. Remember how the Paycoin price was going to be maintained above $20 by "strong hands"? Paycoin was a pump and dump; no question about that now.

Whats going on over here? 

I think Armstrong is right about alts but think that side chains have an important role to play in making blockchain tech useful and scalable

Yes! they clearly do not have any advantage over bitcoin and they never will!
But also some altcoins just cannot be ignored like LTC , Doge ...

This is great advice. Sidechains are an innovative platform that will takeover a struggling ecosystem when problems arise and keep it built up for future generations to prosper with.

That isn't the question. The question is "what altcoin would you *want* to implement as a sidechain". Sidechains are a solution looking for a problem - one which doesn't exist IMHO.

Take a look at this article: http://insidebitcoins.com/news/sidechains-could-turn-bitcoin-into-the-reserve-currency-of-the-internet/27132

The title of the article is "Sidechains Could Turn Bitcoin into the Reserve Currency of The Internet".

There are 2 problems with this title in my opinion.

1: A reserve currency is an monetary concept, not a technology one
2: Monetarily, Bitcoin ALREADY IS the reserve currency of the internet because all other currencies are priced in it on exchanges

Also, I wouldn't agree with the idea that "the real world tends towards one currency". In fact the real world tends towards diversity in all aspects. Just because you have "common" currencies doesn't mean they can't be diverse.

Re. this....


...what's to stop the market independently valuing the sidechained alts where there are liquidity deficiencies in one sector and excesses in another ? I realise that Bitcoin's value just gets adjusted in response and everything evens itself out, but that's what happens at the moment anyway. I don't need to "lock up" any bitcoin to know that my alt currency is backed - I can see the exchange value in the markets.

Having sidechains dangling off Bitcoin just makes for a messy, ambiguous currency that's lost all its fungibility because some parts of the money supply are in demand and others aren't.

If you look at an alt currency like say Bitshares, you'll see that it already implements a concept like sidechains except much more elegantly in that it makes a proper distinction between economic value and technological value. Collateral in one currency is locked up against liquidity in another (just like sidechains proposes to do), there is no limit to the number of collateralised currencies (or "digital assets" as they're known) you can collateralise and they are potentially pegged (economically, not technologically) to a fiat value or other real world asset. The difference with bitcoin is that the Bitshares blockchain is *designed to support this economic model*. It supports all the mechanics required to properly collateralise and maintain the liquidity in the secondary asset currency. Not only that it can support a peg against an external asset (as opposed to sidechains which peg against bitcoin - the base asset) and allow it to inflate in exchange for a revaluation of the underlying currency.

All the sidechains concept is doing economically is backing an altcoin with bitcoin and guaranteeing the existence of the underlying collateral - something that can be done by 3rd party enterprises and markets (such as the Winky ETF).

Obama and other world leaders should give speeches to their nations about how all these damn alts are distracting from the BTC technology

To further some points I've read so far... altcoins pertaining to specific markets are useful & perhaps more practical. - This seems to be a common argument many are making and I would have to agree with it. An example is Amazons implementation of "amazon coins." They see the benefits of crypto, their high level execs which are paid millions of dollars a year decided it is most beneficial to create a coin rather than use an existing one.

And I think that's true for many niche markets. You can tailor the code as you see fit. For these reasons altcoins are not "distractions," but they will not replace bitcoin. Bitcoin is a first-mover and as such has experienced many issues that other second-mover altcoins were able to avoid. However, the future of crypto will be determined by the adoption of bitcoin. There are many people with great stakes in bitcoin and their push for mainstream adoption will couple with bitcoins inherent value to raise the price and further investor confidence

It might surprise you to find out that the majority of my crypto holdings is in BTC - not alts.

Like I said - I've always seen Bitcoin as being "the one" and have had plenty of arguments in the distant past where I took your side.

But things are not black and white. The last 2 years have told us somethings which we would be stupid to ignore. What they've told us is that the economics of crypto and the technical evolution of crypto are 2 distinct paths. The alts have carried the technology forward while Bitcoin continues to carry the value forward.

In the face of that you can't just say that "alts are dying". The advance they've made technologically over bitcoin is massive. Nor will sidechains address the technology issue because - as I've already banged on about - it leaves the market wide open for decentralised alt-currencies that are not sidechained to bitcoin but still carry bitcoin's value (like they are doing today). So all I'm saying is that however "nice" sidechains look from a bitcoin perspective, they don't look that great from a market perspective.

Nice, you finally see the light!  Please come over from the DRK coin basement where no one trades and no one outside of that basement knows it exists.  Step into the BTC light my liege!

I can expect exactly that. Sidechains are just altcoins without the get rich quick scheme.

Please do tell which specific altcoins features cannot be implemented as sidechains.

It may look like one to you but it isn't one.

If you can't tell the difference money and a communications protocol then I can't help you, but be advised that markets sure can.

Sure looks like a Protocol stack to me.





Uhm....is DRK Coin even trying to be a Cryptocurrency?

I'm not saying sidechains can't work - I'm saying you can't remotely expect them to displace alt coins because they are *not* altcoins.

Of course, nobody can know how this will all go in the future, but I think one of the things that characterises your view and doesn't mine is your comparison of Bitcoin to TCP/IP.

Such an analogy is a big mistake.

Bitcoin is not at all like the fundamental internet network layers. For a start it isn't an international technological standard, it is a private monetary brand. I wouldn't even liken it to a high level protocol (of which there are many such as http, JSON, SMPT etc).

The market can come up with new decentralised currencies anytime it wants and have them incrementally adopted. What matters isn't whether it's mechanically interfaced with bitcoin but rather that it's economically interfaced with it by way of a market value.

Maybe sidechains will have a future and maybe they won't, but I don't think it will have any bearing on the future for alts. Cryptocurrencies are already extremely fluid and interchangeable - far more so than fiat currencies. That fact alone implies there will be a comfortable co-existence to mutual benefit of bitcoin as a reserve and altcoins as a kind of "transport / liquidity layer".


It would suggest no such thing. Bitcoin lost 80% of its marketcap against fiat last year. Are you concluding from that that Bitcoin has no future, is "shrinking and..will be completely phased out" ?

And why are you calling it the "shitcoin market" ? Do you want to be taken seriously or not ?

Bitcoin has survived as long as it has because that altcoin market exists. Altcoins have demonstrated that blockchain technology is not limited to the monetary and technological properties that bitcoin alone exhibits. It has served as a stepping stone and a liquidity engine for bitcoin trading as well as all kinds of innovative tech evolutions. The reason its marketcap declined is exactly the same as the reason bitcoin's declined - speculative consolidation and profit taking. Technical development, innovation and market involvement however are more active than ever.

I don't know why I'm even defending this point of view because it's so self evident. The idea that alts are not going to have a huge role if the crypto-economy blows up is ludicrous. Of course they will - bitcoin has already been left in the dust by altcoin technology and sidechains are not even on the drawing board.

As I say - BTC will likely have the role of a cryptocurrency monetary reserve, but any alt that has a value measurable in bitcoin which is infinitely more practical in specific markets is not going to disappear.