Topic: Coinbase CEO: bitcoin is far ahead! Altcoins are distractions! - page 9. (Read 10474 times)

Bullshit. http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/

Bitcoin's trading volume makes up 83% of all cryptos trading volume. That percentage is only increasing as time goes on.


Most people only use bitcoin to obtain shitcoins? What kind of fantasy land are you living in?


Agreed. Altcoins have the get rich quick scheme niche appeal.


Ever since I was born, every prediction I made has come true. (true story)

I predict that Bitcoin + sidechains will completely wipe out the shitcoin cesspool.


Yea, why would anyone want to trust this legally compliant/insured/audited exchange backed by the NYSE, USAA, and BBVA, when we could be using one of the many shitcoin exchanges created by sketchy anonymous basement devs in their spare time.

And the flame war rages on, people is so predictable...

Not all sidechains will be one way pegged, like micropayments/merchant sidechains, therefore it won't reduce the coin supply. Though I've never heard of reducing the coin supply being a real issue as btc is infinitely divisible.

When sidechains increase the uses of bitcoin, the adoption should increase along with liquidity.


Please do elaborate because you didn't explain at all how sidechains are not remotely scalable.

Monero is not a clone of Bitcoin and it offers something that Bitcoin does not - unlinkable & untraceable transactions using ring signatures. I find it useful and more interesting than bitcoin at this point.

TLDR move on to DRK coin instead!!!

That's a very sweeping generalisation that does no justice to the complexity of the altcoin market.

First - there are 2 very different contexts in which bitcoin can be appraised:

[1] - monetary context

[2] - technology context

In other words, in a monetary context bitcoin can be perfect (meet all the requirements for high quality monetary medium - like gold does) but in a technology context it may not be (like gold isn't:not very portable and not very transmittable).

Even in a monetary context, however, bitcoin has 1 missing property: fungibility. The fact that coins can be tracked on the blockchain detracts from bitcoin's suitability as a monetary medium by adversely impacting on its fungibility. Several altcoins address this deficiency directly and there is no sense in which that feature can be described as a "gimmick". It is a fundamental property of sound money and the market will endorse that fact.

Secondly, although bitcoin's deficiencies in a technological context may not detract from its marketcap or monetary suitability, they will detract from its useability. There are all kinds of areas where this is true. Take, for example, the "shares" based algos where shorts in pegged digital assets are matched against a natural demand for stable currencies for use in retail. This is a fundamental monetary mechanism which has been in use in societies for eons. Despite that, there's no way bitcoin itself will ever meet that market requirement, it's a completely different monetary animal.

Nor are sidechains ever likely to meet these requirements because the idea isn't remotely scaleable enough for the reasons I outlined here (and even if it was it wouldn't address the demand for genuinely de-coupled alt currencies).

In my opinion, many alt coins haven't even approached 10% of their potential value against bitcoin. Some of them could well exceed Bitcoin in marketcap even if BTC remains the cryto "reserve".

We won't know until adoption takes off because while there's no widespread adoption the altcoin's technological advantage is redundant and speculative only.

With widespread adoption however, there we'll see entire markets for which Bitcoin simply isn't suitable for practical reasons - too slow, too precious, too transparent, too whatever. At that point, I expect that some of the alts will rocket in value to fill the gaps.

This thread is like a who's who of shitcoin pushers.

Looks like a wanna be Bankster crying.

Coinbases "rick rolling" stunt was a HUGE red flag.  

I think they have some pretty serious issues going on.

I agree! If they do offer an advantage over Bitcoin, it is negligibly small. Bitcoin itself offers a lot of advantages and is itself something completely new compared to the traditional financial systems, it's got the first-mover advantage and doesn't need shorter block times or anything.

I couldn't agree more, Bitcoin is the first and only. The others are just noise, wastes of time...

That is Pretty right and straight forward

Coinbase CEO: bitcoin is far ahead! Altcoins are distractions!

Well he's NOT wrong!   

All altcoins are by nature, just copycat, pump and dump coins.  Pump the price a few points, gone tomorrow.  Gimmicky features, gimmicky logos, proof of stake 10%, oooh 10 second confirmation times must be good!

I guess he forgets the important fact that AltCoins, collectively, far superseede Bitcoin in total $$ trades.

He also forgets that many/most people only use Bitcoin to obtain AltCoins?

He also forgets (of fully understands) that his remarks only really benefit those with fat wallet?

He doesn't understand that Bitcoin has general appeal whilst AltCoins have niche appeal?

Although I'll agree that no-mining coins kill the purpose of cryptos, Bitcoin will at some point no longer be the "über alles" of cryptos.

So far all my predictions in cryptos have happened, so let me make some more crazy predictions.

Afloudist on that jackass!

Glad I don't trust them with any of my coin.

 I totally agree with him.

Anyone who invests in any shitcoin - this includes "Lite"coin and Doge by the way - will be sucking dicks for satoshi dust within 2-3 years.

To certain extent, I do agree that cryptocurrency future still lies on bitcoin. Altcoins though in the past have being used as a way to introduce new technology but unfortunately it has been severely manipulated especially those created as scamcoin. In a way or another bitcoin's reputation has suffer as a result mainly because when people view crypto, the first thing they will see is bitcoin and we are getting all the blame. It's time we go back to bitcoin.

That's also the position that some prominent VC's such as Fred Wilson of USV take
Incidentally, USV is an early investor in CB

Yes altcoins are distractions. But lets hope ethereum brings about a change next month.

I doubt very much that sidechains will prove a satisfactory substitute for truly independent, free-floating alternative cryptocurrencies.

For a start, welding the "alt" into a pegged straightjacket in Bitcoin creates more problems than it solves because it needs to 'hijack' a portion of the bitcoin money supply to generate the alt-coins giving rise to all kinds of liquidity problems (in Bitcoin, by taking coins out of supply and in the alts by limiting their ability to respond to market demand).

Bitcoin is already deflationary enough as it is - the altcoin market is a very nice way to address the need for a natural elasticity, monetary growth
and technological diversity without bitcoin developers constantly hammering out code and hardforks. Bitcoin can still form the reserve currency which "backs" all other alts (it's already is doing that - we price the 'alts' in BTC).

Secondly, what you see right now is the market working: it's showing you what the future's going to be. In other words, you can bolt on all the "warts" you want to Bitcoin physically but there will always be an altcoin market. There's just too much diversity in the world to be able to architect the future into a single technology. It reminds me of the 1990's when Microsoft tried to monopolise the browser market by making Internet Explorer an extension of Windows so the user had "everything in one platform". Sorry - no can do, even though your the biggest technology company in the world with 95% of adoption, your never bigger than people's imagination.

Sidechains is the kind of idea that someone has as a metaphor for what the market's doing already. It's a nice idea as an economic model but not remotely implementable in practice if the crypto-economy ever gets to a significant size because markets will just blow it away with things like decentralised exchanges which perform the same function but without all the liquidity and technology restrictions of sidechains.

What you just said made absolutely no sense.

You know bitcoin isn't a shitcoin when the NYSE, USAA, and BBVA invest in a bitcoin company.

Or when Microsoft, Dell, Newegg, Virgin Galactic, Paypal, Ebay, Square, Stripe, Namecheap, Wordpress, Cheapair, etc, start accepting bitcoin.