Topic: Could 2nd generation coins fail like 4/5th generation programming languages did? (Read 719 times)

IMO 4GL failed because it didn't become another "generation" at all, in the sense of superseding the dominant paradigm.

There may be a superseding of 3GL in the future which would be a true 4GL but will probably be called something else.

Fourth Generation languages didn't fail.

http://www.4d.com

Interesting analogy. At some point the improvements doesn't outweigh the already established 'network effect'. I feel we are far from that stage when it comes to cryptos, and we are barely in the first generation yet. In some 10 years we will probably bunch all the 2.0, 3.0 or whatever comes now and look at them as starting experiments.

If you ask a thousand people you will get a thousand different answers as to what is a second gen coin. What second gen means is very fuzzy.

Interesting analogy, a bit of a stretch to match up the firepower of the 5th. gen programme with the (relatively) miniscule research effort being devoted to cryptocurrency gen 2.

I was in the audience for one of the “5th gen” presentations, our group at HP Labs being deep into Prolog and all that logic programming stuff, we'd rocked up to find out what all the fuss was about. I recall that the talk was memorable for an initial stir of anticipation in the audience when the (Japanese) presenter apparently promised a discussion of “the three virgins”, a promise almost immediately cruelly dispelled by the words, “In virgin one, we started off with ...”.

Although, frankly, it wouldn't really have mattered if they'd been able to kick off with version 1000, the epistemological foundation was fatally flawed. By slide 4-ish they were presenting the architecture, I turned to my PM and indicated we could all go home at that point, safe in the knowledge that the MITI programme presented no real competition as it was doomed from the start.

According to the architecture diagram, the core was vested in the implementation of a pair of concepts that I'd never before seen referenced in an AI talk, “assimilation” and “accommodation”. Both are central concepts of Piagetian developmental psychology and were enormously controversial in a cognitive science context because of their long-standing and stubborn resistance to formalisation. (Not wrong per se, just a hugely brave undertaking, or a foolhardy one, depending on how familiar you are with the foundations of developmental psychology.)

And, inevitably, the historical view is continuously being revised:

“In spite of the possibility of considering the project a failure, many of the approaches envisioned in the Fifth-Generation project, such as logic programming distributed over massive knowledge-bases, are now being re-interpreted in current technologies. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) employs several layers of logic-based knowledge representation systems.”

Slides of the architecture of the semantic web make no mention of concepts drawn from developmental psychology (well, it is only virgin one, after all).


Cheers

Graham

Projects that brand themselves as being 2.0 are a minority in the altcoin scene. Most of the coins on CMC aren't 2.0 coins, although there are some 2.0 coins there which don't have large market caps such as NHZ, NFD, NAS, Qora, NODE, etc.


There isn't an exact definition but usually it refers to coins like NXT which have additional features on top of a simple currency system. In NXT's case, it has an asset exchange, alias system, voting, monetary system, etc. Usually the asset exchange is considered to be the most important distinguishing factor since it goes with the whole "colored coins" concept. Ethereum also goes beyond a simple currency system since it attempts to build apps on top of the blockchain.

So far, they have tended to be new source coins that are often Java-based although some like NODE aren't. Sometimes the Cryptonote coins are also referred to as being second generation coins since they are new source and introduce advanced anonymity features but this is more rare.

2nd gen or 3rd gen always replaces first gen in tech.  ALWAYS

What is a second gen coin? Everything after BTC? LTC? Is it cryptonote? Assets? Is it transparent chain?

Maybe it's just me but it seems 4th and 5th gen langs are the results of mathematicians trying to do something useful in the real world.

What I understand is that most of the features of fourth generation languages were later adopted into third generation languages through the addition of extra features and libraries. Fifth generation languages were more or less a complete failure though.


Usually the fourth generation moniker is restricted to application-specific languages whereas Python is a general purpose language with fourth generation characteristics:


I've dabbled in C++ (although not C) myself and I have a reasonable knowledge of Python. C++ does contain a large number of very low-level constructs but I'd still put it in the 3GL camp compared to the assembly languages that came before it.

It didn't. 

Can someone answer this?

How are Python and C considered in the same bracket? Python is one level of abstraction above C. The reference release CPython is implemented in C itself.

Maybe there should be a 2.5 generation for C above assembly but below higher level languages.

Most of these coins fail because most of their teams are incompetent in the first place.  And most of them rely on the community's money to get funded.  That cannot take you far enough where you want to go.

Now that was just the projects who are serious on giving us something.  The other coins were/are dead the minute they were released.  You want to see them?  Go to coinmarketcap.  It's like over 90% of them.

When did scripting die?

there isn't any 2nd generation yet, all those that claim to be 2.0 are a step backwards from bitcoin. original code doesn't mean better.

Definitely not a Bitcoin maximalist. I have 2/3 of my crypto savings in BTC. Rest is in NXT, NEM, Monero, BitShares, Counterparty, Qora, and many others such as DOGE, LTC, DRK, etc. I like the technology behind these projects, and I like the technology behind neural networks too but just because something has more features doesn't mean that it will be readily adopted by mainstream society.

As for Bitcoin not reaching a $1 million+ market cap until 2 years into its creation, I don't think you can really compare Bitcoin with altcoins today. Bitcoin was the first successful attempt at a decentralized cryptocurrency. Virtually nobody knew about Bitcoin until mid-2011 because all of the activity happened on an obscure mailing list frequented by cypherpunks and then to an equally obscure forum. The same is obviously not true for the crypto scene today.

I agree it's way too early to know what will happen in the long run. Bitcoin could experience another bubble like it did in 2011 and twice in 2013 or it could gradually start increasing in price again like it did in 2010 and 2012. If either did happen, then I would expect the market cap of NXT and many other 2.0 projects like Ethereum to reach the hundreds of millions. However, that doesn't answer the original question of whether they will unseat Bitcoin's position as the main cryptocurrency. Hence what I'm more interested in is the community's view as to whether or not these second generation currencies will a.) completely replace existing first generation currencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin altogether, b.) simply co-exist side-by-side, or c.) fizzle out and die.

Personally, I'm agnostic about the issue. Overstock sees decentralized 2.0 platforms such as NXT and Counterparty as being highly useful and this is a position that I agree with. That being said, Overstock is very much an outlier when it comes to cryptocurrencies and whether or not these features are enough to push the rest of the industry towards these newer systems is highly speculative and something that still remains to be seen.

Fourth and Fifth generation programming languages were supposed to have been the next level up from third generation programming languages. The first programming languages were machine code. Today, we refer to these as first generation programming languages. Second generation programming languages were assembly languages. They were a step up from machine code since commands could be entered in the form of mnemonics rather than a sequence of 1's and 0's. They were more memorable and easier to grasp for humans compared to pure machine code but they were still fairly complicated and tied to a particular machine architecture.

Third generation programming languages are what we use today. Examples include Python, C (and its derivatives), Java, BASIC, and Pascal.

Fourth and fifth generation programming languages were supposed to have been based on things like databases and neural networks. They were touted as being the next big thing that would revolutionize programming but instead they fizzled out and never became popular. Japan invested millions of dollars into fifth generation computer architecture research, much of which turned out to be a waste. Some of these languages aren't completely abandoned and are still used today but only in specialized contexts and for niche applications.

Could the same fate befall the current generation of second generation coins? What do you think is the likelihood that second generation coins like NXT and NEM will succeed and become an ubiquitous part of everyday life vs. the likelihood that such second generation systems and their features like asset exchanges will fail to take hold?