Topic: delete - page 3. (Read 5193 times)

Hey this guy can code!  And how do you know?

Yeah Bansal != Satoshi.

About the only new block chain and cryptocurrency I can foresee any success for in the future, other than Bitcoin, will be an inflationary one backed by BTC. This will serve the dual purpose of having a decentralised currency with a predictable inflation rate - therefore putting to rest the "deflationary spiral" arguments - and a chance at becoming really popular because, being backed by Bitcoin, it won't be seen as competing against it.

Solidcoin will never threaten Bitcoin.

I do own some bitcoins, and I am not saying this because I want to preserve their value.
When my money is at stake, I am very agnostic and practical; if I really thought that solidcoin had the slightest possibility of replacing bitcoin, I would certainly diversify and buy some.

However, I am not doing it (just as I did not buy ixcoin or i0coin). Here is why:

- Solidcoin would have a future if bitcoin did not exist. Unfortunately, guess what, Bitcoin was invented 2.5 years before, and strong network effects ensure that it will keep its dominant position. Bitcoin cannot be threatened by a clone. I order to suceed, an alternate blockchain needs to propose something really different.
- The differences between SC and BTC are not monetary differences, but instead technical differences of the protocol (difficulty retargetting, time interval between blocks), and modifications of the client, that are wrongly presented as differences of the currency (encryption, buttons). On the monetary side, BTC and SC are exactly the same thing, because they both offer a currency that has a limited supply. In other words, solidcoin is just another Bitcoin clone.
- If another blockchain posed a real threat to the value of Bitcoin, it would be possible to update Bitcoin, as the OP suggests. Such an update is technically trivial, but it needs to be accepted by a majority of miners. If the threat was real, I am sure that such a majority would be quickly found. At this point, however, I do not see this happening. The protocol differences implemented in SC do not provide a real advantage. Developers seem to agree that a 3-minutes interval between confirmations poses security problems, especially in a large network.
- Solidcoin's market cap is currently neglectible compared to Bitcoin. I do not think that this will ever change. Solidcoin's network might stay alive for some time, but that does not mean that its value will take any significance.
- There is no evidence for a real economy sustaining solidcoin's value. The merchants that have decided to "accept solidcoin" were bought with bounties. So much for their objectivity.
- Solidcoin's "early adopters" (I am talking of people who buy solidcoins) are speculators who might dream that solidcoin will experience the same value increase as bitcoin. This is the only thing that sustains solidcoin's value, because there's no economy there. Unfortunately, this will not happen. Again, it could happen only if bitcoin did not exist :-) History happens only once.

so, if you are planning to invest some money in solidcoin, think again. it is a zero-sum game. In order for you to win, someone has to lose.
OTOH, if you are a miner looking for profitability, just be rational and go for it, but do not hold your solidcoins too long or you will be burnt :-)

Perhaps maintaining the codebase on a network that performs $M of transactions per day is too much for a handful of unpaid volunteers? A common mantra around here is that "the market will take care of it." When needs are not being met, then a competitor will eventually emerge that attempts to satisfy those needs. What we should all be afraid of is a large international megacorporation (Google, Amazon, Citi, Apple) deciding they can fill those needs better with teams of highly paid programmers and unlimited funds.

That the world's foremost cryptocurrency cannot reliably encrypt its most important file is just...sad. Also, it seems that a couple months have gone by and *still* nobody has gotten their collective shit together to get defensive trademarks for Bitcoin, despite evidence that lawyers around the world are doing so. The inability of this project to adapt and change will eventually result in Bitcoin 1.0 in becoming a footnote in Wikipedia.

We should have an "Obvious attempts at false market rumors" subforum and move these posts there.

Not every way, iirc, VHS could record longer on one tape than Betamax, which was a crucial reason that it won.

Either way you would have to put together 51% of the hashpower of the network to pull it off, I guess longer blocks could make the attack more inconvenient, but they would probably still do it if they had the capability.

Bottom line is this, ten minutes is too long.  If you want to just keep trading these things among yourselves fine, if you want these to actually be widely used in the real world this problem has to be solved.  And no I'm not letting anyone walk off with my stuff with zero confirmations, or even just one confirmation.  And my customer isn't going to sit there for an hour to wait to leave with the stuff he's trying to buy.  Bitcoin with 10 minute confirmations is a niche currency for certain internet transactions, at best.

thank you for this serious question.
did you receive the 25 SC bounty after posting it ?

(see http://solidcoin.info/bounties.php )

Presumably you'll have multi-protocol clients developed that can support the various flavours and blockchains that exist.  So in that case a merchant who takes the time to incorporate btc into his site will just incorporate all the different flavours in one go at no extra cost.

IMHO the key is volatility.  Since transaction fees are all negligible and if we assume all the different versions are equally secure, the only thing a merchant would care about is the volatility of the different versions.  You're always going to want the one that is least likely to fluctuate w.r.t your outgoings.  e.g. if you are reselling cars that you bought with USD, you want to receive whatever will fluctuate least against USD.

Unless I missed something, then that's correct, but only if you interpret it in a certain way.
With the same relative hashpower vs. the rest of the network, over the same # of blocks, chances of finding X blocks in a row are the same, doesn't matter if avg. time/block is 10 seconds or 10 days.
But... wouldn't a theoretical attacker care more about how much time it takes to get a successful double-spend instead of how many blocks?

ITT: people think mining 6 1-minute blocks in a row is as difficult as mining 6 10-hours blocks in a row

Well done SolidCoin advertisement

The irony is back then, Sony was against copy protection...

To revert a part of the block chain, you need to do as much work (in terms of hashing power) as was done to create the part of the block chain you're trying to revert. It does not matter whether this corresponds to one or to one million blocks. The frequency of blocks has nothing to do with security - it is only a trade-off between convenience and frequency of stale blocks (caused by network latency).

However, if you do not care about the security the block chain offers you (for example when you trust the sender not to try a double-spending attack), faster blocks are more useful.

true, this.

look what happened with betamax vs VHS. basically, betamax was better in every way yet VHS won out

The amount of time is irrelevant, it is the amount of blocks you know have made it onto the block chain that gives you confidence.  Six confirmations is six confirmations, weather it took an hour or fifteen minutes.  After six confirmations there is very little risk that your transaction is going to end up on an orphan block, and as long as difficulty is in balance you are not going to have blocks solved every few seconds.

Why would solidcoin block propagate faster if they are built the same as bitcoin blocks? With similar size they will even be a tiny bit slower, as there are more headers per hour... Generating 60 1-minute blocks is still as hard as generating 6 10-minute blocks. To be as secure as 6 Bitcoin confirmations you still need as many confirmations as the *scamcoin generates per hour on average.

With high block frequency you run into more forks, more scalability issues (propagation really is the key here - and already on Bitcoin with just a few thousand nodes it can take a few seconds until a block has propagated) and SC still doesn't solve the issue that transaction relaying is not rewarded/encouraged in any way.

no store is really going to take SC/IX/I0 at this stage.

Volatility is even higher than bitcoin.

BTC is going to remain relevant because it was first. SC has some differences but many similarities, however, a place that accepts Bitcoins doesn't just automatically accept SolidCoins too. Two different block chains entirely.

Even if SolidCoin is ten times better in every measurable sense, if Bitcoin is accepted at ten times as many places, Bitcoin will keep existing.

This is why Discover isn't dead.

[edit] Er, this is why Discover isn't COMPLETELY dead.