Topic: From 11 coins to 2!.. BTC and PPC win for me and here's why. - page 2. (Read 3506 times)

BTC = long term investments, big transactions (like buying a car or real estate)
LTC = everyday use for small transactions.

BTC is just too slow for everyday use with small amounts. LTC wins here IMO.

Hi Luckybit,

your posts are long and frequent, but I fear you have come to a deadlock in all your arguments, especially about that scarcity matter of coins.

In some of the first posts I read from you in another thread it appeared to me that you have a point, but now your arguments appear to me to become less and less reasonable, I see an increasing number of unproven claims in your post in the best case, and even more evidently wrong statements and assumptions.

"Bitbar" is even more scarce.

This statement is completely Illogical and of course untrue, it is neither proven by logic reasoning nor by market experience.

Except from that, crypto coins should be designed for use as an exchange and storage medium, not for collection. If collection coins are requested by the market participants (i.e. not coins to be used for payments), I propose to introduce a coin with a block generation rate of 6 hours per block. (I am mentioning this, because you repetitively make your arguments from the perspective of the collector, not from the perspective of the user, see also further below)

...which seems to prove your arguments wrong (sorry  ). It seems that Mincoin is the same as Litecoin/Feathercon, with the sole difference of another cap limit. This makes it the best example of a pump&dump scheme. (Avg block generation time in last 24 hours: LTC 2.5 minutes, FTC 34 minutes (!), MNC 1.9 minutes).

You also have to learn that you cannot make psychology theories about people's behavior out of nothing. If people behave different from what you originally thought, you have to question your theories and not try to persuade the world that they should behave acc. to your theories - this is doomed to fail. (I am saying this because my impression is that this is what you are trying to do, perhaps unconsciously - please forgive me if I am wrong [now I am also trying to be a psychlogist  ])

So you call Feathercoin a pump&dump, but Minecoin is not, just because the latter has the decimal point shifted by 1 and a half digits? This speaks for itself. Hey, then kilo-FTCs are no pump&dump, but milli-MNCs are a very bad pump&dump scheme!

Yes, there are 4 times more LTC than BTC. But if LTC turns out more useful in some distant future due to shorter confirmation times, this *may* be conceived as an added value and be reflected in exchange rates acc. to supply & demand. But it can also be that LTC never comes close to 25% of BTC value, just because BTC stays ahead in terms of infrastructure/market penetration for merchants, service providers, clients, apps etc. (just like people stay with facebook even if google+ has better features). The value does not only depend on the number of coins.

No! Not because it is less scarce. If the price (vs. FIAT) goes up and down in parallel to BTC it's just because both are crypto-currencies, i.e. the same kind of commodity!

Of course it is! It just exists for only 1 month now, so this is much too short to draw conclusions w.r.t. exchange rate on illiquid markets. By the way, the currency mMNC (milli-Mincoins) is less scarce than Bitcoin by a factor of ca. 500, still they always have a fixed ratio to MNC, namely 1:1000, although MNC are more scarce by a factor 2. Acc. to your theroy MNC and mMNC should evolve in different directions, which renders your theory self-contradictory.

I cannot believe this argument is meant to be serious. And by the way, crypto-coins should be designed to work as a medium of exchange and storage, that's their intrinsic value. If crypto-currencies were there to serve collector's needs, they would be pump&dump ponzi schemes, so every responsible crypto-coin designer should NOT listen to requests from coin collectors! This idea is insane. Is it possible that I am feeding a troll while writing these lines?
I propose all passionate coin-collectors start collecting kBTCs from today on - they are 1000 times more scarce than Bitcoins and collecting them will certainly be fun  

Also my kLTCs go up and down fully in parallel to LTC, although LTC is 4 times less scarce than BTC, whereas one kLTC is 250 times more scarce then BTC (1 kLTC = 1000 LTC, by definition).

Likewise, I have mBTCs (I can even set the mBTC unit in the bitcoin-qt or Elecrum client, and soon you will be able to trade mBTCs also on exchanges!), but this does not suddenly make it a better or worse coin.

I also have a MichaelCoin, which is defined as 1 MichaelCoin = 123.45 BTCs. If you are a passionate coin collector though, I am willing to sell you one MichaelCoin for only 199 BTC!

So all this is just a matter of definition, you are totally over-interpreting the relevance of cap limit of coins.

Why? Who is "we"? "we" coin collectors? But anyway - such coins already exist! One of them is the MBTC (Mega-Bitcoin), I call it MBC now, that is defined as 1MBC=1,000,000 BTCs. One MBC is currently worth $100 million each. Unfortunately, I only own 0.00....01 MBCs at the moment, because they are so scarce.

This is *exactly* the same for Mincoin, it is no less a pump-and-dump coin. Just because the nominal cap limit is shifted by a few digits for one coin, it doesn't make it a fundamentally different coin. But you are suggesting all the time that this does make a fundamental difference, which is really ridiculous.

Grains of sand have no value as medium of exchange, as opposed to crypto-coins. So they have no intrinsic value unlike crypyto-coins. I think you are again arguing from the collector's perspective, not from the user's perspective, otherwise you wouldn't have come up with this comparison.

You (or "they") cannot just "buy them *all* up". The percentage of *all* coins that one is able to buy up does not depend on where the decimal point of this coin was defined to be located. The cap limit is fully irrelevant when talking about percentage of coins.

Note: The fact that some alt-coins are valued in strange relation to their cap-limits on some exchanges does not mean that the alt-coins are designed wrongly, but it just shows that lots of inexperienced participants are active on the exchange markets at this early stage. This would certainly change once professional trades start benefiting from these irrationalities.

These numbers are purely arbitrary.

So Bitbar overdid it... "interesting"  . I think if the block generation time for bitbar would be higher (a few hours on average), bitbar could become the perfect "collector coin"  , similar to gold bars (=the bitbar logo).

You are again making the false assumption that coins that are less scarce than BTC are falling when BTC is falling (i.e. have a fixed exchange rate towards BTC), whereas coins that are more scarce than BTC are not falling when BTC is falling (i.e. they rather keep their exchange rate towards FIAT currency, not BTC). This theory is far-fetched and clear nonsense. The prices are made on the exchange markets and do not follow the rules you are proclaiming here. Normally I would have expected such argument from a naive person or from a troll, but maybe you are just mis-led by your own ideas and have not yet realized that you have run too long with your thoughts in the wrong direction.



Morover, about another topic, on Demurrage with Freicoin:

You again hang on to the same error. Whatever the basic idea of a coin is (here it is the demurrage), this idea does not make more or less sense depending on whether you place the decimal point 1 or 2 digits further to the left or to the right.

Your reasoning is arbitrary. One could equally well plead that those owning much should pay less demurrage (in percent terms, not in absolute terms of course) because they are already paying a lot to the community anyway.
I think both extremes are nonsense (apart from being not realizable). With Freicoin, in fact those who own little pay little demurrage, those who own much pay much demurrage. In fully linear relation to their funds. This is the fairest and simplest mechanism I can possibly think of. Effectively it acts like the principle of osmosis (to draw an analogy to biology), and it operates in opposite direction as today's debt interest based system, it means transferring wealth from the rich to the overall community. But I do not want to go into this here any further, it is macro-economical stuff and also rather political.

Kind regards,
Michael

(hope I did not feed a troll here, and if not, hope I could help)

Isn't novelty something we want in a niche coin? I admit it does not enhance the technology so from a technologically perspective it's not new (it's just Litecoin with different math), but from a psychological and economic perspective it's very different. You can tweak Litecoin and come up with a better Litecoin and this is still valuable if it's proven to actually be better based on those tweaks. If Mincoin had active development I would be confident in it's long term future, but because of it's tweaks I think it has a niche it's filling which no other Litecoin based coin effectively fills so it's safe for now.

I told you some niche coins are to be collected as a store of value and not as a currency. Gold bars, where do you spend them? You can't spend gold but you can buy it knowing it's value will keep going up over time. So what I'm saying is we need some coins just for that purpose to satisfy long term coin collectors who have an entirely different psychology from the short term speculator types who love Chinacoin and Feathercoin. The long term bulls and long term collectors want more coins like Mincoin while the short term profiteers want more coins like Feathercoin and Chinacoin. The technologists want to see a more secure or an anonymous coin.

I'm of a technologist and long term collector mindset. I'm not into the short term profiteering mindset unless I literally have no other way to make profit. The lack of balance is causing the collector types to contemplate or even go into mining or buying stuff like Feathercoin because when Feathercoin is 400% more profitable than any other coin at the time there is no better option but to mine that. But it doesn't change the fact that no one is going to collect Feathercoins and the niche exists for collectors.

The actual currency which will become mainstream should be Bitcoin, as it's the best technology. The candidates to beat Bitcoin in technology right now would be limited to Netcoin and PPcoin. Litecoin only beats Bitcoin in speed of transaction, but not in security. PPcoin may someday beat Bitcoin in security and Netcoin can improve on PPcoin. I agree more thought has to go into the technology and security side but at the same time the coins have to fill different psychological niches.


And that is the problem I have with Demurrage. I don't see how it can practically work. It's not going to be very fair to the people who don't have many coins to have to be taxed. I'm not against taxes or transaction fees but when those fees get too high people are going to transfer their wealth to another coin.

Unenforceable.. you have no way of counting the coins a person owns.. multiple accounts; multiple wallets even.

Freicoin features demurrage which is an anti-hoarding tax. I like the idea but I don't like the fact that there are 100 million coins. Perhaps if it were much more scarce the idea might make sense because I do think if we end up with a Bitcoin elite as some have termed it, where you have people who become Billionaires from mining or buying Bitcoin, those people should ultimately be made to invest or spend. I don't agree with the rate or numbers chosen by Freicoin to do it. I think for instance Demurrage shouldn't take place until we actually have Bitcoin billionaires. I think also the rate has to somehow be adjusted against something else. To just promote GDP just to promote GDP isn't a good idea because there could be situations where there is nothing useful to buy, and to force people to spend when theres nothing reasonable to spend it on isn't good. Also it might encourage short term investments rather than long term, and also how many coins would you need to have before demurrage kicks in?

If you have a total of 21 million coins like with Bitcoin and you have demurrage to that, then perhaps everyone who has over 50,000 coins should pay the hoarding tax? In this case it starts making sense and I would think it's a good idea if the size of the tax increases with the length of time the coins are hoarded in combination with the amount.

Like if someone hoards only 50 coins but hoards it for 10 years that should not trigger demurrage but if they are hoarding 50,000 coins over 5 years it should.

Mincoin offers nothing but novelty and the creaters failed to create the excitement at the start - just like they are rebooting SC with no fanfare. Doing it after the fact is much harder and eventually people will tire of it and look to BTC because that can be spent and in reality there is zero difference but for the fraction.

If you're a fan of Mincoin.. where can you spend it? Same for Bitbar and all the other wannabes.. they really need to make themselves useful, which is the big opportunity - making alt-coins real world useful and not just an obscure investment for geeks.

I perhaps should have mentioned FreiCoin.. I don't understand it entirely but it does look to me close to something that the Islamic Banking community might be ok with.. large market there. I expect it would need a tweak or two. I'm not sure why anyone would buy it as investment, so perhaps an Islamic Bank would have to premine and make equivalent for it to work well.

0.003 but I see your point. My point is that new coins have to offer new psychology, new math, new technology, to fit into different niches. People who like to collect coins love limited editions and it's just a niche. Coins will eventually figure out how to fill that niche and these limited edition coins will become incredibly valuable. In my opinion these coins should be treated as the store of value or store of wealth commodities so that other coins can focus more on acting like a currency.

The point is we need coins we can buy or mine which might someday be worth $10 million each if we hold onto them. We also need coins which we can use to make microtransactions really fast. Somehow Mincoin is able to hit the psychology of both these activities by allowing for long term holders to save them hoping they'll be worth more than Bitcoin even though we all know that probably wont happen, but at the same time for actual transactions it's much faster than Bitcoin or even Litecoin. Go and test it out.

The flaw in Mincoin is it does not seem to be under active development. The creator changed the math of Litecoin which altered the psychology drastically and made it more deflationary and I think this is a good thing because we actually needed a deflationary scarce version of Litecoin. But what happens next with it?

PPcoin is also needed because I think long term we all know Proof of Work isn't going to work. Mining isn't going to be profitable for much longer and the writing is on the wall. Transaction fees aren't going to change that either and if Bitcoin tries that route then PPcoin and Proof of Stake coins will be cheaper and will win.

Forever 0.002..

The problem with Feathercoins, Chinacoins and other pump-dump coins is each new coin seems to up the total number of coins making it less and less attractive to long term collectors. Basically the only reason anyone buys these coins is for short term profits because they have no long term profit capability when theres trillions of them.

Go ahead, collect a few hundred out of the trillions upon trillions of grains of sand on the beach and then sell them in exchange for a pile of feces. It's just pump and dump. The way to make it work and I keep advocating it, the supply of these new alt coins has to be rare enough that you can't just go and buy them all up instantly, or mine millions of them in a day. It should be scarce like say 11 million, 10 million, even 5 million, and it should take a while to mine large amounts.

I think Mincoin has it right but thats just one coin. I think Bitbar went too extreme about it but as a concept it's going in the right direction. People will trade their Bitcoins for coins which are worth more. If a Bitbar is worth 10 Bitcoins now it makes perfect sense to trade 10 Bitcoins for a Bitbar so that if the price of Bitcoins collapses you've put your Bitcoin into the Bitbar. It makes sense to trade Bitcoin for Mincoin each Mincoin is worth twice the value of a Bitcoin long term. This makes sense for long term holders and collectors.

It does not make much sense for speculators who make up the vast majority of the people on exchanges. They want Feathercoin and Chinacoin because they have no intention of investing for 2-3 years, they are thinking 2-3 weeks or 2-3 days. That is the difference between scarce coins and the over produced coins. The over produced coins generate immediate profits because they are mined quickly, instamined or premined, and theres if you mine a billion in a few days then hype it up while you DDOS the exchanges so the price of Bitcoin drops, then yeah you can make a major profit doing that several times until people figure out the script.

A genuine coin offers either new technology, increased scarcity, or both. If the mathematics and psychology are not changed due to increased scarcity, or if the technology isn't new, it's probably a scam coin. Mincoin had new mathematics and psychology of scarcity making it superior to Litecoin in many ways. If Litecoin for example has direct competition it will probably be from Mincoin. PPcoin wouldn't compete with Litecoin it would replace it entirely. Litecoin wont be able to replace Bitcoin because the people who have Bitcoins when 1 Bitcoin is worth $100,000 if we get there, will never trade 1:1 for Litecoins when Litecoins are worth $10,000 or $20,000. The difference between $100,000 and $20,000 is so huge psychologically that there is no way Litecoin could ever overcome it and let's be honest. If Bitcoin were $100,000 Litecoin would probably be more like $3000-4000. It simply will not be able to compete with coin collectors who will sell all their Litecoin holdings for Bitcoin the moment it looks like Bitcoin could reach $100,000. This dump will keep the price of Litecoin from ever getting that high but it also means less people will use it because the value of Bitcoin in dollars will be so far beyond it.

So one thing to consider with all this is what value potential does that coin have in USD? The coin has to compete with USD, not just Bitcoin, not just alt-coins. Someday we may have cryptocurrencies where 1 coin is worth $10 million USD, but that cryptocurrency wont be Bitcoin because the math makes it improbable, and it wont be Litecoin because Litecoin moves the math to the opposite direction, so for long term holders and collectors we will need coins which will have value increase over the years if successful. A $10 million dollar coin is possible if there are only 5 million total that exist. These are the kinds of coins that coin collectors would trade BTC for to buy in hopes that they will be worth $10 million. Just as long as the technology is better than BTC I think it's fair.

It's funny when things are 'obvious' on messageboards, it's usually off base. Way to completely misunderstand the FTC community. Then again, it's the Internet, everyone is rich, good looking and right.

The only coin that is more scarce than Bitcoin is Mincoin. People will only collect coins if the next generation of coins are more scarce than Bitcoins.

21 Million Bitcoins? There are 10 million Mincoins, plus Mincoins are based around scrypt and have fast transactions. Yet no one mentions Mincoins when they talk about alt-coins. It's always inflated overly produced pump and dump coins like Feathercoins. There are more Litecoins than Bitcoins so Litecoins will never be worth as much and their value is forever tied to the value of Bitcoin. If the price of Bitcoin goes down so goes Litecoin because Litecoin is less scarce than Bitcoin.

This is not true of Mincoin. When the Price of Bitcoin goes down Mincoin stays the same. PPcoin also stays the same when the Price of Bitcoin goes down. Scarcity does matter for collectors, we want a limited edition coin to collect.

Ya things are getting a tad ridiculous with MinCoin, BitBar, YAC (like is this dev dude even trying? YAC? )

But, hey, this is The Internetz.  Hopefully in this Darwinian system the truly better coin will rise to the top if it gets created.

I think there is space for a 3rd major coin, behind BTC and LTC, that has very quick confirms, for purchasing things online... but will just have to see where the coin falls.

All these scam coins do take money out of BTC's worth but hey, there isn't anything that could or should stop them from being created. Hopefully ppl will just get sick of the truly useless ones and become more scam-aware and just be more hesitant to use them.   

I think you're where I was yesterday

Also, I got the humour but then it also did capture rather well the idea, of how Alt-TC are convincing themselves they are successful by saying they are successful over and over..

Guess humour isn't universal!

I find a big problem with your thinking - its purely based on a very limited specification in a very small window.

I agree that BTC and PPC are cool coins, however, LTC is also cool for the same reason.  Even FTC has something to say and suddenly we are up to 4 coins!

The problem is that you are looking for an ideal, and the world doesn't work like that.

Different coins are focused on different problems, and each will be great at their speciality.  Eventually, we will find some which are good at a number of different things, and they will become more popular, and eventually, we will have 7 or 10 or 35 different coins with enough of a user base to be considered mainstream. Maybe only BTC and PPC will be used by loads of people everywhere, but I very much doubt its going to be that clear cut!

Its expecting that only 2 coins which have already been developed will make it all the way through to mainstream adoption, regardless of future developments, where you got it wrong!

Yes, I couldn't find a detail of how SHA-3 works, so it's hard to judge the difference. I don't see SHA-256 failing but perhaps if there's a risk of Government or those with big resources interfering then it's worth considering something more.

One of the big things that draws people to bitcoin is that they can mine it on their home computer. Once the asic's take over sha-256 coins that will take the "fun" out of it for alot of people. No more finding the perfect video card, overclocking it and finding the max stable hash rate balanced with cooling. Just order a box and let it sit in the corner. -.- Its so antiseptic.

as long as there are asic's there will be scrypt coins.

They were created to gain more BTC and LTC. It was never more obvious then with FTC and CHN. PPC is interesting but i'm still not sure on it yet because of it using sha256, I think if they went with another hash it would be way more successful in the long run.

I wonder what might happen is a large mix of alsorts of attempts and challenges over time and the current fast burn of same-coins perhaps it just one flavour of that. Perhaps we're just learning about what can work and what can't and no doubt the variety can't do any harm to the outcome; but it might do harm if we're naive about what is different and what is the same.

Personally, since I'm not in the business of developing new coins, I can only hope to raise the price of alt coins so that a quality super genius realizes at he/she can profit from creating the best Alt Coin.  Just like any other industry, when money is involved, talent shows up.