Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 1217. (Read 2032266 times)

Well, we do have one set of long-standing empirical evidence for how markets treat these things: The precious metals market. Gold, Silver, Platinum, and possibly several other metals share many of the qualities that would make them able to be decent money (in pre-electonic times). Yet gold's premium to industrial-value and total "market-cap" is huge. Silver is just as old and scarce (more scarce actually, right?), but gold is the clear leader, by roughly two orders of magnitude, in the monetary-metals space. So at least in the scarce-metals with similar properties domain, the market chose just one for overwhelming dominance.

Wasn't the same argument made when litecoin came out.  I don't think anyone is going to launch an exact copy.  All will or currently have variations on the bitcoin idea.  And we haven't even had a single major corp or government try to do a coin of their own.  What happens if Google or Facebook does a coin.  They've experimented with their own sort of money before but it didn't take off possibly because people inherently saw it as easily manipulated but under a guise of a crypto how fast do you think googlecoin would spread?

Simple duplicates will not take off, without a powerful network behind it it makes as much sense to buy it as it is to buy Zimbabwean dollars.

I am not a tax lawyer, but if I were you, I would report everything I would ever consider to sell and thus move into the fiat money system, but claim to have lost the keys to the rest, assuming the taxmen are not silly enough to think that charging me something roughly equivalent to the market fiat value of those bitcoins would make sense.

That's one of those issues bitcoin will have to deal with if it is to truly succeed.  It's a fact that it's easily duplicated and therefore isn't as scarce as some proponents like to prophesize.  How the market handles that will determine the future of cryptos in general.  Just like gold cryptos are an outlet for the current developed world government malaise called modern finance.  That may last a long while or it may come to a spectacular end much faster.  If governments are forced by circumstances and citizens to get their act together the need for bitcoin or other cryptos may not be as great as it is now.

I'll always have a golden codpiece...and I need a fairly good sized one.

Back to Bitcoin, I've always been elephant hunting when it comes to my speculative interest.  I'm not to proud to bag a warthog so I don't go home empty handed, but I still plan to keep enough powder dry to get the elephant as well.

And when the tide goes back out, we get to see who is swimming naked

A rising tide floats all boats...

crazy what power one can have simply by holding a decent percentage of a desired finite resource

I don't think we have to worry about an alt getting within an order of magnitude of Bitcoin.

I know we're all a little confused and surprised at LTC/USD $20+ and NMC at $6+ and heck even FTC doing pretty well. But then again, BTC is just under $1000 so it was only a matter of time before folks remembered that altcoins were fun to play around with using their spare half a bitcoin that they left on BTC-e and forgot about for a year.

As for their technological distinctions, I agree, not much, there is NMC's domain thingy which I think is pretty cool. In general they just act as less-than-useful extentions of BTC with more volatile exchange rates, and as was mentioned, makes things more annoying for regulators. It also may help developers explore different technologies and options. Having multiple fully functioning altcoins with large market caps is a little different than running a few computers on a testnet. Altcoins can help experiment with client features that BTC devs would wait another 2 releases to try with bitcoin. For example, I have a feeling that coin control will be released with litcoin-qt before bitcoin-qt. Feel free to disagree with me here, I don't intend to overstate the effect or usefulness of alt-coins. I just think they aren't as annoying and potentially BTC-disrupting as many folks think.

Disclaimer: I mainly like them because of the mad profitz I've experienced by buying and holding a select few. Color me greedy! What can I say, they are speculative instruments and I speculated correctly.

No there aren't. Stop it.

1) 4x Supply.
This one should be obviously irrelevant. I won't bother unless you disagree.

2) 1/4 Block times.
First off, there are effectively zero use-cases where 2.5mins is acceptable but 10mins isn't, especially when you overlay the statistical variance on those numbers. They're both terrible for the retail buy-a-cup-of-coffee scenario; 0-conf will have to be accepted for both coins. And for the usual online-purchase scenario, waiting an hour for full conf is just fine.

It's also worth noting that it's unproven how litecoin will perform at scale with the different constants. Orphans may be an issue; and there are convincing arguments for it still taking close to an hour to get full security no matter what the block-time, due to the nature of blockchain-style global-consensus.

3) Scrypt.
Originally supposed to be GPU resistant, and until recently, called "asic-proof" by promoters....neither is true at all. ASICs for litecoin are being built now, with order-of-magnitude improvement over GPU litecoin mining. The arms race will be similar to bitcoin's in the end.

4) "Optimizations"
We'll see what the ltc dev team comes up with, but because the bitcoin and litecoin codebases are so similar, it's fairly reasonable to assume that any materially beneficial improvements made to one will eventually be incorporated into the other.


Note that I think the alt experimentation is great, and I've come to believe that there's value in a strong (but not too strong) technically-similar alt chain as "insurance" to the dominant chain, along with some trading/liquidity benefits. But I'd still hope that if an alt DID get within an order of magnitude of bitcoin, it'd have distinct technical advantages that bitcoin hadn't-yet or couldn't incorporate.

Maybe the theory is wrong.

My personal view is that alternate crypto-currencies strengthen Bitcoin by discouraging regulatory attack and by offloading some of the load on the core system (or potentially could) which could keep it from needing to outgrow the available infrastructure without mutating in an unhealthy way.

Beyond that, I'm all for competition.  If an alternate grows in because it is focusing on thing that users see as valuable then I see it as a good thing.  If I've been to lazy to do the due diligence require to diversify (which is so far the case) than I have nobody to blame but myself for the loss.

I really do wish these derpcoinz would just go away, it is hard enough explaining BTC to people, they hear about all these other implementations and they just throw up their hands.  It is kind of embarassing the alphabet soup of BScoins.

People believe in the 'strongest' network, it's as simple as that, saw FTC? One 51% attack and it's pretty much finished.

About LTC, it's good to see it alive and kicking, as it gives people plausible excuse to send their BTCs into a mixing wallet and the legislators nightmare trying to regulate it.

There are "material technical distinctions" between LTC and BTC.

Are you bloody kidding me? Ugh. Be careful what you wish for, people.

More than one very successful (from a market-cap perspective) crypto will ultimately devalue them all, if there are no material technical distinctions.

I get in twitter fights with gold-bugs and their ilk all the time, and the best leg they have to stand on (and my only lingering long-term hesitation about bitcoin, for that matter) is the alt-coin argument. I have to lean on "network effects" and "first-mover advantage" arguments to defend bitcoin's market-cap and longevity in this light, and strong non-distinct alts will break that argument.

That said, bitcoin has risen almost 10x recently, and litecoin is catching up to keep its old multiple (~1/40), so that's fine, but much more, and we start to have empirical issues that invalidate important theory.

We reached LTC:Silver ozt parity before BTC:gold.

LTC trading for $21.38 on BTC-e and silver $19.97.

Embarrasing for BTC!

Awesome....thanks. This I can work with.

dog ate the paper wallet?

Such a disaster losing all my bitcoin in that boating accident...oh wait, that's not going to work this time.