Topic: Is competition healthy for Bitcoin? - page 7. (Read 11351 times)

In my opinion competition is always healthy. It helps drive innovation and change.

http://youtu.be/l4CZfLmUJV4 - any opinions on this viewpoint stated here ( 3mins in )

The transaction is likely valid on both forks, so will end up finding its way into blocks on both, right?

Cooperation is better than Competition..  That's why I do not embrasse competition of any kind !

There are two coins that do: Litecoin and Novacoin. The primary value they provide over Bitcoin is they are not Bitcoin.

Just for argument's sake pretend for a moment the Bitcoin Foundation became highly corrupted and subject to selling out to the highest bidder, perhaps even the government. That organization, to date, is made up of some of the most influential and powerful individuals and businesses in the Bitcoin community. As Bitcoin grew so could the power and notoriety of the Bitcoin Foundation, and with this the potential for complete disaster if there was only Bitcoin in the marketplace.

Alternatively, look at the most recent uproar over the discussion for change of block size. Like the creation of the Bitcoin Foundation this had potentially major implications for Bitcoin, and accordingly threatened to divide the community into those for and against it. Unfortunately, by involving the protocol itself the large economic damage caused by a messy fork would be secondary to damage in confidence of block chain based currency working at all.

If Bitcoin is the only show in town then as Bitcoin goes so goes the idea of crypto-currency overall.

On the other hand having other coins that exist apart from Bitcoin give the marketplace something else to evaluate, and provide another avenue of choice to express discontent; that's always healthy.


I don't think you fully appreciate the differences.

First, being a clone is a compliment showing how valuable the original protocol implementation is. However, a key difference is time between blocks being reduced from 10 minutes to 4 minutes on average. This means network transactions confirm more than twice as fast on average for litecoins than bitcoins. If you don't think fast confirmation time is valuable to the marketplace, especially as it grows, I'm not sure how to explain to you that it is.

The other difference is there is roughly 4 times as many litecoins as bitcoins. Economically this is less significant, but not entirely without effect. In general, theoretically, the more currency in existence the more widely it is likely distributed, meaning a larger overall potential marketplace.

Last, Novacoin unlike Litecoin provides a very real intrinsically valuable aspect over Bitcoin, which is the inclusion of proof-of-stake in addition to proof-of-work to guard against 51% attacks.

This explains why these two coins, out of all the ones in existence past and present besides Bitcoin, have notable and increasing value. The free market seems to agree with this or something similar which is reflected in the litecoin and novacoin prices, now $0.14 and $0.50 respectively. Anyone remembering Bitcoin in the early days might recognize the similarity in early price point.

it is when you got one guy spreading fud saying its in the name of freedom but then saying don't spread your wealth anywhere else. lol

if bitcoin gets out from just the 'amsterdam currency' niche market great. but at the moment the majority of bitcoiners are not helping themselves out beyond those markets.

having the freedom to choose which to push forward, should be just that, a freedom. no competition at all and a mindset of staying in a niche market wont help bitcoin at all. they need competition just to give them more incentive to thrive and to expand, else in 4 years time they will be saying "we have value because of silkroad" as their only defence that there is a constant supply and demand.

thanks (sacasticly) to Luke Jr for trying to make lite coin look bad

https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Litecoin&diff=prev&oldid=35713

luke JR has a personal grudge against litecoin and has been at it since late november 2011 putting in false and vindictive comments about litecoin.

why??

because he knows litecoin has potential. i dont tell people to read the wiki on litecoin because its now one mans fud files and no longer a source of truth.

instead i give out free litecoins and let people try it out for themselves. if they done like it, they can always stop using it.

luke Jr has obviously missed out all the social values of bitcoin and only cares about the financial value of bitcoin. thats why he creates the fud.

i dont care which digital currency goes mainstream and takes over the likes of paypal and other payment processors that have geriatric banking restrictions. as long as one does, and has a good reason in doing so.

there are too many anonymous people wanting bitcoin to stay anonymous so they can continue doing dodgy dealings, there are too many profiteer's not wanting a world invasion which will cause a stablised price.

so for me litecoins is the perfect candidate for mainstreaming.

let bitcoin be the amsterdam currency for drugs, guns and prostitutes, along with cheap electronics. and let litecoin be for everything else.

openly trading with each other. lots of people talking about making a bitcoin have red and green addresses depending on what its used for. well litecoin can be the green address.

+1

Competition would be healthy for cryptocurrency...not sure it'd be healthy for bitcoin though.  Which is fine because I don't care as much about bitcoin as I care about the cryptocurrency movement in general.  Depending on how smooth the next bitcoin fork will be, several alts may be born.  If bitcoin starts hitting that 1MB limit & a fork never takes off, then I can see an alt that fixes that issue taking off.  But for the time being, bitcoin is still working fine for me, and I personally won't switch until these issues start becoming more of a problem.

Bitcoin has had a lot of time and money pumped into marketing. I don't see anyone spending millions marketing Litecoin. Maybe someone should give it a shot!

I doubt a flaw in bitcoin wouldn't be present in litecoin too...

I consider them your backup currencies to be honest, in case someone discovers a serious flaw with Bitcoin or it turns out Satoshi Nakamoto is really our evil overlord and intends to conquer the world with Bitcoin

Sometimes "uniqueness" is not being different but being a secondary choice.

With every good thing there are choices.

Coke/Pepsi

Ford/Toyota

Myspace/Facebook

McDonalds/Burger King

The whole idea behind alternate coins was to test new properties. Namecoin was a great idea, but just didn't get traction. I don't see any other alternatives offering anything unique and beneficial to distinguish them from Bitcoin. Competition has favored Bitcoin so far.

Whatever opinion everyone has on litecoin, I suggest that calling it a pyramid scheme - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin - does a disservice to both Bitcoin and litecoin as its a likely starting point google search for anyone new to the whole thing, basically if litecoin is so similar and had of come first it would have been bitcoin that was labeled the pyramid scheme as described here.

Using a Bitcoin logo as the header could use a re-think too.

FTFY : Competition may not be good for bitcoin, but it is good for us (bitcoin alt crypto-currency users).

Competition may not be good for bitcoin, but it is good for us (bitcoin users).

Competing currencies would be the best thing that ever happened to money and world markets, what other way are we going to discover what the best method of exchange is? It's great that they made Bitcoin open source because even if Bitcoin does ever get taken down there will be a bunch of other more improved and updated currencies to use.