Although 99.9% of alt coins are stupid or outright scams, I think they should have a place. Alt coins can be a hedge against any entity that thinks it could crush bitcoin. Any serious attempt to do so would just result in the ascendancy of another coin.
My problem is that it has become almost impossible to sort through the dozens of script-kitty announcements that junk up the forums. There has to be a way to do both.
Could we:
- Allow blocking of some areas? kinda like an ignore list for forum sections.
- Keep posts in the alt section from showing in the recent posts list?
- Set up another related/linked domain for alts? altcointalk.org is available.
- Other?
1 and 2 are already possible in your profile settings. There is a Ignore Board Option.
How can you not know this?
Really? I did not know this.
Also, @surfer43. 99.9% IS way to high. I don't know what percent of alts are serious attempts to create a viable coin. I shouldn't have used numbers.
Way too high. Even dogecoin isn't a scam coin, and only 'stupid' insofar as it probably won't be alive in a year or two from now. But that's the beauty of our little experiment we have going here: the market will decide that, not forum censorship (except for the most vile cases of scams, of course, which should be removed)
And thats begs the age old question, for what do you consider a coin being a scam? must it be blatantly premined, or would you consider mass marketing and exchange spamming of add requests as scandalous and meeting the criteria for a scam? to me it seems like dogecoin and many other coins that use marketing or other meaningless forms of hype and manipulation to determine their coins value, making it inherently a scam. Its an issue of perspective largely, so some might disagree but if you are using the oxford dictionary to describe a coin such as doge or quarkcoin, or even megacoin for all its advancement against 51% attacks, they are all fundamentally overhyped flashmine/premine fests and therefor must be considered scams. there can be picking and choosing what constitutes a scam when you are assigning labels, regardless of the popularity of said coins, and this alone provides solid support for the premise that the Alt section should be removed or the rules for posting greatly altered. I am personally of the opinion a clean break needs to be made to give alternate currencies a new home, just to increase the quality and prominence of bitcoin related posts and discussions.
I don't think it needs to be all black and white. shades of grey, baby.
So, first, to qualify as a *scam* coin would require extraordinary proof, but if it is determined to be a scam (as in: hard evidence the creators plan to scam investors, like, say, launch an IPO, then run with the money), the scam should be labeled and removed, as if it were any other product.
Now, what is probably a more appropriate label for something like doge is *spam* coin. And there we will need, IMO, slightly more flexible criteria. Here's a rhetorical question: what is the 'hard', objective difference between a spam coin and a successful crypto?
Answer: there is no objective *inherent* difference. It's a matter of what the market determines through trading it.
So why not take that into account? New coin creators can advertise their coin *once*, in one thread. Then watch and see. If the price and trade volume of the coin picks up speed, the heavy restrictions on posting about and promoting it will be lifted, gradually. If not, it stays contained to that one thread. And endless bumping of threads and an abundance of 'promotion' thread will never be okay, no matter how much your project is picking up speed. It's kind of common sense, isn't it?