Guys, we are not supposed to make new cryptocurrencies with the purpose of making money on them by mining. This is all you ever think of!
There *might* be ideological ideals involved with launching an alternative block chain but anyone thinking that people weren't going to try to make a quick buck off it is deluded. Sure it's fun for some of the late comers to become early adopters, but the experience isn't the same when people have multi-GH rigs jumping in at low difficulty.
To make a proper currency, it needs to fix all the problems with bitcoins, or as much as possible.
Here's main ones for people adopting it:
1)
Forget the wallet websites which get hacked and aren't the purpose of bitcoin. Download the software and start it up. Well, despite that bitcoin has been around about a year and a half and hardly has been used, it takes minimum 60 hours on a high speed cable modem to finally download all that stuff from peers. And then it stores that stuff not neatly in a bitcoin directly, but it hides it in some windows directory. I don't know why it takes so long since it's only about 750 megabytes and that takes me under ten minutes to download that off a torrent.
But imagine ten years from now with bitcoins actually being used a whole bunch and then a newbie tries to start bitcoins and they have to download 100 gigs of stuff. And the peers go slow so it'll be very long, maybe a month of running the client.
When I've transferred my wallet.dat, I have the same thing of having to download all the transactions again. This is really bad.
This was theorized a long time ago. Alternative block chains will have the same problem.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability2)
Despite all this CPU power devoted to mining, they can't use it to make transactions not take hours to complete.
In
http://solidcoin.info/faq.php it mentions, "A pump-n-dump is when a large mining operating (known as a pool) decides for some reason to mine another chain than Bitcoin, usually for profit purposes but in some cases for malicious/childish reasons. They mine and mine, until the difficulty is so high it's no longer profitable, they then jump ship, leaving the difficulty so high it sometimes takes months to fix." I don't understand how this works, but mining should do two things (a) generate new coins when the currency is stagnant, (b) if there's lots of activity then it should not generate any new coins but simply process transactions and take transaction fees, something fixed at like 0.01 coin.
You should really get your definitions from an independent source, try Wikipedia;
"Pump and dump" is a form of microcap stock fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements, in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price. Once the operators of the scheme "dump" their overvalued shares, the price falls and investors lose their money. Stocks that are the subject of pump-and-dump schemes are sometimes called "chop stocks". [1]
"Pump and Dump" doesn't have anything to do with mining pools in regards to block chains. Pools are a cooperative effort of users. The forums and IRC pump up the value and most miners dump them because they believe that they will be worthless eventually. Again, anyone thinking that people weren't going to try to make a quick buck off it is deluded.
Yes, about part b, I am serious. We have enough bitcoins so mining ideally would stop generating coins. This needs to be based not just on transactions but on the general money flow and it needs to be done in a way so people hoarding coins and sending it back and forth between their wallets can't cheat this. I posted in
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.927 "Will occasional losses of bitcoin wallets limit available maximum bitcoins?" and even Satoshi chimed in. But well with this idea, if there's not enough coins in circulation, then it'll make more but when there's plenty in circulation, then miners are paid transaction fees instead. And so it's not 100 coins a block, then 50, then 25, then none but let's say it's 50 coins a block minus transaction fees. So if there's 40 coins worth of transaction fees, then miners get 50 coins but only 10 new ones are made. And if there's over 9000 coins in transaction fees, then miners make a lot in transaction fees. This way, miners are paid to process transactions.
Also solidcoin made its blocks at 3 minutes. Thinking ahead, these should be 30 seconds maximum. Since miners either join pools or have fast hardware, this won't be an issue. I personally think 5 seconds would be ideal and then basically 5 seconds and then a fraction of a coin.
If there are too many coins in circulation then the price will fall. If people just hold coins and don't spend them then the price will fall. It's simple economics both ways. Satoshi actually did a lot of calculations, economics models, and behavioral predictions. Bitcoin's behavior is based on those and so far it has been pretty accurate despite turning into a monster (GPU mining) that he didn't predict. It might not be perfect but Bitcoin is the first of it's kind and will take a while to prove the theories involved. Alternative block chains haven't done a fraction of the research that Satoshi did when devising Bitcoin.
Now once an alternative is done, that's not it. The creators need to mine it harder than the founder of ixcoin mined coins. They need a couple million coins sitting in a trust. These are not to be sold, but to be used should bitcoin or some previous cryptocurrency completely turn obsolete. Then people with the bitcoins will be given some value for their coins based on the honor of the founders of this system. This way people have faith in bitcoins and this new system too. This is extremely important once something replaces bitcoins. Founders mine lots of coins, then hold them to support the previous cryptocurrency.
Obviously the people starting it need to be honorable. If you make it just to make money mining, you are doomed. When bitcoins began, it was an awesome idea and coins were worthless and wasn't about mining to get you rich, but a long term investment in a fixing internet commerce.
A "couple million" coins "sitting in a trust" is first of all hard to prove and accept, and second of all not productive to the currency. I think these forums have proven that most people on here will not trust someone no matter how much proof they are given. There is a culture of disbelief and conspiracy on these forums and it's very sad.
I don't really like that the founder of Ixcoin pre-mined 500,000 coins, but from a business perspective it makes sense to offer incentives to lure capacity and talent from Bitcoin. It's no different than a competing business coming into a sector with only 1 big company there already, and since they can't offer a lower price on a competing product they have to offer some kind of incentive.