Topic: [Random] Whats with all the alt coins? (Read 1005 times)

Altcoins are currently a get rich quick scheme: the early adopters (and presumably also the creators) are able to mine significant amounts of coin. Whether the difficult increment makes it unfair or not, these early adopters will get 1'000s if not 10'000s or 100'000s of coins, and if they hoard them all will then hold significations shares of total coin in circulation. Then they do their best to raise interest in the coin, find people willing to pay for them (with BTC, LTC, etc.) and finally, if the coin gains enough popularity, dump their coin on an exchange like BTC-e. Some savvy traders were able to make a bit of money this way with Feathercoin and Chinacoin: both started selling artificially high when the exchange first started trading them. If you're able to conclude the first sell orders, you're then able to dump 1'000s of those altcoins (that took you a few hours to mine) for several $100 worth of BTC.

SImplest would probably be to just use a merged-mined coin (so miners don't need to be paid 100% of the entire coinage plus transaction fees on top of that too, like all these recent altcoins), issue all the coins in the first block to the research community, and let them use those coins to reward people who find aliens or fold proteins or let them use their GPUs for some massive calculation or whatever.

Like is supposed to happen in the long run for most chains, the miners will be paid by means of transaction fees.

It is "almost free" to merged-mine yet another chain; as more and more merged mined chains exist the amount of money/value each needs to pay to miners should decrease with each chain added to the merge.

Since there are 7 merged chains running already, adding another is already pretty darn cheap.

EDIT: Actually, giving just one initial dose of funds to the research community is a dead end, once they spend it it is gone. So maybe better would be either have them make their results free open source so they can qualify for devcoin generation shares, or build something similar to devcoin, or simply code thier addresses into the code as addresses the coinbase has to be sent to.

-MarkM-

This is what'll cause it to fail, as SciCoin. If you want to contribute to distributed computing go folding@home or bionic.

Forcing people to contribute whilst mining ain't gonna work, unless you roll the computing into the coin generation/encryption algorithm, which then massively limits the types and logistics of any processing you could have done!

Well like all the merged mined coins, the first step is a copy of bitcoin that has had the merged mining patches applied.

I made a copy of bitcoin quite a while ago now, renamed the directory "newcoin" and, it seems applied the merged mining patches. That was as far as I got but that is all that is wanted as a common ancestor for all the merged mined coins to rebase themselves upon.

It is no longer a very recent bitcoin but it is much more recent than most of the merged mined coins are currently using. Getting the merged mining patches to apply to the latest bitcoin code would probably be harder because over time more and more subsystems seem to be getting moved into separate source code file. Which is good but confounds the patch-applying process making more manual intervention and possibly even modification be needed to get the patches applied.

I do not know enough about git though to push this "newcoin" to a new repo. Right now it pulls from the main bitcoin repo if I use git pull. If there is a way to tell it to push to a new repo called newcoin under my "knotwork" github account that would be nice as then we'd have a repo of just bitcoin (albeit not the latest bitcoin) with only the merged mining patches applied. Waiting for such a repo is so far the primary delay in getting all the merged mined coins moved to newer code than they are currently using.

-MarkM-

I personally have high hopes for curecoin, waiting for its implementation

I can't wait for a new ALT coin to come out that is truly innovative. I will support it the best I can.

People say I only say good things about Bitcoin and Litecoin, but that is simply because all of the new ALT coins are scam coins/pump and dumps and/or only changed a few parameters from existing coins.

I'm not going to support any copy cat chains, but when something truly innovative comes out, I will be the first to adopt it.

It's time for ALT coins to innovate or be left in the dust and soon forgotten.

YAC is a bit innovative (in terms of hashing algo: scrypt-jane), the rest are only clones of Litecoin with small modifications which promote early adopters (or even VERY early adopters: BTB, MNC).

But I think there is a light in this tunnel of greed: CureCoin and ScienceCoin.

Or "junkcoin"

I see what you did there haha xD


I second that

They do overall seem to show renewed interest in having low time between blocks, so if nothing else they might be indication it would be useful to rebase GeistGeld (15 second blocks) on new bitcoin code to bring GeistGeld up to date codewise.

Since GeistGeld can be merged mined alongside bitcoin it already provides, and has all along been providing, about as fast a block speed as can realistically be used, without needing to divert any hashing power away from bitcoin.

-MarkM-

Oh snap!

Yeah, it's getting ridiculous. Soon they won't even bother giving the alt coins proper names, they'll just be "yet another coin" or some shit.

As topic title says, whats will all the new alternative coins?

I personally treat all new alt coins as bullcrap because all of them are basically the same. Creatora create them just for a quick buck.

It seems to me the main point of alternative crypto currencies and crypto currencies in general has been forgotten.

Every creator simply creates new coins with almost the same codes and nothing new and claims that "my new coin will be the next best coin".

Simple logic, u create a new alt coin and want it to be a hit and for it to have widespread adoption and usage? Plan it properly, think of its features first before anything else, without a good use for your coins, any technical expertise used in making your coin will never set it apart from other alt coins.

Ok random rant over...

On a side note,  someone create a crypto jewel please, ive had enough of alt coins in a month :l