Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 89. (Read 387491 times)

This is updated and cross-posted from another thread, for what it's worth.  You guys seem to like statistics and reality, and perhaps this is pertinent to the discussion.  

I've been working on some indexes specifically for alts.  Indexes were all balanced at 100 just eleven days ago at noon.  Info source is coinmarketcap.com

Latest, from about two hours ago:

Index 1: cap-weighted, includes all cryptos except BTC is now 75.36
Index 2: cap-weighted, includes all cryptos except BTC and LTC is now 80.68

(These indexes are imperfect because coinmarketcap has added 5 or 6 cryptos in the last eleven days, which skews them a little high.  Interesting that the HUGE dump by LTC has such an impact)

Index 3: cap-weighted, includes a basket of 31 NON-LTC cryptos selected by cap/volume metrics is now 73.58
Index 4: cap-weighted, includes the basket of 31 PLUS LTC is now 71.25

(I think Index 3 is actually the closest to what I'm trying to accomplish, which is to judge the general movement of the alt market as a whole.  I created Index 3 and intentionally left out LTC because it was so much larger than the rest of the alts and I wanted to gauge the movement of my portfolio against a representative sample.  Again, note that LTC influenced lower.)

Index 5: price-weighted version of Index 3 is now 70.17
Index 6: price-weighted version of Index 4 is now 69.25

(Dow Jones is price-weighted.  S&P, Russell, most others are cap weighted.  I just set these up to see if there would be much difference.  Again, LTC provides downward weight.)

Meta index is 73.38.  This contains elements of all above.  

My feeling is that Index 3 is the one that alt traders would find to be the most representative of general market direction, but I'm open to any feedback if y'all have some.  This weekend, I will re-balance the basket.  I'm using strict cap/volume statistics to mechanically re-balance.  Right now, the basket is 31 cryptos, but it's possible that it could drop to 26 or go up to 36 representative examples.  

I'm planning to seek out some help from somebody who can integrate API so that I can put some or all of these indexes up on a website that updates every 5 minutes along with coinmarketcap.com.  

TL:DR If your alt portfolio hasn't dropped by 26.42% in the last eleven days, you might be beating the market.  If this kind of info is helpful to you and/or if you can help me put together a simple website so that alt traders can access this info, hit me up.

For what it's worth, XMR hasn't changed much in relation to BTC during this time frame, but my start date is a bit arbitrary.  That just happens to be when I started, in part because I wanted to know how Monero was doing compared to other alts.  My start date happens to be just after XMR took a haircut versus BTC over a period of a couple of days.  I wanted to determine how bad that really was in the bigger picture.

edited to say "balanced at 100 just eleven days ago at noon" (had originally written nine, but that was incorrect.)

due to all scams im offering escrow for altcoin - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8374994
actually 2 contacted me saying they.. want me listed but dont want real escrow.
altcoins are joke this days...

My fees: 1% of whole premine

NXT community is decentralized. What individual members of the community do (exchanges in this case) is not unanimous opinion of all NXT community, and NXT community has no control of what individual members do, it's super duper decentralized, you know. Some members of NXT community even think of getting rid of its semi-official forum, because the forum makes it sort of more centralized, which goes against principles and values of NXT. Exchanges are free to act on their own, they are businesses, just like in real world you can choose to accept the money you know for sure involved in theft or not accept it.

So the response by the NXT community is to taint the coins involved in the theft?

Theoretically, if 51% of forging power would be sent to forge on an alternative chain, just like in PoW currencies, where 51% of the hash rate of one entity can overcome other chains. However, in NXT no single entity owns 51% and if this happened, it would be a combined decision of many forgers (like in voting) or distributed consensus.

The hacker at the moment controls ~4.6% of the hash rate, correct (he sent 5m back to bter before he disappeared, maybe he'll send more later). There are plans in the NXT community to notify all exchanges not to accept funds from that address, however that may not work in practise. He can sell and depress price of NXT for some time, but can't destroy NXT with this. If you're looking for bargain prices of NXT, get some bitcoins ready soon.

Thanks. So was there any chance a roll back could have happened? And now they are not going ahead, does this mean the hacker now controls 5% of the hashrate of Nxt?

When NXTs are moved from a wallet, the wallet of the exchange is left with no forging power, they can't make any dicisions whatsoever. Coins have to stay in wallet for 1440 blocks to get forging power. Only those forgers who have coins in the wallet for 1440+ clocks and forge decide the fate of NXT. There are rolling checkpoints in NXT, that make chain reorganizations past the last 720 blocks impossible. Which means all txs which were included in blocks older than 720 blocks deep are 100% irreversible, even theoretically. I hope this briefly explains all your wrong assumptions.

What I read was that it was bter making the decision to to roll back or the community decision to block that account.

The fact that this was talked about is cause for concern. From what I read if enough people decided they could have used their coin forging power to make it happen with little downside. 

Some people are more tolerant of others controlling their currency and I understand that. However that is unacceptable for my uses.

If I have been misinformed instead of calling me a retard please explain. As I understand it if a similar hack happened in bitcoin everyone would have just said. Oh well it was the exchanges fault. But with Nxt the exchanges hold power because they are effectively the biggest miners.

drawingthesun, you are simply retarded (or you didnt read what happened).


If the majority of the forging power wants to forge in an alternative chain, it is the most decentralized decision ever made. Every forger has in his hands to forge or not the alternative chain.

Shroomskit. What you've said, would make any newbie in cryptos scared of ever touching nxt...

The forgers switching chains because of a theft would be horrible for a coin. Any cryptocoin that experiences that(like vericoin) will fade away, it won't be able to be called a "currency" anymore.

drawingthesun, you are simply retarded (or you didnt read what happened).


If the majority of the forging power wants to forge in an alternative chain, it is the most decentralized decision ever made. Every forger has in his hands to forge or not the alternative chain.

Well I am selling all my Nxt as soon as I can, the fact that the community has shown that it will freeze any account that is inconvenient simply destroys all credibility they had, which being a pure POS wasn't much to begin with.

Somehow BTER's mistake will be somewhat handled by a community block is simply a joke, wasn't Nxt meant to be more decentralized than bitcoin?

This is good for them, but I am still out for now, the fact that this was on the table scares me.

It also presented an interesting argument about the trouble of large thefts of Nxt actually causing long term harm to the security of the Nxt chain, as each coin is essentially like a miner.

The community actually showed the opposite. It was clear that they were not going to support a rollback as evidenced by the lack of forging on that chain.

I don't want to identify someone as clever by name without more evidence than I have already, and pumping a scamcoin would be evidence that I had mistaken slyness for cleverness.
Can't hope for much more than that for free, I guess.  It's a weak data point though - just consistent with priors, no new signal.  I guess I'll continue to ignore it.

Well I am selling all my Nxt as soon as I can, the fact that the community has shown that it will freeze any account that is inconvenient simply destroys all credibility they had, which being a pure POS wasn't much to begin with.

Somehow BTER's mistake will be somewhat handled by a community block is simply a joke, wasn't Nxt meant to be more decentralized than bitcoin?

Who was that?

jl777 released the whitepaper already and killerstorm gave a pretty negative review of it on reddit.