Topic: rpietila Wall Observer - the Quality TA Thread ;) - page 189. (Read 907212 times)

As Bitcoin proponents, is it not a little hypocritical for us to criticize "pump and dump" as something only applicable to alts and not Our Coin? 

For me the high risk that the 'the one' to dethrone bitcoin (acknowledging of course the reasonable chance there may never be one) is not amongst today's vast offering of altcoins does not only mean it's a waste of money to invest in them, it's also a waste of time trying to keeping up with what is going on with them, which ones actually bring something new to the table etc etc.  It is why I'm liking ideas such as sidechains or spinoffs as a means of providing a space in which to experiment with innovative ideas whilst taking out the pump 'n dump aspect to which all alts are prone irrespective of their potential value meaning that something with a great potential among so many may get dumped to oblivion and the ideas behind it lost.


I'll also quote this for those who missed it last page because I take my hat off to you telemaco for doing the vast amount of research you must be doing to keep on top of this and am grateful to you for summing it up thus.  I am not generally anti-speculation but I think it causes severe problems in the altcoin space and masks potential real value that may be hiding in there (and though I get your point I will keep calling them altcoins for now) and look forward to a means (whether it's spinoffs or whatever) of bringing new ideas into the arena coming into being which takes out the destructive pump 'n dump element.

1. Bitcoin will not adapt any "feature" of the alt coins outhere unless if its completely necessary.

2. There must be a really innovative alt coin out there to take the place of bitcoin, and for some years i think it wont happen

Thanks for the solution Risto. I followed your strategy and it worked out beautifully so far. Just that it's uneasy for me to see altcoins drafting behind bitcoin vehicle. I sure hope merchants not buying hypes from alts.

Ok, but can I ask you 2 simple questions that seem to completely befuddle the alt coins lovers? (they never reply with a valid argument, or even reply at all):

1. Since Bitcoin is completely programmable, then in the future can it not take on any new feature of any alt coin out there?  Thus rendering all other alt coins obsolete?

2. How do you know without a doubt that it will be one of the current list of alt coins that will Bitcoin's successor?  Why not some alt coin that hasn't even been invented yet?  And if it is possible it will be an unknown future coin that may not be around next year or even for the next several years, then wouldn't investing in any of the current ones be pretty worthless right now?

There are many alts out there with huge technical merits. That doesn't count for much when they're consistently ravaged by pumpers though and there's no way they're giving up their habits any time soon. I wonder what it'll take for a real contender to escape that.

I am going to defend here some alt coins.

First, Is Altcoin the correct name for another different coin? Sure there are many that just replicate some parameters, add some variation and are launched to the market for the next pump and dump, i don't even name that altcoins, i call those shitcoins, but there are coins out there that provide interesting approachs to different problems, Memorycoin brings a vote system in the same wallet that to some extent could be used to decide software development team or some coin "foundation" decisions, maybe the rest is not interesting. Reddcoin is going to release a Proof of Stake based on money velocity to help itself as a competitor to doge as tipping coin on social companies motivating users money velocity (share coins). Will it succeed? Vertcoin, Myriadcoin and X11 coins have brought differences regarding the mining approachs and the existance of Asics, Dogecoin as ridiculous it might appear brings some fun to teeneagers (nice market niche)? Gridcoin has an interesting approach bringing all the mining power to BOINC Berkley university Software to help research cancer, cells, molecules, etc. Next is a different breed and maybe it can teach some other coins about just the wallet design with messages, p2P exchange, and almost instant money transference. Counterparty brings P2P exchange aswell other approaches the same as Bitshares, Ripple brings the scam of the premining at a corporate level as we have seen a couple days ago and so they should be ashamed ;-)

Second, as Software engineer i could say that is more difficult to apply software patches to a system that has higher risk, has bigger spread and different userbase. You have to test things much more, consequences are way bigger, many more circumstances have to be thought of. It is also not the same to immediately install software update in a bank or in a hospital as immediately install a software update on a shoe shop.

Bitcoin as it grows will probably suffer a little from that. Can Bitcoin be hardforked right now? Will be easily hardforked in the future? That brings some doubts, but as the dinousaurs the bigger it gets the response time might decrease. Just that alone could bring a case for the existance of altcoins as an evolutive sandbox where multiple developers (95% with only a pump and dump objective i agree) bring some ideas to the table.

Are Darkcoin/Monero or the like pump and dump scheme? I think like in many situations things are not black and white, where Bitcoin is a pure innovative technology and any alt is just a pump and dump. There are many grayscales. Some bring some interesting ideas to the table and there are medium term investors that appreciate those, some short term and also traders just surfing the waves. If you check Karpelescoin (just an example) probably it will be a pump and dump and unless you are the pump and dump organizer you will be severely hurted there. But if you invest on a coin that is fast, anonymous (it might be interesting for some coins in some countries is even a fundamental right to have some privacy and not publishing your bank movements on your blog), has several security algorithms comparable to SHA-3 (so you don't discover in 10 years that NSA was quite involved on bitcoin or other one) well there might be a lower percent of pump and dumpers and probably many more investors bringing money to the market and making a coin surpass others like peercoin, etc. I have used that example but i think there are interesting approaches on many other coins.

Finally, I cannot recall many companies, technologies that have not had a competitor after some time. Are Mercedes-Benz or Audi alts of Ford? Is the WWW an alt of Gopher? Is Chrome an alt of Mosaic?. Is IBM still the only producer of Personal Computers. Are still compuserve and MySpace the only kings on their respective niche markets.

I am heavily invested on Bitcoin and as "It's about Sharing" has just mentioned, i only invest a very small amount on alts, less than 5% but i think it is scary and even risky to think that Bitcoin is going to be the only cryptocoin in the future. When I invest on Google shares i pay a lot of attention to Oracle, to Apple, to Yahoo because those are competitors and from the competitors you can learn and sometimes you can receive a good lesson, i will not dismiss a good idea just because it comes from a small team or because i want bitcoin to succeed (although some would just not agree on a bitcoin forum).

Previous pumps have had similar volumes. Blackcoin volumes on Mintpal were over 8000 BTC at its peak.

I'm not sure Darkcoin is a pump. The volume is in the thousands of BTC daily.
My first thought/intuition when I saw Darkcoin at .005 a few weeks back was this "Hmmm, I think this coin might be a prime way of laundering stolen bitcoins. It also might attract people who want more anonymity, not to mention it sounds cool."

If this is a pump, it is a pump with LOTS of money behind it. I haven't followed prior pumps before, and am not sure of the BTC volume, but 3,000 or 4,000 bitcoins a day is a fairly large volume. Doable for sure.

My larger question is this:
When Bitcoin went the way of ASIC's, it basically helped to solidify Litcoin as the number 2 coin. But now ASIC's are coming into LTC, and imo this will eventually make it Wall Streets #2 behind bitcoin. (We are so early in, I really think there will be a few taken in by the masses.) Anyway, my question is "Where does all the GPU hashing get pointed at now?" Darkcoin is basically a Quark
clone. I liked that coin but my problem with CPU coins are that they are very open to Bots and though that has it's benefits (lots of hashing!) it also means lots of viruses and such trying to mine it via peoples computers.

There is going to be a clear number 3 coin, which one will it be? If Darkcoin isn't a pump it sure looks like a possibility. I wonder about VTC as well. NXT and Etherium as 2.0 coins are interesting.

If you have limited funds, finding that #3 might be the way to go. And risking a small amount, % wise, might be the way to go.

I'm 80% in Bitcoin, 20% in LTC and think it would be a good decision to put 5% into 2 or 3 alts.

Its about sharing

Maybe you should add to this rule the "test of time" - without it you are chasing hype and you are left with useless coins and the creators/miners have your bitcoins. There are only a few altcoins older than 12 months and hundreds of them less than 6 months.

After each bubble capital is searching for protection and/or more gains and now this can be seen in altcoins. After April 2013 crash we saw great capital pouring into miner stocks and guess how many of them are still operational? Very few and much cheaper.

There is no real competitor yet, only a hype. But this is good, because it helps with redistribution of bitcoins and it only reinforce bitcoins as the keystone. Beside this people are actually trying to find creative solutions in order to get more bitcoins via altcoin redistribution and this makes us all richer with new knowledge and awareness.

That is why I just mine them into BTC   

I've played the altcoin market recently. What you basically do is guess which coin is going to get pumped next--either by analyzing the micro-accumulation and price suppression by whales, or by having insider information, or by jumping onboard early during the pump. Then you wait, sometimes weeks, watching the markets like a hawk, hoping you were right and the coin doesn't go to zero. Then you exit once the pump begins, hopefully before the whales decide to.

It's a pump & dump game, no more, no less. Inexperienced traders will get eaten alive.

Thank you !!! Who doesnt like to talk about the bitcoin knight and his new castle ? or about the norwegian 5$ sandwich story which turned into a 1M flat ?  Seriously folks, this is the kind of story that makes people interested in bitcoin.

How a coin with this parameters can rise as it did is nothing short of astonishing. Will Monero archive something similar with no pre-mine and better anonymity than Darkcoin?

The key feature of DRK, anonymity, is also its greatest weakness for going mainstream. You have seen how hostile governments have been to just Bitcoin, which transactions can be traced in. Now imagine DRK popping up into the mainstream, do you think governments will sit idle and let businesses accept it? Some might, others will clamp down even harder than they did with Bitcoin. Countries that are friendly to Bitcoin now might not be friendly to a coin that has money laundering built right into it. Yes, a government can't stop the protocol, but they can stop businesses from accepting it by making the use illegal. Most likely, this would not be hard to achieve as they could simply make the argument the main use of the coin is for money laundering. If they made it illegal, it won't stop it being used on the black markets, but it will stop it from ever going mainstream because everyday businesses simply aren't going to break the law to allow a new payment method. So its growth potential would probably be limited to the black market. I don't think you would ever see Amazon or any big company using it, because of the backlash and the government crackdowns.

Licensed regulated exchanges will come, so its feasible a licences exchange can only trade licences 'approved' coins.
Right now the cryptoworld is the wild wild west and things move to fast for regulators to catch up, it wont always be like that.

The main pump right now is from ill-gotten Bitcoins.

Generally agree with this. Likely this can change.

DRK is currently just a pumped up coin. It needs time to grow. The growth it has had over the past month is crazy but i suspect you will see it correct and steady at a lower range than it is now.

Interesting..  Thank you... 

1. Altcoins have not really gained relative to BTC in the last months. They still account for only 9% of the total market cap. If this number rises to more than 20%, I would start to consider them. Otherwise no need.

2. A low-risk way to hedge yourself for the risk that an alt would conquer Bitcoin is as follows: buy into every altcoin with the same percentage as you hold Bitcoins. You only need to divest 9% and you are invested in all cryptos and it is completely equal for you whatever happens between them from then on.

2b. To make it sane, employ a lower threshold such as only buy the alts that are minimum $10M marketcap AND rising vs. BTC.

3. DRK is not getting interesting at this moment. It has just undergone a pump with price 20-doubling. It was interesting in the beginning of this, similarly as BlackCoin. I would rather short DRK due to momentum considerations now (although this may change).

4. If BTC is bought to immediately buy DRK, it has no net effect to BTC price.

Bitcoin has increased in price on average 10x annually. That is quite enough risk / reward for me. I get nervous whenever I sell bitcoin waiting for the price to go lower. Much better to be long in bitcoin except for the bubble peak - as Risto has guided me.

Altcoins are wicked risky, but the reward can be immense. Look at Mooncoin now: only worth a few Litoshis now but once 30 Satoshis......

Its all about momentum and a lot of patience.

too risky for me, but probably can be a big profit when done right