Topic: The Problem With Altcoins - page 9. (Read 16515 times)

I have no problems with people having a different opinion than me. I know you won't convince me to sell my junk and I won't change your opinion either, but that article was junk. If it makes you happy I would have written the same thing on an article positive on altcoins.

The problem I have with people like you (srry for generalisation) is that you live in your own opinion bubble and just read stuff that support your ego and prejustice.

LOL, did you even read the same article I did?  Oh wait, you didn't even read it because you got butthurt that it badmouthed your beautiful junkcoins.  Funny that you mention greed, that is the only thing backing up all the junk out there.

This article can be summed up by:

The Problem With Altcoins is that they hurt my personal wealth, so they are bad.
The rest is just backward reasoning to justify that Bitcoin is superior to everything.

There is no point in reading an argumentation which is driven by it's agenda. I have to admit that I haven't carefully read thru the whole nonsense, but the fact there isn't even one positive thing about altcoins in it shows it's purpose. Greed is more visible to most bitcoiners when they look down at altcoins, but that is the very same greed that got most of them into bitcoins aswell.

Independet of the topic, it is alwasy a bad idea to read only stuff that supports your oppinion.

GPU mining is the equivalent of a horse and buggy in the age of cars.  Sure, they are mad that they are now irrelevant, and this is one gasp at it, along with the speculators who missed the boat and want to get rich quick.  You could say thing about buggy whip manufacturers in 1920 "what a shame it is that this infrastructure is there and unused".  The only purpose it serves is people who are stuck in the past or trying to get rich quick.  The bubble is popping, especially as each new scamcoin pops up and people try to cash out from the last one to get rich at the next one.  The only people who care about miners are miners.

there is obviously a very large market starting to form in altcoin realm. all bitcoin miners are ether selling their gpus or converting them to mine altcoins. the infrostructure is there and its a shame not to use it in their opinion. dont forget that some of us make free elecy happen.

Meanspirited yes, biased?  I don't see it.

And yes, namecoin does have uses.  It also has a lot of limitations, like names expiring and only being regenerated so fast.

What besides namecoin isn't either terrible or a scam or both?

I look at it this way: At all times, the commodity with the best money properties would be the most sellable, and therefore gain exchange value in addition to its use value. When better money became available, the value of the old money would fall back to its intrinsic value. To the contemporarys, this would appear (in fact be) a bubble that burst. This could happen to bitcoin if a better cryptocurrency became available. I think currently bitcoin is the best, theoretically it could even reduce gold to its intrinsic value. Trying to introduce something worse than the currently best money would fail.

I found this to be a biased and mean spirited article. Just take a look at the images and captions.

Also the author cherry picks alts to bash. Namecoin for example brings a lot of innovation to the table due to the innovative use of the generic name/value pair and namespaces of which a decentralized DNS is one of the implementations. (Namecoin emphasizes the value of an open blockchain for purposes other than just currency)

Sure the majority are scamcoins but please don't tar them all with the same brush.

Not necessarily.  Someone inflating bubbles then running away when they explode is not weakening the potential.  If anything, they are hurting it.  Move them to alt-coins, let that economy remain completely unstable.

Some changes in the money supply can affect economic calculation and thus the ability to accurately assess the connection between actual available investments and time time preference. That does not mean that time preference changes, only that the relationship between nominal and real interest rate changes.

I would say that normally, people do the economic calculation using the unit of account, and that also determines the nominal interest rate. Interest rates of other media of exchange, in the absence of transaction costs, would simply adjust due to arbitrage. Historically, there probably were significant transaction costs for arbitrage, but this does not apply to cryptocurrencies. So freicoin could only affect the difference between nominal and real interest rate if it was unit of account. This is unlikely unless it overtakes not only Bitcoin but also fiat money, and this is unlikely because it has lower liquidity and no significant improvements of transaction costs. If it does not become a unit of account, the demurrage would be arbitraged away on derivatives markets.

I personally am somewhere in the middle. I don't think that Freicoin can meaningfully compete, for the reasons Daniel Krawisz lists, but I also don't think it will go away, because cryptocurrencies have shown that the critical mass of media of exchange can be lower than economists previously expected and historically experienced. Demurrage seems to have supporters who are willing to spend their resources on publicity, development and actual use, and that appears to be enough. That Freicoin survives does not require that the economic theories behind demurrage are correct, rather it is more of a question of network effect, social group dynamics, organisation theory and so on.

What about if you spend fiat on obtaining alt-coin, then spend alt-coin on obtaining BTC  

I think the major threat to Bitcoin from alts is that they crowd the picture to an outside. It makes the landscape look more complicated. A quick comparison of the price graphs for alts and Bitcoin should change that perception fairly rapidly.

every $, € (and so on) that is spent for any kind of altcoin cannot be spent for bitcoin. therefore it weakens the potential of bitcoin.

The best purpose they serve is to move idiotic speculators who are trying to make a quick buck out of the Bitcoin market.  You are buying tulips if you are buying alt-coins.

Alt coins gave people who missed out on the bitcoin bubble 2013 another chance. LTC jumped from $0.66 to $5 in a matter of weeks.

There are things that theoretically could not be added, such as a better distribution mechanism of initial coins.  You really can't go back in time and redo that.  Then again, that potential flaw fades every day as Bitcoin becomes more widespread and easier to obtain.

The OP's article discusses Freicoin and unsurprisingly disagrees with the economic theories of Gesell as we would expect from someone on the Mises Circle as Gesell is basically heretical to the Austrian school of economics.  But the author to his credit dose not call Freicoin a scam or accusing it's supporters of being disingenuous, he simply feels our economic theory is wrong which still puts us on a higher level of respect then other alts in his eyes.

I would argue though that the author proves our own case when he attempts to make his.  When he says


He has actually struck DIRECTLY at the key disagreement between Gesell and the Austrian school, Gesell says interest is a monetary phenomenon resulting from liquidity, Austrians say it is a result of time preference.  But he then goes on to say


Here the author I think makes the rather simple error here of saying higher by 5% when it's quite obvious the rate is lowered by 5% (conversely the PPC coins ability to grow increases interest by the rate is grows at).  But this is really inconsequential if the rate is up or down, the point is that he admits that interest rates will be altered by the nature of money.  This is nothing less then the admission that interest is a monetary phenomenon as it is subject to change when the durability of money is changed.  Jow can interest arise from a universal human time preference but be dependent on the durability of money, a characteristic of the money itself?

Lastly the author states


Their is some truth here, Freicoin discourages the formation of speculative bubbles which have been the driving force in BTC.  But speculation is not the only thing that gives coins value, the earliest days of BTC were built on ideological interest and commitment.  Their is also the valuation that comes from the active circulation of a finite supply via the classic MV = PQ equation, in our opinion this can provide a valuation without speculation.  Lastly we have a charitable distribution plan for the bulk of the initial coin base which will bypass the need for most people to buy coins as we feel this is unnecessary and a huge contributor to speculation.

Actually the history of software clearly shows that a brilliant new idea that no one foresaw often knocks over an established giant that is not innovating.  Actual physical manufacturing is a lot harder to undermine because of the high upfront capital cost needed to have the huge scale to take on someone with market dominance.  Feature incorporation is indeed a likely scenario if the feature is cosmetic, but the things that really matter to BTC, the coin cap, the algorithm and the coins durability are all sacrosanct, virtually all alternatives are different in exactly thouse areas that BTC would never change.

Sorry, but this quote alone shows where this guys allegiance lies, I've given up reading the entirety of these kind of articles because they're usually all the same kind of ranting that gets posted everywhere whenever the word 'Bitcoin' is mentioned, I'm glad despite the gaps in my knowledge I don't believe as much bullshit about Bitcoin as this guy does. Some altcoins are just bloody daft, that's true, there are some that are just blatant clones, but what's going to happen if the developers get put in jail etc. for money laundering or making currencies? Cryptocurrencies need a free market if they are to survive.

I see altcoins largely as backups of Bitcoin, you always need backups on a computer and a digital currency should be no exception, don't go hating against regulated and fixed markets and then complain when you finally get an unregulated free market because there's too much competition which is the main point I'm taking away from this guy.

I wouldn't say "impossible to add to Bitcoin" since that is basically never the case - you can add almost everything to Bitcoin.  But as you point out, it may not be practical.  I for instance consider Namecoin to be the most valuable "alt-coin" and of real use as opposed to most of the others, since it has some very real and great additions over Bitcoin.  But while it can in theory do everything that Bitcoin does and even more, I think it makes sense to not use them "also" as a Bitcoin-replacing payment system (or try to do so) but rather have different blockchains for different purposes (payments with Bitcoin, every kind of securing/freeing "information" with Namecoin).

Yes. And I enjoyed wallowing in it.  


Correct.

One point which they did not highlight enough is that because cryptocurrency is software it is much harder for altcoins to displace bitcoin, which is very different from competing manufactured products.

Consider supercoin which has some radically better features than Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin has over $1bn riding on its success there is a significant investment by all the people who use it, own it, mine it, and otherwise profit from the ecosystem. So there would be huge incentive for Bitcoin dev to clone the software changes which make supercoin so super, even if it means a hard fork. Such a hard fork would be tolerated as all bitcoiners want to protect their own interests. As soon as these features are released in a new bitcoin version, then supercoin becomes irrelevant.