Topic: The problem with the new wave of cryptocurrencies - page 2. (Read 2271 times)

It sounds great in theory... but in practice it will be horrible.

When the community drives a coin fully, it has no direction.  There has to be a leader.

Building consensus is one thing, but letting a community lead without having a direction is another. 

For my money... we have all the technology we need now.  The coin that wins the race will be about planning and marketing.  Like BTC, you should be able to any of the "crap" coins out there and make them a winner simply by doing the work required to make them appeal to the masses.

BTC has a lot going for it, and a lot of drawbacks as well.  That is also true of any of the alt-coins present or in the near future.

This post demonstrates that you haven't even read about the fundamentals of Bitcoin yet.

In practice these are young projects that require a lot of dev work/maintenance, and the original devs know better what they are doing. Plus I'm not sure if the community would be okay with a copycat for the sake of avoiding premining. But I guess it's worth a try if someone is up to the task.

Hi, there are already community driven coins out ...

check http://crypto-coins-table.com/

I've developed an idea for a new type of crypto-currency which will be all community driven. No IPO's, No Pre-Mine and the community will control everything involved with it.

The problem however is that they are not rewarding people in a meaningful way to secure the block chain and in nxt's case of rewarding stake holders increasing rewards based on increasing stake seems fool hardy as all you would need to break the system would be a larger stake than everyone else and to not spend until the remaining coins shoot up in value to some ungodly level ..

I have developed an idea for a new type of crypto-currency which will be all community driven. No IPO's, No Pre-Mine and the community will control everything involved with it.

No, that's wrong. bitcoin 0.1 was released on Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:05:49 -0800 (md5sum dca1095f053a0c2dc90b19c92bd1ec00 ). The timestamp of the gensis block was 2009-01-09 02:54:25 [1]. The famous quote from the genesis block is proof that the launch was after 2009-01-03: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

That he owns 10% of the money supply is due to the fact that interest in the beginning was very low, and everything was mined after launch. And he has spend only 50 BTC of it (at least as far as I know). He might as well could have destroyed the coins, but that might have lead to some confusion.

[1] http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f411475428afc90947ee320161bbf18eb6048

Bitcoin was instamined (cousin of the premine) by SN. Personally, I have no problem with a premine as long as the founders are upfront about it and are transparent as to its use. For example, using it to fund activities which bolster adoption of the currency.


I think that the alts are a good thing, regardless of whether they succeed or fail. I'm thinking specifically of the ones which add something to the knowledge space, like the PoS coins, like Ethereum, like NXT. Even if they fail, they are taking risks that the Bitcoin team cannot take and they are breaking new ground, and kudos to them for doing it.

NXT in particular has potential for much wider adoption.

As of today the status is:

Bitcoin has a marketcap of 6000M$ and perhaps 3-5 million users
Nxt has a marketcap of 26M$ and perhaps 1000-10000 users(?)
eMunie has a marketcap of 0M$ and 0 users(?)
ethereum has a marketcap of 0M$ and 0 users

Whether that will change is hard to predict, and anyone guessing it right will stand to make a fortune. With regards to premine/IPO I think you're right. Why would a superior concept need millions of investment when Bitcoin itself was boostrapped from 0$? It's actually a good contra-indicator. I don't mind risk-capital pushing things forward. there is a lot of handwaving/marketing going on. again, Bitcoin didn't require that at all, and nowadays it would be very easy for a new protocol to emerge. I'm confident that appropriate meta-protocols and markets will evolve overt time. Exchanges will ban clones / pump&dumps as demand for those coins will fade.

Having said that I don't find that the concepts of the alternatives are "solid", quite the opposite. There are some interesting ideas, but very far from proven. And you can't really reset the bootstrap process/money supply function. A system with a dynamic money supply could be an interesting experiment, though.

Do not worry about that. It isn't going to happen that soon , also there is a chance that they won't be able to work with Bitcoin.

Well, technology keeps moving forward, what if we'll have Quantum computers in near future? Do you imagine how fast we could mine bitcoins then? 21 million wouldn't be a problem..

Actually Google is the leader, so is Bitcoin; that won't change anytime soon, if ever.
You are posting random nonsense.

Yes and Google will never beat Yahoo and AOL...

Yeah, right... Keep on dreaming!!!

They will never gain adoption/popularity as Bitcoin will. No matter what they do.

The first wave was about technology
The second wave must add marketing in order to be successful
For me, Ethereum cuts it so far

I've been looking lately into NXT, eMunie and Ethereum; I still have to wrap my head around the details, but from what I can gather so far all of these seem rather solid propositions in paper.

In practice though... I couldn't help but notice that they all share the following:

    Premine: a small stake of the total economy is distributed among founders and friends or otherwise distributed arbitrarily to other people

    Funding & IPO: a portion of the premine is sold for funding purposes on release; prices are fixed and set by the devs on said IPOs.

    Operating like a company: It's seems pretty glaring that the focus is not so much on creating a currency but on creating a sustainable business for the founders, developers and early-early adopters.

By contrast, successful cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and later Litecoin had no premine and no IPO or funding; they were just open-for-all experiments that grew, not cryptocurrency-businesses. Granted times have changed, and IPOs might make sense now since we know cryptos can work and everyone wants to be aboard the next Bitcoin, but still. This all sounds too much like Ripple, which as far as I'm concerned was a flop.

Am I too conservative in thinking that all of these new cryptocurrencies are doomed to fail despite their technical merits?