Topic: Time to grow up. - page 3. (Read 4557 times)

Finally somebody that says it how it really is. Well done !

Why do you think the long-term value of LiteCoin is so different than Bitcoin (as in "approaches zero", not just a few orders of magnitude)?
Bot-friendliness is perhaps the only fault I find with LiteCoin, and thus far it's a theoretical one ... it might be realized, dropping the coin value, but it might turn out not to be a significant factor after all.

This is my take on LiteCoin in more detail.

I misspoke. All altchains seen so far (except namecoin) should have no valuation, based on any rational economic analysis. Bitcoin has value because of existing and expected future economy of goods and services. Namecoin provides a distinct utility that is purchased by destroying namecoins. The altcoins? So far, no released altcoin has made a single tangible step towards defining future value. Rather, they've rushed to setup exchanges without clarifying the purposed and long-term vision of their coins. Speculators rush in to buy in the hope that the price will rise. But with no defined or expected long-term realization of actual value, that becomes the very definition of a Ponzi scheme; it's a scam.

1. Why?
2. Even if it does't "reach bitcoin valuations", but just 1/100th of it, and stablizes at that valuation, then how is it a scam? It's a good deal for early adopters, but it's not a pump & dump.

As long as we're talking philosophical principles, fine. The “point” I'm referring to is that a secure, distributed currency and a democratic everybody-can-mine-at-home crypto-token are provably opposite goals. It is technologically and economically impossible for the latter coin to ever reach bitcoin valuations. Anyone trying to convince you otherwise is selling snake oil.

This is the essence of the scamcoin--either to get you to believe that you can get in early and make big bucks (a classic investment con), or get you to invest in the impossible (snake oil).

I'm not missing the point, trust me.

What's exciting about Bitcoin is the theoretical possibility of mining it at home, even if in practice it's not relevant right now.
It's still a very exciting project.

The excitement comes from it being peer to peer, and minting not being limited to a select group of people. Everybody can be a miner if they chooses - it's just not worth it to most people.

@ripper234, if the first thing that comes to your mind in describing bitcoin is “you can mine it at home”, then you're missing the point entirely, and we can talk past each other until the cows come home.

If you have CPU-hours to burn, then at least contribute to Folding@Home, or something equally worthwhile.

There is a claim that Botnets aren't that big of a threat (e.g. on Tenebrix FAQ). I don't know if it's true or not, time will tell.

The advantages of a CPU friendly network is that literally everyone can play. It's released in a control manner, so no "hidden" early adopters. You don't need to compile C++ or run linux to be an early adopter of LiteCoin - just download and run. When Bitcoin was first released, this was certainly not the case.

I'm not saying that LiteCoin > BitCoin ... again, time will tell.

Fact is, when I told my friends about Bitcoin, half a year ago, I told them "yeah, it's a crypto-currency you can mine at home ... in theory. In practice, don't try it, because you'll just burn your CPU for nothing. How to mine on a GPU? I don't know, it's too late, the hash power is huge already".

So there are people who feel Bitcoin is unfair in some sense. Those people might not feel this about an noob-friendly fair alt chain that doesn't have a ton of pre-mined coins. Or might not.

If the theory is correct, new comers will not feel the "early adopter envy" to such a degree as it was with Bitcoin, and LiteCoin can at least find its market, even if it won't dominate over Bitcoin. I don't have anything better to do with my CPU right now, so I'm trying it out. Perhaps I'll even buy a few when there is an exchange, we'll see.

Every coin I've seen so far wasn't a good candidate as "silver", each for its own reasons. I think NameCoin could have been, but was deliberately underdeveloped (still no GUI, I don't know how much time after release).

Understand, it's not "bitcoin vs the alts". It's "cryptocurrencies vs fiat", and everyone that invests in Bitcoin should invest some portion in alts, because they have some chance of out-growing bitcoin, at least relatively. Even if Bitcoin market cap is X1000 than LiteCoin in a year, perhaps if I invest a small amount of time & money today, my money will grow by a factor of 1000, while Bitcoin might only grow by a factor of 10. I don't know the likelihood of this scenario, but I believe it's possible.

Sorry for the long post.

Finally someone that gets the ScamCoin philosophy.

@ripper234, “bitcoin silver” is a funny analogy I don't quite get. It's not fundamentally any different than bitcoin in any way. Scrypt vs sha256, short rounds, and a larger monetary base... that's all cosmetic. The last two are literally one-line changes, with very little practical effect. It's still bitcoin protocol, bitcoin scripting language, bitcoin generating curve, and a hash-derived proof of work. It's bitcoin through-and-through, except for a choice of hash function that makes it resistant to parallel implementation.

And why? Because a few people on this forum didn't like that parallel sha256 made mining unprofitable for those without means? Please don't forget that the role of the miner is to provide security to the network, not to make you rich. Those hoards of GPU, FPGA/ASIC mining rigs provide security far, far better than any CPU-based system could. That time traveller attack? It still exists in bitcoin, but thanks to parallel miners, exploiting it would set you back millions of $$. With these new CPU-friendly, security-hostile *coins, any reasonable botnet operator will be able to herd more hashing capacity than the entire legitimate network, far into the foreseeable future.

“Tenebrix/Fairbrix/Litecoin: Bitcoin, minus the security!”

You'd have to go to the equation of exchange: (monetary base) x (velocity) = (price level) x (gdp)--velocity being a measure of how quickly money changes hands. A positive increase in price level is what's usually meant by “inflation”, so take the first derivative and isolate d/dt(price level), and you'll see all the terms that need to be dealt with.

To get fixed, positive inflation you'd have to set the block reward to a fixed percentage of the total number of coins (so it changes with each block), then add in a factor to cancel/zero out each of the remaining non-zero/changing terms.

I know of no altchain that does this.

I didn't rant against anything by name. I was also careful to say “as originally presented” w.r.t GEG. Of course having pre-mined 7m coins then actively working to setup an exchange casts one heck of a dark cloud on the whole project. Why are people still mining now that the experiment is a success? Why is anyone putting up a bid order on the exchange?

I have, and I don't like it (I had a heated debate with him on the freicoin forums)--my opinion is quite opposite JohnDoe's: it's disastrous from an economics and security standpoint, but nothing is stopping an implementation. I do like that it is a genuinely new idea. But so far it's all talk and no code, and I don't like that.

Well, take a look at EnCoin mate !

Alternative currencies are the new Bitcoinduit.

I completely agree

but there's an even better reason not to make a new coin:
someone will just do 51% doublespend attacks on the exchanges if the hash rates are too low
we've seen this with ixcoins and i0coins so far

it's probably easily done with gg, the hashrate is not that high
so there's really room only for three currencies:
1. bitcoins
2. namecoins with merged mining
3.

1) It seems to me that making a coin that has a fixed increase-in-percentile  in miner output is rather trivial.

2) Since I am not economist (so please don't take this question as some kind of pedantic trollolololery), why is nominally fixed output not considered a case of fixed "inflation", is there a universal agreement as to that increase in monetary mass should only be counted in percent of previous output ?

P.S.:

I think it is as good opportunity as any to remind that what is taking place in "consez" is neither proper inflation nor proper deflation, but more of a kind of psychological shenanigan.

maaku - first I saw your post, and I agreed with it.

Then I saw LiteCoin (which might have spurred your post to begin with).

I haven't seen such a serious contender as LiteCoin for the "Bitcoin silver" in a while. Its advantages over the other chains are explained within.

I don't know if "No GPU" is a good feature of a coin or not, but this is the first coin that gives us a good chance to test this.
I will be mining it when it launches.

It is not radically different than Bitcoin, I agree, but no harm in trying other things, at least when you're serious, don't pre-mine, and respect your predecessors. coblee seems to fit these criteria, just by that one post.

@Lolcust, nominally is different from actually--to my knowledge there is no *coin out which strives for the latter (a much harder problem).

As an aside, I do applaud you for Geist Geld, at least as it was originally presented. It came out just as I was in a debate with someone else about the possibility of bitcoin supporting very-short rounds. I had done some modeling which showed that rounds as short as ~4.5s were possible on the current bitcoin network. Although short round-times have made other attacks against the GEG network much worse, it has not been the root source of any security problems, and the network has been remarkably stable (more stable, in fact, than I had predicted).

GEG singlehandedly dispelled a number of myths about round-times that were until now widely believed on this forum. That kind of experimentation is a Good Thing.

Define fixed inflation - since inflation is fixed nominally in some of them new coins

Going good, we have been working super hard on TF 2.0 and will soon be released for beta.

I stopped coming here because of the kids.