Topic: Why are there so many alternative cryptocurrencies? (Read 2426 times)

ugh.

I guess I will now. It's gonna have to wait until after I'm done sorting through job openings today though, so thanks for posting them all. I'm sure you didn't just share them for no reason. That amount of articles will probably take me a lot of time to get through, so I guess I'll be back tomorrow

The only solution I've found for this so far, is to realize that most of these coins are launched with a dedicated profile for the announcement. I usually just put that profile on ignore and carry on my day. Seriously, it's been so relieving. I've gone through the first 50 pages of altcoin announcements and now maybe out of 50 pages, I've got about one page worth of announcement threads that show up as blue, while the rest are all grey. So much of a relief.

It took about 3 days to go through them all, best time investment ever.

I get what you mean, sorry if I wasn't clear. I was trying to make the point that I don't think any of us know don't know if, in the analogy, bitcoin is flash memory or an 8 track and everything else is just a one-off, because it's all still so new. My perspective is that anything that is poking out from bitcoins shadow currently is, in the very least, technically interesting and worth it to look into (even if you're not buying). Currently, I can see bitcoin as the 8 track or you can see it as the flash memory, but recognizing that such an evolution took place in the past has allowed me to observe these things with a different mindset than when I originally came here.


Hah! Couple weeks? Last two days, there's not been less than four launches per day! I just put them on my grey list and move on for the most part. Actually another possibly technically interesting one came up today: La'Zooz. It appears to be using PoS stuff, which I'm not wild about because you have to buy into the distribution method, but the knowledge that someone can come by one day and change the distribution method to one that solves the byzantine generals problem would be a fascinating discovery. I'll even admit that I don't understand it enough yet to say that they haven't done just that, but I'll give it a few days to explain themselves before it's on the grey list. Last thing on my mind though is to throw money at it like it's gonna usher in a new paradigm, though. Opposite this though, there's been Vox Populi, MiracleCoin, DarknetCoin, Fractions, Malibucoin and quite a few others that went immediately to my grey list (this does not mean I'm not mining them out of boredom, however).

The tough part about that, though, is that it requires a hard fork. So, if a PoS coin were to do something like this, the entire mining network, with likely the most costs sunk into this, and the exchanges, and all the stores would have to be okay with that. Sure, it's possible, but a change like that could take years. Even if it only takes one year to change, what kind of ground could the competitor cover in 20% of bitcoins lifetime? Probably a lot. Generally, this knowledge has led a lot of people to assign words like 'scam' to reasonably legitimate projects, because to do otherwise would likely hurt their marketcap. Again, the blinders come up and we're left with only one group of people being 'allowed' to come up with legitimate technical contributions to cryptocurrencies. I don't know if that's gonna last. Sure looks like it will, but I dunno.


All I can find myself able to confidently contend is that altcoins are currently a niche market, just as bitcoin was when it was largely used for silk road.


I'm sure they can stand to lose $20.00, as purchasing this amount of bitcoins 4-5 years ago could have allowed them to live comfortably for years (10k+ bitcoin Pizza?). Plus, consider that the $20.00 they're throwing at cryptocurrencies is money they won't waste on an hour and a half long movie, an extra meal they really don't need to eat, another t-shirt that's gonna end up in the trash in a year anyways. All I'm trying to say is that by owning even as little as one single block of them could give them the incentive to learn and participate in cryptocurrencies, maybe visit this forum and learn things, hell maybe even make them rich within their lifetime all from not buying a tee shirt. One thing I do not advocate; however, is betting the barn on any of these. Big mac? Sure. Next month's rent? No way.


If you feel like a parasite, please spend time trying to discover you you feel like that. Once you discover exactly what it is, if it disgusts you, then the most responsible thing I can think to do is bring your concerns to the developers as many times as you can until one of them figures out how to make you stop feeling that way, because by extension they're partially responsible for it in addition to yourself. Every once in a while, I can guarantee one of them will listen. If you enjoy it though, then keep on grabbing as many as possible

You didn't read all the links linked in the above linked post.


http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/10/14/so-when-will-we-know/


http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/10/14/dow-2015-75/


http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/10/14/dow-for-10-14-2014/


For details on the bolded phrase, read these posts:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/03/29/latin-america-dollar-loans/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/10/09/the-dollar-the-greatest-short-position-perhaps-in-history/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/05/22/historic-trade-deal-russia-china-will-this-dethrone-the-usd/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/05/08/dollar-trade-reserves/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/03/29/the-short-dollar-the-debt-bubble/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/26/the-paradox-of-the-dollar-the-crash/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/03/05/beware-the-dollar-rally/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/12/15/yuan-the-death-of-the-dollar-good-one/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/07/15/killing-the-dollar/



So let me spell this out for you. Different private assets rallied when the ECM model[1] rose or declined, e.g. stocks rising during ECM rises from 1997-1998, 1999-2000 (dot.com), gold, silver rising during ECM declines 1998-1999, 2005-2006, 2007-2008, 2009-2011, and Bitcoin rising during ECM declines 2013-2014. Government bonds rose in the intervening periods. But as of 2013, stocks started to invert and continued rising with the ECM decline 2013-2014.

Nasdaq (dot.com):

(notice in addition to correlation with turns on the ECM, that the entire bubble rise & fall was 8.6 years perfectly fit to the model)

Government bonds should rise now while all private assets are starting to align with the 2015.75 inversion of the ECM (due to the impeding failure of government worldwide) thus all will make lows around 2015.75. After 2015.75, the government debt contagion will go over the cliff and the short dollar positions all over the world will create contagion that has never been seen before in the history of the world.

After Oct. 2015, the dollar will rally hard, along with all private assets (stocks, gold, real estate, commodities, collectibles, Bitcoin). Before private assets were separated by risk as to how they performed differentially during ECM rises and declines, but as government debt goes into default globally, all private assets will be seen as less risky than government debt after the BIG BANG on Oct. 2015. The ECM declines which occur every 4.3 years have been correlated with increasing worse contagion, i.e. the Long Term Capital Management scare in 1998, the 2008 global debt contagion, and so the debt contagion after 2015.75 is going to be much worse than 2008. The private assets are now all aligning with that reality and thus while ECM (business cycle confidence move up), the private assets are all moving down to make a low by 2015.75 at the latest. Before stocks were viewed a positively correlated to confidence because they were valued on their dividends, now all private assets are being increasingly valued on their lack of direct default exposure to government debt thus they start to move up on ECM declines and move down on ECM rises.

But the governments with their police states, taxes, and capital controls (KYC, AML, bail-ins, etc) will be confiscating private assets left and right.

So commerce will collapse. War, riots, massive unemployment, worldwide pandemic, petulance, etc.. will ensue.

We need that decentralized crypto-currency that is really a currency. Horror lies ahead.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Confidence_Model

There are a few alts that do appear promising. There are also projects underway developing potentially complimentary systems to work alongside bitcoin that could give bitcoin the same technical improvements that some alts are now promising. the problem is that the vast majority of alts were made out of greed, and it has become extremely difficult to wade through all the garbage coins to spot the promising ones, so most people just dismiss the alts as scams or fads.

Ehhh....yeah, i'm kinda putting words in your mouth here but making an analogy that Bitcoin is akin to an 8-track player and new fancy alts are akin to a Blu-ray, isn't exactly apt in my opinion.  I mean, good god, the magnitude of BTC, what it does, and what it enables people to do is just astonishing.  It's not perfect but it's good enough.

I'd say fiat is akin to the 8-track, BTC is a giant leap to the Blu-ray player, and new alts are just adding on superfluous bells and whistles that while maybe nice, aren't exactly necessary at the moment.  Alts are a great playground for new advancements, but BTC can adapt and incorporate new features into the protocol, albeit at a much slower pace.

In a world of open-source code and new coins coming out every other week, and the BTC network, hashrate, and merchant adoption growing at a rapid pace, nothing has time to catch up.  Just give it a couple weeks and the new shiny alt we all ohhhh and ahhhh over will be replaced by another shiny alt that does everything the previous coin did + 1 MORE MIND BLOWING FEATURE THAT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD AND REPLACE BTC!!!  OMG!!!  BUY BUY BUY!!!

And this cycle will repeat, and BTC will slowly pick at the rotting corpses of dying alts and incorporate anything good they came up with.

There will always be alt coins, but I contend they will remain a niche market.

And no, I haven't made an effort to convince my family to buy BTC because if this whole grand experiment fails, I don't want to be the cause of them losing money.  They know I believe in BTC and I evangelize for it, and if they want to cross that bridge I will be more than happy to point them in the right direction, but they need to decide to cross that bridge on their own.

I am not a speculator or an investor, I'm just a parasitic alt-miner and trader trying to make up for missed opportunities before the BTC train leaves the station for good.

Actually, in relation to the previous paragraph I just wrote, perhaps the difficulty in selling this (specifically bitcoin) to people lies in the fact that when trying to spur adoption with bitcoin, the mental aversion found in an outsider (non-adopter) is that you are blatantly trying to sell them a top-down architecture of financial design? Immediately they correlate this to the situation they're already in and become dismissive of the prospect, and refuse to learn any further. I'm referring more to the distribution model of bitcoin, and not the overall currently decentralized blockchain transaction network (which again will be met with centralization when tx fees become a relevant issue). So, in comparison, perhaps bitcoin is too close of a sell to what people currently see fiat as (money)? Generally my selling point has been uncovering their misunderstanding of what fiat is and comparing that to bitcoin, rather than the topological structure of the distribution method of fiat.


With that in mind, trying to sell someone on an altcoin that is less centralized than bitcoin will be a foreign concept to them; as my efforts were spent largely on discerning the difference between fiat and bitcoin, and not the distribution method of fiat and the distribution method of bitcoin. The idea that an account cannot controlled seems to be directly related to a non-centrally controlled transaction network, and seems not to be as related to the distribution of the value tokens to be used by that network?

Also, Paypal has recently given me the KYC or get out change to my terms of usage. I haven't updated them, for the time being. I find that strange, because two other people who I know use Paypal have not been asked for a copy of their drivers license and everything else that comes along with singing up at some altcoin exchanges. So in response to your 'instant signup', this seems to be a selective thing to me at this point in time.

Do you think it'll be easy to jump on the train, as it's leaving the station?

There is a great deal of innovation that will come out of the alt coins however, POS is a wonderful technology. PoS is another way of saying "please take your coins off the market so I can dump on you"

Crypto-currency can do something that fiat can't. People all over the world in theory could signup for a bank account immediately without needing to give blood samples and locks of their hair. The key point I've always made it is all about distribution. It is a chicken and egg problem of people need a fiat account if the coin isn't a unit-of-account, yet the coin can't scale to unit-of-account if people don't join the coin by buying some on an exchange with fiat. That has been the bottle neck up to now, because what is the point of using Bitcoin if you already have a bank account and Paypal (also Bitcoin is more difficult to use, less consumer protection, slower transactions, etc).

Gaining a bank account is getting more and more onerous even in the developing world. The SOBs can't control the world if they can't control your accounts, so they have no choice but to make this process more and more difficult. They are trying to unifying at birth biometric and national id systems to make the process more automatic, but they won't get there any time soon.

So for the moment you will need your bank account with Paypal and Apple Pay, or they might try instant signup with low volume limits not needing KYC. But that can be quickly leveraged to hide money from their control by moving everything though numerous accounts.

So there, I've alluded to one my secret strategies.

But I have many more I won't share. Sorry I won't tell you everything.

You will know when Bitcoin has been replaced, because you will see adoption of the new thing skyrocketing. Then you will jump on the train as it is leaving the station.

EDIT: crypto-currency is a battle for the "last mile", i.e. who is going to scale out to those who don't have bank accounts or those business models that are unable to use Paypal effectively because of its (often chaotic) KYC and AML policies, transaction fees, or technology. On the latter two, for example how well (fast and fees) do micro payments work on Paypal?

Many altcoins are only there to scam out newbies. Thats kinda sad - But there are also a few which are willing to help, where bitcoin cant.

I'll quote the hackneyed reference to 8track, cassettes, betamax, dvd, flash memory to you here. Obviously not the best reference, as we don't know the future, but a valid one nonetheless.


Then you, as an investor and not as a speculator, are not utilizing your full skillset to get them on board. In a relative view to myself, I've increased adoption to bitcoin by about 300% by now. The key to helping people gain a legitimate interest lies in explaining not only the 'to da moon' rich for a million years mindset, but also in sitting down and having very long conversations about what money is and what decentralized blockchain technology is in relation to it. Not everyone wants to be rich for a million years, because grandma, in addition to her likely misunderstanding of the technnology, likely won't be here for a million years. She doesn't want to be rich, but she might be swayed on your ability to teach her a thing or two. Crossing this line moves you from being a speculator to an investor, or maybe even more.

They may technically be improvements, but first mover advantage and network effect trumps any technical advantages.

I remember telling my family about getting into this stuff a couple years ago, they thought I was crazy, now they see Bitcoin on the news.  Even my grandma knows about Bitcoin, but she doesn't own any.

If my grandma won't buy Bitcoin, what technical advantages will make her want to buy an alt coin?

Yes, but apart from the miserable clones, there are coins like Counteryparty, Doge, Anoncoin, Monero, Darkcoin, Boolberry, Bitcoindark, Saffroncoin, Node, Darknote, Crypti, Checkcoin, Securitysyscoin?, Primecoin, Namecoin, Etherium, Bitmark, Riecoin, Cryptonite, Maskcoin, MC2, Skycoin, Siacoin, Lottoshares, MMC2, Gameleaguecoin?, eUtopium?, IronBankCoin?, Huntercoin, SIGA, Peercoin, Bitnet?, eMunie, Maidsafe, Ripple, Nostrum?, Zennet, Zerocash, WorldWideCoin? and other various new coin projects that your 'missed the btc train' model doesn't 100% describe.

Sure, some are probably shit coins, but the technical/social differences present in some of them are on the level of which bitcoin will likely never see. It's clearly too early to tell if they're valid technical improvements, but to attribute the entire cycle to greed is akin to running around with blinders.

This.

Everyone is pissed (me included) they didn't stock up on BTC when it cost pennies.  Alts are selling the dream you can be in on BTC 2.0

Sure, there is money to be made, but there will be no BTC 2.0, in the end there is only BTC.  You missed the train, accept it, and use alts as a means to get as much BTC as possible before the party is over.

Devs clone already existing coins and buyers buy them beleiving that theymissed tht BTC train , so they buy the newly cloned coins. But new coins get dumped into oblivion and then new coin is on the way. Its rinse and repeat cycle flourishing on greed.

Go away MicroGuy, take your GLD with. Are you still making youtube videos?  I never knew if I should laugh or be disgusted at the lame old man trying to get people to buy his shitcoin "CUZ IT CALLED GOLD GUYS!!!! GEE WHIZZ, HOW COULD IT FAIL?!?!?!?"

Now that citizens, or at least smaller retailers looking for a better deal, have valid reason (alibaba, etc) to conduct regular international exchange, what type of barriers in fiat are there that wouldn't be there with a cryptocurrency? Apart from the obvious increased fee % for using fiat to transact internationally, would you say there were significant political, legal, or other (social/technical?) barriers in place in order to 'curb' the average citizen or smaller retailer from ever wanting to transact internationally, that would continue to push them to using the local fiat currency?

I think what I'm wondering is, were these barriers to international exchange more designed to stunt transactions of financially non-empowered people, or were the barriers more designed to cultivate multiple international debt issuance systems? And could the technical barriers be eliminated, leaving only exchange volatility for a system using multiple forms of cryptocurrency?


And I think, after a 10 months of reading, trying to understand or just regurgitate information, that I'm finally at the point of being able to ask questions.


What does SDR stand for? Regardless, are you saying that agglomerating the debt into one unified fiat could allow the debt issuance to continue, without the previous international barriers of transaction between people? I'm sure the answer to why this is lies in the economic devastation thread, as possibly the collapse of retail/industrial economies could cascade into the implosion of a local fiat economy, but not immediately lead to the implosion of a global one?

Could I take this further, and say that individual fiat economies, through excess debt issuance, will tend to take the value of everything to zero in relation to its fiat worth? And, as an attempt to subvert that occurrence, somehow combining them into one unified fiat will prevent that temporarily, and one unified cryptocurrency will prevent that permanently?

+1.
People think that creating a coins is easy money.

We all know the reason why. Just greed. Most try operate under the illusion of catering to a niche in the market, but the devs only create them to get rich quick. They dump them then move on. Probably close to 99% of these other coins are completely pointless.

I don't recall any prior discussion. I believe I am first to state it that way, at least from everything I've digested over the internet over the past 8 years.

The national fiats existed because each government wanted to write its own debt (that comes from Armstrong) and because its citizens didn't need to do international exchange.

The next global currency might just be for importers and exporters to hedge with, unless we move to full blown global transactions between individuals.

And the other political selling point is to have a currency which is not beholden to the corrupt politics of any nation (which will become so evident and hated as we descend into the economy abyss after 2015.75), so the BIS, WorldBank, etc.. can regulate its supply.

So that begets my bifurcation of the global economy concept. I have argued in the threads such as Economic Devastation and Dark Enlightenment that the retail and industrial (physical goods) economy is dying (the governments will tax it to death, profit margins near 0 due to China, etc) and the virtual (downloadable goods, e.g. 3D printer designs) is the fast growing future.

Thus the coming fiat global units (e.g. SDRs) could be for the dying economy.

Thus any paradigm shift crypto-currency must target the new economy and create the new global unit-of-account. We need to race out ahead of Paypal and Apple Pay.

The latest flurry of Armstrong links explain the transition underway towards the above outcome.