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My opinions: Bitcoin - Actually used as a store of value, for capital flight, as a hedge, for darknet commerce, and some other ancillary purposes. Genuinely n

My opinions: Bitcoin - Actually used as a store of value, for capital flight, as a hedge, for darknet commerce, and some other ancillary purposes. Genuinely novel, and likely not going anywhere. Litecoin - Likely not sufficiently differentiated from Bitcoin to become major, but nevertheless compliments BTC for trading and acts as a sort of 'plan B' for some categories of Bitcoin failure. Ethereum - Cool tech, but all the innovative parts of it are highly unproven. The most novel thing done with it (the DAO) has arguably crippled the whole scene fundamentally with the fork (Vitalik is a kingmaker, and thus could be held liable). The "ICOs" - Pump and dump, baby! To understand this, take a look at all the ICOs (https://icotracker.net/ https://icotracker.net/) and look at the business plans. Basically, there's a whole ecosystem that seeks to recreate Silicon Valley, and bases their presumed success on the magic of Ethereum to give them a competitive advantage. Figure how many of those would have to be successful for the whole scene to stay afloat, and then consider whether that's even close to reasonable. I think it's transparently obvious that 95% of the ICOs work just fine with a simple database and don't leverage Ethereum in any way whatsoever. But perhaps I'm wrong. Some other stuff like Dash seems kinda interesting, but it's anyone's guess how the market will respond to it.

lazerpants 9y ago
Bitcoin seems to be a victim of its own success. Transacting in BTC is expensive and very slow now. I think that's what is driving growth in LTC and ETH. BTC proved the concept is workable, but that doesn't mean it will stick around.
- zanny 9y ago
  There have been years for bitcoin to adapt the protocol - even in non-forking ways - to ease the transaction backlog. Those with commit access and authority have chosen not to. I got out of it mainly for that purpose. I was interested in a universal currency, not a get rich scheme based on enticing people with the promise of the future just to use that promise as a means to pump exchange rates. Going forward, it is a perfectly serviceable crypto-gold, but it has no greater aspirations anymore. I think there is absolutely still room in the market for a cryptocurrency that isn't a ponzie scheme that can actually function as a daily driver currency replacement, but none have become popular yet. Probably because they aren't ponzie schemes.
  - brasky 9y ago
    You can't record every currency transaction on a blockchain it simply doesn't scale. None of the altcoins have figured out how to scale either.
    - dacox 9y ago
      Seriously, was there this much politiking for infighting when people proposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model.
      - detaro 9y ago
        Well, the stack around the OSI model seems to have lost to TCP/IP due to being late and overengineered, so possibly?
    - sp821543 9y ago
      How did we solve the problem of recording every written word into a single book?
    - zanny 9y ago
      You don't need everyone to have a complete blockchain. Etherium, for example, lets you just do fast syncs that use a fairly fixed amount of storage space. You need a copy somewhere to have an actual blockchain, but not every node need host that chain. The major players in the economy, however, with the resources to keep around 100GB every couple years of data are incentivized to to maintain the stability of their currency network. Because blocks are reverse-signed, you can't have a limited pool of old blocks and forge the records. Its a chain for a reason - each blocks signature is dependent on its peer blocks, and we still don't have anything close to breakable sha-256 that would compromise bitcoin.
      - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
        > You don't need everyone to have a complete blockchain. You do if immutability, censorship resistance, and resistance to state capture is what you hope to achieve with your crypto. > Etherium, for example, If Vitalik Buterim were to be arrested for whatever, or if he were even to just have a skiing accident and die suddenly, you'd see how important that decentralization is in bitcoin. There is no single point of failure in bitcoin. That's the point. Hey, for what it's worth, I think the tech behind ethereum is great. Most of the people who acquire it have no idea really what it is good for, but it has real potential. But as a 'store of value'? That's just one of the things that it isn't designed for.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
  That's certainly true, but I also tend to think that the scaling debate is overblown. Bitcoin, from the outset, has been designed to generate consensus around a majority chain. Forks are ultimately the source of Bitcoin's security and its development. If there's any elegance to Bitcoin, however brutal, it's here. There are several approaches to scaling Bitcoin that should work. The debate focuses on risk aversion and which will be best. In the end, though, any untenable situation should be quickly resolved as a majority choose the least painful option. The New York Agreement appears to be this in action, and represents a major shift in the community as a new client may become the default. Many have compared Bitcoin to TCP: it's not great, but it's good enough to become a standard. I tend to agree with this view, though there are many well-founded concerns.
  - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
    The second part of the nya has a hand waving requirement of 80,000 or so nodes uninstalling their existing node client software and installing a new unreviewed and untested node client three months after the segregated witness component is activated. I don't even know how that would be possible even if it was a change that everyone wanted, which they don't. Reckon the first component is going to happen but there is very little chance of the hard-fork part.
- 127 9y ago
  It used to be expensive. It is not anymore, as the bigblockers stopped the spam.
- companyhen 9y ago
  BTC could start using SegWit and some other stuff shortly to speed up transactions and lower costs.
sputknick 9y ago
I agree with all this, although I would phrase the Ethereum part differently. It's all unproven, but thus far, everything that they have said would theoretically work, and tried to implement, turned out to work in practice. Not disagreeing with your point, just the connotation around the word "unproven". The big test for me around ethereum comes when someone pushes the first REAL dApp on to mainnet. If that works out... then things get really interesting.
- crummel 9y ago
  Wasn't the DAO supposed to be the first real app, and it failed so badly they had to hard-fork to fix it?
  - sputknick 9y ago
    Touche. Second real dApp?
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Isn't it functioning fine now though?
    - sp821543 9y ago
      What happens when the next one is hacked to the same degree? I doubt a second fork will be tolerated.
      - JulianMorrison 9y ago
        The forkers have established - perhaps quite reasonably - the principle that Ethereum isn't a set of rules unto itself, but it includes the ability to right what are externally perceived as wrongs even when they are done by playing according to the internal rules. So the forkers have set a precedent for more forks, as needed, whenever the community as a whole decides some sufficiently impactful party is cheating the spirit, rather than the letter of the law.
just_one_time_ 9y ago
I disagree that it is "anyone's guess how the market will respond". It is been clear for going on 3-4 years now that the market will respond buy buying up all the Bitcoin and price will continue to skyrocket. I'll never need a job and have been telling anyone who will listen this same thing for years now.
MicroBerto 9y ago
But what happened to Dogecoin?
- halite 9y ago
  What happened to mySpace? something better came and made it obsolete.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  If I remember correctly DogeTipBot shut down after stealing a bunch of funds from its users, removing a significant use for DogeCoin.
Jabanga 9y ago
>Ethereum - Cool tech, but all the innovative parts of it are highly unproven. I think it's quite proven. Turing complete contracts work according to their code. This has already allowed hundreds of automated token sales to take place, and anyone to copy paste some code to make their own token (with most using the ERC20 standard). Alpha versions of several Dapps like Augur have been created and there is the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) which was programmed to do several innovative things: * automatically release names for registration on a staggered schedule * use hidden bids that are all revealed during a reveal phase * require the winning bidder to deposit the winning amount of ETH in the ENS contract for as long as they want to maintain control over the name, thus attaching a rental cost for squatting on a valuable name like exchange.eth, which means the rent charged is proportional to the economic rent extracted by rent-seekers. * allow peer to peer trade of names All of these ENS features have been working for months. And this is simply a contract built on Ethereum. And there are people working on contracts to lend out the ETH held for reserving ENS names, showing there are no limits to what can be done, subject only to the cost of the computing resources of the EVM. Just as another quick illustration of the openness of Ethereum to innovation, here's a project that automatically created 10,000 unique digital collectibles, each a graphical depiction of a cryptopunk character, put them on the Ethereum blockchain, and then let anyone that wanted to, claim them for free. All 10,000 were claimed and there has already been 25.0317 ETH ($7,762.83 USD) worth of cryptopunks purchased from those holding them, and there are currently 91.2646 ETH ($28,302.97 USD) in bids for cryptopunks for sake: http://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks http://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks
- sjg007 9y ago
  Would you please expand on this in a blog post? Very interesting to hear this out.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    Thanks for the vote of confidence. If I can see a way to expand on it in a blog post I'll do that.
deskamess 9y ago
I do not get ICO or what value they present. However I do see some value in contracts and how they can be tied to crowd funding. I am curious how the Braid movie, funded entirely through ETH [1], will pan out. The payout and profit sharing mechanism are defined in a contract and all that resolves automatically. No guarantee you will get your money back but it is a nice self contained investment vehicle. I did not get in, but this approach does let one invest in 'products' that one would not normally have access to (VC Me). [1] https://campaign.braidthemovie.com/ https://campaign.braidthemovie.com/
h1d 9y ago
Litecoin's value went up 10 fold because it found a way to be useful as a new feature testbed for somewhat real life situation. Went up with SegWit and Lightning Network activation accordingly, from $4. It would've only valued as that for being "plan B".

lazerpants 9y ago

Bitcoin seems to be a victim of its own success. Transacting in BTC is expensive and very slow now. I think that's what is driving growth in LTC and ETH. BTC proved the concept is workable, but that doesn't mean it will stick around.

zanny 9y ago
There have been years for bitcoin to adapt the protocol - even in non-forking ways - to ease the transaction backlog. Those with commit access and authority have chosen not to. I got out of it mainly for that purpose. I was interested in a universal currency, not a get rich scheme based on enticing people with the promise of the future just to use that promise as a means to pump exchange rates. Going forward, it is a perfectly serviceable crypto-gold, but it has no greater aspirations anymore. I think there is absolutely still room in the market for a cryptocurrency that isn't a ponzie scheme that can actually function as a daily driver currency replacement, but none have become popular yet. Probably because they aren't ponzie schemes.
- brasky 9y ago
  You can't record every currency transaction on a blockchain it simply doesn't scale. None of the altcoins have figured out how to scale either.
  - dacox 9y ago
    Seriously, was there this much politiking for infighting when people proposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model.
    - detaro 9y ago
      Well, the stack around the OSI model seems to have lost to TCP/IP due to being late and overengineered, so possibly?
  - sp821543 9y ago
    How did we solve the problem of recording every written word into a single book?
  - zanny 9y ago
    You don't need everyone to have a complete blockchain. Etherium, for example, lets you just do fast syncs that use a fairly fixed amount of storage space. You need a copy somewhere to have an actual blockchain, but not every node need host that chain. The major players in the economy, however, with the resources to keep around 100GB every couple years of data are incentivized to to maintain the stability of their currency network. Because blocks are reverse-signed, you can't have a limited pool of old blocks and forge the records. Its a chain for a reason - each blocks signature is dependent on its peer blocks, and we still don't have anything close to breakable sha-256 that would compromise bitcoin.
    - Frogolocalypse 9y ago
      > You don't need everyone to have a complete blockchain. You do if immutability, censorship resistance, and resistance to state capture is what you hope to achieve with your crypto. > Etherium, for example, If Vitalik Buterim were to be arrested for whatever, or if he were even to just have a skiing accident and die suddenly, you'd see how important that decentralization is in bitcoin. There is no single point of failure in bitcoin. That's the point. Hey, for what it's worth, I think the tech behind ethereum is great. Most of the people who acquire it have no idea really what it is good for, but it has real potential. But as a 'store of value'? That's just one of the things that it isn't designed for.
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y ago
That's certainly true, but I also tend to think that the scaling debate is overblown. Bitcoin, from the outset, has been designed to generate consensus around a majority chain. Forks are ultimately the source of Bitcoin's security and its development. If there's any elegance to Bitcoin, however brutal, it's here. There are several approaches to scaling Bitcoin that should work. The debate focuses on risk aversion and which will be best. In the end, though, any untenable situation should be quickly resolved as a majority choose the least painful option. The New York Agreement appears to be this in action, and represents a major shift in the community as a new client may become the default. Many have compared Bitcoin to TCP: it's not great, but it's good enough to become a standard. I tend to agree with this view, though there are many well-founded concerns.
- Frogolocalypse 9y ago
  The second part of the nya has a hand waving requirement of 80,000 or so nodes uninstalling their existing node client software and installing a new unreviewed and untested node client three months after the segregated witness component is activated. I don't even know how that would be possible even if it was a change that everyone wanted, which they don't. Reckon the first component is going to happen but there is very little chance of the hard-fork part.
127 9y ago
It used to be expensive. It is not anymore, as the bigblockers stopped the spam.
companyhen 9y ago
BTC could start using SegWit and some other stuff shortly to speed up transactions and lower costs.

sputknick 9y ago

I agree with all this, although I would phrase the Ethereum part differently. It's all unproven, but thus far, everything that they have said would theoretically work, and tried to implement, turned out to work in practice. Not disagreeing with your point, just the connotation around the word "unproven". The big test for me around ethereum comes when someone pushes the first REAL dApp on to mainnet. If that works out... then things get really interesting.

crummel 9y ago
Wasn't the DAO supposed to be the first real app, and it failed so badly they had to hard-fork to fix it?
- sputknick 9y ago
  Touche. Second real dApp?
- colordrops 9y ago
  Isn't it functioning fine now though?
  - sp821543 9y ago
    What happens when the next one is hacked to the same degree? I doubt a second fork will be tolerated.
    - JulianMorrison 9y ago
      The forkers have established - perhaps quite reasonably - the principle that Ethereum isn't a set of rules unto itself, but it includes the ability to right what are externally perceived as wrongs even when they are done by playing according to the internal rules. So the forkers have set a precedent for more forks, as needed, whenever the community as a whole decides some sufficiently impactful party is cheating the spirit, rather than the letter of the law.

just_one_time_ 9y ago

I disagree that it is "anyone's guess how the market will respond". It is been clear for going on 3-4 years now that the market will respond buy buying up all the Bitcoin and price will continue to skyrocket. I'll never need a job and have been telling anyone who will listen this same thing for years now.

MicroBerto 9y ago

But what happened to Dogecoin?

halite 9y ago
What happened to mySpace? something better came and made it obsolete.
saagarjha 9y ago
If I remember correctly DogeTipBot shut down after stealing a bunch of funds from its users, removing a significant use for DogeCoin.

Jabanga 9y ago

>Ethereum - Cool tech, but all the innovative parts of it are highly unproven. I think it's quite proven. Turing complete contracts work according to their code. This has already allowed hundreds of automated token sales to take place, and anyone to copy paste some code to make their own token (with most using the ERC20 standard). Alpha versions of several Dapps like Augur have been created and there is the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) which was programmed to do several innovative things: * automatically release names for registration on a staggered schedule * use hidden bids that are all revealed during a reveal phase * require the winning bidder to deposit the winning amount of ETH in the ENS contract for as long as they want to maintain control over the name, thus attaching a rental cost for squatting on a valuable name like exchange.eth, which means the rent charged is proportional to the economic rent extracted by rent-seekers. * allow peer to peer trade of names All of these ENS features have been working for months. And this is simply a contract built on Ethereum. And there are people working on contracts to lend out the ETH held for reserving ENS names, showing there are no limits to what can be done, subject only to the cost of the computing resources of the EVM. Just as another quick illustration of the openness of Ethereum to innovation, here's a project that automatically created 10,000 unique digital collectibles, each a graphical depiction of a cryptopunk character, put them on the Ethereum blockchain, and then let anyone that wanted to, claim them for free. All 10,000 were claimed and there has already been 25.0317 ETH ($7,762.83 USD) worth of cryptopunks purchased from those holding them, and there are currently 91.2646 ETH ($28,302.97 USD) in bids for cryptopunks for sake: http://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks http://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks

sjg007 9y ago
Would you please expand on this in a blog post? Very interesting to hear this out.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  Thanks for the vote of confidence. If I can see a way to expand on it in a blog post I'll do that.

deskamess 9y ago

I do not get ICO or what value they present. However I do see some value in contracts and how they can be tied to crowd funding. I am curious how the Braid movie, funded entirely through ETH [1], will pan out. The payout and profit sharing mechanism are defined in a contract and all that resolves automatically. No guarantee you will get your money back but it is a nice self contained investment vehicle. I did not get in, but this approach does let one invest in 'products' that one would not normally have access to (VC Me). [1] https://campaign.braidthemovie.com/ https://campaign.braidthemovie.com/

h1d 9y ago

Litecoin's value went up 10 fold because it found a way to be useful as a new feature testbed for somewhat real life situation. Went up with SegWit and Lightning Network activation accordingly, from $4. It would've only valued as that for being "plan B".