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IMHO (because to claim to "know" anything about how this is all going to turn out is to be a fraud), Bitcoin is the proof of concept for this whole crypto thing

IMHO (because to claim to "know" anything about how this is all going to turn out is to be a fraud), Bitcoin is the proof of concept for this whole crypto thing. It was the first. It was the genesis idea. But good lord, do we think it's the actual solution? What would be the odds? I imagine that Bitcoin will play its part as the public face of the blockchain revolution, but something else - or many other somethings - will be the successors that we actually use in the future. (Pick your own alt-coin as the successor; good luck.) If I had a large holding in Bitcoin now I would be cashing out or I'd be nervous. I'm not saying it won't go higher, I'm saying that at some point its demise is inevitable. Might be quick, might be slow, but it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field. It's not even close.

kybernetikos 9y ago
> it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field Not only that, but it's shown that it doesn't have the ability to make the changes necessary to innovate and stay current.
- solotronics 9y ago
  It has evolved to be a store of value and it's doing an amazing job at that. Thinking from the perspective of the developers (many of whom have very large amounts of BTC) a slow and deliberate rate of changes is a very good thing. Making a mistake here would mean hundreds of billions of dollars would be lost. I am all for other cryptos moving quickly and breaking things to test out new ideas. Who in their right mind would take the same mentality on Bitcoin?
  - newfoundglory 9y ago
    Why is this praiseworthy in bitcoin and seen as delaying progress and selfishly holding onto gains in taxi companies?
  - ComputerGuru 9y ago
    Bitcoin is absolutely not a good store of value. A good store of value is a reliable store of value: one where you can place your assets and go back and get them at any later time. As a deflationary currency, bitcoin would be a hypothetically good store of value if a bitcoin actually had any intrinsic or even just de facto value. But it clearly doesn’t: it’s only the conversion to and from USD (and others) that has given it any value at all as an investment vehicle to some. And _that_ value isn’t guaranteed preserved one bit.
    - HereBeBeasties 9y ago
      Most asset classes look like that, though. Gold has some intrinsic value as a good conductor/reflector of heat. But it's not really so very much superior to aluminium or copper or whatever to make it worth what it is worth. It is expensive because it is scarce. That's it. Bitcoin is the same. (They are obviously very different in other ways, but you get the point.) Things don't need to have intrinsic value to be valuable. They simply need to be desired by the market.
      - chakalakasp 9y ago
        Gold isn't even in the same realm of volatility as BC, though. You put money in Gold and you're pretty sure if the world burns it's still worth something. You put money in BC at breakfast and you may be a pauper by lunch.
      - ComputerGuru 9y ago
        I agree with you - I actually implicitly meant everything you said. The crux of the matter lies with your last sentence: "They simply need to be desired by the market" Ergo, the quality of an asset as a "store of value" (the point of contention I was addressing in my comment) is directly mapped to the desire. BTC's desire is insanely volatile, automatically making it a poor store of value. My point is precisely that all assets used as currency are oftentimes intrinsically worthless. It's the demand - and the liquidity it provides converting to and fro said currency from other goods or currencies - that makes it a value storage vehicle. BTC, as a "value storage vehicle," is a very poor choice. Gold isn't.
- hbosch 9y ago
  In fairness (I'm personally not a Bitcoin supporter) from the outside, it seemed more like the problem is no one can agree on who should be pushing changes and innovation: Core Dev or the coalition of miners?
  - spookthesunset 9y ago
    > In fairness (I'm personally not a Bitcoin supporter) from the outside, it seemed more like the problem is no one can agree on who should be pushing changes and innovation: Core Dev or the coalition of miners? If you step back and look at any kind of "libertarian" driven project this becomes a problem. When everybody who makes something inherently distrusts authority or having anybody "in charge", you can never really build anything big. I'd say bitcoin provides good evidence that to make any big change in a system the buck always has to stop with some individual. With nobody in charge, you'll just drift around at the same local maximum--sometimes going up a bit, sometimes going down a bit, but never moving to an even larger but different source of value. I dunno... just a thought....
    - rspeer 9y ago
      Your thoughts are fine, don't undermine yourself by saying "I dunno... just a thought" like that.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
foxhedgehog 9y ago
I see this as the 1.0 era of blockchain. There may yet be an amazon or a google lurking amidst all of the pets.com ICOs out there. If I had to guess who would survive, I would say SAFE.
colordrops 9y ago
What is being missed by your analysis is that the value in a blockchain comes more from the network than the tech. There are thousands upon thousands of blockchains of no value. You could fork bitcoin or some other chain right now and start it on your laptop. Doesn't mean anything - the network is the value. So taking this into account, when the shackles of Bitcoin's simplicity and limitations become unbearable, the network will evolve through protocol upgrades or through a contentious fork where the hash power and development resources will move to. In either case your coins and value are retained.
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  If humanity decides to walk the path of the worser tech, you can build a metropolis from diamond and light elsewhere as much as you want- nobody is going to migrate. They are going to pay outrageous sums, to upgrade the path the group is already heading down, the will pay to bribe and cast aside tech that holds them back. Alternative standards, no matter how pure and clean from a technical point of perspective, will be ignored. Linux vs Windows allover, in fintech infrastructure and protocolls.
  - Bombthecat 9y ago
    Jep, that's why you just invest in bitcoin if you want to make money
- lojack 9y ago
  With atomic swaps and other innovations in the space, the cost of switching networks is becoming smaller. It’s hard to say how all of this will pan out, but I’m guessing we’ll see a much more diverse space than what you’re picturing.
- zrm 9y ago
  > What is being missed by your analysis is that the value in a blockchain comes more from the network than the tech. That is the reason why anyone can't just create a new coin and expect everyone else to value it, but that doesn't mean there can't be any viable competitors. And if a competitor with a sufficient advantage got popular enough, it could take the lead. For example, the hack Bitcoin used to become popular was to be deflationary, which encourages speculation. That got the value up before it was cool, but it stays deflationary -- even gets more so -- once it's popular, and the consequent speculation causes high volatility. Once you're popular, being deflationary becomes a liability instead of an asset. It's possible for a coin not to be deflationary and have the supply set by computing costs. If the value of the coin falls below the energy cost of creating them, people stop creating more of them and the value stabilizes there (so it doesn't keep going down). But as demand for the coin increases the value rises above the threshold and people start mining again (so it doesn't keep going up). That stability would be a huge advantage. But it's not possible to convert Bitcoin to that because its deflationary nature is priced into its value. Making it non-deflationary would make it worthless to speculators, which would eliminate most of its current valuation. So all it would take is for a non-deflationary coin to become popular enough for people to trust it not to disappear overnight and the people using it for transactions rather than speculation would prefer it over Bitcoin.
runeks 9y ago
> It was the first. It was the genesis idea. But good lord, do we think it's the actual solution? What would be the odds? If superior technology comes along, what will prevent Bitcoin from adopting this, and using its network effect to outmaneuver a competing blockchain? A couple of months ago, the Bitcoin network adopted the SegWit protocol change, which could be considered a minor fix (no major improvements to scalability). If the Bitcoin network can agree to adopt a minor fix, why wouldn’t it be able to agree to adopt a major scalability improvement as well?
- jononor 9y ago
  Adoption of Segwit (a minor change) was neither quick, easy or without controversy. It does not lend much faith in the Bitcoin community ability to deploy big changes in a timely manner.
  - etr-strike 9y ago
    The consensus rules of bitcoin are supposed to be incredibly difficult to change. That's a feature, not a bug. Changing consensus rules is only easy if the network is centralized. That's not something I want to have in my money. If new technology demonstrates it's value beyond doubt, upgrading the network will have vast consensus.
perlpimp 9y ago
bitcoin is already used in pseudo reserve de-facto currency to trade other currencies. perhaps it will stay that way - a way into crypto world.
InternetUser 9y ago
> something else - or many other somethings - will be the successors that we actually use in the future. Right now, the top 3 crypto-tokens are Ethereum-based, as are 89 of the Top 100: https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/ https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/ Word-find "token" here to see what the word means in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum
tenaciousDaniel 9y ago
This is my thought as well, and I don't understand why it isn't more commonly stated. The sheer chances that the very first implementation of this technology turns out to not only be viable for long-term success, but is actually adopted as such, seems extraordinarily low. There's what I call the "football" effect. The player jumps on the football after a fumble, and while he's the first to grab it, there's a handful of 250 pound guys about to jump on top of him. Bitcoin is the first to the football, but over the long term I think it's going to get inevitably crushed.
- Klinky 9y ago
  There's also something called "first mover advantage", which kind of contradicts your "football effect". There have been a ton of altcoins created, none of which have crushed Bitcoin. Bitcoin is still holding on to the football quite handily.
  - omg_ketchup 9y ago
    Also, the first person to jump on the football does get possession of the ball for the team, so there's that.
  - tymmc 9y ago
    I'm personally skeptical that incumbency is a significant advantage, particularly given that Bitcoin now is impractical to use directly for most transactions. If your transactions are being done off the blockchain and it's trivial to switch to denominating them in a non-Bitcoin currency, and there's no particularly strong reason for people to accept Bitcoin as payment over a different currency, what's the barrier to entry for a new crypto-currency?
    - Klinky 9y ago
      The barrier to entry is low. The barrier to mass adoption is high. Bitcoin is winning that war handily compared to any other cryptocurrency. There are definitely flaws with Bitcoin that will need to be ironed out, but the world's most elegant cryptocurrency is useless if no one has heard of it or uses it. First mover and marketing often trumps technological advantage. A non-techie doesn't care about Ethereum or Monero, but they do care about Bitcoin when the news is talking about how valuable it is everyday. Bitcoin is changing the mindset of what money is to the masses, this can't be said for other cryptocurrencies. Perhaps Bitcoin will fail at some point in the distant future, but for the time being it is absolutely the most influential cryptocurrency, this can easily be seen by all altcoins' value being pegged to their BTC conversion rate.
flibble 9y ago
If you have a bitcoin and cash out the amount you make us fixed/limited to the current value if a bitcoin. If you don't cash out the maximum you could possibly lose is 1 bitcoin but that amount you could make is largely unlimited. Your bitcoin could triple or 100x in value.
ignoramous 9y ago
> Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field. It's not even close. Just curious here: What would you say are technically better solutions than bitcoin?
- eternalcode 9y ago
  that is a tough question as many other alt-coins have yet to be challenge by the huge volume that btc/eth experience. Some might say litecoin for one.
  - badloginagain 9y ago
    I also like litecoin for the purely selfish reasons of it still being (relatively) cheap. BTC prices are out of my ability to play, and most ICO's are derivatives of 'ScamCoin'. LiteCoin is one of the few options it feels I can still get in on the action with a purpose driven coin with a strong/transparent dev team.
    - berberous 9y ago
      You know you can buy fractions of a BTC, right?
- fsiefken 9y ago
  Some say NEM https://steemit.com/altcoins/@vincent4384/is-nem-really-the-sleeping-giant https://steemit.com/altcoins/@vincent4384/is-nem-really-the-...
- nadam 9y ago
  One can argue that Dash is superior for payment. But because of network effects and bitcoin's battle tested security (and utility as store of value or settlement layer) even I as a big (but not fanatic) Dash fan hold more Bitcoin than Dash (BTC 55%, DASH: 21%, EOS:24%) If Dash becomes mainstream, then that 21% of mine will be enough for me. :)
- nly 9y ago
  I'd argue some of the cryptocash ideas thrown around in the 90s were vastly superior on the technical front. We've had the schematics for instantanous, high transaction volume, offline, double-spend resistant, completely untraceable and anonymous, digital cash for 25 years... with no blockchain or energy crazy energy consumption requirements. Why didn't these technologies succeed? Because none of those properties have any business advantage over boring, simple, centralized credit-card processing and back then everything was sealed up in patents until it missed the boat.
Vadoff 9y ago
You do realize bitcoin is constantly evolving and can change its code right? If another crypto creates a better scaling tech, bitcoin can incorporate that idea.
- Xorlev 9y ago
  Can, but won’t as has been proven repeatedly.
  - jiggunjer 9y ago
    Proven when? He said better tech,not bigger blocks.
  - etr-strike 9y ago
    SegWit, Mimble Wimble, Schnorr Signatures, Lightning Network, and Rootstock all prove you're talking out of your ass.
  - grubles 9y ago
    libsecp256k1, which was developed for Bitcoin, uncovered bugs in OpenSSL. It also increased signature validation speed by 5x. https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.12.0#signature-validation-using-libsecp256k1 https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.12.0#signature-validation-...
VarFarYonder 9y ago
> If I had a large holding in Bitcoin now I would be cashing out or I'd be nervous. I'm not saying it won't go higher, I'm saying that at some point its demise is inevitable. Might be quick, might be slow, but it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field. It's not even close. My guess is that this is less of factor than you think. I don't think that HTML/CSS/JS is the best technical solution for creating websites, and yet that is what all browsers use and there are few signs that that is changing anytime soon.
xorcist 9y ago
Somebody who feels compelled to sell their Bitcoins because the technology is not ready has probably not acquired any in the first place. Whatever technology replaces Bitcoin is likely something you can buy with Bitcoin. That's why people rush to buy something which obviously isn't "ready" (but maybe "good enough"). It's speculative, but do not think that people who invested a lot in this didn't think this through at least as much as you have.
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  Moving from bitcoin to another crypto currency is still chasing out, unless I misssed your point.
- seppin 9y ago
  > Whatever technology replaces Bitcoin is likely something you can buy with Bitcoin. Now THAT is the speculation to end all speculations.
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  > do not think that people who invested a lot in this didn't think this through at least as much as you have. Yeah, it's not like I can go on to /r/bitcoin and read multiple dedicated screeds along the lines of "I'm recommending my friends to invest savings in BTC for retirement". Whereupon someone replies "They should keep something in a Roth IRA for diversity", and the OP comments, "What's a Roth IRA?" Yes, there are sophisticated investors. But in a lot of cases, the only thoughts going through peoples heads is "Get Rich Quick". There's more discussion of "what color Lamborghini am I buying?" than anything else on those forums right now than anything else. Well, beside 'HODL! HODL! Even if the market corrects $10,000 tomorrow, HODL!'.
  - xorcist 9y ago
    Is the argument that you think Reddit users are representative of Bitcoin investors? Most of the time it feels like these discussions are stuck rehashing old arguments in circles, but this was truly innovative. Thank you for not being predictable. As for the argument itself, I think you are correct not to make any investment decisions based on what you described.

kybernetikos 9y ago

> it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field Not only that, but it's shown that it doesn't have the ability to make the changes necessary to innovate and stay current.

solotronics 9y ago
It has evolved to be a store of value and it's doing an amazing job at that. Thinking from the perspective of the developers (many of whom have very large amounts of BTC) a slow and deliberate rate of changes is a very good thing. Making a mistake here would mean hundreds of billions of dollars would be lost. I am all for other cryptos moving quickly and breaking things to test out new ideas. Who in their right mind would take the same mentality on Bitcoin?
- newfoundglory 9y ago
  Why is this praiseworthy in bitcoin and seen as delaying progress and selfishly holding onto gains in taxi companies?
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  Bitcoin is absolutely not a good store of value. A good store of value is a reliable store of value: one where you can place your assets and go back and get them at any later time. As a deflationary currency, bitcoin would be a hypothetically good store of value if a bitcoin actually had any intrinsic or even just de facto value. But it clearly doesn’t: it’s only the conversion to and from USD (and others) that has given it any value at all as an investment vehicle to some. And _that_ value isn’t guaranteed preserved one bit.
  - HereBeBeasties 9y ago
    Most asset classes look like that, though. Gold has some intrinsic value as a good conductor/reflector of heat. But it's not really so very much superior to aluminium or copper or whatever to make it worth what it is worth. It is expensive because it is scarce. That's it. Bitcoin is the same. (They are obviously very different in other ways, but you get the point.) Things don't need to have intrinsic value to be valuable. They simply need to be desired by the market.
    - chakalakasp 9y ago
      Gold isn't even in the same realm of volatility as BC, though. You put money in Gold and you're pretty sure if the world burns it's still worth something. You put money in BC at breakfast and you may be a pauper by lunch.
    - ComputerGuru 9y ago
      I agree with you - I actually implicitly meant everything you said. The crux of the matter lies with your last sentence: "They simply need to be desired by the market" Ergo, the quality of an asset as a "store of value" (the point of contention I was addressing in my comment) is directly mapped to the desire. BTC's desire is insanely volatile, automatically making it a poor store of value. My point is precisely that all assets used as currency are oftentimes intrinsically worthless. It's the demand - and the liquidity it provides converting to and fro said currency from other goods or currencies - that makes it a value storage vehicle. BTC, as a "value storage vehicle," is a very poor choice. Gold isn't.
hbosch 9y ago
In fairness (I'm personally not a Bitcoin supporter) from the outside, it seemed more like the problem is no one can agree on who should be pushing changes and innovation: Core Dev or the coalition of miners?
- spookthesunset 9y ago
  > In fairness (I'm personally not a Bitcoin supporter) from the outside, it seemed more like the problem is no one can agree on who should be pushing changes and innovation: Core Dev or the coalition of miners? If you step back and look at any kind of "libertarian" driven project this becomes a problem. When everybody who makes something inherently distrusts authority or having anybody "in charge", you can never really build anything big. I'd say bitcoin provides good evidence that to make any big change in a system the buck always has to stop with some individual. With nobody in charge, you'll just drift around at the same local maximum--sometimes going up a bit, sometimes going down a bit, but never moving to an even larger but different source of value. I dunno... just a thought....
  - rspeer 9y ago
    Your thoughts are fine, don't undermine yourself by saying "I dunno... just a thought" like that.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

foxhedgehog 9y ago

I see this as the 1.0 era of blockchain. There may yet be an amazon or a google lurking amidst all of the pets.com ICOs out there. If I had to guess who would survive, I would say SAFE.

colordrops 9y ago

What is being missed by your analysis is that the value in a blockchain comes more from the network than the tech. There are thousands upon thousands of blockchains of no value. You could fork bitcoin or some other chain right now and start it on your laptop. Doesn't mean anything - the network is the value. So taking this into account, when the shackles of Bitcoin's simplicity and limitations become unbearable, the network will evolve through protocol upgrades or through a contentious fork where the hash power and development resources will move to. In either case your coins and value are retained.

Pica_soO 9y ago
If humanity decides to walk the path of the worser tech, you can build a metropolis from diamond and light elsewhere as much as you want- nobody is going to migrate. They are going to pay outrageous sums, to upgrade the path the group is already heading down, the will pay to bribe and cast aside tech that holds them back. Alternative standards, no matter how pure and clean from a technical point of perspective, will be ignored. Linux vs Windows allover, in fintech infrastructure and protocolls.
- Bombthecat 9y ago
  Jep, that's why you just invest in bitcoin if you want to make money
lojack 9y ago
With atomic swaps and other innovations in the space, the cost of switching networks is becoming smaller. It’s hard to say how all of this will pan out, but I’m guessing we’ll see a much more diverse space than what you’re picturing.
zrm 9y ago
> What is being missed by your analysis is that the value in a blockchain comes more from the network than the tech. That is the reason why anyone can't just create a new coin and expect everyone else to value it, but that doesn't mean there can't be any viable competitors. And if a competitor with a sufficient advantage got popular enough, it could take the lead. For example, the hack Bitcoin used to become popular was to be deflationary, which encourages speculation. That got the value up before it was cool, but it stays deflationary -- even gets more so -- once it's popular, and the consequent speculation causes high volatility. Once you're popular, being deflationary becomes a liability instead of an asset. It's possible for a coin not to be deflationary and have the supply set by computing costs. If the value of the coin falls below the energy cost of creating them, people stop creating more of them and the value stabilizes there (so it doesn't keep going down). But as demand for the coin increases the value rises above the threshold and people start mining again (so it doesn't keep going up). That stability would be a huge advantage. But it's not possible to convert Bitcoin to that because its deflationary nature is priced into its value. Making it non-deflationary would make it worthless to speculators, which would eliminate most of its current valuation. So all it would take is for a non-deflationary coin to become popular enough for people to trust it not to disappear overnight and the people using it for transactions rather than speculation would prefer it over Bitcoin.

runeks 9y ago

> It was the first. It was the genesis idea. But good lord, do we think it's the actual solution? What would be the odds? If superior technology comes along, what will prevent Bitcoin from adopting this, and using its network effect to outmaneuver a competing blockchain? A couple of months ago, the Bitcoin network adopted the SegWit protocol change, which could be considered a minor fix (no major improvements to scalability). If the Bitcoin network can agree to adopt a minor fix, why wouldn’t it be able to agree to adopt a major scalability improvement as well?

jononor 9y ago
Adoption of Segwit (a minor change) was neither quick, easy or without controversy. It does not lend much faith in the Bitcoin community ability to deploy big changes in a timely manner.
- etr-strike 9y ago
  The consensus rules of bitcoin are supposed to be incredibly difficult to change. That's a feature, not a bug. Changing consensus rules is only easy if the network is centralized. That's not something I want to have in my money. If new technology demonstrates it's value beyond doubt, upgrading the network will have vast consensus.

perlpimp 9y ago

bitcoin is already used in pseudo reserve de-facto currency to trade other currencies. perhaps it will stay that way - a way into crypto world.

InternetUser 9y ago

> something else - or many other somethings - will be the successors that we actually use in the future. Right now, the top 3 crypto-tokens are Ethereum-based, as are 89 of the Top 100: https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/ https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/ Word-find "token" here to see what the word means in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum

tenaciousDaniel 9y ago

This is my thought as well, and I don't understand why it isn't more commonly stated. The sheer chances that the very first implementation of this technology turns out to not only be viable for long-term success, but is actually adopted as such, seems extraordinarily low. There's what I call the "football" effect. The player jumps on the football after a fumble, and while he's the first to grab it, there's a handful of 250 pound guys about to jump on top of him. Bitcoin is the first to the football, but over the long term I think it's going to get inevitably crushed.

Klinky 9y ago
There's also something called "first mover advantage", which kind of contradicts your "football effect". There have been a ton of altcoins created, none of which have crushed Bitcoin. Bitcoin is still holding on to the football quite handily.
- omg_ketchup 9y ago
  Also, the first person to jump on the football does get possession of the ball for the team, so there's that.
- tymmc 9y ago
  I'm personally skeptical that incumbency is a significant advantage, particularly given that Bitcoin now is impractical to use directly for most transactions. If your transactions are being done off the blockchain and it's trivial to switch to denominating them in a non-Bitcoin currency, and there's no particularly strong reason for people to accept Bitcoin as payment over a different currency, what's the barrier to entry for a new crypto-currency?
  - Klinky 9y ago
    The barrier to entry is low. The barrier to mass adoption is high. Bitcoin is winning that war handily compared to any other cryptocurrency. There are definitely flaws with Bitcoin that will need to be ironed out, but the world's most elegant cryptocurrency is useless if no one has heard of it or uses it. First mover and marketing often trumps technological advantage. A non-techie doesn't care about Ethereum or Monero, but they do care about Bitcoin when the news is talking about how valuable it is everyday. Bitcoin is changing the mindset of what money is to the masses, this can't be said for other cryptocurrencies. Perhaps Bitcoin will fail at some point in the distant future, but for the time being it is absolutely the most influential cryptocurrency, this can easily be seen by all altcoins' value being pegged to their BTC conversion rate.

flibble 9y ago

If you have a bitcoin and cash out the amount you make us fixed/limited to the current value if a bitcoin. If you don't cash out the maximum you could possibly lose is 1 bitcoin but that amount you could make is largely unlimited. Your bitcoin could triple or 100x in value.

ignoramous 9y ago

> Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field. It's not even close. Just curious here: What would you say are technically better solutions than bitcoin?

eternalcode 9y ago
that is a tough question as many other alt-coins have yet to be challenge by the huge volume that btc/eth experience. Some might say litecoin for one.
- badloginagain 9y ago
  I also like litecoin for the purely selfish reasons of it still being (relatively) cheap. BTC prices are out of my ability to play, and most ICO's are derivatives of 'ScamCoin'. LiteCoin is one of the few options it feels I can still get in on the action with a purpose driven coin with a strong/transparent dev team.
  - berberous 9y ago
    You know you can buy fractions of a BTC, right?
fsiefken 9y ago
Some say NEM https://steemit.com/altcoins/@vincent4384/is-nem-really-the-sleeping-giant https://steemit.com/altcoins/@vincent4384/is-nem-really-the-...
nadam 9y ago
One can argue that Dash is superior for payment. But because of network effects and bitcoin's battle tested security (and utility as store of value or settlement layer) even I as a big (but not fanatic) Dash fan hold more Bitcoin than Dash (BTC 55%, DASH: 21%, EOS:24%) If Dash becomes mainstream, then that 21% of mine will be enough for me. :)
nly 9y ago
I'd argue some of the cryptocash ideas thrown around in the 90s were vastly superior on the technical front. We've had the schematics for instantanous, high transaction volume, offline, double-spend resistant, completely untraceable and anonymous, digital cash for 25 years... with no blockchain or energy crazy energy consumption requirements. Why didn't these technologies succeed? Because none of those properties have any business advantage over boring, simple, centralized credit-card processing and back then everything was sealed up in patents until it missed the boat.

Vadoff 9y ago

You do realize bitcoin is constantly evolving and can change its code right? If another crypto creates a better scaling tech, bitcoin can incorporate that idea.

Xorlev 9y ago
Can, but won’t as has been proven repeatedly.
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  Proven when? He said better tech,not bigger blocks.
- etr-strike 9y ago
  SegWit, Mimble Wimble, Schnorr Signatures, Lightning Network, and Rootstock all prove you're talking out of your ass.
- grubles 9y ago
  libsecp256k1, which was developed for Bitcoin, uncovered bugs in OpenSSL. It also increased signature validation speed by 5x. https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.12.0#signature-validation-using-libsecp256k1 https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.12.0#signature-validation-...

VarFarYonder 9y ago

> If I had a large holding in Bitcoin now I would be cashing out or I'd be nervous. I'm not saying it won't go higher, I'm saying that at some point its demise is inevitable. Might be quick, might be slow, but it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field. It's not even close. My guess is that this is less of factor than you think. I don't think that HTML/CSS/JS is the best technical solution for creating websites, and yet that is what all browsers use and there are few signs that that is changing anytime soon.

xorcist 9y ago

Somebody who feels compelled to sell their Bitcoins because the technology is not ready has probably not acquired any in the first place. Whatever technology replaces Bitcoin is likely something you can buy with Bitcoin. That's why people rush to buy something which obviously isn't "ready" (but maybe "good enough"). It's speculative, but do not think that people who invested a lot in this didn't think this through at least as much as you have.

ComputerGuru 9y ago
Moving from bitcoin to another crypto currency is still chasing out, unless I misssed your point.
seppin 9y ago
> Whatever technology replaces Bitcoin is likely something you can buy with Bitcoin. Now THAT is the speculation to end all speculations.
FireBeyond 9y ago
> do not think that people who invested a lot in this didn't think this through at least as much as you have. Yeah, it's not like I can go on to /r/bitcoin and read multiple dedicated screeds along the lines of "I'm recommending my friends to invest savings in BTC for retirement". Whereupon someone replies "They should keep something in a Roth IRA for diversity", and the OP comments, "What's a Roth IRA?" Yes, there are sophisticated investors. But in a lot of cases, the only thoughts going through peoples heads is "Get Rich Quick". There's more discussion of "what color Lamborghini am I buying?" than anything else on those forums right now than anything else. Well, beside 'HODL! HODL! Even if the market corrects $10,000 tomorrow, HODL!'.
- xorcist 9y ago
  Is the argument that you think Reddit users are representative of Bitcoin investors? Most of the time it feels like these discussions are stuck rehashing old arguments in circles, but this was truly innovative. Thank you for not being predictable. As for the argument itself, I think you are correct not to make any investment decisions based on what you described.