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People who actually use bitcoin must be ignorant of all the much more usable and useful alt-coins. Can anyone think of a good reason to actually use bitcoin vs

People who actually use bitcoin must be ignorant of all the much more usable and useful alt-coins. Can anyone think of a good reason to actually use bitcoin vs. ripple/stellar/dash/zcash/monero/nem/...? Maybe it's just cause so many platforms have been built around bitcoin?

aaron_m04 9y ago
Or even Bitcoin Cash...
- etr-strike 9y ago
  Yea, no.
rhino369 9y ago
Because your drug dealer only accepts bitcoin? Does anyone else actually use it? Other than as a get rich quick scheme?
- Casseres 9y ago
  Craigslist now allows people to mark their posts as crypto-friendly. Anyone who accepts Bitcoin runs into the problem where others can know their balance by looking up the address (and thus could be at risk for theft/mugging). If people want to keep their balances private and not share their transaction history (or later transactions), they should use a coin that's private by default such as Monero. Additionally, Monero has a dynamic blocksize, so as usage increases it won't experience the transaction backlog that Bitcoin faces.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    You should create a different address for each post on Craigslist. It is pretty easy and prevents this problem. If you have a website and have an address displayed for donations, then you will get multiple donations to the same address. With any one-off just make a new address in your wallet. (I use bitcoin core wallet. Not sure how others work.)
    - tehlike 9y ago
      Monero now supports multi address.
      - jameskegel 9y ago
        No, you are wrong, Monero has merged in MultiSig which is something unlike what it sounds, it basically means you can now make a wallet where several people hold a piece of a key and a majority agreement is required to spend.
        tehlike 9y ago
        https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/2056 https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/2056 Are you sure?
        jameskegel 9y ago
        Subaddresses have not been integrated into a tagged release yet. We can discuss hypotheticals though, if you prefer.
        tehlike 9y ago
        Isnt it the same for multisig? You didnt say it is not yet in a tagged release, just mentioned no it isnt subadress but multisig, ehich tells me you had no idea Either way, it doesnt matter.
    - Casseres 9y ago
      And then later on transfer it to your main wallet and pay another fee, and trust that whomever your first address still isn't paying attention to it, or hope they didn't get their coins from a tainted source?
      - jameskegel 9y ago
        It’s all the same wallet just a different address, no transfer needed.
  - thisisit 9y ago
    > Additionally, Monero has a dynamic blocksize, so as usage increases it won't experience the transaction backlog that Bitcoin faces. I am kind of confused with the block size thing. Sure, increasing the size means more transactions can be added into the problem. Bu, as far as I know bigger block size has it's own share of problems - block propagation is slower which can cause double spending and frequent orphans means the blockchain has to keep re-organising frequently too.
- loblollyboy 9y ago
  I don’t think your average drug dealer would accept 0.001 BTC for a dime bag
- LaikaF 9y ago
  Darknet sites accept litecoin and monero now. At least some do. The BTC transaction fees are hitting a large percentage of their customers (people making sub $200 dollar transactions). That plus monero is better for their purposes anyway.
- hndamien 9y ago
  Drug dealers use Monero, not Bitcoin.
justboxing 9y ago
> much more usable and useful alt-coins I agree. I researched Ripple a lot and am sold on it, since it's not just a crytocurrency (XRP Ticker) but is also a protocol that Gates Foundation, AMEX and other banks are using to perform cross-border payments almost instantly and with a lot lower fees and overheads. Are any of the others you mentioned, ex : stellar, dash, monero etc similar to Ripple? If not, what are their use cases? Any links you can point me to would be helpful thank you. (I know I can google this, but google is full of SEO-ed promotional and pump-and-dump posts, so can't really rely on that info).
- trophycase 9y ago
  Stellar is very similar to Ripple
- makomk 9y ago
  Ripple relies on a set of hardcoded trusted nodes to validate all the transactions. This makes it very interesting to banks, since they can just set up their own set of nodes and use the Ripple protocol for transaction settlement between them. It's less appealing to people who're attracted to cryptocurrency as an alternative to trusting banks.
- gomox 9y ago
  Ripple is a pre mined token that has central control. It's not really comparable to Bitcoin.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    I mean... Satoshi had a stash too. That said, i like monero extra because of that too.
- macawfish 9y ago
  Stellar is the most similar to Ripple (I think they had code in common at some point). Dash and Monero are a little older, and I don't think they solve the scalability issue in any special way, but are definitely less popular and therefore more usable. I recommend reading forum posts about these different currencies to get an idea of what people think are the most competitive features/pitfalls. You could google something like "most scalable alt-coins" and then read stuff from reddit and bitcointalk.org. When a few of them have gotten your attention, do a "x vs. y vs. z" search and read more forums. You kinda have to feel it out!
hanbura 9y ago
Alt-Coins don't have astronomic price increases, are far less accepted by merchants and have far less backing from the finance industry. In short, most altcoins are neither useful for investment nor payment. Which is a shame, because there are some coins that have substantial technical improvements over bitcoin, and nearly all of them can handle more transactions/second than bitcoin
- trophycase 9y ago
  Pretty much every altcoin parent mentioned has outperformed Bitcoin YTD
- gomox 9y ago
  > Alt-Coins don't have astronomic price increases The really big multipliers have been in so called alt-coins for years. This statement is flat out wrong.
- hoveringcto 9y ago
  Ether is up about 10,000% over a year, while BTC is up about 2500%...
gomox 9y ago
A lot of these are only faster to transact because they have nowhere near the volume of transactions that BTC has. BTC is also much more widely accepted and understood.
jondubois 9y ago
None of the coins mentioned above can scale to become a mainstream currency. They're just the most hyped ones. Blockchain-based coins are hard to scale. The most scalable ones at the moment use a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) instead of a blockchain. I think that IOTA and Byteball (both DAGs) are the most advanced at the moment in terms of scalability. In the long term, Ethereum may have potential if they manage to implement sharding. Another good long term bet is Lisk which aims to scale using sidechains.
- makomk 9y ago
  Last I heard, IOTA had collapsed under the load of all the transactions from speculators, with people complaining it took days to get transactions to confirm. A blog post about this even made it to HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944112 (As far as I can tell it took a much lower transaction volume than the Bitcoin one to cause this too, though there doesn't seem to be that much in the way of useful stats out there.) This isn't terribly surprising because from the discussions I saw, the entire justification for why it could scale infinitely seemed to boil down to the creator accusing anyone who questioned this of spreading FUD. Byteball may be doing better, but on the other hand it hasn't had the same kind of speculative bubble that's done Bitcoin and IOTA in yet.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    I think it was because IOTA experienced an influx of spam transactions which were not dealt with properly. I'm sure that IOTA still has issues but I think that the core DAG/tangle concept is sound. Unlike with most other tokens, these problems should be relatively easy to fix... My bet is that it's much easier to scale a DAG than a Blockchain. But I'm sure that some blockchain-based tokens will also scale eventually.

aaron_m04 9y ago

Or even Bitcoin Cash...

etr-strike 9y ago
Yea, no.

rhino369 9y ago

Because your drug dealer only accepts bitcoin? Does anyone else actually use it? Other than as a get rich quick scheme?

Casseres 9y ago
Craigslist now allows people to mark their posts as crypto-friendly. Anyone who accepts Bitcoin runs into the problem where others can know their balance by looking up the address (and thus could be at risk for theft/mugging). If people want to keep their balances private and not share their transaction history (or later transactions), they should use a coin that's private by default such as Monero. Additionally, Monero has a dynamic blocksize, so as usage increases it won't experience the transaction backlog that Bitcoin faces.
- njarboe 9y ago
  You should create a different address for each post on Craigslist. It is pretty easy and prevents this problem. If you have a website and have an address displayed for donations, then you will get multiple donations to the same address. With any one-off just make a new address in your wallet. (I use bitcoin core wallet. Not sure how others work.)
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Monero now supports multi address.
    - jameskegel 9y ago
      No, you are wrong, Monero has merged in MultiSig which is something unlike what it sounds, it basically means you can now make a wallet where several people hold a piece of a key and a majority agreement is required to spend.
      - tehlike 9y ago
        https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/2056 https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/2056 Are you sure?
        jameskegel 9y ago
        Subaddresses have not been integrated into a tagged release yet. We can discuss hypotheticals though, if you prefer.
        tehlike 9y ago
        Isnt it the same for multisig? You didnt say it is not yet in a tagged release, just mentioned no it isnt subadress but multisig, ehich tells me you had no idea Either way, it doesnt matter.
  - Casseres 9y ago
    And then later on transfer it to your main wallet and pay another fee, and trust that whomever your first address still isn't paying attention to it, or hope they didn't get their coins from a tainted source?
    - jameskegel 9y ago
      It’s all the same wallet just a different address, no transfer needed.
- thisisit 9y ago
  > Additionally, Monero has a dynamic blocksize, so as usage increases it won't experience the transaction backlog that Bitcoin faces. I am kind of confused with the block size thing. Sure, increasing the size means more transactions can be added into the problem. Bu, as far as I know bigger block size has it's own share of problems - block propagation is slower which can cause double spending and frequent orphans means the blockchain has to keep re-organising frequently too.
loblollyboy 9y ago
I don’t think your average drug dealer would accept 0.001 BTC for a dime bag
LaikaF 9y ago
Darknet sites accept litecoin and monero now. At least some do. The BTC transaction fees are hitting a large percentage of their customers (people making sub $200 dollar transactions). That plus monero is better for their purposes anyway.
hndamien 9y ago
Drug dealers use Monero, not Bitcoin.

justboxing 9y ago

> much more usable and useful alt-coins I agree. I researched Ripple a lot and am sold on it, since it's not just a crytocurrency (XRP Ticker) but is also a protocol that Gates Foundation, AMEX and other banks are using to perform cross-border payments almost instantly and with a lot lower fees and overheads. Are any of the others you mentioned, ex : stellar, dash, monero etc similar to Ripple? If not, what are their use cases? Any links you can point me to would be helpful thank you. (I know I can google this, but google is full of SEO-ed promotional and pump-and-dump posts, so can't really rely on that info).

trophycase 9y ago
Stellar is very similar to Ripple
makomk 9y ago
Ripple relies on a set of hardcoded trusted nodes to validate all the transactions. This makes it very interesting to banks, since they can just set up their own set of nodes and use the Ripple protocol for transaction settlement between them. It's less appealing to people who're attracted to cryptocurrency as an alternative to trusting banks.
gomox 9y ago
Ripple is a pre mined token that has central control. It's not really comparable to Bitcoin.
- tehlike 9y ago
  I mean... Satoshi had a stash too. That said, i like monero extra because of that too.
macawfish 9y ago
Stellar is the most similar to Ripple (I think they had code in common at some point). Dash and Monero are a little older, and I don't think they solve the scalability issue in any special way, but are definitely less popular and therefore more usable. I recommend reading forum posts about these different currencies to get an idea of what people think are the most competitive features/pitfalls. You could google something like "most scalable alt-coins" and then read stuff from reddit and bitcointalk.org. When a few of them have gotten your attention, do a "x vs. y vs. z" search and read more forums. You kinda have to feel it out!

hanbura 9y ago

Alt-Coins don't have astronomic price increases, are far less accepted by merchants and have far less backing from the finance industry. In short, most altcoins are neither useful for investment nor payment. Which is a shame, because there are some coins that have substantial technical improvements over bitcoin, and nearly all of them can handle more transactions/second than bitcoin

trophycase 9y ago
Pretty much every altcoin parent mentioned has outperformed Bitcoin YTD
gomox 9y ago
> Alt-Coins don't have astronomic price increases The really big multipliers have been in so called alt-coins for years. This statement is flat out wrong.
hoveringcto 9y ago
Ether is up about 10,000% over a year, while BTC is up about 2500%...

gomox 9y ago

A lot of these are only faster to transact because they have nowhere near the volume of transactions that BTC has. BTC is also much more widely accepted and understood.

jondubois 9y ago

None of the coins mentioned above can scale to become a mainstream currency. They're just the most hyped ones. Blockchain-based coins are hard to scale. The most scalable ones at the moment use a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) instead of a blockchain. I think that IOTA and Byteball (both DAGs) are the most advanced at the moment in terms of scalability. In the long term, Ethereum may have potential if they manage to implement sharding. Another good long term bet is Lisk which aims to scale using sidechains.

makomk 9y ago
Last I heard, IOTA had collapsed under the load of all the transactions from speculators, with people complaining it took days to get transactions to confirm. A blog post about this even made it to HN a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944112 (As far as I can tell it took a much lower transaction volume than the Bitcoin one to cause this too, though there doesn't seem to be that much in the way of useful stats out there.) This isn't terribly surprising because from the discussions I saw, the entire justification for why it could scale infinitely seemed to boil down to the creator accusing anyone who questioned this of spreading FUD. Byteball may be doing better, but on the other hand it hasn't had the same kind of speculative bubble that's done Bitcoin and IOTA in yet.
- jondubois 9y ago
  I think it was because IOTA experienced an influx of spam transactions which were not dealt with properly. I'm sure that IOTA still has issues but I think that the core DAG/tangle concept is sound. Unlike with most other tokens, these problems should be relatively easy to fix... My bet is that it's much easier to scale a DAG than a Blockchain. But I'm sure that some blockchain-based tokens will also scale eventually.