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Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town
- mojomark 9y agoWhat the hell is up with economist.com proofreading. A grammatical or spelling error in the article title is a red flag to me that screams "I'm a piece of garbage, don't read me". Time to reestablish quality over quantity.
- uberswe 9y agoHaha, I saw the same thing. No way I would pay 20 euro to read that.
- seanp2k2 9y agoI used to play a game when I'd read TechCrunch for whatever misguided reason: I'd read until the first obvious spelling or grammatical error. I don't believe that I ever made it beyond the second paragraph. US journalism today is largely awful clickbaity crap, and the ad revenue encourages a race to the bottom for content quality. It'd be awesome if there were a way to align incentives for this to not be case. So far, nothing I've heard of seems to be working very well aside from running ads and trying to sell subscriptions, sometimes despite low-quality content.
- tir 9y agoExactly, if they couldn't even get the title right, what else in the article is going to be incorrect?
- crdoconnor 9y agoThe economist's dirty secret is that it's mostly written by a bunch of cheap graduates.
- pixelpoet 9y agoThe whole native English-speaking world is heading this way, things like singular vs plural and even past tense are going the way of the dinosaur (and that's without getting into subtler things like much vs many). Interestingly, one of the first things I noticed in Germany is that almost everyone speaks and writes better English than people from the UK and US.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoIn case the error gets fixed, will you guys clarify what you are referring to? Do you want it to say "crypto-currency game in town" instead of "game in crypto-currency town"?
- wallawe 9y agotitle: "Bitcoin is no long the only game in crypto-currency town"
- perseusprime11 9y agoLet’s see how long they will take to fix
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sjkelly 9y ago"no long" -> "no longer"
- empath75 9y agoI wish people would stop using market cap as if it was meaningful for cryptocurrencies. A lot of these coins are traded at low volumes on unregulated exchanges that allow wash trading and other means of manipulating prices. Even were that not the case and they had meaningful price discovery mechanisms 'market cap' would be a meaningless metric because if someone were to buy all the coins, they'd have destroyed the value of them because they've ruined the network value of the currency. This isn't the case for stocks in an actual company, because if you buy all the shares of a company with a 10 billion dollar market cap, you now own a company worth approximately 10 billion dollars.
- xwvvvvwx 9y agowhat would be a better measure?
- soVeryTired 9y agoYield? Oh wait.
- powvans 9y agoExactly. You could buy assets that produce things people need or you could buy a random string of numbers and letters. Obviously we are in a post scarcity world and therefore producing something of value is really a net negative. All hail the inert string of chars! It’s better than something because it does nothing.
- twblalock 9y agoI would consider how many people use them for transactions, if they are supposed to be currencies. Most people look at the price and the market cap because they can tell that the primary use of crypto-currencies is for speculation.
- ChrisClark 9y agoYeah, maybe we should look at the average daily transaction count and average fee per transaction.
- ExactoKnight 9y agoBitcoin 10 minute block generation times is an inherent problem that unless changed, will doom the protocol to its eventual death. It's like trying to make a 56k modem work, when broadband is available. When litecoin came around a few years ago these were abstract problems, but now that transactions with $10 fees take 36 hours to confirm... the issues are real and a switch needs to happen. Lightning network or not, these hacks to speed up the network unequivocally make more sense to do on a network with faster block generation times. Necessity will force this outcome.
- ericb 9y agoThat problem isn't a result of the 10 minute blocks. A 0-confirmation transaction normally is just fine. These are available on Bitcoin Cash.
- jdc0589 9y agoI honestly don't know a ton about cryptocurrencies, but I though confirmed transactions were.....more or less whole point? can you give me an ELI5 version of why 0-confirmation transactions are ok?
- ericb 9y agoIt depends on the use-case. If you look at credit card transactions, they are only "confirmed" after 120 days (when chargebacks become harder...not impossible). A 0-conf transaction will work for all scenarios where you would trust a credit card with about the same amount of certainty. For those other scenarios, 10 minutes is better.
- Isomatik 9y agoI think it's really only comparable for online transactions, where all credit card transactions are Card Not Present and you aren't able to 100% guarantee that the delivery went to the correct person or that the card wasn't stolen, making fighting the chargeback sometimes not worth it. A brick and mortar doing swipe transactions should have everything they need to effectively fight chargebacks, so I wouldn't consider that money to be 'gone' the way it would be in a double-spend.
- wozz 9y agoI wish we could stop posting articles under a paywall
- s73ver_ 9y agoWhy?
- nhooyr 9y agono paywall for me.
- gondo 9y agosimply disable javascript
- vesak 9y agoWhat you should actually wish it that payment to such publishers would be so easy that you wouldn't need to think about it.
- natch 9y agoAs long as "easy" also means "cheap."
- kiliantics 9y agoIf only there were some kind of internet-based money system that could integrate with these features...
- nextgens 9y agoYou might want to give https://github.com/nextgens/anti-paywall https://github.com/nextgens/anti-paywall a shot.
- louismerlin 9y agoI recommend you check out https://raiblocks.net https://raiblocks.net if you're looking for a currency that could compete with Bitcoin as a means of payment. The tech is smart as hell.
- perseusprime11 9y agoAnd who cares? Nobody is accepting raiblocks as a payment. There are more engineers working on Bitcoin and far more infrastructure around Bitcoin. All these altcoins are pump and dump schemes.
- Pseudothink 9y agoNobody was accepting Bitcoin as a payment in 2009. I wish I'd cared about it more then.
- louismerlin 9y agoThe project is still early stage, but still it promises to be what bitcoin should have been from the start : a decentralized, feeless and instantaneous means of transferring value.
- perseusprime11 9y agoWhat value?
- unabridged 9y agoThis is what most people don't get, these technologies are all open source. So even if some random coin comes up with a great new feature, bitcoin can just add it or at worst someone can create a fork of bitcoin with the new tech. The value is not the tech, its the network. Bitcoin has good liquidity and been tested though many drops and spikes. Each time it makes the network more antifragile. No one wants to trust a new currency where a large percent of holders have never been tested and might sell off their entire share at any time.
- 9y ago
- cup-of-tea 9y agoErm... it hasn't been the only crypto in town for a long time now. But I guess these kind of publications have only relatively recently caught up with the fact Bitcoin exists at all.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y agoBitcoin dominance dropping below 50% was not close to the realm of possibility just 2 years ago. Bitcoin is now only at ~33% of dominance.
- innoprenuer 9y ago"Even Facebook has reportedly started looking into creating a token. Should the world’s biggest social network ever make that move, bitcoin’s days as the leading crypto-currency would almost certainly be numbered" > this is a paradox, blockchain technology's best use case is decentralization of data (and power from companies like facebook). And if Facebook issues crypto coin and it starts dominating the market (not necessarily) then we are back at square one.
- deadlycrayon 9y agoI agree with you, but that's idealistic. See: Ripple (https://ripple.com/ https://ripple.com/)
- Klathmon 9y agoFor all the talk of Ripple being centralized, they aren't by design, and they have a plan in place to reduce and eventually eliminate that centralization (to a point). They decided that it would be a good idea to start centralized, then over time wane themselves out of the "validation" of transactions until it's in the hands of a diverse group of validator nodes where no one person has the ability to change things.
- jonnydubowsky 9y agoHow about the part where the founders hold enough tokens that they could crash the price or manipulate the market at will. I understand that they have loose structures in place to keep them honest, but they could absolutely still act badly. We trust that they won't.
- Klathmon 9y agoThere are 2 things here, There is the cut that the founders hold, and there is the portion under the control of Ripple labs. Ripple labs has a very strict way of handling the XRP they hold. It's not just "lose structures" in place, they are using the Ripple blockchain to escrow 55 billion of the XRP and release it on a set schedule of (I believe) 1 billion per month, and any that is left over at the end of the month is re-escrowed. So they can't just "flood the market" at any time, there is a set limit to how much they can even sell without hardforking the blockchain in their favor. The founders have free reign on their 20 billion XRP, but I don't see why they would ever use it to crash the price.
- jonnydubowsky 9y agoThere is important work being done to create a general framework for valuing cryptoassets. We might consider a few key concepts, total addressable market (TAM), percent penetration of that market, velocity, and number of coins outstanding. It's essential to understand the token velocity, and the degree by which a network is effectively capturing some of the value it delivers to its users/token holders. Chris Burniske, a crypto fund manager writes "these aren’t companies; they don’t have cash flows. Hence, using a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis is not suitable. Instead, valuing cryptoassets requires setting up models structurally similar to what a DCF would look like, with a projection for each year, but instead of revenues, margins and profits, the equation of exchange is used to derive each year’s current utility value (CUV). Then, since markets price assets based on future expectations, one must discount a future utility value back to the present to derive a rational market price for any given year". “Cryptoasset Valuations” @cburniske https://medium.com/@cburniske/cryptoasset-valuations-ac83479ffca7 https://medium.com/@cburniske/cryptoasset-valuations-ac83479...
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y agoBitcoin is also one of the least interesting when it comes to innovation. Bitcoin has one of the worst max tx rate. What bitcoin has is the network effect and security, but if the friction from tx fees becomes too high it could be dethroned.
- OhDagny 9y agoSometimes inefficiency / inelasticity is a feature. Sometimes.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoMy opinions: There are not meaningful differences between different proof of work coins. All PoW is based on the same principles, has the same security costs, and the same scaling challenges. Bitcoin remains the top dog and will likely stay that way due to network effect. PoS could be interesting, but it's largely untested in the way that Bitcoin is. We need to see how mineres/voters behave and whether large holders can exert undue influence. Ethereum is by far my favored coin to see this tested, and if successful, would actually have more security for a given network cost. This is potentially disruptive. DAG-coins or whatever you'd like to call them seem to like they're getting 'free wins' and I suspect that their security model is not sound. They're interesting but extremely risky. Ripple is simply not a cryptocurrency by any reasonable definition.
- SippinLean 9y agoGood point, Ripple could only be a cryptocurrency if you define that as being "a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets" or some other crazy garbage.
- Mc_Big_G 9y agoCraigslist is no longer the only game in classifieds town.