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Very disappointed with the discussion here. The author makes many good points deconstructing the claims made by creators of many of the altcoins. His main arg

Very disappointed with the discussion here. The author makes many good points deconstructing the claims made by creators of many of the altcoins. His main argument is that none of the altcoins improve on Bitcoin in any significant way, and most of these altcoins (specifically the Scrypt-coins) were probably created out of greed. Many people who invested in GPU-mining rigs were looking for something like Litecoin to take off and make their massive investments worthwhile. I think the author is dead on. These altcoins don't improve on bitcoin, and are all orders of magnitude less valuable as money.

rainsford 13y ago
I definitely agree. I don't think Bitcoin is perfect, but the alternatives don't actually fix any of its shortcomings. Instead they tweak small technical details that make little difference in the quality of the currency. Whether Bicoin succeeds long term is going to have very little to do with whether the hashing algorithm is SHA-256 or scrypt (a major change in Litecoin).
DanielKrawisz 13y ago
Thanks!
synchronise 13y ago
I have to strongly disagree and I think the author has gotten it wrong. There have been quite innovative alt coins in this first wave, the most prominent ones being Namecoin, Litecoin, Peercoin, Primecoin, Freicoin and possibly Anoncoin as they have all found niches that they can cater to. Litecoin has the second largest market cap and has the honour of being the first major Scrypt coin Peercoin has the third largest cap, it introduced Proof of Stake as an alternative for Proof of Work and in the latest round of alt coin investment it did the best in terms of market cap increase to coins ratio. Namecoin has a niche as a alt DNS Primecoin allows Proof of Work to be useful rather than selfish to the network as is the case with Bitcoin Anoncoin recently integrated i2p and Zerocoin to provide greater anonymity for users Freicoin had a great idea with demurrage, very capitalist, but it failed because people want a currency that's either going to hold or appreciate in value and also because 80% of the funds were held by the Freicoin foundation rather than the community. There's also a second wave of altcoins coming, ones not based on Satoshi's algorithms. The best example would be eMunie, which from what I hear is very close to release.

rainsford 13y ago

I definitely agree. I don't think Bitcoin is perfect, but the alternatives don't actually fix any of its shortcomings. Instead they tweak small technical details that make little difference in the quality of the currency. Whether Bicoin succeeds long term is going to have very little to do with whether the hashing algorithm is SHA-256 or scrypt (a major change in Litecoin).

DanielKrawisz 13y ago

Thanks!

synchronise 13y ago

I have to strongly disagree and I think the author has gotten it wrong. There have been quite innovative alt coins in this first wave, the most prominent ones being Namecoin, Litecoin, Peercoin, Primecoin, Freicoin and possibly Anoncoin as they have all found niches that they can cater to. Litecoin has the second largest market cap and has the honour of being the first major Scrypt coin Peercoin has the third largest cap, it introduced Proof of Stake as an alternative for Proof of Work and in the latest round of alt coin investment it did the best in terms of market cap increase to coins ratio. Namecoin has a niche as a alt DNS Primecoin allows Proof of Work to be useful rather than selfish to the network as is the case with Bitcoin Anoncoin recently integrated i2p and Zerocoin to provide greater anonymity for users Freicoin had a great idea with demurrage, very capitalist, but it failed because people want a currency that's either going to hold or appreciate in value and also because 80% of the funds were held by the Freicoin foundation rather than the community. There's also a second wave of altcoins coming, ones not based on Satoshi's algorithms. The best example would be eMunie, which from what I hear is very close to release.