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This will likely end up being called FaceCoin, because two syllables is easy to say.

There isn't yet a cryptocoin called this, but I expect one will be created in a day. Then Facebook will have to buy them out to get the name. Call it coin-squatting.

FaceCoin exists: https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...

it's at about 1/10 it's peak.

I'm guessing somebody is done propping up the market. This is a bit too much of a drop off for it to just be a course correction.

Are there any real, legitimate crypto-coins that got started by an initial offering?

Several thousands probably. More than 100 I could probably count in my mind ...

Most coins don't work like Bitcoin. They have no "mining".

Here you see about 1500 coins and their market cap: https://coinmarketcap.com/all/...

Pyramid schemes expand, and then collapse entirely.

Bitcoin has expanded and shrunk by large percentages around a dozen times so far, and each time, it comes back stronger than before.

Not the behavior of a pyramid scheme.

This sure looks like a pyramid scheme that grew exponentially until around 18th December 2018 and has fallen ever since then.

https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...
https://i.imgur.com/tIRjZll.pn...

Hmm let's see...
Here's a list of all mineable coins: https://coinmarketcap.com/coin...

I'll let you figure out how many of those are ASIC-mineable. Answer: not many.
This doesn't mean ASICs can't be built for them, after all you can build an ASIC for anything. The issue is some of the algorithms make building and using ASICs prohibitively expensive.

Yep.

What part of "Initial Coin Offering" makes sense to anybody? (apart from the people offering the coins, naturally)

In what way isn't an ICO a scam? There's over 1500 cryptocurrencies now (but only one that makes any sense).

There is, it's TRX.

https://coinmarketcap.com/curr... to sign up.

Well that sucks. And I was going to suggest maybe a Nibble Coin too, but apparently someone had that idea already also.

https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...

went to check out d.tube, and ewww, need to start enabling not just their scripts, but also 3rd party scripts just for a page to not be blank.

list of scripts at first pass are ..d.tube
â¦asksteem.com
https://api.asksteem.com/
â¦coinmarketcap.com
https://api.coinmarketcap.com/
â¦gstatic.com
â¦steemit.com
https://api.steemit.com/

See in that list, they still depend on google for stuff. Also when I have to enable a buch of 3rd party scripts, I move on.

btw, youtube only has 4, keeping the 2 doubleclick blocked and the website is perfectly usable, and only 2 enabled.

Indeed.
In Jan 2016, dogecoin was valued at 15 million.
In Jan 2017, dogecoin was valued at 24 milion.
Now, it's valued at 1.7 billion

quite impressive. It really shows off the fundamental strengths of a bubble economy.

$70 trillion in market cap for all publicly traded companies. Bitcoin? $240 billion. Bitcoin is around 0.3% of the market cap of publicly traded companies, I don't think people are rushing from stocks to BTC, and I don't think a BTC crash to $0 would create much of any issue for stocks (other than people trying to jump back in to stocks, to stem their losses from BTC).

Bitcoin does over 6 billion a day in trade volume

Says who?

Really? Market trades are public information https://coinmarketcap.com/

And how much of that volume is trading bitcoin for bitcoin?

What? That makes no sense. Why would I trade Bitcoin for Bitcoin? Trading means exchanging something for something else

When the trend is up, most of the orders are buy, you can bet your ass $100MM USD a day in sell orders would be noticed.

$100M in one trade might, but no-one is that stupid. A fund I'm associated with dumps millions a week across multiple exchanges and it's not even a blip. But why cash out? Bitcoin is a currency and a security, they can buy things directly with it use to borrow against. Just like Shares, Gold or Cash.

How long before that bursts and there are hundreds if not thousands worthless crypto-currencies, like dot-coms after 2001?

This is a list of actively traded cyptocurrencies:
https://coinmarketcap.com/all/...
Remember, the hoardable value of each of them is based on the idea of limited supply. Your question should be, How long before the market realizes that this has already happened?

I'm holding out for the Bitcoin Ultimate GOTY Edition with all the DLC.

Give it another month or two. If you search for "bitcoin" today on CoinMarketCap you get this list of already-available cryptocurrencies:

• Bitcoin
• Bitcoin Cash
• BitcoinDark
• Bitcoin Plus
• BitcoinZ
• Bitcoin Scrypt
• Bitcoin Red
• BitcoinFast

And soon Bitcoin Gold will be added to the list...

Not all crypto currencies are created equal but common sense hints that most of them will certainly pop because obscurity will kill them: 1192 are far too many.

I'm more curious as to why bitcoin's dominance has been steadily increasing since July.

My take is that up to now BTC was just a nerd thing. Now it is breaking mainstream it is about to go stupid. I heard a guy at work say he's shifted his retirement fund to BTC (already made 50% this year). The demand market is shifting from a few million nerds, to hundreds of millions of semi nerds, until it hits the billions of regular folks. BTC is the de facto crypto currency so will be a magnet for users new to crypto. The supply/demand potential could see this thing hitting $1mil/coin (sounds stupid I know, but why not?)

I'm more curious as to why bitcoin's dominance has been steadily increasing since July. One possible explanation is that alternative currencies (mainly Ethereum) are no longer as profitable as they used to be due to an increase in difficulty. Or maybe Bitcoin receives a lot more attention. Or maybe it's just the sum of everything: a number of large exchanges, publicity, many vaporware ICOs, etc. etc. etc.

Exactly what do you think is competing here?

They've been applying for a patent on an electronic cash system since 1999. They updated the patent in 2009-2011 to something that resembles very, very much, Bitcoin.

These bankers do own Bitcoin. Lots of it. In the last few hours we've seen massive buy orders that have made the price start to rebound.

While this can't be proven, these signs suggest price manipulation by JP Morgan in order to buy more cryptocurrency at a much cheaper price.

> Me, I'm holding out for TrumpCoin.

Already exists: https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...

Predictably, it is pretty worthless :-).

So it has the same value as Confederate currency.

> Me, I'm holding out for TrumpCoin.

Already exists: https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...

Predictably, it is pretty worthless :-).

LOL you are too late... sad + funny
https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...

No. Not yet. BTC volume is low compared to the equity trading. BTC volume is generally in the range of 50K - 200K BTC / day. And spiking much higher the last few few days

Last 24 hour trading was over 940k BTC or 2.5Billion USD https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...

PIVX actually solves most of these problems and is currently on a steep rise https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...

Here are the trading volumes on the different exchanges over the last 24h. I'm quoting only the top tree between BTC and local currencies - there are many many more.

Bitfinex $39,590,400 (BTC and US dollars)
bitFlyer $37,823,900 (BTC and Japanese Yen)
OKCoin.cn $16,917,200 (BTC and Chinese Yuan)

https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...

A few hundred million dollars over a single day is not likely considered "low trade volume".

The absoloute value of one "coin" is not a useful comparision. It doesn't really matter whether you have lots of "coins" with a low value per coin or fewer with a higher value per coin.

More interesting as a measure of the relative importance of cryptocurrencies is the "market cap". The value per coin times the number of coins in circulation.

By that measure dogecoin's significance is about 0.1% of bitcoin's

http://coinmarketcap.com/

> Bitcoin is all the hype, but the blockchain has flaws, in that it isn't as anonymous as one would hope for — you can track past transactions.

Bitcoin transactions record sending and receiving addresses, and the amount sent, and that's it. Privacy depends on how careful you are outside the transaction itself. For example, if you buy something physical online, and give a delivery name and address, the store knows who those bitcoins came from. But compared to a credit card or paper check, which have your name printed on them, bitcoin transactions have the *possibility* of privacy. Cash is no longer anonymous, by the way. Banks and ATMs can scan serial numbers when cash goes out and comes in. Depending how many hand-to-hand transactions happen in between, they can figure out what you were doing.

> Rumors of Bitcoin showing cracks are popping up and also there are quite a few alternatives out there.

The Bitcoin Network is still running fine. They are getting close to a limit in the code originally intended to stop spam transactions. That limits the size of "blocks" of transactions to 1 MB. The current arguments are over how and when to raise that cap. A majority of the network has to upgrade to raise the limit. Yes, there are lots of alternatives, because all it takes is to fork the code and slap a new name on it (it's open source). But as this table ( http://coinmarketcap.com/ ) shows, Bitcoin is 7/8 of the market, and only three others have significant market capitalization and trading volume. Building a network of users, apps, etc. for an ecosystem is a lot harder than releasing a new cryptocoin.

> Is getting into dealing with crypto currency worthwhile already?

It was for me, but I started in mid-2011 (from an article on Slashdot, in fact). If it is worthwhile for *you* depends on a lot of things. If you send money to family in another country, or international wire transfers, it may be very worthwhile, because of the very high fees from the other methods. If you are an average US consumer with credit and debit cards and want to shop on Amazon, not so much.

> become easily trackable once NSA and the likes adapt their systems to doing exactly that?

The NSA can download a copy of the blockchain, just like everyone else. What they have, that the rest of us don't, is all the other data collection that can correlate a Bitcoin transaction to a person or place. Like if you are using a smartphone app to send bitcoins, they know who owns the phone and where you were at the time

> What digital currency has the technical and mind-share potential to supersede bitcoin?

What social network is going to replace MySpace? :-). What OS is going to replace Windows? Predicting the future is hard, especially before it happens

> Are there feasible cryptocurrencies that have the upsides of Bitcoin (such as a mathematical limit to their amount) but are fully anonymous in transactions?

Bitcoin can be anonymous, but you have to use it properly for that to happen. As I said above, data leakage *around* a transaction is how you de-anonymize it. The same would be true of alt-coins (the general name for cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin). If you use them to buy something, the seller may leak your info.

> What do the economists and digi-currency nerds here have to contribute on that?

Economists in general don't have the software chops to understand how cryptocurrencies work, and have religious beliefs on how economies and money *should* work. Not all of them, but a lot of them. My own opinion is bitcoin is the most developed cryptocurrency, with the most users, apps, mining hardware, etc. The direction in the future won't be replacing bitcoin with another coin, but building layers on top of Bitcoin. It's a communication protocol for scriptable transaction messages, and people have barely figured out how to make use of that. As such, it is similar to the IP protocol stack.

Yeah, the coin doesn't seem to be doing well: http://coinmarketcap.com/asset...
It's not on any exchange, either.

First of all, the libertarian position is that we need a free market in currencies - not just picking one winning solution like gold or Bitcoin, or the idea / prediction that I present below. In the past, having a myriad of currencies would have made price tags and cash registers very complicated, but 21st century tech is making this ever-less of an issue. Banks, supermarkets and other businesses, neighborhoods, churches, charities, etc could all issue their own currencies, and conversion between them would be trivial. On a level playing field, as we already see in market segments like online encyclopedias and uncomplicated software, non-profits with the most open solution have the competitive advantage. The market will decide what the most popular way is, while dissenters will still be free to do their own thing.

As technology advances, all scarce chemical elements are vulnerable to long-term supply inflation risk - nano-bots gathering gold particles in the ocean, asteroid mining, stelar-scale antimatter-powered particle colliders, etc. Bitcoin (and the hundreds of other cryptography-based currency networks) are awesome, but they're designed specifically to confront the coercion-based "legal tender" of the present day, rather than for optimal transaction time, convenience, deterrence of theft, etc. It still remains to be seen which alternative currency networks do best in the face of (government-backed) DoS attempts, volatility, etc. National governments will surely try to hold on to power, but in the long-term more and more people will see them as obsolete - violence will only accelerate their fragmentation and collapse. In the long term, in a freer and more rational world, markets will likely go back to preferring a currency that is backed by something tangible and scarce. Most people don't want to risk losing their life savings if their laptop gets stolen or hacked (or if the party you trust to hold your wallet gets hacked, etc)...

I can think of no better "tangible and scarce" things in the universe than living biological specimens, that have to be kept alive. This solves two problems at once - backing currencies, as well strengthening the market incentive to save species from extinction. About 5000 years ago people decided that gold is scarce and thus a convenient medium of exchange, even if abstracted through paper money; in the 21st century people are realizing that endangered species are too!

Instead of holding gold in a vault (or worse, being backed by government promises and force alone), new banks would own safaris, aquariums, terrariums, insectariums, paludariums, etc that efficiently assure the proliferation of species, "mining" them through breeding. This of course would lead to inflation quickly if just a small number of species was involved, but currencies can be backed by a basket of MILLIONS of different (sub)species, weighed in value according to their rarity. The plant / animal's unique characteristics, health / quality of life, etc could also be a part of the formula. If done right, "mining costs" (the cost of housing, feeding, etc the life-forms) would make it very difficult to cause major inflation, and minor inflation would be nothing but a natural "tax" that makes it unlikely that any more natural species will go extinct.

There are believed to be 8.7 million varieties of species in the world, most being small and thus easy to preserve. For comparison, the variety of species of books published by humans is

The bitcoin code is open source. All you need to do is spin up an exact copy, let's call it bitcoin2.0, with a whole new set of coins. Aside from having a fresh block chain, it's otherwise identical, and user software can be made to handle both interchangeably. This has already somewhat happened with the collection of altcoins. They are mostly similar and use different names, but they add to the digital coin universe:

http://coinmarketcap.com/

The *idea* of bitcoin can't be lost, and the *code* for bitcoin is open source. Therefore people can and do make other digital currencies:

http://coinmarketcap.com/

Some of them may be silly, copycats, or scams, but we will never run out of coins. That Cat is out of the bag.

To augment your points:

On deflation:

There are currently 51 cryptocurrencies being tracked at http://coinmarketcap.com/ . Most of them are variations on the original Bitcoin software. They exist because the Bitcoin software is open-source. Nothing prevents someone from making an exact copy of the original Bitcoin, call it Bitcoin#2, and generate another 21 million coins, and making an integrated user client that reads both block chains (transaction databases). And then repeating that for Bitcoin#3, 4, ...

Effectively that is what is already happening with the 50 other alternate currencies, and the only thing stopping massive coin inflation is lack of significant interest in all but the original bitcoin and litecoin. Thus the market will decide if it wants inflation or not, the world isn't locked into the 21 million coin limit of bitcoin.

On Tax Evasion:

The Underground Economy in the US is estimated at 20% of total GDP. In many countries it is much higher, and is referred to by the more polite "informal economy". The US version is divided into the "black market", i.e. illegal activities, and the "off-the-books" market, which is legal stuff, just not reported. It was that way before bitcoin existed, so nothing new here.

On Evil Uses:

From what I have seen, Bitcoin encourages better morality between people. Contrary to what people think about anonymity and Bitcoin, the public transaction ledger means *anyone* can inspect what is going on. So when an Auburn student waved a "Hi Mom - Send Bitcoin" sign at a football game, we could see how much was donated (a lot) and whether he lives up to his promise to give most of it to a homeless shelter. Governments that want to track bad guys merely need to run some Bitcoin network nodes around the world, and they can see where transactions are coming from in real time. The only way to truly hide is to do what Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for Bitcoin's creator, did - which is never move his stash of early coins. If it moves, it can be tracked. In fact, we know he never moved the original bitcoins he mined, simply by looking at the public block chain.

You are neglecting the "Network Effect", the reason there is only one big auction market or social network at any given time.

Bitcoin had about a three year head start on other cryptocurrencies, therefore the client software is better developed, more merchants accept it, more users have wallet apps on their smartphones, etc. Your statement about "nothing prevents a new one popping up" is true, and has already happened: http://coinmarketcap.com/

They list 53 coins so far, but the top two, bitcoin and litecoin, represent 98% of the total market value. It's definitely possible for another coin to be a better product, and eventually overtake bitcoin, but it won't happen next week. I expect it to take years to overcome the leader's head start.

Man, the future of FOREX is going to make the Linux DE holy wars look like minor doctrinal differences...

I think the parallel with Linux is valid on a lot of point.
Not only have recent history seen an explosion of variants:
(There are many alt-coins just as there are many linux distributions).
But on the long term, probably is will resolve itself in the same way:
A couple of widespread mainstream variants (like Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, openSUSE) (same in the crypto-coin world: Bitcoin and Litecoin are apparently here to stay, and happy at their position)
A few others for more specialist uses (like Gentoo, Knoppix, SystemRescueCD) (probably in the crypto world some *actually anonymous* coin will emerge).
And then a whole bunch of entries that nobody has ever heard of and are almost not used.

But there's a small difference:
- Low popularity linux distro, end up usually abandonned
- Whereas, low use coins end up being the playground for troll-traders.

Then someone will invent a new currency and the cycle repeat itself.

It has already been done. And far more than once.

For those curious, there are currently 12 million bitcoin in existence, with a net value of about $4.3 billion.

Source: http://coinmarketcap.com/

The deflation occurred when DPR took the coins out of circulation by putting them in his private stash. As soon as someone starts dumping those coins then BTC value will drop. Removing the risk of this happening may increase confidence in the value of the currency a little but not catastrophically. 600000 BTC is about 5% of the total amount of BTC at this time. Now someone schooled in econometrics can probably calculate the effects of this looming event.