Slashdot Mirror
Are Altcoins Undermining Bitcoin's Credibility?
An anonymous reader writes The editor of a Bitcoin advocacy site believes the proliferation of altcoins (cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin) is harming Bitcoin's long-term potential as an alternative to traditional currencies. Posting at BadBitcoin.org, a site that seeks to expose online scams that target Bitcoin users, the pseudonymous ViK compares altcoins, including the Internet meme inspired Dogecoin, to a pump-and-dump scheme where developers create their own version of the Bitcoin wallet and blockchain and then "pre-mine" or generate a significant number of cryptocurrency units before the altcoin's official release. Later, when their value has risen, the pre-mined altcoins are exchanged for Bitcoin or in some cases converted directly to cash. While critics of cryptocurrencies in general might find ViK's comments about the altcoin "tulip" mania ironic, the self-confessed Bitcoin fan is nevertheless calling for an altcoin boycott: "The easiest way to stop them is to not participate. We all know that they only have one purpose, and that is to make Bitcoin for the so called developers."
I'm not really a fan of any "altcurrency", but this guy just comes of sounding whiney and self-serving.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Bitcoin has about as much credibility as Monopoly money in my mind. Asking if something can undermine the credibility of monopoly money doesn't really make any sense.
I don't respond to AC's.
While there are some pump & dump operators out there, not all altcoins are bad
Saying that all altcoins are bad is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater
If all altcoins are bad, bitcoin will be bad as well, after all, what is bitcoin without the number crunching - just like all the other altcoins ?
how meany people are useing Bitcoin just to play the market like stocks?
All of this is funny money.
Bitcoins are just in your imagination.
USDollars are merely imagined by the USGovernment.
Gold has no real value other than using it for things like electrical contacts, etc.
None of this is real money.
If you want real value, get a basket of eggs, hatch the chicks, raise them up, feed them pasture, your other asset - you are landed I hope - and they'll lay more eggs. Now you're in business and can feed yourself. When you succeed at that start feeding other people and they'll give you something of real value like a pork chop or firewood to stay warm with. What ever you do, don't accept cash, bitcoins, gold or other fraudulent currencies for your eggs. You want real value for your real things.
As opposed to bitcoin which totally isn't a pump and dump scheme?
Some altcoins are actually interesting (eg huntercoin has a way to mine by playing a bomberman type game).
Geez. And I thought I was easily amused!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Like all investments in something unproven, there is a lot of risk. And frequently, people who don't know what they are doing are making stupid bets. I don't see the problem.
Bitcoin is a social movement dedicated to the elimination of central banks by providing a superior alternative.
This is obviously of concern to the entire class of people who derive unearned benefits via the operation of central banks. That class has an well-trained group of mercenaries that specialize in identifying, infiltrating, and disrupting social movements which threaten the profits of the ruling classes (see the transformation of Occupy the Fed into Occupy Wall Street into irrelevance) via well documented methods (see Snowden leaks, etc.)
Bitcoin is going to be attacked from every angle until such time until either it or central banks no longer exist.
Anyone who supports any sort of crypto currency could say the same about bitcoin. Early adopters/(founders?) of bitcoin still control a huge number of bitcoin, so how is that not a pump and dump scheme itself?
I'm not a fan of crypto currencies at all.
How many people are using their savings just to play the market like stocks?!
This is like Britney Spears complaining that lady gaga is a non talent attention whore.
Of Betteridge's Law?
No seems a perfectly fitting answer.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
But they said the exact same thing about Linux distributions in the 90's, after the post Redhat influx of distros. What we learned from that experience, and some of us knew it at the time, was that the more people you have working in their own isolated environments, solving the problems that are important to them... the more innovation you have in the greater Linux space. It's the trickle down effect in open source software, and it's what makes a product or product ecosystem stronger. And we're seeing the same effect in the Bitcoin space. Just look at the proliferation of Scrypt variation, Gravity wells, different variations on proof of work, proof of stake, and others. Like Linux, Bitcoin is more than a bundle of software products, it's an entire ecosystem. To dismiss that, and say that there should only be about Bitcoin seriously misses the way open source innovation works. The rest is all marketing, which is bullshit by definition.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Pump and dump is an IPO, massive failures of bitcoin companies, just another shady business practice. Everything old is new again when you don't know history.
...and here I thought they where MINING Bitcoins all the time...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I turned to spirits for investment. I mean, where else do you get 20% and more for your money?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You think the USD would retain any credibility if everyone and their dog could legally start printing their own money?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No one, unless they are buying stocks.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
From where I stand, I think the proliferation of altcoins have undermined Bitcoin since around december 2012, when the number of altcoins started to multiply at an insane rate. Even Litecoin, the main Bitcoin alternative, has lost more than half its value since then.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
they designed a currency that assumes the world's population is constant.
Gosh, some advocates of a competing currency and libertarian fantasy are now cowed by competition? Say it ain’t so!
I’m rooting for some online cash to become viable, but don’t know if Bitcoin will be it (I suspect not since it has the same liquidity / shock issues as gold standards do) but let’s have a bunch of experiments and see what the market says.
Sure. You can print/mint any currency you want, as long as it's not meant to pose as federal reserve currency. There is nothing illegal about it.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
The programmers need to design a digital Bretton Woods system and enforce a stable exchange rate. For instance, the value of one eMark could be pegged at one five hundredth of a bitcoin, and the various central banks would be obligated to buy and sell bitcoins and emarks at that rate. That way, a miner wouldn't have to worry about backing the wrong computations.
Why would the market not correct the inflated value of alt currencies, eventually? Aren't heavy fluctuation and scams a feature of immature markets? And doesn't outside interface inhibit correction?
What does this even mean? Asic proof?
ASICs (Application-specific integrated circuits) represent specialized hardware specifically designed for a particular task, in this context the ASICs are designed to mine coins. ASICs outperform (both in speed and power consumption) CPUs and GPUs making ASICs far more profitable.
:-) 24/7 mining some coin.
Coin proof-of-work algorithms have some sort of difficulty setting to control the number of coins being awarded during a time period. The more mining horsepower there is the higher the difficulty goes. This rising difficulty level makes the mining calculations take longer. So as the total capability to do work (all the CPUs+GPUs+ASICs) goes up the difficulty goes up. An individual CPU, GPU or ASIC earns fewer coins per hour as difficulty rises but the total number of coins generated remain roughly constant over time.
ASIC-proof algorithms attempt to leverage the fact that ASICs are specialized. They try to incorporate things found in CPUs and GPUs but not in ASICs. The motivation is to allow CPUs and GPUs to profitably mine something. The problem is that the things missing from the previous generation of ASICs used to design the ASIC-proof algorithm have been finding their way into newer generation ASICs.
So the short story is that some alt-coins were partially motivated by CPU/GPU miner that were driven out of bitcoin mining. Newer generations ASICs are now taking over alt-coins and CPU/GPU miners are once again being driven out.
Those great deals you find on ebay for a used high end GPU. It very well may be a GPU that was over clocked and run just below the point of spontaneous combustion
Gee, you don't say?
Clearly Bitcoin has enough credibility for people to value it at hundreds of dollars ...
But not enough credibility for merchants to hold/keep the bitcoins they receive from customers.
Merchants tend to use merchant services offered by various bitcoin exchanges. Basically the merchant does all their pricing and accounting as normal in whatever fiat currency they use, dollars, euros, etc. When a customer indicates they wish to pay in bitcoins the merchant sends sale info to the exchange, the exchange converts the price from fiat to bitcoin and provides a payment address to send bitcoins to. This payment address is the exchange's, the merchant never touches a bitcoin -- lucky for them if they are subject to IRS jurisdiction but that's another story. When the merchant receives the coins they credit the merchant's account with the original fiat amount specified regardless of any particular fluctuation that may have occurred in bitcoin's price.
In short. The merchant prices and does accounting in fiat currency and receives fiat currency in payment. The only thing new is that their payment processor is a bitcoin exchange rather than VISA or Mastercard.
I would assume that credibility pollution is not much of an issue since I don't think people confuse all cryptocurrencies as being "Bitcoin". However, I have no actual data so maybe they do. I would assume that the users of these more exotic currencies are a smaller group who know that these are all different.
The bigger concerns I have with these is that they seem rather redundant.
Also, does anyone _actually_ view Bitcoin as "an alternative to fiat currencies and central banks" or more as "a real solution to the problem kludged by PayPal"?
Since when does Bitcoin have any credibility to be undermined?
...but not necessarily have huge advantage.
ASIC-proof algorithms attempt to leverage the fact that ASICs are specialized. They try to incorporate things found in CPUs and GPUs but not in ASICs. {...} Newer generations ASICs are now taking over alt-coins and CPU/GPU miners are once again being driven out.
You can build an ASIC for pretty much anything, and beyond some point, it might be commercially reasonnable to attempt it (if the market is big enough and there are enough people interested into buying hardware, it might be worth trying to design sellable hardware).
Now the question is: is there an actual gain in doing it? And that's where all the details lie in.
Depending on the complexity of the Proof-of-Work algorithm, it might range from
- PoW is dumb easy. Each jump in technology (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC) result in massive increase in performance. Hashing power jumps forward several orders of magnitude. Each new technology simply obliterates the relevance of the previous generation (that's the case with bitcoins' SHA256 algorithme).
all the way to the opposite:
- PoW is awfully complex. The algorithme has so much requirement, that your ASIC basically ends up being a slightly custom CPU. The only real benefit compared to GPU, is that the ASIC consumes a tiny bit less power when compared to a GPU.
Also, keep in mind that some PoW actually solve real-life scientific problems. If somebody managed to create ASIC hardware for PrimeCoin or RieCoin, there's some publication-worth fame to be made.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Are you talking about Bitcoin's deflationary tendencies? Bitcoin deflation assumes one thing, that people will continue to want Bitcoin, a "commodity" designed to be limited in supply. In other words, for the value of Bitcoin to rise people must remain INTERESTED in Bitcoin. If interest in Bitcoin falls, then the value of Bitcoin also falls, which just a roundabout way of saying "inflation".
I suspect the lack of positive or negative news about Bitcoin is contributing to the current downward trend of its value relative to the dollar.
Impossible. That would imply that Bitcoin had credibility to begin with.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I say this as an avid supporter: BitCoin has a serious problem, at least as far as its "distributed" nature goes.
As it has grown in populatity, the motivation for the average Joe to participate in block creation has vanished. Personally, I used to mine one or two BTC per month; first on my CPU, then on my GPU; today, it would literally take me about four years on a high-end GPU to mine a single BitCoin - Why bother? Today, only a handful of hardcore dedicated ASIC-based miners control new block creation. And make no mistake, I don't hate on them for doing so, they serve a valuable purpose for the BitCoin economy as a whole (no new blocks means no transactions processed).
Altcoins serve as a sort of "American Dream" for those who missed out on the gold rush. People see others who made a small (or in some cases, not so small) fortune mining BTC, and want to put their otherwise-idle PC power to use doing something similar. Hard to blame them, but at the same time, the activity itself very much counts as speculating with an "investment" funded through their electric bills - Not healthy for either cryptocurrencies as a whole, or for the individuals hoping to get in on the next LiteCoin.
I consider this the "awkward" years for BitCoin growth. Once it becomes infeasible to make serious money mining BTC, the huge mining farms will vanish, the difficulty will drop, and eventually people will go back to casually mining in the background on their GPUs just for the transaction fees if not the block rewards. For now, though, only those willing to drop tens of thousands of dollars on a mining rig can participate in that half of the economy.
so now a BTC thread has a majority of anti-BTC comments, esp AC's...I'm wondering what caused this change...or if it's always been viewed with skepticism but hype warped our perception
i'm telling you, ever since we started seeing BTC on /., and especially after it got big, i tried to provide a counterpoint to the BTC proponents...got modded troll every time
i was cool about it, not trollface...especially not at first, maybe after a months I'd get aggro in a deepthread but really i went out of my way to be fair minded
got hammered by the mods!
now the AC's are some of the most hilarious anti-BTC comments (someone above asked for a BTC to Pog to Beanie Baby conversion table)
i don't know what this all means...I know htere are paid commentors and hype/fanbois but i'm just wondering if people have come to their senses about BTC or if it's always been this way and the hype/comment bots warped our perception
Thank you Dave Raggett
So its Facebook compliant. Because no one really uses illegal porn/drugs/money launder coin do they?
Hate to break it to you, but the good ol' US Dollar, cash-in-hand, remains the worldwide go-to currency for laundering money.
BitCoin makes international transactions easier, no question there; but as far as its reputation for illegal activities goes, outside the opportunistic Silk Road, it actually has significantly more traceability than a stack of Jacksons.
If you want to launder on a purely domestic scale, you want nothing to do with Bitcoin. Yes, if careful you have a certain type of anonymity once in the system; but the weak points comes from the buy-in and cash-out. Unless you "launder" your money by buying mining rigs, and don't mind cashing out by buying things at Tiger or OverStock, moving large sums around in the blockchain just gives the feds a blinking neon sign for where to look for you.
I read that as iCoin at first. Which would have immediately created a horde of fanbois using it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Why don't we apply this to ALL craptocurrency?
It's a waste of time, computing power, energy and programming time needed to alter payment backends for this e-funny-money.
If nobody participates, they all collapse like the speculating-their-asses-off house of cards that they are.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
One reason I'm rooting for an Altcoin is I'm worried about deflation if Bitcoin wins.
A limited amount of inflation is a good thing, if the cash sitting in your wallet gets progressively less valuable you have a motive to spend it and generate economic activity.
But there's a finite amount bitcoins, which means at some point they'll all be mined. At that point as the economy grows each bitcoin will represent an ever larger portion of the economy. People will be reluctant to spend bitcoin because they'll be forgoing those future price increases and the economy will suffer.
I'm not sure how well any Altcoins solve this problem, but I'd prefer a currency where the money supply grows in pace with the economy.
I stole this Sig
I remember some ransomware called Cryptolocker demanded payment in Bitcoins.
"The financial sector will lose it's grip pretty quickly on all this."
This is very funny given that Bitcoin is currently being integrated into the "official" financial system as another commodity or currency (depending on the jurisdiction).
The financial sector is *taking over* Bitcoin as we speak.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
PrimeCoin and RieCoin currently have no known FPGA nor ASIC implementation and the few GPU implementation don't seem to bring the huge leaps in performance that GPU brought to Bitcoin's SHA256.
It's not that they were designed with the purpose of being CPU-only (ASIC-resistant was never the main foal in creating them).
It's that they are based around actual scientific problems that ARE difficult. Designing silicon for them *would* be a scientific improvement.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Are Multi-level-marketing schemes undermining the credibility of Ponzi schemes?
In the long term, I suspect that a vast number of alternative cryptocurrencies will be created. This churn of new cryptocurrencies will produce quite a few duds, scams and fads, but at some point the idea of creating a cryptocurrency won't be as cutting edge as it is now. Then the churn will slow, and we'll be left with a handful of serious currencies, each of which has a unique use or attraction that makes it viable in the market. We need more than one cryptocurrency so that people have a choice. If there are several currencies, then the competition will spur innovation, the value of each currency can stabilize against the others somewhat and no single market crash or overlooked security concern will bring down all of them. Urging people to boycott alternative cryptocurrencies and use only Bitcoin is shortsighted and harmful.
If you all haven't learned by now that shitcoin and all the garbage like it has got serious issues you deserve everything coming your way.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
it's not regulated until it's regulated. That regulation is coming, and you can't escape it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
There is another huge value in accepting bitcoins. You don't have to worry about charge-backs.
Unless the blockchain forks again. Admittedly that would only occur in drastic circumstances and those effected confined to a very narrow time window. However the risk is not zero, but it is very very low. In 2013 a coding bug in the BTC mining software -- this is where the blockchain, the public ledger we all use, comes from -- necessitating a fork. Assuming no disappearing payments, no double spends, would require no future coding bugs by the BTC dev team.
I wager 200 quatloos on the newcomer.
I have heard so much about the so-called "ASIC-resistant" alt-coins but have yet to meet one yet Can you kindly tell us which alt-coin(s) is/are truly ASIC-resistant ?? Thanks !!
Note my use of "were theoretically". The scrypt algorithm, which many current alt-coins are based on was chosen back in the day because the coin dev teams thought it ASIC resistant. However it was only theoretically resistant and that did not match reality. As I indicated before, it was designed to do things that the sha256 based ASICs (Bitcoin) could not, however when alt-coins became profitable enough ASICs were designed for scrypt.
This cycle will repeat. Even if some algorithm were found that uses every bit of a GPU's computational power an ASIC would be developed that had only the computational circuits, ditched the graphics output circuits, packed those circuits in a custom chip, packaged them in a unit by the hundreds with a controller and cooling and only needed a low power devices like a raspberry pi to control dozens of such units. The preceding would beat a PC motherboard hosting as many video cards as can fit.
sounds like he has a lot of bitcoins, so he wants to preserve their status.
Altcoins are having success, even parody ones. Why? Because *coins are a ponzi scheme. Who comes first, gets more for less.
Yeah, creators ARE premining. But nevertheless, the first users can do cheap mining as well, paid by the users who are joining later. Because of this effect you cannot tell people to boycott altcoins, when they have the opportunity to make a lot more money there than with bitcoin.
So maybe there will not be mined more and more bitcoins, but for every coin-currency which is "used up", there will come a successor, which can be mined from start. So its a meta-coin, which does not work by hashing more and more transactions, but by creating new currencies, which will replace the old ones.