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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."
You're just miffed because I have a hotel on Park Place and three houses on Boardwalk.
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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.
When Bitcoin was launched, Satoshi had only been mining for a day or so. If you had been paying attention to the right forums, you could have started mining more or less at the same time he did and in fact some people (like Hal Finney) did exactly that.
What's more, Satoshi does not appear to have dumped his coins. Nor did he engage in much pumping. Indeed once people started hyperbolically talking about how Bitcoin would bring about world peace, trying to get Wikileaks to accept it and so on he retreated into the background and eventually left. His coins are still there.
Creating something new with no built in advantage for yourself, being totally honest about it, and then when its value soars not selling ..... is pretty much the opposite of a pump and dump scheme.
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.
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I just don't agree with him. Bitcoins have some serious issues. If someone develops a digital currency that addresses those issues and makes them more practical for every day use I support it. If I had to wait for 10 minutes to get my starbucks coffee paid for I'd probably decide to just pay cash. I also wonder how quickly the blockchain would grow if bitcoin became more mainstream. Anonymity is also an issue. I think competition between digital currencies will only make them more practical and robust. That can only be a good thing for digital currencies in the long run. If progress is not made digital currencies will never replace conventional ones.
I hereby award you the Hermes Conrad award for meticulous technical correctness. It may be collected at the Central Bureaucracy upon reception of a properly filled out, signed, stamped and notarized Award Reception form.
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Clearly Bitcoin has enough credibility for people to value it at hundreds of dollars.
No -- clearly Bitcoin has enough potential for people to value it at hundreds of dollars.
There's a difference. The price of Bitcoin was driven up in the past couple years mostly on the basis of what it might become, not so much what it already is. That's not "credibility" as a currency -- that's potential value as a speculative investment.
You may not think much of it, but as long as there are people willing to exchange it for traditional currency or goods and services that's enough to keep it viable.
Again, that's not why it has most of the value it has today. Most of the growth has been because there have been people willing to exchange traditional currency for it, not the other way around.
Currencies can get their value from at least three components: (1) "inherent" ulility value of the basic material, (2) utility value of the currency as a medium of exchange, and (3) speculation due to investors and people happy to buy the currency because they think other people will ultimately need the currency for reasons (1) and/or (2).
Paper dollars, for example, have almost no value of type (1), but they have a lot of type (2), and the U.S. dollar is popular enough around the world that lots of people view it as a safe enough investment for (3), which keeps its value higher than if it were only the internal currency of the U.S. Gold has some value of type (1) (i.e., applications requiring its properties, like jewelry and applications which use its conductivity and resistance to corrosion), and it functions in limited capacity in (2), but most of the increase in gold's value in recent years has come from (3).
Now take Bitcoin. It has absolutely NONE of (1). Until relatively recently, it had extremely few everyday applications where it could be used for (2), and still there are significant problems to be overcome which will make it easy for average people to deal directly in it as a currency in safe and secure fashion. So the VAST majority (maybe 99% or more) of Bitcoin's value is about (3) -- random speculation as an investment, effectively gambling on the idea that it will eventually become widely adopted.
That's not "credibility" -- yet. Maybe someday every Bitcoin early adopter's dream will come true, and it will pay off and that value will convert from (3) to (2). But I'm not gonna hold my breath, and I'm certainly not going to go out and buy virtual "money" whose value is currently mostly held up by a small number of investors. Say what you will about the "fiat" nature of the dollar or whatever, but you have hundreds of millions of people worldwide that depend on that value everyday, and they all have an interest in keeping it afloat. Bitcoin? I have no idea who holds most of the value, but I know it's concentrated in a much smaller group of people, and I have no reason to think that they won't dump and run screaming if trust in the "magic money" dies next week.
Adding to this, a number of existing altcoins do, in fact, attempt to address bitcoin's weaknesses. Litecoin attempts to resist customized hardware mining and also make the blockchain update faster. Primecoin solves a somewhat useful mathematical problem instead of completely wasting computer cycles like Bitcoin does. There are other examples.
Anyway, it only seems natural that as time goes on, better and better cryptocurrencies will be incrementally developed. To ask everyone to use ONLY what's the first iteration of this tech would be silly.
Of course, there are "me-too!" cryptocurrencies as well, typically with only minor 'improvements' and designed to make the creators rich. I'm all for educating people about how they could be taken advantage of. But boycotting? Come on.
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