I wanted to post a different thread to discuss the "crypto-coin" boom that happened this week.

For those who don't know, crypto-coins (or alt coins) have exploded in popularity among the bitcoin crowd. Some coins have gone from 5-10 cents to 2-3 dollars, making early investors millions. The market caps have gone from $500,000 being significant to the same coins have 20-30 million in market cap just two weeks later.

While alt-coins have long been a favorite of the "pump and dump" crowd - much like penny stocks - it's been their popularity in China this week that have many thinking if the run can be more sustained.

Even more, some (like WorldCoin) have financial services coming out that will allow direct crypto-fiat transactions...much like Coinbase is for bitcoin.

Anyway, I really wanted to get a good discussion going here of these coins. Full disclosure: after staying FAR away from alt coins this summer I recently jumped in to three that I like a lot and think they have a lot of long-term potential: WDC, Megacoin, and Peercoin. I'd love to hear what coins others like and the reasons why!

SoP

Why do you like these coins over something like Litecoin? Do you see them ever becoming the #1 crypto-currency?

Litecoin already exploded, easier to pump and dump cheap stuff than one that already is big.

http://coinmarketcap.com/

1) Figure out what coin is gonna be pimped to Chinese
2) Buy it first
3) Dump

I'm looking for four things:

1. Functionality (i.e. speed of confirmation times)
2. Vision by the developers
3. Plan for communications/marketing
4. Decent transparency with the developers

I know the most about Worldcoin so I'll go into detail with this coin:

- With confirmation times under 30 seconds (significantly faster than bitcoin or litecoin) it's extremely easy to send money (almost) instantly, anywhere in the world, for free. It also has a bank attached (Scharmbeck Financial Services) that is opening beta-testing on Dec 20th. This company is already registered with finCEN for legal operating in the US and is currently applying for a European license. This is what I was referring to when I said some coins have their own "Coinbase." So when a merchant, say on ETSY, wants to accept Worldcoin, they receive the money within 30 seconds and can instantly convert that to US dollars (or whatever other fiat). Most alt coins do not have this.

This is actually a coin that can easily be used by small business in the near future.

- Any time spent in the IRC will show an enthusiastic communications team that is really starting to promote the coin hard and has a pretty good plan of action for Dec/January. They definitely know what they want this coin to be and have pretty good action steps of how to get there, through Q2 2014

- The developers are not anonymous, and the board includes a lawyer. Two are in the US and one is in London. You actually know who these guys are - less chance for this being a scam.

- Word on the street is that BTC38 (Chinese exchange) is adding them Dec 6th, but I cannot promise anything...this is coming from an instant message from BTC38's lead developer on QQ

Check out the IRC - talk to people - and see for yourself!

As for MegaCoin and Peercoin, I'll post more tomorrow. Bed time for me...

SoP

whats the best way to store various altcoins longterm

should one just store them on various exchanges?

should each client be downloaded to your computer?

something else?

Confirmation time is a total red herring, super fast confirmation times not only increases blockchain bloat and orphaned blocks but it also drastically decreases the irreversibility of transactions with only a few confirmations, creating a false sense of security. Zero confirmation transactions are suitable for a vast number of uses, anyway.

It reminds me of the arms races to see who can put the most blades on a razor, megapixels in a digital camera, or gigahertz in clunky overheated Pentium 4s. Does more make the best product? Not necessarily, but casual users don't understand that. That's why there's this aimless arms race for lower confirmation times (which merely requires a small tweak to the bitcoin code).

And currencies that come "attached" to banks don't exactly seem decentralized but they do seem like they're intended for the enrichment of said bank.

Regardless, I question whether it's a good idea to have threads that hype up cryptocurrencies owned by the OP. There's enough of that on bitcointalk.

pretty much 90% of alt arguments are people with A coin vs people with B coin and none of the other one.

I forgot that it doesn't matter that litecoin isn't actually silver to btc's gold, as long as the majority think that it's true.

I also forgot that it doesn't matter if it was massively premined, it doesn't matter if it's originally a scam/pump and dump or whatever or a million hard forks when the majority of people plunking down $ don't even know or care.

There's a few I like b/c I think they have a shot; but so many of these are sooooo bad. Doesn't matter though.

I really never looked at peercoin till now, sigh.

Yeah every coin is basically "how can we get rich with this". Some people are doing it though with services, scams, scams, and scams.

I don't think you will find many people here falling for your attempt to pump worldcoin but nice try.

You should put all of your money into all of them! It is important to diversify between the ones that haven't run up because they seem too much like a scam but will figure out how to run a scam and those that have run up because they have already figured out how to run a scam!!!

My personal favorite is the pokedigimagicdegatheringbeaniebabietuliperific coins!!! Can't lose!!!

zerocoin is probably the only one i will look at closely in the future

I have 2 ideas for altcoins.

Since cats rule the interweb there should be a catcoin. It has alliteration going for it as well.

The other is smellcoin. The thing I miss most about btc is that they do not smell. You would have to go back to the way US money used to smell before they started redesigning it years ago to make it more difficult to counterfeit. Money used to smell wonderful but alas it no longer does.

And if any of you think sexcoin is a good idea, it already exists.

"I made this thread to pump an altcoin I recently bought." - SonofPegasus

****, its starting to look like I should cash out some of my btc to buy/make some gpu miners and just mine whatever coin is new atm. seems really +ev, especially if I just convert those coins back to bitcoin after they get pumped up.

I had no idea there were at least 37 crypto-currencies. Junkcoin is my favorite, that's some awesome branding right there.

Ding ding.

I've never bothered with it since I haven't invested in mining hardware and I'd feel pretty crappy about participating in this circus of fleecing suckers, nor do I want to check twice a day for the latest clonecoin to make sure I'm in before the difficulty adjusts. I'm pretty sure it's a profitable endeavor, though, and it'll keep happening whether I participate or not because of all the people with no clue who want to get rich quick. Even if I did I could never participate in the "zomg this has two tweaks to the code which makes it faster and rarer than bitcoin" hype since I know better and that would be downright fraudulent.

There are probably > 100. Those are just the biggest ones.

Yes thats my endgame - try to pump a coin on a forum where the average person plays 100NL or less. The coin has a 19 million dollar cap - there is no "pump" coming from 2+2 users.

You're right though, I shouldn't have mentioned any coins by name. It's a fascinating development, though.

I would, however, love for a mod to delete this thread so I can start a new one for general discussion. Whether you snicker at the idea or not, the fact is the cap of all alt-coins combined grew by about $800,000,000 over the last week - primarily from users from other countries - and this deserves to be its own thread.

An AMD video card is is now profitable in the terms of $10 a day to mine these.

quark is my favorite, however I think I am late. I don't own any. The name really grows on you and Still and Keiser are now pumping it. BTW, LTC is the most pumped coin of them all. It was a joke, however the team made sure 50% of all messages in the altcrypto board at bitcointalk were LTC.

I started to mine quark when it 1st came out and found a block for a 1000 in the first minute. However, only found one block since that first block.

Maybe we can start a team and create our own. I still think with a little work, anyone can become a multimillionaire right now creating a coin. Someone said steelcoin, but I think that name would wear out.

Couldn't agree more - but investors don't need confirmation times to make a difference, they just need people to think confirmation times make a difference.

Why is it your favorite? I've been hearing a lot about this coin and do not know anything other than it has exploded lately.

obvious spam is obvious

LTC and PPC. The others, meh.

BBQcoin for entertain value

1. I like the name.
2. The mining reward halves every 3 weeks to a low of 1.

Many of these coins are going to be pumping out mining rewards for years. Mining offers really nothing to the coin. iOc already has a low inflation rate, so I like that coin too. Worldcoin the ming reward drops 1% a week, so about 40% a year.

The interesting thing about Quark is that afaict 98% of the coins have already been mined in the first 6 months. They do CPU mining rather than GPU/ASIC mining, which theoretically means the coins are being mined by a wider array of people (rather than the expensive ASIC mining operations cornering a huge chunk of the BTC market going forward, which does strike me as a weakness of BTC).

Their contention is that this has created a more decentralized distribution of coins than BTC has or will ever have. This theory relies on the idea that many early miners sold their coins (since they were so cheap and therefore were available to anyone to buy) to offset mining costs. I'm not sure I buy it. But if it were true, then at first glance, decentralized distribution seems like an appealing feature. On the other hand, the idea of 98% of the coins already being mined seems unappealing. I think for the casual observer the mining feature makes cryptocurrencies seem more like other currencies (gold especially), whereas if Bitcoin was already completely mined and people were just swapping it around, I think a lot of people would feel like it is complete bullsht as a currency (rightly or wrongly).

CPU mining combined with a long mining phase seems like the most appealing combo that no coin seems to be doing (or if they are they have other weaknesses, they're not popular, whatever), but I am completely spitballing what is "appealing" and have trouble figuring out the ramifications of any these features, or even figuring out the extent to which the differences/improvements in various altcoins matter from an investment perspective.

http://quark.freeforums.net/thread/1...ization-supply

i'm of the opinion that there will be another coin which will reduce BTC to minor player. i haven't figured out which coin that is yet, or even if it yet exists.