I'm going to invent one cryptocurrency for every man, woman and child on the planet. That will ensure that we all are rich! To make sure that there isn't excessive inflationary pressure, I will limit the number of new cryptocurrencies announced per day to between 10 and 23 depending on demand. You will have the opportunity to ignore everything you could possibly learn about economics no less than 10 times per day!!! What a bargain!!!

But wait! There's more!!!

Allow me to announce my first coin here. The BTMCoin (tm). I'm not very good at encryption, but have an excellent mind that is virtually unhackable so all transactions will entail guessing what number between one and 1,000,000,000,000,000 that I'm thinking of is as I create each one. At each transaction I will add a second number (whatever I am thinking of at the time) for the utmost of security. All records will be kept in my noggin, and a crack team of people who I'm claiming are internet security experts ensures me that my firewall between the noggin storage system and the internet is as close to as perfect a security system as you can get.

[font=very small]Your mileage may vary. May cause unpleasant tingling due to excessive mouth breathing. Consult your Rabi and veterinarian and licensed psychologist even thinking about purchasing BTMCoins. We currently only accept physical US dollars in exchange for BTMCoins and will only be sellers of the coins once we trade them back and forth amongst ourselves for a bit to establish a growth rate to make a pretty chart to make it a "can't miss" investment for you![/font]

I'm going to edit my original message because it was pretty harsh.

Guys - I'm up pretty big on alt-coins in the last two weeks. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying that because I used to post a lot on this forum back in 05-08 (until I lost my password when the site was hacked in 09) and people here have helped me make a lot of money playing poker.

If you want to think trading alts is stupid, fine - that's your prerogative. But there is a ton of the world's money being pumped into this system and it would be foolish to completely disregard virtual currency.

I'm up 50x my investment in three weeks. Think about that - it's crazy. It's like final tabling at a non-main event WSOP event. It's worth your time to look into this, even if you ultimately agree not to invest. Remember, to make money you don't need virtual currency to be the next big thing, you just need to be in on the ground floor when the world "thinks" that virtual currency is the next big thing.

That's my 2cents.

Yep. Absolutely. That train left about a year ago.

If more than one similar cryptocurrency is successful, that implies that other crypto currencies of this type could be forked. With the availability of more cryptocurrencies demand for any particular one should fall ensuring their failure.

To argue that Litecoin has value, you have to make the case that it is fulfilling some unique need that bitcoin doesn't. Or you have to make the case why two cryptos can succeed where three cannot, or maybe why three can but four cannot.

what does the silver fullflling that gold doesn't have as a medium of exchange? gold can be divisible in many small chunks, so we kinda don't need to use silver as a store of value, right? why are people buying and storing silver coins and bars? silver is a scam! exactly as litecoin!

It's totally different, silver and gold are physical things that have industrial value. And even as money, silver is easier to use for small things.

I don't think anyone is saying LTC is a scam, and its value could be justified as a percentage chance that something happens with BTC (or LTC arbitrarily wins out somehow). But in the long-run there's no advantage to having multiple networks that do the same thing, it's one or the other.

as I said I wasn't talking about industrial values of silver and gold. I'm talking only about silver that is in coins and bars, why people using it as a store of value? why? we have gold which can be divisible to many chunks just like bitcoin can. why are we using silver for storing wealth purpose? explain.

The difference here is that after silver and gold, there are a handful of other metals that could be used for coin value and then nothing. There's a fixed number of naturally occurring metals in existence. There is no fixed number of crypto currencies. Gold is primarily more valuable than silver because it's more rare.

I'm probably dumb. But I don't see the answer to a question. why are people using silver bars and coins as a store of value, when we have gold that is perfectly fiting that role because of it's divisibility to many small chunks (just like bitcoin). How is that happened that people using silver to keep their wealth in it?
what does silver brings to the table that gold doesn't have in terms of being medium of exchange and wealth storage?

How are you going to pay for $1 worth of stuff with gold? How does that compare to $1 worth of silver?

i think silver is used in industrial chemical manufacturing. idk how much, but there are people that use silver to help make stuff.

People use both silver and gold for this monetary purpose because they share a lot of properties. I imagine gold is not exclusively used because it is very rare. 1000 years ago, there might have been entire villages without an ounce of gold to trade amongst themselves. You're correct that gold is very divisible, but there is a practical limit, so silver is useful in that respect too.

This is a different situation than with altcoins because anyone with the internet has access to both. So access is not a problem. At current valuations, divisibility is also not a problem and won't be for the foreseeable future. Because of this, people should choose to use the more widely accepted coin, in this case bitcoin. This network effect is self-reinforcing too. As a bitcoin vendor you would have to give me a pretty compelling reason to accept both bitcoin and another altcoin. I don't want to write more code and deal with worse exchanges if I don't have to. The only vendors who are going to take litecoin are going to be ones who want to gain some marketing edge in this early interest phase of the game. If it's less valuable because it has a smaller network then it's going to be worth less money. When the speculation interest dies out, I imagine you'll see a big reversal for litecoins.

I would expect some of the big payment processors to automatically convert litecoin or whatever to bitcoin for you. As a merchant, you want to accept as many forms of payment as possible, so long as there aren't a lot of costs of doing it. Very few merchants are directly dealing with the Bitcoins as well, it's so easy to go through BitPay or Coinbase.

This is true. But there must be some network effect. If there isn't a real network effect then any currency with a liquid exchange and a payment processor could get going, making them all worthless.

ok. makes sense.

Have been a bitcoin user for a year and never really bothered with altcoins since I found them all to suck. But after the rise for BTC in november I decided to invest in WDC. This thread helped, thanks!

(Pumping it up a bit, ignore my advice)

What is WDC ?

Its WorldCoin. When I go to their website I get a McAfee warning so you know its a solid currency.

Since this thread is still alive and since at least some people are interested...

A good website for a list of coins & market caps if anyone is interested:

http://coinmarketcap.com/

Also, some exchanges to take a look at:

www.cryptsy.com

www.bter.com

www.vircurex.com

----------------

The Chinese exchange www.btc38.com had to limit registrations to 1,000 a day because they were growing so rapidly...rapid growth in China is part of the $700,000,000 increase in market cap of alt coins over the last month alone

ya but john mcafee went insane years ago.

Quark is trash, yet more and more people are drawn in every day. This is turning into the biggest scamcoin in history. Bill Still is nothing more than a snake oil salesman. I have nothing against the technology (its great having 30 second blocks and an ultra secure hashing algorithm), I just can't stand the idea of making Bill Still and his cronies rich. Don't be fooled by Quark's apparent valuation. After taking into account a premium for liquidity, the fact that early adopters of Quark have huge holdings and that no one of any intelligence will ever accept this in exchange for anything of substantial value, the currency is garbage.

Who am I?
-Recent MBA grad (finance specialization) from a top tier Canadian school
- ~100K total in BTC and LTC holdings
-going to be selling 2 of my rental properties this spring and accepting BTC and maybe LTC
-done hundreds of hours of research on cryptocurrencies
-In the process of purchasing a $1M+ business and I will likely adopt BTC or LTC as a payment option

Talking about Quark's http://coinmarketcap.com/ rise to fame is also a joke. A market cap of a currency should not be valued based on only on the last trade. It should use some sort of a weighted average price approach that takes into account the entire # of coins outstanding. This way people will not fall victim to low volume and high price movements caused by shameless promoters like Bill Still. Valuing a cryptocurrency market cap based on the last trade (especially when there is market manipulation going on.. quarkcoin) only makes sense if there is a never ending supply of greater fools than the last.

Please do not fall victim a 98% pre-mined scam coin. There are not enough fools to bail you out. There is only enough to make Bill Still rich.

Put it this way... I'll NEVER accept quark and neither should you.

Could someone who has a good knowledge of quark tell me how the network will be secured once the block reward falls to 1 quark? I have tried reading up on quark, but can't find the answer and this seems like a huge fundamental problem with it.

I could see the following happening. Someone borrowing a bunch of quark coins, selling them (creating a big short position), rent a bot net and use it to kill the coin. With such a small mining reward performing such an attack would be pretty cheap and almost certainly make a big profit.

What do people think of altru coins like Primecoin & Curecoin? I own a bit of each. I like that they use computing power for a purpose rather than just abstract mining, but unsure what/if any value to apply to it.

Primecoin looks for prime numbers or something like that, what benefit does that search actually have? Edit: Looks like it finds "Cunningham chains", I'm not sure what the breadth of utility discovery of these chains actually has.

Not sure about Curecoin can't find much info on it but looks like it's to do with protein folding which is useful from what I understand. Well intentioned, but I don't think that's a linear problem? If it's not, it increases the likelihood of it being exploitable or unfair and might lead to problems later perhaps. (Need to give it some more thought though). My understanding is that Bitcoins mining is solving a linear 'problem' which is quite an important quality of it.

Also, by suggesting that these alt coins are using the computing power for a purpose seems to suggest that the computing power used for Bitcoin has no purpose. On the contrary, I think that the computing power is being used for great purpose, it's supporting Bitcoin and providing stability and resilience. This is incredibly valuable in itself.

From what I understand, Primecoin doesn't actually do anything useful with prime numbers, it just gives the impression of that.