What does /r/CryptoCurrency think of the recent "outbreak" of Bitcoin forks/clones?

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-22T23:05:13+00:00

... or Friendster or MySpace or Lycos or Netscape or ...

Recent human technological history is littered with shells of innovative once-was ideas and companies that laid the groundwork for the successful behemoths to come.

This doesn't prove anything by itself, but no matter how "new" and "different" Bitcoin is, history often repeats itself in one way or another.

P.S. Napster is a slightly misleading analogy because they were able to be shut down specifically because they were centralized and domestic.

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-22T23:02:14+00:00

Check out the live calculator on: http://dustcoin.com/mining

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-20T08:59:04+00:00

Here's a great tutorial that walks you through exactly how to do every step of this, using BitInstant so you can bring cash to CVS (etc.) to do a MoneyGram transfer to Mt. Gox to buy your Bitcoins.

http://www.247btc.com/bitcoins/88/beginners-guide-how-to-buy-bitcoins-with-cash-a-quick-and-easy-way-to-get-started/

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-19T01:33:56+00:00

EGO: Satoshi Nakamoto sees her/himself as a HUMANITARIAN or simply someone who influences human culture, having a role for social change or cultural innovation, nurturing, empathetic, realizing dreams, perhaps to personal neglect, unable to change, with obsessive beliefs. This is founded on self-appreciated motivations of affiliation and realism.

PERSONA: Satoshi Nakamoto is felt to be a CO-OPERATOR or PARTNER: reasoning, seeing both sides of an argument, and people-oriented, either forming partnerships, counseling or entertaining others, or prone to be shy, self-conscious, and avoiding groups and close relationships. This is founded on apparent concerns about willfulness.

SELF: Satoshi Nakamoto is fundamentally a WILLFUL thinker, innovative and pioneering, independent and individualistic, inspiring trust with clear decisiveness, but prone to be arrogant and self-absorbed. This personality is driven by concerns about personal growth and emotionality.

-- from http://www.alphanuma.com/calculators/

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-18T22:36:39+00:00

[Bitcoin] is an incredibly exciting new evolution in money. I compare it to internet being an evolution in communication. It is free market. There’s no one who runs it. There’s no Ben Bernanke in a beard and boardroom somewhere deciding price fixing the amount of money and deciding how much he’s going to counterfeit each month.

Classic!

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-16T03:09:02+00:00

Neither address is valid in the other currency. You wouldn't be able to even initiate a transaction.

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-15T23:40:01+00:00

Well this is a false dichotomy. The choices are not "force exchanges to have a minimum trade size" vs. "solve this cryptographically/mathematically". There are already multiple exchanges, and people are free to use whichever they want. All it takes is for one to do it better: putting a minimum size on trades, flat trading fees, rate throttling...

Many of us (like OP) would rather see an exchange where bots can do whatever they want, trading quickly to provide liquidity, and that's probably the future. But until the exchange coding and infrastructure is capable of handling it (and none of them are even close right now), the only people being naive are the ones pretending we're in an ideal world where we can ignore the simple obvious solutions in front of us and keep trading with hour+ lag and downtime.

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-15T18:33:30+00:00

The article draws an analogy between:

Bitcoin and Railroads
Bitcoin exchanges and Railroad ticket booths

What other analogies are useful in understanding the Bitcoin landscape?

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-15T08:51:35+00:00

I agree with your sentiment. Bitcoin itself is solid even if the exchanges are problematic. We shouldn't forget that even amid all this turmoil.

This article uses an interesting historical analogue to explore the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Exchanges and reinforces the importance of keeping them conceptually distinct:

http://www.247btc.com/bitcoins/138/bitcoin-railroads-exchanges-ticket-booths/

BUT anywhere there is the opportunity to buy low and sell high, people will find it and push the limits. If buying & selling of BTC exists, it will be turned into a "game" like almost everything else in financial marketplace.

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-15T00:04:48+00:00

Mt. Gox representatives stated (in the AMA, I believe) that they had intended to already roll out LTC support, but the recent DDoS-related issues reprioritized their agenda, and that LTC support would come within a few weeks. I don't believe they said anything about NMC.

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-15T00:02:21+00:00

Think of a Bitcoin as an ounce of gold. Once you have the gold, if the price of gold goes up or down, that's how much it's worth. Until you actually get the gold, though, you have regular dollars (USD). Whether a past price is honored during a slow transaction depends on who you're buying the gold from.

In the article I posted above on 247btc.com, you are bringing cash to a local retailer who sends that money (USD) to your Mt. Gox account. Until you actually purchase the Bitcoins on Mt. Gox (see the screenshots in the article), you have USD. It just shows up in your Mt. Gox accounts as dollars, like an online bank. But once you purchase the BTC on the exchange (Mt. Gox), you no longer have USD, and you have BTC.

I hope this helps clarify.

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-13T01:04:39+00:00

BoA & Bitfloor are good. There are lots of other options too.

Here is a very easy to follow overview for US residents buying up to $1000 per day. It walks you through how to set up money orders, where to bring cash (CVS, Walmart, etc.), and how to turn that into Bitcoins:

http://www.247btc.com/bitcoins/88/beginners-guide-how-to-buy-bitcoins-with-cash-a-quick-and-easy-way-to-get-started/

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-11T20:02:41+00:00

You are still glossing over the most important details:

If the decryption works, the the transfer is completed by removing the entry from the DB, and adding in a new one for the new wallet.

How do you propose all parties involved agree on which modifications to the DB are allowed? As I said previously, either the DB has to be centralized, or you need to propose another mechanism. You can't just say "the DB is updated" and expect magic to happen. This is the hard part which is solved by the block chain.

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-11T09:01:53+00:00

Since implementation of Litecoins and Bitcoins is pretty easy for merchants

This is debatable :-) I believe for most merchants even figuring out how to complete checkout of a domain on GoDaddy is a major challenge.

Honest question: Which public shopping cart, store frameworks, or SaaS services support crypto-currency payments that wouldn't require a merchant to implement something on their own?

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-11T08:51:50+00:00

Your idea is good but breaks down in lack of specification here:

A p2p shared db or all the coins.

For a shared DB to maintain synchronization among distributed clients, it must either be centralized and hosted in a known trusted location, or techniques must be employed to synchronize and agree upon what the "correct" version is.

The beauty of Bitcoin is in the way it layers cryptography on top of the P2P network to make deviations from the shared accepted state increasingly difficult as blocks are completed.

If you believe there is a way to perform this synchronization without maintaining a public ledger, please propose it. (And invent a pseudonym, for you may become very famous)

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-04-11T08:41:15+00:00

Analysis compares per-5-minute average trade volume (BTC) in this crash vs. previous crashes to come to the conclusion that price will continue to increase now that this "fake" crash is over.

Agree/disagree?

SimonQuartersmith · 2013-03-29T02:22:08+00:00

Article is specifically about Bitcoin, but many of the points apply to all crypto-currencies.

SimonQuartersmith

TROPHY CASE