Quote from: BitcoinHodler on December 02, 2016, 02:51:11 PM

Quote from: Bitboy12345 on December 02, 2016, 01:23:13 PM

1. Is the alt coin market flooded?

2. As a result, is the current status of the alt coin market more than likely to scare off new to crypto investors/traders because of the fact that almost every other day a new ICO is on the cards and in most cases the information presented might be overwhelming to anyone outside of crypto?

3. Do you think we are becoming/have become more of a "penny stocks market" in the view of the general public other than a true and feasible alternative to the world economy?

4. Has the rise/era of crowdfunding done more harm than good toward blockchain projects and the now more than 600 crypto currencies in circulation?

5. What can be done to improve on the overall perception associated with cryptography/alt coins from an outsiders perspective?

6. Should websites that list altcoins such as coinmarketcap remove the majority of the coins listed or at least list according to far stricter criteria?

1. yes i also believe that this market is flooded with countless altcoins which are all copying each other, pump and dump and die.

2. it will scare off new investors in altcoins not crypto in general. newbies will go back to bitcoin and stay there.

3. i have heard this from others too, and i believe we are nearly there.

4. yes it has because when majority of them (the devs) are only looking for a get rich quick scheme through crowdfunding, this firstly harms users ' trust and then development in general.

5. it may be a bit late but i think if any good project comes along and their developers stop prioritizing making money over other things we can see some improvement and that coin will be much more successful.

6. no because we have also adopted with this new situation and we are only looking for a get rich quick altcoin where we can join in the pump and dump it right after the top. and sites like coinmarketcap help finding coins and where they are traded and more information.

I am developing an altcoin which is not yet officially announced, and I entirely agree with the response provided for #5.

What we have up to this point in altcoins is best characterized as developers who are either just in it to rake in easy ICO money and/or who are self-deluded as to the viable importance of their altcoins. IMO, the following summary from @r0ach describes the situation well (and you really should click that quote and read my replies in @r0ach's thread).

Quote from: r0ach on December 01, 2016, 08:16:20 AM

Let me start off by telling a story. At the height of peak-altcoin, a guy I know released some garbage coin with the sole purpose of trying to make money in a pump and dump. I told him, hey, why are you making this stupid scamcoin? His response was, "just what exactly are we trying to do here?" (i.e. being involved in cryptocurrency in the first place).

Before you try to create or engineer something, you first have to actually identify the problem you're trying to solve. The problem to solve is ~~not decentralization, it's~~ creating an alternative to rent seeking usury, aka slavery.

The current state of cryptocurrency consists of closed entropy systems like Peercoin, which are internalized proof of stake, and open entropy Bitcoin PoW systems, which are just externalized proof of stake in practice, not decentralized. Both are stake based and stake based systems have the following attributes, they're designed around someone monopolizing a variable then practicing rent seeking usury on everyone else.

The internalized stake is basically world domination on cruise control and should be shunned by anyone who doesn't want to be a slave, while the open entropy system of Bitcoin tends to give you the same result when you're just externalizing your metaphorical stake into the Pareto principle of the real world. This means cryptocurrency solves really nothing in it's current state, and things like physical silver coins as a currency would be vastly superior in terms of both decentralization and avoidance of usury or seigniorage fee.

Having said that, if you were to try and improve on cryptocurrency in some way, you would be required to remove the stake variable entirely.

At this time, we basically have 4 main genres of innovation coming from altcoins:

1. Anonymity/Privacy (Monero, Zcash, ...)
2. Smart Contracts (Ethereum, ...)
3. Microtransactions/Scaling (DPoS, e.g. Steemit)
4. Decentralization (all shitcoins bullshit thus far)

The other shitcoins are very technologically weak innovations (egregious flaws which I have detailed in my posts) which attempt to incorporate some of the above innovations but do so with flawed technological bullshit. Examples include:

Vcash
Dash
CloakCoin
MaidSafe, Sia, StoreJ
NEM
CounterParty, Rootstock

There are centralization wolves in sheepskin (and network effects die with centralization):

Lightning Networks, KimDotCom's BitCache

There are copycoins which are lower-quality ripoffs of others:

ShadowCash

There are also the social networking shitcoins which have no prayer in hell (for reasons I have written about) of being widely adopted because they are conceptually flawed:

Steemit
Synereo
Yours.network
Ark
etc...

The problem for the serious (non-shitcoin) altcoin attempts listed for #1 and #2, is they haven't solved #3 and #4. Also #2 haven't solved safety and killer apps yet. And #1 (by itself) is not a mass adoption market.

So we are in a situation where we need a developer (or developers) who able to seriously address #3 and #4 combined and provide some real mass adoption case which is actually a serious threat to Bitcoin's dominance and current adoption stagnation. #1 is an optional feature to add. #2 is a potentially huge market to explore after fixing #3 and #4.