Re: defending ahead the p2p nature of bitcoin - blending hashcash & scrypt
Seriously though, with all due respect (and with admittance of my conflict of interest here) - alt-coins (or rather, truly innovative alt-coins as opposed to one-two tweak clones) are useful.
They prevent monoculture.
If anything, we need more altcoins pursuing different niches (I feel that there are market niches which BTC, contrary to popular belief, fills imperfectly, allowing for an alt to take that niche without affecting mainstream btc adoption - but that's a long and boring story)
They prevent monoculture.
If anything, we need more altcoins pursuing different niches (I feel that there are market niches which BTC, contrary to popular belief, fills imperfectly, allowing for an alt to take that niche without affecting mainstream btc adoption - but that's a long and boring story)
Arguably, what you want is one timestamping chain. All other chains can then use that timestamp service to establish ordering of their transactions.
That is effectively what merged mining actually does anyway.
It would allow the main chain headers to be extremely clean.
Certain practicalities (like "motivating miners of the meta-chain") aside, monoculture is admittedly very comfy.
However, non-monocultural settings are less susceptible to exploits and systemic failures of design.
Monocultures also tend to "calcify", stifling innovation and accruing institutional commitments (the latter isn't always a bad thing, but it can limit the directions project can realistically take - for instance, bitcoin becoming more anonymous would piss off FinCEN by breaking an implied institutional commitment. Or, for a more obvious example, consider the response of people who already bought ASIC units to a hypothetical PoW change
)