Quote from: theymos on May 01, 2013, 02:11:50 AM

Quote from: Tittiez on April 30, 2013, 01:31:21 PM

Luke is right. The only reason people buy it is to make a profit off how volatile it is. Don't kid yourself in thinking it is as good as bitcoin. Think in terms of all of the COD clones, did they ever actually succeed in being the new popular game? No, because they brought nothing substantially new to the table. COD always won over the market, just like bitcoin does and will.

Agreed. I encourage people to mine LTC if it's profitable for them to do so, but it's sad that some people are actually investing in Litecoin. Litecoin and other near-exact Bitcoin clones have no chance of going anywhere, and it's a tragedy that people are spending time on them rather than Bitcoin or an altcoin that actually improves significantly on Bitcoin. There are so many interesting things that an altcoin could do, but people waste time on these tiny Bitcoin modifications...

I'll just leave this here.

Quote from: casascius on April 29, 2013, 05:20:27 AM

The free market remedy is the altcoin.

When the free market decides that the ownership of Bitcoins is too lopsided in a manner that is against the public interest, or that there are too many coins out there that are sitting idle, not circulating, and causing people anxiety... those people will start accepting altcoins for their goods and services and will potentially make the value of a Bitcoin plummet. That should be an incentive for big/majority holders to make sure the coins start flowing. I mean, this is why Bitcoin is succeeding...the people buying it are jumping, at least in a small part, out of the dollar and euro and perhaps even gold.

And by altcoins, I don't mean any specific altcoin. In other words, it's not going to be a run to Litecoin. If the masses start chanting that all old money needs to go down the toilet, they'll start accepting a brand new coin totally free of prior speculators. The old money won't go to zero, it will just go down a lot and lose its "bubble air" as the speculators jump ship (probably a good thing for stability overall).

You'll have cryptocoin clients with plugins that allow entities to pick which coin they will and won't accept for whatever reason, so the overhead of businesses deciding to accept or not accept a new "whatever coin" will be trivial, especially if there are mostly automated tools and platforms for converting them to whatever asset the business really wants to hold or do their accounting in.

OK, I will admit, I've wandered into pure speculation territory myself. It is at least plausible, however, I think. I can't imagine people would want Bitcoin if one entity had a significant percentage of the total coins and was using it to disrupt the markets (presumably without concern for a loss of their own wealth).