Quote from: nightfox on May 14, 2013, 01:41:41 AM

Quote from: Schrankwand on May 14, 2013, 12:50:40 AM

Quote from: ik2013 on May 14, 2013, 12:48:41 AM

Well personally I am interested in alt-coins because they are easier to mine. It's much nicer to see a half or whole coin reward instead of one to 8 decimal places...

The only question is how easy will it be for the SHA-256 ASIC chips to be converted to alt-coin mining. I suppose that depends on who developed the coin/miner and the ASIC developers

None of the coins are more profitable at the moment, though.

And for mining SHA-256 coins, you simply start cgminer, send it to the pool you want to mine in and it will start mining. Whatever tool you may be using.

the same to me, I vote for Royal coin

Here is the real problem with all this BS alt-coin talk. Just because it is easier for you to mine does not give the thing value. Do you not see the endless road of this logic? Bitcoin becomes difficult, so you abandon it for litecoin, then litecoin becomes too difficult and you abandon that for {insert next stupid alt-coin here}.

This is not how currency and commodities markets work. When the gold became harder to find after the initial California gold rush those miners did not just use their digging tools on some other random mineral/element they decided was easier to get their hands on; gold had a value and that is why they started mining it. Some jerk just did not wake up one day and say, "Hey I think I will start mining this yellow shit out of the ground and people are gonna pay me for it." Gold had an intrinsic value, thus attracting miners.

Yes, technically speaking someone did just wake up one day and invent Bitcoin and now a very modest amount of people have decided that they are willing to trade it for some value, but Bitcoin enjoys an advantage over all these other alt-coins precisely because it was the FIRST to market. A group of mostly geeks (I say that lovingly) thought it was a decent idea and decided that they could probably use some of their excess (and thus unused) computing power to participate in this cool, new geeky thing. It now has some value determined by a small market of people who are (supposedly) willing to trade this virtual currency for cold, hard cash.

The Bitcoin market itself is very volatile though and still in its infancy. It could crash and burn at ANY moment and all of use who have invested time and money would be screwed, but that is how markets and commodities work. True, if you own a cow it will probably never hit a value of zero, but Bitcoin ain't no cow. It is a virtual currency and currencies rise and fall in value everyday. They can crash and burn when they are propped up and supported by HUGE banks run at the behest of WHOLE FREAKING COUNTRIES. Bitcoin is essentially a peer to peer trading group; for goodness sake Mt. Gox was borne from a Magic: The Gathering playing card exchange.

All this talk of "which coin do you like best" is a bunch of garbage. Do you honestly think that you can just start minting money out of thin air by turning on your PC? That is the height of foolishness. You have been told that things in life do not come cheap, or free or without work, correct? Serious Bitcoin miners have spent serious time and/or money to do this. Just because you found a currency on some web site run by some anonymous prick you have never met with some technical gobbedly-gook scheme about hashes and hexadecimal keys (or whatever) does not mean you just freaking stumbled upon something that is now gonna be the NEXT, NEWEST, BIGGEST thing to make money off of by doing absolutely nothing.

Do yourself a favor and go read a book about currency markets and basic business practices. Have you ever heard of the Euro? Do you have any idea why they created it? I will give you a quick answer (one of many, but this reason is relevant to the present discussion): because Europe is millions of people of different cultures living very close together and having a dozen freaking currencies milling about was a TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS. So they consolidated all that mess into 1 currency to make things easier. Now why the hell would the marketplace allow LAZY people to just decide to create a dozen new currencies with no intrinsic value, backed by no major institution, and that is volatile as hell? What business wants to have to accept whatever stupid virtual currency you decided to show up with and take the risk that his payment will not plummet in value the very next freaking day?

So please, let's all agree that this alt-coin talk is crap. Only 2 things can happen to solidify a second virtual currency: 1. Bitcoin is hacked so bad it is destroyed completely and everyone flees to another currency or 2. Bitcoin becomes a solid, non-volatile currency that markets and investors (not miners) can depend on, thus proving a proof of concept started by Satoshi and cementing the ENTIRE idea of virtual currencies in the first place.

Either way, talking about "Well I like this currency," and "I like this one better because my cheap laptop mines it faster," is irrelevant. No one can predict from here whether Bitcoin or any other virtual currency will succeed at all.

Having said all that, I support Bitcoin like a mother&*^%&. And I will continue to mine it until it just becomes so damn expensive that only the ASIC corps are left, which is the inexorable end to this mining thing-- just look at gold mining and farming.

Do you like this rant? Here is my address. Wink

15BpbTyRi6JbFue7PZp9gqaVtUUdh6faDx