Quote from: jackjack on June 26, 2013, 03:16:25 PM

Quote from: lucasjkr on June 26, 2013, 02:44:46 PM

Afterall, a few years ago, any argument that people currently use against Alt-Coins was just as applicable to Bitcoins.

Really? So Bitcoin is the exact copy of a previous software/concept except 3 modified lines?

No, Bitcoin brought new ideas to the world, for certain.

The arguments commonly trotted out arguments against Litecoin (let alone the other Alt Coins) center around:

A) They were created to enrich the early adopters
B) They're no good because there's no where to spend them

Both of which were used (and are still used, to lesser extents) against Bitcoin. Which makes it funny that Bitcoiners shrug off those arguments against their favorite cryptocurrency, yet launch them at any others.

Many of us do think that many alt coins provide interest twists on Bitcoin's precepts that do bear investigating, rather than simply being blown out of the water by a 51% attack.

For instance:

Litecoin has both faster confirmations (much more suitable for retail/in-person transactions), and an algorithm that SHOULD be more resistant to ASIC miners becoming such dominant forces in the ecosystem. I've seen many posts saying that Scrypt could be targetted by ASIC's, and if that's the case, maybe Scrypt isn't the end-all solution. But that doesn't mean that there aren't memory-hard algorithms that bear investigating, if enough people think that ASICMiner will represent potential point of failure/target of attack once they've succeeded in vanquishing GPU miners from the network entirely.

PPCoin has a completely different reward mechanism altogether, which doesn't depend nearly as much on consuming electricity.

Friecoin's demurage feature is a mechanism for encouraging those with coins to spend them through the economy rather than holding them in anticipation of rewards for simply doing that. It, in effect, encourages Friecoin to be treated as a currency rather than a commodity.

Lastly, no coins have tried this yet, but a coin without a cap on number of coins issued would be an interesting twist as well. People talk about the "benefits" of Bitcoin's having a fixed limit of coins to issue, but the fact is, we can't call that a benefit as yet, because we have yet to get to a time where there are no new coins being issued. If the transaction fees inside each block aren't enough to incentive miners, the end of new coin issuance might be the end for Bitcoin.

(Funny, to realize that this huge reply is in follow up to a one sentence barb! Oh well...)