Quote from: justusranvier on August 22, 2013, 08:14:17 PM

Nails it.

http://themisescircle.org/blog/2013/08/22/the-problem-with-altcoins/

The author Daniel Krawisz expounds verbally:

http://letstalkbitcoin.com/e53-monetary-darwinism/

(skip 30 or 34 mins into the audio stream)

I've invited him to debate me, awaiting a response.

One big hole in his (and Moldbug's) "there can only be one" theory, is that if a merchant only accepts BTC and I have only an altcoin, then assuming liquid exchange markets between the altcoin and BTC along with clever programming, I can pay with my altcoin at that merchant with one click. So there isn't any significant cost in terms of market mass to being not first in the market.

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one would expect the mining difficulty to go up to the point where
investment in mining technology produces similar returns to investment in
the rest of the economy. And, of course, as I mentioned above, it is false
that Scrypt-coins are immune to ASIC mining

1. With CPU-only mining, I expect difficulty to exceed any reasonable
level that can be returned on investment, because millions of people will
do it because they easily can (download and click) and they won't correlate
to their insignificant increase in electric bill nor the cost of the PC they
already own applied to their part-time, hobbyist mining.

2. Scrypt can indeed by made immune to ASIC and GPUs. You should study it
more closely.

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This argument highlights the emphasis from altcoin adherents on mining
rather than on monetization. There is no logical reason why any ordinary
user of Bitcoin should want to become a miner in the first place.

Er, what about obtaining coin quickly and anonymously with a download and click to run a CPU-only miner?

Obtaining Bitcoins is problematic, slow and complex. The new Bitcoin ATM machines that will be every where globally "by the end of 2014" will require a hand print, government id, and face photo. My gosh how much more one-world currency, 666 could it be?

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Early on, it was profitable for casual Bitcoin users to be miners because very
few knew about Bitcoin. Mining now requires a capital investment, just
like everything else in the economy.

Er, I don't have to buy another PC if I already own one that is often idle (at night when I sleep for example).

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A transition to lower profitability and greater capital
intensiveness is inevitable for any maturing industry.

Yes, but that doesn't mean those two items can't be provided by decentralized peers.

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This does not make it elitist; it simply means that the industry is
growing increasingly specialized.

Conflation of issues. What makes Bitcoin elitist is the incorrect technical design. Specialization is independent of elitism.

This is a smart guy who thinks he is smarter than he is. He is young, he will learn from older farts like me to expect the unexpected and not be so smug claiming omniscience.