Quote from: Geenstijl on February 05, 2014, 12:11:42 PM

tru, but not all succesfull alts have to be innovatie. Marketing can do a significant part of the job, as is proven by Quark and Doge.

I don't think it can actually.

Quark was an exceptional case because it got promoted by Bill Still who is a massive figure in the financial blogisphere. It also got a mention by Max Keiser. There are other reasons why Quark survives - one of them being that it got established a few months ago before there was a tsunami of other alt coins. Another being that it has a unique algorithm - "Quark" algorithm with high security hashing. That said, it may or may not survive.

Another thing that people get wrong about cryptocoins I think is that they need to be able to handle "point of sale" transactions well and fast. My opinion on that is that if any cryptocurrency ever gets near a grocer's or supermarket in any substantial way, they are not going to be doing blockchain transactions. Payment processors will handle the trade in the same way as cryptocurrency exchanges do right now. i.e. when you do a trade on an exchange, it happens instantly - nothing to do with that coin's blockchain speed - because the exchange is acting as a "payment processor" and managing the trade between 2 accounts. So it's just numbers that are involved, not blockchains. Only later are the account balances migrated to the blockchain to be "set in stone". Thats the way supermarkets work today and it's the way they'll work in a cryptocurrency economy as well. Payment processors support other functions essential to point of sale operations, such as reversing payments (when the next customer's cornflakes accidentally get rung through your till), voiding, handling discounts and store cards - all sorts of stuff that blockchains were never designed for and never will be.

As the flood of "alts" becomes a torrent, it will be increasingly difficult for a coin to be successful just on "marketing". Doge simply has absolutely massive liquidity - it will never be worth anything because its primary job (as I see it

) is to provide liquidity, not value preservation. What do people do when they make money on alts ?...convert it straight away to bitcoin. (Or if you're me, Peercoin, Primecoin or LItecoin) because those are the cryptoeconomy "banks" that can be relied upon as a store of value. Other coins will have different roles and if one of them is liquidity then it can't also be store of value any more than the US Dollar can.

All this stuff is complex, multi-dimensional and has to be thought about when considering what you're investing in, why and for how long.