Quote from: agorism on May 17, 2014, 12:24:35 PM

Is Dogecoin the only one in danger?

No.

The hash power devoted to securing altcoin chains is orders of magnitude smaller than the hash power devoted to bitcoin, and the cost of an attack in general is therefore orders of magnitude smaller. Doge got a special mention because it was used as an example recently of the economic effects of reward halving on hash power distribution - the author of that paper made the point that every time doge cuts their block subsidy in half the hashing power devoted to securing their blockchain will also be cut in half. Doge was mined too quick; its block reward is cut in half many times more often than Bitcoin's. But it isn't the quickest-mined coin out there by any means; just one that's a bit remarkable for the size of its current market cap. All of the quick-mined coins have this problem, and many of them are already gone. But that's only the technical side of blockchain safety, and unfortunately that isn't even the main type of risk.

Altcoins, in general, are a cesspool right now. In fact it would not be too much to say that the *AVERAGE* altcoin is a scam. Exchanges are openly taking bribes to list altcoins regardless of merit. Some of them are even developing their own altcoins in house for the sole purpose of trading fraud. Other people are more or less openly accepting payments to hype coins on Reddit, Twitter, etc, then engaging in blatant price manipulation in order to drive prices up on a particular day so scammers can sell their premines at maximum profit. Several coins a week that are doing "crowdfunding" or "IPO" to sell their initial distribution of coins are simply scammers who then disappear with the money.

If you even consider investing in altcoins, you should first have a definite reason to believe that the one you're investing in isn't a scam. You should second have legal recourse (meaning, you know AND CAN PROVE exactly who the scammers are and where they live) if it does turn out to be a scam. If you have trouble following that second rule, it's not because it's an unreasonable rule; it's because scams ARE THE NORM in the altcoin world and scammers will not give you enough information for legal recourse. While some non-scam coins exist, they are rare exceptions. Nobody in that business is entitled to the benefit of a doubt.

That's a completely separate issue from chain security w/r/t large (or small) transactions - but once again, if you don't fully understand why a blockchain is (or isn't) secure and what resources are required to attack it - then you don't know enough to even evaluate the security of an altcoin that's operating with different rules, and if you can't evaluate the security of its blockchain, then you shouldn't be investing in it even if it's a non scam.