I was just calling it doomsday as a joke. The reward halving from 50 to 25 BTC went just fine.
Reward halving is one of the best features of bitcoin, not a flaw at all.
Most alt coins are completely and utterly useless. Be careful.
Would be interesting knowing why and which coins you are referring to!
I won't speak for the good Doc. But i use this site Vircurex to store my namecoins that come from Bitminter.
https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?locale=en The highest valued altcoin on their radar is the litecoin (lightcoin?) and it's only just over a bit penny per litecoin. It seems to me altcoins made an appearance and were just used to obtain BTC. New ones come and go without ever appearing on the list and they discontinue trading of other alt coins all the time because they just get TOO worthless.
Now I ONLY mine Bitcoins so i don't know how quickly you can come across altcoins even with high powered rigs. But it just seems it's most worthwhile to mine BTC directly. I'm sure there are tons of opposing opinions and I would love to hear a few. Could always use an excuse to check out a different miner like a Gridseed or DualMiner or otherwise if I'm convinced there's any reason to invest in an altcoin miner.
But all that merchandise and followers of the dogecoin are apparently now trading them in for BTC at 0.00000029BTC per 1 Dogecoin. That doesn't sound profitable no matter how you look at it. In fact name coins, which we get for free just for mining BTC are worth, what is that, 10000 times more than a dogecoin is now? YEESH. Miner beware. If i'm missing something though please inform me, I always love to learn more about virtual currency and I'm just a SMALL time miner. JUST enough to not pay for humble bundles and the occasional electronic toy from certain stores that will accept Bitcoins for payment.
Anyway, that's just my two (bit) cents on the topic of alt coins. Hopefully someone can tell me they mine at 100's of times the rate of BTC and the equipment is such and such cheaper to get started, etc. Any way to make a little more out of a little less.
In addition to mining Bitcoin on BitMinter, I am mining LiteCoin with a Zeus Thunder X3 and bringing in just over 1 LiteCoin per day. At ~30Mhs (which is quite good for LiteCoin) that puts me in the top 35 or so on the pool that I'm on there. I agree about all these different altcoins out there -- to me, just not worth the trouble & electricity). My pool does support merged mining of Pesetacoin and Umbrella LTC. Pesetacoin is a new Spanish alt... Not worth, but a few fractions of a US cent... But as it is merged mining it is no big deal. I think they will also include Dogecoin merged mining as well when it is available ( as you may know, there is an effort to boost Dogecoin prices by enabling merged mining with LiteCoin).
But, for me -- I am there to simply diversify my mining a bit with LiteCoin. The rest is gravy. My goal is to ultimately convert the Litecoin to Bitcoin.