Quote from: Ippolit on May 27, 2012, 09:39:42 PM

Quote from: Kazimir on May 25, 2012, 10:26:20 AM

Since the emergence of Bitcoin, several alternative cryptocurrencies have appearted, although afaik none have them come even close to bitcoin in terms of popularity, trading volume and money involved.

Question: why? Is there something wrong with Bitcoin? What advantages do the alternatives offer? What does Bitcoin lack what the others don't?

It's my impression that these alternatives were only introduced by people who would like to be early adopters themselves, hoping to see their stack of virtual coins (which are cheap or free to obtain in the early stages) booming just like BTC. Or am I mistaken?

Solidcoin is just a profit-driven scam IMO.

Litecoin is interesting because its mining mechanism is designed to be CPU-friendly, so you have less of an advantage from mining it with specialized hardware.

Devcoin has a mechanism which pays 10% of mining profits to developers - an interesting experiment at what's basically a voluntary, decentralized taxation mechanism.

Namecoin is actually really useful (or would be if anyone actually used it) - it's a decentralized DNS system (DNS systems map IP addresses like 173.194.73.105 to human-readable URLs like google.com)

So they do have some redeeming value.

I'm curious what can I actually do with Litecoins?
Now I'm only selling it on vircurex ...