This is completely unrelated to technical side of Bitcoin, but i digress:


Built in tax or demurrage has not proved popular (see Freicoin). Socioeconomics 101 - people will not submit to a system which does not satisfy their needs. Current society is all about status and class. You need to first remove status and class by convincing people there is no need for status and class (good luck trying to override our ape instincts).

Then capitalism will disappear on its own.

The key thing to recognize is that it doesn't matter if it's a get-rich-quick scam in and itself. If you're daytrader in bottom barrel altcoins, what you really care about is how the pump is executed exactly.

If you want short term returns, you have to pay attention to short term sentiment trends, fundamentals play next to no role in here.

In addition, with bull market we're in now, there isn't much else to put money into. Speculation is a zero sum game, and it's absolutely crucial to be positioned in a place where the most fools are, while being a lesser fool than the median.

Or you can play it long term, so called "smart money". You wait until trust in CCs hits all time low - like post mtgox hack, or governments cracking down on CCs in the near future. Once that happens, you dip buy long established coins when they drop like a rock during that period.

And cash out 4 years later when they're up again.

It's completely up to you which strategy you prefer. Majority of users on this forum are daytraders, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's where the money is. While quick speculation can yield high profits, it's also far more risky as the trends are fickle. Long term speculation is far more dependable, but most people simply don't have the patience for it.

I mean, you're forking NEM, but the ANN has no word on what's going to fixed in NEM, and there's a lot to improve (sybil-PoS for starters). While all at the same time the ANN having a detailed breakdown who cashes what on the premine. That doesn't exactly instill confidence this is focused on any technical fundamentals whatsoever.

It's the opposite, there's too little. I'd say out of the total number you see here, 95% coins are trivial scams, and it's even worse for ICOs, where I'd say the number is about 99%. Exchanges being on it doesn't help, either.

The market is more or less the same like any other penny stock market. Folks taunt bottom barrel alt crypto speculating like something new, but schemes like this were around for a long time.

Notice Me Senpai

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2590375.msg31214228#msg31214228

I'm curious, why not just fork NEM and be done with it?

There are 2 categories, both are worth investing into, but for different reasons:

• Long term. Code talks, bullshit walks. If the coin is competent, they overwhelmingly deliver some sound code *before* they even start trading anything. Typically they run testnet first, too. This is the case for all long lived coins basically. Ethereum and such is a modern example of this - they got money from VCs first, and then used the crowdsale to pay off VCs.
  
  
• Short term pumps. They generally cover most of first 2 pages of altcoin ann, all day. Pumps are often an easy ride because are so easy to categorize. These coins typically have no implementation, aggresivelly solicit funds, and churn out PR (not code, copy pasting doesn't count) day after day. If they deliver anything at all, it's utter garbage, often they just exit scam.
  
  

In bullish market, "long term" generally isn't where the money is. This is the reason why as a speculator, you must pay close attention to the, shall we say, "marketing oriented" projects as well.

Which means tracking shilling and FUD, because that's just a way how category 2 coins duke it out, those virtually never compete on technical merit. It ultimately boils down to "fake news" propaganda wars.

Pro trader bots scrape altcoin section to track shill/fud ratio in real time - keep track of whos "winning" and act accordingly.

Under no circumstances one should pay attention to shills/fud content, lest one would suffer brain damage. What is important about these is *quantity*. If there is sign of massive shill campaign, might be worth looking into if a pump rally is about to happen, as the campaign might pay off. Conversely, if there's sign of a start of FUD campaign, might want to short accordingly.

As for long term investing, that's self-evident. Unfortunately just knowing the buzzwords ("DAG", "IOT", "CT", "zkSNARK") is not enough - buzzwords are tool to shill the technically illiterate, not to describe technology.

Can a dev confirm/deny this analysis is correct?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ccpolice/comments/80i2yb/a_a_closer_look_at_dagger_xdagcheatcoin/

Unfortunately the code could benefit from some cleaning up to make it more clear what it does, can't really tell for sure myself without running a small testnet.

If the analysis is correct, what needs to be done to modify the total order rule so that TXNs are confirmed in parallel (main chain -> main tree)? I gather it would complicate the code a bit, but it would be a shame keeping XDAG stuck up like it seems to be.

I've spent some time surveying the state of DAG implementations. As always in the crypto world, it's an ecletic mix of insanely impressive research, ill guided engineering, mediocre copycats and outright scam ranging from trivial to extremely sophisticated. So let's dig in!

1. Meh: IOTA, famous, but disturbing amount of technical debt.

2. Interesting, but not a real DAG: RaiBlocks/Nano, while related, is not a DAG chain in strict sense - does not propagate "I've seen and acknowledged that branch" state normal DAGs are supposed to do. That said, Nano is very impressive in engineering sense, but suffers from a lot of formal debt: The voted-in federated nodes doing conflict tiebreaks do not have livenesss guarantees whatsoever. There is no recorded history, and loss of quorum means loss of access to consistent state of both past and current.

3. Interesting: ByteBall is formally quite  unassuming DAG. It too depends on "sworn in" federated tiebreakers like Nano, the quorum is not as bad as compared to Nano, as past votes cast by witnesses is recorded history.

4. Blah: Aidos = IOTA cargo cult. Non functional. The existing code is very preliminary, and seems to be just Go port of IOTA from Java, trinary nonsense and all. Might be useful to get Golang port of IOTA, though?

5. ?? Dagcoin - which one in particular?

6. Academically competent DAGLabs - Startup employing some of the researchers responsible for the cutting edge GHOST, SPECTRE and PHANTOM theoretical work. No published code yet, but if they do, it's going to be legit unless the VCs botch it.

7. Blah: Oyster = Some sort of horrible IOTA and EVM cargo cult. Seems to be straight IOTA instance with some marketing fluff on top.Move along.

8. ICO scam Paragoncoin.

9. Border ICO scam, but not a DAG The techs at HCash might be onto something, but HCash PR team really does shuts it down with the bullshit fest. HCash is just Decred (Bitcoin-NG). The thing they added is lua-scripted smart contracts, but as an external module (works similiar to counterparty and such). Still brobably a good idea rather than trying to mutilate decred directly.

10. Pretty legit RChain. The only downside is complexity introduced through the unorthodox choice of process calculus for contracts.

11. ICO scam IOT-Chain. It's interesting the lengths they've gone to show off fake code. Top of the class China fake.

Others:

12. ICO scam TravelFlex. ICO ended in december, no single line of (original) code delivered since then.

13. ZCash clones Fill-in-any-other-clone of ZCash today is unlikely to become DAG anytime soon.

14. Not many people realize That Ethereum is a Block-DAG, in it's most primitive form (GHOST).

15. Seems legit, but review pending Universa. They don't elaborate on nature of the consensus whatsoever. Cursory looks at it suggest some sort of interactive voting. Still reading to figure out more.

updates on this post will be on: https://www.reddit.com/r/ccpolice/comments/80em51/state_of_dag_hype_2018/

It's just renamed bitmox, fork of early dash with pos added or somesuch.


All marketing rubbish none of which exists at best, and probably for the better because most of it is just pretty hilarious wordsalad.


This might be of some help:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1742783.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1793468.0

Chances are high the guy is the same one and just trying to flip the coins from ico scam by pumping the pony he's got, another common trick in the book. That CCRevolution guy seems to be responsible for one of the most insane technobabble buzzwords I've seen tho, I really want to smoke the shit he's doing.

Intuitively, truly open membership (without some sort of bond in form of hash power or stake) isn't possible in trustless setting, because the collateral is there to replace trust. Best you can do is self-referential PoS, and even there you need some sort of bootstrap for the self-referentiality ... to refer to.

Easiest way to get open membership is through trust DAG or hiearchy, ByteBall, Ripple and even Tor does it. But those are quite obviously not trustless. To explore that area, you might ask under what circumstances is trustlessness necessary, and to which degree optimistic trust may work. For example bittorrent or IPFS is open membership with extremely rudimentary quorum (one-to-one optimistic tit-for-tat), yet sort of "consensus" is achieved (slow leech vs honest peer uploading back will be judged quite universally). This works because the stakes for sophisticated attack are not high, it's only to prevent casual abuse.

No, you got it right. Sia and Storj are not proof of storage, closest existing thing atm is BURST, and even that is seriously flawed, and that's just mere proof of erasure.


Although a bit better theory-wise, IOTA is currently in very bad shape (mostly thanks to shoddy implementation). It relies on node trust, otherwise you could take it down with a moderate GPU mining rig. My opinion on it is basically "another maidsafe, perhaps marginally safer this time".


Definitely, especially if the implementation is new, it's to be expected to be buggy for few years. Out of the bunch it was probably NXT with most famous glaring holes which were (luckily) silently patched. By extension, incidents like TheDAO bring all this to another meta level.


Claims to "replace" bitcoin is to be viewed with extreme suspicion. Personaly I'm looking for things branching out into spheres Bitcoin definitely cant do in its current shape.


Bitcoin is arguably not the *best*, the strength of bitcoin is it's *conservative* design. Bitcoin is, for all intents and purposes, the first, most minimal (in terms of theory) and most tested implementation of trustless CC. Which bank would you prefer, one with 100 year tradition with history of prudence as well as various conservative warts from 100 year ago, or a new flashy hip startup?


Even the major ones like NXT, MasterCoin, BitShares all lost against counterparty and later eth. It's a risky bet to think blackhalo could fare better this time.

In terms of pure sales pitch, CLTV implementations like blocknet (or something similiar with fancy UX) are better in the near term. In the longterm, every bitcoin fork and their mom pulled CLTV from upstream, making no room for any intermediary currency for x-swaps, it would just add to the spread.


eMunie sure knows how to keep hype for 3 years. Whenever this is done, there's usually good reason for there being no single line of code in years, and when something finally shows up, the results tend to be underwhelming. Though I'd love to be proven wrong.


Monero is quite unique because of its bullshit inception story, luckily it's not that common. Indeed in terms of "original", it should be probably clarified "the most accepted by the community". Given that monero was the first non-scammy fork of cryptonote at the time (though even there rumors exist that monero devs knew about the AES exploit). Whatever, it's the "original" now.


XBY is generic rubbish. Didn't know about raiblocks until now, looks somewhat original, albeit not really sure yet as I had only cursory look at its cowboyish consensus code.

Blocknet and Bitbay are, in the stringent sense, "just bitcoin base hacked a bit". The reason im averse to that is that these overwhelmingly can't transcend what bitcoin already does in any meaningful manner and you get grotesque supernode perversions like dash.

Don't throw ByteBall in that mix though. Byteball is perfectly fine and im quite fond of it (that's why its in honorable mentions), but it's not technically trustless cryptocurrency in satoshian sense. It's a web of trust DAG, semantically more related to Ripple. It's a notable difference from Iota, where each transaction carries PoW proof (you can reframe iota as bitcoin where each transaction has its own block, but you can't do that for BB).


Indeed. It may seem asinine at first, but hear me out: People don't write new implementations just because they like the additional work, but because its often imperative to innovate. The only exception to the rule I've encountered is Sia, which for some odd reason is written from scratch, yet is technically very uninspiring and could work just as well as a bitcoin or some other codebase fork. The opposite is things like Ethereum - it'd be far more effort trying to bend bitcoin into that, hence why it is separate codebase from scratch.

Of course there's silver lining to the black and white thinking, and certain forks have proven innovative for one reason or another, but usually tend to be just mere extension of the original. A canonical example of this is Namecoin. It had its utility back then, and it was well engineered and everything, and it made sense to just fork bitcoin to do this. But it wasn't certainly that revolutionary, in fact, you could run the same service on bitcoin's chain, too.

Not everything is sunshine in the "from scratch" space. Tendermint and Maid come to mind as a massive clusterfuck of naivete and poor understanding, but it could be just growing pains.

edit: clarify why iota is trustless and byteball isnt

I've checked that thread, and half of the poll are just clones of bitcoin (often of zcash and dash variety). Which is why I'd like to keep discussion in here to point out the merits of what is "real".

It seems that most of the board occupants are using different optics for that word, there seems to be strong preference for marketing rather than what is actually under the hood. This is fine thing to do for short term speculation (ie to ride pump and dump trends). The idea is that in the long term, altcoins ultimately compete both in terms of time-to-market and rigorous robustness (Bitcoin has both), and finally features (which the altcoins i've listed are offering).

Just like with anything else, marketing has little to say about fundamental qualities. If the product is significantly better than incubents, it will sell itself. I'd not consider the quality of marketing to make decisions to "HODL". Best thing you can do about marketing is write a bot to track amount of shilling for any given particular ticker to catch their pump campaigns early, but it's not really useful beyond that.

As far I can tell, current "real" projects are (roughly by date of conception).

* Bitcoin
* NXT
* Cryptonote (now Monero)
* BitShares (now Steemit)
* Ethereum
* Sia
* Iota
* Waves (reimplementation of NXT to be more ETH-like)
* Cardano
* Tezos

(i'm sure i've missed something, please tell if you know about others)

By real I consider complete and often highly innovative codebase from scratch, not just copying and bending previous stuff, nor piggybacking on existing networks (tokens).

Vast majority of alts out there is just bitcoin slightly tweaked.

Honorable mentions, as those are not satoshian BFT blockchains, but interesting nevertheless in their own right:
* Ripple
* Storj (modern seti@home for spare disk space)
* Byteball (TX DAG)
* Hyperledger ("Consensus" of non-deterministic contracts)
* Many chains like zcash or dash, though highly divergent, are still ultimately rooted in the bitcoin codebase

As for how to deal with the clones, those are not necessarily a scam, often it makes sense to just copy the base and slightly tweak it. Bitcoin had many influental forks (such as Litecoin, Peercoin or Blackcoin) and to a lesser degree NXT.

edit: added more OC implementations

For those who didn't figure it out yet, there's no such thing as "fair distribution" via ICO, it's smoke and mirrors. The end result is exactly like Ripple - ie you're investing in something with unknown dilution.

All ICOs without burn are inherently scammy, because issuer can self-buy up to unlimited amount. To illustrate:

1. New PoS coin is announced.
2. Coins are distributed according to BTC deposited to ICO address up to certain date (or asset purchases, or whatever)
3. Others buy 100BTC worth of shares
4. Issuer buys 900BTC worth of shares and gets his 900BTC back immediately. Can even repeat the cycle many times during ICO, if the deposit address is not guaranteed to be frozen.
5. Issuer now owns 90% of issue at zero cost

This is why only proof of burn distribution can be trusted (ie XCP did things right, NXT or master? not exactly.)

Bump, if anyone knows other codebases, please post.

Agreed. Alts focus on the most of the trivial problems (moar nynymyz! moar sakjuure! moar not asikk!) while completely ignoring the most glaringly painful problem of all bitcoin and its clones:

General public does not perceive it as a currency, but speculative pyramid-scheme commodity. And rightly so; given peculiar shape of coin halving distribution.

Whoever invents actual decentralized (ie not ripple) currency with reasonably stable peg to fiat wins. Until then, its not really that interesting, except for dark markets which can appreciate the other properties of bitcoin and make a sacrifice of stable price.

Ok, will lurk there if it turns out nxt is the way to go.

I see now. Bitshares-PTS was surrogate for initial development, and the DAC toolkit indeed seems to implement DPOS chain from scratch. Is it in useable state? Also, is it possible to use it without PTS?
The DAC looks a bit cowboyish and complex, however it indeed appears to be its own thing, mentioned in OP.


That's indeed the idea, but the point is having the most lightweight client as possible (I'd prefer to avoid SPV, but in the end it might come down to that).