Quote from: guybrushthreepwood on January 12, 2014, 12:24:43 PM

Quote from: Romyen on January 12, 2014, 06:49:28 AM

Quote from: maursader on January 11, 2014, 06:25:25 PM

Realistically the only other alt currency I can see being adopted by major retailers other than BTC would be LTC (Naturally, due to market cap, right?)

I agree it would probably be litecoin, but disagree on the reason. Market cap is a meaningless concept when applied to cryptocurrencies. It's calculated by multiplying the number of coins in existence by the price per coin at the time of the last sale. A little more meaningul would be trade volume in a fixed time peried, measured in common units, e.g. BTC or USD. However even that isn't very meaningful because some trade volume involves mixing or moving coins already held.

Litecoin seems to me to have the most established market among the altcoins at this time, but its standing might change in the future.

Marketcap isn't meaningless. If there's billions or trillions of coins in existence then there always going to be worth very little.

Market cap is meaningless because prices are determined on the margin. Say you premine a billion coins, and sell one for a dollar. That doesn't make you an instant billionaire because you can't sell the rest of them for a billion, or even anything close to that. Developers make prices artificially high by making coins artificailly scarce, and selling a few of them to suckers. Their coins look like they are doing well, based upon market cap rankings, but as I said, it's really meaningless. The market is being manipulated through artificial scarcity.

Romyen

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