Surprised they don’t switch to monero if they’re switching cryptocurrency. Fast and cheap (like litecoin) but also many added privacy benefits.
Highly scalable because of their centralized nature are Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM), Stellar started as a Ripple fork. I finally went for Stellar because of the founder (he founded and sold MtGox and founded Ripple), more potential to grow because of lower cap, the complete feature set and some recent announcements (such as Kik/Kin moving from ETH to XLM, Singal-founder will use XLM for his MobileCoin).
I might buy Ripple after some correction though. Ripple has a different positioning but a good setup too. The cap is already very high, close to ETH's.
Edit: Why the downvote?
Edit2: changed that Stellar started as a Ripple fork
HN seems to me like the place to discuss the tech behind a coin, not whether or not to speculate on it for monetary gain.
Personally, I wouldn't say Monero "isn't fast or scalable." Perhaps it's not compared to other coins, but compared to Bitcoin it sure seems fast and scaleable. (Again, I didn't downvote your comment for disagreeing with that.)
Every fully decentralized coin hits at an early point the ceiling and won't scale. Vitalik Buterin expressed this recently. So, why should XMR be faster?
Besides, the anonymity is nice but just pipe your <put any coin here> through some random exchanges and you have the same effect, so it's really not that killer feature to create a new huge ecosystem. I like XMR's tech a lot and I think it's not too bad to have XMR in your portfolio, the question is if it has the potential to be one of the next major coins in the long-term (3-5 years). There, I rather see other candidates with a much higher probability, there is just too much good competition which came up the recents months/years.
It doesn't have the same effect. Blockchain analysis would be able to see right through that.
How?
While in Bitcoin you can offload older utxos to a slower memory, because the access pattern is “utxos die young”. Also, utxo set grows much slower or even can be stable (“1 utxo per person”) while tx volume grows forever.
Bitcoin scales way better than Monero or Zcash (that has the same requirement to store all “nullifiers” to prevent double spending).
That term is misleading and implies actual RAM-type memory is needed, which is untrue. Monero scales quite well using a database on SSD up to transaction rates far in excess of anything Bitcoin can or will realistically handle now or any time soon (certainly hundreds and possibly thousands of tx/sec).
Likewise the total data that needs to be stored grows slowly at realistic tx rates, roughly 80 GB/year at 10 tx/sec. That's similar to the rate of growth of the bitcoin blockchain (unpruned) and well within the hardware capabilities of both existing cheap SSDs and even more so the visible trajectory for future cheap SSDs.
Are you serious? Sold MtGox? That's how you remember him? He was steering that particular ship when it hit an iceberg.
McCaleb sold the site to French developer Mark Karpelès, who was living in Japan, in March 2011.
On 19 June 2011, a security breach of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange caused the nominal price of a bitcoin to fraudulently drop to one cent on the Mt. Gox exchange, after a hacker allegedly used credentials from a Mt. Gox auditor's compromised computer to transfer a large number of bitcoins illegally to himself.
Monero’s tx fees are low due to lack of use, they go up way faster than bitcoin’s even with RuffCT and adaptive blocksizes.
In the case of bitcoin cash in particular; it would probably still be fine at bitcoin scale. This is because its main difference is removing an artificial limit within Bitcoin. As this limit was set without an empirical basis (and bitcoin showed no signs of degradation as it approached the limit), you would probably be able to scale the block size up some without causing problems.
How much you can scale is still at question. Here [0] is a talk about this very question. Using a small testnet (~6 miner nodes and 12 clients) they were able to achieve 500tx/s with a 1GB block with relativly minor optimizations of the standard Bitcoin implementation (the final bottle neck here is propagation delay reaching 10 minutes). This is, in my opinion, an upper bound on what the Bitcoin protocol can handle.
Smaller transaction sizes with adaptive block sizes seems like a good scaling solution. Is there something I'm missing?
The fee in terms of XMR actually reduces when there's more transactions. However if its value in terms of USD rises, then the fee in terms of USD still might go up with more adoption. Perhaps that's something the developers can adjust in their regularly-scheduled hardforks.
That still makes it a little larger than the average Bitcoin transaction, but the mentality there seems to be that privacy has its price. While next-to-free is preferable, I don't disagree.
This isnt future proof but should alleviate some pressures while internet and widespread computational infrastructure improves