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Comment by waytogo | Hacker News Reader

Looked really deep into alt coins the last few days, I checked also XMR which isn't fast or scalable. It's now fast because of the little use compared to BTC and ETH.

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

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I haven't voted on your comment in either direction, but if I had to guess why someone else did, maybe it's because you're speculating about what coin to buy in order to make a profit.

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.)

this comment is somewhat tangental but from what I have seen the tech does not necessarily determine the value of a crypto. things like network effect and marketing seem to make a larger difference at least at first. do any end users care about the tech stack of myspace vs facebook? it will be interesting to see if technical merits win out over the long term in the cyptocurrency space because it was originally largely comprised of tech people.

> ...but compared to Bitcoin it sure seems fast and scaleable.

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.

> just pipe your <put any coin here> through some random exchanges and you have the same effect

It doesn't have the same effect. Blockchain analysis would be able to see right through that.

> Blockchain analysis would be able to see right through that.

How?

Monero is less scalable because you have to store all tx outputs (key images) instead of just unspent tx outputs, since Monero does not know which outputs are fully spent (for larger ring sizes). And these must all be stored in fast random access memory for double spend prevention. That’s an ever-growing pile of data!

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).

Nice, this is good in-depth explanation of why XMR isn't scalable.

> fast random access memory

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.

I'm not sure any blockchain scales "well," so it's like comparing turtle speeds. Likely they'll all be moving to lightening network for scalability, so it's a waste of time comparing them. The factors that are interesting for blockchains are immutability, fungibility and censorship resistance, and due to privacy, Monero wins 2/3. As for network security, that can change as more people appreciate how privacy influences cashlike properties--though I think Bitcoin will end up being a sort of digital gold going forward, which isn't a bad market to contral as far as price evaluation.

>he founded and sold MtGox

Are you serious? Sold MtGox? That's how you remember him? He was steering that particular ship when it hit an iceberg.

IDK if Jed hit the iceberg, from Wikipedia:

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.

I believe the dark web market alphabay also allowed the use of monero, motivated by improved privacy over Bitcoin. Performance wasn't really impacted since not many vendors on alphabay accepted it

Stellar started as a fork of Ripple, but has no code in common with Ripple any more. See Jed's comment in this thread: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/29815/what-is-th...

Maybe seen as a shill.

I think the tech and the team behind Ripple is positioning it very well for the future. Check out Ripple's Payment Channels. They scale up to match Visa's transaction levels.

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