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Comment by terabytest | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this break bitcoin's concept of no central issuer? If you have to send stuff to the organiser, that's somewhat of a central authority, isn't it?

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I could see SolarCoin working if there was some kind of specialized hardware that monitored the amount of electricity flow, but I can't think of a way to verify that it is hooked up to a solar panel versus plugged into a wall.

I could see people hacking that specialized hardware...

yes.

sidenote: please stop making coins.

it sort of defies the point of it being a currency of any kind if there are millions of different yet indistinguishable ones.

Don't worry, natural selection will happen to them. Most coins of close to zero value will reach the bottom faster than they expect.

This isn't obvious! See my comment to IgorPartola above.

Why? A new blockchain is no real threat to any existing and established altcoin such as BTC or LTC. On the other hand, it's possible that someone will come up with either a technical improvement over the established altcoins, or die trying.

Now, what would be really helpful is a wallet app that lets you have all different types of coins in one place. That way you wouldn't have to run 17 different clients for 17 different coins. It would also help you lose all your altcoins in one place.

17? At the last count there's over a thousand of them.

And most aren't used at all.

It is a threat! If a there are a thousand indistinguishable block chains, it's (arguably[1]) as if the number of coins on a single blockchain were much bigger, which drives down the price. Since there's an infinite supply of new blockchains at more or less any price point (again, arguably), the price should be driven down to zero.

[1] Arguably, -there is, for instance, the question of whether arbitrary differentiators such as "being the first blockchain" suffice to make the blockchain market not perfectly competitive, - but this point needs to be (and as far as I can tell hasn't really been, here on HN) argued about. See http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/on-... for some references, though.

Not much more than different currencies or different goods devalue others as stores of value in general.

I think you're wrong, but am willing to be told otherwise. Here's why: one currency is not (generally) legal tender outside its country of origin, so there's an exchange rate determined roughly by the trade balance between countries etc. If all currencies were legal tender everywhere (a much more analogous) situation, the exchange rate would not be determined by the same factors, since the currency would in no way be pegged to the nation.

Then the question becomes: what does in fact determine the exchange rates? I.e., would one currency be "infinitely valuable" compared to all others? Which one? The first? Or would all of the stabilize at the point where 1 of A is always worth 1 of B, because that's easiest to work with?

I'm not sure legal tender matters much. It's all about what people generally expect other people generally to give them for the currency when they decide they want to convert it into something else. See, for instance, the Somalian Shilling retaining its value despite a period that basically lacked a government (http://www.economist.com/node/21551492) or the fact that the dollar is happily accepted in very many countries. What does screw with things is currency controls, but that's not really substantively different than any other market manipulation.

The value of an altcoin, the true market value, is in my mind determined by two things. First, how many different ways can I spend it reliably? For example, I can spend BTC on goods on Overstock.com. I can spend Dogecoin on a tip for a comment on Reddit. BTC is already more valuable to me than Dogecoin.

Second, is the size and composition of the specific altcoin network. For example, lots of new altcoins use central checksumming during the early stages to prevent early market manipulation. This is bad, since the coin is then for a period of time controlled by a central entity. BTC and LTC are mature enough to not have this problem anymore.

In other words, sure bring on more altcoins/blockchains. I don't care. Let's let the market decide that. In the end the total market cap of all these coins will converge and the more coins are created every day the more we approach the point of people starting to be able to tell the difference.

That determines your subjective value for the coin. Market value depends on it only to the degree that the subjective value others place on the coin mirrors yours.

Of course. Naturally, everyone places different value on these things. However, I have several reasons to believe that my criteria has some merit. Specifically, look at the reverse of each of the two criteria: imagine a coin with a very small network and a very young blockchain. This means that a player with lots of computing power can at least mine a huge amount of the coin, or even carry out a "51% attack" and double-spend.

Also, imagine a coin which you cannot spend on anything. You can mine it and send and receive it in a vacuum, but you cannot derive any other value out of it. Is such a coin in any way more valuable than a coin which lets you buy a cup of coffee, a car, or a house?

I certainly think that those both deserve to be important considerations, and probably most others assessing will think so as well, so they will certainly affect things. But there will be lots of other factors, individual (diversification, speculation) and collectively (amount of currency available), so I feel that "determined by" is too strong. I also didn't really like the "true market value" wording, but I'd have let it slide if that was my only concern.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_(payment_protocol)

I don't accept your fiat of making BitCoin the one true coin.

there's room for more than 1, litecoin, bitcoin.

don't just make copies of what's available, it drives down price and stops adoption of it as a trading standard.

But SolarCoint is not a bitcoin -- it is just a cryptocurrency.

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