Bitcoin Core

Why has Bitcoin failed? It has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralised form of money that lacked “systemically important institutions” and “too big to fail” has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people. Worse still, the network is on the brink of technical collapse.

Litecoin and other scamcoins like it, on the other hand, do not bring anything new to the table.

They are just mere clones that retain the pump-and-dump nature of Bitcoin, but without the innovation that makes Bitcoin viable as a currency.

All privacy technology comes with a cost, and unfortunately, Monero (and Zcash) style transactions have a very significant impact on scalability (spent coins db).

Most of the stuff in this space doesn't get actively exploited. Look at BTCP or IOTA, both terribly, hilariously insecure, and, yet . . . nothing. That doesn't make them secure; it only means there is lower-hanging fruit for people to exploit.

IOTA is so batshit crazy they managed to turn a theoretical one-time-signature vulnerability into an actual, practical-to-exploit one.

I like to think the markets will eventually abandon tech-train-wreck coins (like IOTA).

BCH has nothing to do with Bitcoin

Note how the Dash masternode scheme has the effect of artificially pumping dash... which would he really funny if anti-privacy spies are running masternodes, and thus propping up the price!

As for the coins associated with MaidSafe and Storj, there's no reason to think any of this instant confirmation, low-fee, no-mining stuff is Sybil resistant. Sure, it might work if we can rely on the majority of nodes being honest and you not being Sybil attacked, but at best that's certainly a lesser standard of security than Bitcoin offers; at worst it just won't work.

TRON is a fascinating economic and ethical study. Can a photocopy pump be backfilled with real substance?

It's like paper mache art. Inflate a paper-thin balloon, then surround it with hardened substance.

When Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV get to mining cost equilibrium, assuming their prices are both $100, the cost to reorganize 6-blocks will be $7,500 (12.5 block reward with almost no fees x $100 x 6 blocks ). In 1.5 years that cost halves. Still think a fee market is ridiculous?

[Bitcoin Gold] is an altcoin not a hard fork.

Hard forks are when an existing system changes (in a non-backwards compatible way). New systems are just altcoins, never hardforks.

The part that confuses people is that if you attempt a hardfork without consensus, you end up with an altcoin instead.

Dogecoin is merge-mined, so the marginal cost to attack it is zero; attacking Monero is much more expensive than that.

ASIC-resistant [like Ravencoin's attempt] is stupid. It just gives a bigger advantage to whoever does it first.

The Zcoin trusted setup is *really* clever: they reused a pubkey generated 25 years ago for the RSA Factoring Challenge.

Bitmain is the central bank of BCH. Bitmain has tried to maintain a peg to their reserve currency, BTC, and has failed. Bitmain has failed to keep the peg at 0.15 BTC, 0.12 BTC and recently capitulated the 0.1 BTC level. This is a central bank selling its reserves to keep its peg to another currency. What’s worse, much like a central bank, they’re running out of reserves and BCH will finally float on the market instead of having the artificially inflated value that it has now.

The reality is bleeding-edge crypto is risky; the counterfeiting vulnerability is the second inflation bug that Zcash has had.

BTC has categorically worse privacy than ZEC on L1,, but the trade-off is a safer system re: total loss. Had this been exploited, it could have easily been a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.

On BTC, an inflation bug is very likely to get caught quickly, even if exploited, because of the transparency. There might be a few days shutdown at worse: awful but survivable even in the worst case.