Well, I do understand your point of view. You are in the trading business and earning money when customers make a trade. Fair enough.
We understand your point of view as well - you make some good points. We do a lot of advocacy work in the digital asset space - we are for example a founding member of DATA (Digital Asset Transfer Authority).
http://www.datauthority.org/But we also need to make money and have to be practical. So digital currencies that trade high volume will tend to get our attention more than currencies that trade lower volume.
I just like bitcoin to succeed and have a feeling that adding coins that do not 'add' something and are based on a meme do not help with adaptation to use bitcoin as a currency by the general public. What if the fun is over? Will the media take the opportunity to use dogecoin as an 'example' how silly virtual currency are? There are already news reports talking about dogecoin price drops and then explain that the name is derived from a meme... People that are not so technical don't understand bitcoin already, explaining what dogecoin is.. well..
Dogecoin could crash once the meme wears thin and attract negative publicity. But it's not clear that dogecoin would die as a result. If the user base is well established already, it may carry on just fine. It's also not clear that the negative publicity would hurt bitcoin much. Bitcoin has already weathered a lot of negative publicity just fine. The take-way message might end up being, "alts are dangerous, better to stick with bitcoin." So the negative publicity for dogecoin could be a plus for bitcoin.
Also, I'm not clear on why it would be that only coins which don't "add" anything might detract from bitcoin. At this point there are a bunch of interesting alts that "add" something. These interesting alts probably confuse the general public just as much as the uninteresting alts, and contribute just as much to the idea that digital currency might be iterated to the point of triviality.
Sure, maybe dogecoin does add something(to use it for 'tips' on reddit for example), but compared to bitcoin and litecoin, dogecoin is still very young. Biggest part of those 65k+ subscribers are probably there since the beginning. Hashrate is still very high because until now it is the most profitable coin on mining pools(even on switcher coin) and people get paid in litecoin. When dogecoin price is not rocketing anymore and the mining payout is halved, it will become less profitable and people will switch.
We'd just have to address this situation if it arose. If the network hashrate dropped to dangerous levels, we'd halt trading.
Cryptocurrencys are something new and we yet have to find correct 'settings'(eg. confirmation time) that work in a real life environment. Adding a coin that is innovative and does try something completely new like NXT(no I don't have any nxt..) would make sense. Dogecoin is just another fork(that get's forked also because of the super fast confirmation time..)
It seems that when most people talk about a coin adding something "new," they are talking about the technical parameters of the coin. This discounts the importance of things like branding, marketing, community, etc., which strikes me as a bit short-sighted. Sure, dogecoin doesn't add anything new on a technical basis. But it has arguably been quite innovative in terms of it's unique branding and community, and these things do matter. NXT is interesting and certainly deserves a shot on some exchanges, and it's being given a shot. It might make sense for us to offer it, but I'm not so sure it makes more sense to offer it than dogecoin. Given your point below, which is a good one, we probably don't want to offer every coin that's interesting and might make some sense to offer. We are aware of the increased danger of forks with dogecoin and have special monitoring in place as a precaution against that.
We have already seen on cryptsy that the more coins they added, the lower the volume for each coin became and the less interesting it was to trade a particular coin. This is what I see happening on the dutch kraken community. People start to trade at other exchanges because volume is better.
Yeah, unfortunately more choice and more options in trading can be the enemy of liquidity. We have to be careful about overdoing it, but at the same time we don't want be afraid of expansion.
Anyway, I'm sure you guys thought it through like everything on your exchange and we'll see in future how it will work out..
Yes, we'll be watching closely to see how it goes. Thanks for your thoughts.
