No its biggest (first-class) problem is it doesn't have a single feature that can't be adopted quickly by Monero and which makes it extremely compelling "must have" coin. A team won't change that.

The second non-starter problem is the name isn't professional, i.e. it reflects on a lack of marketing.


From the little I've seen, the marketing guy needs to be fired unless I missed something major. I viewed thes short video explaining loss of unlinkability and that was well done. But there are so many total lapses in the marketing such as:

1. No compelling Buffet-esque moat, i.e. product management marketing interaction.

2. No significant effort applied to picking a name.

3. No target demographic identified and quantified.

4. No strategy.


With the qualifier "long-term", then I entirely agree. But you always need that Benevolent Dictator there to keep the consensus from falling into the pit of abject failure known as democracy, e.g. Bitcoin hasn't significantly innovated since Satoshi left.


Just keeping telling yourself that please.

If you are referring to not building a team at the opportune time after initial innovation, then I agree. But if you are asserting a small team can't compete towards break away innovation then I disagree.

When I was trying to use Adobe PageMill in Sept 1998, I got so frustrated that I decided to code CoolPage(.com) drag+drop WYSIWYG web page editor (from a Nipa Hut in the Philippines) and released it within 2 months. With a few months I had 1000s of downloads per week and had built one-click publishing to free hosts social networks such as Geocities and Fortune city. By 2000 or 2001, it had million+ downloads and 335,000 active websites (confirmed via an Altavista feature where I could list all sites by creation tool meta tag). I had blown away PageMill and their team. Note before that I had worked in a programming role with the Marketing and Product Manger Steve Guttman for what is now Corel Painter and he was the former Product Manager that brought Adobe Photoshop to fame.

Corel Painter was basically created by two guys Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges. Mark coded 3D Painter by himself in a matter of weeks.

Back in 1986, I coded WordUp which was 5 x 720K diskettes of 90% 68000 assembly code mostly by myself and Mike Fulton.

Yes it is true that you need a team for very complex things. So if you can't simplify the creation of a coin, you will need a team. And surely you need to recruit a team (bounties) if you want to rise from release to a mature coin because there are so many issues to deal with on the development side.


But it may not be impossible to simplify the issues needed to release and innovate with one coding God.

Note I didn't say that is me. I just gave some examples of past success showing it isn't entirely impossible, although I agree with you it is unlikely.

I wish Bitcoin devs believed you, so I could watch it crash and burn.

For example, if Bitcoin tried to change the mining algorithm to defeat ASICs.

You think users are going to risk sending their transactions to a chain with radically reduced hashrate? Do you think investors are going to support the chaos of splitting the coin and the collapse in confidence and value?

What holds consensus together is fear of loss from chaos. Otherwise everyone would go flying off in different directions already. Bitcoin is not a monolith of 80% agreement on all features. Rather it is "bite your tongue and adhere because you have more to lose from breakup". If you break that consensus in two parts, the incentive to adhere will be lost and people will go fighting over all their pet concerns.

Democracy is a lot like marriage in that facet.

I agree with both of you. If you could really get "enough" of the users on board, miners would not want to mine a coin that has greatly reduced value for long, so the same incentives that cause altcoin miners (say scrypt miners) to jump around to the most profitable coin would cause more and more bitcoin miners to jump to the more valuable chain as well. Its difficulty might be lower for a while, but that would rapidly attract miners to the superior profitability.

However, in practice this "enough" probably needs to be a huge, largely unrealistic, percentage, probably 90% or more (possibly even something like 99%). I doubt you could even get 90% of bitcoin users to upgrade their software quickly even if it weren't controversial or risky. As I understand it, there are still people using quite old versions. It just doesn't happen.

Anything less than near unanimity from the users and you get complete chaos, with both miners and users unsure of what was happening, what was going to happen, or what they should do about it. The loss of value/stability/confidence in the entire thing would not be restored for a long time, if ever.

I give up trying to talk to you - you simply don't appear to actually read what other people write, and respond to some strawman argument of your own creation.

My post was very clear:  *A hard-fork is effective if enough of the exchanges, merchants, and actual users play along with it.*

And you came back and said "NO!  The users would have to buy in."

In the time-honored tradition of the Internet:  Plonk.

So is the future of Bitcoin either stagnation or civil war? There seem to be quite a few issues that appear to completely divide people. I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here, but I can't imagine anything but a 'war' resulting from any major change to Bitcoin that would require a hard fork. Minor issues get blown out of proportion already.

Lets say Bitcoin jumps 100% tomorrow, will most cryptos jump with it?  Litecoin was the first coin that rode the bitcoin coattail offering not much added benefit.

Will the likes of XMR & NXT ride the next wave?

I say yes.  We are partaking in a market that Wall Street hasn't grasped yet and when it does our small speculative plays today could pay enormous dividends in years to come.   

I wear my  at night

Always bet (small) on the underdogs 

With daily volume of hundreds of btc, the verbal pumping of couple of guys is not meaningful. You have to put a sizable amount of btc on the ask side to move it up. And if i remember correctly, the bagholder rpietila was even talking monero down expecting it to fall short term.

Sorry, didn't know that praising Monero was mandatory. You guys are pathetic.

Critics are welcomed - just don't forget to bring arguments. Hint: ad hominem are not arguments.