Live data from Hacker News

Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

techcrunch.com

141–150 of 257 posts

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#141

About time. I've been waiting for an easy way to get Litecoin for so long. Every time I checked in the past, it seemed to require working with some Russian bank to get things set up, and something would always error out or "not be supported" or some crap and I'd eventually give up, like in the early days of bitcoin (if I had figured out how to successfully buy it I could have bought btc at $7 a coin once, and probabl…

Back in the day, I literally sent a check to some guy via snail mail to get some Bitcoins. That was the BEST way to acquire them!

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope not for them, because there clearly was insider news at play, here. While litecoin was rising in previous months and its coinbase addition has been rumored, technical analysis two days ago shown compression and it was not expected to have any big move before tomorrow. Then, out of nowhere, ltc spiked, yesterday. 3 hours later, it was announced that litecoin was being added on coinbase.

Btw, I'm only in trading since cryptos and don't know classic markets, I would love someone to explain to me why using insider news is a crime. The thing is, it only seems fair to me to be able to exploit insider news. Employees from a company are not affected by stock price change, at least not in a good way ; because when stocks go the wrong way, they'll certainly feel it by being asked more for less in their work.…

At the same time, if all employees knew bad news and dumped all of their stock at the same time, the rest of us would be left holding bags.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#143

I never really got the appeal of Litecoin. It was basically just a copy and paste of Bitcoin with only minor alterations made to the source code (like changing the PoW for Script which never really defeated ASICs and a few other small changes.) It made no major innovations that can be named and even to this day it still lacks several of the major bug fixes that made it into Bitcoin (there are still patches missing fr…

It makes sense to have two similar but independent cryptos - if one falls into some crazy governance stalemate the other can go on.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#144

Is there a reason a lot of these cryptocurrencies have suddenly started to skyrocket all at once?

World tensions are high. Apparently whenever there's bad news, the cryptocurrencies spike? It's kind of like a safety net similar to gold. The current thing driving it might be a combination of factors, among which is the North Korea situation with chinese investors moving funds into cryptcurrencies?

Are people honestly that concerned about North Korea?

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#145
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example they had that bug last year where somebody was able to steal 50 million dollars equivalent ether from the network. IIRC that caused one of the hard forks and is the reason there are now both eth and etc. That was a bug in the DAO protocol. I'm not aware of any bugs in the btc protocol to allow hackers to steal money in their entire 8 years existence

It wasn't a bug with the protocol though. It was a bug with the coding of the contract. However there has been a few forks to mitigate DDoS attacks.

No, it was worse; it was a bug in the community that proved people aren't really willing to abide by smart contracts when they feel they lost. That incident split the community in half with one side willing to tear down the entire thing just to make sure the thief didn't get away with it. And now there are 2 Ethereums.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#146

Is there a reason a lot of these cryptocurrencies have suddenly started to skyrocket all at once?

My understanding is that Bitfinex (a major exchange) can't process USD withdrawals so people are buying up cryptocoins with their balances, driving up prices. It is being compared to the situation at MtGox.

Many of the other alts have most of their volume on the exchange Poloniex which claims to be US based but offers no transparency on their operations. They offer margin trading. The fincen registration number listed on their terms page is not valid. The office address listed is for a corporation registration company in Delaware.

IMO the whole thing is a powder keg. At least it's exciting to watch.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#147
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin has by far the greatest amount of research and intellectual effort driving it It's not like the research is exclusive. Note that any research done on bitcoin can also be shared and used on other projects. Litecoin for example, which is a fork of bitcoin, is now benefiting from bitcoin's R&D by using Segwit first. Likewise, other blockchains can teach a lesson for bitcoin. For example sha256 proved not to be…

> For example sha256 proved not to be a good hashing algo because the reliance on ASICs, which centralizes mining. Another important area in research is the development of other greener forms of blockchain security such as Proof of Stake, which will most likely replace Proof Of Work once perfected. Theoretically speaking all algorithms are able to be optimized by ASICs. ASIC resistance is not about making ASICs impos…

Or use PoS to avoid the situation entirely.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope not for them, because there clearly was insider news at play, here. While litecoin was rising in previous months and its coinbase addition has been rumored, technical analysis two days ago shown compression and it was not expected to have any big move before tomorrow. Then, out of nowhere, ltc spiked, yesterday. 3 hours later, it was announced that litecoin was being added on coinbase.

Btw, I'm only in trading since cryptos and don't know classic markets, I would love someone to explain to me why using insider news is a crime. The thing is, it only seems fair to me to be able to exploit insider news. Employees from a company are not affected by stock price change, at least not in a good way ; because when stocks go the wrong way, they'll certainly feel it by being asked more for less in their work.…

> I would love someone to explain to me why using insider news is a crime.

Because a market isn't fair if everyone doesn't have the same information available to them. Trading on insider information is literally stealing from those who don't have it. Imagine the CEO of a company knowing he's about to announce bad news and shorting his own stock ahead of the announcement to make millions from it, then buying it all up cheap at the bottom before announcing some large new government contract causing the price to rebound and making more millions again... all that money he's making, he's stealing from the general public by knowing what's going to happen ahead of time and using it to have an unfair advantage. Insider trading is like knowing the future, that's not a fair market.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#150
post #19
post #10

It will take significant time and effort to overtake Bitcoin's name recognition and first mover advantage. However, there's also an advantage to being a second mover that can adapt quickly to a changing environment... I doubt Bitcoin will be the supreme crypto-currency in a few years. It's just too implausible that Bitcoin is perfect enough as is, and/or the community will be able to implement any needed changes befo…

Bitcoin has by far the greatest amount of research and intellectual effort driving it, and it's far from a static protocol. It doesn't need to have gotten everything perfect, it needs to change just quickly (or slowly) enough to retain its core value proposition vs. other cryptocurrencies. Maybe it will get replaced, maybe not. But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized, most secure,…

>But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized

3 people control 95% of all hashing power on the network!

http://bytemaster.github.io/update/2015/09/29/Bitcoin-is-100...

Post reply on HN