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Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

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Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#81

Post by aedron »

bitcoinstudent wrote: post #32
mrb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin doesn't need to be perfect to remain #1. Just needs to be good enough.

I don't think that's really true... it was true for things like TCP, http, and email, which had massive network effects and little competition at their start. But Bitcoin is already only 60% of the total market cap of all cryptos. While bitcoin was already a monopoly, Ethereum came from nowhere to become 1/3 its size (and growing). "Good enough" is not good enough here. Competition is alive and well. Without active d…

How is that market cap measured? In the (few) real-world cases where crypto-currencies are used, I have only ever seen bitcoin.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#82

Post by oelmekki »

runeks wrote: post #69
oelmekki wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, fundamentals radically changed. Last year, litecoin was stilll "the first altcoin historically, which is just a duplicate of bitcoin and is mostly unmaintained". This year, it suddenly became bitcoin's staging area. For those not aware, there's an ongoing heated debate in bitcoin about scalability issues that just seems to be unable to find consensus between several concurrent solution propositions. Litecoi…

> Last year, litecoin was stilll "the first altcoin historically, which is just a duplicate of bitcoin and is mostly unmaintained". This year, it suddenly became bitcoin's staging area. Bitcoin already has a staging area, called testnet3. The coins in this network are worthless.

The difference between both is that you can actually use litecoin, so we have an idea how features perform in real conditions. Call that a beta area rather than a staging area if you prefer, but I guess you see the difference between litecoin and testnet.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#83

Post by Svekax »

mbrock wrote: post #54
Svekax wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad idea. When you're buying a cryptocurrency, you're purchasing trust. Leaving your cryptocurrency with a third party undermines this. Any business idea based on people leaving cryptocurrency with a third party is doomed. Instead, why not tackle the reasons why buying those cryptocurrencies are difficult?

Coinbase doesn't seem all that doomed to me. Neither does Polychain Capital, the cryptoasset hedge fund backed by Andreesen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

Coinbase is a broker. They make money by charging a fee when you convert between currencies. Their customers purchase Bitcoin and then transfer the funds into a Bitcoin address that they generated locally.

Polychain Capital is a hedge fund that only accepts investments greater than $500k from investors wealthy enough to manage the risk. If op had something like this in mind, he wouldn't be gauging the interest of random people on HN. Still, I believe they're too tempting a target and it's only a matter of time before their holdings are stolen.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#84

Post by charsifood »

sanswork wrote: post #80
charsifood wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of ETH's price is propped up by speculation? I don't know of any stores that take ETH, while plenty take BTC. BTC also completely runs the economy of the DarkNet. I believe all cryptocurrencies are somewhat propped up by speculation, but BTC is still the preferred currency for the vast majority of people using cryptocurrencies for the actual exchange of goods and services. That's how BTC derives its value (+…

You can't judge any cryptocurrency by the number of stores that accept it because they all fail at that. Go to any random city and you can probably count the number of locations that take bitcoin on one hand and half of those probably haven't done a transaction in so long that they won't remember how to do it.

I'm judging the value of a cryptocurrency by how many tangible goods and services I can extract from it. That is the entire function of a currency. I can pay for my VPN and my cloud servers with BTC. I can meet up with people locally and sell BTC for cash [effortlessly]. I can't do that with any other cryptocurrency.

I'm not at all judging the technical merits of one cryptocurrency versus another.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#85

Post by oelmekki »

oelmekki wrote: post #71
nnfy wrote: post #2

Would a vendor like coinbase be subject to any legal repercussions if its employees purchased litecoin before the option to purchase went live, and the price spiked?

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. So it seems only fair that someone working in a company could benefit from knowing what is going on there : they would have a part of the pie, for once.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#86

Post by sanswork »

charsifood wrote: post #84
sanswork wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't judge any cryptocurrency by the number of stores that accept it because they all fail at that. Go to any random city and you can probably count the number of locations that take bitcoin on one hand and half of those probably haven't done a transaction in so long that they won't remember how to do it.

I'm judging the value of a cryptocurrency by how many tangible goods and services I can extract from it. That is the entire function of a currency. I can pay for my VPN and my cloud servers with BTC. I can meet up with people locally and sell BTC for cash [effortlessly]. I can't do that with any other cryptocurrency. I'm not at all judging the technical merits of one cryptocurrency versus another.

>I can pay for my VPN and my cloud servers with BTC.

Provided you use one of a limited selection of providers compared to using credit cards.

>I can meet up with people locally and sell BTC for cash [effortlessly]

Depending on where you are located.

>I can't do that with any other cryptocurrency.

You can do both of those things much more easily using traditional currencies. In both those cases you are getting a worse deal than just using normal cash for the services desired.

That's why you can't judge any cryptocurrency for that because they are all universally shit at it.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#87

Post by hasch »

dvdhsu wrote: post #23

Is there interest in a cryptocurrency index fund? The idea is you could just buy an index fund composed of, say, 50% BTC, 20% ETH, 15% LTC and 15% ZEC. I'm fairly certain that one of these cryptocurrencies will 10 or 100x in value over the next 5 years, but buying each one individually is just such a pain. Would you invest? In reality, we'd probably buy the top 10 coins weighted according to some measure, and rebalan…

Someone could always go to https://coinmarketcap.com/ and (sorted by market cap) buy the top N weighted by their current market cap relative to each other. I would say there is no real need for an index at all.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#88

Post by hasch »

bitcoinstudent wrote: post #32
mrb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin doesn't need to be perfect to remain #1. Just needs to be good enough.

I don't think that's really true... it was true for things like TCP, http, and email, which had massive network effects and little competition at their start. But Bitcoin is already only 60% of the total market cap of all cryptos. While bitcoin was already a monopoly, Ethereum came from nowhere to become 1/3 its size (and growing). "Good enough" is not good enough here. Competition is alive and well. Without active d…

with ETH you have to understand, that a lot of capital influx goes into ICOs. They need ETH as a token. It will take months or even a year to play out these ICOs and not all of them will be profitable. That's when the ICO bubble deflates.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#89

Post by tscs37 »

tudorconstantin wrote: post #38
pferdone wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to hear your opinion why you think Bitcoin is more secure than Ethereum.

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

DAO wasn't a protocol anymore than a Bitcoin Client is part of the protocol.

It was an application that failed.

Re: Coinbase adds support for Litecoin

#90

Post by devrandomguy »

Svekax wrote: post #78
nkuttler wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> competent Bitcoin broker That's the entire problem. Bitcoin has existed for eight years, and for a long time virtually nobody knew about it. Not a single bitcoin broker could demonstrate competency yet. It's better to stay out of this market if you think you can trust them.

Looks like the parent uncovered an HN bug. I'm guessing that they posted an unbalanced asterisk, which resulted in the "reply" link being italicized, and an empty message.
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