[Cryptography] Altcoin volume

[iang]

(apologies, very old reply slipped through cracks)

On 25/09/2017 23:30, Jerry Leichter wrote:

>>> There can only be one.  Who is winning?
>> There can only be one winner with zero semantics.  Two cryptos with zero semantics have no differentiation, and thus the primary mover is likely to squeeze all copies out through network effects.
> Why doesn't Gresham's Law apply?

Gresham's Law applies when the two units have substantial other 
purposes.  e.g., cows for eating or milking.  Electrons on a blockchain 
don't have much substantial other purpose.

But mining does - the electricity consumed in mining has lots of 
purposes.  So one could look at the differences in efficiency of the 
mining process.  If one is comparing say Bitcoin segwit and Bitcoin 
cash, then there is no real difference in their mining process so little 
to say.  One could predict that Ethereum & Bitcoin could compete on 
efficient mining, especially if PoS ever takes off.  Or wait until next 
year's DPOS contenders take flight.

iang



ps ...which segues into this old paper:
Bitcoin & Gresham's Law - the economic inevitability of Collapse
http://iang.org/papers/BitcoinBreachesGreshamsLaw.pdf

Which in short predicted that (a) Bitcoin was vulnerable to botnet / 
stolen electricity, and (b) entry into market by thieves would toxify 
the marketplace, and (c) Bitcoin would eventually collapse within if it 
toxified.

The paper was lambasted as with all anti-Bitcoin papers.  But it has 
recently emerged that the botnet threat of (a) was very real in the day 
(PG and I had no insight into actual data) and it was the ASICs that 
tipped the balance back to honest mining.  (Not the GPUs, they were 
equally vulnerable.)

For (b) check out the Bitcoin politics.  For (c), wait :-)