[Klathmon]

And I could make thousands of kinds of physical coins next month, it doesn't mean physical money is worth less...

I feel like I'm crazy here, how is the ability to make a new "thing" make something else less valuable? A toyota isn't worth less because I can make a new car company next week, Facebook isn't worth less because I could make a clone of it tomorrow, A company stock shouldn't be consitered "worthless" just because I can create a new company tomorrow...

What am I missing? Why would the ability to make something new affect the rarity of an unrelated "thing"? Why isn't the value determined by what that "thing" does, how it does it, the number of people that believe in it's ability to do the thing it says it will do, and more? Why do you think it matters that someone can create a new currency?

[UncleMeat]

There are two kinds of rarity. There is rarity of the thing itself and rarity of things like the thing. Consider an extremely rare thing used for some industrial application. It is very expensive because there is little supply. But if there is another thing that functions just as well then the price of the first thing drops, even though the supply of that thing is fixed.

The only differences between bitcoin and bitcoin2 after a fork are the miners. If the number of miners is sufficiently large to be confident in transactions, original bitcoins and bitcoin2s are just as good at being used for whatever. This is even worse if bitcoin2 has some new desirable properties that bitcoin does not have.

[Klathmon]

I agree to some point. You can't forget the network effect, which in many cases is the most important factor (it's easy to make a clone of twitter, but good luck getting everyone to switch). Because Bitcoin is basically just a way to ensure that a group of people are doing math with a given set of rules, if you get a copy with slightly different rules, you need that group to agree to them to give it value. It doesn't really have many analogies in the physical world that I can think of, the closest is actual physical currencies.

Just because I can make a "Flollar" doesn't mean that it's going to take a bite out of USD. I have nothing to backup my flollar, no users, no army, nothing. It's the same way with cryptocurrencies. Just because you can fork bitcoin doesn't mean you'll take a chunk of it's value. You still need to provide all of the other things that make bitcoin valuable that's not in the codebase (decentralization, userbase, vendors/exchanges, software that works with it, time with real usage to show that it's secure (or at least that your changes are secure), and just trust that it will stand the test of time). And even if you do that, bitcoin can and will evolve over time. If you start to eat bitcoin's lunch, there is no reason why they can't just fold your changes into bitcoin proper. If it's in everyone's best interest to have the feature, then consensus will be easy to achieve and the network can be upgraded. In a way, it's similar to forks of an open source project. In the vast majority of cases, a fork of a codebase doesn't reduce the number of users of a project. In some cases it does, but it normally doesn't happen overnight, and takes years and years to have people transition over (take openoffice vs libreoffice for example).

All that being said, I do think that bitcoin is in a bad place right now, and they are dangerously close to allowing another currency to jump up as the main contender, but I don't believe that any of the top 10 or so have actually solved the scaling problem that bitcoin currently has without getting rid of the biggest benefits of a cryptocurrency.

[root_axis]

> And I could make thousands of kinds of physical coins next month

No, you couldn't, not without literally tons of raw material, heavy machinery and infrastructure to mint the coins, laborers to run the operation, time to process the raw materials, and a practical mechanism to circulate the coins. These are serious barriers to the creation of physical money, unlike cryptocurrency which can be instantly and effortlessly minted in unlimited quantities by a single individual and easily distributed over the internet. There is no comparison.

> A toyota isn't worth less because I can make a new car company next week

This analogy makes no sense. A Toyota is valuable because it has an inherent utility in its ability to provide its owner with an effective method of transportation, crypo-tokens (as opposed to the network itself) have no inherent utility because they are not actually a thing and do not exist independently of the ledger that qualifies their distribution. Certainly, if any single individual could generate an unlimited supply of "effective transportation" instantly at near zero cost, the value of toyota's would very quickly decline.

> Facebook isn't worth less because I could make a clone of it tomorrow

First of all, no you couldn't. You could create a much crappier version of Facebook with an unmaintainable code-base that doesn't scale and supports a minuscule fraction of Facebook's feature set, and even that would cost you time, money, and effort. Even if you could just git clone Facebook's code, you still wouldn't be able to get it running and keep it running without a team of senior dev, ops, and network engineers, plus an annual server bill in the hundreds of thousands at the absolute minimum.

> A company stock shouldn't be consitered "worthless" just because I can create a new company tomorrow...

The point is that you can't just "create a new company" tomorrow that is in any way comparable to a successful business, otherwise everyone would do it... not to say that some don't try, but the ash heap of history is littered with the remains of companies that thought they could replicate a successful company's business model only to find out that its actually not that simple.

[Klathmon]

>The point is that you can't just "create a new company" tomorrow that is in any way comparable to a successful business

That's my point exactly! Just because you can replicate the "class" of thing, doesn't mean you can replicate the thing...

Just like how a company stock isn't just a piece of paper that anyone can photocopy, a cryptocurrency isn't just the code that runs it. It's the users, the track record of security, the amount of vendors and exchanges that use it, the amount of centralization/decentralization to it's development team, the amount and maturity of implementations of the software, and any number of other intangible things.

Simply making a new cryptocurrency is exactly the same as making a new company, or a new facebook, or a new toyota, or a new anything. It doesn't make you a direct competitor any more than my "klathmonbook.com" is a direct competitor to facebook just because I replicated some (or even all) of the functionality.

>the ash heap of history is littered with the remains of companies that thought they could replicate a successful company's business model only to find out that its actually not that simple.

So is the pile of scamcoins and poorly thought out implementations that have already collapsed within months of their creation. Give the space some more time, and I bet you'll see a lot more of them fail, because just like how creating a company isn't just clicking a button, creating a successful cryptocurrency isn't a simple thing either. But I still don't think that it means that all cryptocurrencies are worthless because anyone can enter the space.

[root_axis]

> Simply making a new cryptocurrency is exactly the same as making a new company, or a new facebook, or a new toyota, or a new anything.

No, it isn't at all similar, because business are specialized entities with specific properties that cannot be easily replicated, unlike a crypto-token ledger which can be instantly and effortlessly replicated with identical qualities and capabilities at near zero cost.

> So is the pile of scamcoins and poorly thought out implementations that have already collapsed within months of their creation

The critical distinction that you're not seeing is the fact that it costs nothing to create a scamcoin unlike a business which can cost the creator everything if it fails. You're also ignoring the fact that a business has to effectively serve the market for it to even be comparable to a competitor, you can't just incorporate a business, buy a bunch of ads and start pulling in money, you need to actually do something that generates wealth, unlike crypto-token ledgers which require nothing except for people to run the code.

[Klathmon]

Why do you think it "costs nothing" to create a successful crypto-token?

I can create a business with a hundred dollars and a trip to the local government building, but that doesn't mean i'll be successful, or that i'm a competitor to facebook. Just like how anyone can fork a cryptocurrency, that doesn't make them successful or a competitor to bitcoin.

And I disagree about how creating a business can cost the creator everything, isn't limiting liability one of the biggest reasons to start a company? So that you don't lose everything if it doesn't work.

But I think you need to really look at what it takes to build a cryptocurrency, let alone a successful one. You seem to be ignoring my point that a currency isn't just the code, but the network, the users, the trust, the amount of hardware and software written for it, the number of implementations, the amount of acceptance at vendors, the number of reputable exchanges, and the amount of decentralization. Replicating all of that isn't going to be any easier than getting everyone to switch from facebook to "klathmonbook" would be.

The fact that there are hundreds of cryptocurrencies created all the damn time that aren't overtaking bitcoin proves my point. If you replace the word "business" with "cryptocurrency" in your last paragraph, it still holds true. A good cryptocurrency needs to provide a benefit, and in bitcoin's case (at least to me) that benefit is decentralization, "push based" payments, the ability to be your own bank, a network of users and vendors that trust and use it, and not needing to trust anyone to transact with them using it.

[root_axis]

> Why do you think it "costs nothing" to create a successful crypto-token?

Because "success" for a crypto-token requires near zero effort from the entity deploying the ledger, all that is necessary is to rebrand forked code and pump enough hype into it so that people start buying it. The billion dollar ICO phenomenon is a concrete example of exactly what I'm referring to and that's just one blockchain with a second layer of abstraction on top. If Donald Trump forked litecoin tomorrow and told all his followers to buy the best cryptocurrency ever and that bitcoin was a fake-news token supported by the Obamas, Trump-Coin would be within the top 5 crypto-tokens literally over night.

> I can create a business with a hundred dollars and a trip to the local government building

And if Trump went on TV and pumped that business every day for a year, it would be a certain failure because a "business" is not a clerical detail that you can effortlessly replicate by filing paperwork with the government, it's an organization that embodies the implementation of a concrete business process, it requires that the business owner actually do something.

> the network, the users, the trust, the amount of hardware and software written for it, the number of implementations, the amount of acceptance at vendors, the number of reputable exchanges, and the amount of decentralization

Right... but there is nothing marrying any of that to any specific implementation of a compatible blockchain, this was particularly apparent with the BTC vs BCH fork where companies didn't even know whether or not they should recognize the new ledger that was instantly created out of thin air... but ultimately they decided they would recognize it and suddenly there is "double" the total amount of bitcoin that existed previously. These kind of things can't happen with a business because you can't instantly fork a functioning business with 5 minutes and a PR.

[Klathmon]

You need to do some more research, because the way you describe things is not how they really are.

The success of a crypto requires much more than just forking and publishing, it's not just hype based except for the scams and fly-by-night operations.

And there aren't "double" the Bitcoin any more than a photocopy of dollar bill doubles the amount of money in circulation.

There is a new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Cash, but that is not the same as Bitcoin. Just because they have similar names doesn't make then the same, just because they come from the same codebase doesn't make them the same.

Unless you also think that creating a successful browser is just hitting fork and publish, or creating a successful operating system is just hitting fork and publish, or creating a new Facebook is just copying the functionality.

If it's really that easy, then please take over Bitcoin yourself, as there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars to be made here, surely if it's that easy you can handle it?