I'm still very new to crypto and I don't really know much about other coins. I'm just trying to learn. So shit coins aren't built in a similar way as bitcoin, with increased difficulty when they are minted? Are they just being thrown out endlessly with degrading value, like printing fiat currency?
Discussion
Some are supply-limited and proof-of-work, some are not.
Even most of the good ones are mostly just "bitcoin clone, but without merchant adoption or field-tested security".
Some have unique features. "Privacy coins" like Monero (XMR) use mathematical techniques to prevent tracking users on the blockchain, which has driven widespread adoption in privacy-conscious online markets.
ETH has on-chain "self-executing contracts", which was revolutionary when it came out, but its supply is controlled by a privately owned corporation, so thats a hard no from me.
Maybe one day an altcoin will dethrone Bitcoin, as bitcoin dethroned HashCash et al, but most probably most altcoins will crash and burn, while the few good ones continue to be used alongside Bitcoin to do things bitcoin does not (like privacy).
Namaste
>ETH has on-chain "self-executing contracts", which was revolutionary when it came out, but its supply is controlled by a privately owned corporation, so thats a hard no from me.
I don't know why you would make something up like this. the founders and the ethereum foundation combined own less than half a percent of the circulating supply. ETH ownership is more distributed than bitcoin's hashrate. the supply is controlled by two factors: ETH is created through staking rewards, and it is destroyed when transaction fees are burned. when network usage is high enough it becomes deflationary.
vitalik doesn't have a big red button on his desk that can print ETH out of thin air. the behavior of the supply is controlled by network consensus and market participation. it's not nearly as cartoonish as you suggested.
Rhetorical exaggeration, its true, but control is less about stakes and more about code and politics. ETH bothers me there, so I don't own any.
But I love Solidity. A pity none of the competition have gained much traction.
maybe rootstock can become upgraded from a semi-permissioned sidechain to a ZK rollup, and you can have the EVM without ETH. but it would most likely require bitcoin to have at least one soft fork. I wouldn't hold your breath.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain. It helps a lot.
From my limited knowledge, Doge for instance has no supply cap, and verify a block every two minutes I believe. 10k coin per block reward. Admittedly, that's actually better monetary policy than the dollar. (It's not absolute scarcity, it's inflationary by nature and way less decentralized than BTC, but it's probably less corruptable than fiat.) And XRP is a closed loop system where all the tokens were minted on the outset of their protocol. There's everything you could imagine I would think. Some copy the BTC script and just nuance it, like Bitcoin cash (I think) has 4 MB blocks where BTC has 1 MB blocks.
Some use proof of work, some use proof of stake, some burn tokens to send transactions (which I think is true for xrp)
It's a big wild world of all sorts of new tricks people are figuring out. I actually am not hardnosed about BTC being the only one that will succeed, it just does it better and did it first.
Thank you so much for taking the time to explain. Really appreciate it!
