theymos

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Theymos's list of altcoins with some technical merit August 16, 2017, 08:48:22 PM

Last edit: August 17, 2017, 06:24:16 PM by theymos #1 Most altcoins are pure pump-and-dump, but there are a small handful that actually have some technical merit. I will list them here, according to my opinion/understanding.



For each one, I will assign a technical merit/innovation score. On the day of its release, Bitcoin would have had a score of 100, whereas a score of 0 would be a pure pump-and-dump built on stupid gimmicks and other nonsense -- I don't list these at all.



Ethereum



The way Ethereum's Solidity works is very interesting. It feels good to use, like magic. When people first see it, it often blows their minds. And there are several useful things that these super-smart contracts enable. However, Ethereum is built on the same technology as Bitcoin, and this technology has serious real-world issues and constraints. So although Solidity feels unlimited and magical:



- You often need to resort to centralization in order to do things, which completely defeats the point.

- Not all, but most real-world uses of Solidity can be done on Bitcoin, though it's more of a headache (like writing in assembly vs JavaScript).

- The Solidity "magic" hides many real-world issues which can still occur, such as reorgs, network-wide scaling issues, various possible attacks, etc. -- this is the cause of most of the various ETH disasters over the years.



ETH makes the power of cryptocurrency and smart contracts very plain to people, and I appreciate that, but it's not actually very good at being a cryptocurrency or securely/efficiently/reliably executing smart contracts.



Additionally, Ethereum ignored years of prior discussion regarding the safety issues of high-power scripts, and as a result of this and other design decisions, it faces serious security and scaling issues which have really started to become apparent as people try to actually use ETH for real applications. I can't see it surviving without major breaking changes or (more likely) an ever-increasing number of centralization band-aids.



Score: 1



IOTA



The tangle design is interesting and potentially useful, though I have several serious concerns about how it will actually work long-term:



- In order to achieve lasting, stable scalability, something will need to be done to limit bandwidth. Otherwise you still have the problem that everyone needs to download everyone else's transactions in order to be a trustless node, and this simply doesn't scale no matter what else you do. How can you split the network so that one node can trustlessly ignore a lot of the network's total transactions, but transactions are still possible cross-split? Doing something like splitting the graph into a cycle of semi-separate segments might be possible, but it seems very difficult to do this and maintain security+convergence.

- With a chain, if miners become evil and rewrite the last 6 blocks or something, everyone is going to notice and be affected, and so a unified response (PoW change, etc.) will be fairly easy. But with a graph, maybe an attacker could just nibble at the edges in such a way that 99.99% of users are able to think "well, it's not really my problem". In fact, it may not even be easily provable that an attack happened at all.

- I am not convinced that a tangle is stable/convergent/secure in all circumstances. Even if it seems to work under all tests so far, it may well fall apart under a clever but not-too-difficult attack, or perhaps even just on its own. The whole idea that transaction volume is what adds security to the tangle makes me uneasy, since an attacker can always produce unlimited fake transactions, while the network will only produce a "natural" number of transactions unless additional measures are taken to generate good fake transactions.



Possibly due to the IOTA devs sharing similar concerns, IOTA's software currently relies on centralized checkpointing.



Score: 0.1



Monero



Monero is the most widely-used highly-fungible cryptocurrency, and it has a good record for being secure/stable. Fungibility is very useful, and the way it is done in Monero is quite good, though it's not actually mathematically private; it is theoretically possible to get some identifying clues from Monero transactions without breaking any crypto, though it's very difficult, especially after RingCT. Its method of anonymization has very severe scaling downsides, however; Monero makes Bitcoin look Visa-scale.



Score: 4



Zcash



Zcash has the same general goals as Monero. Theoretically, it should have slightly better anonymity than Monero, but you have to trust that the key ceremony was completed honestly, and you also have to trust that there are no flaws in Zcash's more esoteric/experimental cryptography.



Creating/validating anonymous Zcash transactions requires several gigabytes of memory, which is very harmful to centralization and anonymity. If you're the only person who goes to the trouble of creating anonymous transactions, then you'll stick out like a sore thumb.



Zcash's underlying technology may have theoretical scaling advantages; probably better than Monero, and perhaps better than even Bitcoin. But I don't think that this is being exploited at all in the current code, and I haven't been able to find an exact quantification of how good it could be.



Score: 1



Unlisted



I have investigated these coins, and give them a score of zero. Note that when a family of coins have almost the same technical features/properties, I give the one which seems "most major" its proper score, and the rest in that family a score of zero. If you very much prefer a clone's economic properties, tiny changes in constants, etc., then it is maybe not unreasonable for you to prefer that clone instead, but in this post I am concerned with highlighting the most prominent examples of major innovation.



- Bcash - clone of Bitcoin

- Bytecoin - very similar to Monero, and Monero is bigger / more active, even though Bytecoin came first

- CounterParty - an even more inefficient/unscalable way of trying to do what Ethereum does

- Dogecoin - clone of Bitcoin

- ETC - clone of ETH

- Litecoin - clone of Bitcoin

- NMC - mostly a clone of Bitcoin with some not-very-innovative extras tacked on

- Ripple - 100% centralized

- zcoin - clone of zcash



Not yet evaluated



I haven't investigated these enough yet to give them scores.



- BitBay

- Blocknet

- Byteball

- CloakCoin

- Dash

- GameCredits

- Neo

- PIVX

- Waves

- XEM

- XtraBYtes

- Zencash