Monday, January 13, 2014

Serious New Competition for Bitcoin

I still consider Bitcoin a transmission mechanism rather than a money, that said, at this level there appears to be emerging a significant new competitor to Bitcoin, Zerocoin.

I still see a problem with Zerocoin, in that, like Bitcoin, I believe it will have a problem being adopted on a major scale because of eventual government regulations, but from an anonymity perspective, and dark trades, it appears that Zerocoin has a major edge.

Forbes has the details here.

5 comments:

  1. ZeroCoin is exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops since competition in currencies is a good thing. Bitcoin and ZeroCoin can serve different market needs and it will be interesting to see how much market share ZeroCoin captures.

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    1. Zerocoin... it's a bubble!
      Got there before Wenzel.

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  2. ZeroCoin is fascinating from a crypto perspective (the cryptographic primitives used by Bitcoin are actually pretty basic; most of the thought went into solving various distributed consensus problems), but it has major scalability issues that still need to be addressed. ZeroCoin transactions are very large; they take a lot of computational power to verify; ZeroCoin requires the use of a cryptographic accumulator that currently cannot be pruned and requires one-time initialization by a trusted party; and the protocol relies heavily on cutting-edge cryptographic primitives that may or may not turn out to be secure. As for the advantages you cited (anonymity and dark trades), there are a number of innovations going on in this area in Bitcoin, some of which can be implemented using only existing features of Bitcoin (e.g. CoinJoin and CoinSwap) and others that represent more radical avenues of research (like CoinWitness).

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  3. Actually, there seems to be a TON of competition in crypto-currency. http://bitinfocharts.com/

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  4. Great, another crypto-currency to waste money on. let's all invest in another super-volatile fiat "currency." yawn.

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