1.
No altcoins solve the 1MB transaction limit, so those who think that the limit can be solved by moving onto litecoins will be sorely disappointed. It's unlikely that altcoins are going to be innovators in that space, either, because most don't have the development staff to implement an alternative. They just clone the latest bitcoin code and integrate it with their own.
I'd keep an eye out if an altcoin appears that solves this problem.
2.
I've been wondering if there may be more money to be made in litecoins than in bitcoins. Litecoins are at 10.569 right now, or slightly below 0.02 bitcoins. Altcoins tend to lag behind bitcoins during the bubbles, as people see the high price of bitcoins, get disappointed that they missed the bubble, and then see that the price of altcoins is still low.
Last time, the litecoin ratio increased to 0.05 for a day at the end of November. With the highs in /u/moral_agent's bubble charts, that would suggest that litecoins would be worth $200 or $300 during this bubble, which is a 20x-30x gain, compared to a 10x gain with bitcoins.
I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where there is a bubble and the ratio declines below its current low 0.02, so I would imagine that, at worst, litecoin owners would be just as rich as bitcoin owners.
3.
How do you make something more valuable by restricting its usage? I heard it said that someone believes that the only way that bitcoin can survive is if it has small blocks. This argument just doesn't make sense to me. If there is enough bandwidth and disk space, which there is, why would there be any reason to retain small blocks other than to enrich big bankers?
This is like saying that a highway is more useful if it only has one lane instead of three, because we can just put higher tolls on it to keep traffic congestion down.
4.
Coinbase pays transaction fees when you send bitcoins from its wallets, and they are high enough to confirm on the first block. I didn't know this until yesterday. This is a nice way to save money rather than using the reference client. If you want to buy a bunch of stuff, send all your money to Coinbase with one fee, and then use Coinbase to pay the vendors individually so that they eat the multiple fees.
I might do this to clean up my wallet, which has 1100 inputs. That cleanup transaction will be expensive, but then I can resend one output back out to a new wallet to "pay ahead" before the blocks reach the size limit and fees rise as a result.
5.
Continuing with the "developers" discussion, my mining pool project lost a developer, who had not been contributing and who we agreed had to leave the project. Whereas I had completed my work two weeks ahead of schedule, that will cost us at least six weeks. Unfortunately, I can only control my own behavior.
I think that the characteristics of developers need to be expanded to have an additional "Z" axis on that two-dimensional chart. Currently, we have intelligence and laziness; I also think we need to add communication skills. Developers with poor communication skills hinder projects when they cover up issues that are affecting the project's schedule.
6.
I bought a bitcoin yesterday. I was looking at the market and the green line was straight up, whereas the red line to the right was almost flat to infinity. Of course, that can change quickly, but I think I will buy many more today.
In /r/bitcoin, I haven't seen such positive sentiment in months. You know that a bubble mentality is forming when people are saying things like "I put $200,000 in bitcoins" and "I'll go bankrupt if bitcoin crashes." The ultimate indicator is when people start paging /u/ToTheMoonGuy, which I saw a few times - a sure thing that people are feeling good.
7.
The reason why I plan to buy more bitcoins than the one I bought yesterday is because of the huge investments coming into the space from VCs and investment firms. These companies don't just throw around $30m funding rounds on technologies that have no promise. They make sure there is a business plan where these people can make money, and they are a lot smarter than I am.
8.
The killer app for bitcoin is money, which should be obvious to most everyone. Some people are trying to argue that the technology is more valuable for all sorts of other things like existence proofs and voting. Those other things are important, but there's a reason that money came first: because it is the most important and it is a requirement for all the other things to operate.
When you look at the venture capitalists funding the startups, look at where the two biggest investments have been: $25m to Coinbase, and $30m to Bitpay. There are also large investments into exchanges. There are a lot of neat things that bitcoin can do, but the money isn't going into developing contracts. It's being aimed at the simple buying, selling, wallet hosting, and merchant acceptance of bitcoins.
9.
People who argue that bitcoin isn't being adopted enough to fuel a bubble are looking at the wrong metric. Price has never been driven by adoption. Price is driven by publicity, speculation, and investment; adoption is a lagging indicator that occurs after bubbles. Overstock and Tigerdirect and the Sacramento Kings didn't adopt bitcoins before a bubble; they did so after one.
Other
- Days until July 24: 76**
- I edited this post to delete a duplicate copy below it, and to correct a sentence where I accidentally used the wrong person's name.