Lessons Learned from Alt Coins

[FreeTrade]

This is a very interesting question, I'm pretty busy for the rest of the weekend, but I'll definitely try to think about this more completely next week. Some very obvious things...

1. POW - It's clear POW or a POW hybrid is the most popular. (Given their success despite massive relative waste.)

2. Distribution - Having distribution that is perceived as very wide and very fair. (This is hard to achieve as sharedrops have shown to always crush price - free money - but other methods might not be wide enough .)

3. Credible Utility or utility prospects - What moves those markets is when a big payment processor or exchange adds them or they develop tools centred around utility. Then of course ideally people do actually start making use of it. (In DGC it was widely used for tipping and sharing, Dash for privacy, BTC gambling and silk road initially etc.)

Auroracoin demonstrated a few concepts at once when it hit a high > $1 Billion

Credibly Utility. It among many presented the idea that the way to get a coin to have genuine utility and widespread use was to bootstrap it within a large existing community, in this case Iceland.
Delayed Distribution.  The distribution that could lead to credible utility would only come at a future date, so people were trading a very limited supply and inflating the price. (Also demonstrated with Ethercoin directly before Ethereum launch.)
Sharedrops don't work well. Once the coins did start getting given away and supply came on the market the price was crushed.

4. A unique selling point - For BTSX it was the idea that a currency could be profitable and not wasteful and that it would have BitAssets.

Good advice here too

[FreeTrade]

What lessons can we learn about how to launch a successful alt-coin?  Perhaps we could use this information to help us improve BTS marketing.

If you wanted to "create an alt coin" and only a "coin", not a DAC... how would you market it to maximize its market cap to be higher than DOGE.

Lesson: Mining is the "fairest" (if thats possible) distribution method invented, and the method that best prevents whales from dominating the price. Case in point: spawning 30 million BTS to AE.

Lesson: Focus on one great idea (The DEX) and get it finished without succumbing to inventor's ADD.

I agree with these two points, and would expand a little . .

1. Fairness (Distribution fairness)
2. Transparency (Easily seen to be fair)
3. Simple (Bitcoin + 1 New Idea)
4. Fixed in nature (No moving the goalposts after launch)
5. Supply constrained (These days, you gotta figure out a way to avoid the killer pump'n' dump)

Dan, I think you're very brilliant, but way ahead of the market. You would have been better launching 4 or 5 different alts, all focused on different ideas - not that I saw that 2 years ago either.

[merivercap]

re: Dogecoin

It was popular in the US before, but doesn't seem as active here anymore.  Oddly enough China seems like the big player.  Nearly 70% of the price spike volume was coming from BTC38.

Here is a thread on how Doge might have been introduced to many in China: https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/3o2t5x/dogecoin_and_china/

People are familiar with Doge in China and that's huge.  There might even be a cultural connection with the Shiba Inu..lol

BTW a small amount of Dogecoin popped up in my BTC38 account so there might be a marketing push going on right now.....maybe they are giving people Doge, spreading the word and helping pump up prices..  Anyways China markets are getting crushed and crypto is generally a good safe haven asset anyways and so it's a good opportunity to promote Doge this way. 

Can someone from China comment?  BTW what is going on with the Yuan?  It seems the government is trying to support it by selling a lot of US dollar reserves.  There seems to have been massive debt money created the last few years in China as well and a lot of it is probably going bad...anyways.

Takeaway?  It seems China is very important. 

[CLains]

The main lesson is this: The whole cryptocurrency space is a feather in a global storm. Without comprehending that radical change in valuation might be irrational from our PoV, we'll be unable to think clearly on all levels.

[btswildpig]

alt coins normally don't allow to issue more coins at will/shareholders'vote  , even mining requires hardware/factory investment that is not easily sold .

capital like that . otherwise , it will become ATM for the devs(whoever they're , which company they'are).no capital is stupid enough to be the ATM of some guy they didn't know who only put up  intelligence other than risky investment .

[CoinHoarder]

I have thought about this before and recently came up with an improved design. Thanks for reminding me to update it.

This is only intended to cover the distribution part of the problem... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=675333.0

A. Far advance warning of an altcoin's distribution/fundraising, with a clear objective and roadmap for the project, and a set timeframe for the distribution/fundraising
B. A working closed source beta, to be open-sourced after the original distribution period
C. PoW distribution (50% of the genesis stake)
Ca. Use several different mining algorithms, with each having an their own separate difficulty and the same chance to find the next block (implemented in several coins.. MyriadCoin was the first)
Cb. Use at least one algorithm per different types of mining hardware (one for Scrypt ASICs, one for SHA256 ASICs, one for CPUs, one for ATI GPUs, one for NVIDIA GPUs, etc..)
Cc. The point of this is to allow people with all types of minin hardware to participate so it is inclusive of everyone.
D. A regular IPO distribution (50% of the genesis stake)
Da. This is to allow people to participate in the initial distribution that do not want to hassle with mining equipment.
E. Launch said closed source beta into the wild after the distribution/fund-raising has occurred and switch to PoS
F. To mitigate claims of having an unfair PoS distribution to early insiders...
Fa. Have an annual auction governed by smart contracts
Fb. The amount of tokens sold in the annual auctions should be reduced each year until eventually there are no more auctions or coins released
Fc. This is intended to mimic the block reduction scheme and distribution of most PoW currencies

[ffwong]

Let people mine the altcoin. Of course, some will dump it for bitcoin or fiat. But some will keep it to see if the coin price rises. In this sense, mining is a kind of marketing tool. Currently, bitshares cannot be mined, but ethereum can be mined.

Since the launch of ethereum, mining blogs (like cryptomining-blog) keep having news on ethereum and helping ethereum promote.

[Empirical1.2]

This is a very interesting question, I'm pretty busy for the rest of the weekend, but I'll definitely try to think about this more completely next week. Some very obvious things...

1. POW - It's clear POW or a POW hybrid is the most popular. (Given their success despite massive relative waste.)

2. Distribution - Having distribution that is perceived as very wide and very fair. (This is hard to achieve as sharedrops have shown to always crush price - free money - but other methods might not be wide enough .)

3. Credible Utility or utility prospects - What moves those markets is when a big payment processor or exchange adds them or they develop tools centred around utility. Then of course ideally people do actually start making use of it. (In DGC it was widely used for tipping and sharing, Dash for privacy, BTC gambling and silk road initially etc.)

Auroracoin demonstrated a few concepts at once when it hit a high > $1 Billion

Credibly Utility. It among many presented the idea that the way to get a coin to have genuine utility and widespread use was to bootstrap it within a large existing community, in this case Iceland.
Delayed Distribution.  The distribution that could lead to credible utility would only come at a future date, so people were trading a very limited supply and inflating the price. (Also demonstrated with Ethercoin directly before Ethereum launch.)
Sharedrops don't work well. Once the coins did start getting given away and supply came on the market the price was crushed.

4. A unique selling point - For BTSX it was the idea that a currency could be profitable and not wasteful and that it would have BitAssets.

[Akado]

Have a roadmap and stick to the plan.
Announce new stuff once it's 100% complete.
Having many different features is not as important as having utility. It needs to have practical use.
Having a good community backing it up.
Fair initial distribution.
Known devs. So many scams already people might not take it seriously if the devs aren't known or have a good reputation.
Like anything in life, having the right connections, knowing the right people and having many contacts.
I think these are underrated but videos showing it's practical use along with tutorials, etc. This allows anyone to "try" it without having to download it first. It can give a really nice feel.
Communication. This is very important.

[btswolf]

Random thoughts...
Give it utility, not necessarily something useful.
Let something magic happen, People need to smile when they use it.
Make it interactive. Make it a game. If X people make a transaction at the same time and luckily hit the same block, they got rewarded.
Link Tokens to Pictures, make it collectible.
Do something for the society.
Touch peoples hearts.
Let it "rain" puppies.
Facts and stats do not matter so much.
It is not about the coin, it is about Tools, Apps, fancy and unique stuff.
Give people tools to be creative.
Make them feel the coin is alive.
Make it fun.
...
Edit: a single tool that goes viral can bring you more attention then every marketing campaign could ever do.

[Tuck Fheman]

What lessons can we learn about how to launch a successful alt-coin?  Perhaps we could use this information to help us improve BTS marketing.

If you wanted to "create an alt coin" and only a "coin", not a DAC... how would you market it to maximize its market cap to be higher than DOGE.

Create a new grown ups forum with fewer restrictions on what can be said (even though that whole freedom of speech thing is so 1970, allegedly) and one that allows tokens to actually be given out without threats of bans or other users complaining about someone giving away tokens by actually using what was the best thing to come along to BitShares (Sharebits) instead of complaining about people using it until people simply stop using it much at all. I guess I'll crawl back in my hole for a few more weeks now so I don't get any more threats of bans or told to stop spreading UIA's around freely until that happens. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#nofunhereonlycomplainingsotheresmycomplainttoo

[speedy]

What lessons can we learn about how to launch a successful alt-coin?  Perhaps we could use this information to help us improve BTS marketing.

If you wanted to "create an alt coin" and only a "coin", not a DAC... how would you market it to maximize its market cap to be higher than DOGE.

Lesson: Mining is the "fairest" (if thats possible) distribution method invented, and the method that best prevents whales from dominating the price. Case in point: spawning 30 million BTS to AE.

Lesson: Focus on one great idea (The DEX) and get it finished without succumbing to inventor's ADD.

[monsterer]

What lessons can we learn about how to launch a successful alt-coin?  Perhaps we could use this information to help us improve BTS marketing.

If you wanted to "create an alt coin" and only a "coin", not a DAC... how would you market it to maximize its market cap to be higher than DOGE.

Be first, or be lucky.

[bytemaster]

What lessons can we learn about how to launch a successful alt-coin?  Perhaps we could use this information to help us improve BTS marketing.

If you wanted to "create an alt coin" and only a "coin", not a DAC... how would you market it to maximize its market cap to be higher than DOGE.