Looked really deep into alt coins the last few days, I checked also XMR which isn't fast or scalable. It's now fast because of the little use compared to BTC and ETH.

Highly scalable because of their centralized nature are Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM), Stellar started as a Ripple fork. I finally went for Stellar because of the founder (he founded and sold MtGox and founded Ripple), more potential to grow because of lower cap, the complete feature set and some recent announcements (such as Kik/Kin moving from ETH to XLM, Singal-founder will use XLM for his MobileCoin).

I might buy Ripple after some correction though. Ripple has a different positioning but a good setup too. The cap is already very high, close to ETH's.

Edit: Why the downvote?

Edit2: changed that Stellar started as a Ripple fork

I haven't voted on your comment in either direction, but if I had to guess why someone else did, maybe it's because you're speculating about what coin to buy in order to make a profit.

HN seems to me like the place to discuss the tech behind a coin, not whether or not to speculate on it for monetary gain.

Personally, I wouldn't say Monero "isn't fast or scalable." Perhaps it's not compared to other coins, but compared to Bitcoin it sure seems fast and scaleable. (Again, I didn't downvote your comment for disagreeing with that.)

> ...but compared to Bitcoin it sure seems fast and scaleable.

Every fully decentralized coin hits at an early point the ceiling and won't scale. Vitalik Buterin expressed this recently. So, why should XMR be faster?

Besides, the anonymity is nice but just pipe your <put any coin here> through some random exchanges and you have the same effect, so it's really not that killer feature to create a new huge ecosystem. I like XMR's tech a lot and I think it's not too bad to have XMR in your portfolio, the question is if it has the potential to be one of the next major coins in the long-term (3-5 years). There, I rather see other candidates with a much higher probability, there is just too much good competition which came up the recents months/years.

> just pipe your <put any coin here> through some random exchanges and you have the same effect

It doesn't have the same effect. Blockchain analysis would be able to see right through that.

> Blockchain analysis would be able to see right through that.

How?

Monero is less scalable because you have to store all tx outputs (key images) instead of just unspent tx outputs, since Monero does not know which outputs are fully spent (for larger ring sizes). And these must all be stored in fast random access memory for double spend prevention. That’s an ever-growing pile of data!

While in Bitcoin you can offload older utxos to a slower memory, because the access pattern is “utxos die young”. Also, utxo set grows much slower or even can be stable (“1 utxo per person”) while tx volume grows forever.

Bitcoin scales way better than Monero or Zcash (that has the same requirement to store all “nullifiers” to prevent double spending).

> fast random access memory

That term is misleading and implies actual RAM-type memory is needed, which is untrue. Monero scales quite well using a database on SSD up to transaction rates far in excess of anything Bitcoin can or will realistically handle now or any time soon (certainly hundreds and possibly thousands of tx/sec).

Likewise the total data that needs to be stored grows slowly at realistic tx rates, roughly 80 GB/year at 10 tx/sec. That's similar to the rate of growth of the bitcoin blockchain (unpruned) and well within the hardware capabilities of both existing cheap SSDs and even more so the visible trajectory for future cheap SSDs.

I'm not sure any blockchain scales "well," so it's like comparing turtle speeds. Likely they'll all be moving to lightening network for scalability, so it's a waste of time comparing them. The factors that are interesting for blockchains are immutability, fungibility and censorship resistance, and due to privacy, Monero wins 2/3. As for network security, that can change as more people appreciate how privacy influences cashlike properties--though I think Bitcoin will end up being a sort of digital gold going forward, which isn't a bad market to contral as far as price evaluation.

Nice, this is good in-depth explanation of why XMR isn't scalable.

this comment is somewhat tangental but from what I have seen the tech does not necessarily determine the value of a crypto. things like network effect and marketing seem to make a larger difference at least at first. do any end users care about the tech stack of myspace vs facebook? it will be interesting to see if technical merits win out over the long term in the cyptocurrency space because it was originally largely comprised of tech people.

>he founded and sold MtGox

Are you serious? Sold MtGox? That's how you remember him? He was steering that particular ship when it hit an iceberg.

IDK if Jed hit the iceberg, from Wikipedia:

McCaleb sold the site to French developer Mark Karpelès, who was living in Japan, in March 2011.

On 19 June 2011, a security breach of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange caused the nominal price of a bitcoin to fraudulently drop to one cent on the Mt. Gox exchange, after a hacker allegedly used credentials from a Mt. Gox auditor's compromised computer to transfer a large number of bitcoins illegally to himself.

I believe the dark web market alphabay also allowed the use of monero, motivated by improved privacy over Bitcoin. Performance wasn't really impacted since not many vendors on alphabay accepted it

Stellar started as a fork of Ripple, but has no code in common with Ripple any more. See Jed's comment in this thread: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/29815/what-is-th...

Maybe seen as a shill.

I think the tech and the team behind Ripple is positioning it very well for the future. Check out Ripple's Payment Channels. They scale up to match Visa's transaction levels.

If you want fast and cheap have a look at RaiBlocks (XRB).

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/raiblocks/

https://raiblocks.net/

A cryptocurrency whose whole supply was distributed through a faucet of solving captchas from a link at Bitcointalk...?

I have zero idea of technology of RaiBlocks but how it gets distributed, has nothing to do with it. What am I missing?

Monero and associated technologies have no scaling solution on the table. It is a problem.

Monero’s tx fees are low due to lack of use, they go up way faster than bitcoin’s even with RuffCT and adaptive blocksizes.

Would you say that a lot of smaller coins tout their quickness and cheapness as a benefit but it is simply because of their low usage? I have heard similar about bitcoin cash.

Its difficult to say. Having low usage would make most reasonable coins cheap and quick; but does not give us any information of how they would behave at scale.

In the case of bitcoin cash in particular; it would probably still be fine at bitcoin scale. This is because its main difference is removing an artificial limit within Bitcoin. As this limit was set without an empirical basis (and bitcoin showed no signs of degradation as it approached the limit), you would probably be able to scale the block size up some without causing problems.

How much you can scale is still at question. Here [0] is a talk about this very question. Using a small testnet (~6 miner nodes and 12 clients) they were able to achieve 500tx/s with a 1GB block with relativly minor optimizations of the standard Bitcoin implementation (the final bottle neck here is propagation delay reaching 10 minutes). This is, in my opinion, an upper bound on what the Bitcoin protocol can handle.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDF8bOEqXt4&t=4079

Not the parent but I would say yes, definitely. It’s easy to make a cryptocurrency where there is less demand for transactions than can fit in in a small block. The real challenge is when the demand seriously ramps up, which only bitcoin (core) and ethereum have seen.

I believe a drop-in replacement called Bulletproofs is being developed to reduce the transaction size. It's been a while since I looked into what else is being worked on.

Smaller transaction sizes with adaptive block sizes seems like a good scaling solution. Is there something I'm missing?

The fee in terms of XMR actually reduces when there's more transactions. However if its value in terms of USD rises, then the fee in terms of USD still might go up with more adoption. Perhaps that's something the developers can adjust in their regularly-scheduled hardforks.

I could totally be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I read that Bulletproofs only reduce transaction size by about 40%. While that's still a nice decrease, it won't get the project to the scalability that it needs. It may buy them a years worth of time at the pace the transactions are growing before they'll need a better solution.

I just skimmed through their subreddit, and it appears to be between an 80% to 90% reduction.

That still makes it a little larger than the average Bitcoin transaction, but the mentality there seems to be that privacy has its price. While next-to-free is preferable, I don't disagree.

Thanks for the clarification! And yes, I agree as well that privacy does have a price. However, with transactions growing tremendously with the increased popularity and speculation of crypto-assets, there will be a point where enough is enough. I hope that a further iteration for greater efficiency will be found in the future.

Yes so we could imagine a new upper bound of 100 tx/s

This isnt future proof but should alleviate some pressures while internet and widespread computational infrastructure improves

Sidechains are on the research roadmap you can see it here: https://getmonero.org/design-goals/

Yeah for real, I cant wait for the day a criminal gets busted because they used an AML/KYC enabled payment channel run by Goldman Sachs on bitcoin’s lightning network