Bitcoin and the Road to Obsolescence. Napoleon Bonaparte once quipped that fame and glory is fleeting but obscurity is forever.
As it turns out, that’s a fitting description of bitcoin’s illustrious past and probable future. Besides wild price swings, government bans, massive security breaches, and fraud, the $8 billion bitcoin market’s latest hurdle is something nobody (except for Marc Rich) can escape: taxes. The latest IRS ruling that now taxes bitcoins as property and not currency is significant. It means that virtual bitcoin miners are forced to include the fair market value of all their bitcoins as gross income on the date of receipt. This is exactly the kind of adverse tax ruling that nobody in the bitcoin religion, especially Andreessen Horowitz, wanted to see. The second wave: forking the Bitcoin Protocol and what it means for the future of money. Excerpted from Carl Miller: “A programmer can piggyback on the bitcoin code, customise it, and within a day give you your own currency.
There are around 70 cryptocurrencies currently being traded in reasonable quantities. At the moment, most have tinkered around with bitcoin to offer some kind of additional edge. YaCoin - Your digital currency for fast and easy transactions. Novacoin. Peercoin. Peercoin (unofficial code: PPC),[citation needed] also known as PPCoin, P2P coin and Peer-to-peer coin, is a cryptocurrency that uses both proof-of-stake (PoS) and proof-of-work (PoW) systems.[3][4] Peercoin is based on an August 2012 paper which listed the authors as Scott Nadal and Sunny King.[3] Sunny King, who also created Primecoin, is a pseudonym.[5] Nadal's involvement had diminished by November 2013, leaving King as Peercoin's sole core developer.[4] Peercoin was inspired by Bitcoin, and it shares much of the source code and technical implementation of Bitcoin.[6] The Peercoin source code is distributed under the MIT/X11 software license.[7] Peercoin is the third-largest minable cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Peercoin has a marketcap of $100 million USD as of Feb 8, 2014.[8] Unlike Bitcoin, Namecoin, and Litecoin, Peercoin does not have a hard limit on the number of possible coins, but is designed to eventually attain an annual inflation rate of 1 percent.