Cryptocurrency of the Day

As some of you know I spend too much time looking at crypto. I have a fair amount invested in the area too

I decided I may as well share some of the interesting coins, tokens and dApps I come across along with timely updates.

I’m definitely not offering financial advice , just a place to learn and keep up with the crypto news and chew the crypto cud.

You can also share your findings and opinions freely.

I am starting with IOTA and EOS because I believe both could be phenomenally important to the future of crypto and this weekend is an important milestone for both !

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First up : IOTA.

IOTA is based on a unique non blockchain tech called the Tangle. You can visualise it here.

Pretty cool right. Each transaction requires you perform a small Piece of Work confirming two other transactions . The power of the Tangle is it becomes more robust and faster as more transactions occur (which is the opposite of traditional blockchains). Best of all it is feeless to make a transaction so we can see why it could be attractive for micropayments and data transfer and also data storage.

I’m starting with IOTA because as one of the founders says , it either goes to a trillion dollar market cap or nothing . If you are interested in crypto you should not ignore IOTA

It’s obviously connected with the internet of things and has real partnerships with Bosch, Fujitsu and many others . Bosch has invested millions in IOTA.
It is run by the non profit IOTA Foundation, which is really pushing it forward and they have banking and teams mostly based out of Germany

IOTA has some BIG news coming through recently.
Last week or so their Trinity wallet was released, this was a long time in coming but it’s very slick and solved a lot of problems with transferring and holding IOTA. A big step forward.

Tomorrow is another huge day for IOTA when we finally learn what Q is. The IOTA team claim this is the biggest step forward for IOTA and crypto so far . We shall see. It’s also causing the price for spike but it could be ‘buy the rumour, sell the news’. It could be some sort of new financial exchange but who knows.

A lot of hype behind it and a cool video teaser!
https://qubic.iota.org

I have been tracking IOTA for six months and their progress has been phenomenal so far . From being regarded as a bit of joke by bitcoiners to now being seen as a serious threat to blockchains and the miners that power them. No mining is requred for IOTA making it a lot greener too.

Next up is EOS , the ‘The Blockchain for Commercial Scale’ backed by crypto bigshot Dan Larimer and BlockOne,

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Next : EOS (officially went live today)

In the world of blockchains, there are only two real heavyweights so far. Bitcoin and Ethereum. Could EOS supersede Ethereum dominance as the leading protocol ?
I don’t know about that due to Ethereum’s first mover advantage and massive ecosystem . I do know though that it is shaping up to be a potential serious challenger medium to long term.

Their big claim from the FAQ.
'The resulting technology is a blockchain architecture that has the potential to scale to millions of transactions per second, eliminates user fees and allows for quick and easy deployment of decentralized applications.'

If you understand how ethereum has scaling issues you know this could be very attractive for developers.

So EOS has raised 4 billion USD. A lot of folks are skeptical about this given they haven’t even launched their block chain mainnet yet.

I tend to see it as giving them tremendous resources to invest in dApp developers and promote their blockchain. They comitted at least 1 billion USD to developing the EOS ecosystem. I always think back to Facebook paying 19 billion USD for WhatsApp. EOS is an open block chain with a lot more tech potential and strong worldwide backers than Whatsapp. Also all those folks who bought EOS have a vested interest in seeing it succeed. It’s record breaking ICO is finishing this week!
(there is another story around the ‘block producers’ who will power the blockchain, basically it’s controlled by what is called Proof of Stake and uses a ownership voting principle whereby you nominate which nodes get to process the blocks and hence earn a financial reward, it’s a very interesting distributed ownership and voting system and it differs significantly from Bitcoin, there are a couple of big block producer groups out of China who are rumoured to have staked 10s to 100s of millions).

EOS open source mainnet software , Eos v1.0, launched today .

“EOSIO 1.0 Release” https://medium.com/eosio/eosio-1-0-release-ca67ad3aa78f

PS . All registered EOS holders will receive a lot of free tokens this month as they will be airdropped into EOS holders accounts. One needs to hold registered EOS on a wallet not on an exchange such as Binance to get the air dropped tokens some of which could be quite valuable in future. As of writing there are only 6 hours to register for their mainnet snapshot so I certainly do not advise anyone to purchase EOS tokens right now.

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Blimey! It’s carnage at the moment.

EDIT: Sorry, wrong thread.

What are your thoughts now on this latest down leg of the crypto space? Isn’t it ironic that a failed bit at an ETF would cause this much of a down move, seeing as crypto was supposed to be the antithesis of established financial structures. Or is there more to it?

Yes it’s deeply ironic.
I.think it’s mainly.that folks are.holding off waiting for a clear bull run and there’s needs to be some real usage catalyst, success story…Not just this ETF, exchange, futures talks.
IMHO This will happen most likely end of this year or next year latest…

Obviously I’m in the dark like everybody else when things will turn around exactly. It could go lower still.
I think btc has put in a bottom around 6k usd three times so there’s that.

Alts valuations in the toilet so dca of amounts one can afford is prob not a bad idea right now.

Anyway last thing I’m doing is selling into cash now I am just holding.

The Microsoft Starbucks partnership for Bitcoin payment, do you see this as significant, or are consumers already overloaded with payment options…credit card, Starbucks app, debit card, cash, etc

I don’t see that as significant at all , personally speaking (and I even bought into a crypto wallet payment system at ICO called Crypterium , ETHOS is also not bad).

I will give you an example of what I think would be significant

OTA travel booking sites. They often charge over 15% commission , with block chain you can remove the middleman and save the 15%. Also you could verify reviews and communicate directly with hotels and airbnb hosts.

Other possible contenders for consumers would be worldwide lotteries .

Biggest may be digital asset trading …Digital copies of real assets, but it takes time to put the infrastructure together. However this could be a trillion dollar business ultimately .

I don’t really know what’s the first consumer breakthru (if I did I’d put all my investments in it lol) , if could Also be something I am not familiar with. But I have a small portion of money is riding on those travel block chain sites. Also video sharing site. Also lending.

If a big consumer site becomes ‘blockchain based’ it’s a validation signal for investors to jump in, this block chain stuff can actually work, right now almost everything is ‘in the future …’. and there are far too many shitcoins and scams.

There’s trillions in logistics, wharehousing, shipping that could use blockchain technology. At the same time, we’d lose thousands maybe millions of jobs, but yeah it’s wasteful in its current state. I was curious about this decentralized exchange for trading but that’s not something I think the power system would readily hand over

Yes I am not ignoring logistics tracking and it’s a good use case. Will only be a couple of winners I guess.

I really like decentralised trading platforms too.
Switcheo is one I have used with my ledger login and it is how I bought into AVA which is a travel OTA (just volume is poor). AVA isn’t even available on a centralised exchange yet !

They can replace some banking functions… You don’t need to hold.funds on the exchange …DEX are getting better fast hopefully by end of year will be a few big and high performance ones on Neo and EOS and Ethereum.
Switcheo has had issues but hopefully getting more stable and more volume. They depend on the performance of the underlying block chain platform. In this case NEO had become congested due to lack of txn charges which slowed the performance of Switched DEX. So it illustrates clearly that higher performance block chains (probably with a small and fixed fee attached to txn) are required for real world usage.

This makes me more comfortable holding EOS in the downturn.

The real reason why valuations are down.

Ripples transaction service xRapid , which utilises the XRP going, is finally launching which will power international transactions within 3 seconds for a fraction of the price of existihg bank facilitated transfers .

Needless to say the price of XRP exploded on the news.

Ripple is actually one of the oldest cryoticurrencies that has been developed , unlike many crypto projects most XRP are owned by the Ripple company and it is not decentralised .

Ironically this ‘bankers coin’ may result in the first real mass use case of cryptocurrency and reawaken the bull market.

Isn’t it counterproductive for this use if the coin is volatile? Sounds to me that it would be better to execute such transactions in say USD or EUR rather than XRP.

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XRP is the medium of exchange, you can exchange any currency that is supported by the bank or exchange at either end. The beauty of block chain means once that transaction has been achieved (supposedly 3 seconds target) there is no further bookkeeping or settling of accounts required such as you see for credit card payments. For international payments you save having to go through intermediaries such as the Bank of New York, from my memory that was about 35 USD.

Your point about price volatility is good.
Ultimately I think all cryptos will undergo real time conversion against a FIAT sticker price and in that case they will be a means of payment. You just use an app and choose which currency to pay with. A similar situation happens when you pay with VISA overseas and you choose which currency to pay with.

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I wonder how they will keep track of every transfer / control money laundering / taxation ? :thinking:

They don’t care. That’s one of their selling points.

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With some blockchains you can track all transactions and also view how much is in the wallet of the receiver. Bitcoin is quite transparent in many ways. Monero is a privacy block chain alternative.
The IRS in America doesn’t care too much as long as you pay your taxes !
For other countries it’s almost anything goes right now.

The crypto market has been very stable over the last few months, although still mired in a bear market there are numerous signs of green shoots.

XRP is moving ahead smoothly in adoption.
Ethereum has probably bottomed out now and is still the king of smart contracts with a massive ecosystem also supported by coinbase listings.

I am still down quite a bit , lost big on some but my investment in travel related blockchains is paying off big time, especially LockTrip. Simply put using block chain tech you don’t need a middleman like booking dot com which extracts a large commission. Therefore you can get an average of 10-15% lower prices. Locktrip has already run up but Travala (AVA) is waiting in the wings and a juicy price.

The other one that I am very positive on development is IOTA. I have followed this project for almost a year it went from a buggy semi functional geek network of 20 min transaction times to a fully functional network with easy to use wallets for non experts and average 2 minute transaction times. IOTA has massive promise because it is not a block chain but a DAG, that means as opposed to block chain the transaction speeds get FASTER as network usage increases! It’s price is really nice now as well given how much it has advanced over the year…

I am also invested in lending block chains such as Ethlend (LEND) and Salt. They are volatile to say the least (which is why I wouldn’t advise people adverse to risk to invest…that goes for all of crypto) , still I am hopeful they will do well when the market becomes bullish again .

What’s going on with Tether?
It broke the $1 level and went to below 90 cents.

It’s supposed to hold at $1, from what Bitfinex “says”.

Tether is always a concern but there are a lot of other stable coins now and probably folks will move their money back into BTC if bullish once more. I wouldn’t hold any USDT personally.