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Any cryptocurrency investors/enthusiasts in here?
Hey all, haven't seen a thread on this yet. What projects do you folks have some stake in? Any you're interested in but haven't picked up? Thoughts on the market?
Hey all, haven't seen a thread on this yet. What projects do you folks have some stake in? Any you're interested in but haven't picked up? Thoughts on the market?
I'm fairly anti-cryptocurrency. In its current form, it's bad for the environment, bad as a currency, bad for fraud protection, bad for securing your money, bad for investing... I could go on and on (as my wife unfortunately knows).
Will it ever grow out of these problems? Maybe. But I'm currently waiting for the craze to die off, if for no other reason than that it's hard to be an environmentalist and support any proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.
I think comparisons between the current financial market's efficiency and that of the crypto markets are barely fair once the volume of transactions are considered. This article is a bit old at this point but it shows the difference in order of magnitude pretty well.
As far as fraud protection, https://info.silverwire.io is making strides. It's a smart contract for the EVM that allows you to reverse Eth transactions within 15 minutes. And on stability, there's a promising ERC20 token named DAI (https://makerdao.com/) that's soft pegged to the USD (e.g. it has economic incentives implemented that drive the price of one DAI towards ~$1).
Definitely agree with you re: environment/securing money/investment. Most of my "investments" in the space are exchange tokens with very sparse proof-of-work involvement if any. I'm hoping proof-of-stake systems prove reliable enough to replace PoW but the current environmental impact is absolutely unsustainable.
I wonder if the whole power consumption of Crypto is a well thought out argument. When you take a step back and look at the amount of energy wasted in other currencies system. There is a huge cost to be paid in any physical currency. Minted coins require mining resources, the minting process, physically securing and transporting the coin. Printed money has much of the same problems that coins have along with the need for anti counterfeit measures. There are other cost besides the raw energy to produce, secure and move a currency. Whole industries spend energy to track, trade, and predict price fluctuations.
Energy is going to be consumed with any currency. One could argue with the advent of cleaner energy sources, Crypto is/will be more environmentally friendly then any printed/minted currency.
You're comparing apples to oranges in that you're comparing physical currency to digital currency. The only fair comparison is one non-crypto (but digital) transaction vs. a crypto transaction.
It seems self-evident to me that proof-of-work transactions require more energy, because a non-crypto transaction does not do any calculations that are purposefully thrown away in the end.
I haven't bought any myself, but there have been a couple of crypto donations to Tildes, so I guess I now effectively have a small stake in both BTC and ETH. I'll most likely just hold onto them for now and see what happens to the value, cashing them out isn't urgent.
It's definitely not a very positive source, but this site/blog is interesting to watch to see what happens to someone that put $800 into a bunch of less-known coins in January: https://66shitcoins.com/
He usually makes an update post on the blog every couple of weeks or so to show what's happened with his total value.
Oh, that's a cool site, thanks for sharing!
I bought into a "crypto fund" with some friends and family around the same time with a similar premise. We're down about 45% since Feb. but that was certainly not a good time to buy relative to today's prices. Hoping the crypto donations eventually equal the value of ~!
If you're going to accept crypto I highly recommend adding Monero and using the service globee. I'd be happy to help
Request Network seems really cool, thanks for mentioning it!
No problem. I really appreciate that they are one of the few ICOs that have a reason for the coin and actually follow through on their roadmap.
Fantastic stuff here, the BCH community has a special place in my heart for sure.
Appreciate all the links as well, thank you!
I am very interested in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, from both a tech and ideological perspective. Coming from an Austrian economics & free market background, I hope that cryptocurrency can take take the monetary control out of the hands of central banks and put it back in the hands of the people. I think blockchain could benefit a lot of applications, including voting, public accounting, contracts, and decentralized content sharing.
There are still a lot of issues with the tech that need to be addressed, such as security, scalability, and energy consumption. Others have the valid concern that quantum computing could eventually break private keys and render it useless. One way or another though, I believe that blockchain is here to stay in one form or another.
A few that I'm interested in:
Monero - a private and fungible coin
Skycoin - An incentivized method of providing a decentralized mesh network
Stellar - a low cost, international token providing fast and inexpensive transactions
Etherium - Smart contracts, a powerful coding framework, and the basis of many other coins
Love Monero, one of the projects that first got me interested in this space. Ethereum is fantastic though I found writing smart contracts to be a bit clunky, though my experience with them is pretty limited.
I like the idea of monero, but the problem with it is that the privacy mechanism causes the unspent transaction set to grow without bound, and I don't see how that can be fixed.
This is the first time I've read about this issue, is there a name for it?
I don't know that there is a name for it. But it falls out naturally from the use of ring signatures. Essentially in bitcoin you can prune the UTXO when you see that an output is spent, right? Monero prevents knowledge of which outputs are spent by ring signatures. So you need to track every transaction output forever. I guess if you know the terms you might stumble on some writing? I haven't followed monero that much for this reason. I think zcash is more interesting in the sense that I think it can scale as a currency, but the maths behind it is super new, and the security of the currency relies the creators not engaging in funny business. Not a great basis for crypto either :|
EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/5gdltd/how_does_monero_avoid_uncontrolled_utxo_growth/
I've had skin in the game since 2012 or so (BTC, Doge, Vert, Dash, BCH, LTC) and while I like it as a concept, right now, in its current state, its a bit of a mess. For the most part, this is because of community division and the prevalence of people only in it to get rich quick. I don't see this going away anytime soon tho because of its history as, in hindsight, a extraordinary investment. There's also the environmental concerns, which while important, I hadn't really considered until recently.
I'm looking forward to the expansion of the Lightning network on the main BTC chain. I see this as one of the next major steps in moving towards mainstream adoption (although if this should be the goal is a debate of its own). When the LN becomes widespread the ridiculous fees that have been plaguing the network will begin to disappear.
Things that still need to be done include:
I'm still tentative about its future. I know that there isn't a chance that it's going to completely sputter out and die, but I don't know when (if) we're going to see growth like we did in 2013 and in late 2017/early 2018 again.
Yeah, the speculation has really poisoned the market.
How do you feel about the viability of the LN wrt decentralization? From what I can tell, unless the core devs have solved (or made big moves on) the routing problem the LN has a strong possibility of leading towards a more centralized BTC.
Yeah, despite having read the whitepaper on it and doing some research, I'm probably not read up enough about it to comment too much. I've been busy with schoolwork for most of the time the recent, bigger developments have come out. I look forward to seeing what they do (if anything) about the decentralization issue because its one of the things that the community was built upon that seems to have started to take a backseat in recent years.
As a cryptography nerd, I find the topic fascinating. It's a cool idea, and tech like Lightning Network is brilliant
I've got COSS, Nexo, KuCoin, Cardano, Divx, Enjin and some random crapcoins I bought on a whim (CarVertical, TelCoin.) Really interested in the SIRIN labs token but haven't jumped on buying any yet.
Been invested since 2010. Was a Bitcoin maximalist but have now seen the error of my ways.
Currently now am a Monero maximalist. I see utility in a select few projects here and there but for the most part the only advantage to blockchain is censorship resistance and the majority of these projects are trying to replace things that are uncensored.
Monero is the closest thing to censorship resistance for money that there is right now. Over 1/2 of darknetmarket transactions are XMR now. Approve or disapprove but it was originally what got Bitcoin on the map. Privacy and fungibility are crucial aspects of money and only Monero even attempts to solve these issues.
I'm in it for the Long haul
I love monero, it's what got me into crypto in the first place!
Big time! I started investing right after the ATH (no relation) and have been bullish for crypto ever since. My portfolio includes REQ, ADA, XRP, XLM, PRL. I want to invest in OMG, MKR, BNB, BTC, SUB, POE, ZEN.