Don't get me wrong - but why do people keep blindly asking to see a white paper for every crypto project out there?
Is it because every scam ICO needs a white paper, a wordpress site and a slack group? Do 10 pages of overnight quickly thrown-together text really hold the power to persuade you that that project is going to be a huge success? With ICOs - 99.9% of white papers I've seen are just embarrassing - no tech info, bold claims and loads of grammar problems.
To come back to your original question - no, Shift doesn't have a white paper - it never had an ICO. Nobody ever presold its entire stock to start up a fictional idea with an initial 100 mil. market cap. Its an older project where experienced developers came together to develop something great - originally just for fun. Other people found it and invested in it because they realised that that fun little project has the potential to explode into something amazing.
What is so amazing about it?Decentralised internet via IPFS and dApps. Sounds vague enough right? Maybe - but the first dApp is very very clear and targeted - Phantom, cloud-based P2P hosting with a DNS gateway to tie that to regular domain names. Yup - you get your domain name, connect it to the Shift gateway and voila - your site is hosted across 100+ servers. You can't ddos it or take it down, you can't censure it and it costs you a fraction of what it would if you were to host in on a grid server or Amazon Cloud...
Is it all just science fiction?No, thats the benefit of being around for a while - Phantom is already on Shift testnet - everybody can upload stuff and play around it with. For example play around with
this litle game a test user created and shared on Shift - and again, this is not science fiction folks - its already hosted on there and new kind of Internet is already in the making! In a few weeks it goes on the mainnet and thats where the fun begins and I believe the project will explode.
Whats all that other crap about payments/sidechains/etc?Thats all coming up - I firmly believe in Shift and they're razor focused. Hosting came first. Then come the payments so that the "little people" running Shift nodes/gateways can get paid for hosting your shit. etc. etc...
What do you love about it so much?They're not f*cking trying to do everything. They identified a real niche market and they're razor focused that. How big is that little niche market? - like half of internet is hosted on Amazon S3 and similar cloud providers... do the math.. real solution working on a real problem! timeframe? not 5 years for now, not 1 year from now - now!
Why should I believe you?You shouldn't. I'm just a new registered users with 0 previous posts and I didn't even send you a white paper
Do your own research - read the website and their road map (although they're working on a new one I hear), check out their Github and register on their community forum
their community forum to discuss these things with the developers and hundreds of users/gateway operators. And for God's sake just try Phantom on your own!
Excuse the rant