The Future and Problems of CryptoIt's friday, didn't get much sleep last night but that did give me a lot of time to think.
Current Crypto Problems with solutions- Too many scamcoins: if noone invests in coins with ICO/IPO/Premine/Instamine the problem would solve itself. People who defend ICO/IPO by saying "but the devs can't work for free or they need money for promotion". Look at us. We manage to pull it off, build trust, build a community and create a community chest. Use that to finance features/marketing for which you really need money. If you need to get paid at the startup of your coin, it's obvious you don't have enough trust in yourself to pull it off.
- Too many coins in general: This is quite normal in a relatively new industry, everyone will try to launch their own coin and get money out of it. Lots of devs even have multiple coins, people defending that "oh it was just a project and now I'm working on another project" should be shot. You don't leave a project until it's finished, if a coin failed, you've failed. If you handed the responsibility over to someone else, that's a different story. DO YOUR RESEARCH.
- Too many plans, no real results: You've seen all those nice topics on bitcointalk with a development roadmap and/or whitepaper claiming that they are implementing something new! But it takes around 1-2 months of research but buy/mine coins now! That's just hyping to get the price up. How many real innovations have been made lately? Except for ours of course.
- Scamcoins on exchanges: The exchanges have some responsibility here but in the end. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. The safest way is to invest in coins that have been around long enough.
- Exchanges fucking up/failing/scamming: this is a tricky one, the general rule is "don't leave coins on exchanges". This however doesn't work, what if you want to buy/sell put some buysupport or sellwalls. If there is no trading, the coin has no value. This is a fundamental issue. Try to minimize your coins in exchanges, use exchanges that have been around for a long time with admins that are accessible. Oh and if an exchange wants to do a complete overhaul even though it's working perfectly, get everything out ASAP. Don't fix what isn't broken.
- Cryptotraders and Manipulation: Another annoying one, too many big traders can break a coin. Then you get the effect of pump and dump. So many coins during the first week they have 300+BTC volume per day and if you check on them a few weeks later, they barely have 1 btc volume per day. Cryptotrading should be discouraged, crypto-investing should be encouraged. When you select a coin to invest in think the following: "Does it scare me if I couldn't sell it within 2-3 months?" if the answer is "Yes" then you shouldn't invest in that coin.
The Future of CryptoIn a few years there will only be a handful of coins left, I obviously assume that Pandacoin will be one of them since the team has the right vision. So many coins out there with no vision, just by trying to implement something new you really don't grow that big and stay big. Plenty of examples but I don't want to single out coins. You need to implement the right things at the right time with the right marketing.
Teams will become more professional. How many professional coin development teams are out there? Most are run by students with no real world experience, how do you expect them to make the coin you invest in big? We've already established a great team of industry professionals. If you don't have a team or just have 1 dev and 1 marketeer you're really not going to make it.
Countries will want to see transparancy, all those (claiming to be) anonymous coins will die out. Well maybe not all, maybe 1 or 2 will remain since it fills a certain nichemarket but it will never be accepted everywhere.
Commodity vs Currency: the main issue here is coinsupply. If you get paid for doing a job and you get 0.0001 of a coin or 1000 of a coin, which would be more interesting? It's a big psychological factor that a lot of people fail to see at this point. Bitcoin is a commodity at this point, it really isn't a currency. If you want a coin to be used as a currency you need quite a lot of coins to realize that (32 billion is a nice number). A lot of people have the impression that scarcity is good, coin will be worth a lot. This is fundamentally wrong.
Speed of transactions is also an issue, well mostly with Bitcoin, it takes forever for bitcoin transactions to complete. Most coins have this fixed but this is a fundamental flaw from Bitcoin.
We are heading into an exciting future, most coins will die but the ones that survive will be stronger and more popular than ever, Bitcoin will be overtaken in a few years.
Proof-of-stake vs Proof-of-work: In the current version Proof-of-Work doesn't really have a big future, it's impossible to mine bitcoin for example without having to buy an expensive miner which might not even pay for itself. This is the ASICs issue and 51% issue. Not going in details on this one but I believe that PoW has to change to have a chance to survive longterm. PoS on the other hand is perfect, gaining stakes for keeping the network secure, simple, elegant and effective solution.
Bitcoin has another issue that it's already so big that it's not flexible anymore. There are some other fundamental features that could/should be added to a coin to be a real longtime succes and currency and that's something that for Bitcoin will be almost impossible to do.
Where does Pandacoin fit in?Well we've been around for around 8 months now, escaped the ASIC issue to POS. We have proven ourselves to deliver on our promises and have a lot more really cool stuff in store.
- Great Vision: To grow outside of the current cryptoworld and get new crypto-investors you need to be easy to use/obtain/understand, even though 1 journalist thought this was a "niche" (smart)
- Great realistic coinsupply: 32 billion
- Great, professional dev team with a lot of experience
- Great community
- Realistic expectations
- Focussed on users/walletholders rather than value
- Fast transactions
- Real useful future developments
- Most secure Proof-of-Stake network out there with a difficult between 500 and 900 all the time
- 2.5% interest per year because of Proof-of-Stake, just for keeping your wallet open
- And everyone loves a panda!
This is all my personal opinion.
And I couldn't let it all go to waste on 1 page, took me a while to write damnit
