I think Syscoin is a great project and I am invested heavily. However I am slightly concerned about syscoin's dependence on bitcoin. We have all seen that when bitcoin's price collapsed recently, so did sycoin's. In that connection I have two questions:
1. Is there a plan to facilitate the purchase of syscoin with fiat? The fact that syscoin is traded almost exclusively against btc is one of the reasons sys's price is so dependant on btc. If sys were traded against fiat directly, dependence on btc price would decrease.
2. Is there a plan to move away from PoW? I have noted the following statement on the website: "Syscoin network piggybacks on the most robust and secure network the world has ever seen. Upon enabling this capability, our network grew 100 fold in less than 12 hours and it continues to support an incredibly stable hashrate (an indicator of network health)." This is great, but only while the btc network is doing great, and is therefore another form of dependence on BTC. Further, do you think that PoW is sustainable long-term, given the general concerns expressed about it, i.e. energy consumption and centralisation?
1. Is there a plan to facilitate the purchase of syscoin with fiat? The fact that syscoin is traded almost exclusively against btc is one of the reasons sys's price is so dependant on btc. If sys were traded against fiat directly, dependence on btc price would decrease.
2. Is there a plan to move away from PoW? I have noted the following statement on the website: "Syscoin network piggybacks on the most robust and secure network the world has ever seen. Upon enabling this capability, our network grew 100 fold in less than 12 hours and it continues to support an incredibly stable hashrate (an indicator of network health)." This is great, but only while the btc network is doing great, and is therefore another form of dependence on BTC. Further, do you think that PoW is sustainable long-term, given the general concerns expressed about it, i.e. energy consumption and centralisation?
We understand your concern. Currently all coins are dependent on Bitcoin's swings to a certain extent. I would, however, have to disagree that when Bitcoin's price collapsed so did Syscoin, in fact Syscoin considerably resisted in comparison to many others (sure the fiat value went down a little bit with Bitcoin but certainly not as much as most).
1. Yes, currently you can purchase Syscoin using British pounds via Bittylicious, there are also smaller exchanges that offer this service via credit card. It is, however, definitely on our "to-do" list to integrate fiat payments directly into Blockmarket, but that is certainly not an easy feat. We are constantly reaching out to exchanges to add Syscoin as well.
2. Syscoin will be a hybrid combination of SHA-256 POW and masternodes used secure the network. I don't see SHA-256 merge mining as a "dependence" on BTC, but it is using the current infrastructure to provide you one of the most secure (if not the most) altcoin networks. If for some reason, BTC is not the dominant coin, then those miners will still need to mine something with their equipment which is only possible with SHA-256. Also to clarify, Syscoin is merged-mined with ANY SHA-256 coin, not just Bitcoin.
It is difficult to determine if SHA-256 mining will be sustainable in the future, merge-mining Syscoin with it does not add to the footprint as miners simultaneously mine SYS with another SHA-256 coin without compromising their hash-power. Like with any software, upgrades happen and if we find that another solution can provide us with a more secure network, then we will probably move in that direction.
