Thought I was going to make a little in depth post about the general market. This is worth reading for anyone who hasn't had the time to dive into what's really going on.
Bitcoin And The Space In General
There are so many things to consider when trying to understand whats going on and what the future will bring. Right now, we have nervous mainly young investors and speculants who desperately try to position themselves. Some are done for and have sold, some are trying to dollar cost average. Some are certain the market will turn around, and some are skeptical towards the whole space. So let's try and look at some facts
Where Are We?
I wasn't around as an adult in 1993, and I'm not certain we can just point at the early days of Interent and claim that it applies to cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology today. But in a way we can. There is no starting point. It's called technology. Internet is not it's own thing. It's an extension of computing. And computing is an extension of electricity and it's all rooted in human endeavour and continuous explorative mind. We create.
So Blockchain technology and the crypto currency market could very well become much much bigger than the Internet. And much more important as well. In the future we might look back at Internet the same way we look back at computers in general or electricty, or eventually even how to make fire. It's something we take for granted and there are a LOT of people who understands it and knows how it works. We might even look back on Blockchain and take that for granted while we are pursuing something much greater.
Dapps
Dapps stands for decentralized applications. Many dapps are being built on top of Ethereum, which is a protocol or a language to create Dapps. Recently Ethereum has gotten competition by other protocols that are trying to win the race.
But if we look at how many Dapps there really is and how many people use those Dapps, we can clearly conclude with either two things: No one want Dapps, or there are so few Dapps and it is so early that the few Dapps that exists are for a very small audience.
So currently there are less than a few thousand, yes THOUSAND people using the top 10 Dapps. That's it. Yet there are hundreds of crypto projects valued in the tens of millions of dollars. Just a few weeks or months ago, there were over 100 crypto projects being valued over 100 million USD. So these projects, many Dapps are valued because of their future utility. And keep in mind that most of them will fail. But ALSO keep in mind that it takes years to develop.
Hanging around in the space I see that the crowd is often very young and inexperienced. In the normal world we know that starting up a company means getting investors and burning the money on creating a prototype. Then you get more investors and you start marketing and trying to compete and stay ahead and most fail anyway. Now, investors invest in these things because they can make enormous gains if they succeed. But they make sure they don't put all their money into an idealistic start up. So should you.
Now let's take a look at what people are most interested in right now
EOS
EOS has been on most peoples lips lately, and since I am an investor I have obviously been involved and trying to gather as much unbiased information as possible.
EOS is a little bit different. It is not as decentralized in its structure as say Bitcoin. But it seems to me like they are trying to solve a big problem, and frankly I think EOS is onto something. In crypto we have some very big issues that we all want to solve. One is scaleability, another one is security. We also want decentralization. It's hard to get everything.
Recently there has been some drama on wether or not EOS is in fact decentralized because they froze 27 accounts that were involved with scams and/or theft. A good thing would most people say. Keep in mind that it is needed consensus to do these things. You will vote for blockproducers the same we vote for witnesses on STEEM. And if you don't like the way things are headed, you vote for someone else.
Another thing which is great is the staking. If you keep your EOS staked, your EOS is safe because it takes 72hours to unstake them. In that window you can contact EOS and have your account frozen.
Airdrops
Then there is the airdrop model that everyone is talking about. Basically, if you own more than 100 EOS you are eligible for airdrops. The systems works like this (simplified): Owning EOS is like owning some offices in an apartment building. Companies (developers) need to rent office space (EOS) in order to build their project on EOS(the platform) You rent out EOS and you receive airdrops as a reward. Now you are an investor in their project, you are getting involved and everyone benefits.
You don't need a wallet to receive airdrops. Airdrops are tied to your public address. So even if you don't download and access a wallet in five years, when you finally do, the airdrops you are eligible to is there. Holding your EOS on exchanges means you don't own the rights to your own private key, and therefore the exchanges are in their legal right to just take the airdrops themselves. They might grant you some. But why accept that?
Accounts, Names, Transactions , And Wallets
EOS is trying to make things easier, so they will allow accounts to be tied to names, much like on STEEM. You can for example send Steem from Bitfinex directly to your account name. Same will be possible with EOS. You will also be able to whitelist transactions, which is a great functionality. If you regularly send funds to someone or something, you don't have to approve it each time. Just check mark it.
People are often confused about how this whole thing works with passwords, keys and wallets. The most important thing to keep in mind is that your private key IS your EOS (or your eth or steem or whatever) It is not IN the wallet per se. The wallet is an interface to let you view the blockchain for your convenience. Right now there are two wallets available made by blockproducers: Simpleos and Greymass. I have personally tried both. Simpleos was awesome, but unfortunately I had some problems with the compatibility with my OS X. The greymass-wallet works like a charm. I decided to trust these wallets, because I wanted to dive into everything with EOS from the getgo. No risk, no reward. Please do your own due diligence.
Scatter and EOStoolkit
These are two important tools right now. Both are legit, but like always there are risks, there might be security breaches, so if you don't want to take absolutely any chances, just leave your private key until wallets are compatible with ledger or trezor
Scatter is a chrome and firefox addon/extension that works a lot like metamask. It's a little bit confusing at first, and it's a little bit like bungy jumping. When you connect it with your private key you are trusting a third party.
With [Scatter] you can connect with tools like EOStoolkit. This is where you can bid on premium suffixes and also create your own 12 letter account name. Don't bother trying to create cool ones, because they are all taken. You're not a genius for googling "cool 12 letter names, or all 12 words" people way smarter than you have all ready done that ;) Don't bother searching for 9 letter words and adding eos in front either.
The suffixes are interesting. You can bid on for example .eos or .com or .dapp and the winner will be able to create and sell or give away any account ending with that suffix. And that person will be the only person able to create those accounts. So if you win .eos you will be the only one who can create non 12 letter accounts with .eos behind it.
Some has raised concerned about the RAM price of accounts. This is for especially interested individuals, but it is imporant as it hints to a possible hardfork all ready.
https://github.com/EOSIO/eos/issues/4173
I think we will wrap it up there.
STEEM
I'm just going to keep this short. @exyle made me aware that @ned had been starting to power down. He explains that this is not nesecarilly a bad thing. Ned has powered down before, and who knows what he is going to spend the money on?
Well.. @ackza checked the wallet and found out that @ned had been transfering more than 110000 steem (hundred and ten thousand steem or almost 130 thousand dollars) to @brixtongg, a new account created in June with no followers no nothing. Googling brixtongg there is not much, but it could seem to be some kind of clothing manufacturer or something. Let's hope @ned is going to spend money on some marketing and not buying himself new shoes for 130k USD!
So, I hope you enjoyed this read up. Please let me know if there are any substantial errors and I'll make sure I will correct it. Let me know in the comments what you think and what your thoughts on the space, EOS and Steem is in the months to come!
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