Analysis of SUBSTRATUM
A full analysis of Substratum Coin
- Who is creating the coin?
Justin Tabb-
Software team manager for projects. Has had experience working for Apple, FaceBook, openstack, as well as software for Disney and USA presidential election voting software.
Seems to specialize in software that has to do with putting different pieces of information together, in accordance to a specific time frame.
Abram Cookson- Lead Software Developer
Not a lot of info on this guy, seems to have developed software for medical companies but more info is required.
Product: A Decentralized Internet
Substratum intends to create a decentralized internet.
Right now, if you want to create a website, you need to pay an outside company to "host" your website. This company has a computer that your website is downloaded onto. When people access and interact with your website, they must talk to this computer. The hosting website has its own standards for what can be allowed on the website, as well has obligations to governments to allow or disallow certain websites.
This is particularly problematic in Asia. In most Asian countries, the internet is monitored. This means that certain media websites as well as news forums are censored and will not show up on a regular Google search.
Residents of these Asian countries either go without news or take the time to learn the tedious art of TOR browser and VPN. Tor browser and VPN are ways of masking a computer's location in order to access unauthorized websites. These methods are not 100% fail proof.
Substratum intends to link a bunch of computers worldwide. By running a "Substratum Node", an owner of a computer would allow the Substratum network to run on their personal computer. This allows the computer to host websites. In return for renting out her computer, the owner would receive Substratum tokens.
No one would control the internet network. If she needed to work on her computer, she could shut the Substratum network off, until she no longer needed the computer.
Users of the Substratum Network would not need a Tor Browser, or a VPN. They would just pay to use the service via Substratum tokens. Businesses as well could have applications for this type of service. However, more research would be required to validate this, as no businesses are on this network as of this writing.
Trajectory: Where the Company will take this platform in the future
ICO: "Initial coin offering", a period of time in which a company issues currency at a lower price in order to gain the money they need to continue operations.
Pre-ICO: A time before the official ICO in order to reward early investors. Tokens or currency is usually sold at a steep discount.
August 14th: Pre-ICO Ends, Official ICO Begins.
ICO end date: September 14th
September 2017- Coin will be added to exchanges Bittrex and Bitfinex
Platform itself is scheduled to be up and running in September. For better or worse, this timeline indicates that this company is moving very fast. Usually things of this nature take a while to program and develop. By sending out part of the platform early, then updating the platform consistently, this company has an opportunity to create a powerful proof of concept if enough people adopt the platform.
Early 2018: The platform will allow people to pay for goods/services using crypto currencies. This platform will require the substratum (substrate) token to be used as a bridge currency.
Ex: I have 10 Bitcoin, your store only accepts Litecoin. I would go to your store and pay with Bitcoin. Substratum itself would convert my Bitcoin to substratum. Then it would convert Substratum to Litecoin, for you to take off the market. This gives Substratum usefulness. Its usefulness specifically is as a means of exchange. "Means of exchange" is one of the three things that make an object qualify as "money".
Development Roles: How are changes made and when
"Yes, there is a voting system and more active players votes are weighed more heavily"
This was the response I got when I asked OVERRIDEPRO on slack. He did not go into more detail.
He would not answer directly if the users or developers would make decisions. For this point they get an "F" because the lack of direct answers is somewhat sketchy.
User Privacy
This platform is all about privacy. The spenders of this token will be completely private. Anyone coming in contact with the platform will be completely private.
Browsers, businesses, and everyone in between would be anonymous using this network.
Anonymity has the potential to be used for the wrong reasons, however, this platform may be used as a platform for bringing the power from governments to the people.
Hackability, Fraud
There is little ability to hack as everything would be decentralized. It would be extremely difficult to find the website, wallet, or person to hack, as all of these things would be hosted on many computers and the hosting computers would change as people turn their computer hosting nodes on and off.
Fraud was not covered on the whitepaper and this is a reason for concern.
User Ease of Use at a Protocol Level
The platform is based on making anonymous website browsing easier. This platform should be many times easier than the current methods. With "crypto pay", their way of sending and receiving money(substrate), they are making business on the block chain much easier.
Other Thoughts and Mentions
I reached out to developers to ask questions based on the six questions I ask of every investment I buy. They were reluctant to answer many questions, telling me that it would be explained in future interview videos. I told them I was a blogger and still did not get an answer. They told me they wanted to keep some information in order to release it later and reward early investors.
What this means is that they want to keep some hype for later. They will release information later on, outside people will buy the coin based on this information, and the price of the coin will go up.
This sounds like a ploy..
Strong platforms like Bitcoin and ethereum don't need hype. They told everyone from the beginning exactly what they were going to do. They released all the "hype" in advance, knowing that once they delivered on their product, even more people would buy the coin.
Saving hype for later implies that they either don't have it all figured out yet, have a weak management team, or are pulling a scam. I figure it might be a combination of all three.
They don't have all the information investors need because they haven't gotten to those decisions yet. They seem to have a weak team. On the whitepaper, the credentials for the developers are extremely vague. It's possible that these people have never been in a marketing department and just don't know how to make things look professional. This looks like the mom-and-pop shop of cryptos.
I'm not saying that it is a scam, BUT, its possible that the people running this know exactly how much these things will go up in value. When they say they are benefiting early adopters, its very likely they mean themselves.
I currently own 18,000 substratum tokens. I will keep 1,000 to hold long term, and sell the other 17,000 IMMEDIATELY. Most cryptos spike the few days after they are launched on the market, during that spike I will sell and not look back.
The development team also has no official contracts with exchanges Bittrex and Poloniex, they claim to have talked to BitFinex. Again, sketchy.
This coin gets an overall rating of D- and I'm kind of salty I bought before researching more.
A decentralized web is a brand new concept, so hopefully I am wrong and they pull through.
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STOPdo you really will sell most of your substratum now after what its happening in the world against liberty and criptomoney?
It is misleading on Substratum site where they mention current and past clients. Substratum has nothing to do with those clients as far as I can tell. Those are clients from Overridepro. That is a BIG red flag there!