Raiblocks (XRB) has pumped astronomically in the month of December heading into January. Everyone is excited about the next fast, feeless cryptocurrency with high throughput. Why is everyone so excited? Because Bitcoin is slow and expensive with low network capacity. Therefore, we NEED a cryptocurrency that provides us faster and cheaper transactions. We NEED a cryptocurrency that can scale.
The problem is we already have cryptocurrencies that achieve this. Ripple, Stellar, Iota, Bitshares, Steem and many others can achieve exceptionally high throughput with minimal or no fees (you can argue against those individually, but not all of them - the point is others can achieve it). Steem is a great example as it confirms transactions in 3 seconds with no fees and processes over a million transactions per day with little to no issues at all. In other words, not only does it have the solution on paper, but it is implementing it too. Yet it is half the size of Raiblocks. There are many other examples too.
Andreas Antonopoulos, one of the greatest minds on Bitcoin, cleverly said that "in order to have scaling problems, you first need to have scale." Which, Raiblocks isn't close to achieving yet. But I don't even need this argument because I think EVEN if the block lattice works perfectly under stress, it won't ever be placed under stress. In other words, it won't be adopted. Why?
Well this is where things get more controversial - Because I don't view scalability as the number one issue facing cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was practically free to use at one point. Did that cause everyone to come running? 10 minute blocks stopped them you say? What about all the cryptocurrencies with block speeds in the single digit seconds? Are we all running to them?
The number one issue facing cryptocurrencies now is not scalability - time will fix that issue, guaranteed. It is the natural evolution of technology to fix such technical issues. No, the major issue facing cryptocurrencies right now is that they are generally INFERIOR to the relative centralized solution, which prevents adoption. Why use Bitcoin when you have Paypal or Square? Consumer protections, comfort, more businesses accept it, and your friends actually know what it is.
Cryptocurrencies suffer due to poor user interfaces, a lack of public understanding, few businesses accepting them and applications that look like they came straight out of the 1990s. Until cryptocurrencies become comparable to their relevant centralized competitor to the laymen person, they will always be stuck in niche use cases - period.
Some people speculate Raiblocks will become the next major cross-cryptocurrency pairing over Bitcoin. If speed were the concern, why isn't Ether used for more cross-currency pairing than Bitcoin? I'll tell you why - because speed simply does not matter outside of transfers between exchanges. Once inside an exchange, all trades are settled internally.
This means you could have a cryptocurrency with 10 hour blocks and it would settle as quick as an instanteneous cryptocurrency once inside an exchange. Furthermore, for a cryptocurrency to take over Bitcoin for purchasing altcoins, it would need fiat onramps. Raiblocks isn't even on any major exchanges yet outside of Binance soon. If Ripple isn't on GDAX yet, good luck getting Raiblocks there.
The long and the short of it is this: Speed isn't everything. Stop being distracted by what is possible and think more about simply what IS. If Apple hasn't proven to you yet that superior tech isn't what matters, then I don't know what will. Happy speculating everyone.
P.S: I have nothing against Raiblocks and the team itself, more the speculative frenzy surrounding it.
You gained a new follower today, looking forward to going through some of your analysis, and glad to have ya on Steem. I really need to start watching more analysis videos, I've been enjoying them a lot over the holiday break :)
However, I don't agree with many of ways you've presented the data or the rational that this is just a pump and dump. I figured I'd leave my thoughts as to why, since I absolutely love a good debate.
First of all, the comparison to Steem and Bitshares isn't represented well. You are right in pointing out that Steem has incredibly high transaction volume (at a peak of 1.3m transactions), which is higher than any other blockchain that I know of. However, when you do the math on that, you'll see that 1.3m transactions/day is only about 15 transactions per second. Thats a long ways away from the 604m transactions/day that a 7000 TPS blockchain can produce. Steem and Bitshares are arguably close to each other in terms of transaction speed, but neither of them are anywhere close to what RaiBlocks has been proven to achieve. There's also the issue that both Steem and Bitshares are filled with non-transfer operation types, which can fill up blocks fast and could create delays in confirmation.
Why is RaiBlocks different? It's because it's not a blockchain like Bitcoin, Steem or Ethereum - it's something fundamentally different and new, a block lattice (or DAG).
These legacy blockchains you mention (Steem/etc) all have sequential numeric blocks which are produced by the block miners/producers, and those entities are allowed to produce blocks through PoW, PoS/DPoS, or some similar method. Users submit transactions to these producers for inclusion within the next block on the blockchain. Their transaction is included (if space permits), then subsequently confirmed, to prove that it's a valid transaction as it propigates through the network.
At the core, almost all adoption related issues can be attributed to this flaw within this model of the blockchain - limited space and time. It's also the reason that adoption is actually decreasing in the case of Bitcoin (primarily fees today, but also block speed/size). It doesn't matter how great you make the Bitcoin wallet's UI, how many stores accept it, or how many people are doing transfers to one another - the blockchain itself is the source of the frustration in nearly every case. Tweaking these values every time scaling needs to occur isn't a solution to the problem either, and Lightning doesn't solve any problems since it still requires the same fee/wait to open or close a channel. The model these blockchains follow creates inconveniences and a dependency upon whoever or whatever is creating each block (or until you move off-chain, like Lightning).
This next generation of cryptocurrencies, like RaiBlocks (and IOTA), no longer follow this model. Instead of a relationship between a user and block producer, in which the user submits operations to the block producers, they are one and the same. The user themselves now create new portions of the chain (or Tangle in IOTA) in the form of "blocks" (or Tips in IOTA). The only wait for inclusion is now based on the time it takes for your machine to create and validate that transaction and then broadcast it. Blocks are never full and there's no fee market to compete against.
Technologically, in my opinion, it's a superior way of including data within a publicly distributed and decentralized ledger.
The frenzied hype and most of the garbage you read on the internet doesn't talk about any of this because most people don't really understand what's actually happening or how it works. Most people are seeing fast transactions that don't cost them a dime, so that's what they're talking about. Once you dig deeper into the technology you'll start to realize what's magical about it and why smarter money is betting on RaiBlocks to upset many other currencies. At least that's what I see in this current rise :)
Also - one last point I'd like to make regarding something you said (@7:52) regarding Steem/Bitshares and adoption. I believe the adoption of RaiBlocks has already been much more rapid than either Steem or Bitshares. To compare apples to apples, out of the ~18.5m blocks within the Steem blockchain, only 3.3m (3,327,919) transfers of STEEM or SBD have actually occurred since it's creation in April of 2016. RaiBlocks at this point is at 2.3m (2,371,871) transfers of XRB which is not too far behind. Steem's been more widely used for much longer than RaiBlocks, so I'd imagine that at this point, there are more transfers on RaiBlocks per day than there are for Steem. There's no good way to look up this data at the moment so I'm speculating, but you can't rule it out and just say that these chains are more widely adopted.
To close, I have high expectations for all of the currencies you've mentioned. As a Steem witness myself, I obviously am cheering for all of the graphene chains to find success, but new advances in technology like this can't just be ignored and deemed as a P&D :)
This is a great comment and I really appreciate you taking the time to write out a very clear description of the technology that RaiBlocks runs on.
I noticed that one of Crypto Investor's points was that scalability is something that is always solved in time, and though it is somewhat true for centralized technologies, the case for Bitcoin is far from the typical, and the LN is not even close to being the decentralized scalability solution that Bitcoin has been searching for.
First of all, how does LN work? If Alice wants to send money to Bob, they have to open up a payment channel on LN, which involves both of them sending money into a special Bitcoin address, after which they can exchange bitcoin so long as the channel is open, and eventually close it in order to "commit" the transactions on the main blockchain (hence the "off-chain" nature of the LN).
You can link multiple channels like so: if Alice <-> Bob and Bob <-> Stacy, in order for Alice to pay Stacy, Bob would have to pay Stacy first, and Alice would reimburse Bob (in order to see why this actually works in practice I recommend reading the LN whitepaper or this series of articles on the LN: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-building-a-bidirectional-payment-channel-1464710791/).
All of this is supposed to be over a distributed network, but unfortunately LN will never be in a position to scale to a million users, let alone 10/100 million.
First: in order to create a payment channel, you actually need to do an on-chain transaction in order to place bitcoins in escrow. If you plan on only doing off-chain transactions, it's basically not possible, because these bitcoins must be sent on-chain in order for the channel to get set up.
Second: payment networks don't scale. Suppose we want to support 100,000 users. In this iteration of the LN, we can have a user with one payment channel to 10 other users, with no redundant connections (i.e, no cycles in the network). This means that the maximum amount of "links" we need to make in order to set up a channel between two users U_1 and U_2 is 5, but we needed 10 payment channels to have this property.
However, this isn't the only setup for the network. You can drop the number of channels from user to user, but you'll have to increase the number of hops - for example, if instead of 10 users we connected each user to 2 other users, we'd have a binary tree which would have depth log_2(100000) ~= 17, meaning that we would need at most 17 hops in order to connect any two users in the network with a payment channel.
A large number of channels (in CS terminology, the branching factor) means that users would have to divide up their funds over all of these channels in order to even use them. A large number of hops means that all of the users' bitcoins will be locked up routing everybody else's bitcoin. Especially since, in a hop, there is effectively a loan going on because we use network time to eliminate risk: Alice can only send money to Bob once she is sure that Bob has paid Stacy, otherwise we'd be in trouble.
In addition to this, every single hop that we make over the network must have sufficient funds in order to make this lend possible - for example, if Alice wanted to send 1 BTC to Stacy but Bob doesn't have that much, we can't use Bob for this payment channel, and have to find another one.
So you can see that, at least from this very quick explanation, the LN makes nothing better for (decentralized) scalability. It lends itself very well to centralization because then exchanges can act as the middlemen that ensure that enough bitcoin is in all the required payment channels so that merchants are able to use them, but I don't see any merchant ever using the LN anyways, because it has to commit some amount of Bitcoin for each channel, which is not feasible for many day-to-day businesses or even big corporations (Starbucks, for example).
So my point is, if RaiBlocks has indeed "solved" the scalability problem, it will be extremely good for crypto as a whole because we can actually use the damn thing to pay for our groceries.
A great writeup and you highlighted my thoughts exactly regarding LN, I couldn't have said it better myself. I deleted a couple paragraphs from my original response that actually echoed some of these exact same thoughts because I was getting too word-y :)
I really wish I could say the same about IOTA, but it's in a semi non-functional state and is a painful experience to use.
Thanks for sharing your opinion about Iota. The whitepaper fascinated me so much I was thinking about opening an account on some exchange to buy a little. Still might but feeling less urgency now.
Regards,
Rick
It has a lot of potential and I'm still hopeful but I don't think there's a rush to buy IOTA. I personally hold IOTA and will continue to do so. But - I have a feeling it'll slide down a bit more before it jumps any higher. I'm a terrible trader though, so don't take my investment advice for more than it's worth :)
I, too, am a terrible trader. I want to be a buy and hold investor but that has caused me to ride too many positions to zero or near there.
So I treat every position as a trade and let the ones that work become investments. The market finally convinced me that controlling my losses was more important than maximizing my gains. That took a while because I appear to be a slow learner.
I take your advice as freely given and nominally value it at cost. ;-)
Regards,
Rick
We have TREMENDOUS doubts in our mind bitcoin will fix it's scalability issues. This author states it, but that doesn't make it true, and his claim is unsubstantiated. for one thing, crypto will eventually be a para-legal mechanism, and anything requiring PEOPLE to "fix" it technologically, will be a legal hot potato.
Raiblocks attempted to solve most problems from the getgo, and make it so a committee of people didn't have to change ANYTHING, and part of this vision resulted in raiblocks laser-focus on CURRENCY-ONLY, not platform or nifty use-cases.
We attempted to simplify the raiblocks discussion, read our article here...
We enjoyed your writeup, even if we disagree a little bit.
Here's more on raiblocks, we think it's pretty cool, even tho you're right that it could be a pump-and-dump, but then again, so could ANY cryptocurrency. It MIGHT be better than bitcoin tho, read why...
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@harpooninvestor/raiblocks-master-crypto-series-because-everyone-deserve-their-own-blockchain
I think you're missing the point - as the video explains there is little practical value (at the current time) in a feature that increases transaction limits regardless of how clever it might be at a technical level. If it doesn't provide a market advantage that can entrench it for the long haul it's nothing but a fanciful distraction until the next contender comes along incorporating the very same ideas but with more whistles.
There's an alt-coin singularity event on the horizon - maybe 2-5 years out - where big problems will have been solved and all of the best-of-breed approaches will have amalgamated into the surviving protocols (just as has happened with every single software platform in history, laying waste to the competition). My bet is with cryptovestor on this one - for better or for worse it will be successive versions of ethereum and bitcoin that are left standing, the rest is just a game of musical chairs.
I'm would argue Cardano over Ethereum, but like you said, it's going to be the big coins that incorporate the little coins' technologies/advancements that come out on top. Though it's still early, so maybe the Google/Microsoft/Apple of cryptocurrencies hasn't been born yet.
One thing to keep in mind is that you can't just always "incorporate" a feature from one blockchain to another, since there are incompatibilities that arise from the fact that blockchains have an immutable history.
We have TREMENDOUS doubts in our mind bitcoin will fix it's scalability issues. This author states it, but that doesn't make it true, and his claim is unsubstantiated. for one thing, crypto will eventually be a para-legal mechanism, and anything requiring PEOPLE to "fix" it technologically, will be a legal hot potato.
Raiblocks attempted to solve most problems from the getgo, and make it so a committee of people didn't have to change ANYTHING, and part of this vision resulted in raiblocks laser-focus on CURRENCY-ONLY, not platform or nifty use-cases.
We attempted to simplify the raiblocks discussion, read our article here...
We enjoyed your writeup, even if we disagree a little bit.
Here's more on raiblocks, we think it's pretty cool, even tho you're right that it could be a pump-and-dump, but then again, so could ANY cryptocurrency. It MIGHT be better than bitcoin tho, read why...
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@harpooninvestor/raiblocks-master-crypto-series-because-everyone-deserve-their-own-blockchain
Is there anything I can read to understand IOTA and or RaiBlocks from a laymen perspective? I can go as deep as it get, I just can't read code.
I wish I had a list of bookmarks so I could just drop a link or two, but I don't have anything immediately on hand.
The easiest way I can explain it is that blockchains are a 1-dimensional path (from block 1 -> 2 -> 3), with a specific target time between those blocks. DAGs (which both IOTA and RaiBlocks use) jump to a 2 or 3-dimensional model, where instead of a set progression, the ledger itself expands infinitively in all directions.
The above is a decent representation of the difference.
Interesting analogy. I'll feel like I need to read more on them.
This video is a great watch for newbies:
What is a graphene chain?
It's an older name that Bitshares/Steem used for the core code behind them. I think now a days it's called AppBase or (something)Base in almost all of the variants. Bitshares, Steem, Golos, Peerplays, EOS, Decent, Muse, Karma, Scortum... there's a lot of them.
Graphene probably isn't the best term to use since they've all modified the core at this point, but it's stuck in my vocabulary :)
HOW ABOUT IOTA. HOW ABOUT HSR?
I agree with most here, but I feel the urge to educate you a little bit. IOTA and RaiBlocks claim to have instant transactions and no fees. For IOTA the tangle still has to be saved somewhere. The founders say, it should be able to store data on the tangle. So you need access to the whole history. But if there is no mining and no fees, who is going to download and store the whole tangle? If transactions are free, this means: free storage. The tangle will grow exponentially with free transactions. Same with Raiblocks. That's a huge conceptional mistake, no one seems to care about. Why would anyone download and save the tangle, if there is no incentive? IOTA has so called perma nodes and even has to use a coordinator node to handle the technical problems, which come with this promises. Both these solutions are the highest form of centralization. You have to understand that whenever someone tells you about free transactions and super fast and high scaling, the trade offs are most like found in censorship resistance and decentralization. If you just buy on their promises, you will get burned. You think they are revolutionary, because they use cool buzzwords, but you only know very little about the technology and the related problems. Moreover, Ethereum can reach thousands of transactions per second in small private networks. This has nothing to do with the real world.
> Why would anyone download and save the tangle, if there is no incentive?
Why do people run Steem seed, bitcoin or ethereum nodes? What about seeding torrents? There's no incentive to any of these either, yet people do it.
The reason people run these network nodes is because they want a reliable on-ramp that they control to access the blockchain, which is the same reason you'd run a IOTA or RaiBlocks node. Every business or advanced user that utilizes these networks ends up running a node, which decentralizes it to some extent.
> IOTA has so called perma nodes and even has to use a coordinator node to handle the technical problems, which come with this promises.
I can't defend IOTA's coordinator, as it's one of the biggest problems with their technology as I see it. The only reason I mentioned IOTA a few times is because it uses the same technology principals as RaiBlocks, albeit in a slightly different way. IOTA promises to remove the coordinator at some point in the future, but we'll wait and see if/when that actually happens. If they don't, it's a huge problem.
> You think they are revolutionary, because they use cool buzzwords, but you only know very little about the technology and the related problems.
I hope you're not addressing me directly, because I know plenty about the technology behind these products, both in their advantages and disadvantages. I do my research and surround myself with others that do the same. I don't buy into marketing hype.
Edit - Also I just noticed you're a brand new user, welcome to Steem! :)
Originally posted in the /f/undefined forum on chainBB.com (learn more).
Thank you. I am referring to all the persons, jumping on the hype train.
Bitcoin and ethereum network is run by miners, which will earn money for handling transactions and downloading the whole blockchain. If you have a 100 Terabyte Tangle, do you think people will download it just for good will? You mentioned seeding torrents is done without incentive. It is not. It is one of the biggest problems of torrents. Try to download a random torrent and it will be offline 90% of the time. It is exactly the problem I am describing. Blockchain should be persistent. To reach this goal, people need an incentive to download and store the data. No fees makes no sense here. I read many arguments against it and they are all based on good will. Well, I don't want to take the bet, that some people just want to make this world a better place and will invest millions of dollars, just to keep the network alive, without gaining direct profit from it.
There's a lot of em, that's for sure. I can't argue the fomo/hype is out of control at this point - but not all of us just stumbled on this stuff in the past 30-60 days :)
I don't believe this is true, though I'd love to see any information that says otherwise. The network itself is actually decentralized via people running full nodes. The miners are just the ones producing the blocks and earning the rewards. It only takes one (or a few, if you want failover/high availability) bitcoin full nodes to power an entire mining farm. You could setup hundreds/thousands of ASIC devices to mine and use a single full node to feed block headers to all of them and occasionally submit a block.
Then there's the case of mining pools, which arguably is one of the most prevalent forms of mining in terms of individual users. The miners who use pools don't download the blockchain either, the pool does, and they again probably run only a handful of nodes for the entire pool. Those full nodes are not even publicly accessible to the larger network (to prevent DDOS) and hidden behind a stratum. Every home ETH miner you know probably uses a pool and doesn't run a full node, nor do they actually download the entire blockchain. They're taking rewards and not contributing to that P2P distribution.
In the case of Steem (one of the blockchains I know the most about), the witnesses here do download the full blockchain on their "mining" servers, but then they completely firewall it off from the world so that it'll never be discoverable by the rest of the network. The P2P distribution on the Steem blockchain doesn't happen on incentivized nodes either.
The ones who probably run the most full nodes on any blockchain network (and thus distributing on the P2P network) are likely the exchanges and service providers, since they're continually bombarding the APIs with requests to monitor transactions and submit operations at a far greater rate than any miner would.
From what I understand - those who are actually rewarded in mining make up an incredibly small portion of the people who actually download the full blockchain and then redistribute it to others across the P2P network.
From Spain Madrid, thank you for an honest un vias expert opinion, any other currency with new tech we should know about?
you are a Artist mi friend.
You got a lot of hate for your opinionated post/video :). When bitcoin passed 10 or 14k, you said one thing, market doesn't care about tech anymore, it's a ponzi, bigger fool theory.Even right now when I'm "investing", I do look what coin or project offers but I'm more inclined to see if there'll be bigger fools to buy that shit for a higher price, maybe because of some pretty website, maybe because they have a "partnership" deal with someone.
Everytime I argued against iota, it's flaws, I got downvoted to oblivion in reddit, it's the same thing with raiblocks, or ripple right now. There are laggards everywhere, honestly I don't care about the tech behind raiblocks, today it dipped and I got myself small amount xrb, I may increase that position only to dump it on binance, hoping there'll be fools who'll buy it for a higher price there.
Not a problem, pretty awesome that you ran across this article via a google search! :)
Regarding #2 - there's been a lot of talk of "moving the decimal" to address that problem. Currently XRB (errr NANO I guess?) is using Mxrb, but could easily be changed to kxrb, which moves the decimal to the right by 3 places. In the current system:
1 Mxrb = 1 XRB = 1000 kxrb
But it could easily be changed so that:
1 Mxrb = 1000 XRB = 1000 kxrb
More info on the units themselves that are compatible with the blockchain can be found here:
https://github.com/clemahieu/raiblocks/wiki/Distribution,-Mining-and-Units
Yup! Pretty much any blockchain can pull this trick off to some degree.
I haven't looked deeply into blockstack - but I do know they have some existing platforms that are pretty interesting and could be adapted to their own blockchain. I don't think it's as robust of a solution as something like EOS, but more focused sort of like Steem. Again, I've probably spent less than an hour reading about them, so I could be wrong ;)
Interesting points, but i don't think it's fair to compare adoption rates to Steem just yet seeing that most people can't even buy the coin right now. I also don't think that transaction speed is the sole reason why people are invested in it long term, either. I would, however, agree with you completely that hype around the thing has reached the early "euphoric" stage.. but this is not really enough to convince me that the thing is a classic "pump and dump" or that this WILL dump hard. Even when Verge started selling off, it still didn't drop to even half of pre-pump levels.. or how about the crazy pump on Power Ledger(POWR), 100% purely driven by hype? POWR predictably deflated back down, however, it also didn't take long to gradually rise back up to it's all time high(less than a month). Did either Verge or Power Ledger die? Did investors forget about them quickly to move on to the next popular flavor of the week? Of course not and it won't happen with RaiBlocks even IF it "dumps" as you say. Why do you think this is?
The classic pump and dumps of the old penny stock days and now crypto always have the exact same characteristics. Very quiet flat trading chart for months with no development progress, then a sudden and sharp 2-3 day pop up to get that spark going, followed by an immediate gap down to half of the initial pump, then sometimes a rapid swing in both directions once or twice to bait more newbie fomo buyers, and finally ending with either a fast or slow bleed out as volume dries up(ReddCoin is a good recent example). While RaiBlocks DID rapidly grow in December, it started off very organic and if you take a closer look there wasn't that much selling pressure on the thing even as it started doubling in price before it went into the hype overdrive today. This lack of short term dumpers to me tells me that there are more long term believers in the thing than there are quick flippers. A good sign. The chart looks way more like Power Ledger an less like ReddCoin. Remember, time is accelerated in the crypto world. 1 month in stocks = 1 day in crypto.
On the tech fundamentals and adoption:
One thing I learned from the stock market world is that fundamentals aren't a bullet proof way of determining whether or not market sentiment will drop on a stock or that one company will win over another. RaiBlocks might not be solving an immediate demand right now in the crypto space(this is to address your comment about RaiBlocks not doing anything that is in current demand at the moment) but people are invested because they believe that the value of what RaiBlocks attempts to solve will be more relevant eventually.. Everything comes down to your time frame on when you are expecting a ROI. People are invested in Tesla and Amazon even though they are still not profitable companies at the moment and are currently trading at high multiples of their forward earnings. It may not seem rational, but this doesn't really matter if enough people believe that they WILL be profitable in the long term. There is what many will claim should be the "true value" and then their is perceived value. The second matters way more. Remember, VHS won the battle against Betamax. At the end of the day, the old Maynard quote still applies, "The market can remain 'irrational' for longer than you can remain solvent."
The idiot OP didn't even understand why this coin was flat for so long. I'm not going to do his homework for him, because I let idiots be idiots, however the price rise correlated in time with an event in the lifecycle of XRB.
XRB is going to be huge! People called Bitcoin a pump n dump back in 2012...
but what I am really here for is to thank you @steemed for your hospitality at STEEM Park on New Years day... it was a great little place to start the year
https://steemit.com/steempark/@jeffjagoe/visiting-steem-park-in-brooklyn-ny-an-epic-start-to-2018
I respect Crypto Investor and watch his content a lot(even though he's been wrong lately on some predictions. BTC dominance increasing, for example), but his biggest blindspot is that he thinks too much like a trader and not like an investor, which is ironic given the name of his channel. Specifically, he only thinks in the short-term. You can clearly see this when he claims that RaiBlocks does not solve "the immediate need in the crypto space" at the moment. Adoption, interface, ease of use, etc.
It is commonly known that in the investment world, the BIG money does not chase these short term gains. It goes for the unique and interesting projects, regardless of their immediate applications. I'm talking about the billion dollar investors, not the million dollar ones. These types of investors ALWAYS try to get in early on something that will give them 100x, 1000x gains in a few years when demand for what they are invested in becomes more relevant. They look at big picture potential here. I work in the tech field and have personally met at least 2 billionaires in my lifetime. When you talk to these people about investment and the types of things that they are interested in, they always gravitate towards those types of projects that break new ground. Stuff that nobody else is doing in that space.
My father studied Quantum mechanics in the 60s, had a PhD in the topic and taught at Virginia Tech for a number of years afterwards. At the time, everyone told him that what he was investing his time in was a waste because it did not address an immediate problem, nor did it have any practical implementation at the time. It was purely theoretical. Today, you've got the top tech firms paying millions for the brightest minds in that very field, now that quantum computing is a reality. This is why people are interested in RaiBlocks, in my opinion. It's laying down a foundation for the future.
One final point I'll make is that when you are investing in a stock/crypto, you are not just investing in the tech or the project. You are investing in the people behind it. It's obvious that the RaiBlocks team is very passionate and forward-thinking.. and that they are trying to do something radically different from everyone else. Regardless of whether or not this is currently relevant or that it is something in high demand today, this is always where big investment opportunity lays.
Downvoted for a lot of reasons. I'm going to lay those out.
First of all, though, I didn't mean to nullify your rewards. That was an accident. I didn't realize I packed that much of a punch. But this accident is going to underscore the prelude to my critique.
See I just downvoted you with about $2M of steem power. I didn't even know it had this valuation until I looked tonight. What does this $2M represent? The steem power of my accounts amounts to a clerical error on my part when I powered down "all" my steem last year, in an effort to dump steem and move from this platform. What was left was the steem power in this account and a bunch of others that were too small to trouble with. So I didn't bother powering all this down and am letting it sit, for no other reason than I have more important things to do.
Yes I'm bragging. I'm bragging because I am a badass trader and know what I am doing. $2M in steem accounts is an afterthought for me.
Wrap your mind around that for a moment. It is literally an afterthought.
Now, what does this have to do with the point I will make here? It means that if you want to compare your "cryptovesting" to mine, I will wipe the floor with you. I am a badass. Ask anyone who is in my trading groups. And ask them how long ago I was hyping raiblocks to them, and what price it was.
Now, the reason I down voted you to "oblivion" is that your silly post about raiblocks is completely misinformed. You don't know what you are talking about. At. All.
First, you have the ignorance to claim that steem is a potential solution to the scaling problem. It isn't. The only way steem is a solution to anything is to remove the constant sell pressure caused by the reward pool. The pool is poorly conceived, and its flaws have never been addressed, and never will be. With steem's economic problems, it will never be a solution to the scaling problem or anything else.
Second, you claim that scaling isn't even important. I promise you that you are 100% wrong. It is ALL about scaling. For crypto to be relevant, it has to provide a global payment solution to compete with the centralized services that you claim are superior.
They are not superior, by the way. They suck. They suck because they revolve around an entrenched system of exploitation. They stem from inflationary monetary policies that funnel wealth to the already powerful. Every centralized exchange and bank is an agent of a centralized government, and these governments exist to transfer the fruits of economic productivity from the populace to those who control the money supply.
Now, in terms of scaling, bitcoin is unusable as a payment system for transactions less than about $500 right now, where the high speed fee of 10 USD comes out to a 2% surcharge. Bitcoin can't scale in its present implementation. Ethereum can't scale either. It can't even keep up with cryptokitties.
The only coin you mention as a potential scaling solution is bitshares.
Third, and worst, your post is cynical bullshit. Any idiot can be cynical and disparage a cryptocurrency platform like raiblocks or any other coin. The problem I have with this cynicism is that you have absolutely no balls. You are a chicken shit negative ninny, and your argumentative strategy reduces to unfounded name calling ("pump and dump"). This is why you deserve a huge downvote. And that's what I did, partly by accident.
You actually criticized “unfounded name calling” and referred to @cryptovestor as a “chickenshit negative ninny” in the same sentence. Bravo, sir.
legit /leh-jit/ - Owns $2M of a coin, uses the coin's platform to say it isn't a solution to anything
Dear @donaltrump and all the flaggers,
please consider removing your flag for this post. Here are some reasons why:
@cryptovestor probably spent the better part of the day creating this post and no matter what his opinion might be, it is original content and that should be rewarded. Right now this post is not visible due to your downvote. So you are basically silencing opinions.
You disagree with him. And that's fine. I don't want to persuade you. But his opinion IS valuable to a lot of people, including me. I think it is very important that we have a whole spectrum of opinions on this platform - and minority opinions should be protected. If we start going around and flagging controversial content, it will disincentivize posting such content.
In my opinion you abused the flagging system. Check this post on flagging etiquette https://steemit.com/steemit/@onceuponatime/flagging-etiquette-and-practice.
Please stick to the comment section, if you disagree with someone
Hate speech doesn't exist.
I totally agree, retailers were pretty keen on bitcoin at first but the increasing fee's & transaction times have turned most if not all away, these things are already getting out of control with people only purchasing/transferring BTC as an investment.
Increased adoption, let alone mass adoption is grinding things to a halt. There's no use for bitcoin or ether in the retail sector in their current form, scalability (and a currencies public reputation) is clearly whats preventing any sort of adoption right now. To be competitive with legacy systems, transfers need to be instant, without network congestion & with no transfer fee...
I'm not here trying to claim I will be buying beer with XRB in a few years from now but this is a step in the right direction to address the issues that prevent most cryptos from being used as an actual payment method. If it's successful enough to be picked up by the general public and commercial/retail sector is another matter entirely but I do feel (or hope) its's not just coin of the week hype over nothing.
Have to admit, you do sound pretty badass too :D.
Scaling isn't even important. TODAY. It obviously will be in the future, which is exactly what he said, but a successful cryptocurrency needs much more than scale.
Current centralized payment services are superior in only one way, the only way that matters: they function. They're used. They're scaled. They may be garbage, and they may represent an opportunity in the tens of trillions of dollars for a decentralized replacement, but TODAY, credit cards can process thousands of transactions per second, in currencies that are actually accepted everywhere in their host countries, through cards that nearly everyone already has in their possession. You're confusing today with the decentralized world of the future, which hasn't actually come to fruition yet.
You don't understand money. You think money is the ability to pay your cable bill with a credit card. You're lack of understanding of money probably means that paying bills will always be a struggle for you. But take it from me that scaling is important. The market, which represents collective wisdom far greater than yours, values it tremendously.
Being an assertive no nothing with a $0.01 vote on steemit does nothing to validate your poorly conceived opinion.
I'd say that once you have wealth, you will understand what the true issues with money are. But I am confident that will never happen.
That's right
A few things:
Replies will be delayed longer than usual on this (maybe even til I finish point 2 in this list) because there was a ton, and I mean a ton, of feedback to this video and description that has made me realize how careful I need to be on delivery. I would like to craft a more careful response as the reason this video ever went wrong is because it wasn't carefully crafted (even though most of what I have written here in the description more accurately reflects what I think).
I will likely do a follow-up video because I need to do damage control anyway. I know some of you will tell me I don't owe anyone an apology, and I agree - I won't be giving one. However, I seemed to have split most people right down the middle (support me or completely against me). This is not the aim of my content - I prefer having people who are more in the middle, like jesta's comment here. Many of your comments here are both supportive & critical, which is what I aim for - I would like to rectify that a bit more onto YouTube so expect a follow-up video.
For those of you invested in Raiblocks, understand that my comments are aimed more generally at the sheeplike behavior we are seeing with it recently more than those of you who genuinely are interested in it over other solutions. I don't think full-on "currency" cryptos are well positioned in this market (so yes, that does include MANY cryptocurrencies other than Raiblocks), but I understand the appeal especially if you invested early and believe in it. Note that my criticisms are based on those two factors (the hype and use case).
I appreciate the patience as always.
@cryptovestor, perhaps this discussion on RaiBlocks needs to be extended with a series of articles ... there is a lot of information here and one point that I am interested in is the difference between the DAG/Lattice of Rai versus DPoS.
I'm not vested in Raiblocks... 😂
But, I appreciate the time you take to post your opinions. People need to chill. An opinion doesn't leave bruises.
i can't wait for your "I've told you so" video in a couple of weeks. i like most of your videos and especialy this one, because people have to come real on XRB or IOTA or whatever. and btw. thank you for the link to the actitity web site.
The only youtuber that I watch EVERY video ..... Just keep doing you. Great job and your opinion is very much appreciated.
You're a great speculator and that's what I follow your channel for but there are a couple points that should be elaborated upon.
1- Lightning network as a solution to Bitcoin's scalability problem.
From what I understand that the lightning network is really just a bandaid solution. It requires prepayment of funds that are intended to be spent with a single merchant and it also requires two transactions, one to initiate, and one to finalize and broadcast the transaction. Only the prepaid funds are available for instant transaction with the merchant over the lightning network. As you say, most of the transactions involving bitcoin is to and from exchanges, the lightning network would be useless for this use case and will not result in much improvement for scalability. There might be other changes to the bitcoin network that will improve scalability but that will probably be at least two years on.
2- Steem
I’m not sure if I understand steem correctly but I think the vast majority of ‘transactions’ on steem aren’t transactions. The vast majority is just recording posts and votes from the steemit.com on the blockchain, not value transfer transactions.
Another problem (or plus-side) with steem is it’s inflationary and it always will be. The only way steemit is can be feeless is because of its guaranteed inflation that’s paid out to people that validate transactions. Inflation is a good feature for currencies people actually use day-to-day but people in the crypto world tend to hate on coins that keep inflation forever as a feature.
This is unrelated to the video but I’m also very doubtful about steemit’s ability to succeed as a social media platform. It’ll have all the problems all social media platforms have now, relating to hate speech vs free speech, spam, harassment, fake news, regulation, and not to mention competition from incumbents. The money could motivate a lot of people but like regular social media, the money will be concentrated to the most popular and influential users, a few dollars a year isn’t much incentive for people that just endlessly scroll facebook or reddit to adopt a whole new platform.
I really think RaiBlocks is unique and it’s fundamental difference in technology (DAG) is was allows it to be what it is, feeless and instant, I’m not sure traditional blockchains could ever mimic that. You certainly could be right about the pump and dump, it will be bloody if true. I also agree that adoption is the biggest problem and I doubt any crypto currency in existence now will ever be widely adopted as a global currency. A good currency needs three things, stable value, near instant transactions, and near zero fees, not one crypto can check all these boxes but RaiBlocks does two better than any other for now at least.
Your last paragraph nails it. Cryptos cannot be used widely in the real business world if they are not stable. Real business profit margins are often small and so buying manufacturing materials or selling end goods wit a currency system that may move up or down by anything from 10-70% in a day is roulette - totally impractical.
The crypto space is like the Californian Gold Rush on hyper steroids. At the moment it’s a speculators platform not a business platform.
Across the crypto board, transaction speed, particularly settlement time, is awful at the moment. Waiting well over a week for money to arrive in your account is also worrying and not acceptable from crypto exchanges. Business needs stability. Cryptos are insane right now and so it’s difficult to see how they can successfully connect. The slow process of evolution will grind out a workable union.
I agree wholeheartedly on the stability issue. Frankly I'm surprised @cryptovestor didn't also pick that out as another one of the killer features that is desperately needed in the space. If you're genuinely interested on how this is being solved I'd check out the MakerDAO project (i.e. DAI tokens).
Hi Cryptovestor,
I enjoy your videos. I appreciate the fact that you aren't just pumping coins, you are making up your own mind and do so while trying to be honest.
I don't agree with a couple of your points though. And for the record 65% of my crypto portfolio is in Bitcoin and 3% in RaiBlocks.
The lightning network is not going to be an answer to Bitcoins scaling issues. I got around to looking into it a few days ago and was bitterly disappointed. Opening up channels of commerce that are only useful over repeated transactions is not worth the hassle imo. And I'm coo-coo over cryptocurrency. I'm one of the guys that goes out of his way to transact via bitcoin.
Scalability and adoption are a little bit like the chicken and the egg. You can't talk about one without the other. I believe that if Bitcoin scaled more gracefully it would be being adopted that much more quickly.
Which makes RaiBlocks an interesting alternative. If it doesn't do what it claims it can do, and I clicked on this video expecting you to tell me it doesn't, then it will be worthless. But IF it does then my gut feeling is that Litecoin and Bitcoin could be relegated to Silver and Gold 2.0. The reason why RaiBlocks was around so long unnoticed was because people assumed Bitcoin would be the answer. The optimism around the lightning network has shaken my confidence though and opened the door for alternatives.
Also I feel you slipped and missed the point when you said if speed and scalability were the only issues then we have PayPal. There's a reason people are interested in conducting transactions with cryptocurrencies instead of a government issued and controlled currency.
Maybe not unlike the reason you are interested in using Steemit instead of YouTube?
Thanks again for the thoughtful videos and insight.
Wait, you don't think lightning will fix bitcoin, but still own 65% bitcoin? Does not compute. If you don't believe in Lightning, you don't believe in Bitcoin. To be clear, neither do I.
Bitcoin and litecoin are not stores of value, by definition. They're not digital gold and silver. A store of value must first be used as a widespread currency and build a history of purchasing power stability (this is the adoption phase, not random mass purchasing by laymen who heard about it from their cousin's nephew, despite prohibitively high fees destroying any utility the network may provide), or there is no value for it to store. If you're not on the lightning bandwagon, abandon bitcoin for something with an actual future while it's still priced in 5 figures.
I think the basic idea of lightning network is in and out between 2 accounts, but this can be generalized to much more, even if there is no transaction between to btc addresses. This is just a record of some transaction that is then sent to the blockchain. It's like if you sent btc to a A address, that send the same amount to the B address that finally send your btc to the receiver address. Then all transaction that have used the virtual A/B addresses goes to the blockchain. Note that A and B addresses can be used as sender/receiver, and the blockchain has just to receive the sum of these transaction. So you just send btc to someone, he receives it instantly thanks to lightning network, and ultimatly the blockchain record it. No idea of what you see about your address on the blockchain, maybe some transaction labeled as lightning.
So, yes, it is a scalability solution, this plus bigger blocks, maybe to handle all information about the transaction of a lightning network (that have to be recorded) will make BTC the more powerful crypto by far. Just add smart contract and you have a beast that no one can beat ...
I'm not a blind BTC believer, just realistic, my favourite crypto that I hodl wathever is LTC (just saying to be clear).
You damn right, man!
Usability (to get adoption) is a main quest for cryptos. BTS & Steem has a knack here cos they are useful for something else than just a transactions.
I completely agree the rise of XRB has been insane. However I think you're glazing over the fundamental value of XRB.
It is a true decentralised cryptocurrency and it's actually working. So lets take a look at some of the other cryptos that are ahead of XRB
XRP - fast and low fees, centralised
IOTA - fast and free transaction, centralised (coordinator) and not working
Bitcoin - slow, high fees and centralised (miners)
Litecoin - centralised (miners)
I agree it's not going to #1 on CMC, but it deserves a spot in the top 10. Why? the whole cryptocurrency space was founded on Satoshi's vision, a truly decentralised trustless currency. XRB is the only one that really matches up to the original vision.
Happy to see other people's thoughts on this.
Seems like it was having issues earlier today on XRB’s biggest exchange.
That's why rai.exchange is being actively worked on to address bitgrail's longstanding problems
Yes - this has already been addressed. You will probably find that it's the incompetence of BitGrail than XRB. BitGrail was running 1 node to process all the deposits and withdrawls... ONE NODE.
This is another good video @cryptovestor, thanks for the details and presentation of the material. I generally agree with you. Let me explain my reasonings:
I don't see RaiBlocks as having the business and structure to support adoption. It's a small crew at this point. The technology is impressive from what I have seen. But that is just the tip of the iceberg for adoption. Debit cards. Merchant adoption. Security tests.
It is interesting that RaiBlocks is very essentially a Distributed Proof of Stake Coin. Datadash did a RaiBlocks video recently and pointed this out. Hmmm... where does the DPoS model also reside? In 2 other coins that come to mind, Bitshares and Ark. In fact, if you listen to Ark videos, you will find out it was inspired by Bitshares. Most people may not realize that Ark transaction take on the order of 8 seconds to complete ... and is very fast. The Ark toolchain is very robust and the wallet and smartbriding to Ethereum are quite powerful. The overall utility of coin like Ark (not shilling for Ark here, btw) is much greater than a coin like RaiBlocks.
When I look at a coin like Ark, (or possibly a coin like Cardano) I see a multi use case for the coin in addition to be being a fast currency. I am closely watching Ark as they strive to make more industry relationships. This also goes for other coins such as Litecoin that are attempting to have more partnerships/cards.
I get the sense that perhaps the hope is that RaiBlocks will becomes a substitute for Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dash, and this is the genesis of the FOMO. This could be possible, but the partnerships that Litecoin is creating and the structure / organization that Dash has already puts them way ahead. Even a coin like Decred which has a governance model and an organization structure supporting it.
There could be an inflection point that allows RaiBlocks to become easily adopting, and I will be investigating alone those lines. However, at this point, I don't quite see it. I would classify my overall thoughts on RaiBlocks as "positive on the tech, negative on the adoption, neutral overall" at this point.
This summed up my thoughts quite well.
Nice write up. I wouldn't say it's inferior. We are just using new technology based on old technology. The problem with PayPal is that you have to have a bank account, wifi, your information is not encrypted, and you have to pay fees to PayPal. Crypto will find a way to change all of these things. Centralization also leads to corruption and an oligarchy. Once crytpo becomes more mainstream, plenty of the centralized businesses will go out of business.
I'm relatively new to cryptocurrencies' financial aspect, but one thing I have noticed is that emotions are running extremely high. If you tell someone on /r/bitcoin that BTC is in a bubble, they will act as if you have insulted them. People are thinking emotionally and not analytically. Your channel has been a great resource for a beginner like me, and breath of fresh air.
sorry, for the angry tone, not actually angry at you, but passionate
All the noobs fantasize about some future potential that WE ALREADY HAD when BTC was $250. I've actually USED cryptos for purchases A LOT back since 2013 ..and I CAN'T anymore 'cause they're so damn useless and clunky!
I get where you're coming from, but THERE IS NOTHING BUT the scaling problem. Nothing. NO one has use for junk that's clogged and slow.you know how we fix problems like scaliblity? We. Find. Better. Tech. And I'm tired of being f'ing patient about it!
What's the point of early adoption when only the early adopters got any practical value. Bitcoin only had an actual reason to exist when it was under $500. Sure I love the investment gains, but that was never suppose to be the point and is unsustainable if it IS the point.
The question isn't "why Riablocks" . .the question is why is all the other crap on the top 10 list?!? Bitcoin Cash, NEM, Stellar, NEO .. heck even Ethereum can't handle stupid cats!! Bitcoin and Ethereum have name recognition but can't. Do. Their f*ing. Jobs! As someone who didn't get into this as a get-rich quick scheme, I'm freakin' pissed that the crap no longer works 'cause of all the normies!
Winter 2014 I was IN LINE at a Gamestop and realized I didn't have enough money .. bought a gift certificate with BTC and used it within 5 minutes without having to get out of line! DANGIT, BTC saved me from my credit card debt 'cause I stopped over-spending. :\ (I'd put my whole check into BTC after rent and utilities) -- SO many times I would buy a gift card with crypto at the end of a meal and use it on my way out .. now I have to buy it like 2 hours ahead?!? Dude, WTF?!? -- Once I bought a movie tickets with Bitcoin WALKING from my car to the theater and had it scanned from my phone WITHOUT SLOWING MY STEP .. well THAT'S shot to Hell. I want my freakin' crypto back!
So YEAH, F the big names and gimme something that just works. Yay, Raiblocks .. if it has a chance, I'm supporting it.
(edited order of points)
I like your comment because it's humble and practical and your writing style is easy on the eyes and you're not trying to one up anyone.
Why thank you I agree. :) -- I guess you're trying being sarcastic, but I really don't understand why anyone gets into crypto now .. I mean .. BELIEVES in crypto. (Are those the same thing?) I guess I'd buy Apple stock if I though it was going up even though I hate Apple .. but since I don't believe in the tech I'd be ready to bail at a moment's notice.
It WAS awesome and useful and now they're all crap .. I have used LTC and DASH on Overstock, but even there it has to get shapeshifted to BTC first and get clogged and trimmed down by fees. What would make people believe they're ever going to really get fixed or going to really be useful again? And if they can't be useful again, then how can you argue it's not all a ponzi scheme?
I'm not being sarcastic. I like cryptocurrency because honestly I like to mine it, it's fun, I like to read the papers on the uses and think about if it is practical or not. I look at the advisors and boards to see who the people are behind the coins and tokens. Right now it satisfies a curiosity and thirst for knowledge and understanding. My background is in studying history, so things that impact the human condition interest me and I like to think (idealistically) about the future.
I was checking out Overstock the other day and couldn't get shapeshift to work using ETH so I gave up on that. They need to take out the converting piece on that and just straight up take the currency. Overstock seems interested in holding cryptos so maybe they will do it. Stepping out and saying "I'm going to hold (anything else but BTC)" is a risky statement for big companies I think but something has to be done because you are totally right the slow SLOWNESS and fees is a huge drag.
Merchants need assurances on a few points: chargebacks, returns, escrows (for returns), happy customers, safety. But dollars and banks can do this... what is the impetus for anyone to use a cryptocurrency? I guess if they are tired of bank fees and things. But dannnng BTC fees are super ridiculous right now.
Yeah, I wasn't sure if you were serious or sarcastic, but since I was generally venting I figured I better cover my bases. :) I thought my use of "noobs" might have been a bit over-the-top, but I feel like everyone has gotten into this stuff SO recently they don't have the larger picture. I got into crypto mining early 2013 cause "screw the banks" and "we can do it better." And for awhile I really think we WERE doing it better .. but NO one talking about it now seems to have been around to remember that!! -- I BELIEVED in the tech and scrimped and saved every dollar so I could get more, or build better miners. NOW, I'm pretty much losing faith in the tech .. right as everyone else is paying so much attention to it. I keep asking myself "what's the point, credit cards have encryption chips now?"
But actually that's why I used LTC on the Overstock platform .. it was the easiest way to get money off of gdax as LTC was the only network that wasn't clogged. (And I used Dash 'cause I found a good number of Darkcoin on an old computer that I'd forgotten about when Darkcoin was rebranded and was only like $7. -- I'm KICKING myself for not doing the master node thing when I had the chance!!) I believe overstock has it's own crypto in development actually .. and gyft as well. I've used gyft for so years, so I hope they come up with something good as well, absolutely wonderful platform.
OH, well if you're a history guy, you might consider looking at the impact of "pieces of eight" as an economic unit .. or even solidus if you want to go back farther. I think both are a much better comparison for the potential of cryptos than tulips.
I think a lot of people have been early adopters like you - me too, for me it was VR. I'm just so over now that no amount of pumping can get me pumped anymore lol I'll check out gyft, and solidus and pieces of eight. Thanks for the inspiration!
Super interesting take on this. You obviously are a serious outlier here, but your reasoning, as usual, is sound.
With so many cryptos in the market one of the most important things people can do before investing is to read about it and understand if its something they support both morally AND investment-wise. Many people fail to look at this, as you have highlighted in this video. It is a common oversight that most people partake in to simply get on board with something that is the flavour of the week/month.
I too would be interested in your thoughts around Cardano, as it is something that is receiving some good attention as well.
Also curious if you think that Pump and Dumps have a place in terms of allowing people the ability to make money. Do you think it's too dangerous, poor morale or causes too much FUD in the entire crypto market? Something you typically look to partake in or stay away from?
Thanks for driving some discussion around this. Lots of good can come from this one.
PS. I love the Thumbnail
Cheers
This meteoric rise shows the state of crypto today... absolutely crazy. Zero fundamentals, zero research, just people hopping on the coin that's pumping. It seems that every month there is a new "revolutionary" coin that will change the world and take over. Last month it was Cardano, IOTA and Verge. It doesn't matter that most projects have yet to prove their real value, people are eager to throw money as if there's no tomorrow. Also, EVERY SINGLE MONTH there is yet another contender that supposedly will be the next X. People don't realize how big it is to be the first in a certain space just as BTC was. Also people forget that every week that goes by there's going to be more and more coins contending for the top 20 list. The only positive I see in this crazy market is that eventually, only the real gems will stay on the top 10 list. Eventually, things will taper down and we will see some stability. It doesn't make any sense at all to have a different top 20 list every freaking day.
What is exciting about RaiBlocks is not that it is fast and scalable, but mostly that the transaction fees are zero. Zero fees is not the same as low fees, especially when it comes to microtransactions or adoption in countries with weak currencies and incompetent governments. There needs to be adoption beyond that though. This would be the coin I could see people rallying behind, if the tech works and it can mature. I think the dump will not be from the hype train dying off, but if or when vulnerabilities of this unproven tech are taken advantage of.
I think the hype for Vertcoin was genuine at the time (unlike that of current moronic Verge shills). It is/was the people's coins. Raiblocks also feels fair and the community support behind it also feels genuine. I hope it succeeds.
A good point! Low fee's are only low so long as the price of the coin is low.
Back in 2015, I could send a Bitcoin transaction with a fee of 0.0005, which was a few cents. That was a low fee. You can still send with that same fee and it still works (sometimes), but now that's $7. That's also only accounting for that fee in USD (my local currency), not to mention when you add another dimension of additional non-USD currencies and their relative values, it gets way more complicated and sometimes expensive.
No fee's was one of the reasons I have been a big fan of Steem, and is one of the reasons I'm also a fan of XRB.
Curious - do you apply the same rationale to Cardano?
I'm not sure the comparison is apt, although I see where you're coming from. As much as I like the project, it seems pretty clear that ADA is quite overvalued right now. But it's not pumping like crazy like XRB is... ADA is up ~7x in the last month, XRB is up ~125x during that time.
Also, the two coins are fundamentally different. XRB sells itself purely as a currency, while ADA doesn't even have the stated goal of being a currency. Cardano's entire purpose is to see what creating a blockchain using the scientific method looks like. It tries to identify and correct the technical issues faced by previous blockchains. It's really not trying to be a currency - Charles H has even stated in interview that one of the cool things he'd like to see come out of the project is a developer creating a volatility shielded currency on top of Cardano.
So to me, the long-term aspects of both coins are really not comparable. I ADA is currently overvalued a bit but as a 2019 pick I'm quite confident it's solid. Can't say I feel the same about XRB. If I had any I'd be selling them all pretty soon.
That's an interesting question but I don't think Cardano and Raiblocks are comparable. Cardano is a platform that others can build on, which would give it a gateway for adoption and would increase its value. Also, a lot of people like Cardano because of its academic philosophy. This legitimizes Cardano which can lead to more adoption. I can see an actual company finding merit in Cardano to the point of using their platform and investing in it. Just my opinion though!
Thanks. I’m pretty ‘green’ to crypto so always appreciate any clear takes on the overwhelming # of options out there.
You mention that Raiblocks is only listed on one exchange (Bitgrail). You also claim that it has no chance of long term survival due to lack of adoption.
Well both these issues go hand in hand.
There are TWO exchanges that are about to list Raiblocks: Binance and Kucoin
Once that happens, ADOPTION will GROW.
It's way too early to write off this coin.
If you like this post, and/or havent heard of Kucoin, please check it out and sign up on my link below, thank you:
https://www.kucoin.com/#/?r=1c4xs
Kucoin is rivaling Binance, but has a much better marketing and rewarding system.
Check it out.
So I don't trade I FUCKING HODL and have been doing so with bitcoin for some years now. Is raiblocks a deflationary monetary system?
I think Raiblocks qualifies as deflationary - no new tokens will be created and the 133m that exist now are the limit. So from here on out, as wallets are lost and coins are burned, there will only ever be less and less.
Looks like your steemit blew up fast, didn't check for a couple days and your getting mega bucks, well done. In terms of profitability you have many less steemit followers but is it now more profitable than youtube?
You got a 5.45% upvote from @upyou thanks to @pandasquad!
The reason why people believe XRB is undervalued was because people shilled it as the "IOTA, but better." However, IOTA still isn't in a phase where it's fully functioning, whereas XRB is in a functioning phase. IOTA, at its peak, had around a $15B market cap. So people, like me, thought why can't XRB have a $15B market cap if IOTA did. I personally thought it was severely undervalued as a cryptocurrency and most of that undervaluation was because there wasn't good enough marketing. IOTA still has a $10B market cap. Do you personally think IOTA is overvalued? How do you think IOTA will end up if you think another payment cryptocurrency isn't needed?
I was waiting for this video and I am surprised it was hidden.
I think if people don't agree with you they still should not completely fuck you over with downvoting you to 0$.
But be prepared everytime you will make a bearish video, this will happen again.
I did not research RaiBlocks enough so I will make no comment on it. However I do disagree on the point that Lightning Network will solve everything. I would really like to see a video from you that goes in-depth into how Lightning works and what the pros and cons of it are. Since you are one of the more rational and IMO smarter YouTubers out there, I think you will recognize the problem soon enough.
FYI there are other people on Steemit with a similar name to yours that might be getting your viewers (from YouTube) instead.
Great post. I suspect the only people disagreeing with this argument are those on the Raiblock band wagon.
Fyi love your content you are my most frustrating but appreciated content creator. Frustrating because you often undermine my opinions but appreciated because usually I need that alternative perspective you are offering.
Honestly, you have changed my investment mentality as radically as cryptocurrencies have changed my life. I have been reading the book cryptoassets that you have recommended and it has been an amazing read so far. The way you are able to Calmly asses the situation in the market is truly remarkable, and I hope to learn it one day. Keep up the good content, you are my biggest inspiration as to what I want to achieve as an investor. Hope you won't get too many raiblocks fan boys hating you for telling them the hard truth.
I agree with you on the state of adoption of cryptocurrencies. There are already solutions out there that do many of the things that crypto does but is centralized, especially in the developed word. I think it has massive potential in developing countries but trying to get the average person in America interested outside of price action is hard to do. I love blockchains and the potential they have. Trying to explain the backend of a distributed system and how/why that is important to someone is another.
Im sad to see this great content to be downvoted to the ground.
WHY?
WHY?
WHY?
Another amazing video, hats off. I have recommended your youtube channel to a few good friends now, exceptional content. Could you say something about your background in investing, if I may ask of course.
I'm afraid the vast majority of cryptos will end up being pumps and dumps... thing is, they can be pumped for several more years.
This is exactly the type of constructive criticism I like from your YT as well. Not just bashing a coin because of XYZ excuse but giving a detailed opinion on why you think what you do and articulating it in a way that everyone can relate to. Well done.
I remember that these rail blocks are distributed through solving captchas but i don't find major developments in this coin not only this most if the cryptos are don't have good business plans.
Interesting video, I like your realist view of some of the crypto space as it helps me get outside of the crypto echo chamber. I have heard a lot about XRB in the last few days and tend to agree with your assessment for the most part (especially since its currently pumping on a single shitty exchange which tends to yield very temporary pump/dump style results for the most part).
THANK YOU! Finally someone who brings up Steem and BitShares on these speed comparisons, for some reason they seem to always be left out of the comparisons!
I think you are severely underestimating the fact that it has NO fees. Sure, there are other coins that you can move around with relative speed, but the lack of value lost for a decentralised currency is absolutely remarkable. It's a beautiful thing to ping back and forth tiny amounts of XRB and see the full amount getting there in no time, and I've seen many people invest on the coin upon trying that.
Good point. But I think fee becomes an issue when used under the "Crypto as a currency for paying for goods and services" use case. Most people are using it as "Crypto as a speculative investment" and all we do is buy and keep it in exchanges and move around exchanges. In most cases all cryptos except bitcoin (currently) the fee is very low and we are willing to pay for it atleast I am. In my humble opinion, without mainstream adoption the value add generated from low fee is not significant.
No fees is precisely one of the major downfalls of Raiblocks. It sounds good as a selling point, however in practice no fees also means wide open for endless attacks. With no monetary penalty for sending massive amounts of transactions, this thing is a toy.
There's no monetary penalty for sending massive amounts of transactions in XRB, but there is a monetary penalty in having to do massive amounts of PoW to submit all of those transactions (which uses electricity, which costs money).
I'd welcome you to try this attack and see how well it works out for ya :)
Thank you for your insights. Keep up the good work
Sorry as this is unrelated to this particular video but do you think you can please do a video on the lightning network for Bitcoin. I know how it works but I would really like to hear your opinion on what the impact will be. I love this video too by the way I 100% agree with you and it's always refreshing to hear a dose of reality every now and then when it comes to cryptocurrencies. Keep up the great work and Happy New Year.
I support this suggestion! I hear lots of talk of how lightning network is all about a conspiracy to centralize Bitcoin and for central banking to grasp control over crypto and further enslave people who are only in this to free themselves, divorce themselves from the banking system. @Cryptovestor has a unique voice of opinion to speak on this topic.
We enjoyed your writeup, even if we disagree a little bit. While bitcoin can fix itself, it might ALSO be too simple to say that, vs reality. We don't own any raiblocks at the moment, but we think you might be missing some things about raiblocks. See specifically our Biff & Jane example.
Here's more on raiblocks, we think it's pretty cool, even tho you're right that it could be a pump-and-dump, but then again, so could ANY cryptocurrency. It MIGHT be better than bitcoin tho, read why...
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@harpooninvestor/raiblocks-master-crypto-series-because-everyone-deserve-their-own-blockchain
You are probably right about its eventual irrelevance, but I think it's a simpler story. I've read and heard about the cryptocurrency, and my take is that 2 major things contribute to all this hype, and the speed of transactions is not at the forefront or the reason at all. First, most people have deep disdain for Ripple and everything it stands for, so XRB is being "sold" as the decentralized XRP that happens to be able to also have the speed to make it a player on the tech specs side. Ripple just so happened to have a 10X increase alongside this talk of what XRB is, and it is easy for people to get on board this hype train with those simple concepts. More can be said about what a decentralized XRP would mean in the community of emerging tech to keep the core philosophies of what blockchain is meant to do for freedom and privacy and independence to varying degrees, and with a fear of the evil Ripple money gaining in the crypto world, XRB looks like a good guy protagonist.
I won't use or support XRP in any capacity -- not even to make money :-)
I don't know if XRB is really necessary, despite its advancements. Maybe I just have "coin fatigue," but I'm with Crypto Investor on this one and don't think it will be adopted beyond initial speculation.
I'm wondering if the supposed need for XRP in banking and the adamant refusal of many to support it actually creates a market for something like XRB to take hold in a decentralized currency environment, even if XRB is not the one to do it and fails. My thinking may also be greatly misguided and also why XRB is being pumped under a huge misunderstanding and false expectations.
I do believe that speed, fees and usability will be of high importance for the value of a cryptocurrency
Do you think platform cryptos that return a dividend such as ARK or NEO or any that have master nodes are solid holdings in 2018? The reason being that as institutional money enters the space, cryptos like these check more boxes as a potential investment.
This is a pretty smart and balled dealing with something everybody is shilling about. The stupid attitude of most people creates use case of pumping coins are like this.Oh ETH was $30 dollars at once, i will pick the next ethereum by watching huge price actions based on: i don't know everybody thinks it will be the one?
These people literally have no sense of risk management at all.
We never see the dark side of this situations that how many people lost their money at these. Listen some of those people it is fucking depressing. I mean it just happened at verge for 2-3 times. Some people can't even say verge's name anymore.
Yeah for the investors of RaiBlocks we seem like grumpy missed out bastards who is trying to throw shit on something we did not invest in but if you are so sure that why would you wasting your time for someone who so stupid to not buy RaiBlocks and missed out a great oppurtunity?
Whatever man they deserve to burn. If they won't they deserve to be rich too because of taking that much of a risk too which is incredibly high that i have no idea how it is still going up.
I would agree with you.. This reminds me of Verge where it was going through the same phase before it lost steam (and seems to continue that trajectory)... I still remember when it was 1-2 cents in Dec. Then John McAfee's tweet and all the hype and it jumps as high to about 29 cents (Dec 23). This is the same coin that has not made much impact since its inauguration of 2014. The development team could not met their roadmap deadlines and then hyped that it is a privacy coin (let alone the rebranding of the coin in 2016). All this add up to a pump and dump that people just listen to the hype and not the reality of the coin. Please note that Wraith is not an easy installation (only available with Mac only) and their protocol (and privacy) has come to be questioned. With all this, why the hype on Verge? It all points to a lot of hype after McAfee tweet and reality showing that Verge is not making the grade (today a cryptocurrency was going up but Verge is still going down and at 13.4 cents)
Reference: https://medium.com/@MartinRosulek/how-cryptocurrency-verge-pushes-privacy-and-anonymity-to-the-next-level-4b367e16a8a4
https://news.bitcoin.com/privacy-coin-verge-allegedly-leaking-users-ip-addresses/
http://bitcoinist.com/faith-wraith-misplaced-verge/
It can't be further away from Verge. There was no hype, just Reddit and regular user shilling. No McAfee proclamations, dev team is not anonymous and lead dev is a highly regarded systems engineer, they've met all their goals and have a working product which so far has performed as expected. Unlike other coins there was no pre-mine or ICO, it probably has one of the fairest distributions of any top 50 coin. You only need 500 coins to be in the top 10k wallets.
XRB is the furthest thing from a pump and dump.
There is a lot of hype... I am being realistic.. I have been researching on Verge for the past month and even before John McAfee.. I was very interested in buying the coin because of their marketing.. So I did additional researching.. Their prize focus was Wraith protocol. That was supposed to be announced after Nov 25. Though I give credit is due with their completion of Stage 1 (Core Wallet 3.0), Stage 2 has not been completed still. They got Wraith out recently but it is only available for Mac (12/31/2017). Though I can't say the development team is good or not, I do see is that they are having a hard time meeting deadlines. At the end, the Wraith protocol that came out could be flawed and not working to expectation. Also, consider the history of the coin... It was rebranded from Dogecoindark. If the development team was solid, I would ask the history of of the coin since 2014... These are flags... Could it succeed? Quite possibly. But the track records are showing otherwise.. John McAfee did not help (after he promoted it)... You could make an educated guess for yourself
Honestly, you really do not give any sound technical reasons as to why XRB will fail. Your main point is that it will not get adoption, but that is a problem for all cryptos right now. The argument that you are making here could be applied to almost any coin that is currently rising through the ranks.
In your video, rather than critiquing the technology in a direct and logical fashion, you completely dismiss it saying "I don't care if it is perfect tech, it can never get adoption." That's a strawman fallacy. The tech is everything at this stage. It is the hardest part to get right. Making fancy websites or pretty marketing pictures/mobile apps is trivial and can be done by monkeys and college students. And this is coming from a real world, full time software engineer who lives and breathes it every day. The real value is in the core tech behind the block lattice. That is the hardest part to theorize and implement.
All of that said, there are some legitimate problems/unknowns with the core tech right now that you could have addressed had you been educated and informed, which you clearly were not when you made this video. For example, there may be a way to possibly ways to compromise the network with spam attacks (currently being worked on by a dev) or a 51% attack. Both of these types of attacks are addressed in the white paper and are real threats to the integrity of this currency. But, instead of talking about anything concrete or technical that is unique and specific to the Raiblocks project, you simply spew a bunch of nonsense about adoption which is something that the entire sector is currently struggling with.
It is a shame that someone with your level of influence could not put together something with more substance.
Couldn't agree more. Great vid!
In short, we need next gen CryptoKitties.
But seriously though, the thing that will drive cryptocurrency to the masses will be some sort of use case that can only be done with crypto and/or done more effectively. All the other cases of adoption in shops and businesses will follow because it will be more convenient to add it in(also price will be less volatile).
I had a crypto kitty born today. Looks like people aren't talking as much about it compared with three weeks ago. Im holding on to my RaiBlocks until the Binance community choice voting is over on the 5th.
Yeah i noticed RaiBlocks climbing up and was asking myself what the hell is going on but couldn't find any info on what speacial thing its got thats pumping up the price. Also i kinda missed the Vertcoin pump can you explain it a bit?
Raiblocks Summary -
Promising Technology
Massive valuation ($4B USD)
Tiny user base
Tiny developer base
Present on few exchanges
I agree every coin has to start somewhere, but this one is MASSIVELY overvalued at the current stage of development. This reminds me of the bitcoin pump in 2013. It has a good technology, "a story" is created around it, the price pumps, then it crashes.
Having a good technology is just the start for a coin. The real work is gaining adoption and branding.
Thank you for shedding some light on the XRB madness. Was going to throw some ETH at it yesterday but decided to wait for your video first. Apparently a wise decision since the XRB price has been falling in the last hours. Do you have any opinion on a new ICO that's currently in progress: CHSB token "Swissborg". Thanks for your great contribution to Cryptospace. 👍
Which coin in your opinion has identified User Interface (UI) as an issue and is taking steps towards mainstream adaption? I can think of Dash Evolution pay creating an API which helps users setup wallet using username and password (just as you do for any website). A marketplace is attached to it so we can buy things off the market. It has even Savings Account, Current Account and you can also setup an Autopay feature. I am not sure how far the team has reached. Will this increase acceptance?
Disclaimer : I am not pumping Dash here - I think the instant mining is a big scam.
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Wow this comment section is embarrassing.
As an XRB investor myself, I asked myself the same questions on whether or nor this coin had a future. And after watching this video I see he touched on the exact concerns I had with this coin.
Oh wow 7k transactions per second, ya well you know Visa, that card EVERYONE has and EVERYONE uses, that has practically hit max usage, well they process 3k transactions a second, so even if XRB got to the popularity of Visa which will NEVER happen to ANY cryptocurrency for years, 7k is still excessive
As for the top comment on this video, the 3 MASSIVE errors are the dumbest shits I have ever read
Also mentions scale as not important before pointing out the biggest issue with bitcoin is scale which is hindering adoption...
The biggest issues in crypto this year have revolved around scale. Should bitcoin have bigger blocks, should there be segwit, what about proof of stake, can be shard/prune the chain, why can't Litecoin and others operate as transaction layers... Every single big event in crypto tech this boiled down to scale and no they can't be "solved" through the natural progression of tech. Do the calculations, calculate the size of BTC and Ether's chain and their growth rate and tell me that's viable for decentralization. Vitalik didn't just put out contracts to scale Ether if he thought it was so simple. No one has the answer to scale yet which is why Rai has been so impressive.
Speaking of pump and dumps, TRON is getting pretty out of hand as well, and suspiciously began its insane run-up at the same time as Raiblocks.
I have a feeling you might have caused this:
This epitomizes the market generally. The entire market is a pump and dump. If people really believed in what they invested in, why would they dump it at first sign of negativity towards it.
A very limited subset of cryptocurrency products will have a future because for most cases it doesn't solve a problem. Crappy ideas are being wildly overfunded based on investors believing this is the next coin that will reach the moon and make them rich. The market is not at all healthy, the industry is shifting in a different direction to grab attention and sell a tonne of coins - rather than actually improving the technology space.
People have to take a step back and think from a real world perspective, what problem does the product actually solve and how will it benefit someone in order to gain adoption.