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RE: Why Raiblocks Will End as a Pump & Dump

in #raiblocks7 years ago (edited)

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.

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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).