5th Edition of CryptoDash - Coins, Tokens, dApps, Chains, ICOs and Wisdom

kiree (25)in #bitcoin • 6 years ago

5th Edition of CryptoDash

Coins, Tokens, dApps, Chains, ICOs and Wisdom

(This is a copy of CryptoDash newsletter delivered every two weeks)

First of all let me apologise for the formats of all editions, as I realized they were not mobile optimised and many of you surely are reading on your phones. I have fixed the issues and the whole newsletter should now be much more readable. So thanks for your patience and not unsubscribing right away

I still recommend rather reading it on your laptop as some links require thorough reading and/or listening.

Before starting with a new edition, I wanted to ask for a personal favour. I have recently written a status on LinkedIn about the responsibility of our generation as more tech-savvy citizens. Since crypto is such an exciting topic, it attracts lots of wrong people. I would like to encourage everyone on this list to educate their closest ones and public on the topics of risk management, security and fraud.

P.S. Thank you for being a reader of CryptoDash. I have gotten positive reviews so far and doing this in my free time thus all feedback is very valuable!

Stay safe and enjoy this issue!

Kirill

News & Resources

// Market recap
In the last issue, I mentioned that the market should be bullish in the next few weeks. Well, I couldn't be more wrong...

As you probably already noticed, the market hit a downturn and erased lots of value amidst the fake news from mainstream media on crypto bans from India, Korea and China. At the same time fake hoax emails are also flowing around the internet regarding Hong-Kong & China bans, yet again. It was discovered though that this FUD started after email of the government official was hacked. Feel free to disregard many of the worrisome information from the mainstream sources as it is usually looking for more revenue from clicks and ads using sensational headlines. Nevertheless, the market is still very sensitive towards bitcoin being bearish and any negative news start panic sells, thus allowing institutional investors to buy cheaper coins. If I would have to describe the crypto market in one word, it would have to be manipulation.

In relation to bitcoin price => Ari Paul from BlockTower Capital mentioned in one of his predictions that: "Bitcoin will trade at both $6,000 and $60,000 at some point in 2018."

Remember: "Smart money is just dumb money that's been through a crash."

// News
The state of the Token Market by TokenData & Fabric Ventures
Here is a sneak peek: 2017 will go down as the year that token sales (also known as ICOs) dominated a large part of the daily conversations in the worlds of cryptocurrencies, decentralized web/ Web 3.0 economics and venture capital. More than 5.6 billion dollars of capital was raised in 2017 according to the metrics used by the TokenData team. This compares to 1 billion dollars of 'traditional' venture investing in blockchain startups in the same timeframe and a 'mere' 240 million dollars raised by token sales in 2016.

Facebook bans crypto ads including bitcoin & ICOs
The whole industry was pretty much asking for it with lots of money being spent on ads for all sorts of crypto projects and products. Now that Facebook cracked down on the ads and apparently Google is following, there is also an opportunity for new advertising projects to reach the audience. I personally have heard about cases where 300k USD was spent to raise around 10m USD, so since the economics of ICO fundraising work, there is no reason for the madness to stop.

LINE to add cryptocurrencies
Obviously, more companies noticed the trend, including the cash that Coinbase, Binance and other exchanges are earning. LINE is about to introduce a feature where its users will be able to buy and sell cryptocurrencies directly from the app. Not a shabby start with 200m+ users...

Samsung to develop ASIC chips
Another titan is about to start utilising the cryptocurrency craze by producing chips for the mining process. It's quite interesting to watch corporates trying to jump on a hype train. Similarly to Kodak, it seems like everyone realized that there is indeed some potential in the blockchain game.

VCs take on evaluating cryptocurrencies
Here is another view on how to evaluate the future value of tokens and cryptocurrencies. I have been digging into valuations for a bit now considering there is no real standard and many views. This article takes on an interesting approach with a spreasheet.

Opinions

// Bitcoin by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of Anti-Fragile)
Taleb is one of the greatest authors of 21st century and just have written a post on bitcoin. Here is a sneak peek:

"In the complex domain, expertise doesn't concentrate: under organic reality, things work in a distributed way, as Hayek has convincingly demonstrated. But Hayek used the notion of distributed knowledge. Well, it looks like we do not even need that thing called knowledge for things to work well. Nor do we need individual rationality. All we need is structure."

#CryptoTwitter

Tweet!

"Cryptocurrencies that are faster and have lower fees will dethrone Bitcoin!" Folks have said this for years, but it's a paradox --- permissionless blockchains don't scale well. Popularity creates contention for scarce block space and in turn, higher fees. --- @Lopp

Podcast

// TurtleCoin the next Dogecoin?

Turtle coin is a community-driven privacy coin with fast transactions. What sets it aside is its community of friendly people that help you to mine and buy it. It goes the opposite way of building the product first instead of raising vast amount of money from ICOs.

Tools & Communities

// Coinvision
Convision is the tool I use to check on social volume, influencers and events. A free subscription also comes with 10 alerts per month with some solid trades and ICO ideas on time. The UI is very clean and everything is being updated on a frequent basis. It also comes with a cool telegram bot where you can type a command and get events for a specific coin. Check it out here.

Digital Asset Spotlight

// ICO: AKROPOLIS
Kindly note that the project hasn't released the white paper yet, but it's worth keeping an eye on it due to the following reasons.

Akropolis is ridding the world of flaws in pension funds with a new immutable and transparent Smart Contract based Pension Fund Infrastructure that is aiming to change the way humanity thinks about saving and investing.

// Problem:

The world's pensions are in turmoil. As our societies are getting older, the systems designed to support us into retirement are massively inefficient. 48% of the retirement-aged population do not receive a pension, and the retirement savings gap globally will grow from $70 trillion in 2015 to $400 trillion by 2050

// Team:

One of the most exciting things about Akropolis is the all-star team it has gathered to fulfil the mission. The team has some rock solid experience having worked at the likes of Lehman Brothers, Vanguard, TechStars, Binance, Merrill Lynch, Ethereum Alliance and many more.

// Whitepaper pending --- see Akropolis

Random stuff

// Cryptocommits by Cryptomiso
This is just a cool website showing how active are code repositories for specific projects. It doesn't really say anything about quality, but it gives an indication that devs are really working on something and deploying code.