My Simple Rule for Evaluating Blockchain Projects: Where’s The Working Product?
Lots of blockchain projects. So many opportunities, FUD everywhere. How to grok it all?
I ask myself one question when I start to evaluate a new blockchain. It cuts through all the bullshit and gets to the heart of the matter.
The Question: Can I Use a Working Product Yet?
The original bitcoin wallet. Rudimentary, yet effective.
This rule is simple and effective.
People will wax poetic to me for hours. They’ll talk about the history of blockchain, the future of decentralization. They invoke the oppressive nature of the nation-state, of large corporations, and beckon me towards the utopian future.
Then I get to their website - and it’s nothing more than an email list sign up.
”Where’s The Product?” I ask. After all, there must be a product right? Somebody just told me their new dapp is going to replace Facebook, bring new wealth to a marginalized grouip of people, and make me coffee every morning.
“Oh, these things take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Have patience, and buy into the ICO. It’ll all be worth it.”
I am Triggered By Big Ideas With No Working Product
That’s right - TRIGGERED.
You wanna trigger me, this is how to do it. I am honestly baffled - many people in the crypto space are buying the Brooklyn Bridge. They believe so many ideas with so little evidence.
We all know this is a bubble - at some point, a lot of the current cryptocurrencies will collapse. Of the many hundreds of tokens available today, the majority will be worthless in five years. The challenge is to find the good blockchains that will survive the bubble’s pop.
It is very simple for me. If you have some kind of working product, even if it’s an early beta version, we can talk.
After all: Not all good ideas will actually work. In the words of Vtalik Buterin, "There's always going to be this large set of applications where decentralization actually does not work.”
Here’s the source for that quote - an excellent 30 min talk w/ Vtalik and Naval Ravikant
How a Product Helps You Evaluate a Blockchain
There’s the obvious thing: If you see at least one working project built upon a blockchain (like Steemit for steem), then you immediately know that the concept works. You can see it functioning in the real world.
What if it doesn’t work? Is that the end of the discussion? Not necessarily.
Exhibit A: The LBRY app
A beta product, even an alpha product, tells you a lot. It gives you a gut feeling about the whole project. When I first used the LBRY app, it wasn’t very good. However, I could see how the idea made sense. I loved the team, and loved that they were operating on a single $500k VC investment - no ICO.
Most importantly, I was able to watch the app evolve. In the last 6 months, the LBRY team has made vast, exponential improvements to the technology.
That’s how I was able to exclusively host my first single from my upcoming EP there - and with NO issues. With DTube, on the other hand, I’ve seen the opposite. The service has not improved much, and therefore so far I am not very excited about that product.
Final Thoughts
Of course, I am not the most experienced blockchain expert out there. I’m a guy with about a year of experience who has taken the time to read a lot of the foundational texts - the white papers, the Nick Szabo essays, Vtalik’s essays, and foundational literature relating to cryptography and decentralization.
So far, this is where I have landed. I am pretty strict on this ideology right now. There are too many people jumping into the blockchain space due to hype, and requiring a working product is a good way to clear out the fakers.
What do you think? How you do measure new projects that you discover in the blockchain space?
I'm not quite as hard over on there must be a working product, but if there is not, there must at least be a sound concept, with a well thought out roadmap and a realistic valuation. Unfortunately, that rules out 99% of ICO's and alt coins. There are probably only 10 worth looking at TBH.
Which ones are you looking at right now?
Difficult question. Btc, ltc, eos, bts and Steem I suppose. I like gridcoin from a concept perspective although it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. I like eth but I think it’s price is too tightly linked to the ICO thing so could crash if ICOs are banned or regulated heavily. What are your thoughts?
I think eos has great potential but is still a concept at present and is prob still overvalued despite the dramatic falls.
I think eos has great potential but is still a concept at present and is prob still overvalued despite the dramatic falls.
All your choices are pretty good in my book. I'd just add LBRY as another really good blockchain that I have my eye on - it's not very high up on the charts, but the dev team is great and it's an easy investment at $0.20 per token or so.
I’ll take a look. I have an issue where the vast majority of coins serve no purpose. They just seem to exist because they can. This screams pump and dump. Teams need to realise that to make a coin successful they need more than the best tech solution. They need to engage with the public and increase usage!
I agree.
And I'd like to point out the "How's the product evolving?".
That is very important. Cause I can make a good POC/Alpha product, but if it stays there then it doesn't matter how great the idea is.
And that,unfortunately is my issue with Steemit. And I know this will be controversial but, Steemit did not really evolve much in last year when I started using it. I even took a big break and when I got back there was almost no change. And that's one thing that keeps me skeptical about the project and the governance.
Maybe it's improving now, and maybe it's a hype by some well meaning users who wish for it to be true.
So I'm skeptical, or at least questioning. And I think that's good and healthy for any project.
Now, that does not mean I don't support it and don't want it to get better. (I even just had an idea of how I could help with that, a project of sorts) but there's always reality we should look at.
Steemit is functional, the front-end really hasn't evolved much in 2017 so you do have a point there. I think the community is evolving at least, growing stronger by the day.
Well, just to be devil's advocate :).
DTube is functional, too, right? :).
No, I would not call DTube functional.
I use the same rule. It actually cuts down the potential number of interesting candidates dramatically!
Ya, it's amazing how many revolutionary blockchains are just... ideas in some dude's brain.
Worse still man, I suspect some know exactly what they are doing when they think ICO
Such a good way to look at this. Great advice on this.
And so this!
All, talk.
A friend of mine had a similar heuristic back in the dot-com boom days. "Would I use their web site?"
I've been applying a modified form of his rule for the cryptos that I hold. It might be a great idea, but if I don't see how I, personally, can make use of it, then I'm not interested.
As with your rule, Steem ranks high if you sort the cryptos that way.
Great way of looking at it... If you don't want to use a website/blockchain, why will someone else want to? Makes it easier to recognize weak execution.
Nice information
Flagged 15% as a warning for spam.