The Emperor's new clothes awards / Crypto style

Ever since Bitcoin launched in 2009, interest in blockchain technology has grown like a virus. There is very good reason for that. It would appear that people all over the world are unhappy with the way things are and despite the risks and challenges, are looking for a change.

The crypto space today is full of innovation and dreams, utility and value, decentralisation and community. It is also full of risk and deceit, theft and greed, fear and empty promises.

The difficulty is working out where the true work is taking place, where the true value sits. It is made more difficult because from one minute to the next, that value moves around. More difficult still is the fact that many building and launching projects to the best of their capabilities will fail and some projects that start out with the best intentions find it difficult to let go when the writing is on the wall.

The market price for each crypto token is well, the market price, but just how realistic and well informed are the market participants? How accurately are the risks being interpreted for each project?

Of course, I don't have all the answers, not even close. But I thought it would be fun to take some of the biggest projects by market cap and play upon some of their potential flaws.

I will award each one with an "Emperor's New Clothes" score from 1-10, 10 being the most naked! ;)

I stress this is a bit of fun though I hope it helps people to generally consider the very real risks that come with these projects and the market price of tokens associated with them. Please do not consider anything here in this post as investment advice. Some or all of the suggested flaws may be outdated or inaccurate.

1. Bitcoin

Highly centralised, co-opted by segwit devs, radically adjusted protocol, forked chains more likely, terrible governance, wastes billions in electricity costs annually, highly unscalable, prohibitive transaction costs.

Score : 10

1. Ethereum

Highly centralised, highly unscalable, poor governance, DAO disaster, wastes billions in electricity costs annually, ICO machine, prohibitive transaction costs.

Score : 10

1. Ripple

Highly centralised, loved by bankers...until they can launch their own proprietary blockchains and as common as grains of rice.

Score : 11 (yep, had to turn this shit up to eleven!)

1. Bitcoin Cash

Probably the truest Bitcoin out there but still has all the flaws...

Score : 8

1. & 6. Litecoin & Dash

Clones. One of which has some quasi privacy feature and some interesting marketing. Scalability issues, prohibitive transaction costs.

Score : 9

1. NEM

Scalability issues, there are so many, prohibitive transaction costs.

Score : 7

1. IOTA

Scalability issues....there are a lot of "things" on the internet, prohibitive transaction costs.

Score : 9

1. NEO

Scarily new consensus mechanism.

Score : 8

1. Monero

Clone and has......zzzzzzzzz.

Score : 10

1. Ethereum Classic

All the flaws of Ethereum....

Score : 10

1. OmiseGO & anything else built on Ethereum

Ethereum cannot scale so anything built on Ethereum may have issues.

Score : 10

1. BitConnect

Is this a ponsi? We'll probably find out soon enough because of the scalability issues.

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The majority of these projects have people of integrity working on them and within their communities. They are all pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology in their own way. The experimentation has in most cases been invaluable in informing later iterations.
They may all be superceeded one day or perhaps one will succeed where the others fail. What is of utmost importance is that someone gets it right so that this technology can set us free so that we may live in peace and continue our exploration of what it means to be human.

The common theme in my project scoring was the issue of scalability. No blockchain project has completely solved that issue, therefore the use of blockchains and decentralised applications remains niche. The possible exception to that is Steem and Steemit....the performance capabilities of the Delegated Proof of Stake consensus mechanism and the Graphene optimised software have come the closest to reaching the required performance level necessary to unlock global dapp and token adoption. The development team that truly unlocks this potential will see an explosion of adoption the likes of which it is difficult to imagine.

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Happy Steeming