Building the next Main Street “Crypto-conomy”- Cryptonomics 202
By: I A Edwardsson
Tags: Ethereum, Iota, Bitcoin, Tron, Dash

“Kript-o-kon-o-mee” — A Main Street Economy powered by multiple distributed public ledgers and multiple cryptocurrencies, where each DLT is operating as a transparent & fair inter-connected set of Distributed Autonomous Organizations using mutually agreed “Proof of” schemes to validate transactions between multiple parties and DAOs, where each DAO currency is operating a currency which truly is a trusted store of value.

What is this anyway? It’s certainly not free trade…

I dream about the next Cryptoconomy, a lot. It’s a place I envision where “Fair & Free Market Forces reign among inter connected playing fields of business, a playing field anyone, of any means, can join and realize their own dreams, operating their own business, transacting safely between other businesses in order to acquire the quality of life they envision for themselves and their family.

Aside from my own personal excitement and the fact my brain is almost 100% occupied, racing at high rpm iteratively, looking to create, invent, figure out, in practical terms, how the next Cryptoconomy a can be realized, I also find myself dreaming in a positive way about the world’s prospects for the first time in a long time. IMO, never before in human history has the world, a world now primarily powered by the forces of technology and the people behind their technological advances, been so close to being able to remove the usury shackles from 99% of the world’s debt slaves, to be free from the tyranny of those controlling centralized financial systems and the puppet politicians, that is, free to join in to this new Cryptoconomy, and do it at little or not cost.

To me the new Cryptoconomy is a bottom up, “Main Street” affair focused on the creation of real value found in new and innovate products and services.

The new Cryptoconomy has few if any real barriers to entry. You don’t need to be an “Accredited Investor” to invest, today’s privilege of the rich and famous. A Cryptoconomy means anyone can join regardless of their means or standing, they “go their own way” in the Cryptoconomy, make their own choice about the cryptonomic tools they want to use to carve out their own marketing and business niche in the Cryptoconomy which will be powered by new rapidly forming cryptocurrencies with the scalability needed to power a new Cryptonomic reality, enabling anyone with a few computing resources to invest in and earn a decent living, regardless of their age and energy levels and ideas.

What is really exciting about the new coming Cryptoconomy is there are multiple, new competing distributed public ledgers which can actually scale their transactions per second and make it easy to create Smart Contracts “SCs” without the need to be super computer literate, where transactions will be secured easily and quickly, with or without blockchains.

For many, joining the Cryptoconomy will be a simple commitment. By simply making a few of their own local compute, network and/or storage resources available, anyone owning such resources with a decent Internet connection can immediately download their cryptocurrency wallet of their choosing and start earning cryptocurrency rewards, which can be spent directly and/or converted to fiat currencies to acquire the goods and services they need to gain the quality of life they envision for themselves and their family. Nice!

Heady days are about to arrive, no doubt.

OK, now that we truly are at this important tipping point in history, a complete reboot if you like of the world’s financial system,

What‘s the ‘catch’?

Introducing Cryptonomics 202 and the next Cryptoconomy

Awareness and Education are the first few hurdles any good marketeer of a new idea must address and jump over before the the mass public or consumer market is ready to trial, then hopefully adopt a new way of doing anything, let alone pay for it.

In the case of the coming New Cryptoconomy, let’s tackle the first hurdle. Awareness.

There are seven important facts we need to be Aware about the world of crypto today, the current “State of the Union” SOTU if you like, before we can even contemplate getting educated about this new emerging Cryptoconomy…

Much has changed in the cryptocurrency world of “Blockchain”, which is vastly different today from what it was during those heady valuation days of December 17th, 2018, just a little over a year ago.

Let me outline these seven facts about today’s state of crypto currency and distributed ledger technology “DLT” for you below, before you jump into the new emerging world of Cryptonomics 202:

First, ICOs “Initial Coin Offerings” are out, as there are too many regulatory unknowns worldwide and more hurdles every day erected by the “state-ist” governments found around the world looking to control the state (who owns what) and pace of cryptocurrency adoption, so as to “buy time” for those currently in control of the world’s financial system in order for them to manoeuvre existing sources of wealth in fiat currency through and in behind (anonymously) the Venture Capitalist “front men” in order to maintain the status quo of power and control in the world of finance. This is market fact. One only has to look at EOS and their proof of share model to understand what is really going on. Those still friendly to ICOs all have underlying “catches”, so called preferred investor discounts, and share distribution models which prevent the “un-accredited investor”, you and I, from getting the same deal. So do your homework, and please understand the so-called friendly crypto regimes, are in fact controlled remotely by the traditional financial centers around the world, i.e.- Malta is really controlled by the UK and the EU, Singapore is also controlled by the UK, EOS is controlled by NYC investment interests on Wall St., etc…

Second, “PoW” Proof of Work Blockchain-based Mining is out in a conventional Von Neumann sequential “Blockchain” processing sense, where “Proof of Work” operating on centralized GPU and custom ASIC and FPGAs compute muscle is powered by cheap abundant energy sources, now using enough electricity to power 1/10th of the world, all employed to solve “PoW” puzzles in order to keep the “Blockchain” created versions of business transactions enumerated in cryptocurrencies values stored in both distributed (Bitcoin , Ethereum et al) and centralized(Fedcoin?,Ripple) ledgers, public and private, safe. All this is energy is consume “In the name of electronic book-keeping” which cuts out the book keeper and the middlemen (Accountants and Lawyers). Also the transactions per second of PoW Blockchain ledgers are pitiful. less than 20 transactions per second., and any attempt to scale with sidechain and or sharding techniques have been met with defections to create yet another set of blockchains (witness Bitcoin) via a good ole “Hard Fork” of the opensource code, creating yet another “Altcoin”. (some would say “shitcoin” now number in the 2000+ range, many of them still born, and their founders living on the proceeds, sipping on exotic cocktails sunning on a remote beach somewhere, but I digress;) )

Today’s “PoW” Proof of Work Blockchains from leaders like Bitcoin and Ethereum, representing 65% of the crypto market today in Market Value, are huge power sucking aliens, using enough power daily to power several small countries.., much of it burning NG, oil, diesel, nuclear and coal non-renewable fuel sources which pollute the earth. (image dailystar.co.uk)

Third, early “crypto” fans, users and supporters are now starting to realize the current crop of Bitcoin and Ethereum “Blockchains” based on Proof of Work “PoW” can never scale in terms of TPS “Transactions per Second” to become widely adopted as a transaction network or to be used as transaction platforms, yet both together dominate 2/3s of the global crypto market in terms of valuation driven by investor speculation, nothing more, nothing less. Where are the real global transaction networks based on cryptocurrencies? Also where are the energy efficient distributed public ledgers?

Transaction per second “TPS” is everything when it comes to distributed public ledger scalability. “Sharding” that is Zoning of transactions between gateways and adding private 2 public ledger connectivity with “Side Chains” will help in both cases it doesn’t change the fact Blockchain is sequential, and IOTA’s DAG “Direct Acyclic Graph” is massively parallel, able to scale and speed up as more users and transactions are added with much lighter POW (minimal use of power doing puzzle solving) while offering quantum computer hack proof validation of transactions .

Slideshare Presentation on IOTA Scalability

Fourth, A new wave of scalable TPS “Transaction Per Second” distributed public ledgers, some customer variants of Bitcoin’s blockchain, others based on “DAG” Directed Acyclic Graph technology variants, are emerging powered by real use cases and users.

Fifth, STOs “Securitized Token Offerings” are “still born” and make no sense because they pander to the “statists” trying to control cryptocurrency as a source of increased tax revenue to power the status quo of governments around the world, and are the ugly cousin of ICOs.

Sixth, There is a huge lack of real working “transaction networks which can scale and can be easily used by the average person”. To date, only Dash is solving the real world problems of hyper-inflation in South America with their “custom” version of Bitcoin’s Blockchain, and even then, not that well. And this after 10 years of Bitcoin. The reality is the Bitcoin development community is seriously fragmented on multiple fronts while still clinging to their “Bitcoin Maxima-list” agenda of “their can only be one.” Bitcoin will survive as a store of value, like Gold or Silver, and have an important place in the next Cryptoconomy I will describe further is this document, however it won’t be the Bitcoin Maxima-list version of the world, for all of the reasons above and one more…

Seventh, and most important, Initial Service Offerings “ISOs” will scale the next Crypotoconomy tps need, and in the process, driven by the consumer market “need for speed and convenience (easy liquidity) consolidate the many Use cases and Applications offered today as 2000+ Altcoins(many of them shitcoins) to operate on just the scalable cryptocurrencies (Dash, IOTA, etc..)and their secure distributed public ledgers, where each App will be executed as SC controlled applications deployed as distributed services on those public ledgers, delivered as services which actually integrate the use of of the cryptocurrency in a utility fashion to power the service,are now emerging as the way to scale transactions per second, Smart Contracts “SCs”, requiring no regulatory approval as a security. Those Altcoin based use cases and Apps which fail to make the move away from legacy Bitcoin and Ethereum ERCxx based “PoW” Blockchain distributed public ledgers will either be merged by their handlers (many of their handlers are VCs) and forced to transition onto these scalable ledgers and cryptocurrencies or perish. There will be a few exceptions operating on Blockchain using other Proof of Schemes such as EOS and others using “Proof of Share” (ie-I have the biggest holding Position so I get all/most of the mining rewards) and also Proof of Authority “PoA” (for those that like the status quo- that is being managed and controlled by existing authorities, especially Lawyers) . (Look for IOTA’s QUBIC Computer service infrastructure to enable the above.)

Education, the second hurdle, requires the savvy crypto investor and budding “Crypto-preneur” to really dig into the facts above and develop a detailed understanding of the details which differentiate each new emerging technology and set of services and products which are rapidly forming this new world of Cryptonomics 202. Success is in your understanding of the details in the differences and various pros and cons between what will become the new foundations of the Cryptoconomy.

First, let’s identify the player and why these emerging cryptocurrencies and their distributed ledger technologies, communication systems and compute resource management capabilities are posed to become the new foundation of the Cryptoconomy. These are my early choices, there are other comparable budding candidates out there I am sure, who will challenge, or at least pre-tend to challenge. I have made my choices based on:

their ability to execute in providing real value today to investors, consumers and Crypto-preneurs for: store of value+;transaction per second processing+;Smart Contract+;computer resource management (compute/storage/network)+;Integration of existing Applications+;Support for IoT+;+Support for eVoting+;Efficient/clean use of energy+;+Convenience to Investor & Consumer+;Convenience of Liquidity in to other useful stores of value (metals, energy, and asset backed fiat currencies)+;”Proof of” Transaction Validation Method+;Distributed Exchange Support+;DLT Robustness/Node Count

Their “RoadMap” plan for tomorrow to add additional “value” which can actually be made use of my the investor and the Crypto-prenuer

The quality, depth and agility of their development teams

The “same as above” for their supporting communities

The market segments they serve directly, namely, their positive impact on: reducing energy consumption; clean food production; clean water production; protection of assets; use of clean energy; clean air protection;

Here is my “silver seven” short list or “Show me the Growth” crypto-team for 2019 through to 2021 (that’s right a three year forecast) who will create the building blocks of the New Cryptoconomy, without the obvious Top 10 look (Yes no BitCoin “XXXX:, no Ethereum or their “altcoin” derivatives) :

1- DASH, 2 IOTA, 3 Hashgraph/Swirl, 4 Electroneum, 5- Maidsafe, 6-NEM, 7-Telegram

1 DASH- (once Xcoin an early Bitcoin fork, later Darkcoin) one can only be impressed with the way DASH, a DAO managed(by DASH masternodes requiring 1000 DASH= US $95000 in holdings in order to be able to vote in the DAO) distributed public ledger system qith it’s own blockchain and alt currency (its a bitcoin fork) has been adopted by people in Venezuela and Argentina (and by citizens and residents of other countries suffering the same hyper inflation) to get around the hyper inflation affecting those economies caused by the corrupt regimes badly managing them. DASH is really a custom Blockchain implementation based on Bitcoin which essentially proxy approves transactions quickly, and then commits the approvals to their blockchain asynchronously to ensure a fast convenient user experience (CX Customer Experience), with a decent wallet CX not requiring a computer degree. DASH’s daily transaction volume speaks for itself, facilitating lots of small transactions with overall good value volume. What I like about the DASH team( US based HQ) and their roadmap is they are totally market and customer driven. DASH have found their early growth market use niche (small transactions in hyper inflation economies) and their store of value, anonymity(optional), wallet convenience and TPS settlement speed advantages have been put to the test, to prove their effectivenes in multiple non-speculative market uses . Bitcoin Cash may have more value volume (driven by price speculation in the market by the money men on Wall St. in NYC) on any given day, as reported on CoinMarketCap, however DASH has the transaction volume and wallet holders are using DASH to execute daily buy/sell transactions of everyday Goods and Services to portect themselves from rampant local hyper inflation, transactions which are effectively being sold/bought using DASH currency, although for sure these same goods and services transactions live a dual life valued in US $ or local currency. Expect DASH to move into or be near the Top 10 on CoinMarketCap for quite awhile as the existing “fringe” or even “Fake” Top 10 (with exceptions Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash sticking around staying at the top in 2019) start to slide down to lower market cap rankings as consumers and investors look for real stability in their cryptocurrency investments which have a normal trajectory of growth driven by Main St. market use cases , like the ones DASH fulfil quite nicely, at this time. The price of entry if you want to run a DASH masternode is not cheap, however according to Wikipedia “To incentivize their operation, (DASH) masternodes receive 45% of all newly created Dash (with 45% going to miners and 10% to the organization’s treasury) so the rewards can also be big. Given a Masternode cost over $1M at the height of the market December 17th, 2017, now might be just the right time to get in if you can swing US $100K. Living in a corrupt world and need to protect yourself from such forces? DASH has what it takes for anonymity according to Wikipedia “(DASH) “InstantSend” bypasses mining and instead requires a consensus of masternodes to validate a transaction, speeding transactions.[4][1] “PrivateSend” is intended to make transactions untraceable; it mixes participating users’ unspent Dash before executing a transaction”. DASH is what Bitcoin (without the fragmentation and infighting)should have become in IMO. Ready to use and grow, with nifty TPS scaling features to deal with volume spikes, DASH is ready for the prime time growth of the new Cryptoconomy, with speed and optional anonymity built in (if you can get over the fact the founders “ helped themselves” to millions of newly minted coins in the early days… :) ). For the “here and now” investor and user types DASH tops my list for growth in 2019, and will put a strong showing in for 2020 and 2021, as DASH becomes a key cornerstone DLT and crypotcurrrency in the next wave of the Cryptoconomy slated to take off in 2019.

2 IOTA- thought by most to be the champion of all things IoT “Internet of Things”, has slipped a bit in terms of market capitalization out of the Top 10. The relatively low volume of trading compared to the rest of the top 15 crypo-currencies suggests/reflects how IOTA is really in a league and market space of it’s own, one largely defined by IOTA’s partnerships with big companies like VW, Audi, Bosch and Fujitsu Germany looking to leverage IOTA’s “no blockchain” quantum computer hack proof and hugely scalable Tangle DLT features (based on DAG “Directed Acyclic Graph” to improve the mobility experience, improve quality of products via accurate production and supply chain management and help lower the cost of automating and managing manufacturing processes. Of course IOTA is working hard to bring useful technology to the world of sensors and controls at the edge or in the fog of the Internet at very low cost and power consumption leveraging ternary or trinary 3 bit technology (-1, 0, +1). While IOTA has not been immune to large speculator driven market cap swings, IOTA’s market cap usually tracks and lags a day behind the Top 10, as there are speculators invested in IOTA driving most of the activity. That said the volume traded is tiny faction of what the HODLer’s actually own, so in reality IOTA is a very stable investment, as these same HODL proponents of IOTA know a good investment and technology when they see one, and aren’t in the mood to sell generally. All good. The team is young and full of energy and ideas, that said they have been savvy enought to bring in real pros to develop their QUBIC computer resource management & Smart Contract layer which sits on top of, and is upgradable from the current Tangle Node network to QNodes, just freshly baked this month, and expected to be ready for test network use later in the first half of 2019. All good, especially for the IoT crowd.

3 Hashgraph/Swirl- A darling of Mike Maloney at goldsilver.com who is also a key investor, the commercial implementation which is Swirl, Hashgraph/Swirl has been adopted already and is in use protecting transactions between a large network of Credit Union companies across the USA. HashGraph/Swirl is really an Enterprise private blockchain technology, however its worthy to note Swirl competes directly with the opensource offerings of Hyperledger which is fully supported by IBM, and as such SWirl the commercial counterpart of Hashgraph, has the first big win in that private Enterprise market place. Again Swirl private IP and not on Github so you need to license their TPS capability and hire Swirl to integrate Hashgraph to get the TPS performance and inter-company security value, that said not every “blockchain” in the Enterprise space needs to be “white box” open source (Hyperledger). So Hashgraph/Swirl makes it on to my list for those wishing a “more ready to use” black-box alternative which can b e tuned to meet your inter-organizational TPS and security needs, to the highly customizable (read slow and expensive to develop deploy and costly to maintain) white-box opensource Hyperledger project. Hashgraph/Swirl has proven it has the TPS muscle to handle any transaction bus system and scale to transaction volume in the private Enterprise domain, for those inter-commercial and institutional groups looking for Blockchain transparency to secure transaction pairs transapently (behind closed doors) with Swirl’s “Gossip like” protocol. How Hashgraph/Swirl integrates via gateways into the public world of multiple cryptocurrencies is still up for debate, however the Swirl team is technically strong and the Hashgraph technology is TPS scalable, so I expect market forces will drive the necessary Hashgraph integrations with other popular cryptocurrencies as needed.

4 Electroneum- The “in and out of favourite” early darling of mobile mining in late 2017 has survived the last market cash of 2018 and is now climbing “back in” to a prominent CoinMarketCap position having steadily moved up the ranks (of shit-coins and “dine and dash” ICOs) climbing all the way back into a the 60th position in CoinMarket Cap, having done so on the backs of very modest speculative trading volume which indicates the Electroneum faithful are largely Hodlers. The Electroneum valuation is slightly above their intake during their partly troubled then corrected ICO in the fall of 2017 and that is good news. Android and Apple smartphones earn mining rewards by solving the lightweight CryptoNight(forked from Monero) Proof of Work puzzles in their Electroneum Wallets as a background process while their phone operates and get the benefit of using the Electroneum wallet to manage buy/sell orders where there is some liquidity on secondary centralized exchanges, if you need to convert your Electroneum into fiat or other cryptocurrencies. Electroneum’s CryptoNight PoW implementation is ASIC and FPGA proof , yet lightweight enough to work reasonably well in the backgorund of the latest high powered multi-core smartphones, many of which are now Chinese processors which can be acquired for under US $100.00 in most markets. per this review article link on Mediumhttps://medium.com/@humanjets/coin-review-electroneum-etn-47855c0a721a “ They (Electroneum) aim to make it far easier than existing crypto currencies for peer to peer and point of sale transactions by focussing on user experience and viral mass adoption (including the mining simulator), primarily at the market of mobile phone users and focussing on providing a digital payment solution to the developing world. Electroneum IMO, is will positioned to be a big player in the budding cryptocurrency micro-payments market. The Electroneum team is marketing savvy, and has proved they can fight through the social media noise to stay relevant, now it’s up to their tech team to execute and deliver on their roadmap.

5 MaidSafe- Champion of privacy and anonymity “P&A” and really an effort to rebuild the Internet as such, has soldiered on, sticking to their roadmap, ignoring CoinMarketCap fluctuations, steadily updating github with a series of small breakthroughs P&A, which are now looking quite impressive and operating partly on their test network. What is very interesting about Maidsafe (once marketed as Massive Array of Interconnected Disks- MAID) is their founder is a seriously well-seasoned Networking expert, who has been in the trenches building networked solutions for 25+ years. David Irvine get it, and so does his team. Maidsafe is building the alternate to today’s internet, they have reasonably focused and clear marketing and messages and their community it fiercely loyal, of modest size and building distributed apps that people need and actually work, like Music and Video players, Web Sites, etc. Their uTP hole punching implementation on Github is quite good and necessary if you want to run portions of, or your own version of the Maidsafe network behind firewalls where UDP is the only way in and out of the private network. At position 59 after the crash of 2018, Maidsafe has survived and is now about to be in a position to thrive as they closer to releasing the public network for use by us all. If you are “Swinging for the Fences” looking for that really big and long “home run”, in the new Cryptoconomy emerging in 2019, then Maidsafe is a good choice, given the Maidsafe roadmap targeted breadth and depth of their capabilities, and the velocity of the team’s effort on Github to deliver on same. I personally like the Maidsafe team, their goals and the loyalty of their community, Maidsafe are bringing real P&A to the Internet along with a host of Apps people actually will want to run in their businesses or for pleasure as a consumer. The P&A part is long over due and a great incentive replacement to the dark and merky Tornet.

6 NEM- Singapore’s alternative to Ethereum also survived the 2018 crash, and are still enabling ICOs on their platform in crypto-friendly government regime of Singapore. ICOS have never been so easy than on NEM, no programming required to get started, yet it is possible to customize later. TRON may be big in Asia now, however I still think NEM is the future of Mid-Market Enterprise and Small and Medium Sized business boutique coin offerings.., many of which could live quite nicely in the NEM world outside of the bluster of Ethereum’s world of ERCXX dictates.

7 Telegram- TON is big, really big, the team is proven twice over, (they even got chased out of Russia), the vision is BIG, rolling your installed base is always a good thing and Telegram is that “in spades”. Given Telegram’s P2P payment and Smart Contract focus, you would expect them to dominate, and they probably will as those two market segment forces converge in the world of crypto and distributed public ledgers. That said, there is still alot of work to be done @ Telegram“ https://smartereum.com/43063/cryptocurrency-news-today-get-ready-as-the-telegram-1-7-billion-cryptocurrency-is-almost-ready-for-launch-telegram-coin/” and Ethereum and the legion of Altcoins targeting the same market, Zcash, Monero, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Electroneum all have their own communities and established Hodlers. That said their ICO of 1.7B was the biggest ever. I am sure the Team at Telegram will excute, eventually, as the task they are taking on is really big, and be sure about one fact, Telegram will certainly muscle their way in to ride the next big wave of market cap valuation surges many predict will crest later in 2019.

A word about the past, and forward market dominance in 2019..,

Bitcoin and Ethereum, largely because of their own internal problems, and partly because of their DLT design will likely see their collective dominance in the market place wane rather quickly in 2019 as more and more, markets and their rank and file citizens are faced with hyper-inflationary forces and move to altcoin crypto-currency use in mass to both convert and protect their own dwindling fiat stores of value, looking to transact directly without the banks peer to peer “P2P” in the same crypto_currencies or those which have fast liquidity between crypto and fiat. This will mean those altcoins with fast convenient, scalable settlement are likely to rise to the top for micro transaction use, and those distributed public ledgers with low/no transaction fees will shine, as will those with really flexible and easy to use Smart Contracts also shine. All three of these features are not built in to Bitcoin or Ethereum from day one and have been treated as bolts ons (Lightning Network for Bitcoion, scalability as sidechains and sharding in Ethereum), as both of the early incumbents scramble to adapt to the competition from better altcoins, Dash and IOTA included.

That said bitcoin will be around along time, as the ultimate store of value given all the investment poured into bitcoin today, while IMO Ethereum’s competition has caught up and passed them, and are now just entering a real competitive battle for market share as EOS, Waves, TRON and others challenge for Smart Contract supremacy in the public distributed ledger market segment.

All of these recent changes in the Cryptoconomy are definitely changing the dominant market dynamics of Cryptonomics in a good, distributed and fragmented way, with lots of business and consumer choices emerging from the new and rising players in the market to really inject some competition into the market into what has been up to December 2017 a two horse race.

More on all of this later in 2019, when we come up for air to see what has really happened!

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