[Cryptography] Altcoin investing.

[James A. Donald]

It is clear that there are enormous profits to be made by producing a 
money that bypasses governments and the banking system

And enormous profits have been made

But because there is so much dumb money pouring in, we are seeing a lot 
of altcoins and Initial Coin Offerings for stuff that is not actually 
finished, or not actually working as designed yet, and may never work as 
supposedly intended and supposedly designed.

The altcoin that will win will be the one needs to be scalable all the 
way to Visa and Mastercard levels, and needs to be visibly decentralized 
and visibly resistant to state seizure.

Bitcoin was genuinely decentralized from the beginning, and over time 
became more centralized.

The new altcoin offering are for the most part not genuinely 
decentralized.  They have a plan for becoming genuinely decentralized 
some time in the future, but the will and ability to carry the plan 
through has not been demonstrated.

I like the steemit design.  The witness system is scalable, the witness 
voting system has problems which may be fixable, or may be inherent.

But I have a suspicion that investing in steemit is only going to profit 
whoever owns steemit.com, not the owners of steemit currency.

A successful altcoin needs to be a blogging platform like steemit, but 
it also needs to be a federation, like Usenet or Mastodon.

Then one could be more sure that success of the federation currency 
would benefit owners of the currency, rather than owners of a single 
central website.

Needs to be Mastodon with the ability to support a blog like post, and 
to send and receive money.  Steemit.com is wordpress.com with the 
ability to send and receive money.

Almost there, but not yet quite the right design.

Bitcoin has a decentralized name system, rooted in Zooko style names 
that are not human intelligible.  Its resistance to state power comes 
partly from the fact that there are several miners and anyone can be a 
miner, and partly from its decentralized name system.

Steemit has a communication and blogging system.  But if I hold steemit 
currency, steemit.com connects that to my phone number, which the 
government connects to my true name.   All that handy dandy data that 
the government would like all in one place that you can serve a warrant 
on or mount a raid on.

Need a *decentralized* communication and blogging system, unlike 
Steemit.com's centralized communication and blogging system, and a name 
system that is resistant to government intervention and control, like 
Bitcoin's name system.

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