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RE: Speculation: The next crypto bull run is weeks away
Bakkt is a very big deal b/c they'll be adding much more than just Bitcoin in the future.
ERC-20 Gov't Approved and Regulated Stable are going viral. The application stack layer of Ethereum increasing exponentially now.
Longterm:
Use drives demand. Demand drive the price. Crypto is limited supply. The protocols that get mass adoption will gigantic in value.
Use requires scaling which may require sacrificing some decentralization. In other words political integrity is put at risk in exchange for mainstreamability. I'm for mainstreamability but I realize that some projects are going to choose political integrity. EOS clearly chooses mainstreamability as does Steem. In my opinion it is always a balance.
To have political integrity means to be fringe. Most people just aren't that ideological. On the other hand to go mainstream means to put emphasis mostly on scale and performance in order to compete with the Facebook etc.
There are tradeoffs all around. I think of Bitcoin as running one of the more pure experiments out there by keeping a more narrow focus. Other projects subscribe to the "fat protocol" thesis and pack more features into the base layer. The trouble happens when they need to continually tweak these extra features -- it often breaks applications and businesses that built on top of that feature.
It's important to run all the experiments.
I agree most people want something that's usable. They also want something that's stable ... and predictable ... and that no one can steal. All that's really keeping someone from stealing my STEEM is my password -- no 2FA needed.
My biggest complaint with fat protocols though is they get too clever, have too many bloated options, and ultimately could be fragile. I think Steem is a good example -- tons of useless features and complexity -- just look at the "wallet" page as a newcomer and your head will spin. Why are there four options for currency: Steem, SP, SBD, Savings?
So while you can scale up transaction speed, you might be creating a technical mess that can't scale up in terms of features and usability.
My thought is if we choose to sacrifice decentralization, it should be at a higher layer than the base protocol. With Bitcoin, you could imagine this in the distant future if new banks use the Lightning Network for transfers and we, the users, choose to keep our bitcoin in the bank -- not so much on the main chain. The banks would form a centralizing function, perhaps by tracking our bitcoin balance in a centralized database.
So we would have the choice as a user of centralizing or not. Perhaps there could be a variety of banks with different emphases (security vs interest rates vs fractional reserve). But the base protocol doesn't require or dictate any of this.
My thoughts exactly. Clearly Bitcoin has become the most idealogical. Having the right balance I believe is the key to mainstream acceptance. I'd rather have a few trade off with decentralization than to remain un-scalable and not user friendly. Long as the coin is censorship resistant I am good.
That is why I think we will see a bull run in weeks. Bakkt if they are legit and serious will have to buy BTC at some point. Ethereum has issues with scalability which I thought was going to be solved this year when I made my price prediction in early 2018.
Yes, a lot of scaling solutions going on behind the scenes with Ethereum. If you play Zombie Battle ground now it feels just like a centralized game but running on ETH. They are using a Plasma chain. Raiden is going live next week and the constantinople HF is first week of November.
Definitely Plasma and Raiden help. But I do think more improvements need to be made. One of them is the ability to do distributed computing in a way which can scale. I looked into iExec because I realized that would be a bottleneck. At the moment people are content to use AWS for running instances even to provide witnesses for Bitshares/Steem. This is a problem though because it's a centralization risk.
And the upcoming HF is also supposed to reduce the emission rate to around 2 ETH. I think this is a good start but perhaps doesn't go far enough in alignment with the community which wanted 1 ETH. Overall ETH is going in a good direction but there is serious competition like EOS, Tezos, and others.
I saw a lot improvements live in Zug, Switzerland (Crypto Valley) when I was there for about a month this summer.
The great thing about ETH, it's very easy to program applications solutions unlike some other blockchains.
Many teams have built out their own scaling solutions to make it feel like normal application.