Why I Bought OmiseGO

Hi everyone! This is my first cryptocurrency post on Steemit. I wanted to share with you all my reasoning for moving some of my Bitcoin over to OmiseGO. 

It all started with one bad trade in Bitcoin. I was feeling very bullish about Bitcoin and had been making okay money. Bitcoin had already hit $5000, so $4600 was feeling like a steal! What could go wrong? The next day the Chinese government announced the ban of ICO's... The market took a hit and still hasn't recovered as there is still uncertainty about the Chinese cryptocurrency market. So there I was stuck with a loss. Nonetheless, it was a good wake up call for me as a trader. I needed to be more diligent and disciplined with my trading choices. Now, I could've played the HODL route and eventually done fine. I think Bitcoin will continue to rise. But OMG kept popping up on my radar. 

My friends were talking about it, crypt0 was talking about, random net kids on Discord were talking about it. Even vitalik buterin has been talking about it and repping some of their swag.

 I'm normally not that into non-mainstream alt coins because it requires a lot of research and the value tends to go down. However, I thought this was worth looking into. So the first thing I checked was the OmiseGO website to get the high level overview. And I sure liked what I saw...

Now the way a website looks should never be the key reason to buy something, but I do think it is an important litmus test for developers. If they can't make a nice website how are they going to be able to make revolutionary blockchain technology? The first thing you see on the site is their cool logo and motto:

Unbank the Bank with Ethereum

This is a really good summary description of what OmiseGO is. I wasn't initially aware that OmiseGO was being built on top of Ethereum. This is a really big win for me because I think Ethereum has a lot  of intrinsic value. And OmiseGO is one of the early capitalizations on this potential. OmiseGO or OMG can basically be broken down into two parts. There is the OmiseGO network or blockchain, and there is the OmiseGO wallet framework. Okay, cool, another blockchain and another wallet. But no, this blockchain really differentiates itself.

Have you ever used apps like Venmo, Square Cash, or something like Apple Pay? They are essentially just ewallets. The question always is, which one should I use? Venmo tends to win out because it is so popular. A good case of winners win. However, not everyone has Venmo installed. They may use a epayment service. The problem right now is that you can't send funds from Venmo to other wallets. Venmo is a more mainstream example, but other ewallets have the same issue. There is siloing between the different payment networks. This creates inefficiencies, unnecessary technological complexity, and pushes away adoption of electronic payments. 

OmiseGO is looking to change all of this. You will be able to send money from any kind of wallet hooked up to the OmiseGO blockchain. Perhaps, even more importantly you will be able to send any kind of currency from different countries! You can send money to your friends in Berlin or Bangkok! Any kind of cryptocurrency can currently do this, but OMG is looking to be much more ubiquitous and accessible. This is really valuable in places like South Asia where there are many different countries next to each other. The political divisions inherently create economic ones.

The key feature here is the OmiseGO blockchain network functioning as a decentralized exchange. Yes a dapp! Imagine something like Bittrex running as a P2P dapp?! You wouldn't have to worry about hacks, because thanks to the Nakamoto innovation you can't hack blockchains!!! One of the really nice features about this decentralized exchange is that it allows for trading across different cryptocurrencies/assets a lot like how ShapeShift works. The problem with exchanges like ShapeShift is that it requires all the different nodes for each blockchain. This is a lot of computational overhead and complexity on the part of the exchange. OmiseGO's network alleviates this by relating the activity of a different blockchain to itself via Ethereum Smart Contracts. ETH for the win!!! This also opens up a lot of arbitrage opportunities.

The next cool part is that OMG blockchain works as a Proof of Stake network. The exciting thing about PoS is that it does away with the energy intensive process of finding a bunch of prime numbers (Proof of Work mining). Mining was a necessary part of Nakamoto's original idea, but Vitalik and others are looking to do away with this implementation detail. So the fact that OMG is PoS is very exciting to me, because it shows that PoS is not just a Proof of Concept. If you want to know more about Proof of Stake make sure to check out the Casper project. The main reasos why the designer's chose PoS is efficiency. There are a literally significantly less computations being done than a Proof of Work design. This is important when you are tying to compute the world's finances. This point about efficiency leads me to the next cool part about OmiseGO. 

At the golem meetup in Berlin the team at OmiseGO gave a presentation about their work. Which I highly recommend watching. After watching those talks, I was feeling pretty confident to buy into OMG. I love the part about how OMG can be used for everyone, from bankers to street vendors selling coconuts. The final speaker of that night was Joseph Poon. He is a blockchain all star and Lightning network co-author. He also co-authored a paper discussing a similar project with Vitalik Buterin for the Ethereum network called Plasma. This was the subject for his talk at this meeting. Plasma is very relevant for OMG because it will be using Plasma infrastructure to process all of the different transactions. The way this works is by doing the majority of computations off chain, and then submitting a finalized merkle proof to the Ethereum network. Its basically high, performant MapReduce on the blockchain. This level of performance will be key when OMG is going to scale. Being a functional programmer, I was basically crying with happiness. One of the key things I noticed was how much this project reminds me of Truebit. Side note: thinking about doing separate posts about Plasma and Truebit because I think they are both fascinating and deserve a lot more detail. Let me know if you are interested in the comments.

So after some research I determined the fundamentals behind OMG were pretty solid. Basically, if you believe in Ethereum you should believe in OmiseGO. So now I wanted to see the technical analysis side of it.

You don't need to be an analytics genius to tell that OmiseGO is special. I have OMG on Bittrex so I will be using it for my point of comparison, but you can get OMG on other exchanges. Poloniex recently announced their support for the token. 

On Bittrex, OMG is currently the number one coin in terms of market cap. It has close to more volume than the next two largest coins combined for both BTC and ETH markets. 

Market Caps:

OmiseGO = 13416.110 BTC

OkCash = 8547.095 BTC

Quantum = 6413.692 BTC

And to think that OmiseGO is only priced at 0.00284000 BTC at the time of writing this post! Which works out to be ~ $12 dollars. If you are doing the math in your head it will lead to one result:

Yeah, mind blown! And this is all happening before OMG network even drops. This means there is A LOT of hype around this. Very soon we will be graced with the universal wonder that is the OmiseGO blockchain. They are planning a rollout in Q4 of 2017!!! I'm hoping for the price to moon after that.

So that concludes my post about OMG and why I decided to buy in. I am feeling very excited because this is the first coin I've been bullish about early on its development. My conclusion after my research was that I was okay with taking a loss on Bitcoin, because I wanted to get in on OMG as soon as possible. The expectation being that I will make up for the loss in the long run.  This post should not be construed as financial advice, but I do hope you take a look at OMG. 

Best of luck!

Relevant links:

OmiseGO Whitepaper 

OMG Website

OMG Summary