Opinion: 'Crypto Bashing'
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Exploring Cryptocurrency
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One of the remarkable phenomenon you see when you follow so very closely the cryptocurrency community and the somewhat insulated news sources and culture(s) therein is this concept of 'crypto bashing'.
And I mean this in a unique context, qua - like I said - the crypto community. This isn't a more macrocosmic context, such as JPM Chase publicly chastising Bitcoin and blockchain for years only to develop their own proprietary token asset that runs on a permissioned blockchain, or Warren Buffet (in my opinion, the most antiquated and therefore overrated investor alive) despising cryptocurrencies because he self-admittedly can't understand them...the solution to which, in his expired mind, is deeming them "worthless".
No, I'm not talking about all the hate our community receives from the mainstream world, a world that largely doesn't even know what a consensus algorithm is and yet takes up the mantle in admonishing crypto investors, developers, and users. (And by the way, these same people don't even realize half the institutions they use are already running a blockchain or otherwise distributed system that wouldn't exist without Bitcoin and Nakamoto's white paper...)
I'm talking about hate within our own community, and I'm moreover referring to two specific projects: Ripple and TRON.
Many in the cryptocurrency community - especially those on Reddit (but then again, Reddit is for the most part a consortium of video game-fixaed 20-something white males who each have a PhD in Arguing on the Internet), incessantly moan and complain about how Ripple is evil for working with banks and how TRON is a giant "s**tcoin" or scam project.
I can't even enumerate the myriad reasons these sentiments are absurd. Let's get TRON out of the way:
How would an Sun, who graduated from billionaire business magnate Jack Ma's private business school (which has an application process more difficult than Harvard and Yale combined, requires one to have founded and run a business with millions in annual revenue just to apply, and accepts something like a mere 40 students per year) be a scammer? How does that make sense? Build an entire mainnet, open international offices, develop two development standards, and host international conferences...that's an even bigger front than Bernie Madoff! I mean, Madoff just had a reputation as an investor...Sun has a reputation plus all these things.
Let's remember that Sun is a businessman, a marketer, not a computer scientist before we complain about TRON's "partnerships" (which is an A-freakin-plus for adoption efforts, by the way). He's a businessman, and that's why he has a massive, transparent team of developers et al who have worked very hard to build TRON into one of the most creative, forward-thinking crypto projects in existence. They have more DApps than Ethereum and EOS combined and they have more users of DApps than any other network. Their mainnet is incredible, interesting, fun, and affords autonomy to up-and-coming devs and rewards community/network participants.
Should we discredit that because a Chinese-English speaker and volunteer translated the TRX white paper by using translation tools and copying generalized statements? Really, check out what was plagiarized: not technical specs, not infrastructure, but vague catch-all, SEO-optimized abstracts.
And what about Ripple?
Are we truly so arrogant as to think that cryptocurrency is going to get anywhere without SEC regulation? Without corporate interest? Did we think that banks would just sit back and let blockchain technology remain in the Wild West and not partake? Ha! At least Ripple took the initiative to open a dialogue with these people, to create a connection between our community and the centralized world. This is invaluable.
What about remittance payments, pre-funded Nostro accounts, and forex issues? It's easy for those of us who are fortunate enough to reside in developed countries like the United States, Britain, Germany, etc to forget that XRP is immeasurably valuable to people in developing "third world" countries. These people don't have access to banks (30% of the human population, to be precise). If they do, they have access to corrupt banks, or banks that don't have these aforementioned Nostro accounts and thus require massive fees and wait-periods sometimes weeks long in order to process remittance payments. This is the money being sent home so someone's family can eat. This is what XRP facilitates.
But maybe you disagree, or perhaps none of that matters to you. Then I ask you this: what about the fake ICOs? What about the fact that BitConnect happened? What about the thousands of blatant ETH investment scams, ponzi schemes (purchasable trading bots much?), fake projects?
My point today - as I rant, as I commit my thoughts to the page in brilliant vernacular form(lessness) - is that the energy we spend "bashing" legitimate projects could be better utilized focusing on actual threats and plagues to our community.
You don't have to like Ripple or TRON; you don't have to believe they're going anywhere or worth one IOTA (ha!). But is the energy expended on perpetuating FUD about these projects properly allocated when someone new to this space - someone we should have been available to instead of bickering on Reddit - just lost 10 ETH to a scam project? On that note, this person will now vow to never use crypto again, and tell everyone they know how awful it is. Great.
This is why I support all legitimate projects. I don't care which one is going to make me money. Hell, personally I couldn't care less about video games, and yet I support multiple platforms that deal exclusively with gaming. This is because everyone is a node, a part of a larger dialogue that is about finding that killer app, finding that perfect consensus mechanism, increasing adoption, increasing use-cases. Sure, I have my personal investment choices, but you won't hear me shaming any legitimate project that is actively contributing to this space. I leave my feelings out of it.
Just some thoughts to consider.
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Update: Summer 2019
Howdy all,
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Best,
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