So, I just went to cryptocompare.com and with a dual screen I will go down the list with a view to finding different real-world use cases. The criteria is not meant to be finding the best investment choices, or most beneficial ideas to society. The washing machine that orders soap deserves acknowledgement, but its benefits to society or its disruptiveness to the that industry or its potential profits are not the issue under examination. All those questions will be determined in the marketplace soon enough anyway. I don’t want us to overlook any potential great breakthroughs. Maybe I am not the best guy to be doing this. I must admit that when I first heard that the new cell phones were going to have cameras I could not see why anyone would want what was then, a crappy little camera on their phone.
There is a tradition in the crypto currency community of using Bitcoin as the benchmark price. For example instead of ETC Ethereum being $289.44 USD right now it is instead thought of as being 0.07281 BTC.
I think that we have covered Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash the number-one and number-four spots. We haven’t covered many of the use-cases smart contracts that Ethereum facilitates yet, but I fear that might take up half the book. Number three on the list is LTC or Litecoin. Charlie Lee is the younger brother of Bobbie Lee whom we mentioned earlier. I think them being much like brothers Eli and Payton Manning both big time NFL quarterbacks for different teams to use a sports analogy which is probably not appealing to my target audience of women and techies. Charlie was first out of the gate to fork Bitcoin. He made Litecoin much faster. At the time he sold Litecoin as ‘silver’ to coincide with Bitcoin ‘gold’. He made do Litecoin much faster merchant transaction confirmation times. Recently Litecoin agreed to take Bitcoin Core’s ‘Segregated Witness’ and implemented it on Litecoin as a demonstration prove how well that SegWit worked. I think that we had better leave some room on the list of potential billionaires for Charlie Lee because Litecoin has a three- billion dollar valuation and a price of $54.32 USD.
Next on the list in fifth place is a real crypto rocket of the vertical trajectory type mentioned earlier. OmiseGo or OMG is a proof of stake coin. I compare the business model to be like a blockchain based Lloyds of London mercantile insurance partnership. OMG is trading at $10.55 USD and has a valuation of 1.48 billion USD. Today, twenty-five million dollars worth of OMG sold on Bitfinex, and another three and a half million dollars worth of OMG sold on BitTrex.
David Sonstebo is the founder of IOTA, with a trading symbol IOT for the new coin which is trading at fifty-six cents. Aside from the obvious internet of things use-case IOTA has made claims that ‘Tangle’, developer Sergey Ivancheglo’s “ first Proof of Stake” consensus algorithm is quantum proof. I have not investigated at all whether or not the coin is secure against attacks when quantum computers potentially will be fast enough to zip end to end through todays blockchains in fractions of a second. Tangle uses Directed Acyclic Graphs, or DAG files as we miners call them in its algorithm. DAG files are notoriously slow to download and are the bane of Ethereum mining. On the first day of trading on the Bitfinex exchange in Hong Kong IOT sold 1.5 billion USD a record ICO. Jamie Burke owns Outlander Ventures the venture capital firm from England that is promoting IOTA. I have to say that we have two late entries to the Bitcoin Billionaire Stake race because this looks like a real winner to me. Jamie’s elevator pitch would sound like this “If one considers that a token is buying you a stake in the future economy that this protocol unlocks, which has been estimated by the IDC to reach 1.7 trillion by 2020 the numbers don’t seem so large.” IOTA’s capitalization right now is 1.57 billion USD and nineteen-million dollars worth sold on Bitfinex today.
Monero is ninth on the list with XMR coin worth $95.39 USD, down from $140 USD recently due to the overall market correction because of the announcements coming out of China. Still fourteen point six- million dollars was traded across several exchanges today. Monero has a 1.44 billion dollar market cap and has been trading and being promoted for a long time. It is fast with sixty-second block times and uses a Ring Signature System that can make Monero transactions untraceable which would indeed be a new use case for our purposes but certainly not the only coin offering either un-traceability or anonymity.
We have covered NEO already and I am eager to write about Dash which is number nine now. There are different token trading frequency lists for bitcoin, USD, CNY , EUR ,GBP ,JPY ,INR currency lists of activity on the coins page of cryptocompare.com. The positions on the chart are much different tonight from what they were yesterday and I am using the to USD list. Evan Duffield was the founder of Dash. Last, I heard he went AWOL and said he was quitting. I was interested in Dash and I personally made some terrific returns cloud mining Dash or X11 as they call it with Genesis Mining. And of course everyone got interested in Dash when Amanda B. Johnson from the Daily Decrypt show submitted a winning DAO proposal: that some of the 10% management and development budget Dash had should be spent on a weekly YouTube show every Wednesday. I think she was just to good at being a spokesperson for Dash and my guess is that there was some company internal resentment that maybe she was becoming a de facto CEO. The Dash model is really one of the best if not the actual best itself. Their only flaw was that no one thought that the deposit of 1,000 Dash to become a master node operator would get so expensive as Dash soared to $316 UDA. Good grief! I have two Dash floating around inside this computer somewhere that I had better locate, I lost my old Dash wallet when I tried out their new Electrum bitcoin wallet.
That is not as bad as my 20 Ethereum and optional I guess my twenty Ethereum Classic. I don’t feel angry at all about my old Mist Ether wallet having money stuck in it. Vitalik made it clear on the Frontier Cover page this new wallet is not guaranteed to be safe. It was his joke that hey things might go wrong. There may still be some hope, and the Ethereum slack is very helpful. Downloading myetherwallet may help if I put it on the same machine. All that I really lost was $140 USD because I bought the Ether at seven dollars. Every single investment that I made went up far higher and faster than I ever considered possible really. I am mining Ethereum and I have been interested in the Parity implementation of Ethereum from Dr. Gavin Wood, so there is no way that I am down on Ethereum.
Lets get back to Dash after I interrupted myself. Dash has been around for several years and has been stable and has been building networks of businesses that accept Dash at their tills. Dash has a total capitalization of 2.4 billion USD and seven million dollars worth traded today across many exchanges. I like the company but the lackluster booths that they presented at the Miami and New York bitcoin trade shows could sure have used Amanda’s touch, and the company should have listened to her ideas about business.
Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse has been flogging Ripple for years now and getting static from the anti-banker types in the crypto community, because bankers are his target market. The Ripple XPR token has usually been valued in fractions of a bitcoin. It has since soared all the way up to nineteen-cents American. There are 100 billion Ripple in circulation and no more will be created. There is no mining going on. Small amounts of Ripple are destroyed by each transaction to make Ripple a deflationary currency. The substantial current market capitalization for Ripple XMR is 7 billion dollars USD, and six and a half million dollars worth traded across several exchanges today. Ripple is meant to be a global payment channel, that is its best known use-case and I think that they have a chance to corner the 155 trillion dollar market in global remittances . That must be what this list of savvy big-time Ripple investors thought as well : Accenture, Andreessen Howowitz, CME Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, Google Ventures, Santandar Ventures, Seagate, and SBI Group ( Ripples Asia Partner located in Tokyo). Ripple has offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Sydney, India, and Luxembourg.