The main principle of Streamr – may it work?
Let’s freely follow up the last article about IOTA because it has something to do with Streamr. A Common denominator is the Internet of Things (for more please see the previous article). Unlike IOTA, Streamr doesn’t bring a completely new solution like a ternary code but it uses Ethereum as a platform. The advantage is that developers don’t need to concentrate on possible flaws of unexplored things so they can concentrate on the main principle of Streamr – data streaming on the one side and data consuming on the other side. The main objective of Streamr is real-time data streaming and it’s working very well.
Let’s be more concrete. On Streamr.com you can check very impressive part of the Streamr project – editor which gives you simple to use tools that let you try how you can work with real-time data and react to events. And you don’t need to be a programmer.
Let’s explain the picture of how it works. In Streamr you can choose a type of data stream (I chose “bitcoin” in Twitter posts according to the tutorial). Then type time interval (frequency of “bitcoin” in Twitter posts in last 1 minute). Then you can set up GreaterThan, Filter, and Email sending you an e-mail every time number of bitcoin mentions on Twitter exceeds a threshold. In addition, there is available the Table in which you can see real-time data stream. Right now you can use Streamer for bitcoin trading.
DATAcoin is the means of compensation among data producers and consumers. It’s monetization mechanism for data producers. A smart device like a self-driving car can stream a traffic data. The smart device can produce data for anyone (for free) or just for subscribers (and get paid for it). Worth mentioning are broker nodes (the “miners” of this network) between subscriber and consumers which establish a P2P network. According to whitepaper “The network hosts a publish/subscribe mechanism and supports decentralized storage of events. The network throughput scales linearly with the number of participating nodes, and it can process millions of events per second. Nodes are incentivized to do two things: report checksums for their assigned partitions to the network coordinator smart contract, and deliver data to any smart contract subscribers.” And they are paid for it by DATAcoins.
Threats
Every time you value an investment, you shouldn’t forget about risks. Right now cryptocurrencies keep rising so one can easily omit threats. I see short or mid-term threat that DATAcoin isn’t listed on any well-known crypto exchange except Bitfinex and Ethfinex so there may not be sufficient demand which would lead to significant growth of the price. But at the same time it’s opportunity – once DATAcoin is quoted on the stock exchange, the price will very likely increase significantly. Another threat is IOTA which solves the same problem and it could attract all the attention and leave DATAcoin unknown.
Conclusion
I really like DATAcoin as it’s backed up by experienced project management team and it solves the real-life problem – data streaming for IoT. Streamr can provide you very good editor so Streamr is right now very useful for a common man. Threats mentioned above are just short or mid-term risks. In long-term only one thing matters: cryptocurrency will be a functional means of payment. I believe DATAcoin will.