Hcash is something that I've missed.
Hcash is the future. It's absolutely freaking huge.
Well. It's a hyper ledger which will attempt to connect every cryptocurrency there is. Including different blockchain protocols and blockless ledgers (namely IOTA). Imagine sending your BTC and recieving ETH instantly. Imaging having a big share of BitShares which you don't want anymore: press of a button - you have IOTA, NEO, ZEC, whatever you want.
Oh and on top of that: zk-snarks and decentralized governance. Huh.
I can not stress enough how huge that is.
Here's much more respected member of community, Charles Hoskinson, conveying his vision of future:
I highly recommend you to listen to the first part which lasts about 15 minutes.
Hcash solves a lot of that. Those are real problems we have today: BTC hardfork is coming. Wouldn't it be nice to actually transfer your alts skipping the exchange? Take any other crypto: what if you disagree with the recent changes and do not want to support a project anymore? And what's more important is we're not talking about glorified turbo exchange. Having something like Hcash would greatly stabilize the market and allow you to move wealth in a seconds rather than playing on exchange rates.
Moving on, zk-snarks. This is a known technology first seen in Zcash and the only technology in cryptospace offering true anonymity. There is a lot of FUD and frankly I don't want to start the discussion with Monero fans but even Monero is researching zk-starks (a different mechanism built on top of zk-snarks) in order to employ as a side-chain.
Why not zk-starks one might ask? Suffice to say it has a lot of issues at this point which will hopefully be fixed over time. zk-snarks on the other hand is already established and successful.
Hcash plans to have both public and private addresses (which is important since sometimes you want your transaction to be visible) and both "black" and "white" coins similar to ByteBall. This could lead to some complications making "black" coins more valuable.
Decentralized governance. This is something that makes Dash special. Although Dash's implementation is far from ideal and deserves a fair share of critique it shows exactly how strong of an idea that is. As long as you own coins you have the right to vote. You are part of the community and you decide where it goes. Blockchain is independent. It has it's own treasury fund from which it can pay developers, advertisers, entrepreneurs. And community decides how exactly that money is spent.
If that doesn't make you excited, I don't know what will.
The big if
We're going to have ~84M total with an almost $1B marketcap. That's not small.
It's going to be bigger. Much bigger.
If Hcash's team manages to pull it off.
Technical difficulty behind Hcash is immeasurable. It is one of the most ambitious projects I've seen so far. It requires a ton of research both theoretical and practical. It requires giant finance. It requires top-notch developers, scientists and community.
So far Hcash is a big promise.
There's nothing wrong with being ambitious. I'm an investor in ZenCash which is a similarly ambitious project with some very hard technical implementations to be made. The reason I'm fine with ZenCash is because of how open and transparent team is. They share with their community every success and setback.
Hcash? Blackhole
Apart from a very bleak whitepaper there's very little info. Whitepaper does not specify any technicalities. Folk in crypto usually treads things like these very carefully.
So who are people behind and can they pull it off?
Some users went as far as to call Hcash a scam. I tend to disagree:
- Team is real. Khal Achkar will be speaking at Dubai conference. They are actually sponsoring the whole thing.
- This is a bit pretentious to ask for an experience with blockchain when the industry is so young. We have many cases already when someone's first project in crypto is a huge success.
- They have secured some huge investors. I'll let the image do the work:
- Some great promise from having multiple research partnerships and securing new ones. SJTU, Honk Kong Polytechnic University, Monash University.
Conclusion
This is definitely a very ambitious project worth being aware of. There are heckton of technical hiccups they'll have to overcome and I don't know if they will. I couldn't find their actual developers. They need them and in big quantities. If they deliver what they promise I see this growing faster than Ethereum did but that might be my imagination. In any case application and usability of such tech will greatly improve, ease and fasten blockchain adaptation around the globe.
Currently Hshare is being traded and mined. Once Hcash launches you'll be able to trade your Hshare to Hcash on 1:1 ratio. All Hshare will be destroyed and has no practical usage. If this coin reached $350M on a promise alone can you imagine what happens when it becomes the reality?