Nic Carter

Something is deeply wrong with NEM, but I haven't quite figured out what it is yet.

I think ZRX is great but it’s telling that its main use is as a “governance token”, something which has yet to be codified...Greatest intellectual challenge for token buyers - decoupling network usefulness from token value. ZRX another casualty

IOTA is more appropriately described as a “crowdsourced hate machine” these days.

Steem has already collapsed into a hopeless mess of politics, campaigning, and bribery. The proof of work is simply obscured, not absent. Raw hashes are a lot more elegant.

PIVX master nodes are unwinding – people losing faith. If they start to liquidate (already happening on PIVX)... the cascade will be something to behold.

I know lots of really smart people that are EOS fans; maybe I'm missing something here, but I've never heard a good justification for the structure of the sale. On balance, going for the continual-outflow model was a huge reputational risk that few things would have justified.

[Nano] is a DPoS coin that claims to have free transactions with no trade-offs. It was heavily astroturfed on Reddit. I felt that its consensus mechanism might entirely fail, and that the considerable enthusiasm was contrived. Amazingly, January 1 was almost its precise all-time high — its market cap on that day was an eye-watering $4.6 billion.

In fact, the consensus mechanism for RaiBlocks (rebranded to Nano) did not fail, but its major source of liquidity, the BitGrail exchange, did get extremely hacked in February. This wasn’t a trivial hack, either — approximately $150m (at February prices) went missing. That was a mammoth 13% of the entire supply. Despite the immense setback and a truly impressive price collapse, development appears to be ongoing.

Dash remains fairly active both on the development side and the community development side. The plutocratic “governance” process continues to fund (mostly unproductive) projects with a pool of capital subsidized by 10% of new issuance. On the adoption side, Dash has been redirecting its marketing budget towards buying ads on planes (smart: you literally can’t look away!) and lobbying businesses in Venezuela to accept the currency. I’ll admit it, I’m pretty impressed with the willingness of the Dash community to stubbornly crusade about banking the unbanked… with an asset that exists to facilitate rent-seeking on a massive scale.

Augur deserves credit for being a functional and interesting dapp, although it’s unclear whether the decentralized reporting will prove robust enough to support liquid markets and induce large punters to join the platform. And I personally believe it would be less fragile as an open source launch with an anon/non US dev team, rather than an ICO-funded venture.

Storj is a distributed data storage token project that raised about $30m in an ICO in May 2017. It’s in a rough category of troubled data storage projects along with Filecoin, Sia, and MaidSafe. It has seen its fair share of drama and founder exits. When I’ve asked, technical experts with domain knowledge will concede that distributed file storage is a near-intractable challenge, and a mainstream application of the technology is still years away.

The Tezos situation is a beautifully pure illustration of when dreams meet reality in network design. Neat and tidy on-chain governance becomes messy human institutions, litigation, and marketing campaigns for one fork over another.

The TRX ERC20 coin is a placeholder for a future coin on a new chain. However, until mainnet launches (looks like May 31 is their latest date, undoubtedly to be pushed back), they are just an ERC20 token. Their usage stats are pathetic compared to ETH.

Everyone with a brain saw the dynamics of [delegated proof of stake] and understood [the formation of cartels] would occur. We now have lots of good evidence from Steem, Lisk, Bitshares. DPoS is not a new form of governance, but a very old one – a feudal protection racket.

Verge, Bitcoin Gold, and Monacoin (unverified) have all been attacked in the last day or so. This is the inevitable destiny of every smaller PoW chain.

Verge and BTG were both sold as a “better bitcoin”. This is the fate of every better bitcoin.

BNB markets itself as having a fundamental backstop (cashflows) when it does not. [Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao] encourages these valuation models and [retweets] them.

BNB could be a great instrument if:
- they paid pro rata dividends to holders in perpetuity, not this insipid burn
- they actually released real 10ks/ quarterly earning reports
- they stopped pretending that there was a utility component for valuation

LEO is like a not terrible version of BNB but they're both very distant from resembling equity, or really any credible claim on cash flow

[Stellar is] like a more pointless Ripple, which is a seriously impressive threshold of futility.

Bank deposit-backed stablecoins will win (and have already won) simply because they're more capital efficient, and that trumps everything.

You can get censor-resistance lite from a network of shadow banks willing to back stablecoins. As long as there's some bank worldwide willing to facilitate the issuance of these things, they will exist.

Even the decentralized™ stablecoins like Dai/Sai clearly have an issuer/administrator . . . so it's not clear that they're any more able to resist coercion than, say, an overseas bank in some tax haven somewhere.

There's a reason there's $4.5b worth of Tether outstanding, $450m of USDC, and only ~$100m worth of Dai. It costs >$1.5 to create $1 of Dai, and it costs ~$1 to create $1 of USDT/USDC. The economics is persuasive.

Consider that banks issuing unaccountable stablecoins might converge, censor-resistance-wise, to administrators of crypto-backed stablecoin systems (which do exist).

In that case, the bank-issued coins are cheaper.

[The] TON [whitepaper] was just blockchain fanfic. Investors almost certainly got implicit or informal assurances there weren't present in the whitepaper from Telegram.

Decred ticket price: ~80 DCR or about $2200. Anyone with a balance lower than that cannot stake and their funds are diluted away.

No one seems concerned about the distribution of wealth in Decred but I'd wager that ticket price excludes 50%+ of tokenholders. This is what I mean when I say staking introduces a regressive tax.

[In Zcash,] the protocol has been racked with controversy over whether the administrator should receive additional protocol-derived funding. The spigot of seigniorage is very hard to turn off, once active.

Bank deposit-backed stablecoins will win (and have already won) simply because they're more capital efficient, and that trumps everything....To be fair I think there’s a big chance something like Dai is able to retain its true censor resistant characteristics and so remains differentiated, but I think it’s likely to stay somewhat niche.

The best argument I have against Ripple is: Imagine if another company, not named Ripple, was started in 2020 and announced their intention to monetize by selling a new currency/asset to retail with no restriction, disclosure, or securities exemptions.

They would be hit with an SEC action so fast.

Verge had 5 [hashing] algorithms and one of them was exploited to cause hyperinflation. Adding complexity adds risk.

USDC might claim that it's playing nice but it's exploiting a arb between cosplaying as regulated and actually being regulated. they haven't blacklisted an address yet. it's effectively permissionless (with all the issues that inculcates) until regulators wake up.