I like the mission of this project. But I don't understand why the founding team has chosen to deploy its own blockchain instead of creating an application layer on top of an existing smart-contracts-capable blockchain (e.g. Ethereum)?

While I can see the advantages of using an existing blockchain solution (improved security through a larger mining pool, interoperability with other apps/contracts, better development focus on the application layer instead of infrastructure layer), I fail to see the benefits of creating yet another blockchain for CREA.

This has been most probably discussed before. Please point me out to any official statements on the topic, I couldn't find a coherent explanation in my limited time digging around.

If I understand correctly, Iota defends against sybil attacks through having the clients attach PoW to transactions. Yet the PoW is by its nature computationally expensive, thus energy-draining and time-consuming. It looks to be a less-than-ideal fit for embedded devices, where the energy availability/consumption and the computational power are scarce, sometimes critical resources.

Moreover, I assume that a GPU or an ASIC (comparable in scale with the current top-level bitcoin mining chips) would exceed the total PoW capability of tens of thousands of embedded devices (or maybe more). So thinking about this disparity in resource availability (PoW capability) between different classes of devices, isn't it paving the road towards cost-effective sybil attacks?

How does Iota address these challenges?

Liqui.io has a good ICO token selection. Always withdraw your coins to a local wallet after you buy them.

The absolute value (in dollars) of a coin should not be a criteria for assessing its growth potential. Look at technology, team, product instead and don't get fooled by 1 coin = 1 cent.

I'd choose Ethereum.

Ripple, most probably. Also BTC and XEM. Some banks are also trying to deploy their own custom blockchains.

Ok folks, a thought exercise:

What if we used 1 satoshi instead of 1 bitcoin as a unit for denominating value? People would freak out - we have quadrillions of satoshis in existence! How would that actually impact the value or market price of BTC though?

Now let's use 1 GigaIota as a unit of value. Boom. There are only 2.8 million GigaIotas in existence. The current price for each GigaIota is 0.1 BTC. There you go. You can safely proceed now to research the project in greater detail and assess its value based on stronger criteria, rather than getting stuck on the total number of coins.
 

I'm trying to compile a list of the confirmed speakers for the Consensus 2017 conference that's about to start on May 22nd. Can you guys help me with this?

So far, I only know about Syscoin, they announced it on their website.

More food for thought: https://medium.com/the-blockchain-times/enterprise-blockchains-are-a-huge-overpromise-7ca2d19324b3

Lots of people in the financial sector got hyped by Ripple. That's probably gonna drive the price up for quite a while.

No trusted third party. You don't need to trust the miners. You validate their proof of work mathematically.

They can act as investors but cannot act as regulators or policy makers. That's a significant improvement already.

I prefer to have access to the code that's managing my money. Exploits happen less often when the code is public. Hint: Linux vs Windows.

Don't assume that the regulatory forces are always benevolent. Every once in a while it so happens that their best (market) interests might just as well collide with your best interests (hint: the financial crisis in Greece).

Oh banks have big incentives to adopt blockchain ledgers: cut down the infrastructure costs by distributing their databases, replace human capital with smart contracts, and stay in the exact same business while posing as innovative and forward-thinking

There is no offline Ripple wallet as far as I'm aware. Let me quote from gatehub.net: "We enable financial institutions to act as a Ripple gateway without having to worry about technology." Please point me to a client app that I can download on my local machine and use Ripple without having to trust a third-party or a "gateway". Maybe I missed it.

Or maybe there isn't such an app (?!) Well that would be equivalent of saying "let us handle your money for you". And that's the exact opposite of what bitcoin tries to achieve.

I've read Satoshi's paper back in 2011. I'm confident I understand most of the building blocks of the Bitcoin network.

Ever heard of privacy?

Nope. Reforming the system needs to address the core principles that makes it prone to systemic corruption. Ripple leaves the existing principles untouched and disguises the so-called revolution into "breakthrough" technology. Yet the way they're using the technology won't change anything in the economic landscape, if you ask me. It will get the banks a shinier makeup to stay in the same business and do the same things.

I'm not so sure that's a good thing after all. In a healthy democracy the political power and the monetary power should be as separate as possible.

There's a thin line between evolution and digression. And I believe Ripple leads the way to the biggest digression we've seen so far in the  cryptocurrency world.

Glad you asked, this points exactly to the disastrous potential of having a centralized party (the exchanges) holding people's money. Gox users were literally entrusting their assets to be held by the exchange. The same thing that happens when you entrust a "gateway" to hold your ripples. Now stating the obvious, if they were storing the bitcoins on their local wallets, then the centralized Gox hack wouldn't have done much.

I did my own thinking and I'm not part of any "higher-level" fud campaign. Neither do I support or endorse any shitcoins for that matter. Now let me rephrase:

Bitcoin* has a real potential to change the world. It came out of nowhere some years ago and said - look, people can now send monetary value to each other without trusting each other and without requiring a trusted third-party to settle their transactions. This is huge. Bitcoin delivers on this promise and slowly but surely democratizes our financial systems, making them both global and censorship-resistent. It takes the banks out of business because we now have the means to store our coins on our own private devices (laptops, mobile phones, etc) and transact with each other without a trusted intermediary.

Now what about Ripple? Here's the deal - you don't store your coins anymore. You gotta trust Ripple. Your money is on their servers. Just as your bank next door. The server code is closed source. Forget about transparency and "utopian" ideals. We know better how to do it. Let us handle your money. We're using "blockchain" technology Nevermind it's privately owned, privately controlled, closed source and thus prone to politically-influenced censorship. That doesn't matter. Because we're certain that Santander, Google, SBI Group are there to serve our best interests. All of them are not-for-profit organizations with a sole mission to make the world a better place. But too much talk already. Let's catch the next pump wave with them and get rich.

Capische?

* When I mention Bitcoin above, feel free to replace it with any other cryptocurrency that stands by the same core values: open, global, borderless, transnational, distributed, trustless, censorship-resistent.

The absolute value of a currency unit is completely irrelevant. What you're interested in is the relative growth rate. Otherwise, following your logic, BTC is overvalued because you can only have 0.05 BTC for $100.

Tezos and Aragon caught my attention. Both have a few red flags though.

Jesus Christ. I'll paste it here:

Ripple is not a cryptocurrency. It is an electronic token, issued by a company: Ripple Labs, Inc. This private company can do whatever it wants with the coin. They can create tokens from thin air if they want.

Ripple is alive because of the huge lobbying efforts towards banks and other financial institutions that are afraid of the disruptive threat of the crypto world and want to buy a share in the game. The wrong share.

Ripple is not open-source. No server source code has ever being released, with the paid developers behind Ripple admitting that it is to prevent others from building something better than Ripple. You cannot contribute to Ripple's code, because it is not open source. Every single Ripple node is controlled by a private for-profit company.

It is centralized, like a bank or PayPal. Not a decentralized currency. Ripple pre-mined 100 billion Ripple coins for themselves and didn't allow others to mine during this time or even tell people it was happening.

Every cryptocurrency is subject to a 51% attack. In Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies, miners control the network, and if a miner gains 51% of the total network power, then they can choose to double spend transactions. Some altcoins have tried trust nodes or central checkpointing, however that only moves the 51% attack vector from miners to another entity which can be 51% attacked. In Ripple, it is already 51% attacked by the 14 employees of OpenCoin, Inc. They control the server software (written in C++), and they can choose to double-spend transactions at will. While it's highly unlikely that they will do that, a centralized entity means a single target for law enforcement and court orders.

It is a large-scale scam.

This one looks promising indeed  

I believe people will realize sooner or later that there's real power in being able to kickstart your company, manage everybody's virtual shares and organizing shareholder voting sessions, all in a distributed p2p fashion, from one single interface.

I think Golem is one of the few projects that need to happen in one form or the other. P2P distributed computing is as powerful as P2P distributed storage, if done right. And that's a big *if*.

But assuming the team is capable enough on delivering on the promise, Golem has a bright future ahead because it has the first-mover advantage.

This makes absolutely no sense. Why would it be recommended to store it "online"?

Late to the party, sorry in advance for repeating other people's questions but I cannot go through the 200 pages here:

How is the Elastic Project different from Ethereum?

There are quite a few coins out there with full premine (by design): XEM, MAID, SGNLS to name a few. But they either have a proof-of-stake system in place, or an entirely different way to deal with the block security issue.

I'd definitely want to hear an official comment on this matter before taking this coin seriously.

I'm not sure how merged mining works. Do the miners have to split their hashpower between Litecoin and VIA, or they can mine with 100% power Litecoin, and securing VIA is a "side-effect" of that work? Intuitively I'd say they will need to split the hashpower between coins, so the same problem of mining incentives still stands (assuming Litecoin has the bigger profit per megahash).

So VIA has not reached v1.0 yet but its total supply is 95%+ already mined to the date of this post. Without putting too much thought into it, I smell unhealthy economics moving forward.

Are you planning to keep it strictly deflationary? Aren't the mining rewards too small to incentivize the miners secure the network?

You might be right on myetherwallet.com. I was talking about server-side wallets.