For the longest time BTC has been dominating, and much of this is due to the sole reason of it being first to market.
Being first to market has brought BTC a lot of benefits: It automatically get’s listed on any crypto exchange, it is the most mined coin with the highest hashing power in any PoW network, and it is also the first coin that gets driven into a lot of new markets with an aim for mass adoption.
Currently, BTC’s daily volume lies at approx $4 Bill per day, and that’s in a bear market mind you. So it’s safe to say the BTC isn’t going anywhere for now at least.
What BTC first promised was to act as digital cash, but in a decentralised way, a way for people to transact without any scrutiny or oversight, and all this completely anonymously.
A stark reality many find after they dig into the technicalities of BTC, and a lot of blockchains is, that they are actually quite far from anonymous, and governments and agencies have long ago created systems which can track a BTC address to a real owner.
Much of this is done through KYC central points like Coinbase. Cashing in or out leaves you vulnerable, and allows for not only the government, but also hackers to track down your identity.
BTC is also quite far from being decentralised, just have a look at what Craig Wright, Jihan Wu and Roger Ver managed to do to the market.
We went from hovering at $6.5k for months to suddenly going down under $4k. This is well documented, and they even bragged about it on Twitter, so let me stop you there before you give me your crazy TA charts or Chinese New Year predictions, it was those three guys who single-handedly brought the prices down to where they are today. Not really decentralized now is it?
And also do take a look at Bitmains hashing power, and how much of the BTC networks hash rate is concentrated in China. That’s where the real power lies within the BTC network, and is also where a lot of it’s issues come from. As we all have beared witness to in the last month and a half.
Hashing wars are not fun for anyone. We can all agree on this.
Hence, we can conclude that BTC is not decentralised, nor anonymous.
One of the first projects that tried to tackle this issue was DASH, they implemented Masternodes on top of a PoW coin to enable fast and anonymous transactions on the network, and to further decentralize it.
The only problem with this is that the MN’s are free to collaborate outside of the network, and create coins out of thin air as there is no 3rd party to oversee them. They transact anonymously between them, which is what frees them to conduct such malicious behaviour without oversight.
Other chains like XVG have been proven not only hackable(very low hash rate on their PoW chain https://bit.ly/2rFkoLb), but are also far from anonymous as they are only partially anonymous chains.
In traditional blockchains and various “partial” anonymity chains, the users are exposed to analytics and malicious attack vectors. Many around the world use this exposed data to exploit cryptocurrency users. This allows for attacks and leaves room for traceability.
The same goes for Monero, even after their Bulletproof release which in all honesty, is quite remarkable technology and I take my hat off to them and their team of developers. Unfortunately, their chain was only partially anonymous for years, and people have been able to track transactions and expose identities through their chain. Moving into Bulletproof was supposed to fix this, but given that their chain was partially open for so many years, there exists now records and advanced softwares and tracking algorithms which allow for people to still be tracked and exploited on their chain.
The Zerocoin protocol(libzerocoin) is now the foundation for many privacy coins, and is relatively safe and secure to use. But these systems although maybe anonymous, allow for other vectors of attacks through centralising power to huge wallets on PoS networks.
There is in my opinion only one coin/token out there which has identified all these problems and is actively developing a brand new blockchain where the necessary checks and balances will be in place from launch.
(Disclosure, I am part of the team and have been on board since early May)
DAPS(Decentralised Anonymous Payment Network) is a revival project of an older established cryptocurrency who’s original developer re-appeared and started dumping coins, because of this we split from it entirely by creating a token and doing an airdrop to holders through a snapshot. This was done to ensure that the old developer was not carried along with the project.
The airdrop is now done, and we have also provided a 3rd party certification of our development as well as a coming release of our test-net in January 2019. We are welcoming 150 community members to join in on the test-net, and after this we will hire several 3rd parties to attack it and test it until we have a chain which is ready for launch. We expect this to be in Q2 2019.
Our chain will have a PoW + PoSv3 + Masternodes + PoA system in place, which in turn allows for a network where no one can cheat, but still remain anonymous. The necessary checks and balances are in place from day one, which allows for a truly private and anonymous chain where the Masternodes are kept in check by the PoA miners and those again are kept in check by the PoS network.
We got an insanely active and large community for a token(placeholder until we move to main net) of this size. And the team is super friendly and open to any questions, we are used to them and operate with a worldwide team that’s on 24/7 to answer any questions.
This would be the one project I would recommend to anyone. This is also mind you, my first post ever where I talk warmly about a coin/token project, and so consider this my first “shill” :)
Our TG : https://t.me/dapscoin
Discord: https://discord.gg/w898czA
Website: https://www.dapscoin.com
Whitepaper: https://www.dapscoin.com/whitepaper.pdf
We are currently trading at 3 sats, so it’s an excellent opportunity to join in and for once be one of the early ones :)
