The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, maybe in that order (CARDANO, Ethereum and EOS)?
Well as far as Proof of Stake is "dPoS" consensus is Concerned, it might just be the case, so read on. (delegatedPOS for the record, not to be mistaken for plain old POS, see cryptoslate link below for more info on those coins/tokens)
I give each of the above dPOS champions a 2 year dPoS report Card, ranking them on key investor criteria with a technical bent.
Of course understanding if the above is true is in the "details", so here goes let's dive in and take a look.
First, I have a qualifier you might all want to consider. Maybe Bill Hoskinson does have an "axe to grind" with Ethereum's Valeri Buterin in what went down there, while today we see Bill's CARDANO gig 'rocket' past Dan Larimer and BlockOne PoS EOS ?
Cointelegraph's latest 'Bill H' CARDANO Interview June 5th 2020 can be read here with my more 'politically correct' public comments.
My first big question in this Mexican Standoff of the Heavyweight PoS (Feature) Gunslingers?
TK Advice: Mammoth Post Ahead, if you are short on time, move on.. ;)
Who forgot their gun?
If TPS "Transactions Per Second" is the issue, then that would be Ethereum 1.0 (who forgot their gun.)
Since EOS entered free fall, the past Year or so, towed down partly by legal issues and their inability to deliver real value to the world of C++ programming (tools anyone, and I am not talking about the development staff at EOS) you would think EOS has a one up on everyone in the game of PoS (nothing to do with dog doodoo, it's Proof of Stake, I am talkin' about in EOS's case, really. ;) )
So if their is only one Gun at this dPOS Mexican Standoff, and CARDANO has that gun, what do the other two do? Languish in crypto market terms is one word that comes to mind.(at least for the next two quarters.)
EOS was the crypto darling of mid 2018, because of the "21 chosen one" model of dPoS (and hard SPIN as the grand Globalist Kumbuya Experiment re-invention of money?), meaning those with the most crypto value at stake get to mine for a time, controlling who gets to mine every 'epoch' where settlement times were amazingly fast with guaranteed settlement intervals AND rewards are guaranteed for running the nodes handling consensus (highly centralized if you ask me, like UN planning, compared to BTC and others). All good! Si, Senor!
TK note- Dan Larimer is attributed to the invention of dPOS in most circles, in the early days of BitShare? OK there are flavours emerging all the time and it is open source and relatively easy to fok and build your own version for the tech savvy.
Sort of. Except EOS forgot about the other multi-million miners out there which would like to play, having mining not be "as distributed" as they liked when setting up their Kumbaya Version of PoS. Result? Well once a top 5 consistent Market Cap Valuation, EOS has slipped to 10th place on most charts having lost US $ 7 Billion or 'there a bouts', after reaching their EOS Market Valuation peak in mid 2018, about 2 years ago.
Is an EOS 3.5X recovery of the current price available to get those 2018 peak investors heads "back above water" in the cards in the next six months?
Well Anything is possible, however, I will go on record as saying the large majority of wise investors do have other 'larger upside' (six months) POS crypto options emerging which have refined the model to be more fair, where CARDANO and ADA are looking more and more to fill the lead option for many investors when it comes to betting on who will win the PoS stakes. (Random PoS any one with some base limit and penalties for cheating, ie- lose your stake, ALL OF IT?)
And Dark Horses, there are many of of them (of various sizes and dev horsepower), mostly underfunded and understaffed pretenders and a few who truly are emerging as heavyweights armoured with additional added value.
I will save the POS Dark Horses deep dive " mid term investor and tech rating" for another post, save one, which I know fairly well, that being IOTA. Yup IOTA are doing a hard pivot to smart Contracts and adding POS in parallel with IoT centric PoW .
So I will touch on the latest breaking new at IOTA as it applies to their add of PoS to their DAG TANGLE and IOTA's qubic project HARD pivot into Smart Contract support, mainly because IOTA just proved on their test network with Hornet nodes they can easily achieve 1200 TPS Transactions per Second on really modest OTS "Off the Shelf" Hardware.
TK Disclosure, I don't own and have never owned IOTA. I have been an early participant in IEN IOTA Evangelist Network since early 2018, so know IOTA technically fairly well and am current in every way, given we have a focus on IoT in our EnerSettle project.
TK Observation/Plans- I have yet to choose the blockchain tech(s) needed to deploy a project I am working on called EnerSettle, mainly because I have found no tech that is ready for prime time, given my solution/service requirements . My shortlist was IOTA (for IoT use cases) and Hyperledger (for ERC20 settlement to other blockchains), I have dropped the latter and added CARDANO, and am on the fence adding in ETH 2.0 , waiting for it to show up in production mode. I might instead use either Chainlink or Cosmos to front end the solution for specific inter-blockchain use cases (Including BTC somehow).
EOS- The bright shining star of 2018, we now see hindsight truly, here in 2020 vision and, we now see EOS more clearly.
A comparison to HD TV is in order to explain what I mean. HD shows the actor's blemishes, brilliantly and they don't like it, at all. The market of time is like HD, revealing the true intent (or lack of it), true direction and actual behaviour of a cryptocurrency offering, stripping away the promise to reveal the facts. In EOS case, if we were to re-grade their paper, their whitepaper and apply today's bell curve give the current players their A ( I don't give out A+, to anyone) in my books now a C+ when it comes to their POS solution.
EOS 2 Year dPOS Report Card- Overall Grade "C+"
Can they attract Investors/Miners and Developers w/ the Status Quo?
1 Confidence in Team- C- Where are the C++ Development tools and support for the Community? Largely MIA? Most think so.
2 PoS Chances to Mine- D- Hodlers can sit on their proof of stake and "HOG" mining rewards and they do so, often.
3 Vision - C++ Dapps A C++ is very much a big development community, but for how long... Rust and Go are calling...
4. 3rd Party Dev # C There are few which are notable, very few
5. Honest Marketing D- The Investor Court Cases point out EOS 'oversold" and "hyped" , now sticking to Blockone's foot? Whoops
6. Backer intent C- Almost a D except to say the VCs, Like Blockchain Capital have backed a few other decent offers.
Automated Pump and Dump players? Me thinks so ...
7. The Future B I still think EOS can right the ship, they need to work hard on dev tools to support Go and Rust devs,
old C++ guys won't likely change their ways in mass, but PoS @ needs concurrency
(hell, even Kotlin has that in spades, EOS could do a Kotlin specific Distro and snag many Java folk...)
Is EOS a better pick than Ethereum or CARDANO? Well not really, unless, there is a dramatic turnaround or REALLY BIG EOS announcement which "pricks up everyone's ears, like EOS are changing their POS model to be more inclusive to all miners (not just the chosen 21) and EOS have released a host of new development tools across multiple languages ( Go and Rust would be my dev language picks) AND, EOS announce a few more big league partnership s which actually deliver some real usable value everyone needs (prospect of wide spread adoption are very good). Otherwise there are plenty of crypto investments which will provide a better mid terms 6 month return than EOS.
Will EOS survive in the long run? Yup, they raised an ocean of cash and, I personally think EOS have not choice but to 're-rig' their Vision and Direction and, then start to quickly execute on such a strategic pivot, which should contain a more miner inclusive POS model (like expand the number of session Miners 10 FOLD to 210). For now though, in the next six months, the pragmatic way forward for EOS is to continue to be the VC and Whale place to wash money into and out of the market , behaving as is, which is be the better casino tables where whales can bet for and against the smaller rise and falls of the market by playing the EOS market cap as it tracks that market rise and fall , so as to make decent money on small movements given the amount of money currently staked in EOS by some very big players.
For the small investor EOS is less interesting, especially if you are looking to recoup the last six months of losses most of us have, and need to put your money to works with chances of better return before the end of the tax year (to take advantage of those losses and reduce your overall tax bill.) In this POS Mexican stand-off assessment, CARDANO may be the best choice.
TK Disclosure, I don't own and have never owned EOS.
Ethereum, is my favourite "Take your time, but hurry up" Crypto PoS play. All very promising two years ago, 2 years later? Not so much, All I here is POS Crickets .
Well not quite. I do like Ethereum's grand vision and their communities resolve to bring the "Flippening" into play sooner or later versus Bitcoin's market dominance. That said look in the rear view mirror, CARDANO is gaining fast and, there are is a stampede of wild dark horses, with a few current market heavyweights like IOTA pivoting hard into refined versions of PoS which will challenge Ethereum 2.0 POS. Building a World computer where all Smart Contracts are treated equal on the blockchain in terms of settlement and trying to build a "World Computer" at the same time is no easy thing to do. If anything others will learn from the Ethereum effort, with one other especially CARDANO's Bill Hoskinson having learned early as one of Ethereum's co-founders. "BH" voted with his feet and started up something better in his own mind based on what he had learned at Ethereum.
The big question is, has the Ethereum community as a whole ,(imo the world of ETH seem very fragmented into multiple ideologue camps to investors outside looking in, their weekly newsletter is evidence of that) learned from their past few years of self-inflicted 'lack of real break-thrus'? Maybe not, however a few of their 'off-spring' ERC20 style have and certainly both Chainlink and Cosmos as inter-blockchains show an early promising glimpse of how how Ethereum 2.0 may scale TPS. My tech sense (and months of research on the subject) tells me ETH Separation of the Compute layer from the Settlement layer needs some work, to get the "world Computer" working properly.
Ethereum 2 Year dPoS Report Card- Overall Grade "B-"
"The Never ending dPoS Journey of ETH 2.0.... snore ?
1 Confidence in Team- B- Where is PoS exactly on the RoadMap delivery time table? Hmm.
2 PoS Chances to Mine- C+ Boosting TPS is one thing w/ guaranteed block settlement times, but not the only thing
Please clarify how Eth 2.0 PoS works in layman's terms...
3 Vision - SC A Its grand, maybe too grand "boiling the ocean style" with Smart Contracts and more ERCs
4. 3rd Party Dev # A lots of community and many top 100 ERC20 coins/tokens. Kudos
5. Honest Marketing C So geeky, the weekly updates they are. lol! Yoda would be proud...
6. Backer intent B- Some cracks are appearing, as other ERC20 plays run out of cash from their 2+ year old ICO
lower valuations suck, market is ticking up, runway is shortening, cash is getting tight, capiche?
Automated Pump and Dump players? So Many, they are hard to keep track of..
7. The Future C+ I am a fan of Ethereum 2.0 , when it shows up. Execution Ladies & Gents requires commercial levels of
professionalism across all facets of the biz, a re-org of how the community works together is in order..
and it's a tall order... as semi-chaos is the current order of the day. Good news is the kids are growing up.
Ethereum gets my "BAD" card in this POS Mexican Standoff, only because their 'collective' execution as a whole community has been like watching blue dye disperse in a public swimming pool, all over the place, as the community truly does BTOBS (and like shooting each other as much as the competition) , not a healthy condition and, one that needs to be corrects with a new community governance model which gets rid of the benevolent dictator for life, (this aint no python gig... :) )
Clearly Ethereum has a large community. ETH will see some of it's graduate ERC members in the Top 100 execute much better than others (generally not in the Top 100) and, those Top 100 ERC20 'plays' do have more commercial rigor (#BAT is a good example using an Ethereum private fork and ERC20 to create the permissioned Advert world through the eyes using the BRAVE Browser), will indeed, drag the rest of the ERC20 gang regardless of Market Cap and its fanatically loyal "BTC Hating" community 'kicking and screaming' toward pragmatic market driven uses and solutions, provided ETH 2.0 implements POS changes without too much trouble which IMO is not easy. This POS part of the ETH 2.0 effort ETH investors should watch closely (with parachutes attached) over the next two quarters.
Will Ethereum keep pace with CARDANO in terms of percentage growth in Market Cap, quarter over quarter to the end of 2020? Unlikely, I would say, but ETH will continue to grow in value as some of their offspring ERC20 protege will execute better than the core community and, are now really the biggest source of innovation feedback to the ETH community, within what is now the largest Smart Contract centric community of the market we call crypto.
So investors should expect modest ETH price growth the next few quarters, largely driven by algorithmic trading which treats BTC and Ethereum in a more or less equal 'bid and ask' manner. (ETH gets the benefit of being towed by BTC price movements either way.)
Will Ethereum outpace EOS market cap percentage growth quarter over quarter? In my books yes, by reasonably large margins of say 10% to 15% better per quarter, at a minimum, so if you have few investment 'bucks' to spare, they are better placed in either Ethereum or CARDANO for those looking for some sort of six month return on their money (and not EOS).
TK Disclosure, I don't own and have never owned Ethereum. I do own some BAT thanks to Publish0x. :)
Oh #CARDANO , what have you done!
Created a community that actually works for the community with decent voting mechanism to keep the ADA currency more than buoyant?
Act more like a commercial company doing dev and test than a crypto community? Take a stand on what crypto is all about with no BS? (Yeah BH is damned right this political). Oh yeah all of these things and a bit more.
CARDANO is less than perfect in the POS design/architecture space IMO (its very complex at first glance and technically deep), but what the hell do I know after 35 years of tech? (I have not yet had a technical lobotomy and still actually do hack and build stuff, in the power generation space. )
Ouroboros is CARDANO's POS based Robust Transaction Ledger, part of a layer cake of value add being created over the foundation led by Charles Hoskinson's own co. IOHK, as shown in this CARDANO.org Roadmap. Cardano's research driven approach with a pragmatism, unafraid to adopt existing tech, has nicely avoided what I see as the Ethereum community largely insular "NIH" Not Invented Here style of creativity building that monstrosity of a "World Computer". So Kudos to CH and gang for seriously adopting the "intellectually Honest" approach. At the end of the day, CARDANO announcing they have implemented POS on their ITN Test network this past week or so and, it actually appears to be working, bodes well for CARDANO's future and the successful implementation of their vision of building blockchain tech which supports instituting soft and hard fork changes without production disruption and doing it so @ scale. (Something Ethereum could never pull off). Time will tell in the coming months if CARDANO has truly pulled this seriously ambitious tech goal off, where a pass result, would in my books be largely based on whether or not the test deployment survives all manner of known POS attacks.
The POS 'settlement layer' of CARDANO can be engaged to support several types of use cases, offering a rich set of business opportunities to the fast growing developers of distributed LEDGER tech. as a result, expect CARDANO's current upward market cap price momentum to continue for the next couple of quarters nutil the test data starts to be published by community members. At that point the momentum swing could either increase, if the tests (especially the POS attack tests) provide to be both all encompassing and successful passed or stall, if not all or some of the key tests are not successfully passed. (Checking out the test metrics for pass/fail criteria is on my bucket list in a future post on CARDANO.)
CARDANO 2 Year PoS Report Card- Overall Grade "B+"
"A Hot dPoS Production Insert, 'ballsy' move to replace PoW mainstream... WHOA!
1 Confidence in Team- A- Bill H. is an A player, the community has a lot of A players, do they have the pace? looks like it
2 PoS Chances to Mine- B- Randomizing PoS rights let's more people play, in the mining space, no?
This needs work, PoS TPS promise looks fine we will see what shows up on ITN Net
3 Vision Speed and? B+ I like that focus, but there is more to crypto than just TPS @ scale
the details on connectivity and oracle bridging of other public DLs is interesting, I need more info
investors need the info in layman terms with the value ID'd well
4. 3rd Party Dev # A- The community is not huge like BTC and ETH, but not small either , its quality that counts here
5. Honest Marketing B Still somewhat geeky, the balance is hard to find, coverage is probably the bigger problem. MarComm?
6. Backer intent B- Puritan Crypto, I am waiting for the MayFlower Logo to show up... Partnerships please in Biz? more?
The quality of the partnerships involved with ADA and Caradano in B level, they need to look at IOTA
7. The Future B+ CARDANO is somewhat in the altruistic purist public DL camp, understand the future is political and charged
The stand against regulators is a good one, they need to reach out to the larger crypto community fast
The Dark Horses, the big ones that have pivoted into PoS are real and will take market share
Maybe a PoS alliance is in order to create a generic standard
Me thinks the timing is right to do this latter point
EOS gets my "GOOD" card in this dPOS Mexican Standoff dated June 9th 2020, because their 'collective' execution as a whole community has been very much like a commercial company, driven by the kids who are now grown up. My hope is they will help create a PoS alliance to create a community of PoS Cryptos in a POS Forum or Alliance of Crypto startups, where inter-chain standards need to be just that, and where the committee on PoS and Crypto in general start to look like the IETF without the government wankers running the show this time around...
TK Disclosure, I don't own and have never owned CARDANO.
The BIG Hard Pivot Dark Horses- True Challengers in the dPoS Movement :
Is IOTA The BIG Dark Horse to Watch ENTERING the dPOS game?
IOTA, if they have learned anything the past 2 years, mainly from their community, is core research does not necessarily move the crypto price upward and that, IOTA have not de-coupled from BTC coat tails, largely because IOTA has not really delivered anything other than refinements, until recently.
Then all of a sudden, the IOTA community (not the IOTA foundation) took it upon themselves to build a blazing fast compact node which could operate in smallest from on a Raspberry PI with few resources. That same IOTA "Hornet' node hardware now replaced the IRI reference implementation(Java) as the main node design going forward, just as IOTA goes full distributed consensus for their settlement of transactions (Shimmer) .
Well the net of it the current waiting transaction PoW approval of two waiting transactions which have already done their PoW approvals now scales to 1200 TPS Transactions Per Second, confirmed with testing last week.
This has "just" happened, a few months after IOTA announced they were hard pivoting into Smart Contracts with the qubic team resources after proving IOTA could mount "Hornet" nodes on a RaspberryPi and load the code and run that ternary code a binary lightweight FPGA.
Totally hi tech nerd stuff, for sure.
I am going to reserve an IOTA POS report card as above, after IOTA POS delivery, which is likely later this year working in parallel with the PoW method now supported on the IOTA DAG TANGLE distributed public permissionless ledger.
Suffice it to say IOTA has one of the largest communities out there, and arguably the largest in Europe with really big partners centred around the IoT space. My last 2/12 years experience with IOTA , with some interaction with the BD team is they are highly focused, market use case driven and have an excellent commercial grade, super experienced and expert tech leader at the 'helm' of the IOTA Smartcontract effort in Eric Hop (Ex Phillips, now based in Vancouver, Canada), who just led members of the team in creating their QUPLA scripting Language for compliation into their FPGA intermediate flow programming language.
Trinity Wallet hack aside (they refunded the small losses and fixed the Wallet hack in 2 weeks, However the network was halted, this back earlier in 2020), I expect IOTA to be a contender in the Smart Contract segment of the market with POS.
In short, IOTA have learned a few hard lessons these past two years and finally, are just starting to actually deliver on their TPS promise @ scale with 1200 TPS. That type of performance is hard to ignore especially when its serving distributed IoT devices.
The have deep pockets and good partners and the community of supporters and third party developers are now expert in all things IOTA, don't count them out, are positioned in IoT is an excellent buy today imo and, even better now, if IOTA can deliver a one-two punch of Smart Contracts and dPOS in a timely manner before the end of the year, for both mid and long term gains, starting in 2021.
What's next for TK?
For a Later post to be delivered before the start of Summer in July, I will be diving into some of the more promising dPoS tech emerging from the depths of the market valuation charts.. as follows:
Other dPOS Heavyweights in the Top 30 - #TEZOS, #TRON
The dPOS "Up and Comers"- Top 30+ and Beyond --> Wannabes with some Special Team- Value Adds and 1/2 a chance?
The dPOS Pretenders- too Bad So Sad or Boutique Break Thru, with a Look to Merge such talents to create a Surprise Challenger?
Think Merger and Acquisition...
Should be fun, will keep you investors and techies a like, up to date on this twin tectonic plate shift in the crypto space called dPOS and Smart Contracts 2.0
TK over and out. :)
