1/ What are the top coins and what are their perspectives in the world? Meaning if bitcoin focused on security with the exclusion of everything else. What do the other coins do?
2/ First, we have to look at the trade off with security vs transaction limits and how it differs from traditional centralized payment services like Visa or Paypal.
3/ Security for traditional systems is primarily focused on server hardware or server software. Mostly around roles, permissions, detection, and prevention mistakes in the software. The scalability system doesn't have a fundamental security system in place like Proof of Work.
4/ What this means is that security is mostly a process concern. The engineer, devops, and security team can all make mistakes in security. So in order for Visa to be secure, they have to roll out changes slower and double/triple check everything.
5/ What Bitcoin and Proof of Work does is build the security with the transaction system. This makes the transaction system secure but not as scalable. This distributed system is subject to a majority hash power attack. Security is maintained not only by PoW and incentives.
6/ This leads to performance problems, but ultimately the alt coins creators realized that there are a series of other vectors that one can innovate on:
7/ There's a cognitive dissonance that people have around coins. A number of the world views are not at odds with each other, they are complementary. It could be very well true the Ripple $xrp are complementary with bitcoin $btc
8/ Movie theaters didn't "die" because of VHS/Netflix/DVDs. It still exist because the user experience is complementary. Attendance is still on a slow decline, but it provides a complementary user experience.
9/ The Euro didn't kill off the USD. They simply wrap the commodity or economy on a regional basis and provides access to it. So there is a couple of attributes that are in effect here: region, use cases, governance, centralization that will all co-exist.
10/ So let's start from the top. #1 $btc Bitcoin's perspective is security at the foremost. It's focused on a cloud currency that's for the people without any leader. It has performance issues but decides to solve it in layers with lightening network as the L2 solution.
11/ #2 Ripple's perspective is that banking is here to stay. The world view is that a protocol that can complement the existing infrastructure is the best approach vs building an entirely new network and layers.
12/ Banks are not going to disappear simply because of bitcoin and any "revolution" will require 20-30 years to happen. I would argue that protocols like $xrp are not an anomaly. They are a reflection of the trade off between centralization and existing infrastructure.
13/ Their perspective is that blockchain is a technology first and foremost and not a wide cloud network like Facebook. The other perspective is around being able to reconcile states that are normally immutable within bitcoin simply because banks need to reflect their wet process
14/ #3 Eth perspective is that secure computing is the most important. It originally started with PoW and then with Casper now. You could argue that the non fungible tokens (ERC721) and tokens for ICOs (ERC20) are the largest innovations for applications to the wider public.
15/ Their tradeoffs reflect security as the core concern. Simplicity of programming language but then trading off security at the compiler and application level. While proof of work is security for the settlement and transaction layer.
16/ So while it's security at the lowest level, the upper level the EVM, programming language that are not the most secure. We'll see this year newer perspectives across all parts of this stack and regional players will have its own networks.
17/ #4 Bitcoin Cash's perspective is transaction finality speed with security. Solving with bigger blocks. They have a brand disadvantage but if they hammer their point with merchant adoption and emphasize their role as "medium of exchange"
18/ While most people think Bitcoin is a belief play. I would argue it's more a execution play. The open question is can Bitcoin Cash get merchant adoption and do development faster than Bitcoin.
19/ #5 Cardano. Their perspective is executing peer reviewed implementation and writing code from a formal specification. So you could argue that the play here is building on the organizational process and betting on formal verification as a way to mitigate security issues.
20/ #6 Litcoin. Their perspective is faster engineering execution, lower transaction fees, and merchant and transaction adoption. The bet has been on their org's ability to execute quickly and their focus on increasing currency transactions.
21/ #7 NEM. Their perspective is developer usability to allow you to code smart assets effectively. I would argue that a large part of this market is marketing toward developers across different regions. Largely NEM, ADA, Eth are all competing in this category for dev mindshare.
22/ #8 Stellar. Their perspective is serving smart assets and decentralized exchanges.They've spent more time on the layers of the settlement layers leading to a fast and diverse set of financial applications that can be built on top of $xlm
23/ #9 Tron. The value is content applications that they want to bring into the market. They use multiple underlying networks for different purposes. PoW to do user registration. Routable DHT for search and storage.
24/ This allows them to leverage existing research (i.e. p2p networks like bittorrent) to scale social networking and content features. It's unclear how well this works in practice toward responsive and real time media like social networks or games, but TBD.
25/ #10 IOTA. Their perspective is taking advantage of the properties of Directed Acyclic Graphs and making the computation much more efficient. This is an alternative architecture to blockchain but does use PoW as well.
26/ We now see an ecology of experiments on computation and currencies. We're not in the Cambrian Explosion of computation and currencies. You're seeing the emergence of narrow and wide cloud networks that are use case and regional focused.
27/ What does this mean? If you assume the analogy for coins is the Petrodollar: Then you can assume that every currency will wrap an economy or use case.
28/ There are many layers in the computing stack (transaction, settlement, virtual machine, compilation, verification, authority) and it's impossible for one coin or language to reflect all of the use cases.
29/ This is why there are so many countries. Every currency and country is a wrapper on geography based goods and use cases (commodities, industrial goods, and information technology). The coins will be sliced across use cases, regions, and industry.
30/ Meaning it'll be natural for their to be a $eth of China $qtum $neo or a $eth of Japan which is $ada There are narrow networks simply because cloud networks have to bootstrap off of physical networks, which is people and cultures.
31/ In conclusion, we are currently in the Cambrian Explosion of exploration and experimentation. All computing research into graph theory, cryptography, security, game theory, compilers, formal verification, permission systems, and p2p research will be fully explored.
32/ This will lead to many forms of applications within finance and computation, but most importantly this will not always be centralized. There will be industry + blockchain systems which will be reflection of the existing infrastructure like $xrp This I argue is not an anomaly.
