Project Focus Update

Mobile Wallet

The Skycoin mobile wallet is done.

https://play.google.com/apps/testing/net.skycoin.mobile

Branding, Design

We are revamping the content pages for the Skycoin website

We have a new logo now.

Bounty program has been up for a month. If anyone wants to make Skycoin videos, check the bounty program in telegram.

Skycoin Branding Kit

Skywire

Skywire is working but is getting a rewrite, to use the skycoin/net networking library.

The dashboard for cluster management (node manager) and global network dashboard is currently under development.

Then network will be fully usable for the public for VPN, Socks5 proxy and we will start moving applications on to the new network namespace.

New Wallet

Version 20 of the wallet is being released. This is a new wallet from scratch and has been in the github development branch of Skycoin for a month now.

Version 20 is several dozen times faster than the old wallet.

Project Focus

Quote from: LiskEnterprise on September 14, 2017, 11:03:15 PM

This forum is dead and the price is dead… There maybe a correlation. Becasue you moved to telegram there is no productive conversations here. BTC talk is the first place new crypto people go to study a new platform and they see nothing happening here.

The price is not dead.

When we sell coins on the market, the price goes up.

It is impossible for people to buy at the price they want and no one wants to sell the coin. There is no reason you would sell a coin if it can go from $0.05 to $600 in three months like Byteballs and other coins did. This is a well known dynamic for people who have been watching for the last eight years how the coin market operates. It is especially obvious to people who under the psychology of financial assets and how bubbles occur.

All the coins like IOTA, Litecoin, Byteballs, Bitcoin had very long latency periods.

That is because exponential growth from a small user community, even at 1% per day growth rate takes years to growth to the point that it reaches public conscience.

The user community, technology growth at a continuous, constant rate over years, but the asset appreciation occurs suddenly and violently (once the coin/ asset/market breaks a critical threshold of awareness). Then suddenly what you only heard two or three times before over a few months, suddenly begins to appear everywhere. User growth is constant and linear, while public perception, awareness and attention is a threshold function.

If user community is 100 people and growth rate is 1% per day, that is only 1 new user per day. Our telegram doubled three times in users, over last two months and we have not even started on advertising or marketing yet and have almost zero videos and zero marketing towards public and have not done listing on any large exchanges yet for visibility.

The price does not matter either. There are projects that are a piece of shit and barely work, have no value and have massive operating costs (negative cash flow, losses) and who are trading at 120x the market cap of Skycoin. There are very very few blockchain projects that actually have developers, real user communities or actual technology that is useful or can retain a userbase.

The active userbase metrics for Skycoin have increased 8x, but the price has been stable. The price is not the best metric for evaluation, because it is a lagging indicator and lags behind technology, development, marketing and user community by months or years.

Internally, we do not use the price a metric but look at fundamentals such as:

• technology development and readiness status
• user community growth
• activity and application adaption
• usability improvements
• improvements in marketing effort and Skycoin structure/organization (how many people are active in the bountry program)

As we have improved the coin and marketing the Skycoin volume has decreased because people have been less willing to sell. When we release major news, the Skycoin price does not increase, but the volume decreases because there are fewer people selling at the market clearing price. When we have done coin drops for testing, the skycoin price goes up, as we sell coins onto the market.

Normally, the coefficient is negative. As you sell X coins onto the market, the market price should decline by Y. However, the market price goes up. The linear coefficient for the market’s impulse response function has the wrong sign. “The more coins we sell the more the Skycoin price goes up”.

When people sell Skycoin the psychology is “Someone is dumping” and people try to lure them into dumping more by increasing the price. The buyers of Skycoin are trying to acquire long term positions (maximizing the absolute number of coins). So they are buying over time, without increasing the price. However, the sellers are not willing to sell at the current price.

This is consistent with what we are seeing on the OTC markets. There are some people who have 30% or 40% of their total cryptos holdings shifted into Skcoin and they are buying and holding and not participating actively on the markets ( but instead waiting for future appreciation).

So the market psychology of the Skycoin market is different than Monero or Dogecoin, where people are just sitting there day trading around the price and creating a high volume. Once we are on a larger exchange, we will see more day trading and high volume, but the buy and hold for early stage or emerging coins, does not generate a lot of volume.

We tried for a few times to do “market making” and put 10 BTC on both the bid and ask side, but the coins were all bought up and exhausted very quickly and we do not know how to set the spread or the price because there were only orders on the buy side and none of th sell, so the bot just runs out of coins, so we could not even run a market making bot successfully. This indicates there is high demand, but that people want to buy at a low price.

We are just going to let the markets do whatever they want, because that is just the way it is. The yoyo bot guy stopped and the market looks a lot better now and there are multiple people actively trading and price has been very stable. So the Skycoin market and order book is maturing.

The people trading Skycoin are also extremely intelligence and sophisticated. They have an extremely high level of technical competency and education compared to the users of other coins. Many of the Skycoin user base also has a very good understanding of human psychology and market behavior.

The Skycoin Community has the highest percentage of Software Developers and Engineers of all the coins. The Skycoin Community is very organized and many of them are planning their coin portfolio allocations out for months and years. They are looking at the new projects, before they are listed on exchanges and they are evaluating the projects based upon technical fundamentals and ability to appreciate in the future. So we do not have the emotional driven market of the other coins and the price has been very stable.

• Skycoin has developers (most of the projects raising tens or hundreds of million of dollars do not have developers)
• Skycoin has its own blockchain (the ERC20 tokens and many of the projects raising tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in “ICOs” do not have a blockchain)
• Skycoin has application, that can be run and work (almost all of the ICOs raising tens or hundreds of millions of dollars do not have applications or are just raising the money to hire developers/or build the applications which do not exist except as vaporware)
• Skycoin has a continuous development history of over almost eight years ( while many/most coins have no developers, no blockchain, no development history and no working or demo applications)
• Skycoin has technology. We know what we have to do to solve the problems we are working on. (Instead of raising 100 million dollars to solve a problem that people have been trying to solve and failing for the last four decades with no progress).
• Skycoin has a user community of people. (Not just bots and people flooding channels with bots to claim bounty program rewards and competing for who can get the most bots in their channel.)
• etc

So based upon fundamentals we are doing very well. However, for most of the market it is impossible for someone on the outside to look at a coin and figure out “Does anyone actual use this?”, “Does this coin actually have a user community?”, “Is that 100 million dollars a day in trading volume real or is it one bot trading with itself to create the appearance of volume?”. “Is coin really worth 200 million, or did some guy create 200 million coins and start trading them with himself for $1 a coin?”. “Does this coin really have anyone following them on twitter or did they buy 50,000 bots to follow them”.

Most of the coins on the market today are completely fake. 100% fake. No developers. No blockchain. No product. Fake liquidity. No user community except for people paid to do activity and make it look like there is a user community. “Lets flood reddit with bots and pay fifteen people $40 a day to make it look like we have a community”. ETC “We have a community. Look at our community manager shit posting under 14 different reddit accounts!”

You cannot compare Skycoin to these fake coins. If we wanted to do it the same way, we could do the same thing and make the market cap go to $500 million tomorrow. I can run a bot right now and send the volume to $5 million dollars a day. It does not mean anything.

Skycoin has to be built upon a foundation of reality and not mere appearance. That is why all the attention is focused on the technology and the fundamental metrics, instead of running a penny stock pump and dump. In this market, to do this honestly is a huge handicap.

We anticipate that during these bubbles, people will make a lot of money speculating on dubious assets and projects, however as the bubble deflates the smart money will rebalanced away from the speculative assets into projects which have a foundation in reality and not merely speculative (flight to safety). The current alt-coin market has a penny stock pump and dump, horse betting mentality and is not favorable for real projects. The current market for crypto-asset is still purely speculator driven.

The current crypto-assets market:

• Instead of being driven by reason, it is driven by emotion
• Instead of being driven by reality, it is driven by perception.
• Instead of being driven by value, it is driven by speculation

We wanted to differentiate Skycoin by moving away from this and preparing for the phase when the money shifts away from the speculative coins into a fundamental or value driven market. However, majority of the market for the immediate future is going to be valueless asset tokens, with no revenue or income and no economic purpose and no economic activity, which have hundred million dollar or billion dollar valuations. The sole value of the token, being that there are people are wiling to buy the tokens for harder, spendable currencies like Bitcoin or fiat (pump and dump).

I believe the next stage of crypto-currencies we are entering will be coins based upon user communities, real economic activity, crypto based applications and commodity backed coins (power grid tokens, bandwidth/telecom coins). Where as the current generation is based upon marketing slogans “We are IoT” (with no IoT devices) and “We have Smart Contracts” (that no one uses).

Then Skycoin also have a large segment of the community is also very patient and is testing out new software (with bugs) or that is difficult to use and install (like the BBS app, mobile wallet and Skymesssanger). So they have some experience with what we are building that the public has not seen and which has not been marketing etc. Many people are closely and personally tracking the Skycoin project progress now and testing the applications.

The price has also been tracking the Yuan and USD. However, in the long term we expect Skycoin will resume tracking BTC. Especially after the OTC market is integrated.

Price is a lagging metric, so is not useful. Price appreciations can be extremely violent and rapid and often reflect userbase growth or adaption that has been occurring continuously over years. It can also reflect what happens when a coin breaks the level of conscienceness, due to onset of sudden, high intensity, focused marketing and exchange listings (which takes months or years to prepare and lay the foundation for).

Exchange Listings

The scheduled listing on US exchanges was affected by the SEC letter. The US exchanges still have not resumed listing new coins.

We think all the US exchanges will be dead or irrelevant within two years.

Any US jurisdiction can be seized and the customers coins stolen by the government at any time (similar to what happened to eGold when the US government seized the customers collateral and kept it or MtGox when it went into receivership). There is an extremely long history of governments ( especially the US government) just seizing assets and collateral belonging to customers and just stealing the money and assets.

Current regulatory actions in the United States, Japan, Korean and China are accelerating the schedule for adaption of DEX (decentralized exchange) technology.

We should have accelerated and prioritized the time table for exchange listings last year. This set our time table back six months, but is not major problem.

Most of the large coin holdings have been moved off exchange are essentially illiquid because of the risk of theft from government seize, risk of exchange being hacked and/or holders being unwilling to submit themselves to the invasive tracking and surveillance that use of the current exchange entails.

Since most of the Bitcoin are off-market and not on the order books ( non-exchange traded), for the above reasons, the market for crypto assets is being set largely by a small number of high speed arbitrage firms with massive volume, whose positions in the order book are extremely thin compared to the total volume of coins in circulation. Meaning that if people attempted liquidation of even 1% of the outstanding volume of issued coins, there would be a severe decrease in coin price and inability to find buyers at the current market price without taking a 30% to 70% discount (depending on the magnitude of the capital outflows which are occurring at the same time).

The crypto volumes are are very large, but deceptive because the volume is from high frequency bots and does not reflect the order-book depth. Even 1% of coins being dumped can completely destroy the order book.

DEX will allow a larger number of coins to be active on the market and order book and increase stability by increasing the orderbook depth (because large holders do no longer need to worry about counter party risk and having their coins stolen, seized or hacked by keeping them on exchange). The increased order book depth should decrease volatility and make it more more difficult for a small number of players to cause large price movements and market manipulations.

So we are expecting most of the market to move to DEX and most of the coin volume to move to coins that have lower transaction times (away from bitcoin) to the coins whose transaction times are closer to the rate of exchanges ( currently impossible for all coins based upon PoS/PoW and which has only now become possible with new consensus algorithms, such as Skycoin Obelisk).

I think exchange centralization is a fad or a phase (like MtGox).

We will see more of the altcoin markets internalized because of the regulation and then eventually moved to DEX (decentralized exchange).

We are still working with the existing exchange, but are starting development of the Skycoin OTC market and our exchange federation protocol for enabling DEX.

What is happening is the exchanges are forming “self-regulatory” committees to block the creation of new exchanges (the business is very profitable and they are making 0.1% on each side of every trade on very high volumes). Unless they can regulate out new competitors, the exchanges are unable to maintain their high transaction and trading fees. Then they are creating “white lists” by country and only allowing the listing of crypto assets that the investors/owner groups of the exchanges have invested in or own a large percentage of.

The crypto-markets are forming into a new cabal, that is almost identical in structure and function to the wall-street cabal Bitcoin was developed to rebel against.

• the mining pool cabal (the three mining pools that control the network. Now being challenged by state backed mining pools, such as the Russian government backed entity)
• the exchange cabal (the exchanges approved to convert between fiat and crypto, who price fix the trading fees and exchange fees and use regulation or connections with legacy banking system to exclude competition)
• the coin white-list cabal (Apple white list, Korean whitelist, Japanese White List, etc)

It is very upsetting to watch what is happening in the Bitcoin exchange market. I think this is another phase of crypto. There seems to be a cycle of consolidation and then re-decentralization in response to the abuses once an oligarchy has formed and begins to abuse their power.