Oct 14 2017

Development CX Statement

State of the Crypto Market and Development Updates

Q&A

There is no mention of a re-working of the whitepapers. Should this not be a priority so that your marketing that has started has reference material. This is a technical coin and so the documentation needs to be up to date.

Everyone is so busy.

We are trying to get a technical writer, to just produce content and write articles around the info-graphics we did.

Why is it only one decimal point change in the coin? All other coins have 6 to 8 decimal points.

1 decimal place means ~$0.30

We will enable 2 decimal places when Skycoin hits $10. We can enable the full 6 eventually.

We just do not want people spamming nano-transactions and bloating the blockchain with junk.

Why not promote the close of the telegram and the slack channel. Move completely to discord.

No one is on Discord. We do not use the slack much.

We have Sky-Messenger and our own messaging platform, so will probably move over there eventually.

We also have BBS and our own social media platform.

Also the telegram was set up wrong. Some people can access the news slack but are locked out of the BB and the main slack.

Telegram bans numbers/users from non-english speaking countries in English speaking super-channels because of spam. Get a google voice number and use that and then it should work.

In my opinions alot of the alts and also BTC and its family maybe will go through another boom market.

Yes. Definitely.

I am seeing junk platforms with no users, trading for almost a billion dollars.

Bitcoin may hit $10,000 by March.

Summary of the Current Bitcoin Market

This is what is happening on inside track and what we discussed recently….

We will see some ups and down, with marketing going up and down, but the volume of money and attention flooding into crypto-assets only keeps increasing.

However, there are VERY FEW real or legitimate coins. There are lot of coins with very nice looking websites and many coins with very nice looking “advisor boards”. There are coins raising hundreds of millions of dollars in ICOs left and right.

However, almost none of these coins have any software developers or have the ability to hire or manage software developers or the ability to architect or design software.

However, their marketing is very good. Since they do not have to do software development, they can focus 100% of their energy on their marketing (instead of having to develop things). While the projects who are actually doing real things are handicapped in this market and ignored.

Some of the projects with no developers who have raised insane amounts of money, have even announced that they will not open source (no one gets to see if they are developing software), until “their AIs are done”. So they are going to build some type of artificial intelligence machine learning (LOL, what!?) before anyone can see if they are actually writing code or know how the system they are building is supposed to work.

Since there are so few real projects, we will see MASSIVE floods of money, that are quite rapid, into the small number of real projects.

The time to invest in these projects, between when no one cares when everyone is rushing in and the coin has appreciated is very brief.

Previously, coins had a period where public could buy them at a low price, before they appreciated. It tooks years (like Litecoin and Bitcoin).

Then for more recent coins like ByteBalls, there were only a few months to buy because it exploded in price from pennies to $800 in merely a few months. Now the appreciation is happening even more rapidly and in an even more compressed time frame.

Now, with projects like Cardano, all of the coins are pre-sold to insiders. Then the coin just magically APPEARS in the top 15 out of nowhere. There is no period when the coin is being bought/sold by a user community. They just sell the coins to insiders, VCs and the already wealthy. Then the coin POPS on the exchange at its full price and then they pay marketers to promote it and people to buy it. While the insiders dump as many coins as they can.

So before, there was a period when the public could find a good coin, cheaply, and buy it before it appreciated. Today, it is just a cartel of insiders who are already rich, giving each other coins (pre-ICO, lol what?) and institutional sales, before throwing the coin on an exchange and trying to dump as much of it as they can on the public.

So the new model is:

The founders and insiders buy in at 1/10th the ICO price
They sell to public at ICO price (10x what the insiders paid in the “pre-ICO” no one told you about)
Then they dump the coins on the exchange at the ICO price and support price with the pre-ICO/ICO sales and then market the hell out of the project. Dumping as many coins on the dumb public as they can.
Then everyone on the advisor board is doing this for +20 coins. Some of the people are just doing the ICOs, going to next coin and washing/repeating every week.

Most of the “Raised 150 million dollars in ICO!” are fake. Its like five guys taking their money, putting it into the coin and then getting their money back on backend.

The “investors” are demanding extremely steep and large discounts (huge percentages of the coins at extremely large discounts). “All the other coins are giving me 30% of the market rate”. The “coin investment funds” are literally popping up, to shop around and try to buy up 5 or 20 million dollar chunks of crypto-coins. 5% or 20% of crypto-currencies at a fraction of the market price, so they can dump them over time on the market for profit.

The old model was:

You release coin
It gradually appreciates over years as user community and adaption grow
The earlier people do well and hopefully the project does something useful

The current models is to just scam the public for anything you can get.

I think, from experience with some of the coins I have advised on, from some of the conference calls I have been on, that I can predict that we could see some exchange owners raided at gun point and thrown face down with a gun to their head while their servers are looted and confiscated by the government. Not because their are scamming people, but just because they are clueless and snubbing the wrong person or the friend of the regulators.

Basically, none of the governments wanted to “regulate” Bitcoin or the exchanges until the “regulator” and their friends started getting into the market and wanted to push out the other people. In the United States especially, you will have an oligarchy like CoinBase and a few companies and only they are allowed to operate. They will start white listing coins, so only their coins get listed and exchanges will be delisting the other projects.

The exchanges that are not owned by the right people are going to be shutdown (or hacked).

They are literally doing “Do what we say and we will protect you”, then on backend they are trying to get them shutdown at gunpoint so they can put their “licensed” competitor in place. Sort of like Circle trying to integrate Bitcoin into iMessage, then creating a white-list of which coins could go into the Apple App store. Everyone is trying to figure out how they can grab this thing and get control over it.

Just imagine if Apple integrated circle as the “official Bitcoin wallet” and put it in iMessenger, then purged all the Bitcoin wallets from the App store.

The coin market is forming into an oligarchy. People are demanding “regulation” because they are scamming everyone left and right and do not want to compete with other people’s scams so they want to own and control the regulation and shut everyone else down. That is what is happening.

I think we may see another round of large hacks, like we did on Gox.

There may not be a regulatory or legal pretense for shutting down particular exchanges (like what happened to BTC-E) and they could be “hacked” and cleared out like MtGox.

There was also a conference call where it was pointed out that the SEC was funded by regulatory actions, fines and asset seizures. That is where their budget comes from.

The exchanges are ranked by volume.
Exchanges with no fees can create infinite fake volume, so only the exchanges with trading fees are included in ranking, otherwise it’s inaccurate
To pump up their volumes and stay in the top of the rankings, the exchanges are doing secret rebates of trading fees and other scams to inflate their volume, while the actual volume is much lower
The exchanges that are most aggressive about puffing their volume and who are least moral are highest ranked
There is a huge incentive for exchanges to lie and puff their volume (which is why they are only listing scam coins, who can guarantee high volumes and fees)

Exchanges will not list a coin unless they are guanteed to make a minimum of $5,000 or $40,000 a day in trading fees. So the coin has to be heavily marketed to scalp that much money off the user community after the ICO. The exchanges are taking 0.1% on each side (0.2% per trade because they are trading against themselves). So every million dollars a day of volume is draining a coin $2,000 /day in exchange fees. Some of the coins are doing $6 or $10 million/day in “paid volume” or “guaranteed volume” ($12,000 or $20,000 a day in volume for medium sized coin). The exchange owners only care about volume.

The scam coins and mega-ICOs are paying the fees and working with the “market makers” to create the fake volume so the exchange owners know how much money they will make.

Kraken is probably the only exchange that no one complains about and is not screwing with the volume.

Most people with large orders are actually trading OTC on Bitfinex or other OTC platforms.

Most of the exchanges are making their money on volume and do not have maker/taker fees so there is no real order book depth. Making it very easy to rig and manipulate coin prices with a relatively small amount of money (hence OTC must be used to fill large orders because they cannot be done on the order book). The market structure is just broken and optimized for manipulation.

No maker/taker fees, so a thin order book depth
Exchanges making all of their fees on volume
Exchanges ranked by fake volume (and exchanges are faking volume)
Hidden trading rebates
Paid market makers (people paid massive fees to create fake volume)
Inaccurate exchange rankings (by fake volume)
Inability to buy/sell on market (thus a need for OTC)
Most coins are off markets because of the hacking risk (getting Goxed)
Ability to easily rig billions in coin market cap with little money because there is no real order book depth
Emphasis of exchanges on only the largest, most well marketed coins who have done huge ICOs (all of which are scams). No emphasis on technology or real companies

So for concrete example and instance there are three micro-grid tokens and companies:

One is launching token and is a 100 million/year existing business who has been building and operating combined heating/electricity generation for thirty years. Has whole legal department to deal with regulation and customer pricing laws and compliance. Has existing customers and revenue.
The other two coins are are massive ICOs that raised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but have no software, no employees, no experience building power grids and do not even understand the regulations required to operate in the markets they are raising funds in an ICO for. Has no customers, no revenue, cannot even operate in the markets they are raising funds for.

The result:

The two scam ICOs, already have multiple exchanges lined up to list them, with confirmed listing dates
The actual company with 100 million/year in revenue with actual power grid projects, cannot even get a phone call or get the exchanges to talk to them

That is what the altcoin market looks like right now. The non-scams are actually being filtered out for economic reasons.

What is happening now is:

The latest generation of users is buying/selling 15 or 60 coins in their portfolio. Someone who owns 60 coins does not have 60 wallets installed on their computer. Even the altcoin investment fund people are having trouble keeping 15 wallets installed to an offline computer and figuring out how to do offline transaction signing for them.
They do not even have wallets installed for ANY of the coins. Meaning all of the coins are just sitting on exchanges waiting to be looted
I did a survey of Ethereum users and ask them questions like “What Ethereum Thin Wallet is Best? Is there something like Electrum for Ethereum? What are the best Ethereum wallets?” and most of the “Ethereum Users” have never actually used an Ethereum wallet or cannot answer, do not know. This means all that money is on exchanges somewhere, its not in their wallets.

For the smaller coins (even coins valued in hundreds of millions or billions of dollars), many actually have almost zero real transactions, zero people actually with the wallet. I know this from node IP stats and harvested data I have seen.

Also, for the majority of the coins the volume is fake. There are coins with very impressive volume (which the exchanges are making a lot of money on) and very impressive market caps, but its all fake. Just completely fake. To get enough volume to get on exchanges, you have to agree to pay a market maker to create volume.

So some coins are giving 3 or 5 million dollars in coins to day trade on the exchange, to make the exchange owner money and lure in suckers and if you are an honest coin or not doing that, they won’t list you and will complain “Your volume is not high enough” and to go give their friends free coins to day trade and make the exchanges a lot of money.

They know the people that will do this and who wont.

The exchanges are making so much money on the scam and scam ICOs, that they will only list scam coins (which they make more money on). Their whole business is about volume. They can have 10 million/day in “volume” and the real order book depth is ten Bitcoin.

Also, most (the most popular) “Bitcoin News” websites are publishing fake news, “China Bans Bitcoin for the fifth time”, “Russia Bans Bitcoin”. Then when exchanges shut down something actualy happens (an event) there are ZERO articles about it on those website, because the REAL NEWS is not timed to their market pump and dumps. The media sites are literally just doing timed market pump and dumps with completely fake news. They are even recirculating fake, leaked “regulatory letters” from four years ago as “Just released China banned Bitcoin” news. And every single day is either a “pump day” or a “dump day”.

So for 90% of these projects, unless you are an insider and the one rigging the markets and in the cartel, you are not going to benefit from buying any of these coins. They have already appreciated 100x before you will even see them on the market. They are just popping into the top 20 out of no where now, with no one in public able to buy anything before the peak and then immediately crash afterward.

There are almost 0 (ZERO) news websites tracking:

Actual technology
Real world usage of blockchain
Real world development (projects with developers)
Smaller projects that are trying to do something more than run a pump and dump for the suckers

The whole market has been taken over completely. The libertarian aspiration of Bitcoin have been killed by simple greed and lust after easy money.

There are people who have real data (primary data) and they know which coins have actual users and real user communities. I track this data constantly and the data is pretty bad. The existing coin market is a train wreck.

Since no one ever withdraws coins from the exchange, the data suggests that many coins are selling more coins than actually exist. The trading volume and activity is completely uncorrelated to any real verifiable primary metrics.

People have told me that some exchanges have a history of sudden delisting of some coins without allowing the users to withdrawal. Which would explain what is happening. My attitude now is “If the coins are not in my wallet and on my computer, they do not exist”.

Once the regulators lock out the smaller coins from the markets completely with white-listing, the only thing that is getting listed will be two or three multi-billion dollar mega-scams a month. I have no idea what this will look like. Only the biggest, most toxic, best dressed scams who paid off the most people will be able to get listed.

The big changes to the market will be:

Multi-coin support (cross platform coin/wallet support standards, people pulling coins off the exchanges)
DEX (distributed exchanges), the real and long term money has already moved off the exchanges because of the hacking risk.
Real uses of blockchain instead of speculation (actual companies, using tokens for real business functions)

However, the sophisticated people are doing very very well. The people who know what is going on.

Many of the large investors are moving off of the exchanges to OTC.

They are boycotting all the coins with one or two “pre-ICOs” where the insiders get to buy at 1/100th the price of the public. They are ignoring the massive ICOs and looking at fundamentals and primary metrics.

It is sort of obvious, to anyone that is not an idiot, that if a coin raised 1 billion dollars in an ICO, that the price is not going to go up 100x (that 100 billion dollars in shucks are going to come along and dump one hundred billion dollars into the coin so that all the people in the ICO can exit 100x when the bought it at before the ICO). Especially if the coin is a “Smart Contract Platform” with no users or applications and not Enron selling a billion barrels a year of oil for E-coin.

IF:

A coin raises 1 billion dollars in an ICO
The coin WILL NOT increase to 100x the ICO price
To go up 100x, the existing coin holders have to be bough out for 100 billion
That money has to come from somewhere (where as the vast majority of coins only lose money and all of their inflows come from people buying the coin for speculation)

So it is obvious that all the best relative returns are in the smaller projects and not the mega-ICOs.

So all the money is being made by avoiding the mega-ICOs and focusing on fundamentals.

Where as idiots see “They raised twelve billion dollars in FIVE MINUTES. I NEED TO MORTGAGE MY HOUSE AND BUY THIS IN CASE IT GOES UP 3x AFTER THE ICO”. Then all the people who bought the coin at 1% of the ICO in the “pre-ICO” (that you were not invited to), will dump everything at the ICO price as soon as it hits the market.

This trend of everyone creating twelve bitcoin forks, so they can get free coins and dump them is also ridiculous.

New Wallet

Wallet Version 20 is released.

All nodes have been upgraded.

Completely new wallet from scratch. The new wallet is dozens of times faster.

Blockchain syncing is hundreds of times faster and is almost instant now. The old wallet took 1 second per block to sync. The new wallet syncs a few thousand blocks in a few seconds.

In future upgrade, all blocks will be treated as immutable data objects in CXO, so that the blockchain can be downloaded in parallel across all blocks and all connected peers, using all available bandwidth in parallel with no constraints on the block ordering.

This will be even faster than Bitcoin’s “header first downloads” or the rust ethereum approach.

CoinHours

The new wallet (version 20) now shows the “CoinHours”, which users earn for holding Skycoin.

We are working on an exchange for converting and establishing an exchange rate between CoinHours and Skycoin. Coin Hours are similar to the “Gas” in Ethereum or coin aging in Bitcoin, but are exchange-tradeable and are a separate parallel currency in Skycoin.

Coin Hours are used for transaction fees in Skycoin and will also be used for network resources on Skywire.

Coin Hours may eventually also be used for allocation of distributed computation resources, storage or bandwidth on Fiber and any Skycoin side changes with embedded CX scripting language.

The future wallet versions will add an API and UI to specify or split the CoinHour balances in transactions.

If Skycoins are held on an exchange, the coin hours earned will go to the exchange.

Skycoin CoinHours are also a very important part of the Skycoin CoinJoin infrastructure for increasing transaction privacy. CoinHours will be posted as collateral for mixing to prevent participants from backing out of or slowing down CoinJoin transactions. Skycoin CoinJoin transactions improve the mathematical guarantee of Skycoin transaction privacy by spending outputs from multiple wallets in the same transaction. This prevents the most common deanonymizing attacks in Bitcoin. When fully implemented, this will give Skycoin a ZeroCoin-level mathematical guarantee of transaction privacy, with orders of magnitude less complexity and computation overhead than the ZeroCoin implementation, by eliminating the requirement of the highly complicated zero-knowledge proof system.

Skycoin (DEX) Distributed Exchange Support

We are currently designing a hardcoded, 2-factor multi-signature transaction type with relative time locks for Skycoin. This new transaction type will enable DEX and atomic swap support across Skycoin and all Fiber coins.

We are also evaluating proposals for introducing a third transaction type for atomic swaps between blockchains. However, we believe that atomic swaps between blockchains are not mature yet and that the 2-signature multi-sig with relative time lock is the simpliest/easiest way to implement this.

Skycoin Projects Position on the Smart Contracts Fad

Skycoin does not have a “Smart Contracting Language”. Our blockchain language is a full programming language suitable for both desktop, server, networked applications but with all the features required for blockchain embedding.

We believe that “smart contracts” are a fad. In the future when anyone can publish their own blockchain as easily as creating a word-press blog, it does not make sense to cram the real world uses of blockchain scripting onto a third party platform. While we have a programming language, CX, that is designed for actual applications and real world usage, not “smart contracts” (as to date we have been unable to find a single real use or application for smart contracts).

CX

CX is an extremely strict, statically typed, affordance based (based upon Alan Kay’s COLA architecture), mathematically deterministic language. CX is designed to support the whole range of applications from being embedded on blockchain, to programming for GPU, FPGAs and achieving power saving and performance on next generation CPU architectures (RISC-V) which have explicit cache load/store instructions.

We are currently prototyping OpenGL support for CX.

CX also has a new website and programming sandbox.

http://cx.skycoin.com

I want to see people writing video games or a poker app or something on CX soon. I enjoyed “GameCoin” and we need more experiments in embedding video games on blockchain like GameCoin.

The Skycoin bounty program will expand to including incentive for video games and applications written in CX on the Skycoin platform.

The Skycoin bounty program will expand to including incentive for video games and applications written in CX on the Skycoin platform.

I like huntercoin because it is a blockchain based MMO and we wanted to build a language and platform platform to make gaming and communication applications easy. We did not feel this is even possible with a “smart contracts” language. Expecially because the most popular application by user are messaging/ communication, file sharing and gaming applications.

We also wanted to allow developers to prototype business logic and test applications in CXO (which is like blockchain-lite) before publishing onto a real blockchain, where making updates/fixing bugs becomes much more complicated.

Skycoin is also the first platform that will be able to distribute blockchain state updates globally in less than 300 ms (instead of 15 minutes or 30 seconds) and this is the minimum threshold for “real time” interaction required for several applications like decentralized poker.

Obviously the issues of waiting +30 seconds between interactions and an inconsistent block rate impair the user experience. Bitcoin’s rate of one block every 15 minutes makes poker unplayable and Ethereum’s rate is still insufferable for real time applications.

I do not see any real world usage, economics or technological capacities justifying the billion dollar valuations of these “Smart Contract Platforms”. I think “smart contracts” are already past peak and are in a bubble.

So for us to enable these real applications, required years of technology work to have a platform that could meet these requirements. Regardless of whatever the “smart contract platforms” say in their marketing, these applications are only becoming possible in the next generation. Simply none of the current generation of platforms has a technical solution to overcome the requirements for mainstream adaption.

So I am really excited about doing a bounty to have something like HunterCoin (MMO on blockchain) or some kind of real money rogue-like (e.g. NetHack) built on top of CX. “Real Money Dwarf Fortress on Blockchain”. It will be exciting to see what people do with this.

CX source code

Skycoin Roadmap Finished

The roadmap is on the website now

https://www.skycoin.com/roadmap/

The beta test of the first distributed social media application on the Skycoin platform is ready.

https://www.skycoin.com/downloads/ (scroll down to the BBS section)

BBS is a peer-to-peer replicated social media application, built upon immutable data structures (CXO) on top of the Skycoin platform.

All database in the Skycoin distributed BBS application is replicated peer-to-peer using the Skycoin CXO library (previously called Aether). Post submissions are submitted over a prototype of Sky-messenger, which is Skycoin’s TOX-like standard for machine-to-machine communication between public keys (github.com/skycoin/net).

Sky-messenger is specifically designed for peer-to-peer machine-to-machine communication, but also has a human-usable, Wechat-like interface.

Skycoin OTC Market

Now that the prototype for Sky-messenger is working, we can include an integrated Skycoin OTC market in the next wallet release.

The new wallet will also eventually include a “Send to Bitcoin address” function, which should increase Skycoin liquidity.