The current state of ICO’s. The cryptocurrency space and I/O Coin Development Update
The U.S. House of Representatives Capital Markets, Securities, and Investments Subcommittee Holds First Cryptocurrency Hearing
ICO projects like Ethereum and DAO raised millions of dollars. Since then many jumped on the bandwagon to raise funds by making smart contract tokens with promises that simply could not be fulfilled. Early investors quickly saw enormous returns, but many were left with useless tokens or massive losses from dumps. These big players engaged on a rinse repeat of launching tokens while making astronomical amounts of funding that have continued a vicious cycle which has diluted the real, fair launched, cryptocurrency space. Some new exchanges are now paid off (Pay for Play) and the people at the top along with the same exchanges have a chance to prepare the markets with mild liquidity and jump start their P&D schemes.
For pure cryptocurrencies, exchanges were there to facilitate further distribution of coins and to enhance the user experience in our decentralized markets. For coins to be listed on exchanges, they would carefully look at the open source code in order to ensure it meet the requirements to be listed. Now it seems that those days are over. Exchanges are asking all sorts of ICO related questions and even what kind of money or tokens will be allocated for marketing. Most of the questions no longer fit the model of cryptocurrencies. Even Binance exchange has its own token just like Bitfinex. Charging millions to even consider adding a fairly launched decentralized cryptocurrency. Forcing pure cryptocurrencies out while giving many tokens with no real use, a safe haven. The game now for some other exchanges is to stay alive and walk the line or face SEC investigations. But while the game of easy millions from hot air continues, why will they care for pure cryptocurrencies in general. This is one reason where regulation is welcomed, as long as it keeps these exchanges at bay.
Unfortunately this is a stark reminder of the good old days of premines and failed ICO’s, but this time they are more sophisticated. Some of Big players care less if the product that’s offered works or not or even if it’s decentralized. The end game is to get rich quick, fast and move on. They come in to our space, woo people with fallacious whitepapers, nice like pyramid marketing incentives and flashy graphics. To make matters worse, all these tokens have put these blockchains in dire straights. Pushing them to their limits at a very early stage. And now we have failing blockchains that are too big to fail. This is leaving some smaller exchanges with huge tech-support headaches to deal with, but as long as the quota is met, I guess the madness will continue. This has also led to more hackers and scammers as they prey on private keys that are floating around in order to access these tokens.
Regardless of this mess, we still have real, public, fair launched cryptocurrencies that are still alive and kicking. Since Satoshis original purpose was to decentralize, you should know by now that many of these copycat projects have failed. Even our beloved Bitcoin is in trouble. Some have open their code to centralized companies that are snooping right into peoples transactions. Some other projects ran back to the same places crypto was running away from. Entering in partnerships to make gimmick features for the quick pump. Making dangerous changes to their code and essentially rendering their projects to a mere centralized database.
The rise of legal ICO’s will continue as private entities need cash flow and also a ledger that they can control. It’s not in their DNA to have a public community control a multi billion dollar ledger. Companies are running to patent digital currencies and claim rights to open source code. Therefor they have gone out plagiarizing open source code and tweaking legal wording in order to gain a patent. And now more than ever using the words Blockchain to make their companies stock bump. What I can't stomach are public projects that have told users, “YES we are fully decentralized”, but developers have sold their souls at the expense of making marketing news for the quick P&D action. Others leaving users holding on to a promise and bags of coins with ledgers that are rendered useless. Thankfully there are still good community driven projects out there that will meet the commodity criteria, pushing for decentralization and working by the decentralized rules. Just as bitcoin did in the early days, these cryptocurrencies are pushing against this quicksand to bring you the best in decentralized blockchain.
The entire premise of an ICO, to sell tokens made of thin air, of a whitepaper without anything to show for in code, is a complete fraud. We knew this in the early days, as they would only open the can of scams. Decentralized ledgers were supposed to be fair launched and worked in an open source environment by many developers looking after the code. It was essential for developers to do cross checking without having a central point of interest or even ownership. Today, Developers can work on these ledgers on their spare time or even dedicate their full time lives to these projects as proposals for governance models have flourished.
These open source projects are not backed by any central entity, but by hard working communities. In the near future some of these community driven projects will have cutting edge decentralized exchanges and the ability to interpolate between public blockchains. Fiat will be obsolete, as the world will move to digital, making the point of entry a thing of the past. People will transact in digital and many freedom lovers will only transact in private cryptocurrencies. This is not to say that governments won't be essential but, that’s if the government learns to respect innovation and works for the people, not the other way around. But don’t move so fast, the governments are coming to the rescue now. Proposing big clamp downs and regulations. But this could also make things tough for the regular joe while easy for the ones that have structuring. This could lead to even larger schemes by accredited investors and exchanges will continue to get greased.
The same can be said about tech corporations which have empowered the few at the top while leaving many to despair. Even engineers working for big firms will get tired from the daily constraints to enrich someone else. They get the nice perks but in the end they feel empty. Freedom to build upon their ideas is narrowed to a political means of the corporate structure further depressing the workforce. These companies are now stepping in strong along with banks to stop the bleed of customers and engineers running to crypto. Some banks are going as far as to closing checking accounts. Their plan is to supersede efforts made in the open source community to further their own corporate business quotas.
Access to private, public digital currencies should be a respected right for all in kind. There are too many things that already separate us all, but cryptocurrencies could be a beak of hope in the finance sector for humanity. For these reasons we should be skeptical of too much regulation and corporate takeovers.
The down side here is when these entitled policy makers and corporate hawks care more for their wealthy donors, while the people at the bottom suffer. Going forward this will be a tough fight for the advocates of financial freedom and tax fairness in crypto markets. Here is where the government will pull out the boogie man card “money laundering”. This is the case where many suffer for the acts of a few. So for now, the unchecked, ICO party is over. Things will get tougher for ICO’s. The second card government will pull is “illegal activities”. As they will think ICO Projects, could be backed by criminals and be an easy tool for finding seed funding for illegal activities while masking things as a legit crypto project. This in turn could end up costing billions of dollars in losses and hurt the very same people we are trying to help. And is for these reasons that the rules will change. There will be more regulations but most of them will be an advantage for the government, accredited businesses and financial institutions.
What I hope happens is that the government regulate ICO’s, treat them as securities but leave pure fair launched cryptocurrencies out of it. There should be no taxing of pure cryptocurrencies, because there is no company or central entity backing them. Users that pick them up are mostly using them for means of exchange, goods or services, store of value, fueling dapps and confirming transactions on the ledger. If taxes continue to be imposed in these areas it would be an accounting nightmare. Price fluctuations are very volatile to say the least. These cryptocurrencies are also not issued by the government and are secured by users via decentralized public nodes. If exchanged for Fiat, I believe governments should not tax users as there are fees paid to exchanges and those exchanges are already taxed. They are also monitored and running by SEC rules. If the government is worried about money laundering outside of the exchanges, they could impose a hard cap on over the counter sales for Fiat.
Aside from all these uncertainty in the space, our team has kept working tirelessly on IOC. Believing fearlessly in the people. Pushing against all odds to provide a great public blockchain. One that users can rely on. We hope that in the coming years we can continue to innovate. Even if we have limited resources. Together we can all work to maintain it open source, secure, fast and reliable to further deliver on the promises of a truly decentralized ecosystem.
If you are new to our story, as a reminder IOC was fair launched back in 2014. There was a 2 week mining period to achieve initial coin distribution. This is the only way and most fair way we had at the time to launch a fully decentralized POS chain. There was no foundation or central entity selling ioc. Everyone involved in the project has donated time and efforts to develop the I/O coin chain. IOC was also launched with an X11 algorithm which was video card resistant to make it very difficult to insta mine. The community at the time of launch bought coins in the exchanges from miners or mined. This means we are all in this together. We all as a community should look after the well being of the I/O coin blockchain. It is not owned by a central company. The foundation is a non for profit foundation that was put together to oversee the curation of the blockchain and to serve as a liaison between the community and developers of the open source code for IOC.
The current technical state of the blockchain has improved since the DIONS upgrade. As you can see in the image above our orphans have dropped significantly. The staking is currently at almost 48.7% as of today. The shuffle that was put in place is working as expected
As part of our new “shuffle staking” feature, lower weight addresses no longer have to wait over 30 days and are receiving rewards for confirming transactions much sooner. This is an improvement in comparison to coinage. Coinage was initially conceived by Peercoin. Coinage would impose at times a very hefty warming period which had led to criticism from other communities that it would hinder the desired effect in securing the network. With coinage, users with high stakes would unlock wallets for a very short time to collect the reward and then go offline. This has been improved and stakers only collect rewards if they maintain up time and stake.
I/O Coin dev team update
The I/O Dev team continues working hard with our “shade” coding & testing for upcoming stealth addresses. We released our whitepaper in Chinese and will be followed by other languages. To check our code work you may follow us here.
You can read more of our upcoming new features as in stealth addresses and ring signatures in our whitepaper.
Star I/O
Get ready for the Battle of the Blockchain universe!
Star I/O is an intergalactic strategy game (Command & Conquer Like) being developed using the data storage capabilities of the I/O Coin blockchain. The dev team for Star I/O gave us an update and it reads as follows;
“Universe data is loaded from php api to Unity from an i/o coin wallet and rendered to what is in the video. All is functional and ready to use. Next step is show planet info and acquiring a planet.”
Graphical and rendering test 1
Graphical and rendering test 2
Please don't forget, If you are getting any wallet support from members be considerate if you can donate for their efforts.
We are looking forward for the space to start to get cleaned up from the craze that it has been in. Hopefully real projects with real solutions and offerings as in applications can start to flourish. The IOC Blockchain platform be already used to build decentralized apps that are fueled by IOC. If you have any ideas or comments, please make sure to drop some lines. If you would like to help in any way we are looking for devs to help the team to continue in upgrading the current wallet, dapps, qt wallets, mobile wallets etc. If you are a developer feel free to drop us a line or join our developer channel.
I/O Coin, Ticker: IOC is listed on Bittrex. You can submit a request for a new individual account as well as a new business account: Click here
Thanks
Don't forget to vote for I/O Coin for the Cup on Digax vote
