Piotr Piasecki
More from this author
Crypto projects to look forward to in 2018
2017 has been an important day for both Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. While hopefully not as tumultuous, 2018 is looking like it will bring us a lot of interesting innovation in the space. Here are some of the things I'm personally looking forward to seeing unfold in the new year.
The next wave of ICOs
About half a year ago, SEC released an investigative report concluding that DAO Tokens were securities. Since then there have been a number of high profile cases reinforcing this classification world-wide - UIP, LLToken, CCC, and HMS had to issue refunds to the ICO purchasers in China, Protostarr closed up shop, REcoin and DRC World were charged with fraud and so on.
The need for universal opt-in replay protection
SegWit2x got canceled, and with it probably the most heated "battle" in the Bitcoin space thus far draws to a close. There are many lessons to be learned from this ordeal as well as some other forks that are happening around Bitcoin - what constitutes "consensus" in the community, how will the future forks be handled and so on. One important aspect I haven't seen discussed as much currently is the ongoing issue of fork-proof replay protection - a feature that caused some controversy by its absence in SegWit2x and made Bitcoin Gold a laughing stock when they created a bounty for it very close to their forking date.
What is Bitcoin in the light of hard forks?
This year has been one of the more controversial years for Bitcoin thus far. We have already seen a number of important forks happen - SegWit, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold, and we're scheduled to witness some other forks soon - Bitcoin Cash doing a hard fork, SegWit2x looming ever closer, and we might even see some emergency PoW change hardfork in response to SegWit2x. Amidst all of that, many people are asking themselves, debating and fighting over an important question - "What is Bitcoin?" (that iconic question).
Blockstream vs miners – looking at the incentives around the SegWit2x fork
The past few months in the Bitcoin community have been filled with discussion of an upcoming hardfork - SegWit2x. There have been a lot of people voicing their opinion on the matter of whether that fork should be allowed to pass or not, but today I would like to look at who I believe to be two key players in this debate - Blockstream (opposing SegWit2x) and the miners, the core signatories of the New York Agreement. More specifically, I will be focusing on the incentives both of those parties have when it comes to dealing with SegWit2x.
A mark of one’s existence – records in the blockchain
Part of being a human is wanting to leave a mark on the world. Within us lies the deep need to be remembered, in some form, after we die. We see it in the Cueva de las Manos - Cave of the Hands, where the inhabitants left the outlines of their hands painted on the walls as early as 13'000 years ago.
What other cryptos can learn from Ripple
While last week I dissected Ripple's XRPs. There are many fundamental features of the Ripple system that other cryptos can learn from. A lot of them are small and obscure to anyone who hasn't had a hands-on experience developing systems on top of cryptos. Luckily enough, that's my speciality.
Counterarguments to Ripples value preposition
As some of you might know, I really like the idea behind the Ripple system. Creating a settlement layer based on trust and IOUs, being able to issue any asset easily, working quite well as a middleware layer, incentivising specialisation, creating a singularity of money, all of that is great. The system is not without its flaws however - centralisation of validators is an issue, and so is the token distribution. While both are interesting topics, with the recent meteoric rise in XRP price, I think it's worth focusing on that part of the discussion.
Another crypto bubble and the rise of altcoin markets
The crypto markets seem to be in another bubble, orders of magnitude bigger than the last. However, this time a lot of the money is flowing into altcoins interestingly enough. How this situation will play out and where the market will stabilise at will be a really interesting story to watch unfold - whether Bitcoin will re-capture the market, or will some other crypto take its place.
IOU price vs trust – a look at Tether
Fiat-denominated IOUs have a long history in the crypto space. Ripple launched in 2012 with its host of fiat gateways. BitUSD and TetherUS began circulating in 2014. PayCoin launched and died in 2015. It seems that recently Tether has gotten itself into some banking problems and its price started to reflect that.
