It’s time to check back in to what’s happening in the world of cryptocurrencies! Which—give it credit—is never, ever boring . Some things seem evergreen; the Bitcoin civil war is resurgent; the Ethereum’s growing pains continue. But out there on the horizon, some strange and interesting things are happening. I give you, for instance, appcoins, Blockstack, and Zcash. Appcoins Forget Bitcoin, say the appcoin true believers; forget Ethereum; heck, forget venture capital. Any project that can find a way to implement some time of internal cryptocurrency–an “appcoin” used to pay for goods or services within that project’s remit–can use that, first to crowdfund millions of dollars’ worth of initial development costs by selling “pre-mined” coins, then to share the rewards of success with those lucky / visionary initial users and investors. It sounds appealing! It has precedent; it’s exactly how Ethereum itself was funded, after all, and plenty of early Bitcoin enthusiasts got rich from that enthusiasm. You can see why blockchain enthusiasts unhappy with Bitcoin’s direction of late, such as Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, are so excited about the idea. But — totally aside from questions of whether this is technically legal — like all crowdfunding, appcoins run the risk of questionable incentivization; “make a lot of money up front” is a lot more tempting than “build something extraordinarily difficult and cutting-edge, and then see if there’s money in it,” as Bitcoin and Ethereum did. Appcoin poster child Steemit, for instance, provoked so much skepticism they were reduced to posting “ 7 reasons Steemit is not a Ponzi scheme ” on their official blog. That’s never good. More to the point, we’ve been here before; Ethereum isn’t just the second big blockchain, it’s the only one of many post-Bitcoin blockchains to have any real impact. So-called “altcoins” faded […]
