Tremendous value in DigiByte
This Medium post is actually in response to some other nonsense I’ve seen floating around about how other Cryptocurrencies have “tremendous value” based on ridiculous and misguided claims.
I propose this: There is more value now in DigiByte than any other single cryptocurrency out there at present!
Now fair warning: Some of what follows is an outright strawman misrepresentations of what other blockchains have been touting in recent twitter tirades. Some of what follows is an accurate portrayal of their insanity and flawed logic these other blockchains use. Hopefully after reading this you’ll see through the minimal amount of satire that’s here, to the crux of the issues that other blockchains have that they overlook or ignore, and see how DigiByte genuinely overcomes and surpasses them all.
I also want to preface this with the understanding that as you read this, you’ll likely think “But, if we don’t do X, then this particular blockchain I’m thinking of has no value proposition?”. Yes, I agree, many blockchains need to simply up and disappear. We don’t need thousands of them all doing the exact same thing (payments), coz that’s genuinely just stupid. Some will fall by the wayside in my vision of the future, and we need to be OK with that. It’s not a bad thing, because only the best and most suitable are what will remain!
So, I’ll start with a proposal as I’ve seen touted recently, and then basically tear it apart
1/ Security is all about the “cost” of the ASICs that protect your network
I would argue that it’s not just about having USD$150,000,000 of ASICs protecting your network, or about being the single blockchain with the most hash-power in a particular algo.
Rather, there are many elements that make up security, and having the most hashpower for a single algorithm is nice, having the most hash-power for 3x algos (As DigiByte does) is probably even better.
Combine this with the fact that DigiByte is BY FAR (I mean by an order of magnitude) more decentralized when it comes to mining than any other alternative blockchain out there, and this “security” goes way above and beyond just hashpower.
2/ Miners DO have an incentive to attack any network, if it means they get more coins: They want money!
You see, when somebody attacks a network, they’re not doing it to “double their coins”. They’re doing it for more money! Often when a 51% attack occurs we’ll see an attacker immediately swap out of the vulnerable altcoin chain for Bitcoin, and subsequently fiat currency. Mostly because they know holding a double-spent coin is bad for their funds. For example, when Bitcoin Gold was attacked, it would NOT have been by regular Bitcoin Gold miners, but rather it was done by an attacker who rented mining hash power.
Why? For money! Not for Bitcoin Gold. Bitcoin Gold was simply a means to an end.
If a miner can attack a network, and get more value out of that (especially vs honestly mining), they very likely will. It doesn’t matter which network they attack, miners don’t mine for purely philanthropic reasons such as “I do it to secure the network”. No any miner at any form of scale (over and above, say, a single graphics card) does it to get paid. That’s the cold hard truth, it doesn’t matter what the blockchain.
Liquidity matters not when it comes to this, as it simply means an extra small amount of work for an attacker trading their double-spent coins on a different exchange. Attackers don’t care about the blockchain they’re attacking! Only money.
You see the whole idea of Bitcoin, and also of DigiByte, is that you trust nobody! This is why DigiByte has taken a vocal stance against Lightning Network which requires you trust somebody. You don’t need to trust miners, nor should you (Especially with the recent Bitcoin vulnerability we’ve seen affect a number of blockchains that I talked about in my recent video). However, you can be certain that if you offer a fee to somebody alongside your transaction, they will validate it and include it in a block.
The value proposition with DigiByte is that one set of miners are unable to hold the blockchain to ransom with high fees, both thanks to our scaling blocksize, as well as being MultiAlgo. DigiByte is a winner here, because one group of, say, SHA256 miners can’t just decide to maintain a monopoly and reject blocks to / from a certain address (Or any number of other slim but plausible scenarios), because other miners on Skein or Myriad-Groestl will simply pick up the transactions, take the transaction-fees, and maintain the network.
3/ Merchant acceptance is easy
I’m going to half disagree here. It is, for some cryptocurrencies, but it can be infinitely better. The onboarding process for many new users is nothing short of abysmal, basically across every single blockchain.
Integration with 3rd party software also sucks, again for pretty much everything across the board.
Sure, there are some options out there that help such as Coingate, who do most of the hard work for integration, but overall it’s actually just a real pain in the ass to get in to cryptocurrency for most people. The reverse goes for merchants, getting the funds back *out* of cryptocurrency.
Add to the fact that some ridiculous blockchains want to additionally have users “buy into” (and lock up their funds in) the Lightning Network, yet another incredibly cumbersome step towards using cryptocurrencies (Which arguably is hardly even blockchain technology at that point) and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
Lightning Network absolutely sucks for new users.
Having to buy funds and then commit them, it’s the most absolutely insane notion I’ve ever heard. I’m gobsmacked daily by the fact that otherwise intelligent people seem to think that’s a great idea of a solution. If you look at Lightning Network from the perspective of somebody who is outside of the “cryptocurrency userbase”, suggesting people accept payments through it is nothing short of insanity.
I propose DigiByte’s method of on-chain scaling is FAR superior to absolutely any other blockchain out there. Not compromising with Proof-of-Stake, nor compromising with off-chain transactions, and still scaling far into the foreseeable future and beyond with the DigiSpeed hard fork.
4/ What’s sound money now will always be sound money
I would argue that there are some blockchains around simply through sheer ignorance from the masses. Sure, “one Bitconnect” will always be worth “One Bitconnect”, but everybody knows what happened to the value of Bitconnect. It offered nothing and before long the scam unraveled.
People need to be aware that some things are better at being “sound money”, and some are around simply because of speculation and some damn good marketing and driving of the “narrative” over the past few years.
A coin that does 4–7 transactions per-second is not “sound money” for the world if you’re trying to use it as “cash”. It could survive as a “store of value” thanks to its limited supply. However, you still cannot use a “cash for the world” currency by having a mere 10x that processing power. I’ve looked in the past at how DigiByte, even though currently it has capacity to do over 10x what the Top #50 blockchains are actually doing in transactions, DigiByte still needs to (and will) scale further. DigiByte is by far the most scalable UTXO blockchain out there!
As I’ve mentioned above, the DigiSpeed hard-fork is what sets DigiByte apart from the rest, the planned, smooth, reasonable and most importantly attainable, scaling on-chain!
Where other blockchains are content with spending 7–9 years without adjusting, adapting, growing or improving, DigiByte has been a first in many things and shown consistently that it can improve. This makes it stand a far better chance to be both sound money AND more! Even recently with the Bitcoin CVE-2018–17144 issue, DigiByte was the first blockchain to get the release out and into the wild.
It’s that rapid development and consistent focus on both security as well as improvement, that makes DigiByte the best bet for being sound money both now and into the future!
5/ Lightning Network will give value to anything other than Bitcoin
Lightning Network is almost a “currency” in itself, once the LN people figure out the routing and payments that is. I would argue that there’s no value to anything being on Lightning Network. Interoperability with other blockchains is great and all, but committing funds with the Lightning Network is a ridiculous means to an end. Not to mention interoperability is already available through atomic swaps without the Lightning Network
Adding to this, every single node needs to know that a transaction has taken place, in realtime, if they are to be able to use those nodes for payments of their own (Meaning Lightning Network will use a TON more bandwidth than on-chain payments).
Anyways, once you’re “on” the Lightning Network, nobody cares about what you used to get onboarded with, they’re going to want Bitcoin or fiat.
Sure, people can swap between currencies on the Lightning Network between say Bitcon and Vertcoin, but why would you want to get paid out in your smaller currency when you could get paid out in Bitcoin which has THE most liquidity? You don’t want to get paid in something that’s #30 in liquidity when you can get paid in the #1. Now, and into the future, why get paid in BBQcoin as an “end goal” for Lightning Network payments? There’s zero point to it. You want to get paid in Bitcoin, or fiat.
If you want to do atomic swaps, you don’t need the Lightning Network.
DigiByte has been doing Atomic Swaps for years now, and I’ve demonstrated this in late 2017 by doing it myself using BlockNet.
DigiByte removes the need for the Lightning Network by scaling well on-chain, and contrary to what I’ve seen I can confirm (in the video above) without a shadow of a doubt that you can do Atomic Swaps for almost every blockchain without the Lightning Network! Just take the dumb part out, do Atomic Swaps on-chain, save the bandwidth and the hassle!
6/ One coin will always be “cheapest” for fees
This is an outright lie.
As the value of a coin / blockchain (and subsequently their market cap) increase, so too will the cost of transactions. Having a higher maximum supply helps, because the cost of moving around value will be measured in smaller and more expandable amounts. However there’s always going to be another shitcoin that comes out that can do payments for cheaper, or even for free.
This isn’t a good thing when you’re hedging your bet being the cheapest, and others can do it for free. What happens if IOTA joins Lightning Network, with cheaper “free” payments than almost anything else?
Also, ditch any coin that needs the Lightning Network to survive on their value proposition of payments processing, because there will always be a faster / cheaper coin to come along, in which case anything that depends on Lightning Network to survive is worthless in my eyes.
7/ Being a testnet is worthwhile
Having a secondary blockchain to be a testnet is an absolutely abysmal value proposition.
Anybody can fork bitcoin at any time, and do whatever they want with it. The main chain will remain in-tact, because it’s intentionally built from the ground up to resist attack. DigiByte is also built likewise.
If you want to test how a future change will go in Bitcoin, or DigiByte, you fork the codebase, make the changes, and you do your tests on your own private “mainnet” of the chain. You don’t need a multi-million or multi-billion dollar testnet.
It’s a ridiculous claim, one that needs to die in a fire. Fast!
8/ One instance of being “before Bitcoin” makes you valuable
Basically, everything is faster / cheaper than Bitcoin at this point. Being ahead of Bitcoin in one instance of development post-launch doesn’t make you amazing.
It’s worth being aware that DigiByte was the first major altcoin to implement SegWit, by weeks! Qubitcoin technically beat DigiByte too, though arguably it’s a lot easier to get consensus to implement in a cryptocurrency that was at the time so small it wasn’t even on CoinMarketCap.
Regardless, SegWit is the most common reference people note when talking about needing a “testbed” for Bitcoin. Now, IF there is a need for a “testbed” for Bitcoin, DigiByte has shown it can be it, through over four years of consistent innovation, growth, and improvement. Other blockchains have barely changed since they were created, and in fact consistently lag behind in implementing upstream developmental improvements.
IF this was a valid argument (That’s a really big if), then DigiByte is the only logical choice here, basically because we actually did it first.
9/ Development is fastest on DigiByte
OK so this is a follow-on from the last point, but I’m not going to try and even pretend any other blockchain has a hope of dethroning DigiByte here. Our developers are without a doubt some of the (If not THE) most amazing code-ninjas in the blockchain space!
As I mentioned above, DigiByte was the first altcoin to implement the fix and get it tested and subsequently pushed into the wild. No mean feat. In addition, we’ve got members of our community who look after contacting Exchanges, Mining Pools, and other services such as ATM vendors, to alert them individually about an upgrade. That sort of dedication is key in this sort of situation where it’s a critical bug that could knock their node off the network.
We heard from a number of major exchanges and mining pools that DigiByte were the first to actually notify them, they weren’t even aware of the issue existing in Bitcoin, let alone in any other blockchains. Because of this, I want to take this opportunity to thank those people who work so tirelessly to ensure DigiByte yet again stands out from the crowd. It’s no mean feat contacting close to 100 exchanges, not to mention dozens of mining pools, plus other popular service vendors, yet our dedicated community members take it upon themselves to do this, the very embodiment of decentralization!
However it wouldn’t be a good example if there was just “one time” that DigiByte did well. DigiByte has implemented a number of features even before Bitcoin, for example many of the API changes that are happening in the upcoming Bitcoin 0.17 are already implemented in DigiByte since 6.16.2 in early 2018. I know first-hand, because we’ve already had to deal with Exchanges and Mining Pools still wanting to use the soon to be deprecated RPC calls in Bitcoin and all other Bitcoin codebase forks.
You’re welcome Bitcoin, DigiByte is actually breaking ground for you with those RPC calls, for several months now. In addition to that, we did SegWit a long time prior, and proved it would be all fine and dandy. No need to thank us, it’s just what we do!
In summary
DigiByte exceeds the value proposition that any other competing blockchain can provide, in basically every single way, shape, and form.
If you know of any other blockchain that has the history of rapid development, consistent improvements, speed, security, scalability, decentralization and low-cost transactions that DigiByte does, I warmly welcome you to rebut the above points and show me that DigiByte is not THE best in all the aforementioned ways.
If not, welcome to the community. You’ll find we’re mostly a pretty warm bunch, dedicated, enthusiastic, and most importantly decentralized. Whatever you bring to the table, there’s always somewhere for you to fit in!
