Five years, battle-hardened, and several near-misses of being a Bitcoin millionaire later, I’ve found one universal truth about this entire sector; trust and honesty is hard to come by. If you’re unaware of Bitcoin and why it’s all the ‘rage’ right now then it’s because there are no interventions with cryptocurrency; your money is your own so to speak, and the bank, or government, can’t suddenly decide that they now own your money for whatever reasons. There is also the whole issue of large transfers spanning across the globe. A bank may cost you a small fortune and lots of red-tape but with Bitcoin it’s less than $50 to send anywhere in the world.
But even the best products and systems have their faults, and Bitcoin is no exclusion; with no third party involved then it’s much harder to get your currency back if you lose it, or worse, have it scammed from you. Large online payment processors such as PayPal won’t even recognize it as a tradeable item and have left their doors open rife for fraudulent activity. I myself have been scammed over $1000 in charge-back fraud and there’s nothing I can do about it, but that’s another story.
At least the days of the fraudulent investor-backed startups are almost at an end though. To become a successful project with a large pot of funding you need to have a solid concept and something tangible. By tangible I mean that people need to be able to show that they are willing to frequently update investors with ideas and plans. Gone are the days when a professional looking graphic and some fancy words would cut it. We have a long long way to go to heal the wider community from the aftermath of disasters like Paycoin. Finding honesty in a sea of people that want us to lose money, or to just blatantly steal it off us is hard to find.
This is why when I stumbled across Draftcoin I was very impressed. It might be the first project that I fully believe in and feel fully invested in. It’s not often that I come across a development team that have transparency as their motto and lead by example wherever they are. If you’ve read any of my work previously you will notice that trust, honesty and safety are very big in my eyes, and when I came across Draftcoin I felt that I slotted in neatly as part of their community. I feel at home there. I trust them with their vision.
See, I’m a gamer, and Draftcoin are an esports platform. It is encouraged by their team that new users compete in various online games in an attempt to enrich and diversify their cryptocurrency portfolio’s. They’ve personally told me that trading at the exchanges is a losing game; most people lose out and the only winners are the market setters, those with the large amounts of Bitcoin. I agree with them, personally, I’ve stopped trying to play the market because I more often than not lose some of my coins.
I love their idea. Win coins by competing in games. That sounds better than lose a small fortune trying to gain on cryptocurrency exchanges! I’m all for that, and, of course, the complete transparency of their team. It’s refreshing to see a development team as open and honest about their vision and progress.
Draftcoin is also a completely new idea. There was no ICO (investment for startup), no bounties, and no anything. Their coins were sent directly on the market and floated on a local exchange. Anyone wishing to join the team were paid in Draftcoin at the current market value. I assume it was done like this so that they can have significant backing for the sustainability of their project.
I’m also a regular user of Steemit. I like Steemit because, again, the honesty and transparency of the developers. The beauty of Steem is that it is written to the blockchain and remains there forever. No-one can lie on there without it being visible to the world. If you recall I wrote about this two years ago when it had been challenging the core values of the way content was monetized on the web, and I wished for it to set a trend. So far this has been an amazingly successful project.
This year will be different though. The Steemit community are planning to go one further and monetize the ‘actual web’ with Smart Media Tokens. Websites owning these tokens will be able to reward everyone, right down to their article commenters. Think of it, right? Proper rewards for artists!
It’s going to be an exciting 2018 for Cryptocurrentcy and transparency!