Francis Pouliot

Last month the NEM overlords claimed to have developed a system to “tag and freeze” hacked NEM coins. My guess is a block explorer with a blacklist API, not some “Blockchain magic.”

But regardless, I wouldn’t want to be them when the DHS and CIA knock on their door concerning Venezuela.

The Stellar platform itself doesn't "suck" in the same way that the Ripple platform itself doesn't suck.

What sucks is that they decided to create a useless and worthless utility token for their financing instead and forced it on Stellar users instead of just tech.

Typical of BitShares/Steemit: all the insiders make the money. It's a permissionsless pyramid scheme, the scientology of crypto. The higher you are on the ladder, influential, and the more familiar with obfuscated incentive patterns, the more rent you can covertly extract.

This industry is entirely morally bankrupt. We have to call a spade a spade. BAT is one of the most obvious ponzi schemes I've ever seen. They raised $36M from investors, they claim it is donations, yet the "donation receipts" are traded.

Litecoin's only real use case was to be an R&D project for reflecting on and benchmarking security of decentralized timestamps (e.g., OpenTimestamps project).

Scarcity drives value.

E.g. someone can fork Civic easily and implement the same system with Bitcoin payments. Utility only leads to value insofar as the useful feature is hard to reproduce. Forcing use of Civic by banning all other currencies won't work if Civic forks work too.

What makes Grin dangerous is that it does have a compelling story and people might think that translates into value for the coin. The user experience is shitty. To get even remotely close to Lightning, it would need years of work [and] hundreds of devs. It won't be used [in] real life.