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Investors, especially large institutions will have teams of lawyers who would would have paperwork from the party they purchase from vetting the purchase. Their insurance is the law and an ability to hold the seller responsible for loss in any case where that risk might exist.

No one pays 20% markup on a car, or gold, or a diamond ring under normal circumstances.

Washing illicit money though paying miners for their new Bitcoins is an established method for money laundering.

  What’s more, miners can offer something unique: brand-new, 
  “virgin” coins, which some investors covet. Such coins 
  command a premium of up to 20 percent, according to 
  Travis Kling, founder of the hedge fund Ikigai. It’s 
  easier to prove they’ve not been involved in money-
  laundering operations, he said

See this bitcoin laundering method described in this post from a moderator on BitcoinTalk dated August 22, 2013, 02:32:31 AM [ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0 ] Payment to miners / mining pool operators for their freshly minted "clean" "virgin" coins in exchange for a 20% markup.. why would anyone want to immediately lose 20% of their investment?...

"Decentralized dark pool exchange protocol. Built for laundering large volumes of crypto."

https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-fines-btc-e...

Those numbers are based on the market spot price, and not the order book support from real world buyers. Cryptocoin exchanges are mostly bots and the order books are mostly loaded with spoofed bids that are pulled away once real buyers and sellers start pushing one way or the other, hence the volatility.

What TRON is trying to do is sell tokens to users to be able to access bandwidth. Where do these tokens come from to begin with? TRON just whips them up for free.

If I remember right, a famous Bittorrent group based out of the UK called Oink was shut down because they took donations for running the site. One can imagine the same fate would await TRON once the tokens are found facilitating pirated MPAA and copyright IP works.

It's amazing that such a clearly fraudulent project acquired any funding to begin with.

  Claiming that we will not be able to solve the routing 
  problem on the lightning network is exactly the same as 
  claiming that we won't be able to solve the routing 
  problem on the Internet. Routing is a solved problem, 
  but is a difficult problem to implement, which is why 
  the clients are in BETA.

For digital payments I could skip the scam and use Venmo or cash.

I don't get why anyone would bother wasting their money on LN? You have to first buy the Bitcoins which is highly volatile so the risk of losing your money is always possible.

What's the use case? Why bother going though all the trouble and why is there a need to buy someone elses tokens which they basically made for free?

It sounds like you need to convince people to use Bitcoin because you own some and need more people to buy it so you can sell for fiat and make real money. Why else would you try to dismiss the inherent issue with race conditions in decentralized routing networks? Handwaving the flaw by saying "it'll be fixed in the future" is either your ignorance or a lie and an attempt to deceive.

You can't even claim it's the fault of beta software, because it's not even theoretically possible to solve the decentralized routing problem. LN is just another form of paypal/banking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

Quiet obvious how your scam works.

The vast majority of the supply is owned by a very small oligarch.

The chances of Bitcoin becoming obsolete or failing catastrphically due to a glitch or bug in the protocol software - like what just happened a few days ago (luckily by someone who desired to fix it, if the bug was found by a malicious actor they would have destroyed the entire Bitcoin ecosystem), the cryptocoin software can not be guaranteed as a safe store of value.

Anyone who "invested" in Bitcoin at the start of this year has lost upwards of 50%, so that would qualify as inflation in your terms. Other cryptocoins have seen losses exceeding 80%-90%.

The way cryptocoins work is by early users dumping their supply onto new users to exit and extract real value from the suckers who then become bag holders, the new users hope to do the same but are at a severe disadvantage to early users who own the vast majority of the supply.

What is that called? It's not deflation.

  Sealioning (also spelled sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a 
  type of trolling or harassment which consists of 
  pursuing people with persistent requests for evidence or 
  repeated questions, while maintaining a pretense of 
  civility. The troll pretends ignorance and 
  feigns politeness, so that if the target is provoked 
  into making an angry response, the troll can then act as 
  the aggrieved party.

Please feel free to prove my claims wrong, with any verifiable example.

  >A whole world currency that is potentially immune to 
  inflation and government manipulation.

Or manipulation from exchanges which generate counterfeit accounts and fake volume in order to steal BTC from the market before they exit scam like most of the exchanges in the past have.

What do you think about Tether and "stable coins" being generated by the billions for free (and then those operators using the counterfit stablecoins to steal BTC/XMR/ETH)?

https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

The common theory is that Bitfinex, Tether, and most of the Cryptocurrency exchanges are operating as fractional reserve banks - and creating more cryptocoins for free, meanwhile "buying" Bitcoin, Monereo, Ethereum, and so on for free because they operate in the dark.

If this is true, it's worse than real central banking, and it's quiet possible Bitfinex and other exchanges have stolen the vast majority of BTC in circulation.

  Protections for Customer Funds Are Often Limited or 
  Illusory. Generally accepted methods for auditing 
  virtual assets do not exist, and trading platforms lack 
  a consistent and transparent approach to independently 
  auditing the virtual currency purportedly in their 
  possession; several do not claim to do any independent 
  auditing of their virtual currency holdings at all. That 
  makes it difficult or impossible to confirm whether 
  platforms are responsibly holding their customers’ 
  virtual assets as claimed. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-09-27/crypt...

  Bitcoin inflation rate per annum: 3.87% 
  USD Current inflation rate for the United States is 

Early in Bitcoin history, by design Bitcoin went though a period of hyperinflation where Satoshi and a few users acquired most of the coins in circulation.

Aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation.

Also there's a chance that something will make Bitcoin obsolete in the near future - immediately destroying the trade value of Bitcoin, either a new cryptocurrency, a quantum computer or cryptographic breakthrough that would allow theft of BTC private keys or more predictably a bug like what recently happened in the main Bitcoin core wallet client software which allowed a user to inflate the supply of Bitcoins past 21 million and mint more BTC for free.

So if you were truly concerned about long term stability - gold or tangible functional assets would be much safer than software based pet rocks.

https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/cve-2018-17144-the-aftermath...

  The obvious worst part of this bug was the inflation 
  exploit. An attack could create new bitcoins at will, 
  exceeding the 21 million hard cap limit that is 
  currently in place. This would absolutely destroy 
  confidence in not only Bitcoin, but every 
  cryptocurrency.


  In addition, a miner could crash every single node they 
  are connected to by producing a block with an invalid 
  transaction in it. Miners are will go out of their way 
  to connect to as many other mining nodes as possible, so 
  they receive notifications of blocks faster.


  Imagine you’re a miner, hashing away at block #1000. 
  Another miner, Jim, finds block #1001 and starts 
  propagating it around the network. However, you’re not 
  connected to Jim, so it takes an extra few seconds for 
  you to receive the block. During those few seconds, the 
  network has moved on and you’re wasting hashpower and in 
  turn money. You need to receive the new block before you 
  get started on the next one.


  All the miners are highly connected, so if one is 
  producing client-crashing blocks, many of the larger 
  miners would be hit.

Bitcoin has a higher inflation rate than USD.

  Bitcoin inflation rate per annum: 3.87% 
  USD Current inflation rate for the United States is 2.7%.

This presumably is intended to enrich the Bitcoin oligarchs as a passive way to extract rent and wealth on the network simply for controlling existing capital.

This design choice indicates either a comic level of negligence, or intent to shift away from p2p to centralized information control.

only a 1% chance of successfully routing a $67 payment on the lightning network:

https://i.redd.it/twku0lwslz411.jpg

  Sending payments using the Lightning Network is cheaper 
  than the regular Bitcoin network, but suffers from 
  routing errors and wallet bugs that make it impractical 
  even for highly technical users. [1]

How then can a decentralized PAYMENT network preform better then routing on the trusted internet (which exists at layers below the lightening network)...

in an adversarial decentralized global payment network, information does not propagate instantaneously. As transaction rates increase, race conditions will increasingly clog the network. There is no way to fix this as information takes time to travel across the network and because this is a payment network, all nodes are constantly shifting funds around. Optimizing away from race conditions inevitably requires a large enough pool of liquid capital that its only solution is for all nodes to connect to a single central hub, or a small number of centralized hubs large enough to support all users and all clients. This is not designed for a peer to peer system and there is no other solution. This can be verified though rudimentary modeling simulations of random nodes, and more so when node sizes are limited to what a normal person would have in a small amount of cash at any given time, or even a sum deposited into a checking account.

The way Lightening Network is designed, is predictably to benefit capital holders with enough excess capital to act as the backbone hubs. Normal users will be unable to bypass the Bitcoin banking/payment processor LN hubs and unable to reliably route though peer to peer paths on the LN.

This presumably is intended to enrich the Bitcoin oligarchs as a passive way to extract rent and wealth on the network simply for controlling existing capital.

This design choice indicates either a comic level of negligence, or intent to shift away from p2p to centralized information control.

As transaction rates increase, race conditions will increasingly clog the network. There is no way to fix this as information takes time to travel across the network and because this is a payment network, all nodes are constantly shifting funds around. Optimizing away from race conditions inevitably requires a large enough pool of liquid capital that its only solution is for all nodes to connect to a single central hub, or a small number of centralized hubs large enough to support all users and all clients. This is not designed for a peer to peer system and there is no other solution. This can be verified though rudimentary modeling simulations of random nodes, and more so when node sizes are limited to what a normal person would have in a small amount of cash at any given time, or even a sum deposited into a checking account.

The way Lightening Network is designed, is predictably to benefit capital holders with enough excess capital to act as the backbone hubs. Normal users will be unable to bypass the Bitcoin banking/payment processor LN hubs and unable to reliably route though peer to peer paths on the LN.

This presumably is intended to enrich the Bitcoin oligarchs as a passive way to extract rent and wealth on the network simply for controlling existing capital.

"Distribution is complete" - how was the supply created and distributed?

Hint, the supply was "premined" and a the creator chose to gift a very small percent of the supply out to users in order to incentivize them to promote it.

You can not mine or create nano (raiblocks), you must purchase it from the dev who created the supply.

https://raiblocks.net/page/frontiers.php?limit=100

https://medium.com/andreas-tries-blockchain/iota-cannot-be-u...

The network is centralized and unusable. There is no real world use case, and additionally the architecture is optimized for Trinary which is weird for IOT hardware because it's not mass produced to the scale of normal binary hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer

The lightening network inherently suffers from limitations on transaction rates and an inability to scale up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition

It's one of the most basic computer bugs, and LN design is incompatible with a fix for race conditions due to decentralization.

There's also the aspect that the Lightening Network's design inevitably turns it into a banking network, designed to extract fees for the wealthy.

https://youtu.be/Ug8NH67_EfE?t=623

Compounding the already highly centralized wealth of Bitcoin oligarchs who took control of the supply for pennies on the dollar and need new users to dump their nearly free coins out for real money in fiat, where they would be able actually buy property.

https://howmuch.net/articles/bitcoin-wealth-distribution

  Bitcoin inflation rate per annum: 3.87% 
  USD Current inflation rate for the United States is 2.7%.

Aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition

It's one of the most basic computer bugs, and LN design is incompatible with a fix for race conditions due to decentralization.

There's also the aspect that the Lightening Network's design inevitably turns it into a banking network, designed to extract fees for the wealthy.

https://youtu.be/Ug8NH67_EfE?t=623

-Privacy: See the recent example where the state sponsored espionage involving sophisticated hackers had their activity traced though Bitcoin's blocktchain transaction log.

Even Monero's XMR is prone to statistical analysis to unmask users:

https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2018/3/arti...

https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/

A more serious question will be what happens when the laws catch up with users using a system designed for money laundering, tax evasion, and enabling black markets?

-Uncensorability

The software which enables blockchains and proof of work is susceptible to attacks by motivated state level attackers, so far only smaller blockchains have been targeted (presumably by rival groups with expendable mining resources).

A much easier censorship attack occurs at lower network levels.

  One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion 
  people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or 
  Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And  
  if we just include all balances, we include many dust 
  balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 
  0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The 
  imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient 
  among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH 
  per address. So this is the distribution of ownership 
  among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 
  2017.


  In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like 
  this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the 
  ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking 
  information on all holders with balances >$20,000. 
  Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini 
  coefficient would mean that a government would only need 
  to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a 
  large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with 
  it the ability to tank the price.

  With that said, two points. First, while one would not 
  want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as 
  then only one person would have all of the digital 
  currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost 
  the network), in practice it appears that a very high 
  level of wealth centralization is still compatible with 
  the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we 
  show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better 
  metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder 
  concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of 
  arbitrarily choosing a threshold.


  ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious 
  issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion 
  of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini 
  coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it 
  does not directly measure the number of individuals or 
  entities required to compromise a system.


  Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a 
  subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini 
  coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners 
  with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that 
  compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be 
  sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the 
  maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges 
  rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck.


  Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries 
  with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, 
  then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would 
  again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a 
  Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in 
  >51% of mining being compromised.

Again, PoW is not immune to "Irreversibility" it actually constantly has a known attack surface for reversing transactions and double spending. The only thing preventing it is so far no only a limited amount of attacks on smaller blockchains have taken place.