Five little-known blockchain currencies rise as more national currencies continue to fall.

Mainstream news if full of doom headlines for many national currencies. Meanwhile the emerging Blockchain currencies continue to rise. Some of these have reach gains of over 1,200% this year. To put that in perspective Imagine the price of silver reaching $180 by May 31. There are hundreds of strangely named Blockchain currencies, and anybody can create their own copycat of early bitcoin prototypes in an afternoon. How does one know the genuinely unique and promising currencies from the multitude of worthless scam-coins? This piece will help as a guide to finding some promising ideas for Blockchain tokens that make them stand out from bitcoin.

Each of the five Blockchain currency tokens listed here do something unique that the first blockchain currency, bitcoin, itself does not do. Bitcoin can adopt many features that are found useful in many of derivatives of itself, but second and third generation blockchain currencies are now emerging from the stack of worthless coins found on coinmarketcap.com. This list is ordered from largest market cap to smallest.

The list:

Ethereum. https://ethereum.org/

This open source blockchain acts as the foundation layer to support many blockchains containing their own digital tokens as higher level functions. This is like the internet being a base layer, but email, voice over IP, and many other functions use the internet base layer and build their functionality over top. This means ethereum exists for different functions than bitcoin, and is not considered a competitor top bitcoin by many as they mostly complement each other for usefulness.

Ethereum is unique in that it is designed primarily to be the token of value used in smart contracts that run without human intervention and can complete when programmable conditions are met. This can send value contained in the token through the network to be paid to the recipient. It is a complete programming language that completes many of the initial goals bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s, bitcoin code that still remains untested and deactivated.

Importantly, this has generated developer and industry excitement, which are required network effects to make a successful blockchain survive and thrive. It touts the that it created the first ‘world computer’ where decentralized autonomous applications can run. Imagine a corporation without a board of directors, CEO, or physical location. Whose laws would govern such a machine if it only lived in ‘the cloud’ like the bit torrent network? Owners can set up conditions for contracts which is really what a company comes down to – and it becomes its own service. Its usefulness is self-evident if it attracts users to utilize the service for completing agreements and trades in the future.

Imagine a contract for agreement that you can sign today and cannot be changed in the future. Think frustration of agreements have used to sign up to use Facebook or Gmail that independently that then get changed because of their security policy, or the privacy policy gets arbitrarily changes after you have signed up and started using their service.

Maidsafecoin. http://maidsafe.net/

This is perhaps the beginning of the sharing economy of the Blockchain era. It’s the AirBnB and Uber of internet shared economy.

Participants in this network are paid to provide computing power and storage service in a decentralized system where they are paid in tokens for their service. The benefits are un-censorable applications and websites that keep identities private rather than treating users as a commodity for advertisers and agencies that track every click. This, not yet operational, network plans a fixed amount of tokens that will be recycled by the same users that are paid for their contributions.

The purpose for the tradable token include paying the community for providing privacy and protection from identity theft, and authoritarians of the world that continue to stymy free speech, and self-imposed censors of thought. It is currently still building out the network headed by a centralized company. Their plans indicate a future with no center with a world-wide reach that act as a bit torrent kind of network for applications and communications that remain private.

Dash: https://www.dash.org/

Dash is digital cash with improved privacy and anonymity. The first major advantage bitcoin enjoyed was being the first trusted means of money exchange by people who had every reason in the world not to trust each other.

This is the nature of the dark market. The infamous ‘Silk Road’ was taken down by authorities in the US as it offered drugs, and faked passports among other illegal items. The people who used this network were obviously committing crimes in most countries. As such – we could argue most of the people conducting business were criminals. How do two criminals that have every reason to NOT trust each other do illegal business over the internet – with trust? Bitcoin found its first killer application (no assassinations were committed during the processing of this market). Unfortunately, the salacious headlines grabbed the attention and imagination of the public that in many cases still associate the two together. They fail to remember that criminals also were using cell phones, pagers, radio scanners, cars, and email on most other technologies first as well. The cops always seem to have to catch up. Today it is widely suspected that every bitcoin transaction is being carefully monitored and several round-ups of dark web criminals have proven that the perceived bitcoin protection is long gone if they really want to find you.

Dash attempts to return to those early days in the way of trusted privacy for cash. Cash itself is immoral – it has no ‘good’ or ‘evil’. It’s just a tool for transferring value. As such, there could be legitimate ways that one would want to keep their transactions private. The laws in certain countries might be objectionable to those outside of its boarders. Trying to purchase a bible in North Korea can land you in jail – or worse.

Dash coin has a built in ‘tumbler’ that jumbles up all transactions so it becomes unclear the source and destination of transactions. If governments had a problem with bitcoin at first, they aren’t likely going to like this. Yet, it is interesting and has real world use-case today. It has a unique governance model that bitcoin could learn from.

Bitshares: https://bitshares.org/

Bitshares touts itself as a third generation blockchain.

Property tokens for real world objects. Every property can be tokenized to recognize and identify it. This allows it to be traded and tracked on the network. It acts as a decentralized trading platform for asset exchange. Its value can be pegged to more stable money and currency such as USD or gold.

It claims it can handle industrial scale for trading next generation platforms. It may be something like the next generation e-trade for any kind of asset.

Factom: http://factom.org/

Who will the smart contract contact to find the verifiable ‘truth’ of the state that makes the contracts complete? Factom may act as an ‘Oracle’ of truth. It will record and establish records of ownership or just about any other proof of the state of things at given times that are independent and immutable. They are working to have common open source interfaces to connect to other blockchains which can use their service to check for truth. The ‘truth’ will be hashed into the blockchain permanently and can be checked by the network at any time. They issue their own token that is used for payment to record records for later retrieval and verification between parties that might not otherwise trust each other.

They may wind up being the ‘google’ of the next generation where people might use as an adjective to check on records for anything. One might imagine one day in the future, “Did you factom that record?”

There may be other emerging technologies that bubble to the top and are notable exceptions to the layers of garbage and scam-coins underneath. Picking the right ones to research is a bit of a modern day treasure hunt. It helps to have a scouting report and now you have.