In the first part we talked about the governance and investment aspects of SmartCash. Now it’s time to look closer at the other two foundations, privacy and everyday usage. We’ll also assess the risks and do some price speculations!

The private coin

Ever since people found out that bitcoin transactions are easily traceable, there have been a lot of effort to create a coin with truly anonymous transactions.

If bitcoin is a totally open and transparent system, then on the other end of the spectrum we have Monero. Monero is taking privacy to the extreme by encrypting the whole blockchain, so that you can only see transaction-hashes but no input-output addresses or amounts. Don’t believe me? See for yourself: moneroblocks.info.

Monero’s approach

Then there many coins in between those two extremes, that usually support private transactions in some way as an additional and optional feature.

At the time of this writing SMART doesn’t have private transactions, and so cannot really compete with other coins in that space. However, It does support coin renewal via Zerocoin protocol used by many other popular projects such as PIVX and Zcoin.

To simplify, when you send someone a coin via Zerocoin protocol, it goes into the Zerocoin escrow pool and is considered “burnt”. Later, a new and unrelated coin is taken out of the pool and transferred to the recipient, or “minted”. The chain between the two parties is broken and no links between them exist on the blockchain. This is possible thanks to zero-knowledge proofs.

Zerocoin: umm, it goes something like that…

For SMART (at least for now), Zerocoin is only used to provide coin fungibility. This means you can take your coins out of circulation for some time, then get the same amount of new coins back. How is that useful?

For example, if your coins were somehow tainted (used for shady transactions) or owned by somebody famous in the past, that leaves a trace that can be followed on the public blockchain. Renewing coins is like clearing your browser history — all traces from previous activity are gone. So it’s a pretty cool feature to have, and no, bitcoin doesn’t have it.

Again, keep in mind, that Zerocoin private transactions (if SMART will support them in the future) is just but one approach to blockchain privacy. True privacy is a very difficult thing to achieve. I find it amazing that a little-known coin like SMART has anything to offer at all privacy-wise. This alone will make it stand out.

The instant coin

Finally we have the actual transactions as our last cornerstone of SMART. But really this was, and still is, the main focus of almost all crypto currencies. In fact, how can something be a currency if it’s non-transferable? The real question here is how fast are the transactions and how many can we perform in a give time window — speed and volume.

In bitcoin network a transaction can hang around the memory pool for quite some time, even with a high enough transaction fee. Usually it’s around 10 minutes, but can be 30 or even more if you’re unlucky. That was okay in 2010 I suppose, but not in 2017. It’s also the reason why bitcoin moved away from its original vision as a payment system and became a de facto store of value.

I would speculate that many people who bought bitcoin (because the hype) have never actually used bitcoin. They keep their imaginary “bitcoin credits” on an exchange, waiting for the price to go up. Only when they decide to withdraw it to their own wallet, do the they actually start using bitcoin. If more people would attempt to use bitcoin, they would quickly discover how slow it really is (not to mention the network would be overloaded). No one in their right mind would pay $5500+ for such a thing…

If crypto currencies want to compete with traditional systems like VISA in e-commerce space, they need to do much better. Fast, instant transactions are a must.

Ready, set…pay!

SmartCash has a blocktime of 55 seconds, which already feels quite fast. It’s a great feeling to click the send button and have the amount appear on the other end in less than a minute. But that’s not all.

The dev team apparently understands the importance of fast transactions and is working on Smart InstantPay (expected late 2017), allowing payments to show up in an instant.

No more waiting at all. The potential is huge, since that would mean SMART can be integrated with all kinds of real world payment systems. Paying with cryptos in stores and restaurants is really not that far away.

Risks

First, lets list the obvious risks.

Is this a scam? Will the founders run away with the community fund? Pump and dump the price?

Can happen. Has happened to other cryptos before. However, with SMART I see a lot of work has already been put into the project and I don’t expect scammers to bother working so hard.

Hmm, I wonder why I put this here…

Community fund is managed manually as far as I know, so there will always be the temptation to grab it and run away. However, dishonest gains in the short term are always lower than honest ones in the long term. If we all just do our part honestly and let the project grow, every one will be much better off. I’m sure the founders are aware of this.

Second, I would put competition and lack of adoption.

With so many projects going on right now, it’s hard to compete for attention. Without users any project will slowly die. Adoption is key, and is not easy to achieve and there’s simply too much going on right now.

Third risk is not making progress with development. Development is important because without new features and improvements adoption will decrease. Simply put, development drives adoption. If great things are being done, people will notice sooner or later. Too many projects have been abandoned due to developers leaving or loosing interest.

I’m hoping that for both adoption and development risks the community fund can become SMART’s secret weapon. The fund can be used to run campaigns to raise awareness, as well as pay developers for their work.

Price speculations

It’s time to have some fun and speculate, so don’t take this section too seriously! Predictions in the crypto world are known to be extremely unreliable, but everyone still does them anyway because it’s so exciting!

Lets imagine you’ve invested in 10000 SMART at around 3 cents for $300 in October 2017. You probably got it on Cryptopia, a rather small and unknown exchange. Currently, over 90% of the SMART trade volume happening there.

Moon phases . I heard that crypto enthusiasts are really into astronomy…

What will SMART be worth by the end of 2017? Summer 2018? End of 2018? My predictions are:

around 10 cents by the end of 2017 — your SMART is worth $1000.

around 30 cents by summer of 2018 — your SMART is worth $3000.

around 60 cents by the end of 2018 — your SMART is worth $6000.

I would say the predictions are neither too conservative nor too optimistic. However, I do assume that the two risks, adoption (community growth) and progress in development, are being managed well.

Conclusion

We’ve covered a lot of topics in these two articles and hopefully made a strong case for future growth of SmartCash.

SMART is (or aims to be) social, paying, private and instant. That’s four times more that what most coins our there aim to be. Will it succeed? Who knows, but if 2018 is going to be at least as big for crypto currencies as this year was, SMART has a very good chance.

Thank you! SMARTies are welcomed here: SNg865wP4Yu81JirZtS2Cjpd1H2oT7ahSG

If you would like to learn more about SmartCash please visit https://www.SmartCash.cc