Tezos’ technical innovations analyzed

Posted on November 9, 2018August 23, 2019 by George Alex Popescu Leave a comment

Tezos brings multiple technical innovations: On-chain Protocol Governance, Liquid Proof of Stake, and their own smart contract language called Michelson. As the Tezos network has now been live for a few months and in order to understand the potential of the network we interviewed Samuel Harrison from Tezos Commons Foundation.

As Samuel explains, it is best to think of Tezos Commons as one “marketing” arm, among others, of the Tezos ecosystem. And, in particular, Tezos Commons is the arm that is based in Silicon Valley.

Understanding Tezos

We are, of course, interested in understanding Tezos. Especially it comparison to Ethereum, EOS, Cardano and other smart contract blockchain platforms.

Solving volatility to drive mass crypto-payments adoption – Central Bank of Crypto and Crypto Dollar

Posted on September 19, 2017August 22, 2019 by George Alex Popescu Leave a comment

In my eyes volatility is what is preventing crypto currencies from being more used for payments in online commerce.

I believe that crypto currencies are much better adapted than credit cards for online payments (faster, cheaper, non-reversible, simpler, etc). And yet crypto currencies are hardly used at all:

Preferred methods for online payments — Preferred method for online payments ( from here, chart made in 2016)

BTC is 300x more volatile than EUR

I strongly believe that lack of adoption is due to the crypto’s volatility. Merchants have costs in fiat currency (USD for example). Having a BTC price for their product that changes by 30% a week is not manageable and provides poor customer experience. Imagine if you wanted to buy a car and the price was today 10 BTC and tomorrow 13 BTC and day after 7 BTC while the normal consumers haggles over $200 for the price of the a $40,000 car and needs hours/days to make the payment. This is not manageable.

The 8 lessons from comparing the internet age vs the blockchain age

Posted on September 11, 2017August 5, 2019 by George Alex Popescu Leave a comment

I believe in 10–20 years 1 BTC=$300,000 and 1ETH=$22,000. Let me explain why using a comparison of Internet age vs the Blockchain age.

Early ‘90s

I look at the blockchain space as being in the same state as the internet was in early ‘90s.

Why is that? Because only a few of my friends have heard of Bitcoin and none of Ethereum. Because none of them have used anything in the crypto/blockchain space. And when I ask taxi drivers, or random people I meet I also get the same answers: yes, I vaguely heard of Bitcoin but they know nothing about smart contracts, ICOs, and they are not using anything in the crypto space, yet.

I believe history repeats itself. We can learn from the early years of the internet and internet/tech companies what is likely to happen to the blockchain space.