I’m not asking in terms of investing, but rather in terms of it becoming a functional currency.<p>I ask because there is a lot of cynicism here(which i share) about Bitcoin but I wonder if there a rosier views for coins with more privacy, lower transaction fees, etc.
Surprised I'm not seeing Cardano mentioned here.<p>It has a network of academics working on protocols and R&D and even one of the founders of the Haskell programming language.<p>IOHK is the company building cardano<p><a href="https://iohk.io/en/team/philip-wadler" rel="nofollow">https://iohk.io/en/team/philip-wadler</a><p><a href="https://iohk.io/team/" rel="nofollow">https://iohk.io/team/</a><p>PoS consensus protocol
<a href="https://cardano.org/ouroboros/" rel="nofollow">https://cardano.org/ouroboros/</a><p>They are also one of the few blockchains to use nixos in production<p>Cardano was founded by Ethereum's co-founder Charles Hoskinson and is a 3rd gen block chain aiming to dethrone Ethereum
Bitcoin is the only one that's proven itself useful today. Others will be hit or miss, but the crypto world will be more like an ecosystem than anything else, with room for many to exist that solve different problems.<p>Others that I find useful:
1. Ethereum
2. Link
3. BAT
> becoming a functional currency<p>None. At least until a sovereign nation decides to ditch fiat for crypto. The first to do that, I bet, will still treat it like fiat and use all the classical monetary policies. So, it'll be crypto in name only.<p>Eventually, IMHO, Bitcoin will eat all the money in the world, stabilize at something like 10-15 million per. Then it'll just kinda take over as being more trustworthy than any fiat. Of course countries will try to regulate the heck out of it. But, since it has no president of Bitcoin, it'll survive.<p>Then, we'll have to deal with the knock on effects of a deflationary currency and all that entails.
There's lots of dislike about nano in HN and outside for some reason but on paper it does seem to do well as a currency. <a href="https://nano.org" rel="nofollow">https://nano.org</a>
I'm very interested in the Chainlink project ($LINK). Decentralized Oracles providing real-world data on-chain seems to me to be a no-brainer. A good example that's talked about is crop insurance. Aggregate regional rainfall within a certain geographical area from several different sources into a single value, that is then used to guarantee the terms of a smart contract seems to be a pretty useful thing. This type of use case is applicable to any number of decentralized financial products.
I don't think bitcoin will be a functional currency in its current state since your currency can't be more volatile than the prices of the goods you are using it to buy.
<a href="https://Sora.org" rel="nofollow">https://Sora.org</a> - Decentralized Central Bank, the team launched a Central Bank Digital Currency with the Central Bank of Cambodia last year (Bakong).<p><a href="https://soramitsu.co.jp" rel="nofollow">https://soramitsu.co.jp</a>
XLM.<p>XLM wants to achieve some goals that are just amazing and it works so well. It is there to convert and send money feeless and fast without even the need to have a XML wallet on the recieving party.<p><a href="https://www.stellar.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stellar.org/</a>