I wanted to talk a bit about my currently most disliked cryptocurrency.
>Trx.
I have talked a bunch about various shitcoins like BSV lead by a crook and liar. Ethereum Classic that has nothing to justify its price, having little to no dapp use along with the double spend fiasco they suffered.
LISK has a similar problem as well with almost nothing of consequence built on it. Most of these cryptocurrencies have nothing to offer in terms of mass adoption and yet they are highly rated in the crypto space.
But this is about Tron. In my mind they have surpassed Dogecoin as the king of shitcoins.
Its important to state all these cryptocurrencies have some intrinsic value simply due to blockchain technology but at this point in time with major tech development happening, “just being a crypto” does not cut it.
The biggest problem tron is facing is the utterly terrible quality of transactions happening on that chain that open the question of
>”who is it that uses Trx and for what purpose?”
I looked at the dapps listed on State of the dapps for Tron and i found a very interesting thing. 70 of the top 100 dapps listed at the time i looked were either high risk games or simple gambling. This is where the vast majority (id go even as far to say “almost all”) of use of the Tron blockchain comes from. Bot scripts programmed to run bets ad nauseum.
Basically transaction spam.
The problem with gambling dapps in this case is that i dont think a single one of these dapps has any kind of licence to conduct gambling and the people behind them are generally completely anonymous.
This opens users to all kinds of problems. Customer abuse. Susceptibility to exit scams and schemes.
And in the case of the business models of gambling dapps, users are essentially partaking in a:
PYRAMID SCHEME.
Most of you are familiar with the exit scam done by @magic-dice and how they essentially robbed users that thought it was a solid idea to treat gambling as a solid investment strategy, due to the promised dividend payouts from Magic Dice. @themarkymark, one of the bigger investors in Magic Dice talked about the exit scam they pulled a few months ago. His post really shows how you can easily find yourself in a vulnerable position and can be left with very little, or none at all, ability to react.
Magic Dice didnt come up with that business model. It copied it from many Tron and EOS gambling dapps.
How it works is pretty simple. A gambling dapp launches its own token. Gamblers spend money and get the gambling dapp token in return. Holding that gambling token gets you a part of the earnings that the dapp earns.
Pretty straight forward. But…. What people tend to forget is that
>The player base is always the loser.
People will play a few games and quit unless they are addicts ofc and since the player base coming from crypto communities is small, making gambling seem like an investment further incentivizes gambling.
If you did the math on the token emission of Magic Dice tokens, the time to break even when taking into account reduced emmision over time (which can discourage late comers), the house edge, the time to break even for anyone not coming in early was extremely long.
At one point the big “investors” must have realized that they were playing against themselves. The spending by smaller accounts was insignificant compared to their own and they were continuously losing.
The only way for their investment to be profitable is if more suckers after them thought that they would become rich by “investing”, because some other sucker after them would think gambling is a good investment and so on… All that while the emission was being reduced and their stake slowly but surely diluted if they didnt keep playing, with no sink to speak off coming.
> A pyramid scheme is a way of making money that cannot continue very long. It involves promising people payment, services or ideals, primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme or training them to take part. It does not supply any real investment or sale of products or services to the public. .
Steem has for most part gotten rid of Gambling. There are still a few dapps out there like @epicdice which i sincerely hope users will avoid and research thoroughly. You will not only lose due to the house edge, you are open to losing much much more if you start looking at gambling as an investment.
That brings me back to Tron. When your blockchain is completely dominated by such business models and activities, when most of the transactions come from what is essentially a criminal activity what other description can you give to TRON?
If a house where people gather to smoke crack you call a “Crack house” despite some people also eating and sleeping there then why would it be wrong to call Tron a “massive Pyramid scheme” where most of the transactions come from unregulated gambling where the gambling dapps adopted a pyramid scheme business model?
