There's a whole space of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) which are dedicated to this area. You can read about CryptoKitties, NFT collectibles, and NFT marketplaces like SuperRare and OpenSea.

Certainly.

PoW is a very energy-inefficient (but secure) way of reaching consensus in a distributed system. You can use a number of other consensus algorithms to reach consensus, such as BFT, DAGs, and Proof of Stake.

Proof of Stake systems, for example, require no special hardware and don't use exorbitant energy, but are much trickier to prove the security of (and to prove security, you need to make assumptions about the network).

Generally speaking, blockchains tend to be transparency technologies. (They also have aspects in privacy as well.) If you can manage to get most economic activity (payments, purchases, investments, financial operations) onto blockchains, and if you can convince the transactors to be transparent about them, then this will probably represent the most accurate real-world measurement of GDPs. That's a lot of if's though. :)

You should look up some of your favorite blockchain projects and contribute to their open source repos! The best resource for an engineer, especially a blockchain engineer, is experience.

Ethereum is not going to be the only platform upon which you can launch dApps. Check out Tezos, Cosmos, Dfinity, Polkadot, and many of the other projects which are providing platforms for development.

It's a popular language for the backend technologies that comprise a lot of the node software used to run decentralized networks or blockchains. Rust is also a popular language for this purpose.

I would say knowing Golang is a good idea for blockchain and in general.

Well, blockchain has relatively little "backend programming" unless you're programming the consensus layers or blockchains themselves. If you want to pursue this, I recommend learning some backend languages (in blockchain, Go and Rust are popular) and then learning as much as you can about consensus, various consensus algorithms (BFT, Nakamoto, Proof of Stake systems) and find a team which is building a base layer technology.

If you want to program the "backends" of dApps, then you're coding a smart contract programming language. The most popular one is Solidity, and there is a large amount of literature on Solidity programming and many deployed contracts have their code available for inspection on Etherscan.

If you want to focus on the frontend, there is a large overlap between dApp frontend programming and just JavaScript frontend programming in general. Here, you'll want to learn things like the Web3.js framework, how to connect hardware wallets like Ledgers and Trezors to the frontend, and interacting with the Ethereum (or another blockchain) from JavaScript.

All of these activities should be accompanied by a fundamental understanding how blockchains, and probably Ethereum, work underneath. Most blockchain projects are open source and maintain open developer communities that you can participate in. Just pick a project you like and see if they have open bounties (see: Decentraland, Aragon, district0x, etc.).

That's a very comprehensive answer, I'll certainly draw from it. Thank you!

Congratulations on your progress so far. If you're looking to raise money from blockchain-focused VCs or cryptoinvestors, then you need to get access to them. My advice is to attend quality blockchain-focused conferences and events, ask other founders who they raise from, and pursue warm intros to investors.

On a political level, I am not a fan of cryptocurrency regulation as it has unfolded in the US so far. The main reason is that not enough time and attention is given by our regulators to recognize the potential of new technologies and they would rather use old frameworks which don’t quite make sense. It’s also a political issue, so no one wants to take on the reputational risk of actually setting guidance and the space’s founders are left with an environment where it’s difficult to operate.

I don’t think this stops systems from being decentralized in a technical sense. Also, globally, there are vastly different regulatory attitudes toward cryptocurrencies, some of which support the technological principles of blockchains well.

That’s an interesting question but sadly way too big of a topic for an AMA.

I don’t think you could enforce charity payments without legal contracts or without the charities being on-chain. On the other hand, you may not need to enforce it. It’s a good research area, but I have seen very few decentralized “non-profit” models, or any that work.

Can you give me your opinion on my idea that everyone should have the right of access to universal cryptocurrency?

If you want to be a good systems engineer, learn how blockchains work underneath.

If you want to be a good frontend engineer, learn how blockchains work underneath.

1. I don’t think Steem’s blockchain does that — I think the market trades it around a dollar. If you’re referring to Steem Dollars (SBD), then those assets have a stabilization mechanism based on data feeds built into the Steem blockchain.

2. I’m not sure. Steemit is a private company. Steem is a public blockchain. It’s hard to see how a public blockchain might “fail” in the traditional sense of the word. It just keeps doing what it does. Steemit the private company might fail in the sense that it will fail to generate revenue and fire its employees, but I have no special knowledge of the inner workings there.

Of course. One way is via a bug in the implementation of the economy. :)

Today, our engineering team works to helo CoinFund participate in open, decentralized networks as a voter, supply-side service provider, or miner. It also performs data acquisition tasks on decentralized networks.

We are not currently hiring but send your resume to info@coinfund.io and we will get in touch when we are.

The currencies of most countries are largely digital already. If cryptocurrency becomes the foremost currency technology, this outcome is possible, even likely.

We don’t know, but that is the fundamental thesis of folks who are studying, building, and investing in open source (decentralized) protocols.

Tokens are not inherently good or bad, but an effective token might be one that helps a cryptoeconomic system accurately and securely perform its purpose, and perhaps that purpose is useful to the world. In some cases, tokens are used as an investment exposure mechanism — in that case an effective token is one that captures the economic value one is trying to get exposure to.

CoinFund is a private, digital asset class focused investor. It invests in the companies, projects, digital assets, and networks which comprise the blockchain and decentralization space.

Thanks for the question, I am hardly an economist, I am much more a technologist or cryptofinancial analyst. :)

I think the value of blockchain assets is decreasing because prices today are not driven by fundamental value but by sentiment. And sentiment is down on most assets in today’s market.

I don’t think any given model is necessarily flawed. All models have their application spaces. Livepeer has a super interesting inflationary cryptoeconomics with variable inflation rates based on network participation — that’s super fascinating and interesting.

No one has built a proper mainstream app yet. CryptoKitties came slightly close, but not there yet. We’ll need to spend some more time on base layers and infrastructure and middleware in order to be able to create proper mainstream user experiences.

We’ve been living with decentralized communities on the internet for years. If they are the future, then we are living in it. :)