Hey yo, what is going on with my special bunch, the faithful Chico Army & of course any newbie,
who I like to call a viewer of the tube.
My name is Tyler, for those who don’t know, and this is the crypto channel, whose content
surprises you better than this German commercial, with a ninja turtle.
I’ll give you a nickel, if you eat that turtle pickle.
It’s time for Chico Crypto!
What’s today’s topic?
Turtles?
No ghosts, I’m talking ghost chains.
What are they?
Blockchain’s that are abandoned...they have no people using them and minimal development,
which means barren activity & no “real” transactions.
If active blockchains & the communities behind them are crypto’s own virtual kingdoms,
ghost chains can then be compared to bustling wild west goldrush boomtowns during the 19th
century, which as we know, a majority spiraled into abandonment and became a ghost town.
So let’s just look at this gold mining town example.
Bodie California...as at the peak of its popularity, no one would have thought it would be abandoned
today.
In 1859, WS Bodie found gold in the area, and started a little mining camp, which would
become Bodie.
In 1876, a much larger ore deposit was found, transforming it into a wild west boomtown.
By 1879, the town grew from a couple hundred people, to 10 thousand,
This meant they needed amenities to support the growing community population.
Bodie began to have the amenities of larger towns, including a Wells Fargo bank, a fire
department, workers unions, several daily newspapers, a jail and at its peak 65 saloons
lined main st.
From the 1880 map of bodie, it’s obvious it became a city within just 20 years from
WS Boide first striking gold, over 2000 buildings & some legend have Bodie as California’s
third most populated city...but that would all rapidly change.
Bodie’s deposits were quickly taken, and other more plentiful regions began to pop
up across California, Arizona & Utah.
Little boomtowns of their own popped up in these regions, which lured the once supportive
community of Bodie away.
They were supportive of Bodie when it could provide for them...once monetary prospect
vanished...so did the people.
By 1890 Bodie had a population of just 779 people, an over 92 percent decline in population
& today it's a picture perfect ghost town, completely abandoned, although turned into
a state park so people are daily visiting, but no one lives there.
So how do ghost blockchains compare to these boomtowns?
Well, many of these blockchains were constructed during the crypto bull rushes of 2014 and
2017.
Just like back in the 1800s many of the boomtowns were constructed due to another rush..a one
for gold.
The prospect of riches draws in the community...but you gotta be able to communicate….back in
the 1800s, people expanded due to better communication channels... technical advancements in print,
the invention of the telegraph & the telephone.
People were able to discuss, plan, and create across farther distances...but today, we have
the widest communication channel of them all, the internet, which allows this community
concept to cross the chasm of local and national, to global and worldwide.
The internet allows communities.
Blockchain + the internet allows financial kingdoms or the fate of the ghost chain.
And there are only 2 financial kingdoms in crypto right now: Bitcoin & Ethereum.
The rest of the “competing” blockchains are either tribes attempting to work their
way up to kingdom status, or ghost chains.
I’ve spoken much deeper on this tribal and kingdom concept in this video, give it a watch
it’s in the description, for a great primer of what’s to come.
So, who is the ghost chains in crypto?
Who are the Bodie Californias?
The jerome Arizonas, or of the blockchain world?
And are there any in the top 10 cryptocurrencies??
Well, there are ghost chains in the top 10 & actually a slight majority of them are ghosted,
having minimal development, barely any users, and just a few transactions every minute.
Evan Van Ness, he actually tweeted about this & gave me the idea for this video, thanks
brother...he said in May: 3 ghost chains with billions in market cap but zero use: eos,
xtz & xrp.
XRP is the one in the top 10, actually number 4 in ranking.
He says regarding XRP “Academic paper finds: 98% of XRP transactions have 0 value.
Well edit that, as I looked at the paper, and yes is an academic one, but form the paper’s
abstract it says “Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of the transactions
are used for value transfer purposes.
In particular, over 94% of transactions on the XRPL carried no economic value.
So 94 percent not 98, but this is still a freaking large percentage of ghost transactions
& as we can see from section 3.3, the data is recent.
They collected data on the 3 blockchains analyzed from October 1st 2019 to April 30th 2020.
So why would people be sending 0, nada, nothing, zilch value transactions to a blockchain?
Well fake transaction volume, so you do not look like a ghost chain.
From the paper’s summary on XRP, they said this “the throughput on XRPL during our
observation period appeared to be fraught with zero-value transactions.
We learned that both transaction volume and token value on XRPL are highly manipulable.
So, looking at Coinmetrics, since the beginning of this year to today, XRP has been averaging
about 900k transactions per day & then adding the most transacted on blockchain to the graph,
we can see that XRP was more active than ethereum throughout most of the year.
No, you weren’t...majority of those are ghost transactions.
Now let’s add a couple other blockchain to the graph, in the top 20who do something
similar, EOS and TRX...because they too claim to be more active than ethereum.
Today Tron based on TX count, claims to be 2.5x more active, 2.5 million tx per day,
and EOS nearly 6x, the blockchain claims nearly 5.9 million, while ethereum is just above
1 million.
Fake, fake, and let say one more time..fake transactions.
Need an example...how about that one time, September 18th, when Tron based JustSwap,
claimed to have nearly 6 billion in 24 hour volume.
This brand new, just launched uniswap compe-titor, with 12 times the volume as we can see that
day Uniswap had just over 500 million.
And it got worse, Justswap volume, peaked at 15 billion one day….
YA right, cuz look at the graph, it dropped off a cliff, and as we can see today, just
over 11 million in 24 hour volume.
What happened?
You even had the founder of Tron tweeting Justswap was better than Uniswap?
Well Larry Cermack writer for the block, explained below...Isn’t 88% of JustSwap volume coming
from a fake YAMv2 token?
So yes it was, like I said FAKE.
Besides, the 3 mentioned, the top 20 is riddled with ghost chains.
Like the Bitcoin forks, who began in 2017 attempting to take away the kingdom title
from BTC.
One claims to be more active than BITCOIN.
BSV...it claims to have twice the transactions count...which you know is false, as if you
look at their most popular application twitch, and stats for the past 24 hours were slim,
added all up, each action on the site, only 2049, which means only 2049 transactions maybe
double, 5 thousand that for multi transaction actions through their most popular dapp.
That is less than 1 percent, even using 5 thousand of the claimed transactions.
Well, people will argue, just like BTC, most of the transactions happen through exchanges.
Well going to Bitinfo, the 100 largest transactions on the network, made up nearly 90 percent
of all the trading volume...so no, that is false too.
How about Bitcoin Cash?
Well I love looking at this visualizer, which shows a road, and each car passing is a transaction
on each chain.
Ghost town, compared to BTC wouldn’t you say?
But at least Bitcoin Cash isn’t faking it.
Now what I find interesting about the ghost chains who aren’t faking it, is their transactions
fall into a similar range about 25k per day to 60k per day with the random anomaly here
or there.
As we can see, with Bitcoin Cash this is true of in the dark blue, but also, ethereum classic
the green, dash the ocean blue, doge the orange, and litecoin the grey.
Why is this?
This is based on trading infrastructure built for these coins.
All are products of crypto gold rushes, Dash and litecoin from the 2014 one, and ethereum
classic a product of the next...
They had time to get exchanges trading the coins back and forth, arbitrage bots, and
more….but that is all that is going on with these chains, users aren’t there for the
most part, it’s just computers trading the assets back and forth.
So my friends, this is what I want to tell you...the ghost chain reckoning is coming.
Like the boomtowns of old, their were rich prospectors, that stayed, had an emotional
attachment to the chain, I mean town, they tried to support it, putting all their money
into a sinking pit, eventually the town went barren...Same will happen to these chains,
maybe not for all right away, whales will try to support it, but eventually with no
use or users, the blockchain will become fully deserted.
I’m sticking with where the true activity is...when you look at fees over 24 hours compared
with other chains, it’s on bitcoin or with ethereum & it’s defi.
They are supporting the industry and the community of users..
Cheers viewers I’ll see you next time!