Bitcoin and Ethereum have been based on Proof of Work since they launched. It’s been 10 years since Bitcoin was introduced. You won’t see people making everyday purchases with it (coffee, haircut, rides, restaurants). You won’t see it with any Ethereum tokens, either. One big reason some people started to consider these tokens “scams” is because they aren’t used for their intended purpose. For cryptocurrency to be an actual currency (means of exchange), the networks need to be much more scalable. Ideally, they should be sharded from day 1.
If the decentralized crypto world doesn’t get its act together and become scalable, then the crypto payments space will belong to Facebook, Telegram, WeChat, Amazon, etc. This past year, Facebook’s announced Calibra will be integrated into WhatsApp worldwide, and Telegram announced they will release Grams (TON).
We have to trust these networks to really be end-to-end encrypted. Telegram’s founder certainly has a good track record of fighting for user privacy. But so did Apple, and you can see what happened recently in the USA and in China.
By contrast, decentralized networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum are letting regular people run their own nodes. Well, that used to be true, until full nodes started requiring massive resources to run. Intercoin’s design allows everything to be truly decentralized, so each coin would be watched over by a small number of nodes, which are extremely difficult to locate, let alone commandeer. And the incentives to do so are too small for each individual coin.
A network that is decentralized, with multiple independent (and distrusting) parties, is harder for any elites to take over. Even if those elites happen to be a consortium of financial companies.
Our roadmap involves building a decentralized crypto-based payment network on top of a decentralized, web-based social network.