A case for Ravencoin

I've seen a lot of posts and comments recently about the value of Ravencoin and questions like "why is 2022 the year for Ravencoin". This post started as a comment response to another thread but I quickly realized that this was well outside the reasonable length for a comment (and maybe it is for a self post too, who knows). Nothing to really back this up other than speculation and watching trends over the past couple of years and I'll be the first to tell you that I don't see everything that goes on. I try to stay on top of it all but crypto is a vast ocean of projects and ideas. It would be impossible for any single person to know 100% about everything happening everywhere within the space. So, this is my humble response to those who have asked "What's the use case for Ravencoin?" and "Why are you so bullish on the future of Ravencoin?"…

So, the last half of 2020 and in to 2021 we saw a lot of projects exploring the NFT space. Most of what's currently been done up until now has been purely digital; digital music, digital art, digital games, etc. There was some discussion, but little action, around the idea of digital representation of something in the physical world. Only towards the end of 2021 did we see some action in this part of the NFT space. ConstitutionDAO being a famous (now infamous) example of a project attempting to link the blockchain to something in the real world. I think we're going to see more of this in to 2022. Not only will we see continued adoption of NFTs as we've seen them but also an expansion of what an NFT can be. Overall I think the demand for tokenization is only going to grow over time and we're going to need a fast, secure and high bandwidth way to facilitate this.

But you're probably saying, "Cool. Well, then people will just continue to do that on Ethereum. What does this have to do with Ravencoin?" … But will they?

In the short term, the answer is probably, yes. Ethereum has a lot of momentum behind it right now with a very large user base, but the cracks in the ecosystem are starting to show. They've been struggling to scale with demand for years now and they've been promising, but not delivering, on a transition to a Proof of Stake model (more on that later) for a long time; kicking the goalpost down the road every time the release date approaches. But we are starting to finally see some real movement in that direction and it's being touted by many to be the savior of the Ethereum ecosystem, but I'm not so sure about this.

Longer term, I think we may see growing discontent within the Ethereum ecosystem. PoS may not end up being that magic, silver bullet everyone is saying. As a user of several chains, many of which are already PoS, I can tell you that they also struggle with high throughput; often lagging well behind during large market moves, causing users to be unable to execute contracts in a timely fashion and more. Additionally, there are plenty of arguments out there against PoS, that it's more susceptible to centralization and so forth. For those who become disenchanted by Ethereum, there are not many options, let alone other PoW networks which support tokenization or have any sort of analog to smart contracts on Ethereum. For those users, I think Ravencoin is well positioned. It's not only fast and inexpensive but it's a PoW network with a native mechanism for tokenization built right now without the need for the complexities and inefficiencies of smart contracts (not to discredit the flexibility of smart contracts in the least).

Ravencoin's main problem (if you want to call it that) is also its biggest selling point; decentralization. Unlike a lot of other chains, Ravencoin doesn't have a corporate sponsor (looking at you Polygon, Solana and Terra) to push development objectives, pay developers to expand their ecosystem and make flashy marketing material. It's just the users and a community of people who believe in the future of a decentralized network where anything can be represented digitally on the blockchain. This is causing Ravencoin to get off to a slower start but, like the story of The Tortoise and the Hare, slow and steady is proven to win the race. We're not running a sprint, this is a marathon. Ravencoin has only been around for about four years now. Well, four years after Bitcoin was released in to the world, it was only worth about $4 and was considered little more than an Internet joke with which you could buy a Pizza if you begged the right person hard enough. Ten years later, it has grown to become "digital gold" and "akin to owning property in the digital age" and has raised in value 12,000x. And that's without being able to do more than act as a store of value. Imagine what Ravencoin, a network of utility, can achieve given another ten years.