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RE: Final thoughts on Tron's Steemit acquisition
Justin Sun is also a formidable marketer and shiller
I wonder to what extent this is, in a practical sense. I suppose its obviously worked so far, but from what I can tell he already had significant backing from his 富二代 upbringing (rich second generation being born from within the riches of the previous generation's economic boom in China), so I wonder how much of his direct marketing has succeeded vs raw spending.
And, from what I can gather, Tron is extremely dead outside of gambling apps which implies another element of failure, no?
I guess I still need to look into his successes. I've only read about how he's a sociopathic/narcissistic criminal so far
Fair points. Firstly, Tron does have a large following. Looking at social activity on Santiment, it's one of the most talked about alts, outside the majors. Its $1.7 billion market cap and hovering in and around the top 10 on CMC also suggests it has plenty of money invested in it. These numbers all suggest there's orders of magnitude more interest in Tron than Steem or most altcoins.
Of course, dApp adoption is a different thing. Here, there are two aspects - users and economics. Like I said, it's all about economic activity, DAU numbers don't matter until it hits a critical mass of several million which no dApp is even close to. Let's face it - the only reason not to build on ethereum is you have a large volume of transactions but very, very low value for each. Right now, this is basically just gaming, gambling, DEXs and other niche apps like Steem-style social media. With Layer 2 solutions like Optimistic Rollup now live on ethereum, there's even less reason too; and by the time Ethereum 2.0 Phase 2 releases in a ~2022, it'll be an even smaller niche.
In the here and now though, Tron has built a decent economy around gambling dApps. You can scoff at gambling, but economic activity is economic activity. You have some pretty active gambling dApps like Wink which alone have greater economic activity than all of Steem combined. Yes, Steem has more users than Wink, but it doesn't matter - once again, it's all about how much money is flowing through the platform. So, yeah, Tron is a solid 3rd place behind ethereum and EOS.
I don't want to comment on Justin Sun's character or Tron's reputation - there's undoubtedly plenty dodgy things happening there. I'm just focusing on the objective merits, and yes, Tron is a legit player in the crypto market today, for whatever reason, by hook or by crook.
PS: Tron USDT actually has $850 million circulating, which is an impressive figure too.
Gambling certainly shouldn't be downplayed in terms of its economic value - here in Australia, an entire Casino was planned, built, and exempted from local and state planning laws in order to lure more Chinese gamblers to Australian shores for gambling holidays.
This largely removes my need to go digging up intel myself, cheers.
When you say 'In the here and now though' - Is that to imply as things stand, the Tron handover is only relevant for the next couple of years, or is it good to adapt?
By that I meant Tron's future prospects as a smart contract/dApp platform, not the Steemit/Tron deal. I don't really see Tron being adopted as a dApp platform aside from niche cases like gambling, in the long term.