I cant say im shocked but I am. After all trump said in the run up to his election regarding his opposition to the funding of terrorism, he does this. Once of the biggest beneficiaries of this deal will be Saudi Arabia!

If you didn't know already, Saudi Arabia is the incubator for Wahabi Salafism, the radical form of Islam that was reserved for isolated bedwin tribes up until the turn of the 19th century. Now with the protection of Isreal and the USA Saudi has been allowed to propagate this very dangerous doctrine. It absolutely flabbergasts me that trump and general Mattis knowing what they know would take such a step to further destabilising the Middle East taking sides with the saudis.

It also baffles me that Isreal would be more opposed to Iran than Saudi considering the type of ultra conservation loons that the country is producing. I guess the term the enemy of my enemy is my friends is very true in this situation.

Ive recently been mulling over what the best types of consensus protocols will be as this industry expands and scales up. One of the major factors in having a successful scale up whilst maintaining the integrity (decentralisation, distributed, immutable) will be the type of consensus protocols a project chooses.

Bitcoin uses the Proof of work (POW)
Ethereum are in transition from POW to Proof of steak (POS) via casper
EOS,LISK,STEEM and a few others use delegated proof of steak (DPOS)
NEO use delegated byzantine fault tolerance (DBFT)

I know of a few others such as: Proof of Activity
                                              Proof of Burn
                                              Proof of Capacity
                                              Proof of Elapsed Time
                                              Proof of Attention

Now my deliberation comes with this, apart from proof of work there are no other consensus protocols that I know of that forces people to put "skin in the game". To a point where you pretty much need to expand resources just to have a say and I feel like this is the only one that achieves true security. Is it even possible to have long term success and scaling without 100% security?

I do think some of these alternative protocols have some really cool innovative ideas but can they scale and achieve the required levels of security needed to stave of constant attacks? Or am I overestimating the need for skin in the game for security?

Venture capital firms take investing in crypto and turn it into a professional industry. They dedicate untold resources into the study of coins and they don't make too many silly mistakes so it always pays to take notice of who they invest in. I've compiled a list of some of the biggest VC's to look out for and follow.

FBG CAPITAL
FENBUSHI
BLOCKCHAIN CAPITAL
INBLOCKCHAIN
KINETIC CAPITAL
BITMAIN
PANTERA CAPITAL
COINSILIUM GROUP
SEQUOIA CAPITAL (SOON)

are there any other big players I have missed that would be worth paying attention too?