Thanks for your feedback!

The coin's infrastructure operates in physical locations which answer to some sort of local government. The number of locations and the regulatory environments those jurisdictions have correspond to some level of regulatory risk. For example if all of your mining is in China, and China decides to ban mining your coin will suffer more than if your mining is setup across 10 different countries with various approaches to crypto.


i was using cryptocurrency as an umbrella term for both "pure" cryptocurrencies and hosted tokens, but both can be analyzed in this framework. A "pure" cryptocurrency is typically more decentralized than a token because it's mined into existence and not an issued pre-mine by developers. This is what the SEC looks at when making a determination about how to regulate cryptocurrencies and why Coinbase only lists the coins it does. I wrote a bit about this here if anyone is interested: https://cryptograf.io/blog/2018/03/23/Government-Eyes-Cryptocurrency/

Yea, that was hilarious. I actually did a whole write up on that committee hearing. The gist is that when it comes to regulation on ICO tokens, it all comes down to whether they will be classed as securities or commodities. The more decentralized the coin, the more likely it is a commodity with less regulation. Decentralization is the ULTIMATE!

https://cryptograf.io/blog/2018/03/23/Government-Eyes-Cryptocurrency/

Level of Decentralization - how to measure?
    running on its own blockchain?

What are the dimensions along which cryptocurrencies should be evaluated?

Like if I want to know how good a coin is along the SCAM (bad) to FUTURE (good) spectrum what should we be looking at?

Some ideas:

Level of Decentralization - how to measure?
    number and share of mining pools
    number of nodes
    number of developers, and development teams/clients
    number of jurisdictions that coin operates in
    potential regulatory threats (how "subversive" is the coin?)
  
Primary Problem Solved - how to measure?
    user testimonials
    partnerships
    trials
    website
    whitepaper
    blog posts
    market research (eg. how big is the market being addressed?)
  
Developers - how to measure?
    pedigree
    github activity

Community - how to measure?
    how active are they?
    how willing and able are they to entertain and effectively counter critiques?

What else!!?!


  

Thank you for the kind words. I don't know if these specific projects are worth investing in (you will have to DYOR) but here are a couple pursuing this paradigm:
https://www.bottos.org/
https://synapse.ai/

I was watching the House Financial Services Committee hearing a few weeks ago and the anti-crypto Congressman Sherman asked "What can you do with cryptocurrencies that you can't do with anything else?." And no one on the panel could provide a decent answer, which bothered me.

I thought about how to convey to people the societal good that cryptocurrencies enable, and I came to the conclusion that AI is the perfect example. AI needs a lot of data to function, so if humanity wants to benefit from it to the maximum extent, all of our data basically needs to be fed to the AI. But who would control this data? and this AI? Whoever it was would have immense power. They would be able to predict the future!

So the question becomes: How can you take advantage of AI without giving up your digital sovereignty... That's where decentralized apps come in.

Cryptocurrencies basically give you the power to run giant companies where no one is in charge, and this is a powerful tool to minimize corruption and the wielding of too much power. With the Facebook fiasco in the news, this is an easy example to give to people. Imagine if Facebook had been decentralized, would network participants have approved their own manipulation at the hands of politicians?

I wrote more about this here for anyone interested: https://cryptograf.io/blog/2018/04/16/Crypto-Ai-and-the-Social-Good/