For anyone who wants to be kept up to date with the latest Stratis info, Khilone keeps on top of all of the news with his various media:

https://medium.com/khilone

https://twitter.com/Khil0ne?

He was banned from this Bitcointalk, so you can see what he's up to in the above places

Depends what you mean by dapp, since strictly speaking Stratis has had dapps for years (Stratis Identity is a dapp, for example, but obviously people aren't counting that). As for businesses using the Stratis platform, you can see a list here: https://www.stratisprojects.com//. Some are using the Stratis consultancy (Gluon, BGT & MEDI), which is complementary to the Stratis Platform itself. All of these are in an early iteration. This is because Stratis Group Ltd is not yet encouraging people to use the smart contracts until a few bugs are ironed out. The fact that there are "no dapps" (as I said, depends on how you're defining dapp) is a direct result of Stratis' state of development, not its measure as a useful platform.

The idea of value here is an interesting one. Firstly, I would argue that no cryptocurrency has value, in and of itself, including (at the moment) Bitcoin. Thus I would say, with regards to value, that use is currently immaterial. However they do have a market value. This market value is informed by scarcity. Stratis' market value is currently wholly informed by scarcity which is driven by speculation. The reason that Stratis has any market value at all is due in part to the "big hopes" that you mention people had. Nothing has changed. If anything, the value proposition has only grown stronger as the fundamentals improve.

What we're really talking about here is inducing scarcity to Strat through usage of the services of the platform. Right now, immediate usage of the platform by clients is not being actively promoted by the internal Startis team. They are, however, promoting development of client applications for future usage of the services. Examples of this include Gluon's product and Medi's prescription tracking solution.

We are not seeing "no dapps" because no one is interested in Stratis' platform. We are seeing "no dapps" because Stratis is asking people to hold off until they are confident in the security of the smart contracts offering, and accompanying sidechains

It's 95% to activate it (follows BIP-9: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0009.mediawiki). The QT wallet will eventually be ignored for staking by a future version of the Stratis Core wallet (possibly around December 2019?), which will soft fork out the old C++ clients, meaning that the network will be 100% C# clients. This will activate cold staking, if it's not activated beforehand

Cold staking will still require that you operate a full node, so you will still have to be running a wallet 24/7 (unless you find a way to delegate to another full node, similar to a staking pool). Cold staking allows you to stake while you Strat balance is held in a different wallet, which can be held offline.

Cold staking is not about convenience, it is about security. The idea is that people are more comfortable staking by operating an online full node but with their staking balance offline in a different wallet than they are operating an online full node with their staking balance online in the same wallet. Thus, more people will be willing to stake due to improved security of their coins while doing so, and in turn the network is made more secure since the number of strat being staked overall goes up.

You can run the Full Node with the Stratis Core wallet (found here: https://stratisplatform.com/wallets/). The node can be operated with zero Stratis, but to stake you'll need an amount of 0.1 Strat or larger. Staking is available only from the Stratis Core wallet

Stratis will be giving a presentation to the Minnesota Cryptocurrency Group, Chris Trew will do a live-streamed Q & A afterwards.

https://twitter.com/CryptoUMN/status/1113107842352013313

The official twitter account was hacked and the hacker made tweets which included hate crime speech and generally sought to discredit Stratis Group Ltd

New tweet from Khilone, covering his interview with Dan Gershony, Stratis' CTO:

https://twitter.com/Khil0ne/status/1108761540478582784

Interview with Dan Gershony @dangershony CTO at @stratisplatform

🧐 https://medium.com/khilone/interview-dan-gershony-chief-technology-officer-at-stratis-platform-adc0a780b853 …

"Decentralized networks are by definition unstoppable, it's only a matter of time."

Khilone's latest Stratis Weekly, #62:

https://medium.com/khilone/the-unofficial-weekly-stratis-retrospect-62-khilone-6a16678c599d

* Full Node and Stratis Core Update
* Airdrop by @MediConnectUK for $STRAT Holders
* Cold Staking
* New #Blockchain Explorer by @tokenview2018
* Highlights AMA @chrisblockchain @crypto_copia
* Article @Cristian_R_Pop

https://twitter.com/Khil0ne/status/1107665574535053313

Everyone is going to have a different investment strategy. People use two determining factors to build their portfolios: risk tolerance and timescale tolerance, whether they're doing it consciously or not. There is no "one size fits all" investment strategy. For example, the one you've outlined here wouldn't work for someone with a large amount of money: the kind of money which comes with significant liquidity considerations. Most investors adopt a strategy which balances short-term trading and long-term investment. It's a personal decision determined by risk tolerance and the time they're wishing/willing to be invested for.

The biggest gains are made by slowly entering a large position for a long-term hold and exiting equally slowly. Stratis saw a 300,000%+ gain even before it hit its ATH. Gains of this magnitude are harder to achieve by compounding smaller gains (let's say that you are a very capable short-term trader, to see 300,000% on your initial investment you would need to double your money 11 times consecutively, and then see a 50% increase on top of that: 100% gain-trades 11 times over on the same lump of money - bearing in mind the considerations you have to take as that sum increases - and then some). However, that doesn't invalidate short-term trading such as you've outlined above; both strategies are equally valid and will be employed according to each individual's risk tolerance and timescale preference. Talking about the market in terms of cycles suggests you have a lower timescale preference (but I'm not going to put words in your mouth, of course, just my reading of the situation), so your strategy probably works for you, which is great. That doesn't mean that it will work for everyone, in particular those who have a higher timescale tolerance.

This book is from 1949: https://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/133361/The_Intelligent_Investor.pdf

The lessons within are relevant to this day and fully applicable to treating the cryptocurrency industry as an investment.

Is there such a thing as a mandatory update in crypto? If a mandatory update exists, then you couldn't really call it a peer-to-peer network with a straight face.

This update brought stability improvements, optimisations and various improvements to the already extant Core wallet.

Far from it being simply a change in version delineation, you can read in depth about the (significant) improvements made here: https://stratisplatform.com/2019/03/13/stratis-full-node-3-0-2/

Gluon, Verified Stratis ICO, have launched their newest product: https://twitter.com/gluon/status/1104186252683665408

https://www.gluon.com/announcing-petromo/

They continue to demonstrate the competence of their business, and are getting themselves into a very strong position prior to their ICO. Props to the Gluon team for what they're achieving.

I wrote an answer to a similar question a few days back, which covered two technical aspects in which Stratis has an advantage over ETH, in particular. These are both just opinion and I'm sure there are good arguments against. You can see the post here (I won't quote the whole thing because it is pretty long, you can just click through to see it): .

Moving away from the architectural advantages, another advantage would be the dedicated Stratis Consultancy. Development of decentralised-peer-to-peer-network-based applications is really tricky, and very dangerous given that you are dealing with code which is literally people's money, and isn't just code which exists on top of some infrastructure to insulate it from people's actual money. The Stratis team are made up of experts in their industry. The Stratis Consultancy is in the business of selling that expertise. Clients that engage with the consultancy, and thus build on top of the platform, are better placed to successfully build their applications than those that don't.

Documentation can be found here: https://github.com/stratisproject/StratisBitcoinFullNode/blob/master/Documentation/coldstaking.md

TStrat can be got from here: https://faucet.stratisplatform.com/, or from the Discord server by asking one of the internal dev team for some: https://discord.gg/9tDyfZs

You can get some TStrat from here: https://faucet.stratisplatform.com/

It might be a bit a boring to get a significant amount from there, and sometimes the faucet isn't running, in which case your best bet is to join the Discord (if you're not there already) - https://discord.gg/9tDyfZs and get some directly from the team. If you let me know your username I can give you a role to bypass the modbot, that way you don't have to jump through the hoops and can dive straight in.

https://twitter.com/Azure/status/1103757717674618890

Learn how to get an enterprise-grade #blockchain platform in .NET with @stratisplatform Full Node on #AzureMktplace:  http://msft.social/S4h5hZ

The 95% threshold is established by the BIP-9 precedent: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0009.mediawiki

The 95% will be met, but it might take a good half a year or so

Yeah, without a way of migrating to Core without having to create a transaction, large holders are incentivised to keep staking through the qt client.

Only way I can see it happening is if there are some other reasons to move to Core. Perhaps masternodes or some other feature of StratisD. I think that just straight up soft forking would be a slap to the face of the long-term stakers, but maybe it's worth it? I don't know personally. I can think of reasons for and against cold staking, so it's not really something that bothers me too much personally. However, having the majority of blocks being produced by StratisD clients does seem to me to be in the best interests of the overall network, so getting people to migrate under the guise of helping activate cold staking seems like one smart method.

Only way is to convince people to stake using Stratis Core. So a little way of helping might be to tell people you know to stake through Stratis Core.

Firstly, I guess it's important to point out that the Stratis ICO Platform is blockchain agnostic, so a project running an ICO through the Stratis ICO Platform is not limited to issuing a token on top of any one blockchain, but can instead choose that which they think suits them best. So that out of the way, we can look into some advantages/disadvantages of building on top of Stratis.

Transactions per second is a measure of throughput. Tps is an average taken over the block interval (txs per second = number of txs in a block / block interval in seconds), so it doesn't necessarily tell us a huge amount about the capabilities of a blockchain, but it is an easy to grasp measure to give us some sense of the capability of a blockchain at the blockchain level. Obviously, this measurement becomes meaningless as you move on to second layer techs.

For Stratis, the achievable throughput is effectively indefinite since the Stratis ecosystem employs sidechains, blockchains which are pegged to the Stratis mainchain in such a way that the coins of the sidechain in effect become Strat themselves. This means that it is possible to use Strat on a whole new blockchain, with different consensus rules, parameters etc. from the Stratis mainchain itself. If (for some reason) you need a higher throughput than is currently achievable in the Stratis ecosystem, you can create a new sidechain which gives you the throughput threshold you need. For most applications, this will be completely unnecessary, but it's good to know that it is an option.

The question you've raised, behind the question about transactions per second, is why Stratis over the competition? EOS and NEO both have such huge architectural problems (IMHO) that we can ignore them and concentrate on ETH vs Stratis, since ETH is in a league of its own above EOS and NEO.

To this end, here's a little ETH vs. Strat breakdown from my perspective, concentrating on the two main differences:

Solidity/EVM vs. C#/CLR

Bitcoin started it all off and had the first smart contracts. Using a purpose built language called Script, developers could build “smart contracts” which are basically a set of conditions which must be met in order for a transaction to be valid. For example, a very common smart contract is the multisig contract. This basically requires more than one signature to be valid. Thus, a smart contract is simply “money can move from here to here so long as this set of conditions is met in such a way that execution of the contract comes out “True””.

Bitcoin’s Script language is very limited by design and it is not Turing complete. Turing completeness refers to whether or not a language can be used to simulate any Turing machine. Non-Turing-complete languages are usually built for a very specific set of applications, whereas Turing-complete languages are usually designed with broader set of applications in mind.

Ethereum wanted to take the set-of-conditions-under-which-a-transaction-becomes-valid to the extreme and allow developers to build any non-trivial applications, all based around this idea of smart contracts. To do so they created their own virtual machine, the EVM, and designed an accompanying Turing-complete language called Solidity.

So why build the EVM and then design a language to suit that particular operational environment? Smart contracts offer a unique set of challenges. There are LOADS of considerations for smart contracts, you can’t have loops, must be deterministic, smaller code is better etc. Adapting existing virtual machines to smart contract development is a monumental task.

So the cheap answer is: building the EVM and Solidity from scratch was the easiest way of delivering on Ethereum’s promise of providing smart contract development with a Turing-complete language with sufficient confidence in security. (For a more complete answer, read through Buterin’s replies here: https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/vitalik-buterin-13gxQB)

The trade off is developers now have to use an unfamiliar operational environment. As Jordan Andrews (lead smart contract developer at Stratis) says: “frustrated with the “young” state of solidity and Ethereum smart contract development environments, I started craving bringing my favourite development environment (C# / .NET / Visual Studio) to blockchain development.” (https://hackernoon.com/a-token-smart-contract-executing-in-native-net-and-92ceaf972713) The .NET ecosystem is one of the best populated development environments that exist today, both in terms of tools available to devs and in terms of community support.

So, allowing smart contract development with .NET’s own VM (the CLR) is hard, but if the trade off is worth it? How come no one did it earlier? Well, in this case, Stratis has first mover advantage. CLR only became open source in 2015, and Stratis started out building on top of NBitcoin (C# implementation of Bitcoin built by Dorier, starting in 2015) so in some sense Stratis started life at the earliest possible moment.

In the years since, they’ve managed to deliver smart contracts with that promise; Developers can now:

- Create SCs in a familiar environment (.NET framework). Smart contracts already require devs to learn a whole new way of thinking about application engineering due to the constraints of achieving peer-to-peer consensus. Forcing them to learn a new language/dev environment raises that barrier to entry yet higher. With Stratis, that is not the case.

- .NET code which executes on chain. This means that Stratis smart contract code will behave in the same way as in any other C# application. Something which cannot be guaranteed when using a custom virtual machine (looking at you, NEO…).

- Access to all of the tools and broader benefits of the .NET framework, including established best practices, security auditing of code (made even easier since the code can be decompiled direct to the C# source code), fantastic support from the millions-strong C# dev community.

Stratis chose the hard option because they believe that the benefits outweighed the costs. There will be people who will make a strong case against Stratis’ decision. It’s not easy to take an unbiased position, so I think we will have to go the “the proof will be in the pudding” route and see how Stratis’ smart contracts stack up in terms of dev adoption.

It must also be said that executing CLR code comes with other challenges with regards to achieving consensus amongst executing nodes, and talking to ETH devs you'll get a few criticisms of this solution along these lines. These challenges required Stratis met them head on with solutions such as the coming Whitelisted Smart Contracts. Whitelisted Smart Contracts are the current solution and will be replaced by a more elegant solution in due course.

Deploying to mainchain vs. Deploying to sidechains

To do this part of the discussion justice we have to do some thinking about what a blockchain is. Not about what it does, or what it enables, but what it actually is (caveat - the following is an analogy: a heuristic to better communicate my point. As such, it is a model and we should bear in mind that “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. Hopefully this is useful).

A blockchain is waste. A blockchain is a necessary, but unfortunate, waste by-product of achieving peer-to-peer consensus on the system state of a cryptocurrency. A blockchain is not something you want, it’s something you need to get mutually untrusting parties to agree about the state of a cryptocurrency, i.e. where all the money is, the history, all information existing in the crypto itself. If it were possible to achieve true peer-to-peer consensus about the system state of a cryptocurrency without a blockchain, then it would be preferable to do so. However, it seems that it is not possible.

Over time this waste gets bigger and bigger and sometimes the waste is being produced at such a rate that it makes the cryptocurrency difficult to use.

We can usefully take the analogy further: a blockchain is a pile of waste and more waste is added to the pile with every block. Sometimes, so much waste is being produced at once that it becomes difficult to process it and more waste is being produced than is able to be added to the big blockchain pile. We’ve seen this happen with Bitcoin and Ethereum. Transaction fees were being pushed up by the mechanics of competition as congestion overwhelmed “waste management” and people were willing to pay higher prices to have their waste processed first.

Smart contracts compound this. A blockchain can become bogged down by smart contracts and by the transactions associated with smart contracts (plus things like Airdrops etc.). Smart contracts produce a lot of waste and it tends to be that the more sophisticated the smart-contract-based application, the more waste it produces.

The difficulties faced by Ethereum last year are prime examples of this. Smart contracts were making Ethereum unusable for large periods of time. As adoption grows, so too will the difficulties facing cryptocurrencies which do not have in place some sort of scaling solution.

Stratis’ solution is sidechains. A sidechain is a blockchain which is pegged to the Stratis mainchain in such a way that Strat must be locked up in order to use the sidechain. In this way, you can think about Sidechain as being a completely different blockchain which actually uses Strat! It’s a really neat solution. When you’re using a sidechain, you’re effectively using Strat but on a completely different blockchain (but it won’t say you’re using Strat, you’ll be dealing with the coin native to the sidechain, which will no doubt be called something else, but this coin cannot exist unless you lock Strat up in return). Thus all the waste is offloaded to a completely different pile, instead of being heaped onto the Stratis waste pile.

The Stratis mainchain does not support Stratis Smart Contracts. Only sidechains can be Stratis Smart Contract enabled. Thus all waste associated with Stratis smart contracts will be heaped onto sidechain waste piles rather than onto the Stratis waste pile. This means that the Stratis mainchain itself is left free to go about its business of processing transactions and maintaining the underlying economy to the Stratis ecosystem.

Ethereum has no such scaling solution. In my opinion, this is a much more clear cut advantage for Stratis.