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May 06, 2015, 11:57:05 PM Last edit: May 07, 2015, 12:08:09 AM by Lorenzo |
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... As opposed to large corporations and governments?
The past three years have shown us that there is the potential for huge amounts of money to be made in the altcoin scene. You would think that businesses would see the opportunity and capitalize on a chance to make enormous profits. And yet, virtually all of the successful altcoins so far (e.g. Litecoin, Dogecoin, NXT, NEM, etc.) have been developed by teams of private individuals and volunteers. Some altcoins such as Ripple and BitShares were created by actual companies (Ripple Labs and Invictus Innovations, respectively) but usually only smaller businesses have gone so far as to develop their own altcoins. Only Ripple significantly departs from this trend as they were also funded by Google.
Established businesses such as Microsoft and Google have teams of software experts and cryptographers that most in the altcoin scene can only dream about. If a single lone programmer can create something as profitable as NXT which went from a market cap of $10,000 to $100 million in the space of three months, surely a large company such as Microsoft can do the same?
The argument that cryptocurrencies are almost always community-based open source projects and are thus owned by the community rather than a single centralized entity doesn't hold because many many corporations have invested in open source projects in the past and any investment of development should translate to profits for anyone who holds the currency. For instance, Sun Microsystems developed OpenOffice.org before selling it to Oracle along with their other assets. Much of Java is also free and open source software. Many Linux distros are developed and distributed by for-profit companies who then offer support services and resources for enterprise consumers.
EDIT: I understand that Microsoft and IBM are working on blockchain technologies but so far, these have been purely research projects rather than attempts to develop an actual marketable product.
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