I was going to post this text somewhere else but realised during writing that what got me hooked on NAV Coin wasn't really what they are doing today but what I believe they will be able to achieve in the future. NAV has a lot of interresting attributes. Generally speeking, Proof Of Stake in general and NAV's organisational structure in particular is a really interresting path to get a currency that is both fungible but in the same time the perfect tool to decentrally govern (any) organisation. I would love to have your opinions about this and also maybe give me suggestions of other coins that are similar (or maybe better), because I haven't really came across many people that see this the way I'm about to describe here.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think privacy is going to be more important in the future. My holdings so far in this category includes mostly NAV but also some PIVX. Have stayed out of XVG and XMR because in the long run I don't believe in anything that uses POW (can expand on that if someone wants to). I'm also thinking about getting into Smartcash but haven't researched it enough to pull the trigger.
So I'm still heavy into NAV. Even if it at first glimpse looks like they have nothing new, I think the coin has a lot going for it in the long term. The organisation in itself is to me 90% of the value of NAV. I am convinced that this kind of organisational structure is the future of financial industry. Even though NAV at this point is a bit risky investment (like any crypto btw) the coin is undervalued. Here are som of my Pro's and Con's about NAV;
NAV pro's:
* Lack of hype from investers and team. The NAV team seem to have their feet on the ground and are progressing through the road map with a steady pace. They don't overpromise and they don't overdeliver (pushing out poorly tested tech). Me myself being swedish really appreciate the humble attitude from their lead developer Craig MacGregor but this is off course a more philosofically stand point.
* Focus on user. The technology needs to be easy to use if it's going to be widely adopted. Just checkout the NavPay app which is the first one to offer privacy payment through your cellphone and even my grandmother could get it done. This focus, to me, makes NAV the Apple of the crypto world. It also helps that the webpage and all their software user interfaces are eye candy (I love the purple scheme, lol).
* NAV have a unique solution for privacy with dual block chains, which I believe is the best privacy solution out there today. Not because it's more private per se (it's actually worse than some other solutions when the transaction volumes are low), but it's much more beautiful in it's simplicity and flexibility. I could see some of the other projects implementing ZK-snarks etc painting themselfs into a corner, because the tech is very complex and makes it difficult to avoid future problems. Problems with privacy is what could really kill the trust for a coin. One good thing with dual blockchains is that staking can be done with low spec gear like Raspberry PI, cellphone etc, which makes it more probable that the blockchain will be kept truly decentralised. With higher volumes the privacy is also greatly enhanced. And of course, if zk-snarks turns out to be well tried and trusted in the future it could very well get implemented into NAV eventually. Just saying that NAV has a better start off than others.
* Road map plans with NavPay with NavMorph making NavPay the only app you'll need to send any crypto private in one simple action. NAV beeing the native token means you'll save some percent on just keeping NAV. This reminds me of Ripples philosofy when taking on a Swift replacement and it's just brilliant.
* Organisational structure. Even though the number of code contributors currently are fewer than some other similar community based projects, I believe that having a central structure for organising the development is superior. The overall work is likely to be better focused on value building productive tasks, rather than what every individual developer feels he should be doing that day. Also, the ability to deal with partnerships "in the real world", is a strong attribute. The organisational structure being kind of central, doesn't at all have to mean that the blockchain in itself is any more centralized, because with POS, the distribution of investors/stakers is what decides how decentralized the blockchain ultimately will be. I see NAV as a preview of how ownership and decision taking within many companies will be handled in the future. Take Ripple for example. Even if Ripple Labs at a first glimpse seem to have organisational similarities to NAV it's very different because Ripple owns the vast majority of their tokens. NAV is nothing like that because the coins (and therefore decision taking power) are much more distributed/decentralized and with POS the power to decide the future of the coin is back in the hands of the user.
* Taking on partnerships. Changelly is important to get the NavMorph functionality quickly off the runway. I think this would be much more difficult to achieve within a community only organisation. This is also what opens up for investers looking for symbiotic relations, which will help strengthen the NAV token and give it more value.
NAV con's:
* Slow development. The organisational structure gives some strength but is also a little bit slow. As you might have grown aware of, in the crypto world, one week sometimes can feel like a whole year in the old normal world. The team is small compared to some community based projects which could mean that the development being to slow and allowing competitors to catch up. Eventhough so far of what I've seen, NAV has done a lot more of productive development with fewer contributers, than some of the community based contributions that I have been watchin. Also the NAV community has recently voted for a fund (1% of stakes) to get more people into the office, so this could be a non issue further down the road.
* Even though I like that NAV has taken on partnerships there are some issues with the Changelly function in NavPay, that is taking awfully long time to solve. Who's responsible for this I cannot really judge but it's painful to see.
In the long run "the wheat will be seperated from the chaff" though, and I think the NAV-community will have overcame most obstacles above.
https://navcoin.org/
