This is a story about SmartCash.
I was looking through my cryptocurrency spreadsheet last night (that post has almost 9k views!), and I realized I haven't been trading much lately. Altcoins have been going down so a handful of my coins are worth less than what I paid. Previously I was using profits to invest in new things. I'm not good at letting go once I buy in because if I think the project has merit, I also think eventually others will also and the price will go back up after a dip. It's also possible I bought some crap coins that will never be taken seriously. Time will tell, I guess. I also remember the excitement of buying BTS and PIVX before they blew up in price, and I thought, "I'd love to do something like that again." Yesterday, @msg768 surprised me with a tip from a tipbot on Steemit I had never heard of.

SmartCash? What's that all about?

So that's what I did last night. I started reading up about it, and it really caught my interest. > SmartCash is a community governance, cooperation & growth focused blockchain based currency & a decentralized economy. The website looks solid, it has a nice web wallet (which I signed up for and moved the coins I was given to), and joined the Slack channel to chat a bit with the team. I was reminded of the way BitShares creates worker proposals funded by the blockchain via voting. Then I realized this is the same coin @heiditravels mentioned in her recent video: Blockchain Tech is Bringing Honesty Back to Charities. It seems someone created a proposal to help feed people in Venezuela. How freaking cool is that?!? So then I got even more interested. The volume on this thing is really low as you can see here:

It's not even on Bittrex yet. I had to create an account on Cryptopia to buy some **(note: that is a referral link)**. This is where my "haven't been trading lately" side got overruled by my "I want to see a new project moon!" side. I got out my Ledger Nano S and decided to give it a shot. I bought just a bit last night and a bit more today and I have a buy order in for some more. Could this go down a lot from here? For sure! At the same time, if it goes from $0.02 to $0.04 then I doubled my money (assuming I sell). The more I learn about this project, the more I think they have some real players involved, and it might be one worth holding. The @smartbot is pretty cool, for sure, and my hunch is you're going to be hearing a lot more about SmartCash here on Steemit because of this proposal for Steemit banner ads which looks like it will get funded:

You can see all proposals at https://vote.smartcash.cc/ If Steemit starts getting flooded with news about SmartCash, you can say you heard it here first. :) I really like their "Hive Teams" concept. Instead of a single group of core developers, they have different "hives" which are focusing their efforts in different ways. They've made some good progress on their roadmap as well.

Staking Rewards

One of the things that caught my attention right away was their SmartRewards idea. > SmartRewards are a price stabilization mechanism and a way to encourage long term holding. Long term holders are key to the project’s success since the SmartHive treasury needs SmartCash to appreciate in value in order to fund meaningful 3rd party proposals and help grow SmartCash into a successful global crypto-currency. Each wallet address holding at least 1000 SmartCash will get paid each 30 days on the 25th and the snapshot for the next month will happen at the same time. The SmartRewards will come out of the 15% block reward allocation.

This is like staking rewards without having to have a wallet open and running all the time. Similar to how Neo rewards token holders with Gas tokens, but the catch here is you can't move your coins. If you move them, you aren't eligible for that month's SmartRewards. For this reason, it's a good idea to have a spending wallet address separate from a staking address. The web wallet creates three addresses by default, one for spending and two for staking. It doesn't matter which one you use as long as you don't touch the funds for more than 30 days. You can use this SmartRewards calculator to see what the current SmartRewards are for this coming month.

Privacy

I haven't used the renew function yet, but it seems to be built into the full wallet client based on the Zerocoin protocol. True cryptographic anonymity may become more and more of an important thing in the future. It's not yet implemented in the web wallet, but asking around in the Slack channel I found it will be implemented after the ability to vote.

Challenges

The block explorer is nice: https://explorer.smartcash.cc/. It's where I found the rich list of the top 100 token holding addresses.

**Whoa!** What's up with that address holding 55% of all the tokens? Also, 80% of the newly minted coins goes to these addresses **(that's a lot!)** I started grilling the team in Slack about that and about who controls those addresses. Unlike BitShares worker proposals which are controlled via the blockchain, currently SmartCash distributes value manually. That means humans are involved. That means we have to trust someone not to steal the coins and dump them on the market. As I pressed in further, I found the individuals who control these funds are anonymous (though I did have two people direct message me and let me know they knew who they were, but did not reveal them—nor did I ask them to). Essentially, they are trying to protect these individuals to ensure someone doesn't show up at their house and harass them. It's probably safe to say "the founders" control those addresses. So how big of a problem is that? Well, the point of cryptocurrencies is to eliminate the need for trust. It's a trust-less system which relies on protocols for pre-determined outcomes. To me, this is a big risk. And yet, at the same time, Steemit, inc essentially followed the same model. They mined most of the tokens here via the @steemit account and they use those funds to onboard new users and support development. So far, it seems SmartCash funds from these accounts are being used in a similar way. We should always be concerned when a project is centralized like this. At the same time, after grilling the team there in slack quite a bit, I do think they are sincerely working towards decentralizing things as much as possible in the future. The leaders of the hives have access to the funds and, so far, it seems there hasn't been any abuse (that I know of). As a programmer, I'm a fan of doing something manually first until you understand it well enough to automate it. That seems to be the model they are following as well. So, having looked into the project since last night, I decided to write this post about it. Please don't take this as investment advice as I'm not an investment advisor. This is just my story which I thought you might enjoy. There are no guarantees in cryptocurrency, and it's possible the small amount I've already invested may go way down and stay there. There's also the slight chance this project could blow up, get added to some big exchanges, and be a lot of fun. That would be exciting. Either way, do your own research and see what you come up with. I decided to write this post once I learned enough about the project, but I think I'll also submit it to some of the contests they have going on to see if I can earn some rewards that way as well. Does that make this a "pay to post" blog entry? Not to me. I was going to do it anyway and found out about the contests like this and this later on (thanks for letting me know, @decentralizd). So there you have it. I'm not staking my reputation on this one, but I do think it's interesting enough to check out. Let me know what you think. If you would like to learn more about SmartCash please visit https://www.SmartCash.cc -----

Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, and voluntaryist who wants to help create a world we all want to live in. Visit UnderstandingBlockchainFreedom.com

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