"Good For Nothing" Crypto Coins - A More In-Depth Look 👀

You may have seen the "good for nothing crypto tokens" (2023) post put out by Forbes lately, which I won't post directly due to copyright issues, but if you saw it, I'm sure you'll know what I'm talking about. I know the grifting culture in Bitcoin/Ethereum had gotten pretty bad lately, but I've never seen it so aggressive before since this was put out by a major publication which reads like a "hit piece" since the information behind it is very spotty and often outright incorrect. In actuality, the original list actually has a few nice collection of crypto projects that show genuine promise, mixed in with a few that are legitimately questionable. Here is the original list, often followed by snarky comments of each:

XRP (XRP), Cardano (ADA), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), Internet Computer (ICP), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Stellar (XLM), Stacks (STX), Kaspa (KAS), Theta (THETA), Fantom (FTM), Monero (XMR), Arweave (AR), Algorand (ALGO), Flow (FLOW), MultiversX (EGLD), Bitcoin SV (BSV), Mina (MINA), Tezos (XTZ), EOS (EOS).

The argument that these coins are "unproven and lacks utility" can apply to basically every crypto project right now, except that the top coins maintain their price by taking fees from traders as its main source of "income". So the unfortunate reality is that in their "marketing efforts" they have to keep on the offensive since their products don't exactly "speak for themselves" either. It's sort of funny because all of the critiques that are listed here could very well apply to the "top" coins themselves, too. It's a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black.

I'm not familiar with ALL of the projects (if it's missing here you can assume I have no opinion on them) but I have been keeping tabs on a few on this list for a very long time. Here are a few more nuanced takes on the coins below - as always make sure you DYOR (Do Your Own Research) since the media tends to misdirect more than illuminate, especially when it comes to matters of money.

The "Good For Nothing" Coins

Cardano ($ADA): If you didn't know already, there was a massive falling out between Vitalik and Charles a long time ago, where they both used to work together in Ethereum's initial core team. Charles "left" the team (or was "fired", depending on who you talk to), then founded Cardano using the money he made from other investments, which sparked the rivalry between ETH and ADA right from the start.

The branding of Cardano has changed quite a bit over the years, but the initial impetuous of ADA was "peer review" - which borrowed from the practices of academic journals and the scientific method. He hired a lot of smart people with PhDs and academia to form his core team but at the same time marketed heavily into crypto's "degen culture" - seemingly contradictory ideas that eventually became the genesis for the culture of ADA.

I have mixed feelings about the whole "academic approach" thing since as a former academic that process in itself can have mixed results, too. ADA went unnoticed for a long time but created a cult-like following among the degen crowd - the "Cardano Army", fueled by anti-ETH sentiment, had a pretty strong presence online after the project took hold, which is still very much alive today. For a while, it was looking like ETH "won" the war but after the recent blunders of the ETH ecosystem ADA is starting to look more reasonable and appealing to the average person out there - the fight isn't over yet, it seems.

Bitcoin Cash ($BCH): Bitcoin Maxis love to attack this project because it's basically the same as Bitcoin, except that it has larger block sizes, which makes the coin much more "useful". Satoshi originally envisioned BTC as being a payments system, not merely a "store-of-value" as is the case now, so you could make the case that BCH followers are merely trying to follow through on that promise.

As far as I can tell, BCH is a project run by people that genuinely want to see Bitcoin improve - they were the faction that fought against the "scarcity mindset" that the miners imposed on BTC, where price and fees became the priority over usability and utility. It's a thorn in the side for the Bitcoin Maxis because it's a reminder that the "original" version of BTC is getting closer to becoming obsolete each day, as it focuses too much on "store-of-value", which isn't really a real competitive advantage when that's something any coin can do.

I don't have a strong attachment to either side of this battle, but there's more to the BTC/BCH rivalry than what you're lead to believe, so it's worth taking a deeper dive into the details, just to be aware.

Litecoin ($LTC): Litecoin started as a fun experiment/project started by Charles Lee. Initially conceptualized as a cheaper/faster version of Bitcoin, which the original description actually portrays accurately. But what a lot of people don't know is that there was considerable collaboration between Litecoin and Dogecoin, and many of DOGE's initial iterations borrowed heavily from LTC. As far as everyone knows, Charles Lee is just a nice guy that loves tech - maybe some of that good will passed onto DOGE because it's one of the few projects in crypto where drama/scandals tend to be rare. (At least in public, anyway.)

The biggest issue with Litecoin is that while it is/was more performant than Bitcoin as advertised, it lacked the type of identity or story-telling that limited its growth and adoption. LTC suffers from lack of branding, which is probably why DOGE ended up surpassing it eventually, even as a later-comer.

Internet Computer ($ICP): I'll admit that I know very little about this project, except that it has a group of hardcore followers that believe in its potential, very strongly. It claims that it "solved" the trilemma problem in the space (scalability, decentralization, security) and operates like an "Operating System", which sets it apart from the others.

As with a lot of crypto projects out there, ICP also suffers from an identity problem, which is also made evident in the name. Internet Computer? What is that? Why? I've read many articles on it and talked to a few of its followers but it's still not clear to me what the use-case is, aside from the tech being supposedly "amazing".

Ethereum Classic ($ETC): These are the OG "Ethereum Maxis" - so maxi that they refused to follow the majority of the community when ETH forked their chain in order to "reverse" the hacked transactions from a DAO disaster that occurred in 2015. Most people don't remember that incident at this point (according to critics of the move, it was basically Vitalik compensating for his friends' mistake), but it is worth noting this was one of the biggest controversies of the crypto space at the time. This set the tone for how disagreements were handled on Ethereum from there on out - setting the ecosystem to become the SV-influenced, monoculture entity that it is today. (e.g. they "forked away" the dissent so they didn't have to deal with it, basically.)

To be perfectly honest, I wasn't following the controversy that closely at the time so, I just followed the herd on this one and supported the forked ("official") version, mostly for practical reasons. But in hindsight, that might have been a mistake - it was the first signs that ETH holders were basically incapable of conflict resolution and was more than willing to compromise their values for personal/financial reasons. (The saving grace for that particular incident was that it was highly publicized and debated thoroughly, but nowadays those sort of issues get pushed behind closed doors.)

That being said, I would not recommend getting involved with ETC because it has seen very little development since then and has been hacked by 51% attacks several times (due to its small size) - which means that there are a bunch of illegitimate coins floating around the ecosystem right now as we speak. This is one of the few on the list where I agree with the recommendation to stay away from, completely.

Stellar ($XLM): Disclosure: I made a little bit of money from XLM during its initial airdrop in 2014-15, which I sold off in 2017/18 since I wasn't exactly sure what they were building towards. You could still say something similar today - the project went through several rebrands, with the "non-profit/global-aid payments system" being one of its latest. But it's also another project that suffers from the lack of clear use-case and identity branding. Of the things I've read so far, a lot of the "value-add" propositions tend to be vague and unclear, at least to me.

Theta ($THETA): Having Steve Chen from YouTube as one of its co-founders, THETA is tackling an extremely difficult problem, which is to bring video/streaming to Web3, which hasn't happened yet, due to the current limitations of blockchain technology right now. But THETA actually shows a lot of promise, since they have the most backing from enterprise-level organizations, which is necessary to deliver video in a streamlined, reliable manner. (While the crypto space obsesses over low-res jpegs, they are focused on the content that the rest of the world is consuming right now - video. The potential for them to leap-frog the entire industry is very real.)

This coin being on the "good for nothing" list was genuinely confusing for me because THETA has the backing of some very big names in the Web2 space, and several thousand nodes which are live right now. It's certainly way ahead of ETH-based projects like Livepeer (LPT), which sort of lost its momentum after "the merge", where fees didn't go down as expected. I think the likely motivation was for Forbes to take a pot shot at a potential future competitor, which may pose a threat to traditional media orgs like them. (Always read between the lines, folks.)

But THETA's low usage numbers (which is true) basically means that they haven't figured out a sustainable business model and has yet to exit its testing stages. Big businesses tend to move slow and it's still a question mark as to whether they can make it work at scale, even if they have the resources available to execute on very expensive ideas like video.

THETA's biggest competitor is actually Odysee (LBRY), which is the Web3 video platform that are actively attracting users and content producers right now. The Web3 video space tends not to get talked about as much but is nonetheless an important sector to pay attention to since the majority of the world still considers video to be its "primary" content type, at least when it comes to digital.

Monero ($XMR): Monero has a lot of hard-core supporters who are also "privacy rights" advocates - that was the whole point of the project to begin with, after all. Even ignoring the political or potential criminal controversies around this project, the idea didn't catch on as many would have hoped, due to the fact that 1) privacy options can be built into existing chains, so why do we need an entire coin dedicated to the concept itself? and 2) it's questionable if privacy can be really be made 100% effective due to the fact that blockchain systems are designed to be transparent, at its core. You can anonymize transactions through tumblers and other tools, but the fact that wallet A sent this amount to destination B will still show up somewhere, at some point.

Nonetheless, the branding/story itself did stick, which is why it continues to have its cult-like following, despite limited usage. Though if you're looking to launder money, it's probably just easier to use fiat, honestly.

Arweave ($AR): Storage will become a very big problem in the future of Web3, assuming that in the long run, its usage becomes more mainstream. If you're uploading stuff onto the chain, after all, where are you going to store it? (There is IPFS - but then, how do you retrieve that data in a reliable way?) The solution: pay local nodes to host content in a decentralized way, using tokens as an incentive for people to maintain and host data/content.

Conceptually, AR is very similar to projects like Filecoin ($FIL) and STORJ ($STORJ), which are both aiming to solve the problem in a similar way. Although Arweave claims that unlike IPFS storage systems that still could potentially be "disconnected" given enough time, the way the chain works is that it last "forever", and at low cost. It's yet to see if these claims hold up to the hype - it seems too good to be true, in a way.

The "proof-of-storage" space is largely untested right now because we don't actually know how the markets will handle storage solutions when demand for storing files in a decentralized way ends up spiking at some point. (OpenSea was storing their NFTs on traditional servers until a few people called them out on it, for the record. It's unclear how reliable these methods were, longer-term.)

Still, this market is potentially a sleeper project in the crypto space because should the demand for Web3 content spike again, it is a sort of thing that *everyone* will need to use.

Honorable mention: Chia ($XCH) has an interesting storage-based protocol that validates transactions based on storage space, which could potentially become viable in markets with an abundance of storage space. That hasn't happened yet, but in the future, perhaps?

Algorand ($ALGO) / MultiverseX ($ELGD): These projects are "high-performance chains" that have gathered some attention in recent years - for ALGO, it emerged around the same time that Ethereum was getting bogged down from its CryptoKitties / CryptoPunks hype in 2017 when gas fees started to go up for the first time. These chains claim to have solved the "trilemma problem" (security/decentralization/performance), which may or may not be true. Either way, they ended up on this list because many feel like it has yet to "prove itself" in environments where its use-cases are real, rather than experimental.

The tech of these projects may very well be superior to other chains, it's hard to tell, but its followers tend to be pretty direct in the ways they talk about their project so that's at least something. But like a lot of other project, these projects also suffers from a lack of branding and story about what their product actually does.

The reason to consider these projects as "sleepers" is that if the technology ends up working as advertised, an adoption by a big entity could possibly take these coins from 0 to a 100 overnight. But that largely depends on if they can convince people to use it for something other than money-in-it-of-itself.

Tezos ($XTZ): Disclaimer - I am obviously very heavily biased towards this project, so take things with a grain of salt. But the "little used" description in the original file is basically wrong, since Tezos is basically the chain that made a name for itself as being the "art chain" through Hic et Nunc/Teia - which gives the chain an identity that tends to be very rare in the industry as a whole. Tezos is known for good art at affordable prices, which often doesn't show up on sales volume charts but continues to be very strong in terms of # of transactions and chain activity as a whole.

XTZ also has one of the most sophisticated on-chain governance systems (which most coins simply don't have), as well as financial tools (liquid staking, and now adaptive issuance), which aligns stakeholder interests in a rational/reasonable way. On Tezos, the "Bakers" community (XTZ's version of validators who run nodes to keep the economy running) usually directs the direction of the chain itself, which is done through lengthy deliberations and negotiations over longer periods of time.

The above is actually the chain's most underappreciated part: Tezos has a long track record of implementing protocol-level changes through consensus vote, rather than the unilateral actions of a core team or top-down decisions made behind closed doors. Protocol proposals are talked about openly, in public, and the results of the votes are publicized to everyone, leveraging its on-chain governance system that keeps track of every vote. (People can also see how high-level entities are voting in a transparent way.) Tezos is the model closest to how developed countries operate - or should operate, anyway.

For this reason, I've decided to take a chance on XTZ since it's the project I see as being most "compatible" with how the real world operates. Once people get tired of the pumps and loose money floating around in crypto and start looking for something more serious from Web3 platforms (which might take a while, to be perfectly frank), Tezos will be the obvious choice for people to take.

EOS ($EOS): EOS was arguably one of the first "proof-of-stake" chains put into production, and emerged during a time in crypto where proof-of-work was the dominant methodology, by far. (Ironically enough, a lot of Ethereum Maxis back then attacked EOS for being proof-of-stake - then suddenly went quiet after ETH itself switched to that model.)

EOS - as far as we know - "worked", at least on a technical level. Recent markets have proven that most people don't really care whether or not a chain runs on proof-of-work, or proof-of-stake, so in hindsight, they may have been proven right in some ways. But the downfall of EOS lied in its governance system - the chain suffered similar problems that DAOs are facing now - even if you're technically able to "vote", what's the point of voting if the results of it is dominated by players who own 99% of the tokens anyway? Token concentration and lopsided voting power eventually lead to people questioning the validity of the system as a whole, and the chain eventually lost its ranking in the markets as people became disillusioned.

Proof-of-stake networks, due to its higher fluidity and liquidity, require a higher bar of governance systems that can anticipate outcomes like these, which the project simply wasn't prepared for, in a way. Bitcoin and Ethereum are, in a way, suffering from the same problem due to their lack of on-chain governance systems, but the question now has become: Does it matter? Do people even want agency or the ability to have a say to begin with?

Gridcoin ($GRC) [Honorable Mention]: Still one of my most favorite projects. Started in UC Berkley in conjunction with BOINK - it basically attaches proof-of-work algorithms to @home processing, which puts its computational power to good use (scientific research, space exploration, data crunching, etc.) Right now most proof-of-work systems, including Bitcoin, spend a lot of processing power and energy on arbitrary mathematical problems, which basically goes to waste, thereafter. GRC solves this problem by making the number crunching "useful" - while also giving the person doing the crunching a return in exchange for their "donations". It is a win-win for both crypto and @home projects at once.

Gridcoin also has the most sophisticated and user-friendly wallets out there, that combines wallet functions, governance/polling, and staking/investing all in one place.

This is another project that has seen limited usage - mostly because its funded by non-profit/academia/corporate funds and doesn't seem too interested in joining the rat race of coin market caps and charts. But if there is one coin that makes Bitcoin look really obsolete, it would be this - it is basically better in every way and gives proof-of-work models a reason to exist, longer term.

So that's about it, at least from what I've seen since 2014, when I first got into crypto. It's worth noting that the markets do not stay the same, and the things people talk about from one year to another seem to change all the time so it's best not to get too attached to any particular perspective, especially if you're in it for the long-term. (I was heavily involved with ETH projects until a few years ago and quickly reallocated everything - so things can change very quickly in this space, really.)

Good luck, folks. I don't give out financial advice as a rule of thumb, but if there's one recommendation to crypto holders out there - is never take things at its face value - always read between the lines. 👀