For those that haven't heard of TRON, it is what I would call one of the most successful scams in the history of cryptocurrency. It is a currency that was made on top of Ethereum (thus, it took no actual effort to create, as this can be done instantly and for free), paired with a significant amount of hype and lies to investors.
Some investors in TRON have lost up to 66% of their net worth thus far (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tron/), making it one of the largest crashes that has been seen in the top 10 coins on CoinMarketCap in quite awhile. Some of the things investors believe are completely absurd, citing that the Chinese government or Amazon will use TRON. It's unfortunate the levels of misinformation that so rampantly spread and cause many to lose their hard-earned money.
It's very interesting to see how bubbles plays out. I do think cryptocurrencies are real and have big potential, but after seeing likes tron, verge, and doge, I also believe the current valuations are biggest bubbles of our lifetimes. Yet, you see people justifying ~10b$ valuation on the premise of a whitepaper written with broken english, then partnerships that are merely vaporware (remember iota announced msft partnership, yet it was more like iota was using azure products).
Interesting times. Just play into people's irrational decisions and you'd make big bucks.
With <30 transactions/s, which is state-of-art, they don't have any future. If a better protocol keeping Satoshi's goals but more scalable is invented, then we will see something that might not be just a bubble.
Technology isn't even the biggest issue - even if you had fast zero fee transactions you still have the problem of inherent volatility and deflation. Volume doesn't help with volatility here, at least not in the current designs that have fixed money supply - the incentive to hold becomes even larger the more use a coin sees - you make a contract for x coins in 10 months that's worth 10x - that just makes everything too complicated.
If someone figured out a way to peg the value of crypto to some other big currency that would have potential - but then the speculators wouldn't be making 10x.
Services like BitPay require transactions to go through quickly. If your transaction arrives an hour too late the bitcoin price in usd has changed and bitpay refunds you your money or asks you to send more money. In both cases you have to pay the transaction fee again.
I wouldn't be surprised if a high transaction fee increases the speed of deflation. Smaller transactions are stuck and will be forgotten. Spending the currency is difficult. All you can do is hold or convert to fiat.
The TRON Whitepaper (what investors are 'supposed' to read and invest off of) is written terribly and copies significantly from other successful projects: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/7oeh92/trons_trx...
It's possible that the CEO of TRON made at least $300M USD from selling his own coins that he created out of thin air: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/7oh01s/trx_tron_...
The CEO tweets in ways specifically designed to entice investors to speculate on his coin, such as specifically telling people it will go up in value: https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/947463313775927297, or specifically saying the downwards price movement is due to changes to CoinMarketCap information (completely false): https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/951191786902274048
Some investors in TRON have lost up to 66% of their net worth thus far (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tron/), making it one of the largest crashes that has been seen in the top 10 coins on CoinMarketCap in quite awhile. Some of the things investors believe are completely absurd, citing that the Chinese government or Amazon will use TRON. It's unfortunate the levels of misinformation that so rampantly spread and cause many to lose their hard-earned money.