What is Ergo and is it a worthy investment?
THE SHORT ANSWER
No bells, no whistles, just a realistic and surgically thorough rework of blockchain technology, not driven by loud gimmicks, but based on the demand for a stable and truly decentralized applications platform. Longevity, ease of use, flexibility. Everything about this feels like a scientist’s passion project, and all the complex information available on Ergo reads like the work of a team of brilliant minds. With Emurgo, the famous company behind Cardano’s success, it does look like a promising, if a bit slow blooming, venture. It’s a prototype, better than the original blockchain in every way imaginable.
WHERE TO INVEST IN ERGO
• Citex — https://www.citex.me
• Hotbit — https://www.hotbit.io
• CoinEx — https://www.coinex.com
PROS OF ERGO INVESTMENT
• Community and ecosystem — a lot of information on use cases, thorough tutorials on typical implementations, a lively community of enthusiasts who are willing to help you with your task. And a three-part Whitepaper, that not only acknowledges current and pressing issues with blockchains but clearly states how Ergo aims to be different.
• True decentralization — what seems like a tall order is, apparently, easy to achieve when you have a team full of PhDs on cryptography — their product is immune to mining pools problem. They use a non-outsourceable task, which means that a pool will likely lose money when its member solves the proof of work puzzle and obtains its private key. Also, by introducing memory-bound tasks, they are leveling the playing field between pros with ASIC and regular folk with their gaming GPUs.
• Anonymity — ErgoMixer is a powerful trustless tool, that ensures untracebility of your precious coin without them ever leaving your control! And developers should rejoice, for this Sigma-algorithm-driven Mixer is an innate part of Ergo’s blockchain, so no risky, bulky, or even third party solutions are necessary — it’s all in one neat package.
• Non-Fungible Tokens — Ergo has full native support for those in its blockchain. It’s another feature with endless use cases. You can create an art auction app (and, in fact, it has already been done — check out https://ergoauctions.org), or you can use Ergo as identity confirmation. The sky’s the limit.
CONS OF ERGO INVESTMENT
• Complexity — Ergo is a technical marvel. Problem is, marvels like that are not easily understood by most — it becomes a game of trust. One thing Ergo still isn’t managing to solve is integrating all its glory in an everyday life of a potential consumer. And not every potential customer will be able to understand exactly why Ergo is superior and more technologically advanced.
• Direction — Ergo is a powerful feature-rich toy. It is of immense interest to scientifically minded people, it’s fun and pleasant to use, but, since it doesn’t fill a specific industry niche and instead tries to be another “Bitcoin, but better in every way”, it’s likely to lie in the shadows for a while, and there’s no guarantee that it will ever escape them, at least not in time to earn its rightful place on the market. Hopefully Ergo’s recent alliance with Emurgo will help alleviate this feeling of project being suspended in the air.
• Volatility — the smaller the cryptocurrency, the bigger the risks. And this one is currently rather small, and very volatile. Up until very recently Ergo was also only available for trading on small exchange platforms, which also pose a significant hazard to your investments.
MORE INFO FOR TECHIES
This project definitely gives us some nefty nerdy things to reiterate and learn about. So let’s give our brains some food!
ErgoScript is Turing Complete. If you want to know what that means, you can check out this short video by Computerphile — https://youtu.be/RPQD7-AOjMI. In short — it’s a mark of a full-fledged programming language, that is capable of computing everything that can, in theory, be calculated. All the ones we know and love — like Python, Javascript, or C — are also Turing Complete.
Etherium’s accounts VS Ergo’s UTXO — it’s a struggle for dominance in the field of smart contracts. Accounts are very overhead-rich and heavy, but typical UTXO is stateless and doesn’t have persistent storage, which is not ideal for some applications. Ergo’s transaction trees can simulate that with their immutable UTXO data structs. This is a real win for blockchain scalability.
Ergo’s implementation of Oracle pools — the way decentralized apps can more easily and flexibly get information from the outside net. The whole process of averaging data points and presenting the requester with a final UTXO point occurs on blockchain and is super easy to implement by developers.
