Would you recommend Binance to buy LINK?Might as well repost this then.
The World Economic Forum and Smart Contracts.
The World Economic Forum wrote in 2015 that 10% of worlds GDP would be on the blockchain by 2027 in a poll done by leading industry experts and executives. Right now the transformation of regular fiat money and on to digital currency is happening. But this isn't the point, no where the real value lies in, is in the contracts. Contracts as you know is the binding of two entities or more, that enter in to an agreement where the parties involved are reasonably sure that they will uphold their end of the agreement. This relies on trust. Where blockchain comes in, is that you can code smart contracts on the immutable digital ledger, and thus create a digital tamper-proof agreement. In other words, a trustless agreement between two parties or more, where the conditions are deterministic and based on proof of mathematics and physics, not on trust in a brand (for example a banking institution). Some of you might have heard about this with Ethereum, and the ability to code a smart contracts on Ethereum using solidity (a programming language)
The Oracle Problem
The main problem that blockchains have, is a way to communicate with the real world and feed the information to the contract itself. This is called the oracle problem in the blockchain space. An oracle is to put it in simple terms an online notary that keeps your contract constantly updated. To clarify, the oracle is connected to the smart contract as well as various API's that is related to the terms of the contract. Weather patterns for example (for farmers insurance, flights), price feeds (for fluctuations of currencies), temperature (transport of goods), stock tickers. Basically any real event in the world that is subject to constant change. Having a centralised oracle, or making an oracle for each contract, is for the former a security and reliability issue, and for the later the same as well as time consuming to code for each contract. The way to solve this is having decentralised oracles, as it not only removes the security issue of having one oracle node run the show (thus severely increasing the risk of failure or the deliverance of bad data), but it also creates a service where reliable oracles can be requested by the user running the smart contracts, and check an oracle node providers reputation. A user, pending on the size of the value of the contract that is being issued would want more redundancy for information to safely have an aggregated data pool, as well as being delivered high quality data from premium sources. Thus the user would naturally pay for the services of the oracle.
The oracle operator themselves stake their own assets (in this case link tokens) in their node as a guarantee that they're providing the data for the duration of the contract and the quality of the data. To not fulfil these terms would result in the oracle operator losing the link tokens he has staked to the user that requested the node. Should the terms be however met, and the oracle operates in good faith, the node operator will be paid in link tokens. This is already a working product in real time, please see https://feeds.chain.link to view current running nodes. You can also see the various node operators on https://market.link
There's only one company that is currently solving this problem in a decentralised manner, and as mentioned above has a working working product, that company is Chainlink. If you wish to peruse their website it's; https://chain.link
For a visual presentation see this video for the technical paper click here.
Who are partnered with Chainlink / who uses it?
Chainlink is instrumental for blockchain to succeed, and each day they're getting new partners, but to name them all would take too long (there's over 400) and I would rather focus on names that you recognise. Swift global banking (see R3), R3 (R3 uses Kaleido Blockchain which has Chainlink integrated), Mircosoft, Zeppelin_OS, Web 3.0 foundation, BSN (The Chinese's state blockchain service network), the top Korean banks, google, Oracle (the second largest tech company) DocuSign, Openlaw, T-Sytems (Deutsche Telekom, you might be more familiar with their division; T-Mobile), IC3, and many more. Chainlink has been very good at keeping their lips tightly sealed, but the information is still public (but hasn't been reported by any major outlet) and to those in the space, it's easy to find and verify. All these companies will be running their blockchain services, and they will, or already have integrated Chainlink in their blockchain (meaning that Chainlink is blockchain agnostic and can run any chain). T-Systems are even offering their services as Chainlink Oracles, currently running at least 55 nodes.
Here's an updated list of partners, clients, grants, and integration of Chainlink
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ahUZjuIqqwG9dZLvlm0sgHmckRVUC6kB396narYKSyU/edit
The people involved
The core team of Chainlink are relatively unknown outside of the blockchain space, however they have since their inception been working with the brightest minds in computer data science, blockchain, and cryptography. The main person of interest is Ari Juels this man, conceptionalised "Proof of Work" the method that Bitcoin (to name one) is based on, in 1999 and he is the leading academic figure in blockchain, as well as the co-director of IC3 along with Emin Gün Sirer (another leading figure in the academic research in blockchain). Ari Juels co-authored the Chainlink whitepaper 1.0 in 2017, and has co-authored multiple papers that works on solving the challenges with blockchain, that Chainlink aims to solve. Chainlink also works closely with Ed Felten, the chief scientist in Off-Chainlabs, and former CTO of the White House, where Felten attended the Chainlink smartcon 0 in August 28th 2020 and presented the Aribtrum projects, and its goals to solve the scalability of Ethereum.
How does this benefit me?
Ok, that's all great. Where's the value? The value as I mentioned before lies in the contracts. The biggest market for contracts lies in derivatives which is one quadrillion (Yes, you read that right). If the projection by the experts that the WEF polled is right, then it follows that the derivatives market will follow along in doing their transactions and contracts in the blockchain (smart contracts). We're already seeing rate of adoption increasing of companies adopting this technology, and to summarise, Chainlink will be to the blockchain as google is to the internet, and this is actually an underestimation in my opinion. See the value of a contract here. Since the link tokens will be staked and providing a safety to the contracts value, and the supply is fixed, it's reasonably to assume that the chainlink tokens will mirror that of the average contract price, and more once the derivatives market starts issuing future bonds and contracts, on the blockchain. The token are still available on exchanges, both centralised and decentralised, but the number is gradually dwindling, as of writing this now, there's only 13% of the supply left on the exchanges. The link token is fixed at 1 billion. You can purchase it, on kraken, coinbase, or gemini.
It's not too late.
No, they have an annoying tendency to always schedule a maintanence period and then you can't withdraw. If you want something more legit, I would go with kraken.com, though binance does allows you to buy without KYC yourself. So if you have crypto instead of fiat then it makes more sense to deposit on binance and buy link from there, and then withdraw it as soon as possible. Not your keys, not your tokens as they say.
I already have an account with them and deposited money. But if I buy it and withdraw it to a wallet that should be good, right?
Yeah that's fine.
Apart from LINK which of those do you think has the most potential?
The SEC thing, is just FUD. Chainlink is registered in the Caymen Islands, they refused U.S. citizens to participate in the ICO, it's a utility token and not a currency, and they never talked about price. Unlike Ripple which promised buyers that XRP would go up. Don't worry about Chainlink mate, every major institutions are going to use it, or are already using it. They got their ducks in the row. The main thing you will encounter with Chainlink, is that there's still a lot of FUD from 2018 floating around, that was intentionally written by the LINK marines, to FUD "normies" to use that term away from the project and keep the price as low as possible to accumulate as long as possible.
Once it stabilises, alts will pick up.
LINK over $35 now
