Status:
Some things verified first-hand. Explored guardian node economics - updating this periodically - interested in the potential of Theta as a technology and of Theta and Tfuel tokens as investments.
Other Reviews:
Coinbureau Review of Theta Token
Binance Research Review of Theta Token
Basic Info:
Theta is a decentralized content distribution network, with a micropayments network built in. It might potentially be used as a infrastructure layer for store-and-forward, or live and interactive video content.
Whitepaper: https://github.com/thetatoken/theta-protocol-ledger/blob/master/docs/theta-technical-whitepaper.pdf
Theta Github: https://github.com/thetatoken
US Patents: Three of these. Here's the latest one. Not sure these influence anyone but the VCs.
Notes on Tfuel/Theta token economy:
From a Theta Labs Medium Channel Post on Theta Fuel:
"THETA is used strictly for staking and securing the network, while TFUEL is used to power microtransactions and operations of the network. [Theta - governance token; Tfuel - Operational Token]"
Tfuel is used to pay relayers.
5 tfuel were issued to every holder of 1 Theta token when the mainnet launched.
USD price of Theta coin is currently at .22 today (first draft of this document).
There is a 5% inflation rate for Tfuel built into the system. After a year there should be 5,000,000,000 Tfuel initially created plus 250,000,000 newly created during that year.
Tfuel will get burned up in transactions.
Regarding supply and cap, section 3 of the binance analysis analyzes the Theta token only, not Tfuel. This is hardly a decentralized autonomous system, though. It is a certainty that Theta Labs could change the supply - we have to assume that they are a counterparty.
Reddit heresay: 60 % of the free trading shares are staked with a 2-day wait to sell. Of the 1B coins authorized, Theta Networks is holding a massive % of those back.
I can't verify any of that heresay. It doesn't seem to jive to me that Theta Las is holding tokens out of circulation. I could not discover proof that new tokens could not e issued, so it hardly matters until and if I can get that done.
Partnerships:
Unclear what the partnership is with Google - but I think that's a google employee saying that Google agrees to maintain a relayer:
https://www.coindesk.com/google-signs-on-as-network-validator-for-blockchain-video-network-theta
They have a number of other partnerships with big players - mostly of that type.
Samsung is an investor, along with a slew of VC-type orgs. It seems that there is a lot of interest.
Valuation:
Youtube is currently a 15billion dollar business.
Thetacoin market cap is currently 222MM (update Oct 7 - over 700MM) (update May 18 - almost 10B) (update May 24, back down to 6.4B - that's crypto markets for you :) )
There are a few different ways to look at the utility value of this token to those would pay to have content delivered. We could ask what content providers would pay, for instance:
What would Youtube pay for the infrastructure to deliver all of the video content they deliver? Obviously, less than 15B. How about all of the store and forward video content out there combined (netflix, amazon, etc)? Maybe 50B. What percentage of that market could Theta serve with a 10x reduction in cost in the next 20 years? Maybe 25%. So in todays dollars, 12.5B. Future value of 12.5 at 5% over 20 years is: 33.16. Growing market, high chance of disruption, low chance of taking that market share.
The total value of the network to the planet, if successful, might be in that ballpark. Tfuel could conceivably represent that in it's yearly turnover. the THETA token itself is a token that pays for the security of the network - and there is some value in having a more secure and decentralized network - so has utility - but - as it is largely a "manifested" value - it's very hard to guess at.
Running nodes:
Running a theta node on your laptop: Probably o.k. On a gig connection to the net, will take a day or so to sync the net as of this writing. Thankfully it uses only one CPU. (update Oct 7 - don't try this)
Running a theta guardian node on google cloud - est cost 200USD per month. I got a test node up and running fairly quickly. However:
Just looking at the Google Cloud pricing for my guardian node, and the Tfuel earnings at https://guardianmonitor.io/, which I assume is normalized into USD, it looks like you need 600K staked in a GCP node to earn back the 200USD per month that it takes to run one.
So don't try that, either, unless you are able to stake enough theta to make it worth it to you v. other staking opportunities.
Community:
For running nodes - it's all on slack.
There is a discord channel on the webpage for other stuff.
There is a telegram channel, but I have not seen any theta network people post there. I do see people respond with spam after every post I make, or try to get me to join a staking pool, but that's about all there is.
There is a support email address: support@thetatoken.org
Trading:
It appears that theta is avoiding us exchange listings.
As of this writing, if you are in the US, you can trade theta token and tfuel on godex.io, which doesn't seem to be transparent in the least. The chinese version of binance also trades theta and tfuel. ( Update Oct 7 - rumors are that coinbase will add support soon - but that is hearsay )
(Update May 18 - now also supported on simpleswap.io and a few other exchanges.)
Guardian Node Notes (old):
The instructions for GCP are fairly simple and work.
However, the supplied node I tried had a number of problems:
In your group and shadow files, you will note that the outsourced devops team that put this together left all their logins in every node. I removed those:
floppy:x:25:ubuntu,sekhar_mandapati,yash_mujumdar,ishaqshaikh,ishaq_shaikh,dion,richbodo
Automatic security updates, a one minute application, was not enabled.
I also had to work on the firewall and a bunch of other stuff. This is just not where we want to be right now with this image.
I'm sure they will fix that - they did respond on slack that this was being looked into.
Team:
The Theta team I communicated with was responsive, overworked, and capable. They are getting things done. I dig these guys.
The main things that concern me about Theta are the private sale, VC involvement, and centralization. Not deal breakers, just things that I don't understand fully and that make Theta labs a source of counterparty risk.
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