With all the ranting and speculation, very little has been said of what it would actually mean for Steem users to migrate to the Tron blockchain. How does the Tron ecosystem work? What benefits and disadvantages does it have?
As someone who practically begin his blockchain journey on the Tron network, I think I might provide some useful information to those who are curious.
Disclaimer: I am not in favor or against Steem joining Tron, I will remain an observer for the moment being. This is just informative and a little of my own experience.
This post contains information on:
- TronLink Wallet
- TronScan
- Bandwidth and Energy
- Super Representatives (SR)
- Tron Power and Voting for SR
- Personal experiences
TronLink
There are too many wallets that interact with the Tron ecosystem to go into describing them all, especially on mobile devices. Personally I use TronLink wallet which has proven to be easy, intuitive and reliable so far. It can be used as an extension for Google Chrome and has apps for Android and iOS.
TronScan
You can use TronScan as a browser-based wallet but it is also the official browser for the blockchain. It has many functions, sort of like Steemd and Steemworld put together in the sense that it holds all block transaction information, as well as your personal interactions with the network.
Bandwidth and Energy
As soon as you open up your wallet you will see two bars: Bandwidth and Energy which are key to interacting with the Tron ecosystem:
Bandwidth: Allows you to perform transactions in the network. You immediately receive 5000 points of bandwidth that are constantly regenerating and most transactions consume roughly 200 points of bandwidth. That gives you approximately 25 free transactions daily. You can freeze TRX (the main Tron token) to get more of this, but unless you are gambling it’s probably not necessary.
Energy: This is a fickle one! Energy is used for smart contracts and is obtained by freezing TRX . Some smart contracts can burn a LOT of energy. For example, I have 1,000 TRX frozen which gives me nearly 50,000 energy points but I have run into smart contracts that burn up to 150,000 energy points!
If you don’t know what a smart contract is I suggest watching this clear and detailed explanation.
So, what happens if the smart contract demands more energy than you have available? It burns up your TRX! Without warning! Major downvote for the Tron network! For every 1,000 energy points you are missing it will burn 0.1 TRX off your wallet. Of course, if you’re a whale it won’t matter much, but for us small hodlers it stacks up and can eventually hurt. This is the reason why it’s recommended to freeze at least 2,500 TRX which is currently worth 50 USD, approx.
And it gets worse! If you don’t have enough energy points nor enough TRX, it will burn up all the energy and TRX you have without completing the smart contract! I had to find that out the hard way, because no one tells you this!
Tron Power and Super Representatives
On the bright side, freezing your TRX grants you Tron Power (yes, just like Steem Power), which enables you to vote for Super Representatives (similar to Witnesses) or SR for short. Since the SR distribute a big chunk of their profits to the community, you will be receiving dividends every 6 hours which are pretty small, but hey, it’s something.
Super Representatives are similar to Steem Witnesses in the sense that they make proposals for the network and produce blocks through Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) consensus mechanism.
However, they are different than Witnesses as anyone can be a candidate provided you have 9999 TRX to burn. Just by being a candidate you already begin receiving rewards but you have to make it to the top 27 to become a SR.
Some SR even give out tokens if they are working on a particular project that uses that asset. For example, if I vote for the BeatzCoin SR, they will airdrop me their token that is used in a site called VibraVid, a music and video sharing platform.
All of this freezing and voting business is done through TronScan. There you can check blocks, nodes, SR proposals and all sorts of fun stuff to improductively burn through your day.
Personal experiences
Many of you might be aware that currently most Tron dapps are all about gambling. Casinos can be a good way to generate passive income but I recomend doing research first as there are big scams just waiting for someone to bite.
I had a sour experience on BetFury, where at first I saw they had big dividends and with a pretty stable amount daily so I decided to go big on it. They even publicitized a 300% APR when I entered. I mined the tokens and burnt around 5000 TRX, only to see that the dividends started to dramatically drop. Suddenly the APR became 150% and then 84%, until finally there was no mention of APR on the site. Currently I am getting only a 10% of the original daily dividends I was supposed to get.
But that’s not Tron’s fault, it’s just to illustrate the kind of stuff you might find in the network and I think that is largely due to the lack of a community there to regulate it. If a strong community such as the one we have at Steem was to participate, I’m sure scammers would be exposed quickly and this kind of dapps would start to make sure they delivered what they promised.
So that’s what I can offer regarding Tron network. If you plan to interact with it, be careful, as it is incredibly shady compared to Steem. Here, it’s the helpful people who offer value to the community who thrive, while Tron is full of misguiding and unreliable gambling dapps with no sense of community.
I was thinking of adding a list of dapps I’ve tried out on Tron and share my opinions on them but that makes for an entire post. If you’re interested on that content let me know, I’ll do it if there are enough requests.