In Taipei, the kin/kik ICO, (or much more blandly, the "token distribution event") took place at 9pm tonight - about two hours ago.

I had a kind of businessey dinner at the Grand Hyatt at 6. I didn't want to be late getting home and onto my business of buying in, but dinner was getting on, and around 7:30 I started to get antsy. Ok, we wrap up but the guy who was supposed to pay the bill tells me that he left his wallet in the car! Everyone else had left, and he wanted me to hold down the table while he ran back to his car to get his wallet.

Ok, I said, but I thought it might be some kind of scam. He left his bag behind as an assurance to me that it was not, as we have only recently met.

But man, I felt like I was waiting at that table for ever. Actually it was just fifteen minutes, from 7:45 to 8, but it felt like forever!

It turns out that he didn't park his car in the hotel garage, but somewhere way down the street instead. He didn't know he got three hours free parking for eating in the restaurant. It was was a pricey place. Just to give you an idea, my beer was $9 USD.

Not to mention that service in general just seemed super slow tonight. It took them for ever to bring me that beer. There were hardly any other customers around. It was just one of those kinds of nights when everything moved slow as molasses.

I wanted it to be 9:00 so I could be at home and buy my kin and be done with it! (Ok, there's more to tonight's story that was fascinating to me, like the people that I met, but that's for later.)

How I ended up here

I've been here on Steemit for about a week or so, and it is cool, totally. But it could be better. And some bigtime competition just arrived in the form of Kik and their $1.25B implied valuation.

Just as a point of information, I heard about Steem because of kin. When I read the whitepaper about what kik wants to do I just about jizzed my pants! It is so obviously the solution to busting the facebook monopoly.

Up until that point, I had been following bitcoin and ethereum, but none of the other cryptos, really. The kik ICO is what really brought me into learning more about ICOs, and the ERC-20 standard, and why that makes Ethereum the top network for token sales... for now at least.

I read an article in the Coin Telegraph on analysts favorite coins and why. It was fascinating. There were 3 or 4 analysts talking about which coins they like from an investment standpoint, and why. It was a very helpful article for me, a nice doorway for further research. I really love that site because of the pictures. They are always so random and bizarre and stylisticly unique.

Here's the article:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/insider-crypto-tips-who-to-back-for-big-bucks

And here's the picture:

Image source Coin Telegraph

The picture is so radical: Mmmm! Pancakes and flavored sugar water!

Here's what it says about Steem:

“Imagine if your social media posts could earn you money based on how popular they were. Imagine if you could get paid as tastemaker and curator of content published by others. Now what if the content creators kept 100 percent of the ownership rights to their content, and there were no advertisers or special interests getting between creators and fans? Steem is the first utility token that is truly being used for this function. Platforms like Reddit, Medium, and even Facebook should be nervous.”

And I just about jizzed my pants again! Seriously, I was that excited, and I high tailed it over here, and here I am.

But I really feel like I'm here on kind of a stopover, on my way to what kin is going to be. (Who knows, maybe I'll stay. Maybe I'll have a home in both camps. Who knows what tomorrow brings.)

The only thing I know is that we're living in a fast changing world. Competition is coming, and this place is still in beta. Hell, in that respect, competition is good. Competition makes both parties better for it, and it makes for a better user experience.

That being said, there is an incredible amount of competition going on in the token/currency space in general. It is like the 1999 Nasdaq all over again. There is some serious grain here, but also lots and lots of chaff.

The coins I came away with as most interesting on my first pass are:

• Omise Go
• Ripple
• Waves
• Steem (of course)
• Litecoin
• Veritaseum
• Bancor
• Monero

I have a good gut feeling about a couple of them, but it is early, there is still so much risk. There is business risk (i.e., oops! chose the wrong business model!), management risk (the CEO is a drunk), market risk (the bubble pops), regulatory risks (the governments declare war on cryptos), etc. There are other kinds of risks I haven't thought of. There is the opportunity cost of you spending you time here instead of somewhere else, like on AI, or IoT, which are also revolutions of their own.

All that being said, I like boldness of action, and for that reason I like Steem and Steemit. I'm curious to see what kik rolls out. In a lot of ways, they should just flat out copy a lot of what the facebook does, but make it clear that the users are maintaining control of their data.

Some things need to be figured out for this Steemit / kik model of allowing users to capture the value they create on a social network. For example, there needs to be more ways to filter content here. I would like to see a stream of the most recent comments -- comments are great entry points for conversations.

Maybe we should start a Steemit improvement project, or a kind of suggestion box. Something that should be super easy would be to be able to sticky a post at the top of your blog. But that's for the comments, or another thread.

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At any rate, long story short. I got home by about 8:45. I bought a few beers at the grocery store, which I'm drinking now.

I bought 10 ETH worth of kin, or about $3,000 USD. It was done in 2 batches of 5 because I didn't add enough gas to the first transaction, and it was taking forever to get verified. So I did a second transaction of 5, added more gas, and they both cleared a few minutes after that.

After that I bought about $500 worth of Steem. The only reason I bought less is that there is the possibility that I could earn some here, and I'm interested in cracking that code. My next purchase is probably going to be Omise go. They seem to have a good shot at capturing the Asian payments market. They are big in Thailand, because one of the founders is Thai, and the other founder is Japanese, which should help them in Japan. If they can land Indonesia... Indonesia has 250 million people! Who needs China if you have everyone in Asia but?

I'm open to hearing your opinions on any of these matters. Especially other favored tokens / altcoins and why.

Whatever happens, I have a couple of new interesting stories to follow in Steem and kin. Another beat. The crypto beat!

Ok, I'm babbling now, I better hit the sack.

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BTW, I made the below graphic because I saw other people on here using similar devices. I thought I should try it out. What do you think? Are such organic, inline ads helpful?

Good night Steemit. Say hello to your new, potentially very large (as in valued at $1.25 billion), baby brother, kik. Keep an eye on him. I will be.

Follow me @taipeibeat