I have been interested in looking into Tron for awhile now. Unfortunately, I didn't until recently. It seems to be an interesting project, albeit somewhat controversial. I won't go through an exhaustive outline of Tron because there are several different pieces on Publish0x that have covered it well an better than I could. However, I will highlight some of the things I liked about it.

Cliffnotes on Tron and What Attracted Me

The idea of building a "Decentralized Internet" is ambitious, and the space has some hard competition. However, Tron has some interesting features on their token side. For example, they were originally part of the Ethereum environment, but switched to their own blockchain recently. On top of this, it also runs on a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), which has many advantages over the traditional Proof of Work (PoW) models. I wanted to learn more about this and actually get in on some of that action.

If you want more information, I feel like the best thing people should do for any project is read the whitepaper and see what the crypto is all about. That's some basic advice, I know, but advice I feel like a lot of people either ignore or overlook this part because frankly... reading whitepapers is not the easiest thing in the world. In fact, you'll probably think you had a stroke. Take a look at this excerpt of Stellar Lumen's Whitepaper, defining a Federated Byzantine Agreement System:

It would seem that the Naysayers were correct. Crypto is Magical Internet Money. The major idea is to familiarize yourself with the type of technology theyre using, their expected supply, and their use case. Do these seem to be something you think would work? You might not have a crystal ball, but pulling the basics out of the whitepaper will put you ahead. I would also suggest that if you're really ambitious, have a shot at really learning the technicals and understanding it. That's not required homework. I didn't do it myself.

But I digress...

Is Tron Worth It?

That is a multiBILLION dollar question. The first thing I look at when I'm assessing the potential value is the supply. TRX has a supply of close to 99 BILLION tokens. That is a hell of a lot of tokens. However, TRX has several mechanisms in place that will actually "burn" tokens over time. Some of these include becoming a Super Representative (which you vote on for rewards - read ahead) which burns 9999 TRX. There is also times when the Tron Foundation may burn tokens for a particular reason, as they had on several occasions in the past. This means a permanent reduction in supply can eventually place the TRX in a more reasonable territory.

But let's assume it didn't.

It would appear that one of the best models showing Bitcoin price trajectory is the Stock to Flow Model. Basically, as we approach the halvening event in may for Bitcoin, this will affects the "in-flows" and "out-flows" of people buying bitcoin. Integrate this with FOMO, regular day trading, and even a higher rate of adoption (Remember, crypto still has less than 1% adoption worldwide), we could be looking at BTC potentially reaching prices of 100k USD or more. This is why in the long term, even for high supply coins, it would be okay to expect a reasonable increase at some point. What's a coin market cap of 100 billion, when BTC's cap is at a trillion? High supply coins are long term bets, at least in this author's humble opinion. I'm fine with being wrong, and this is definitely not financial advice. This is why I think within the next five years, it would be completely okay to suggest that TRX could reach anywhere from 0.50 USD to 1.00 USD. Cool. Burn  significant amount of coins and you could have an even higher price. Double Cool.

Finally, the biggest thing about Tron that I enjoy; Their TPS, or Transactions Per Second. Their whitepaper purports that Tron can get up to 2000 transactions per SECOND. Wow, that's a metric ass-ton. Compare that to Bitcoin's theoretical 27 transactions per second. Oh yeah. This was a selling point for me for the very fact that Tron is built in with scalability. That makes me happy.

My Experience

I want to buy some TRX. I have an account with Bitmart and went ahead and used some BTC from my kitty to purchase my TRX. Yay, I am now the proud owner of magic internet money.

What now?

There are quite a few wallets I could transfer to, but the option I went with was TronWallet.me It's a community developed and well respected wallet and is available on IOS/Android. They also have their own token called TWX. Cool stuff, Here's some screenshots of the wallet and voting page:

Cool stuff. I especially enjoy the dark theme. Easier on the eyes and the battery. So, after I set up the wallert and transferred my TRX from BitMart, I went ahead and Froze all of it. That gave me particular number of votes that can be applied to one of several Super Representatives, or SRs. These guys basically "win" amounts of TRX and distribute that award to others based on votes. They get their cut, and we get ours for voting. The more votes you have, the higher the reward. By the way, how much do you get.

Keep Track of Estimated Rewards!

Now there are over a hundred different special representatives for TRX. It would be hard to compile results and see who has the best rewards and perks for your vote. That's why I recommend using TokenGoodies. They keep track of all the SRs, show you the highest rewards, and even tell you who has the most reliable payouts:

Awesome. I went ahead and went with TronWalletMe because I was impressed with the wallet and because they offer an additional reward of their own tokens. That's awesome. I want some of that.

Conclusions

My experience was fun and interesting to do, but only because I put forth the effort to read into Tron and its inner workings first. I implore you kind reader:

Due diligence is key. There are rewards for the patient and the conscientious. I could be outta-my-ass wrong about all of this. After all, I'm just some guy on the internet.

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