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Welcome to unquestionably the best, cleverest and down-right coolest privacy-tech community on the planet! DarkNote (formerly known as duckNote) is an anonymous open-source cryptocurrency based on CryptoNote technology and the CryptoNight algorithm. While we take our technology seriously, we are also a very friendly and fun community. Please come in, have a seat, eat a duck or two... and join us!
I’m a commentator for a tournament of nightmares. I’m not sure the participants are willing.
You’d think being a psychiatric ward for 38 months would be enough to deter a guy from ever going back to a sport that involves watching human beings at the height of their physical prowess beat the living shit out of each other. Sometimes regulated, sometimes not. But, here I am, fresh outta the loony bin and reading the most unusual advertising slogan I’d ever laid eyes on; “The most terrifying tournament has come around once again! Conquer your fears in theNFC*…* literally.” This was the business card that accompanied my black envelope as it was handed to me on the discharge ward by a well dressed and gangly fella with an uncomfortable wide smile. He didn’t say much of anything, just that his name was “Watson” before bowing and holding up the envelope. “Heh, like the butler, right?” I said, taking the envelope from his plasticine hands. His smile ripples across his face and he nods slowly, his perfect hair unmoving in the strong wind before he turns on his heel and walks back to the black sedan. The cold air chilled my bones, and I pulled the medical bracelet from my wrist, grimacing at the marks underneath before following Watson to the Sedan and hauling my luggage into the trunk before setting off, not knowing how I came to even be there in the first place. I guess right now, that doesn’t really matter. What matters is where I am now and what I’m doing. "blood strewn across the canvas, frayed brain matter sailing across my head and splattering against the wall, a woman standing in a pool of blood as the deformed creature twitches on the ground" My name is Sal “Motormouth” Sabotta, I’m a sports commentator by trade. Be it combat sports, pro wrestling, death-matches or martial arts tournament, I’ve done it all. I won’t lie; Work can be hard to come by. I’ve spent months struggling for rent and resorting to less tried-and-true commentary methods in order to survive. That has, at times, involved trying my hand at some of the more underground competitions; unregulated fights, sick, illegal games bet on by people on the dark web and worse… Things I’m not going to detail here. Things I’m not proud to have taken a hefty pay-check for from greasy, sweaty fucks in Armani tracksuits and stinking of cheap booze and coke all the way up to well-dressed bitcoin farmers in their 20s who probably own child slaves. In short, I’m no stranger to the grim underworld or the secrecies with which they conduct their work. I see money and an easy way to make it with my voice; I don’t ask questions. So when I received an email the day of my discharge from the hospital and I’m told “you’ll receive a letter from Mr. Watson, take it and follow the instructions to the venue. Pay up front as agreed.”, I don’t question it. Especially when the note is personalised, and the doctor says my medical fees were covered. We drove past numerous landscapes, vistas and neighbourhoods before veering off into an industrial estate and entering an underground tunnel. Half a mile in, Watson stops the car and peers back, smiling. He directs a thumb to the service door in the side tunnel and rubs his neck, a scar running from ear to ear. Was he a former fighter? Gangster? I sighed and got out, still in my medical gown and hauling ass to the door. It opened before I could reach out and a tall, muscular woman in her late 30s greeted me with a smile. She was imposing, powerful in her gait, a black eyepatch with several seals adorning the sides accompanying a thick scar down her face did nothing to stop her beauty. She wore a tank top with a black cloak with white fur on the tops and sleeves, a thick black chain clasp around the neck. I won’t lie; she looked badass. Terrifying, but badass. “‘Bout time ya showed up, Sabotta!” She grinned and put a cinderblock of a hand on my shoulder. I’m 5’10 and 180lbs, but she made me feel like a child in front of her. The power emanating from her fist was unbelievable. “C’mon, the trial match is starting and I don’t want no tourney without a broken in commentator! You gotta know the ropes of this place!” “You know your driver was standing right outside when I was discharged, right? Couldn’t think to give me an extra day or two to freshen up?” I frowned. This wasn’t normal protocol, even for back-alley promotions like this. She just laughed at me and slapped my shoulder. “The tournament waits for nobody, Sal. Times a-wasting.” The hallway is dimly lit and the sounds of a ruckus above us are as impossible to ignore as the sounds of thudding, screaming and snapping. As we pass several doors with one-way mirrors on the front panes, I hear sounds I could have never placed in the animal kingdom or otherwise; gurgles, clicks, grunts and even otherworldly whispers. “What the fuck is that? You guys doing animal fights down here? I mean I called a monkey fight once, but it’s not exactly… pleasant.” I shuddered, thinking of the violence chimpanzees can inflict on one another, let alone humans. She never stopped walking or staring directly ahead when she responded.“Those ain’t animals. Not by a long shot.” Before I can probe further, I’m hurried into a changing room and practically swept off my feet by her strength. I turn back and she’s already poking her head out the door. “You’ve got 5 minutes, get your shit and head up the left stairs, Watson will guide you.” She grinned, and I saw gold filings in her teeth that glinted as much as her bedazzled eye patch. “Ya came highly recommended… I expect good things!” I do as instructed and within 5 minutes I’m back in my commentary clothes; an open buttoned Hawaiian shirt with my old Hotel Inertia shirt underneath, skinny black jeans and shimmering black shoes. I found some old slick gorilla powder in my hair and dusted it up, opting for the dishevelled look as I knew I’d be sweating by the end of the ordeal. “You shouldn’t bother putting in so much effort, y’know. They’re not gonna care how good you look, only how well you talk.” Standing in the doorway was a woman in her 40s, dark-skinned and hair clad in meticulous dreadlocks, tied back into a large bun with a pair draped down the sides of her head. She held a thick book in one hand and pocketed a serrated blade in the other before motioning to me. “We’ll have to do the pleasantries on the way, the match is starting and you don’t wanna miss that. The commissioner isn’t the type you want to upset. Especially when you’re not here by choice.” I looked for a moment, dumbfounded. “I’m here because I was invited, already got my pay from the woman who let me in.” I shrugged, pocketing the envelope and getting my equipment from the suitcase. The woman gave a sad smile and shook her head. “Of course you’d think that. She likes it that way. Bet she didn’t introduce herself either, did she? C’mon.” I follow her down and after a few minutes we come to a fork in the hallway, an elevator system to our right and a stairway to the left. Dutifully, Watson stood patiently, still grinning and motioning us to go up. Once we’re situated in our booth upstairs, I set my equipment up and look down at the table, expecting a slew of papers and fighter information in front of me. I look to the woman to ask, but she doesn’t break her stare in the darkness, looking down at the arena floor some 100ft below us.“You won’t need that. Not for this match.” The lights flicker on and the enormity of this venue reveals itself to me. It’s a structure of imposing steel, dried blood, claw marks and other unknown substances that littered the 40ft wide circular pit the fighters contested in, a black lift on either side from the fighters corners that I can only assume ascended up from their locker room area. Around them were chain-link fences that rose up to the audience stands above, situating around 300 people across all four sides. At the very top sat our booth, the commissioner’s office directly opposite, the judges booth to our right and the fight analysts/medical area to our left. Standing in the centre with a spotlight over them was the commissioner, microphone in hand and an energy that was almost palpable. “Ladies, Gentlemen and Freaks of all kinds out there in the universe. I welcome you once more to the annual Nightmare Fighting Championship Tournament! It’s been a long year, but we have new blood to pit against our resident night terrors and some fresh fears to feast on the fortuitous soul that frolics into their den. As always, our contestants will be fighting for their freedom, a chance to get their wish or to fight for the ultimate prize.” The crowd cheers and the majority are hidden behind thick plexiglass and lighting, but I can see some have Karate Gi’s, weapons in hand and others with demon masks as they whoop and holler. The clientele here were, at least in my estimation, experienced. But I was feeling a lump in my throat at that one phrase The Commissioner so surreptitiously added in without issue; “As always, our contestants will befightingfor theirfreedom*”* I leaned to the woman next to me and as if she knew what I was going to ask; she put a finger up and shook her head. Eyes awash with fear and a grimness I had only seen on that of trainers who knew their fighter was not ready for the bout ahead. She pointed the finger down to my machine, then to the pit. Turning it on, I looked down as the commissioner began to talk, readying myself to commentate on whatever weirdos came up to battle. “But before we get to that, we have an exciting exhibition match for our loyal supporters who bankroll this event every year. Without you elite few, we could not do this. You are the pound for pound goats of support! Now, without further ado; let’s get this show on the road!”The rest of the lights clicked on and spun around the venue as they raised the profile of the bout, the elevators both whirring into action as the right one arose first. “In this corner, from the marionettes shop and accompanied by his Bunraku doll “Mr. Stares”, it’s the man who pulls the strings… THE PUPPET MAN!” Out steps a tall, thin Japanese man in full clown makeup. His head shaven save for two ridiculous strands of hair stretched out and fluffed up to their limits, like red antennae. His eyebrows large m’s that practically cover his forehead, the nose a completely vacant slot with a black hole drawn in and the mouth… the fucking mouth was nailed shut. Literally. Sharp rusted nails had been hammered down through the lips with such force that they’d bent. A sickening crimson red face-paint stretched across the entire bottom half of his face, making it seem far larger by comparison. He carefully held a small bundle underneath a sheet and bowed deeply to the audience before standing at his designated spot. “In the other corner, from the streets of god knows where and the womb of someone who misses him… "Hulked Up" Michael O’Donnell!” I watched with wide eyes and a stomach threatening to evacuate its contents at any moment as the smoke cleared and a boy no older than 17 rushed out, beating his chest and screaming to the crowd as if he was the Incredible Hulk. I don’t know if they drugged the poor kid, but he clearly had no idea where he was. “There are no rules, no referees and judges only exist in case of a draw or unclear victory. Our commentary team will take over and we wish you a phenomenal match.” She drools a little before she speaks again, looking up at me and winking. “Let’s make this a violent one.” She snaps her fingers and leaps for the fence, climbing up with ungodly ease before sitting on her makeshift chair in her office. I have no idea what I’m seeing but every cell in my body is urging me to run; I feel my knees tense and my frame rise ever so slightly before the woman next to me puts her hand on my thigh, pushing me down with great force. “You have a job to do, so do I. Trust me, you think you can leave but if you get out of this chair, not only will YOUR life end. Mine will too.” She unsheathes the serrated blade and looks at me with pity. “We both have a part to play here, so put the headset on and let’s do our job, no matter how hard it is.” Hands shaking, I pick up the headset and connect it to the portable recorder and take a breath. “I… I need your name. What is it you do?” I stutter, trying to calm myself. She hands me a bottle of water as the surrounding lights dim and the spotlight focuses on the spectacle below. “I’m Madame Nelle Lockwood, cryptid hunter and your co-host to guide you through tonight. Good to meet you, Sal.” - NFC EXHIBITION MATCH: "Hulked Up" Michael O’Donnell vs The Puppet Man w/ Mr. Stares “Welcome fight fans from around the world, god knows how you’re listening to this or WHY, but here we are. I’m your host Sal “MotorMouth” Sabotta, wishing this was all a bad dream. Joining me this evening is our cryptid specialist and all round badass Madame Nelle Lockwood. How are you doing, Nelle?” She looks at me with a bewildered look on her face before blinking and coming to her senses. “Uhh… good! All things considered… boy, you really have a professional knack for this, huh? I can see why Commissioner Alduin brought you in." “Ahh, yes. That’s right, folks! NFC Commissioner Alduin invited me here personally and our exhibition match proves to be… challenging. Let’s check in on the action below.” I look down and see The Puppet Man sat down and gesturing to the figure under the sheet, like he’s got a negotiation going on. The boy, undeterred and furious, rushes towards him and takes his back, slapping his head and even pulling on his hair with extreme prejudice. “Well take a gander at that, that kid has absolutely NO fear. When I was his age, I would have stayed FAR the fuck away from a nightmare spectre like that. But hell, this is all part of the show, right? Hope they’re paying that poor guy down there a sizeable sum to throw a fight to a child. What do you think, Nelle; is this the weirdest make-a-wish fulfilment task or what?” I look over to her, hoping she’d indulge me and that I could believe this was just going to end with a pissed off actor storming away when the child hit him too hard. But Nelle was scanning her now open book and looking for information on dolls. “He’s talking to his doll because it’s desperate to be let loose. He’s trying to bargain with it to spare him. This is the nature of the puppeteer and his master.” She pushes the book to the centre of the table and shows me a faded illustration of a pristine Bunraku doll; a kind of meticulously crafted Japanese take on the ventriloquist doll. The limbs are thinner and the face is more minimalist, but still no more frightening. “They usually have a symbiotic relationship, but it seems this one obeys the doll and will not want to face more punishment.” “What do you mean more punishment?” I ask, looking back down at the feverish puppet man as he tries signing frantically under the sheet, even putting his head under as the kid bites his arm and kicks him, screeching. “The nails, Sal. Those aren’t to silence him, they’re to punish him.” The rest happened in slow motion; the sheet fell down. The puppet man stood up and walked to his side of the fighters corner, facing the elevator and placing his face into his forearms as he shook. The boy followed to keep attacking, but with one swift kick to the midsection, the boy was propelled back to the centre of the pit where the doll sat. If there was a human face, I didn’t see it. Instead, I was staring down at a small wood carved spider, the head sporting black geisha hair and the makeup still present, but rows of sharpened black teeth protruded from the clicking mouth and two larger eyes jutted out from the base of the skull, smaller ones dotted closely around it. It was like seeing a puppet ogre spider. “Looks like The Puppet Man has let Mr. Stares out to say hi and I can certainly see why he was under that sheet, this one isn’t pretty folks! The face doth fit the name. The question is, what’s he doing to do ne- “I didn’t need to finish the question. My hands shook, and the world spun around me as this creature crawled towards the still wheezing boy with ungodly speed and perched itself expertly beside him. I don’t know if it was my eyes or the distance from where I sat, but this was NOT a small puppet. He was easily half of the boy’s height and that became more unnerving when he reared up on his back legs, the head clicking up and the raspy voice hissing out like a gas leak in a building. “Hey, hey, kid! Wanna make a deal?” The kid rubbed his eyes, seemingly realising where he was as he calmed down and an air of utter confusion around him. “If you let me be your new master and you promise to take care of me, I’ll let you go!” His head spun around and the jaw clicked ferociously as he giggled, extending out a clawed paw. “Whaddya say?” The boy, still confused, slowly reached out his hand and the moment immediately reminded me of a slew of nature shows I’d seen as a kid; where a predator waits until the prey is lulled before striking. I felt the chill up my spine as he extended his hand and grabbed Mr. Stares. In that moment, he leapt up the arm and bore his way into the boy’s mouth, down his throat and shredded his flesh. The sound was so horrifying, so visceral that it outshines any backyard stabbing, joint snap or broken nose. The boy didn’t even have time to scream, he simply looked up with tear-stained eyes as the puppet disappeared. Then he started walking without him realising. He looked down at his limbs, terrified, looked over at The Puppet Master, who still had his head to the elevator and pleaded with someone, anyone to help him. I looked to Nelle who refused to take her eyes away, studying the battle in an almost morbid scientific curiosity, detached entirely from the scenario. I couldn’t fathom how she did it, how she ignored this boy begging us to get him out of there. I wanted to. Every instinct in me as a fight fan and a decent human was to scream “STOP THE FIGHT!”. But clearly, when my own life is at risk and money is involved... I am not a decent human. Instead, with bile in my throat and a sweating forehead, I did my job. “M-My goodness! The P-uppet, I mean, “Mr. Stares” has BECAME the puppet master, surely the fight will be over with our young competitor incapacitated? What does our commissioner have to say about this?” She stared at me, her one eye gleaming and her face elated with the violence. “It ain’t over yet, church boy. We haven’t even seen the finale, have we Puppet Master?!” She laughs and slaps her knee, the puppet master sobbing as he sinks to the floor and she continues. “He ain’t done feeding, not yet.” The way she said that word “feeding” nearly made me lose what food I had in me. That was a young man, somebody's baby boy… “What does she mean by that, Nelle? What is the strategy to victory here?” Nelle looked down at her book and traced her finger across a passage before wiping her forehead and pushing the locks aside. If her composure wasn’t breaking yet, it would do soon. “This kind of parasitic doll feasts on its prey and targets non-essential organs first, controls the host with the neurotoxin in its tail and then, when it’s finally content, it gives the brain a second injection.” “What happens then?” I asked, my own professionalism hanging on by a fucking thread at this point. She shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose.“I guess you’ll see in a moment, I sure as hell don’t want to. Not again.” Before I can prompt her further, the boy lets out an ear-piercing shriek and falls to his knees, gripping at his head before it turned red, then purple and finally an ugly shade of puce before… The sound of a watermelon hitting the ground from a great height is the best comparison you’re going to get without making me want to rush to the toilet to puke for a third time. But that’s what happened. His head burst and chunks of his skull, flesh and brain matter sprayed the pit and the walls, some hitting my desk and making me audibly shriek, much to the commissioner's delight. “HA! You didn’t run! I like you, Sal. You pass for the tournament!” She hauls her body up and slams down to the pit, applauding as the microphone descends from the heavens. “And your winner; The Puppet Man and Mr. Stares!” The crowd erupts with applause as the weeping puppet man pulls the blood-soaked puppet out, places him under the sheet and silently begins to walk back to the elevator while attendees clear up the boy’s corpse. “What… what the fuck IS this place?” I ask Nelle, pausing my recording. “This is where nightmares are kept and set upon mostly unwilling competitors for the world’s amusement. You HAVE done dark web fights before, right? Mafia snitches being put into lions pits, bum fights, addicts fighting women to score… this can’t be THAT unusual to you?” I stared at her incredulously. Was that even a question? “I did the dark web ONCE and it damn sure didn’t involve monsters!” She scoffs and closes her book, stretching before looking at me with contempt. “Oh, it did. Just not the ones you hear about in fairytales. Good luck with the selection process. I’ll be back for the opening round. Don’t try to run, they’ll devour us both in minutes, if you think this is the pinnacle of what lurks beneath this club, you're in for a rough night.” She sauntered off, leaving me deflated, sickened and terrified. Unable to leave and frustrated to the point of tears that I couldn’t express that concoction of emotions, I did what I always do; I regressed and pressed “record” on the device as Commissioner Alduin continued. At that moment, however, I was deaf to it all. The gravity of the situation had fully enveloped me… They weren’t kidding about the unwilling participants, I just didn’t realise I would be one of them.On every side of me sits men and women with a desire for violence that goes beyond the norm, beyond the sane and beyond the boundaries of humanity.Below me are an untold number of creatures rattling their cages and howling for blood. Across from me is a woman so powerful she could crush my skull beneath her boot with the utmost ease if it so amused her. That invitation was nothing more than my own ransom note in pretty colours and flattering platitudes. I was in a tournament housing nightmares incarnate. And it would only get more violent from here on out. - The opening round was a blood bath.
Ok, A little backround. I know hardware and networking. I can build just about any config of a computer. I understand overclocking and undervolting. I can invest around 2,700 for initial investment. So do I buy hardware to build a GPU miner with at least 6 cards or more? Probably RX580 as they are cheap and I have one in my rig. More on that later. Or do I a Asic miner like this I understand a GPU miner is multiple coins and not Bitcoin, and Asic is nothing but Bitcoin. I've done the math on the Asic miner and the ROI in about 3 months with a net gain of about ~10,000 USD a year @ .13 cents per Watt. I've had a hard time finding a solid or semi way of calculating the earnings for a GPU miner. Not only because it is many coins or dedicated to one coin, but there our other variables involved. However I have more control of the hardware if it fails. I dipped my toe into mining with my own rig that has a RX580 fatboy and a AMD Phenom ii x4 955 black edition. I overclocked the GPU and undervolted the CPU to reduce heat since it was hitting 62 cel. The GPU gets 12.5 sol/s and the CPU was getting ~322 h/s. All this added up to ~170 watts and a net of .00218322 BTC/Month. This was all done using Cudo as it was easy to find and setup just to test. This was just a test to see how it would work. I wouldn't use Cudo to full scale as it is a pool and the transfer to a Wallet is pretty steep in relationship to earns. I understand that in a pool you get your share based upon how much of the "work" you did to get find block. So do I build or buy? With that much computation power do I need to join a pool? What software is best for pool or alone? I am comfortable with CLI as long as it's well documented, but would like a remote GUI. Also what is the best wallet with the best fees for transactions. Currently using uphold since I use Brave. I think I covered as much as I could, if you have any questions let me know. Any advice would be great. If I should post this else where let me know please or I could just cross post it. TIA. Be safe, stay safe! Edit: Words and BTC earning was WAY off then I first typed this.
Don't blindly follow a narrative, its bad for you and its bad for crypto in general
I mostly lurk around here but I see a pattern repeating over and over again here and in multiple communities so I have to post. I'm just posting this here because I appreciate the fact that this sub is a place of free speech and maybe something productive can come out from this post, while bitcoin is just fucking censorship, memes and moon/lambo posts. If you don't agree, write in the comments why, instead of downvoting. You don't have to upvote either, but when you downvote you are killing the opportunity to have discussion. If you downvote or comment that I'm wrong without providing any counterpoints you are no better than the BTC maxis you despise. In various communities I see a narrative being used to bring people in and making them follow something without thinking for themselves. In crypto I see this mostly in BTC vs BCH tribalistic arguments: - BTC community: "Everything that is not BTC is shitcoin." or more recently as stated by adam on twitter, "Everything that is not BTC is a ponzi scheme, even ETH.", "what is ETH supply?", and even that they are doing this for "altruistic" reasons, to "protect" the newcomers. Very convenient for them that they are protecting the newcomers by having them buy their bags - BCH community: "BTC maxis are dumb", "just increase block size and you will have truly p2p electronic cash", "It is just that simple, there are no trade offs", "if you don't agree with me you are a BTC maxi", "BCH is satoshi's vision for p2p electronic cash" It is not exclusive to crypto but also politics, and you see this over and over again on twitter and on reddit. My point is, that narratives are created so people don't have to think, they just choose a narrative that is easy to follow and makes sense for them, and stick with it. And people keep repeating these narratives to bring other people in, maybe by ignorance, because they truly believe it without questioning, or maybe by self interest, because they want to shill you their bags. Because this is BCH community, and because bitcoin is censored, so I can't post there about the problems in the BTC narrative (some of which are IMO correctly identified by BCH community), I will stick with the narrative I see in the BCH community. The culprit of this post was firstly this post by user u/scotty321"The BTC Paradox: “A 1 MB blocksize enables poor people to run their own node!” “Okay, then what?” “Poor people won’t be able to use the network!”". You will see many posts of this kind being made by u/Egon_1 also. Then you have also this comment in that thread by u/fuck_____________1 saying that people that want to run their own nodes are retarded and that there is no reason to want to do that. "Just trust block explorer websites". And the post and comment were highly upvoted. Really? You really think that there is no problem in having just a few nodes on the network? And that the only thing that secures the network are miners? As stated by user u/co1nsurf3r in that thread:
While I don't think that everybody needs to run a node, a full node does publish blocks it considers valid to other nodes. This does not amount to much if you only consider a single node in the network, but many "honest" full nodes in the network will reduce the probability of a valid block being withheld from the network by a collusion of "hostile" node operators.
But surely this will not get attention here, and will be downvoted by those people that promote the narrative that there is no trade off in increasing the blocksize and the people that don't see it are retarded or are btc maxis. The only narrative I stick to and have been for many years now is that cryptocurrency takes power from the government and gives power to the individual, so you are not restricted to your economy as you can participate in the global economy. There is also the narrative of banking the bankless, which I hope will come true, but it is not a use case we are seeing right now. Some people would argue that removing power from gov's is a bad thing, but you can't deny the fact that gov's can't control crypto (at least we would want them not to). But, if you really want the individuals to remain in control of their money and transact with anyone in the world, the network needs to be very resistant to any kind of attacks. How can you have p2p electronic cash if your network just has a handful couple of nodes and the chinese gov can locate them and just block communication to them? I'm not saying that this is BCH case, I'm just refuting the fact that there is no value in running your own node. If you are relying on block explorers, the gov can just block the communication to the block explorer websites. Then what? Who will you trust to get chain information? The nodes needs to be decentralized so if you take one node down, many more can appear so it is hard to censor and you don't have few points of failure. Right now BTC is focusing on that use case of being difficult to censor. But with that comes the problem that is very expensive to transact on the network, which breaks the purpose of anyone being able to participate. Obviously I do think that is also a major problem, and lightning network is awful right now and probably still years away of being usable, if it ever will. The best solution is up for debate, but thinking that you just have to increase the blocksize and there is no trade off is just naive or misleading. BCH is doing a good thing in trying to come with a solution that is inclusive and promotes cheap and fast transactions, but also don't forget centralization is a major concern and nothing to just shrug off. Saying that "a 1 MB blocksize enables poor people to run their own" and that because of that "Poor people won’t be able to use the network" is a misrepresentation designed to promote a narrative. Because 1MB is not to allow "poor" people to run their node, it is to facilitate as many people to run a node to promote decentralization and avoid censorship. Also an elephant in the room that you will not see being discussed in either BTC or BCH communities is that mining pools are heavily centralized. And I'm not talking about miners being mostly in china, but also that big pools control a lot of hashing power both in BTC and BCH, and that is terrible for the purpose of crypto. Other projects are trying to solve that. Will they be successful? I don't know, I hope so, because I don't buy into any narrative. There are many challenges and I want to see crypto succeed as a whole. As always guys, DYOR and always question if you are not blindly following a narrative. I'm sure I will be called BTC maxi but maybe some people will find value in this. Don't trust guys that are always posting silly "gocha's" against the other "tribe". EDIT: User u/ShadowOfHarbringer has pointed me to some threads that this has been discussed in the past and I will just put my take on them here for visibility, as I will be using this thread as a reference in future discussions I engage:
When there was only 2 nodes in the network, adding a third node increased redundancy and resiliency of the network as a whole in a significant way. When there is thousands of nodes in the network, adding yet another node only marginally increase the redundancy and resiliency of the network. So the question then becomes a matter of personal judgement of how much that added redundancy and resiliency is worth. For the absolutist, it is absolutely worth it and everyone on this planet should do their part.
What is the magical number of nodes that makes it counterproductive to add new nodes? Did he do any math? Does BCH achieve this holy grail safe number of nodes? Guess what, nobody knows at what number of nodes is starts to be marginally irrelevant to add new nodes. Even BTC today could still not have enough nodes to be safe. If you can't know for sure that you are safe, it is better to try to be safer than sorry. Thousands of nodes is still not enough, as I said, it is much cheaper to run a full node as it is to mine. If it costs millions in hash power to do a 51% attack on the block generation it means nothing if it costs less than $10k to run more nodes than there are in total in the network and cause havoc and slowing people from using the network. Or using bot farms to DDoS the 1000s of nodes in the network. Not all attacks are monetarily motivated. When you have governments with billions of dollars at their disposal and something that could threat their power they could do anything they could to stop people from using it, and the cheapest it is to do so the better
You should run a full node if you're a big business with e.g. >$100k/month in volume, or if you run a service that requires high fraud resistance and validation certainty for payments sent your way (e.g. an exchange). For most other users of Bitcoin, there's no good reason to run a full node unless you reel like it.
Shouldn't individuals benefit from fraud resistance too? Why just businesses?
Personally, I think it's a good idea to make sure that people can easily run a full node because they feel like it, and that it's desirable to keep full node resource requirements reasonable for an enthusiast/hobbyist whenever possible. This might seem to be at odds with the concept of making a worldwide digital cash system in which all transactions are validated by everybody, but after having done the math and some of the code myself, I believe that we should be able to have our cake and eat it too.
This is recurrent argument, but also no math provided, "just trust me I did the math"
The biggest reason individuals may want to run their own node is to increase their privacy. SPV wallets rely on others (nodes or ElectronX servers) who may learn their addresses.
It is a reason and valid one but not the biggest reason
If you do it for fun and experimental it good. If you do it for extra privacy it's ok. If you do it to help the network don't. You are just slowing down miners and exchanges.
Yes it will slow down the network, but that shows how people just don't get the the trade off they are doing
I will just copy/paste what Satoshi Nakamoto said in his own words. "The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server."
Another "it is all or nothing argument" and quoting satoshi to try and prove their point. Just because every user doesn't need to be also a full node doesn't mean that there aren't serious risks for having few nodes
For this to have any importance in practice, all of the miners, all of the exchanges, all of the explorers and all of the economic nodes should go rogue all at once. Collude to change consensus. If you have a node you can detect this. It doesn't do much, because such a scenario is impossible in practice.
Not true because as I said, you can DDoS the current nodes or run more malicious nodes than that there currently are, because is cheap to do so
Non-mining nodes don't contribute to adding data to the blockchain ledger, but they do play a part in propagating transactions that aren't yet in blocks (the mempool). Bitcoin client implementations can have different validations for transactions they see outside of blocks and transactions they see inside of blocks; this allows for "soft forks" to add new types of transactions without completely breaking older clients (while a transaction is in the mempool, a node receiving a transaction that's a new/unknown type could drop it as not a valid transaction (not propagate it to its peers), but if that same transaction ends up in a block and that node receives the block, they accept the block (and the transaction in it) as valid (and therefore don't get left behind on the blockchain and become a fork). The participation in the mempool is a sort of "herd immunity" protection for the network, and it was a key talking point for the "User Activated Soft Fork" (UASF) around the time the Segregated Witness feature was trying to be added in. If a certain percentage of nodes updated their software to not propagate certain types of transactions (or not communicate with certain types of nodes), then they can control what gets into a block (someone wanting to get that sort of transaction into a block would need to communicate directly to a mining node, or communicate only through nodes that weren't blocking that sort of transaction) if a certain threshold of nodes adheres to those same validation rules. It's less specific than the influence on the blockchain data that mining nodes have, but it's definitely not nothing.
The first reasonable comment in that thread but is deep down there with only 1 upvote
The addition of non-mining nodes does not add to the efficiency of the network, but actually takes away from it because of the latency issue.
That is true and is actually a trade off you are making, sacrificing security to have scalability
The addition of non-mining nodes has little to no effect on security, since you only need to destroy mining ones to take down the network
It is true that if you destroy mining nodes you take down the network from producing new blocks (temporarily), even if you have a lot of non mining nodes. But, it still better than if you take down the mining nodes who are also the only full nodes. If the miners are not the only full nodes, at least you still have full nodes with the blockchain data so new miners can download it and join. If all the miners are also the full nodes and you take them down, where will you get all the past blockchain data to start mining again? Just pray that the miners that were taken down come back online at some point in the future?
The real limiting factor is ISP's: Imagine a situation where one service provider defrauds 4000 different nodes. Did the excessive amount of nodes help at all, when they have all been defrauded by the same service provider? If there are only 30 ISP's in the world, how many nodes do we REALLY need?
You cant defraud if the connection is encrypted. Use TOR for example, it is hard for ISP's to know what you are doing.
Satoshi specifically said in the white paper that after a certain point, number of nodes needed plateaus, meaning after a certain point, adding more nodes is actually counterintuitive, which we also demonstrated. (the latency issue). So, we have adequately demonstrated why running non-mining nodes does not add additional value or security to the network.
Again, what is the number of nodes that makes it counterproductive? Did he do any math?
There's also the matter of economically significant nodes and the role they play in consensus. Sure, nobody cares about your average joe's "full node" where he is "keeping his own ledger to keep the miners honest", as it has no significance to the economy and the miners couldn't give a damn about it. However, if say some major exchanges got together to protest a miner activated fork, they would have some protest power against that fork because many people use their service. Of course, there still needs to be miners running on said "protest fork" to keep the chain running, but miners do follow the money and if they got caught mining a fork that none of the major exchanges were trading, they could be coaxed over to said "protest fork".
In consensus, what matters about nodes is only the number, economical power of the node doesn't mean nothing, the protocol doesn't see the net worth of the individual or organization running that node.
Running a full node that is not mining and not involved is spending or receiving payments is of very little use. It helps to make sure network traffic is broadcast, and is another copy of the blockchain, but that is all (and is probably not needed in a healthy coin with many other nodes)
He gets it right (broadcasting transaction and keeping a copy of the blockchain) but he dismisses the importance of it
UYT Main-Net pre-launching AMA successfully completed with a blast
7 pm, 29th September 2020 Beijing time the UYT Main-Net pre-launching AMA successfully completed with a blast! Here is a full record of the AMA: Host: Hello everyone, it’s a great honor to host the first AMA of UYT network in China. Today, we have invited the person in charge of UYT Dao. Let’s ask Mr. Woo to introduce himself Woo: Hello, I’m Ben. I’ve met you in the previous global live broadcast. I’m the director of UYT Dao and the founder of IGNISVC. At present, I’m the CEO of the TKNT foundation and have been engaged in the blockchain industry. Q1. At present, different types of blockchains have emerged, but cross-chain interaction is still suffering a lot. In your opinion, what is the necessity and significance of cross-chain? Answer: The full name of UYT is to unite all your tokens, which is to integrate all public chains and increase the liquidity of the whole industry. Our purpose is not to create another public chain, but to become a platform for the exchange of value, technology, and resources of all public chains. What we need to solve is that each individual chain can circulate with each other. The full name of UYT is to unite all your tokens, which is to integrate all public chains and increase the liquidity of the whole industry. Our purpose is not to create another public chain, but to become a platform for the exchange of value, technology, and resources of all public chains. What we need to solve is that each individual chain can circulate with each other. Q2. The founder of Ethereum, V Shen, once wrote a cross-chain operation report for bank alliance chain R3, which mentioned three cross-chain methods. Which one does UYT belong to? Can you briefly introduce the cross-chain solution of UYT? Answer: In Vitalik’s cross-chain report, there are three main cross-chain methods. The first is that both parties do not know that they are crossing the chain, or that they cannot “read” each other, such as the centralized exchange. The second way is that one of the links can read other chains, such as side-chain / relay chain. That is, a can read B, and B cannot read a; The third is that both a and B can read each other’s, which can achieve the value and information exchange between a, B, and the platform. UYT belongs to the third kind. Our new official website will be online soon. Here are a few simple points: first of all, the architecture of UYT includes relay chain, parachain, parathreads, and bridges. In terms of ductility, it has exceeded almost all the public chains currently online. In the UYT network, there are four kinds of consensus participants, namely collector, fisherman, nominator, and validator. The characteristics of this model are: first, all people can participate without loss. Secondly, as long as anyone makes more contribution to the ecology, he will get more rewards, otherwise, he will receive corresponding punishment. The underlying layer of UYT is the substrate, which uses the rust programming language. Rust is committed to becoming a programming language that can solve the problems of high concurrency and high-security systems elegantly. This is also a great advantage that we are different from other blockchain projects in technology. Q3. What are the roles in the UYT network? What are their respective functions? Answer: After the main network of UYT is online, there will be four roles: collector, fisherman, nominator, and validator, which is totally different from the current system of the test network. The collector, in short, is responsible for collecting all kinds of information in the parallel chain and packaging the information to the verifier. Fishermen, to put it bluntly, is fishing law enforcement, which specifically checks out malicious acts and gets rewards after being checked out. The nominator, in fact, is a group of rights and interests. The verifier is its representative, and they entrust the deposit to the verifier. Verifier, package new blocks in the network. It must mortgage enough deposits and run a relay chain client on a highly available and high bandwidth machine. It can be understood as a mining pool. It can also be understood as the node in the current UYT DAPP. Q4. What is the mining mechanism of the UYT network? The only way to obtain UYT after its issuance is to participate in mining activities. In the initial stage, the daily constant output times of UYT are set to 1440000, and the cycle of bitcoin is halved. Mining rewards can be obtained in the following five ways: 1) Asset pledge mapping mining 2) Become the intermediate chain node of uyt network 3) Recommendation and reward mechanism 4) Voting reward 5) UYT network Dao will take out 10% of gas revenue from block packaging for community construction and reward of excellent community personnel Q5. The rise and fall of the blockchain are very fast. In order to give investors confidence, is there a detailed development plan, implementation steps, and application direction of UYT network in the next few months? Answer: UYT Network test network has been running stably for a year. After the main network is launched, all mechanisms will undergo major changes. The relationship between the UYT test network and the main network can be understood as the relationship between KSM (dot test network) and dot the main network, and the feasibility of the technology can be reflected more quickly by the UYT test network because of its faster timeliness and all future technology updates Some will move to the main network after the stable operation of the test network. In order to give users a better experience and give more rewards to excellent nodes, all Dao organizers are working hard for it. The development team has completed the cross-chain of bitcoin and some high-quality Ethereum based tokens in the early stage, and now the code has all been open source. For other mainstream currencies, community members can apply for funds to develop. In order to develop the ecology and make a better technical reserve, we will set up a special ecological development fund when the main network goes online. The transfer bridge is our key funding direction. The maximum application amount of a team is as high as 100000 US dollars. In addition, if other public chains want to connect to UYT, they will get technical support. In order to encourage developers to participate in ecological construction, Dao also launched a series of grants to support development. Developers can directly pull the better applications on Eth and EOS directly, or develop new products according to their own advantages. These directions are now the focus of funding. Due to the early online testing time of uyt network, it is based on the earlier version of substrate1.0. The on-chain governance mode can only be realized after the upgrade of 2.0 is completed. At present, the upgrading work is going on steadily, and the on-chain governance will be implemented in the main network with the launch of the uyt main network. As a heterogeneous cross-chain solution with high scalability and scalability, UYT network can perfectly bridge the parallel encryption system and its encryption assets in theory, and its wide applicability in the future can be expected. Therefore, we do not limit the areas where UYT network will play its advantages and roles. But in the general direction, there will be mainly DEFI and DEX ecological plates. From the industry, it can cover a wide range of fields, not only finance but also games, entertainment, shopping malls, real estate, and so on. Q6、How can UYT help DEFI? Answer: UYT network can not only link different public chains but also make parallel chains independent and interlinked. Just like the ACALA project some time ago, it has successfully obtained Pantera capital’s $7 million saft agreement. Although the concept of DEFI is very popular now, all DEFI products are still in the ecology of each public chain, and the cross-chain DEFI ecology has not been developed. UYT is to achieve cross-chain communication, value exchange, and develop truly decentralized financial services and products. For example, cross-chain decentralized flash cash, cross-chain asset support, cross-chain decentralized lending, Oracle machine, and other products. At present, our technical team is also speeding up the construction of infrastructure suitable for the landing of more DEFI products and services and is committed to creating a real cross-chain DEFI ecology, which is only a small step of UYT’s future plan. Q7、TKNT should be one of the hottest projects in the UYT ecosystem recently. Please give us a brief introduction to the TKNT project and the value of TKNT in the UYT ecosystem. Why can TKNT increase 400 times in 7 days? And what is the cooperative relationship between UTC and TKNT? Answer: I will answer each project from the technical and resource aspects. Let’s first introduce UTC. UTC is the token of Copernican network and the first project of UYT game entertainment ecology. In the future, it will be responsible for linking. Due to the high-quality public chain in the entertainment industry, because of the limited slots of UYT, each field will seek a high-quality partner and help the partner become the secondary relay chain of UYT. After the main network of UYT goes online, many chains will want to access UYT Greater value circulation, due to the limited external slots of UYT, the cost is also very high. At this time, you can choose to connect to UTC first, and then connect UTC to UYT. With more and more links with UYT, it will gradually evolve into a secondary relay chain of UYT network. UTC’s resources, online and offline, offline payment and offline entity applications, also have a very large community base. The ecological partners have very good operation experience in the game industry. They will use blockchain technology to change the whole game entertainment industry to make it more transparent and fair. At the same time, there are enough entity consumption scenarios. This is also UYT Because of the reason why the network chose to cooperate with it, the UTC project has been supported by the UYT ecological fund. The support fund includes that after the main network is launched, it will also be the first ecological cooperation project supported by UYT. Because of the online time of the main network of UYT, UTC can’t directly form a chain at present and will give priority to issuing on Ethereum. TKNT is a new concept project TKN.com TKN is the largest online centralized guessing game platform in the world at present. TKNT mixes bet mining and DEFI, so it can carry out fixed mining through platform games, build a system that can realize game participation and in application payment in all Dapps based on ERC20, and combine with various financial services. The reason why TKNT has created a myth of 400 times in 7 days is that the TkN platform has a buyback plan. As we all know, the online quiz game entertainment platform has an amazing profit. Every quarter, the profit will be used to buyback. The strong profit support has led to the huge increase of token. In the future, all users can use UTC to participate in TkN games. Therefore, the main network of UYT is that Line is also of great significance to TKNT. With the maturity of UYT ecology and technology, TKNT can have a more powerful performance. If TKNT wants to link more public chains, it needs to access UYT network, and realize a bigger vision with cross-chain interaction of UYT. After TKNT was launched on the exchange, the highest price has risen to $14, and now it has dropped to about $2.50. You will see that it will once again set a record high and create greater miracles. You will also see that $3 will be the best buying point for TKNT, because there will be several major moves in TKNT, and the global MLM plan will be launched on October 7 in Korea, China, and other countries There will be many marketing teams in Europe to promote TKNT, including DAPP.com As a shareholder of TkN, TKNT will also make every effort to promote TKNT. Secondly, TKNT will be launched next month on the largest digital currency exchange in South Korea, and Chinese users will see the shadow of TKNT on Binance in November. Of course, the decentralized trading platform of UYT will also be launched in the future. Q8. What is the significance of the launch of UYT’s main network for the industry and ecology? Answer: UYT is one of the few cross-chain platform projects in the industry at present. There are many public chains and coin issuing projects. Why? Because of less work, more money. However, there are very high technical and capital requirements for cross-chain and platform. This barrier is very high, so almost no project side is willing to do this. But once this is done, it will be of great significance to the whole industry of digital currency and blockchain. Because it will subvert the current situation of the whole currency circle and chain circle acting on their own, and the painting land is king. Let each independent ecosystem achieve a truly decentralized and trust-free cooperative relationship. This huge change will promote the whole industry to develop into a healthy and virtuous circle macro ecosystem. Q9. The slogan of many project supporters is that UYT should surpass Ethereum. What is the difference in technology between UYT network and Ethereum? Answer: Thank you so much for supporting UYT. In fact, the correct understanding is that UYT is the next era of Ethereum. First of all, UYT has a different vision from Ethereum. Before the emergence of UYT, Ethereum, and EOS, no matter how well they developed, belonged to the era of a single chain. The popular metaphor is a LAN. However, UYT can realize the interoperability of each chain and bring the blockchain into the Internet era. Secondly, UYT is far superior to Ethereum in technology. It mainly includes three aspects: shared security, heterogeneous cross-chain, and no fork upgrade. In the case that Ethereum 2.0 has not been implemented, UYT is the most friendly bottom layer for the DFI projects and other Dapps on Ethereum. Now, the hair chain architecture substrate of UYT is compatible with Ethereum smart contract language solidity, so eth developers can easily migrate their smart contracts to UYT. Up to now, there is no good solution to the congestion problem of Ethereum, while UYT network not only solves the network congestion problem. What’s more, UYT can easily realize one-click online upgrade, instead of having to redeploy a set of contracts on Ethereum for each version upgraded and then require users to follow them to migrate the original assets from the old contract to the new contract. Developers can quickly and flexibly iterate their own protocols to change their application solutions according to the situation, so as to serve more users and solve more problems. At the same time, they can also repair the loopholes in the contract very quickly. In the case of hacker attacks, they can also solve the hacker stealing money and a series of other problems through parallel chain management. We can find that for Ethereum, UYT not only solves the congestion problem we see in front of us but also provides the most important infrastructure for the future applications such as DFI on Ethereum to truly mature into an open financial application that can serve all people. It also opens the Web 3.0 era of the blockchain industry. In terms of market value, Ethereum currently has a strong ecological construction, with a market value of US $40 billion. UYT will also focus on the development of this aspect after the main network goes online. No matter in terms of market value or ecological construction, I have enough confidence in UYT, after all, we are fully prepared. Q10. What is the progress of the ecological construction of UYT? What opportunities do current ecological partners see in UYT or what changes may be brought about by UYT ecology? Answer: After the main network of UYT goes online, there will be a series of ecological construction actions, and more attention will be paid to establishing contact with traditional partners. Cross-chain decentralized flash cash, cross-chain asset support, cross-chain decentralized lending, Oracle machine, and other products will also be the key cooperation direction of UYT. UYT will give priority to the game and entertainment industry because this industry is most easily subverted by blockchain. As the ecological construction of UYT gets bigger and bigger, the future slots will become more and more expensive. The earlier you join UYT ecology, you will get more support from the ecological fund because the ecological fund is also limited. From the perspective of token value-added, all the project parties will cooperate with the project side in the future, and the project side needs to pledge a certain number of UYT to bid for slots, except for ecological rewards, others need to be purchased from market transactions. The difference between the pledge here and the pledge we understand is that the UYT of the ecological partner participating in the auction pledge cannot enjoy the computing power for mining. UYT main network has several opportunities for Eco partners to look forward to, the first point is bitcoin, bitcoin will be later than other assets late, but eventually, all the bubble and value will return to BTC, after the wave of DeFi bubble elimination, the focus will be very much in the bitcoin. UYT ecology can provide a more mature bottom layer for defi. In addition, now Ethereum’s DEFI is that of Ethereum and ERC 20 tokens, and the outbreak point of bitcoin has not yet arrived. Therefore, the DEFI of UYT ecology may be the next opportunity, which is a good opportunity for everyone. The second opportunity is that after the main network goes online, the future UYT ecological projects will compete to bid for slots. In fact, the original intention of UYT is to realize the interconnection of all chains. The chain outside the UYT ecology also needs to communicate. The third is cross-fi. The BIFI is hatched on Ethereum, and the def on UYT can realize multi-chain operation. For example, TkN games or future UTC game platform users can call bitcoin on the UYT chain. This form only belongs to the decentralized finance in the cross-chain era of UYT, which can be called cross-fi. Q11. Which exchanges will UYT go online next? What is the online strategy like? Answer: As the founder of ignisvc and as UYT As the head of the Dao organization, we have always had good cooperative relations with major exchanges all over the world. TKNT will appear in several exchanges one after another. Hitbtc exchange in the United Kingdom, Upbit and Bithumb Exchange in South Korea, Bitfinex exchange in the United States, Binance exchange in China, BKEX exchange, and Kucoin exchange in China are all our partners, and they have been paying close attention to UYT Development, UYT is the public chain with the largest user base and the highest community participation in the cross-chain field, so the future value is immeasurable. If we have to go to the exchange, then we will choose one of the above exchanges to launch. But the vision of UYT is to create a fairer, safer, and transparent circulation in the field of digital currency, and users can master all the assets by themselves, Therefore, in the beginning, there is a simple DEX on the UYT wallet, which is a simple matchmaking transaction and is also an on-chain transaction. After the completion of the UYT DEX, more transactions may occur in the UYT DEX. However, after the main network of UYT is online, centralized exchanges can directly access the block data synchronization of UYT, and it is not ruled out that some exchanges will directly go online for UYT trading. Such exchanges will not enjoy the support of the ecological support fund of UYT. The network project is a community-led project. Each cooperation plan of the exchange will be carried out in the way shared by the community in the future. Dao organization can only implement it according to the voting results. Q12. What are the plans for the promotion of ecological development and market by the launch of UYT main network? Answer: The launch of the main network will be completed around October 15. On the offline side, due to the epidemic situation, we will jointly organize corresponding market activities with nodes in different countries. At present, there are three large-scale offline meetups that have been identified. We will also start a global roadshow when the epidemic is over. On the online side, we have opened online Wechat, Kakao, Twitter, Reddit, and telegram communities. We will carry out AMA activities in various countries and promote them all over the world in various ways. Of course, we will launch MLM plans and cooperate with more marketing teams.
the year 2020 in Bitcoin Cash so far: a detailed history
the year 2020 in Bitcoin Cash so far: a detailed history What follows at the bottom is a four page long chronological overview of what happened in BCH in 2020 so far. To make it more digestable and fun to read I start with my narrating of the story. My attempt was to remain as objective as possible and "let the facts speak for themselve" with everything sourced. I also link to manyread.casharticles, the decision of which are the important ones to include is certainly not easy, I count on the rest of the community if I overlooked anything important. summary & my narrating of the story: The year started out relatively calm, with cashfusion in "the news" and an older ongoing controversy between Amaury and Roger Ver being worked out. Starting Jan 22nd all debate broke loose with the announcement of “Infrastructure Funding Plan for Bitcoin Cash” by Jiang Zhuoer of BTC.TOP. To illustrate this point 2 days later coinspice ran the title " Roger Ver Praises Vigorous Debate, [...]" and 6 days, less than a week, later Chris Pacia made a read.cash post titled "The 253rd "Thoughts on developer funding" Article" which might have been only a slight exaggeration or he might have been counting. Part of the reason of the tsunami was the lack of worked out details. By the time of Pacia's post a lot had changed: Both BU, Bitcoin Verde and a group of miners had made announcements not to go along with "the plan". On feb 1st, the second version of the IFP was announced by Jiang Zhuoer in a post “BCH miner donation plan update”. Two weeks later on Feb 15th, the third iteration was announced by Bitcoin ABC which was to be activated by hashrate voting and on the same day Flipstarter was introduced, a sign of the search for alternative solutions. After a few more days and a few more people coming out more against the IFP (including Jonald Fyookball, Mark Lundeberg & Josh Ellithorpe), BCHN was announced on feb 20th with a formal release a week later. Also feb 27th, the DAA was brought back into the conversation by Jonathan Toomim with his " The BCH difficulty adjustment algorithm is broken. Here's how to fix it." video. By early march the IFP was effectively dead with its author Jiang Zhuoer vowing to vote against it. This became clear to everyone when ABC, a day later sudddenly shifted gears towards non-protocol, donation based funding: the IFP was dead. End march ABCs 2020 Business Plan was announced as a way to raise $3.3 million. Mid april to mid may was the high time for voluntary funding with four node implementations and General Protocols, a BCH DeFi Startup successfully raising funds. By May 15th, the 6th HF network upgrade things had pretty much cooled down. The upgraded included nothing controversial and even saw an unexpected doubling in the unconfirmed transaction chain. June 15th a month later things started to heat up again with the BCHN announcement to remove the "poison pill" or "automatic replay protection". 8th Jul Jonathan Toomim posted "BCH protocol upgrade proposal: Use ASERT as the new DAA" which promised the solution to the long dragging DAA problem. Jul 23th however an unexpected twist occurred when Amaury Séchet posted "Announcing the Grasberg DAA" an incompatible, alternative solution. This, again, sparked a ton of debate and discussion. Grasberg lasted just two weeks from Jul 23th to Aug 6th when ABC announced its plans for the november 2020 upgrade but it had successfully united the opposition in the meanwhile. ABCs plan for november included dropping grasberg in favour of aserti3–2d and introducing IFPv4. Now we're here August 8th, the IFP which was declared dead after just over a month (Jan 22-Mar 5) is now back in full force. The rest of the history is still being written but if p2p electronic cash is to succeed in any big regard it's very thinkable that these events will get into history books. Important resources:coinspice IFP timeline&Compiled list of BCH Miner Dev Fund posts, articles, discussions History Jan 13th : “Do CoinJoins Really Require Equal Transaction Amounts for Privacy? Part One: CashFusion” article by BitcoinMagazine [source] Jan 13th : “Clearing the Way for Cooperation” Read.cash article by Amaury Séchet [source] on the controversy with Roger Ver about the amount of donations over the years Jan 22nd : “Infrastructure Funding Plan for Bitcoin Cash” IFPv1 announced by Jiang Zhuoer of BTC.TOP [source] IFPv1: 12.5% of BCH coinbase rewards which will last for 6 months through a Hong Kong-based corporation & to be activated on May 15th Jan 22nd : ”Bitcoin Cash Developers React to Infrastructure Fund Announcement: Cautiously Optimistic” coinspice article including Amaury Séchet, Antony Zegers, Jonald Fyookball & Josh Ellithorpe [source] Jan 23rd : Jiang Zhuoer reddit AMA [source] [coinspice article] Jan 23rd : Vitalik weighs in with his take on twitter [source] Jan 23rd :” On the infrastructure funding plan for Bitcoin Cash” article by Amaury Séchet [source] [coinspice article] in which he proposed to place control of the IFP key in his hands together with Jonald Fyookball and Antony Zegers. . A group of 7 to 12 miners, developers, and businessmen in total would get an advisory function. Jan 24th : “Bitcoin.com's Clarifications on the Miner Development Fund“ which emphasizes, among other things, the temporary and reversible nature of the proposal [source] [coinspice article] Jan 24th : “Little Known (But Important!) Facts About the Mining Plan” Read.cash article by Jonald Fyookball in which he defended the IFP and stressed its necessity and temporary nature. Jan 25th : massive amounts of public debate as documented by coinspice [coinspice article] with Justin Bons, Tobias Ruck and Antony Zegers explaining their take on it. Jan 26th : public debate continues: “Assessment and proposal re: the Bitcoin Cash infrastructure funding situation” Read.cash article by imaginary_username [source] which was noteworthy in part because the post earned over Earns $1,000+ in BCH [coinspice article] and “The Best Of Intentions: The Dev Tax Is Intended to Benefit Investors But Will Corrupt Us Instead” by Peter Rizun [source] Jan 27th : “We are a group of miners opposing the BTC.TOP proposal, here's why” article on Read.cash [source] [reddit announcement] Jan 27th : Bitcoin Unlimited's BUIP 143: Refuse the Coinbase Tax [source][reddit announcement] Jan 28th : “Bitcoin Verde's Response to the Miner Sponsored Development Fund” read.cash article by Josh Green in which he explains “Bitcoin Verde will not be implementing any node validation that enforces new coinbase rules.” [source] Jan 28th : “Update on Developer Funding” read.cash article from Bitcoin.com [source] in which they state “As it stands now, Bitcoin.com will not go through with supporting any plan unless there is more agreement in the ecosystem such that the risk of a chain split is negligible.” And that “any funding proposal must be temporary and reversible.” This announcement from bitcoin.com and their mining pool lead the anonymous opposition miners to stand down. [source] Jan 28th : The 253rd "Thoughts on developer funding" Article – by Chris Pacia, to tackle the “serious misconceptions in the community about how software development works”. He ends on a note of support for the IFP because of lack of realistic alternatives. [source] Feb 1st: “BCH miner donation plan update” IFPv2 announced by Jiang Zhuoer of BTC.TOP [source] Which changes the donation mechanism so miners directly send part of their coinbase to the projects they wants to donate to. It would be activated with hashrate voting over a 3-month period with a 2/3 in favour requirement. The proposal also introduces a pilot period and a no donation option, Jiang Zhuoer also says he regards 12.% as too much. Feb 7th: Group of BCH miners led by AsicSeer voice scepticism about the IFP during a reddit AMA [source] Feb 15th: “On the Miner Infrastructure Funding Plan” article by Bitcoin ABC [source] In which they announce they will implement IFPv3 in their upcoming 0.21.0 release. This version has amount reduced to 5% of block reward and will go in effect with BIP 9 hashratevoting and a whitelist with different projects. Feb 15th : “Introducing Flipstarter” [source] Feb 16th :” Bitcoin.com’s stance on the recent block reward diversion proposals” video by Roger Ver on the Bitcoin.com Official Channel. [source] > Ver called Zhuoer’s IFP “clever” but ultimately “problematic.” [coinspice article] Feb 16th :” BCH miner donation plan update again” read.cash article by Jiang Zhuoer of BTC.TOP [source] In which he briefly outlines the details of IFPv3 Feb 17th : “Latest Thoughts On Infrastructure Mining Plan” post by Jonald Fyookball [source] Feb 17th : “Regarding the Bitcoin Cash Infrastructure Funding Plan, I am certain now that it should be scrapped immediately.” tweet by Mark Lundeberg [source] Feb 19th : “Thoughts on the IFP - A Dev Perspective“ read.cash article by Josh Ellithorpe [source] Feb 20th : “Bitcoin Cash Node” post announcing the new node implementation [source] Feb 20th : First “Bitcoin Cash Developer Meeting” After IFP Proposal [source] Feb 24th : “Flipstarter 500k, 6 independent campaigns” post announcing the goal to “fund the BCH ecosystem with 6 independent campaigns and an overall 500,000 USD target” [source] Feb 27th : BCHN Formally Released [source] Feb 27th : “The BCH difficulty adjustment algorithm is broken. Here's how to fix it.” Video by Jonathan Toomim [source] Mar 3th :” Bitcoin Cash Node 2020: plans for May upgrade and beyond” post by BCHN [source] Mar 4th :”Author of the Bitcoin Cash IFP [Jiang Zhuoer] Vows to Vote Against It, Using Personal Hash in Opposition” [source] Mar 5th :Bitcoin ABC announces their 2020 Business Plan Fundraising for later in march [source] Mar 15th : “EatBCH campaign funded! Next: node campaigns.” campaign funded after 11 hours [source] Mar 30th : Bitcoin ABC 2020 Business Plan [source] $3.3 Million Fundraiser [source] Apr 17th : Five flipstarter node campaign launched. [source] Apr 26th : BCHN flipstarter campaign successfully funded. [source] Apr 27th : VERDE flipstarter campaign successfully funded. [source] May 4th : KNUTH flipstarter campaign successfully funded. [source] May 7th : “BCH DeFi Startup General Protocols Raises Over $1 mil“ [source] May 8th : BCHD flipstarter campaign successfully funded. [source] May 9th : Deadline for node campaigns, ABC flipstarter campaign not funded. [source] May 14th : “With IFP Defeated, Bitcoin ABC, ViaBTC & CoinEX CEO Publicly Consider a Bitcoin Cash Foundation” [source] May 15th : deadline for ABC fundraiser campaign, ends at 55% completed. [source] May 15th : 6th HF network upgrade -> new opcode op_Reversebytes, increased of the chained transaction limit from 25 to 50, and the improved counting of signature operations using the new “Sigchecks” implementation [source] with the “Controversial Funding Plan Rejected by Miners” [source] May 25th : “Announcing the SLP Foundation” [source] Jun 15st : “BCHN lead maintainer report 2020-06-15” announcement to remove the Automatic Replay Protection (a.k.a. the Poison Pill) from BCHN in november [source] Jun 16st : “So [BCHN] is going to fork off from BCH at the next upgrade. Same old story. […]” tweeted Vin Armani [source] Jun 21st : “Why Automatic Replay Protection Exists” post by Shammah Chancellor [source] Jul 7th : “The Popular Stablecoin Tether Is Now Circulating on the Bitcoin Cash Network” [source] Jul 8th : “BCH protocol upgrade proposal: Use ASERT as the new DAA” post by Jonathan Toomim [source] Jul 18th : “$6M Worth of Tether on the Bitcoin Cash Chain Highlights the Benefits of SLP Tokens” [source] Jul 23th : “Announcing the Grasberg DAA” post by Amaury Séchet[source] Jul 24th : “Thoughts on Grasberg DAA” post by Mark Lundeberg [source] Jul 29th : CashFusion security audit has been completed [source] Jul 31st : Electron Cash 4.1.0 release with CashFusion support [source] 4th year, august 2020 – 2021 Aug 1st : “Bitcoin Cash: Scaling the Globe“ Online conference for ForkDay Celebration [source] Aug 2nd : >“Is there going to be a fork between ABC and BCHN?” > “IMO it is very likely. If not in November, then next May.” – Amaury Séchet Aug 3rd : “Dark secrets of the Grasberg DAA” post by Jonathan Toomim [source] Aug 3rd : “Joint Statement On aserti3-2d Algorithm“ post by General Protocols, including Cryptophyl, Read.cash, Software Verde & SpinBCH [source] Aug 3rd : Knuth announces they will be implementing aserti3-2d as DAA for november. [source] Aug 3rd : Amaury rage quit from the developer call [source] Aug 4th : “But why do people care about compensating for historical drift? Seems like a tiny problem and if it's causing this much social discord it seems not even worth bothering to try to fix.” Tweet by Vitalik [source] Aug 5th : “Bitcoin Cash (BCH) November 2020 Upgrade statement” signed by BCHD, electron cash, VERDE, BU members, BCHN developers, Jonathan Toomim, Mark B. Lundeberg and many others [source] Aug 5th : “BCHN FAQ on November 2020 Bitcoin Cash network upgrade” [source] Aug 6th : “Bitcoin ABC’s plan for the November 2020 upgrade” [source] the announcement that they will drop Grasberg in favour of aserti3–2d (ASERT) and will also include FPv4 in which 8% of the blockreward goes to ABC as development funding. Aug 7th : “Joint Statement from BCH Miners regarding Bitcoin ABC and the November 2020 BCH Upgrade.” Read.cash article by asicseer [source] stating “Over recent months, most miners and pools have switched to BCHN, and presently operate a majority of BCH hashrate.” Aug 7th : “Simple Ledger Protocol's Joint Statement Regarding Bitcoin ABC on BCH's November 2020 Upgrade” read.cash post by the SLP-Foundation [source]
All you need to know about Yield Farming - The rocket fuel for Defi
Source It’s effectively July 2017 in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), and as in the heady days of the initial coin offering (ICO) boom, the numbers are only trending up. According to DeFi Pulse, there is $1.9 billion in crypto assets locked in DeFi right now. According to the CoinDesk ICO Tracker, the ICO market started chugging past $1 billion in July 2017, just a few months before token sales started getting talked about on TV. Debate juxtaposing these numbers if you like, but what no one can question is this: Crypto users are putting more and more value to work in DeFi applications, driven largely by the introduction of a whole new yield-generating pasture, Compound’s COMP governance token. Governance tokens enable users to vote on the future of decentralized protocols, sure, but they also present fresh ways for DeFi founders to entice assets onto their platforms. That said, it’s the crypto liquidity providers who are the stars of the present moment. They even have a meme-worthy name: yield farmers. https://preview.redd.it/lxsvazp1g9l51.png?width=775&format=png&auto=webp&s=a36173ab679c701a5d5e0aac806c00fcc84d78c1
Where it started
Ethereum-based credit market Compound started distributing its governance token, COMP, to the protocol’s users this past June 15. Demand for the token (heightened by the way its automatic distribution was structured) kicked off the present craze and moved Compound into the leading position in DeFi. The hot new term in crypto is “yield farming,” a shorthand for clever strategies where putting crypto temporarily at the disposal of some startup’s application earns its owner more cryptocurrency. Another term floating about is “liquidity mining.” The buzz around these concepts has evolved into a low rumble as more and more people get interested. The casual crypto observer who only pops into the market when activity heats up might be starting to get faint vibes that something is happening right now. Take our word for it: Yield farming is the source of those vibes. But if all these terms (“DeFi,” “liquidity mining,” “yield farming”) are so much Greek to you, fear not. We’re here to catch you up. We’ll get into all of them. We’re going to go from very basic to more advanced, so feel free to skip ahead.
What are tokens?
Most CoinDesk readers probably know this, but just in case: Tokens are like the money video-game players earn while fighting monsters, money they can use to buy gear or weapons in the universe of their favorite game. But with blockchains, tokens aren’t limited to only one massively multiplayer online money game. They can be earned in one and used in lots of others. They usually represent either ownership in something (like a piece of a Uniswap liquidity pool, which we will get into later) or access to some service. For example, in the Brave browser, ads can only be bought using basic attention token (BAT). If tokens are worth money, then you can bank with them or at least do things that look very much like banking. Thus: decentralized finance. Tokens proved to be the big use case for Ethereum, the second-biggest blockchain in the world. The term of art here is “ERC-20 tokens,” which refers to a software standard that allows token creators to write rules for them. Tokens can be used a few ways. Often, they are used as a form of money within a set of applications. So the idea for Kin was to create a token that web users could spend with each other at such tiny amounts that it would almost feel like they weren’t spending anything; that is, money for the internet. Governance tokens are different. They are not like a token at a video-game arcade, as so many tokens were described in the past. They work more like certificates to serve in an ever-changing legislature in that they give holders the right to vote on changes to a protocol. So on the platform that proved DeFi could fly, MakerDAO, holders of its governance token, MKR, vote almost every week on small changes to parameters that govern how much it costs to borrow and how much savers earn, and so on. Read more:Why DeFi’s Billion-Dollar Milestone Matters One thing all crypto tokens have in common, though, is they are tradable and they have a price. So, if tokens are worth money, then you can bank with them or at least do things that look very much like banking. Thus: decentralized finance.
What is DeFi?
Fair question. For folks who tuned out for a bit in 2018, we used to call this “open finance.” That construction seems to have faded, though, and “DeFi” is the new lingo. In case that doesn’t jog your memory, DeFi is all the things that let you play with money, and the only identification you need is a crypto wallet. On the normal web, you can’t buy a blender without giving the site owner enough data to learn your whole life history. In DeFi, you can borrow money without anyone even asking for your name. I can explain this but nothing really brings it home like trying one of these applications. If you have an Ethereum wallet that has even $20 worth of crypto in it, go do something on one of these products. Pop over to Uniswap and buy yourself some FUN (a token for gambling apps) or WBTC (wrapped bitcoin). Go to MakerDAO and create $5 worth of DAI (a stablecoin that tends to be worth $1) out of the digital ether. Go to Compound and borrow $10 in USDC. (Notice the very small amounts I’m suggesting. The old crypto saying “don’t put in more than you can afford to lose” goes double for DeFi. This stuff is uber-complex and a lot can go wrong. These may be “savings” products but they’re not for your retirement savings.) Immature and experimental though it may be, the technology’s implications are staggering. On the normal web, you can’t buy a blender without giving the site owner enough data to learn your whole life history. In DeFi, you can borrow money without anyone even asking for your name. DeFi applications don’t worry about trusting you because they have the collateral you put up to back your debt (on Compound, for instance, a $10 debt will require around $20 in collateral). Read more:There Are More DAI on Compound Now Than There Are DAI in the World If you do take this advice and try something, note that you can swap all these things back as soon as you’ve taken them out. Open the loan and close it 10 minutes later. It’s fine. Fair warning: It might cost you a tiny bit in fees, and the cost of using Ethereum itself right now is much higher than usual, in part due to this fresh new activity. But it’s nothing that should ruin a crypto user. So what’s the point of borrowing for people who already have the money? Most people do it for some kind of trade. The most obvious example, to short a token (the act of profiting if its price falls). It’s also good for someone who wants to hold onto a token but still play the market.
Doesn’t running a bank take a lot of money up front?
It does, and in DeFi that money is largely provided by strangers on the internet. That’s why the startups behind these decentralized banking applications come up with clever ways to attract HODLers with idle assets. Liquidity is the chief concern of all these different products. That is: How much money do they have locked in their smart contracts? “In some types of products, the product experience gets much better if you have liquidity. Instead of borrowing from VCs or debt investors, you borrow from your users,” said Electric Capital managing partner Avichal Garg. Let’s take Uniswap as an example. Uniswap is an “automated market maker,” or AMM (another DeFi term of art). This means Uniswap is a robot on the internet that is always willing to buy and it’s also always willing to sell any cryptocurrency for which it has a market. On Uniswap, there is at least one market pair for almost any token on Ethereum. Behind the scenes, this means Uniswap can make it look like it is making a direct trade for any two tokens, which makes it easy for users, but it’s all built around pools of two tokens. And all these market pairs work better with bigger pools.
Why do I keep hearing about ‘pools’?
To illustrate why more money helps, let’s break down how Uniswap works. Let’s say there was a market for USDC and DAI. These are two tokens (both stablecoins but with different mechanisms for retaining their value) that are meant to be worth $1 each all the time, and that generally tends to be true for both. The price Uniswap shows for each token in any pooled market pair is based on the balance of each in the pool. So, simplifying this a lot for illustration’s sake, if someone were to set up a USDC/DAI pool, they should deposit equal amounts of both. In a pool with only 2 USDC and 2 DAI it would offer a price of 1 USDC for 1 DAI. But then imagine that someone put in 1 DAI and took out 1 USDC. Then the pool would have 1 USDC and 3 DAI. The pool would be very out of whack. A savvy investor could make an easy $0.50 profit by putting in 1 USDC and receiving 1.5 DAI. That’s a 50% arbitrage profit, and that’s the problem with limited liquidity. (Incidentally, this is why Uniswap’s prices tend to be accurate, because traders watch it for small discrepancies from the wider market and trade them away for arbitrage profits very quickly.) Read more:Uniswap V2 Launches With More Token-Swap Pairs, Oracle Service, Flash Loans However, if there were 500,000 USDC and 500,000 DAI in the pool, a trade of 1 DAI for 1 USDC would have a negligible impact on the relative price. That’s why liquidity is helpful. You can stick your assets on Compound and earn a little yield. But that’s not very creative. Users who look for angles to maximize that yield: those are the yield farmers. Similar effects hold across DeFi, so markets want more liquidity. Uniswap solves this by charging a tiny fee on every trade. It does this by shaving off a little bit from each trade and leaving that in the pool (so one DAI would actually trade for 0.997 USDC, after the fee, growing the overall pool by 0.003 USDC). This benefits liquidity providers because when someone puts liquidity in the pool they own a share of the pool. If there has been lots of trading in that pool, it has earned a lot of fees, and the value of each share will grow. And this brings us back to tokens. Liquidity added to Uniswap is represented by a token, not an account. So there’s no ledger saying, “Bob owns 0.000000678% of the DAI/USDC pool.” Bob just has a token in his wallet. And Bob doesn’t have to keep that token. He could sell it. Or use it in another product. We’ll circle back to this, but it helps to explain why people like to talk about DeFi products as “money Legos.”
So how much money do people make by putting money into these products?
It can be a lot more lucrative than putting money in a traditional bank, and that’s before startups started handing out governance tokens. Compound is the current darling of this space, so let’s use it as an illustration. As of this writing, a person can put USDC into Compound and earn 2.72% on it. They can put tether (USDT) into it and earn 2.11%. Most U.S. bank accounts earn less than 0.1% these days, which is close enough to nothing. However, there are some caveats. First, there’s a reason the interest rates are so much juicier: DeFi is a far riskier place to park your money. There’s no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) protecting these funds. If there were a run on Compound, users could find themselves unable to withdraw their funds when they wanted. Plus, the interest is quite variable. You don’t know what you’ll earn over the course of a year. USDC’s rate is high right now. It was low last week. Usually, it hovers somewhere in the 1% range. Similarly, a user might get tempted by assets with more lucrative yields like USDT, which typically has a much higher interest rate than USDC. (Monday morning, the reverse was true, for unclear reasons; this is crypto, remember.) The trade-off here is USDT’s transparency about the real-world dollars it’s supposed to hold in a real-world bank is not nearly up to par with USDC’s. A difference in interest rates is often the market’s way of telling you the one instrument is viewed as dicier than another. Users making big bets on these products turn to companies Opyn and Nexus Mutual to insure their positions because there’s no government protections in this nascent space – more on the ample risks later on. So users can stick their assets in Compound or Uniswap and earn a little yield. But that’s not very creative. Users who look for angles to maximize that yield: those are the yield farmers.
OK, I already knew all of that. What is yield farming?
Broadly, yield farming is any effort to put crypto assets to work and generate the most returns possible on those assets. At the simplest level, a yield farmer might move assets around within Compound, constantly chasing whichever pool is offering the best APY from week to week. This might mean moving into riskier pools from time to time, but a yield farmer can handle risk. “Farming opens up new price arbs [arbitrage] that can spill over to other protocols whose tokens are in the pool,” said Maya Zehavi, a blockchain consultant. Because these positions are tokenized, though, they can go further. This was a brand-new kind of yield on a deposit. In fact, it was a way to earn a yield on a loan. Who has ever heard of a borrower earning a return on a debt from their lender? In a simple example, a yield farmer might put 100,000 USDT into Compound. They will get a token back for that stake, called cUSDT. Let’s say they get 100,000 cUSDT back (the formula on Compound is crazy so it’s not 1:1 like that but it doesn’t matter for our purposes here). They can then take that cUSDT and put it into a liquidity pool that takes cUSDT on Balancer, an AMM that allows users to set up self-rebalancing crypto index funds. In normal times, this could earn a small amount more in transaction fees. This is the basic idea of yield farming. The user looks for edge cases in the system to eke out as much yield as they can across as many products as it will work on. Right now, however, things are not normal, and they probably won’t be for a while.
Why is yield farming so hot right now?
Because of liquidity mining. Liquidity mining supercharges yield farming. Liquidity mining is when a yield farmer gets a new token as well as the usual return (that’s the “mining” part) in exchange for the farmer’s liquidity. “The idea is that stimulating usage of the platform increases the value of the token, thereby creating a positive usage loop to attract users,” said Richard Ma of smart-contract auditor Quantstamp. The yield farming examples above are only farming yield off the normal operations of different platforms. Supply liquidity to Compound or Uniswap and get a little cut of the business that runs over the protocols – very vanilla. But Compound announced earlier this year it wanted to truly decentralize the product and it wanted to give a good amount of ownership to the people who made it popular by using it. That ownership would take the form of the COMP token. Lest this sound too altruistic, keep in mind that the people who created it (the team and the investors) owned more than half of the equity. By giving away a healthy proportion to users, that was very likely to make it a much more popular place for lending. In turn, that would make everyone’s stake worth much more. So, Compound announced this four-year period where the protocol would give out COMP tokens to users, a fixed amount every day until it was gone. These COMP tokens control the protocol, just as shareholders ultimately control publicly traded companies. Every day, the Compound protocol looks at everyone who had lent money to the application and who had borrowed from it and gives them COMP proportional to their share of the day’s total business. The results were very surprising, even to Compound’s biggest promoters. COMP’s value will likely go down, and that’s why some investors are rushing to earn as much of it as they can right now. This was a brand-new kind of yield on a deposit into Compound. In fact, it was a way to earn a yield on a loan, as well, which is very weird: Who has ever heard of a borrower earning a return on a debt from their lender? COMP’s value has consistently been well over $200 since it started distributing on June 15. We did the math elsewhere but long story short: investors with fairly deep pockets can make a strong gain maximizing their daily returns in COMP. It is, in a way, free money. It’s possible to lend to Compound, borrow from it, deposit what you borrowed and so on. This can be done multiple times and DeFi startup Instadapp even built a tool to make it as capital-efficient as possible. “Yield farmers are extremely creative. They find ways to ‘stack’ yields and even earn multiple governance tokens at once,” said Spencer Noon of DTC Capital. COMP’s value spike is a temporary situation. The COMP distribution will only last four years and then there won’t be any more. Further, most people agree that the high price now is driven by the low float (that is, how much COMP is actually free to trade on the market – it will never be this low again). So the value will probably gradually go down, and that’s why savvy investors are trying to earn as much as they can now. Appealing to the speculative instincts of diehard crypto traders has proven to be a great way to increase liquidity on Compound. This fattens some pockets but also improves the user experience for all kinds of Compound users, including those who would use it whether they were going to earn COMP or not. As usual in crypto, when entrepreneurs see something successful, they imitate it. Balancer was the next protocol to start distributing a governance token, BAL, to liquidity providers. Flash loan provider bZx has announced a plan. Ren, Curve and Synthetixalso teamed up to promote a liquidity pool on Curve. It is a fair bet many of the more well-known DeFi projects will announce some kind of coin that can be mined by providing liquidity. The case to watch here is Uniswap versus Balancer. Balancer can do the same thing Uniswap does, but most users who want to do a quick token trade through their wallet use Uniswap. It will be interesting to see if Balancer’s BAL token convinces Uniswap’s liquidity providers to defect. So far, though, more liquidity has gone into Uniswap since the BAL announcement, according to its data site. That said, even more has gone into Balancer.
Did liquidity mining start with COMP?
No, but it was the most-used protocol with the most carefully designed liquidity mining scheme. This point is debated but the origins of liquidity mining probably date back to Fcoin, a Chinese exchange that created a token in 2018 that rewarded people for making trades. You won’t believe what happened next! Just kidding, you will: People just started running bots to do pointless trades with themselves to earn the token. Similarly, EOS is a blockchain where transactions are basically free, but since nothing is really free the absence of friction was an invitation for spam. Some malicious hacker who didn’t like EOS created a token called EIDOS on the network in late 2019. It rewarded people for tons of pointless transactions and somehow got an exchange listing. These initiatives illustrated how quickly crypto users respond to incentives. Read more:Compound Changes COMP Distribution Rules Following ‘Yield Farming’ Frenzy Fcoin aside, liquidity mining as we now know it first showed up on Ethereum when the marketplace for synthetic tokens, Synthetix, announced in July 2019 an award in its SNX token for users who helped add liquidity to the sETH/ETH pool on Uniswap. By October, that was one of Uniswap’s biggest pools. When Compound Labs, the company that launched the Compound protocol, decided to create COMP, the governance token, the firm took months designing just what kind of behavior it wanted and how to incentivize it. Even still, Compound Labs was surprised by the response. It led to unintended consequences such as crowding into a previously unpopular market (lending and borrowing BAT) in order to mine as much COMP as possible. Just last week, 115 different COMP wallet addresses – senators in Compound’s ever-changing legislature – voted to change the distribution mechanism in hopes of spreading liquidity out across the markets again.
Is there DeFi for bitcoin?
Yes, on Ethereum. Nothing has beaten bitcoin over time for returns, but there’s one thing bitcoin can’t do on its own: create more bitcoin. A smart trader can get in and out of bitcoin and dollars in a way that will earn them more bitcoin, but this is tedious and risky. It takes a certain kind of person. DeFi, however, offers ways to grow one’s bitcoin holdings – though somewhat indirectly. A long HODLer is happy to gain fresh BTC off their counterparty’s short-term win. That’s the game. For example, a user can create a simulated bitcoin on Ethereum using BitGo’s WBTC system. They put BTC in and get the same amount back out in freshly minted WBTC. WBTC can be traded back for BTC at any time, so it tends to be worth the same as BTC. Then the user can take that WBTC, stake it on Compound and earn a few percent each year in yield on their BTC. Odds are, the people who borrow that WBTC are probably doing it to short BTC (that is, they will sell it immediately, buy it back when the price goes down, close the loan and keep the difference). A long HODLer is happy to gain fresh BTC off their counterparty’s short-term win. That’s the game.
How risky is it?
Enough. “DeFi, with the combination of an assortment of digital funds, automation of key processes, and more complex incentive structures that work across protocols – each with their own rapidly changing tech and governance practices – make for new types of security risks,” said Liz Steininger of Least Authority, a crypto security auditor. “Yet, despite these risks, the high yields are undeniably attractive to draw more users.” We’ve seen big failures in DeFi products. MakerDAO had one so bad this year it’s called “Black Thursday.” There was also the exploit against flash loan provider bZx. These things do break and when they do money gets taken. As this sector gets more robust, we could see token holders greenlighting more ways for investors to profit from DeFi niches. Right now, the deal is too good for certain funds to resist, so they are moving a lot of money into these protocols to liquidity mine all the new governance tokens they can. But the funds – entities that pool the resources of typically well-to-do crypto investors – are also hedging. Nexus Mutual, a DeFi insurance provider of sorts, told CoinDesk it has maxed out its available coverage on these liquidity applications. Opyn, the trustless derivatives maker, created a way to short COMP, just in case this game comes to naught. And weird things have arisen. For example, there’s currently more DAI on Compound than have been minted in the world. This makes sense once unpacked but it still feels dicey to everyone. That said, distributing governance tokens might make things a lot less risky for startups, at least with regard to the money cops. “Protocols distributing their tokens to the public, meaning that there’s a new secondary listing for SAFT tokens, [gives] plausible deniability from any security accusation,” Zehavi wrote. (The Simple Agreement for Future Tokens was a legal structure favored by many token issuers during the ICO craze.) Whether a cryptocurrency is adequately decentralized has been a key feature of ICO settlements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
What’s next for yield farming? (A prediction)
COMP turned out to be a bit of a surprise to the DeFi world, in technical ways and others. It has inspired a wave of new thinking. “Other projects are working on similar things,” said Nexus Mutual founder Hugh Karp. In fact, informed sources tell CoinDesk brand-new projects will launch with these models. We might soon see more prosaic yield farming applications. For example, forms of profit-sharing that reward certain kinds of behavior. Imagine if COMP holders decided, for example, that the protocol needed more people to put money in and leave it there longer. The community could create a proposal that shaved off a little of each token’s yield and paid that portion out only to the tokens that were older than six months. It probably wouldn’t be much, but an investor with the right time horizon and risk profile might take it into consideration before making a withdrawal. (There are precedents for this in traditional finance: A 10-year Treasury bond normally yields more than a one-month T-bill even though they’re both backed by the full faith and credit of Uncle Sam, a 12-month certificate of deposit pays higher interest than a checking account at the same bank, and so on.) As this sector gets more robust, its architects will come up with ever more robust ways to optimize liquidity incentives in increasingly refined ways. We could see token holders greenlighting more ways for investors to profit from DeFi niches. Questions abound for this nascent industry: What will MakerDAO do to restore its spot as the king of DeFi? Will Uniswap join the liquidity mining trend? Will anyone stick all these governance tokens into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)? Or would that be a yield farmers co-op? Whatever happens, crypto’s yield farmers will keep moving fast. Some fresh fields may open and some may soon bear much less luscious fruit. But that’s the nice thing about farming in DeFi: It is very easy to switch fields.
Themis (MIS) Launches Pledge Mining Platform, New Opportunity Occurs to Grow Wealth
With the development of blockchain technology, obtaining data on the chain only is no longer satisfying and how to bridge the real world and the blockchain world has always been the direction of the technological breakthrough. Under this background, Oracle Machine came to our attention. In particular, with the popularity of the DeFi concept, the industry starts to witness a boom of the application of Oracle Machine in financial derivatives, trading platforms, gambling games, and prediction markets. At present, Oracle Machine represented by Themis is developing fast with a good momentum, leading the trend of the development of Oracle Machine and continuing to consolidate the basic technical support for the DeFi revolution. Themis’ mining system has been launched in the market, which is refreshing and appealing (see https://themisoracle.com/#/credit for details on the Themis mining). 90% of MIS, the native token of Themis, will be used for mining output. The entire mining mechanism runs through a distributed oracle protocol, which sets up three roles: data provider, data validator, and arbitration node. Reward and punishment mechanisms are applied to ensure the smooth ecological operation. How does Themis mining work? Is it a new way to become wealthy? What are the characteristics? To answer these questions, we need to analyse the distribution mechanism, mining mechanism, and token value of Themis. With a fairer mining mechanism, small and medium-sized miners can enjoy better benefits One of the core values of blockchain is fairness and justice, and allowing everyone in the network to play a role in the system without permission. However, Bitcoin mining is now monopolized by several mining machine vendors such as Bitmain, leaving little space for other miners to participate. If those old PoW public chains, such as Bitcoin, has formed the head effect in mining, what about those new projects? Let's take Cosmos as an example. Since Binance joined its validator node, it has instantly ranked top with the strong financial strength and user base of the top exchange, making the small and medium nodes hard to participate. After comparison, we can find that the mining mechanism of MIS is very friendly to ordinary users. Assuming that there are 12 mining transactions in a block, the ranking according to the MIS pledged by each transaction would be as follow: https://preview.redd.it/1kfccgps2pg51.png?width=832&format=png&auto=webp&s=bf6c7f614c600826006bc2bf8a6026292c3b328c The pledge ranking is based on the jump ranking weighting algorithm rather than the weighted average of the user pledge amount, which can prevent MIS from being controlled by a small number of people, avoid monopoly, creating a win-win situation in the Themis community. https://preview.redd.it/pme9tcd62pg51.png?width=832&format=png&auto=webp&s=049f899d2a5ee3ce64007d5cc0ae3ed6167c2b3a Compared with other mining projects, Themis has introduced a unique pledge ranking method in the mining design. Users in the best ranking area will get the most benefits, which is a good mechanism guarantee for attracting more users to participate in mining. At the same time, it can lead to the decentralization of data providers, ensuring the decentralization of the oracle system and the positive development of the community. How can miners join in Themis mining? The answer is to become a part of the ecology by playing the role of either data provider, data validator, or arbitration node. The data provider is mainly responsible for providing various types of data, and the data validator verifies and challenges the data offered by the data provider and provides new data. The arbitration node arbitrates the query raised by the data validator and come up with the final result. Both the data providers and validators of Themis need to pledge MIS to obtain the qualifications, and the caller of external data also needs to pay MIS assets when accessing the data of Themis oracles. If the data has been verified as correct, data providers and validators will receive mining rewards, and the more they pledge, the more rewards they will receive. In the mining design of Themis, miners can acquire MIS by providing verifiable random number or offering the price of in-chain assets. Whenever miners call mining contracts, the system will charge no service fee (excluding the service fee of ETH). In addition, if no mining transaction occurs within a certain period of time, the first newly-emerging block containing mining transactions will acquire all the MIS rewards. In this way, miners can be encouraged to continue mining and maintain the ecological stability of Themis. The number of MIS mining for each mining transaction of miners is calculated as follows: First, calculate the number of MIS mining rewards N contained in the block of the packaged mining transaction. If the height difference between the block and the previous block containing the mining transaction is y, then N = y * 20. The MIS mining quantity of this mining transaction is M, then M=Xi/(📷)×N. Among them, X is the ranking of the MIS pledge amount in the block, and those who pledge the same amount of MIS have the same ranking. Few official pre-mining, while 90% belongs to the community Based on the official announcement, the distribution of MIS is: The total amount of MIS is 1 billion, 10% is reserved for early project promotion, the remaining 90% are produced by mining, in which 75% are directly awarded to data providers, 10% to developers, and 5% as reward for arbitration nodes and ecological incentive. The production of mining will be progressively decreased and released with ETH. For some current popular VC-invested projects, institutional holdings hold more than half of blocks and unlock the block every month, which is a huge stress for ordinary pledge users. Many projects also went wrong because institutional investors do not abide by the rules. For MIS, because there is fewer official pre-mining, the selling pressure will be smaller, which is more in line with the value of the blockchain. The release plan of developer and arbitration node and ecological incentive is as follows: https://preview.redd.it/nld8k8gb2pg51.jpg?width=926&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8c2435c993cf86b2bf6b0c4d2a1935708734de97 The release plan of data provider incentive is as follows: https://preview.redd.it/kgia5n6d2pg51.jpg?width=982&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ad1bfe7796fdaec58f3caede2f2a2083c0a07724 The MIS awarded per block reduces by 10% in every 4 million blocks, and the reward per block at present is 20 MIS. We can see that the allocation of MIS follows the following principles. First of all, as MIS is the platform certificate of Themis, it is very reasonable to reserve 10% of MIS for early project promotion. Secondly, 90% of MIS is produced through sustainable mining. This proportion can motivate contract users and miners to conduct contract mining, truly implementing the spirit of win-win community and token economy. Finally, among the 90% of MIS, better incentive mechanisms have been adapted, mining reward ratios are subdivided, which can attract more investors to participate in mining. Reasonable mining mechanism highlights the project value of Themis Themis, as a public chain that provides a mechanism to solve the problems in Oracle Machine, has a unique charm in the value of MIS. From the perspective of the number of tokens, the total amount of MIS is 1 billion, and the total mining pool is 900 million. 90% of the tokens are generated by mining, and the mining output gradually decreases its release with the Ethereum block, showing a great potential in its future added value. The earlier you participate in mining, the more profit you can gain. From the perspective of Themis’s ecological design, Themis is committed to the original intention of building a price oracle. The data provider pays on-chain fees and pledges a certain amount of MIS, and determines the income obtained according to the scale of the pledge; the validator can make profit from challenging the data. Also, any smart contract developer or user need to pay the corresponding fee when calling Themis, and this part of the profit will be distributed to the data provider in proportion. Through this design, a logical closed loop is completed to ensure the healthy operation of the entire ecology and achieve the goal of mutual benefit. In Themis, all parties in the ecology can work together to grow more wealth. In all, MIS has a huge potential for future development and arbitrage, and of course, a great profit potential as well. Today, public chains like Themis are not just a technology platform, but also a symbol of future economic operation mode which connect between the blockchain and the real world. Themis, with a fair, justice and open network through mining, is building a strong token ecology, connecting external chain data and the systems, realising data interaction between blockchain and the real world, and more importantly, creating a new mode of token economy.
AMA AT DETECTIVE ID (25/06/2020) Before welcoming any questions, I would like to briefly introduce STATERA PROJECT. Statera is a smart contract deflationary token pegged to a cryptocurrency index fund. By including STA in an index fund with Link, BTC, ETH, and SNX you can buy one token and access the price action of four of the leading cryptocurrencies. You can also invest directly in the index fund (balancer pool) and receive the benefits of fees and BAL tokens paid to you while also having an automatically balanced fund. Lastly the deflationary mechanics of STA increases the chance for positive price action while decreasing beta (volatility). This is all found in a smart contract that is fully decentralized, the founders can no longer augment the contract in any way and this has been confirmed by a third party code audit through Hacken. Q1 : please explain in more detail about Statera, what is the background of this project? and when was it established? The dev of this project had previously created another deflationary token BURN. When the Balancer Labs released the Balancer Protocol, he had an idea to combine the two, deflationary token and a pool of tokens, making the first deflationary index fund. It started in the end of May and on the 3rd iteration, May 29th - a trustless version was launched that we see today. As briefly explained earlier, STATERA or STA is an Index Deflationary Token built on Ethereum blockchain; Index: Contains a token suite of world class leading crypto assests BTC, ETH, LINK, SNX with STA. Deflationary: On every transaction of STA 1% of the transacted amount is sent to 0x address on ethereum, burned forever, thus reducing the circulating supply of STA Index+Deflationary: STA is mixed with BTC, ETH, LINK SNX in a portfolio, backed by liquidity on a protocol known as balancer (balancer.finance) This platform serves as a market maker for the token suit. The Index suite is of equal rate of 20%, that is 20% of BTC, ETH, SNX LINK and STA, Thus, anytime there is an increase in value of any of those coins or tokens, balancer automatically trade them for STA in order to keep the token suit ratio balanced. And anytime there is an increase in the value of STA, the same process applies. while doing this trade, it enables further burning on every transaction, thus facilitating more token scarcity. In addition to this, Statera was deployed with contract finalised, that is, the index suite can not be altered, It is completely out of Dev's control. Q2 : What are the achievements that have been obtained by Statera in 2020? And what goals do you want to achieve in 2020? By this we assume the questionnaire is asking for a roadmap! First, the project is barely a month old, and within just a month, our liquidity has grown from $50,000 to over $400,000 currently above $300,000. Among the things we have accomplished so far is the creation of market value for STA's Balancer liquidity pool token BPT, which is currently over $1000 per one BPT. Regarding what we set to achieve: The future is filled with many opportunities and potentials, currently, we are working on a massive campaign to introduce our product to the outside world. We have already made contact with different and reputable forums and channels regarding marketing and advertisement offers, some which we are currently negotiating, some which we are awaiting response. All we can say for now is that the Team is working hard to make this the Investment opportunity every crypto enthusiast has been waiting for. Statera has the goal of putting cryptocurrency into every portfolio. We believe we have a product that increases the returns of investing in cryptocurrencies and makes it easier to diversify in this space. We have done so much in June: articles, how to videos, completed the audit, tech upgrades like one token liquidity additions, and beginning our many social communities. We have been hard at work behind the scenes but things like sponsorships, features, and media take time, content makers need days if not weeks to develop content, especially the best of the best. We are working tirelessly, we will not disappoint. We have plans for 2020-2025 and will release those in the next month. They are big and bold, you’re going to be impressed by the scale of our vision, when we say “Cryptocurrency in every portfolio” we mean it. In 2020 more specifically we are focused on more media, videos, product offerings, and exchanges. Q3 : What is the purpose of STA token? How can we get STA? The purpose of STA is an investment in the first deflationary index fund. The whole index's value rises from these aspects: 1. The index funds (WBTC,WETH,SNX,LINK) appreciate in value 2. When the index tokens are traded, the pool receives transaction fees - 1% 3. STA burns on transactions, so it's deflationary nature increases its value as the total supply drops 4. Balancer rewards Index holders with BAL token airdrops every week You can invest via the 'Trade' links in stateraproject.com website. Easiest way is to do it using ETH. The monetary policy of our token is set in stone and constantly deflationary. This negative supply pressure is a powerful mechanism in economics and price discovery. Through the lowering of supply we can decrease your beta (volatility) and increase your alpha (gains). Our token is currently only top 40 in liquidity on Balancer, however our volume is top 10! You want to know why? Because Statera works. Statera increases arbitrage, volume, fees, BAL rewards, and liquidity. Our liquidity miners in our Balancer pool are already making some of the highest BAL rewards on the platform, one user we spoke with made 18% in June, that’s over 150% APY! Our product is working, 100% (or you could say 150%), and when people start to see that, and realize the value, the sky's the limit. Q4 : can we as a user do STA mining? The supply of STA doesn't increase anymore, it only decreases due to the burn feature. So there is no way to mine anymore STA. Only way to acquire the tokens is via an exchange. The monetary policy of our token is set in stone and constantly deflationary. This negative supply pressure is a powerful mechanism in economics and price discovery. Through the lowering of supply we can decrease your beta (volatility) and increase your alpha (gains). Our token is currently only top 40 in liquidity on Balancer, however our volume is top 10! You want to know why? Because Statera works. Statera increases arbitrage, volume, fees, BAL rewards, and liquidity. Our liquidity miners in our Balancer pool are already making some of the highest BAL rewards on the platform, one user we spoke with made 18% in June, that’s over 150% APY! Our product is working, 100% (or you could say 150%), and when people start to see that, and realize the value, the sky's the limit. Q5 : The ecosystem of a public chain has a lot to do with the level of engagement and participation of third-party developers. How does Statera support the developers? Not really. Our project is focusing on investment opportunities for the cryptocurrencies. The cryptocurrency tokens that are not used and are just sitting in a wallet can work for you by being added to an index fund and appreciate in value over time. First off, what we have created is a new asset class, I’ll repeat that, a new asset class. This asset has never existed: “Deflationary Index Fund,” what does that mean for finance? What will developers do with this? It’s hard to give a finite answer. We hope there are future economic papers on our token and what it means to be a deflationary index fund. With the addition of synthetic assets and oracles you can put any asset into the DeFi space: Gold, Nikkei 225, USD, etc. STA can be combined with any assets and bring the benefits of it’s ecosystem and deflationary mechanism to that asset. STA, the token itself, also gives you access to the price action of any asset it is paired with. Put simply STA’s balancer pool(s) give you a benefit in holding them, and STA’s price will reflect it’s inclusion in Balancer Pool(s) (and possibly future financial instruments), so STA is a bet on DeFi as a whole. When we say as whole, we mean as whole: what happens if you include STA in a crypto loan, or package it with a synthetic S&P 500 token, or use it as fee payment in a DeFi platform? Being fully decentralized it is up to our community to make this happen, social engagement and community are key. We are constantly bringing community members onto our team and rewarding those that benefit the ecosystem. in addition, Statera is a fully community project now. Paul who is the current team leader was an ordinary member of the community weeks ago, due to his interest and support for the project, he started dedicating his time to the project. Quite a number of community members are also in the same position, while Statera was developed by an individual, it is being built by the entire Statera community Community Questions (Twitter): Q1 From: @KazimKara35 The project tells us that the acquisition and sale of data between participants is protected by code of conduct and how safe is deployed on the blockchain, but how do you handle regulations while operating on a global scale? Statera is decentralized token, similar to other utility crypto tokens and same regulations apply to it as others. his is actually a benefit of our decentralized nature. This isn’t legal advice, however in the past regulating bodies have ruled that the more decentralized a project is, especially from launch, the less likely they are to be deemed a security (see: Ethereum). This means they can be traded more freely and be available on more platforms. We are as decentralized as you can be. The data itself is all secured through the blockchain which has been shown to be a highly secure medium. We do not store any of your data and as long as you follow best practices in blockchain security there are no added security risks of using Statera. We don’t, and literally can’t, hold anymore personal information than is made available in any blockchain transaction. and that "personal information" is more likely than not just your ethereum wallet address, no "real world" data is included in transactions Q2 from: @Michael_NGT353 What is Mechanism you use On your Project sir? Are you Use PoS,PoW or other Mechanism Can you explain why you use it and what is Make it Different? Our token is an ERC-20 token and it's running on the Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum's POW mechanism is currently supporting the Statera token We run on Ethereum, so we are currently PoW. With ETH 2.0 we will hopefully be PoS this year (hopefully). We use it because ETH has over 100 million addresses and around a million daily transactions. We are currently at about 1,900 token holders, we are just touching the edge of what is possible in this market. We chose the biggest and the best network available right now to launch our product. We think the upside is huge because of this choice. Being the biggest network it is also one of the most secure, no high risk vulnerabilities have been found in Ethereum or in our code (we've had our code audited by a third party, Hacken, and you can read their audit on our Medium page), so we also have security on our side Q3 From : @Ryaaan_Nguyen Can you list some of Statera outstanding features for everyone here to know about? What are the products that Statera is focusing on developing? As mentioned earlier by GC, First off, what we have created is a new asset class, I’ll repeat that, a new asset class. This asset has never existed: “Deflationary Index Fund,” what does that mean for finance? What will developers do with this? It’s hard to give a finite answer. We hope there are future economic papers on our token and what it means to be a deflationary index fund. With the addition of synthetic assets and oracles you can put any asset into the DeFi space: Gold, Nikkei 225, USD, etc. STA can be combined with any assets and bring the benefits of it’s ecosystem and deflationary mechanism to that asset. STA, the token itself, also gives you access to the price action of any asset it is paired with. Put simply STA’s balancer pool(s) give you a benefit in holding them, and STA’s price will reflect it’s inclusion in Balancer Pool(s) (and possibly future financial instruments), so STA is a bet on DeFi as a whole. When we say as whole, we mean as whole: what happens if you include STA in a crypto loan, or package it with a synthetic S&P 500 token, or use it as fee payment in a DeFi platform? We touched on this a bit in the question on what makes us special compared to other exchanges. We have created a product that synergizes with Balancer Pools creating a symbiotic relationship that improves the outcomes for users (our product can also synergize with future DeFi products). By including STA in an index fund with Link, BTC, ETH, and SNX you can buy one token and access the price action of four of the leading cryptocurrencies. You can also invest directly in the index fund (balancer pool) and receive the benefits of fees and BAL tokens paid to you while also having an automatically balanced portfolio (like an index fund with dividends). Lastly, the deflationary mechanics of STA increases the chance for positive price action while decreasing beta. We want to package Statera with assets across the whole cryptocurrency space, with an emphasis on DeFi. We also want everyday people to be able to invest quickly in crypto while also feeling reassured their investment is set up to succeed. We are focused on developing a name brand that people go to first and foremost when investing in crypto: cryptocurrency in every portfolio. This is all found in a smart contract that is fully decentralized, the founders can no longer augment the contract in any way and this has been confirmed by the third party code audit. This is a feature in and of itself, some argue that Bitcoin’s true value is in it’s network effect, first mover advantage, and immutability. Statera is modeled on all three of those and has those features in spades. The community now owns our token, the power in that, giving finance and power to the people, is why we are here. Q4 From : @futcek What do you think about the possibility of creating new use cases in DeFi space for existing real world assets by using crypto technology? What role do you see in this creation for Statera? I think my answer above actually answers this perfectly, Statera in and of itself is a “new use case”, a “deflationary index fund” has never existed, I’ll copy and paste the other relevant part: “With the addition of synthetic assets and oracles you can put any asset into the DeFi space: Gold, Nikkei 225, USD, etc. STA can be combined with any assets and bring the benefits of it’s ecosystem and deflationary mechanism to that asset. STA, the token itself, also gives you access to the price action of any asset it is paired with. Put simply STA’s balancer pool(s) give you a benefit in holding them, and STA’s price will reflect it’s inclusion in Balancer Pool(s) (and possibly future financial instruments), so STA is a bet on DeFi as a whole. When we say as whole, we mean as whole: what happens if you include STA in a crypto loan, or package it with a synthetic S&P 500 token, or use it as fee payment in a DeFi platform? Being fully decentralized it is up to our community to make this happen, social engagement and community are key. We are constantly bringing community members onto our team and rewarding those that benefit the ecosystem.” Statera is a way to make your investment more successful, and owning Statera let's you benefit from other people using it to make their investments more successful (a self feeding cycle). Q5 From : @Carmenzamorag Statera's deflationary system is based in that with every transaction 1% of the amount is destroyed, would this lead to lack of supply and liquidity in the long term future? How would that be fixed? The curve of supply is asymptote, meaning that it will never reach zero. The idea is that the deflationary process will slowly decrease the supply of STA, which – combined with a fixed or increaseing demand – will result in STA appreciating in value. Evidently, as the STA token increases in value, the amounts of STA being traded will slowly decrease: The typical investor might buy 10.000 STA at the current rate, but in the future (proportional to an increase in the valueation of STA) this number will tend to decrease, hence the future investor might only buy 1000 STA. This of course results in less STA being burned. Additionally, STA is divisible to the 18th decimal, why – even if the supply was to reach 1 STA – there would be a sufficient supply. Well this would be a question for a Mathematician, and luckily we’re loaded with them (as seen above)! I’ll try to illustrate with an example. 1% of 100 million is 1 million, 1% of 10 million is 100,000. As we go down in supply the burn is less by volume. What also happens at lower supply is higher prices (supply and demand economics). So those 1 million tokens burned may be worth $20,000, but by the time overall supply is at 10 million those 100,000 tokens may also be worth $20,000 or even more. This means you transact “less”, if you want to buy 1 Ether now with Statera you need 8,900 STA which would burn 89 tokens. If Statera is worth $100 you only need 2.32 statera (.023 tokens burned). Along with this proportional and relative burn decrease, tokens are 18 decimals long, so even when we get to 1 token left (which mathematically would take decades if not centuries, but that is wholly dependent on usage), you are still left with 10 to the 18th power, or one quintillion “tokens”. So it’s going to take us a while to have supply issues :) Nuked Phase (3rd Part) Q) What is your VISION and Mission? Our working mission and vision: Mission: Provide every investor with simple and effective ways to invest in cryptocurrency. Decrease volatility and increase positive price pressure in cryptocurrency investments. Lower the barrier to entry for more advanced investment tools. Be a community focused and community driven cryptocurrency, fully decentralized by every meaning of the word. Vision: We aspire to put “cryptocurrency in every portfolio”. We envision a world where finance is given back to the people and wealth building strategies withheld only for affluent individuals are given to all. We also strive to create an investment environment based on sound monetary policy and all the power that comes with a sound asset. Q) What are the benefits of STA for its investors in long term? Does STA have Afrika as an important area for its expansion? We have ties to Africa and see Statera as a way for anyone and everyone to invest in cryptocurrency. The small marketcap of statera makes it's price low and it's upside massive. Right now if you wanted to be exposed to the price action of four cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, Link, SNX) Statera is a way to gain that exposure in a way that has a huge upside, compared to the other four assets, there are risks in investing in any small cap but with those risk come outsized rewards (not investment advice and all answers are solely my opinions 😊) Q) In the long run, why should we trust and follow STATERA? How do you raise awareness and elimination of the doubts of investors / partners / customers?. You're really asking "How do I trust myself and other crypto investors" The project is FULLY decentralized, it is now in the hands of the community. We would venture a guess that the community wants their investment to succeed and be worth more in the future, so you are betting on people. wanting to make themselves money on their own investment. This is a pretty sure bet. The community being active and engaged is key, and we have short term and long term plans to ensure this happens Q) No one can doubt the strength of #Statera. But can you tell us some of the challenges and difficulties you're presently facing? How can you possibly overcome them? We're swinging outside our weightclass, we don't see litecoin or SNX, or any other crypto product as our competition. Our competition is NASDAQ, Fidelity, etc. We want to provide world class financial instruments that only the wealthy have access to in the traditional world to everyone. Providing liquidity, risk parity, being paid to provide liquidity, unique value propositions, are all things we want to bring to everyone. However we are coming up in a hectic space, everyday their is fud and defamation on the web, but that is the sandbox we chose to play in and we aren't grabbing our ball and going home. We can tell you that we will not disappoint and fighting all the fud that comes along with being a small and upstart project only fuel our fire. Building legitimacy is our largest challenge and looking at our audit, financial report, and some things you will see in the coming weeks, we hope you see we are facing those challenges head on. Q) What is the actual uniqueness of #Statera.??? Can you guys please explain tha advantages of #Statera over other projects.?? When we launched there were no other products like ours. There are now copies, and we wish them the best, but we have the best product, hands down. Over the next couple weeks this will become apparent, if it hasn't already, also a lot of the AMA answers dug deeper into our unique value proposition, especially the benefits we provide to Balancer Pools which shows the benefits we would provide for any index fund. We are a tool to improve cryptocurrency investing Q) Fragmentation, layering and cross-chain are three future solutions for high-performance blockchains. Where is Statera currently? What are the main reasons for taking this direction? We operate on the Ethereum chain, as it upgrades our services and usability will upgrade. We are working on UI and more user friendly systems to onboard people into our ecosystem Q) How STATERA plan to make room and make this project known in the world of crypto, full of technology and full of new projects very good in today's market? We think we have a truly innovative product, which - when first understood - appeals to most investors. Whether you want a high-volatility/medium-risk token like STA or whether you are more conservative and simply just plan on adding to the Statera pool BPT (which is not nearly as volatile but still offers great returns). We plan on making Statera known to the crypto world through a marketing campaign which slowly will be unravelled in the comming days and weeks. If interested, you can check out an analysis of the different investment options in the Statera ecosystem in our first financial report: https://medium.com/@stateraproject/statera-financial-reports-b47defb58a18 Q) Hello, cryptocurrencies are very volatile and follow bitcoin ... and does this apply to Statera? or is there some other logic present in some way? is statera token different from a current token? Are you working on listings on other exchanges? Currently uniswap is somewhat uncomfortable for fees. We are also on bamboo relay, saturn network, and mesa. Statera will be volatile like all cryptocurrency, this is a small and nascent space. But with the deflationary mechanic and balancer pool, over time, as marketcap grows it will become less volatile and more positively reactive to price. Q) Security is one of the most essential characteristics for a project to get reputation. How can #Statera Team assure to their community that users assets and investments will stay safe from unwanted agents? We have been third party audited by the same company that worked with VeChain to audit their code. Our code has been shown to be bulletproof. Unless Ethereum comes up with a fatal security flaw there is nothing that can happen to our contract (there is no backdoor, no way for anyone to edit or adjust the smart contract). Q) Many investors see the project from the price of the coin. Can you give us advantages why Statera is so suitable for long-term investment? and what makes Statera different from other similar projects? Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective. A question you can ask is “What if this fails”? But you can also ask, “What if this succeeds”? Cryptocurrency is filled with asymmetric risks, we think if you look into the value proposition you will find that there is a huge asymmetric risk/reward in Statera, and we will make that even clearer in our soon to be released litepaper. You are on the ground floor of a simple but highly effective solution to onboarding people into defi, cryptocurrencies, and investing. Our product reduces volatility and increases gains (decreases beta and increases alpha in investor terms), which is highly attractive in any investment. The down side is there but the upside outweighs it exponentially (asymmetric risk) Q) What your plans in place for global expansion, are Statera focusing on only market at this time? Or focus on building and developing or getting customers and users, or partnerships? Can you explain this? We have reached out to influencers in other countries and things are in the works. We have also translated documents and are working on having them in at least 4 languages by the end of July. We were founded globally, our team is global, and we are focused on reaching all 7 billion people. Q) Now in the cryptofield everyday there are new projects joining in the Blockchain space. They are upgraded, Well-established and coming up with innovative technology. How Statera going to compete with them? What do you think, one day Statera will become useless And will be lost into the abyss of time for not bringing any new technology? We are the first of our kind, no one had a deflationary index fund before us. Index funds will be the future of crypto (look at the popularity of etfs and indexes in the traditional markets). We are a tool to make your index function better and pay you more. As long as people care about crypto index funds they will care about the value STA brings to that. We have an involved and long term plan to reach dominance over a 5 year span, this is not a flash in the pan, big things coming Q1. You say that the weight and proportions of your tokens are constant. So how have you managed to prevent market price speculation from generating hypervolability in your token price? Do you consider yourselves a kind of stablecoin? Q2. How many jurisdictions allow the use of Stratera products and services? Are they available for Latin America? @joloroeowo The balancer ensures an equal ratio of 20% amongst the five tokens included in our fund. This, however, does not imply that the tokens are stable. Rather, the Balancer protocol helps mitigating price fluctuations. Q) How can I as a Statera participant participate in liquidity mining, and receive BAL as reward? What are the use cases of $STA token, and how are users motivated to buy and hold long term? The easiest way is to go to stateratoken.com and click trade then BPT. You can also buy all five tokens and click on portfolio then add liquidity. Balancer is working on a simpler interface to add liquidity with one token, we are waiting on them. I think we explained the use cases above Q) What do you plan have for global expansion, is Statera currently focused solely on the market? Or is it focused on building and developing or acquiring customer and user or partnership relationships? Can you explain it? We are currently working on promoting the project and further develope our product, making it lucrative for more new investors to join our pool and invest in the STA token. Q1) Statera have 2 types of tokens, so can you tell me the differences between STA and STAC ? What are their uses cases? Is possible Swap between them? Q2) Currently the only possible Swap or "exchange" possible is Uniswap, so you do have plans to list the STA token into a more Exchanges? STAC is obsolete, we only have STA and BPT (go to our website and click on trade) stateratoken.com BPT gives you more diversification and less risk, STA gives you more volatility and more chance for big gains. Q2 we are on multiple exchanges (4), bamboo relay, saturn, and mesa we do have plans for future exchanges but the big ones have processes and hoops to jump through that can't be done so quickly Q) What business scenarios can STATERA support now? In which industries can we see the mass adoption of STATERA technology in the near future? Statera increases the effectiveness of your cryptocurrency investments. Specifically it makes cryptocurrency index funds function better, netting you higher returns, which we have already seen in just one month of implementation. Right now, today, you can buy our BPT token and increase the functionality of holding a crypto index fund. In the future we want every single web user to see and use our product Q) Do you plan to migrate to other platforms like Tron, BinanceChain, EOS, etc. if it is feasible?? Migrating our current contract is not. Starting new offerings on those other chains could be possible, they aren't on our radar currently but if the community requests them we are driven by our community Q) ETH Blockchain is a Blockchain have many token based in it, i have used ETH blockchain long time and i see it have big fee and need much time to make a transcation so Why you choose to based STA in ETH blockchain not other like Bep2 or Trc20 ? Simply: 100 million addresses, 1 million transactions a day. The more users we have the more we will benefit our community. We hope ETH 2.0 scaling will fix the problems you mention. Q) No one achieve anything of value on its own, please can you share about Statera present and future partnerships that will drive you to success in this highly congested crypto space? We have a unique product that no one else has (there are people who have copied us). We can't announce our current and future partnerships yet, but they will be released soon. Our future hopes of partnerships are big and will be key to our future, know we are focused on making big partnerships, some you may not even be thinking about. Q) According to the fact that your algorithm causes 1% of each transaction to be destroyed, I would like to know, then, how you plan to finance yourself as a project in the long term? The project is now in the hands of the community and we are a team of passionate people volunteering to help promote and develope the Statera ecosystem. But then, how do we afford running a promo campaign? We have lots of great community members donating funds that goes to promoting the project. In other words, the community helps financing the project. And so far, we have created a fantastic community consisting of passionate and well-educated people! Q) There are many cryptocurrency startups were established by talent teams, but they got problem in raising capital via token sales due to many factors as bear market, bankrupt etc. This leaded their potential startups fail. So how will Statera break these barriers and attract more funds from outside crypto space? We are community focused and community ran. When you look at centralized cryptocurrencies you can see the negative of them (Tron, ADA, etc.) We believe being fully decentralized is the true power position. You the owner of statera can affect our future and must affect our future. This direct ownership means people need to mobilize and organize to push us forward, and it is in their best self interest to do so. It's a bet on our community, we're excited about that bet Q) What business scenarios can STATERA support now? In which industries can we see the mass adoption of STATERA technology in the near future? Statera increases the effectiveness of your cryptocurrency investments. Specifically it makes cryptocurrency index funds function better, netting you higher returns, which we have already seen in just one month of implementation. Right now, today, you can buy our BPT token and increase the functionality of holding a crypto index fund. In the future we want every single web user to see and use our product Q) Why being a hybrid of a liquidity pool and an index fund? What are the main benefits about this? By being a liquidity pool the exchange side of the pool (balancer also functions as an exchange) gives you added liquidity for more effortless, effective, and cheaper rebalancing. You also benefit from getting paid the fee when people use the exchange AND getting paid BAL tokens that are worth $15-20 USD. These are not benefits you get with an index fund, meanwhile the liquidity pool rebalances just like an index fund would Q) Which specific about technology and strategy of #STA that make you believe it will be successful and what does #STA plan do to attract more users in the upcoming time? I think the idea behind Statera is truly ingenious. We have made an index fund, which investors are highly(!) incentivised to invest in, namely because the ROI, so far, has been huge. An increase in the pool liquidity (index fund) indirectly translates into an increase in the price of STA, why we think the STA token - combined with its deflationary nature - will increase in the long run. The mechanism behind this is somewhat complex, but to better get an understanding of it, I suggest you visit our medium page and read more about the project: https://medium.com/@stateraproject
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