Friday, November 4, 2022

Market Wrap: Cryptos Rise in an Eventful Week; Bitcoin Hovers Over $21K, Ether Soars

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/11/04/market-wrap-cryptos-rise-in-an-eventful-week-bitcoin-hovers-over-21k-ether-soars/

Hiro's Weekly Community Updates: Explaining Crypto to Your Family, Hiro Happy Hours, Hiro’s Monthly Developer Call, Web3 on Bitcoin, and more!

Happy New Month, Stacks devs! T.G.I.F. Here’s a roundup of all the latest announcements, tutorials, and events to keep on your radar. Some of our latest posts include:

A Look Inside Gamma’s Create Portal - In this blog, Sainato dives into the purpose of the new Create Portal, which allows artists and creatives to launch NFT collections and support NFT-gated communities. Read more here.
Crypto, STX, and Hiro: How I Explain Them to My Grandmother - If you are entirely new to crypto or if you work in crypto and need a way to explain to your friends and family what exactly it is that you do, you have come to the right place. In this blog, we walk you through how to explain what you do to friends and family in a simple way.
Breaking Down an Order Book Contract for NFT Marketplaces - In this tutorial, Byzantion co-founder Daniel Fritsche teaches us how to create an NFT order book and its benefits for marketplaces.
Hiro Happy Hours @ LA Blockchain Summit - The end of the year is all about reflecting and planning ahead. Alex Miller, Diwaker Gupta, Jonas Gerber and Kaitlin Pike discuss achievements from 2022 and look ahead to 2023. Listen to the recording here.
Hiro Monthly Developer Call #6 - Thanks to everyone who tuned in last month and a special shoutout to Brian Franklin, Will Corcoran, Max Efremov and others who joined us. Couldn't make the call? Here's a recap to catch all the highlights.
Dan Held on Bitcoin DeFi and Lessons for Building in Web3 - In this episode of Web3 on Bitcoin, special guest Dan Held joins developer advocate Max Efremov to discuss the monetary value of bitcoin, how Ethereum and Solana can't compare to the security and decentralization of the Bitcoin blockchain, and much more.

Looking to enter the world of blockchain? Hiro is hiring! Check out some of our open positions here.

Stay tuned here and on our Twitter for more updates and announcements

World’s First Auto-Scaling Demo on a Blockchain – Shardeum

Shardeum, a L1 blockchain network, is gearing up for an important milestone on 5th November 2022 just weeks after announcing the completion of its seed funding round that saw it raise $18.2mm. The network will demo a key feature from its innovative technology — auto-scaling. This blog will explain why auto-scalability is crucial to Shardeum’s goal of overcoming blockchain trilemma which in turn will help it to keep the gas fees very low and constant on the network.

https://preview.redd.it/81npelcg8xx91.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=039d1e6044fcfca920dd7bd4c67a3ff17b873d19

Milestones Achieved So Far

Shardeum was launched in February, 2022. The project’s protocol layer is called Shardus which is developed by Omar Syed and his team since 2017. Shardus previously had demonstrated auto-scaling and linear scaling features which were key elements to launch Shardeum and its mission to onboard billions of users to Web3. This was possible with the help of sharding and more specifically, dynamic state sharding which is considered an advanced version of static sharding used by more recent blockchain networks such as Near and Elrond. The protocol further completed EVM integration earlier in 2022 making Shardeum an EVM-based layer 1 smart contract platform that can scale linearly with atomic and cross-shard composability.

After Shardeum Foundation was structured in Q1 of 2022, the project set its sights on successfully demonstrating linear scalability to its community for the first time as a layer 1 open source blockchain platform. Linear scaling, in simpler words, means the capability to scale up by adding more nodes to the network. And with more nodes, project aims to not just scale infinitely but expand horizontally by allowing average users like you and me to run a node on the network and keep it safe in return for rewards. April 2022 marked the first time linear scalability was demonstrated by a blockchain network. The below images were taken from the demo event that shows the TPS with 100 nodes and the TPS with 200 nodes. Apologies for the poor quality of the images.

Understanding How Transactions are Processed on Shardeum

Let’s start this interesting exercise briefly by understanding how transactions are processed on Shardeum. Unlike typical blockchain networks, nodes in every shard on Shardeum will validate each transaction individually and reach consensus on them. With dynamic state sharding, nodes are assigned multiple address ranges so when consensus happens on individual transactions, network will process them simultaneously. Such transactions are then batched together in partitions and passed onto archive nodes on the network who are responsible to maintain the transaction history. In typical blockchains, transactions are first added to a block and consensus is applied at a block level which means processing can only happen sequentially slowing down the network. Moreover, the recent blockchains with static sharding run into the problem of waiting to form a new fixed shard before processing every transaction.

Validator node on Shardeum will thus need to download only the current state of the network pertinent to the transactions they handle making it affordable for average users to run nodes and keep it safe. Light architecture as such facilitate Shardeum to take advantage of its other breakthrough features including auto-scaling. Note, although auto-scaling is not new, incorporating this feature at the protocol level will be the first time ever by a layer 1 blockchain.

Shardeum & Auto-Scaling

Asides from its capability to scale linearly, Shardeum will make use of one of the hallmarks in its technology — auto scaling — which will allow the network to automatically increase or decrease its TPS (throughput) capacity based on demand in the network.

Autoscaling will work by measuring the network load every cycle (60 seconds) and coming to consensus on the required number of validator nodes needed to process the current load. This is similar to the Bitcoin network coming to consensus on its difficulty level. For example, when an application on Shardeum goes viral, the network will react by independently adding more active validator nodes to increase throughput capacity. If traffic on the network goes down, it would shrink the number of active validators and keep the operations on the network sufficiently nimble. Remember, auto-scaling is self executed without any need for intervention from an intermediary.

Why Auto-scaling Matters?

Auto-scaling is important for quite a few notable reasons. Firstly, when you build a network, it should ideally be able to self-govern the number of nodes with an optimal and dynamic incentive mechanism. Maintaining high efficiency while scaling to meet demand is what will help keep the cost of the network and ultimately the average transaction fees low. Secondly, auto-scaling helps to maximize decentralization and security. Shardeum, as part of its design, will randomly rotate the validator nodes in and out of the system. When a validator node is rotated out, a ‘standby node’ is rotated into the network to validate transactions. And when the traffic is on the move, the network will make use of ‘standby node’ concept accordingly. And finally, as previously indicated, auto-scalability and load balancing are techniques leveraged by traditional technology powerhouses to seamlessly scale up their networks as more users joined them.

Sharding is the Solution

Blockchain was introduced to bring maximum decentralization and security in our daily lives after the 2008 financial crisis and the focus was never on scalability. But with the technology thriving despite all the challenges it faced through the last decade, industry experts like Vitalik Buterin rightly recognized the need to scale up the Web3 ecosystem to not just compete with Web2 peers but also to replace them in the near future. That’s when solutions like sharding and parallel processing were theorized as potential answers to scalability trilemma through which blockchains can become more efficient. When compute workload, storage, and bandwidth are evenly distributed across all nodes on the network, it will naturally save more resources. That, in turn, will allow the networks to consider and leverage other scalability solutions like auto-scaling for instance.

Three key reasons why Litecoin is undervalued

Litecoin (as well as a few alts) has been pumping in the past couple of days. I think Litecoin is really undervalued and it might be that people are starting to see that too. Here are three key reasons why I think Litecoin is undervalued:

1) 100 percent uptime 10 years straight.

To my knowledge Litecoin is the only cryptocurrency out there that has 100 percent uptime 10 years straight. That's pretty impressive considering how long crypto has been around!

2) It has optional privacy

The recent MWEB upgrade bought a privacy feature to Litecoin. Since then active MWEB addresses have grown at a staggering rate!

3) only 84 million litecoins will ever exist

Similar to Bitcoin only a finite amount of Litecoins will exist. There is a halvening event happening in 2023 which will make it more difficult to mine litecoin, which will push the price up. Litecoin is deflationary. Investors might be starting to price that in.

JP Anaheim show was underwhelming to say the least

Just got back from watching JP live for the first time in Anaheim at the Honda center. I had the VIP meet and greet ticket so I got to shake his hand and get a picture with him at the end.

Wow this was disappointing. I’m still a huge fan of JP but the show itself was a massive let down. The first 20 minutes was just Tammy promoting stuff.

The format was Q&A which was atrocious. The questions he answered were stuff like “what should I tell my kids if they don’t want to go to college” and “what do you think about Bitcoin”… wtf? People wrote in questions through the forum like what do you think about no nut November and Kanye west…

It ended abruptly and was super short like maybe an hour and a half long. He did not talk about anything new or stuff he hasn’t already covered. The main issue for me was just how shallow and bereft of intellectual substance it was. Nothing about the book and nothing about deep philosophy.

He talked a bit too much about the Elliot Page incident and trans stuff for my liking. During the VIP Q&A at the end he answered like 3 questions and was out. There were some people there who were very intelligent and I had a lengthy discussion about Dostoevsky with a gentleman at the event.

Then there was the two girls sitting next to me. When I asked them which JP recommended books they’ve read they said they don’t read books and just watch some of his videos. Had zero thoughts to offer about topics related to philosophy. One of them seemed more focused on her red wine than philosophical banter. Never heard of Nietzsche…

Then there was the rest of the crowd who must have thought this was a live sitcom because they kept laughing at every tease Peterson made against liberals and post modernists which I also thought was humorous at times but it seemed like some of the audience was really getting a kick out of it.

Overall I’m still glad I met him in person and got a picture. JP is still the man who changed my life and for that I will be forever grateful. I just think he’s to commercial now and more focused on political stuff instead of deep philosophical thought.

Do not try to misinterpret my post JP is still brilliant and his lectures on YouTube are genius. I still love the man 100% and wish him nothing but the best. I just did not care for the format of the event and thought there were some things that could be improved.

*I’ve been awake since 6am and I have a 7 hour flight to catch tomorrow. Sorry I’m too tired to use proper grammar. Going to sleep and will continue reading The Gay Science on my way home.

Cardano Daily Discussion - November 04, 2022

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the Cardano Daily Discussion!

The standard sub rules apply here (see sidebar), with the exception that price discussion is allowed in this thread, though we encourage you to try not to make this the focus and talk about the project itself. Please ask questions, help others and be civil - be sure to get involved in Project Catalyst too!

If you're new, please make sure you're read through the newbies guide and share it with others (use the ?newbies comment command to reference it).

⚠️ Scam Warning ⚠️

Please read the Cybersecurity guidelines for Cardano Users.

There are ongoing giveaway scams on youtube and many scammers lurking in Cardano's social channels impersonating ambassadors/moderators/official staff contacting users via direct messages.

For example, searching 'cardano' on youtube and sorting by most recent upload date shows several giveaway scams running (all videos in screenshot are scams):

Ongoing 'giveaway' scams on Youtube

The youtube scams are automated; use stolen footage usually of Charles Hoskinson and are restreamed so to appear to be 'live'; appear to have many watchers (which are bots); use bought hacked channels and are edited to appear like official channels.