Saturday, June 12, 2021

Cardano Rumor Rundown JUN 13 2021

Hey Everyone!

Let's go...

Newly covered today:

Charles recorded for the Lex Fridman Podcast. It went over five hours. This is a big deal given that Lex has 1.12 million subscribers and it’s closer to mainstream than a crypto audience. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1403498549300584448 https://www.youtube.com/user/lexfridman
The Marlowe Webinar with Shruti is now available on youtube. Very interesting discussion of DeFi in general and also specific topics like “deep interoperability” in DeFi. Cardano is obviously already doing the very involved thinking about the future of DeFi. https://youtu.be/vzsUSG5CSj0

Previously Covered but still interesting:

Charles makes the case for collaboration with Starlink in Africa. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1392916783854616577
People are starting to realize what the real value of NFTs will be. It’s not in collectibles. https://twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/1392939118355783682
The Cardano Development Update for this week is out. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-05-14/
The Cardano 360 team also dropped a video with specific mid-month Alonzo testnet updates. At the timestamp in the link below the vid lays out the various test groups and when they will participate. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1393258090703826944 https://youtu.be/5mPC4uLMdEw?t=532
We are seeing some small pools retiring. We’ll obviously see more and more of this as time marches on. But, here’s a salute to the small pools that gave it a go! This SPO also brought us poolpeek.com which we have covered here before. https://twitter.com/CardanoBudz/status/1393252321845465088 www.poolpeek.com
John O’Connor on CNBCAfrica! He gave a really good explanation of how Africa with it’s already very high adoption of mobile payment wallets can leapfrog the legacy payment systems currently in use in more developed countries. He also reiterated that Cardano will expand to five countries this year and 20 next year! https://youtu.be/RET8hIQQLUA
This tweet by u/TheADAApe pretty much sums it all up. When people ask me how I knew, I’m going to point them to this post. https://twitter.com/ArmySpies/status/1393606491110662146
To hear about something truly good happening in the Cardano ecosystem check out this interview with Mickey Watkins, CEO of World Mobile, on the Hotel Cardano podcast. Really good details on World Mobile's connecting the unconnected in sub-Saharan Africa! https://youtu.be/L15bn_b2moA
What if these two got to talking about what Atala Prism could bring to the table for students in the city of Miami? https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1393574632305868805
The saga of BTC maximalists being angry at Elon continues with Elon implying that Tesla could sell its BTC while Cardano continues just doing its thing like normal. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies
Likewise, Marc Cuban tried to FUD real world use of Cardano only to be confronted with a giant infographic of use cases and partnerships along with an explanatory video just for him. https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1393646131708665858 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1393689887648272384
Initial Stakepool Offerings (“ISOs”) are here. Crypto is no stranger to novel means of capital formation and now the Cardano ecosystem is getting in on the action. Here is SundaeSwap’s explanation of how ISOs will work. https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/iso-sundae-with-the-works-c5c335101ef5
ICYMI, Manuel Chakravarty reminds us all that his Cardano Summit 2020 talk is publicly available for questions on native assets. Really interesting discussion of the asset identifier just being a hash of the policy script and how that helps create a super lightweight easy to use system. https://twitter.com/TacticalGrace/status/1394263629088923649
Elon confirms that Tesla has not sold any BTC. https://twitter.com/BTC_Archive/status/1394051036462071808
Charles makes a whole video about how to fix Doge. https://youtu.be/iQd9XjEm8EE
The Ecosystem is getting even bigger every day we inch closer to Alonzo! https://twitter.com/TyIsDigital/status/1394345977952284676
The Cardano Foundation is out to do something incredible with supply chains as described in the fireside chat! In his previous Cardano Live appearance, Frederik Gregaard, CF CEO, also expressed a very healthy and sustainable perspective on what DeFi should become. He compared the current state of DeFi to just moving funds from your left pocket to your right pocket and taking profit. https://youtu.be/d8uPMZplfeM https://youtu.be/xbMSQUA1lss
The ISO model entering the capital formation toolbox in Cardano is going to make the stake pool game extremely interesting with SPOs scrambling to find the right balance between rewarding ADA and giving their delegators other things like tokens. Some stake pools could even become like portfolio funds with relationships with many different projects the tokens of which are given to delegators. Babel Fees could also play a role here for smart SPOs as they may allow access to a wide variety of tokens in the ecosystem that could be used to reward delegators with a sort of index fund exposure to a wide variety of Cardano projects.
May Cardano 360 coming one week from today (always the last Thursday of the month). https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1395117067960045569
New delegations from IOHK are out. Congrats to the selected SPOs. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1395087751746310156
The Cardano Foundation has released the full video of the Fireside Chat with Eva and Fred. Lots of questions answered on a variety of fronts. Very interesting remarks including that in discussions with financial institutions, Fred has found they are interested in exposure to the alpha provided by the asset class in general, tokenization of assets, and the yield provided by staking rewards. Fred counters that they SHOULD be far more interested in the Cardano standard including the concepts of reference accounts, programmability of money, and transaction metadata. https://youtu.be/JW6s9Jkyazg
In a video press release yesterday, the Fed finally admitted that it’s moving toward a central bank digital currency (just like every other central bank). This will eventually be impactful on Cardano and every other crypto ecosystem. https://youtu.be/WOAQxpG79Ag
The Treasury is trying to figure out how to get cryptocurrency regulation in a headlock. This will probably go hand-in-hand with the Fed’s March toward a CBDC. Afterall, what good is all the tracking and monitoring afforded by a CBDC if it’s easier for everyone to just use a non-central bank digital currency? Tax evasion in crypto is also obviously a target problem since we know only about 800 people a year paid taxes on crypto in 2013-2015. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/us-treasury-calls-for-stricter-cryptocurrency-compliance-with-irs.html https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-American-Families-Plan-Tax-Compliance-Agenda.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-taxes-overview
The Cardano Foundation has released the full video of the Fireside Chat with Eva and Fred. Lots of questions answered on a variety of fronts. Very interesting remarks including that in discussions with financial institutions, Fred has found they are interested in exposure to the alpha provided by the asset class in general, tokenization of assets, and the yield provided by staking rewards. Fred counters that they SHOULD be far more interested in the Cardano standard including the concepts of reference accounts, programmability of money, and transaction metadata. https://youtu.be/JW6s9Jkyazg
In a video press release yesterday, the Fed finally admitted that it’s moving toward a central bank digital currency (just like every other central bank). This will eventually be impactful on Cardano and every other crypto ecosystem. https://youtu.be/WOAQxpG79Ag
The Treasury is trying to figure out how to get cryptocurrency regulation in a headlock. This will probably go hand-in-hand with the Fed’s March toward a CBDC. Afterall, what good is all the tracking and monitoring afforded by a CBDC if it’s easier for everyone to just use a non-central bank digital currency? Tax evasion in crypto is also obviously a target problem since we know only about 800 people a year paid taxes on crypto in 2013-2015. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/us-treasury-calls-for-stricter-cryptocurrency-compliance-with-irs.html https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-American-Families-Plan-Tax-Compliance-Agenda.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-taxes-overview
Charles has now added the Jack Dorsey edition to his series of “Let’s Educate Crypto Adjacent Celebrities” videos. https://youtu.be/lMZ1xQzWtl4
...and still...KINGS OF THE GITHUB! May our reign never end. https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1395771379929255945
Some banks still won’t allow customers to buy crypto with their accounts. In 2021, this is still a thing. https://twitter.com/CryptoCardano_/status/1395933037192437763
Even the Pope is condemning Proof-of-Work? At least, that’s how the crypto community took a recent tweet. https://twitter.com/Pontifex/status/1394993742226939905
Apparently, you can now have your own Stakepool run for you for $122/month in a Stakepool-as-a-Service arrangement. https://twitter.com/ChrisGraff/status/1396169061487333380
If you want to see how the Cardano NFT space has been heating up, you can check out CNFT resale listings at Lovelace Marketplace. https://lovelacemarketplace.io/all-categories/
Ethiopia awards new Telecom license as promised. The winner, a consortium including Vodafone, Safaricom, and Sumitomo; will invest $8 billion in their network in Ethiopia in the next 10 years and will cover the country in 4G. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-22/ethiopia-awards-new-telecoms-license-to-vodafone-consortium https://twitter.com/AbiyAhmedAli/status/1396060475184533505
Check out this new infographic explaining how World Mobile Works! https://blog.worldmobile.io/post/how-world-mobile-is-connecting-the-unconnected-infographic/
Cardano hits 1MM wallets! https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1396331888093061121
Set your calendars! The May Cardano 360 is this Thursday! https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1396331908632653830
Charles releases a 90 Day Countdown to Alonzo video. https://youtu.be/u6negi1yAQQ
Institutional inflows into Cardano get some coverage by the crypto press. https://cointelegraph.com/news/cardano-sees-largest-weekly-inflows-from-institutional-managers-coinshares
Charles and Kim Dotcom have a conversation about PoW miners possibly fleeing China with all of their hardware. https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1396964996693708801
Cardano gets a little coverage on NBC for it’s energy efficiency. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cryptocurrency-goes-green-proof-stake-offer-solution-energy-concerns-rcna1030
Plutus Pioneers Lecture #7 is out. https://youtu.be/_EDJt55vOB0
Yesterday was ADA Payday with the end of Epoch 267. I hope everyone made lots of sweet delicious staking rewards! https://adapools.org/epochs
Paypal moving away from the “walled garden” model. This is decentralization teaching the legacy institutions a lesson. https://www.coindesk.com/paypal-will-let-customers-withdraw-crypto-exec-says
Charles is interviewed on Yahoo Finance where he explained: 1) how the lack of an obvious decentralized governance system in ETH and BTC will cripple their efforts as they attempt to scale and the founders/core developers start losing prominence, 2) the ADA EUTXO system is vastly more scaleable with it’s local state being so much more amenable to sharding than ETH’s global state system, 3) Cardano has a high willingness to bring on users in hypergrowth areas like Africa where ETH seems to have little interest, and 4) ETH does not seem to be as highly concerned with interoperability which might become highly valuable in the future. https://twitter.com/YahooFinance/status/1397593275826151424
Cardano 360 is tomorrow. Don’t miss it if you want to hear about all the awesome things happening with Alonzo (smart contracts), Hydra (scalability), and everything else! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1397549347592675338
The May Cardano 360 was yesterday and we had lots of updates including the Color Coding for the different stages of the testnet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS33gRj9JYE
Alonzo “Blue” Era Testnet (through mid June; <50 user cohort) will include the basic functionality of the system for testing basic contracts . Initially the SPOs will be included, then some of the Plutus Pioneers will be allowed in, then a few of the outside development firms (Plutus Partners). The Plutus Partners will be working on specific areas including oracles, DEXs, stablecoins, NFTs, and DeFi. This will produce code and documentation that will be publicly available.
Alonzo “White” Era Testnet (mid June to mid July; <500 user cohort) will add more Plutus Pioneers and more functionality. They will develop various dApps and there will be interaction on the user side of these dApps. They will do some benchmarking at this stage.
The Alonzo Hard Fork Combinator Event requires a lot of different pieces come together at the same time. But, this is not their first rodeo and they have a lot of experience with this from the ITN, Shelley, and etc.
Alonzo “Purple” Era Tesnet (mid July to mid August; fully public) will involve a full public network with all of the Plutus pioneers, the Rosetta Api to the exchanges, Daedalus, hardware wallets, graphQL, and full functionality. The purpose of this phase will be optimization.
Alonzo “Red” Era Tesnet (August; a very short phase) will involve a new network where they can test scalability and stability.
Alonzo “Black” Era Tesnet (August; a very short phase) will be the final public testnet where they will ensure they have their candidate mainnet releases ready to launch on the mainnet.
They are committed to making sure there is a very large group of people who are familiar with using the Alonzo testnet by the time the mainnet launches.
Alonzo Mainnet (August-September). It’s looking like Alonzo mainnet launch was positioned in very late August through September in the infographics. That makes me assume there is a chance of August, much better chance of September, and also some chance of October or later. This is blockchain development after all. Also, we’ve waited years. Why care about a few weeks?
There will be another Plutus Pioneers Cohort later this summer.
Marlowe Run will be a browser product that can run on mobile or desktop. It can be linked to your wallet and be used to run Cardano smart contracts simultaneously on a distributed basis across multiple user browsers. The user interface is light years ahead of anything we saw in Marlowe Meadow or the Marlowe Playground simulations. It will include a library of off-the-shelf contracts.
There will be a Marlowe Webinar on June 3. Register here: https://webinar.marlowe-finance.io/
The ERC-20 converter was looking very intuitive and seamless in the new demo. It should be on the testnet in June.
Manuel Chakravarty gave a big update on Hydra (layer 2 scaling). Hydra will not require that the base layer be modified since it will be implemented via Plutus smart contracts. Hydra is actually a collection of protocols including Hydra Head and Hydra Tail. Hydra Head is a symmetric protocol where multiple participants will be online simultaneously for the whole period of the head exchanging messages. Hydra Tail is an asymmetric protocol involving a high performance server and many clients that may be mobile and could be offline for large portions of the tail’s existence. There will also be “inter head & tail networking” which will allow for a network of heads and tails. They have a published research paper on Hydra Head. They are currently writing the Hydra Tail paper.
Hydra is distinguished from other layer 2 protocols by its isomorphic properties. This means you will be able to run any smart contract that works on the base layer in a Hydra Head! This is very special. We won’t need special purpose contracts built out just for layer 2. There are some big implications to this. Since a Hydra Head is essentially just a Plutus smart contract, this means you can run a Hydra Head inside another Hydra Head. It’s turtles all the way down, guys. It sounds like they can do this iteratively as much as they want.
Aggelos also gave a good presentation on the importance of “skin in the game” in resource based consensus protocols (both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake) and its effect on promotion or discouragement of centralization. He explained how Ouroboros has built-in safeguards to prevent centralization including the K parameter (currently at 500) which caps total rewards per pool and the alpha parameter (currently at 0.3) which splits rewards into a 77% piece and a 23% piece. A pool can take its share of the 77% piece based on the pool’s total stake and its share of the 23% piece based on the pledge of the SPO. A higher alpha parameter makes it less attractive for individual SPOs to proliferate multiple pools since they can’t be as leveraged on their available pledge and still get as big a share of the 23% piece. This also discourages Sybil Attacks. As Cardano on-chain governance progresses, these parameters will be controlled by the community.
There will be a Cardano Goguen Summit in September. It will be hybrid digital/in-person.
Charles is helping to bring the cryptographer who broke SHA-1 to the University of Wyoming. The Cardano funded blockchain lab there could be on the road to be a powerhouse. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1398290866419105802 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiqun_Lisa_Yin
We don’t often get to hear from the engineers behind Yoroi over at Emurgo. But, here’s a podcast with Vicente Almonacid from Emurgo. Check out 12:50 where he mentions the dApp Connector (Cardano’s Metamask Equivalent). https://twitter.com/vacuumlabs/status/1397847633696280576
Check out this great article from Cardanians.io on the work being done at the University of Wyoming on a physical chip for transfer of private keys in day-to-day cashlike transactions. https://cardanians.io/en/cardano-can-give-crypto-a-cash-like-experience-58
Professor Aggelos Kiayias recently dropped a video explaining exactly how Mithril (apparently neckbeard dungeon master talk for elf armor) is going to allow for Perfect Cardano (ADA) wallets that combine the ease of use and convenience of light wallets with the trustlessness of full node wallets. We also learned exactly how Mithril is going to work. https://youtu.be/LhepJFCyWRk
In proof-of-work, bootstrapping can be done with blockheaders. This won’t do in proof-of-stake since we need information about stakeholder distribution to confirm block validity.
Mithril fixes this by being a cryptographic construction that enables a population of stakeholders to issue a signature consistent with certain constraints.
For Mithril to work in proof-of-stake, it needs three crucial properties: 1) it needs to enforce a threshold ratio of stakeholders before the signature is issued; 2) the pre-signature fragments must be independently verified and subject to public aggregation; and 3) it must be efficient in the sense that the final signature is of constant size and is logarithmically dependent on the # of stakeholders.
Stakeholders will issue special Mithril keys along with the normal cryptographic key material. Then at regular intervals, full nodes will test whether they can produce a pre-signature fragment. Only a random subset of stakeholders will be eligible to produce a pre-signature fragment. When a sufficient # of pre-signature fragments have been issued by eligible stakeholders then it will be possible to aggregate the fragments into a final signature.
This will be a checkpoint that will be verifiable with respect to previous check points all the way back to the genesis block. Such checkpoints will be cryptographic commitments of the relevant UTXOs.
Since the checkpoints will be trustless, a light client (i.e. wallet) will only need to verify the sequence of checkpoints up to the current time to trustlessly bootstrap.
The ecosystem is growing so fast, it’s hard to keep up with all the projects without these infographics at this point. https://twitter.com/Dr_shwetaPHD/status/1398783893638103040
The Cardano subreddit is at 487k users. Half a million isn’t far away. https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
Epoch 268 is a wrap as of yesterday with 22.83 billion ADA staked. https://adapools.org/epochs
Check out the telegram AMA tomorrow with the CEO of World Mobile! https://twitter.com/ZwijBerg/status/1399377659105320962
A very interesting stat on Cardano user growth. https://twitter.com/cex_io/status/1398959088684445699
Don’t forget, the Marlowe webinar is this Thursday! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1399444331556225027
More and more people in the youtube sphere are jumping on the Cardano train. https://twitter.com/techleadhd/status/1399398373384351744
Reuters reports on an EU digital identity wallet project. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/eu-step-up-digital-push-with-digital-identity-wallet-2021-06-01/?taid=60b6e171efd84f0001b64ae1&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
The U.S. Currently has Issued Sanctions on Ethiopia, but they are not all-encompassing economic sanctions as with rogue nations, they have just barred entry into the U.S. for certain government personnel. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/world/africa/ethiopia-us-sanctions-tigray.html
Vitalik is saying it’s highly unlikely we see ETH 2.0 before late 2022. I’m guessing that means mid 2023 which will be after two years of Cardano slaughtering the entire ETH user base. Things are looking so bad that Vitalik says he doesn’t even like using the ETH 2.0 label anymore since he knows the changes will be more incremental. This is what early capitulation sounds like guys. https://cointelegraph.com/news/even-vitalik-buterin-is-surprised-at-just-how-long-eth2-is-taking
Cardano-Nervos cross-chain bridge to be built. This would be at least the second cross-chain bridge after the Cardano-AGI bridge. https://www.coindesk.com/cardano-nervos-force-bridge-network-first
Sundaeswap ISO delayed due to regulatory concerns. This brings up interesting questions for the whole space about requesting regulatory permission vs. possibly being forced to ask for forgiveness. https://www.sundaeswap.finance/posts/iso-update
Tim Harrison has announced that the transition to Alonzo Blue was successful. https://twitter.com/timbharrison/status/1400481879883649034
Finally, 500k users in the Cardano Subreddit! https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
We got a nice update on the first week of Alonzo Blue. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1400876181122174977
And….still! Kings of the github! https://twitter.com/CryptoDiffer/status/1400744567956180993
Epoch 269 is in the bag with active stake of 22.77 Billion. Hope everyone made lots of delicious staking rewards! https://adapools.org/epochs
Binance has 63 stakepools charging 6%. Please stop paying so much for the right to stake your ADA. You don’t have to pay that much. You have a huge number of better options. You are literally giving away your ADA rewards to a large corporation. It’s easy: just download the Yoroi Chrome extension, send your ADA there, and pick from the 2k+ available stakepools right inside Yoroi. https://twitter.com/BraveHeartStak3/status/1401204563189940231 https://adapools.org/groups/binance-20 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emurgo&hl=en_US&gl=US
Nigeria Bans Twitter after Twitter censors Tweet from Nigerian President. This emphasizes the need for decentralized social media. A decentralized solution running on Cardano could fix this. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/04/africa/nigeria-suspends-twitter-operations-intl/index.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JilEb42q-CI
A Really Big Deal: El Salvador is on the verge of making Bitcoin legal tender in the Central American nation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uGOfqN2y9k
This could have huge ramifications for bank and accounting treatment of Bitcoin potentially including that banks might suddenly be allowed to handle Bitcoin as a foreign currency. Today it was BTC. But, wait until they find out what Cardano can do. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1401334421773504517
Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, also clarified that there will be no capital gains taxes on Bitcoin since it is a “legal currency” and crypto entrepreneurs will be given instant permanent residence. https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1401622548396314631
Bitcoin enthusiasm seems to be off to a great start among other Latin American politicians after the fervor around the El Salvador announcement. This will serve as a great gateway drug that only leads to Gen 3 projects and Cardano. https://twitter.com/gilson__marques https://twitter.com/carlitosrejala https://twitter.com/gabrielsilva8_7/status/1401965129051389958 https://twitter.com/FabioOstermann
We are always the Github Kings. It’s amazing. https://twitter.com/CryptoIRELAND1/status/1402011593995603975
Charles basically just laid out what 4th Gen Cryptos are going to be all about in his video yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkr1EKQrVeQ
Here’s a good Emurgo blog article on the use of Emurgo Trace in the Oil and gas industry. https://twitter.com/emurgo_io/status/1402339278097502210
IOHK gives us a closer look at everything being upgraded for Alonzo. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/06/08/a-close-look-at-the-software-running-cardano/
We’re currently at 71.52% of ADA staked. This is a pretty incredible ratio and shows the strength of the Cardano community. https://twitter.com/CardanoPoolPeek/status/1402378400803794950
SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce warns about the regulatory impulse being displayed by her colleagues toward crypto and the impact it could have on the stifling of innovation. https://www.ft.com/content/ae0d40a1-8a4a-4885-a6a7-b157e27b3311
El Salvador passes the statute to make Bitcoin legal tender in the country. https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1402827595339681794
Cardano gets more positive coverage on the Nasdaq website with a second article following the one from April 7 earlier this year. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/be-part-of-a-historic-crypto-moment-with-cardano-2021-06-08
Prof. Aggelos Kiayias releases an article on a tri-coin system called Stablefees that could fix the problem of appreciating transaction fees in crypto. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/06/10/stablefees-and-the-decentralized-reserve-system/
There’s very interesting speculation circulating out there about how El Salvador’s Bitcoin adoption might impact relationships with the U.S. and the IMF. https://twitter.com/cardano_whale/status/1403136968456765443
Elizabeth Warren is now talking about the U.S. needs to regulate crypto. https://twitter.com/BloombergTV/status/1402749016845262851
The mid-month Alonzo development update from IOHK is out. Alonzo blue is in full swing and they are working on “hello world round trips” going from the node to the ledger and back. Plutus Partners (third party functional dev firms) are working on different use cases ahead of the Alonzo launch. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1403314932968574981
Miniswap gives us the dev perspective on why Cardano’s Plutus is such an improvement over Ethereum’s Solidity. https://twitter.com/MinswapDEX/status/1403411522110427137
Here’s a great ETH vs. Cardano DeFi project comparison infographic. https://twitter.com/Coin98Analytics/status/1403397242707320835

~Army of Spies

WellBe

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When the Economist (The publication most favoured by establishment politicians) finally begins to publish authentic and up to date information about crypto you know big things are about to happen.

Cryptocoins are proliferating wildly. What are they all for? from TheEconomist

You may have to be a subscriber to view this article so I’ll link in the Ethereum segment.

“The threat comes instead from currencies with nimbler blockchains that can do more than record payments. Ethereum, which hosts ether, the second-most-valuable cryptocurrency, can execute automated programmes that, for example, move money between wallets only after a specific event. Ether and its clones have become central to the budding field of decentralised finance (DeFi), where “smart contracts” replicate sophisticated financial transactions, such as making loans or offering insurance, without a trusted intermediary. That is boosting adoption. Over the past 12 months DeFi drove 40% of ether transactions, up from 7% in the previous period, reckons Chainalysis, a data firm.

With around $59bn in capital deposited in its applications, DeFi remains small. But it is growing fast, and bitcoin, with a blockchain that cannot accommodate smart contracts, is ill-equipped to ride the wave. Its first-mover advantage and scarcity make bitcoin likely to remain attractive as a speculative asset. Yet that could prove poor consolation. “

For a neoliberal publication which I do read (more for their geo-political analysis) they have never written much about crypto - and when they have it’s been at best woefully conservative and doubt ridden and at times just completely wrong.

A shift in this regard for a publication like the economist is big - especially as their audience is traditionally your old white men nay-sayers types.

What A Day: Merrick The Reddish by Brian Beutler & Crooked Media (06/11/21)

"A liberal progressive socialist Marxist." - Ron Johnson, playing right-wing mad (WAIT FOR IT) libs

Subpoenaed Gallery

Congress and the Biden administration suddenly face demands to answer a big question with a seemingly short answer: Which of Donald Trump’s enemies didn’t the Justice Department target.

The latest revelation is the most shocking yet: Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, DOJ subpoenaed Apple for the communication records of House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff, member Eric Swalwell, their aides, and even family members, nominally as part of an investigation into who leaked information about Trump-associate ties to Russia. That investigation turned up nothing and languished until Sessions’s successor, Bill Barr, revived it. (Barr, world’s trustworthiest person, says he didn’t know of any subpoenas targeting members of Congress.)
The dozen-or-so known targets add an intra-branch dimension to a broader scandal: Trump officials have been exposed to have used law enforcement power to surveil people Trump had targeted for political attacks—with the ultimate goal in some cases of indicting them. Trump’s DOJ also targeted at least three Washington Post reporters, four New York Times reporters, and a CNN reporter, pursuant to investigations of leaks Trump found politically embarrassing. The Trump administration would later argue in court that congressional-oversight subpoenas of the executive branch violate the separation of powers.
Fallout has been swift. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin have called on Sessions and Barr to testify under oath, and threatened to subpoena them. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said current DOJ personnel who participated in this action should resign. Schiff insisted the DOJ's internal watchdog investigate the scandal, and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco agreed.

Inexplicably, though, neither Congress nor the Biden administration seemed poised to act until the news broke.

Schiff and other committee members say the Justice Department under Merrick Garland has refused to provide timely answers to questions about whether the Trump leak investigation was partisan (that is, only targeted Democrats) and whether it was properly predicated (rather than simply cooked up because Trump demanded it). Yet while Schiff’s call for an inspector general investigation has been answered, neither his committee nor the House Judiciary Committee has announced an oversight investigation, and the Senate's investigation will require Republican cooperation to subpoena anyone.
DOJ’s refusal to share this information with Congress feeds rapidly growing frustration with Garland’s time at DOJ. In his brief tenure, the Biden administration has embraced a number of positions the Trump DOJ concocted to conceal his corruption. Most recently, DOJ has appealed a lower-court judgment that would force the executive branch to hand Congress documents related to Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel lease. As the Washington Post put it, “Biden’s team has steadfastly defended some of the protections the Trump administration put in place to conceal Trump’s financial interests.”

It’s hard not to notice that the government’s reluctance, even under new leadership, to come clean about how Trump corrupted its bureaucracies, has coincided with Trump’s increasing sense of free rein to sabotage election law in the country. Protecting democracy doesn’t entail simply acting like the system is working the way it did in stabler times. It requires exposing those who are trying to destroy it.

Look No Further Than Crooked Media

This Pride Month, Lovett or Leave It host Jon Lovett returns to the stage for an exclusive Pride performance called “Out of the Closets, Into the Streets.” On June 24, join Lovett and a lineup of your favorite LGBTQ+ acts as they bring the celebration right to you! ”Out of the Closets, Into the Streets” will be streamed live on June 24 at 4 p.m. Pacific time. Join the fun on Crooked Media’s YouTube and Twitch pages.

Under The Radar

In better Merrick Garland news, DOJ will quickly double the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s enforcement staff to protect the franchise. Garland announced the significant resource boost in a high-profile address at DOJ headquarters, where he also said DOJ would review new GOP state-level voter-suppression laws and sham ballot audits, and called on Congress to pass both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. "There are many things that are open to debate in America, but the right of all eligible citizens to vote is not one of them," he said. "The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow." In a not-so-subtle hint ahead of Garland’s remarks, the Democratic Party’s top voting rights litigator, Marc Elias listed six states that have already passed new suppression laws, and which he has sued: Iowa, Georgia, Montana, Florida, Arkansas, and Kansas.

What Else?

The FDA has ordered Johnson & Johnson to discard 80 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine produced at a notorious Baltimore production facility, which may have contaminated them.

High-profile Democrats including Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) have rejected a new, detail-light bipartisan Senate infrastructure agreement because it contains no climate provisions.

Kurt Volker, a key witness in the 2019 Ukraine investigation, seemingly perjured himself when he told the impeachment inquiry, “at no time was I aware of or knowingly took part in an effort to urge Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden”—a claim contradicted by audio of a call he joined during which Rudy Giuliani urged Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden.

Facebook happily accepts ad money from right-wing groups pretending to be left-wing groups urging voters to support the Green Party.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) wants to know why the Air Force hasn’t discharged a notorious white nationalist, despite orders from civilian leadership to address extremism in the military.

The Oregon House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to expel Republican Rep. Mike Nearman, who aided and abetted an armed right-wing invasion of the state capitol.

The Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami was a COVID-19 superspreading event because participants didn’t realize vaccines (brace yourselves) blockchain of transmission (thank you).

A museum in Croatia that showcases hundreds of taxidermied frogs dressed up as students, circus performers, ballroom dancers, and other weird human types became unprofitable during the pandemic and had to be sold.

In an unlikely twist, Crooked Media endorses every word of this message from Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

You Gotta Be Fucking Kidding Me

Here’s what we meant earlier by “Trump’s increasing sense of free rein to sabotage election law in the country.” A new, profoundly disturbing Reuters report details the ways Trump’s supporters have gone about terrorizing election officials across the country, particularly in Georgia. Amid a flood of death threats, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R-GA) and his wife Tricia had to cancel weekly visits from their grandchildren. Around the same time, police accosted members of the right-wing Oath Keepers militia group casing their home. The intimidation tactics risk driving career election officials out of their jobs, creating a vacuum that Republicans may try to fill with Trump loyalists. On the night of the Georgia runoff election, an SUV tailed Vanessa Montgomery, who served as a polling manager in Taylorsville, GA, for 25 minutes, until a 911 dispatcher guided her to a parking lot where police were waiting to assure her safety and the integrity of the ballots she was driving to an election office in Bartow County. Trump and his Republican allies could diminish this threat dramatically, but their election lies have only grown more brazen.

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Light At The End Of The Email

The Pulitzer Prizes awarded a rare special citation to Darnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed the murder of George Floyd and reignited a global movement against police brutality.

Leaders of the wealthy G-7 nations announced they will donate one-billion coronavirus vaccines to low-income countries.

The United Mine Workers of America, a major backer of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), has endorsed the For the People Act.

Sarah is back next week.

Enjoy

Kolz👷🏽‍♂️ on Twitter: "“French is much easier to learn than English." The French:"

I wish Chia farming could work with offline drives (or maybe it can?)

I have lots of smaller (mostly 2TB and 4TB) drives that would be great for storing some plots on. I also have a 15-bay disk shelf. If I stuff it full of all the drives I have available I can add close to 50 more TB to my plots.

Here's the thing. When the shelf is powered on, with all the drives spinning, it sucks quite a bit of power. Not an unmanageable amount to be fair, but easily around 200W idling. The shelf's controllers and fans alone use around 60w constantly, and the drives use maybe 8-10w each just idling.

What I wish (and wonder) is that Chia could somehow keep a catalog of what plots I have, and just enough data to know if I have a qualifying plot. That way, my entire disk shelf could be on a smart switch, and spend the vast majority of its time powered down. In the event that I have a candidate plot, a signal could be sent to the smart outlet which would power up the shelf. The same script would monitor for the shelf to appear on the SAS interface, and once it does, the drive(s) would be mounted and whatever else needs to be accessed would be accessed at that point. If I for some reason had deleted the plot, that would of course be discovered and I'd lose out.

One of Chia's goals is saving energy by using storage instead of compute power. While I'm still using a lot less power than anyone would use for ethereum or bitcoin mining, it still seems like a lot of wear and tear on drives that are just spinning forever, waiting for a rare event.

For people doing small single-drive or low-number-of-drives mining on e.g. a RasPi, you could just use a drive that spins itself down. But most enterprise drives don't even bother to spin down on their own, and even if I do spin them all down manually (assuming they can do that), the shelf is still using constant energy.

Anyone else considered this thought? Or am I just completely misunderstanding how Chia farming works? (I am quite new to this after all, so apologies.)

My thoughts and analysis of the bullrun

There are patterns in the charts: the bull runs start earlier and end later each cycle. This is something that most have noticed.

From how I see it, eventually the bull runs will overlap each other, resulting in a balanced market and result in no bear market to feed a bull run.
This will be adoption. When the cycles eventually float into each other so well that they follow adopted financial patterns instead, which give an average of approx. 4 year cycles (correlation to the 4 year political cycle being the most common?).
As with all hypothesizing, only time will tell what adoption actually will look like or if any of my predictions make any sense.

With BTC, it's the 4 year PoW halving that's the most probable cause for the current type of bullruns.

The definition of "bullrun" is loose, so i will use these metrics: it starts at the lowest dip before a new ATH has been reached and the price can never drop below starting point of the bull run. it is concluded when there is no new ATH in over a year:
january 2011 - june 2011 - 6 months - ATH 29,60€
january 2013 - january 2014 - 1 year, 1 month - ATH 1.147,25$ (+3875% from previous ATH)
october 2015 - january 2018 - 2 years and 4 months - ATH 19.343,04$ (+1686%)

By using these metrics, we look at the actual start of the flow of the market instead of the usual "where did people start going green from previous ATH again" and end where the flow is interrupted.

Current bullrun:
march 2020 - today - 1 year and 3 months. this is far from an increase of the cycle. it would be the first stagnation of the length of a bullrun cycle.
ATH 63.564,83$ (+328,6%)

By these metrics, we should reach a higher ATH. The gains decreased by 43,5% between the previous bullruns. Based on these metrics, we would be reaching an increase of 733% from previous ATH of the last bullrun, meaning an ATH of approx. 140.000$. This is of course based on limited data and should be taken as a rough estimate. In factuality, increases tend to decrease over time as adoption gets closer. 90-110.000$ would be more realistic due to the current financial situation.

Corona could (and has) obviously cut down on the cycle due to lack of investment power. Our countries are heavily invested in printing money and companies are busy trying to survive.
Have in mind though, that the increase of the price of BTC has this form of backing:

1: many BTC holders are gone. their coins will never be sold. same thing with lost wallets, faulty transactions, etc. there will only be 21 million BTC.

2: the increase in interest is often permanent. each cycle accumulates new investors which stay for the long run. some BTC never gets sold. this increase exceeds the flow of investment, as many of us got in poor, planning pension plans and such, only withdrawing at a price increase.
institutional investment is what pumps the price the most. and original BTC holders are obviously whalish (or Welsh?) enough to act as powerfully as institutions.

3: humans easily forget something that has been shown once. we're in the 4th bullrun now. you can't ignore something that has been impactful on society 4 times. and if you can. will you ignore it the 5th time? or the 6th? eventually, old people get replaced by babies which are taught that crypto is the thing you wage slave for.

We also shouldn't be at the end of a bull run, based on the length of previous bullruns.

if we compare our current situation, please have a look at 4.1.2017, price at 1129,87$. On the 12.1.2017, it was at 802,83$. that's a 1/3 crash. not as powerful as the halving tsunami that we were hit with, but a significant blow nonetheless. there was also no pandemic raging back then. there were fewer wars. the world was more stable. people could afford to HODL for longer before they were forced to sell. cause if you overinvested money that was for rent... you can't really HODL. Not during a pandemic.

All right. So now you got your confirmation bias for you to upvote my post, eh?

NOT SO FAST SHITCOIN HODLER!!!

These are the charts for BITCOIN.

I am in no way saying this bull cycle will continue as previously or that it will continue for every coin. Or that it will continue at all actually. Some shitcoins will and are already on their way straight to the core of the earth. More will follow no matter if this bull cycle will continue or not.

It's very likely that your gambles will lagoon while the top coins go for new ATH every day.

Cause if we look at previous cycles. The time of mania is followed by a time of progress.
- this is also where all the shitcoin earnings are reinvested into long-term HODL's.

Before taking out a 31rd mortgage on your cat, please have in mind that these were calculations made based on numbers, which in real life fluctuate due to world events. DYOR.

TLDR:

Corona Corona. Do not touch your friend. Is the bull cycle over? Probably not.

To all those who are uncertain and maybe even doubtful..

The only reason doge hasn’t reached new highs is solely due to the events surrounding crypto in general. Unfortunately, while dogecoin was starting to shine in its SPOTLIGHT, Bitcoin had somewhat of a “crash”, due to a series of events. But know this, crypto will recover, and when it does, Dogecoin will take its rightful place beside the top cryptos and once again shine in the spotlight, reaching its full potential. Hang in there fam! The future is bright! 🦍💎🙏🏼

Stupid question

So what if bitcoin (or any other coin) has a major flaw that leads to a bigger compromise in the protocol? Would that just lead to a fork? Ignoring the potential malicious transactions and fixing it and ignoring the problem from then on? Just see what the community does when it happens?

It's probably a stupid question I know but I was wondering if there are any plans out there for such (unlikely?) events.

Bitcoin 2021 attendees’ positive COVID-19 tests are going viral

Some of those who attended Bitcoin 2021 in Miami have tested positive for COVID-19, leading to a wave of negative media coverage and speculation that it may have been a “superspreader event.”

Thousands of people went to the two-day event, which did not require proof of vaccination or enforce the wearing of face masks. There was little in the way of social distancing either as people packed into crowded auditoriums.

One influencer on Crypto Twitter, Mr. Whale, estimated that there were more than 50,000 visitors at the event. He noted that this was the first major in-person conference since the pandemic began, and said dozens of participants have tested positive. (by cointelegraph)

One of Hal Finney’s last posts on bitcointalk.org. RIP. It gives me hope. You should know him. Cypherpunks Never Die!

Bitcoin and me ( Hal Finney )

March 19, 2013

I thought I'd write about the last four years, an eventful time for Bitcoin and me.

For those who don't know me, I'm Hal Finney. I got my start in crypto working on an early version of PGP, working closely with Phil Zimmermann. When Phil decided to start PGP Corporation, I was one of the first hires. I would work on PGP until my retirement. At the same time, I got involved with the Cypherpunks. I ran the first cryptographically based anonymous remailer, among other activities.

Fast forward to late 2008 and the announcement of Bitcoin. I've noticed that cryptographic graybeards (I was in my mid 50's) tend to get cynical. I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it.

When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.

I was more positive. I had long been interested in cryptographic payment schemes. Plus I was lucky enough to meet and extensively correspond with both Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, generally acknowledged to have created ideas that would be realized with Bitcoin. I had made an attempt to create my own proof of work based currency, called RPOW. So I found Bitcoin facinating.

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.

Today, Satoshi's true identity has become a mystery. But at the time, I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere. I've had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.

After a few days, bitcoin was running pretty stably, so I left it running. Those were the days when difficulty was 1, and you could find blocks with a CPU, not even a GPU. I mined several blocks over the next days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me. In retrospect, I wish I had kept it up longer, but on the other hand I was extraordinarily lucky to be there at the beginning. It's one of those glass half full half empty things.

The next I heard of Bitcoin was late 2010, when I was surprised to find that it was not only still going, bitcoins actually had monetary value. I dusted off my old wallet, and was relieved to discover that my bitcoins were still there. As the price climbed up to real money, I transferred the coins into an offline wallet, where hopefully they'll be worth something to my heirs.

Speaking of heirs, I got a surprise in 2009, when I was suddenly diagnosed with a fatal disease. I was in the best shape of my life at the start of that year, I'd lost a lot of weight and taken up distance running. I'd run several half marathons, and I was starting to train for a full marathon. I worked my way up to 20+ mile runs, and I thought I was all set. That's when everything went wrong.

My body began to fail. I slurred my speech, lost strength in my hands, and my legs were slow to recover. In August, 2009, I was given the diagnosis of ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease, after the famous baseball player who got it.

ALS is a disease that kills moter neurons, which carry signals from the brain to the muscles. It causes first weakness, then gradually increasing paralysis. It is usually fatal in 2 to 5 years. My symptoms were mild at first and I continued to work, but fatigue and voice problems forced me to retire in early 2011. Since then the disease has continued its inexorable progression.

Today, I am essentially paralyzed. I am fed through a tube, and my breathing is assisted through another tube. I operate the computer using a commercial eyetracker system. It also has a speech synthesizer, so this is my voice now. I spend all day in my power wheelchair. I worked up an interface using an arduino so that I can adjust my wheelchair's position using my eyes.

It has been an adjustment, but my life is not too bad. I can still read, listen to music, and watch TV and movies. I recently discovered that I can even write code. It's very slow, probably 50 times slower than I was before. But I still love programming and it gives me goals. Currently I'm working on something Mike Hearn suggested, using the security features of modern processors, designed to support "Trusted Computing", to harden Bitcoin wallets. It's almost ready to release. I just have to do the documentation.

And of course the price gyrations of bitcoins are entertaining to me. I have skin in the game. But I came by my bitcoins through luck, with little credit to me. I lived through the crash of 2011. So I've seen it before. Easy come, easy go.

That's my story. I'm pretty lucky overall. Even with the ALS, my life is very satisfying. But my life expectancy is limited. Those discussions about inheriting your bitcoins are of more than academic interest. My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they're safe enough. I'm comfortable with my legacy. [edited slightly]

I love bitcoin

I really do. I love monero as well, as I personally see it as a better form of money – a better digital currency, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate everything that bitcoin has achieved as a decentralized digital currency. We’re in the nascent of this industry, and by the way current governments and their central banks have been conducting their business, we will grow in popularity a lot in the next years. And a lot of this is due to bitcoin.

I believe monero greatly benefits from bitcoin. It’s a technologically superior currency, because it adds the vital property of fungibility. There are some trade-offs made to achieve that, but unless you’re really in doubt of the math behind the cryptography then monero simply achieves better money properties when compared to bitcoin.

Monero has seen increased usage in the last year, and a non-negligible adoption has been established as well, made of different service providers, online business and even physical stores. More people are understanding and choosing monero; we even have western darknet markets spearheading a “monero-only” policy. This currency is here to stay.

There’s no denying that the increased popularity in monero (and other cryptocurrencies) is due to the bitcoin saga and their fight with the traditional financial system. In that, bitcoin has been doing great despite increasing attempts to diminish its importance on the public mind. It’s in fact been receiving a lot of positive attention from mainstream circles, and for those people traceability is just a normal property of bitcoin. Not a big deal for them (or they might be ones benefiting from it), and more important is that this property has been fundamental to get some sweet love from those who work at the side of power, governments, compliance, analytic companies, etc – the traditional system.

I know it’s a bit cliche to say that bitcoin is the Trojan horse for monero, but it does work a little bit like that. Bitcoin opens the door for the idea that it’s possible to have an alternative financial system completely digital and that no one can freely manipulate. Once people buy into the idea, they end up learning about other concurring digital currencies, which will bring those interested in sound money to monero.

It’s on us to make sure that the people can find and learn about monero in the easiest possible way. Videos, tutorials, books, guides, pamphlets. A certain standard that can be translated and distributed in an organized but decentralized way, actively reaching the people who need to learn about it the most. A bit like the sticker guerrilla marketing, but on steroids. Teaching how a guy in Colombia can use the GUI wallet ‘Merchant mode’ on his old Android tablet to accept monero payments. Then explaining how to easily backup the seed and keys in case of some unforeseen event. There’s much to be done around the idea that cryptocurrencies exist – i.e. people are not used to self-custody. We live in a world of ultimate convenience and “being your own bank” implies in sacrificing that convenience for freedom. I truly see this as an opportunity for this community; while “bitcoin people” are cheering their increased fiat valuation, we take on the less sexy job of proactively providing educational resources to the people, so they can be ready to easily navigate in this new financial system, shielded by the corruption and economic manipulation of the powers that be.

Bitcoin’s idea of a decentralized digital cash has infected too many minds and that’s how monero benefits from it. This community has the power to take the tool that monero is to another level, by working hard to proactively educate people about sovereign money and how to use it. So for providing this environment I love bitcoin and I honestly don’t even need to explicitly point out its downsides when introducing cryptocurrency to new people. Once I explain digital currencies like bitcoin, monero and ethereum and its fundamental differences, they instinctively understand what would be good for them to transact on the daily.

The miami bitcoin conference looks like it may have been a covid superspreader event.

https://www.rawstory.com/some-miami-bitcoin-conference-attendees-say-theyve-tested-positive-for-19/

Have been asked a couple of times about some good resources to research about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. ...Here are my top picks...

As more and more are joining the bitcoin bandwagon thought I'd share a list of resources that may help beginners as well as advanced bitcoin users to better research bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

Already shared the list with a couple of my friends and they seem to be very happy with it.

#1 CoinMarketCap

One of the most popular names in the crypto space, CoinMarketCap provides the aggregated list of all the traded cryptocurrencies in the market along with their market data, such as price, market cap, supply, volume, as well as individual pages for each currency which include information including but not limited to price chart, markets, historical data.

#2 CoinGecko

CoinGecko is the world’s largest cryptocurrency data aggregator with over 6000+ crypto assets and over 400+ crypto exchanges listed on its platform.

CoinGecko believes that market capitalization is not an ultimate measure of a cryptocurrency’s worth as it can be manipulated.

#3 Messari

Messari is an online database of crypto assets that provides users with robust information on pricing, analytics, data insights, and other market intelligence that users understand the landscape of crypto assets.

#4 GlassNode

GlassNode is a blockchain platform that provides data analytics and market intelligence by generating on-chain metrics and tools for stakeholders.

It houses one of the most comprehensive charts related to on-chain data for almost every cryptocurrency.

#5 Coin Dance

Coin Dance is a community-driven platform that provides users with bitcoin-related data including statistics, node information, volume, blocks, and even includes a legality map showing where bitcoin is legal and where it's not.

# 6 Lunar Crush

Lunar Crush is a unique platform that provides social insights of over 2000+ coins. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning the platform aggregates data from dozens of social sources and creates valuable insights on how a cryptocurrency is truly performing and what is the market sentiment surrounding it.

# 7 Coin Market Cal

CoinMarketCal is the leading crypto-economic calendar featuring all the latest, upcoming, and past events in the crypto ecosystem.

From airdrops, ICOs, mainnet launches, wallet upgrades, blockchain summits almost every event is logged on this platform. It is a great tool for investors, traders, enthusiasts to keep track of all the major events happening in the crypto world.

# 8 Trading View

Trading View is a platform that provides some of the most comprehensive crypto charts in the industry, making for a great tool for traders.

The platform comes with hundreds of pre-built studies, 50+ intelligent drawing tools, and a set of tools for in-depth market analysis, covering the most popular trading concepts.

# 9 ByBt

ByBt is a cryptocurrency futures trading & information platform, where users can find information about bitcoin liquidations, bitcoin open interest, Grayscale bitcoin trust, bitcoin longs vs shorts ratio, and actively compare funding rates for crypto futures.

#10 Multi Coin Charts

Multi Coin Charts provides a single screen view of multiple crypto markets. It is great for anyone looking to compare markets and the performance of coins without having to switch between screens.

Users have the option to choose from multiple forex and crypto exchanges.

Source: Blockonomics - Top 10 Tools and Resources for Crypto Research [2021]

Have been asked a couple of times about some good resources to research BCH and cryptocurrencies. ...Here are my top picks...

As more and more are joining the crypto bandwagon thought I'd share a list of resources that may help beginners as well as advanced bitcoin users to better research the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Already shared the list with a couple of my friends and they seem to be very happy with it.

#1 CoinMarketCap

#2 CoinGecko

CoinGecko is the world’s largest cryptocurrency data aggregator with over 6000+ crypto assets and over 400+ crypto exchanges listed on its platform.

CoinGecko believes that market capitalization is not an ultimate measure of a cryptocurrency’s worth as it can be manipulated.

#3 Messari

#4 GlassNode

GlassNode is a blockchain platform that provides data analytics and market intelligence by generating on-chain metrics and tools for stakeholders.

It houses one of the most comprehensive charts related to on-chain data for almost every cryptocurrency.

#5 Coin Dance

# 6 Lunar Crush

# 7 Coin Market Cal

CoinMarketCal is the leading crypto-economic calendar featuring all the latest, upcoming, and past events in the crypto ecosystem.

# 8 Trading View

Trading View is a platform that provides some of the most comprehensive crypto charts in the industry, making for a great tool for traders.

The platform comes with hundreds of pre-built studies, 50+ intelligent drawing tools, and a set of tools for in-depth market analysis, covering the most popular trading concepts.

# 9 ByBt

#10 Multi Coin Charts

Multi Coin Charts provides a single screen view of multiple crypto markets. It is great for anyone looking to compare markets and the performance of coins without having to switch between screens.

Users have the option to choose from multiple forex and crypto exchanges.

Source: Blockonomics - Top 10 Tools and Resources for Crypto Research [2021]

Have been asked a couple of times about some good resources to research BCH and cryptocurrencies. ...Here are my top picks...

As more and more are joining the crypto bandwagon thought I'd share a list of resources that may help beginners as well as advanced bitcoin users to better research the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Already shared the list with a couple of my friends and they seem to be very happy with it.

#1 CoinMarketCap

#2 CoinGecko

CoinGecko is the world’s largest cryptocurrency data aggregator with over 6000+ crypto assets and over 400+ crypto exchanges listed on its platform.

CoinGecko believes that market capitalization is not an ultimate measure of a cryptocurrency’s worth as it can be manipulated.

#3 Messari

#4 GlassNode

GlassNode is a blockchain platform that provides data analytics and market intelligence by generating on-chain metrics and tools for stakeholders.

It houses one of the most comprehensive charts related to on-chain data for almost every cryptocurrency.

#5 Coin Dance

# 6 Lunar Crush

# 7 Coin Market Cal

CoinMarketCal is the leading crypto-economic calendar featuring all the latest, upcoming, and past events in the crypto ecosystem.

# 8 Trading View

Trading View is a platform that provides some of the most comprehensive crypto charts in the industry, making for a great tool for traders.

The platform comes with hundreds of pre-built studies, 50+ intelligent drawing tools, and a set of tools for in-depth market analysis, covering the most popular trading concepts.

# 9 ByBt

#10 Multi Coin Charts

Multi Coin Charts provides a single screen view of multiple crypto markets. It is great for anyone looking to compare markets and the performance of coins without having to switch between screens.

Users have the option to choose from multiple forex and crypto exchanges.

Source: Blockonomics - Top 10 Tools and Resources for Crypto Research [2021]

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What Will Happen After All Bitcoin is mined?

From different points of view, bitcoin resembles advanced gold. Like gold, it is not just subjective to make bitcoin; it expects to “remove.” While gold is supposed to be separated from the real earth, it should be computerized by bitcoin. Like gold, bitcoin is finite in supply, leading to the question of what will happen after all bitcoin is mined?

After all, bitcoin is mined, attention will be shifted to altcoins, which would be traded as a substitute to Bitcoin. Think of it as raw materials like diamonds, gold, and silver. After the last gold is mined, attention will be shifted to other gems like silver and diamonds. The same would happen when the last bitcoin is mined.

Bitcoin also has a specification in its source code that a small and limited inventory should be available. Therefore, 21 million bitcoins will be created at any point. These bitcoins are generally familiar with the supply of bitcoin at a fixed speed of one square like clockwork. Half the amount of clockwork also reduces the number of bitcoins provided in each of the blocks referred to above.

Finite Supply

The inventory is erased once miners open this number of bitcoins. Nevertheless, the Bitcoin convention is conceivable to take into account a larger stock. What if the global bitcoin stock reaches its breaking point? What will happen? Cryptographic money enthusiasts widely discuss this subject. Around 18.5 million bitcoins are mined right now. This leaves less than three thousand thousand, which currently cannot be disseminated.

Rewards for Bitcoin Mining

Since the underlying shipment of Bitcoin, the main 18.5 million blocks have been mined in the long run. It seems we are in the last phases of bitcoin mining with only 3,000,000 additional money to go. However, this is true from a limited point of view. While the facts suggest that most bitcoins have been successfully mined, the events are more confusing.

On fruitful confirmation of a square, the Bitcoin mining measures reward miners with a bitcoin lump. After a while, this loop adapts. Just 50 bitcoins were awarded when Bitcoin first dispatched. It was divided into 25 bitcoins in 2012. It split into 12.5 bitcoins again in 2016.

By February 2021, mine will gain 6.25 bitcoins per new mined square, equivalent to $294,168.75 on 24 February 2021, depending upon the estimate. This decreases Bitcoin’s fifty-fifty swelling rate regularly. Until the last bitcoin is cut, the award will continue to break regularly. In reality, the last bitcoin will probably only be mined around 2140. However, from time to time, it is conceivable to adjust the Bitcoin network convention.

Finite Bitcoin Effects on Bitcoin Miners

It may seem that Bitcoin’s miners are the only people who gather the most easily affected by the limitations of the bitcoin supply. A few of the convention’s disagreements guarantee that miners will be prevented from receiving their jobs until the Bitcoin supply reaches 21 million for use.

In any scenario, if the last bitcoin were supplied, miners would possibly participate and accept new exchanges efficiently and seriously. The reason is that an exchange fee is attached to each Bitcoin exchange.

Though currently covering $2 or $300 per block, these costs could amount to a very high amount of dollars per block, particularly when there is an increase in the number of exchanges at the blockchain and the cost of bitcoin. Finally, it will function like a shut-off economy, where bills are assessed like duties.

Special Considerations

The Bitcoin network must be expected to take over 100 years to complete. Miners will probably accept prizes years like the 2140 methodologies, which are tiny bits of the last bitcoin that has been mined. The emotional reduction in compensation may mean a long time before the cut-off period of 2140 for the mining interaction.

It is also important to note that the Bitcoin network itself will change radically from time to time. Given what happened to Bitcoin over ten years, the mining relationship may be affected by new conventions, new techniques for tracking and planning transactions, and many different variables.

In January 2021, the Office of the Currency Controller (OCC) has adopted a decision on using Paypal of Bitcoin and Tesla’s acknowledgment of bitcoin for purchasing Tesla cars and sung rooftops to adopt the use of cryptography as a policy for an installment.

What if Miners Stop Mining?

While there is a way of thinking that suggests trade expenses would later increase miners adequately, not all people will agree. Of course, from several points of view, the Bitcoin organization will shift until the end of time if a predominant group of minors—or perhaps all miners—were to leave Bitcoin mining.

However, you will still be able to see which wallet holds Bitcoin and how much, and you will also still be able to see the entire history of all Bitcoin exchanges at any stage.

In all cases, it needs mining to affirm new exchanges. If miners stop making new squares, it will be hard to invest some Bitcoin afterward. This is an amazing Armageddon warning to the Bitcoin organization, but many will welcome miners until the end, even though transaction charges are the only ones.

Moreover, as #Hashed CEO Simon Kim told Decrypt, the miners can be enhanced by improvements, irrespective of whether square rewards end, but not everyone agrees.

Growing up, we had been made to believe that fiat money is stable and widely accepted. The reality is that fiat money is a state sponsored ponzi scheme and not immune from currency crisis. And why crypto is here to stay.

China was the first country to use fiat currency, around 1000 AD. Today, fiat money has been in use in every corner of the world. Why is it so popular? Because we had been made to believe in its value.

In contrary to the popular belief, fiat money is not as stable as you think. Fiat money does not have intrinsic value and does not have use value either. What is printed on the bank notes is worthless, be it any large number or beautiful image. Fiat money derives its value purely because a government maintains its value.

Hard currencies such as the USD, the EUR, the JPY or the GBP are widely exchanged and accepted. This is because they are backed by powerful countries. People have trust in them.

However, most currencies in circulation in the world are soft currencies. It hardly has any value outside of the jurisdiction's borders. Don't think so? Try buying bread in Croatia with some kyat or togrog.

Fiat money exists only with the government regulation. Nation rises and falls and thus fiat money can collapse. History has witnessed a numerous hyperinflation events.

Venezuela bolivar: In 2019, the IMF estimated the country's inflation rate would be 200,000%.
Zimbabwe: the infamous one hundred trillion dollar (equal around 70 USD)
Hungary pengo: between 08/1945 and 07/1946, the price doubled in every 15 hours.
Yugoslavia dinar: between 04/1992 and 01/1994, the daily inflation rate was 64.6%. The highest monthly inflation rate is 313,000,000%.
Vietnam dong in the 1980s: a woman opened a saving account of 270 dong in 1983 (worth 75 grams of gold). She withdrew it in 2014, the bank paid 4,385 dong (worth a loaf of bread) for all interest and principal.

It is argued that fiat money is a state sponsored ponzi scheme because the government is the only monopoly player who can print bank notes. A centralised model would result in collapse in the long term if the government is corrupt. In addition, economic downturn can lead to the devaluation of fiat currencies which makes people lose faith in it.

Fast forward to 2009, the Bitcoin network came into existence.

Bitcoin and many cryptocurrencies can solve the problem of the "centralised model". One of cryptocurrencies selling point is its decentralisation. It is mined all over the world and has thousands of nodes run by many people across the globe. Even if a government wants to shut it down, it will still exist.

Also, cryptocurrencies have scarcity characteristics. Unlike fiat currencies, which can be printed by a government (and cause inflation), the number of cryptocurrencies unit in circulation is finite. For example, Bitcoin is capped at 21 million.

In 2021, El Salvador became the first country in the world to make Bitcoin the legal tender. Various countries in Central America and Samoa also have some initiatives to adopt Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. It will create the domino effect around the world. Crypto is here to stay.

Cardano Rumor Rundown JUN 12 2021

Hey Everyone!

Let's go...

Newly covered today:

The mid-month Alonzo development update from IOHK is out. Alonzo blue is in full swing and they are working on “hello world round trips” going from the node to the ledger and back. Plutus Partners (third party functional dev firms) are working on different use cases ahead of the Alonzo launch. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1403314932968574981
Miniswap gives us the dev perspective on why Cardano’s Plutus is such an improvement over Ethereum’s Solidity. https://twitter.com/MinswapDEX/status/1403411522110427137
Here’s a great ETH vs. Cardano DeFi project comparison infographic. https://twitter.com/Coin98Analytics/status/1403397242707320835

Previously Covered but still interesting:

Charles makes the case for collaboration with Starlink in Africa. https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1392916783854616577
People are starting to realize what the real value of NFTs will be. It’s not in collectibles. https://twitter.com/RaoulGMI/status/1392939118355783682
The Cardano Development Update for this week is out. https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/status-updates/update/2021-05-14/
The Cardano 360 team also dropped a video with specific mid-month Alonzo testnet updates. At the timestamp in the link below the vid lays out the various test groups and when they will participate. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1393258090703826944 https://youtu.be/5mPC4uLMdEw?t=532
We are seeing some small pools retiring. We’ll obviously see more and more of this as time marches on. But, here’s a salute to the small pools that gave it a go! This SPO also brought us poolpeek.com which we have covered here before. https://twitter.com/CardanoBudz/status/1393252321845465088 www.poolpeek.com
John O’Connor on CNBCAfrica! He gave a really good explanation of how Africa with it’s already very high adoption of mobile payment wallets can leapfrog the legacy payment systems currently in use in more developed countries. He also reiterated that Cardano will expand to five countries this year and 20 next year! https://youtu.be/RET8hIQQLUA
This tweet by u/TheADAApe pretty much sums it all up. When people ask me how I knew, I’m going to point them to this post. https://twitter.com/ArmySpies/status/1393606491110662146
To hear about something truly good happening in the Cardano ecosystem check out this interview with Mickey Watkins, CEO of World Mobile, on the Hotel Cardano podcast. Really good details on World Mobile's connecting the unconnected in sub-Saharan Africa! https://youtu.be/L15bn_b2moA
What if these two got to talking about what Atala Prism could bring to the table for students in the city of Miami? https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1393574632305868805
The saga of BTC maximalists being angry at Elon continues with Elon implying that Tesla could sell its BTC while Cardano continues just doing its thing like normal. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies
Likewise, Marc Cuban tried to FUD real world use of Cardano only to be confronted with a giant infographic of use cases and partnerships along with an explanatory video just for him. https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1393646131708665858 https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles/status/1393689887648272384
Initial Stakepool Offerings (“ISOs”) are here. Crypto is no stranger to novel means of capital formation and now the Cardano ecosystem is getting in on the action. Here is SundaeSwap’s explanation of how ISOs will work. https://sundaeswap-finance.medium.com/iso-sundae-with-the-works-c5c335101ef5
ICYMI, Manuel Chakravarty reminds us all that his Cardano Summit 2020 talk is publicly available for questions on native assets. Really interesting discussion of the asset identifier just being a hash of the policy script and how that helps create a super lightweight easy to use system. https://twitter.com/TacticalGrace/status/1394263629088923649
Elon confirms that Tesla has not sold any BTC. https://twitter.com/BTC_Archive/status/1394051036462071808
Charles makes a whole video about how to fix Doge. https://youtu.be/iQd9XjEm8EE
The Ecosystem is getting even bigger every day we inch closer to Alonzo! https://twitter.com/TyIsDigital/status/1394345977952284676
The Cardano Foundation is out to do something incredible with supply chains as described in the fireside chat! In his previous Cardano Live appearance, Frederik Gregaard, CF CEO, also expressed a very healthy and sustainable perspective on what DeFi should become. He compared the current state of DeFi to just moving funds from your left pocket to your right pocket and taking profit. https://youtu.be/d8uPMZplfeM https://youtu.be/xbMSQUA1lss
The ISO model entering the capital formation toolbox in Cardano is going to make the stake pool game extremely interesting with SPOs scrambling to find the right balance between rewarding ADA and giving their delegators other things like tokens. Some stake pools could even become like portfolio funds with relationships with many different projects the tokens of which are given to delegators. Babel Fees could also play a role here for smart SPOs as they may allow access to a wide variety of tokens in the ecosystem that could be used to reward delegators with a sort of index fund exposure to a wide variety of Cardano projects.
May Cardano 360 coming one week from today (always the last Thursday of the month). https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1395117067960045569
New delegations from IOHK are out. Congrats to the selected SPOs. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1395087751746310156
The Cardano Foundation has released the full video of the Fireside Chat with Eva and Fred. Lots of questions answered on a variety of fronts. Very interesting remarks including that in discussions with financial institutions, Fred has found they are interested in exposure to the alpha provided by the asset class in general, tokenization of assets, and the yield provided by staking rewards. Fred counters that they SHOULD be far more interested in the Cardano standard including the concepts of reference accounts, programmability of money, and transaction metadata. https://youtu.be/JW6s9Jkyazg
In a video press release yesterday, the Fed finally admitted that it’s moving toward a central bank digital currency (just like every other central bank). This will eventually be impactful on Cardano and every other crypto ecosystem. https://youtu.be/WOAQxpG79Ag
The Treasury is trying to figure out how to get cryptocurrency regulation in a headlock. This will probably go hand-in-hand with the Fed’s March toward a CBDC. Afterall, what good is all the tracking and monitoring afforded by a CBDC if it’s easier for everyone to just use a non-central bank digital currency? Tax evasion in crypto is also obviously a target problem since we know only about 800 people a year paid taxes on crypto in 2013-2015. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/us-treasury-calls-for-stricter-cryptocurrency-compliance-with-irs.html https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-American-Families-Plan-Tax-Compliance-Agenda.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-taxes-overview
The Cardano Foundation has released the full video of the Fireside Chat with Eva and Fred. Lots of questions answered on a variety of fronts. Very interesting remarks including that in discussions with financial institutions, Fred has found they are interested in exposure to the alpha provided by the asset class in general, tokenization of assets, and the yield provided by staking rewards. Fred counters that they SHOULD be far more interested in the Cardano standard including the concepts of reference accounts, programmability of money, and transaction metadata. https://youtu.be/JW6s9Jkyazg
In a video press release yesterday, the Fed finally admitted that it’s moving toward a central bank digital currency (just like every other central bank). This will eventually be impactful on Cardano and every other crypto ecosystem. https://youtu.be/WOAQxpG79Ag
The Treasury is trying to figure out how to get cryptocurrency regulation in a headlock. This will probably go hand-in-hand with the Fed’s March toward a CBDC. Afterall, what good is all the tracking and monitoring afforded by a CBDC if it’s easier for everyone to just use a non-central bank digital currency? Tax evasion in crypto is also obviously a target problem since we know only about 800 people a year paid taxes on crypto in 2013-2015. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/us-treasury-calls-for-stricter-cryptocurrency-compliance-with-irs.html https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-American-Families-Plan-Tax-Compliance-Agenda.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-taxes-overview
Charles has now added the Jack Dorsey edition to his series of “Let’s Educate Crypto Adjacent Celebrities” videos. https://youtu.be/lMZ1xQzWtl4
...and still...KINGS OF THE GITHUB! May our reign never end. https://twitter.com/ProofofGitHub/status/1395771379929255945
Some banks still won’t allow customers to buy crypto with their accounts. In 2021, this is still a thing. https://twitter.com/CryptoCardano_/status/1395933037192437763
Even the Pope is condemning Proof-of-Work? At least, that’s how the crypto community took a recent tweet. https://twitter.com/Pontifex/status/1394993742226939905
Apparently, you can now have your own Stakepool run for you for $122/month in a Stakepool-as-a-Service arrangement. https://twitter.com/ChrisGraff/status/1396169061487333380
If you want to see how the Cardano NFT space has been heating up, you can check out CNFT resale listings at Lovelace Marketplace. https://lovelacemarketplace.io/all-categories/
Ethiopia awards new Telecom license as promised. The winner, a consortium including Vodafone, Safaricom, and Sumitomo; will invest $8 billion in their network in Ethiopia in the next 10 years and will cover the country in 4G. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-22/ethiopia-awards-new-telecoms-license-to-vodafone-consortium https://twitter.com/AbiyAhmedAli/status/1396060475184533505
Check out this new infographic explaining how World Mobile Works! https://blog.worldmobile.io/post/how-world-mobile-is-connecting-the-unconnected-infographic/
Cardano hits 1MM wallets! https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1396331888093061121
Set your calendars! The May Cardano 360 is this Thursday! https://twitter.com/Cardano/status/1396331908632653830
Charles releases a 90 Day Countdown to Alonzo video. https://youtu.be/u6negi1yAQQ
Institutional inflows into Cardano get some coverage by the crypto press. https://cointelegraph.com/news/cardano-sees-largest-weekly-inflows-from-institutional-managers-coinshares
Charles and Kim Dotcom have a conversation about PoW miners possibly fleeing China with all of their hardware. https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1396964996693708801
Cardano gets a little coverage on NBC for it’s energy efficiency. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/cryptocurrency-goes-green-proof-stake-offer-solution-energy-concerns-rcna1030
Plutus Pioneers Lecture #7 is out. https://youtu.be/_EDJt55vOB0
Yesterday was ADA Payday with the end of Epoch 267. I hope everyone made lots of sweet delicious staking rewards! https://adapools.org/epochs
Paypal moving away from the “walled garden” model. This is decentralization teaching the legacy institutions a lesson. https://www.coindesk.com/paypal-will-let-customers-withdraw-crypto-exec-says
Charles is interviewed on Yahoo Finance where he explained: 1) how the lack of an obvious decentralized governance system in ETH and BTC will cripple their efforts as they attempt to scale and the founders/core developers start losing prominence, 2) the ADA EUTXO system is vastly more scaleable with it’s local state being so much more amenable to sharding than ETH’s global state system, 3) Cardano has a high willingness to bring on users in hypergrowth areas like Africa where ETH seems to have little interest, and 4) ETH does not seem to be as highly concerned with interoperability which might become highly valuable in the future. https://twitter.com/YahooFinance/status/1397593275826151424
Cardano 360 is tomorrow. Don’t miss it if you want to hear about all the awesome things happening with Alonzo (smart contracts), Hydra (scalability), and everything else! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1397549347592675338
The May Cardano 360 was yesterday and we had lots of updates including the Color Coding for the different stages of the testnet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS33gRj9JYE
Alonzo “Blue” Era Testnet (through mid June; <50 user cohort) will include the basic functionality of the system for testing basic contracts . Initially the SPOs will be included, then some of the Plutus Pioneers will be allowed in, then a few of the outside development firms (Plutus Partners). The Plutus Partners will be working on specific areas including oracles, DEXs, stablecoins, NFTs, and DeFi. This will produce code and documentation that will be publicly available.
Alonzo “White” Era Testnet (mid June to mid July; <500 user cohort) will add more Plutus Pioneers and more functionality. They will develop various dApps and there will be interaction on the user side of these dApps. They will do some benchmarking at this stage.
The Alonzo Hard Fork Combinator Event requires a lot of different pieces come together at the same time. But, this is not their first rodeo and they have a lot of experience with this from the ITN, Shelley, and etc.
Alonzo “Purple” Era Tesnet (mid July to mid August; fully public) will involve a full public network with all of the Plutus pioneers, the Rosetta Api to the exchanges, Daedalus, hardware wallets, graphQL, and full functionality. The purpose of this phase will be optimization.
Alonzo “Red” Era Tesnet (August; a very short phase) will involve a new network where they can test scalability and stability.
Alonzo “Black” Era Tesnet (August; a very short phase) will be the final public testnet where they will ensure they have their candidate mainnet releases ready to launch on the mainnet.
They are committed to making sure there is a very large group of people who are familiar with using the Alonzo testnet by the time the mainnet launches.
Alonzo Mainnet (August-September). It’s looking like Alonzo mainnet launch was positioned in very late August through September in the infographics. That makes me assume there is a chance of August, much better chance of September, and also some chance of October or later. This is blockchain development after all. Also, we’ve waited years. Why care about a few weeks?
There will be another Plutus Pioneers Cohort later this summer.
Marlowe Run will be a browser product that can run on mobile or desktop. It can be linked to your wallet and be used to run Cardano smart contracts simultaneously on a distributed basis across multiple user browsers. The user interface is light years ahead of anything we saw in Marlowe Meadow or the Marlowe Playground simulations. It will include a library of off-the-shelf contracts.
There will be a Marlowe Webinar on June 3. Register here: https://webinar.marlowe-finance.io/
The ERC-20 converter was looking very intuitive and seamless in the new demo. It should be on the testnet in June.
Manuel Chakravarty gave a big update on Hydra (layer 2 scaling). Hydra will not require that the base layer be modified since it will be implemented via Plutus smart contracts. Hydra is actually a collection of protocols including Hydra Head and Hydra Tail. Hydra Head is a symmetric protocol where multiple participants will be online simultaneously for the whole period of the head exchanging messages. Hydra Tail is an asymmetric protocol involving a high performance server and many clients that may be mobile and could be offline for large portions of the tail’s existence. There will also be “inter head & tail networking” which will allow for a network of heads and tails. They have a published research paper on Hydra Head. They are currently writing the Hydra Tail paper.
Hydra is distinguished from other layer 2 protocols by its isomorphic properties. This means you will be able to run any smart contract that works on the base layer in a Hydra Head! This is very special. We won’t need special purpose contracts built out just for layer 2. There are some big implications to this. Since a Hydra Head is essentially just a Plutus smart contract, this means you can run a Hydra Head inside another Hydra Head. It’s turtles all the way down, guys. It sounds like they can do this iteratively as much as they want.
Aggelos also gave a good presentation on the importance of “skin in the game” in resource based consensus protocols (both proof-of-work and proof-of-stake) and its effect on promotion or discouragement of centralization. He explained how Ouroboros has built-in safeguards to prevent centralization including the K parameter (currently at 500) which caps total rewards per pool and the alpha parameter (currently at 0.3) which splits rewards into a 77% piece and a 23% piece. A pool can take its share of the 77% piece based on the pool’s total stake and its share of the 23% piece based on the pledge of the SPO. A higher alpha parameter makes it less attractive for individual SPOs to proliferate multiple pools since they can’t be as leveraged on their available pledge and still get as big a share of the 23% piece. This also discourages Sybil Attacks. As Cardano on-chain governance progresses, these parameters will be controlled by the community.
There will be a Cardano Goguen Summit in September. It will be hybrid digital/in-person.
Charles is helping to bring the cryptographer who broke SHA-1 to the University of Wyoming. The Cardano funded blockchain lab there could be on the road to be a powerhouse. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1398290866419105802 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiqun_Lisa_Yin
We don’t often get to hear from the engineers behind Yoroi over at Emurgo. But, here’s a podcast with Vicente Almonacid from Emurgo. Check out 12:50 where he mentions the dApp Connector (Cardano’s Metamask Equivalent). https://twitter.com/vacuumlabs/status/1397847633696280576
Check out this great article from Cardanians.io on the work being done at the University of Wyoming on a physical chip for transfer of private keys in day-to-day cashlike transactions. https://cardanians.io/en/cardano-can-give-crypto-a-cash-like-experience-58
Professor Aggelos Kiayias recently dropped a video explaining exactly how Mithril (apparently neckbeard dungeon master talk for elf armor) is going to allow for Perfect Cardano (ADA) wallets that combine the ease of use and convenience of light wallets with the trustlessness of full node wallets. We also learned exactly how Mithril is going to work. https://youtu.be/LhepJFCyWRk
In proof-of-work, bootstrapping can be done with blockheaders. This won’t do in proof-of-stake since we need information about stakeholder distribution to confirm block validity.
Mithril fixes this by being a cryptographic construction that enables a population of stakeholders to issue a signature consistent with certain constraints.
For Mithril to work in proof-of-stake, it needs three crucial properties: 1) it needs to enforce a threshold ratio of stakeholders before the signature is issued; 2) the pre-signature fragments must be independently verified and subject to public aggregation; and 3) it must be efficient in the sense that the final signature is of constant size and is logarithmically dependent on the # of stakeholders.
Stakeholders will issue special Mithril keys along with the normal cryptographic key material. Then at regular intervals, full nodes will test whether they can produce a pre-signature fragment. Only a random subset of stakeholders will be eligible to produce a pre-signature fragment. When a sufficient # of pre-signature fragments have been issued by eligible stakeholders then it will be possible to aggregate the fragments into a final signature.
This will be a checkpoint that will be verifiable with respect to previous check points all the way back to the genesis block. Such checkpoints will be cryptographic commitments of the relevant UTXOs.
Since the checkpoints will be trustless, a light client (i.e. wallet) will only need to verify the sequence of checkpoints up to the current time to trustlessly bootstrap.
The ecosystem is growing so fast, it’s hard to keep up with all the projects without these infographics at this point. https://twitter.com/Dr_shwetaPHD/status/1398783893638103040
The Cardano subreddit is at 487k users. Half a million isn’t far away. https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
Epoch 268 is a wrap as of yesterday with 22.83 billion ADA staked. https://adapools.org/epochs
Check out the telegram AMA tomorrow with the CEO of World Mobile! https://twitter.com/ZwijBerg/status/1399377659105320962
A very interesting stat on Cardano user growth. https://twitter.com/cex_io/status/1398959088684445699
Don’t forget, the Marlowe webinar is this Thursday! https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1399444331556225027
More and more people in the youtube sphere are jumping on the Cardano train. https://twitter.com/techleadhd/status/1399398373384351744
Reuters reports on an EU digital identity wallet project. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/eu-step-up-digital-push-with-digital-identity-wallet-2021-06-01/?taid=60b6e171efd84f0001b64ae1&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter
The U.S. Currently has Issued Sanctions on Ethiopia, but they are not all-encompassing economic sanctions as with rogue nations, they have just barred entry into the U.S. for certain government personnel. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/world/africa/ethiopia-us-sanctions-tigray.html
Vitalik is saying it’s highly unlikely we see ETH 2.0 before late 2022. I’m guessing that means mid 2023 which will be after two years of Cardano slaughtering the entire ETH user base. Things are looking so bad that Vitalik says he doesn’t even like using the ETH 2.0 label anymore since he knows the changes will be more incremental. This is what early capitulation sounds like guys. https://cointelegraph.com/news/even-vitalik-buterin-is-surprised-at-just-how-long-eth2-is-taking
Cardano-Nervos cross-chain bridge to be built. This would be at least the second cross-chain bridge after the Cardano-AGI bridge. https://www.coindesk.com/cardano-nervos-force-bridge-network-first
Sundaeswap ISO delayed due to regulatory concerns. This brings up interesting questions for the whole space about requesting regulatory permission vs. possibly being forced to ask for forgiveness. https://www.sundaeswap.finance/posts/iso-update
Tim Harrison has announced that the transition to Alonzo Blue was successful. https://twitter.com/timbharrison/status/1400481879883649034
Finally, 500k users in the Cardano Subreddit! https://www.reddit.com/r/cardano/
We got a nice update on the first week of Alonzo Blue. https://twitter.com/InputOutputHK/status/1400876181122174977
And….still! Kings of the github! https://twitter.com/CryptoDiffer/status/1400744567956180993
Epoch 269 is in the bag with active stake of 22.77 Billion. Hope everyone made lots of delicious staking rewards! https://adapools.org/epochs
Binance has 63 stakepools charging 6%. Please stop paying so much for the right to stake your ADA. You don’t have to pay that much. You have a huge number of better options. You are literally giving away your ADA rewards to a large corporation. It’s easy: just download the Yoroi Chrome extension, send your ADA there, and pick from the 2k+ available stakepools right inside Yoroi. https://twitter.com/BraveHeartStak3/status/1401204563189940231 https://adapools.org/groups/binance-20 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emurgo&hl=en_US&gl=US
Nigeria Bans Twitter after Twitter censors Tweet from Nigerian President. This emphasizes the need for decentralized social media. A decentralized solution running on Cardano could fix this. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/04/africa/nigeria-suspends-twitter-operations-intl/index.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JilEb42q-CI
A Really Big Deal: El Salvador is on the verge of making Bitcoin legal tender in the Central American nation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uGOfqN2y9k
This could have huge ramifications for bank and accounting treatment of Bitcoin potentially including that banks might suddenly be allowed to handle Bitcoin as a foreign currency. Today it was BTC. But, wait until they find out what Cardano can do. https://twitter.com/CaitlinLong_/status/1401334421773504517
Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, also clarified that there will be no capital gains taxes on Bitcoin since it is a “legal currency” and crypto entrepreneurs will be given instant permanent residence. https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1401622548396314631
Bitcoin enthusiasm seems to be off to a great start among other Latin American politicians after the fervor around the El Salvador announcement. This will serve as a great gateway drug that only leads to Gen 3 projects and Cardano. https://twitter.com/gilson__marques https://twitter.com/carlitosrejala https://twitter.com/gabrielsilva8_7/status/1401965129051389958 https://twitter.com/FabioOstermann
We are always the Github Kings. It’s amazing. https://twitter.com/CryptoIRELAND1/status/1402011593995603975
Charles basically just laid out what 4th Gen Cryptos are going to be all about in his video yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkr1EKQrVeQ
Here’s a good Emurgo blog article on the use of Emurgo Trace in the Oil and gas industry. https://twitter.com/emurgo_io/status/1402339278097502210
IOHK gives us a closer look at everything being upgraded for Alonzo. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/06/08/a-close-look-at-the-software-running-cardano/
We’re currently at 71.52% of ADA staked. This is a pretty incredible ratio and shows the strength of the Cardano community. https://twitter.com/CardanoPoolPeek/status/1402378400803794950
SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce warns about the regulatory impulse being displayed by her colleagues toward crypto and the impact it could have on the stifling of innovation. https://www.ft.com/content/ae0d40a1-8a4a-4885-a6a7-b157e27b3311
El Salvador passes the statute to make Bitcoin legal tender in the country. https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1402827595339681794
Cardano gets more positive coverage on the Nasdaq website with a second article following the one from April 7 earlier this year. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/be-part-of-a-historic-crypto-moment-with-cardano-2021-06-08
Prof. Aggelos Kiayias releases an article on a tri-coin system called Stablefees that could fix the problem of appreciating transaction fees in crypto. https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/06/10/stablefees-and-the-decentralized-reserve-system/
There’s very interesting speculation circulating out there about how El Salvador’s Bitcoin adoption might impact relationships with the U.S. and the IMF. https://twitter.com/cardano_whale/status/1403136968456765443
Elizabeth Warren is now talking about the U.S. needs to regulate crypto. https://twitter.com/BloombergTV/status/1402749016845262851

~Army of Spies