Bitcoin mining — How much energy is really consumed?

A Detailed Summary of Every Single Reason Why I am Bullish on Ethereum

The following will be a list of the many reasons why I hold and am extremely bullish on ETH.

This is an extremely long post. If you just want the hopium without the detail, read the TL;DR at the bottom.

ETH 2.0

As we all know, ETH 2.0 phase 0 is right around the corner. This will lock up ETH and stakers will earn interest on their ETH in return for securing the network. Next comes phase 1 where the ETH 2 shards are introduced, shards are essentially parallel blockchains which are each responsible for a different part of Ethereum’s workload, think of it like a multi-core processor vs a single core processor. During phase 1, these shards will only act as data availability layers and won’t actually process transactions yet. However, their data can be utilised by the L2 scaling solution, rollups, increasing Ethereum’s throughput in transactions per second up to 100,000 TPS.
After phase 1 comes phase 1.5 which will move the ETH 1.0 chain into an ETH 2 shard and Ethereum will be fully secured by proof of stake. This means that ETH issuance will drop from around 5% per year to less than 1% and with EIP-1559, ETH might become a deflationary asset, but more on that later.
Finally, with ETH 2.0 phase two, each shard will be fully functional chains. With 64 of them, we can expect the base layer of Ethereum to scale around 64x, not including the massive scaling which comes from layer 2 scaling solutions like rollups as previously mentioned.
While the scaling benefits and ETH issuance reduction which comes with ETH 2.0 will be massive, they aren’t the only benefits. We also get benefits such as increased security from PoS compared to PoW, a huge energy efficiency improvement due to the removal of PoW and also the addition of eWASM which will allow contracts to be programmed in a wide range of programming languages, opening the floodgates for millions of web devs who want to be involved in Ethereum but don’t know Ethereum’s programming language, Solidity.

EIP-1559 and ETH scarcity

As I covered in a previous post of mine, ETH doesn’t have a supply cap like Bitcoin. Instead, it has a monetary policy of “minimum viable issuance”, not only is this is a good thing for network security, but with the addition of EIP-1559, it leaves the door open to the possibility of ETH issuance going negative. In short, EIP-1559 changes the fee market to make transaction prices more efficient (helping to alleviate high gas fees!) by burning a variable base fee which changes based on network usage demand rather than using a highest bidder market where miners simply include who pays them the most. This will result in most of the ETH being paid in transaction fees being burned. As of late, the amount which would be burned if EIP-1559 was in Ethereum right now would make ETH a deflationary asset!

Layer 2 Scaling

In the mean time while we are waiting for ETH 2.0, layer 2 scaling is here. Right now, projects such as Deversifi or Loopring utilise rollups to scale to thousands of tx/s on their decentralised exchange platforms or HoneySwap which uses xDai to offer a more scalable alternative to UniSwap. Speaking of which, big DeFi players like UniSwap and Synthetix are actively looking into using optimistic rollups to scale while maintaining composability between DeFi platforms. The most bullish thing about L2 scaling is all of the variety of options. Here’s a non exhaustive list of Ethereum L2 scaling solutions: - Aztec protocol (L2 scaling + privacy!) - ZKSync - Loopring - Raiden - Arbitrum Rollups - xDai - OMGNetwork - Matic - FuelLabs - Starkware - Optimism - Celer Network - + Many more

DeFi and Composability

If you’re reading this, I am sure you are aware of the phenomena which is Decentralised Finance (DeFi or more accurately, open finance). Ethereum is the first platform to offer permissionless and immutable financial services which when interacting with each other, lead to unprecedented composability and innovation in financial applications. A whole new world of possibilities are opening up thanks to this composability as it allows anyone to take existing pieces of open source code from other DeFi projects, put them together like lego pieces (hence the term money legos) and create something the world has never seen before. None of this was possible before Ethereum because typically financial services are heavily regulated and FinTech is usually proprietary software, so you don’t have any open source lego bricks to build off and you have to build everything you need from scratch. That is if what you want to do is even legal for a centralised institution!
Oh, and if you think that DeFi was just a fad and the bubble has popped, guess again! Total value locked in DeFi is currently at an all time high. Don’t believe me? Find out for yourself on the DeFi Pulse website.

NFTs and tokeniation

NFTs or “Non-Fungible Tokens” - despite the name which may confuse a layman - are a basic concept. They are unique tokens with their own unique attributes. This allows you to create digital art, human readable names for your ETH address (see ENS names and unstoppable domains), breedable virtual collectible creatures like crypto kitties, ownable in game assets like Gods Unchained cards or best of all in my opinion, tokenised ownership of real world assets which can even be split into pieces (this doesn’t necessarily require an NFT. Fungible tokens can be/are used for some of the following use cases). This could be tokenised ownership of real estate (see RealT), tokenised ownership of stocks, bonds and other financial assets (which by the way makes them tradable 24/7 and divisible unlike through the traditional system) or even tokenised ownership of the future income of a celebrity or athlete (see when NBA player Spencer Dinwiddie tokenized his own NBA contract.)

Institutional Adoption

Ethereum is by far the most widely adopted blockchain by enterprises. Ethereum’s Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is the largest blockchain-enterprise partnership program and Ethereum is by far the most frequently leveraged blockchain for proof of concepts and innovation in the blockchain space by enterprises. Meanwhile, there are protocols like the Baseline protocol which is a shared framework which allows enterprises to use Ethereum as a common frame of reference and a base settlement layer without having to give up privacy when settling on the public Ethereum mainnet. This framework makes adopting Ethereum much easier for other enterprises.

Institutional Investment

One of Bitcoin’s biggest things it has going for it right now is the growing institutional investment. In case you were wondering, Ethereum has this too! Grayscale offers investment in the cryptocurrency space for financial institutions and their Ethereum fund has already locked up more than 2% of the total supply of ETH. Not only this, but as businesses transact on Ethereum and better understand it, not only will they buy up ETH to pay for their transactions, but they will also realise that much like Bitcoin, Ethereum is a scarce asset. Better yet, a scarce asset which offers yield. As a result, I expect to see companies having ETH holdings become the norm just like how Bitcoin is becoming more widespread on companies’ balance sheets.

The state of global markets

With asset prices in almost every asset class at or near all-time highs and interest rates lower than ever and even negative in some cases, there really aren’t many good opportunities in the traditional financial system right now. Enter crypto - clearly the next evolution of financial services (as I explained in the section on DeFi earlier in this post), with scarce assets built in at the protocol layer, buying BTC or ETH is a lot like buying shares in TCP/IP in 1990 (that is if the underlying protocols of the internet could be invested in which they couldn’t). Best of all, major cryptos are down from their all-time highs anywhere between 35% for BTC or 70% for ETH and much more for many altcoins. This means that they can significantly appreciate in value before entering uncharted, speculative bubble territory.
While of course we could fall dramatically at any moment in the current macro financial conditions, as a longer term play, crypto is very alluring. The existing financial system has shown that it is in dire need of replacing and the potential replacement has started rearing its head in the form of crypto and DeFi.

Improvements in user onboarding and abstracting away complexity

Ethereum has started making huge leaps forward in terms of usability for the end user. We now have ENS names and unstoppable domains which allow you to send ETH to yournamehere.ETH or TrickyTroll.crypto (I don’t actually have that domain, that’s just an example). No longer do you have to check every character of your ugly hexadecimal 0x43AB96D… ETH address to ensure you’re sending your ETH to the right person. We also have smart contract wallets like Argent wallet or the Gnosis safe. These allow for users to access their wallets and interact with DeFi self-custodially from an app on their phone without having to record a private key or recovery phrase. Instead, they offer social recovery and their UI is straight forward enough for anyone who uses a smart phone to understand. Finally, for the more experienced users, DApps like Uniswap have pretty, super easy to use graphical user interfaces and can be used by anyone who knows how to run and use a browser extension like Metamask.

The lack of an obvious #1 ETH killer

One of Ethereum’s biggest threats is for it to be overthrown by a so-called “Ethereum killer” blockchain which claims to do everything Ethereum can do and sometimes more. While there are competitors which are each formidable to a certain extent such as Polkadot, Cardano and EOS, each have their own weaknesses. For example, Polkadot and Cardano are not fully operational yet and EOS is much more centralised than Ethereum. As a result, none of these competitors have any significant network effects just yet relative to the behemoth which is Ethereum. This doesn’t mean that these projects aren’t a threat. In fact, I am sure that projects like Polkadot (which is more focused on complimenting Ethereum than killing it) will take a slice out of Ethereum’s pie. However, I am still very confident that Ethereum will remain on top due to the lack of a clear number 2 smart contract platform. Since none of these ETH killers stands out as the second place smart contract platform, it makes it much harder for one project to create a network effect which even begins to threaten Ethereum’s dominance. This leads me onto my next reason - network effects.

Network effects

This is another topic which I made a previous post on. The network effect is why Bitcoin is still the number one cryptocurrency and by such a long way. Bitcoin is not the most technologically advanced cryptocurrency. However, it has the most widespread name recognition and the most adoption in most metrics (ETH beats in in some metrics these days). The network effect is also why most people use Zoom and Facebook messengeWhatsApp despite the existence of free, private, end to end encrypted alternatives which have all the same features (Jitsi for the zoom alternative and Signal for the private messenger app. I highly recommend both. Let’s get their network effects going!). It is the same for Bitcoin. People don’t want to have to learn about or set up a wallet for alternative options. People like what is familiar and what other people use. Nobody wants to be “that guy” who makes you download yet another app and account you have to remember the password/private key for. In the same way, Enterprises don’t want to have to create a bridge between their existing systems and a dozen different blockchains. Developers don’t want to have to create DeFi money legos from scratch on a new chain if they can just plug in to existing services like Uniswap. Likewise, users don’t want to have to download another browser extension to use DApps on another chain if they already use Ethereum. I know personally I have refrained from investing in altcoins because I would have to install another app on my hardware wallet or remember another recovery phrase.
Overthrowing Ethereum’s network effect is one hell of a big task these days. Time is running out for the ETH killers.

Ethereum is the most decentralised and provably neutral smart contract platform

Ethereum is also arguably the most decentralised and provably neutral smart contract platform (except for maybe Ethereum Classic on the neutrality part). Unlike some smart contract platforms, you can’t round up everyone at the Ethereum Foundation or any select group of people and expect to be able to stop the network. Not only this, but the Ethereum foundation doesn’t have the ability to print more ETH or push through changes as they wish like some people would lead you on to believe. The community would reject detrimental EIPs and hard fork. Ever since the DAO hack, the Ethereum community has made it clear that it will not accept EIPs which attempt to roll back the chain even to recover hacked funds (see EIP-999).
Even if governments around the world wanted to censor the Ethereum blockchain, under ETH 2.0’s proof of stake, it would be incredibly costly and would require a double digit percentage of the total ETH supply, much of which would be slashed (meaning they would lose it) as punishment for running dishonest validator nodes. This means that unlike with proof of work where a 51% attacker can keep attacking the network, under proof of stake, an attacker can only perform the attack a couple of times before they lose all of their ETH. This makes attacks much less financially viable than it is on proof of work chains. Network security is much more than what I laid out above and I am far from an expert but the improved resistance to 51% attacks which PoS provides is significant.
Finally, with the US dollar looking like it will lose its reserve currency status and the existing wire transfer system being outdated, superpowers like China won’t want to use US systems and the US won’t want to use a Chinese system. Enter Ethereum, the provably neutral settlement layer where the USA and China don’t have to trust each other or each other’s banks because they can trust Ethereum. While it may sound like a long shot, it does make sense if Ethereum hits a multi-trillion dollar market cap that it is the most secure and neutral way to transfer value between these adversaries. Not to mention if much of the world’s commerce were to be settled in the same place - on Ethereum - then it would make sense for governments to settle on the same platform.

ETH distribution is decentralised

Thanks to over 5 years of proof of work - a system where miners have to sell newly minted ETH to pay for electricity costs - newly mined ETH has found its way into the hands of everyday people who buy ETH off miners selling on exchnages. As pointed out by u/AdamSC1 in his analysis of the top 10K ETH addresses (I highly recommend reading this if you haven’t already), the distribution of ETH is actually slightly more decentralised than Bitcoin with the top 10,000 ETH wallets holding 56.70% of ETH supply compared to the top 10,000 Bitcoin wallets which hold 57.44% of the Bitcoin supply. This decentralised distribution means that the introduction of staking won’t centralise ETH in the hands of a few wallets who could then control the network. This is an advantage for ETH which many proof of stake ETH killers will never have as they never used PoW to distribute funds widely throughout the community and these ETH killers often did funding rounds giving large numbers of tokens to VC investors.

The community

Finally, while I may be biased, I think that Ethereum has the friendliest community. Anecdotally, I find that the Ethereum developer community is full of forward thinking people who want to make the world a better place and build a better future, many of whom are altruistic and don’t always act in their best interests. Compare this to the much more conservative, “at least we’re safe while the world burns” attitude which many Bitcoiners have. I don’t want to generalise too much here as the Bitcoin community is great too and there are some wonderful people there. But the difference is clear if you compare the daily discussion of Bitcoin to the incredibly helpful and welcoming daily discussion of EthFinance who will happily answer your noob questions without calling you an idiot and telling you to do you own research (there are plenty more examples in any of the daily threads). Or the very helpful folks over at EthStaker who will go out of their way to help you set up an ETH 2.0 staking node on the testnets (Shoutout to u/superphiz who does a lot of work over in that sub!). Don’t believe me? Head over to those subs and see for yourself.
Please don’t hate on me if you disagree about which project has the best community, it is just my very biased personal opinion and I respect your opinion if you disagree! :)

TL;DR:

submitted by Tricky_Troll to CryptoCurrency [link] [comments]

Bitcoin Newcomers FAQ - Please read!

Welcome to the /Bitcoin Sticky FAQ

You've probably been hearing a lot about Bitcoin recently and are wondering what's the big deal? Most of your questions should be answered by the resources below but if you have additional questions feel free to ask them in the comments.
It all started with the release of the release of Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper however that will probably go over the head of most readers so we recommend the following aricles/books/videos as a good starting point for understanding how bitcoin works and a little about its long term potential:
Some other great resources include Lopp.net, Gigi's resource page, and James D'Angelo's Bitcoin 101 Blackboard series.
Some excellent writing on Bitcoin's value proposition and future can be found at the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute.
Some Bitcoin statistics can be found here and here. Developer resources can be found here. Peer-reviewed research papers can be found here, also course lectures from the Princeton crypto series.
Potential upcoming protocol improvements and scaling resources here and here.
The number of times Bitcoin was declared dead by the media can be found here (LOL!)

Key properties of Bitcoin

Where can I buy bitcoin?

Bitcoin.org and BuyBitcoinWorldwide.com are helpful sites for beginners. You can buy or sell any amount of bitcoin (even just a few dollars worth) and there are several easy methods to purchase bitcoin with cash, credit card or bank transfer. Some of the more popular resources are below, also check out the bitcoinity exchange resources for a larger list of options for purchases.
Here is a listing of local ATMs. If you would like your paycheck automatically converted to bitcoin use Bitwage.
Note: Bitcoin are valued at whatever market price people are willing to pay for them in balancing act of supply vs demand. Unlike traditional markets, bitcoin markets operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Preev is a useful site that that shows how much various denominations of bitcoin are worth in different currencies. Alternatively you can just Google "1 bitcoin in (your local currency)".

Securing your bitcoin

With bitcoin you can "Be your own bank" and personally secure your bitcoin OR you can use third party companies aka "Bitcoin banks" which will hold the bitcoin for you.
Note: For increased security, use Two Factor Authentication (2FA) everywhere it is offered, including email!
2FA requires a second confirmation code or a physical security key to access your account making it much harder for thieves to gain access. Google Authenticator and Authy are the two most popular 2FA services, download links are below. Make sure you create backups of your 2FA codes.
Google Auth Authy OTP Auth
Android Android N/A
iOS iOS iOS
Physical security keys (FIDO U2F) offer stronger security than Google Auth / Authy and other TOTP-based apps, because the secret code never leaves the device and it uses bi-directional authentication so it prevents phishing. If you lose the device though, you could lose access to your account, so always use 2 or more security keys with a given account so you have backups. See Yubikey or Titan to purchase security keys.
Both Coinbase and Gemini support physical security keys.

Watch out for scams

As mentioned above, Bitcoin is decentralized, which by definition means there is no official website or Twitter handle or spokesperson or CEO. However, all money attracts thieves. This combination unfortunately results in scammers running official sounding names or pretending to be an authority on YouTube or social media. Many scammers throughout the years have claimed to be the inventor of Bitcoin. Websites like bitcoin(dot)com and the btc subreddit are active scams. Almost all altcoins (shitcoins) are marketed heavily with big promises but are really just designed to separate you from your bitcoin. So be careful: any resource, including all linked in this document, may in the future turn evil. Don't trust, verify. Also as they say in our community "Not your keys, not your coins".

Where can I spend bitcoin?

Check out spendabit or bitcoin directory for millions of merchant options. Also you can spend bitcoin anywhere visa is accepted with bitcoin debit cards such as the CashApp card or Fold card. Some other useful site are listed below.
Store Product
Gyft Gift cards for hundreds of retailers including Amazon, Target, Walmart, Starbucks, Whole Foods, CVS, Lowes, Home Depot, iTunes, Best Buy, Sears, Kohls, eBay, GameStop, etc.
Spendabit, Overstock and The Bitcoin Directory Retail shopping with millions of results
ShakePay Generate one time use Visa cards in seconds
NewEgg and Dell For all your electronics needs
Bitwa.la, Coinbills, Piixpay, Bitbill.eu, Bylls, Coins.ph, Bitrefill, LivingRoomofSatoshi, Coinsfer, and more Bill payment
Menufy, Takeaway and Thuisbezorgd NL Takeout delivered to your door
Expedia, Cheapair, Destinia, Abitsky, SkyTours, the Travel category on Gyft and 9flats For when you need to get away
Cryptostorm, Mullvad, and PIA VPN services
Namecheap, Porkbun Domain name registration
Stampnik Discounted USPS Priority, Express, First-Class mail postage
Coinmap and AirBitz are helpful to find local businesses accepting bitcoin. A good resource for UK residents is at wheretospendbitcoins.co.uk.
There are also lots of charities which accept bitcoin donations.

Merchant Resources

There are several benefits to accepting bitcoin as a payment option if you are a merchant;
If you are interested in accepting bitcoin as a payment method, there are several options available;

Can I mine bitcoin?

Mining bitcoin can be a fun learning experience, but be aware that you will most likely operate at a loss. Newcomers are often advised to stay away from mining unless they are only interested in it as a hobby similar to folding at home. If you want to learn more about mining you can read more here. Still have mining questions? The crew at /BitcoinMining would be happy to help you out.
If you want to contribute to the bitcoin network by hosting the blockchain and propagating transactions you can run a full node using this setup guide. If you would prefer to keep it simple there are several good options. You can view the global node distribution here.

Earning bitcoin

Just like any other form of money, you can also earn bitcoin by being paid to do a job.
Site Description
WorkingForBitcoins, Bitwage, Cryptogrind, Coinality, Bitgigs, /Jobs4Bitcoins, BitforTip, Rein Project Freelancing
Lolli Earn bitcoin when you shop online!
OpenBazaar, Purse.io, Bitify, /Bitmarket, 21 Market Marketplaces
/GirlsGoneBitcoin NSFW Adult services
A-ads, Coinzilla.io Advertising
You can also earn bitcoin by participating as a market maker on JoinMarket by allowing users to perform CoinJoin transactions with your bitcoin for a small fee (requires you to already have some bitcoin).

Bitcoin-Related Projects

The following is a short list of ongoing projects that might be worth taking a look at if you are interested in current development in the bitcoin space.
Project Description
Lightning Network Second layer scaling
Liquid, Rootstock and Drivechain Sidechains
Hivemind Prediction markets
Tierion and Factom Records & Titles on the blockchain
BitMarkets, DropZone, Beaver and Open Bazaar Decentralized markets
JoinMarket and Wasabi Wallet CoinJoin implementation
Coinffeine and Bisq Decentralized bitcoin exchanges
Keybase Identity & Reputation management
Abra Global P2P money transmitter network
Bitcore Open source Bitcoin javascript library

Bitcoin Units

One Bitcoin is quite large (hundreds of £/$/€) so people often deal in smaller units. The most common subunits are listed below:
Unit Symbol Value Info
bitcoin BTC 1 bitcoin one bitcoin is equal to 100 million satoshis
millibitcoin mBTC 1,000 per bitcoin used as default unit in recent Electrum wallet releases
bit bit 1,000,000 per bitcoin colloquial "slang" term for microbitcoin (μBTC)
satoshi sat 100,000,000 per bitcoin smallest unit in bitcoin, named after the inventor
For example, assuming an arbitrary exchange rate of $10000 for one Bitcoin, a $10 meal would equal:
For more information check out the Bitcoin units wiki.
Still have questions? Feel free to ask in the comments below or stick around for our weekly Mentor Monday thread. If you decide to post a question in /Bitcoin, please use the search bar to see if it has been answered before, and remember to follow the community rules outlined on the sidebar to receive a better response. The mods are busy helping manage our community so please do not message them unless you notice problems with the functionality of the subreddit.
Note: This is a community created FAQ. If you notice anything missing from the FAQ or that requires clarification you can edit it here and it will be included in the next revision pending approval.
Welcome to the Bitcoin community and the new decentralized economy!
submitted by BitcoinFan7 to Bitcoin [link] [comments]

Happy Halloween - Updated Audit Status of Canadian Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Masks meant something different one year ago when I posted the highly popular “Happy Halloween - Audit Status of Canadian Cryptocurrency Exchanges”. Since then,
  1. We’ve had 20 more cryptocurrency exchange incidents globally.
  2. Canadian exchanges have seen massive progress - in at least a couple of exchanges.
  3. We’ve seen the collapse of Einstein which took millions of dollars more from Canadians. And we saw the OSC crackdown on the inflated trading volume on CoinSquare.
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Blockchain provides the full ability for exchanges to prove asset backing, yet we continue to have to guess which platforms are backed. In an effort to help Canadians find the exchanges which are most transparent, we divide platforms into 5 categories:
If Proof of Reserve or another form of verification was standard on all exchanges, people like Gerald Cotten and Dave Smilie wouldn’t have been able to pull off massive fraud, and cases such as Einstein would have been known long before it resulted in insolvency. Supporting exchanges that don’t provide public validation or transparency is supporting fraud. Even if the platform is 100% honest, they are setting a dangerous standard that enables other fraudsters to hide in plain sight.
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Dead Platforms/Incidents

FlexCoin - As “the world's first bitcoin bank” that’s “not a true bank”, FlexCoin provides “a central location for all of your bitcoins”. “Bitcoins deposited with flexcoin will be stored on [thei]r secure servers” so you can “send bitcoins to non-technical individual[s] via e-mail”. Unlike blockchain, “flexcoin to flexcoin transfers are free”.
MapleChange - “[S]wift, reliable and to-the-point!” “One of [their] primary concerns is security for [their] customers'' which is why “keys are cryptographically encrypted”. More Canadian than anyone! Excuse me while we hold the door open to our crypto! "[W]ithdraws(sic) are next to instantaneous", "rel[ying] solely on the aspect of swiftness"!
Canadian Bitcoins - Funds stored for convenience in a professional Rogers data center, which has the highest level of courtesy and customer service - always going above and beyond to provide expedient service whenever a request comes in!
CoinTradeNewNote - A “meticulously engineered Bitcoin Exchange” “focused on security and tak[ing] these risks seriously”. “[Y]ou don’t have to worry”, they have “90+% cold storage” and their “cold storage is fully insured by Xapo”. Plus, as “a registered Canadian corporation” they “leverage the good guys to fight the bad guys”.
Einstein - You can get “your money deposited and withdrawn faster than any other exchange”. As one customer said "With so many hacks and exit scams, it gives me confidence knowing Einstein is backed by hard-working people just like me." Just check the user experience on their subreddit from their "220,000+ satisfied customers".
EZ-BTC - As the world’s “most user-friendly and bespoke crypto currency management platform”, they have “strong security”. “All your coins are kept in cold storage. They’re safe.”. The presence of physical ATMs was one of the strategies to build customer confidence for their promised 9% annual return on stored funds.
QuadrigaCX - Operating since 2013, with “vast cryptocurrency reserves” right up to the end. "Bitcoins that are funded in QuadrigaCX are stored in cold storage, using some of the most secure cryptographic procedures possible." Even today some of the funds remain 100% secure in their cold storage!
If there are any others I missed, let me know!
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No Verification Found

BitVo - Whether “Canada's premier cryptocurrency exchange” or merely “on a mission to become Canada’s premier cryptocurrency exchange”, we have to praise BitVo’s security for including “multiple signatures of a select group of trusted individuals” which are “not connected to the exchange platform or a network”. It is unfortunate that such common sense concepts are “proprietary” instead of the standard on all Canadian platforms. While assuring that they operate “on a full-reserve basis” and talking about “transparency”, the proof is lacking and nothing indicates it to have been verified externally or even internally. The withdrawal-based fee structure incentivizes users to keep funds “safe and secure” on the platform - which is “owned and operated by banking and security experts”. The “banking” side shows for sure in these hidden fine-print fees, which go well with transparency.
CoinField - Apparently no longer the "most secure trading platform in Canada" but now instead the “Best Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Exchange In Canada” - based in Estonia and no longer having a Canadian office. They’re “fully regulated” in 193+ countries, except for the period between October 2019 and June 2020, when they weren’t even registered as an MSB. They offer a huge range of trading pairs except for the ones you need, with high liquidity except for the pairs that don’t have any, and you can withdraw and trade all of your funds as long as you leave a small amount behind at every stage.
CoinSmart - Not sure what "[i]ndustry leading cold storage" is, but luckily it’s “bank level”. No mention of multi-sig. They’re so "accountable to [their] clients, community and to each other" and "committed to being open and honest" that they don’t include any audit. Deposits are easy and withdrawals are fun - like a video game. Advance through each stage to prove your willpower, complete with warnings, SMS verification that doesn’t display errors (but luckily you can change the number to anything at all without further verification), and even an elaborate high-resolution selfie requirement you have to email in. If you can’t complete or don’t feel comfortable sending info via email, your money is held hostage - no big deal at all really.
Coinut - As "the most secure cryptocurrency exchange", they provide “a comprehensive cryptocurrency exchange platform for trading cryptocurrencies”. (Not to be confused with a cryptocurrency exchange platform for trading coconuts.) They’ve been “running securely for about three years” “by storing cryptocurrencies offline” in a single “offline computer”. In addition to not using multi-sig and "not us[ing] USB drives, as the online computer may be infected with virus", they also don’t appear to use audits or any form of public verification.
NDAX - “Canada’s most secure trading platform” to "set the standard for the Canadian cryptocurrency industry". While NDax promotes “segregated accounts” and “95-98% of user funds in an offline, multi-signature wallet”, there’s nothing to indicate backing of assets on the platform. While apparently partnered with a Canadian bank, the bank is not revealed. No audit found but at least there’s a full-page risk disclosure and disclaimer. You can sleep peacefully knowing that they’re legally protected, even “for losses suffer(sic) to you as a result of any defaults of by(sic) insolvency of other Users.” What does that even mean? Apparently, even with their industry-record withdrawal fees, they couldn’t afford a legal team with proper grammar.
Newton - Newton was one of the first to announce third party custody. You should give your funds to Newton, because they’ll give them to Balance, and they’ll do this for free! And “[m]ultinational companies trust” Balance. According to the Balance terms, “the digital assets you purchase via the Platform are not protected by any government or other insurance”. "Prospective clients...will hold the entire liability associated with purchasing a Digital Asset Cache™️ and using [Balance] services, potentially including partial or total loss of capital." "Balance does not represent or guarantee that the Balance Platform will be free from loss, corruption, attack, viruses, interference, hacking, or other security intrusion, and Balance disclaims any liability relating thereto." "No data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, and as a result [they] cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to [them]." "You are solely responsible for maintaining the confidentiality and security of your Account." If someone else should “[w]ithdraw the digital assets in your DAC to [thei]r external digital wallets as soon as within the same business day.” "Balance shall not be responsible for any losses arising out of the unauthorized or other improper use of your Account." The security of Balance custodianship comes down to (a) proprietary “HSMs” tested by their team of experts are more secure than hardware wallets tested by thousands of teams of experts around the globe, (b) a standardized and documented system of physical security in facilities accessible to a select number of people is superior to a combination of unique physical security, exclusive signing procedure, and complete locational secrecy that could be employed separately by multiple reasonably competent individuals, and (c) placing your trust in the team of Newton, the team of Balance, and the security of a website is more secure than simply trusting a single team to manage the private keys in an offline multi-sig fashion.
While Balance has an extensive page on security and internal controls, I was unable to locate any audit nor verification that the assets on Newton or custodian Balance are actually fully backed against deposits. From the demo page, we can see that Newton has visibility to see their balances on Balance, so at least Dustin and the team can check diligently and make sure they aren’t taken. Why not give some of that visibility to your customers? Why has Newton, which has been a leader in so many other areas (“commission-free”, working to get the best rates, etc…) not been a leader in putting together any level of public visibility to the backing of customer funds on their platform?
​

Apparent Verification

CoinBerry - CoinBerry uses the best practice of offline multi-sig for the storage of all customer funds, a set-up that, to date, has a breach-less record historically. Assuming the private keys are properly managed by separate trained people, CoinBerry client funds are thus stored in what’s essentially a giant cold storage wallet, with all withdrawals handled and verified by multiple people before being approved. However, this model is still subject to the platform being tricked into releasing funds as may have happened in August 2020. What they haven't done is transparently admitted and explained how the breach occurred, which can be an opportunity to highlight security improvements and help other platforms avoid similar issues. Instead, they've recently purchased insurance to cover future incidents. It's hard to judge from a few excerpts of what’s likely a multi-page (or even a multi-chapter) policy, but it would be the first time that insurance has ever paid out in the history of cryptocurrency. A multi-platform insurance strategy could be cheaper, more comprehensive, and more likely to pay out than third party insurance.
CoinBerry is “trusted by Canadian Municipalities”, a deal that enabled “the first payment of property taxes with Bitcoin in Canadian History”. They reportedly also “undergo annual 3rd party financial statement audits”. From records, these appear to be conducted by the firm MNP which is an accounting firm. CoinBerry has not, however, publicly declared themselves to be “fully-backed”, nor have they published any verification on the backing level of funds on the platform. Rather the audits are “secret”. This is concerning given the large referral bonuses paid out by the platform to new customers (including a popular $25 referral bonus for purchasing $50 of bitcoin), multiple issues with withdrawal delays, including one affecting hundreds of customers earlier this year, and the slow increase to their “fair pricing and industry-leading low fees.” Fees have gone from 0.5% to 1%, to a tiny sentence about “adding a margin, or spread, of between 0% and 2% to the rate offered by [thei]r liquidity sources”. Luckily, they “don’t hide fees across your trading experience.” In case you should sign up and find that (up to 2%) rate to be too high, “[a]ccounts requesting a withdrawal of Fiat or Crypto currency in original form, without conducting a trade will be...charged an account maintenance fee calculated as the larger of $25 or 5% of the total amount requested.” You will also need to pay additional “mining fees for crypto withdrawals”, which significantly exceed typical transaction costs and are only mentioned in the fine print of their fees page. CoinBerry has publicly expressed agreement that you should not store funds on cryptocurrency exchanges including their own. Neither their insurance nor world-class security will do anything whatsoever if their platform goes insolvent.
CoinSquare - CoinSquare has had a rough year, most notably with being publicly declared as having inflated trading volume and having to pay multi-million dollar fines. As usual, the Reddit community was already on top of this and apparently, some staff at the company were even open about it. Ironically, one could argue that their dishonest practice did more to stand up to Quadriga than regulators ever did, may have saved thousands of Canadians from losing their funds, and may even have been a key factor in bringing Quadriga down. It remains to be seen what will become of the shell of one of Canada's oldest exchanges. It would be the ultimate in poetic irony if the actions of the OSC to protect CoinSquare investors ultimately destroyed the full value of their investment. If that plays out, I'm sure they will heap praise on the OSC for so publicly and fragrantly shaming CoinSquare for a practice which was similarly employed on other exchanges globally and which they'd already voluntarily ceased months prior to the conclusion of the 6-figure investigation and 7-figure fines.
That said, CoinSquare already had a lack of visibility into their security practices, which they describe as “100% proprietary”. This would imply the team at CoinSquare is smarter than established security standards by experts all around the world at protecting your funds, contradicting previously reported incidents. They describe “SSL and 2FA”, which are more or less standard features of all exchanges. A “95% cold storage” policy is low compared to many other platforms, and it doesn’t appear to be mentioned whether multi-sig is being employed or not. And of course, their apparent regular audits are not public (allegedly by “a national accounting firm whose identity is protected under an NDA"). They’ve routinely described themselves as solvent rather than fully backed.
Kraken - A kraken is “an enormous mythical sea monster”, and likewise Kraken, the exchange, is enormous, the largest and oldest exchange platform in North America. Kraken recently achieved the momentous accomplishment of becoming the first cryptocurrency exchange to be a regulated bank by completing a charter in the state of Wyoming. Kraken calls itself the “most trusted cryptocurrency exchange” and apparently “provides world class financial stability by maintaining full reserves, healthy banking relationships and the highest standards of legal compliance”. While many individual Kraken customers have been hacked, the platform overall never has, which is an impressive record.
Similarities abound further. According to legend, kraken exist off the coast of Norway. According to alleged court papers, Kraken operated illegally in the state of New York. Should you encounter a kraken, you may be best to leave silently. If you should work at the counter for Kraken, you may be legally silenced. One of the former employees for Kraken alleges wrongful dismissal and that the bank accounts of Kraken are actually running millions of dollars short of where they should have been. But don't worry - Kraken’s website features a Proof of Reserve page, stating that “[o]ver the past several weeks, Kraken has successfully developed and completed an industry-leading, independent, cryptographically-verified audit.” But the page was written in 2014 and among the long list of limitations, the process does not enable any validation on the blockchain. Kraken hasn't done any validation or publishing of reserves in 6 years and counting.
NetCoins - Once upon a time, the cofounder of CoinTrader (sound familiar?) decided to found a new exchange - “Canada’s easiest, most trusted way to buy and sell crypto”. As they say on the FAQ, “[t]rading cryptocurrency is completely safe”. Having your own wallet is “entirely up to you! You can certainly keep cryptocurrency, or fiat, or both, on the app.” “Get verified in minutes!” While comforting to know that parent corporation BIGG Digital Assets is audited by Manning Elliott LLP and they have “[r]eal human beings you can get in touch with easily”, this doesn't make up for no visibility whatsoever into how funds are stored or what portions are backed.
​

Full Backing Report

There are only two exchanges in Canada meeting these criteria.
BitBuy - BitBuy has operated since 2016, and was the very first to get a “Proof of Reserve and Security Audit Report” from third party CipherBlade. Since that time, they’ve also established themselves as the first company to get two separate third party validations, with the second one from Blockchain Intelligence Group. The platform’s initial operation as a non-custodial “Express Trade” model lends additional credibility. Therefore, with now two independent third party reports, BitBuy maintains the title as the most transparent exchange in Canada.
However, “Bitbuy has moved its existing bitcoin holdings over to Knox”. You now have to trust both teams and platforms for the security of your funds. This is described by them as an “industry leading push for best practices”. Insurance is of course “subject to the full policy terms, conditions and exclusions”. And “Bitbuy will be Knox’s first platform partner”. Knox has never done this before for any other platform. Their security model is “a mouthful for most”, but let’s break down their pitch. They have “air-gapped specialized hardware”. So is a standard typical hardware wallet. It’s running “custom policy logic”, which could be a good or a bad thing depending on the logic. Their logic has probably been vetted by a single team of experts, which is a standard shy of most hardware wallet protocols vetted by thousands of experts globally. They use a “dual-control operational model”, which if you look up dual-control, it actually refers to the fact that the functionality of the module is simultaneously performing actions and being monitored”. It allows one to “experiment with the system so as to learn about its behavior and control it better in the future” which you can decide for yourself if that’s a good thing to have or not in the hardware that controls withdrawals of an active exchange platform. There is “offline transaction processing”, which again is a standard feature of a hardware wallet. “Geographically distinct facilities” is a good idea, though easily achieved by not storing all the private keys in the same place. Saying that the facilities “communicate in a closed network” is an interesting concept. How can you know that a network is closed? If the facilities are close together, they can be breached together. If far apart, someone can get in the middle. The network is no longer closed the moment any part of it is breached. I can go on and on and break down every one of their systems if I have to, but instead, I’ll quote their own security advice about “minimizing the attack surface of the entire key lifecycle”. The minimum attack surface for a private key is having an individual generate it secretly and securely using a process which is vetted by hundreds of security experts around the world, and not relying on a third party to have to control anything to do with that key. This is already available from most standard hardware wallets, with experts debating whether other advanced experts can find a way to extract the key with access to extremely sophisticated equipment and physical access to the hardware. The best and most efficient way to mitigate a weak or corruptible party is through multi-sig where all parties have to sign the transaction. Adding intermediary custodians instead means funds are lost when any one of them is breached, and when using the same in-house hardware as Knox does, any vulnerability on that hardware or supply chain can compromise multiple wallets at once.
Now, insurance. The policy isn’t public on its website. It gives high-level features only. What’s astounding is that “collusion” is considered a break-through, which says a lot about the state of third party insurance in the space. I requested an example policy from their team. Their response was that it was “proprietary” and that they only “go over it with serious buyers”. In other words, no one has visibility to the actual policy details of what’s really covered outside of BitBuy or Knox, and neither party has any incentive to present that information objectively. For now, until someone cares to prove me wrong, I’ll quote their own website, “[m]ost policies covering Bitcoin theft and loss fall short and provide a false sense of security”.
One of the issues with the BitBuy validation is that it offers no visibility whatsoever for customers to know if their balances were included in any of their third-party validations. As such, BitBuy could have excluded any number of customers and passed both verifications with flying colours. That's why it isn’t a full Proof of Reserve. Also, they stopped talking to me again. But I still believe that BitBuy is one of the least worst platforms, now with reserves verified by two separate third parties.
ShakePay - Firstly, congratulations. The formerly trustless raccoon has now got a third party validation - a key step forward. The ShakePay platform is incredibly good at marketing, with the most powerful “Shaking Sats” program to literally get thousands of Canadians to think about buying more cryptocurrency every single day, or at least to pay homage to their great raccoon mascot. More recently, ShakePay completed a security assessment provided by CipherTrace, and added further insurance. CipherTrace found that reserves appeared to be fully backed including extensive analysis of the transactions and provided data.
ShakePay could be upfront that they charge a market spread or list the buy and sell prices. Instead, they promote the service as “no fees” and list only one price for bitcoin or ethereum, the only coins they sell. To find the model you have to click through to a separate page. The spread and pricing information is only ever available from within a registered account. ShakePay does not offer any additional trading functionality or coins.
ShakePay states that the “majority of all digital currencies are stored securely offline”. The CipherBlade report found this ratio was at “93% of Bitcoin and 91% of Ethereum” in cold storage at the time of the report, though it “var[ies] periodically to some degree throughout the day”. The report refers to a “multi-signature wallet interface”, which they later call a “service to access its sending and receiving multi-signature wallets”, which apparently also “does not have control over cryptocurrency in the hot wallets”. This part doesn’t exactly make sense, as one would most likely consider “access” to a “sending” function as “control”. Apparently, this “not mentioned” service is “without any known security risks” and there are also “redundancy measures” in place as well. Whatever that means in the context of irreversible transactions is a mystery.
However, the majority of funds are no longer stored with ShakePay but have now been given to an undisclosed “trust company registered under the NYDFS”. The “variety of security protocols” in place here include “address whitelisting”, the only policy they are willing to disclose publicly “for security reasons”. While ShakePay won’t identify the third party, “CipherBlade can confidently conclude that Shakepay controls these cold wallets” even though “they are controlled by [the] cold storage provider” and “the cold storage provider ultimately holds the private keys”. ShakePay does receive “an account statement” “which includes applicable wallet addresses and balances held” and “[d]ata found on the blockchain was also in line with information found on these statements.” It will be interesting to see in one of many “quite unlikely” events what “the cold storage provider’s policy and Shakepay’s own policy” would cover, given that the details of both policies are completely secret. Luckily, “[t]he vast majority of Shakepay customers who purchase cryptocurrency on the Shakepay platform withdraw it promptly thereafter.”
It’s important to note that this report is not a Proof nor an Audit (as originally named). “The reviewer is not a professional accountant, and CipherBlade has not performed a professional financial audit or an audit of internal controls and expresses no assurance on the accounting records of Shakepay.” ShakePay was happy to remove “audit” but they still continue to insist on calling this a “proof”, when it’s not. They claim “Proof of Reserves can have a variety of setups” and they cited Nic Carter’s blog post, which also listed all the criteria for the proof, which they did not meet. In discussion with Nic (who is amazingly open to chat), he’s agreed “what they are doing is not a full PoR” and he “didn’t believe it would be a widely consulted thing - [he] was mostly doing it to encourage custodians to take PoR seriously”. The point of a “proof” and why it’s called a “proof” is because it leaves no doubt. A Proof of Reserve needs to prove the reserves - that funds exist on the blockchain, are spendable by the platform, and fully back the assets of any customer who bothers to check. ShakePay’s does not.
​

Proof of Reserves

Presently all platforms in Canada have refused to provide visibility to the public blockchain entries backing funds on their platform. They have refused to sign a proof of spendability for any funds they control. All claims and verifications have been against customer lists provided by the platform with no ability for any customers to validate they were included. This is a recipe for more Gerald Cottens and Dave Smillies.
I understand Proof of Reserve is not practical for all platforms. I was able to come up with an alternative that doesn’t require public blockchain visibility, could be implemented today using reputable third parties, and effectively validates all customers are included.
​

How We Could Have Safe Exchange Platforms In Canada

The first and largest issue has always been a lack of transparency. Far more funds have been lost to fraudulent platforms and wallet services than hacks. Honest platforms need to be giving greater visibility and certainty to their customers to make fraud obvious.
Secondly, no platform employing offline storage and multi-sig has ever been breached. We need to agree on the basic standards of what it takes to keep assets secure and create an environment where best practices are shared instead of hidden between platforms.
And thirdly, third party insurance incentivizes high fees, it limits coverage, and it does everything possible to avoid a payout. We need an organized insurance strategy that is run by platform operators and overseen with the full protection of Canadians in mind.
​
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What’s possible is exciting, but not guaranteed. There are a lot of irreversibly horrible futures which are even more likely if we merely sit back and watch.
submitted by azoundria2 to QuadrigaInitiative [link] [comments]

A Detailed Summary of Every Single Reason Why I am Bullish on ETH.

The following will be a list of the many reasons why I hold and am extremely bullish on ETH.

This is an extremely long post. If you just want the hopium without the detail, read the TL;DR at the bottom.

ETH 2.0

As we all know, ETH 2.0 phase 0 is right around the corner. This will lock up ETH and stakers will earn interest on their ETH in return for securing the network. Next comes phase 1 where the ETH 2 shards are introduced, shards are essentially parallel blockchains which are each responsible for a different part of Ethereum’s workload, think of it like a multi-core processor vs a single core processor. During phase 1, these shards will only act as data availability layers and won’t actually process transactions yet. However, their data can be utilised by the L2 scaling solution, rollups, increasing Ethereum’s throughput in transactions per second up to 100,000 TPS.
After phase 1 comes phase 1.5 which will move the ETH 1.0 chain into an ETH 2 shard and Ethereum will be fully secured by proof of stake. This means that ETH issuance will drop from around 5% per year to less than 1% and with EIP-1559, ETH might become a deflationary asset, but more on that later.
Finally, with ETH 2.0 phase two, each shard will be fully functional chains. With 64 of them, we can expect the base layer of Ethereum to scale around 64x, not including the massive scaling which comes from layer 2 scaling solutions like rollups as previously mentioned.
While the scaling benefits and ETH issuance reduction which comes with ETH 2.0 will be massive, they aren’t the only benefits. We also get benefits such as increased security from PoS compared to PoW, a huge energy efficiency improvement due to the removal of PoW and also the addition of eWASM which will allow contracts to be programmed in a wide range of programming languages, opening the floodgates for millions of web devs who want to be involved in Ethereum but don’t know Ethereum’s programming language, Solidity.

EIP-1559 and ETH scarcity

As I covered in a previous post of mine, ETH doesn’t have a supply cap like Bitcoin. Instead, it has a monetary policy of “minimum viable issuance”, not only is this is a good thing for network security, but with the addition of EIP-1559, it leaves the door open to the possibility of ETH issuance going negative. In short, EIP-1559 changes the fee market to make transaction prices more efficient (helping to alleviate high gas fees!) by burning a variable base fee which changes based on network usage demand rather than using a highest bidder market where miners simply include who pays them the most. This will result in most of the ETH being paid in transaction fees being burned. As of late, the amount which would be burned if EIP-1559 was in Ethereum right now would make ETH a deflationary asset!

Layer 2 Scaling

In the mean time while we are waiting for ETH 2.0, layer 2 scaling is here. Right now, projects such as Deversifi or Loopring utilise rollups to scale to thousands of tx/s on their decentralised exchange platforms or HoneySwap which uses xDai to offer a more scalable alternative to UniSwap. Speaking of which, big DeFi players like UniSwap and Synthetix are actively looking into using optimistic rollups to scale while maintaining composability between DeFi platforms. The most bullish thing about L2 scaling is all of the variety of options. Here’s a non exhaustive list of Ethereum L2 scaling solutions: - Aztec protocol (L2 scaling + privacy!) - ZKSync - Loopring - Raiden - Arbitrum Rollups - xDai - OMGNetwork - Matic - FuelLabs - Starkware - Optimism - Celer Network - + Many more

DeFi and Composability

If you’re reading this, I am sure you are aware of the phenomena which is Decentralised Finance (DeFi or more accurately, open finance). Ethereum is the first platform to offer permissionless and immutable financial services which when interacting with each other, lead to unprecedented composability and innovation in financial applications. A whole new world of possibilities are opening up thanks to this composability as it allows anyone to take existing pieces of open source code from other DeFi projects, put them together like lego pieces (hence the term money legos) and create something the world has never seen before. None of this was possible before Ethereum because typically financial services are heavily regulated and FinTech is usually proprietary software, so you don’t have any open source lego bricks to build off and you have to build everything you need from scratch. That is if what you want to do is even legal for a centralised institution!
Oh, and if you think that DeFi was just a fad and the bubble has popped, guess again! Total value locked in DeFi is currently at an all time high. Don’t believe me? Find out for yourself at: https://defipulse.com

NFTs and tokeniation

NFTs or “Non-Fungible Tokens” - despite the name which may confuse a layman - are a basic concept. They are unique tokens with their own unique attributes. This allows you to create digital art, human readable names for your ETH address (see ENS names and unstoppable domains), breedable virtual collectible creatures like crypto kitties, ownable in game assets like Gods Unchained cards or best of all in my opinion, tokenised ownership of real world assets which can even be split into pieces (this doesn’t necessarily require an NFT. Fungible tokens can be/are used for some of the following use cases). This could be tokenised ownership of real estate (see RealT), tokenised ownership of stocks, bonds and other financial assets (which by the way makes them tradable 24/7 and divisible unlike through the traditional system) or even tokenised ownership of the future income of a celebrity or athlete (see when NBA Star Spencer Dinwiddie Tokenized His Own NBA Contract.

Institutional Adoption

Ethereum is by far the most widely adopted blockchain by enterprises. Ethereum’s Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is the largest blockchain-enterprise partnership program and Ethereum is by far the most frequently leveraged blockchain for proof of concepts and innovation in the blockchain space by enterprises. Meanwhile, there are protocols like the Baseline protocol which is a shared framework which allows enterprises to use Ethereum as a common frame of reference and a base settlement layer without having to give up privacy when settling on the public Ethereum mainnet. This framework makes adopting Ethereum much easier for other enterprises.

Institutional Investment

One of Bitcoin’s biggest things it has going for it right now is the growing institutional investment. In case you were wondering, Ethereum has this too! Grayscale offers investment in the cryptocurrency space for financial institutions and their Ethereum fund has already locked up more than 2% of the total supply of ETH. Not only this, but as businesses transact on Ethereum and better understand it, not only will they buy up ETH to pay for their transactions, but they will also realise that much like Bitcoin, Ethereum is a scarce asset. Better yet, a scarce asset which offers yield. As a result, I expect to see companies having ETH holdings become the norm just like how Bitcoin is becoming more widespread on companies’ balance sheets.

The state of global markets

With asset prices in almost every asset class at or near all-time highs and interest rates lower than ever and even negative in some cases, there really aren’t many good opportunities in the traditional financial system right now. Enter crypto - clearly the next evolution of financial services (as I explained in the section on DeFi earlier in this post), with scarce assets built in at the protocol layer, buying BTC or ETH is a lot like buying shares in TCP/IP in 1990 (that is if the underlying protocols of the internet could be invested in which they couldn’t). Best of all, major cryptos are down from their all-time highs anywhere between 35% for BTC or 70% for ETH and much more for many altcoins. This means that they can significantly appreciate in value before entering uncharted, speculative bubble territory.
While of course we could fall dramatically at any moment in the current macro financial conditions, as a longer term play, crypto is very alluring. The existing financial system has shown that it is in dire need of replacing and the potential replacement has started rearing its head in the form of crypto and DeFi.

Improvements in user onboarding and abstracting away complexity

Ethereum has started making huge leaps forward in terms of usability for the end user. We now have ENS names and unstoppable domains which allow you to send ETH to yournamehere.ETH or TrickyTroll.crypto (I don’t actually have that domain, that’s just an example). No longer do you have to check every character of your ugly hexadecimal 0x43AB96D… ETH address to ensure you’re sending your ETH to the right person. We also have smart contract wallets like Argent wallet or the Gnosis safe. These allow for users to access their wallets and interact with DeFi self-custodially from an app on their phone without having to record a private key or recovery phrase. Instead, they offer social recovery and their UI is straight forward enough for anyone who uses a smart phone to understand. Finally, for the more experienced users, DApps like Uniswap have pretty, super easy to use graphical user interfaces and can be used by anyone who knows how to run and use a browser extension like Metamask.

The lack of an obvious #1 ETH killer

One of Ethereum’s biggest threats is for it to be overthrown by a so-called “Ethereum killer” blockchain which claims to do everything Ethereum can do and sometimes more. While there are competitors which are each formidable to a certain extent such as Polkadot, Cardano and EOS, each have their own weaknesses. For example, Polkadot and Cardano are not fully operational yet and EOS is much more centralised than Ethereum. As a result, none of these competitors have any significant network effects just yet relative to the behemoth which is Ethereum. This doesn’t mean that these projects aren’t a threat. In fact, I am sure that projects like Polkadot (which is more focused on complimenting Ethereum than killing it) will take a slice out of Ethereum’s pie. However, I am still very confident that Ethereum will remain on top due to the lack of a clear number 2 smart contract platform. Since none of these ETH killers stands out as the second place smart contract platform, it makes it much harder for one project to create a network effect which even begins to threaten Ethereum’s dominance. This leads me onto my next reason - network effects.

Network effects

This is another topic which I made a previous post on. The network effect is why Bitcoin is still the number one cryptocurrency and by such a long way. Bitcoin is not the most technologically advanced cryptocurrency. However, it has the most widespread name recognition and the most adoption in most metrics (ETH beats in in some metrics these days). The network effect is also why most people use Zoom and Facebook messengeWhatsApp despite the existence of free, private, end to end encrypted alternatives which have all the same features (https://meet.jit.si/ for zoom alternative and Signal for the private messenger app. I highly recommend both. Let’s get their network effects going!). It is the same for Bitcoin. People don’t want to have to learn about or set up a wallet for alternative options. People like what is familiar and what other people use. Nobody wants to be “that guy” who makes you download yet another app and account you have to remember the password/private key for. In the same way, Enterprises don’t want to have to create a bridge between their existing systems and a dozen different blockchains. Developers don’t want to have to create DeFi money legos from scratch on a new chain if they can just plug in to existing services like Uniswap. Likewise, users don’t want to have to download another browser extension to use DApps on another chain if they already use Ethereum. I know personally I have refrained from investing in altcoins because I would have to install another app on my hardware wallet or remember another recovery phrase.
Overthrowing Ethereum’s network effect is one hell of a big task these days. Time is running out for the ETH killers.

Ethereum is the most decentralised and provably neutral smart contract platform

Ethereum is also arguably the most decentralised and provably neutral smart contract platform (except for maybe Ethereum Classic on the neutrality part). Unlike some smart contract platforms, you can’t round up everyone at the Ethereum Foundation or any select group of people and expect to be able to stop the network. Not only this, but the Ethereum foundation doesn’t have the ability to print more ETH or push through changes as they wish like some people would lead you on to believe. The community would reject detrimental EIPs and hard fork. Ever since the DAO hack, the Ethereum community has made it clear that it will not accept EIPs which attempt to roll back the chain even to recover hacked funds (see EIP-999).
Even if governments around the world wanted to censor the Ethereum blockchain, under ETH 2.0’s proof of stake, it would be incredibly costly and would require a double digit percentage of the total ETH supply, much of which would be slashed (meaning they would lose it) as punishment for running dishonest validator nodes. This means that unlike with proof of work where a 51% attacker can keep attacking the network, under proof of stake, an attacker can only perform the attack a couple of times before they lose all of their ETH. This makes attacks much less financially viable than it is on proof of work chains. Network security is much more than what I laid out above and I am far from an expert but the improved resistance to 51% attacks which PoS provides is significant.
Finally, with the US dollar looking like it will lose its reserve currency status and the existing wire transfer system being outdated, superpowers like China won’t want to use US systems and the US won’t want to use a Chinese system. Enter Ethereum, the provably neutral settlement layer where the USA and China don’t have to trust each other or each other’s banks because they can trust Ethereum. While it may sound like a long shot, it does make sense if Ethereum hits a multi-trillion dollar market cap that it is the most secure and neutral way to transfer value between these adversaries. Not to mention if much of the world’s commerce were to be settled in the same place - on Ethereum - then it would make sense for governments to settle on the same platform.

ETH distribution is decentralised

Thanks to over 5 years of proof of work - a system where miners have to sell newly minted ETH to pay for electricity costs - newly mined ETH has found its way into the hands of everyday people who buy ETH off miners selling on exchnages. As pointed out by u/AdamSC1 in his analysis of the top 10K ETH addresses (I highly recommend reading this if you haven’t already), the distribution of ETH is actually slightly more decentralised than Bitcoin with the top 10,000 ETH wallets holding 56.70% of ETH supply compared to the top 10,000 Bitcoin wallets which hold 57.44% of the Bitcoin supply. This decentralised distribution means that the introduction of staking won’t centralise ETH in the hands of a few wallets who could then control the network. This is an advantage for ETH which many proof of stake ETH killers will never have as they never used PoW to distribute funds widely throughout the community and these ETH killers often did funding rounds giving large numbers of tokens to VC investors.

The community

Finally, while I may be biased, I think that Ethereum has the friendliest community. Anecdotally, I find that the Ethereum developer community is full of forward thinking people who want to make the world a better place and build a better future, many of whom are altruistic and don’t always act in their best interests. Compare this to the much more conservative, “at least we’re safe while the world burns” attitude which many Bitcoiners have. I don’t want to generalise too much here as the Bitcoin community is great too and there are some wonderful people there. But the difference is clear if you compare the daily discussion of Bitcoin to the incredibly helpful and welcoming daily discussion of EthFinance who will happily answer your noob questions without calling you an idiot and telling you to do you own research (there are plenty more examples in any of the daily threads). Or the very helpful folks over at EthStaker who will go out of their way to help you set up an ETH 2.0 staking node on the testnets (Shoutout to u/superphiz who does a lot of work over in that sub!). Don’t believe me? Head over to those subs and see for yourself.
Please don’t hate on me if you disagree about which project has the best community, it is just my very biased personal opinion and I respect your opinion if you disagree! :)

TL;DR:

submitted by Tricky_Troll to ethtrader [link] [comments]

A detailed summary of every reason why I am bullish on ETH.

The following will be a list of the many reasons why I hold and am extremely bullish on ETH.

This is an extremely long post. If you just want the hopium without the detail, read the TL;DR at the bottom.

ETH 2.0

As we all know, ETH 2.0 phase 0 is right around the corner. This will lock up ETH and stakers will earn interest on their ETH in return for securing the network. Next comes phase 1 where the ETH 2 shards are introduced, shards are essentially parallel blockchains which are each responsible for a different part of Ethereum’s workload, think of it like a multi-core processor vs a single core processor. During phase 1, these shards will only act as data availability layers and won’t actually process transactions yet. However, their data can be utilised by the L2 scaling solution, rollups, increasing Ethereum’s throughput in transactions per second up to 100,000 TPS.
After phase 1 comes phase 1.5 which will move the ETH 1.0 chain into an ETH 2 shard and Ethereum will be fully secured by proof of stake. This means that ETH issuance will drop from around 5% per year to less than 1% and with EIP-1559, ETH might become a deflationary asset, but more on that later.
Finally, with ETH 2.0 phase two, each shard will be fully functional chains. With 64 of them, we can expect the base layer of Ethereum to scale around 64x, not including the massive scaling which comes from layer 2 scaling solutions like rollups as previously mentioned.
While the scaling benefits and ETH issuance reduction which comes with ETH 2.0 will be massive, they aren’t the only benefits. We also get benefits such as increased security from PoS compared to PoW, a huge energy efficiency improvement due to the removal of PoW and also the addition of eWASM which will allow contracts to be programmed in a wide range of programming languages, opening the floodgates for millions of web devs who want to be involved in Ethereum but don’t know Ethereum’s programming language, Solidity.

EIP-1559 and ETH scarcity

As I covered in a previous post of mine, ETH doesn’t have a supply cap like Bitcoin. Instead, it has a monetary policy of “minimum viable issuance”, not only is this is a good thing for network security, but with the addition of EIP-1559, it leaves the door open to the possibility of ETH issuance going negative. In short, EIP-1559 changes the fee market to make transaction prices more efficient (helping to alleviate high gas fees!) by burning a variable base fee which changes based on network usage demand rather than using a highest bidder market where miners simply include who pays them the most. This will result in most of the ETH being paid in transaction fees being burned. As of late, the amount which would be burned if EIP-1559 was in Ethereum right now would make ETH a deflationary asset!

Layer 2 Scaling

In the mean time while we are waiting for ETH 2.0, layer 2 scaling is here. Right now, projects such as Deversifi or Loopring utilise rollups to scale to thousands of tx/s on their decentralised exchange platforms or HoneySwap which uses xDai to offer a more scalable alternative to UniSwap. Speaking of which, big DeFi players like UniSwap and Synthetix are actively looking into using optimistic rollups to scale while maintaining composability between DeFi platforms. The most bullish thing about L2 scaling is all of the variety of options. Here’s a non exhaustive list of Ethereum L2 scaling solutions: - Aztec protocol (L2 scaling + privacy!) - ZKSync - Loopring - Raiden - Arbitrum Rollups - xDai - OMGNetwork - Matic - FuelLabs - Starkware - Optimism - Celer Network - + Many more

DeFi and Composability

If you’re reading this, I am sure you are aware of the phenomena which is Decentralised Finance (DeFi or more accurately, open finance). Ethereum is the first platform to offer permissionless and immutable financial services which when interacting with each other, lead to unprecedented composability and innovation in financial applications. A whole new world of possibilities are opening up thanks to this composability as it allows anyone to take existing pieces of open source code from other DeFi projects, put them together like lego pieces (hence the term money legos) and create something the world has never seen before. None of this was possible before Ethereum because typically financial services are heavily regulated and FinTech is usually proprietary software, so you don’t have any open source lego bricks to build off and you have to build everything you need from scratch. That is if what you want to do is even legal for a centralised institution!
Oh, and if you think that DeFi was just a fad and the bubble has popped, guess again! Total value locked in DeFi is currently at an all time high. Don’t believe me? Find out for yourself at: https://defipulse.com

NFTs and tokeniation

NFTs or “Non-Fungible Tokens” - despite the name which may confuse a layman - are a basic concept. They are unique tokens with their own unique attributes. This allows you to create digital art, human readable names for your ETH address (see ENS names and unstoppable domains), breedable virtual collectible creatures like crypto kitties, ownable in game assets like Gods Unchained cards or best of all in my opinion, tokenised ownership of real world assets which can even be split into pieces (this doesn’t necessarily require an NFT. Fungible tokens can be/are used for some of the following use cases). This could be tokenised ownership of real estate (see RealT), tokenised ownership of stocks, bonds and other financial assets (which by the way makes them tradable 24/7 and divisible unlike through the traditional system) or even tokenised ownership of the future income of a celebrity or athlete (see when NBA Star Spencer Dinwiddie Tokenized His Own NBA Contract.

Institutional Adoption

Ethereum is by far the most widely adopted blockchain by enterprises. Ethereum’s Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) is the largest blockchain-enterprise partnership program and Ethereum is by far the most frequently leveraged blockchain for proof of concepts and innovation in the blockchain space by enterprises. Meanwhile, there are protocols like the Baseline protocol which is a shared framework which allows enterprises to use Ethereum as a common frame of reference and a base settlement layer without having to give up privacy when settling on the public Ethereum mainnet. This framework makes adopting Ethereum much easier for other enterprises.

Institutional Investment

One of Bitcoin’s biggest things it has going for it right now is the growing institutional investment. In case you were wondering, Ethereum has this too! Grayscale offers investment in the cryptocurrency space for financial institutions and their Ethereum fund has already locked up more than 2% of the total supply of ETH. Not only this, but as businesses transact on Ethereum and better understand it, not only will they buy up ETH to pay for their transactions, but they will also realise that much like Bitcoin, Ethereum is a scarce asset. Better yet, a scarce asset which offers yield. As a result, I expect to see companies having ETH holdings become the norm just like how Bitcoin is becoming more widespread on companies’ balance sheets.

The state of global markets

With asset prices in almost every asset class at or near all-time highs and interest rates lower than ever and even negative in some cases, there really aren’t many good opportunities in the traditional financial system right now. Enter crypto - clearly the next evolution of financial services (as I explained in the section on DeFi earlier in this post), with scarce assets built in at the protocol layer, buying BTC or ETH is a lot like buying shares in TCP/IP in 1990 (that is if the underlying protocols of the internet could be invested in which they couldn’t). Best of all, major cryptos are down from their all-time highs anywhere between 35% for BTC or 70% for ETH and much more for many altcoins. This means that they can significantly appreciate in value before entering uncharted, speculative bubble territory.
While of course we could fall dramatically at any moment in the current macro financial conditions, as a longer term play, crypto is very alluring. The existing financial system has shown that it is in dire need of replacing and the potential replacement has started rearing its head in the form of crypto and DeFi.

Improvements in user onboarding and abstracting away complexity

Ethereum has started making huge leaps forward in terms of usability for the end user. We now have ENS names and unstoppable domains which allow you to send ETH to yournamehere.ETH or TrickyTroll.crypto (I don’t actually have that domain, that’s just an example). No longer do you have to check every character of your ugly hexadecimal 0x43AB96D… ETH address to ensure you’re sending your ETH to the right person. We also have smart contract wallets like Argent wallet or the Gnosis safe. These allow for users to access their wallets and interact with DeFi self-custodially from an app on their phone without having to record a private key or recovery phrase. Instead, they offer social recovery and their UI is straight forward enough for anyone who uses a smart phone to understand. Finally, for the more experienced users, DApps like Uniswap have pretty, super easy to use graphical user interfaces and can be used by anyone who knows how to run and use a browser extension like Metamask.

The lack of an obvious #1 ETH killer

One of Ethereum’s biggest threats is for it to be overthrown by a so-called “Ethereum killer” blockchain which claims to do everything Ethereum can do and sometimes more. While there are competitors which are each formidable to a certain extent such as Polkadot, Cardano and EOS, each have their own weaknesses. For example, Polkadot and Cardano are not fully operational yet and EOS is much more centralised than Ethereum. As a result, none of these competitors have any significant network effects just yet relative to the behemoth which is Ethereum. This doesn’t mean that these projects aren’t a threat. In fact, I am sure that projects like Polkadot (which is more focused on complimenting Ethereum than killing it) will take a slice out of Ethereum’s pie. However, I am still very confident that Ethereum will remain on top due to the lack of a clear number 2 smart contract platform. Since none of these ETH killers stands out as the second place smart contract platform, it makes it much harder for one project to create a network effect which even begins to threaten Ethereum’s dominance. This leads me onto my next reason - network effects.

Network effects

This is another topic which I made a previous post on. The network effect is why Bitcoin is still the number one cryptocurrency and by such a long way. Bitcoin is not the most technologically advanced cryptocurrency. However, it has the most widespread name recognition and the most adoption in most metrics (ETH beats in in some metrics these days). The network effect is also why most people use Zoom and Facebook messengeWhatsApp despite the existence of free, private, end to end encrypted alternatives which have all the same features (https://meet.jit.si/ for zoom alternative and Signal for the private messenger app. I highly recommend both. Let’s get their network effects going!). It is the same for Bitcoin. People don’t want to have to learn about or set up a wallet for alternative options. People like what is familiar and what other people use. Nobody wants to be “that guy” who makes you download yet another app and account you have to remember the password/private key for. In the same way, Enterprises don’t want to have to create a bridge between their existing systems and a dozen different blockchains. Developers don’t want to have to create DeFi money legos from scratch on a new chain if they can just plug in to existing services like Uniswap. Likewise, users don’t want to have to download another browser extension to use DApps on another chain if they already use Ethereum. I know personally I have refrained from investing in altcoins because I would have to install another app on my hardware wallet or remember another recovery phrase.
Overthrowing Ethereum’s network effect is one hell of a big task these days. Time is running out for the ETH killers.

Ethereum is the most decentralised and provably neutral smart contract platform

Ethereum is also arguably the most decentralised and provably neutral smart contract platform (except for maybe Ethereum Classic on the neutrality part). Unlike some smart contract platforms, you can’t round up everyone at the Ethereum Foundation or any select group of people and expect to be able to stop the network. Not only this, but the Ethereum foundation doesn’t have the ability to print more ETH or push through changes as they wish like some people would lead you on to believe. The community would reject detrimental EIPs and hard fork. Ever since the DAO hack, the Ethereum community has made it clear that it will not accept EIPs which attempt to roll back the chain even to recover hacked funds (see EIP-999).
Even if governments around the world wanted to censor the Ethereum blockchain, under ETH 2.0’s proof of stake, it would be incredibly costly and would require a double digit percentage of the total ETH supply, much of which would be slashed (meaning they would lose it) as punishment for running dishonest validator nodes. This means that unlike with proof of work where a 51% attacker can keep attacking the network, under proof of stake, an attacker can only perform the attack a couple of times before they lose all of their ETH. This makes attacks much less financially viable than it is on proof of work chains. Network security is much more than what I laid out above and I am far from an expert but the improved resistance to 51% attacks which PoS provides is significant.
Finally, with the US dollar looking like it will lose its reserve currency status and the existing wire transfer system being outdated, superpowers like China won’t want to use US systems and the US won’t want to use a Chinese system. Enter Ethereum, the provably neutral settlement layer where the USA and China don’t have to trust each other or each other’s banks because they can trust Ethereum. While it may sound like a long shot, it does make sense if Ethereum hits a multi-trillion dollar market cap that it is the most secure and neutral way to transfer value between these adversaries. Not to mention if much of the world’s commerce were to be settled in the same place - on Ethereum - then it would make sense for governments to settle on the same platform.

ETH distribution is decentralised

Thanks to over 5 years of proof of work - a system where miners have to sell newly minted ETH to pay for electricity costs - newly mined ETH has found its way into the hands of everyday people who buy ETH off miners selling on exchnages. As pointed out by u/AdamSC1 in his analysis of the top 10K ETH addresses (I highly recommend reading this if you haven’t already), the distribution of ETH is actually slightly more decentralised than Bitcoin with the top 10,000 ETH wallets holding 56.70% of ETH supply compared to the top 10,000 Bitcoin wallets which hold 57.44% of the Bitcoin supply. This decentralised distribution means that the introduction of staking won’t centralise ETH in the hands of a few wallets who could then control the network. This is an advantage for ETH which many proof of stake ETH killers will never have as they never used PoW to distribute funds widely throughout the community and these ETH killers often did funding rounds giving large numbers of tokens to VC investors.

The community

Finally, while I may be biased, I think that Ethereum has the friendliest community. Anecdotally, I find that the Ethereum developer community is full of forward thinking people who want to make the world a better place and build a better future, many of whom are altruistic and don’t always act in their best interests. Compare this to the much more conservative, “at least we’re safe while the world burns” attitude which many Bitcoiners have. I don’t want to generalise too much here as the Bitcoin community is great too and there are some wonderful people there. But the difference is clear if you compare the daily discussion of Bitcoin to the incredibly helpful and welcoming daily discussion of EthFinance who will happily answer your noob questions without calling you an idiot and telling you to do you own research (there are plenty more examples in any of the daily threads). Or the very helpful folks over at EthStaker who will go out of their way to help you set up an ETH 2.0 staking node on the testnets (Shoutout to u/superphiz who does a lot of work over in that sub!). Don’t believe me? Head over to those subs and see for yourself.
Please don’t hate on me if you disagree about which project has the best community, it is just my very biased personal opinion and I respect your opinion if you disagree! :)

TL;DR:

submitted by Tricky_Troll to ethfinance [link] [comments]

Syscoin Platform’s Great Reddit Scaling Bake-off Proposal

Syscoin Platform’s Great Reddit Scaling Bake-off Proposal
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https://preview.redd.it/rqt2dldyg8e51.jpg?width=1044&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=777ae9d4fbbb54c3540682b72700fc4ba3de0a44
We are excited to participate and present Syscoin Platform's ideal characteristics and capabilities towards a well-rounded Reddit Community Points solution!
Our scaling solution for Reddit Community Points involves 2-way peg interoperability with Ethereum. This will provide a scalable token layer built specifically for speed and high volumes of simple value transfers at a very low cost, while providing sovereign ownership and onchain finality.
Token transfers scale by taking advantage of a globally sorting mempool that provides for probabilistically secure assumptions of “as good as settled”. The opportunity here for token receivers is to have an app-layer interactivity on the speed/security tradeoff (99.9999% assurance within 10 seconds). We call this Z-DAG, and it achieves high-throughput across a mesh network topology presently composed of about 2,000 geographically dispersed full-nodes. Similar to Bitcoin, however, these nodes are incentivized to run full-nodes for the benefit of network security, through a bonded validator scheme. These nodes do not participate in the consensus of transactions or block validation any differently than other nodes and therefore do not degrade the security model of Bitcoin’s validate first then trust, across every node. Each token transfer settles on-chain. The protocol follows Bitcoin core policies so it has adequate code coverage and protocol hardening to be qualified as production quality software. It shares a significant portion of Bitcoin’s own hashpower through merged-mining.
This platform as a whole can serve token microtransactions, larger settlements, and store-of-value in an ideal fashion, providing probabilistic scalability whilst remaining decentralized according to Bitcoin design. It is accessible to ERC-20 via a permissionless and trust-minimized bridge that works in both directions. The bridge and token platform are currently available on the Syscoin mainnet. This has been gaining recent attention for use by loyalty point programs and stablecoins such as Binance USD.

Solutions

Syscoin Foundation identified a few paths for Reddit to leverage this infrastructure, each with trade-offs. The first provides the most cost-savings and scaling benefits at some sacrifice of token autonomy. The second offers more preservation of autonomy with a more narrow scope of cost savings than the first option, but savings even so. The third introduces more complexity than the previous two yet provides the most overall benefits. We consider the third as most viable as it enables Reddit to benefit even while retaining existing smart contract functionality. We will focus on the third option, and include the first two for good measure.
  1. Distribution, burns and user-to-user transfers of Reddit Points are entirely carried out on the Syscoin network. This full-on approach to utilizing the Syscoin network provides the most scalability and transaction cost benefits of these scenarios. The tradeoff here is distribution and subscription handling likely migrating away from smart contracts into the application layer.
  2. The Reddit Community Points ecosystem can continue to use existing smart contracts as they are used today on the Ethereum mainchain. Users migrate a portion of their tokens to Syscoin, the scaling network, to gain much lower fees, scalability, and a proven base layer, without sacrificing sovereign ownership. They would use Syscoin for user-to-user transfers. Tips redeemable in ten seconds or less, a high-throughput relay network, and onchain settlement at a block target of 60 seconds.
  3. Integration between Matic Network and Syscoin Platform - similar to Syscoin’s current integration with Ethereum - will provide Reddit Community Points with EVM scalability (including the Memberships ERC777 operator) on the Matic side, and performant simple value transfers, robust decentralized security, and sovereign store-of-value on the Syscoin side. It’s “the best of both worlds”. The trade-off is more complex interoperability.

Syscoin + Matic Integration

Matic and Blockchain Foundry Inc, the public company formed by the founders of Syscoin, recently entered a partnership for joint research and business development initiatives. This is ideal for all parties as Matic Network and Syscoin Platform provide complementary utility. Syscoin offers characteristics for sovereign ownership and security based on Bitcoin’s time-tested model, and shares a significant portion of Bitcoin’s own hashpower. Syscoin’s focus is on secure and scalable simple value transfers, trust-minimized interoperability, and opt-in regulatory compliance for tokenized assets rather than scalability for smart contract execution. On the other hand, Matic Network can provide scalable EVM for smart contract execution. Reddit Community Points can benefit from both.
Syscoin + Matic integration is actively being explored by both teams, as it is helpful to Reddit, Ethereum, and the industry as a whole.

Proving Performance & Cost Savings

Our POC focuses on 100,000 on-chain settlements of token transfers on the Syscoin Core blockchain. Transfers and burns perform equally with Syscoin. For POCs related to smart contracts (subscriptions, etc), refer to the Matic Network proposal.
On-chain settlement of 100k transactions was accomplished within roughly twelve minutes, well-exceeding Reddit’s expectation of five days. This was performed using six full-nodes operating on compute-optimized AWS c4.2xlarge instances which were geographically distributed (Virginia, London, Sao Paulo Brazil, Oregon, Singapore, Germany). A higher quantity of settlements could be reached within the same time-frame with more broadcasting nodes involved, or using hosts with more resources for faster execution of the process.
Addresses used: 100,014
The demonstration was executed using this tool. The results can be seen in the following blocks:
612722: https://sys1.bcfn.ca/block/6d47796d043bb4c508d29123e6ae81b051f5e0aaef849f253c8f3a6942a022ce
612723: https://sys1.bcfn.ca/block/8e2077f743461b90f80b4bef502f564933a8e04de97972901f3d65cfadcf1faf
612724: https://sys1.bcfn.ca/block/205436d25b1b499fce44c29567c5c807beaca915b83cc9f3c35b0d76dbb11f6e
612725: https://sys1.bcfn.ca/block/776d1b1a0f90f655a6bbdf559ff5072459cbdc5682d7615ff4b78c00babdc237
612726: https://sys1.bcfn.ca/block/de4df0994253742a1ac8ac9eec8d2a8c8b0a6d72c53d6f3caa29bb6c171b0a6b
612727: https://sys1.bcfn.ca/block/e5e167c52a9decb313fbaadf49a5e34cb490f8084f642a850385476d4ef10d70
612728: https://sys1.bcfn.ca/block/ab64d989edc71890e7b5b8491c20e9a27520dc45a5f7c776d3dae79057f59fe7
612729: https://sys1.bcfn.ca/block/5e8b7ecd0e36f99d07e4ea6e135fc952bf7ec30164ab6f4d1e98b0f2d405df6d
612730: https://sys1.bcfn.ca/block/d395df3d31dde60bbb0bece6bd5b358297da878f0beb96be389e5f0e043580a3
It is important to note that this POC is not focused on Z-DAG. The performance of Z-DAG has been benchmarked within realistic network conditions: Whiteblock’s audit is publicly available. Network latency tests showed an average TPS around 15k with burst capacity up to 61k. Zero-latency control group exhibited ~150k TPS. Mainnet testing of the Z-DAG network is achievable and will require further coordination and additional resources.
Even further optimizations are expected in the upcoming Syscoin Core release which will implement a UTXO model for our token layer bringing further efficiency as well as open the door to additional scaling technology currently under research by our team and academic partners. At present our token layer is account-based, similar to Ethereum. Opt-in compliance structures will also be introduced soon which will offer some positive performance characteristics as well. It makes the most sense to implement these optimizations before performing another benchmark for Z-DAG, especially on the mainnet considering the resources required to stress-test this network.

Cost Savings

Total cost for these 100k transactions: $0.63 USD
See the live fee comparison for savings estimation between transactions on Ethereum and Syscoin. Below is a snapshot at time of writing:
ETH price: $318.55 ETH gas price: 55.00 Gwei ($0.37)
Syscoin price: $0.11
Snapshot of live fee comparison chart
Z-DAG provides a more efficient fee-market. A typical Z-DAG transaction costs 0.0000582 SYS. Tokens can be safely redeemed/re-spent within seconds or allowed to settle on-chain beforehand. The costs should remain about this low for microtransactions.
Syscoin will achieve further reduction of fees and even greater scalability with offchain payment channels for assets, with Z-DAG as a resilience fallback. New payment channel technology is one of the topics under research by the Syscoin development team with our academic partners at TU Delft. In line with the calculation in the Lightning Networks white paper, payment channels using assets with Syscoin Core will bring theoretical capacity for each person on Earth (7.8 billion) to have five on-chain transactions per year, per person, without requiring anyone to enter a fee market (aka “wait for a block”). This exceeds the minimum LN expectation of two transactions per person, per year; one to exist on-chain and one to settle aggregated value.

Tools, Infrastructure & Documentation

Syscoin Bridge

Mainnet Demonstration of Syscoin Bridge with the Basic Attention Token ERC-20
A two-way blockchain interoperability system that uses Simple Payment Verification to enable:
  • Any Standard ERC-20 token to be moved from Ethereum to the Syscoin blockchain as a Syscoin Platform Token (SPT), and back to Ethereum
  • Any SPT to be moved from Syscoin to the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC-20 token, and back to Syscoin

Benefits

  • Permissionless
  • No counterparties involved
  • No trading mechanisms involved
  • No third-party liquidity providers required
  • Cross-chain Fractional Supply - 2-way peg - Token supply maintained globally
  • ERC-20s gain vastly improved transactionality with the Syscoin Token Platform, along with the security of bitcoin-core-compliant PoW.
  • SPTs gain access to all the tooling, applications and capabilities of Ethereum for ERC-20, including smart contracts.
https://preview.redd.it/l8t2m8ldh8e51.png?width=1180&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0a955a0181746dc79aff718bd0bf607d3c3aa23
https://preview.redd.it/26htnxzfh8e51.png?width=1180&format=png&auto=webp&s=d0383d3c2ee836c9f60b57eca35542e9545f741d

Source code

https://github.com/syscoin/?q=sysethereum
Main Subprojects

API

Tools to simplify using Syscoin Bridge as a service with dapps and wallets will be released some time after implementation of Syscoin Core 4.2. These will be based upon the same processes which are automated in the current live Sysethereum Dapp that is functioning with the Syscoin mainnet.

Documentation

Syscoin Bridge & How it Works (description and process flow)
Superblock Validation Battles
HOWTO: Provision the Bridge for your ERC-20
HOWTO: Setup an Agent
Developer & User Diligence

Trade-off

The Syscoin Ethereum Bridge is secured by Agent nodes participating in a decentralized and incentivized model that involves roles of Superblock challengers and submitters. This model is open to participation. The benefits here are trust-minimization, permissionless-ness, and potentially less legal/regulatory red-tape than interop mechanisms that involve liquidity providers and/or trading mechanisms.
The trade-off is that due to the decentralized nature there are cross-chain settlement times of one hour to cross from Ethereum to Syscoin, and three hours to cross from Syscoin to Ethereum. We are exploring ways to reduce this time while maintaining decentralization via zkp. Even so, an “instant bridge” experience could be provided by means of a third-party liquidity mechanism. That option exists but is not required for bridge functionality today. Typically bridges are used with batch value, not with high frequencies of smaller values, and generally it is advantageous to keep some value on both chains for maximum availability of utility. Even so, the cross-chain settlement time is good to mention here.

Cost

Ethereum -> Syscoin: Matic or Ethereum transaction fee for bridge contract interaction, negligible Syscoin transaction fee for minting tokens
Syscoin -> Ethereum: Negligible Syscoin transaction fee for burning tokens, 0.01% transaction fee paid to Bridge Agent in the form of the ERC-20, Matic or Ethereum transaction fee for contract interaction.

Z-DAG

Zero-Confirmation Directed Acyclic Graph is an instant settlement protocol that is used as a complementary system to proof-of-work (PoW) in the confirmation of Syscoin service transactions. In essence, a Z-DAG is simply a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where validating nodes verify the sequential ordering of transactions that are received in their memory pools. Z-DAG is used by the validating nodes across the network to ensure that there is absolute consensus on the ordering of transactions and no balances are overflowed (no double-spends).

Benefits

  • Unique fee-market that is more efficient for microtransaction redemption and settlement
  • Uses decentralized means to enable tokens with value transfer scalability that is comparable or exceeds that of credit card networks
  • Provides high throughput and secure fulfillment even if blocks are full
  • Probabilistic and interactive
  • 99.9999% security assurance within 10 seconds
  • Can serve payment channels as a resilience fallback that is faster and lower-cost than falling-back directly to a blockchain
  • Each Z-DAG transaction also settles onchain through Syscoin Core at 60-second block target using SHA-256 Proof of Work consensus
https://preview.redd.it/pgbx84jih8e51.png?width=1614&format=png&auto=webp&s=5f631d42a33dc698365eb8dd184b6d442def6640

Source code

https://github.com/syscoin/syscoin

API

Syscoin-js provides tooling for all Syscoin Core RPCs including interactivity with Z-DAG.

Documentation

Z-DAG White Paper
Useful read: An in-depth Z-DAG discussion between Syscoin Core developer Jag Sidhu and Brave Software Research Engineer Gonçalo Pestana

Trade-off

Z-DAG enables the ideal speed/security tradeoff to be determined per use-case in the application layer. It minimizes the sacrifice required to accept and redeem fast transfers/payments while providing more-than-ample security for microtransactions. This is supported on the premise that a Reddit user receiving points does need security yet generally doesn’t want nor need to wait for the same level of security as a nation-state settling an international trade debt. In any case, each Z-DAG transaction settles onchain at a block target of 60 seconds.

Syscoin Specs

Syscoin 3.0 White Paper
(4.0 white paper is pending. For improved scalability and less blockchain bloat, some features of v3 no longer exist in current v4: Specifically Marketplace Offers, Aliases, Escrow, Certificates, Pruning, Encrypted Messaging)
  • 16MB block bandwidth per minute assuming segwit witness carrying transactions, and transactions ~200 bytes on average
  • SHA256 merge mined with Bitcoin
  • UTXO asset layer, with base Syscoin layer sharing identical security policies as Bitcoin Core
  • Z-DAG on asset layer, bridge to Ethereum on asset layer
  • On-chain scaling with prospect of enabling enterprise grade reliable trustless payment processing with on/offchain hybrid solution
  • Focus only on Simple Value Transfers. MVP of blockchain consensus footprint is balances and ownership of them. Everything else can reduce data availability in exchange for scale (Ethereum 2.0 model). We leave that to other designs, we focus on transfers.
  • Future integrations of MAST/Taproot to get more complex value transfers without trading off trustlessness or decentralization.
  • Zero-knowledge Proofs are a cryptographic new frontier. We are dabbling here to generalize the concept of bridging and also verify the state of a chain efficiently. We also apply it in our Digital Identity projects at Blockchain Foundry (a publicly traded company which develops Syscoin softwares for clients). We are also looking to integrate privacy preserving payment channels for off-chain payments through zkSNARK hub & spoke design which does not suffer from the HTLC attack vectors evident on LN. Much of the issues plaguing Lightning Network can be resolved using a zkSNARK design whilst also providing the ability to do a multi-asset payment channel system. Currently we found a showstopper attack (American Call Option) on LN if we were to use multiple-assets. This would not exist in a system such as this.

Wallets

Web3 and mobile wallets are under active development by Blockchain Foundry Inc as WebAssembly applications and expected for release not long after mainnet deployment of Syscoin Core 4.2. Both of these will be multi-coin wallets that support Syscoin, SPTs, Ethereum, and ERC-20 tokens. The Web3 wallet will provide functionality similar to Metamask.
Syscoin Platform and tokens are already integrated with Blockbook. Custom hardware wallet support currently exists via ElectrumSys. First-class HW wallet integration through apps such as Ledger Live will exist after 4.2.
Current supported wallets
Syscoin Spark Desktop
Syscoin-Qt

Explorers

Mainnet: https://sys1.bcfn.ca (Blockbook)
Testnet: https://explorer-testnet.blockchainfoundry.co
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Thank you for close consideration of our proposal. We look forward to feedback, and to working with the Reddit community to implement an ideal solution using Syscoin Platform!

submitted by sidhujag to ethereum [link] [comments]

Vitalik dropped a bombshell on us when said that "high fees make Ethereum less secure". I explored what that means, why it's true, and what it means for the future of blockchains

The source of this is: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1285593115672358912
And in particular, he links to: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf
I am: an Ethereum entrepreneur working full time on https://flowerpatch.app, an indie game
When I first read that tweet, I was really surprised. We've been thinking since the start of Bitcoin that fees would gradually become the long-term thing that sustains miners. We were told that paying miners = security for the network
Overview:
The btc whitepaper explained that the block rewards would go down, slowly over time. Ethereum is modeled on this concept too, though has no fixed cap. Then: big blocks are good, because big blocks = more fees. However, looking back at this idea now, we see that there was a fair bit of hand-waving in this transition, and a new scalability problem becomes clear:
  • Up until recently, blocks have basically always had the same value per block. It turns out that this was a very important game theory assumption!
  • As fees begin to dominate the miners' revenue, we enter into a world where some blocks are very valuable, and some blocks not so much
  • An additional problem, especially in Bitcoin, is the "exponential time variance" in block mining. Sometimes, there's just no blocks for an hour
  • Miners always have the option to "fork" a blockchain. As we start to have high variance in the value of blocks, it becomes much more logical to try to fork valuable blocks instead of building on top of them. The paper states this as: "it becomes attractive to fork a “wealthy” block to “steal” the rewards therein". You can incentivize other miners to "join in" on your theft-fork by not taking all of fee revenue (i.e. not including all the transactions), leaving some for others that wish to follow you into the dark world. The paper provides an illustration: https://i.imgur.com/I2K9QDd.jpg
  • The paper also outlines several other "bad actor" strategies that miners can use. Increasingly, as blocks become irregular, and more "evil" strategies start to creep in, this actually opens the door to further bad actors, and collusion
  • One key quote from the paper: "Without a block reward, immediately after a block is found there is zero expected reward for mining but nonzero electricity cost, making it unprofitable for any miner to mine." — this leads to another class of game theory issues, where miners have no reason to start mining until transactions start to pile up, but still have to pay electricity fees. The world has changed since the btc whitepaper: various schemes for mining multiple currencies at once, or quickly switching to alternate networks, become available. Miners may choose to switch off their equipment, or switch networks for a while, instead of waiting for transactions to pile up. They call this phenomenon "mining gaps"
Their conclusion:
Impact on Bitcoin security. If any of the deviant mining strategies we explore were to be deployed, the impact on Bitcoin’s security would be serious. At best, the block chain will have a significant fraction of stale or orphaned blocks due to constant forks, making 51% attacks much easier and increasing the transaction confirmation time. At worst, consensus will break down due to block withholding or increasingly aggressive undercutting.
How this affects Ethereum:
  • Ethereum has, like Bitcoin, been slowly reducing its block rewards
  • Today, as Vitalik said, we had fees make up 40-50% of the block rewards
  • This actually introduces a new scalability issue — if we increase the blocksize by 4, even if the network could handle that, we could have a situation where fees make up 200% of the block reward (50% x 4). This would start to seriously undercut Ethereum's security, as the tweet alluded
  • This issue is not purely hypothetical, but could really happen, if fees hit a sustained 100-300Gwei — on today's eth1 network! Even without extra blockspace! We could start seeing these mining strategies appearing soon
How we fix this:
  • As Vitalik mentioned, EIP-1559 does largely solve this issue. That's all the reason we need to include this EIP. Burning fees is the key to fixing the game theory. But if nothing else, you can achieve a 0% inflation rate while still issuing block rewards, as long as enough eth is burned
  • ETH2 is not susceptible to these issues, because mining rewards are shared, rather than adversarial. The years of game theory research were worth it
What happens with Bitcoin:
Well, this probably won't be an issue for quite a while, because BTC's rewards will only slowly dwindle over the next 100 years. However, they have a strict policy around this. BTC was always meant to have a totally fixed cap, and that's a big part of their "digital gold" narrative. What happens if the price of BTC tanks while the network is at capacity and has high fee revenue? They could start seeing issues pretty soon, especially with the abundance of other coins using the same mining hardware. There's already a fair bit of miners that jump between BTC/BCH/BSV based on profitability, so the "mining gaps" we discussed earlier could become more prevalent
submitted by hugelung to ethereum [link] [comments]

Epic Cash Vitex Exchange AMA

What is EPIC CASH?
Epic Cash is the final point in the journey toward true P2P internet cash, the cornerstone of a private financial system. The Epic currency aims to become the world’s most effective privacy-protecting form of digital money. In order to fulfill that goal, it satisfies the three principal functions of money:
1. Store of Value — can be saved, retrieved, and exchanged at a later time, and of predictable value when retrieved;
2. Medium of Exchange — anything accepted as representing a standard of value and exchangeable for goods or services;
3. Unit of Account — the unit by which the value of a thing is accounted for and compared.
Website: http://epic.tech Whitepapers: http://epic.tech/whitepaper Epic Cash Community: https://t.me/EpicCash Miner Chat: https://t.me/EpicMiners Gitlab: gitlab.com/epiccash Twitter: twitter.com/EpicCashTech Social Media: http://epic.tech/social-media Exchanges: https://epic.tech/service-list
Oleg✌🏻
Hello community! Our AMA with EPIC begins🚀 We are very happy to have you here, on our joint AMA👌 So, lets start! The very first question for you. Can you introduce yourself?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble I’m Max Freeman, which stands for “Maximum Freedom for Mankind” — we believe that the existing fiat money system enslaves people by unfairly confiscating their wealth through inflation. By using an honest money system such as Epic, we can improve the quality of life for billions of people worldwide.
Yoga Dude Hello, I am Yoga Dude 🙂 I handle Marketing and PR, in crypto since 2011 started as Bitcoin miner, and in 2014 in Monero, and in 2015 in Ethereum, oh and briefly in DOGE for fun and unexpected profit. Heard about Epic Cash while learning about the Mimblewimble algo and joined the team last year.
JLong I am John, Doing the general engineering and managerial work
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble I have been involved in early stage cryptos for the past 3 years, after building a global trading business for the past 20 years.
Oleg✌🏻 nice to meet you🙂
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble Epic is a decentralized community project like Bitcoin or Monero, there is no central authority or corporation involved. We had no ICO and no premine, we had a fair launch at 0 supply last September.
Yoga Dude Great to meet everyone :)
Oleg✌🏻 Here we go the 1st question for you ~ 1. What is Epic Cash about?
Yoga Dude Epic Cash is designed to fulfill Satoshi’s original vision of P2P electronic cash, adjusting for what we learned from Bitcoin, a medium of exchange that is fast, free, open to all, while being private and fungible. We launched in September 2019 as a Proof of Work mineable crypto, without an ICO or a premine.
Oleg✌🏻 Look like a real Bitcoin🙂
Yoga Dude with privacy and fungibility 😄
Oleg✌🏻 Sounds cool! move on to the next question… 2. What makes Epic Cash better than Monero or other privacy coins?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble First off, we have a lot of respect for Monero and other privacy coins, we learned a lot from what they did right and what they did wrong, Our blockchain is much lighter than Monero or Bitcoin, our transaction engine is faster than Monero or ZCash. We use a three mining algo approach to allow more users the ability to obtain Epic Cash. We are a new, highly undervalued, coin and we look great not only for future use but for today's investment. Our blockchain is 90+% smaller than Monero or Bitcoin. Coins such as Zcash have optional privacy. Epic makes all transactions private, and it is impossible to trace movements of coins by watching wallet addresses.
Oleg✌🏻 Young and hot😋 security and privacy level is very important now but… 3. Why copy the same supply economics as Bitcoin?
Yoga Dude It is hard to compete with the success of Bitcoin today, part of the elegance and the appeal of Bitcoin is the responsible emission rate, terminating at 21million highly sub dividable coins. Like the Bitcoin supply curve, Epic Cash encourages early adopters, and with subsequent halvenings maintains a gradually diminishing flow of additional currency while preserving the overall value.
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble In 2028, the supply of Epic matches that of Bitcoin and they stay in sync until the final coin is mined in 2140. We have 4 halvenings between now and then, which is demonstrated in Bitcoin to drive the value over market cycles. Epic is a chance for people who were late to Bitcoin to ride the wave and not miss their opportunity this time.
Oleg✌🏻 Interesting! 4. Why Choose Epic Cash over Grin and Beam?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble First of all, we have tremendous respect for all Mimblewimble currencies and their talented teams, they all taught us a lot and we are thankful for that. Without sounding too contentious, the choice seems obvious. We offer the same core tech, but with a much more responsible emission curve — Grin is an endless fountain of emission and inflation (60 per second forever), and Beam is even more frontloaded outpacing even Grin’s aggressive emission schedule for the next several years… We respect Grin and Beam, we learned from them, and we believe we are the next evolutionary step. Additionally, as we mentioned earlier, we offer more ways to mine Epic Cash, both with GPU and CPU and ASICs, this gives us more potential users and miners, vs Grin and Beam that are only mineable with GPUs.
Yoga Dude Yes, all that ☝️😄
Oleg✌🏻 I hope the miners read it all carefully 👌 Next question 5. Why have a development fund tax and what will it be used for?
Yoga Dude Dev fund tax today is at a reasonable 7.77% dropping by 1.11% every year until it hits zero. As Epic Cash grows in value these funds will become increasingly more relevant in additional technical, marketing, and fintech partnerships developments.
Oleg✌🏻 Very smart! 6. What is the advantage of 3 mining algorithms?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble By having multiple mining algorithms we are able to attract CPU, GPU, and ASIC miners simultaneously. Currently all other Mimblewimble currencies are mineable with GPU only ignoring a large segment of CPU miners. Monero made a splash migrating to the RandomX CPU mining algo. Epic Cash from the beginning embraces all mining communities. Many miners are successfully using older hardware such as Xeon processors to help secure the network. We use RandomX for CPU, ProgPow for GPU, and Cuckoo for ASIC.
Longer term, our flexible architecture means we can have many algorithms, not just 3. Our roadmap includes an allocation for SHA3 Keccak, which will help further decentralize the network and keep it unstoppable.
Yoga Dude We love miners 🙂 and Epic Cash can be mined with laptops and gaming rigs 🙂
Oleg✌🏻 A wide selection of mining methods is a great way to create a stable, decentralized and large network👌 Let’s talk about persons… 7. Who are the people developing Epic Cash?
Yoga Dude We are blessed with a very talented team of skilled developers with diverse backgrounds, many of them are volunteers who believe in what Epic Cash stands for and contribute with product and usability innovation. Our teams main focus is to make Epic Cash the best, most secure, most user friendly and usable product on the market, without making it unnecessarily techie, with as much mainstream user appeal as possible. This is a serious challenge but we are up for it 😄
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble It is also important to note that we are a truly open ecosystem that anyone can participate in. Our community has developed wallets, mining pools, educational content, and much else besides. We are not limited by the funding generated during an ICO or VC investment, our users are an essential element of our team.
Oleg✌🏻 Sounds very attractive. 8. What do you think is currently lack in today’s crypto?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble We believe there is not enough privacy, anonymity and fungibility, although there is a growing awareness in the community as to why these are necessary. People are waking up to the fact that privacy is a right for everyone but today it is being exploited and violated by corporations, governments and unscrupulous individuals. Privacy does not mean that you have something to hide. We have doors on our houses, curtains on our windows, we wear clothes, and we have security on our bank accounts and businesses, not because we are criminals.
Fungibility (the property of not being able to distinguish one unit of currency from another) also has become a hot issue as people have started to get in trouble because of someone else’s misdeeds. Tainted money (coins that are blacklisted or restricted) is a problem for Bitcoin and Ethereum, the top two cryptos today. Mimblewimble eliminates the risk of tainted coins making them indistinguishable from each other. With traceable coins, you always have to worry if the coins you are getting were involved in a hack, or perhaps the darknet.
Oleg✌🏻 It’s good to see strong and safe coin in our time Let’s talk about your future… 9. What does the Epic Cash roadmap look like going forward?
Yoga Dude First and foremost, we are focused on security and usability.
We are working on a new, improved GUI wallet to incorporate the community feedback on ways to improve it.
We are in the process of completing final testing phases for the next iteration of Epic Cash which will make it more secure and stable. Once that is done, we will be rolling out Android and iOS support to make Epic Cash usable on leading smartphones and smartwatches. Beyond that without going into too much detail we are focused on continuous evolution of privacy, ease of mining, and overall speed and usability.
And of course we are constantly looking to add more exchanges both with and without KYC.
Oleg✌🏻 Are you working on Android and IOS wallet ? What will your application be?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble Yes, we will release a mobile wallet this year. It will bring us one step closer to people being able to actually use cryptocurrency as money in daily life.
Yoga Dude The idea is to be able to access Epic Cash from any platform and device
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble Epic is very lightweight, which means that low-end devices such as smartwatches can participate.
Oleg✌🏻 Ok, got it. Thanks for clarification! 10. What else can you tell us about Epic Cash?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble Well one thing I really want to mention is our great Epic Cash community. We’ve been building a decentralized community organically, without the talk of price pumps, pressure to HODL and other BS crypto-gimmicks. Our community is truly global and consists of developers, volunteers, miners, and other Epic enthusiasts spreading the word about Epic Cash, helping us reach millions of people around the world to improve their quality of life through social media and directly. Everyone is an evangelist, everyone is an influencer, everyone has the power to make the world a better place to live in. As we continue to grow — the future looks Epic 😊
Yoga Dude Definitely the community! We got a talented crowd of very cool and motivated people from all over the world!
Oleg✌🏻 Thank you guys, for such informative answers 🙂 Now we proceed to Section 3, where a Community can ask their questions to the EPIC team Now I’ll open chat for the quite some time … Oleg✌🏻 Thank you all, dear community! EPIC team, please choose the 10 best questions you want to answer.
AngeI Everyone likes Privacy & Epic Cash provides their Best Privacy to users But, Which Technologies are being used by Epic Cash to make Blockchain very Private and Completely untrackable ?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble From the wallet to the node, Epic uses Dandelion++ to bounce transactions around the world before they go into the mempool for mining. Within the blockchain itself, Cut-Through merges all transactions in a block together, with CoinJoin automatically mixing all coins.
Beyond that, there are no addresses, so it’s impossible to watch someone’s wallet.
Arnold Even litecoin is implementing mimblewimble, Don’t you think it’s a significant threat for Epic if they implement it, then why would anyone use a less popular and a new cryptocurrency.
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble LTC is implementing mw as an “extension block”, meaning that it is optional and not all transactions will use it. This is very different than the core protocol leveraging mw to make all transactions private and all coins fungible.
Aluta Why Epic cash so much focus on fungibility? Does fungibility matters that much?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble Fungibility is going to be one of the key issues within the cryptocurrency space in the coming years. Today, if you accept traceable coins from a seller, you are liable if they have ever been used in any illegal activity. This has led to a two tier market where freshly minted coins sell for more than circulated coins. When coins are fungible, like Epic, you don’t have to worry that you will run into a problem when an exchange or merchant blocks your transaction.
Joxes It is a pleasure.
When I first researched EpicCash, google showed me a youtube video that talked about how to mine with EpicCash. It made me ask: is this mining activity profitable so far?
We are in the early stages of development I guess, what adoption strategies are you taking to have sustained growth? is it feasible to reach N ° 500 rank in coinmarketcap in the medium term?
Yoga Dude When I got into crypto, it was by mining Bitcoin back in 2011 when you could still solve blocks on a single computer, but Bitcoin at the time was anything but profitable 😄 Today Epic Cash is still new, still young, and still undervalued. I believe it is mining-worthy because of its potential, not because of today’s price. By allowing Epic Cash to be mined with GPU and CPU on gaming rigs, servers, and even laptops we offer maximum public participation in our project. More people involved in the project, the more evangelists there are. We empower people to mine Epic Cash and to promote it.
S.P.A.D.E What new features of Epic Cash provide that Grin or Beam does not offer. Why do we need Epic Cash?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble They are great coins, but there are some ways in which Epic improves. Epic has better tokenomics than Grin and a more sustainable model than Beam, that has a company behind it that needs to repay investors via its high dev tax. this article explains in more detail https://medium.com/@frodofreeman/overview-of-mimblewimble-cryptocurrencies-7c70be146f50
Sahil What’s the Minimum Hardware / setup Required for Mining of EPIC Cash coins? Is Mining Profitable and Can we Mine EPIC Cash coins at Home?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble It is possible to mine on an ordinary laptop or desktop from the last 5 years, sometimes older. Epic is open to everyone, and our friendly community is standing by to help you get started at t.me/epicminers
Erven James Sato “TOKEN BURN” is BENEFECIAL for any projects, in able to CONTROL THE NUMBER OF TOKEN CIRCULATION and TO PROVIDE GREATER INCENTIVES TO INVESTORS.
Does your GREAT PROJECT have plan about TOKEN BURN?
Xenolink For deflating projects It is beneficial to drive the demand / scarcity / and price up in a faster pace. Epic Cash is here for the organic long run not the short run. However when it comes to long term economics elastic supplies whether inflating or deflating will not be a solid long term economic model. This has been heavily discussed already with Bitcoins inelastic Fixed 21 million supply in the past. Having a fixed model demonstrates good long term economics without worrying about balancing a deflating/inflating model. Bitcoin is a perfect example of a 21 million inelastic fixed supply model that has been proving itself till today. Which is why we are also using the same fixed 21 million supply model. Epic Cash plans to have a solid organic long term future to bring free private fungible money and make this world a better place.
Red Z🔥🤙 No one predicted the COVID-19 pandemic while developing their business model. But the crisis and recession of the global economy is our present with you and it affects all sectors, including blockchain. Will you make or have already made changes to the project roadmap, tokenomics? Do you have a plan in case the situation does not improve in the coming months and will affect the crypto industry even more?
Yoga Dude One thing we have seen as the result of the COVID-19 is more governments are talking about moving to digital cash — digital dollar in USA, digital Lira in Turkey, etc… If in the past the idea of digital money was not graspable by some people, today its the governments that are educating the people for us about the value of digital currency… What is ironic, the governments, by printing money to solve the economic consequences of COVID-19 also educating the consumer about the true “value” of fiat… What we offer is a touch free, borderless, private, anonymous, fungible currency that can not be printed beyond the initial defined algo. We are more responsible than the printing presses of the governments 🤔
kunlefighter How does the Dandelion++ Protocol, Confidential Transactions (CT) and CoinJoin assist in protecting the privacy of individuals and their transactions on Epic Cash Blockchain?
Max Freeman | Epic Cash | Mimblewimble Dandelion++ bounces transactions around before committing them to the blockchain, making it impossible to determine where they originated from. Confidential Transactions means that all tx are private, you can’t tell anything about where the coins have been or who they belonged to. CoinJoin in essence melts down and re-mints each coin every time it is used, making it impossible to track their ownership or usage history. Epic provides comprehensive privacy to everyone, without the compromises that other pre-mimblewimble coins have.
Dr Mönica Hello sir @maxfreeman4 @Johnsstec @Yogadude
Thanks for the ama I notice that Epic Cash has 2 type of new algorithm, progPoW version 0.15.0 and randomX version 1.0.3 NOW , CAN you tell me why you choose these 2 algorithm???
Yoga Dude We went with RandomX because it is a solid and very popular CPU centric algo used by several coins — most recently Monero. Most miners today heavily favor ASICs or GPUs, leaving a lot of solid high end users in the dust unable to mine emerging cryptos. As far as ProgPow, again its an established algo for GPU miners, and thanks to many cryptos starting with Bitcoin/Monero/Ethe etc there is no shortage of GPU rigs out there :) plus again the casual user with a video gaming caliber card can get in on the action.
Oleg✌🏻 Perfect! It was a great AMA, but it is coming to an end, thanks to everyone who was with us. Thanks EPIC team for taking the time👏. I hope our projects will be able to collaborate even more closely in the future and achieve new successes. Cheers!🎉
submitted by EpicCashFrodo to epiccash [link] [comments]

What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin Explained Simply for Dummies ... BitCoin Mining Hardware Guide ft. CRAZY Obsidian Mining ... Bitcoin Mining 2019 - Should We Mine Bitcoin? - YouTube How Does Bitcoin Mining Work? Is Mining Bitcoin Still Profitable in 2020? - YouTube

While Bitcoin made a lot of headway towards a trustless currency, there are still concerns. The concentration of power among ASIC miners in a few locations make some people wonder if mining is becoming too centralized. GPUs And Decentralization. At present there are two leading forms of mining, as Crypto Briefing has previously explained. Bitcoin, Litecoin and other leading cryptocurrencies ... Bitcoin Google search volumes are up, brokers are advertising their crypto offerings again, scammers are coming back, and first-time buyers are knocking on the doors of exchanges. To help crypto newcomers avoid classic beginner’s mistakes, ... Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were invented in 2008 by an anonymous computer programmer, and bitcoin mining refers to the work done by computers connected to the global Bitcoin network. Current Bitcoin Mining Hardware Requirements. During Bitcoin's first years, mining didn’t require specialized hardware. With a reasonably decent laptop, Bitcoin software, and an active Internet connection, it was possible to mine a few coins. The minimum recommended system requirements are: 145 GB of ask space Bitcoin is considered to be the very first cryptocurrency — it appeared on the market more than 10 years ago. At that time, the mining industry was just beginning to gain momentum, and it was easy to make money from mining Bitcoin. It was enough just to download the software, install it on your computer and start mining.

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What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin Explained Simply for Dummies ...

Get an additional $10 in Bitcoins from Coinbase when purchasing through my referral link http://fredyen.com/get/Bitcoins Raspberry Pi: http://amzn.to/2l6yrW7... July 24 (Bloomberg) --- Bitcoin mining is the complicated process through which new bitcoins are made. So how does it work? Bloomberg and Switch-Video explain. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining explained with the Byzantine Generals Problem. We use it to explain the essence of cryptocurrency mining. Get started with ... This is what you need in order to mine BitCoins or other crypto-currencies. This hardware guide tells you what you will need to buy to get started. Keep in m... How to BitCoin mine using fast ASIC mining hardware - Duration: 27:15. Barnacules Nerdgasm 1,684,593 views. 27:15. How to mine bitcoins? What is Cryptomining? solo mining -pool Mining EXPLAINED! # ...

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