Blockchain update

[Adeptus]

Re: Blockchain update

Thanks for the interesting posts Adeptus. Do you know how much you have invested in total and where you stand today if you were to convert to USD?

The first rule of crypto is you never talk about how much crypto you have. ;-)
I did invest a significant amount for me personally. It was enough that within a few years I expected it to go over $1M. It actually took longer than i thought, mostly because I made many bad investments. However it was also a small enough amount that if I lost it, my life would remain mostly unaffected, barring perhaps being able to pay off my mortgage sooner.

How much I made based on how much I invested is not that interesting. You need just look at the charts I posted further up in this thread and do some calculations on how much you could make if you buy relatively low and sell relatively high. The gains can be astronomical.

[*T*]

Re: Blockchain update

Thanks for the detailed reply, but I didn't mean an run an exchange, I meant literally a broker. As you say dark pools OTC trades operate off-exchange.
I'm in the UK in which the regulation is friendly. Our problem is hostile banks closing accounts. Coinfloor, a UK exchange, works with brokers for off-exchange trades.

I know all about hacks; I had some coins on Gox, I even remember bitcoinica!

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Blockchain update

8. NEO - $35.46, $1.7 Billion cap - This was advertised as the Chinese Ethereum. So it exploded in price recently from $1 to $45. I missed the boat on this one, but I will not invest in it. The Devs are Chinese, there's supposedly only 2 of them, they do not communicate much and there's been some very recent analysis that confirms that this blockchain isn't decentralized at all (at the moment). So it breaks one of the sacred rules of blockchains. Quite simply, I don't trust it.

NEO is a very interesting one.

It just took a mega hit today....far more than the big hit to Ethereum.

They've gotten some bad press for not being a public blockchain, but their corporate response is that they have a long term plan to slowly release into a broader public blockchain.

Its the China angle that I really like.

Bitcoin, Etherium, etc will likely NOT gain traction in China for many reasons that is backed by examples in most industries outside major global consumer luxury brands.

China will have its own cryptocurrencies/blockchains.....that seems certain.

Is NEO in a position to maintain a #1 position or to even maintain a top 3 position in China over the next 20 years?

I think of Amazon's pathetically tiny market share of commerce 20 years ago when I was there, and look at now.

Surely blockchain has similar long term potential as traditional retail/ecommerce.

Quora seems to have a fair few cryptocurrency/blockchain SMEs and there seems ot be a positive consensus on NEO.

I'm thinking we are fast approaching a first inflection point or "step" in terms of general awareness of cryptocurrency/blockchain.

It seems to be a wild west creation of a new volatile/liquid-ish asset class.

When you think about retaining purchasing power holding US Dollars and Gold it feels like flipping some of those US Dollars into cryptocurrencies seems like a serious consideration.

It feels like we are shifting from innovators to early adopters with an early majority on the horizon potentially.

I'm thinking about going long on NEO because China(in my Donald Trump voice) and the response to criticism seems quite reasonable and measured from an Asian perspective.

-----

I wonder if it would be worth asking EJ/Admins to incorporate cryptocurrency/blockchain into future long form analysis.

Despite the thrashing today(potential entry point? looks like it!) it's no longer just for innovators.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Blockchain update

NEO response to recent negative press article:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NEO/comment...atrix_article/

[*T*]

Re: Blockchain update

NEO shat the bed because China central bank banned ICOs. There have been a lot of "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" ICO scams. So be careful in China. The bitcoin legal status is at least relatively clear (can be owned and traded, but not used as money / replacement to RMB).

Re. EJ, this stuff will only affect the macro picture if it's widely used to evade capital controls, or central banks decide to hold as reserves. I wouldn't rule out the later one day.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Blockchain update

NEO shat the bed because China central bank banned ICOs. There have been a lot of "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" ICO scams. So be careful in China. The bitcoin legal status is at least relatively clear (can be owned and traded, but not used as money / replacement to RMB).

Re. EJ, this stuff will only affect the macro picture if it's widely used to evade capital controls, or central banks decide to hold as reserves. I wouldn't rule out the later one day.

The consensus I'm reading is that China over reacted and will likely emplace regulation due to the wild west cowboy nature of aspects of Chinese commerce and now ICOs.

I've read from a few(disclosed as NOT being NEO holders although disclosure for cryptocurrency from non professional analysts is nebulous/murky) that NEO is still best positioned at the moment for a reasonably regulated ICO market in China.

If crypto/blockchain is not likely to break into the macro in the medium term, I wonder if commentary on the micro/specific sector climate for cryptocurrency/blockchain as part of the entrepreneurial investment focus of iTulip in recent years would be worthwhile?

I would think cryptocurrency/blockchain, speculative frenzy aside, certainly seems to have significantly more long term blue sky potential than VR/AR, with its own speculative frenzy that seems to have died again.

I would agree completely that it would be way too premature to think of cryptocurrencies being held as sovereign reserves due to the tiny(relative) capitalisations and the even tinier trading volumes.

But from small seeds grow mighty Sequoias

Where are we with cryptocurrency/blockchain in 5 years, 10, and 20?

What are iTulip members' thoughts?

[Adeptus]

Re: Blockchain update

Where are we with cryptocurrency/blockchain in 5 years, 10, and 20?
What are iTulip members' thoughts?

The SDR will one day be a private permission based crypto currency. Book it! ;-)

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Blockchain update

The SDR will one day be a private permission based crypto currency. Book it! ;-)

I'm still trying to understand and articulate where blockchain will be in 5-10 years. Although I suspect I. 20,years blockchain will have had a bigger impact than 1st gen ecommerce has had in the last 20 years.

My guess is that blockchain will unleash innovation in the developing world, via opportunity and the ultimately more stable financial platform a cryptocurrency possesses over most developing world currencies.

Bitcoin mining in Venezuela is an interesting user case study out of chilling necessity.

I met with one of our big 4 banks in OZ/NZ 2 days ago, and that conversation will continue in depth working on a tech project to include blockchain.

We had a laugh over JP Morgan's stance on how "terrible" Bitcoin is, when JP Morgan are doubling down on their own Ethereum based platform.

I'm meeting with our local crypto rockstars on Wednesday an exchange called Cryptopia to learn more.

At the moment I am still focused largely on Ethereum and NEO, while also looking at trying to get a small piece of Cryptopia shares.

The recent and significant hits to Ethereum and NEO are looking like more attractive entry points.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Blockchain update

This just popped up on my LinkedIn newsfeed:

"Bitcoin is not money. To be money it must at once be a reliable unit of value and a reliable unit of exchange. Bit coin is neither. This is evidenced by its price volatility relative to government money. Governments are able to create money that is a reliable unit of value and exchange by virtue of their ability to tax. Bitcoin is little more than a unit of speculation and its value at any given time primarily a function of the usual speculative forces that determine the value of any object of speculative interest with a heavy dose of ideological belief mixed in, not unlike gold. Unlike gold it is not a reserve asset of governments. It will eventually revert to zero value whence it came." Eric Janszen

I'd be interested in hearing Eric's opinion on crypto currencies in general(rather than just Bitcoin, which I view as an experiment that exploded out of the laboratory into the wild) as well as the potential of the underlying blockchain technology.

[FrankL]

Re: Blockchain update

This just popped up on my LinkedIn newsfeed:







I'd be interested in hearing Eric's opinion on crypto currencies in general(rather than just Bitcoin, which I view as an experiment that exploded out of the laboratory into the wild) as well as the potential of the underlying blockchain technology.

Blockchain technology looks very interesting, with a lot of potential to disrupt (yup, I know, cliché word) existing business models in finance.
However, right now it's more of a technological discovery/evolution process, and I'd be wary to invest any money into existing coins rather than the technology or human capital powering/developing it.

It seems there are significant hurdles that need to be tackled still:
- scalability (a distributed ledger of transactions need to be able to process transactions quickly enough and in large enough volume to become useful, I don't think we're there yet)
- robustness (how do you prevent too much influence from groups that control a majority of the coin mining resources, and how do you guard against fragmentation resulting from developers/investors forking a cryptocurrency?)
- widespread acceptance (as said, before it can be money it needs to be widely accepted. I think this is a very hard sell to governments and finance industry, that benefit substantially from controlling the money supply today. My best guess is that this can only come by working around governments and finance industry (disruption), to allow people to preserve wealth when existing systems break down (e.g. hyperinflation))

As far as the quote from Eric, I find it a rather simplistic approach. Anything that serves a purpose that can provide people with savings/profit will retain value. There's no reason it inherently needs to go to 0 (although it may very well, but not for the reasons he quotes). And yes, I do think that right now there's an enormous amount of speculative money in bitcoin that probably does not reflect any real potential (as the technology is still in its infancy, if you look at all the hurdles of which I tried to summarize some).

[Adeptus]

Re: Blockchain update

Where are we with cryptocurrency/blockchain in 5 years, 10, and 20?
What are iTulip members' thoughts?

The SDR will one day be a private permission based crypto currency. Book it! ;-)

Gee, I'm getting good at these prediction things... ;-) ;-) ;-)





Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busi...7b4c73c3fbe9ff

FULL ARTICLE:

Forget bitcoin, IMFcoin could be the digital future of SDRs

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde.

• JAMES MACKINTOSH
• The Wall Street Journal
• 10:36AM October 6, 2017
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Forget bitcoin, think IMFcoin. The head of the International Monetary Fund has been musing about the future of money, and thinks there is a decent chance it will come from the guardian of the world’s monetary system.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde held up the organisation’s special drawing rights as having a possible digital future at a Bank of England forum last week, and put what she said was a “question mark” over whether SDRs could replace existing international currencies.
“It’s not a far-fetched hypothetical,” she said, and the IMF needed to be ready.
The SDR is a long way from the digital disruption that cypherpunks hope cryptocurrency can deliver. Dreamt up in the 1960s, SDRs are a kind of artificial currency whose value depends on other currencies. US dollar is a part of it, but so are euros, sterling, yuan and yen. An SDR is a bit like a currency mutual fund for central banks.
For decades it has been an afterthought in the global financial system, but the IMF has spent the past year thinking about how to give SDRs a broader international role. So could some sort of crypto-SDR eventually replace the US dollar as the world’s money?
The idea has heavyweight support from those who want to diminish the US dollar’s status, notably in China. People’s Bank of China governor Zhou Xiaochuan called in 2009 for wider use of the IMF’s money to “gradually replace existing reserve currencies with the SDR”.
The reasons are well-rehearsed, and not digital. China — and other emerging markets — would like to diversify their risk away from the greenback. They also worry about the inherent problem of using national money for global reserves. .
SDR or IMFcoins could the US dollar in international trade and reducing both the big currency swings that can destabilise countries and the dangers of large current account deficits.
Instead of representing a basket of currencies, the digital SDR would be a currency of its own, albeit one only used for international transactions.
A more limited alternative would try to speed global growth. At the moment, countries hold big piles of US dollars as a form of insurance against a balance of payments crisis, dampening growth and distorting the world economy. If the IMF was empowered to act more like a global central bank, whisking up new SDRs on its own blockchain in a crisis, it would reduce the need for countries to hold reserves.
Jose Antonio Ocampo, a Colombian central bank board member also on the IMF’s expert group considering the future of the SDR, thinks annual SDR issuance could be worth $US200 billion-$US300bn ($256bn-$385bn) a year. “Countries would not have to accumulate reserves, which generate a general contractionary effect on the global economy,” he says.
The prospect of giving the IMF the ability to execute global helicopter drops of money worries believers in strong currencies.
Jim Rickards, an author and former general counsel for failed hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, thinks SDRs will be issued to reflate the system in the next crisis, hurting the US dollar’s reserve status.
“It’s all converging on a world where the dollar will just be a local currency like the Mexican peso,” he says. He is a longstanding advocate of using gold to back money to limit the supply.
The real opposition to an IMFcoin is likely to come not from fans of gold, but from defenders of the US dollar’s central role in the global system. Sterling once held the role of global reserve currency, but it was abandoned in favour of the US dollar.
The benefit of having the reserve currency is obvious: Americans can offer to buy real things from the rest of the world with money the Federal Reserve creates out of nothing, and other countries have little choice but to accept. The US gets lower interest rates than it otherwise would and can run a permanent current-account deficit with impunity — just so long as it remains the reserve currency. There is a downside to having the reserve currency, though. The purchase of dollars by the rest of the world makes it harder for the US to devalue to support its own economy — as it happened during the global financial crisis.
There is little chance US politicians will want to give up what a French finance minister once called the “exorbitant privilege” of the US dollar, no matter what Ms Lagarde might suggest. As she noted, the IMF would need a “geopolitical situation that would be propitious” for the changes she is speculating about to happen.
Luckily for those holding US dollars, the geopolitical situation is still tilted in favour of the US, and there is little prospect we all be trading in IMFcoins anytime soon.

[jk]

Re: Blockchain update

In September, Burger King Russia launched Whoppercoin, a cryptocurrency which can be traded forWhoppers...

[DSpencer]

Re: Blockchain update

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...climate-change

If true, this does not seem sustainable.

[Adeptus]

Re: Blockchain update

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...climate-change
If true, this does not seem sustainable.

It's not sustainable, at least not from an environmental perspective, and solutions to this issue already exist. Namely: Proof of Stake (PoS) which is being developed by Ethereum, and dPoS (delegated Proof of Stake) which is being developed by EOS, Tezos, and others. In short, PoS/dPoS models require no advanced mining gear at all; rather the transaction processing is performed by blockchain nodes running on standard computers (no GPUs or ASICs required), and the general idea is that your node gets randomly selected to process transactions and you get rewarded with X additional tokens of the blockchain, just like a miner would + any transaction fees for that block. Further, in order to ensure you will not cheat the system, you have to "stake" a minimum of Y number of tokens in order to be eligible to process the transactions for that block. After your node completes that task, all other nodes verify it was done correctly, if descrepencies are found, you lose ALL your staked tokens. This mechanism then thus ensures malicious actors are punished and also no 51% attacks are possible, whilst also saving terawatts of electricity. It's actually quite an elegant solution on paper, but let's see how well it works in practice.

Here's a doc that explains this and other "consensus algorithms" being developed by various blockchains.
https://www.persistent.com/wp-conten...sus-Models.pdf

Here's a key table excerpt from that doc:



This paper covers about 5 of them, but I've heard there's actually upwards of 12 different models being experimented with. So yeah, Proof of Work is not likely to be the consensus mechanism of choice in the mid to long term for most blockchains.

Here's a quick video (8mins) on Proof of Stake

Here's one on dPoS (9mins):

[jk]

Re: Blockchain update

http://thereformedbroker.com/2017/11/27/it-just-got-real