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You recommended Terra. Acc to this About stablecoins there has been some problems for other stablecoins re. maintaining the peg ratio.
How does Terra solve this? Are there contracts written to enforce adjusting buy/sale of pegged currencies?

Why are US residents prohibited from buying Terra/Luna? Being an EU resident this is not a problem, I am just curious as to how the US regulatory framework is structured re. cryptocurrencies.

Terra's UST stablecoin is pegged to an algorithm against Luna burning. If it ever gets outta whack it's free money to arbitragers who will gobble up UST until it re-balances.

You can buy Terra's Mirror token (for synthetic stocks) on Coinbase today. You can also buy Luna on Crypto.com if you're a US citizen I believe. All cryptos outside of Bitcoin/Ethereum are legally questionable in US, so most companies are only listing the biggest market cap names.

I'm pushing very hard for the Terra team to list synthetic SpaceX stock on their Mirror platform.
 
Can anyone explain why ETC has been doing so well in the last month compared to ETH?
ETC is smaller than ETH, thus swings tend to be bigger in both directions.


Btw here are my two best book suggestions for crypto.

1. Amazon.com: Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money (Audible Audio Edition): Nathaniel Popper, Robert Fass, HarperAudio: Audible Audiobooks

2. Amazon.com: The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum (Audible Audio Edition): Camila Russo, Laura Jennings, HarperAudio: Audible Audiobooks

These two should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in crypto. The first one is the history of Bitcoin. The second one the history of Ethereum. To understand where it all came from, how the brilliant minds envisioned the future. Must reads both.
 
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ETC is smaller than ETH, thus swings tend to be bigger in both directions.
Sure but my understanding is that ETC is an outdated crypto prone to repeated hacking and ETH was forked off it to improve it and is more secure, used by more people and institutions, and is switching to a more efficient proof of stake instead of proof of work. ETC has a maximum number so there is scarcity like BTC but other than that it seems inferior to ETH across the board. I guess I'm surprised there is much interest in it at all. I wonder if some of it may be simple confusion between the two, a friend of mine has been talking about how his "Ethereum" had been doing well, not realizing the difference or that the ETCG trust he bought was holding classic.
 
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Sure but my understanding is that ETC is an outdated crypto prone to repeated hacking and ETH was forked off it to improve it and is more secure, used by more people and institutions, and is switching to a more efficient proof of stake instead of proof of work. ETC has a maximum number so there is scarcity like BTC but other than that it seems inferior to ETH across the board. I guess I'm surprised there is much interest in it at all. I wonder if some of it may be simple confusion between the two, a friend of mine has been talking about how his "Ethereum" had been doing well, not realizing the difference or that the ETCG trust he bought was holding classic.
I will give my own story. I have never bought any ETC, but when the fork happened I was rewarded quite a few. At the time I was semi against forking ETH but I loved the fact that the fork could happen and thought it would probably make Ethereum more antifragile.

So I suddenly had a position of ETC, which imo is just as if I had bought and them and considered the purchase a sunk cost. So the question was, should I sell my ETC, should I buy more? What if ETC became the leading version and ETH died and I was standing there with my worthless ETH? Should I keep ETC as a hedge? Which is not too different from the thought if a Bitcoin-maximalist is wondering if the should hedge with some Doge, ETH, ETC etc . At the time I was facing this decision the ETC/ETH ratio was bouncing around between 0.05-0.3. I decided to sell all my ETC for ETH at 0.15, but that was a pretty shaky decision and in hindsight it could have been a very costly mistake. Lots of people waited longer to decide.

Anyway I think it is pretty clear that ETH won the network effect of developers at this point, so I am a bit surprised that ETC/ETH is still rather high. But I can understand that some people want to hedge their bets.

Imo whenever you consider a position, consider how you would rebalance if you already held that position. There are some frictions with trading, taxes, conversion fees etc, but try to figure how your ideal balance should be. It doesn’t really matter if you buy them or you hold something you already bought, what matters is your balance. And consider if you held a bunch of shitcoins, would you sell them? If not then, then you should probably move towards buying them. If you already hold them, then consider if you would buy them if you didn’t hold them? If you had 1% less bitcoins would you buy 1% more? If not then you should probably lean towards selling that.

Then there are less rational strategies, those might be needed when you enter crazy markest where only crazy strategies win. Then choose a crazy strategy and stick with it, knowing that you would never get crazy rich being able to risk a crazy position if you weren’t using a crazy strategy. This is the high IQ plays, that requires you to discard your own rationality. Not for the faint of brains.
 
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To everyone here that previously took the argument about BTC mining being "not environmentally damaging" etc. - I'm pretty sure Elon just gave you all a big:
giphy2.gif


elon-btc.jpg
 
I, for one, am glad Elon came out with this statement. He has effectively moved the debate from bitcoin vs banking or gold to bitcoin vs crypto that are substantially more energy efficient. This is a better framing. I believe the world will increasingly rely on cryptocurrencies (multiple), but we do need to make careful choices about which cryptos are more energy efficient regardless of the source of the energy used.

I think Elon saw weakness in bitcoin. At first the framing of bitcoin vs banking seems to make sense if bitcoin is the only crypto that can succeed in the battle with fiat and traditional finance. But dogecoin demonstrates that any number of crypto competitors can challenge bitcoin's crypto ascendency. Once you realize that bitcoin need not be the dominant crypto, it becomes an open battle of crypto vs crypto. Tesla cannot in good faith to its mission side with the least energy efficient crypto on the market.

Bye bye, bitcoin.
 
I've seen some confusion on why Elon seemed to change his mind on BTC when it's conventional knowledge that mining is energy intensive and can sometimes be powered by coal/oil.

I think it's fair to assume that Elon doesn't take any "conventional knowledge" for granted without verifying it. And we know Tesla had been operating their own nodes to verify transactions. So I think it's likely he saw firsthand how much power their nodes were consuming and made his decision off of that.
 
I've seen some confusion on why Elon seemed to change his mind on BTC when it's conventional knowledge that mining is energy intensive and can sometimes be powered by coal/oil.

I think it's fair to assume that Elon doesn't take any "conventional knowledge" for granted without verifying it. And we know Tesla had been operating their own nodes to verify transactions. So I think it's likely he saw firsthand how much power their nodes were consuming and made his decision off of that.
I agree. I think Tesla took a hands-on, deep dive into the whole bitcoin technology. I do suspect they were looking for ways Teala could participate and make it better. A lot of bitcoinists and other are calling foul on what they perceive as caprious and even manipulative behavior. But in my experience observing Musk for many years, I think he and Tesla took an honest interest and were disappointed to see just how difficult the challenge is to make bitcoin more efficient.

Indeed, the message sent was pretty clear: if bitcoin wants to be taken seriously as currency for global commerce, it needs to cut its power consumption by 99% to be in league with many other cryptocurrencies that use less than 1% as much energy per transaction. The problem for bitcoin is in its own polity. Bitcoiners must be willing to change the protocol to achieve this 99% power reduction. Bitcoinist, however, are stubbornly committed to its bruteforce proof of work. It has become an essential part of the bitcoin brand. Few individuals can challenge bitcoinist the way Elon has. They have to decide if they are willing to change protocol to be taken seriously by global corporations. Indeed the ESG movement it pretty much forcing corporations not to touch bitcoin on environmental grounds. Tesla shareholders certainly do not benefit when Tesla lose ESG points on account of bitcoin. So bitcoin needs to get with the ESG agenda, if it wants to be taken seriously by corporations.

My expectation is that the bitcoinist are too entrenched in the current PoW protocol to make the necessary changes. So I'm expecting that corporate treasury thesis will fall apart. I expect that Tesla will play a key role in anointing the ESG-compliant successor to bitcoin.
 
I agree. I think Tesla took a hands-on, deep dive into the whole bitcoin technology. I do suspect they were looking for ways Teala could participate and make it better. A lot of bitcoinists and other are calling foul on what they perceive as caprious and even manipulative behavior. But in my experience observing Musk for many years, I think he and Tesla took an honest interest and were disappointed to see just how difficult the challenge is to make bitcoin more efficient.

Indeed, the message sent was pretty clear: if bitcoin wants to be taken seriously as currency for global commerce, it needs to cut its power consumption by 99% to be in league with many other cryptocurrencies that use less than 1% as much energy per transaction. The problem for bitcoin is in its own polity. Bitcoiners must be willing to change the protocol to achieve this 99% power reduction. Bitcoinist, however, are stubbornly committed to its bruteforce proof of work. It has become an essential part of the bitcoin brand. Few individuals can challenge bitcoinist the way Elon has. They have to decide if they are willing to change protocol to be taken seriously by global corporations. Indeed the ESG movement it pretty much forcing corporations not to touch bitcoin on environmental grounds. Tesla shareholders certainly do not benefit when Tesla lose ESG points on account of bitcoin. So bitcoin needs to get with the ESG agenda, if it wants to be taken seriously by corporations.

My expectation is that the bitcoinist are too entrenched in the current PoW protocol to make the necessary changes. So I'm expecting that corporate treasury thesis will fall apart. I expect that Tesla will play a key role in anointing the ESG-compliant successor to bitcoin.
I'm just guessing here, but I think Elon somehow likes prook-of-work. His mind is capable of resolving differential equation real time (I read that somewhere) so he's always busy projecting things. My wild guess is that he sees a small probability of Tesla chips (Dojo? or even cars?) mining in the future. If it's cars, it's a huuuge distributed computing powerforce. Probably, they finally convinced him that proof of work is not fixable, that brute force is exponentially costly in terms of energy. I also think that Hiro Mizuno and others more ESG-oriented told him that this Bitcoin craze was hurting the mission.

Let's see what the future holds, but I'm quite sure this is not the end of the Tesla-crypto saga.
 
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It depends on the coin you're mining. A couple years back, i built a rig based on AMD Radeon Vega 64 cards that mined XMR (Monero) and several other similar coins at a rate and power efficiency level that was absolutely untouchable by any nVidia card. it just depends on the underlying algorithm.

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I'm glad Tesla has suspended its Bitcoin transactions. I have nothing against Bitcoin as a technology or a store of value, but it *IS* uniquely contrary to Tesla's stated mission of sustainability. I don't love the erratic swerving of direction, but I am glad they are now doing the right thing.
Thanks @Pezpunk for your *****informed****** take on Bitcoin, a lot of us (me included) tend to talk about things we don't actually now.

The wording of the Tesla statement "<1% of Bitcoin's energy/transaction" makes me wonder if finally they are looking at proof-of-stake coins - they usually state they are 99% more energy efficient than Proof of Work. Look how it did not use the word "mining"...

I think that in some sense Elon likes proof of work (he's got a fleet of CPUs with wheels, and a lot of computing power in-house) but I also guess he thought proof-of-work to be fixable... Which very probably is not. I'll let the expert discuss about this.

So proof-of-stake coins are the next possible scenario. There are a bunch: ETH2 in 2022, Cardano, Algorand, Tezos, etc... I personally own a few of them, with my personal preference for Cardano.
This would cut out Bitcoin and Doge, because they won't change.
 
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Thanks @Pezpunk for your *****informed****** take on Bitcoin, a lot of us (me included) tend to talk about things we don't actually now.

The wording of the Tesla statement "<1% of Bitcoin's energy/transaction" makes me wonder if finally they are looking at proof-of-stake coins - they usually state they are 99% more energy efficient than Proof of Work. Look how it did not use the word "mining"...

I think that in some sense Elon likes proof of work (he's got a fleet of CPUs with wheels, and a lot of computing power in-house) but I also guess he thought proof-of-work to be fixable... Which very probably is not. I'll let the expert discuss about this.

So proof-of-stake coins are the next possible scenario. There are a bunch: ETH2 in 2022, Cardano, Algorand, Tezos, etc... I personally own a few of them, with my personal preference for Cardano.
This would cut out Bitcoin and Doge, because they won't change.
Thanks!
Anyone with experience mining or staking feel like offering a ELI5 explanation of the differences between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, and why one (staking) is just that much more efficient?
 
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Thanks!
Anyone with experience mining or staking feel like offering a ELI5 explanation of the differences between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, and why one (staking) is just that much more efficient?
I'm not able to do that, sorry.
I can do a ELI2 explanation: PoW is based on solving puzzles. Very very complicated puzzles, so the computers need to be really big! And they consume a lot of energy.
PoS is another system entirely. It basically asks a lot of coin hodlers to verify the transaction: no puzzles involved. What's nice is that as a hodler you get a lot of interest on your coin. The more it sits there, the more it earns.
 
Thanks!
Anyone with experience mining or staking feel like offering a ELI5 explanation of the differences between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, and why one (staking) is just that much more efficient?
Bitcoin’s main innovation was solving the Byzantine Generals Problem, how to reach consensus about transactions and to prevent double spend. Satoshi solved it using compute to solve an increasingly difficult hashing problem which is solved in average every 10minutes. If you find a solution to the hashing problem you publish your solution, if there are different solutions competing then the chain with most compute is considered consensus. This is called Proof of Work, PoW. To generate so much compute takes a lot of energy.

Since then people have had some time to think about how to solve the Byzantine Generals Problems.

Another way to reach consensus is to let people stake currency and based on how much they stake they are more likely to be the winner of a lottery. If you agree with the majority you get to keep your winning, if you don‘t then lose your winnings. This is called Proof of Stake, PoS

PoW
Pros: works, is tested, has lot of users
Cons: Is slow, cost a lot of energy

PoS
Pros: fast, consumes a lot less energy
Cons: less tested, challenges remains to be solved for some implementations, current implementations has few users

Most likely ETH will implement their next generation PoS 2021-2022. This will cut down on energy. When this is done, there are scaling solutions that can be added to reach very high transactions per second. Imo it seems likely that Bitcoin will remain a store of value, while ethereum, either as eth or using tokens, will be the chain with most real world transactions. This for use as currency, but also for other applications such as database, complex contracts, decentralized autonomous corporations, resource management etc.

There are blockchains already using PoS, like IOTA. They don’t have very much volume at the moment and I doubt they will overtake Ethereum before Ethereum 2.0 with PoS is released. There are also centralized solution such as XRP, but they are not crypto currency and imo more likely to replace SWIFT than to create currency 2.0 or web 3.0.
 
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This is turning into a crypto thread and we will get the mods angry and start to delete posts, which they definitely should to maintain order here.

But, don’t look at a movement in a crypto token with ~billion market cap, that is controlled by whales and a good marketing strategy. They control the narrative, they know people will say exactly what you said if they see it pamping now, when everything is damping. Just look at the tech, that’s what’s important. Always.
We should probably get out of Doge before the Marshall arrives.