Libre Blockchain

2021-05-14 05:34:25 Those Looking to Make Money Should Start Doing Serious Research on Fundamentals

Most people that subscribe to this channel probably have some financial interest in this space related to investing.

That's fine. This is 'cryptocurrency' - so any purist that scolds you for being purely interested in enriching yourself by investing in this technology is a fucking idiot and you should dismiss them as such.

You have every right to be solely focused and interested in financially enriching yourself in this space.

However

In the future moving forward, doing so is going to require that you start seriously probing into this space.

This channel and others that are created under the 'Librehash' flagship are designed to help guide you in the right direction, but ultimately you will have to enter that rabbithole yourself.

As things stand currently, there's too much "noise" in this industry (and in finance, in general), to simply turn on the TV to CNBC or read through CoinDesk articles and consider yourself informed enough to make intelligent investment decisions.

You're going to have to dig for some information yourself, read things directly, and perhaps even get acquainted with some concepts you've never been introduced to before if you want to continue to have an 'edge' on the markets and remain profitable.

This channel won't preach to you that the "mainstream is evil", but you should know that CoinDesk, Coinbase, Binance, etc., are for-profit businesses that operate with the goal of churning profit. Nothing wrong with that. But realize that there's no room in that equation to make sure that you "get rich too".

You Might Profit By Coincidence

Again, this channel is NOT** saying you should uniformly distrust all major sources of information & projects, but you should realize that the goal here is for the backers of these entities to profit or get a high return on their investment.

For that to happen, someone needs to buy whatever they got for more than they paid for it. If you manage to get a slice early enough, you may be on the same gravy train.

But understand that you're likely not on that train because every slice you do get is one less piece on their plates. You're beng marketed to, to create demand so that profit can be made.

Always keep this in mind. Detach yourself from the emotional arguments being made in this space and ruthlessly consider your own self-interest if you're an investor. Get rich first, then save the world if that's what you're here for. But don't try to intermingle righteous ideas with investment. You'll go broke. Open / Comment

2021-05-14 05:24:03 "Caring About the Tech" is the Future Pathway to Profit

If you said you 'cared about the tech' back in 2017, you would've looked like an idiot.

You didn't need to really care at that point. People were content to accept ideas, theories and wild promises about what blockchain would be able to do.

But now we're at an inflection point.

Governments understand blockchain. Researchers understand it too. The general public is gaining a much better grasp of how this technology is supposed to work.

Blockchain is also something that can't be ignored at this point. The richest man on planet earth was just on 'Saturday Night Live' doing skits about it. We're way past the point of getting excited that someone really influential in society has heard of Bitcoin / blockchain.

And now that we're at that point, future gains based on the idea of spreading the word to those that haven't heard about it yet and getting them excited enough to buy in is becoming increasingly less effective.

Use Cases Need to Be Genuine

By 'genuine', that means that the use case has to actually leverage blockchain technology in a way that provides a tangible benefit over other alternatives available today.

That means that you can't cook up a project where you and 20-100 other "validators" confirm everything that's processed on the ledger, purpose it specially for some niche task like product tracking or user authentication, then say, "Ta-da! Look at what blockchain is doing!"

^^^ This will still work for a little while longer, but at a certain point it will cease to be effective because if you aren't actually leveraging blockchain technology as it was conceived by Satoshi in the Abstract of the Bitcoin whitepaper, then your project will never provide those benefits.

You may fool people for a little while, but sooner or later you'll run into issues like the 'Binance Smart Chain' and others are having right now.

Goal isn't to Compete With Visa

Visa can do what it does (millions of TXs/second) because they operate, monitor and clear their own ledger.

That's the tradeoff.

The benefits of blockchain can only be actualized if the blockchain in question is truly built and operated as a TRUSTLESS, (decentralized and distributed) piece of open source technology that's backed by a legitimately open, documented merit-based process to dictate how new code is merged into the source.

Bitcoin met those requirements at one point in time. At this point, it no longer does - specifically at the part where the coding process should be open, merit-based and devoid of agendas that deviate from the core goal of improving the software in a way that provides the greatest benefit to the greatest number of users.

Community Feedback Should Be in the Form of Suggestions - Not Code Decisions

For example, if you hate the high fees on Bitcoin, that's where you need to chime in at. But it isn't your responsibility to become a full-time programmer and adjudicate decisions on complex proposals like Taproot.

There are well enough professionals and experts in the world that can dig into code and dissect the benefits / drawbacks of decisions. But Blockstream does not allow that to happen. And ultimately, this hurts and stunts Bitcoin's growth. Open / Comment

2021-05-14 05:12:19 This Channel is Not Anti-Blockstream, Bitcoin or Crypto

Blockstream is criticized frequently on here because this channel cares about Bitcoin. This is a crypto-focused channel, so it would be a bit weird for us to be obsessively covering crypto without some sort of interest in the space.

Criticism is Necessary

This sort of ties into the theory behind why 'open source', 'decentralization', etc., are touted as favorable features for an ecosystem or project.

The idea is that these characteristics give us a window into what's really going on behind-the-scenes as well as the reassurance that the project in question is being fairly provisioned.

But that just speaks to the 'decentralization' aspect.

The open source aspect is favorable because it provides a pathway for community participation. Microsoft's source code is closed. So you don't have the ability to tinker with the source code and you certainly can't augment it and publish those changes publicly without a legion of lawyers descending upon you.

Bitcoin is Unique Due to the Conditions Upon Which it Was Created

Never again will someone be able to spring up with an idea that operates on the same principles as Bitcoin and benefit from such an organic, curious intellectual online community in the same way that Satoshi did.

That makes Bitcoin a unicorn and something to take seriously.

At the same time, despite its wild success since birth, we can't fall asleep at the wheel and assume that its simply destined for greatness.

The work that Satoshi and others did in 2008, 2009, 2010 is absolutely astounding. They built the backbone of this space. And had they not busted their asses the way they did, Bitcoin would be nowhere near where it is now.

In this channel's opinion, Bitcoin has stagnated significantly over the past few years due to a gradual movement by the blockchain community away from 'getting your hands dirty' and coming up with your own setups.

This is How Exchanges and Projects Were Built

Way back before the trillion dollar valuation, we had people coding up websites and various implementations that used Bitcoin by hand.

As far as we know, Satoshi wasn't getting paid and nobody has claimed to be on Satoshi's payroll.

No VC firms were throwing billions of dollars at Bitcoin back in '08/'09, and nobody was an "expert" in blockchain because everyone was learning about it for the first time. Even Satoshi got hit with a few questions and ideas that sparked dialogue about present and future decisions that may need to be made to ensure the sustainability of the project. Open / Comment

2021-05-13 18:54:23 Cardano the Lone Wolf Recovering in the Blood Bath

Interesting.

Said many times before that Charles Hoskinson is underestimated too much in this space.

There would've never been a 'Daniel Larimer' if it weren't for Hoskinson (he's the one who connected Larimer w Bo Shen* back when they were still working on 'Bitshares').

Bo Shen is the same guy that went on to start the 'Fenbushi Group' with Vitalik after Vitalik reached out to Shen and other Asian whales in an effort to save the Ethereum Foundation from bankruptcy (do a ctrl+f search in this channel if you need references for any of this ; we've covered it too many times already).

Bigger Point to Make Here

Charles isn't a fuck up. There seems to be this idea that he's not a 'big player' or someone to take seriously in this space for some reason (maybe that's just the trolls trying to e-bully him on Twitter) — but don't believe that hype.

Cardano's trying to be here when the smoke clears.

(this isn't an endorsement of the project; doesn't matter to this channel whether you buy Cardano / never do) Open / Comment

2021-05-13 18:47:50 Yikes, looks like Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust is now trading at a -20% discount (and declining by the second).

Only Savior For Grayscale = ETF

And that's quite some ways away at this point.

Exchanges just aren't even close to legitimate in this space — all of the shenanigans with dogecoin, 'Shiba Inu' and shit like that has eradicated any plausible argument that there's any credible semblance of healthy control or influence that exchanges in this space can *and/or* will exert to ensure that things are up to snuff for the SEC Open / Comment

2021-05-12 18:56:25 Have We Discussed 'WazirX' Yet?

As if folks in India haven't been hit with enough bad news - Binance has taken it upon themselves to ensure to compound the misfortunes of anyone foolish enough to use this crypto exchange over there.

Here's a full write-up about that here: https://librehash.org/wazirx-another-crumbling-binance-entity/

- "But I thought that cryptocurrency in India was banned"

Not quite. And the 'ban' proposed is not an anti-crypto measure. India's economic health (especially now in light of recent events), is still more so on the fragile side of things.

Contrary to what you see in the U.S. and other nations with stronger economies, many of India's leading national banks have been forced to source their own funding from FDI (foreign direct investment) over the past few years.

This hands-off approach by the Indian gov't created a largely inconsistent, discordant financial system that screwed India in a couple of ways:

1. Weak financial institutions in certain regions / areas have severely limited the financial options available to affected citizens in the region. In laymen's terms, you could be a brilliant developer, innovator, etc., but that may all be for naught if the major financial institution in your region is incapable of providing a substantive loan / other advanced financial management options one may need to take things to the 'next level'. For those that live in countries not impacted by this issue, this is sometimes a "perk" of one's national banking system that's taken for granted.

2. Many financial institutions in India are not weak due to incompetency, but rather a lack of support from the national government in years past. If you're a U.S. citizen, then you likely remember the sweeping measures the Federal Reserve passed in the aftermath of the '07/'08 Recession as well as the March '20 market panic. These measures largely saved the American economy from an inevitable fate of doom. Many major financial institutions in India have had to seek outside investment to compensate for the lack of superfluous funding from the national core itself. But even this proves difficult as many foreign investors are hesitant to spend substantial sums of money within the Indian market (in some regions) without a guarantee of strong infrastructural support by the gov't itself.

India's Crypto Stance is Part of a Wider Recalibration of the Nation's Financial Ecosystem

All of this is written from the perspective of someone that is not a citizen of the state of India (so take it with a grain of salt) - but research gives the impression that India has taken great strides over the past few years to rectify some of these errors in judgment to ensure that the nation is in a position to be a major competing force before the end of the next quarter century (2025-2050).

The talent, education, and innovation are obviously there - its just a matter of harnessing that potential, which is easier said than done.

No nation is perfect by any means and, to an increasing extent, we're all tied to one another in some way by virtue of globalization, technology propagation, etc. Open / Comment

2021-05-12 18:41:55 Review on 'Shiba Inu' Completed That will be published in here soon. Didn't delve into the whitepaper - there was enough information outside of the project to adjudicate its likely merits. There have been many that have asked for a* quick rundown on… Open / Comment

2021-05-12 17:53:20 Review on 'Shiba Inu' Completed

That will be published in here soon.

Didn't delve into the whitepaper - there was enough information outside of the project to adjudicate its likely merits.

There have been many that have asked for a* quick rundown on what this project is about.

Could be wrong - but from a distance this is a DeFi project that appears to leverage 'Elastic Finance' (i.e., "symmetric rebasing") to adjust the total circulating supply of the asset periodically to target a certain price range (hence the bold claim on its site that it will be a "DOGECOIN KILLER", despite dogecoin never being "alive" at any point, so to speak).

Whether this is what they're doing or not though is neither here nor there, because there are too many red flags with this project. We'll get to all of them really soon. Open / Comment

2021-05-12 17:49:56 Vast Majority of 'Exploits' Are Developer Honeypots

Probably 95% or more. Especially at this point.

And the reason why there's emphasis on this definitely being the case now is because there are only so many different ways to screw in a lightbulb. Most of these projects are utilizing the same boilerplate / template smart contract code.

Its been a while since a novel exploit has occurred (i.e., one that involves an unprecedented / never-before-seen method of execution).

If you're stitching together a smart contract (for whatever reason), its usually par for course to do a little homework and see what pitfalls (if any) your predecessors have fallen victim to.

OpenZeppelin and Consensys actually do a phenomenal job at making sure that their documentation is up-to-date, staffing their Discord & TG channels with devs that can respond to you within a reasonable time frame & providing a neverending stream of resources to assist devs with constructing these smart contracts.

As They Say

"Fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice....c-can't get fooled again." Open / Comment

2021-05-12 17:44:50 ​​Looks like xToken got exploited. Around $25M drained. According to the recent xToken tweet “Minting on all contracts has been paused as we investigate reports” Open / Comment