You must not understand the value of open source.
The code is open source to make it as good as can be. From there drawing it in and closing it up is a non issue.
Controlling other contenders is trivial when you own the system.
Just use a different cryptocurrency. There are several that are more decentralized than bitcoin just by measuring Nakamoto coefficient (or also called Minimum Attack Vector) alone.
If validators aren't your problem and instead it's the amount owned by elites, then look at cryptocurrencies with little VC backing that is still bought into that crypto.
If you think the system is rigged and you have a better way, fork another project like bitcoin/ethereum/cardano/etc and make your own blockchain with the new implementation that makes it better. Costs very little to do that but you'll only convince people to invest if you actually bring something new to the table that people find valuable and worthy.
Apologies for the late reply, I wrote a post earlier and something happened with the internet connection and everything was lost before being posted. I became depressed and made me some eggs.
What other metrics or indicators would you look at when assessing a given blockchain?
There are several metrics other than price to look at both for long term investors and short term day traders who may look at metrics like the Relative Strength Index. For me when looking at a layer 1 blockchain, I like to look at long term metrics like how much development activity is happening on the core code (Github commits to measure) and # of (useful) projects that are developing on the blockchain. No matter what if the price is up or down, if there is no one developing on it then it is essentially a dead project that'll go to zero at some point. What gives real value is the number of people using that blockchain for real life improvements. In lower market cap projects I would also look at development activity (Github commits & # of projects developing) in ratio to number of devs on their team.
Other good indicators is to look at 30 day transaction volume (coinmarketcap and coingecko should take care of this), 30 day NFT Volume (if they're active in that space), total value locked in DeFi (there was a great etc.
EDIT:
Mentions of Terra Luna in Messari’s “crypto theses for 2022” report: 55
Mentions of Cardano in Messari’s “crypto theses for 2022” report: 2
Be aware of extreme bias in the crypto community even in metrics websites and especially in journalistic/media sites. I am pretty biased to Cardano but I just see so many strengths there that are either not being reported or covered up with lies. I did my research, looked at all the top projects and this is my choice for the strongest project. People are waiting for the DeFi projects to roll out on Cardano, that is where I think it's going to get real good.
Given that, Messari and DefiLlama are other crypto metric sites many people use.
https://cryptoslam.io/ is a great website to look at NFT sales volume but they are very obviously missing Cardano NFT sales volume which would be #3 if included in their 30 day charts. If you notice, it is also only -20% in 30 day NFT sales volume compared to top 3 on Cryptoslam.io: Ethereum (-74%), Solana (-71%), BSC (-79%).
Another important indicator for me is how transparent that blockchain is in terms of development, roadmap, and projects developing. Can they give short and simple explanations as well as long and thought out explanations on the same topic? How big of a community of communicators do they have? Is their code open source? Is code being audited?
Red flags for me are projects that don't meet their roadmap goals after given ample amount of time. Here is a video with Vitalik Buterin announcing that by 2016 ETH 2.0 will be running proof of stake.
6 years later Ethereum is still working on moving to proof of stake and they just suffered a 7 block reorg in their inital testnet for the merge. A block reorg is when the blocks in the blockchain get out of time alignment meaning the ledger is giving faulty information about when a transaction was made (definitely not good)
Ethereum Beacon Chain Suffers Longest Blockchain 'Reorg' in Years
Decentralization is absolutely worth pursuing because it takes much more entropy and time to destroy it. Take a look at this genius episode from a kids show from over 20 years ago to see what happens to an asset when it becomes completely centralized in hands of a few compared to the many. When an asset is completely controlled by a few people and everyone else sees it, the masses begin to reject that asset.
Solana is one of those projects that is more centralized and the devs shut down their blockchain every other week to make "fixes" on it. This means they shut down all transaction activity on the blockchain and they ultimately control your ability to make transactions. That is a HUGE deal and imo nobody should ever have that kind of power. They also magically made Solana appear on the blockchain about a year ago on their first blockchain shutdown, idk why people forgot that. All it takes is one of the devs to go rogue and things could get really bad for Solana holders. Not to mention the recent DAO vote on their Solend project to take control and liquidate a wallet that was about to sell $180 million of Solana which would dump Solana price. The deciding vote was a wallet of $700k and took 80% of the vote. See how important decentralization is? The next day after the results were announced the devs held another "vote" to undo the previous vote of taking over the wallet and undid the previous voters. Pretty hypocritical if you ask me and not a safe place to invest.
Also, what are your thoughts on stablecoins? Algorithmic vs fiat pegs etc.
Tether is going to lose its market cap, USDC will eventually take its place as the top stablecoin. The question is how fast will Tether lose its market cap? Also how much market cap is lost in the crypto community if Tether runs out of "dollar equivalent assets" before its actual market cap goes to $0.
The problem with this $13B liquidation though, originates at the source of this report published by Tether, stating that only 2.94% of its reserves are in cash. The pie chart in that document is a bit misleading -- it says 3.87%, but it is 3.87% of the 75.85% category of "Cash & Cash Equivalents & Other Short Term Deposits & Commercial Paper."
That report was published on March 31, 2021. At that time, the market cap of Tether was ~$62B (see chart below). 2.94% of that is $1.8B. We can also play out a second scenario: assume the cash reserves grew in tandem with the market cap. If that's the case, then at $83B, $2.4B would be in cash reserve.
Tether Claims 'Coordinated' Conspiracy Is Trying to Take It Down
USD Coin (USDC) is a digital stablecoin that is pegged to the United States dollar. USD Coin is managed by a consortium called Centre,[1] which was founded by Circle and includes members from the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase [2] and Bitcoin mining company Bitmain,[3] an investor in Circle.[4] USDC is issued by a private entity and should not be confused with a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
I still need to do more research into them and how things can be affected if say Coinbase flops and/or the price of Bitcoin drops further pushing Bitmain out of business as well. These entities "manage" USDC but to what extent can they control my USDC and transactions?
As far as algorithmic stablecoins go, I would look into AgeUSD protocol (this is a stablecoin design but not an actual stablecoin) and specifically look at SigmaUSD stablecoin that is using the AgeUSD protocol.
It is complicated but once you understand it, it's not that bad and it seems to be built much sturdier than the other algorithmic stablecoins that have failed recently like Luna (I remember somebody trying to get me into it and I kept asking what that 20% APY was backed by).
SigmaUSD is an algorithmic stablecoin project on a smaller market cap blockchain called Ergo that has never depegged throughout this bull and bear market even with Ergo taking big dips. The stable coin is over-collateralized by the underlying asset (ERG on SigmaUSD protocol). The price of the underlying asset (ERG) would have to drop over 75% in a very short time (like an hour or less) to actually begin depegging the stablecoin. Anything longer than that and people flooding into the Reserve Token will be making some good money from the SigmaUSD protocol fees. The price of Ergo is listed on the blockchain in real time by the Ergo Oracle.
Redeeming of SigRSV for ERG or Djed on Cardano can only occur when the reserve ratio is greater than 400%.
In a short answer for how to make money on this, if you're shorting Ergo price to go down in the future, you buy the stablecoin SigUSD and if the price of Ergo goes down you get back more Ergo when cashing out of the stablecoin. Likewise, if you're longing Ergo you can buy the reserve token SRV and if the price of Ergo increases further you cash out your SRV for more Ergo. It's actually a little more complicated than that since if Ergo price falls to the point SigUSD is lower than 400% overcollateralized to SigRSV, then people locking in ERGO for SigRSV tokens get exponentially more rewards in users fees as the price of Ergo goes lower. This is a reward mechanism to get people to buy more reserve tokens to get the SigUSD overcollateralized again (Which is why if even Ergo fell 75% in price in one day, other people would be too greedy buying SigRSV to let the stablecoin get depegged).
It was exhausting when I was first trying to understand SigUSD stablecoin and I know this is already information overload but I'm gonna dump some more links for you to come back to:
How would've Ergo's SigmaUSD held up with the whole LUNA Fiasco?
SigUSD is over-collateralised, every sigusd is backed by 3$ currently. Everyone can see that there is money in the bank. This stops a bank run at its inception. The breaking point of the peg is explicit and open for anyone to see. With UST, you have no idea, which gives you an incentive to get out first.
Luna supply depends on terra usage, Ergo does not. Burning luna when trend is up, pumps its price. However, when trend is down, luna price will dump harder, because more luna is printed.
collateral ratio for sigusd is higher. This means that the capital efficiency (less collateral tied for each stablecoin) is better for terra. That is why luna/terra can offer better yield.
However, this means that luna/terra needs an additional mechanism to ensure stability...
lol, again, this is just a tool used to manipulate people coupled with a desire to enhance the related technology, you can get on the wave and ride or not your call.
This fable that you can become the next bitcoin or what have you is a function of riding the wave. The point is that when the chips are down the only currencies accepted are the ones that will be allowed, the others will be hunted to extinction.
Person-to-Person transactions traded with food/resources/services/etc can't be tracked so easily. If everyone gave up on the dollar, made new wallets, and just started doing person-to-person transactions with crypto, the government wouldn't be able to monitor it.
Also it's not about becoming the next Bitcoin, it's about giving people control of their own financial wealth. New innovations are coming out all the time and it'll only be so long till Bitcoin loses the market share of crypto. Government won't be able to take your crypto unless you give to them. No amount of threats and abuse can force them to take it from you, you have to give them the keys to your wallet to take your crypto. On the other hand, bank accounts can be taken all the time, money and gold is much easier to find as well than a single piece of paper with your keys on it hidden somewhere in the world.
HarmonyONE is not Bitcoin and the developers were warned months ago about this hack specifically the way it happened and they did nothing about it. This is another Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bridge hack. You will find most hacks in cryptocurrency involve Ethereum in some way or another. That is because the programming language they made up for smart contracts, Solidity, is highly expressible along the lines of Javacript but also highly open to exploits. Because there are more things that you can do on Solidity, there are more doors to open for hackers. Many top cryptocurrency blockchains right now are copies of the Ethereum blockchain architecture and set up. When a hack happens in one, similar hacks can happen in other similar blockchain and it's all a matter of how well the devs did to secure the network.
The hack is no different to what occurred with [Ethereum] Ronin network. 2 out 4 wallets were compromised to make transactions to unlock tokens on Ethereum side. But it was angrier that the exploit was warned in April, but the Harmony team didn't give a shit.
Bitcoin on the other hand runs on a functional programming language. It is very tight and doesn't leave room for bugs and exploits. This is both their greatest strength and weakness because they won't be able to run smart contracts but you won't find any hacks on the Bitcoin network.
Morale of the story, if you don't want hacks and want secure money, don't use Ethereum copies. Look for cryptocurrency blockchains that run on functional programming languages like Bitcoin or Cardano (which unlike Bitcoin can do smart contracts and still has never been compromised while maintaining a top 10 position for years).
Blockchains are a very simple data structure, few people could get it wrong, even if they tried hard. The dollar and most other western fiat currencies has been digital for decades too, just just haven't realized because the user interface has been slips of paper, checks or plastic cards which to you looks physical, while in the back end everything happens digitally.
Then the code wouldn't have been open source and spurred innovation into a new industry.
You must not understand the value of open source. The code is open source to make it as good as can be. From there drawing it in and closing it up is a non issue.
Controlling other contenders is trivial when you own the system.
Just use a different cryptocurrency. There are several that are more decentralized than bitcoin just by measuring Nakamoto coefficient (or also called Minimum Attack Vector) alone.
If validators aren't your problem and instead it's the amount owned by elites, then look at cryptocurrencies with little VC backing that is still bought into that crypto.
If you think the system is rigged and you have a better way, fork another project like bitcoin/ethereum/cardano/etc and make your own blockchain with the new implementation that makes it better. Costs very little to do that but you'll only convince people to invest if you actually bring something new to the table that people find valuable and worthy.
Apologies for the late reply, I wrote a post earlier and something happened with the internet connection and everything was lost before being posted. I became depressed and made me some eggs.
There are several metrics other than price to look at both for long term investors and short term day traders who may look at metrics like the Relative Strength Index. For me when looking at a layer 1 blockchain, I like to look at long term metrics like how much development activity is happening on the core code (Github commits to measure) and # of (useful) projects that are developing on the blockchain. No matter what if the price is up or down, if there is no one developing on it then it is essentially a dead project that'll go to zero at some point. What gives real value is the number of people using that blockchain for real life improvements. In lower market cap projects I would also look at development activity (Github commits & # of projects developing) in ratio to number of devs on their team.
Other good indicators is to look at 30 day transaction volume (coinmarketcap and coingecko should take care of this), 30 day NFT Volume (if they're active in that space), total value locked in DeFi (there was a great etc.
EDIT:
https://nitter.net/cardano_whale/status/1534849482189578241
Be aware of extreme bias in the crypto community even in metrics websites and especially in journalistic/media sites. I am pretty biased to Cardano but I just see so many strengths there that are either not being reported or covered up with lies. I did my research, looked at all the top projects and this is my choice for the strongest project. People are waiting for the DeFi projects to roll out on Cardano, that is where I think it's going to get real good.
Given that, Messari and DefiLlama are other crypto metric sites many people use.
https://cryptoslam.io/ is a great website to look at NFT sales volume but they are very obviously missing Cardano NFT sales volume which would be #3 if included in their 30 day charts. If you notice, it is also only -20% in 30 day NFT sales volume compared to top 3 on Cryptoslam.io: Ethereum (-74%), Solana (-71%), BSC (-79%).
https://opencnft.io/market-overview#trend
https://www.cnftjungle.io/statistics
Another important indicator for me is how transparent that blockchain is in terms of development, roadmap, and projects developing. Can they give short and simple explanations as well as long and thought out explanations on the same topic? How big of a community of communicators do they have? Is their code open source? Is code being audited?
Red flags for me are projects that don't meet their roadmap goals after given ample amount of time. Here is a video with Vitalik Buterin announcing that by 2016 ETH 2.0 will be running proof of stake.
https://files.catbox.moe/uea6n1.mp4
6 years later Ethereum is still working on moving to proof of stake and they just suffered a 7 block reorg in their inital testnet for the merge. A block reorg is when the blocks in the blockchain get out of time alignment meaning the ledger is giving faulty information about when a transaction was made (definitely not good)
Ethereum Beacon Chain Suffers Longest Blockchain 'Reorg' in Years
https://decrypt.co/101390/ethereum-beacon-chain-blockchain-reorg
Visualising the 7-block reorg on the Ethereum beacon chain
https://barnabe.substack.com/p/pos-ethereum-reorg?s=r
Decentralization is absolutely worth pursuing because it takes much more entropy and time to destroy it. Take a look at this genius episode from a kids show from over 20 years ago to see what happens to an asset when it becomes completely centralized in hands of a few compared to the many. When an asset is completely controlled by a few people and everyone else sees it, the masses begin to reject that asset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7WPeUpcBlg
Solana is one of those projects that is more centralized and the devs shut down their blockchain every other week to make "fixes" on it. This means they shut down all transaction activity on the blockchain and they ultimately control your ability to make transactions. That is a HUGE deal and imo nobody should ever have that kind of power. They also magically made Solana appear on the blockchain about a year ago on their first blockchain shutdown, idk why people forgot that. All it takes is one of the devs to go rogue and things could get really bad for Solana holders. Not to mention the recent DAO vote on their Solend project to take control and liquidate a wallet that was about to sell $180 million of Solana which would dump Solana price. The deciding vote was a wallet of $700k and took 80% of the vote. See how important decentralization is? The next day after the results were announced the devs held another "vote" to undo the previous vote of taking over the wallet and undid the previous voters. Pretty hypocritical if you ask me and not a safe place to invest.
Tether is going to lose its market cap, USDC will eventually take its place as the top stablecoin. The question is how fast will Tether lose its market cap? Also how much market cap is lost in the crypto community if Tether runs out of "dollar equivalent assets" before its actual market cap goes to $0.
Opinion: collapse of USDT
https://archive.ph/krSEF
https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/4EtXPBkmEPDNbIHNajz9vQ/bb4766acfe36f5af0c4e54a2694c8a31/tether-march-31-2021-reserves-breakdown.pdf
Tether Claims 'Coordinated' Conspiracy Is Trying to Take It Down
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxnq8b/tether-claims-coordinated-conspiracy-is-trying-to-take-it-down
The next question is how safe is USDC? Who created and controls USDC and are they able manipulate my USDC coins/transactions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USD_Coin
I still need to do more research into them and how things can be affected if say Coinbase flops and/or the price of Bitcoin drops further pushing Bitmain out of business as well. These entities "manage" USDC but to what extent can they control my USDC and transactions?
As far as algorithmic stablecoins go, I would look into AgeUSD protocol (this is a stablecoin design but not an actual stablecoin) and specifically look at SigmaUSD stablecoin that is using the AgeUSD protocol.
https://github.com/Emurgo/age-usd
It is complicated but once you understand it, it's not that bad and it seems to be built much sturdier than the other algorithmic stablecoins that have failed recently like Luna (I remember somebody trying to get me into it and I kept asking what that 20% APY was backed by).
How to trust a stablecoin
https://files.catbox.moe/l6xf8y.mp4
SigmaUSD is an algorithmic stablecoin project on a smaller market cap blockchain called Ergo that has never depegged throughout this bull and bear market even with Ergo taking big dips. The stable coin is over-collateralized by the underlying asset (ERG on SigmaUSD protocol). The price of the underlying asset (ERG) would have to drop over 75% in a very short time (like an hour or less) to actually begin depegging the stablecoin. Anything longer than that and people flooding into the Reserve Token will be making some good money from the SigmaUSD protocol fees. The price of Ergo is listed on the blockchain in real time by the Ergo Oracle.
Redeeming of SigRSV for ERG or Djed on Cardano can only occur when the reserve ratio is greater than 400%.
In a short answer for how to make money on this, if you're shorting Ergo price to go down in the future, you buy the stablecoin SigUSD and if the price of Ergo goes down you get back more Ergo when cashing out of the stablecoin. Likewise, if you're longing Ergo you can buy the reserve token SRV and if the price of Ergo increases further you cash out your SRV for more Ergo. It's actually a little more complicated than that since if Ergo price falls to the point SigUSD is lower than 400% overcollateralized to SigRSV, then people locking in ERGO for SigRSV tokens get exponentially more rewards in users fees as the price of Ergo goes lower. This is a reward mechanism to get people to buy more reserve tokens to get the SigUSD overcollateralized again (Which is why if even Ergo fell 75% in price in one day, other people would be too greedy buying SigRSV to let the stablecoin get depegged).
https://files.catbox.moe/40td1h.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/bosr3r.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/rge4oz.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/mte70v.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/0l3b7c.png
https://files.catbox.moe/x27p74.png
https://files.catbox.moe/utwdiv.png
https://files.catbox.moe/6mls3x.png
It was exhausting when I was first trying to understand SigUSD stablecoin and I know this is already information overload but I'm gonna dump some more links for you to come back to:
How would've Ergo's SigmaUSD held up with the whole LUNA Fiasco?
https://archive.ph/mJOC5
SigUSD is over-collateralised, every sigusd is backed by 3$ currently. Everyone can see that there is money in the bank. This stops a bank run at its inception. The breaking point of the peg is explicit and open for anyone to see. With UST, you have no idea, which gives you an incentive to get out first.
https://nitter.net/ergoplatformorg/status/1524118293476700160
https://curiaregiscrypto.medium.com/sigmausd-vs-the-competition-e70b23fe37a3
Luna supply depends on terra usage, Ergo does not. Burning luna when trend is up, pumps its price. However, when trend is down, luna price will dump harder, because more luna is printed.
collateral ratio for sigusd is higher. This means that the capital efficiency (less collateral tied for each stablecoin) is better for terra. That is why luna/terra can offer better yield.
However, this means that luna/terra needs an additional mechanism to ensure stability...
PSA: sigRSV is not a simple long position
https://www.teddit.net/r/ergonauts/comments/prxpag/psa_sigrsv_is_not_a_simple_long_position/
Noob tries to explain SigmaUSD/RSV (an attempt at an ELI5)
https://www.teddit.net/r/ergonauts/comments/nhjc1f/noob_tries_to_explain_sigmausdrsv_an_attempt_at/
lol, again, this is just a tool used to manipulate people coupled with a desire to enhance the related technology, you can get on the wave and ride or not your call.
This fable that you can become the next bitcoin or what have you is a function of riding the wave. The point is that when the chips are down the only currencies accepted are the ones that will be allowed, the others will be hunted to extinction.
Person-to-Person transactions traded with food/resources/services/etc can't be tracked so easily. If everyone gave up on the dollar, made new wallets, and just started doing person-to-person transactions with crypto, the government wouldn't be able to monitor it.
Also it's not about becoming the next Bitcoin, it's about giving people control of their own financial wealth. New innovations are coming out all the time and it'll only be so long till Bitcoin loses the market share of crypto. Government won't be able to take your crypto unless you give to them. No amount of threats and abuse can force them to take it from you, you have to give them the keys to your wallet to take your crypto. On the other hand, bank accounts can be taken all the time, money and gold is much easier to find as well than a single piece of paper with your keys on it hidden somewhere in the world.
Do you even know how to own a blockchain system like Bitcoin?
In what respect? registering it to the central digital coin authorities?
Do you know how to take control of a blockchain?
I think you're telling me you don't know shit about what you're talking about. This is the most basic of basics in understanding how blockchain works.
https://communities.win/c/ConsumeProduct/p/15IXkcviA2/hours-ago--hacker-exploits-harmo/c
By attacking the weak parts of the system. Who cares if it would take a trillion years to break your password, just choose an easier method.
HarmonyONE is not Bitcoin and the developers were warned months ago about this hack specifically the way it happened and they did nothing about it. This is another Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bridge hack. You will find most hacks in cryptocurrency involve Ethereum in some way or another. That is because the programming language they made up for smart contracts, Solidity, is highly expressible along the lines of Javacript but also highly open to exploits. Because there are more things that you can do on Solidity, there are more doors to open for hackers. Many top cryptocurrency blockchains right now are copies of the Ethereum blockchain architecture and set up. When a hack happens in one, similar hacks can happen in other similar blockchain and it's all a matter of how well the devs did to secure the network.
https://www.teddit.net/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/vjjwdt/there_was_harmony_once/
Bitcoin on the other hand runs on a functional programming language. It is very tight and doesn't leave room for bugs and exploits. This is both their greatest strength and weakness because they won't be able to run smart contracts but you won't find any hacks on the Bitcoin network.
Morale of the story, if you don't want hacks and want secure money, don't use Ethereum copies. Look for cryptocurrency blockchains that run on functional programming languages like Bitcoin or Cardano (which unlike Bitcoin can do smart contracts and still has never been compromised while maintaining a top 10 position for years).
Blockchains are a very simple data structure, few people could get it wrong, even if they tried hard. The dollar and most other western fiat currencies has been digital for decades too, just just haven't realized because the user interface has been slips of paper, checks or plastic cards which to you looks physical, while in the back end everything happens digitally.