Crypto Journey

Wow, so this popped (free WSJ article) into my newsfeed today.

It's basically a URL with emojis, and people are paying thousands (and in some cases hundreds of thousands) of dollars to own one.

Even Michael Arrington, founder of Techcrunch, spent some serious money.

Investor Michael Arrington, who also has a stake in Yat Labs, says he recently spent $200,000 of his asset-management firm’s money on Rocket-Moon. Taking a rocket to the moon is a common refrain in the cryptocurrency world, and Mr. Arrington wanted to use the Yat as a branding tool for his Seattle-based firm, Arrington XRP Capital. Because users can’t buy one- or two-character combinations directly on the site, the only way he could purchase Rocket-Moon was by participating in a virtual auction hosted by Yat Labs.

If this Reddit post is true, this is a huge concern. CDC is a huge CEX and this would cause some softness to confidence.. but so far not seeing this affect crypto prices. 

From Crypto.com's Twitter:

We have a small number of users reporting suspicious activity on their accounts.

We will be pausing withdrawals shortly, as our team is investigating. All funds are safe.

— Crypto.com (@cryptocom) January 17, 2022

I just made a transfer using the new Taproot address and my experience was fantastic. Cost $0.31 to send and 1x confirmed in under 20 mins. 

I started staking Solana today. It's not easy or intuitive as one might think: you need to pick a validator, which there are many, to stake with. How do you pick a validator? There are many attributes such as voting, uptime, commission rate, etc. A website that is useful is Solana Beach (https://solanabeach.io/validators) which ranks the validators based on a "score" -- the top 20 are blanked out because the website wants new users to stake with others to reduce the reliance on a few validators. 

That is how I stumbled upon the Nakamoto Coefficient which is a measurement of how decentralized a crypto is relative to the total number of miners / validators. 

This website has a great summary of it. 

What is the Nakamoto Coefficient?

As the wave of adoption in decentralized blockchains continues, it is important we pay attention to how decentralized these blockchains are. One metric to gauge the decentralized nature of a blockchain would be the Nakamoto Coefficient. The Nakamoto Coefficient represents the number of validators (nodes) that would have to collude together to successfully slow down or block any respective blockchain from functioning properly. The higher the Nakamoto Coefficient relative to the total number of validators, the lower the risk of collusion disrupting a decentralized blockchain.

I read Fred Wilson's post about buying crypto assets and a few names were new to me. I haven't heard of Arweave before but their website gives away free tokens for new users. So I gave it a shot and now have archived my first website. You can find my Archived website that is permanently stored in the blockchain.

The process to setup was super simple. You can try it yourself too. Let me know your thoughts and what future potential you think this token has.

I added some links to the sidebar. I hope you like them. Most are about tracking crypto activities. Please let me know what others you would like to see on the sidebar.

Wow, I don't think I would've imagined seeing Bitcoin being used at a mainstream consumer retailer. 

The more I read about Bitcoin, the more excited I get. It started as a simple idea / project among a small group of users and today, the entire Bitcoin network consumes more electricity than some countries! Impressive for something that is so "young" relative to other projects that have touched so many lives. 

If it took Bitcoin a decade to consume this much electricity, imagine what the next decade will hold. Could Bitcoin be the driving force to use more green, renewable energy? It would be such a turn of events if in ten years most of the electricity that is being used for mining comes from solar, wind or other forms of renewables. 

That usage, which is close to half-a-percent of all the electricity consumed in the world, has increased about tenfold in just the past five years

Link to NYT article (free)

This is really exciting for Ethereum. I think this is positive and we'll see the price increase by year end. Today ETH is about $2,700. There are only about 12 hours left before this is implemented. 

Learn more about the upgrade from Coinbase here

Check out the countdown to the upgrade here

Just received the below. Enjoy!