[OPINION NEEDED] - Building a wiki-like free project about world of crypto trading/analytics
Hi! Me and a group of enthusiasts passionate about trading and cryptocurrencies have an idea to build a wiki-like free project about world of crypto trading. Now we are gathering ideas on what articles and guides to include first to help beginners to get into the world of crypto trading! We believe that well structured and consistent educational project will boost learning curve of non-experienced traders and will fill the gaps in knowledge of more proficient individuals! We have some views about what kind of information to include, but we really would like to hear ideas from different people with various levels of expertise and experience. Whenever if you only started your way into crypto trading and feeling that you miss something or you have to share some ideas based on your rich experience and - please discuss! We appreciate any posts - the more the better but would like to ask you to prioritise your ideas! Thank you and let’s make crypto trading little bit more easy to learn for everyone!
[OPINION NEEDED] - Building a wiki-like free project about world of crypto trading/analytics
Hi! Me and a group of enthusiasts passionate about trading and cryptocurrencies have an idea to build a wiki-like free project about world of crypto trading. Now we are gathering ideas on what articles and guides to include first to help beginners to get into the world of crypto trading! We believe that well structured and consistent educational project will boost learning curve of non-experienced traders and will fill the gaps in knowledge of more proficient individuals! We have some views about what kind of information to include, but we really would like to hear ideas from different people with various levels of expertise and experience. Whenever if you only started your way into crypto trading and feeling that you miss something or you have to share some ideas based on your rich experience and - please discuss! We appreciate any posts - the more the better but would like to ask you to prioritise your ideas! Thank you and let’s make crypto trading little bit more easy to learn for everyone!
The 4th way of algorithmic trading (Signal Processing)
Algorithmic trading types classified based on development perspectives: 1) Technical Analysis 2) Statistics and Probability 3) Machine Learning I took a different path which is not discussed widely in this subreddit. 4) Signal Processing I'm not a good storyteller, but this is my journey and advices for the beginners First, my background: - Electrical and Electronic engineer, - Software developer (20+ years) - Trader (5+ years) - Algorithmic trader (3+ years)
How I Found The Alpha:
Before algorithmic trading, I was somehow profitable tradeinvestor. Like most of you, when I began to algorithmic trading, I tried to find magic combination of technical indicators and parameters. Also I threw OHLCV and indicators data into the RNN for prediction. I saw that, even very simple strategies like famous moving average crossover is profitable under right market conditions with correct parameters. But you must watch it carefully and if you fell it is not working anymore, you must shut it down. It means you must be experienced trader to take care of your algorithm. I am a fulltime software developer, algorithmic trading was my side project also it became my hobby. I tried to learn everything about this industry. I watched and listened hundreds of hours of podcasts and videos in all my free time like commuting from home to work. These are the most useful to me: - Chat with traders: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdnzT5Tl6pAkATOiDsPhqcg - Top traders unplugged: https://www.youtube.com/usetoptraderslive - Ukspreadbetting: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnKPQUoCRb1Vu-qWwWituGQ Also I read plenty of academic papers, blog posts and this subreddit for inspiration. Inspiration came from my field, electronics. I will not give you much detail about it but I have developed a novel signal processing technique. It is a fast and natural technique which I couldn’t find any article or paper which mention this method. It can transform any interval price data into meaningful, tradable form. The best part is, it doesn't require any parameter and it adapts to changing market conditions intrinsically. These are the concepts that inspire me: - Information Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory - Signal Processing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_processing - ADC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog-to-digital_converter
What a Coincidence:
While googling to improve my algorithm, I found out that, Signal Processing is used by Jim Simon's Renaissance Technologies according to various sources including wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_signal_processing
Proverbs Integration:
Output of the process can be used to develop endless type of profitable strategies. I made some money with different momentum based strategies while thinking about how I can use this technique more efficiently. I like to combine different fields. I think trading and life itself have many things in common. So beside general trading concepts, I think that I can try to implement concepts of the life. Also because of the parameterless design, it's more like a decision making process than an optimization problem. I searched proverbs and advices for better decision making. I handled them one by one and thought how I could implement them in a unified strategy while preserving the parameterless design. In time, this process was significantly improved stability and reliability while it was evolving from momentum to mean reversion. These are some proverbs which I use them at various aspects of the algorithm:
- “The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.” (Japanese proverb) - "When the rainwater rises and descends down to where you want to cross, wait until it settles." (Sun-Tzu) - "If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail" (Heraclitus)
If you wonder how I implement them in the code, think about the last one; how do you define the unexpected, how to wait for it and how to prepare your algorithm to generate profit. By the way, I strongly recommend: The Art of War (Sun-Tzu)
Result:
I have plenty of ideas waiting to be tested and problems that need to be solved. Nevertheless these are the some of the backtest results, for the time being: Crypto: - Market fee and spread are considered, slippage is not. - For multiple assets testing; Survivorship bias was attempted to be eliminated using historical market rank of the assets. Data is acquired from coinmarketcap.com weekly report. ETH / BTC BNB / BTC Binance Historical Top 100 / BTC Other Markets: My main focus is crypto trading. But all the improvements are cross checked in different markets and intervals and validated empirically and logically. It can’t beat every asset and every interval but it tends to work profitably across them. https://preview.redd.it/l865fw6mjfd51.png?width=900&format=png&auto=webp&s=ff217d35637b41e26db8d7cfc3df14c3fb7ec14e Live: The algorithm is running live for over 1.5 years with evolving strategies I mention before. The last one is running for months.
Warnings and Advices:
- Bugs: A few months ago, before bedtime, I released new version for fixing small cosmetic bug and gone to sleep. When I woke up, I saw that nearly 40% of my account wiped out in a few hours. Instead of live settings, I published test settings. It was very painful. I have been coding since childhood, so everyone must be careful. I recommend, implement hard limit for stopping the algorithm. - Fully Automatic Strategy: Finding an edge is not enough. If you need fully automated trading system, you need a portfolio manager (a lot of research is going on at this field) and especially an asset selector mechanism which is maybe more important than the edge itself. If your algorithm is not be able to select which assets to trade, you must select manually. It's not an easy task and it's prone to error. I was very lucky with that: A mechanism already contained in the algorithm was used to rank and select the assets based on their momentums. - Fee-Spread: Because of the market fee and spread, trading is a negative sum game. Do not ignore it when backtesting your algorithm. - Slippage: It's really a problem for low volume assets like penny stocks and lower market cap crypto currencies. Stay away from them or play with small capital or find a way to determine how much money you can use. - Latency: Don’t think it's a HFT only problem. If your algorithm synchronize multiple assets data from the market and run calculations before sending order back to the market, you lose significant amount of time. This usually causes losses that you have not considered before, especially in a volatile environment. Also if you want to develop realtime strategy, you must seriously consider what you will do in downtime. - Datasource: This is the most important part for preparation before developing you strategy. If you don’t have good, reliable data; you cannot develop a good strategy. For free data for various market; I suggest investing.com, but you should consider that volume data is not provided. For crypto, all of the exchanges provide their real data for any asset and any interval, you can use them freely. Also you can buy data , especially if you want intraday data, but I can't suggest any because I never tested them. - Biases: Before developing algorithm, please take a look at and understand the common biases like: Survivorship bias, Look-ahead bias, Time period bias. Or you can be sure that you will face them when you go live. - Live trading: When you think your algorithm can make money, don’t wait till perfection. Go live as soon as possible with small capital to wake up from your dreams and face with the facts early. - Psychology: If your education is based on STEM and you don’t have trading experience, it’s not easy in the real world to swallow all those ups and downs that you see in minutes during backtest. It can affect your mood and your life much more than you think. I suggest, work with a professional trader or only invest what you can really afford to lose.
Last Words:
After over 3 years of journey, I have a profitable algorithm that I trust. I was supposed to lie on the beach and drink beer while my algorithm printing money. But I am consistently checking it’s health and I have always things to do like all software development projects. I posted some of the backtest results, but I don’t know are they considered P/L Porn or not. If so, I can remove it. Sorry about mysterious parts of this post. I removed some parts unwillingly before posting, but there is really a thin line between giving away your edge freely (also it means loosing it) and inspiring people to find their own way.
“Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - Seneca
EDIT:
For those engineers and EE students who are bombing my inbox for guessing what I did; I can not write all of you in private, also I want to explain it publicly. I must say, you are on the wrong way. If I open sourced the signal processing part, probably it doesnt mean anything to you and you can not turn it into a profitable algorithm. I have to clarify that; before I developed the technique, I knew what I am looking for exactly. Signal processing is not magically trading the market, I am trading the market. it's just a tool to do what is in my mind near perfectly. Also proverbs are the way of thinking. I read them and think if it means anything for trading. Lastly watch the Kung Fu Panda :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHvCQEr_ETk
You've probably been hearing a lot about Bitcoin recently and are wondering what's the big deal? Most of your questions should be answered by the resources below but if you have additional questions feel free to ask them in the comments. It all started with the release of the release of Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper however that will probably go over the head of most readers so we recommend the following videos for a good starting point for understanding how bitcoin works and a little about its long term potential:
Some other great resources include Lopp.net, the Princeton crypto series and James D'Angelo's Bitcoin 101 Blackboard series. Some excellent writing on Bitcoin's value proposition and future can be found at the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. Some Bitcoin statistics can be found here and here. Developer resources can be found here. Peer-reviewed research papers can be found here. Potential upcoming protocol improvements and scaling resources here and here. The number of times Bitcoin was declared dead by the media can be found here (LOL!)
Key properties of Bitcoin
Limited Supply - There will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins created and they are issued in a predictable fashion, you can view the inflation schedule here. Once they are all issued Bitcoin will be truly deflationary. The halving countdown can be found here.
Open source - Bitcoin code is fully auditable. You can read the source code yourself here.
Accountable - The public ledger is transparent, all transactions are seen by everyone.
Decentralized - Bitcoin is globally distributed across thousands of nodes with no single point of failure and as such can't be shut down similar to how Bittorrent works. You can even run a node on a Raspberry Pi.
Censorship resistant - No one can prevent you from interacting with the bitcoin network and no one can censor, alter or block transactions that they disagree with, see Operation Chokepoint.
Push system - There are no chargebacks in bitcoin because only the person who owns the address where the bitcoins reside has the authority to move them.
Low fee scaling - On chain transaction fees depend on network demand and how much priority you wish to assign to the transaction. Most wallets calculate on chain fees automatically but you can view current fees here and mempool activity here. On chain fees may rise occasionally due to network demand, however instant micropayments that do not require confirmations are happening via the Lightning Network, a second layer scaling solution currently rolling out on the Bitcoin mainnet.
Borderless - No country can stop it from going in/out, even in areas currently unserved by traditional banking as the ledger is globally distributed.
Trustless - Bitcoin solved the Byzantine's Generals Problem which means nobody needs to trust anybody for it to work.
Secure - Encrypted cryptographically and can’t be brute forced or confiscated with proper key management such as hardware wallets.
Programmable - Individual units of bitcoin can be programmed to transfer based on certain criteria being met
Nearly instant - From a few seconds to a few minutes depending on need for confirmations. Transactions are irreversible after one or more confirmations.
Portable - Bitcoins are digital so they are easier to move than cash or gold. They can even be transported by simply memorizing a string of words for wallet recovery (while cool this method is generally not recommended due to potential for insecure key generation by inexperienced users. Hardware wallets are the preferred method for new users due to ease of use and additional security).
Scalable - While the protocol is still being optimized for increased transaction capacity, blockchains do not scale very well, so most transaction volume is expected to occur on Layer 2 networks built on top of Bitcoin.
Divisible - Each bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimals, which means you don't have to worry about buying an entire bitcoin.
Bitcoin.org and BuyBitcoinWorldwide.com are helpful sites for beginners. You can buy or sell any amount of bitcoin (even just a few dollars worth) and there are several easy methods to purchase bitcoin with cash, credit card or bank transfer. Some of the more popular resources are below, also check out the bitcoinity exchange resources for a larger list of options for purchases.
Here is a listing of local ATMs. If you would like your paycheck automatically converted to bitcoin use Bitwage. Note: Bitcoins are valued at whatever market price people are willing to pay for them in balancing act of supply vs demand. Unlike traditional markets, bitcoin markets operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Preev is a useful site that that shows how much various denominations of bitcoin are worth in different currencies. Alternatively you can just Google "1 bitcoin in (your local currency)".
Securing your bitcoins
With bitcoin you can "Be your own bank" and personally secure your bitcoins OR you can use third party companies aka "Bitcoin banks" which will hold the bitcoins for you.
If you prefer to "Be your own bank" and have direct control over your coins without having to use a trusted third party, then you will need to create your own wallet and keep it secure. If you want easy and secure storage without having to learn computer security best practices, then a hardware wallet such as the Trezor, Ledger or ColdCard is recommended. Alternatively there are many software wallet options to choose from here depending on your use case.
If you prefer to let third party "Bitcoin banks" manage your coins, try Gemini but be aware you may not be in control of your private keys in which case you would have to ask permission to access your funds and be exposed to third party risk.
Note: For increased security, use Two Factor Authentication (2FA) everywhere it is offered, including email! 2FA requires a second confirmation code to access your account making it much harder for thieves to gain access. Google Authenticator and Authy are the two most popular 2FA services, download links are below. Make sure you create backups of your 2FA codes.
As mentioned above, Bitcoin is decentralized, which by definition means there is no official website or Twitter handle or spokesperson or CEO. However, all money attracts thieves. This combination unfortunately results in scammers running official sounding names or pretending to be an authority on YouTube or social media. Many scammers throughout the years have claimed to be the inventor of Bitcoin. Websites like bitcoin(dot)com and the btc subreddit are active scams. Almost all altcoins (shitcoins) are marketed heavily with big promises but are really just designed to separate you from your bitcoin. So be careful: any resource, including all linked in this document, may in the future turn evil. Don't trust, verify. Also as they say in our community "Not your keys, not your coins".
Where can I spend bitcoins?
Check out spendabit or bitcoin directory for millions of merchant options. Also you can spend bitcoin anywhere visa is accepted with bitcoin debit cards such as the CashApp card. Some other useful site are listed below.
Gift cards for hundreds of retailers including Amazon, Target, Walmart, Starbucks, Whole Foods, CVS, Lowes, Home Depot, iTunes, Best Buy, Sears, Kohls, eBay, GameStop, etc.
There are several benefits to accepting bitcoin as a payment option if you are a merchant;
1-3% savings over credit cards or PayPal.
No chargebacks (final settlement in 10 minutes as opposed to 3+ months).
Accept business from a global customer base.
Increased privacy.
Convert 100% of the sale to the currency of your choice for deposit to your account, or choose to keep a percentage of the sale in bitcoin if you wish to begin accumulating it.
If you are interested in accepting bitcoin as a payment method, there are several options available;
Mining bitcoins can be a fun learning experience, but be aware that you will most likely operate at a loss. Newcomers are often advised to stay away from mining unless they are only interested in it as a hobby similar to folding at home. If you want to learn more about mining you can read more here. Still have mining questions? The crew at /BitcoinMining would be happy to help you out. If you want to contribute to the bitcoin network by hosting the blockchain and propagating transactions you can run a full node using this setup guide. If you would prefer to keep it simple there are several good options. You can view the global node distribution here.
Earning bitcoins
Just like any other form of money, you can also earn bitcoins by being paid to do a job.
You can also earn bitcoins by participating as a market maker on JoinMarket by allowing users to perform CoinJoin transactions with your bitcoins for a small fee (requires you to already have some bitcoins.
Bitcoin-Related Projects
The following is a short list of ongoing projects that might be worth taking a look at if you are interested in current development in the bitcoin space.
One Bitcoin is quite large (hundreds of £/$/€) so people often deal in smaller units. The most common subunits are listed below:
Unit
Symbol
Value
Info
bitcoin
BTC
1 bitcoin
one bitcoin is equal to 100 million satoshis
millibitcoin
mBTC
1,000 per bitcoin
used as default unit in recent Electrum wallet releases
bit
bit
1,000,000 per bitcoin
colloquial "slang" term for microbitcoin (μBTC)
satoshi
sat
100,000,000 per bitcoin
smallest unit in bitcoin, named after the inventor
For example, assuming an arbitrary exchange rate of $10000 for one Bitcoin, a $10 meal would equal:
0.001 BTC
1 mBTC
1,000 bits
100k sats
For more information check out the Bitcoin units wiki. Still have questions? Feel free to ask in the comments below or stick around for our weekly Mentor Monday thread. If you decide to post a question in /Bitcoin, please use the search bar to see if it has been answered before, and remember to follow the community rules outlined on the sidebar to receive a better response. The mods are busy helping manage our community so please do not message them unless you notice problems with the functionality of the subreddit. Note: This is a community created FAQ. If you notice anything missing from the FAQ or that requires clarification you can edit it here and it will be included in the next revision pending approval. Welcome to the Bitcoin community and the new decentralized economy!
Necessary Disclaimer: no rule breaking intended. No price manipulation intended. I only want to share verifiable facts/links and my analysis. If I am doing anything against the rules please let me know and I will do my best to fix it ASAP. I trade crypto, including LINK, and I am currently short on LINK. This is not financial advice; this is just for my own record and to start a discussion for anyone who might want more transparency around LINK.
TL;DR:
I believe there is a lot of misinformation, uncertainty, and unanswered questions about the LINK token, the Chainlink ecosystem, the SmartContract parent company. I also believe that LINK's current price is unjustified based on fundamental factors like usage/business case/current customers/future potential. So I'm raising some points and asking some questions. What is this post? Why should I care? How do I use it? Read or skim it. It's about the LINK token, the Chainlink ecosystem, and the parent company SmartContract. It's about why I believe the price of the LINK token may be currently driven mostly by hype and not backed by standard market fundamentals like usage/economics. Update 9 AUG: reorganizing, rewriting this post and moving supporting data/sources into "appendix" comments below on this post. The previous versions of this post and my comments elsewhere were too emotionally charged and caused more division rather than honest, evidence-based, productive discussion and I sincerely apologize for that. I have now rewritten it and will continue to update it.
PARTNERSHIPS
Who has Chainlink partnered with? Who is using Chainlink's technology and network? Who is contributing to developing Chainlink? Google - this is the pinned tweet on Chainlink's official page. Nothing there about Google using Chainlink services or co-developing with them. Just that blockchains/oracles CAN use google cloud services (APIs?). This is Google Cloud's June 13, 2019 blog post: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/building-hybrid-blockchain-cloud-applications-with-ethereum-and-google-cloud Oracle - (TODO. This seems to have potential as some product manager at Oracle has posted that chainlink integration is coming Q3/Q4 of 2020) SWIFT - the best they've got is a 30 second video with NOBODY from SWIFT present, with a *hypothetical* use case using SWIFT API. Intel This is the only google result for "chainlink site:intel.com", and it casually mentions that Intel's TEE (trusted execution environment) technology can be used to improve the security of oracles/blockchains. Nothing about Intel themselves using or developing with Chainlink. https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/new-confidential-computing-solutions-emerge-on-the-hyperledger-avalon-trusted-compute.html Another 240+ claimed project integrations: [TODO] There are so many to keep track of. Every week or even more frequent is yet another integration *announcement* Current DeFi usage: we've heard that Chainlink "secures" $1 billion in DeFi. But that's not in value locked: https://defipulse.com/ (LINK doesn't even appear on that list). That's just with DeFi data supposedly being priced using Chainlink nodes. EG Synthetix: https://blog.synthetix.io/chainlink-decentralizes-first-wave-of-synthetix-price-feeds/ yet where does Synthetix actually PAY to use an oracle? Not visible on-chain, maybe someone will find it. https://defipulse.com/blog/3-defi-dapps-starting-2020-off-strong/ "... Chainlink's following includes partnerships big and small, including Intel and Google Cloud services" example of misleading/exaggerated partnership claims being circulated.
Chainlink's ROADMAP
Threshold signatures, staking, on-chain SLAs: How real are these, is there a roadmap, how will this benefit users, is there any evidence of users currently *wanting* to use chainlink but needing these features and actively waiting for Chainlink to launch these? Staking: for there to be a valid incentive for users to stake LINK, it has to return around 5% annually because anything substantially under that would have users putting their money elsewhere (https://www.stakingrewards.com/cryptoassets) (not counting speculative capital gains in terms of LINK's price, but price gain per token/coin applies to all other crypto projects as well). Currently, for stakable cryptos, around 30-80% of their total supply is staked, and a good adjusted reward is on the order of 5% as well (some actually negative, some 10%+). The promise of staking incentivises people to buy and hold more LINK tokens (again, many other crypto projects have staking already live). That 5% reward will ultimately have to come from the customers who pay Chainlink oracle nodes to use their services, so it's an extra 5% fee for them. Of course, in the near future, the staking rewards *could* be subsidized by the founders' reserve wallets. Threshold signatures: addressed below in a comment. On-chain SLAs: [TODO] Here's supposedly Chainlink's agile/project planning board. (TODO: verify that it is indeed Chainlink's, and then analyse it) https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/projects/2129823
I manually traced EVERY single inbound transaction/source of funds for the above 4 (not counting #1 as 10 LINK is negligible). 2 & 3 are 99.99%+ genesis-funded, being ACTIVELY topped up by a genesis wallet, last tx 4 days ago, 500,000 LINK. #4 has been funded 36 times over the past year and a half (that's 36 manual exports and I did them all). They all come from the 0x27158..., 0x2f0acb..., and https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x1f9e26f1c050b5c018ab0e66fcae8e4394eb0165 (another address like the 0x2f0acb that I went through and checked EVERY SINGLE inbound source of funds, and it's also >99.9% genesis-funded - one tx from Binance for 6098 LINK out of a total ~6,560,000 inbound LINK from genesis wallets), and two other addresses linked to Binance (0x1b185c8611d157a67d9a9d5261b0d2bd52c0bb78, 10,000 LINK and 0x039ac18afe298747c51c85e7c8f0d67c327f3883, 1,000,000 LINK) The 0x039ac... address funded the "Chainlink: Aggregator" address with 127,900 LINK, and the 0x1b185... with about ~9,600 LINK). So yes, it's technically possible that someone not related to Chainlink paid for the ETH / USD price feed because some funds do come from Binance. However, they only come from two distinct addresses. Surely for "240+" claimed partnerships, more than TWO would pay to use Chainlink's MOST POPULAR price feed? That is, unless they don't pay directly but to another address and then Chainlink covers this one from their own wallets. I will check if that's in line with Chainlink's whitepaper, but doesn't that throw doubt on the whole model of end-users paying to use oracles/aggregators, even if it's subsidized? I provide you this much detail not to bore you but to show you that I went through BY HAND and checked every single source (detailed sources in Appendix B) of funds for the OFFICIAL, Chainlink-listed "ETH/USD" aggregator that's supposedly sponsored by 10 DeFi partners (Synthetix, LoopSpring, OpenLaw, 1inch, ParaSwap, MCDEX, FuturesSwap, DMM, Aave, The Force Protocol). Yet where are the transactions showing that those 10 partners have EVER paid for this ETH/USD oracle? Perhaps the data is there so what am I missing? This ETH/USD aggregator has transferred out ~76,000 LINK to I guess the data providers in increments of .33 LINK. It has 21 data providers responding. I will begin investigating the data providers themselves soon. And those middle addresses like 0x1f9e26... and 0x2f0acb...? They have transferred out hundreds of thousands if not millions of LINK to exchanges. And that's just ONE price pair aggregator. Chainlink has around 40 of these (albeit this one's one of the more popular ones). SNX / ETH aggregator is funded 100% by genesis-sourced wallets, only 3 inbound transactions: https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0xe23d1142de4e83c08bb048bcab54d50907390828 Some random examples (for later, ignore these for now) *********** https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x039ac18afe298747c51c85e7c8f0d67c327f3883 bought 1,000,000 LINK from Binance in Sept 12 & 15, 2019. (one of the possible funding sources for the ETH / USD aggregator example above) This address got 500,000 LINK from 0x27158... and has distributed them into ~5-10,000 LINK wallets that haven't had any out transactions yet https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x5bcf3edc0bb7119e35f322ba40793b99d4620f1e ************** Another example with an unnamed aggregator-node-like wallet that was only spun up 5 days ago, Aug 5: https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x2cbfd29947f774b8cf338f776915e6fee052f236 It was funded 2,000 LINK SOLELY by the 0x27158... wallet and has so far paid out ~500 LINK in 0.43 LINK amounts to 9 wallets at a time. For example, this is one of the wallets it cashes out to: https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x64fe692be4b42f4ac9d4617ab824e088350c11c2#tokenAnalytics That wallet extremely consistently collects small amounts of LINK since Oct 2019. It must be a data provider because a lot of Chainlink named wallets pay it small amounts of LINK regularly. It has transferred out 20 times. The most recent transfer out: https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0xc8c30fa803833dd1fd6dbcdd91ed0b301eff87cf which then immediately transferred to the named "1inch.exchange" wallet, so I assume this was a "cash-out" transaction. It has cashed out via this address a lot. Granted, it also has transfer-out transactions that haven't (yet) ended up in an exchange wallet, eg https://etherscan.io/token/0x514910771af9ca656af840dff83e8264ecf986ca?a=0x88e5353a73f38f25a9611e6083de6f361f9b537b with a current balance of 3000 LINK. This could be a user's exchange wallet, ready to be sold, or could be something else. No way for me to tell as there are no out txs from it.
LINK overall transaction, volume, and tx fees
This is to understand how much $ moves through the LINK ecosystem through: nodes, data providers, reserve wallets, wallets linked to exchanges, others. A typical aggregator node tx (payout?): https://etherscan.io/tx/0xef9e8e6dd94ebe9bbac8866f18c2ea0a07408ced1aa77fa04826043eaa55e772 This is their ETH/USD aggregator paying out 1 LINK to each of 21 addresses. Value of 21 LINK ~= $210. Total eth tx fees: .233 ETH (~$88.5, ~42% of the total tx value. If LINK was $4.2 instead of $10, the tx fees would be 100% of the value of the tx). Transactions like this happen every few minutes, and the payout amounts are most often 0.16, 0.66, 1.0, and 2.0 Link. Chainlink’s node/job listing site, https://market.link, lists 86 nodes, 195 feeds, 801 jobs, ~1,080,000 job runs (I can’t tell if this is over the past 2 months or 1.5 years). Only 20 nodes have over 1000 job runs, and 62 nodes have ZERO runs. Usual job cost is listed as 0.1 link, but the overall payout to the nodes is 10-20 times this. The nodes then cash out usually through a few jump addresses to exchanges. Some quick maths: (being generous and assuming it’s 1mil jobs every 2 months = ~6mil link/year = $60,000,000 revenue a year. This is the most generous estimate towards link’s valuation I’ve found so far. If we ignore the below examples where on multi-node payouts the tx fees are more than the node revenue itself, then it’s almost in line with an over-valued (but real) big tech company. For example, one of the latest CHF/USD job runs paid 0.1 LINK to 9 addresses (data providers?) - total $14.4 payout - and paid 0.065 ETH ($24.5) in fees. That’s a $10.1 LOSS on a $14.4 revenue: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xa6351bab810b6864bfebb0f6e1e3bde3c8856f8aac3ba769dd2e6d1a39c0d23f Linkpool’s (one of the biggest node operators) “ETH-USD CryptoCompare” job costs 0.1 link and has 33 runs in the past 24 hours (once every ~44min), total ~78,000 runs since May 30 2019 (once every ~8min). https://market.link/jobs/64bb0845-c4e1-4681-8853-0b5aa7366101/runs (PS cryptocompare has a free API that does this. Not sure why it costs $1 at current link prices to access an API once)
Token distribution:
Top 100 wallets (0.05% of ~186,000 total) hold 83% of tokens. 8 wallets each hold over 1% of total, 58 hold over 0.1%. Of these 58, 9 are named exchange/lending pool wallets. For comparison, for Tether (TUSD), the top 100 wallets (0.006% of ~1,651,000 total) hold 35.9% of the supply. 3 addresses hold over 1% of the supply and 135 hold over 0.1%. Of these 135, at least 15 are named exchange/lending pool wallets. LINK’s market cap is $3.5B (or $10B fully diluted, if we count the foundedev-controlled tokens, which we should as there's nothing preventing them from being moved at a moment's notice). Tether’s is $6.9B. Tether has 10 times more addresses and less distribution inequality. Both LINK and Tether are ERC20 tokens, and even if we temporarily ignore any arguments related to management/roadmap/teams etc, Tether has a clear, currently functional, single use case: keep 1 USDT = $1 USD by printing/burning USDT (and yet as of April 2019, only 74% of Tether's market cap is backed by real funds - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency))). Given that Chainlink's market cap is now 50% bigger than Tether's, surely by now there's AT LEAST one clear, currently functional use case for LINK? What is it? Can we *see* it happening on-chain?
Chainlink’s actual deliverable products
"What do I currently get for my money if I buy LINK 1) as an investor and 2) as a tech business/startup thinking of using oracles?” Codebase (Chainlink’s github has around 140-200,000 lines of code (not counting html/css). What else is not counted in this? Town crier? Proprietary code that we don't know about yet? How much CODING has Chainlink done other than what's on github? Current network of oracles - only ~20 active nodes - are there many more than the ones listed on market.link and reputation.link? If so, would be nice to know about these if we're allowed! Documentation - they have what seems like detailed instructions on how to launch and use oracle nodes (and much more, I haven't investigated yet) (TODO this part more - what else do they offer to me as an end consumer, and eg as a tech startup needing oracle services that I can’t code myself?)
Network utilization statistics:
Etherscan.io allows csv export of the first 5000 txs from each day. From Jul 31 to Aug 6 2020, I thus downloaded 30,000 tx from midnight every day to an average of 7:10am (so 24 hour totals are 3.34x these numbers if we assume the same network utilization throughout the day). (Summary of all LINK token activity on the ETH blockchain from 31.07 to 06.08, first 5000 txs of each day (30k total) shown Appendix A comment below this post.) If we GENEROUSLY assume that EVERY SINGLE transaction under 10.0 LINK is ACTUAL chainlink nodes doing ACTUAL work, that’s still under 0.1% of the LINK network’s total volume being used for ACTUAL ecosystem functioning. The rest is speculation, trading, node funding by foundedev wallets, or dumping to exchanges (anything I missed?) Assuming the above, the entire turnover of the actual LINK network is currently (18,422 LINK) * ($10/LINK) * (3.34 as etherscan.io’s data only gives first 5000 tx per day which averages to 7:10am) * (52 wk/year) = USD $31,995,329 turnover a year. Note: the below paragraph is old analysis using traditional stock market Price/Earnings ratios which several users have now pointed out isn't really applicable in crypto. I leave it for the record. Assuming all of that is profit (which it’s not given tx fees at the very least), LINK would need a PE ratio (Price/Earnings) of 100 times to justify its current (undiluted) valuation of $3.5 billion of 300 if you count the other 65% of tokens that haven’t been dumped by the founders/devs yet. For comparison, common PE ratios are 32 (facebook), 29 (google), 37 (uber), 20 (twitter on a good year), 10 (good hedge fund returning 10% annual).
Thoughts on DeFi & yield-farming - [TODO]
Why would exchanges who do their due diligence list LINK, let alone at a leverage? 1) that's their business, they take a cut of every transaction, overhyped or not, 2) they're not safe from listing openly bearish tokens like EIDOS (troll token that incentivized users to make FAKE transactions, response to EOS) https://www.coindesk.com/defi-yield-farming-comp-token-explained The current ANNUAL yield on liquidity/yield farming is something like 2% on STABLE tokens like USDC and TETHER which at least have most of their supply backed by real-world assets. If Chainlink LINK staking is to be successful, they'll have to achieve at LEAST that same 2% at end-state. IF LINK is in bubble territory and drops, that's a lot of years at 2% waiting to recoup losses.
SmartContract Team & Past Projects
Normally I don't like focussing on people because it leads too easily to ad-hominem attacks on personality rather than on technology/numbers as I've done above, but I came across this and didn't like what I saw. Steve Ellis, SmartContract's current CTO, co-founded and worked in "Secure Asset Exchange" from 2014 to 2016. They developed the NXT blockchain, issued 1,000,000,000 NXT tokens (remind you of anything?), NXT was listed end of 2013 and saw 3 quick 500%-1000% pumps and subsequent dumps in early in mid 2014, and then declined to . SecureAE officially shut down in Jan 2016. Then at some point a company called Jelurida acquired the rights to NXT (presumably after SecureAE?), then during the 2017 altcoin craze NXT pumped 300 times to a market cap of $1.8 BILLION and then dumped back down 100 times and now it's a dead project with a market cap of $13 million. https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveellis0606/ https://trade.secureae.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nxt/ https://www.jelurida.com/news/lawsuit-against-apollo-license-violations As an investor or business owner, would you invest/hire a company whose co-founders/CTO's last project was a total flop with a price history chart that's textbook pump-and-dump behaviour? (and in this case, we KNOW the end result - 99% losses for investors) If you're Google/Oracle/SWIFT/Intel, would you partner with them?
Open questions for the Chainlink community and investors:
Network activity: Are there any other currently active chainlink nodes other than those listed on market.link and reputation.link? If so, is there a list of them with usage statistics? Do they use some other token than LINK and thus making simple analytics of the LINK ERC20 token not an accurate representation of Chainlink’s actual activity? If the nodes listed on the two sites above ARE currently the main nodes, then
PR, partnership announcements: Why is the google tweet still pinned to the top of Chainlink’s twitter? Due to the frequently circulated Chainlink promotion material (https://chainlinkecosystem.com/) that lists Google as one of the key partners, this tweet being pinned is potentially misleading as there isn't anything in there to merit calling Google a "collaborator" or "partner" - just that blockchains/oracles *can* use Google's APIs (but so can most software in the world). Is there something else going on with the SmartContract-Google relationship that warrants calling Google a partner that we're simply not aware of yet?
By buying LINK, what backs YOUR money: If you have bought and currently hold LINK tokens, how comfortable are you that the future promise of your investment growing is supported on verifiable business and technological grounds versus pure, parabolic hype? If after reading this post you still are, I kindly ask you to reply and show how even one of the points I provided is either incorrect or not applicable, and I will edit my post and include your feedback in the relevant section as I have already done from other users.
What have I missed? Of course not 100% of what I've said is infallible truth. I am a real human, and I have plenty of biases and blind spots. Even if what I've provided is technically correct, there may be other much more important info that I've missed that eclipses what I've provided here. Ask yourself: if the current hype around LINK is indeed valid and points to a $100/$1000 future LINK price, then Where’s Chainlink’s missing financial/performance/usage evidence to justify LINK’s current valuation of $10+?
Conclusion
For your consideration, I have provided evidence with links that you can follow and verify, and draw your own conclusions. I have made my case as to why I believe the LINK token is currently priced much higher than evidence supports, and I ask you to peer-review my analysis and share your thoughts with me and with the wider LINK/crypto community. Thank you for your time, I realize this is a long post. All questions and feedback welcome, feel free to comment or PM. I won't delete/censoblock (except for personal threats, safety considerations etc). I am a real human but I am not revealing my true identity for obvious privacy/harassment reasons. (If anyone is wondering about my credentials ability to add 2+2 and work with basic spreadsheets: I have previously won a math competition in a USA state, I won an English-speaking country's physics olympiad, my university education is in mathematical physics/optimization engineering, and I worked for a few years in a global manufacturing company doing data analytics, obviously I'm not posting my CV here to verify that but I promise you it's the truth) I’m not looking to spread neither FUD, nor blind faith, nor pure hype, and I want an honest transparent objective discussion. I personally believe more that LINK is overvalued, but my beliefs have evolved and may continue to do so as I research more and understand more about Chainlink, LINK, Ethereum, DeFi, and other related topics, and as I incorporate YOUR feedback. If you think I haven't disclosed something, ask. As always, this is not financial advice and I am not liable for anything that may happen as a result of you reading this!
Here is how to play the altcoin game - for newbies & champs
I have been here for many previous altcoin seasons (2013,2017 etc) and wanted to share knowedle. It's a LOOONG article. The evaluation of altcoins (i.e not Bitcoin) is one of the most difficult and profitable exercises. Here I will outline my methodology and thinking but we have to take some things as a given. The first is that the whole market is going up or down with forces that we can't predict or control. Bitcoin is correlated with economic environments, money supply increases, safe havens such as Gold, hype and country regulations. This is an impossible mix to analyze and almost everyone fails at it. That's why you see people valuing Bitcoin from $100 to $500k frequently. Although I am bullish on the prospects of Bitcoin and decentralization and smart contract platforms, this is not the game I will be describing. I am talking about a game where you try to maximize your BTC holdings by investing in altcoins. We win this game even if we are at a loss in fiat currency value. To put it another way:
If you are not bullish in general on cryptocurrencies you have no place in investing or trading cryptocurrencies since it's always a losing proposition to trade in bubbles, a scientifically proven fact. If on the other hand you are then your goal is to grow your portfolio more than you would if holding BTC/ETH for example.
Bitcoin is the big boy
How the market works is not easily identifiable if you haven't graduated from the 2017 crypto university. When there is a bull market everything seems amazingly profitable and things keep going up outgrowing Bitcoin by orders of magnitude and you are a genius. The problem with this is that it only works while Bitcoin is going up a little bit or trades sideways. When it decides to move big then altcoins lose value both on the way up and on the way down. The second part is obvious and proven since all altcoins from 2017 are at a fraction of their BTC value (usually in the range of 80% or more down). Also, when BTC is making a big move upwards everyone exits altcoins to ride the wave. It is possible that the altcoin market behaves as an inversed leveraged ETF with leakage where in a certain period while Bitcoin starts at 10k and ends at 10k for example, altcoins have lost a lot of value because of the above things happening.
We are doing it anyway champ!
OK so we understand the risks and just wanna gambol with our money right? I get it. Why do that? Because finding the ideal scenario and period can be extremely profitable. In 2017 several altcoins went up 40x more than BTC. But again, if you don't chose wisely many of them have gone back to zero (the author has first hand experience in this!), they have been delisted and nobody remembers them. The actual mentality to have is very important and resembles poker and other speculative games: A certain altcoin can go up in value indefinitely but can only lose it's starting investment. Think about it. You either lose 1 metric or gain many many more. Now that sounds amazing but firstly as we said we have the goal to outperform our benchmark (BTC) and secondly that going up in value a lot means that the probability is quite low. There is this notion of Expected Value (EV) that poker players apply in these kind of situations and it goes like that. If you think that a certain coin has a probability let's say 10% to go up 10X and 90% probability it goes to zero it's an even bet. If you think that probability is 11% then it's a good bet, a profitable bet and you should take it. You get the point right? It's not that it can only go 10X or 0X, there is a whole range of probability outcomes that are too mathematical to explain here and it doesn't help so much because nobody can do such analysis with altcoins. See below on how we can approximate it.
How to evaluate altcoins
A range of different things to take into account outlined below will form our decision making. Not a single one of them should dictate 100% of our strategy.
Basics
It's all about market cap. Repeat after me. The price of a coin doesn't mean anything. Say it 10 times until you believe it. I can't remember how many times I had conversations with people that were comparing coins using their coin price instead of their market cap. To make this easy to get.
If I decide because the sky is blue to make my coin supply 100 Trillion FoolCoins with a price of $0.001 and there is another WiseCoin with a supply of 100 Million and price of $1 then FoolCoins are more expensive. - Alex Fin's Cap Law
Fundamental analysis
This is done usually in the stock world and it means that each company has some fundamental value that includes it's assets, customers, growth prospects, sector prospects and leadership competence but mostly centered in financial measures such as P/E ratios etc. Valuation is a proper economic discipline by itself taught in universities. OK, now throw everything out of the window!. This kind of analysis is impossible in vague concepts and innovations that are currently cryptocurrencies. Ethereum was frequently priced at the fictional price of gas when all financial systems on earth run on the platform after decades (a bit of exaggeration here). No project is currently profitable enough to justify a valuation multiple that is usually equal to P/E in the thousands or more. As such we need to take other things into account. What I do is included in the list below:
Check Github. You need to make sure there is active development for the platform and it's a very bad sign if the project is either keeping the code closed source or even worse there is simply no development. No projects are "complete".
Check Website. If the website is written in bad English the Chinese google translate type it means that they are not serious enough to produce an unbreakable decentralized project. If you can't write English you can't change the world, period. That's a deal breaker.
Check Team's Linkedin. Numerous projects have either fake Linkedin accounts or the team is comprised mainly by unexperienced employees that are even shown to be working in other companies currently.
Check backers. Projects that have Binance, Coinbase or Silicon Valley VC funds backing them are way more legit but way more overpriced too!
Relative valuation
One of my favorite ways to value altcoins that is based on the same principle in the stock market is to look at peers and decide what is the maximum cap it can grow to. As an example you take a second layer Ethereum solution that has an ICO and you want to decide if you will enter or not. You can take a look at other coins that are in the same business and compare their market caps. Thinking that your coin will outperform by a lot the top coins currently is overly optimistic so I usually take a lower valuation as a target price. If the initial offering is directly implying a valuation that is more than that then there is no room to grow according to my analysis and I skip it. Many times this has proven me wrong because it's a game theory problem where if many people think irrationally in a market it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But since there is opportunity cost involved, in the long run, getting in initial offerings that have a lot of room to grow will pay off as a strategy.
Sector prospects
In 2017 the sexiest sector was platforms and then coins including privacy ones. Platforms are obviously still a highly rated sector because everything is being built on them, but privacy is not as hot as it used to be. In 2018 DEXes were all they hype but still people are massively using centralized exchanges. In 2020 Defi is the hottest sector and it includes platforms, oracles and Defi projects. What I am saying is that a project gets extra points if it's a Defi one in 2020 and minus points if it's a payment system that will conquer the world as it was in 2017 because that's old news. This is closely related to the next section.
Hype
Needless to say that the crypto market is a worse FOMO type of inexperienced trigger happy yolo investors , much worse than the Robinhood crowd that drove a bankrupt company's stock 1200% after they declared bankruptcy. The result is that there are numerous projects that are basically either vaporware or just so overhyped that their valuation has no connection to reality. Should we avoid those kind of projects? No and I will explain why. There are many very good technically projects that had zero hype potential due to incompetent marketing departments that made them tank. An example (without shilling because I sold out a while back) is Quantum Resistant Ledger. This project has amazing quantum resistant blockchain, the only one running now, has a platform that people can build tokens and messaging systems and other magnificent stuff. Just check how they fared up to now and you will get the point. A project *needs* to have a hype factor because you cannot judge it as normal stocks that you can do value investing like Warren Buffet does where a company will inevitable post sales and profitability numbers and investors will get dividends. Actually the last sentence is the most important: No dividends. Even projects that give you tokens or coins as dividends are not real dividends because if the coin tanks the value of the dividend tanks. This is NOT the case with company stocks where you get dollars even if the company stock tanks. All that being said, I would advice against betting on projects that have a lot of hype but little substance (but that should be obvious!).
How to construct your portfolio
My strategy and philosophy in investing is that risk should be proportional to investment capital. That means that if you are investing 100K in the crypto market your portfolio should be very different than someone investing 1K because 10% annual gains are nothing in the latter while they are very significant in the former. Starting from this principle each individual needs to construct a portfolio according to how much risk he wants to take. I will emphasize two important concepts that play well with what I said. In the first instance of a big portfolio you should concentrate on this mantra: "Diversification is the only free meal in finance". In the case of a small portfolio then this mantra is more important: "Concentrate to create wealth, diversify to maintain wealth". Usually in a big portfolio you would want to hold some big coins such as BTC and ETH to weather the ups and downs explained in previous paragraphs while generating profits and keep progressively smaller parts of your portfolio for riskier investments. Maybe 50% of this portfolio could be big caps and 10% very risky initial offerings. Adapting risk progressively to smaller portfolios makes sense but I think it would be irrational to keep more than 30% of a portfolio no matter what tied to one coin due to the very high risk of bankruptcy.
Conclusion
The altseason is supposedly coming every 3 months. Truth is that nobody can predict it but altcoins can be profitable no matter what. Forget about maximalists who are stuck in their dogmas. Altcoins deliver different value propositions and it makes sense because we are very far from a situation where some project offers everything like Amazon and we wouldn't even want that in the first place since we are talking about decentralization and not a winner takes all and becomes a monster kind of scenario! Some last minute advice:
Stay out of paid telegram/discord pump groups. They are deadly for your wallet.
Avoid jumping on overhyped coins that have pumped massively during the last days without any very important news.
Don't keep coins in obscure exchanges for too long or you will get burned with certainty.
Stop thinking that your coin will 1000x and overtake Bitcoin!
P.S If you find value in reading this and want more weekly consider subscribing to my newsletterhere
How to deal with an Ethereum investor who thinks he's my wife?
Hey so welcome. I'm having some trouble getting one of the biggest Ethereum investors to pay me for my work. Basically, one of ethereum's biggest investors has been profitting millions off my work without paying me. His name is Fred Ehrsam over at paradigm capital. I think it's EXTREMELEY relevant to Ethereum because he's investing my money all across the space, and i worry every night that other innocent people will be ripped off by him. I met Fred shortly after he left Coinbase. I had taken a year off from medical school to seek funding for a very proftiable crypto trading algorithm. I knew that if i could get funding for the trading algorithm, then i could use the profits to develop a blockchain-based clinical treatment platform, and in turn treat more patients than i would otherwise as a doctor. Although i was making a very high percentage per day doing this trading strategy, i didn't have enough base capital to completely cover withdrawal fees from more than two exchanges. After examining graphs and other materials i prepared for him, Fred encouraged me to fully drop out of medical school to start a hedge fund with him. Together we came up with the name Paradigm Capital along with about 48 other hedge fund names. So, after that, I worked extremely hard to expand the algorithm from two to five exchanges... At one point I was literally living out of my car in a Walmart parking lot to keep as much money in my trading algorithm as possible, because Fred kept saying he was going to send money to help see if it would scale to 5 exchanges. This guy had a net worth of $21 million at the time i believe. But he never wound up sending the money but kept promising he would. So after a lot more work I expanded the algo to 5 exchanges doing my part. After a few months of expanding the algorithm i stayed at Fred's for a second time a few months later, where he asked me to shower in his room and I then introduced him to a girl i was into, but then he changed gears and told me that i didn't have enough social awareness to start a hedge fund with him. I pretty much knew right then that Fred had stolen or was going to steal my algorithm. But I didn't have enough proof until this Forbes article came out this year. So, my algo is making 100% per month profits for Paradigm Capital, and Fred has stolen a lot of money from me, like millions. Why is Fred so comfortable profitting off my work, and feeding himself off it? Why am I doing all the hard work out in the fields, and he's sitting back and eating fruit and primping himself? Fred must have one of those delusions that he's my wife in the olden times. But I never wanted to have that kind of relationship with him. If I were an investor who wasn't involved in this, I would take into account that nothing Ehrsam has done aside from my arbitrage algorithm has worked. Augur, Veil, tBTC, MakerDAO... they've all been more problems than solutions. Why would you invest in an ecosystem who's philosophies give dozens of tries to a dishonest guy, while the honest, competent people are boxed out? Uhh... Fred literally killed the patients I could've treated as a doctor, and also those I could've treated on my blockchain platform. That's not good. Fred likes prediction platforms because they can be used to kill people through bounties. U think that's the best way to use a blockchain? Fred you will never kill me with a prediction market. You go try and do that with the money you stole from me. He's making decisions with money that's rightfully mine, spending it on projects that, in my opinion, won't be profitable nor do much to reduce suffering in the world. My opinion as a VC would be that if you're going to blow millions of dollars on high-risk projects, at least choose the ones that will have a positive societal impact. Not tBTC copycat projects and augur bounties etc Regardless of sexuality, having a dishonest guy like Fred in your "tribe"* only makes the rest of you look bad. Is it true that in SF you always have to have poke the noobs before doing business with them? Because that doesn't sound fair nor profitable. Divinity doesn't exclusively speak through people who love pretzel sticks. Now PTT wants to Pied Piper the 14-year-olds over at /forniteBR into supporting Ethereum through "community points", hoping a changing of the guard on the East Coast will give him an opportunity to rise up? PTT, He will never let that happen. Not because you're gay, but because your tribe destroys people's lives, like Gawker once did. I will die making sure you don't get Ethereum off the ground. What is it about Fred that makes him so proud to keep profitting off my work without paying me? He's not my wife. Maybe he's not much a man, but that doesn't make him a woman living with me on a farm with me in 500 B.C. Do u know how easy it is to lie and backstab people to get ahead when you're smart? Actual smart people don't shoot lay-ups, they don't take the easy way. They go for the D U N K S. Does Joe Lubin's backstabbing mantra account for that? I just want to be paid for my work. Edit: "Tribe" is a bit of an intellectual meme these days that appears fairly often in crypto circles. It's based on something called "Dunbar's number" which states that social circles max out at 150 people, and everything you do is for those 150 people (your "tribe"). It's not a reference to anything to do with sexuality, rather here it's meant to poke at one of crypto's main problems today. The "tribe" philosophy directly contradicts performing altruisitic acts for the good of humanity, or even for a group as large as a nation. Rather, you do selfish acts for people in your immediate social circle. References to what a "tribe" is: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number 2. https://medium.com/@mmalmi/law-is-better-without-monopoly-778963880276 3. https://steemit.com/anarchy/@cryptogee/watching-child-porn-is-okay-says-ethereum-owner-vitalik-when-anarchy-goes-too-far 4. https://steemit.com/steemengine/@steem-eng/a-tribe-for-every-niche 5. https://acumen.org/moralrevolution/, first chapter 6. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-09-24/dunbars-number-and-genuine-community/
For a quick, easier search - http://www.isthisanmlm.com/ has compiled this whole thread. Special thanks to u/SHIFTnSPACE. - This is now a part of the sidebar as a button widget!
What is an MLM?
Multi-level marketing (MLM), also called pyramid selling, network marketing, and referral marketing, is a marketing strategy for the sale of products or services where the revenue of the MLM company is derived from a non-salaried workforce selling the company's products/services, while the earnings of the participants are derived from a pyramid-shaped or binary compensation commission system. THIS LIST MAY CONTAIN COMPANIES THAT HAVE PREVIOUSLY HAD MLM BRANCH BUT MAY NO LONGER HAVE ONE. If you see a company and are not sure that it belongs on this list, please reach out. I have compiled this list from the sources listed at the bottom along with input from community members. This list may not be 100% accurate but the goal is to get it as close as possible. 31 - Bags 5Linx - Home & Business Services Abby & Anna - Clothing ACAN Pacific - Utilities ACN - Utilities ActiLabs - Skincare/Health Adornable.U - Accessories Advocare - Dietary Supplements AeroGrow - Garden Tools Agnes & Dora - Clothing AIM Global - Nutritional Supplements Akasuka (Japan) - Alcone - Beauty Alice's Table - Flower Arrangement Classes All'asta - Home Goods Allysian Sciences - Aloe Vera of America (Young Living) - Nutritional Supplements Aloette - Beauty Alphay Int - Nutritional Supplements AlureVe - Skincare/Health Amare Global - Nutritional Supplements Ambit - Utilities Amelia James - Ameo - Essential Oils American Income Life - Financial Amsoil - Motor Oil Amway - Health/Beauty/Home Goods Ann Summers - Product Ann Summers (UK) - Adult Novelties Anorak (UK) - Home Goods Anran (China) - Apollo (India) - Juice Apriori - Skincare/Health AquaSource UK - Nutritional Supplements Arbonne - Skincare/Health ARIIX - Water Purification Arsoa Honsha (Japan) - Fitness/Weight Loss Asea Global - Nutritional Supplements Asirvia (shut down) - Marketing Aspire/Digital Altitude - Marketing ATC Coin - Crypto Currency Athena's - Adult Novelties Atomy - Skincare/Health Ava Anderson - Ava Rose - Clot Avisae - Weight Loss Avon - Beauty b:hip Global - Health Bachar Nutrition - Nutritional Supplements Bamboo Pink - Jewelry Barefoot Books - Books Bath.Ologie - Bath Bombs Beach Body - Fitness/Weight Loss Videos BearCereju (Japan) - Cosmetics BeautiControl - Beauty Counter - Cosmetics Beauty Society - Beauty beCAUSE Cosmetics - Cosmetics Become International (US & AUS) - Cosmetics Bedroom Kandi - Adult Novelties Beever (UK) - Hair Care BelCorp (Latin America) - Cosmetics Bellame - Skincare/Health Bemer - Appliances Better Way Design/Imports - Clothing Biogreen Argentina - BioPerformance - Automotive (Fuel Pills) Bod-e Pro - Nutritional Supplements Body by Vi/Visalus - Health Body Shop at Home - Beauty Boisset Collection - Wine Boston Finney (shut down) - Bounce Life/Network - Insurance Bud Star (Canada) - CBD/THC Products BurnLounge (shut down as pyramid scheme by FTC in 2012) - Buskins - Clothing Butterfly Beauty - Cosmetics Cabi - Clothing Cambridge Weight Plan/Diet - Dietary Supplements CAN - Utilities Captain Tortue - Clothing Carico Int - Home Goods Celebrating Home - Home Goods Cellements - Skincare/Health CEO Movement (Not MLM but scammy) - Chalk Couture - Chalkboard Signs Chalky & Co - Home Goods Chandeal (Japan) - Clothing Charle (Japan) - Clothing Charlie's Project - Clothing Chef's Toolbox (AUS) (Insolvency) - Kitchen Accessories Cherish Natural Products - Chloe & Isabel - Jewelry Clever Container - Home Goods Close to My Heart - Scrapbooking Cloud 9 Parties - Adult Novelties Cobra Group/Appco - Cocoa Exchange - Food Color by Amber - Jewelry Color Happy - Color Street - Nail Wraps Colour Me Beautiful (UK) - Clothing Compelling Creations - Jewelry Conklin - Roofing Cookie Lee (shut down) - Cosway (Malaysia) - Health/Beauty/Home Goods Country Scents - Product/Candles Create Your Life - Health Creative Memories - Scrapbooking Credit Repair USA - Financial Crunchi - Cosmetics Cutco - Knives CVSL - Multiple Companies Daisy Blue Naturals - Personal Care Damsel in Defense - Product/Self Defense Darceys - Candles David Lerner Associates, INC - Financial Dazzle and Daze - Clothing Deutsche vermögensberatung/Dvag (Germany) - Financial Diana (Japan) - Dione Cosmetics - Cosmetics Direct Cellars/DC Nation - Wine Discovery Toys - Educational Toys Divvee/Nui - Dot Dot Smile - Clothing DoTERRA - Health/Oils Du Northing Designs - Clothing Dubli Network - Financial Dudley Beauty - Cosmetics DXN - Health/Beauty/Home Goods Dynamic Essentials - EcoWarehouse - Home Goods Elepreneuer - Elk River Soaps - Personal Care Ella Tina - Clothing Elli Kai - Clothing Elvacity - Nutritional Supplements EmGoldEx/Global Intergold - Enagic/Kangen Water - Ionized Water Endless Xpressions - Clothing/Accessories Enersource Int - Nutritional Supplements Enjo (AUS) - Cleaning Producs Envy Jewelry - Jewelry Epicure (Canada) - Food Equinox International (dissolved in 2001) - Ergo (Germany) - Insurance Essante Organics - Essential Bodywear - Clothing European Grouping of Marketing Professionals/CEDIPAC SA (dissolved 1995) - European Home Retail (dissolved 2007) - Evanescence Network - Health EVER Skincare - Skincare/Health Evolution Travel - Product EvolvHealth - Health Faberlic (Russia) - Health/Beauty/Home Goods Family First Life - Insurance Family Heritage Insurance - Insurance Fantasia - Adult Novelties Fantasia (Canada) - Adult Novelties Farmasi - FES Connect - Financial Fibi & Clo - Footwear Fifth Ave Collection - Jewelry First Fitness Nutrition - Dietary Supplements Fit4Mom - Clothing FITTEAM Global - Dietary Supplements Flamingo Paperie - Art Fleuresse - FM World (UK) - For Tails Only - Pet Supplies Forever Living - Health/Oils Forex Education (iMarkets Live branch) - Crypto Forex Entourage - Financial Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing (dissolved 2013) - Four Oceans - Health Fragant Jewels - Bathbombs FreeLife - Nutritional Supplements Frontrow - Fuel Freedom Int - Automotive Fund America (Bankrupt 1990) - Gano Excel - Nutritional Supplements GelMoment - Beauty Gemstra - Jewelry Genesis Pure - Nutritional Supplements Global Legacy Initiative - GoDesana - Pet Gold Canyon - Product/Candles Golden Days (China) - Health Grace & Heart - Jewelry Green HoriZen - CBD Greeting Cake Company - Cake Kits H2O At Home - Personal Care Hale - CBD Oil Hanky Panky Parties (Canada) - Adult Novelties Happy Coffee - Coffee Harvard Risk Management (Legal Shield) - Hayward's Gourmet Popcorn - Food HB Naturals - Health He(L)o - Health Healthy Peach - Dietary Supplements Heavenly Chia - Food Heka Corp - Fitness Helo Wristbands - Health HempWorx - Health Herbalife - Health Heritage Makers - Scrapbooking Hinode - Cosmetics Holiday Magic (shut down) - Home Interiors - Home Goods Honey - Beauty Honey & Lace - Clothing Hualin Biotech (China) - Health iCoinPro - Crypto Currency ID Life - Health Igniting Passion (Canada) - Adult Novelties iMarketsLive - Financial Trading Software Immunotec - Health Imperial Candles (UK) - Candles In a Pikle - Bags Income Advantage - India Hicks - Product/Accessories Infinitus - Health Initials, Inc - Bags Inkd Up Nails - Beauty innov8tive nutrition - Nutritional Supplements InteleTravel - Travel Intimo (AUS/NZ) - Adult Novelties Isagenix - Dietary Supplements ItWorks! - Health J. Elizabeth - Clothing J. Hilburn - Clothing J.R Watkins - Jafra - Beauty Jamberry - Beauty Jamby - Clothing Jamie at Home (shut down) - Janice Collection - Home Goods Java Momma - Coffee Javita - Coffee Jbloom - Jewelry Jequiti - Cosmetics Jerky Direct - Jeunesse - Beauty Jewel Kade (31) - Jewelry Jewelscent - Product/Candles JK Apparel (Canada) - Clothing Jordan Essentials - Beauty JoyMain (China) - Health Joyome (Plexus) - Beauty JuicePlus - Nutritional Supplements Jump Natural - Health Kaesar & Blair - Kalaia - Skincare/Health Kalo & Co - Pearl/Jewelry Kangen Water - Kannaway - CBD Oil Karat Bars - Gold Kaszazz - Scrapbooking Keep Collective - Jewelry Keep Me Safe - Cos KETO (Pruvit) - Keto Coffee - Coffee Ketones - Health Kirby - Vacuums Kleeneze - Home Goods Kobold (Vorwerk) - Kyani - Health Labella Baskets - Home Goods Lady Godiva Beauty - Cosmetics Lavylites - Beauty L'BRI - Beauty LeadUp Consulting - Legal Shield - Legal Services LegArt (Canada) - Leggings Legend Age (China) - Legging Army - Clothing Legging Girl - Clothing Lemongrass Spa - Beauty LeReve (Canada) - Cosmetics Le-Vel (Thrive) - Health Lia Sophia (dissolved) - Jewelry Life Abundance - Pet LIFE Leadership - Financial Life Tree World - Food LifeBrook - LifePlus (US/Germany) - Dietary Supplements Life's Abundance - Pet Supplies LifeVantage - Dietary Supplements Lilla Rose - Jewelry Limelife - Skincare/Health Limu - Health Limu - Nutritional Supplements Linen World - Home Goods Lion Crown - Lipsense - Beauty Liv International - Travel Live Sore - Clothing Longabeger Company - Baskets Longrich (China) - Beauty Lorraine Lee Linen - Home Goods Love Winx - Adult Novelties LR Beauty & Health - Beauty LuLaRoe - Clothing Lulu Ave - Jewelry Luminess - Cosmetics Lyconet/Lyoness - Lyoness - Financial M. Global (Jamberry) - Jewelry M. Network - Nutritional Supplements Maelle Beauty - Beauty Magnabilities - Jewelry Magnolia & Vine - Jewelry Makeup Eraser - Cosmetics Man Cave - Kitchen Accessories Mannatech - Dietary Supplements Mark. - Financial Market America - Health/Beauty/Home Goods Marly Ray - Pearl/Jewelry Marvelous Mouse Travels - Travel Mary & Martha - Home Goods MaryKay - Beauty Maskara - Beauty Matilda Jane - Clothing Max & Madeleine - Skincare/Health Maxwell Clothing - Clothing MCA - Financial Medifast - Nutritional Supplements Melaleuca - Health/Beauty/Home Goods Metabolife (dissolved in 2005) - MiA Bath and Body (Closed) - mialisia - Jewelry Miche EU - Accessories Miki (Asia) - Nutritional Supplements MOA Nutrition - Nutritional Supplements Modere - MojiLife - Essential Oils Monat - Hair Care MonaVie (went into foreclosure 2015) - Morinda Bioactives - Personal Care/Dietary Supplements Motives Cosmetics - Cosmetics Multpure - Water My Club 8 - CBD Oil My Daily Choice - Nutritional Supplements My LALA Leggings - Clothing myEcon - Financial National Safety Associates - Dietary Supplements National Wealth Center - Education Natura (Brazil) - Cosmetics Nature Direct (AUS) - Essential Oils Nature's Sunshine Products - Dietary Supplements Neal's Yard Remedies Organic - Beauty NeoLife - Dietary Supplements Neora (Nerium) - Nerium - Skincare/Health NeVetica - Pet Supplies New Era (China) - Nutritional Supplements New U Life - Health Neways - Personal Care Nikken - Noevir - Beauty Nomades - Jewelry Noonday Collection - Jewelry Norwex - Cleaning Producs Nouveau Riche (real estate investment college) (dissolved 2010 - Nspire Network - Feminine Products NuCerity - Skincare/Health NuSkin - Tooth Paste/Personal Care Nutriboom - NXIVM - Financial Nygard - Clothing Omnilife - Dietary Supplements One Hope Wine - Wine Optavia - Health Opulenza - Jewelry Organo Gold - Coffee Oriflame - Personal Care Origami Owl - Jewelry Our Hearts Desire - Jewelry Paid 2 Save - Travel Pampered Chef - Kitchen Accessories Paparazzi - Jewelry Paperly - Paper Park Lane Jewelry - Jewelry Party Girl - Candles Party Lite - Candles Party Time Mixes - Food PartyLite - Candles Passion Parties - Adult Novelties Pawtree - Pet Paycation - Travel Peach - Clothing Pearl Chic - Pearl/Jewelry Peekaboo Beans - Clothing Perfect (China) - Cosmetics Perfectly Polished - Beauty Perfectly Posh - Beauty Personally Poetic - Jewelry PHP - Insurance Pierre Lang - Jewelry Pink Zebra - Candles Piphany - Clothing PixieLane - Clothing Plexus - Health Plumeria Bath - Beauty Plunder - Jewelry PM International - Health Pola (Japan) - Skincare/Health Poofy Organics - Beauty Powur - Solar Panels Premier Designs - Jewelry Premier Financial - Financial PrimeMyBody - Health Primerica - Financial Princess House - Kitchen Accessories ProDoula - ProYoung - Health Pruvit - Health Pulse Cosmetics - Cosmetics Pure Haven - Cosmetics Pure Romance - Product PureHaven - Home Goods PUREly - Essential Oils Purium - Health Qnet - Nutritional Supplements Quanjian Natural (China) - Food RadiantlyYou - Rain International - Health Rainbow Vacuum - Vacuums Real Time Pain Relief - Health Red Aspen - Beauty RED Safety - Security Regal Home and Gifts - Home Goods Reliv - Health Reliv - Nutritional Supplements Renatus Real Estate - Education RevitalU - Coffee/Health Riway - Deer Placenta Robert Kiyosaki - Rodan+Fields - Beauty Roland (Vorwerk) - Rolmex (China) - Kitchen Accessories Royal Tongan Limu (dissolved in 2003) - Royaltie Gens - Marketing Ruby Ribbon - Clothing Saba - Health/Beauty Sabika Jewelry - Jewelry SafeGirl Security - Self Defense Salad Master - Home Goods SARSO (India) - Scentsy - Health/Oils Schneider's Gourmet World - Food Scout & Cellar - Wine Seacret - Beauty SendOutCards - Gift Cards Senegence - Skincare/Health Shakeology (BeachBody) - Dietary Supplements Shaklee - Dietary Supplements Shopping Sherlock - Shrimp & Grits - Clothing Signature Homestyles - Home Goods Silpada - Jewelry Silver Icing - Jewelry Simple Man - Personal Care Simply Success Elite - SimplyFun Games - Education Skinny Body at Home - Dietary Supplements SkinSanity/Tomorrow's Leaf - Skincare/Health Smart Circle - Smartway - Solavei (dissolved 2015)[ - Solvei (bankrupt) - Sophie Paris (France/Asia) - Clothing South Hill Designs - Jewelry Southern Living at Home - Home Goods SouthWestern Advantage - Education Sseko - Clothing Stampin Up - Paper Steam Energy - Utilities Steeped Tea - Tea Stella & Dot - Clothing Stream Energy - Financial Style Dots - Jewelry Success University - Education Sun Hope (China) - Sunrider - Health/Beauty/Home Goods Sunset Gourmet - Food Sunshine Empire (dissolved 2009) - Surge 365 - Travel Sweet Legs - Clothing Sweet Minerals - Beauty Symmetry Financial Group - Insurance Syntek Global - Automotive T.O.P Marketing Group - TAG Team Marketing - Taisei/Green Planet/Kaikisui (Japan_ - Purifiers Tara at Home - Home Goods Tastefully Simple - Food Tavala - Health Tealightful - Tea Team National - Financial TeDivina - Tea Telecom Plus (UK) - Utilities Telexfree (bankrupt 2014) - The Advert Platfrom - Crypto Currency The Body Shop at Home - Beauty The Landmark Forum - Health The Super Affiliate Network - Marketing Thermomix (Vorwerk) - Thirty One - Bags Thrive - Health Thrive Life - Food Tiber River Naturals - Beauty TKO WorldWide - Tocara (Canada) - Jewelry Tom James - Clothing Total Life Changes/TLC - Health TouchStone Crystal - Jewelry Touchstone Essentials - Dietary Supplements Tracy Negoshian - Clothing Trades of Hope - Jewelry Tranont - Financial Transformational Beauty - Cosmetics Travel Evolution - Travel Traveling Vineyard - Wine TraVerus Global - Travel TriVita - Nutritional Supplements Tropic Skin Care - Skincare/Health True Peak Revolution (Europe) - Truvision Health - Health TS-Life - Nutritional Supplements Tupperware - Tupperware Unicity - Health United Sciences of America (dissolved in 1987) - United Warehouse (UK) - US Health Advisors - Usana - Nutritional Supplements Usborne - Books Utility Warehouse (UK) - Utilities Valentus - Dietary Supplements Vantel - Product/Pearls Vasayo - Health VectoCutco - Knives Vemma - Dietary Supplements viaOneHope - Wine ViBella - Jewelry VIC Cosmetics - Vida Divina - Tea Vie at Home (closed) - Virtuity Financial Group (World Financial Group) - ViSalus (Body by VI) - Dietary Supplements Vitality Extracts - Essential Oils VivaMK - Cleaning Producs Volo - Health Vorwerk - Home Goods Votre Belle Maison (UK) - Giftware Voxxlife - Health Wakaya Perfection - Health WakeUpNow (dissolved 2015) - Watkins Inc - Health/Home Goods Wealthperx - Travel Wikaniko - Home Goods Wildtree - Food Willing Beauty - Beauty Winasun - Health Wine Shop at Home - Wine Wines for Humanity - Wine Wink Naturals - Health World Financial Group/Pinnacle Leadership Development - Financial World Leadership Group (dissolved in 2008) - World Ventures/Wealth Wave/TKO WorldWide - Travel WoTaBu - Travel XanGo/Ziji - Health Xerveo - Dietary Supplements Xoom Energy - Utilities Xooma - Weight Loss Xstream Travel - Travel Xyngular - Health Yanbal Int - Jewelry Yandi (China) - Nutritional Supplements Yelloow - Beauty Yevo (closed) - Yofoto (China) - Health Yoli - Health Yoonla - YOR Health - Weight Loss Young Living - Health Youngevity - Younique - Beauty YTB International - Travel Zepter - Zija - Health Zilis - Health Zinzino (Scandanavia) - Zrii - Skincare/Health Zurvita - Health Zyia - Clothing Zyn - Travel TOTAL COUNT = 594 This list will be continually updated (5/19/2020). 2018 Archived MLM Mega Thread Sources: https://mlmtruth.org/2018/02/08/the-mlm-master-list/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multi-level_marketing_companies Special thanks to u/Copacetic1515 (I could not stick your thread) For income disclosure information: Updated 2019 Thread Other Helpful Links: Discussion about World Financial Group
Updated list of Global Beermoney opportunities (+180!) - June 2020
Updated list of Global Beermoney opportunities (+180!) - June 2020
Introduction
The current, and now previous, Beermoney Global list started nearly 5 years ago. It’s been updated and has grown over all that time, but it also became a hassle to keep current. It was time to build a new list from scratch based on my experience in the Beermoney world over all these years and all the contributions all of you have been making in this sub. The lists consist of opportunities that are available in at least one country that is not the US. This means there are sites which only work in Canada or the UK. There’s sites which are open to the whole world, but this does not mean everyone can really earn something on it. It’s all still very demographic and therefore location dependent. This list should give you a starting point to try out and find what works for you. I’m not using everything myself as I prefer to focus on a few, so not all are tested by me. They are found in this sub, other subreddits and other resources where people claim to have success. I’ve chosen the format of a simple table with the bare minimum of information to keep things clean. It includes a link, how you earn, personal payment proof if available and sign-up bonus codes if applicable. Some of these bonuses are also one-time use codes specifically made for this sub! For the ones I don’t have payment proof (yet) feel free to provide some as a comment or via modmail so others know it’s legit. I am working on detailed instructions for each method that I personally use which will include things like cashout minimum, cashout options, tips & tricks,... For now I’ve split things up based on the type of earning like passive or mobile. Because of this there’s sometimes an overlap as some are both passive and on mobile or both earning crypto and a GPT (Get Paid To) website. The lists are obviously not complete so I invite you to keep posting new ones in the sub, as a comment to this post, or in modmail. Especially if you have sites or apps which work for one single specific country I can start building a list, just like I did for The Netherlands and Belgium. If you recognize things which are in fact scams or not worth it let me know as well.
Beermoney opportunities
Get Paid To (Surveys, tasks, offers, videos, clicking links, play games, searching)
For The Netherlands there are a few very good options next to a bunch of ‘spaarprogramma’s. There ‘spaarprogramma’s are all the same where you receive and click a bunch of e-mails, advertisements, banners,... I advise you to create a separate e-mail address or use a good filter in your inbox as you will be spammed to death. I believe they can be a nice piece of beermoney but they take quite the effort.
The one-time sign-up bonus programs are still to be found here. If you find a new one let me know so I can create the post to keep all the ref links together.
Saving money
Although it’s not really about making money online, it’s still nice to save some money as well when shopping online.
Hey all, I've been researching coins since 2017 and have gone through 100s of them in the last 3 years. I got introduced to blockchain via Bitcoin of course, analyzed Ethereum thereafter and from that moment I have a keen interest in smart contact platforms. I’m passionate about Ethereum but I find Zilliqa to have a better risk-reward ratio. Especially because Zilliqa has found an elegant balance between being secure, decentralized and scalable in my opinion.
Below I post my analysis of why from all the coins I went through I’m most bullish on Zilliqa (yes I went through Tezos, EOS, NEO, VeChain, Harmony, Algorand, Cardano etc.). Note that this is not investment advice and although it's a thorough analysis there is obviously some bias involved. Looking forward to what you all think!
Fun fact: the name Zilliqa is a play on ‘silica’ silicon dioxide which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”
This post is divided into (i) Technology, (ii) Business & Partnerships, and (iii) Marketing & Community. I’ve tried to make the technology part readable for a broad audience. If you’ve ever tried understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum you should be able to grasp most parts. Otherwise, just skim through and once you are zoning out head to the next part.
Technology and some more:
Introduction
The technology is one of the main reasons why I’m so bullish on Zilliqa. First thing you see on their website is: “Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” These are some bold statements.
Before we deep dive into the technology let’s take a step back in time first as they have quite the history. The initial research paper from which Zilliqa originated dates back to August 2016: Elastico: A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains where Loi Luu (Kyber Network) is one of the co-authors. Other ideas that led to the development of what Zilliqa has become today are: Bitcoin-NG, collective signing CoSi, ByzCoin and Omniledger.
The technical white paper was made public in August 2017 and since then they have achieved everything stated in the white paper and also created their own open source intermediate level smart contract language called Scilla (functional programming language similar to OCaml) too.
Mainnet is live since the end of January 2019 with daily transaction rates growing continuously. About a week ago mainnet reached 5 million transactions, 500.000+ addresses in total along with 2400 nodes keeping the network decentralized and secure. Circulating supply is nearing 11 billion and currently only mining rewards are left. The maximum supply is 21 billion with annual inflation being 7.13% currently and will only decrease with time.
Zilliqa realized early on that the usage of public cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were increasing but decentralized, secure, and scalable alternatives were lacking in the crypto space. They proposed to apply sharding onto a public smart contract blockchain where the transaction rate increases almost linear with the increase in the amount of nodes. More nodes = higher transaction throughput and increased decentralization. Sharding comes in many forms and Zilliqa uses network-, transaction- and computational sharding. Network sharding opens up the possibility of using transaction- and computational sharding on top. Zilliqa does not use state sharding for now. We’ll come back to this later.
Before we continue dissecting how Zilliqa achieves such from a technological standpoint it’s good to keep in mind that a blockchain being decentralised and secure and scalable is still one of the main hurdles in allowing widespread usage of decentralised networks. In my opinion this needs to be solved first before blockchains can get to the point where they can create and add large scale value. So I invite you to read the next section to grasp the underlying fundamentals. Because after all these premises need to be true otherwise there isn’t a fundamental case to be bullish on Zilliqa, right?
Down the rabbit hole
How have they achieved this? Let’s define the basics first: key players on Zilliqa are the users and the miners. A user is anybody who uses the blockchain to transfer funds or run smart contracts. Miners are the (shard) nodes in the network who run the consensus protocol and get rewarded for their service in Zillings (ZIL). The mining network is divided into several smaller networks called shards, which is also referred to as ‘network sharding’. Miners subsequently are randomly assigned to a shard by another set of miners called DS (Directory Service) nodes. The regular shards process transactions and the outputs of these shards are eventually combined by the DS shard as they reach consensus on the final state. More on how these DS shards reach consensus (via pBFT) will be explained later on.
The Zilliqa network produces two types of blocks: DS blocks and Tx blocks. One DS Block consists of 100 Tx Blocks. And as previously mentioned there are two types of nodes concerned with reaching consensus: shard nodes and DS nodes. Becoming a shard node or DS node is being defined by the result of a PoW cycle (Ethash) at the beginning of the DS Block. All candidate mining nodes compete with each other and run the PoW (Proof-of-Work) cycle for 60 seconds and the submissions achieving the highest difficulty will be allowed on the network. And to put it in perspective: the average difficulty for one DS node is ~ 2 Th/s equaling 2.000.000 Mh/s or 55 thousand+ GeForce GTX 1070 / 8 GB GPUs at 35.4 Mh/s. Each DS Block 10 new DS nodes are allowed. And a shard node needs to provide around 8.53 GH/s currently (around 240 GTX 1070s). Dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL is possible and can be done via mining software such as Phoenix and Claymore. There are pools and if you have large amounts of hashing power (Ethash) available you could mine solo.
The PoW cycle of 60 seconds is a peak performance and acts as an entry ticket to the network. The entry ticket is called a sybil resistance mechanism and makes it incredibly hard for adversaries to spawn lots of identities and manipulate the network with these identities. And after every 100 Tx Blocks which corresponds to roughly 1,5 hour this PoW process repeats. In between these 1,5 hour, no PoW needs to be done meaning Zilliqa’s energy consumption to keep the network secure is low. For more detailed information on how mining works click here. Okay, hats off to you. You have made it this far. Before we go any deeper down the rabbit hole we first must understand why Zilliqa goes through all of the above technicalities and understand a bit more what a blockchain on a more fundamental level is. Because the core of Zilliqa’s consensus protocol relies on the usage of pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) we need to know more about state machines and their function. Navigate to Viewblock, a Zilliqa block explorer, and just come back to this article. We will use this site to navigate through a few concepts.
We have established that Zilliqa is a public and distributed blockchain. Meaning that everyone with an internet connection can send ZILs, trigger smart contracts, etc. and there is no central authority who fully controls the network. Zilliqa and other public and distributed blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) can also be defined as state machines.
Taking the liberty of paraphrasing examples and definitions given by Samuel Brooks’ medium article, he describes the definition of a blockchain (like Zilliqa) as: “A peer-to-peer, append-only datastore that uses consensus to synchronize cryptographically-secure data”.
Next, he states that: "blockchains are fundamentally systems for managing valid state transitions”. For some more context, I recommend reading the whole medium article to get a better grasp of the definitions and understanding of state machines. Nevertheless, let’s try to simplify and compile it into a single paragraph. Take traffic lights as an example: all its states (red, amber, and green) are predefined, all possible outcomes are known and it doesn’t matter if you encounter the traffic light today or tomorrow. It will still behave the same. Managing the states of a traffic light can be done by triggering a sensor on the road or pushing a button resulting in one traffic lights’ state going from green to red (via amber) and another light from red to green.
With public blockchains like Zilliqa, this isn’t so straightforward and simple. It started with block #1 almost 1,5 years ago and every 45 seconds or so a new block linked to the previous block is being added. Resulting in a chain of blocks with transactions in it that everyone can verify from block #1 to the current #647.000+ block. The state is ever changing and the states it can find itself in are infinite. And while the traffic light might work together in tandem with various other traffic lights, it’s rather insignificant comparing it to a public blockchain. Because Zilliqa consists of 2400 nodes who need to work together to achieve consensus on what the latest valid state is while some of these nodes may have latency or broadcast issues, drop offline or are deliberately trying to attack the network, etc.
Now go back to the Viewblock page take a look at the amount of transaction, addresses, block and DS height and then hit refresh. Obviously as expected you see new incremented values on one or all parameters. And how did the Zilliqa blockchain manage to transition from a previous valid state to the latest valid state? By using pBFT to reach consensus on the latest valid state.
After having obtained the entry ticket, miners execute pBFT to reach consensus on the ever-changing state of the blockchain. pBFT requires a series of network communication between nodes, and as such there is no GPU involved (but CPU). Resulting in the total energy consumed to keep the blockchain secure, decentralized and scalable being low.
pBFT stands for practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and is an optimization on the Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. To quote Blockonomi: “In the context of distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the ability of a distributed computer network to function as desired and correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious components (nodes) of the system failing or propagating incorrect information to other peers.” Zilliqa is such a distributed computer network and depends on the honesty of the nodes (shard and DS) to reach consensus and to continuously update the state with the latest block. If pBFT is a new term for you I can highly recommend the Blockonomi article.
The idea of pBFT was introduced in 1999 - one of the authors even won a Turing award for it - and it is well researched and applied in various blockchains and distributed systems nowadays. If you want more advanced information than the Blockonomi link provides click here. And if you’re in between Blockonomi and the University of Singapore read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 2 dating from October 2017. Quoting from the Zilliqa tech whitepaper: “pBFT relies upon a correct leader (which is randomly selected) to begin each phase and proceed when the sufficient majority exists. In case the leader is byzantine it can stall the entire consensus protocol. To address this challenge, pBFT offers a view change protocol to replace the byzantine leader with another one.”
pBFT can tolerate ⅓ of the nodes being dishonest (offline counts as Byzantine = dishonest) and the consensus protocol will function without stalling or hiccups. Once there are more than ⅓ of dishonest nodes but no more than ⅔ the network will be stalled and a view change will be triggered to elect a new DS leader. Only when more than ⅔ of the nodes are dishonest (66%) double-spend attacks become possible.
If the network stalls no transactions can be processed and one has to wait until a new honest leader has been elected. When the mainnet was just launched and in its early phases, view changes happened regularly. As of today the last stalling of the network - and view change being triggered - was at the end of October 2019.
Another benefit of using pBFT for consensus besides low energy is the immediate finality it provides. Once your transaction is included in a block and the block is added to the chain it’s done. Lastly, take a look at this article where three types of finality are being defined: probabilistic, absolute and economic finality. Zilliqa falls under the absolute finality (just like Tendermint for example). Although lengthy already we skipped through some of the inner workings from Zilliqa’s consensus: read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 3 and you will be close to having a complete picture on it. Enough about PoW, sybil resistance mechanism, pBFT, etc. Another thing we haven’t looked at yet is the amount of decentralization.
Decentralisation
Currently, there are four shards, each one of them consisting of 600 nodes. 1 shard with 600 so-called DS nodes (Directory Service - they need to achieve a higher difficulty than shard nodes) and 1800 shard nodes of which 250 are shard guards (centralized nodes controlled by the team). The amount of shard guards has been steadily declining from 1200 in January 2019 to 250 as of May 2020. On the Viewblock statistics, you can see that many of the nodes are being located in the US but those are only the (CPU parts of the) shard nodes who perform pBFT. There is no data from where the PoW sources are coming. And when the Zilliqa blockchain starts reaching its transaction capacity limit, a network upgrade needs to be executed to lift the current cap of maximum 2400 nodes to allow more nodes and formation of more shards which will allow to network to keep on scaling according to demand. Besides shard nodes there are also seed nodes. The main role of seed nodes is to serve as direct access points (for end-users and clients) to the core Zilliqa network that validates transactions. Seed nodes consolidate transaction requests and forward these to the lookup nodes (another type of nodes) for distribution to the shards in the network. Seed nodes also maintain the entire transaction history and the global state of the blockchain which is needed to provide services such as block explorers. Seed nodes in the Zilliqa network are comparable to Infura on Ethereum.
The seed nodes were first only operated by Zilliqa themselves, exchanges and Viewblock. Operators of seed nodes like exchanges had no incentive to open them for the greater public. They were centralised at first. Decentralisation at the seed nodes level has been steadily rolled out since March 2020 ( Zilliqa Improvement Proposal 3 ). Currently the amount of seed nodes is being increased, they are public-facing and at the same time PoS is applied to incentivize seed node operators and make it possible for ZIL holders to stake and earn passive yields. Important distinction: seed nodes are not involved with consensus! That is still PoW as entry ticket and pBFT for the actual consensus.
5% of the block rewards are being assigned to seed nodes (from the beginning in 2019) and those are being used to pay out ZIL stakers. The 5% block rewards with an annual yield of 10.03% translate to roughly 610 MM ZILs in total that can be staked. Exchanges use the custodial variant of staking and wallets like Moonlet will use the non-custodial version (starting in Q3 2020). Staking is being done by sending ZILs to a smart contract created by Zilliqa and audited by Quantstamp.
With a high amount of DS; shard nodes and seed nodes becoming more decentralized too, Zilliqa qualifies for the label of decentralized in my opinion.
Smart contracts
Let me start by saying I’m not a developer and my programming skills are quite limited. So I‘m taking the ELI5 route (maybe 12) but if you are familiar with Javascript, Solidity or specifically OCaml please head straight to Scilla - read the docs to get a good initial grasp of how Zilliqa’s smart contract language Scilla works and if you ask yourself “why another programming language?” check this article. And if you want to play around with some sample contracts in an IDE click here. The faucet can be found here. And more information on architecture, dapp development and API can be found on the Developer Portal. If you are more into listening and watching: check this recent webinar explaining Zilliqa and Scilla. Link is time-stamped so you’ll start right away with a platform introduction, roadmap 2020 and afterwards a proper Scilla introduction.
Generalized: programming languages can be divided into being ‘object-oriented’ or ‘functional’. Here is an ELI5 given by software development academy: * “all programs have two basic components, data – what the program knows – and behavior – what the program can do with that data. So object-oriented programming states that combining data and related behaviors in one place, is called “object”, which makes it easier to understand how a particular program works. On the other hand, functional programming argues that data and behavior are different things and should be separated to ensure their clarity.” *
Scilla is on the functional side and shares similarities with OCaml: OCaml is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. It has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. For all its power, OCaml is also pretty simple, which is one reason it's often used as a teaching language.
Scilla is blockchain agnostic, can be implemented onto other blockchains as well, is recognized by academics and won a so-called Distinguished Artifact Award award at the end of last year.
One of the reasons why the Zilliqa team decided to create their own programming language focused on preventing smart contract vulnerabilities is that adding logic on a blockchain, programming, means that you cannot afford to make mistakes. Otherwise, it could cost you. It’s all great and fun blockchains being immutable but updating your code because you found a bug isn’t the same as with a regular web application for example. And with smart contracts, it inherently involves cryptocurrencies in some form thus value.
Another difference with programming languages on a blockchain is gas. Every transaction you do on a smart contract platform like Zilliqa or Ethereum costs gas. With gas you basically pay for computational costs. Sending a ZIL from address A to address B costs 0.001 ZIL currently. Smart contracts are more complex, often involve various functions and require more gas (if gas is a new concept click here ).
So with Scilla, similar to Solidity, you need to make sure that “every function in your smart contract will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed due to gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems”.Scilla design story part 1
Some examples of smart contract issues you’d want to avoid are: leaking funds, ‘unexpected changes to critical state variables’ (example: someone other than you setting his or her address as the owner of the smart contract after creation) or simply killing a contract.
Scilla also allows for formal verification. Wikipedia to the rescue: In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.
“Scilla is being developed hand-in-hand with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into the Coq proof assistant — a state-of-the art tool for mechanized proofs about properties of programs.”
Simply put, with Scilla and accompanying tooling developers can be mathematically sure and proof that the smart contract they’ve written does what he or she intends it to do.
Smart contract on a sharded environment and state sharding
There is one more topic I’d like to touch on: smart contract execution in a sharded environment (and what is the effect of state sharding). This is a complex topic. I’m not able to explain it any easier than what is posted here. But I will try to compress the post into something easy to digest.
Earlier on we have established that Zilliqa can process transactions in parallel due to network sharding. This is where the linear scalability comes from. We can define simple transactions: a transaction from address A to B (Category 1), a transaction where a user interacts with one smart contract (Category 2) and the most complex ones where triggering a transaction results in multiple smart contracts being involved (Category 3). The shards are able to process transactions on their own without interference of the other shards. With Category 1 transactions that is doable, with Category 2 transactions sometimes if that address is in the same shard as the smart contract but with Category 3 you definitely need communication between the shards. Solving that requires to make a set of communication rules the protocol needs to follow in order to process all transactions in a generalised fashion.
There is no strict defined roadmap but here are topics being worked on. And via the Zilliqa website there is also more information on the projects they are working on.
Business & Partnerships
It’s not only technology in which Zilliqa seems to be excelling as their ecosystem has been expanding and starting to grow rapidly. The project is on a mission to provide OpenFinance (OpFi) to the world and Singapore is the right place to be due to its progressive regulations and futuristic thinking. Singapore has taken a proactive approach towards cryptocurrencies by introducing the Payment Services Act 2019 (PS Act). Among other things, the PS Act will regulate intermediaries dealing with certain cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on consumer protection and anti-money laundering. It will also provide a stable regulatory licensing and operating framework for cryptocurrency entities, effectively covering all crypto businesses and exchanges based in Singapore. According to PWC 82% of the surveyed executives in Singapore reported blockchain initiatives underway and 13% of them have already brought the initiatives live to the market. There is also an increasing list of organizations that are starting to provide digital payment services. Moreover, Singaporean blockchain developers Building Cities Beyond has recently created an innovation $15 million grant to encourage development on its ecosystem. This all suggests that Singapore tries to position itself as (one of) the leading blockchain hubs in the world.
Zilliqa seems to already take advantage of this and recently helped launch Hg Exchange on their platform, together with financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners and Fundnel. Hg Exchange, which is now approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), uses smart contracts to represent digital assets. Through Hg Exchange financial institutions worldwide can use Zilliqa's safe-by-design smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities. For example, think of companies such as Grab, Airbnb, SpaceX that are not available for public trading right now. Hg Exchange will allow investors to buy shares of private companies & unicorns and capture their value before an IPO. Anquan, the main company behind Zilliqa, has also recently announced that they became a partner and shareholder in TEN31 Bank, which is a fully regulated bank allowing for tokenization of assets and is aiming to bridge the gap between conventional banking and the blockchain world. If STOs, the tokenization of assets, and equity trading will continue to increase, then Zilliqa’s public blockchain would be the ideal candidate due to its strategic positioning, partnerships, regulatory compliance and the technology that is being built on top of it.
What is also very encouraging is their focus on banking the un(der)banked. They are launching a stablecoin basket starting with XSGD. As many of you know, stablecoins are currently mostly used for trading. However, Zilliqa is actively trying to broaden the use case of stablecoins. I recommend everybody to read this text that Amrit Kumar wrote (one of the co-founders). These stablecoins will be integrated in the traditional markets and bridge the gap between the crypto world and the traditional world. This could potentially revolutionize and legitimise the crypto space if retailers and companies will for example start to use stablecoins for payments or remittances, instead of it solely being used for trading.
Zilliqa also released their DeFi strategic roadmap (dating November 2019) which seems to be aligning well with their OpFi strategy. A non-custodial DEX is coming to Zilliqa made by Switcheo which allows cross-chain trading (atomic swaps) between ETH, EOS and ZIL based tokens. They also signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a (soon to be announced) USD stablecoin. And as Zilliqa is all about regulations and being compliant, I’m speculating on it to be a regulated USD stablecoin. Furthermore, XSGD is already created and visible on block explorer and XIDR (Indonesian Stablecoin) is also coming soon via StraitsX. Here also an overview of the Tech Stack for Financial Applications from September 2019. Further quoting Amrit Kumar on this:
There are two basic building blocks in DeFi/OpFi though: 1) stablecoins as you need a non-volatile currency to get access to this market and 2) a dex to be able to trade all these financial assets. The rest are built on top of these blocks.
So far, together with our partners and community, we have worked on developing these building blocks with XSGD as a stablecoin. We are working on bringing a USD-backed stablecoin as well. We will soon have a decentralised exchange developed by Switcheo. And with HGX going live, we are also venturing into the tokenization space. More to come in the future.”
Additionally, they also have this ZILHive initiative that injects capital into projects. There have been already 6 waves of various teams working on infrastructure, innovation and research, and they are not from ASEAN or Singapore only but global: see Grantees breakdown by country. Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa's ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, etc. As some of you may know, Unstoppable Domains (UD) blew up when they launched on Zilliqa. UD aims to replace cryptocurrency addresses with a human-readable name and allows for uncensorable websites. Zilliqa will probably be the only one able to handle all these transactions onchain due to ability to scale and its resulting low fees which is why the UD team launched this on Zilliqa in the first place. Furthermore, Zilliqa also has a strong emphasis on security, compliance, and privacy, which is why they partnered with companies like Elliptic, ChainSecurity (part of PwC Switzerland), and Incognito. Their sister company Aqilliz (Zilliqa spelled backwards) focuses on revolutionizing the digital advertising space and is doing interesting things like using Zilliqa to track outdoor digital ads with companies like Foodpanda.
Zilliqa is listed on nearly all major exchanges, having several different fiat-gateways and recently have been added to Binance’s margin trading and futures trading with really good volume. They also have a very impressive team with good credentials and experience. They don't just have “tech people”. They have a mix of tech people, business people, marketeers, scientists, and more. Naturally, it's good to have a mix of people with different skill sets if you work in the crypto space.
Marketing & Community
Zilliqa has a very strong community. If you just follow their Twitter their engagement is much higher for a coin that has approximately 80k followers. They also have been ‘coin of the day’ by LunarCrush many times. LunarCrush tracks real-time cryptocurrency value and social data. According to their data, it seems Zilliqa has a more fundamental and deeper understanding of marketing and community engagement than almost all other coins. While almost all coins have been a bit frozen in the last months, Zilliqa seems to be on its own bull run. It was somewhere in the 100s a few months ago and is currently ranked #46 on CoinGecko. Their official Telegram also has over 20k people and is very active, and their community channel which is over 7k now is more active and larger than many other official channels. Their local communities also seem to be growing.
Moreover, their community started ‘Zillacracy’ together with the Zilliqa core team ( see www.zillacracy.com ). It’s a community-run initiative where people from all over the world are now helping with marketing and development on Zilliqa. Since its launch in February 2020 they have been doing a lot and will also run their own non-custodial seed node for staking. This seed node will also allow them to start generating revenue for them to become a self sustaining entity that could potentially scale up to become a decentralized company working in parallel with the Zilliqa core team. Comparing it to all the other smart contract platforms (e.g. Cardano, EOS, Tezos etc.) they don't seem to have started a similar initiative (correct me if I’m wrong though). This suggests in my opinion that these other smart contract platforms do not fully understand how to utilize the ‘power of the community’. This is something you cannot ‘buy with money’ and gives many projects in the space a disadvantage.
Zilliqa also released two social products called SocialPay and Zeeves. SocialPay allows users to earn ZILs while tweeting with a specific hashtag. They have recently used it in partnership with the Singapore Red Cross for a marketing campaign after their initial pilot program. It seems like a very valuable social product with a good use case. I can see a lot of traditional companies entering the space through this product, which they seem to suggest will happen. Tokenizing hashtags with smart contracts to get network effect is a very smart and innovative idea.
Regarding Zeeves, this is a tipping bot for Telegram. They already have 1000s of signups and they plan to keep upgrading it for more and more people to use it (e.g. they recently have added a quiz features). They also use it during AMAs to reward people in real-time. It’s a very smart approach to grow their communities and get familiar with ZIL. I can see this becoming very big on Telegram. This tool suggests, again, that the Zilliqa team has a deeper understanding of what the crypto space and community needs and is good at finding the right innovative tools to grow and scale.
To be honest, I haven’t covered everything (i’m also reaching the character limited haha). So many updates happening lately that it's hard to keep up, such as the International Monetary Fund mentioning Zilliqa in their report, custodial and non-custodial Staking, Binance Margin, Futures, Widget, entering the Indian market, and more. The Head of Marketing Colin Miles has also released this as an overview of what is coming next. And last but not least, Vitalik Buterin has been mentioning Zilliqa lately acknowledging Zilliqa and mentioning that both projects have a lot of room to grow. There is much more info of course and a good part of it has been served to you on a silver platter. I invite you to continue researching by yourself :-) And if you have any comments or questions please post here!
On October 11, 2018, Crypto.com launched Crypto Invest after announcing the feature on CNBC Asia’s Squawk Box in January 2018. Over a year in the making, Crypto Invest is a set of trading strategies designed to perform in any market. Users can start building their portfolio from as little as USD 20. Crypto Rocket provides demo accounts to prospective clients with all the features and functions of a live trading account. When trading with Crypto Rocket, you’ll be getting lightning-fast Crypto trading with IQ options. An IQ option is a platform that offers the widest t range of cryptocurrencies as compared to other platforms like CEX and Coinbox. Some of the biggest names in the crypto world like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash, Ripple, and many others are some of those offered on IQ options. Gunbot is an easy to use, advanced crypto trading bot. You define your trading strategy and watch Gunbot do the trading for you. Enabling you to get up to hundreds of profitable trades per day, 24/7. For security reasons, Gunbot runs on your local computer or your server only. The trading fees are 0.15% from each party of successful trades. The fees are, by default, subtracted from the proceeds of each trade. Options . Any registered user can underwrite an option - be it a Call or a Put - on any of the listed securities.
I Tried Day Trading Bitcoin for a Week Beginner Crypto ...
DISCLAIMER: Trading Bitcoin is VERY risky, and 80% of traders don't make money. Make sure that you understand these risks if you are a beginner. I only recommend crypto trading to already ... Mix Play all Mix - Crypto Kirby Trading YouTube This Is The End: How & When Deflation Turns To Hyperinflation - Duration: 51:02. GoldSilver (w/ Mike Maloney) 76,966 views Not everyone is into Bitcoin trading as a lot of the Bitcoin users are customers who wish to use the crypto-currency to buy products and goods from shops and outlets. This video was the old version of PDAX I ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH MY LATEST VIDEO ABOUT PDAX: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzKnWOuYT-c9L4vVmrQk80oh1F... Free $10 Bitcoin: https://www.coinbase.com/join/59b210d01b11c3028dc3b2d3 1. Course & Mentorship: https://learn-plan-profit.teachable.com/ 2. Free Group: http...