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Cryptocurrencies ​

I think Solana/Tezos/NEAR/AVAX/Dfinity are interesting distributed consensus systems for transacting assets and running code (smart contracts). I find privacy coins/contracts like (Monero/SRCT/IronFish) to be most interesting use cases of crypto right now. Especially considering the amount of power governments have to cut you fully from traditional banking system. There are no other constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact.

It's unfortunate that a lot of people/projects use these distributed ledgers as ponzi schemes or wash trading or still use super wasteful consensus systems (like Bitcoin). Some argue that blockchains are useless tech all together. Worst of all, many treat crypto as a way to purely make money with no regulation and that poisons interaction & discourse all around as they try to sell you on the value of often worthless coins and generally be annoying.

I hold few coins only as a way to build unique apps, not for investment purposes (I think there are better investments to be made that help move us to a better future). I don't know what the world, that at least partly, starts to rely on passing state in decentralized way without any reversal of transactions. It seems hard to imagine how this can work well. But I am optimistic. I do think having powerful open source protocols is very powerful compared to the current status quo of opaque systems that only few humans have control of.

From my research, Binance seemed to be the cheapest way to trade coins for FIAT but I maybe wrong. Ideally everyone moves to completely P2P marketplaces where fees are minimal and no one can block your ability to transact.

I do hope someone builds a true decentralized ramp up to a true privacy coin like Monero. So you can go from FIAT to private anonymous transactions at any time and escape the traditional financial systems that use your money to wage war or do other silly things like is the case with Russia/China and to a lesser extent most other countries. The way I see it happening now is we have FIAT to Solana already via traditional marketplaces. Then you can have smart DEX that swaps Solana for Monero. You transact privately there and swap back to Solana then to FIAT whenever you need to do something that is not yet ready for this brave new world. I do hope and think it would be possible to have private transactions for citizens yet still enforce some kind of donations to the public so governments can function. Just things should be transparent so the money is traced publicly as to what it gets spent on whether its education / better cities / roads / etc.

Dune Analytics is great at analyzing public blockchain data. Matt Levine's overview of crypto is nice.

I use hardware wallets whenever I have need to use cryptocurrencies. Ledger is nice.

Interesting ​

  • Monero - Secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency.
  • Iron Fish - Private, anonymous, and easy to use cryptocurrency. (Code)
  • MobileCoin - Private payments for mobile devices. (Web)
  • Nano - Peer-to-peer digital currency with fast & cheap transactions. (Benefits of Nano)
  • Cardano SL
  • Libra
  • zcoin - Privacy-focused cryptocurrency.
  • dcc - Proof of concept for a blockchain with variable hash functions for ASIC resistance. Decentralized cryptocurrency.
  • Celo - Platform for fast, secure, stable digital payments. (GitHub) (Code) (Celo Blockchain Code)
  • Reserve - Flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk through diversification and decentralized governance. (HN)
  • Bolt Labs - Instant, cheap and private payments. (GitHub)
  • Nimiq - Simple, secure and censorship resistant cryptocurrency. (Code)
  • MobileCoin Fog - Private payments for mobile devices. (HN)
  • Dagcoin - Cryptocurrency designed for using, not trading.
  • Kitty Coin
  • sai - Simple single-collateral stablecoin that is dependent on a trusted oracle address and has a kill-switch.

Notes ​