Just a reminder that this is performance art and that nothing contained here should be construed as investment advice, nor an inducement to trade, lend, borrow any cryptocurrency or finance product. Transacting with these assets is risky and you are likely to get rekt. Do your own research and consult a financial advisor before transacting any financial product.

It’s a rainy February here. My new year’s resolution to get back in shape is slightly… underperforming, however, the DeFi Fund has more than made up for that.

It’s been an extremely interesting experiment so far, not only on the technical aspects but on the social side too. A number of people decided around the same time as me to do their own DeFi experiments, putting stablecoins into lending protocols to see how they fared. In addition, I received a number of solicitations to co invest into this DeFi Fund, I told them that they all missed the boat, suckas! A friend even called me a scammer (jokingly… well I hope), to call it a fund and not let outside investment in. …

Happy 2020 everyone!

Just a reminder that this is performance art and that nothing contained here should be construed as investment advice, nor an inducement to trade, lend, borrow any cryptocurrency or finance product. Transacting with these assets is risky and you are likely to get rekt. Do your own research and consult a financial advisor before transacting any financial product.

Just before the clock marked the passing of one decade to the next, I released details of my plans to start trading a small “fund” focused solely on trading “DeFi” products with an initial investment of 1 Ether.

With the Ethereum network undergoing a hard fork on 1 January to relieve itself of a premature glaciation, all was quiet on the old ETH blockchain. This gave me an opportunity to get myself started by moving some ETH…

Rather than making useless New Year’s Resolutions to get in shape, read books, or some other self-enriching pursuit, I decided to commit myself to spending time messing around with DeFi products in 2020. Note that my wife has also made me commit to getting into shape.

Perhaps it was too much rich food over the holidays, or the lack of sunlight on these Atlantic shores, but in all cases it seemed like as good of an idea as any, and maybe I’ll even turn a profit.

DeFi is cool kids for “decentralised finance” and encompasses a myriad of more complex financial products and services. It is most closely linked to Ethereum, though exists on other platforms as well. A key differentiator between DeFi and most cryptocurrency uses before was the introduction of lending and borrowing, i.e. using the time variable of finance. This has given rise to a number of opportunities to trade and potentially earn above average profits. …

(bonus points for anyone that gets the dad joke in there)

Last week MakerDAO underwent a long planned upgrade, moving from its original prototype to a more expansive 2.0 version of itself. Never missing an opportunity, I decided to jump into the potentially historic moment by setting up my own account to manage Ethereum collateral in a Collateralised Debt Position (CDP) and create DAI (Token backed stablecoin) and follow the upgrade. Despite a few hiccups along the way, and potential headaches down the line, the process could have been a lot worse and went relatively smoothly.

TRIGGER WARNING: This post is fairly snarky (that’s my bag). My position is this, DeFi is incredibly interesting, and may throw off some great ideas, however today it is still an experiment. …

One could say that it’s kind of condescending name for a blog post. I guess. My late father used to lovingly refer to my brother and I as bozos, usually after we did something dumb, or pretty much any day that ended in “y”, so you should know that I consider it a term of great endearment. Anyway, if you’re reading this, the title worked.

Don’t like to read more than a paragraph, and still want to tweet your response? TL;DR the Libra Reserve poses all kinds of questions that will take years for properly clued-up economists to iron out (of which Libra currently appears to have none on hand) and will probably end up being economically unfeasible. …

This post continues on my previous post looking at 51% attacks in Ethereum: https://medium.com/@colin_/some-thoughts-some-numbers-double-spend-attacks-on-ethereum-9d58e9ab4bf0

Note: Nothing in this post, or any other materials provided by myself or Platt Advisors SARL, should be considered financial advice. Trading cryptocurrencies is risky and prices may go up as well as down. Please do your own research before putting your funds at risk.

Recapping where we started and ended last-time, I am looking at piecing together factors that could help prove or disprove the notion that stablecoins pose a threat the to permissionless blockchain network on which they live (i.e. are USD stablecoins on Ethereum a problem?). In my last post I discussed a bit about what a double-spend (or 51%) attack is, how it was laid out in the Bitcoin whitepaper and how it may translate into Ethereum. A few days after I posted that, Ethereum Classic experienced a series of 51% attacks, resulting in the deep re-organisation of its blockchain. …

Like everyone else, I occasionally have bouts of relative lucidity, or maybe they’re just shower thoughts. Either way, recently I’ve read a few things that kind of caught up with some logical next steps in my mind. They may be quite obvious to a lot of people, in which case I’m just a late bloomer in this debate, oh well.

Could it be that the innovation proposed in Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 Whitepaper ultimately really has nothing to do with how Bitcoin works?

So my identifiable catalyst seems to be around here a thread that Udi Wertheimer shared this week. While I’m not a fan of paraphrasing, the common phrase from Bitcoin-supporters back in 2014–2017 was “It’s Bitcoin, not blockchain”, as a direct response from large financial institutions making statements to the effect of “We like blockchain, but not Bitcoin” (Full disclosure: I worked for a large financial institution at the time, doing research into these topics, and probably muttered a similar phrase at least once). …

Though I’m not big on disclaimers in cryptocurrencies — I just assume that everyone is always conflicted — given the somewhat provocative title of this post and the follow-on posts that I intend to share, it is probably worth noting that I hold approximately 0.4 Ether (ETH) ~$60 strictly for research purposes through my personal holdings and via Platt Advisors SARL. I do not have, and do not plan to take, any other ETH positions either personally or through related holdings (long or short), directly or through derivative exposure. Believe it or not, I am just in this for the intellectual exercise. Furthermore nothing in this post, or any other materials provided by myself or Platt Advisors SARL, should be considered financial advice.Trading cryptocurrencies is risky and prices may go up as well as down. …