The Week To Be In Crypto [10/29/2018]
Market Overview
Well, while we range around I will be focusing more on tossing out my take on the main topics of the moment.
Decentralization
This past week one of the most popular “decentralized” exchanges IDEX stated that they would be blocking user in New York.
The response of many was “How can a decentralized exchange block people?”, but there is a big difference between the decentralized tools and infrastructure we have access to now and fully decentralized functional applications. Once you create something humans use you start wading into the world of liability and every dApp right now is a centralized piece of software sitting on top of decentralized infrastructure. Decentralization is really a means to the end of censorship resistance. Phase one on this journey to ubiquitous censorship resistance we have designed decentralized infrastructure that is censorship resistant (which is great!) but SOMEONE has to build the tools on top for other people to use and that is where you run into issues. Fully decentralized applications would need to be either build and maintained by some AI (or daemon like in the Daniel Suarez novel of the same name)or be built and maintained through a completely distributed development system where builders don’t know what they are working on and its running on fully decentralized and dumb (all information is encrypted so it doesn’t know what its running) infrastructure. Maybe we get there at some point but we are long way from that. The positive intermediate situation is that there is financial infrastructure being built that significantly reduces the friction to setup financial services. I think we will see exchanges pop up focused on specific jurisdictions and specific assets that work within the rules and handle them well. They should be able to offer a better price for these services than large multinational corporations that have to shoehorn local rules into their infrastructure and competition usually benefits the consumer. And that, in the end, is what I think we are trying to do here, gradually wrenching monopolistic control away from the incumbent powers and allowing true competition to bring the best services to consumers.
What I’m Buying
Lower cap altcoins are making moves here and there, offering good opportunities to make some BTC or ETH. Unless you are full time crypto its hard to play the short term moves but if you want to give it a shot below are the folks I have found on twitter that seem to do a pretty good job of finding some solid opportunities. I am dabbling here and there but still largely selling some of the projects I am not following anymore into BTC and REN.
My weekly REN update — The partnerships are obviously great but having a secure (stored at bitgo) wrapped BTC could be huge for ethereum DEXs across the board.
Recommended Media
Read
Listen
One of the best things I have listened to this year. Everyone’s brain works differently but this is the most I have ever related to a well known “thinker”.
I don’t know why I enjoy this podcast so much but I really do
Click
This is just cool
From the Slack
A collection of content from The Bitcoin Podcast slack group the past week
Follow Me
twitter: https://twitter.com/Tompkins_Jon
linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejonathantompkins
steemit: https://steemit.com/@j-o-n-t
telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/FqrpRUo8CKHV8gGKRuNNNQ(nothing really here yet but will start engaging if a few more folks join)
