Riding The Wave News Summary #66
Crypto Miner Pushback Suggests Ethereum Offshoots Are Coming, How to Spot the Next Celsius Before It’s Too Late, & more
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Crypto Miner Pushback Suggests Ethereum Offshoots Are Coming
2 metrics signal the $1.1T crypto market cap resistance will hold
‘Insane evidence’ Bitcoin has capitulated in past 2 months — analysis
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Crypto Miner Pushback Suggests Ethereum Offshoots Are Coming
In as early as September, Ethereum is expected to undergo a major software upgrade dubbed the Merge, in which the network will shift from using the scores of computers commonly referred to as miners to more energy-efficient validators to order transactions. Not everyone is going along with the change. A growing number of factions are making plans for forks that will copy the current software and, with a few tweaks, continue to essentially run the old version of Ethereum using miners.
One effort, called EthereumPOW, is spearheaded by Hongcai “Chandler” Guo, who used to be a large Ethereum miner in China but is now semi-retired and living near San Francisco. Several Chinese companies manufacturing Ethereum mining equipment -- which will be made nearly obsolete by the Merge -- have asked him to start the forking effort, he said.
Analysts see plenty of hurdles. Newly forked chains often lack support from app developers, promoters and users, and in many cases don’t even have explorer tools that track their usage or lack thereof.
“Most discussions around a PoW Ethereum fork have been relatively short-sighted in scope,” focused on a new token, said Aidan Mott, intel manager at researcher Messari. “However, meaningful planning and research into supporting the ongoing logistics of a new network have been very light.”
Many companies are likely to take a wait-and-see approach. Back in 2016, Taylor Monahan, now global product lead at MetaMask crypto wallet, was spearheading work on MyEtherWallet, which initially said it wouldn’t support the Ethereum Classic fork. The firm soon had a change of heart.
This will definitely be a major event for the news and crypto as a community to watch. Forks are a regular event for crypto as a whole such as “Bitcoin cash” from Bitcoin, so that’s not the part that will make it so important. It’s a push to move from proof of work to proof of stake, which both aren’t necessarily right or wrong approaches. Neither side (developers or miners) are likely going to want to back down as the developers have spent an enormous amount of time developing these changes, which essentially makes the miner’s investment in servers irrelevant.
How to Spot the Next Celsius Before It’s Too Late
Pretty much every commentator is in agreement as to the primary telltale sign of vulnerable platforms: unusually high yields. Yes, Celsius and Terra (via the associated Anchor Protocol) offered yields that seemed too good to be true, or rather, too risky to be true for long.
“At the very least, Celcius displayed a woeful lack of due diligence in lending vast amounts of depositors' money to highly speculative ventures. But the way it made such lofty promises of high returns to sign up and lock away their money had many hallmarks of a giant Ponzi scheme,” said Susannah Streeter, the senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
Streeter advises that speculators should treat incentive schemes that reward holders for not selling (and that charge does who do) with suspicion. Likewise, GlobalBlock analyst Marcus Sotiriou also flags high yields as the major warning sign of a potentially risky platform.
“These platforms were characterizing themselves as ‘deposit takers’ and alternatives to banks, but were investing client funds in various, sometimes aggressive trading strategies to fund the high yields offered to attract those deposits,” said Charlie Beach, the chief risk officer at Nasdaq-listed crypto-exchange EQONEX.
These are some great points, another note is that you can invest in high-risk options like this, but if you do, you would likely need to be a fair-weather friend. Invested when we are moving upwards and at any sign of danger jumping out of the platform. Of course, the danger with this is that if you remove your funds within 90 days of a company declaring bankruptcy, you run the risk of your funds being pulled back into the mess.
2 metrics signal the $1.1T crypto market cap resistance will hold
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