Traditional Finance has wielded a lot of power over lives of people for a very long time. This is because Financial institutions decided the flow of money. Who gets the cheap loans? Who gets the backing and credibility and access? Money and Value is really about access and the power to influence. Banks have a hell lot of both.

Bitcoin, blockchain and crypto in general has enabled a lot of people to have a shot at wielding that power. The information barrier is not high and it does not ask for pedigree. You don't have to be a Harvard graduate to have your plans taken seriously. If you have the ability to take an honest idea and make it work using the blockchain technology, you can easily be the next big institution. Just look at all these DeFi projects with people locking funds in their custody.

The question is are we ready for it? Do you have the capacity to engage and build access??

My mistake Miike. The current circulating supply is around 1 mil like you said.

The last epoch will start on 31st. This will be the last week for Pool 3 and we will have the launch of DAO after hopefully the audits come back clean. The actual distribution of the token will continue for 100 weeks starting from October 19th, 2020. You don't have to worry as that 68% distribution to community is well into the future..

It seems like Open Source will not be such a lovely thing when it comes to stuff like this. The fear that AI solutions have a low enough entry barrier to allow their misuse is not without reason. There are enough "coders" in my part of the world without jobs who will grab any opportunity which allows them to build stuff that makes money.

Someone with enough skill to generate that kind of text would probably have his time better spent elsewhere than spamming the forum or Signature campaigns. Still, if you make such a tool nobody stops you from trading it for a payment like people did with the trading bots.

The rich do have too much. More than they will ever need. In a way though, they are also the custodians of that wealth. It takes a lot of ingenuity, courage and continuous work to become and stay wealthy. The problem is not so much with inequality but with the fact that a few 100 people at the top now have the ability to set agendas for future, manipulate public sentiment as well as monitor individual progress. Technology as well as money has enabled it. Now is that a good thing or a bad thing is not easy to decide.

Just take a small example of this forum as a sort of society. At the top are the likes of @Theymos, CM campaign etc. CM is the central banker while Theymos is like the Government. DT members are your lower level politicians. CM campaign members are the rich businessmen who have worked hard to get here and earn a lot setting an example for the other hard working people of this BCT society. You also have the criminals, the police and the downright lazy-ass bounty hunters who take power and pride in numbers rather than virtue.

Imagine what would happen if Theymos were to one day decide that all of these were equal. All major campaigns shall distribute all their earning to every single individual AND none of the DT1 members will have the power to tag or flag someone. (coz we are all equal, right?)

I think it will be pure anarchy and mobocracy. Those who think that they deserve better than others will organize the mobs to red tag the better members. (has happened) The hardworking group will silently fall to the sides judging the thing to be beyond redemption. There will be a few like @suchmoon (or would have been Lauda) fighting till the end but they won't be able to enforce anything without some sort of leverage over the members of this society. The leverage being the ability to tag, the trust system and good contributions leading to stepping up the wealth pyramid.

You see, Political power and wealth are leverages for the society to keep functioning. Remove them and it'll all come crashing down. Much to the temporary glee of the lazy and entitled members of society who tend to fervently believe they deserve the best and those who are better off, are so only because of their luck or some other factor.

Can confirm that i saw the DOGE pump and thought about Philip. Had bought a few 1000 DOGE earlier but didn't sell. I hope that with the non-CEO Musk, this will be my gest investment till date.

I am running a small rig with 3 GPUs using RX580 8 GB cards. Those are working fine. The RX 570 isn't much different from this. As far as "support" is concerned then you may want to consider the fact that the Nvidia cards tend to support a more diverse set of hashing algorithms. ETH will go the staking way and the AMD cards are mostly suited for Ethash. For other algorithms, the return is not as good as compared to a 1660.

So if you are looking for a longer timeframe, 1660 would be the way to go. With its better hashrate, you will have a quicker RoI. The higher initial investment also means that you can stay in the game longer when ETH goes PoS.

As always, don't bet the house on mining because hashrates increase, price reductions can make the projected "profits" uncertain.

Elon is on another one of his wild sprees this week. I think it all started with him sharing the reddit thread about the Gamestop squeeze. Next was "I kinda love Etsy" which sent their market cap rocketing. Now, of course this.

For all the mad scientist vibe, anyone who follows Elon will know his method of making decisions based on first principles. Him supporting Bitcoin should be enough scientific proof for those who want to but don't seem to have the time to UNDERSTAND bitcoin. This will possibly bring a lot of bitcoin fence-sitters in. Although what I am more interested in is the DOGE Pump (and Dump) going on right as we speak. 24 sat to 260 sat!! currently at 105.

Bitcoin will remain the biggest cryptocurrency no matter what happens. Those who think ETH has even a speck of a chance need to realize that this is a game of "money" now. Bitcoiners have been repeating this for a long time that a new sound money is the foundation for a new type of economy. That money is Bitcoin. It cannot be anything else because nothing else is decentralized and secure enough to convince the wealthy people of the world to bet their net worth on.

Bitcoin is now geographically and even strategically decentralized. The biggest users are in the US and China. Both of these biggest powers cannot agree on what to do with bitcoin without the other taking advantage of it. These are the reasons that only Bitcoin has the chance to continue to create a space in portfolios of people and companies.

ETH has become mostly a platform for further innovations. Most sensible projects are looking to diversify onto other platforms. ETH will continue to serve this purpose but any talk of it overtaking/ replacing Bitcoin makes no sense whatsoever.

If its crypto that you are asking about then the most thriving community would be that of DeFi platforms and the trend of managing the tokenomics using a DAO.
There are people who sincerely want to build products that can replicate a traditional financial system but without the centralized control, manipulation and fees extortion associated with big banks and investment institutions. In a lot of cases, those people are putting considerable time and money to distribute the idea. The numbers for this community comprise of a lot of people from developing countries looking for a quick buck. There is a solid group of people who jump into every project and then run big operations to ensure visibility. This is meant to serve the "pumpamentals"; essentially fake advertising to create hype and pump these projects and rake in profits.

Yet, there are quite a few that have survived these wild days and are going ahead with communities of lenders, buyers, traders who are actually discussing and voting on proposals that concern fee-sharing rates, emission rates etc to manage the tokenomics. It is still hard to distinguish the scams from the sincere ones but people have put in almost 26 Bn into these DeFi projects till now.

The physical marketplace has not really thrived much. OpenBazaar has closed and the closest to using BTC for those of us post-2017 has been exchanging them for Amazon gift cards to buy stuff.

I would like to give some details there. The token is currently being distributed by providing liquidity on Uniswap. The BarnBridge team had made it clear from the beginning that they will not look for aggressive CEX listings. The initial price was decided by the first pool deployed on Uniswap in end of October'20. ~140$. It then went below 20 and stayed there for some 7-8 weeks with every weekly distribution. Just last week it increased to the current price of 50+.

It should be kept in mind that the total supply is 10 Million out of which a little over 2 1 Million are in circulation. The locked USDC/sUSD/DAI on the Pool 1 divides 32000 bond each week amongst the stakers. Those who provide liquidity on Uniswap (Pool 2) divide 20,000 per week amongst them. The risk-free Bond staking pool (Pool 3) divides 5000 tokens per week. This will come to an end on coming Sunday, Jan 31st. Post this, $BOND can be staked in DAO. With DAO launch, all of these things will be open to change as is the case with any other DAO.

As far as bounties are concerned, this will also be the DAO's decision in coming weeks and months depending on the progress and needs of the project. So its not like there won't be any bounties. Just that you'd have to be involved and active in the community whenever they come.

WOW!!. While these things seem out of question in today's connected world, a lot of such things have happened in the past. I didn't know that people put so much value on their credit rating so as to leave their property rather than default on the mortgage.

This is a very good example though that why it is so important to maintain bitcoin privacy. With the clear transaction trails, it will be easy to link all sort of BTC that people are earning today to some sort of questionable transaction (or atleast those that seem questionable). So would people risk getting doxxed and sued by authorities because of the KYC on some exchange or they would let go off that crypto to some sort of Govt treasury or auction of "confiscated good".

Events like these are reminders that how KYC can make you lose all that you have built through sheer hard work.

Ahh. Where are the memes?!! This guy reminds me of that fat guy who went viral with the "Civil war it is" meme. It is actually funny though. The BIS declares itself as being owned by 63 central banks and that it is the banker to banks. Why does the head of such an organization come out so strongly AGAINST putting money into something that people do completely voluntarily.

Its not like they are shifting money amongst their own coterie of institutions behind close doors? The Bitcoin network is used by people who see value in being able to transact without borders and without fear of losing it to some kind of "policy" uncertainty. Heck, it doesn't even have a policy.

Purely from the way that tie curves over his belly, I doubt anybody should take him seriously.

"Forbes" used to be a respected name for some of us in the developing countries. It used to be equated with quality publication and good business advice. Now its just another one of those ad-filled websites with freelancing contributions. This bullish sentiment was expressed earlier by the same contributor when he quoted the virtual strategy meet planned by MSTR.

Now can somebody explain that how is option's expiring a $4B price earthquake? Just an ELI5 on what affect does these Futures contracts have on a commodity? Are they really the sign of a maturing commodity and as much of a big deal as it is made to look?

Haven't you had enough fun with declaring the Bitcoin Noble prize and declaring that you know who Satoshi is? Now you want to have members PM you and join some shady group?

Are you smoking something cheap or just happen to have a lot of free time? All the topics started by you seem to be similar nonsense. If you really have a lot of free time, or more importantly, money and want to do something then there are better ways to help bitcoin than asking for people to PM you.

The BOND token is governance token for the DAO which is going to be launched after audit reports.

Its not a stable-coin and is not for speculation. It is for voting power in the DAO.

There is no ICO as I have said in the original thread. There are bounties when Mark from BarnBridge creates them. There is a weekly bounty of 50 DAI for transcribing the Project calls. You can keep abreast of further developments from Discord and Twitter.

Thanks for chipping in Miiike. As you said, BarnBridge already has a lot of information out. The next stage is launch of DAO platform. There are a LOT of moving parts and they will only increase with the launch of products. Thy are developing this for the long run and I assume that the top investors always have the resources to stay invested. It is not kind to the small investors. I personally would say that a small investor should try to see long term value and simply HODL. LPs and the ETH fees at present make moves by small guys so costly that it is not worth it. This is also quickly changing in the whole space with plans to move to L2 and proposals like the one Balancer has ongoing about distributing rewards to make up for fees. (I doubt it'll  pass though)

For anyone looking to get into this space, you must research and get familiar with the various initiatives in there. It can seem like a lot but at the end it is worth it, not necessarily monetarily but the learning makes you a better participant.

---

Thank you..!

The external audit for DAO is ongoing with Quantstamp and Haechi. I will update the thread when results come. The article basically informs the way that BB will ratify the risk of its products when the Smart yield bond and Smart yield Alpha will launch. The "products" from BB are actually risk-based derivatives. A bridge between Traditional Finance and DeFi. This is a whole new rabbit-hole in itself. Do join the discord and ping me there. Always good to have people actually interested in governance and the space than just quick flips.

I guess it is one of those websites that will automatically open lots of popups with advertisements. It seems you checked the website. I have always been interested to know that is it as easy to get malware on your PC as clicking on such a website?

A lot of phishing emails have links that will automatically download files but I don't think any operating system will allow a program to execute without user permission. I remember that back in the first decade, we used to be wary of the autorun and initialization scripts on USB drives. That was probably the easiest way to get malware on your 256 MB RAM PC. I wonder how advanced have things gotten now that even a smartphone has several times more processing power.

There are so many projects in this space that it is impossible to pick up and choose a gem. What defines a gem at a lot of times is also subjective. Some are looking for a quick 10x, low-cap project. Others are more concerned about finding something that interests them.

A lot of the excitement is in the field of financial products, derivatives and all those cryptic financial engineering stuff. The entry barrier to these can seem pretty high. Yet, a lot of value is shifting to such projects. They need more than an investment of money. They need an investment of time and understanding. So if you ask me, those are the kind of projects that should be called the real gems. I have posted a thread for one of these projects that I find interesting. You are welcome to look at my topic history if you want to find a real gem.

Continuing their commitment towards contributing to the DeFi space, the BarnBridge team has come up with the "BarnBridge Standards and Disclosures". The purpose is to form a standard for defining the risks associated with smart-contract based products like $BOND and provide disclosures regarding the products that will be launched.

This post also has lot of information about the financial terms used in investment circles. I encourage you to go through it and ask for questions down-thread. As suggested by two users above, I will get the guys behind this to answer any queries and engage in the discussion.

I cannot stress this enough but I have to say that I came across BarnBridge while looking for something more than speculative teams that are out to fleece more and more people into buying tokens. I watched their Project Management calls and got engaged in the Discord asking questions and lurking around. There are no guarantees in this space but BOND is the kind of team that is committed to delivery as well as decentralization. Decentralization doesn't mean that everyone will be satisfied. Yet, it does mean that it will give you an opportunity if you engage and contribute. So do not wait. Like I always say, try to learn and contribute in whatever small way you can.

While this is all good news, I believe that you should not read too much into big companies and not risk the house on a bull run. Most of these companies are basically fund management companies that allott portfolios of their investors for good returns. They don't care if those returns come from stocks, bitcoin, some third world country's fund or treasury bonds. All they care about is returns.

They also don't care about Bitcoin, if you ask me. These are not value investors who will do everything possible to understand and nurture an ecosystem for long term returns. There are few of those entrants till now. The real bull-run will come when major tech investors or banks start seeing the value and start investing. This right now is just 2018 on recap.