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@PopPopPrego

Joined 23 February 2021 · 25 posts

Curious Explorer of Cryptoworld...

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@PopPopPrego

Jump Jump! Cointiply Promo Code GRINDITOUT :)

@PopPopPrego

Incredible Final! You can't ask for a better game, the last 40 minutes were so intense. And, we can stop arguing about who is the GOAT (although Mbappe might someday have something to say about that) Felicidades Argentina!

@PopPopPrego

Has anyone used https://www.reverio.io/? It is a Hive-based project that seems aimed at a blockchain version of Quora. I asked a question as part of a contest, and saw that the upvoting process is very much like on other Hive front ends. It seems pretty new, as evidenced by the many 0s on their Spaces tab. Even Backing has 0 questions. Come on Prue and Paul!!

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I think I need to get my Warriors of WOO into the weight room, they seem very bad at mining! lol Mining in WOO is based chance, I think, so with only two common cards, I can't really have high expectations, but I guess I did imagine I would have more than 0. Still like all the excitement around this project!

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I can't believe I am about to say this but AlienWorlds has an update! Yeah, I know! Me neither! This is not quite Thunderdome as promised almost 2 years ago, but at least it is not "Planet Binance"! It is instead.... BATTLEDOME!!! I won my first ever match and have lost every battle since, but at least it is something, right?!?!

@PopPopPrego

Saw this on the #RisingStar discord... Man, STARBITS cannot catch a break. It must be so stressful running a game or platform right now, between criminals, hackers, and the bear!

@PopPopPrego

Does anyone know how to search for users on Noise? Why am I not seeing that function? (other than that I am an idiot)

@PopPopPrego

Trying to drum up a little more interest in Noise! And also trying to form a better habit of being active here - I definitely fell out of rhythm over the past few months. I think Hive folks are natural friends of Noise, so hopefully somebody over there wants to join haha! Actually, I joined Hive because of Noise.cash back in the day. Anyway, if you are curious about my pitch, I posted here: https://ecency.com/noiseapp/@pregosauce/bring-da-noise-noise-cash

@PopPopPrego

Hi Everyone, I probably picked a bad time to get onto Noise, had a long business trip, crossed the International Date Line (I have the perfect alibi for last Friday haha - I didn't exist!). Sorry to have been slow to get going again, I will post more soon. Especially about how stupid I feel to have had funds trapped on Celsius... and then BlockFi... I em so smrt :(

@PopPopPrego

Hi Everyone, my first Noise.app post! I had heard rumors of the rebirth of noise.cash and was excited to reunite with this community. Can't wait to see how this iteration is different and hoping to capture the same fun, warmth, and surprise factor as the .cash community had! I hope some familiar names from Hive, Noise.cash, and even PubOx can say hello! :)

@PopPopPrego

A Shrimp in Splinterlands! I Finally Took the Plunge into this Legendary OG Blockchain Game I did it! I took the plunge! I am now in Splinterlands! And I am getting my ass kicked! But I'm glad I am there. This article will give you a few insights into why I finally joined this groovy crowd of gamers, what you need to know before joining, and what (small amount) I have learned so far. **Why I Finally Joined Splinterlands** There are some perplexing blockchain games out there. In one of them, all you can do right now is admire your spaceship as it uselessly spins. In another one, you just click a button that says "mine" then you click a button that says "claim" then you click another button that says "approve" then you see if you won a prize NFT. Which I never do. I have terrible luck. This is just a fact, and I am used to it by now. Not happy about it, but used to it. So in these click the button see if you get a good prize games, I get sad and annoyed quickly because while everyone else is posting about how they "finally got a good NFT" that is worth $300 after the apparently lame one they got that was only worth $50, I sit around like an idiot waiting to maybe get some NFT that costs more to sell than it is worth. Is it so hard to make a game that actually is a game? What is it with Cryptoworld that creates so many terrible games. I mean, they would have been brutal bores if I was playing them on a Commodore PET in 1988. Click, wait, click, wait, read post about someone getting rich, click, wait, cry salty tears when you get another useless dreck. But in my subconscious there existed a world that was different. A world where the game was a real game, where a little shrimp with a dream could battle his way to becoming a slightly larger shrimp with a few Dark Energy Crystals to his name. I must have read a dozen articles about this magical place, and after each one I am sure my shrimp brain said "sounds too complicated, I will get my ass kicked." However after toiling away with my frail shrimp arms in the Click Mines of Mordor for lo these many years, getting my ass kicked sounded like a dream. At least something would be happening! So, I steeled my shrimpy little heart (I assume shrimps have hearts, right? Does anyone know this?) to plunk down actual human money to go get my ass kicked in a real, honest blockchain game that, for once, actually was a game. **What You Need to Know** I gave away the headline to some degree. The first thing you need to know about Splinterlands is that there is an entrance fee to this game. $10. Well, I am getting ahead of myself here. There is a Free 2 Play version where you do practice battles, but that is it. You do not accumulate assets, power, equipment, or anything else from this version as far as I can tell. Not interesting, not useful. So the Play 2 Earn game is really where the shizzle is at in Splinterlands. And for that, you need to put down $10. Splinterlands is in the HIVE ecosystem. HIVE is supremely complex IMHO. If you want to dive in and understand HIVE, read or watch a comprehensive guide. I am now playing three HIVE games and participating in 2-3 HIVE-based social platforms and I still don't have any clue how anything works. HIVE is a cautionary tale for why people should not take magic shrooms, read the Silmarillion, then code. HIVE experts get it and they know I am an idiot, but if you are not a HIVE expert and don't want to become one, then you can skip all that. I just used PayPal and blammo!, there I was, taking my first steps in the Play 2 Earn world of Splinterlands. Immediately I was confused. Here is the portal to Splinterlands: You will notice two things. First, you can buy with a code (no idea where to get one), PayPal (mm-hmmm), or Crypto. Especially in a down market, I didn't feel like spending my tiny stash of crypto, so I used PayPal because I have an annoying but useful credit card that earns me 3% on internet shopping and I have some fiat rewards credit to burn there. Second, you will notice that the "Packs" tab is selected. This is a NFT-card game, so you might think that you need a starter pack to get going and you might imagine that if you buy something in "Packs" section for a card game that you will get a pack. Foolish mortal! This is HIVE and I already explained that it is confusing in HIVE. No, what you get is more like an account upgrade. For your $10 you can compete in rewards competitions and, crucially, earn Dark Energy Crystals (known as DEC, the game's native currency) and complete daily quests (where you can win cards, DEC or other performance enhancing assets). Once you do that, you can buy more stuff or you can start to Battle! If you do the steps so far, you will have an array of pretty wimpy starter cards to choose from. It would be much better for you to join with a referral. I searched and searched and searched trying to find a specific referral link from an article I remember reading a long time ago. The author generously had offered to lend players great cards to help them advance. I love that sort of thing in Cryptoworld - it is part of what drew me here. But I couldn't find that article, or any of the articles I had randomly read so long ago. I really apologize to the great writers out there who have promoted Splinterlands with so much heart and integrity. I mainly signed up out of frustration with AlienWorlds and Upland and just couldn't find those posts in time. I am a big fan of using referral links and carefully consider which to use. I am sorry I did a crappy job this time around. And on top of that, I know I will be the one to suffer because it will take me days, if not weeks longer to start making progress on this game! I am not very good at it and the basic cards are mainly useless against good cards. My bad, my apologize to Cryptoworld!! I am not going to promote my own referral/affiliate link here, because I think you will do better and support wiser players than me if you use one of these player's codes: TO SUMMARIZE GETTING STARTED Follow a good referral link from a nice, kind, wise, helpful veteran Splinterizer Learn as much or as little about HIVE as you want, but be prepared to spend $10 Your $10 does not buy you any assets, but it does upgrade your account so that you can Play 2 Earn Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) are the native currency and you earn them when you win battles Completing daily quests also can help you win DEC, gain NFT cards that you can use or sell, and compete for other prizes as you get better **What I Have Learned So Far** Well, when I said I was prepared to get my ass kicked, and that the game was complex, I was totally, 100% right. I am getting my ass kicked, and the depth of play is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea deep. Here is my profile after one day: You can see that I am not very good at this. I did tank one of those games on purpose because I was starting to level up before I knew what I was doing, but I definitely am losing more than I am winning. I am pretty sure this will be a continuing trend haha! I did complete a Daily Quest and earned a reward. Because I have terrible luck, I got a very common, fairly wimpy card that I probably will never use and that is worth maybe $0.05. My bad luck is a fact, like I said. I don't count on ever winning a good card or getting a pack or getting a large payout of DEC, because I never have gotten that kind of thing in any other game I've played. I'm a sad-sack grinder and I am a lot of fun, I am sure, for luckier and better players to pummel into a bloody little splat. Hahaha! (I am crying on the inside though) So that is the getting my ass kicked part. What about the complexity? Allow me to let the interface speak for itself! What you see are the menu options at the top left (with the Cards interface open), some golden vampire teeth asset that I have none of in the top middle, with my miniscule DEC winnings of 0.2 DEC after 7 victories, then my username, which strikes fear into exactly nobody at this point. In the row below that you have all the ways in which cards are typed: Edition, Foil (gold is better, which means I don't have any haha!), Role (Summoners versus fighters), Rarity (4 levels), and then Splinters which are the elements or factions of each card. The cards shown here are all Fire Splinters. The Splinter you go to Battle with is determined by your Summoner's Splinter. Everyone says Summoners are the most important card to focus on early, so there's that tip for you. On each of the cards you can see the Mana they require to be deployed in battle, their type of attack (saws mean melee, bullseyes mean ranged). You can see how much damage they do, their speed, and their hit points and so on. Are you tired yet? Hope not because there is more! Cards also have special skills like Reach (can attack from behind the card you choose to be your main melee tank) or Sneak and so on. Each of these cards can be leveled up, too. Oh, and in case that is not enough, Summoners also can grant special abilities to everybody, and in addition to Melee and Ranged attack modes, there also is Magic. You think I'm done, don't you. Poor you. There is at least one more element that comes into play and that is the fact that you sometimes get random rules of engagement for battles (like certain card types get an advantage or are ruled out), and the fact that Daily Quests specify certain types of battles that count. For example, my first Daily Quest needed 5 wins using card decks that had at least one card with Sneak ability. It is complex, dude. That degree of complexity will reward better gamers, which is appealing to gamer types. For me, it ensure that I will forever get my ass kicked, but what else is new! Haha! **My Takeaways** I am excited to dive deeper into Splinterlands! I think it is a real game, with many opportunities to gain assets, get better, learn more, and join a community of people who really like what is happening there. The Splinterlands community, as reflected in the PubOx writers I remember reading weeks ago at east are not just trying to score quick payouts, although I am sure that they are making a very healthy amount through their skills. It seems complex and overwhelming, but I think you, and maybe even me, will prosper if we keep three key ideas in mind: Use a referral from someone awesome It can be as easy as using PayPal to get going, don't let the HIVE mystique slow you down It is a complex game but when in doubt, just keep grinding and you will see some payoff I hope you enjoyed my first take on Splinterlands. As a pretty bad gamer and crypto noob, I will keep sharing my impressions and tips as I go, so consider supporting me. I am pathetic enough already haha!

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What is Bitcoin Cash? - An Introduction to the Most Awkwardly Named Crypto Since BlitCloin **The Takeaway** *BitCoin Cash:* *Is a hard fork from BitCoin, spawned in 2017* *Uses larger blocks and variable difficulty to process more transactions faster* *Has very low fees and very high processing speed comparted to BTC and ETH* *Is used a lot each day, more than 100% of its market cap* *Can be obtained on most Cex and Dex sites, and even through wallets*   **A Tricky Question** So a random stranger comes up to you on the street and mumbles a sincere question through their "Free Brittany" facemask: "What is Bitcoin Cash?" Hmm. You pause.  "I think that's like Bitcoin but it's green and leans in a different direction." When you regain consciousness after the violent beating administered upon your bleeding body by the enraged stranger, who had the strength of a jacked up gorilla by the way, it occurs to you that you should be better prepared for this question in the future. That is what this article is here to help you do. Avoid pummelings from coked up street gorillas who really really want to know what the heck is up with Bitcoin Cash! **Bitcoin Cash - A Hard Fork** There are a few concepts we will need to cover to understand Bitcoin Cash. One of the first is "hard fork." No, this is not what happened to me when I failed to store my AMPL on chain and missed out on thousands of dollars when FORTH was airdropped. That is called being "hard AMPLForked" haha. Sad.  Hard forking (I'm sorry, that is really the term) is when a community of developers create one or more variants of a cryptocurrency while still using the same core blockchain code. Forks could conceivably vary just a little bit or a great deal. Sometimes hard forks express opportunities to pursue new applications with an existing code. Other times hard forks seem to express radically different visions of what the cryptocurrency is supposed to do in the first place.  The big problem Bitcoin (BTC) faced was that it only allowed blocks of roughly 1MB in its transactions. This seems small to my brain, honestly. Like, my old phone takes photos that are 4x the size. But, this adds up to a bottleneck in data processing speed because of two quirks of design. First, according to the original Bitcoin whitepaper (a stirring read, if not quite as exciting as The Economist magazine), nodes are programmed to process larger blockchains first. So there is a bit of a built in bias toward really long chains of transaction block. Some of these might be a decade old and have thousands of transactions recorded, with each block chained to the previous (chain of transactions blocks...block chains, mm-hmm). Second, BTC seems designed to be pretty slow. It processes a block every 10 minutes, so all of the transactions that were executed in those 10 minutes are sorted into a block, and not a very large block, and one of those gets verified ever 10 minutes. Verification means solving super hard algorithms and pretty much requires purchasing expensive, specialized computer processors and running them all the time. The block size, the transaction pace, and the difficulty of the algorithms adds up to one of the most famous numbers in Cryptoworld: **7 transactions per second**. This is not ideal for supporting transactions in a world of billions of people, all of who are desperate to buy Paris Hilton's Prestigious "My Anus" NFTs. The famous 7 transactions per second digit is often followed by the outlandish numbers of transactions old-school finance poster child Visa can complete each second, which reportedly was 24,000 each and every doggone second. And apparently Visa's network has a capacity for up to 65,000 transactions per second. Imagine a world where Paris Hilton fans could send 65,000 of her prestigious anuses around the world each second! *This is "Satoshi Nakamoto's" original idea for adding signatures to the blockchain, from the Whitepaper That Changed Everything.* One suggestion, favored by miners, to increase the speed of transactions, or at least lower the needed computing time, was to drop signatures from the transaction verification stage, then add them back onto the whole block later. This led to something I have only ever seen on Coinbase Wallet, which is SegWit - Segregated Witness as opposed to Legacy transaction verification for BitCoin. It is estimated that up to 65% of block data is from signatures, so SegWit should be easier to compute and therefore cheaper in miner's fees. Sadly, SegWit does not seem to have been adopted by any of Coinbase Wallet's friends, so Coinbase Wallet has to pay a lot of miner's fees by using the Legacy system. **The Vision of True Digital Currency** In 2017 BCH pushed to solve this transaction scalability problem by increasing the size of block to 8MB (and eventually to 32MB). The larger the block, the more intense the computing processing need, though, pushing it beyond the reach of hobby miners. However, the developers who forked so hard on this cryptocurrency also made it so that the difficulty of verifying a transaction could vary depending on how busy the network got. Thus, BCH was designed to be faster, even when there is a lot of use of the coin. That is because, BCH developers very strongly believe that BitCoin failed its original vision to become a digital currency and instead became a slow-to-transact store of value. BCH really could be used for one friend to pay for the next round at the pub, or for a sad, deluded Chelsea football fan to buy a shameful jersey at Oligarch Stadium (I kid because I care), or even for people to easily pay for fresh-picked dragonfruit at a farmside kiosk. Several other forks were created, but BCH has a market cap about 4 times the size of its nearest cousin, BSV (BitCoin Satoshi Vision...I want to make a joke about that name but I can't shake the image of 65,000 Paris Hilton anuses flying around the world every second). To be useful, a digital currency has to be pretty cheap to use and as fast as possible. BCH is cheaper to use than BitCoin, that is for sure. The average BCH transaction fee is $0.035, which one would expect to pay on an average transaction value of $244,548.00. That is a large average transaction. I don't think the average consumer wants to use a digital currency for an average purchase equivalent to a - you guessed it - Lamborghini (spec'd out Huracan or Uris, you take your pick). A digital currency should feel efficient to use for dragonfruit, rounds of beer, or the desperate cry for help that is a Chelsea jersey (we are here for you Chelsea backers). The median transaction size on BCH is much more reasonable, about $37.81, with a median transaction fee of $0.003. Not bad. Other marks of success for a digital currency is how often and how much it is used. According to my new favorite data diarrhea site, bitinfocharts.com, BCH has an impressive 24-hour volume of $26,427,289,514.00. This figure corresponds to 106.21% of BCH market cap. Yes! That is correct! BCH is used so frequently in transactions that the entire total market value of every last BCH-toshi is sent or spent every day with a little extra thrown in.  As warring cousins, everything that BCH does eventually gets compared to BitCoin, so we might as well get this over with.  24-hour Volume in Terms of Percentage of Market Cap: Bitcoin Cash = 106.21% BitCoin = 2.26% Yeah, BitCoin is not changing hands much.  **How Does Bitcoin Cash Hold Its Value?** Both BTC and BCH have built-in scarcity, which supports their value. In fact, there are supposed to only ever be a maximum of 21 million BTC, and the same exact number for BCH. For awhile, BTC and BCH could be mined using the same methods to solve the same difficulty algorithms. Miners would switch back and forth using the same equipment depending on which was more profitable. The problem for BCH was that that approach was not mining enough new cryptocurrency, so the changed their mining difficulty algorithm to be easier. Easier difficulty means more coins get mined. As I write this, there are 18,698,312 BTC mined and out in the world (or trapped forever on someone's burnt wallet) and 18,713,096 BCH mined and running loose, so that strategy worked.  One of the quirks of both cryptocurrencies has to do with this scarcity idea, and the notion that whales might hold onto an overwhelming amount of crypto, leaving the little shrimp powerless to fend for itself. With 97.74% of BitCoin's market cap just sitting on the sidelines each day, somebody is sitting on a lot of it! The top 100 richest BitCoin whales own 15% of all the BitCoin. At the same time, "the people's digital money" BCH is pretty concentrated, too. The Top 10 wallets (just 10, not 10% or anything) control 13.69% of all the BCH in the world. That is nearly triple the percentage controlled by the Top 10 BitCoin Wallets. Regular old BitCoin seems to be a lot more widely distributed, including among ultra wealthy whale wallets, so perhaps BCH will become less concentrated over time like its cousin has. **Where to Get BCH** Hopefully you are prepared to avoid savage beatings the next time someone asks you about BCH. But just in case the coked-up great ape has a follow-up question, let's take a look at where you can get and trade BCH. After all, BCH has been on a great price run lately. BCH is often to be found in the Top Ten cryptocurrencies by marketcap, so you really can get it almost anywhere. CoinGecko lists a kind of odd assortment of Binance, Huobi, XT, Upbit, and LBank, but I know that Coinbase, Gemini, eToro, KuCoin, and almost anything other than BlockFi works with BCH. There's even a Binance Secure Chain version of BCH that you can trade on in-wallet Dexes, such as MetaMask, Trust, or SafePal. Heck, you can even "buy" BCH on PayPal. Perhaps the most obvious place to deal with BCH is Bitcoin.com though. Bitcoin.com also is a good resource for BCH-SLP tokens. What are those? BCH has an ecosystem of tokens built on the BCH chain, kind of how all those ERC and BEP tokens are built on Ethereum and Binance, respectively. These are Simple Ledger Protocol tokens, or BCH-SLP tokens.  I personally keep my BCH on Celsius, where it earns interest while I hodl. When it gets to a decent size it will be zoomed to my wallet for pretty cheap! There are a few ways to get BCH for free, mainly through creating blog content for read.cash or by microblogging (the copyright-free way of saying Twittering) on noise.cash. Now when Cokey the Ape confronts you, you can confidently answer BitCoin Cash is: A hard fork from BitCoin, spawned in 2017 Uses larger blocks and variable difficulty to process more transactions faster Has very low fees and very high processing speed comparted to BTC and ETH Is used a lot each day, more than 100% of its market cap Can be obtained on most Cex and Dex sites, and even through wallets

@PopPopPrego

NinjaSwap Live and Active with Bounties and CAKE Airdrop It is certainly an exciting time for DeFi! Keeping track of all the new launches of platforms and projects feels like a full time job. But here is another one that I think is worth a little of your attention. NinjaSwap! It has an exciting name, but does it earn it? At least from first glance, I think it does, and here is why. First, if you are familiar with nearly any of the BSC defi platforms, you will feel right at home. NinjaSwap offers a Dex, Farms, the ability to add Liquidity, and Staking. They also offer a quick link to their 1-page litepaper and a couple of different ways to get NINJA tokens. The first is through their Dex, easily exchanging BNB through your connected wallet. The other three are pretty interesting! You can earn NINJA by completing bounties, which range from connecting to their Telegram channel to creating YouTube content. Completing bounties earns points, which are convertible at some point to NINJA. You can earn NINJA through their CAKE airdrop. If you traded CAKE on Pancakeswap prior to May 1, you ought to be eligible for an airdrop!! That is a cool way to get a little army of Ninjas! One of the more interesting is through their AMO - Automatic Minting Offering. From what I gather, if you use someone's referral link to purchase Ninja (which I of course did!) then that person gets new NINJA minted to their account. So, you can earn NINJA through referrals. I would really love it if you would use my referral: https://ninjaswap.app/amo?ref=MHg2M0REZWYxYmEwOEM2NWY0ZTk2YURiZkM4OUM5xIdDNTI2NjlGQUVl I plan to pursue all 4 of these ways to accumulate NINJA and to look for chances to also gain the two later tokens they plan to introduce for their internal tokenomics, xNINJA and $NAI. The first of these will be part of their loyalty program, and the second will be their stablecoin. Buying NINJA was easy, and so was staking. In fact, as I have been writing this article, I have already earned brand new NINJA (not too much, but seeing those little trailing decimal places grow is one of the joys of cryptocurrency investing). Hopefully it will not be too long before NinjaSwap emerges from the shadows and shows its true power. I think it is worth checking out, but please, this article is for entertainment purpose and is not investment advice, so please DYOR.

@PopPopPrego

Farsite - Getting in on a new ETH-based NFT space game! The theme of colonization has dominated most of the breakout blockchain games recently. There is the colossus AlienWorlds, but also new launches of Colonize Mars, Sphere, and several others. It is a concept that seems perfectly suited to blockchain because at its core it is about laying stake to some new territory and calling it your own. A new contender is on the horizon with what feels like a substantially improved set of qualities to offer gamers. Yes, there will be land to own. Yes, there will be boxes to open and materials to acquire. But, there also will be a whole fleet of ships and supporting machinery to gain and deploy. And the art looks fantastic! I am talking about Farsite of course!! In their own words: "Farsite is a blockchain-powered sandbox MMO RTS game with elements of adventure in a sci-fi setting past on a post-apocalyptic story" It only gets more interesting from there! Players own everything in the game, including the economy. All of the assets are discovered or created by players using NFTs such as Blueprints, Components, a Base on a Planet, and some Credits. We will be exploring asteroids in our Spaceships (also NFTs) to find those Components, and when we create an asset it is ours! We are in the early days with Farsite, but there is an opportunity to get in **right now** and start accumulating assets that will be yours forever! By signing up with my referral link (https://farsite.club/u/gross-salmon-cougar) you can start to complete some very easy communication tasks (like verifying your email or following on Twitter) and earn your first Spaceship! At least check it out and see what you think. There could be huge potential here as this is a much more mature and dynamic proposition than AlienWorlds, and we all know how that game exploded to amply reward players! Please take a look and if you sign up, please use my referral link. I compared signing up with and without referral links, and as far as I can tell, using a referral link makes it easier to start earning your Spaceship (or more!) right away. So, once again, here is my link: https://farsite.club/u/gross-salmon-cougar Enjoy!

@PopPopPrego

NANO Got Spammed - What is NANO and How Did It Get Hobbled? This post introduces The Basics of a pretty cool cryptocurrency, but also looks at the recent beatdown that is still rippling out from the Spam attack. In other words, this is an intro-level post at the beginning with a bit more of a deep dive at the end. NANO is a bit of a mystery to me. Or, I should say that the relative lack of excitement over NANO is a mystery to me. An established crypto with interesting and innovative tech, extremely low fees and extremely fast transaction speeds seems like what we're all waiting for in this time of demoralizing gas and mining fees, right? And yet, it's marketcap is a modest #104 according to CoinGecko. In October 2019, the marketcap rank was #51. How has NANO slipped even during a gas crisis that might logically have sent people into its fast little arms? Given that I am writing this as a days-long blockchain slowdown keeps NANO hobbled, perhaps the answer is sitting right in front of me: NANO got spammed. **An Introduction to NANO and its Technology?** NANO originally launched as RaiBlocks in 2014, seeking to avoid the high computational demands of the main blockchain tech. Those massive computations require expensive miners to process quickly, and those miners require tons of electricity. Needing expensive processors and a lot of electricity is already recognized as a big problem of BTC and ETH networks, and reducing cost and electricity consumption while increasing transaction speed seems to be where a huge part of innovation efforts are directed. NANO was founded by Colin LeMahieu with a vision of transactions that are validated by senders and receivers, not by miners. From my own Noob perspective the biggest variations in cryptocurrencies often come down to the method they use to validate transactions. BitCoin is famous for its Proof of Work (PoW) where the gigantic digital transaction ledgers known as blockchains are calculated and verified by powerful computers, the owners of which are incentivized by asking a fee for their service. These are miners and their miner's fees. Calculations are expensive, take time, and if you try to low-ball miners (in their opinion), they might decide not to work on your transaction and it could fail. Whatever you might think about BTC, with these features, it definitely cannot become the digital version of everyday money. But NANO set out to be an effective and cheap digital money, one you can actually use to pay for stuff without waiting all day or paying high fees. The main innovation as far as I can understand it is to relocate the blockchain. In NANO, each wallet is its own blockchain. Instead of needing to record new transactions on the massive BTC ledgers, using NANO means that only your personal blockchain needs updating. This takes a trivial amount of time and energy, so fees are, well, they are 0.0000. Nada, Nil, Zilch, Rien, Nothing.  You are probably already realizing that there is something missing. After all, every transaction has two sides. In fact, NANO transactions update the Receiver blockchain and also the Sender blockchain every time. So, instead of requests being sent in the form of a really difficult algorithm to powerful computers, two much smaller wallets are update with the new data. The final transactions verifications are distributed and voted upon by hosts of NANO nodes. These nodes perform what NANO calls a delegated Proof of Stake function. It is like a typical Proof of Stake in that node operators must own NANO, but it is delegated PoS in that they also get to sign the transaction verifications for the entire NANO network. And a node owner votes in proportion to their total NANO ownership share when there are discrepancies in the transaction record. Nodes are critical to NANO because they link the very cheap individual wallet-based blockchains into the larger record of transactions, which is called a block*lattice* in NANO parlance (because instead of storing each transaction in ever growing chains of transaction blocks, they store the pairs of Send and Receive transactions across users, which conceptually creates a kind of fence-looking transaction record). This also means that transactions can be processed asynchronously in the moment, with no lag time, and that synchronizing can be done later.  To sum up the key distinguishers of NANO, it is very cheap because transactions can happen on individual processors through the wallet-based blockchains. NANO is very fast because these transactions are short bits of code, and only need to be signed by node operators, which host the network. NANO network then really seems to verify updates to individual wallets, rather than creating monstrous records of every transaction since the mining of the coin. It should be an ideal cryptocurrency - fast, and free to use. But... The drawbacks of this approach are that there is not as much security attached to NANO coins per se. The security function is distributed across node operators under the assumption that due to their large stakes of NANO, they don't want a crappy counterfeit coin to ruin the value of their holdings. So, the thinking goes, while node operators don't take a cut of verifying transactions through pricey mining and associated fees, they gain economic incentives through the success of the entire NANO project. Cool, but let's not forget, the whole system relies on a limited number of computers verifying each pair of Send-Receive transactions, no matter how tiny and with no expenses to users.  Did you say NANO can conduct a potentially enormous number of free, miniscule transactions? Hmmm. **About This Spam Attack...** One of the ideas behind Proof of Work is to make transactions so costly that spammers can't flood networks with a killing number of mini transactions, which could bring the whole network down. The slow transaction speed and the cost are features of many cryptocurrencies not bugs, in this sense.  NANO does not have that feature. They have cheap and fast. According to CoinDesk reporting, last week NANO was hit with more than 70 transactions per second for a sustained period of time, which overloaded some number of the computers operating nodes, which in turn caused them to de-sync from each other. That is, the nodes could not keep up with verifying all the Send-Receive pairs, which opens the possibility of accidentally verifying fraudulent transactions. The better choice, under those circumstances, was to reduce the number of transactions processed to a bare trickle. https://www.coindesk.com/nanos-network-flooded-spam-nodes-out-of-sync Just like a bot army flooding a website with more requests than it can handle crashes the website, the bot army of spam transactions caused node operators to shut NANO down to minimal levels. As I can personally attest, transaction speed went from fractions of seconds to days. NANO is working on an update that is supposed to preserve speed while increasing security against these kind of attacks. And, there are no reports of fraudulent transactions becoming part of the record. But, losing the ability to have the hyperfast transactions NANO is known for significantly reduces NANO's competitive advantage.  In doing research for this article, I ran across this post from 6 months ago: *"Nano is an interesting cryptocurrency, but it’s very benefits are attack vectors. Currently Nano has no way of dealing with a precomputed PoW attack which means a single attacker has the ability to effectively ‘DDOS’ the network."* This is on the site Y Combinator, which is apparently where geniuses go to chat when they're bored with the rest of us, so I couldn't follow much of the post, but apparently the asynchronous nature of NANO's verifications also introduces some problems related to security by limiting the difficulty of transaction verification. I *think* I know what all those words mean. Probably. What I think they mean is that it would be a somewhat heroic act of programming and investment to create world-leading security within the speedy and inexpensive technology NANO spearheaded. **So In The End...** I hope we're not revisiting the Spam-crazy days of 2018 when Chainlink and Ethereum both were knocked out for a few days by spammers. Now, in 2018, I didn't know that either Chainlink or Ethereum existed, so I am basing this on this post on Medium. But, spam attacks on blockchains seem not to be that common anymore, as there have been huge investments in the security of nearly all cryptocurrency year over year. https://medium.com/original-crypto-guy/spam-attack-caused-nano-network-to-slow-down-and-out-of-sync-abd08cf1d270 This is an area where NANO clearly needs some work to regain momentum and user confidence. According to CoinGecko, NANO reached a recent peak at $7.75 back on February 8, and now sits at $4.83 as I write, with remarkably mellow price and volume movement. People are not fleeing this coin despite the fact that the network has slowed substantially. I tend to think that they are sticking by because NANO solves many of the aggravating problems of the BTC and ETH blockchains, but it also could be that those problems are so aggravating that people are sticking with anything that is fast or cheap by comparison. An argument in favor of this interpretation is the mass shift over to Binance Smart Chain despite it being highly centralized, which is a weird choice for those members of Cryptoworld who want Unbanks and decentralized everything. The draw of low fees and fast transactions will always be a big deal in this space, I think. I still like NANO, and hope it can sort things out. This cautious affection is driven quite a lot by the fact that I hate all the fees and know that they have prevented me from progressing as an investor in Cryptoworld. And, although this might not be the most important reason to invest in a project, I get a smile looking at their Executive Leadership Team. I mean, they have names like Colin, George, and Russel, but one of those names belongs to a woman, unlike the executive teams of so many crypto projects. And she's a ginger! That's different! I've always been a bit of a sucker for redheads, I will admit. And on top of that, while the two dudes are looking like they are mentally preparing themselves to shit out a feral pig, the woman almost looks as if she remembers the last time she smiled. Festive! In the end, I think NANO's fate rests quite a lot on how it comes through this fairly substantial crisis, so for now it is wait and see... Will NANO shit out a feral pig or will it remember how to smile? That wraps up my first article on a single cryptocurrency. It was a lot of work, so I hope you found it useful! :) ~~~~~ If you'd like to buy NANO but can't because of those effing Spammers, take a moment to be angry. Then try out a few faucets. The only cure for cryptofever is free crypto, hahaha!  Seriously, though, when you use referral links from me or other writers, you help support our passion for writing good shit, so please consider it.  The Hot list of referral links I am most excited about: Cointiply, BetFury, and RollerCoin, and if NANO is your thing, then TipNano app, too...though I don't see that it is accepting new referrals right now. http://cointiply.com/r/p9Gyy https://betfury.io/?r=601502337521da79ce95370b https://rollercoin.com/?r=kl4g3m6h https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bdf.tipnano&referrer=HNvZLP The Maybe! list of referral links that you might enjoy even if the payout is not so great: FreeBitco.in (if you build your own referral base), DutchyCorp, and Pipeflare. https://freebitco.in/?r=41144131 https://autofaucet.dutchycorp.space/?r=PPP https://pipeflare.io/r/711t

@PopPopPrego

The Weird World of Cryptocurrency from a Newcomer's Point of View There is a moment when you walk in through a plain-looking door and discover that there is a secret world, with new codes, activities, costumes, rituals, and games. And within that room there are more doors that lead to even stranger places where people trade digital graphics for actual money and "mine" monkeys! If you step back and look at this world, I think you will agree... It is pretty Weird! But so fascinating! And, to be honest, there seems to be so much promise - and such a diversity of ways - for building financial independence in this space, that I couldn't help myself. I walked in through the door and tried to join Cryptoworld. The learning curve is crazy steep in this world and so many of the rules that people learn about investing or money management don't seem to apply. As someone with true beginner's eyes, I wanted to share my journey before I forgot what it was like to really be surprised and confounded pretty much every day. I also want to convince you why it might be important to understand the perspective of inexperience folks like me. I  am a mid-life, Gen X American guy. I have a decent job, am accomplished in my field, and have been socking money away in the kinds of retirement investment vehicles that people in my generation were warned would be our only alternative to eating dry cat food under a bridge. We weren't supposed to believe that the government social security apparatus would still be around when it came time for us to start living off the proceeds of what we'd contributed. We'd be on our own.  So, when I had a few spare dollars, I'd write a physical paper check and mail it off with a physical, licked, paper stamp to some big mutual fund company and slowly grow my retirement account. At every job, I upped my contribution to 401k retirement funds until I hit the company match ceiling. I'd read that someone my age would need $1,000,000 at retirement age to survive. Then 10 years later I'd read the number had grown to $2 Million. Then $3 Million, and now my discount broker webpage scolds me that I will need $4,000,000. Next year, I am sure it will be 5 Mil and by the time I actually am of retirement age, I'll need $500 Million.  This is the world I know. Folks like me pore over mutual fund disclosures and Morningstar ratings, throw in some international funds, allocate to some aggressive strategy that you promise you'll shift toward bonds and cash when you get older, and hope that the market doesn't crash when you're finally retiring, or that inflation doesn't come back and send you to Cat Food Under a Bridge Island. Every once in awhile I'd have some fun choosing individual stocks to invest in, and started following a rule that I would never invest in any company I could understand from a business perspective and from a use case perspective. In each of these cases, you could imagine walking down to the store and seeing the products, or to the central business district of a city and seeing the people working for this company. And then November 2020 happened and I stepped into a weird new world where I felt powerless to avoid putting my money into an invisible coin that was really some kind of computer program that required planet-smothering levels of energy consumption to calculate...seemingly executed by hidden armies of underground coders.  I get it. People like me start off as strangers in this strange land. But I think I represent the next wave of retail investors...**the wave that you want to sell to and trade with over the coming decades** as we look at non-traditional assets. We're not the ones who pumped up $WallStreetBets, but the ones who have been investing in the stock market or rental properties or uncirculated gold coins or whatever for a while and now want to understand the incredible opportunities in cryptocurrency. To be honest, we are extremely inspired by the digital generation whether they be nomad or crypto investors. We want our 2nd passports, our banks on a flash drive, and a view of Hong Kong Harbor, Marina Bay, or Old Town Tallinn over our laptop screens, too. Earlier pioneers to this transformation blazed the trail, and I am hoping that by sharing my experiences I can dial down some of the apprehension and worry that I see in so many people who have been trying to build their financial independence the traditional way - and who are now freaking out about fiat debt, civil unrest, the generational costs of the COVID pandemic, and the hungry monster of inflation lurking in the bushes. Cryptoworld is confusing, yes. And requires new skills, new analytics, tons of patience with CAPTCHA, and the patience to wade through oceans of new terms and exchanges to find the ones you can count on. But it is so worth it if at the end of the day, each of us can take more control of our financial lives... from earning to owning to transporting with us anywhere we want!

@PopPopPrego

BetFury Burying Tron? The internet gambling/cryptofaucet/cryptostaking/raccoon-enthusiast site BetFury announced this week that they are proposing fusing their two house tokens into a single token, BFG. At the time I joined the site, BetFury had two tokens, one pegged to Bitcoin, BFG(BTC) and the other pegged to Tron BFG (TRX). You "mine" these tokens by betting with their underlying crypto. For example, when you bet Bitcoin satoshi, win or lose, you mine a little bit of the BFG(BTC) token. Because BetFury has a Bitcoin faucet, it was time-consuming but very possible to keep growing your Bitcoin stake while also gambling just enough to mine 10 BFG(BTC), which means you can make daily staking claims on their set of crypto, which currently is BTC, ETH, BNB, BTT, USDT, TRX. They also have SUN, but the Bitcoin stake doesn't pay out to that coin. I didn't have any Tron (TRX) to deposit, and I am more interested in free-for-free-sake plays anyway, so mining BFG(TRX) was essentially impossible. So, I was quite interested to read through BetFury's proposal to merge the tokens. They laid out their rationale, which mostly sounded like an effort to solidify their BFG token, asked for my vote, and more or less said "sorry Tron fans." The voting is HEAVILY in favor of the fusion, which itself heavily favors the value of the BTC token over the TRX token. For me, this is good news because it means that my little pile of BFG will now pay out in all the tokens they offer (again except for SUN). But does this backing away from Tron on a site that seemed enthusiastic about the coin portend weakness and escalating votes of confidence in TRX? I have not read a single bit of encouraging news about Tron lately and a lot of the writers I follow seem to view it as a scam. It seems to me that the BFG fusion is likely a preview of BetFury eliminating their TRX-backed tokens altogether. As I mentioned above, they already have cut off all paths to earning SUN on the site, and relative to BTC, ETH, and BNB, the other Tron tokens are pretty worthless. What do you think? Is BetFury burying TRX altogether? They have been quite savvy at adding ETH and BNB with nearly perfect timing considering all the planning and marketing setup they need to do for a successful launch. Are they equally savvy at calling the end to Tron? You can sign up for BetFury and start building your stake with my referral link: https://betfury.io/?r=601502337521da79ce95370b. Remember, though, it is a gambling site, and a successful one at that! They know how to get our money, and there is a lot of encouragement for you to bet away all your hard earned faucet drips. Be restrained and you can build little piles of BTC, BNB, ETH, USDT, and more!

@PopPopPrego

Binance Coin Faucet is Live on BetFury, Paying Double for 6 Days With so many of us small crypto investors and traders being destroyed by trollbridge gas fees the Binance Security Chain and the entire Binance.com ecosystem has gotten huge attention. Their BNB coin even topped $300 US briefly before The Crashening. To my knowledge Binance.us doesn't have any attractive sign-up offers right now so I have held off, and other than directly buying it, BNB it not the easiest coin  to accumulate. There are a few multicoin faucets I am exploring (future post, I promise), but BetFury launched their new coin for gambling with a lot of fanfare and a **Free Faucet that is paying double for the next week!** https://betfury.io/?r=601502337521da79ce95370b You can nab **.000022 BNB every 20 minutes** - you can go a week without sleeping, right?  If you are interested, you can use my referral, sign up for BetFury, link your wallet (MetaMask, Atomic, etc.) and get on that faucet!! https://betfury.io/?r=601502337521da79ce95370b Click me! You can see my Brand new Baby BNB Bundle in that screensnip. I'm really happy to see this change! Now, nothing comes for free, and I noticed that BetFury slashed their BTC faucet from 5 to 1.25 so that's not very lovely. But if you are interested in gaining a BNB stash, this is an attractive and exciting time to go for it! Good luck!

@PopPopPrego

Hi, I'm PopPop Prego! I am new here like lots of folks in this community. In fact there is so much new to explore about BCH, blockchain, and all the interesting cultural elements that spin off in this cryptoworld! I picked up my nickname from a character called Magnitude on the show Community, in case you are curious :)