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05/18/2022 Mason Johnson

Why do gamers never get used to Web3 games?

Most gamers have no idea what WEB – 3.0 is and still prefer traditional video games

For years, playing video games was easy. All you had to do was turn on your computer or console, download the game of your choice, and enjoy playing it. Recently, however, new terms – Web3 games, Play-to-Earn, GameFi, NFT, and others – have entered the lexicon of gamers. They have made games more interesting, but they have also made them much more complicated.

Users of blockchain games can own in-game assets, receive rewards in cryptocurrencies, and participate in a decentralized game economy. Unlike regular server-based games, they have no single point of failure. And goods, services and trading assets can be bought and sold on a decentralized secondary market.

In words, it’s all very cool. However, a Coda Labs survey of nearly 7,000 gamers found not everyone is excited about Web3 games. To participate in the Global Web3 Gamer Study, potential respondents had to play video games at least twice a month and perform at least one cryptocurrency action – such as buying or selling non-exchangeable tokens (NFTs).

According to the findings, half of gamers are not familiar with any Web3 gaming terms. 12% of respondents had tried playing blockchain games, but only 15% of the remaining number said they were interested.

The key drawback most respondents cited was the complexity of the Web3 world. Thus, only 6% of gamers have ever used a cryptocurrency wallet or bought an NFT.

In order to develop this direction, blockchain game creators need to move away from “poncinomics” first and foremost. The model in which early adopters profit from investments by new entrants is extremely unstable and requires constant growth, which is very difficult to sustain.

03/04/2022 Manuel Collins

Bitcoin is on the verge of “losing relevance”.

Bitcoin is on the verge of “losing relevance,” and its last gasp was already visible on the horizon before the collapse of FTX, writes Business Insider.

Bitcoin came close to a dead end even before Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX collapse, as its technological flaws make it a questionable means of payment and transactions using it are slow.

BTC’s recent surge is probably “an artificial last gasp before it becomes irrelevant.” To recap, BTC’s price has fluctuated around $20,000 recently after falling earlier this year to $17,000 from an annual high of $69,000.

Bitcoin’s controversial reputation is based on the fact that this cryptocurrency is mostly not used for legal purposes in the real world, is not suitable as an investment because it does not generate cash flow or dividends, cannot be used as productively as commodities, and has no social advantages like gold.

Bitcoin’s value is based solely on speculation and fueled by hype from big investors and lobbyists.

In late 2020, individual companies began promoting BTC at corporate expense. Some venture capital firms are also still investing heavily in it. At the same time, however, ECB representatives noted that the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization poses a reputational risk to banks.

03/03/2022 Maximus Foster

What factors affect the bitcoin value?

First and foremost is the surplus money supply of the U.S. dollar. That is, bitcoin grows when there are essentially no dollars to invest. The more dollars are printed and the more of them are in circulation, the more the value of bitcoin rises. Another factor is the generational shift. People under the age of 25-30 are more willing to invest in bitcoin. This way, they transfer money into this currency and increase their capitalization. As a result, the value of bitcoin is also increasing. The third factor is negative or positive events concerning bitcoin market itself.

However, it is impossible to do any fundamental analysis on the rate of cryptocurrencies, and bitcoin in particular. Therefore, one can win very well on bitcoin as well as lose very badly. Accordingly, such currency can be classified as “gaming”, a gaming financial asset, given that it is a very high-risk investment. No more than five percent of one’s capital should be invested in such instruments. If they are lost, it will be a small loss. And if it leads to a gain, then the capital, relatively speaking, can grow threefold. I believe that only this kind of investment strategy is possible in this segment.

There are alternatives in the form of securities – stocks and bonds. Shares also have a “casino” element to them. Shares represent specific companies, and for these specific companies, you can look at the financial condition and forecasts, calculate the dynamics and invest with that in mind. However, the share of investment in shares should not exceed 30 percent of capital. The situation with investments in real estate is not quite clear at the moment. Real estate is strongly decreasing in value. There is a very strong pressure on this asset, so now, I think, it is worth waiting and at the minimum price you can invest later. The main asset to invest in is bonds. Bonds have first, second, and third tiers.

02/16/2022 Maximus Foster

How cryptoinfluencers help deceive gullible investors

Some cryptoinfluencers have already been caught helping to promote various coins and participating in “pump and dump” schemes, helping to defraud unsuspecting investors.

Many online opinion leaders are able to inspire and lead. They make this or that thing popular, they can also turn the public against it. Cryptoinfluencers do the same thing in the cryptocurrency space. That said, a number of episodes have led investors to wonder if they are participating in elaborate Pump&Dump schemes.

Every now and then there are news stories in the media that welcome a new celebrity to join any cryptocurrency platform. Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and rapper Snoop Dogg, along with other famous personalities, are becoming active participants in the crypto boom.

However, they are sometimes accused of supporting one-day projects. They intentionally promote tokens to unsophisticated investors who have little understanding of the risks associated with cryptoassets. As a result, buyers of such coins incur huge losses.

In a typical Pump&Dump scheme, only the project team and cryptoinfluencers cooperating with them profit from financial losses and others’ grief. A well-known example of such scheme is a fraud involving video blogger Ben Armstrong (BitBoy).

The popular crypto-savvy ZachXBT gave Armstrong an in-depth debriefing in January of this year. In a large Twitter post, he revealed that he posed as a representative of a project in need of promotion, and read Armstrong’s rates for helping him do so.

He also discovered seven scams that BitBoy was actively working with, promoting them among its audience. They are MYX Network (MYX), DistX, Zao Finance, Ethereum Yield (ETHY), Meridian Network (LOCK), Cypherium Blockchain (CPH) and PAMP Network (PAMP).

All of them ended up failing, bankrupting the investors who invested in them. However, this is not the case for BitBoy, which was able to make good money from these campaigns, the onchain detective adds. The blogger subsequently deleted all of his videos posted on Twitter to promote the fraudulent projects. However, as ZachXBT summarizes, “the fact that a video is just deleted doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

01/19/2022 Mason Johnson

Etherium overtook bitcoin thanks to a 5% jump in 30 minutes

ETH/USD has been doing better than BTC in recent days. Indeed, while BTC is up 2.26% in 24 hours and 1.64% in a week so far, etherium is up more than 4% since yesterday and nearly 8% in seven days.

However, much of that gain was achieved in less than 30 minutes last night, as ethereum rose from $1215 to $1280 between 1:20 and 1:50 a.m. European time, that is more than 5%.

Now Etherium is down slight to $1265, but it still retains most of yesterday’s gains.

While the reasons behind ETH’s outperformance over BTC remain unclear, there is some evidence that the situation may continue, and that etherium could significantly extend its gains.

Indeed, a blockchain data analytics company said in a tweet yesterday that the number of active etherium addresses reached a six-week high on Monday, suggesting that this could explain the cryptocurrency’s rise.

The company also noted that the last time ETH active addresses reached such levels (October 15), the price of Ether rose 30% in 3 weeks.

In another tweet on Wednesday, the company noted that the number of etherium addresses containing 100-100,000 ETH had reached a 20-month high, suggesting that funds are accumulating that could support growth.

01/05/2016 Mason Johnson

Anonymity and openness of the blockchain is a good thing

Blockchain is open, everyone can see everything. So Bitcoin has no anonymity, it has “pseudonymity. For example, if an attacker demands a ransom for a wallet, everyone understands that the wallet belongs to the bad guy. And since anyone can monitor transactions from this wallet, the fraudster will not be able to use the bitcoins he received so easily, because if his identity is revealed somewhere, he will be immediately put in jail. Almost all exchanges require authentication for exchanging bitcoins for regular money.

That is why criminals use what is known as a “mixer”. The mixer mixes dirty money with a lot of clean money, and thus “launders” it. The perpetrator pays a large commission for this, and risks a lot, because the mixer is either anonymous itself (and can escape with the money), or is already under the control of someone influential (and can turn in the authorities).

But let’s leave the problems of criminals, why is pseudonymity bad for honest users? Here is a simple example: I transfer some bitcoins to my mother. After that she knows:

  • How much total money I have at any given time.
  • How much and, most importantly, exactly what I spent it on at all times. What I bought, what roulette I played, what politician I supported “anonymously.”

Or if I paid back a friend’s debt for lemonade, he now knows all about my finances. Do you think this is nonsense? How about opening up your credit card financial history for all to see? And not just the past, but all of the future.

If it’s okay for individuals (you never know, someone wants to be “transparent”), it’s fatal for companies: all of their contractors, purchases, sales, customers, volume of accounts, and in general everything and everything becomes public. The openness of finances is probably one of Bitcoin’s biggest drawbacks.

12/24/2015 Manuel Collins

Miners keep the network secure

You’ve probably heard about the miners, the giant mining farms that are built next to power plants. What do they do? They waste 10 minutes burning electricity, “shaking” blocks until they become “beautiful” and can be included in the blockchain (we talked about what “beautiful” blocks are and why to “shake” them in the previous post). This is to ensure that rewriting the financial history takes as much time as writing it (assuming you have the same total power).

It uses as much electricity as a city consumes for 100,000 residents. But add to that the expensive equipment, which is only suitable for mining. The principle of mining (aka proof-of-work) is identical to the notion of burning the resources of humanity.

Blockchain optimists like to say that miners don’t just do useless work, but ensure the stability and security of the Bitcoin network. This is true, except that the problem is that miners protect Bitcoin from other miners.

If there were a thousand times fewer miners and a thousand times less electricity burned, Bitcoin would function just as well – the same block every 10 minutes, the same number of transactions, the same speed.

When it comes to blockchain solutions, there is a risk of a “51% attack. The point of the attack is that if someone controls more than half of all the mining power, he can secretly write an alternative financial story, in which he did not give his money to anyone. And then show everyone his version – and it becomes reality. In this way he has the opportunity to spend his money several times. Traditional payment systems are not subject to such an attack.

It turns out that Bitcoin has become a hostage of its own ideology. “Superfluous” miners cannot stop mining, because then the probability of one person controlling more than half of the remaining power would increase dramatically. As long as it is profitable to mine, the network is stable, but if the situation changes (for example, because electricity prices go up), the network may face massive “double spending.

05/22/2015 Mason Johnson

Blockchain is efficient and scalable, conventional money will die out

Quote #3: “The combination of “blockchain technology + personal body connectome” will allow all human thoughts to be encoded and made available in a standardized compressed format. Data will be captured by cortical scans, EEG, brain-computer interfaces, cognitive nanorobots, etc. Thinking can be represented as chains of blocks, recording virtually all of a person’s subjective experience and perhaps even their consciousness. Once recorded in the blockchain, the various components of memories can be administered and transmitted – for example, to restore memory in the case of diseases accompanied by amnesia.

If every node in the network does the same thing, then obviously the bandwidth of the entire network is equal to the bandwidth of a single node in the network. And do you know what it equals exactly? Bitcoin can handle a maximum of 7 transactions per second – all of them.

In addition, Bitcoin blockchain records transactions only once every 10 minutes. And once a record appears, it is customary to wait another 50 minutes for reliability, because records regularly spontaneously roll back. Now imagine that you need to buy gum with bitcoins. It’s only an hour in a store, so it’s no big deal.

In the context of the whole world, this is ridiculous even now, when Bitcoin is used by barely one in a thousand people on Earth. And at this rate of transactions, it won’t be possible to significantly increase the number of active users. By comparison, Visa processes thousands of transactions per second, and it is easy to increase capacity if necessary, because classical banking technologies are scalable.

Even if conventional money dies out, it is clearly not because blockchain solutions will replace it.

04/06/2015 Mason Johnson

Blockchain is a gigantic distributed computer

If you haven’t been exposed to the principles of blockchain, but have only heard reviews of the technology, you might be under the impression that blockchain is a kind of distributed computer that does distributed computing, respectively. Nodes around the world, they say, are piecing together something more.

This notion is fundamentally flawed. In reality, all the nodes serving the blockchain do exactly the same thing. Millions of computers:

  • Checking the same transactions against the same rules. Doing identical work.
  • Writing the same thing on the blockchain (if they are lucky enough to be able to write it).
  • Stores all the history for all time, the same, one for all.

No parallelization, no synergy, no mutual aid. Only duplication, and immediately a million times. We will talk below about why this is necessary, but as you can see, there is no efficiency. It’s more like the opposite.