In today’s Money Morning…the first episode of our podcast…recent pullback in bitcoin has something to do with India…this time it’s different…and more…

Editor’s note: In our first episode of the Money Morning Podcast, I speak to Leigh Travers who is Executive Director of DigitalX Ltd [ASX:DCC]. Among other projects, DigitalX runs a bitcoin fund. We discuss the recent impact of Elon Musk and Tesla on the bitcoin price as well as a range of topics in the world of cryptocurrencies, including monetary policy, institutional sentiment, and what DigitalX is doing to capitalise on trends within the market.

There’s a podcast in this editorial for the first time, be sure to watch it.

Speaking of bitcoin…

I spend enough time looking at charts and financial statements for those things to occasionally enter my subconscious.

And a couple months ago, I had a dream about the Bitcoin [BTC] price chart.

Wow! It just keeps going up, I thought.

We won’t get too deep into Freud and Jung today, but suffice to say bitcoin is on a lot of people’s minds at the moment.

I dare say a lot of retail investors out there are looking at the chart below thinking they have missed the boat:

To be clear, I don’t think you’ve missed the boat yet, depending on how long you HODL.

And this is the bitcoin price in AUD, which will look slightly more subdued than the BTC price in USD.

Which is because of the relative weakness/strength of the USD and the Aussie dollar.

If you’re a true crypto believer you probably think of crypto in terms of crypto, not crypto relative to fiat.

But what happens if crypto and fiat go to war?

Bitcoin vs Gold: Which Should You Buy in 2021?

Here’s a quick explainer of what India is up to with regards to crypto via Reuters:

‘India will propose a law banning cryptocurrencies, fining anyone trading in the country or even holding such digital assets…

‘The bill, one of the world’s strictest policies against cryptocurrencies, would criminalise possession, issuance, mining, trading and transferring crypto-assets…the bill would give holders of cryptocurrencies up to six months to liquidate, after which penalties will be levied, said the official, who asked not to be named as the contents of the bill are not public.

‘Officials are confident of getting the bill enacted into law as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government holds a comfortable majority in parliament.

‘If the ban becomes law, India would be the first major economy to make holding cryptocurrency illegal. Even China, which has banned mining and trading, does not penalise possession.’

Even China doesn’t do this…

Nice one, India.

To be fair, this kind of move was always on the cards.

Fiat was not going to walk quietly into the night.

And paradoxically, I think moves like this will actually accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrency rather than its demise.

Investors will likely turn up their nose at draconian policies that favour fiat.

More pressure means a quicker exit from fiat.

It’s like a desperate salesman using the wrong tactics on a potential buyer — push too hard and the buyer will walk.

It’s classic government behaviour, really.

As Leigh Travers noted in our podcast chat, bitcoin is directly benefitting from central bank monetary policy and government behaviour.

India won’t be alone.

Others will come forward trying to stop the inevitable.

You can’t turn off the Internet. At least, not without revealing that the emperor has no clothes.

And by that, I mean that if democracies engage in authoritarian behaviour to protect the value of fiat which they have spent the last few decades devaluing — people will vote with their feet.

They will emigrate to crypto-friendly jurisdictions.

They may even form their own countries without the traditional nation state borders.

The nation state will sign its own death warrant if it pushes ahead with crypto crackdowns.

It’s a scary prospect, but one you should be prepared for.

We’ve got a new service in the pipeline (in the coming months) to guide you through the age of techno-monetary competition.

Remember, central bank and government behaviour is largely predictable.

It’s what you do in light of this behaviour that really matters.

Finally, if you want an in-depth look at the world of crypto, be sure to check out that podcast.

Lachlann is also the Editorial Analyst at Exponential Stock Investor, a stock tipping newsletter that hunts for promising small-cap stocks. For information on how to subscribe and see what Lachy’s telling subscribers right now, please click here.

Elastic finance (EeFi) offers an exciting monetary and technological innovation, the likes of which has not been seen in the cryptocurrency market in many years. The emerging elastic finance sub-sector – led by Ampleforth – features tokens that experience dynamic supply adjustments called rebases. The rebase allows crypto assets to absorb demand (as measured by price) in order to produce significant reductions in volatility. In theory the rebase should help elastic finance assets be relatively price stable — as compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

However, as is common with any new and disruptive innovation, the rise of elastic finance has led to controversy, confusion and debate among developers, investors and others. In fact, the current sentiment around elastic finance is negative, primarily due to four factors:

It’s time to take a second look at elastic finance and move past the conventional (negative) wisdom.

Our goal is to address common points of confusion and critiques of elastic finance by:

Let’s start out by revisiting the rebase. Many tend to focus on the mechanics of the rebase – specifically what triggers (from a mathematical and smart contract perspective) token supply expansions and contractions (positive and negative rebases). While the mechanics of the rebase are interesting, we think it is much more important to focus on the why rather than how. 

Why does the rebase exist? The sole purpose of the rebase is to incentivize individuals to engage in buying and selling activity that helps a token achieve stability around a specific price zone or target. There are two types of rebases: symmetric and asymmetric, as defined in the table below.

Ampleforth, the original elastic asset, has a symmetric rebase. Since Ampleforth was launched, a number of teams have introduced elastic tokens featuring asymmetric rebases, mainly in an effort to reduce the impact of negative rebases (supply contraction) on all token holders.

Whether the rebase is symmetric or asymmetric, elastic assets should be judged on their ability to maintain relative stability around their target price zone (or price peg) over extended periods of time. If an elastic asset has not achieved price stability over time, it has failed in its primary function.

For example, over a 12 month period (December 2019 to December 2020), Ampleforth’s price largely hovered around $1.00, as shown in the image below. (Ampleforth’s price target is plus or minus 5% the price of the 2019 US dollar.) During the same period, Ampleforth’s market capitalization grew roughly by 27,000% ($ 1.35 M to $ 367.11 M).

From a utility perspective, users and development teams can develop products, services and applications that leverage:

Since Ampleforth exploded in popularity in July 2020, dozens of teams have introduced elastic assets featuring symmetric and asymmetric rebase mechanics. This flood of elastic assets has left many people asking how they can determine which protocols are worth their time and attention. Here we introduce a new resource: The AmpleSense DAO Elastic Asset Assessment Framework. The Framework features five criteria that can be used to analyze the short-, medium- and long-term viability of elastic assets. We are sharing this Framework with the crypto community in the hopes that it will encourage informed, objective discussion and decision-making about the relevance and viability of various elastic assets.

Many elastic finance assets are being launched where the primary focus is on the rebase. Credible elastic assets will be designed to meet specific objectives (e.g., achieve price stability without collateralization), rather than simply positioning the rebase as a potential profit-generating mechanism.   

To be successful, elastic finance assets must be secure, operated via non-opaque smart contracts, and require the presence of a robust technical infrastructure, such as oracles.  

Successful elastic assets must be highly decentralized, non-censorable and widely adopted.

Investors, users and developers should consider the emerging regulatory landscape surrounding cryptocurrencies, especially as they relate to issues such as stablecoin issuance and securities regulations, when considering the long-term viability of different elastic assets.

The primary objective of the rebase mechanic is to achieve price stability over time. Temporal Price Stability is a metric that measures the amount of time the asset spends within its target range. If an asset is outside its target, the contraction phase (negative rebase) is more impactful on investors, developers and users than expansion (positive rebase).  

Note: It may be more difficult for elastic assets pegged to an individual cryptocurrency’s price, index (e.g., basket of currencies) or total crypto market capitalization to achieve high temporal price stability.

A common critique of elastic assets is that they serve no other purpose than speculation, or offer a solution in search of a problem. This is not the case.

From a macro crypto perspective, elastic assets – specifically those with proven ability to serve as generally stable stores of value and mediums of exchange — could lead to a more robust DeFi ecosystem, and even used as currencies, an achievement that no crypto has achieved. 

Many observers and analysts have noted that DeFi is increasingly vulnerable due to its over-reliance on collateralized and centralized stablecoins. Currently, policymakers and regulators are taking aim at stablecoins, with an eye toward reducing their impact and controlling their growth. One of the most recent developments was the publication of the STABLE Act in late 2020, which would prohibit centralized and decentralized stablecoin issuers from operating without securing a banking charter.

If adopted widely, elastic finance assets could greatly reduce the crypto ecosystem’s reliance on centralized stablecoins, and provide multiple ways to develop innovative, stable stores of value and financial instruments that have limited exposure to governments and regulators — and go beyond what stablecoins can offer.

Admittedly, utilizing elastic assets to help DeFi reduce its regulatory vulnerabilities is a long-term project. Are they any ways elastic assets are being utilized right now? Yes.

Are All Elastic Assets Stablecoins? No.

It is important to note that not all rebasing assets function as stablecoins. Many observers group all rebasing assets into the stablecoin category, which is inaccurate and incorrect. Different elastic tokens seek to achieve stability over varying time periods. Algorithmic stablecoins (that use the rebase mechanic to achieve a tight peg around $1 USD or another fiat currency) are only one type of elastic asset. There are others, as the table below illustrates.

Rebase is designed to enable the token to function as a reasonably stable store of value  (e.g., price generally returns to a target range over time), and uncorrelated asset.

Example: Ample

Rebase is combined with other techniques that encourage token supply reductions, to help the token maintain a peg as close to $1 as possible.

Example: Empty Set Dollar

Rebase is tied to a moving target such as the total crypto market cap, or price of a specific cryptocurrency to provide investors with exposure to a large market or growing protocol/token via a single asset.

Example: Base Protocol, Digg

We are reserving judgment on which of these use cases will be most impactful. Over time the market will determine which ones are most successful and valuable to the cryptocurrency ecosystem.  

 The objective of our independent, community-powered organization (the AmpleSense DAO) is to foster the development of a broad and robust elastic finance ecosystem. Given this, we have put a lot of thought into the various ways rebasing tokens can be utilized – along with the risk of these activities. Risk is defined as the potential for capital loss related to buying, trading holding or using these assets. The three tables below describe emerging and novel (un-launched) use cases for elastic finance assets. Our DAO is working on developing a few of these implementations currently.

There is potential for numerous other use cases to be introduced over the coming months and years, including using elastic assets as a unit of account in financial contracts.

Elastic finance represents a profoundly important innovation in crypto, on par with the introduction of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum, the first rebasing asset (Ampleforth), helped to launch an expanding crop of elastic finance innovations.

Over time the rebase will shift from a source of negativity and misunderstanding to an integral and accepted part of DeFi. It took more than 10 years for people to understand and begin to more broadly accept Bitcoin. Likewise, it may take many years for elastic assets to reach their fullest potential and adoption.

But we do not have to wait for the far future to benefit from elastic finance today. As we have shown, elastic assets can be objectively evaluated, have a clear and vital purpose, and possess use cases that go far beyond speculation and trading.

We look forward to helping to innovate, explain, track and grow the elastic finance ecosystem as this sub-sector matures. We’ll be back with new insights about how elastic finance is evolving and influencing DeFi and the broader crypto market in the future.

The AmpleSense DAO leadership team developed this essay. The DAO is an independent, community-powered organization focused on improving understanding and adoption of Ample and other high-quality elastic finance assets. The DAO’s governance token is kMPL. Learn about and join the DAO’s mission at www.amplesense.io.

What is Elastic (XEL) and is it a Good Investment? Cryptocurrency investors are truly spoilt for choice these days. Not only are there around 1,000 existing digital currencies and assets but there are also new digital tokens launching every week as the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) market is experiencing a massive boom. To make more sense of this new asset class, BTCManager regularly highlights new cryptoassets to gauge whether or not they could potentially turn into profitable investments for its holders. In this article, you will be introduced to the Elastic Project and its native currency the elastic coin, which carries the ticket XEL.Contents0.0.1 Sponsored Links1 What is the Elastic Project?2 The Elastic Project ICO3 The Elastic Coin4 Elastic’s Big Opportunity5 Issues with the Elastic Project5.1 Departure of Key Project Member and Team Changes The Elastic Project is an open source project that aims to develop the first secure, trustless, decentralized, programmable supercomputer. A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or very near the highest operational rate possible for computers. Elastic has been in development over a year and provides the infrastructure for a decentralized supercomputer that can carry out computationally heavy tasks over the Internet. The infrastructure is powered by a cryptocurrency, called elastic (XEL), which allows individuals to buy and sell computational resources. Individuals or companies who require computational resources can model their problem using the elastic programming language and broadcast it to the Elastic network together with a certain amount of elastic coin. Elastic “miners” (node owners) can then offer their computational resources for a share of the offering elastic coins, and their reward will depend on the amount of work each miner has to contribute in relation to the other contributing miners who are participating in solving the problem. This allows individuals and companies to purchase computational power supplied by a range of GPUs and CPUs using elastic coins. Elastic held an initial coin offering in 2016 where it distributed elastic coins in exchange for what the project referred to as donations, accompanied with the disclaimer: “Please do not consider Elastic Coins (XEL) to be shares, futures, certificates, securities, bonds, treasuries, profit-sharing agreements, or anything similar. That is, do not expect any future rewards for your donation. Donating just means supporting the development of an open source project.” The ICO lasted from February 29, 2016, to August 19, 2016, and managed to raise around 710 BTC for the total supply of 100,000,000 XEL. The total supply of elastic coin is 100 million, and no new coins can be mined or minted. Currently, the total circulating supply is 78,054,996 coins. The cryptocurrency started trading on exchanges on June 24, 2017, and can currently be bought and sold on Bittrex and using the Heat Wallet with the former processing the lion’s share of the currency’s $500,000+ daily trading volume.   Since elastic coin became tradable on exchanges, the price has started with strong volatility and peaked at $1.32 on June 24 and spiked again on June 25 to $1.20 and has since trended downwards to currently stand at around $0.32 per elastic coin. The big argument as to why you should look into elastic coin as an investment is that the market for supercomputers is growing at a staggering rate and creating a fully-functioning decentralized supercomputer that gains adoption by key institutions and individuals in this market could bode very profitable for the Elastic project. According to data from Gartner.com, the worldwide revenue generated by the supercomputer market was estimated to be worth around $3.5 billion in 2016. By 2020, the market is expected to be worth $4.4 billion. If Elastic managed to establish itself in the very competitive supercomputer market, even as a smaller player, the profit potential would be very high. If the market welcomes a decentralized supercomputer with open arms, then Elastic could turn into a mega project, provided its team manages to deliver. However, the Elastic Project faces several issues that need to be acknowledged by potential investors. Departure of Key Project Member and Team Changes A leading figure in Elastic’s team with the pseudonym Lannister left the project, which has led to inaccessibility of the project’s ICO funds and scam accusations on the BitcoinTalk Forum to increase. According to a blog post on the Elastic Project website, “Lannister dropped out due to health reasons, the funds collected for the project were frozen (multi-sig wallet, so Lannister was needed to sign off, but was no longer available) so the project was in deep doo-doo land. With no money and lots of development work to be done, it looked like Elastic was finished.” Previous : What is Golem and Is it A Good Investment? Next : BTC-E’s Role in Mt. Gox Hack: Laundered $4 Billion Proceeds of Bitcoin Theft Google is Releasing a Blockchain-related Product for its Cloud Platform When Would an Industry Heavyweight Launch Their Own Coin? Huawei to Build Blockchain Smartphone Blockchain Studios Launch Virtual Reality Game in Conjunction with AmaZix

I am seeing a good deal of misunderstanding arise with the popularity of Bitcoin. Much of this seems to stem from a gold standard style of thinking. It can basically be boiled down to this: There are a lot of moving parts in that, but this idea that a fixed money supply is good is not consistent with the history of money or even the basic facts about how modern money works. Worse, it constrains our economy in ways that make us worse off in the long-run. Make no mistake, as I've explained before, the gold standard was silly and no one who understands money or the history of money should ever support it. But let's get back to Bitcoin…. The fact that Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21MM BTC is not an aspect that makes it a useful form of money. The reason for this is simple - while we generally think of money as something we have money is actually something we don't yet have, but can tap into. That is the essence of having credit. If you have credit you can access money when you need it. After all, credit IS money. For instance, most of the homes in the USA are bought with a mortgage. If you have good credit a bank will take credit risk to issue you new money so you can buy something you otherwise couldn't have afforded. When this is done our economy has that much more output and real goods (the house and the millions of building components that go into it). The borrower gets a house they couldn't have paid for with cash and our economy gets output it otherwise wouldn't have had. Likewise, when people borrow too much the money supply can contract to offset this excess. This is called an elastic money supply because the money supply can expand and contract as we need it to. Since many Bitcoin proponents are Silicon Valley based it might help to use a slightly different example - stocks. Stocks are a financial asset (just like a bank deposit that is created when a new loan is made) that can be created from thin air to help finance ventures. From the perspective of a corporation stocks are the most expensive form of borrowing. Firms issue stock and a venture capitalist or investment bank earns interest on the loan in the form of equity in the company. This is an elastic expansion of financial assets that helps the firm grow and innovate. While this elasticity is generally a good thing it can cut both ways. For instance, during the tech boom there was too much expansion in the supply of stocks to companies that weren't really creditworthy. The same thing happened in the mortgage market during the housing boom. So, this elastic nature can create booms that get out of control. But for the most part this elasticity gives creditworthy borrowers access to money when they need it. And this flexibility allows the economy to adapt and evolve across time as opposed to being constrained by a fixed force like the amount of gold that we can dig out of the ground. I've highlighted some of Bitcoin's weaknesses as a form of money in the last few weeks. Its primary weakness is that it is too volatile to serve as a reliable medium of exchange. But the inability to expand the Bitcoin money supply as the economy evolves is an equally problematic aspect that makes its network adoption relatively limited in scope. This can probably be resolved with some form of smart contract and alternative coin, but the fixed supply is an inherent flaw in Bitcoin's design that contributes to its flaws as a medium of exchange.4 ¹ - This one is particularly annoying coming from people in Silicon Valley where most of the ventures are funded by banks organized as hedge funds calling themselves "venture capitalists" charging their investors 2 & 20 (or more) and taking the absolute most expensive asset an entrepreneur has (the equity in their firm). I have absolutely nothing against VC's (or most banks for that matter), but you can't criticize banks for extending credit and charging fees on that credit when VC's help firms extend shares in exchange for a % of the firm and underlying fund fees. A VC, after all, is basically just a bank with a fancier name. ² - The USA never really had a true gold standard where gold was the only form of money that circulated. We've pretty much always had some form of credit layered on top of gold reserves. In this sense, gold was never a strict constraint.³ ³ - Another common response to this is that the USA experienced its highest growth during the era of the gold standard. Actually, the era of the 1800's was a period when the USA was an emerging market. The growth was largely due to its status as a small emerging economy. But it was also due to the fact that the money supply was somewhat elastic during periods like the Free Banking Era. Ironically, it was the lack of a Central Bank that made many of the downturns in the 1800's and early 1900's far worse than they should have been because there was no efficient mechanism for payment clearing across banks. 4 - Some people argue that the fixed supply of BTC is its greatest strength and that the coin can simply increase in value to allow the money supply expand and contract. But again, this misses the crucial feature of credit as money that allows people who DON'T have money to access money. The price increases in BTC's value only help people who already have access to the money. And in fact, this asset inflation hurts those who don't already have BTC in the first place as it becomes more expensive to acquire. NB - Don't come at me screaming about how I hate cryptocurrencies and am some apologist for the "old" monetary system. I am not remotely against cryptocurrencies. In fact, I hope some of my critiques help resolve some of the current flaws. The chat platform is currently undergoing maintenance. To see the chat, try to refresh in about 5-10 minutes. Chat is not supported in your browser version. Please upgrade your browser or use a different browser, such as Google Chrome. You do not have permissions for this room.

Bitcoin won’t become the standard for daily payments. Period. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love Bitcoin and believe it will remain as the number 1 cryptocurrency by market cap and succeed massively as the best treasury reserve asset/store of value. But the reality is, its fixed supply of 21 million BTC doesn’t work well for commerce because the volatility of demand translates into the price and only the price.

The only way to accommodate the increase in demand for a fixed supply asset, like Bitcoin, is for the price to go up. While that’s great for being a store of value, this can be problematic for commerce because constant price changes make it incredibly difficult to denominate things like services, contracts, or debt.

So, if fixed supply monies don’t work well as the standard for daily payments, what about infinite supply monies like the US Dollar?

The Problem with Infinite-Supply Money like Fiat Currency (USD) The problem with infinite money supplies is that it leads to inflation. Period.

While we use fiat currencies like the USD for commerce and daily payments today, it doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect system. In fact, the US Dollar as we know it today has only been around for 50 years and is a giant experiment that’s failing. 

In 1971, the USD went off the gold standard and adopted a fractional reserve system which enabled the Federal Reserve to issue money as they please without any gold-backing. Ever since this change, the USD money supply has expanded rapidly and with it, inflation has skyrocketed:

Basically, when you have an infinite supply of money and new money is being introduced into circulation, the purchasing power of everyone’s existing dollars goes down, hence why prices go up. It’s essentially theft or as some call it, a “hidden taxation”. And this is how our governments are devaluing our money.

And to be clear here, this is just one problem of inflation. To fully understand the negative effects of inflationary money on society, I recommend you take a deep dive into the graphs and metrics presented on wtfhappenedin1971.com. It will blow your mind. 

The Problem with Decentralized Stablecoins like $DAI

MakerDAO’s decentralized stablecoin $DAI is a better alternative to fiat currencies or centralized stablecoins but still suffers from major issues such as black swan events.

Back in March 2020, when the markets suffered a massive crash due to fear and uncertainty surrounding covid, lockdowns, and the economy, the MakerDAO system for its stablecoin $DAI essentially broke down.

What happened was, MakerDAO Vaults with cryptocurrency backing the $DAI stablecoin require a minimum collateralization of 150% but when the price of Ether (ETH) and other cryptocurrencies dropped over 50% within 24 hrs, a very large number of Vaults got liquidated and the MakerDAO system failed to acquire the required collateral to back $DAI. 

While this unfortunate situation was since mitigated, it goes to show that $DAI is prone to price shocks like the black swan event that occurred in March 2020.

Ampleforth addresses the shortcomings of fixed supply monies (Bitcoin), infinite supply monies (USD), and stablecoins dependent on collateral ($DAI) by creating an uncollateralized elastic supply cryptocurrency $AMPL, where its supply expands or contracts daily based on market conditions.

$AMPL Solves Flaws of $BTC Since $AMPL is the first cryptocurrency with an elastic supply model and is pegged to something (the 2019 inflation-adjusted US Dollar, ~$1.027), I think Satoshi himself would be very impressed by it. 

After all, Satoshi did say:

“I don’t know a way for software to know the real-world value of things. If there was some clever way, or if we wanted to trust someone to actively manage the money supply to peg it to something, the rules could have been programmed for that.”

12 years later, and we now have $AMPL – an algorithmic, decentralized, uncollateralized, and censorship-resistant cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, except it supports price stability by programmatically managing the money supply in response to demand, resulting in a better money.

I think Satoshi would be proud of $AMPL as its accomplishing the vision which he wished he could create but didn’t know how to do. 

$AMPL Solves Flaws of USD Ampleforth has pioneered a revolutionary new monetary policy that emphasizes price stability with an elastic supply. 

It’s completely decentralized and programmatic with the total supply of $AMPL automatically expanding or contracting based on natural market conditions affecting $AMPL’s demand. With that, $AMPL’s price and stabilization are 100% sustained by free-market incentives. 

There’s no centralized entity like the Federal Reserve increasing the supply and inflating the currency. Instead, the Ampleforth protocol helps stabilize the price of $AMPL via its daily rebase mechanism that adjusts the supply up or down to restore $AMPL’s price equilibrium of around $1.02 (the 2019 inflation-adjusted US Dollar).

Now, before you start spewing that $AMPL is far from stable, that its price swings wildly between $0.70 and $1.50; let me remind you that $AMPL has been around for a mere 2 years. It’s nothing on the history of money timeline. 

$AMPL is meant to swing in its early stages of life. This is what brings people in and grows the network. It’s supposed to be used as a more speculative asset right now and thanks to the incentive mechanism that the rebase offers, it attracts more and more value over time.

Eventually, when $AMPL grows to a much larger market cap, the price of $AMPL will become more stable as a larger market cap leads to decreased volatility:

Oh and guess what? Despite its swings, $AMPL has managed to keep an average price of $1.024 as set by design since its inception. So yeah, on a macro scale, $AMPL is maintaining its stability just fine. 

$AMPL Solves Flaws of $DAI First of all, $AMPL is not a stablecoin. 

The price of $AMPL isn’t pegged to any specific price or fiat currency. Rather the protocol seeks a price-supply equilibrium of around $1.02 by increasing or decreasing the supply of $AMPL.

Here’s how that works:

When the price of $AMPL is high (above equilibrium) the protocol increases the supply which incentivizes $AMPL token holders to take advantage of their increased supply coupled with a “higher” token price to take profits. 

This effectively restores equilibrium on the demand side once the change in supply goes through and helps the price per $AMPL to cycle around $1.00.

That said, the price is determined by the free market where arbitrageurs buy or sell $AMPL when it's considered to be overvalued or undervalued, and there is no collateral backing $AMPL.  Rather, it’s an independent financial primitive that does not rely on centralized collateral or lenders of last resort.

That’s how $AMPL fixes $DAI’s flaws.

$DAI relies on crypto collateral provided by stakers and cannot be sustained by free-market incentives alone, which is why it relies on periodic bailouts as seen with the black swan event in March 2020. 

Register now at Publish0x to claim your $$$. It only takes 15 seconds and it's free.

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In this video, Im explaining Ampleforth. Ampleforth is a very interesting and unique project, it tries to be an uncorrelated asset to the crypto markets and achieves this through elastic supply. You will learn exactly what it is, how it works and how it will be used. https://www.ampleforth.org/ WANT TO BE SEEN ON THE CHANNEL? EMAIL contact@ivanontech.com JOIN ACADEMY https://academy.ivanontech.com/webinar JOIN TELEGRAM GROUP https://t.me/ivanontechvip Ampleforth are sponsoring this episode. GET $10 TO BUY YOUR FIRST CRYPTO: https://www.coinbase.com/join/59d1738ff36136022bd9ee10 BUY PHYSICAL BULLION GOLD: http://www.bullionvaultaffiliate.com/ivanli/en BEST ALTCOIN EXCHANGE: https://www.binance.com/en?ref=35933746 BEST WALLET: https://www.ledger.com?r=5a56aa023b40&tracker=IOT Good Morning Crypto Want to be a Sponsor? EMAIL contact@ivanontech.com Join my online academy https://academy.ivanontech.com Join the crypto discussion forum https://forum.toshitimes.com Join Telegram channel https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAE2xJE4l8xhC8MU4cg If you would like me to speak at your conference, book me here: https://ivanontech.com #bitcoin #blockchain #ivanontech Social: LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/ivanliljeqvist/ Instagram: http://instagram.com/ivanontech/ Steemit: https://steemit.com/@ivanli Facebook: http://facebook.com/ivanontech/ Exclusive email list: http://eepurl.com/c0hyc9 DISCLAIMER: This is NOT financial advice. This is just my opinions. I am not responsible for any investment decisions that you choose to make. Ivan on Tech is all about cryptocurrencies and the technology behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, IOTA. We also cover Bitcoin price, altcoin price, investing, analytics, different altcoins. Ivan on Tech by Ivan LiljeqvistArticle Categories:Ivan on Tech Videos

A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cost because of all the companies that failed since the 1990s.  I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them.  I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Bitcoin was created in 2009 as a way to remove third-party intermediaries that are typically needed to conduct monetary transactions. According to a message inscribed in the coinbase parameter of the first block in Bitcoin’s blockchain, this was at least partially in response to the Great Recession that lasted from 2007 through the early part of 2009. Most of us remember the difficulties that banks and other institutions faced as the credit crisis raged on. 

In contrast, Bitcoin was created to serve as a universally accepted and trustless cash system. Although several companies have tried that type of system over the years, Bitcoin’s success is unrivaled and is now attracting attention from global regulators.

As a new presidential administration takes power in the U.S., many wonder how President Biden’s team will handle the rising popularity of cryptocurrency markets. Two central figures on Biden’s team will be Gary Gensler and Janet Yellen. Although both Gensler and Yellen are considered to be pro-blockchain technology, they are also known to have reservations about some of the wheeling and dealing that occurs daily. As cryptocurrency’s popularity continues to rise, the way in which the U.S. reacts to that growth will take on added importance.

It’s clear that Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto had a distrust of centralized banking and finance after the pain that many people experienced during the Great Recession.  Bitcoin was created to get away from the multinational banks and the notion of “too big to fail.”  Given Bitcoin’s rise in popularity over the last four years in particular, there can be no doubting the currency’s success. However, despite that success, many still consider cryptocurrency to be the “Wild West” (rightly or wrongly) of finance.  

When the word “regulation” is tossed around in cryptocurrency communities, people tend to have a strong reaction. I think that is simply a case of not fully understanding that regulation can actually be a good thing if targeted at the right areas. The right areas are not taxation, KYC or AML, issues that can sometimes cause anxiety for those determined to live in a decentralized world. Rather, regulation should be focused on protecting investors and making them feel comfortable investing in an asset class that is still in its infancy.  

A recent example of the wrong type of regulation was discussed by Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, on his Twitter account in November 2020.  

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) November 25, 2020

The point should be clear that while the intention of the potential regulation may have been good, the outcome would be extremely burdensome for cryptocurrency exchanges in terms of having to verify ownership of each self-hosted wallet. Rather than requiring exchanges to devote resources, financial and personnel, toward this type of unnecessary regulation, we should be doing everything in our power to encourage and support exchanges and other crypto entrepreneurs in their endeavor to drive cryptocurrency adoption.

Another unfortunate aspect of an asset class that is just beginning to take shape is that past negative incidents can sometimes shape a false narrative. Case in point is when Yellen, the newly-confirmed Secretary of the Treasury, recently testified in her confirmation hearing that cryptocurrency transactions were used “mainly for illicit purposes.”  

While it’s true that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have sometimes been used for nefarious activities, the criminal share of all cryptocurrency activity was estimated to be just 0.34 percent in 2020. As it turns out, regulators fined banks approximately $10 billion over a 15-month period through 2019 for violating anti-money laundering rules and transacting with countries currently under sanctions. So, it certainly seems Bitcoin’s threat is overstated compared to what we already face. Yellen’s misunderstanding is an unfortunate result of hearing the occasional negative headline.  

Despite that, Yellen did recently acknowledge that digital currencies had the potential to improve the efficiency of the financial system. That viewpoint happens to align with that of Gensler, Biden’s choice to lead the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who is known for his pro-blockchain mentality. The first indication that Gensler will serve as a Bitcoin ambassador is that he taught a class covering blockchain technology’s potential at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. It’s hard to imagine a world where someone would teach about an asset’s potential and then do an about face and try to stifle it. A second sign that Gensler may be Bitcoin friendly is the fact that he penned an op ed for CoinDesk in which he argued that cryptocurrency and blockchain technology would serve as a catalyst for change:

This last point — crypto and blockchain technology acting as a catalyst for change — may not fulfill the heightened expectations of maximalists, but may be Nakamoto’s most enduring early contribution. This new form of private money and its underlying shared ledger technology already have been catalysts for central banks, big finance and big tech. Along with fintech innovations, crypto initiatives have spurned incumbents to update payment solutions and explore new approaches to finance and multiparty database management.

Gary Gensler

The evidence certainly points to Gensler being a friend, rather than a foe, of Bitcoin maximalists. That being said, Gensler developed a reputation for protecting investors while serving as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). He is someone that isn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with banks and corporations that go too far at the expense of investors.  

During a 2018 interview with Bloomberg Television, Gensler said: “I would say, you want some form of regulation, you want traffic lights and speed limits, because then the public is confident to drive on the roads.”  

Gensler also mentioned that he would like to see the big, established exchanges like Coinbase come within the SEC or CFTC.

It can be a bit challenging to get data on precisely how many people own bitcoin, but given that only 55 percent of Americans own stocks, it’s likely a percentage of the U.S. population in the single digits. Bitcoin and other digital assets have been discussed quite frequently throughout 2020, with several notable figures like Mark Cuban, Ray Dalio and Elon Musk making favorable statements and/or tweets. As that continues, it will certainly help convince more average investors to get involved. However, as it stands right now, the average investor may remain uneasy about investing their hard-earned money in an asset that they don’t fully understand.   

Some of that trepidation can be attributed to two main factors:

Volatility is certainly an issue for the average investor but one that may be difficult to address through regulation. The fact is that cryptocurrency is still a relatively new asset class and new asset classes generally experience volatility until they reach maturity. There is an investing principle known as the risk/reward ratio through which investors can determine whether the additional risk they are taking on is worth the potential reward. Despite the volatility, it’s hard to deny that early adopters haven’t been rewarded for taking on that extra risk.

The second issue for those still waiting to invest is that many aren’t sure how to get started.  Fortunately, what once was once a barrier to entry is now actually quite easy. Investors have several options for investing in crypto. 

They can deposit money directly at a bitcoin ATM, which is actually quite useful for those who don’t have access to traditional banking options, though fees for this can be quite expensive with limited transparency. However, the preferred method and the way to really drive mainstream adoption is to deposit funds directly at a cryptocurrency exchange that serves as an offramp for fiat. By looking at CoinMarketCap’s top exchanges (as ranked by volume), it appears as though investors generally do tend to gravitate toward exchanges that are regulated.

Many of the above exchanges do allow customers to send funds directly via ACH and/or bank wire. Once the funds are received by the exchange, investors can begin trading. Many of these regulated exchanges have developed a reputation for being among the most secure due to the following:

Despite the above security measures that are generally followed, a big question that investors always seem to ask is whether deposited funds are safe. The answer is generally yes, but unlike the brokerage industry, there is often no FDIC-style guarantee of safety. This is perhaps one area that regulators could explore in order to ease the concerns for investors still waiting on the sidelines.

It’s clear that cryptocurrency has captured both the imagination of many and the attention of global regulators. While the goals of these two groups couldn’t be more different, they will need to find a way to coexist for the market to grow to the levels that are often dreamed of.  

To spur that growth, regulation is necessary, but it needs to be targeted at addressing the concerns of the average investor. With a new administration now calling the shots in the U.S., it will be interesting to see whether these issues are addressed or whether the can gets kicked down the road, again.

This is a guest post by Thomas Meyer. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

HomepageAbout membershipSign inGet startedHomepagePink PantherBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingJul 3, 2017Fundamental Analysis of Elastic (XEL)By Bronson Tang for Pink PantherJuly 3, 2017Elastic Quick FactsOverview:FactsElastic Coin is known as XELTotal Coin Supply: 100.000.000 XELDistributed Coins: 100.000.000 XELElastic features the “Elastic PL” programming languageNormal nodes broadcast unverified POW/bountiesSuper nodes verify work and broadcast verified POW/bountiesGuard nodes cross verify certain percentages of signed POW/bounties by supernodes to detect malicious behaviorQuestion:What is ElasticAnswer:Elastic: It is a decentralized, trust-less, secure, programmable super computer.There are three main components that make up Elastic:Elastic Coin: The Elastic coin/token (XEL) is the fuelElastic Programming Language: The Elastic Programming Language (Elastic PL) is the mapElastic Project: Decentralized Supercomputer is the vehicle that will get you to your destinationIn this Analysis, I will address the following:What is ElasticElastic CoinElastic Programming LanguageElastic ProjectElastic Compared to the CompetitionElastic IssuesICO Funds TakenElastic Team AnonymousElastic as an experimental non-commercial projectElastic uses transactions pools for tasksChallengesRoad MapTrend AnalysisConclusionWHAT IS ELASTIC IN GREATER DETAIL?Elastic is an open-source project that aims to build the first decentralized supercomputer. Elastic has been developed over the last year or so and provides the infrastructure for a decentralized and distributed super computer, designed to carry out arbitrary tasks over the internet. In this context, Elastic is powered by a crypto currency (XEL) and provides a market-based mechanism to buy and sell computational resources. Those who need computational resources, model their problem using Elastic’s programming language (Elastic PL) and broadcast it on the network, along with a certain amount of XEL coins. The Elastic miners are then motivated to offer their computational resources in exchange for a portion of those XEL coins. The size of their reward depends on the amount of work a miner has contributed in relation to the rest of the miners that have also participated in the task. Using XEL as the driving force, Elastic offers potential buyers a large parallel computation cluster composed of many CPUs and GPUs supplied by the miners.ELASTIC COINElastic Coin provides the infrastructure for a decentralized and distributed computation of arbitrary tasks over the internet. In this context, Elastic Coin is built on-top of a crypto currency and provides a market-based mechanism to buy and sell computational resources. Buyers, those who need computational resources, model their problem using Elastic Coin’s software development kit and broadcast it, along with a certain amount of XEL coins, to the network.The so-called miners are then motivated to offer their computational resources in exchange for a portion of those XEL coins. The size of this portion depends on the amount of work a miner has contributed in relation to the rest of the network. Using XEL as the driving force, Elastic Coin offers potential buyers a large parallel computation cluster composed of many CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other devices supplied by the miners.According to one of the moderators in the Elastic Chat Forum:  “There are 100 million XEL in existence. These are distributed amongst the original donators to the project. There’s some 70 million been redeemed so far.These will be released to a greater audience (or at least a part of them will), via the large exchanges and then the buyers purchase them from there to pay for their computational task.XEL is just a token, so no smart contract within it, nor any ability to attach a smart contract. XEL is literally just the fuel of the system.So, the buyer (or job author) sends their work (written in Elastic PL) to the Elastic system along with the necessary XEL to pay for:Securing the system (a small amount of the XEL is paid towards the node owners) A bounty for finding the solution to the problem On-going work on the program to motivate miners to mine that problem/programSince the miners are rewarded in XEL, they then sell their XEL on the exchanges, where a buyer can then buy them.Basically, the price of XEL is set by the market from the buyer on the exchange. For the miner, you’re right, there’s a complex algorithm that will work out what % of the total fee will be paid to someone using their smartphone, laptop, sever, etc. as computational power.”Elastic Coin constitutes a market that matches buyers and sellers of computational resources according to economic criteria. Buyers, in this context, are those who demand computational resources in order to solve some arbitrary and computationally intensive task. They submit their task to the network and attach a certain amount of XEL|that is the currency of Elastic Coin|to it. Then, sellers, in the remainder of the paper termed miners, are then motivated to offer their computational resources for solving these tasks in exchange for a portion of the attached XEL. The size of this portion depends on the amount of work a miner has contributed in relation to the rest of the network. All this happens \behind the scenes” in a process termed mining without the requirement of manual intervention.ELASTIC PROGRAMMING LANGUAGEThe Elastic programming language allows Elastic job authors to express complex algorithms to be solved for bounties, paid for with XEL. The language is loosely based on the C programming language incorporating many of the basic operators and functions. There are no FOR, WHILE, or DO loops in Elastic PL in order to ensure that programs will not run indefinitely. Instead, job authors will use the Elastic PL REPEAT function.Elastic works different: They do not have one specific use case, instead the use case has to be coded by the users in Elastic’s own programming language — Elastic PL It is similar to C but with limited functionality so it can be guaranteed that Elastic code can be executed on other machines without causing any harm. You can write a program in Elastic PL and be sure that if executed correctly, no exploits, no endless loops, no data leakage.So while Elastic is more flexible in designing tasks, it does not perform better for one particular use case over other systems. With other super computer models, If you want to do 6 different tasks you need 6 separate use cases. With Elastic you can do them all at once. As the Elastic PL is further developed, so the diversity of tasks will become more complex. Currently, only tasks which explore a search space can be performed, and not tasks which are divided into multiple packages (like rendering divides a large image into many smaller tiles).Elastic PL will get better over time with the flexibility that Elastic PL provides. The system is built and designed this way from ground up to allow user configurable tasks. This makes Elastic the only system that currently offer this. The potential of Elastic is basically limitless.To learn more about the Elastic Program Language please click the d>-pl/blob/master/README.mdELASTIC PROJECTThe Elastic Project is a cryptocurrency driven infrastructure for decentralized computation.Elastic is not just a super computer, it is THE super computer. In our vision, people (such as scientists) who are in need of large amounts of computation power do not have to rent an expensive, commercial cloud computing solution anymore. Instead, they can submit their tasks to the Elastic Network along with a certain amount of Elastic Coins. Other users can then offer their spare processing power to contribute to the calculation of those tasks and earn Elastic Coins in exchange. This is similar to the Bitcoin mining process, but without wasting the energy.Elastic Project is one of those platforms, which is entirely decentralized. It is an open source project with contributors from around the world. In fact, Elastic Project was started with a vague idea on Bitcointalk that interested me, which I have then pursued and learnt more once I was involved. This idea then was improved by a number of very bright members of the Elastic community. At the moment, we have a very precise idea of how Elastic should be built to ensure reliability, robustness and security.Elastic Project is a “loose formation of developers. As such, nobody can speak with authority in the name of the Elastic network.”Schedule to launch during the summer of 2016, an Alpha and Beta version can be expected earlier.Elastic Project offers many interesting topics of research. This includes for example the verifiable computation part, the prunability of the blockchain, or the security of the blockchain in terms of a certain type of attacks.ELASTIC COMPARED TO THE COMPETITIONEthereumAccording to this Ethereum is a “world-computer”. However, the use-case of Ethereum is entirely different than the one of Elastic. Ethereum is not used to obtain a certain amount of computation power which can be directed at a complex algorithm that someone wants to have solved. It is more to be understood as a world computer with only one single processor without the support for multi-threading or parallel execution. As a matter of fact, Ethereum can be used to execute arbitrary code and the consensus algorithm ensures that the code is executed correctly. While handy to code, e.g., smart contracts which are then executed by all peers that participate in the Ethereum ecosystem, it cannot be used to bundle the computational power of the peers. The very simple reason is that every peer executes the same thing: Ethereum executes the same code at many peers redundantly.Elastic on the other hand has different aims: it does not want everyone to execute the same thing, but to execute something different. One could say, in Elastic your work is split into many different small parts which every peer in the Elastic network executes a subset of. This way, the computational power of all “miners” is bundled.On the contrary, Elastic cannot be used to implement smart contracts or any other code constructs which are meant to be executed the same way on all nodes. It’s just a totally different use case.GridcoinGridcoin uses a mechanism termed “Proof-of-Research” to measure the amount of computational contribution of the “miners”. According to this, this mechanism is premised on BOINC, a centralized third-party service. More precisely, “miners” download the BOINC software which provides idle CPU processing power to various projects which likewise are centrally hosted. The amount of computational contribution is then measured in a formula named the Recent Average Credit (RAC). The distribution of Gridcoins (GRC) is then conducted dependent on the miners’ individual RAC.The problem with this approach is the involvement of a central authority. The distribution of Gridcoins (GRC) can be tampered arbitrarily the moment an attacker gains access to the centralized service. Also, the existence of Gridcoin depends on the existence of BOINC. If the latter service dies, so does Gridcoin unless an update is rolled out which moves the Proof-of-Research mechanism to a different service.In Elastic, we do not have such problems: we do not rely on any other third-party service and neither do we depend the payout process on any kind of external (not tamper proof) factors. Instead, the measurement of the amount of computational contribution as well as the payout process is done entirely in the protocol itself.ZennetZennet can be understood as an open market platform for computational resources. According to this, a publisher (the entity who is in demand of computational resources) negotiates a contract with a provider (the entity who provides the requested computational resources) using the blockchain. In this context, the publisher may specify special requirements, e.g., in terms of hardware capabilities that the provider has to match. After the negotiation is completed, the provider creates a virtual machine and gives the publisher SSH access to it.The payment process is modeled as follows: the publisher allocates a certain amount of XenCoins (the underlying cryptocurrency). Then, periodically, accumulated usage measurements are read. Based on those measurements a micropayments protocol is used to periodically pay out small amounts of the allocated funds to the provider.Zennet identifies the problem of this “trust based system” itself: the provider may use a handcrafted VM which lies about its benchmarks score claiming to provide more resources than it actually does. It’s the publishers’ sole responsibility to verify that the claimed amount of computational power reflects the reality. Due to the micropayments protocol, malicious behavior (if manually detected) can be penalized by cancelling the contract and charge back the remainder of the funds. A reputation system keeps track of such malicious behavior to help publishers separating the honest providers from malicious ones.From our perspective, this system is not ideal as it adds some overhead in terms of manual responsibility for monitoring the honesty. Also, if very large amounts of computational power are needed which can only be obtained by renting multiple providers, the publisher has to take care about parallelization and distributing his work across multiple SSH instances himself. Moreover, the provider has to verify himself that the VM is actually doing what it is supposed to do and not, e.g., performing the calculations erroneously. According to privacy, the SSH access (if not used via a VPN or TOR) may expose the IP address (and so the own identity) to the provider.While we think that this scheme is perfectly valid and works flawlessly, Elastic tries to get rid of any trust-based factors entirely. In Elastic, the verification of correctly performed work as well as the true amount of invested computational effort is done by the protocol itself.However, since Elastic uses the protocol to verify “work” and “computational” resources, Elastic is limited to the common denominator in terms of hardware … the CPU. That is, GPU tasks could not be verified by nodes that are equipped with CPUs only (But still, since the operations of Elastic’s own programming language ElasticPL are very basic, GPU enhanced miners are of course possible). Still, especially when looking for VMs with special capabilities, Zennet is superior to Elastic.On the contrary, Elastic in our eyes overtakes when it comes down to get computational tasks done quickly without any trust and without the requirement to manually verify anything or synchronizing tasks across multiple virtual machines: you just create a program which is then distributed to as many miners as possible, and you can be sure that the result you get back has been calculated correctly. Please refer to How Does Mining Work to learn about the advantages (and of course disadvantages) of our scheme.VoltcoinAccording to this, Voltcoin works very similar to Zennet.GolemGolem also tries to bring together those who have spare computational power and those who require it. According to this these entities are termed requester nodes, these nodes that announce computing tasks, and compute nodes, nodes that perform computations. As of now, the computation tasks are limited to rendering tasks using blender. Nevertheless, However, Golem seems to be just a “peer-to-peer market” for computational resources and not a cryptographically secure protocol to ensure the correct distribution of, and payment for computational power.The biggest problem in our eyes, and at the same time the reason why from our perspective Golem does NOT constitute a decentralized computer, is that the submitted results are not automatically verified for correctness. That means, that the result someone sends may very well be garbage and so it has to be checked manually by the requester nodes before he acknowledges the release of the funds. At the same time, malicious requester nodes may claim that their work was not carried out correctly and charge back the funds even though the compute node has carried out the task correctly.While a ranking/reputation mechanism, as implemented here, helps to identify malicious users (similar to the reputation system of online auctions where you can “over time” separate honest sellers from malicious ones) this concept differs totally from what we want to achieve in Elastic.We do not want to build a peer-to-peer market where users may betray each other, mitigating malicious behavior only by using trust-based reputation systems! We rather want to build a system which is robust against such kinds of attacks due to a “higher force”, i.e., the protocol, making sure that work is carried out correctly, and workers are guaranteed to be paid out for their efforts.ELASTIC ISSUESAs no technology is infallible nor is any project nor crypto/blockchain technology.ICO Funds Taken by former team memberElastic Team AnonymousElastic as an experimental non-commercial projectElastic uses transactions pools for tasksDuring my investigation, I came across several issues that I wanted to address in this investigation. Items b thru c can be found at the following link: 6I wanted to investigate these issues for myself and see what I could uncover, here is what I have found so far.This post from bitcointalk.org was done by the folks at SONM. So there is a conflict of interest.I don’t think I need to comment any further on “conflict of interest” but I will address their supposed claims in the off chance that one of you reading this actually believes and take credence into what one competitor has to say about another.Let’s first address the Lannister issue and the ICO funds.In April 2017, “Lannister” one the programmers for the Elastic Project left the project and as a result ICO funds were also missing.This is the Elastic official response to the situation:Lannister is gone. ICO funds are gone. We don’t know why. We don’t know if we ever see him again. It’s not like “he took all the funds and run away” because before disappearing he rewarded some of community members with some BTC for their work. He mentioned that he have some health problems also. That’s all we know now.It’s not like he didn’t helped us. He helped a lot. Mostly on server and scripts side. Personally, I remember him as very intelligent person with very rich English vocabulary. I hope that he will come back to us even without funds incognito with another account. He was nice addition to this community.We can safely (jokingly) assume that XEL is proof of burn coin like XCP. But instead of burning our BTC in dead address we burned them in Lannister hands.Please remember that every donator knew before any action that this is just donation and can be spent on development or ice creams.What I have found somewhat interesting and fascinating is that despite this incident, the project is moving forward. And the community that surrounds the Elastic Project has not been diminished. That does speak highly for the project, however it does show something that needs to be addressed in the future when it comes to funds and donations.Albeit, on their site, Elastic does state that donations can be used for whatever they project wishes. And as most people know donations are just that, donations without strings nor conditions attached, and that unfortunately includes a rogue contributor to the project disappearing and the funds as well.Team AnonymousUnfortunately, the team at Elastic has chosen at this time to remain anonymous. It is my understanding that the developers are working part-time and many are working on donations.As such, it does make sense, as an open source project to remain anonymous as the Elastic project is a group/community.Now I realize that this could be construed as a major red flag when it comes to looking at a project such as this, but we must remember that anonymous is not synonymous with “bad” or “untrustworthy” it is just that, the developers’ choice to remain discreet.Now personally, I do not like to invest in projects where the team is anonymous, but there do exist quite successful projects that have remained anonymous and that has not been a deterrent to the success of the overall standing in the public’s eyes. Projects such as NXT, Crown Coin, and event Sia have somewhat anonymous team profiles.Elastic is an experimental non-commercial project  In the article that states this supposed flaw of Elastic, they go on to state that the Elastic project “doesn’t have any financial model or clear marketing plan” and that Elastic has received funding but “their token aren’t listed on any crypto exchange”. As of yesterday, July 1, 2017 Elastic was listed on Bittrex and as far as the claim that Elastic does not have any financial model or clear marketing plan, in no way equates to the viability of a project and whether it has commercial value or not. That is decided by the marketplace and not by a financial model or marketing plan which any tom, dick or harry can create with a spreadsheet and document processor. That is what we might call a logical fallacy.Elastic uses transactions pools for tasksI need to set some groundwork, the original claim stated that:“This leads to a serious problem, a transaction block must be confirmed in a certain amount of time, so a task must be processed in this certain time frame. In the case of general purpose calculations for example protein folding, we can’t know with certain how much time will it take to process the task. Elastic uses its own programming language to solve this issue with a mechanism similar to Ethereum which leads to excessive parallelism and the necessity to run the code on all machines in the network.”I wanted to find out the answer to this supposed claim and this is what one of the programmers wrote me,“Elastic uses a transactions pool for tasks, a mechanism similar to that used by traditional blockchain systems such as cryptocurrencies.” by saying, “All submitted jobs, pow solutions, and bounty solutions are transactions on the blockchain so they behave the same as all other txns in the Elastic network. But I’m thinking the question was trying to get at something else…so if they clarify, please let me know.”Elastic PL — this is the programming language of Elastic. It is based on C and has been modified so that such things as endless loops won’t occur. Basically, Elastic PL has been designed so that it can’t harm the machines it runs on. By making sure that all programmes that run on Elastic are written in Elastic PL, it safeguards the computers of the miners so they can’t be harmed by any of the programs written by the buyers (or job authors as they can be called) and makes the system safe. This is one of the key advantages of Elastic. The fact that it has its own safe, programming language.It also means that instead of a limited number of use cases, if a program can be written in Elastic PL, it can be run on the Elastic system.”I followed up with a bit more clarification and I was forwarded this message:As I’ve previously mentioned, there are three forms of payments, one of which is to reward miners for ON-GOING work. In other words, the miners are not doing the same work SIMULTANEOUSLY and a task DOES NOT need to be completed in a certain amount of time. We do not operate in the same way as Ethereum!Read the section here on Ethereum and you will see that what the people at SONM are saying is NONSENSE, since it explains the difference between Elastic and Ethereum. her-competitors/30Reexamining the original claim comparing Elastic to Ethereum we can read that:According to this Ethereum is a “world-computer”. However, the use-case of Ethereum is entirely different than the one of Elastic. Ethereum is not used to obtain a certain amount of computation power which can be directed at a complex algorithm that someone wants to have solved. It is more to be understood as a world computer with only one single processor without the support for multi-threading or parallel execution. As a matter of fact, Ethereum can be used to execute arbitrary code and the consensus algorithm ensures that the code is executed correctly. While handy to code, e.g., smart contracts which are then executed by all peers that participate in the Ethereum ecosystem, it cannot be used to bundle the computational power of the peers. The very simple reason is that every peer executes the same thing: Ethereum executes the same code at many peers redundantly.Elastic on the other hand has different aims: it does not want everyone to execute the same thing, but to execute something different. One could say, in Elastic your work is split into many different small parts which every peer in the Elastic network executes a subset of. This way, the computational power of all “miners” is bundled.On the contrary, Elastic cannot be used to implement smart contracts or any other code constructs which are meant to be executed the same way on all nodes. It’s just a totally different use case.CHALLENGESIt seems that in investigating the Elastic project a potential major challenge is gaining the “right” mass user adoption.This “right” mass user adoption could come in the form of the following based on sentiment from the community:“Getting serious scientific attention…”“Having researchers and serious institutions using this system to reach advancements in their respected field”“Affiliation(s) with leading tech companies and personnel who recognize the value this system brings.”“Potential partnerships with a university, or a research company”In other words, gaining the real-world recognition/attention from the “ideal” interested party as listed above.ROAD MAPNow, there is not project road map that is publicly visible nor readily available. In addition, as the members of this project are not paid, it is a challenge to keep a road map as that would construe stringent timeframes for a free workforce. However, I have been told that now that there are funds a road map is being put in place over the next month.Immediate next steps are:Identify tasks that need to be completed (a roadmap)Raise funds from the community to pay for tasksApply timeline to taskComplete taskGeneral StatsCreated: 2016Headquarters LocationUnknown/Open Source ProjectCoins Supply100,000,000 XEL Total Supply76,450,177 XEL Circulating SupplyExchangesBittrexHeat WalletFunding AvailabilityElastic Coin is known as XELTotal Coin Supply: 100.000.000 XELDistributed Coins: 100.000.000 XELElastic features the “Elastic PL” programming languageNormal nodes broadcast unverified POW/bountiesSuper nodes verify work and broadcast verified POW/bountiesGuard nodes cross verify certain percentages of signed POW/bounties by supernodes to detect malicious behaviorWho is the customer base?“Getting serious scientific attention…”“Having researchers and serious institutions using this system to reach advancements in their respected field”“Affiliation(s) with leading tech companies and personnel who recognize the value this system brings.”“Potential partnerships with a university, or a research company”Strategy to Gain AdoptionUnknownTREND ANALYSISIn past analysis, I have referenced Gartner’s Trends, and as now one organization has the proverbial crystal ball into the future, we can use this as a baseline for creating supporting evidence that the path for which the Elastic Project is based has true and lasting merit.Below are several trends in the world of supercomputers worth focusing on.This statistic shows the annual revenue of the supercomputer market, from 2015 to 2020. In 2016, the supercomputer market is expected to be worth 3.5 billion U.S. dollars.Worldwide revenue from the supercomputer market from 2015 to 2020 (in billion U.S. dollars)This ranking lists the 10 fastest supercomputers according to the Linpack benchmark Rmax score. The fourth fastest supercomputer as of November 2016, the Sequoia, achieved a Linpack benchmark score of 17 petaflops, completing 17 quadrillion floating point operations per second.Top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world, as of November 2016, by Linpack benchmark score (in TFlops per second)This statistic shows the revenue generated by the leading vendors of supercomputers worldwide, in 2015. That year, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) generated more than 1.23 billion U.S. dollars from the sale of supercomputers. In total, the supercomputer market, which is part of the larger high-performance computing (HPC) market, was worth around 3.28 billion U.S. dollars in 2015.Worldwide revenue from supercomputers in 2015, by vendor (in million U.S. dollars)CONCLUSIONThere is clearly a race to build the very best decentralized supercomputer. Based on my research, the Elastic Project, is in the forefront of this technology. They have a clear advantage, and that is that they are relatively unknown in the wider market. Another advantage is that their competitors, are not actually taking them seriously. This flying under the radar, will be a key component to their success.Potential challenges that they face are funding and mass user adoption.I see these two as really the major hurdles that the Elastic Project needs to address in the short, medium and long-term vision of their project.As with all businesses, and make no mistake the Elastic Project is a business, albeit an open source project, nevertheless they are a business, they need to understand that their major resources of time, energy and money can be their ally or their enemy.A business is an organizational entity involved in the provision of goods and services to consumers.I very much like this project and I see huge potential for them in the future. I see the Elastic Project potentially embracing a social entrepreneur approach which may add even more greater appeal to gaining the mass user adoption that would be necessary to take this project to where the Elastic community wants it to go.BlockchainSupercomputerXelElasticprojectBitcoinOne clap, two clap, three clap, forty?By clapping more or less, you can signal to us which stories really stand out.784BlockedUnblockFollowFollowingPink Panther78Never miss a story from Pink Panther, when you sign up for Medium. Learn moreNever miss a story from Pink PantherBlockedUnblockFollowGet updates

SushiSwap will allow margin trading of some crypto trading pairs that are not available in the market due to lack of liquidity. The move has seen many mid-sized whales enter the network in anticipation of a bullish impulse. 

SushiSwap announced the launch of a cryptocurrency lending and margin trading platform, dubbed Kashi. 

The platform supports a wide variety of trading pairs that were not available before. Using an elastic interest rate with a “target utilization rate of 70-80% of the total supply,” Kashi makes high-risk assets accessible for margin transactions. Traders will be able to short a large selection of tokens and create leveraged short positions. 

Kashi will rely on BentoBox, a highly-anticipated token vault, to help users generate yield from flash loans. 

“The crucial role that the vault plays is that it allows users to earn interest by lending out their assets to margin traders, while simultaneously earning yield on the same tokens from liquidity providing or farming on DeFi protocols,” the team reports. 

Users can now make the most out of their cryptocurrencies by simply transferring their tokens to BentoBox and linking the vault to Kashi. They will be able to create the supply or borrow pair of their choice or short a wide range of altcoins. 

It is worth noting that another iteration of the DEX will be released in the next few weeks. 

Santiment’s holder distribution chart shows that insiders may have prepared for a bullish price reaction to Kashi’s release. The behavioral analytics firm recorded a significant spike in the number of addresses holding 10,000 to 100,000 SUSHI in the past 48 hours. 

Roughly 15 new mid-sized whales have joined the network since Mar. 24, representing an 8.10% increase in such a short period.

Despite the mounting buying pressure, IntoTheBlock’s Global In/Out of the Money (GIOM) model reveals that SushiSwap faces stiff resistance ahead. 

Roughly 5,200 addresses had previously purchased more than 87 million SUSHI between $17.49 and $19. As such, further price appreciation may prove challenging as holders within this price range will likely try to break even on their positions.  

If the formidable supply wall ahead of SushiSwap rejects the upward price action, the GIOM shows stable support at $15. Here, over 6,000 addresses bought 15.50 million SUSHI. 

Failing to hold above this crucial area of support could see this cryptocurrency drop towards the next significant support area between $7 and $11, where approximately 4,000 addresses are holding more than 52.70 million SUSHI. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, this author owned Bitcoin and Ethereum.

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Flare Networks is dreaming about incorporating Cardano’s native token ADA. It has started a survey on its official Twitter account to gauge neighbourhood sentiment.

So far, the majority – more than 82 percent – has voted in favour of incorporation.

— Flare (@FlareNetworks) March 19, 2021

Flare Networks, and the XRPL utility fork, have also added support for common altcoins such as Ripple-affiliated XRP, Bitcoin’s hard fork Litecoin, and LTC’s hard fork DOGE, which Elon Musk favours. Stellar’s XLM is also used.

Dogecoin’s value increased by a whopping 55% as a result of this. LTC integration proposals were revealed in early January.

It is now considering incorporating ADA, the third biggest cryptocurrency (the designation formerly held by XRP).

Cardano’s native coin has recently risen in value after the “Mary” hard fork on March 1.

The coin has risen from the bottom of the top ten list of cryptocurrencies to the top three, displacing XRP.

As previously noted by U.Today, the coin was classified on Coinbase Pro on March 18, pushing the coin’s price to a new all-time high of $1.88.

According to IOHK founder Charles Hoskinson’s latest statement, Cardano wants to grow in Africa, eventually adding millions of new consumers into the Cardano ecosystem.

The last 24 hours brought a different vibe to the crypto street as most cryptocurrencies turned the red candle party into a green one. Now, most of these cryptocurrencies are stable and within a positive price region. 

Here is the crypto market outlook for today

With the bulls finally back in control of the market, price advancement is almost bound to happen. The last 24 hours saw BTC start by dipping. The dip met reversal and the king coin rebounded from as low as $54,470 to as high as $59,825. 

Unfortunately, Bitcoin hit a critical resistance that killed the momentum at $59,825 and resulted in a retracement back to sub-$58k this morning. Interestingly, the dip met support at $57,750 and is on the rise at the time of writing.

Using $58,310 as a key support, traders must test and break more resistance. The strongest of this resistance is the $60k mark. Following recent price movement, BTC may hit the $60k mark before the end of the next 24 hours.

As with Bitcoin, ADA also suffered a slight price dip of the back of the Coinbase listing euphoria. However, ADA quickly recovered from it and is now on an upward trend. On Tuesday, Coinfomania reported an impending surge like the one happening now. 

More traders will look forward to seeing a new all-time high today. For this dream to become a reality, ADA must trade above $1.45 and hike to beat the current ATH of $1.48.

The last 24 hours saw the seventh largest coin by market cap trade within $0.45 and $0.47. The current price pattern is leading to an asymmetric triangle. This an indication of a possible price outbreak to the too or below. 

For now, traders must stable prices above the $0.45 mark. Failure to stay above this mark will result in a price correction to as low as $0.44. The only way after trading above $0.45 is to pump the price as high as $0.48 to secure a test at $0.50.

UNI finds support at $29.5 as it continues its roller-coaster ride. The roller coaster ride as seen as the eighth largest coin by market hit a high of $33.2 and a low of $29.5.

At the time of writing, UNI is on the dip again. The coin will likely hit a rebound at $29.5 and hit a with enough support from traders may reach a new weekly high before the close of the next 24 hours.

Based on price movement, the highlighted cryptocurrencies will likely push to reach new weekly highs today.

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