Utopia Talk / Politics / Crypto Casino Journal

chuck Member	Sat May 15 09:20:31 2021-05-15 Rather than polluting the discussion threads where Seb argues eternally with everyone about everything (as is his wont), I figure I'll track my progression into degeneracy here. I was (once again!) unable to resist the siren call of RLC pump and dumps. Aside from day 1 where I made a pile of loot from it, everytime I've tried to play the volatility of RLC it ended up being a sponge for whatever gains I was getting elsewhere, and this morning is no exception. It's happened several times now. Fool me...what's after thrice? On the bright side, the other half of my portfolio right now is in Cardano (ADA) which has benefited nicely from Musk's BTC manipulations. I'm at breakeven right now but anticipate ending up nicely by 10:56pm board time (the end of week 1). Watching RLC like a hawk. I'll break even on that position at $8.99 but I feel like a peak at $10-11 may be in the cards given the volume and volatility in RLC this week. Unfortunately, my deposited cash is tied up in Coinbase (vs Coinbase Pro) for the next four days and vanilla Coinbase only allows me to place market orders so I can't just place a limit sell and move on with my day.
chuck Member	Sat May 15 09:36:09 As far as lessons (re)learned: 1. This far, buying and holding > jumping in and out of positions, even in a made up market where nothing matters. If I had just bought and held at the beginning of the week, I would be up $5k. 2. Value investing works even when the assets are all of dubious value. I've missed near doublings in two different positions now by moving out of higher value tokens to play volatility games in the gainers/losers. 3. Undisciplined behavior (impulsive buys, paper hands) loses money, just like with real investing! Will post #s once the week ends.
chuck Member	Sat May 15 09:49:38 Oh, also in the lessons learned column: 4. Even if you attempt to guard against the attribution error of perceiving gains from lucky timing as skill, on some level everything that goes good does shift your perceptions as to your own skillfulness one iota. For me, this showed up as looser trades after big gains early in the week, even while I outwardly mocked the idea that I'd done anything in particular to earn those gains.
chuck Member	Sun May 16 06:25:43 Couldn't quite pull out a gain for the first week. Everything is up today but alas, not in time for my 1 week checkpoint. As of 10:56pm board time last night: One week return: -6.7% Highest portfolio value: 177% Lowest portfolio value: 87.8%
jergul large member	Sun May 16 06:30:11 How much have you paid in fees as a %?
chuck Member	Sun May 16 06:42:15 1.49% directly in fees when I was funding the account. No fees as such for crypto -> crypto conversions, though Coinbase does make money from you off the spread.
chuck Member	Sun May 16 07:32:35 Above applies to vanilla Coinbase, and the spread can still be quite high. Coinbase Pro has a better pricing structure. You pay a fee determined by a) your trading volume in the past 30 days and b) whether your order is posted to the order book. http://pro.coinbase.com/fees
nhill Member	Sun May 16 13:01:08 You got in right before another local maxima in the crypto world, unfortunately. There'll probably a consolidation period here before going to new highs. But if you want a lotto ticket there's a new $SAFECOCK coin. Buying one makes it so your cock is safe, and I'm not sure what other benefits it confers. http://safecock.finance/ Now that's a crypto powered ponzi scheme, for real!
Dukhat Member	Sun May 16 22:47:40 Yes ... it'll go to new highs ... because reasons. Or it will crash, destroy a lot of savings since crypto trading is zero-sum and governments worldwide will just ban its use and it will never recover, especially if the US uses its full power to stop it.
nhill Member	Sun May 16 22:55:36 It will certainly, and has already, destroyed many savings. This is a pretty typical pullback so far, the doomers and boomers like Duckhat come out of the woodwork saying it's finally going to zero and all their bias is confirmed. ...then it goes back up and it'll be crickets again. But, tbh, this conversation isn't very stimulating. Yes, adopting a digital commodity as a traditional investment vehicle with more than 10% of your capital is irresponsible. You could do that with growth stocks already (which are down about 60% right now, boom goes the $ARKK). The second richest net worth individual in the world took a massive dump on crypto and it's...*checks notes* down massively! In fact, it hasn't been this worthless since April 27th, 2021! Wow, what a crash. Anyways. What's compelling is the financial infrastructure being built before our very eyes.
nhill Member	Sun May 16 23:00:16 I'm timestamped and documented 6:31 PM, Apr 24, 2021 in calling the downside price action potential for Ethereum to hit ~$1400. That's down another 50% from here. :)
nhill Member	Sun May 16 23:06:28 For complete transparency, I don't expect it to actually go to $1400. But it could-- that's the bottom I have in my risk management process. Realistically, I don't see it dropping below $3000 without another major catalyst.
habebe Member	Sun May 16 23:09:59 Dukhat, What happened to you? You must be the most miserable person on these boards, all doom and gloom, the topic matters not. Do you enjoy anything anymore?
chuck Member	Mon May 17 00:03:33 Lol, the drubbing continues! Last night I was bummed that I had to cut off my portfolio numbers at midnight to report back here because I was sure that it would be back up today based on the positive action yesterday afternoon. This morning started off looking that way but then things, they took a turn! Anyway, I'm in it with what I've got until the bitter end, even in the 0.01% chance it were going irrevocably to zero. I set out to gamble and I'm not going to pussy out now. It is a lot of money at stake (my entire first year's salary after college!) but also it's not a lot of money (less than what The Powers That Be would advise to spend on an engagement ring). My portfolio right now is ETH and ADA. The ADA position is still up in spite of it all but the ETH position is off about 10% from where I bought it. I feel this has a better chance of recovering its value than most coins, so I'll be sitting on that position until it pays off or the fat lady sings.
nhill Member	Mon May 17 00:23:06 It's brutal out there, but Eth is the best long-term holding you could pick, so there's that. I told Nim a few days ago, but I started to switch over to Polygon ($MATIC) for my DeFi services. Just so happened that it almost doubled in that time, too, and still up about 80%.
chuck Member	Mon May 17 00:32:20 Nice pickup. MATIC is one of the ones I watch a lot. Saw it at $0.80 after the Elon tweet but didn't want to move out of my (at the time) ETH position when it was at a historic (on my investing horizon) low, so I stayed put.
nhill Member	Mon May 17 02:05:30 Most of my crypto exposure is still on Ethereum DeFi services, so it wasn't as big of a win as it could have been. I'm continuing to move over to Polygon, as it's a lot nicer to use + gas fees are measured in portions of a cent instead of 100s dollars. I'm still maintaining my original Liquity Trove through Wasabix, but new funds are going into AAVE Polygon.
chuck Member	Tue May 18 14:57:08 Moved nearly all of my ADA into ETH on the following theory: 1. I've eventually landed on the opinion that last week was a disruptive hiccup, not the end of the hype, and therefore that this is a dip and not the start of a bear market. 2. Niche Proof of Stake coins have been a bit of a safe harbor over the past week while BTC and ETH have taken a big hit. It stands to reason that they won't have as much short term upside as ETH while ETH retraces it's previous gains. Plan to ride ETH at least through previous high and then maybe partially reallocate into altcoins after that. Rather miss out on a surprise doubling in ADA price from $2-4 than an IMO more assurred 33% gain in ETH's return to previous high over the next few weeks. 3. Aside from goons putting $200 in joke coins trying to 1000x, the big names are likely to be the target of institutional inflows assuming crypto resumes it's previous hype trajectory. I also recapitalized somewhat. Bought ETH at $3150 yesterday and $3280 today. Still not playing with my retirement funds, just random unallocated savings, but I have done the classic doubling down. I'm now officially into crypto for more than common (salesman) wisdom holds you should spend on an engagement ring. I will just be HODLing as opposed to day trading now that I'm playing with an amount of money I don't want to lose.
nhill Member	Tue May 18 15:45:57 Dollar cost average! It's possible that the short term bottom is in for Ethereum. It bounced off $3100 twice and has been making higher highs & lows since. Not out of the woods yet, but that $3150 entry point is looking good if this holds. I agree with your Ethereum thesis. It has way more institutional support than any alt coin. Once a definite trend forms that institutional money will start flooding the way back towards 5K. $ADA had a nice little bump but it's not the best solution from a technical standpoint IMO, especially since it isn't compatible with Ethereum. And gas prices on ADA are already over 20x more efficiently staked networks like Polygon. L2 networks + Chainlink for off-chain interactions are the way. Polygon is both the leader in the altchain space and the best solution technically. It suffers from some tokenonomics issues, but overall looking like the clear leader. But yeah, a lot of this movement is a result of people experiencing gas fees first hand during the speculative craze. At one point you had to pay ~$500 to buy a meme coin (and people usually only put in a couple hundred so that defeats the point), so many are panicking and moving their money to their favorite proof of stake networks. The funny thing is that most of these PoS coins run on top of Ethereum. They make Ethereum more sound, not less. $BTC I'm not sure where it goes from here. I've been saying it's a bad investment decision since near the start of the year, and still feel that way. Just doesn't have much utility. It's more of a collectible than anything else at this point. HODL is a tried and true strategy, hasn't failed in a decade, don't see anything new that would change that. I'm not a fan of trading, it rarely works out unless I'm scalping parabolas in $DOGE (very rarely, and only for fun) or something equally useless.
nhill Member	Tue May 18 15:47:50 > But yeah, a lot of this movement is a result of people experiencing gas fees first hand during the speculative craze. At one point you had to pay ~$500 to buy a meme coin (and people usually only put in a couple hundred so that defeats the point), so many are panicking and moving their money to their favorite proof of stake networks. The funny thing is that most of these PoS coins run on top of Ethereum. They make Ethereum more sound, not less. This is, of course, ignoring the Musky Elephant in the room. He poured fuel on that fire with his $BTC comments but I think he's less responsible than people think. He definitely tanked Bitcoin, but the Ethereum outflows are more of a post-meme speculative craze hangover.
nhill Member	Tue May 18 15:48:31 (IMO, of course. The wonderful thing about markets is we'll never truly be able to separate cause from effect.)
nhill Member	Tue May 18 16:05:07 @Chuck here are some levels to watch if you're interested in that sorta thing: http://s3.tradingview.com/snapshots/c/c9mkFkXN.png This guy's fib retracement charts are on point more often than not. It's not really my thing anymore (more into the actually using of crypto), but I still check it to see where I should target liquidation prices (liquidation price being essentially a stop loss).
nhill Member	Tue May 18 16:07:09 $2310 is what I currently have my liquidation price at for my Liquity trove, for example. If it dips below that someone can liquidate my collateral and I lose ~9-10% of it. I got this number from the $2464 fib retracement level and accounting for a buffer in case it bounces.
chuck Member	Tue May 18 16:25:50 I figure when all is said and done, he will have caused a flash crash in all crypto short term from which many things will take a few weeks to recover but the truth in his comments w.r.t. energy usage of PoW schemes will have longer term implications for BTC. I think the tweet will be a catalyst in causing ETH to supplant BTC in dominance. Buying BTC will be like rolling coal. You can do it to make a point about your identity, but people generally won't. As far as I know BTC has no Plan B in place whereas ETH has ETH2 and the Merge, so I think the whole fiasco will roll off of ETH's shoulders.
nhill Member	Tue May 18 17:56:51 Yep, I've been telling people since the start of the year that $BTC's run is dead. Unfortunately. many people have some sort of zealous religious belief about it and lost money ignoring me. It was a great jumpstart, but it's stuck in version 0.1. It's passed time to move on to 1.0 (AKA ETH). And Eth 2.0 is right down the corner that should solidify its place as the v1.0 crypto network. It took almost a decade to move from 0.1 -> 1.0 (aka $BTC -> $ETH), so I'm thinking ETH will have a nice long run now. Somehow, I seem to always be ahead of the trends (see $MATIC where I entered at $0.82 and then it went up to $2.50). All I do is look for the best value for my DeFi services and the profits literally follow me. Investors follow the users, and the users profit serendipitously.
chuck Member	Tue May 18 22:07:53 Wheeee
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Wed May 19 04:37:50 So, should I move my btc to matic, is that what you are saying :)
chuck Member	Wed May 19 06:45:09 Picked up 2 ETH at $2600 this morning. Have 15k left that I'm willing to allocate to crypto. Will be holding in cash for now to see if there are any more 20% discounts on offer.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 06:46:09 As tempting as it is to buy at the weekly low, with new temptations every day ;-)
chuck Member	Wed May 19 07:03:54 Obviously ETH is down. What I find especially surprising thoughis that ETH is down 9.4% vs BTC. That seems hard to account for.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 07:31:34 > So, should I move my btc to matic, is that what you are saying :) Well, it would have worked out this past week. Things are shaken up quite a bit now, so not sure what the recovery shape will be, or which coin will recover first/fastest. But yeah, if I had ETH and BTC, I would personally move my BTC to MATIC to modernize my portfolio. Not investment advice ;)
Dukhat Member	Wed May 19 07:34:55 Yes, move from one pyramid scheme to another without any analysis of what is actually driving demand and supply. Classic UP post where the goalposts make absolutely no sense.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 07:40:59 I did the analysis months ago. $BTC doesn't have utility, pretty simple.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 07:41:34 Go ahead and find a single post where I recommended people use or hold Bitcoin. I'll wait.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 07:41:53 Bought 2 ETH at $2500.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 07:54:57 Whew lad. Hit $3000 last night, on track to break $2000 this morning. What an opportunity.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 07:56:00 And Coinbase is having a server outage.
Habebe Member	Wed May 19 08:01:45 Its now at $2145. But, in the long run, it will probably go up in time and make you lots of money.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 08:10:38 Yeah, I bought again at $2.2k. Cancelled my $2k limit order, maybe put one in at $1500
nhill Member	Wed May 19 08:18:27 Opportunity of a lifetime right now if you have the guts.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 08:42:51 Heh. Cancelling the $2k limit looks like a tactical mistake but a lot has happened since 9am. Bought a bit higher once it looked like this rally way going to break the $2365 peak it set before the fall to $2k. I'm tapped as far as money I'm willing to allocate to crypto now. Took a huge hit making my initial buy when I did and front loading it heavily. With this dip and buy-ins, low to mid $3ks is my breakeven. I still see this as panicked selling though, so I still feel okay with my gambles. Here's to hunkering down and watching for a bit.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 09:13:04 There are no short roads in crypto. When it bounces back, it bounces hard and fast. (we won't see Duckhat here for a while when that happens, so enjoy him while it lasts)
Habebe Member	Wed May 19 09:35:53 I really wish I would have bought at 2100...oh well.
Habebe Member	Wed May 19 09:36:41 Here is to hoping it drops down to near nothing ans I can buy several dirt cheap.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 09:48:54 Honestly, when it can drop 37% in 12 hours, who knows. I have been disabused of any short term beliefs about the price of ETH. If it went to $1000 tomorrow that would not shock me at this point. I'm still investing my thesis, which is that ETh will go up. Who knows though, maybe this money is tied up for 12 months before that happens.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 09:52:45 And of course, maybe it never happens and I get it wrong. C'est la vie if so.
TheChildren Member	Wed May 19 09:54:36 how much u lose boi, be honest with us. we promise we aint gonna laugh. its just 4 educational purposes. shit that collapses 20% when a charlatan speaks, is why we dunt invest in it. da charlatan promised u hypaloop. its "really easy" he said. that was 7 years ago... lets be honest and look at what achieved since then. be honest motherfuckers. u see any hypaloop going 1000 mph??? OR NOT? they dunt even got a track. get the fuck outta here.
Cloud Strife Member	Wed May 19 09:59:48 Wait, when did TC start spitting the truth?
chuck Member	Wed May 19 10:03:22 Lol, whoever is using tc multi to ask instead of asking themselves is a pussy. Down $20k.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 10:05:56 > shit that collapses 20% when a charlatan speaks, is why we dunt invest in it. That argument goes both ways, if you just bought at 9AM EST it's up 30% since then. You've never even heard of the concept of risk/reward, lol. But, as I said from the beginning, investing in crypto isn't really the best lens. I no longer participate as an investor, but I'm an active user & developer.
Dukhat Member	Wed May 19 10:17:34 Chuck is being realistic about the risk he is taking. Nhil is just a schill. No analysis at all about why demand or supply for crypto goes up and down which is the important question to ask. Just constant gaslighting from a random internet retard.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 10:19:34 Down $10k.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 10:29:17 Nevermind, brainfart there.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 10:37:32 > Chuck is being realistic about the risk he is taking. Nhil is just a schill. No analysis at all about why demand or supply for crypto goes up and down which is the important question to ask. Well, you seem to think $BTC represents crypto, so that pretty much tells us your level of due diligence lol. Btw, the $MATIC I entered at $0.82 (it's timestamped in this forums, if you want to look) is worth $2.15 right now. Stay poor, my friend. I lost real money on Ethereum, in the tune of 6 figures, but the $MATIC balanced most of that out.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 10:38:07 Also, gaslighting isn't real. Cope harder.
chuck Member	Wed May 19 10:55:33 My brainfart was that I forgot about $5k I deposited (!). I was $10k below being $5k down.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 11:01:17 As long as you don't full on degen with leverage, these paper losses will disappear in the long run. Duckhat loves to talk about supply/demand (such a 1D guy, he is), so I'll throw him a bone. Blockchain analysis shows that a major catalyst in these flash crashes is whales liquidating over-leveraged positions and taking the coins at the cheaper price. Survival of the fittest. Then people think the bottom is in and lever what little cash they have left, and there's a rinse/repeat or two. It's not a friendly market, nor is it regulated. Stick to owning your crypto and not a derivative and long-term you'll be fine.
Dukhat Member	Wed May 19 11:01:53 > gaslighting isn't real. Cope harder. So fucking stupid.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 11:03:40 Gaslighting is the SJW way of saying "he say thing i dunt understnd and now i confused". Massive cope. In my day, we called that being 'so fucking stupid'.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 11:04:10 Take some responsibility for your own lack of comprehension, lol. Damn your locus of control is in another universe, no wonder you're so miserable.
Dukhat Member	Wed May 19 13:32:59 Your deep and wrenching ignorance is on full display.
Dukhat Member	Wed May 19 13:41:25 Of all your stupid beliefs, the fact that I don’t believe in crypto is making me miserable is the stupidest by far. No doubt many including possibly you have made lots of money on crypto. Their risk tolerance is unfathomably high to do so but good for them but it’s still a pyramid scheme where someone else has to lose for you to win. I’m perfectly happy chugging away as a value investor in traditional stocks and other assets. I also admitted to owning a basket of crypto already. My friend in finance advised me to take a stake and gave me some insights into his firm’s algorithm for timing the market and managing the risk. It also incorporates actual hard data about what drives demand and supply for crypto; something you never fucking talk about and its absolutely inane because its the most important factor in determining the price of not just crypto but everything else. Gaslighters try to change the goalposts and you just tried to do it again by attacking the use of the word as SJW nonsense. Your arguments are idiotic and anybody with a brain will take it as such, Your perspective on everything else is nutbag conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen and other dumb shit.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 13:42:15 *yawnnnn* yeah, I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of Ether by using DeFi, what do you want from me? Like I said, I made most of it back by switching assets to the Polygon platform a few days before the crash. I'm down a lot more on paper than Chuck in absolute terms (~80K), but % wise I'm in okay shape and have more than enough to continue living off interest. Do you want me to sit around & whine about losing more money than you make in a year so you can drink some schadenfreude? Have at it, little buddy. I'm $80,000 poorer today.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 13:44:30 I think you're miserable because you're obviously miserable, lol. Anyone can read your posts and see that you are a whiny little bitch.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 13:47:05 > I’m perfectly happy chugging away as a value investor in traditional stocks and other assets. I also admitted to owning a basket of crypto already. My friend in finance advised me to take a stake and gave me some insights into his firm’s algorithm for timing the market and managing the risk. I already said in the other thread that I don't even invest in crypto, wtf are you on? I'm a value investor. I was transparent enough to post my entire portfolio the other day. Where's yours?
nhill Member	Wed May 19 13:48:53 http://m1.finance/AYRV6vQ-1ugi Here's my portfolio again so you don't have to hunt it out.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 13:49:31 My target portfolio for Q3 this year, that is. I'm 30% transitioned from previous comp.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 13:55:17 Btw Duckhat You've provided literally zero arguments other than DUUR SUPPLY DEMOOOND. Lol, 1D viewpoint. Read the book Misbehavior of Markets and come back here for a fractal discussion. On the other hand, I've filled up multiple threads of arguments which you can't understand so you call it gaslighting.
Habebe Member	Wed May 19 13:58:45 "Of all your stupid beliefs, the fact that I don’t believe in crypto is making me miserable is the stupidest by far" Dukhat is so miserable I doubt it's limited to one thing as the cause.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Wed May 19 14:01:24 Hope you don’t mind chuck, atleast my questions are hijacking this away from Dukhat and his mental unhealth. Nhill I understand right now you think ETH, link and matic, but in 6 months that could be something different. So, when you are reading white papers or in otherways researching crypto, what are you looking at/for? What are the technical fundamentals of a sound system, meaning, one that is worth a long term relationship with, that will potentially fuel the future.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 15:15:17 This will be rambling because I'm going to stream-of-consciousness you my process in a practical example. I look at what problems it's purporting to solve, their solution to the problems, and how well it is implemented (e.g. code quality & documentation). My first exploration years ago was Bitcoin, because it looked like a promising alternative currency & potential store of value/hedge against inflation. It turned out to not suit those cases as well as I initially thought, so I stopped buying last year. Concurrently, I had been exploring Ethereum and its smart contracts but it wasn't very compelling to me until the DeFi ecosystem boomed last year. The problem Ethereum solved was providing the infrastructure & standardization for building decentralized applications. Decentralized applications existed before, but Ethereum created a common platform upon which they can interact securely. One problem projects had, though, was figuring out how to price things properly across projects. Each project had their own attempts at providing price oracles, to varying degrees of success, and generally leaving things open for arbitrage bots to exploit people. Enter Chainlink. Chainlink solved that problem and provides a framework to solve similar problems across projects. Now that nearly all DeFi projects use Chainlink Oracles to determine price, there's fewer exploits. That's when DeFi really started to bloom. But then DeFi hit a wall around December of last year. So many great dApps were being created that the demand for Ethereum exploded, and like all supply/demand issues, a miner's computation power became very expensive and has stayed that way. When DeFi first started, gas was measured in dollars, now it's hundreds of dollars. That's what led me to Polygon/Matic (it used to be called Matic Network, but now it's called Polygon Network, but the token is still $MATIC). I remember first thinking that Eth was the way, and all they had to do was fix gas fees by Proof of Stake or some similar solution. Then I read an article by Vitalik, the creator of Ethereum, and he made a compelling argument that even when Ethereum is fixed, the majority of end-user interaction should happen on layer 2 networks, and Ethereum would be the common 'clearinghouse' of sorts between disparate networks. So after that I started researching L2 solutions, and alternative chains like Cardano. I dismissed, and still do (perhaps at my peril?) fully alternative chains. There's too many dApps out there built on Ethereum for me to believe something like Cardano will catch up, even though it solves some issues with Ethereum. As I was researching, Polygon Network became the clear leader in the L2 space. I read the code and whitepapers, but, even more importantly, I used it starting last week, to get a feel for it. I like what I see, and magically made stupid money as a side effect of my experiment. I do see some warts on Polygon. There are still failed transactions, unexplained delays, etc. It's in its infancy, but I've researched the team, read their whitepapers, and read their smart contract code, and I'm confident they can work it out. Skale is another network I'm keeping my eye on. It launched recently. But it's very similar to Polygon (and tbh it looks more constrained), so I have little interest in it. At this point in the growth cycle, network effects are most important. Even a bad solution with the proper network effects can end up being the winner. And Polygon isn't even bad. The other thing I look out for down the road is the emergence of tokenless projects. For example, Optimism, the project that aims to add a similar L2 network, but it doesn't have a token behind it. Tokenless projects are compelling to me because tokencomics can, and often do, result in Ponzi Schemes if you aren't careful in reading how the tokens are distributed. So I have my eye on that. I also have some money to play with on Binance Smart Chain, where I use PancakeSwap for DeFi services. It works fine, but it's also a Binance project so it goes against the grain a bit, and, despite being fully backed by a large corporation, still lags in network effects. The biggest thing that drives me is I'm constantly looking for something that solves a problem that I'm having, is nice to use, and has network effects. I don't speculate on projects like Skale even though that's the biggest return. E.g. I only got into Polygon last week, if I was using it 4 months ago my tokens would have gone bananas. But I'm not a speculator- I waited until it was properly usable. So another thing I have my eye on is the consolidation of lending services. Right now there's so many, such as my favorite Ethereum project Liquity, and my favorite Polygon project AAVE. The market is very saturated right now, so I don't really hold onto my AAVE or LQTY tokens. But if we see some consolidation and network effects I'd be more willing to keep them. Right now I convert my AAVE to USDC or MATIC, despite using the AAVE platform. However, once I see that consolidation I will want to hang onto some tokens as that is a big crowded space. I'm happy to keep reporting back on my explorations, and would love to hear others report also. It's all very new and changing fast, so the more the merrier.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 15:20:21 The funny thing is that people like me are the actually the driver's of supply/demand. You know, the people that see a project and actually use it. Then you have people like Duckhat that say bUt U dOnT eVeN uNdErStAnD tHe dYnAmIc sYsTeMs iN pLaCe fOr SuPplY aNd DeManD! Bitch, I am the supply and demand. Investors follow people like me that find a great project and decide to use it for non-speculative purposes.
habebe Member	Wed May 19 15:30:16 I know almost nothing about AAVE other than Mark Cuban likes it and its stick price has shot up a lot under the radar.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 15:36:41 AAVE is a lending platform that provides instant loans if you put up the collateral, and the collateral you put up is also able to be loaned to others. So you earn interest on the collateral at the same time. You can even choose pairs that will pay you to take out a loan at times, depending on supply demand. e.g. if there's a huge supply of Tether (USDT) to be loaned, the APY on taking out a USDT loan will be low, let's say 3%. But if you put up $DAI as collateral for your loan, and $DAI is in higher demand, you might end up earning 4% APY on your DAI. The end result is you get paid to take out a loan. Sounds crazy, but it's supply & demand. They are variable rates, so the loan may not always be free, but you can rebalance instantly whenever you'd like. It's a neat platform.
nhill Member	Wed May 19 15:39:29 Also, it survived (and so did Liquity) today's flash crash with flying colors so I'm even more bullish on both of them now. A big unknown of these projects is what would actually happen if the price of crypto crashed 20-30% instantly, as many loans would have to be liquidated when that happens. Things proceeded smoothly. People that were over leveraged got liquidated. I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of Ether out of my Liquity trove because it dipped below $1900, but that was the risk I was taking and I have no issues with it. The system worked as intended and remained liquid/usable throughout the whole day (sans ridiculous gas prices).
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Wed May 19 15:53:56 Nice, thanks. What are the returns you are getting from AAEV?
nhill Member	Wed May 19 16:02:56 The returns I'm getting from AAVE are way better than they should be. ;) Right now Polygon is doing a promotion with AAVE. They allocated 1% of $MATIC tokens to promote it. From late April this year, until June 15th, 0.5% of $MATIC tokens are distributed to AAVE users as rewards for seeding the platform. After June 15th, the other 0.5% will be distributed for another year or so, but now -> June 15th you get very good rewards. I put up my $MATIC & $DAI for collateral to take out $USDT. Even taking out loans has $MATIC rewards temporarily. So I get a 13.45% APY on my loan itself that costs 3.86% APY. The collateral I put up also earns 9% for the $DAI and 7% for the $MATIC. So if you combine the loan with the collateral I'm reaping about 20% APY right now. Again, that's temporary and is a promotion Polygon spend $40 million dollars on to promote their network. You can also increase your leverage by taking your loan and putting that up as collateral. Like all leverage that increases your risk to a degree, but if you keep it denominated in USD through $DAI/$USDC that risk is almost zero. However, if you convert your loan to $MATIC and put that up as more collateral you're essentially taking out leverage on a volatile crypto currency (asking for pain IMO).
nhill Member	Wed May 19 16:05:23 The returns aren't as good as Liquity, most likely, but the lack of gas fees makes up for that, as I'm able to dynamically change my leverage based on market conditions (e.g. I'll lever up during the day and then lever down while I sleep, which is how I didn't get my AAVE collateral liquidated in the crash, I had already moved to cash before bed).
nhill Member	Wed May 19 16:13:55 OTOH, my Liquity Trove did get liquidated while I was catching some ZZZs. It's a horrible feeling to wake up missing a huge sum of money, so I'm happy to have a way around that in AAVE. I'm still developing my new strategy from the liquidation. Do I build up a new trove or go all in on Polygon? Decisions, decisions... I prefer diversity so pretty sure I'll be building a new trove. But for now I'm waiting for volatility to settle.
Habebe Member	Thu May 20 05:18:01 AAVE is now down....alot. But ETH and the rest are almost recouped.
Dukhat Member	Thu May 20 07:41:49 lol, what an insane egocentric response
nhill Member	Thu May 20 07:56:24 Translation: I'm out of arguments as I can't even defend the single one I made.
Habebe Member	Thu May 20 08:12:12 Nhill, In all fairness that hasn't seemed to stop him before. I pitty Dukhat, for whatever reason he seems immensely miserable.
Dukhat Member	Thu May 20 08:50:16 Nhil reminds me of a lot of the IT guys I use to work with who don't really know tech (basically blow into ethernet ports). They always jump into the esoteric parts about cryptocurrency. Which is fine, it's interesting to hear about how secure it is but then they make giant non-sequiturs. Lack of education is a helluva pill. You guys love to project a lot. I don't hate cryptocurrency, but it's still a scam. If you realize this and want to invest in it and ride the wave like Chuck, go for it. I've done a little bit of it too but my decision-making process involves timing my sell-offs in time for the inevitable burst and relying on a network of friends working for instutional investors who have the resources to forecast such things. But to base any decision with real money at stake off what Nhil says? LoL. You're a fucking retard to do so.
nhill Member	Thu May 20 08:59:31 I never once told anyone to invest, I generously shared my expertise on the future of our financial system. LOL, IT. I was a software engineer at a multi-billion dollar company before I made my break. You may hate it, but your life is in my hands. My code often means the difference between life and death when you are in an airplane. But really, ad hominem is your last stand? Surrender accepted.
nhill Member	Thu May 20 09:01:17 > Lack of education is a helluva pill. B.S. Software Engineering M.S. Artificial Intelligence I take on contracts to write medical AI for university researchers to help the world and keep me busy. But please, post your credentials.
nhill Member	Thu May 20 09:02:52 If you have a brain tumor and the AI I wrote (being integrated into clinics as we speak) detects necrosis and prevents you from going into surgery, you're welcome.
nhill Member	Thu May 20 09:22:26 You can really tell the difference between someone with Education (Seb), and a dilettante like Duckhat. Seb and I went back and forth & came to an agreement on virtually everything. We both came to different conclusions (me, it's the future, Seb thinks it's doubtful). Perfectly fine.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 20 09:26:59 And just to be very clear, I have yet to join any Defi platforms or buy or sell a single crypto based on what Nhill has said. FYI since Dukhat seems to care so much about what I do with my money. I am very slow to move on these things, this isn't my area, I can't read code and that leaves me at the mercy of others. So I get may data from several independant sources. Having said that, I think Nhill knows what he is talking about. For all your talk about investments and being financially independant, dukhat, you have provided no evidence, either external evidence or really the way you behave on UP. Your behavior on UP is deplorable of the lowest form, that shit you pulled when Rugian's father passed away, no one will ever forget that. And that stunt by itself put you in the forever loser camp. You are a hateful and bitter person and it oozes out of every post you make.
nhill Member	Thu May 20 09:32:59 Nim Glad to hear. Solidity smart contract code isn't super complicated. It sounds more intimidating than it actually is in practice. It'd be worth exploring some basic tutorials on creating smart contracts, as I think you could pick it up quickly and at least get to the level of basic comprehension. It'd be difficult to assess the engineering/architecture/code quality without a lot of experience, but understanding smart contracts itself isn't as onerous.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 20 09:37:13 I am waiting for ETH to settle and then I will go for Liquity, have not decided if I am staying there or going straight for Wasabix. I am concerned about how they have distributed LQTY, this is a red flag that seems to be mentioned in most sources I read about assessing DeFi platforms. It gives me all kind of scame vibes. Doesn't need to be, but I think it is a bad decisions for platforms, because it requires me to trust the people who have a lion share of the tokens behind the "institute". It goes against the trustless idea.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 20 09:40:27 Nhill That is actually a great idea, I have decided to put 1 hour or so per day to read much more in depth into crypto. If you have any good sources for learning to create smart contracts as a way to understand them, don't be a stranger :) I will do some searching later.
nhill Member	Thu May 20 09:45:04 Yes, I agree. Thankfully, you don't have to engage with the $LQTY token in any form to use Liquity. I'm not super happy with Wasabix after the crash. The stability pool for LUSD made a lot of money from the liquidations that I missed out on with Wasabix, and their smart contract code for removing your LUSD completely from Wasabix takes a ridiculous amount of gas to process. I would recommend staying away from Wasabix for now. It's nice to reap huge yields, but it literally takes thousands of dollars of gas to remove all your LUSD and close out of Wasabix. (you can remove bits and pieces for normal amounts, it's only the fully closing out of the platform that is expensive). I read the code, and this wasn't done on purpose to lock you in to the platform. The under-the-hood ops required to close out the contract takes more computing power than I expected from reading the code, however. Lesson learned there. I need to figure out a solid way to estimate gas costs based on cyclomatic complexity or something like that (not directly using cyclomatic, as that's easy enough to avoid, but something along those lines)
nhill Member	Thu May 20 09:48:44 Nim http://doc...uction-to-smart-contracts.html was what I used but it's overly technical and assumes you're familiar with compilers and common technologies like Node and Docker. Hmm. I'll look for friendlier resources. I'm sure there's tutorials out there that are more welcoming.
nhill Member	Thu May 20 09:49:17 But reading that would help, even if you don't actually write/implement it all.
Dukhat Member	Thu May 20 09:57:54 lol, Nim trying to impose his fake morality onto UP. This place went down a deep dark hole once Trump was the nominee and never went back. You internalized Rugian and obaminated's rampant lying and racism because you yourself are a vehement misogynist and identify culturally with a lot of the alt right. So fuck you Nim. Nobody gives a shit about morality around here. And fuck Rugian and his dead dad. Why he went fishing for sympathy here when most of his posts are gleeful about all different types of non-white groups being oppressed is beyond me. Maybe on some level, he realizes he's an ingrate locked in an internet bubble free of empathy and compassion. To pretend otherwise was an absolute fucking farce.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 20 12:03:22 Thanks nhill. Dukhat You are the one who went down the dark hole when Trump got elected. Plenty of us here didn't go down that abyss and continue to treat each other with respect and general human decency. You remember how toxic it was between me and Jergul? Not anymore. Did you hear me describe seb as moral and decent person the other day? These are the two people I have disagreed and discussed with the most, by far. Things used to get really toxic, but no one really lost their grip on reality the way you have. And then there is the fact that there are plenty of poster here where it never even reach that level with. So, human decency still exists on this board and you are welcome back whenever you decide want to let go of the hate.
Dukhat Member	Fri May 21 19:53:20 lol, crypto started crashing as soon as Nhil comes back to shill for it.
Dukhat Member	Fri May 21 19:53:28 Thar she blows!
Dukhat Member	Fri May 21 19:53:35 TTT for posterity.
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