Over the past few months, I’ve been contributing weekly market analyses to Liquid’s blog. Many of these posts contain cryptocurrency charts from TradingView that look something like this.
Substratum Commences ETH/USDT Trading with ICO Funds to Recoup Losses
Earlier this week, Substratum CEO Justin Tabb made an update video sharing details about the SUB token swap and smart contract update. Near the end of the video, Tabb discusses Substratum’s stance on treasury management. Specifically, Tabb revealed that an in-house trader will be using ETH raised from Substratum’s ICO to conduct trades with the goal of increasing the firm’s ETH holdings. To my knowledge, this move is unprecedented in the sense that no other ICO-funded project has publicly acknowledged the trading of ICO funds on unregulated exchanges. Before we get into the implications and of this announcement, here is Justin Tabb’s statement.
How to Convert PDFs to Image Files with ImageMagick in macOS
To convert PDFs to image files, you’ll need to install Homebrew, ImageMagick, and Ghostscript. Homebrew is a package manager for macOS that allows you to install and manage a variety of software packages with a single command. ImageMagick can be thought of as the Swiss army knife of image processing and manipulation. Ghostscript is a PDF interpreter that’s required for ImageMagick to process PDF files.
Substratum’s SUB Token Swap & Smart Contract Update
Substratum’s smart contract for its SUB ERC-20 token has recently been the subject of widespread criticism due to its built-in mint token function. The minting function, which can be found in the second version of Substratum’s whitepaper states that, “should the market ever reach 90% saturation, the network will create 10% additional tokens and separate them into an account that is only used to fuel the network. These will not hit the exchanges and will only be available for transactions within the network.”
It Really Seems Like No One Understands Substratum →
The Blockchain Report:
The Substratum platform utilizes blockchain technology by having cryptographic algorithms that ensure data integrity. This leads to a more secure and private Internet experience.
So many people fail to realize Substratum’s network routing layer has nothing to do with blockchain technology. Substratum only uses blockchain technology, specifically the ERC-20 token standard, to process payouts for network contributors. Seriously, just take a few seconds to think about this. Why would Substratum route network data packets through blockchain (a slow public database) to “ensure data integrity”? How would that even be possible?
So you may be wondering what the benefit of this is. Well as we’ve seen from centralized hosting platforms, censorship has become a large-scale issue. This is the kind of thing that overcomes that. A real world example would be Chinese citizens using Substratum nodes in order to access websites that the government restricts them from being able to see.
I’m 100% against oppressive censorship, but let’s stop pretending that Substratum is somehow going to make a difference. In fact, I’d argue that Substratum actually puts more Chinese citizens at risk. China has a history of imprisoning VPN providers. Starting a VPN service requires a significant amount of capital to build out the proper infrastructure. Thus, the opportunity to start up such an enterprise is only available to a small minority of people.
Substratum essentially enables anyone with a computer and Internet connection to become a VPN-equivalent service provider by serving requests on the network. This is a problem because there’s nothing stopping the Chinese government from setting up a few Substratum nodes to do IP discovery on the network. What do you think they’re going to do once they start finding Chinese IP addresses? Sit around and earn SUB tokens?
How to Disable Gutenberg in WordPress 5.0
Add the line below to your theme’s functions.php file to disable the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress 5.0.
/* Disable the Gutenberg editor. */ add_filter('use_block_editor_for_post', '__return_false'); There’s also an official Classic Editor plugin if you want to go that route instead.
teamLab Planets
We spent the afternoon at teamLab Planets in Toyosu today. What a beautifully designed experience. Definitely worth the visit.
Steemit Lays Off 70% of its Employees →
Ned Scott:
Given the weakness of the cryptocurrency market, the fiat returns on our automated selling of STEEM diminishing, and the growing costs of running full Steem nodes, we have been forced to layoff close to 70% of the team. The remainder of the team is staying on to focus primarily on reducing the costs of the infrastructure running steemit.com and our public APIs, and ensuring that the community can remain informed of developments.
I really enjoyed using Steemit last year, but the inability to specify canonical URLs for blog posts ultimately put me off. I still think Steemit is the only blockchain-based social platform that has managed to a decent user base and following, so this development is very unfortunate. My thoughts below.
- It’s silly to blame the layoffs on the current bear market instead of the real reason — poor treasury management. It’s clear that Steemit, Inc. chose to speculate in a high-volatility market with investor funds instead of cashing out to fiat in accordance with a real and reasonable financial plan.
- Accounting for inflation, Steemit auto-mined and sold ~80% of the token supply since its inception. Is there a detailed financial report that shows where all of this money went? If so, Steemit, Inc. should consider making it publicly available. If not, then why not?
- Perhaps it’s time for Ned Scott, who still owns ~$750,000 worth of STEEM, to step down as CEO and move into an advisory position. His leadership has been questioned by many in the community, and he doesn’t seem equipped with the knowledge and experience to bring Steemit, Inc. out of this financial mess.
A LEGO city
Living in a city like Tokyo, it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day chaos on the ground. From above, you can understand the importance of perspective.
My Favorite Train Station
Lavender Farm Station (ラベンダー畑駅) in Furano, Japan — perhaps the most beautiful train station on Earth.
