Many of us in the cryptocurrency space have been waiting for the next major market contraction for several years, and it has finally arrived, in spectacular fashion. COVID-19 and government response to it are disrupting markets in a way that few could have expected, putting a massive strain on markets already leveraged to the point of malfunction. The US central bank, the Federal Reserve System (“FRS”), is running the same plays it did during the 2008 crisis to address the market contraction: a combination of reducing its target interest rate and using effectively-unlimited credit to backstop various markets directly. Since Bitcoin was released shortly after the 2008 crisis, many people have come to understand the substantial …
Getting to know the Decred blockchain I started exploring the Decred blockchain in more depth at the end of 2019 as I scoped out a plan for the third phase of the Open Source Research Program. With a local instance of dcrdata up and running, I watched it whizz through hundreds of thousands of blocks worth of data, creating tables representing every address, transaction, input, output, and vote - the origins and destinations of all the DCR in existence.
The Decred community considers privacy to be a fundamental human right.
Protecting the privacy of Decred users has been a core tenet of the project since it’s inception. To quote the Decred constitution:
Privacy and security are priorities and shall be balanced with the complexity of their implementations. Additional privacy and security technology shall be implemented on a continuing and incremental basis, both proactively and on-demand in response to attacks.
In late 2019, Jake Yocom-Piatt revealed a much anticipated privacy solution for Decred - CoinShuffle++ (CSPP). The introduction of CSPP enables users to anonymize their Decred by mixing with the steady stream of ticket transactions which flow through the network as part of …
Introduction Bitcoin gamified time-stamping. Decred gamified decision-making and formed a digital collective, a technology-enabled experiment in human organization.
The core infrastructure is under construction; the same holds true for Decred communications.
Last year, Politeia enabled direct stakeholder sovereignty over much of the marketing spend, the Contractor Management System (CMS) was introduced to track spending, and Decred iterated and experimented with new marketing tactics.
The following is a summary of 2019 spending, an evaluation, and a call to arms to think about and grow Decred differently in 2020.
We recently observed the Monero hack in which an attacker compromised getmonero[.]org and replaced one of the binaries with a malicious coinstealer.
The Monero team has good reliability when it comes to security and all indicators seem to show that the attack was sophisticated. Point being no matter what your security posture, this could happen to anyone.