Posts

This Week in Cryptocurrency / The (My) Case for Algorand

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There's no ignoring the rapid advancement and public acceptance of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Cryptocurrency.  Just one week preceding this post (02/08/2021) we saw Tesla add $1.5 Billion of Bitcoin to their balance sheet and announce that they will begin accepting bitcoin (and other cryptos) as payment.(1)   Two days later (02/10/2021) we saw MasterCard announce that in 2021, they will "start supporting select cryptocurrencies directly on [their] network."  They do admit that this will be a process requiring regulation and research to ensure MasterCard's compliance measures are met.  However, MasterCard does specifically mention stablecoins ("cryptocurrencies that attempt to peg their market value to some external reference(2) - such as the USD" as the implementation they "expect to bring into [their] network"(3).  I will come back to why this is important.   In further MasterCard news two days later, (02/12/2021) we saw an announcement that

My Cryptocurrency Discovery

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For my first official post, I will provide a high-level and overly-simplified rundown on Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Finance in general.  Then, I'll discuss my personal experiences and the specific data points I analyzed with Ethereum .  I'll try to keep this and all future posts as objective and digestible as possible, as there are hundreds of resources out there by industry experts that go into greater detail than I can. ------------------------------ Without getting too involved, I see the 2020 and continuing sociopolitical climate as a strong advertisement for crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi). For the sake of smooth conversation, I'll refer to both as exchange systems for digital assets not reliant on banks and other institutions .  A simple phrase I've seen online I like that summarizes these systems well is "wild west" as they are still very experimental and lacking in regulations resulting in high volatility.    I will preface with the sent

Introduction - About The Author

 I'll try to keep this introduction short and sweet.  I've included a brief biography on my profile page, so feel free to check that out for some additional background. I never had been significantly involved in any investing.  However, I found myself with some extra free time browsing twitter and seeing headline after headline, tweet after tweet regarding Bitcoin, blockchain, cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi).   I had always been aware of these as general concepts, but I never paid much attention.  Rather, I was naïve and wrote off the concepts as irrelevant and worthless.  I was wrong. For the months of November through January, I closely tracked Bitcoin and Ethereum and watched them each double from approximately $18,000 to $36,000 and $700 to $1,400 respectively.  It seemed like many sociopolitical factors  (pandemic, stimulus payments, presidential shift, riots, the challenge on wall street/Gamestop/WallStreetBets) were advertisements for cryptocurrency and