Shownotes
The next major upgrade for Cardano will bring a number of performance and scaling improvements. We will take a look at the included CIPs as well as the other improvements bundled up with this important update.
Technical note .. I recorded the show with the door to the office open..it changed the sound of the recording. Sorry about that and it won't happen again!
News and Links
https://www.cryptopolitan.com/paraguay-okays-new-crypto-regulation-bill/
https://decrypt.co/101834/bug-brings-down-solana-blockchain-for-four-hours
https://bitcoinist.com/mirror-protocol-attacked-no-one-turned-rescue-it/
https://ambcrypto.com/terra-luna-nansens-report-reveals-new-information-on-usts-depegging-fiasco/
User Support
signsofnewgrowth - Thank you so much for your support!
Podcasting 2.0 Apps Available at http://newpodcastapps.com/
I can be reached by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrypto.com and on twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @mcintosh@podcastindex.social. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Website
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist website: https://incompetech.com
Transcripts
Hey, everyone.
Speaker:No one on this podcast is a financial advisor, and all information presented on this podcast
Speaker:is for informational purposes only.
Speaker:Now that we have the legal stuff out of the way, let's jump on in.
Speaker:Welcome to the Generational Wealth of Cryptocurrency podcast.
Speaker:I'm your host, Macintosh.
Speaker:Today we're going to talk about the Cardano Vezel hard fork that will be coming at the
Speaker:end of this month.
Speaker:So this week we do want to talk about the Cardano upgrade.
Speaker:It is technically a hard fork, but this is how they're doing the upgrade.
Speaker:I'm not sure if they've done this in the past.
Speaker:They seem to be quite confident that this is the way that it should be done, and frankly
Speaker:this is probably something that I trust them on.
Speaker:So I wanted to take a few minutes and go over this.
Speaker:Later this year, as I mentioned, we also have the Ethereum upgrade coming.
Speaker:So I thought for the next episode that we would cover that.
Speaker:Since Cardano is happening first, we'll talk about it first.
Speaker:Like I said, it's scheduled for June the 29th.
Speaker:It covers a number of areas.
Speaker:For those who aren't familiar, we talk about ADA quite frequently here on the Generational
Speaker:Wealth podcast, but I will provide a brief overview before we dive in.
Speaker:It is currently the number seven coin, and that does include Tether and USDC in that
Speaker:list, which are both, of course, stable coins.
Speaker:I don't really rank them in that list, but they have market cap.
Speaker:So they count.
Speaker:The market cap for Cardano is about $19 billion currently.
Speaker:The price, as of right now, is actually $0.56, along with a lot of other tokens.
Speaker:Of course, it is down.
Speaker:However, it has actually seen some good action.
Speaker:A few days ago, there was a jump, I believe, over a 24-hour period of about 25%.
Speaker:So that was actually pretty impressive.
Speaker:And there are a lot of people who think that this upgrade, which we'll be talking about
Speaker:here in just a second, will power it past $1.
Speaker:I have no idea.
Speaker:Don't know.
Speaker:We will just have to see.
Speaker:I suspect, as it approaches June the 29th, it will go up maybe even more so than some
Speaker:of the other tokens in terms of percentage.
Speaker:But I'm not sure we can really ascribe that to this upgrade.
Speaker:So what do we have?
Speaker:For one thing, there are four, what they call CIPs, Cardano Improvement Proposal, that will
Speaker:be wrapped into this.
Speaker:Just to give you guys a little background, when you research this stuff, you go and you
Speaker:read different websites and whatever, of course, and they all are a little bit different.
Speaker:And some of them are actually just wrong.
Speaker:There was one, in fact, that I found while I was looking at this.
Speaker:It listed something completely incorrect.
Speaker:So it's almost like a little puzzle to put together.
Speaker:And this hard fork will include four CIPs, CIP 31, 32, 33, and 40.
Speaker:And I'll just go ahead and kind of give the brief overviews real quick.
Speaker:CIP 31 is what's about reference inputs.
Speaker:CIP 32 is what about inline datums, 33 reference scripts, and then 40 was collateral outputs.
Speaker:Now, I'm going to group these together.
Speaker:CIPs 31, 33, and 40 all relate to the Plutus smart contract.
Speaker:So Plutus is what they call their smart contract platform.
Speaker:So that's how they build decentralized apps on Cardano.
Speaker:And those first three are specifically for Plutus.
Speaker:The reference scripts, the inputs and collateral outputs both give it more functionality.
Speaker:One of those actually relates to performance improvement.
Speaker:The reference scripts will actually help with the execution speed and the transaction costs.
Speaker:So it'll make it cheaper.
Speaker:Although Cardano is certainly not known as an expensive blockchain, this implementation
Speaker:should help with their transaction cost.
Speaker:Basically, in a snapshot and overview, everything here involves either speeding it up or improving
Speaker:the transaction costs.
Speaker:The scaling improvements, the CIP 32, the inline datums is actually directly for scaling.
Speaker:And then they implemented a couple of other things which I can't find a direct reference
Speaker:to in terms of the CIPs.
Speaker:They have a big deal which will certainly impact performance called diffusion pipelining.
Speaker:And that will speed up the transactions.
Speaker:And then also, maybe a little bit controversially, at least in my book, they are increasing the
Speaker:block size by 10%.
Speaker:So they're packing in more transactions into a block and that will speed things up.
Speaker:And I don't know if you're familiar, but Bitcoin went through a period where they
Speaker:had quite a kerfuffle, they had quite a fuss over the block size.
Speaker:And one of the forks of Bitcoin was actually caused by that.
Speaker:So it's a rather sensitive topic.
Speaker:No, I haven't heard anybody complaining about this.
Speaker:I would note, however, that that has been an issue in the past with other blockchains.
Speaker:I think actually looking at the size of things here, they're actually quite small at this
Speaker:point.
Speaker:So the 10% increase really doesn't seem to be frankly that big a deal.
Speaker:But that's it.
Speaker:So that will be executed at the end of June.
Speaker:We expect quite a bit of good to come out of that.
Speaker:This is part of Cardano's kind of slow and steady cadence.
Speaker:People complain about the rate that they put out updates and this kind of thing.
Speaker:But they don't have issues when they do it.
Speaker:And in general, they have very few issues on the Cardano blockchain now.
Speaker:Some people certainly have said, well, that's because nobody's using it.
Speaker:That's not really true anymore.
Speaker:There are, if it ever was, but there are a lot of people who use Cardano.
Speaker:There are quite a few transactions flowing through that network at this point.
Speaker:So I think that's kind of an invalid argument.
Speaker:And in fact, in our news today, we will discuss another blockchain who maybe they are trying
Speaker:to grow too quickly and they have again had issues.
Speaker:So you may be able to guess where I'm going with this.
Speaker:And no, it's not Terra Luna, although we will be talking about them for just a minute.
Speaker:It is the Solana blockchain.
Speaker:Earlier today, and I'm recording this on Wednesday night, June the 1st, they had another bug
Speaker:that brought down the Solana blockchain for just over four hours.
Speaker:It was stopped completely.
Speaker:So I've been discussing this type thing for the last few weeks and my disgust in kind
Speaker:of the way things are going in a lot of these blockchains, Solana is not decentralized.
Speaker:It's clearly not being run very well.
Speaker:And so you see these issues over and over and over again.
Speaker:I'm not going to go into this in any depth other than to, I will have a link to it in
Speaker:the show notes.
Speaker:But other than to say, you know, they were down for four more hours, their price is down.
Speaker:You could say that was the market in general.
Speaker:I would be deeply concerned if I were somebody who had Solana at this point.
Speaker:And frankly, I'd be preparing how I was going to exit that asset.
Speaker:The next bit of news involves Paraguay and it appears, and this is a little inconclusive,
Speaker:they passed a new crypto regulation regulation bill there, whatever they call them deputies
Speaker:in there.
Speaker:I do not know anything about their political system, but it says that they voted 40 to
Speaker:12 in favor of the crypto bill.
Speaker:So apparently this was very well received.
Speaker:I did read elsewhere.
Speaker:Part of the reason for this, and this is very interesting.
Speaker:So Paraguay apparently has a deal and I don't remember if it was with Brazil alone or with
Speaker:Brazil and Argentina to get energy, electricity from a hydroelectric project on a river that,
Speaker:you know, is a shared resource between the countries.
Speaker:I think it was just Brazil, but it may have been Argentina as well.
Speaker:And I remember specifically, and I'll try and find the article, but I may not be able
Speaker:to at this point, it said that they only use like 26% of the energy that's allocated to
Speaker:them from this project.
Speaker:So basically there's a bunch of unused energy that they end up selling very cheaply back
Speaker:to the surrounding countries, Brazil, Argentina, and they really get no benefit from it.
Speaker:Paraguay actually has very cheap energy overall, I would assume in large part from this hydroelectric
Speaker:project.
Speaker:And so the implication of this article was one of the driving forces of this crypto bill
Speaker:was that they are trying to lure Bitcoin miners because they want to use more of that allocation
Speaker:of energy.
Speaker:Basically they have wasted energy, if you want to look at that, a bunch of wasted energy,
Speaker:a large amount.
Speaker:And so they're going to use that as an incentive to bring in Bitcoin miners to use that energy.
Speaker:Obviously this is clean energy, not based on fossil fuels of any kind or nuclear power
Speaker:for that matter.
Speaker:And that's going to benefit their country in terms of, you know, more jobs and all this
Speaker:kind of stuff.
Speaker:So that was actually one of the driving forces of this.
Speaker:This article does make mention about a license for foreign miners talking about Bitcoin miners,
Speaker:or I guess just miners in general, really other proof of work blockchains through competitive
Speaker:energy rates.
Speaker:So they are talking about that as part of this bill.
Speaker:But specifically I did read about this hydroelectric project that's actually generating so much
Speaker:energy that it's super cheap and they're basically kind of giving it away almost.
Speaker:And they want to utilize that.
Speaker:And what do Bitcoin miners look at?
Speaker:I will tell you one of the most important functions of determining profit in Bitcoin
Speaker:mining is the cost of generation.
Speaker:Right now at about $22,000 or so, if we got down to that level, it would be profitable
Speaker:to mine Bitcoin up to roughly 10 cents a kilowatt hour, kilowatt hour I think is what it's called.
Speaker:So which is kind of the national average for business.
Speaker:But if it goes below that, then it's not actually profitable to mine if you sell at that time.
Speaker:But obviously if our energy is cheaper, then we make more profit as a miner.
Speaker:I do not currently mine.
Speaker:It's something that I would actually like to do.
Speaker:But just to be clear, I don't actually mine right now.
Speaker:So I thought that was very interesting.
Speaker:It's a very calculated move on their part, a play to bring in that type of business.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:The last two articles are news items are about Terra Luna, the Terra Luna ecosystem.
Speaker:And I'm going to start with a simpler one.
Speaker:So a few days ago, it was discovered that the mirror protocol, which operates on the
Speaker:Terra Luna ecosystem, basically has been under attack.
Speaker:If you want to call it that losing millions of dollars for the last several for the last
Speaker:day or so.
Speaker:Now this was on, let's see, when was the date of this article?
Speaker:I want to say this was yesterday.
Speaker:I don't see a date on this article.
Speaker:I believe it was yesterday.
Speaker:It might've been the day before.
Speaker:I actually tried to look up some more recent information and can't find anything.
Speaker:But basically the price Oracle, the part of the system that goes out and looks up the
Speaker:price of Terra Luna was not switched from what's now called Terra Luna Classic to the
Speaker:new Terra Luna.
Speaker:And so the price was completely massively skewed.
Speaker:And there were people who were, they call them bad actors in here, but they basically
Speaker:found a bug in the protocol.
Speaker:And so they extracted a bunch of money from it.
Speaker:The thing is people were trying to get a hold of Do Kwan, the guy who heads up Terra Luna,
Speaker:the developers of Mirror Protocol, and as far as Do Kwan didn't answer, he just didn't
Speaker:respond to tweets or anything.
Speaker:And the Mirror Protocol devs are missing in action.
Speaker:They're nowhere to be found.
Speaker:So apparently they're just going to let it burn to the ground.
Speaker:So there you go.
Speaker:That's great.
Speaker:This is the kind of thing I was warning about.
Speaker:I'm not surprised to see this.
Speaker:That ecosystem is very rapidly falling apart.
Speaker:And I, you know, if you have anything involved in that system, if you have any money at all
Speaker:at this point, I would just take it out.
Speaker:And that's Anchor, that's Mirror, that's any of these systems that are based on Terra
Speaker:Luna.
Speaker:And if you don't know, you need to look it up.
Speaker:I would assume that if you have an asset on some platform, you would know the backing
Speaker:of it.
Speaker:But do not count on me to sit here and recite all the Terra network, you know, platforms,
Speaker:the platforms that are utilizing that Terra ecosystem.
Speaker:I do not know them offhand.
Speaker:I never owned Terra.
Speaker:I almost put money on the Anchor Protocol.
Speaker:Unfortunately, I decided not to, although I probably could have gotten it out before
Speaker:I lost any real money in it.
Speaker:Now the second item is something that I've been looking for since this happened.
Speaker:And you know, I theorized and I said so on here that the Terra Luna fiasco was a coordinated
Speaker:attack.
Speaker:And the thing is, is that all of this is on the blockchain.
Speaker:This is ultimately decipherable and you can figure out how things were done.
Speaker:So this report was put out.
Speaker:It's called the Nansen Report.
Speaker:I don't know who Nansen is.
Speaker:Nansen is a group of researchers, I guess.
Speaker:But they studied the blockchain data from Terra and its connections to Ethereum through
Speaker:the wormhole bridge protocols.
Speaker:And they said it was not caused by a single hostile party.
Speaker:They said that a total of seven wallets were flagged.
Speaker:And it also concluded that the USTD pegging was not carried out by hackers or attackers.
Speaker:So I guess that depends on what your definition of attackers are.
Speaker:Now I would argue, first of all, seven wallets on a blockchain, they could be owned by the
Speaker:same person, absolutely.
Speaker:They're anonymous.
Speaker:It's not like they have a driver's license inside that wallet to show you who owns it.
Speaker:It's just a wallet on the internet.
Speaker:It's just an address, right?
Speaker:So it was carried out by these well-funded wallets.
Speaker:They looked at the own chain data between May the 7th, which is essentially when they
Speaker:started and the 11th.
Speaker:And they started withdrawing their UST liquidity.
Speaker:So UST is the Terra stablecoin from Anchor.
Speaker:And then it says that they moved the liquidity to Ethereum via wormhole bridge and swapped
Speaker:into other stablecoins on Curve's liquidity pools.
Speaker:So it goes into more detail than that.
Speaker:It actually took remarkably little, frankly, to tear this down.
Speaker:So they give some of the notable transactions, an $85 million transaction out of one on May
Speaker:the 7th, $175 million on the 7th of May, and then another $125 million as well.
Speaker:A third wallet bridged $20 million to Ethereum out of UST.
Speaker:The fourth wallet dealt at about $10.5 million of UST.
Speaker:And then we had $20 million on the 5th, $30 million on the next one, and about $60 million
Speaker:on the last one.
Speaker:And that was it.
Speaker:And that's all it took to tear down Doe Kwan's empire.
Speaker:And that's it.
Speaker:So in my mind, these people didn't actually do anything illegal.
Speaker:You may not agree with that, and that's okay.
Speaker:You know, Doe Kwan was so confident in his system that nobody could, you know, it was
Speaker:safe.
Speaker:This was basically just taking advantage of the system, right?
Speaker:As they withdrew all that from the system, it de-pegged the UST, and then that cascaded
Speaker:down into essentially nothingness.
Speaker:They didn't actually do anything wrong.
Speaker:Now, you may have said, well, they did this with ill intent, and that's arguably true,
Speaker:but they didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker:They're not going to go to jail for it.
Speaker:I would argue actually that Doe Kwan should be the one going to jail, but I probably shouldn't
Speaker:say that on the record.
Speaker:He is innocent until proven guilty, of course.
Speaker:However, I will say that a lot of people lost a lot of money in this.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So that was the two bits of news about Terra Luna.
Speaker:And you know, that new network has launched.
Speaker:They call the old protocol Terra Luna Classic, and now it's Terra Luna for the new one.
Speaker:And it's certainly not blown anybody's socks off.
Speaker:In fact, it's gone down since it came out.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:And again, like Solano, if you have any money in Terra Luna, well, I would actually even
Speaker:more so with these Terra Luna ecosystems, if you have any money in that, just get it
Speaker:out.
Speaker:Just move it to anything aside from being involved in that.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:I will have links in the show notes, but that's it for the news.
Speaker:Moving on to our next section, and this will be new for me.
Speaker:So if you will bear with me, I have told you all in the past, there's been a few, I've
Speaker:gotten a few boosts of the podcast that unfortunately I was not set up so that I did not know who
Speaker:sent those boosts or they just didn't send a message.
Speaker:I'm not sure which.
Speaker:And a few days ago, I get a message in Telegram and a Telegram channel, which I get on my
Speaker:phone.
Speaker:And a few days ago, I was sitting around and my phone dings and I looked at it and I got
Speaker:a boost.
Speaker:My first boost that we'll be reading on the air.
Speaker:And so this person, they're our first user supporting the show, at least in a public
Speaker:manner.
Speaker:And I sincerely appreciate that.
Speaker:The user's name, Signs of New Growth, sent a message, said congrats on the 50th episode.
Speaker:Of course, our last episode was number 50.
Speaker:And thank you.
Speaker:I appreciate that.
Speaker:And he sent, he or she sent, I have no idea.
Speaker:They sent 3,333 sets using Fountain.
Speaker:So that is awesome.
Speaker:I do want to actually pause for just a second before we move on and wrap things up.
Speaker:Both the podcasts that I listen to that use the Value for Value model, the Podcasting
Speaker:2.0 podcast that Adam Curry and Dave Jones host, and Adam is on another podcast called
Speaker:No Agenda that's been around for like a lot, like 12, 15 years, I don't know, with another
Speaker:man named John C. Dvorak, who was a longtime computer columnist and I remember him back
Speaker:in the 90s.
Speaker:I mean, honestly from, shoot, I'm drawing a complete blank.
Speaker:It doesn't matter.
Speaker:He's been in a lot of different magazines.
Speaker:He actually had a column in Computer Shopper, for example, back when it was the size of
Speaker:a phone book, if you're old enough to remember that.
Speaker:Anyways, I do listen to both of those shows.
Speaker:They do this type thing on both of them.
Speaker:And on both of those shows, there's almost always like some little numerology applied
Speaker:to the money that people send them.
Speaker:As an example, on Podcasting 2.0, I know in particular, they'll get these.
Speaker:They call it a row of ducks, and it comes from the silly Nintendo Duck Hunt game, right?
Speaker:NES Duck Hunt.
Speaker:And so a row of ducks is two, two, two, two, or more twos.
Speaker:You know, 2,222 or 22,222, I think I said that right.
Speaker:So when they read that off, they're like, hey, it's a row of ducks.
Speaker:And they play a little jingle, a little sound, and they have a bit of fun with it.
Speaker:So as we're starting to get these, I'm thinking about this and how we can do this.
Speaker:As in New Growth, to be honest, I don't know what 3333 represents.
Speaker:I've heard it before on those shows, and I don't recall actually.
Speaker:So we'll have to figure something out.
Speaker:I am going to be very upfront about this.
Speaker:I'm not going to do anything that's vulgar or like some people send in 420, and 420 is
Speaker:a reference to April the 20th, which is like National Smoke Weed Day or whatever.
Speaker:It's something to do with marijuana, right?
Speaker:It's not really a literal US holiday, but if somebody sends me 420 sats, that's awesome.
Speaker:I appreciate it, but we're not going to call it anything.
Speaker:It's just 420 sats.
Speaker:I'm just not going to do that.
Speaker:That's just not me.
Speaker:People have a lot of fun with this, I hope.
Speaker:I would like to figure out something around this.
Speaker:The people who support this show, they're part of what makes this special.
Speaker:I want to make this fun.
Speaker:I want to make this something that when we talk about this, hopefully on a regular basis,
Speaker:it's a fun little time.
Speaker:So we'll figure that out as we go along.
Speaker:We've got all the time in the world, but there we go.
Speaker:So there's our first one, 3333 from Signs of New Growth.
Speaker:Really appreciate that.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:By the way, Bitcoin price, 29,791.
Speaker:Right now, Ethereum is at $1,815.
Speaker:It had pumped up a little bit this morning and fell down.
Speaker:It's broken out to an extent, but it's hesitant about even how far it's going to go.
Speaker:I'm quite certain it's going to pull back.
Speaker:It's a matter of where it goes to.
Speaker:A lot of people think it may hit $33,000 or even a bit higher and then retrace.
Speaker:We'll see.
Speaker:Honestly, right now, it's not looking like it's even going to get there, so it may just
Speaker:start going back down.
Speaker:That's okay.
Speaker:It gives us more time to dollar cost average, right?
Speaker:Cool.
Speaker:So Generational Wealth Cryptocurrency supports Podcasting 2.0.
Speaker:It's a value for value podcast with no sponsors and no advertising.
Speaker:There are three ways you can support the podcast, time, talent, and treasure.
Speaker:If you want to support the podcast and has the time or talent, I've got a ton of stuff
Speaker:we can do, chapters, transcriptions for the podcast.
Speaker:There's other stuff.
Speaker:Treasure, just what it sounds like.
Speaker:You can be like Science and New Growth, send in some Sats.
Speaker:You can stream Sats to the podcast using a Podcasting 2.0 app to show your support.
Speaker:Those are listed at newpodcastapps.com.
Speaker:If you're kind of old school, you can send money by PayPal to macintoshgeneworthcrypto.com.
Speaker:I would, regardless, recommend that you get a Podcasting 2.0 app for the optimal listening
Speaker:experience.
Speaker:Like I said, those are available at newpodcastapps.com.
Speaker:If you like the content, I would love it if you would tell your friends about the Generational
Speaker:Wealth Cryptocurrency podcast.
Speaker:Hey, thanks for being here.
Speaker:I hope this has been helpful and I would love to hear from you.
Speaker:Actually, if you have ideas about these Sats, I'll probably start doing Roa Ducks.
Speaker:I need to dig up the sound for that.
Speaker:It's kind of funny, but we'll have others that we come up with.
Speaker:Shoot me a Twitter or email me.
Speaker:Let me know what you think about that.
Speaker:I'm on Twitter at MacintoshFintech and you can reach me by email at macintoshgeneworthcrypto.com.
Speaker:Of course, the Generational Wealth website is at geneworthcrypto.com.