It's no secret that ever since the Covid19 ravaged the planet the world has gone into a spiral of panic, and markets crashed. With crashing markets money started flowing to gold. And it caught my attention. With that I also realized that blockchain can be an effective technology that can be utilized in Gold Trading.

Later, to no surprise I realized that it already picked up steam, Britain's government-owned Royal Mint along with a growing number of companies has launched services that let businesses and investors buy and sell digital tokens representing physical gold via blockchain transactions.

I even calculated that is competitive to do so and even more cheaper and effective to trade gold on the blockchain.

Some significant advantages being no annual fees for owning tokens, compared to annual fees of 0.25-0.5 percent for gold Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs) and there needs to be no payment of annual secure storage fees of 0.12-0.25 percent for gold bars. That translates into a higher return on investment for gold backed tokens, because over time the compounding effect of fees significantly reduce the overall return.

As interest for gold picks up, more businesses will want to participate. More people with lesser capital will also participate. Millennial generation might start considering traditional asset classes like gold, and entry barrier can become lesser. Such Gold Trading systems can have advantages by building on new generation Blockchains like Concordium mainly because of some features that Concordium provides. Concordium has regulatory compliance by design so one need not have to worry about the legal and regulatory hassles that come with buying traditional assets like Gold. It also has privacy feature in its protocol. This is important because blockchain mainly stands for transparency that may also expose buyers to risks of revealing how much Gold one is buying or selling that may bring with it various unforeseen risks and manipulation in markets. Having all your transactions private means no one can see how much you are buying or selling protecting your identity legally and lawfully.

It also has fast transaction and high throughput for global scale, so a trader in the United States can legally trade Gold from the Middle East or Asia without having to wait for hours to process and transact hence, saving them lots of money.

Concordium also provides White Label Production Architecture and Sharding which means that every company can take advantages of Concordium Blockchain while eventually having a white label of their own brand and customizing it for their clients without their clients even realizing.

So I wont be too surprised to see actual gold being brought on your cellphone recorded on the blockchain. Imagine such low barriers to entry could kick start a new run and benefit two large industries in a big way.

What do you think of decentralized Hedge funds? Do you think they can work successfully as intended? Do you think they stand a chance against institutional hedge funds with good strategies? We are experimenting in finance in a very unique way. Initially I did not take this seriously because of the name. When I read more about it, I started understanding it better.

If any of you want to understand how this works : https://medium.com/@nyanfinance/nyan-finance-and-the-importance-of-decentralized-funds-management-bf93f9623e7

This looks like a largely experimental idea though, they seem to have less than 200 followers currently on Twitter, so we maybe still very early.

I think in crypto value investing has worked for me. Having patience to wait it out in a project with good fundamentals surely works.

This is the wild wild west of crypto. There will be scams, but there will be many useful experiments too, DeFi applications are like a testnet to real world finance and the possibilities.

Depending on the energy source, researchers estimate that crypto-mining can produce 3-15 million tons of global carbon emissions. Right from the manufacturing of mining equipment to cooling facilities and the handling of e-waste in addition to the energy consumed by the mining equipment to secure the network, it can be quite a wasteful process, however I do know that PoW has proved tobe an effective method to secure a network, as long as 51% of the whole network is not controlled by a central authority.

However, I cam across Virtual ASICs by Concordium is a very interesting concept that has been scientifically proven by academic research. I think it might be worth looking at. Virtual ASICs are essentially a virtualized version of proof-of-work.

Miners can buy on-chain virtual mining machines which can be powered by virtual electricity. Similar to their physical counterparts, each powered virtual ASIC has a certain chance to win the right to create the next block. In the boundary case where virtual electricity is free, the protocol corresponds to proof-of-stake using an ASIC token which is separate from the currency itself (the amount of stake equals your virtual computing power).

In the other boundary case where virtual computers are free, we get a proof-of-burn equivalent. That is, a consensus mechanism in which miners ‘burn’ money to obtain lottery tickets for the right to create the next block.

The authors ( “ Virtual ASICs: Generalized Proof-of-Stake Mining in Cryptocurrencies “) of provide the cryptographic machinery required to base a consensus protocol on Virtual ASICs, as well as to sell them in sealed-bid auctions on-chain. They ensure that as long as a majority of the miners in the system mine honestly, bids remain both private and binding, and that miners cannot censor the bids of their competitors. To achieve this, the authors introduce a novel all-or-nothing broadcast functionality in blockchains that is of independent interest.

I think this is an energy efficient and cryptographically secure method that might help us save the environment and at the same time not compromise on network security. What do you think about this?

With APY's on yield farming reaching insane levels and also crypto being seen as a good hedge against fiat now there is a feeling that crypto is replacing standard money. Though I don’t think cryptocurrencies will replace “standard money” immediately fully. The main reason is, there are too many formal big players like Banks, Payment processors and many other middle men, agencies out there who get their share from the current monetary system.

Perhaps as more adoption grows and more business Blockchains like Concordium start serving the masses by integrating public blockchain in enterprises, with regulatory compliance and on chain ID verification in place, it might become easier for businesses to adopt this technology and might become a strong parallel money system that can co-exist with the traditional money.

Global Debt is something that is to be a major worry for all countries and the fiat money losing its value over years and economies heading towards hype inflation of fiat money.

Banks, governments are looking at introducing stable coins. And digital money dominance will eventually increase with reducing paper money. People will be more comfortable to view digital numbers on their screens and
also have a sense of owning and controlling it, this is when cryptocurrencies will take the cake since it will not be owned by a single entity.

I think we are heading towards a world where the definition of "standard money" itself will change. Now coming to the question of how long will the part last? Well, the part can never stop if it is fully regulated and legal from a regulatory point of view. Hence, I think the way forward will be regulatory compliant crypto. But crypto can never be stopped.

What are your thoughts? What is your "standard money"?

Isn't Yearn VC ( Fair Value capital ) giving a run for the VC's? I see lots of Big names being involved.

$Sushi or $KIMCHI a good farmer always eats his hard day's work. What made you your biggest gains this year? What is the next fork you would love to see?

Since farming is the new mining, I thought I'd speak about it.

Hello there farmers, how are you farming today?

How many chads farmed the hell out of $SUSHI , $KIMCHI , $CHOP , $CREAM recently? Heard farmers are printing crypto like the Feds these days? How was your farming experience? What did you learn? Other than the fact that you were poor because of the gas fees.

Incentivized testnets are another rage that is tearing through crypto lately. Many interesting projects have come up with Incentivized testnets. Incentivized testnets have brought fortunes to many node operators.

Some good examples are to name a few are, Filecoin , Cardano, The Graph , Coda Protocol , Keep Network , Acala Network , Kusama Network , Concordium.

Some alpha leaks say that Concordium is a enterprise public blockchain with inbuilt regulatory compliance and identity verififcation that will help bring banks and business into blockchain. They are apparently having their incentivized testnet in October 2020. So dont miss this one, little birdy says, a huge percentage of total token supply is allocated to the testnet node operators.

So be it farming or incentivized testnets, hope you are stacking sats. Coz we are now in a bull market andit's raining crypto.
They say, a hard day's labour at the farm always pays.

I am no financial advisor but however I believe this answer will age well. A few of them who look at this and actually put a few dollars o these projects may become millionaires.

Please do your own research before investing and none of what I say is financial advice.

Here we go,

Some of the projects that I believe will be top projects in 2021 are :
1. BTC : King needs no introduction, digital gold 2.0.

2. Ethereum : Finally Eth 2.0 will be here, we are already seeing the DeFi craze sweep the planet. Vitalik save our gas fees.

3. Polkadot : Polkadot Ecosystem will be the next big runner , potentially causing the next bull run.

4. The Graph : Indexing protocol, most of the popular projects use this. Mark my words, this will be a top 20 project.

5. Concordium : Dark horse of Crypto regulation and a hedge against regulation. Concordium is a blockchain having Identity verification and Regulatory framework by design. With 2020 being the year travel rule gets implemented. This one will be huge, bringing enterprises and banks into crypto through a public blockchain.

6. Tezos : We all know how this gonna run.

7. Near : Near Protocol has been having lots of developments and this one will bring value to the table. 

8. Skale : Scaling Ethereum, enough said.

9. Ripple : Ripple will keep having those scam pumps, XRP army will shill again.

10. Chainlink : We all know this Kek coin with mad fundamentals with perpetual pumpamentals.

11. SpaceChain : This one has huge partnerships, European Space Agency, NASA , and has already put satellites in space. Tim Draper low key shills this shit.

What are your picks? Which is the dark horse in your bags?

I would be careful and skeptical. Too many new scams to part with your BTC

For me Hold has made more money than trading. If you want to invest and learn use the testnet, that's what they are there for. Not your precious crypto.

The blockchain and cryptocurrency industry is an industry that is constantly changing and evolving. So it’s hard to give you a binary answer inmy opinion. I honestly love both the projects.

However when I look at it from a larger perspective, I realize that the industry is rapidly changing and the top project maybe something we least expect. I see a lot of development happening in the Web3 ecosystem with respect to Polkadot. I see new projects like Concordium which are exploring new paradigms like Faas( Finality as a Service ) and are backed by years of Academic Research. DeFi is changing the way we know Finance.

If there is one thing we can learn from the industry, its that change is the only constant and BTC is King. It has always been.

Ofcourse Ethereum is very innovative, it is infact one of the most innovative projects out there, but BTC will continue to dominate unless Ethereum brings something so huge that it will lead mass adoption and will be seen a better store of value than BTC. Ethereum was never intended to be a store of value.