The most recent version of the US Dollar is a 50 year old experiment, few understand this. There is no guarantee our current fiat currency will survive another 50 years. The US Dollar, from one form to another, has more than 240 years of history since the Continental Congress authorized the issue of Continental Currency in 1775. Since the days of America’s Founding Fathers, the underlying mechanics and physical form of the dollar has changed several times. The most recent being in 1971 when Richard Nixon unilaterally ordered the cancellation of direct convertibility from USD to gold. This act was known as the Nixon Shock. As of late, The United States of America, like most nations, use a fiat standard in which our currency is no longer backed by any physical asset but rather a promise from our Federal Government. Some believe the near-zero marginal cost of production of the current fiat dollar detracts from its attractiveness as a medium of exchange and store of value because a fiat currency without a marginal cost of production is easier to debase via overproduction and the subsequent inflation of the money supply. According to FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) The United State’s current Monetary Base is north of $5.1 TRILLION up by almost $2,000,000,000,000 from this day last year.

Enter Bitcoin and the future of programmable monies like Ether and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC’s). Bitcoin is famous to the general population for its price volatility. For those who have read the Bitcoin White Paper, know there is much more to Bitcoin’s technology than what a Bitcoin is worth in USD. The Bitcoin Blockchain solved the double spend issue which plagued the Internet since its inception. Remember back in the early 2000’s when you could download any song for free from limewire? This was because like anything else on the internet, music could be infinitely copied and distributed. Bitcoin solved this with blockchain technology, a Proof of Work consensus mechanism, cryptography/hashing algorithms (SHA-256), and crypto-economic incentives. As far as monetary policy goes, Bitcoin has a mathematically derived total supply cap. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. No one has the capability to change this due to the strength of the network.

Ethereum on the other hand is different than Bitcoin. Ethereum can be thought more of as a decentralized computing network whereas Bitcoin is more of a decentralized payment network. Although Ether, Ethereum’s blockchain native currency, is used as “gas” to pay transaction fees. Some like to compare Ether to digital oil rather than digital gold. Bitcoin has more limited yet very important capabilities, the ability to send value from one person to another with no middle-man. As long as you pay the transaction fee (in Bitcoin), your transaction will be included in the blockchain. Ethereum allows more capabilities such as crowdfunding through ICO tokens, banking capabilities through DeFi protocols like MakerDAO, true in-game ownership of digital assets (Minecraft plug-in), non-censorable social media platforms (Peepeth), and so much more. Ethereum doesn’t have a hard supply cap like Bitcoin but rather a “Minimum Necessary Issuance” policy where the protocol only inflates total supply at the lowest rate to keep the upmost security for the network.

• Andreas Antonopoulos on why a nation-state trying to disrupt the Bitcoin blockchain would waste billions of dollars and ultimately not work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM

Market Update

Percent Change Based on Last Monday Open

Bitcoin- $9,740 (+3%)

Ether- $244 (+3%)

Gold- $1,684 (-3%)

DJI Average- 27,110.98 (+6.81%)

NASDAQ Composite Index - 9,814.08 (+3.42%)

S&P500 Index- 3,193.93 (+4.91%)

NYSE Composite Index- 12,641.44 (+7.1%)

New Developments

1. Ameribor (Private Ethereum) For Reference Rate, Federal Reserve Chairman

2. “Ready to Stake” Ethereum wallets

3. State of ETH2, Ethereum Foundation

4. Wasabi Wallet Gets a Closer Look, Europol

5. Bitcoin Futures Volume, Larry Cermak

6. Disrupting the Payment System, Proton Chain

7. 17% of Financial Advisors Own Crypto, Bitwise Research

Industry Insight’s

• The Week On-Chain (Week 22, 2020), Glassnode Research

• Unknown Bitcoin Miner Recent Outflows, Ki Young Ju

• Need For Cryptocurrency 2008 to 2020, Vitalik Buterin

• Brave Browser passes 15 million Monthly Active Users, Brave AMA

Python Activity

WordClouds is a fun way to highlight important subject matter within text documents.

# Import libraries

from nltk.corpus import stopwords, reuters

from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer

from wordcloud import WordCloud

import re

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import nltk

# Pull in data set

ids = reuters.fileids(categories='gold')

corpus = [reuters.raw(i) for i in ids]

# Define function to clean text document (daisy chain)

# Remove stopwords, remove punctuation, lemmatize words into root, lower-case words

def process_text(doc):

    sw = set(stopwords.words('english'))

    sw = sw.union(["wa","ha","said","one","per","foot","us"])

    regex = re.compile("[^a-zA-Z ]")

    re_clean = regex.sub('', doc)

    words = word_tokenize(re_clean)

    lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()

    lem = [lemmatizer.lemmatize(word) for word in words]

    output = [word.lower() for word in lem if word.lower() not in sw]

    return ' '.join(output)

# Process text for wordcloud

big_string = ' '.join(corpus)

input_text = process_text(big_string)

# Create wordcloud visual

wc = WordCloud(width=1200, height=800, max_words=10).generate(input_text)

plt.imshow(wc)

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Quick Earn Opportunity

Once you own cryptocurrency it’s relatively easy to earn more by lending it out. There are various lending and borrowing platforms for top cryptocurrencies today. Many of them have several tiers enabling higher earnings depending on various factors. For example Celsius allows users to earn in their native ERC-20 token CEL which increases the dollar amount you receive on assets within the platform. Other platforms like Blockfi allow users to earn interest in several different cryptocurrencies no matter the asset used to lend out. However, both of these platforms gain control of the assets once deposited, their are “decentralized” solutions like Compound which allow users to keep control of their crypto and earn interest. The difference is who owns the private keys to the wallet holding the cryptocurrency. The best rates are typically for lending stablecoins (pegged to USD) like USDC, DAI, and USDT. Blockfi currently pays out 8.6% APY on USDC.