The Control - Issue #44
2018 appears to be the year of the stablecoin; many centralized stablecoins have launched recently and many more are likely to be launched soon. The current centralized stablecoin landscape reminds us of the centralized exchange landscape in 2012; there's probably a few that are OK, but trust-minimized, transparent solutions are sorely needed.
The good news is we already have a trust-minimized, transparent alternative that is growing in adoption (Dai) and another coming to market soon (Basis).
Required reading this week
The Best Privacy Coins — www.keysheet.io
Peter Kwang walks through his recommendations for the best privacy coins and how to use them safely and anonymously.
If games drive crypto mass adoption, they will be grassroots — www.tonysheng.com
Tony Sheng argues that if cryptogoods do drive a new wave of crypto adoption, it'll be from games/experiences that are uniquely enabled because of crypto-native benefits rather than trying to wedge cryptogoods into existing models.
Why isn’t Bitcoin banned everywhere? — hackernoon.com
Bitcoin was supposed to be the enemy of governments; it was supposed to create a parallel, uncensorable economy. Haseeb Qureshi explains why most governments have ushered Bitcoin through the front door.
Synchrony and Timing Assumptions in Consensus Algorithms Used in Proof of Stake Blockchains — medium.com
Zubin Koticha explains the "synchrony" assumptions in consensus and outlines the timing assumptions that different PoS blockchains aim to employ.
1confirmation portfolio reading this week
Cool Things Built Atop Augur: A 5 Minute Guide — medium.com
Augur has been out in the wild for less than 100 days, but talented devs around the world have already started building cool things on top of it. Ben Davidow walks through the most interesting projects including our portfolio company Veil.
Terraforming Bitcoin Testnets — medium.com
bloXroute is in the final stages of building their Proof of Concept to show how they remove the blockchain scalability bottleneck. Senior DevOps Engineer Yan Pritzker wrote an excellent blog that walks through how to use Bitcoin networks for development and research.
Lessons Learned Squatting ENS Domains — medium.com
ENS domains are now tradeable as ERC-721s on OpenSea, due to some awesome work by Billy Rennekamp. Read about how ENS Nifty lets you wrap your ENS domain in ERC-721, plus how to avoid ENS squatters.
Crypto Startup dYdX Lets You 'Short' Ethereum, Raises $10 Million — fortune.com
Led by a16z crypto and Polychain, with participation from 1confirmation, Craft Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, VY Capital, Abstract Ventures, and Kindred Ventures.