Seeing the red in the markets today, I have reduced my own exposure to crypto. I’m still waiting on the side with gold, since I really want to time this one right.
Though it’s difficult to sell at the lows, it’s even harder to suffer a loss. Even though the chances aren’t huge, if the U.S. dollar keeps rising, and support levels start breaking, we could see the market decline 15% to 20% in the short term.
Only time will tell if this is a wise decision or not, but a key component of trading is playing the odds, which is arguably more important than guessing the future.
In any case, I did want to leave you with a few things to ponder and to read this weekend. Recent developments in the crypto world may be providing us with a glimpse into how the future of the decentralized web is about to play out.
So, this piece by my good friend Tim Copeland at Decrypt tells the dubious story of how Tron Founder Justin Sun performed a hostile takeover of the crypto-centric social network Steemit.
There was a literal custody war on the network between Sun and the community to try and control the protocol, and Copeland does a great job of putting it into layman’s terms for us. So make sure to check that the story at this link. This is important stuff.
This other story is hot off the press. It tells a completely separate, yet strikingly similar tale of the Polkadot network, and how some large exchanges acted in their own interest, instead of acting in the interests of both their clients and Polkadot.
Further, these major exchanges behaved in such a way when both their clients and the Polkadot community were vulnerable.
Specifically, Binance and Kraken caused widespread confusion by listing the project’s DOT token on Aug. 18, three days before the digital asset was scheduled to undergo a redenomination, an event that is similar to a stock split.
When these two exchanges listed the digital asset, each DOT token was scheduled to be split into 100 DOT tokens.
As a result of this development, units of this digital currency were available for a significantly reduced price, and in short order, they experienced some rather aggressive gains.
Journalist Rachel Wolfson provided some excellent coverage of this story.
