My Crypto Journey, of More Truth and Less Trust

~dwulf

My beginning into Crypto

I have been seriously involved with crypto for about 3 years so far.  Like many, I wish I got in sooner, bought deep in Bitcoin and Ethereum, so I would be set for life.  But like many, I came late to the party and have been finding myself scrambling to dive deep, learn the history to gauge its future, learn the code base to design it in a more palatable way, and to finally once and for all decouple myself from the tyranny of the old world financial system and the government that rules it.

In my journeys I have started from scratch, learned about the original Blockchain, Bitcoin, mostly guided from Andreas M. Antonopoulos, who explained and wrote about Bitcoin exclusively.  I devoured all his content, read all his books, watched all his videos, so I could get a good grasp on the subject.  This was important to me, as I had a terrible fear of asking just anybody about it because they might use my lack of knowledge to swindle me in some way, manipulating me to surrender my mnemonic words, passwords, or anything that would give access to what little BTC I was able to obtain and take it from my wallet.

I learned as much as I could, if I had questions, I would re-read or re-watch source material or ask an anonymous question on reddit or other forum.

I eventually got to the point where I built a Lightning Layer 2 solution on a Raspberry Pi, using MyNode software, taking careful notes and documenting my progress, both my failures and my ultimate successes.

I felt that was the cornerstone of my journey, but it would not end there.

Ethereum and the Kingdom of Vitaly Dmitriyevich "Vitalik" Buterin

I will admit, when I learned about Ethereum for the first time, I only really knew the name Vitalik Buterin, the nerdy Russian programmer who appealed to me first.  I would soon learn about Dr. Gavin Wood and Charles Hoskinson later, but would never really know why they had a falling out from Ethereum until much later.  When I did, I better understood the crypto dynamics.

Ethereum, picked up where Bitcoin left off, Ethereum was ipso facto, programmable money in the form of smart contracts, which was a horrible name, because they were neither smart or a contract, it was a programmable piece of software at the end of the day.  Solidity, was the environment, which ran the EVM, Ethereum Virtual Machine, and with that one could build programmable Blockchains.

Unlike Bitcoin, whose programmability was restricted to opt-codes and was not turing complete.  Ethereum was turing complete, and could perform full turing executions, which led to a problem of managing the executions of loops, specifically infinite loops which could tie up and convolute the Blockchain system.   This was solved, in a manner of speaking, by incorporating gas costs, which would tax the execution of processing using a fractional piece of Ethereum, called gwei .  This would prevent the unnecessary bloated execution from getting out of hand by increasing the cost of execution of the code.  The idea was to make it too expensive to create smart contracts that did too much and clogged the Blockchain which would affect the TPS, transmissions per second.

At the time Ethereum was proof of work, like bitcoin still is today, but this would not scale so an effort was made to make Ethereum proof of stake and incorporate a sharding mechanism that would allow better scaling.   Forking the code base was proposed, and implemented with ETC, Ethereum Classic, but this involved the mandates of people choosing to stop using the ETH Blockchain, and start using ETC Blockchain and to anybody that knows what happens when you depend on the user to either update their software or use something else, it would always be a point of contention.

So Ethereum v2.0 was proposed, which would retrofit Ethereum v1.0 “seamlessly and without the user having to do anything.

Cracks in the Rift, Dr. Gavin Wood and Charles Hoskinson go their own way

It wasn’t long after that a few of the original gangsters decided to break away from the Ethereum project.  I am honestly unclear on the details, I have googled and read forums but I have not found out any more details than they left to spearhead their own Blockchain solutions.

What little I did find out was mostly arguments over money, stewardship of the project, and doubt of the scaling solutions.

This is where the story gets vague but I will tell it in the best manner that I am able to.

Charles Hoskinson, ADA and Cardano

Charles broke away from what I can tell for mostly the same reasons that Dr. Gavin Wood did, to implement a better scaling solution.  Charles was a bit more business and regulator friendly, but not entirely trusting of regulators, which put him into different circles to get better adoption for crypto currencies.

As an academic and united states citizen, he was able to build a better rapport with business and regulators in the nation-states, including Africa as well as the U.S., which allowed his Cardano network to be more accepting on US exchanges and open to more US citizens.

While this allowed for more adoption, and the proof of stake mechanisms and planning was well thought out, it was like most things of a methodical and bureaucratic nature a long time coming and not well adopted by the anarchist developers that would implement sooner with Dr. Gavin’s camp or Vitalik’s original camp, so it was more difficult to find developers to build out smart contracts or to develop on the Cardano Blockchain at all.  To date, Cardano is slowly building out according to its roadmap and finding developers that are willing to learn the Haskel language to implement, but it is nothing like Dr. Gavin Wood’s Kusama and Polakdot, that is expecting chaos fast and furious.

The Good Dr. Wood, KSM expecting chaos, and DOT. 

Dr. Gavin Wood’s story is a bit different, and in my personal opinion the better engineering solution going forward.  He created Substrate, the development environment to build Kusama and Polkadot.  It was coded with Rust, a very fault tolerant language that virtually eliminated most of the conventional programming errors like memory leaks, segmentation faults, or dangling pointers and was compiled to WASM (Web Assembly) which provided forkless upgrades and software pallets that could be added or taken away as needed. 

Taking a 2 pronged approach, of a bottom up redesign to the problem of scaling.  Creating a real test network called Kusama, real in the sense that real value was put in the real world (not exclusively a test network with play money), Kusama, was a literal canary in the coal mine approach, where implementations would live or die and chaos was expected in short order and if they passed this litmus test would graduate to the more mature Polkadot Blockchain which would be the flagship to present to the corporations and regulators.

Kusama and Polkadot had wide appeal to most of the anarchist developers and because of the sound selection of programming methodologies attracted the top talent.  Bridges, relay chains, and para chains/threads were the core focus of the blockchain that would provide bridges to the other Blockchains.  The mechanisms of Validators and Nominators provided staking rewards to validate blocks on the Blockchain, incentivising users to lock their KSM and DOT to earn rewards and income.

At the time of this writing, crowd auctions for available parachain slots are underway for the Kusama Blockchain, the projects look very promising and I am hopeful that these projects will boost the price of both KSM and DOT, and the liquidity coin tokens of the respective projects.

Personally I am all in, mind body and soul.  95% of my personal wealth is tied up in crypto, leaving only 5% in fiat to negotiate what I cannot negotiate with just crypto.   I am actively developing with Substrate, performing security audits and DevOps for high caliber corporations specifically dealing with Substrate, Kusama, and Polkadot staking with millions of crypto capital and backing the Blockchains.

I personally feel this is a revolution that will give freedom to the world and an individual's wealth.  In this new world there is less trust and more truth and a true separation of the church of the government and the state of one’s personal wealth.

And to all the tyrannical governments, regulators, and tax authorities, may you burn in the hell you created to enslave the race of man.  For the first time in history, it is your turn to bend the knee to the people, because the Code is the Law.