Back in August of 2021, I purchased 1 ETH worth of Hanzo Inu token based on a new strategy I was testing on picking moonshot tokens in their early days. Hanzo Inu was a fairly new token that had started back in May, it had the four qualities I thought made for a promising altcoin project (read more about that here).

Eth was around $3000 USD at the time, so my investment has added nearly 10,000 USD to the ledger. That value has been holding–I waited two weeks before writing this article just to make sure that it wasn’t just a pump. This is no pump and dump–I’m convinced of that after spending the last couple of hours listening to the founder and the community team on their recent AMAs (Ask Me Anythings – see below).

What it has revealed to me was that the money I invested in the project was not wasted. In fact, I found that the community leaders are thoughtful, genuine and I’m excited about what I have to share today.

There is so much, let me start with a quick (tl;dr) overview.

• NFT Sale – Estimated for Mid-November. 8,888 to be released. Current holders to be whitelisted. ~200.00USD mint fee, and more.
• Marketing Plan and CEX Listings – Currently in negotiations. Send suggestions via Telegram or Twitter @HANZOINU
• MMORPG – Narrative in development, promising innovations with in-game tokens and NFTs.
• Game Contract Update – Contract needs development to expand, updates happening after NFT sale.
• Layer 2 Solutions + Bridging – Lots of potential, Bridging to BSC coming with fair matching on ETH.
• Partnerships – Possible, Hanzo team wants to maintain project and community integrity and foster growth long term. Will partner with true synergistic alliance rather than to make a quick buck.

During the AMA we got an amazing briefing given from Jebron and Sandy who are community leaders, early investors, and ultra-passionate about the project. We also heard from the founder, Charles during the event, who spoke about partnerships and the future of Hanzo. Overall, my sense was that the team is committed, driven, and has a great long-term perspective and vision for the project.

Marketing and CEX listings

Unless you’re BTC or ETH, getting listed on exchanges can be pricey. Currently, the team is negotiating or considering moving with a listing on Gate.io, FTX, and HotBit. All of this is tentative and dependent on a number of factors. Part of the funds the team plans on raising from the NFT sale is planned to be invested in listing on CEXes. There are still developments happening in the NFT space and a number of exchanges are adding NFT art to their service offerings. The plan is to find the right fit for the $HNZO token and the Hanzo NFT Art. What the leaders did promise was at least 1-2 CEX listings are forthcoming in the near future. More updates will follow.

NFT Art Sale

Jebron announced that the NFT sale would happen in Mid-November timeframe in two stages. The first stage will be a minting opportunity for early investors as they have plans to whitelist the folks who have truly HODLed and have been promoting the coin from the start. Being a part of the very early SHIB Army myself, I was a little disappointed I couldn’t mint my Shiboshi; so I’m pleased to see the team is planning a little reward for the folks who’ve been holding through the tough times we had during the summer. Ouch.

That said, there will be 8,888 NFTs released in a “Founder’s Collection.” 3,888 will be whitelisted for early adopters, and the other 5,000 will be released in a public sale. Hanzo NFTs will have 125 unique traits and expand on what an NFT can be in some interesting ways.

Additionally, there are some benefits for early minters such as:

• Participation in a beta-test round of the game
• Get access to special limited drops for minters
• In-game crypto may be involved

Sandy said that the Hanzo Inu NFTs will bring a new dimension to the NFT world. She was inspired by the artist’s work and thought the Hanzo NFTs would, “breathe a whole life into the [upcoming] game.” She stated that these NFTs are “crazy detailed”, and are a new full-body style. What’s even more incredible is that each full-body NFT of Hanzo will be made up of individual sub-NFTs like weapons, clothes, and accessories that can be used and traded in the game that will be released in 2022.

Hanzo NFTs will cost about $200.00 USD each during the initial sale, and the Founder’s Collection proceeds will go to furthering the project by hiring more staff to grow the project and to fund the upcoming game.

MMORPG – Game in development, Alpha version possible this year.

Both community leaders had updates for the game that is scheduled to be released sometime next year. Hearing Sandy describe the narrative and the vision for the game got me excited. Features that were described highlighted a new approach to the popular “Nintendo Party Games” where participants played together interactively in the game environment. Sandy and Jebron wanted to make it very clear that the new game will have complex gameplay and isn’t just a copy of previously done NFT or crypto-based games. The game will focus on social engagement, NFT art, creativity, and has a lot of dimensions using the Hanzo token for utility in the game.

What really stood out to me was the interesting and highly creative narrative. Sandy described it like, “a month-long festival that is going great until something happens and Hanzo is called to begin the journey.” The game changes from an MMO to an MMORPG and is similar to past dungeon crawler games (like Diablo) but with a crypto-twist. The loot collected in the game will be actual NFT art pieces that will be tradeable both on and out of the game environment.

If you’re not into gaming and just in it for the investment and/or NFT art collection, it doesn’t sound like you’re going to be disappointed since the value that Hanzo Inu is bringing to the marketplace soon will be interesting to watch.

Contract Update

I probably should have brought this up sooner, but honestly, it’s not as interesting as the other developments in this project so I’ll get to it now.

Charles and Sandy both stressed that the contract update is a necessary thing that will allow for proper growth and expanded functionality. Jebron noted that they needed a way to access marketing funds that won’t be pulling money out of the Hanzo Inu crypto-sphere. The contract will change reflections to ETH and be more easily used to purchase real-world marketing and other hard services that require fiat currency.

The contract update is going to be expensive but is being done to provide a solid foundation for the project moving forward. Updating to V2 is a priority and plans are to move forward on it after the NFT sale. I personally would expect it to happen early next year since we’ll be right up against the holidays.

Partnerships

Jebron and Charles both stated that they are looking ahead and planning on finding partners that make sense to partner Hanzo up with. While lots of things are possible, what stood out to me was that these leaders have personal integrity and want to add lasting value to the Cryptosphere, rather than doing a cash grab. They are currently in talks with some of the other projects out there and any partnership will be done with a holistic approach and will be focused on strengthening and supporting the community.

Conclusion: The Hanzo Inu Token Project is Solid

I don’t like to brag, but I told you so. This project is solid with a thoughtful and interesting team behind it. Getting in early is important on anything these days, but you have to do your homework and have some basic ways of converting the tsunami of data that is coming at us is crazy.

Projects like Hanzo are great examples of basic community building and creating a movement. The other value that it shows is hard work. With hard work, anything is possible. The timing of Hanzo is great because NFTs and Crypto both couldn’t be hotter. I think Hanzo is a winner with a huge value add through innovations and forward thinking.

Hanzo Links:

• Coin Market Cap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/hanzo-inu/
• Hanzo Inu Contract Address: 0x239dc02a28a0774738463e06245544a72745d5c5
• Website: https://www.hanzoinu.ninja/
• NFT Game: https://www.hanzoinu.ninja/mmo
• Telegram: https://t.me/hanzoinu
• Twitter: @HanzoInu

10 OCT 2021 – AMA with Jebron, Sandy, and Charles

July 10, 2021

How to buy Hanzo Inu Token

This week on-chain was a tough one to watch with the price of BTC dropping to the expected lower 40s suggested by last week’s prediction published by The On-Chain BTC Forecast: Week 37.  This week looked strong out of the gate with prices surging momentarily on Saturday night, only to be left like Cinderella at the ball as the price turned to pumpkins and shriveled by 10,000 USD in the early Sunday morning hours. 

Week #38 Major Takeaways

1. How can we link stock market action to price movement in BTC? It’s difficult to find data and direct links between stocks and BTC therefore it’s difficult to objectively link price action with random events in the world at large.
2. Where are we at in terms of larger cycles? Looking at metrics like the Puell Multiple, it’s fairly easy to see larger patterns in behavior as miners seek to find the best times to sell BTC. It looks as if we are at the bottom or nearing the bottom of a low Puell cycle.
3. Are we ready for a bull run as illiquid assets grow? Clearly, illiquid and liquid BTC are heading in opposite directions with illiquid assets on the rise and liquid assets decreasing daily. Common sense tells us as an asset becomes more scarce, it’s value increases–if demand increases. 

Social media reacted strongly and if nothing else there seems to be a direct positive relationship between the dropping price of BTC and the number of data charts and emojis that get squeezed into a tweet by every laser-eyed BTC bull monger. One must exercise caution when absorbing data that is explained with a 144 character short story rather than with the novel that BTC deserves.

Most on-chain experts quickly blamed the Evergrande situation for multiple failures, first in their failed forecasts and for the large dip in price; citing weak equities market action and an overall down week for most notable markets on-chain and off. 

Sentiment overall was pensive and sullen, with some sources indicating, as usual, that a bullish move is indeed ahead for the burgeoning cryptocurrency, there does seem to be convincing trends to indeed signal a strong recovery in coming weeks even while it may take some time to develop.

How can we link stock market action to price movement in BTC?

It’s difficult to make direct on-chain links, Looking at the stock prices of Grayscale and The Bitcoin Fund (ETF) we can see a closely linked relationship between the price of BTC and the respective equities, but understanding price movement this week in relation to Evergrande will be a hard connection to make.

Options volumes are up this week and looking at the relationship between price and volume, it’s not perfectly clear as volume seems to have an inverse relationship to price during some periods and a direct relationship at other times. Although different than the equities market, it could provide some insight into investor sentiment.

Where are we at in terms of larger cycles? 

We find more clarity here. Using the Puell Multiple we can see how profitable a miner is compared to the rest of the year. We know that miners sell overtime to pay for fiat expenses and of course they’d rather sell fewer coins than more coins when paying the bills. Taking a macro view over the past five years, we can mark times when it’s been extremely profitable for miners to sell. The higher the Puell Multiple, the more miners are enticed to sell off into the market strength to take profits. Conversely, when Puell is low, miners begin to accumulate which lowers liquidity and signals an opportunity for others to buy coins as the price stabilizes prior to reaching new highs. It’s fairly obvious by looking at this metric that we are Puell is relatively low but not bottomed in this cycle. The question is whether it will continue on its upward trend or linger towards the downside as the price stagnates offering an opportunity to buy more BTC before it climbs.

This year’s data seems convincing and zooming out to three years of Puell/Price data the trend looks clear, the potential for price growth is clearly apparent.

Going even further out to 10 years of data, we can see the longer-term relationship between price and Puell. The price of Bitcoin tends to be lower when Puell is lower. This corresponds to lower profitability for the miners and signals a potential price recession and a time for the opportunity to increase BTC positions prior to expansive growth. Price action that was observed as recently as this spring supports this assertion and is also illustrated in mid-2019 and early 2018. Going back further reveals similar behaviors as miners accumulate during periods of lower profitability followed by strong sell-offs into the rising price.

Are we ready for a bull run as illiquid assets grow? 

The total amount of Bitcoin in circulation is currently under 20 million BTC. Bitcoin can be classified into three main categories when it comes to liquidity: illiquid, liquid, and highly liquid. The first, illiquid, describes BTC assets that are being HODLed long-term in cold wallets or lost forever due to access problems. These assets are essentially completely unavailable to the market with little chance of being “spent” in the near term. Liquid describes bitcoin that is being held by entities like exchanges, which represents the smallest amount of the total circulating supply. Highly liquid BTC is the Bitcoin that is being constantly traded and transacted on a daily basis. 

We can clearly see a trend of illiquid supply growing over time which indicates a strong and growing HODL behavior in the market. Based on these figures, nearly 77% of the total supply of BTC (18.8m) is considered illiquid.

Current levels with the price at ~42k on 9/23/2021:

• Total Supply: 18.8m
• Illiquid: 14.4m
• Liquid: 1.3m
• Highly Liquid: 3.1m

Even more interesting are the linear long-term plots of this data which shows clear trends in regards to the illiquid vs liquid relationship. The general observation is crystal clear: liquid supply is diminishing while illiquid supply is growing. 

Smoothing out the data clarifies this trend, and the assumption can be made that as the accessible supply of BTC (liquid supply) decreases and becomes illiquid, the price of Bitcoin should react by rising in the face of greater demand and usage. Especially since the trend appears to support the idea that HODLing, if tied to illiquid supply,  will increase, reducing the accessible amount and driving price up due to increased demand.

Conclusion: BTC Price in a slight downward trend with a potential upside in coming weeks.

It seems obvious that those who control the supply of Bitcoin, control the price. In this case, the miners seem to be firmly in the driver’s seat. When looking at the Puell Multiple and factoring in recent profit-taking, the potential for price growth is possible. Whether or not it is eminent is unclear since in the past even when Puell was low, the price of BTC stabilized or dropped further as profitability dropped.

Next week

The forecast for BTC in week #39 is that prices will stabilize and hover in the low to mid-40s with possible modest gains or losses in price over the week prior to any considerable price action. 

Later this year

Looking further into the later weeks of 2021, the expectation that prices will begin to climb with the potential to reach beyond ATHs of early 2021 into the high 50s and low 60s looks promising.

Featured Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

On-chain this week #37 of 2021 has been exciting and the price of BTC has swelled to recent local highs. While many in the crypto markets are looking for the strong winds to blow off tops as we leave the dog days of summer, BTC remained rather sleepy with little weekly price change.

The question remains if Bitcoin will follow other traditional markets this autumn and begin to expand through Q4 into the late spring of 2022. This week’s sentiment seems bullish, but sentiment taken from social media can be deceiving; by asking the right questions we can uncover the true nature of the factors that are driving the price of Bitcoin.

• What are the miners doing? This week we can see a significant sell-off of BTC reserves held by mining wallets. Supply has increased as they empty coffers.
• Are the HODLers HODLing? As if in lockstep with the miners, we saw a decrease in HODLing.
• Does increased wallet activity mean increased BTC adoption? With price spikes, we see more action. As nations beginning to use BTC as their primary currency; it’s easy to infer that we’ll see more of this.

What are the miners doing?

Historically, BTC miners make the early move as they control the levers of their supplies to the bitcoin market. This recent price surge last week was no different. As the price of BTC grows, miners–who are compulsory sellers, usually sell when they have a large supply of BTC from mining rewards, and historically, they sell into strength. In this chart, we can see a sell-off that started towards the end of last week.

Notice how the actual data differs from the “smoothed” 7-day moving average. We can see a consistent change in the amount of BTC that miners held through the last week, rather than a growing trend as the 7d-MA might lead us to believe. 

Are the HODLers HODLing? 

As we look into the wallet balances of BTC holders who have decided to never give up the dream of the million-dollar Bitcoin, we can see that the population of HODLers may not be holding as much BTC as they claim. HODLers seem to be paper-handing their way all the way to the bank, and selling into strength just like the miners do. Look at last Saturday and you’ll see a sharp decline in HODLers HODLing.

Does increased wallet activity mean increased BTC adoption?

As the price of Bitcoin increases, we see that the number of addresses that go active increases. Since each individual person can control multiple addresses, it’s difficult to directly link activity with price movement, but, by looking at the chart above we can see that users typically take weekends off. The “Number of Active Addresses” metric seems to validate this assumption with decreased activity over the weekends in the past month, with a strong rebound towards the end of the week. 

One might suggest that the sharp increase of activity could be explained by countries like El Salvador creating wallets for its citizens and allowing for BTC to be exchanged as legal tender. Our intuition might tell us that more activity, regardless of the source of that activity, is a good overall signal. However, we should be use caution when making such connections without taking into account the changes that are happening in how we use BTC on a daily basis.

Conclusion: BTC Price will sink to the lower 40s.

Looking forward to the end of week #37 and into week #38, we should see prices relatively flat through the weekend with the potential for some small gains as miners head back to the mines in search of more coins. 

Comparing the 7-Day Moving average to the 14-Day Moving average, we reveal that even though on a small scale–it appears that price is moving upwards when we look at the 14-day trends, it’s clear that price hit a high-point with an obvious expansion. This indicates that we should expect to see a downturn in price with a drop off to the lower 40s as we seemed to have reached a new local high in this cycle. 

Featured Photo by Harrison Kugler on Unsplash

There are few technologies that leave me searching for words to begin. Most have fancy marketing, cool logos, and things that draw you in and try to distract you with features that are as shallow as the technologies they are based on–we can safely turn our heads and ignore most of what’s going on out there. This time, in our quest for understanding the cryptographic, it’s time to explore another puzzle: Solana.

Solana is an open source project implementing a new, high-performance, permissionless blockchain. The Solana Foundation is based in Geneva, Switzerland and maintains the open source project.

https://docs.solana.com/introduction

This time, our task is extremely and wonderfully dense. Understanding the value in Solana is hard because understanding how it works is hard, and, in search of a whitepaper for the project I found 8 whitepapers that are necessary to understand this technology. As I go through them, it’s like reading mini-doctoral dissertations on different areas within cryptography–I challenge you to read through these and understand them. In this article though, I promise to paint a high-level picture if I’m already losing you.

Today, I want to introduce a few things that I’ve learned about Solana, and why later today I’ll be building a Solana validator. I can almost guarantee that I’ll be writing much more on this project. There’s just too much to cover in one article.

There are 8 key innovations that make the Solana network possible:

• Proof of History (POH) — a clock before consensus;
• Tower BFT — a PoH-optimized version of PBFT;
• Turbine — a block propagation protocol;
• Gulf Stream — Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol;
• Sealevel — Parallel smart contracts run-time;
• Pipelining — a Transaction Processing Unit for validation optimization
• Cloudbreak — Horizontally-Scaled Accounts Database; and
• Replicators — Distributed ledger store

The major takeaways

The first thing I noticed when I started reading about Solana is that it’s being lead by a Swiss Foundation. This is interesting especially since it brings me to our first point. Time. If I had to describe the whole project, that’s where I’d start. Solana’s big-picture innovation is similar to the Swiss movement of the world’s best watches; what I mean is that the Swiss know how to keep track of time. It makes sense that they would be so deeply involved here–distributed computer systems need precise and near-perfect timing to operate in our world today. From what I can see, they’ve done it again. This time leveraging a different sort of proof–Proof of History.

Solana is a high-throughput, high performance blockchain.

Before we move forward though, I want to hit the pause button here and take an aside. We need to really understand why time is so important when it comes to computers and furthermore, why time is especially important when it comes to decentralized blockchains. We have to understand the problem that Solana is solving.

To begin, remember that every database, every ledger, every log needs a timing system of some kind to maintain order. Time is something we humans came up with, a measurement for when events happened or will happen. In a ledger, time is non-negotiable when it comes to verifying when something happened–it needs absolute order. The ledger needs to be able to record if something happened and exactly when it happened.

We need a point in time. Without timing, there is no blockchain.

Maybe two things happened exactly at the same time? In database speak we use the term Atomicity, to describe when a database operation occurs; which is interesting because we also use essentially flawed tools like atomic clocks as a “trusted third parties” to tell us when things happened. However, with time dilation (time in regards to clock timing, moves faster as we change altitude), the effects of Relativity, and even slight network delays can render timestamps inaccurate in a globally dispersed network of computers all trying to work together. Timestamps are not reliable and are essentially useless for deciding order at the scale of say the Bitcoin blockchain.

I find it fascinating that we cannot even measure time to a known level of precision, read about Planck time below–the smallest interval of time that physicists and philosophers are working with today. Furthermore, study of quantum gravity by people like Carlo Rovelli, expose even more problems that we have in how we experience time. Aristotle thought about time as simply a way we count changes, and Newton believed that time moves forward regardless of change, and Einstien, with his theory of Special Relativity, said that time is relative to your frame of reference.

Instead of asking what time it is, we need at ask what is time?

Planck time

The Planck time t_P is the time required for light to travel a distance of 1 Planck length in a vacuum, which is a time interval of approximately 5.39×10⁻⁴⁴ s.^[24] All scientific experiments and human experiences occur over time scales that are many orders of magnitude longer than the Planck time,^[25] making any events happening at the Planck scale undetectable with current scientific technology. As of October 2020, the smallest time interval uncertainty in direct measurements was on the order of 247 zeptoseconds (2.47×10⁻¹⁹ s).^[26] While there is currently no known way to measure time intervals on the scale of the Planck time, researchers in 2020 proposed a theoretical apparatus and experiment that, if ever realized, could be capable of being influenced by effects of time as short as 10⁻³³ seconds, thus establishing an upper detectable limit for the quantization of a time that is roughly 20 billion times longer than the Planck time.^[27][28]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units#Planck_time

To bring it back to what we need to understand, we need to be able to agree what time is, we need a specific time. Multiple computer systems run by people who don’t exactly trust each other is the issue with decentralization, but by solving the problem of timing, we bring about order. It must be noted that the fact that it’s impossible to reliably link a moment in time to a specific event in distributed computer system was the problem that made a decentralized blockchain impossible, until Satoshi Nakamoto invented the solution (read this email from Satoshi), Proof-of-Work.

Bitcoin has exposed us to many new ideas and has shaken the world with its innovation, but here’s another–the Bitcoin blockchain is possible because a side-effect of how blocks are written make it a large decentralized clock! Bitcoin has a function built into it called nLockTime that helps make agreeing on a time possible. The blocks in the blockchain operate like a global clock–with an average of 10min per tick. I would argue that this is one of the greatest “discoveries” of our modern age, brought to us through the use of cryptography and blockchains.

Solana has many ways to get involved.

When I first showed up at the Solana website, my head started to spin immediately, in a good way. The reason is that there are many ways to get involved with Solana.

Obviously, you can invest with Solana like other cryptocurrencies, you can also stake Solana through a validator, you can build your own validator (as I mentioned previously) as I am doing, or, you can develop applications with it. You can develop on-chain applications in Rust and in C.

I want to make a note here and mention that from a developers perspective, the Rust programming language is widely used and loved by developers–according the the 2021 StackOverflow Developer’s Survey, it’s the most loved language in the world. I believe that due to this fact, adoption of Solana will accelerate–especially since Solidity, the language that Ethereum Smart Contracts use–isn’t even on the list.

The other thing I love about Solana’s infrastructure is the simplicity of how they word things. CryptoCourt and I have had many discussions about the use of strange jargon to describe things in the crypto world–and even how using the term Smart Contract can be confusing to people. Instead of trying to confuse people and come up with new terms for things, Solana simply calls its on-chain smart contracts–programs. I like that.

Additionally, there is lots of starter code for people to learn how to write on-chain programs, along with a large community of developers that are providing starting points and tutorials that make developing programs relatively easy. I was able to set up an escrow program in just a few hours.

Conclusion: it’s just the beginning for Solana

There’s a lot to unpack with the Solana universe–and it really has just begun. Overall, it’s an exceptional project with fantastic marketing, a huge community, well-thought out implementation, and it leverages the best things that blockchain has to offer. I’m going to continue to explore and report on the developments that I learn through my experiences.

I’ve already started my validator–I’ll update you when you can stake SOLs (the native token of Solana) on my own system! Solana takes the best things from Bitcoin (the timing concepts) and is looking a lot like a better Ethereum. My prediction is that when Solana hits the mainstream–it will overtake Ethereum in regards to price.

Featured Photo by Mickey O’neil on Unsplash

By CryptoCourt – Guest Contributor — I’m an attorney, crypto investor, and crypto miner.   One thing I’m not:  a software engineer.  Following crypto conversations on social media is very much like watching people speak a language I barely speak, and one that I know I will never speak fluently.  No doubt tech gurus have felt similarly listening to attorneys discuss contract law.

But as an attorney interested in helping the crypto world interact with “the state” (whether through federal, state, local or international law), I do my best to understand the technology.  

When researching Smart Contracts, it is common to come across visions of use-cases that, to me, seem greatly distanced from our present.  Yes, I can envision a future where crypto is easily transferred for the clean and clear title of PHYSICAL real estate, but (unless someone can show me otherwise) we are many, many steps away from that happening, involving the complex interaction of technology, law, and politics.   There is a big difference between buying virtual property in Decentraland, and buying physical property in Omaha, Nebraska.  In Omaha, you may move into your dream home and discover an underground oil tank that costs you 50k to clean up. Not in Decentraland.  The difference is real-world risk.  Making deals is about allocating risk.  

So why do outlets like CoinDesk regularly publish articles suggesting that Smart Contracts are on the verge of  changing the way we do deals? 

From “16 Ethereum Predictions From a Crypto Oracle”: 

Contracts are the connective tissue of the world – sales contracts, college acceptances, employment offers, insurance policies, medical prescriptions, NDAs, ISDA agreements, etc. Yes, Earth runs on contracts (not on Dunkin’). Ethereum allows contracts to go truly digital. The digitization of the contract is the digitization of the global economy, which has been valued at an estimated $270 trillion (compared to the $18 trillion market cap of gold that bitcoin stands to capture). Ethereum has the opportunity to upgrade entire economies, not just one asset class. 

That is pretty big talk, and the tone is that these changes are happening imminently.   Are they?  I see the vision, but I just see a big … gap …

From “Top 12 Smart Contract Use Cases”  

Smart contracts can be used in a real-estate deal. Both the parties (buyer and seller) can create a smart contract that can automate the deal once the buyer pays the property value to the seller. To make all of these happen, the property first needs to be digitized on blockchain technology. Once done, both parties can carry their deal using smart contracts.

The catch:  the property needs to be digitized.  When you realistically think what needs to happen – in terms of legal and regulatory hurdles, not to mention technological hurdles – for a physical property to be “digitized” in a way that it can be easily transferred through a Smart Contract on the Ethereum, that seems far off.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Eth.  I look at a list like “100+ Ethereum Apps You Can Use Right Now” here, and I see plenty of existing or imminent use-cases for Eth in the space of DeFi and NFTs.  But for those who are promising more out of Ethereum Smart Contracts, I would love to hear more about how we are realistically going to get there.

Featured Photo by Sebastian Pichler on Unsplash

A few years ago, I remember trying to explain what blockchain is to a friend. We went over it again and again, and finally, he got it. Back then my understanding was good, but still a little under-educated, it took me a lot of time and reading to solidify what it can and can’t do in my mind.

Today I can confidently explain that blockchain is just a next-generation of database that uses cryptography to write and store data in a way that is immutable. Bitcoin is just a software package that interacts with a blockchain. That software can do essentially do two things: 1. You can write data and 2. you can read data on the Bitcoin blockchain. And, yes–Bitcoin is a smart contract. It’s a software package in a class of packages that interact with a blockchain. Someone started calling that class, smart, and then others started to think smart in that context meant wise and intelligent. That’s where we went wrong.

Software is only as good as the programmers that wrote the code. Bad software is bad, calling programs that interact with blockchains “smart” is just marketing.

There are lots of things that I’ve come across working with computers that seem much more complicated than they actually are, and I’ve struggled to understand why we as a people do this. The initial thought that I have is there are people–marketing and salespeople, technophiles, politicians, pundits, who are all looking for ways to create polarity in the discussion of technology. That “interference” can obscure the actual technology behind the concepts that are being dramatized and sold to the mainstream.

Remember when people started calling computer servers, “the cloud?” The cloud became a term that people would use whenever they wanted to say that we were storing something on a remote server on the internet someplace. Before the cloud, we called them networks or clusters of servers. People in technology started to use the word, cloud, as simple jargon, an easy way to refer to the vast network of computers that everyone was building–and we are still building them–computer servers, and lots of them.

Terminology, such as, “the cloud,” is just a marketing term. If you understand computer networks, hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), internet protocol (IP), domain name systems (DNS), then guess what, you got it! Because that’s all the cloud is–a collection of servers that are connected with HTTP, IP, and DNS. As simple as all these things are to me today, I suspect that there are a large number of people who use each of these tools for most of their workday who still have no idea what goes into “the cloud.”

Using that discussion as our appetizer, let’s move onto the main course of our discussion, the “smart contract.” If you jump on social media and try to find an objective definition for a smart contract there, you might be hard-pressed to find it. In fact, I don’t believe that’s where you should look in the first place–mainly it’s because there are hundreds, thousands, or millions of people out there who don’t really understand the basic fundamentals of a software program. Those folks are trying to make something that is just a few lines of code into a social movement or an all-powerful AI system that will take over the world. I’m seeing that there is a big misunderstanding being created with the term smart contract. People don’t get it, just like the cloud.

Google: “what is a contract” and see what you get.

con·tract

1. noun: a written or spoken agreement, especially one concerning employment, sales, or tenancy, that is intended to be enforceable by law.”both parties must sign employment contracts”

1. verb: enter into a formal and legally binding agreement.”the local authority will contract with a wide range of agencies to provide services”

These definitions are just two of the many that the word, contract, means. There are lots of meanings for the word in other contexts. In medicine, your muscles contract. In linguistics, it can mean to shorten a word or phrase by combination or elision: “quasistellar object” was contracted to “quasar.” Like many other words, the word contract needs context to be understood.

I think that this is the main reason why we are getting it wrong with the term, “smart contract.” Well, at least some people believe we are getting it wrong. Smart doesn’t mean intelligent to programmers, it means capable. It means digital capability. Smart Phones, Smart Cars, Smart Refrigerators, Smart Bulbs–all smart means is that something, a device, is digitally connected and capable. It doesn’t mean sentient, it doesn’t mean intelligent, it means connected and digital. That’s it.

Contract in the smart contract context is a programmed agreement to give and take. It’s not a legally enforceable agreement protected by law. It’s an agreement between machines. If you give me this input, I’ll give you this output. Our browser takes a website name, or URL–connects your computer to another computer that is associated with that URL, and returns the content from that server. You enter a URL, you get content. That’s the agreement there, that’s the contract. The only reason that people call it smart is that it’s simple and purpose-driven–it’s cause and effect–it’s not smart at all. It’s just smart to use such simple systems when you’re trying to get something done. After all, we really don’t want a truly smart and/or intelligent browser, do we? What would happen if you put a URL in your browser and your browser was really smart and instead sent you a message that said, “Hey Dan, it’s not time for you to watch Netflix now, you should be working.” Mass hysteria would follow. Cats and dogs would start living together and people would run amuck in the streets!

Let’s all just take a minute and a deep breath here. The term smart contract is just a marketing term being used by techies to define a program that interacts with a blockchain, it’s the software that we run on a computerized platform. The smart contract is the software and the blockchain is the computerized platform. They are as smart as the programmers who wrote them and the integrity is only as good as the platform it runs on. We should keep it that way–and understand it that way.

It’s not the smart contracts that we have to worry about because they just do what they are told, it’s the smart people that are creating them that we need to watch.

Featured Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash

Cryptography is taking over, yes, let’s face it. Crypto is winning. Big time. Let’s take a moment to ignore all the drama and price speculations on all the moonshot coins out there and focus on some real technology. There are meme coins and altcoins, but let’s look at a couple of coins that have REAL WORLD PRODUCTS attached to them. Not just speculation, not just hype, not just a large Twitter or social frenzy–but tokens and coins that are supporting things like getting remote devices online, linking smoke detectors, or transmitting soil moisture data 5 miles away to a receiver? Guess what? People are using crypto to do this–and they are calling it mining! What??? Yes. You can buy these “miners” and make money. I’m doing it. Stick with me on this.

This is what we call next-generation tokenomics… Enter Machine Xchange Coin-MXC and the Helium Network-HNT.

• MXC Current Price: $0.040481
• HNT Current Price: $23.35

First of all. Let’s define some terms.

LPWAN: Low-Power Wide Area Network, think miles and kilometers rather than feet and meters. We use networks like this all the time and don’t think about the acronyms.

Have you used Bluetooth recently? Bluetooth is a Low-Power Local Area Network(LPLAN) protocol. Bluetooth can send data a few meters away to your headphones or mouse, and it uses a Bluetooth proprietary radio. That radio transmits and receives LPLAN protocols. (BTW: There are billions of devices out there in the world that are using Bluetooth radios. Billions.)

Let’s look at this graphic:

How does this work? It’s simple really–and I know, I don’t like it when people say something is simple and then immediately start saying something that doesn’t make any sense. So let’s break it down like this.

Let’s say you’re in a room with lots and lots of people in it, and you’re trying to talk to someone that’s standing on the other side of the room. If you try to just talk to that person, with a normal tone of voice, and a normal volume–that person won’t be able to hear you. But if you shout a few short words in a lower tone but with more emphasis, “PLEASE COME HERE.” The chances that the person hears you and understands what you’re saying goes way up. Radios just amplify sound and transmit it a long way. They work the same way as you shouting, just with more efficiency. Dogs use the very same “technology.” A low bark can be heard from 100s of yards away by our ears… maybe miles away for dogs. Wolves howl to transmit data miles around them.

LPWAN is just a fancy name for a super-efficient radio that can transmit small amounts of data a long way without the use of a cellular or any other third-party system.

Okay, great–so dogs barking is a wonderful technology. What does it mean for us? How can we make money?

Now that we understand exactly what LPWAN is, and generally, how it works (with radios); we have to go back to our gif image above and make sure we make the connection (pun achieved) with what these things are doing. They are putting devices online for a fraction of the cost.

Farmers in China are using LPWANs to connect to their cows out in pastures miles and miles away.

What about that gas/electric/water meter on your house or apartment? Guess how other countries are collecting that data? Do you think in China, they have a meter guy walking around to every single power meter and recording it by hand on a piece of paper and then transcribing that paper into a database back at the home office? That’s what we do in some locations–in 2021!

I was at the pet store the other day and wanted to get a radio collar for my dog. They had Bluetooth trackers, and GPS trackers… all of them were expensive and required some kind of account with a cell phone provider like AT&T or Verizon. Or, they were short distance. Boo. I don’t want to pay for yet another phone line just to find my dog–especially if I can use something free like LPWAN technology to find my dog, bag, car, child… see what I mean.

Those little tiles that some people use to find their keys are awesome right? Imagine a tile that you could attach to something and then not charge for weeks or years. Hook it up to solar and now you can find it anywhere at any time… I think the more you think about it… the more ideas will come to you and you’ll start to see where we can use this.

Want to know how “Smart Cities” are being built? Yep. LPWAN.

What do we need to get started with this?

We need radios–and guess what. We have radios.

Back in May, I ordered a set of M2Pro Radios. In the image above they are the “Gateway Owners.” I’m a gateway owner. I have now set up 2 radios one at my home and one at a family member’s house about a mile away. Anyone can connect to me and use them to get to a network. The connection to use one of my radios is completely managed by the device itself–I am just providing a gateway and getting paid with MXC tokens to do this.

True Decentralized Networks

In the past, I’ve tried to understand how blockchain is important–if you get on Twitter or Reddit, you might find some good information about all of this, but a lot of it is just has too much interference from other channels. People mix politics, drama, and polarity into these things. Now I understand decentralization much better.

Imagine if the MXC foundation tried to officially pay me to host one of their gateways here in my house. I’d need a contract, some kind of agreement, some bank account, attorneys, accountants–all great but expensive.

Look at how they are doing it. All I have to do is buy one of their antennas–and put it in my house and connect it to the internet. That device sends small amounts of crypto to me, using the Data Dash App which is really just a device manager and a cryptocurrency wallet. As you read this, I’m collecting MXC tokens. That’s the incentive, and I’m getting paid just by turning on a radio. The MXC Foundation is willing to pay me “rent” to provide the capacity to other application developers and companies to use the network–and it’s extremely affordable. The cost for a downlink is 88 MXC at the time of writing. I’m still learning about these figures, and I’m in the process of building small devices that I can connect to these radios so I can see exactly what it costs me.

There are lots of ideas that come to me for this. You have to think low bandwidth though. Small amounts of data, not large ones… could we send movies with this? well… no. Text messages, Tweets? I’ll bet you a BTC!

LPWANs are great solutions for some applications requiring intermittent or inconsistent data transfer over long distances for a long time. Think smart garbage disposal meters, smart parking meters, or soil and water quality sensors, collars on cows in a Montana pasture, or maybe dolphins that a scientist is tracking without GPS.

It’s happening

There’s a lot I’m skipping over, obviously, there are some shortcomings to these devices, and haven’t really scratched the surface. But you can visit https://ussn.matchx.io/ and see the devices that are linked to the Huobi Pool. I’m connected there, but you can see there are way more gateways in other countries than in the USA. Europe is awash with these antennas.

Because this topic is so vast with so much to cover, I’m going to stop for now and call this Part One of a four-part series on LPWAN and how it’s colliding with cryptocurrency.

I’ll be publishing the next parts of this soon. I’m still waiting for my HNT coin miners so I’m going to probably wait until I have those in hand and running for a while before I write about those. Here’s how I’ll go about this series… (subject to change)

• Part One: What is LPWAN, Exactly? *This Post.
• Part Two: What are real use case scenarios and which companies are actually using this technology.
• Part Three: How does crypto intersect with this technology?
• Part Four: Deep dive analysis into the M2Pro Miner and The HNT Miner.

Featured Photo by Jack Sloop on Unsplash