Internet outage June 8, major internet failure June 17. Shoulda Used Theta

(CNN) Beyond bitcoin: These altcoins are super popular (link).

‘One of the better performing pairs of cryptos this year are two related tokens that are geared toward online content creators — Theta and Theta Fuel. Theta has soared almost 400% in 2021 while Theta Fuel is up an astounding 1,700%’.

Hollywood Powerhouse CAA Joins Blockchain Video Network Theta (link).

• ‘”We believe that blockchain technology and the rise of digital collectible NFTs will bring unprecedented opportunities to our family of storytellers, trendsetters, icons and thought leaders in the entertainment industry,” Michael Yanover, CAA’s head of business development, said in a statement’.

The adoption continues.

$500 million asset manager joins Theta Network as Enterprise Validator (link)..

‘“We’re thrilled to expand our support for Theta as an enterprise validator and governance council member, taking a direct role in securing its blockchain,” said Ali Farahanchi, Managing Director at DHVC’.

‘He added, “Theta has made massive progress since we led the Series A equity round in 2017, and we expect another 100x growth as the protocol transforms the media and entertainment industry through blockchain and decentralized technologies.”’

The adoption continues.

Another prediction of 100x growth from its current size.

Widespread internet outage (at Fastly’s content delivery network) impacts major websites (June 8, link).

Airline and bank websites go down in another major internet failure (at Akamai Technologies’ content delivery network) (June 17, link).

Content delivery network (link).

‘CDNs are a layer in the internet ecosystem. Content owners such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their end users. In turn, a CDN pays Internet service providers (ISPs), carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers’.

13 Days Left: Theta & TFuel Get A Huge Publicity Boost! (link).

11 Days Left: “Shoulda Used Theta!” Why the world NEEDS Theta and how you can be a part of it (link).

‘Two MASSIVE Internet outages less than 10 days apart due to failing CDNs (Fastly & Akamai) reveals why the world NEEDS Theta’

Why Are Streaming Platforms Crashing Before Popular Finales? (link).

‘Showtime, HBO Max and Disney+ all had service outages ahead of season finales or live events, but user volume isn’t always to blame’.

10 Days Left: Video Streaming Platforms Crashing? Shoulda Used THETA! (link).

(NFT) Non-fungible token (link).

‘certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable’

‘provide the owner with a proof of ownership that is separate from copyright‘

It’s not NBA Top Shot, Beeple or a tweet, but IBM is about to turn patents into NFTs (link).

NFTing a NBA top shot and a tweet represents amateur hour but when someone like IBM thinks of NFTing anything, it represents the arrival of the professionals.

THETA TOKEN PARTNERS WITH IBM?! 1 TRILLION-PLUS NFT OPPORTUNITY!!! THETA TOKEN BULLISH NEWS!!! (link).

‘Theta token rumors are spreading like wildfire lately regarding a possible partnership bettwen IBM and Theta, this might happen as there are some news indicators suggesting the two might be up to something, the biggest of them all is the fact that Jieyi Long has been selected to present his work on “Off-Chain Micropayment Pool for High-Throughput Bandwidth Sharing Rewards” at the @IEEEorg International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency on Thursday, May 6th!’

APPLE AND THETA TOKEN POSSIBLE PARTNERSHIP?! (link).

The theta token started life on January 17, 2018 with a value of $0.16, and when google came along back in May 2020 and bought 5 million theta tokens and began staking them onto their theta validator node, it was still that value and on March 24,2021 it hit an all time high of $14.82, nearly 100X for the OGs.

Do I think that the theta token can do another 100X from where it is now? Heck, yes. It only remains to be seen if IBM, Apple or both have theta validator nodes beforehand.

Theta network staking: tfuel (EN) vs theta (GN). GN restart regularly. GN does not sync

Why we need the THETA network (what problem does it try to solve) (link).

At the start of the theta network all of the GNs would receive, on each reward cycle, their reward calculated on a weighted basis but this could not scale so an upgrade was recently applied which, on each cycle, only 300 rewards each of 12 TFUEL would be issued. My GN has multiple public addresses and the reward to each might vary a lot but on average I would say that I am receiving rewards that are similar to the rewards before the upgrade.

Staking: tfuel vs theta

PRE-ELITE BETA vs ELITE TFUEL staking rewards (link) in which youtuber ‘TeddyB’ suggests that the reward from EN staking will increase 58 times when theta mainnet goes to v3, the release for which did get pushed out to 30 June, 2021.

Staking Rewards (5-to-1) Disparity between ($10) THETA (59% staked) and (35c) TFUEL (if the same was staked, not 11%) (link).

Understanding THETA & TFUEL staking rewards Golden Price Ratio. TFuel Farm explained! (link).

Of the above ‘TeddyB’ video vs the other above ‘Cryptos For All’ video, the latter makes a better explanation of the staking dynamics between GN staking theta and EN staking tfuel.

Theta GN restart at frequent intervals, perhaps weekly

Someone on the theta forum has suggested that a theta Guardian Node should be restarted at regular intervals, using the restart node option from the menu. I have started restarting my GN on a weekly basis and I suggest you do the same.

Sometime during 2021 the theta blockchain ticked past the 10 million block mark. Fortunately, a theta GN does not need a full copy of the theta blockchain because it’s the job of the theta validator nodes to have a full copy of the theta blockchain.

Furthermore, the idea of the snapshot that the theta GN is taking while it is starting/restarting is so that the theta GN only listens for new blocks post-snapshot that come out of the validator nodes, and records these new blocks to the hard drive, while the old blocks get blatted from the hard drive, bypassing (I think) the recycle bin.

Possible fix to a theta GN that does not synchronise

Got the following from the Theta slack forum as a possible fix to a theta GN that does not synchronise and it allegedly worked:

1. Close the GN app

2. Go to the folder C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Theta Guardian Node\ThetaGN\configs\mainnet

3. Manually delete the “snapshot” file in this directory, and the “db” directory under this folder. (NOTE: be careful NOT to delete the key/ directory and the config.yaml file)

4. Restart the GN app

Voyager: ‘Earn up to 10%* interest APR 50+ Digital Assets’ / Declaration of Financial Independence

The information in this post should not be considered financial advise.

‘Earn up to 10%* interest APR 50+ Digital Assets Commission-Free** Crypto Made Simple’ is the slogan on the Voyager app’s website investvoyager.com. The opportunity for profit that is open to the public is through the token needed by the Voyager app, namely voyager (VGX). As the user base for this app grows these tokens have the potential to increase in value.

Right now, the voyager app is a minnow start-up and is not likely to be promoted heavily by the mainstream which means that the public will likely only hear about it through word of mouth such as what I am attempting here.

Voyager Token (VGX) gains 926% as mergers and acquisitions bring new users (link).

I fully expect it to surpass it’s January 2018 all-time dollar high of $10 and go many multiples higher sometime in 2021.

PART 1 – Voyager VGX to $50 in 2021? WHY YOU NEED TO BUY NOW! (link).

(@investvoyager) We apologize for the inconvenience, our app is experiencing intermittent outages due to unprecedented growth. All funds are safe. We’ve been seeing 100 new accounts a minute, and are increasing our capacity. (link).

VOYAGER COMPLETES MERGER WITH LGO POSITIONING COMPANY WITH FULLY REGULATED EUROPEAN PLATFORM (December  11,2020, link).

‘This merger gives Voyager the ability to service the 750 million European population’

I think it is only Americans (excluding New York state residents) who can download the Voyager app to their phone, while there is a desktop version in beta test.

Earn 5% Interest on Ethos Tokens held on Voyager (Oct 14 2019, link).

Unfortunately, us in Europe will need to wait for the merger of the 2 tokens VGX and LGO into a new token that was promised in the previous post to take place during Q1 of 2021 before we can earn interest.

Voyager’s January Interest (APR) Rates (21 digital assets, link).

‘When you hold 10,000 VGX in your portfolio, you can earn up to 9.5% on USDC, 6.5% on BTC, & 5% on ETH’.

The whitepaper for Voyager when it was known as Bitquence (link).

The Voyager Token whitepaper (link).

The Seven Pillars of Bitcoin (link).

Visa Could Soon Introduce Cryptocurrencies to Its Payments Network, Its CEO Says (link).

Visa Signals Further Crypto Ambitions With API Pilot for Bank Customers to Buy Bitcoin (link).

Declaration of Financial Independence (link).

The traditional system of money we have today began in the 17th century, notably for England it was the year 1694 that saw the creation of the bank of England, which started out as privately owned until it was nationalised in 1946 (link).

Theta Network Research & 2021 Roadmap (it is coming for youtube)

The information in this post should not be considered financial advise.

‘Next generation video delivery powered by you’ is the slogan on theta network’s website thetatoken.org. The opportunity for profit that is open to the public is through the 2 tokens needed by the network, namely theta and theta fuel (TFUEL). As this network grows these tokens have the potential to increase in value. Right now, the theta network is a minnow start-up and is not likely to be promoted heavily by the mainstream which means that the public will likely only hear about it through word of mouth such as what I am attempting here.

tfuel how does it work? THETA TOKEN and TFUEL EXPLAINED (link).

This youtuber claims that some Wall St analysts have a tfuel price target of $5 for 2021 and for 2022 of $60. As of 2021-03-05 the price was 5c.

Importance of the EDGE node to the THETA network (link).

The number of edge nodes has grown to 27,000 as of 2021-03-24 from 2,100 following guardian node staking being launched in mid-2020 on their mainnet. This is the moment that theta suddenly became a viable network.

Google Betting Big On This EXPLOSIVE Altcoin (Theta Price Prediction $24 during 2021) (link).

5m10s ‘In fact youtube is likely going to be using theta as a second layer to increase the quality of its streaming service’.

I can see theta completely replacing youtube in the not-too-distant future. As of 2021-03-05 the price of the theta token was $3.5 and I think I might have started buying them at 10c so I am up a bit but if theta does replace youtube I think it might be going much higher than $24.

Theta 2021 Roadmap Medium Post (link).

(Q1) What are Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT)? (link).

‘ – Non-fungible tokens (or NFT) are unique blockchain-based tokens that can represent practically anything—including physical assets’.

‘ – A large proportion of NFT currently represent in-game items and crypto collectibles, but they have innumerable potential use cases, many of which are currently being explored’.

(Q2) Line (software) (link).

‘Line became Japan’s largest social network in 2013. In October 2014, Line announced that it had attracted 560 million users worldwide with 170 million active user accounts.^[10][11] In February 2015, it announced the 600 million users mark had been passed and 700 million were expected by the end of the year.^[12] It is the most popular messaging application in Japan.^[13] It is also popular in Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Turkmenistan.^[13][14]‘

(Q2) Video Transcoding: Why is it Important in Livestreaming? (link).

‘Transcoding, in the media context, means the process of converting a file from one format to another. It can be a file format, a video file, or an audio file. The outcome? For media viewers, this process makes video files available across different devices and platforms. For video producers, transcoding prevents placing a heavy strain on your computer due to large file sizes. And for streamers, it lifts the burden when you transfer or upload a video file to a website’. 

(Q4) IPFS powers the Distributed Web (link).

‘A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to make the web faster, safer, and more open’.

Theta 2021 Roadmap Discussion w/ Big Dog (link on theta.tv).

I think it is safe to say that Big Dog is in awe of theta.

Universal Basic Finance is made possible by bitcoin

The information in this post should not be considered financial advise. Furthermore, I must warn you that the value of a unit of bitcoin has been flipping between bear market and bull market seemingly in correlation with an event in the bitcoin protocol called ‘halving’ described below.

If you are not aware just how bitcoin turns traditional money and finance squarely on its head then allow this post to tell you just how revolutionary bitcoin is. I will try to keep this brief.

A few things to know before anything else is that bitcoin is not a get rich quick scheme and it will never be promoted by any corporation as they cannot take a commission when someone starts to use bitcoin. Instead, promotion of bitcoin is largely by word of mouth.

So then what is bitcoin? Bitcoin is both a system of money and a payment network that not only did not ask anyone for permission to exist, it did not need to ask.

While systems of money have been in existence for thousands of years, like modern day national currencies, and payment networks like traditional banking date back to 1600s and more recently the likes of PayPal offering online banking services, it is the first time in human history that one system is both of these at the same time.

The biggest drawback in traditional finance is that it excludes huge numbers of people for a variety of different arbitrary reasons. By contrast, bitcoin not only does not exclude anyone from using the system, it cannot be compelled to exclude anyone. Anyone wanting to become a bitcoin user would only need to download the bitcoin wallet software. These two characteristics alone qualify bitcoin as a system of Universal Basic Finance but please read on.

So then what are the main functions of a bitcoin wallet? The primary function of a bitcoin wallet is to interrogate the bitcoin blockchain to discover how many units of bitcoin a user has available to spend. It can do this because the bitcoin blockchain is a record of what public addresses owned how many units of bitcoin and when ownership was transferred from one bitcoin public address to another, by way of timestamped transactions. The secondary function of a bitcoin wallet is to cryptographically sign a transaction for transferring an amount of bitcoin from one or more public addresses to one or more public addresses.

For a system of money to endure the asset that it uses as money must have durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, be of limited supply, and have acceptability. Bitcoin measures up to these as follows.

·        Durability: a full copy of the bitcoin blockchain exists on every full node on the network so the units of bitcoin themselves are 100% durable.

·        Portability: as a user’s bitcoin wallet is not where a user’s holding in units of bitcoin is located, the portability of these units is a moot point. What matters instead is the portability of each user’s bitcoin wallet with its underlying private key that sometimes can be represented by a seed phrase.

·        Divisibility: each unit of bitcoin is divisible not to just 2 decimal places like traditional money but to 8 decimal places, an extra 6 over traditional money. If this proves to be insufficient at any point in the future, it can be increased.

·        Uniformity: every unit of bitcoin is the same as and indistinguishable from any other.

·        Limited supply: the supply of new units of bitcoin is limited to a predictable schedule that will max out at 21 million units. This will make for an asset pool comprising of 2.1 quadrillion exchangeable units known as Satoshis, in honour of the anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

·        Acceptability: this is the biggest question of them all. Each person will come to their own decision on whether bitcoin is a viable alternative currency to fiat. Fiat being money regulated and centralised under the control of the state, the opposite of cryptocurrency as it is designed on the principle of doing away with state control, state involvement and eliminating the need for third parties like banking institutions. Most that do make this decision in favour of bitcoin I think will never be going back to fiat, and that includes me.

Payments in traditional finance are made using, among other things, 6 digit sort codes, 8 digit bank account numbers and 16 digit debit card numbers, both outgoing and incoming. All this data must be enclosed in very heavily secured systems every step of the way. Unfortunately, such centralised security is breached on a regular basis. By contrast, bitcoin makes payments using a private key to public key pairing, also known as asymmetric encryption, both of which are found on user’s bitcoin wallet. The first of its two mechanisms make use of the private key to create a digital signature against a transaction with its content as input. The second of its two mechanisms make use of the public key, also known as the bitcoin public address, by which network nodes validate that a given digital signature used to sign the associated transaction is authentic or not, an outcome that is strictly binary.

While some transactions in traditional banking can only be performed when a bank branch is open, the bitcoin network is online and ready to receive transactions 24/7, every day of year.

If a bitcoin public address could be thought of as analogous to a traditional bank account and a private key could be thought of as analogous to a traditional bank then bitcoin is an entire banking industry that is the sovereign property of one human being. Furthermore, each bitcoin private key, when kept private, is not something that anyone else can lay claim to. So, when President Obama said that bitcoin is a Swiss bank account in someone’s pocket, he did not go nearly far enough since the number of bitcoin public addresses available on each private key is ridiculously high.

In contrast, a bitcoin payment can only be made from bitcoin public addresses that have any unspent amounts of bitcoin and cannot exceed the aggregate of the unspent amounts, which means that the recipient of any and every payment can know that they cannot possibly ever receive counterfeit units of bitcoin. I think that is astounding.

The need to make change that exists in a payment made using traditional money, does not exist in a bitcoin payment because bitcoin dispenses with the concept of physical denominations such as £1, £5, £10, etc.

Given the above, we can see just how much a revolution bitcoin is but please read on as thus far I have only written about bitcoin the monetary system whereas what follows will be about bitcoin the payment system and its use of an open blockchain mechanism operating a cryptographic algorithm in place of a trusted third party.

People can volunteer their machines to run the bitcoin algorithm whose function is to validate transactions which are held in a pool on unconfirmed transactions across all nodes on the network. The incentive for people to do this currently is to receive a reward of new units of bitcoin. The race to receive this reward is won whenever a cycle of the hash function of the algorithm discovers a hash output that has the requisite number of leading zeroes.

All the other machines on the bitcoin network running the algorithm will only accept a new block of validated transactions sent to it by the node claiming to have won if it has the winning hash output, adding it to the blockchain as the latest block.

The network will regularly revise the number of leading zeroes needed to win the race in order that a new block is added to the blockchain approximately every 10 minutes as dictated by changes in the computing power of the network.

The network will also regularly reduce this reward of new units of bitcoin by 50% every 210,000 block approximately every 4 years in an event called ‘halving’. This reward of new units will cease at the last ‘halving’ which will occur in the year 2140 that will leave the fee for each transaction as the only incentive for machines to run the bitcoin algorithm.

Everyone who is anyone significant in the bitcoin world thinks that whoever invented bitcoin the money and payment system created something that will literally transform our society very much for the better. To come full circle with my original comment that bitcoin is not a get rich quick scheme, what it replaces – the traditional monetary system – is a get poor slowly scheme for the 99.99%, being as it is debt based. This way I can say that it will never be too late to get into bitcoin because the value that currently resides in the traditional monetary system will progressively migrate into bitcoin.

The bitcoin blockchain came into existence on January 3, 2009 and the very first block in the bitcoin blockchain, called the genesis block, contains the text from a quote from the front page of the British newspaper ‘The Times’ that reads ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks’.

Theta Edge Node Cast/Worker

 

There is a second type of Theta Node that is open to the public in addition to the Theta Guardian Node (GN). That node type is the Theta Edge Node (EN) downloadable from thetatoken.org and which has 2 sets of modules. As you scroll down this webpage you will find an endorsement from Steve Chen the co-founder of Youtube which should sell you on theta as should Google signing on with theta.

 

The first set of modules on an EN is Edgecast for watching or broadcasting fully decentralised streaming and the second is Edge Workers for caching, computing. All 4 modules are described in Theta’s blog ‘Introducing Theta Edgecast: The world’s first decentralized streaming DApp for end-to-end live streaming, transcoding, caching and video delivery’ (link).

Do we need youtube any more with all their censorship, demonetization, deplatforming?

 

️ WHAT IS EDGE COMPUTING? | LET’S COMPARE WITH CLOUD (link).

 

(IBM) The Future of Edge Computing (link).

 

My Theta Edge Nodes have been configured to send the Theta Fuel tokens earned to my wallet’s public address for the Theta token. An alternative destination for the Theta Fuel tokens earned by an EN would be a public address on a cryptocurrency exchange account, the most popular one being binance.com, and according to the theta slack forum token payouts take place at month end.

 

While Theta Fuel tokens are earned by running an EN with the cache switched on, unlike those earned by a GN I think that the amount is based on how much the network makes use of a particular Edge Node which logically would depend on how proximate it is to that usage demand. I am hoping that as the network grows in usage then the earnings will grow in proportion to that usage. Of course, I could be wrong on all this.

 

On the slack forum I have found a demo stream for the Theta Edge Node (link) which plays brilliantly on my Theta Edge Node.

 

Although the minimum stake for a GN is 1,000 Theta token, the exchange binance.com does offer it’s account holders a 1-2% staking feature whose minimum stake is 10 Theta tokens (link) with token payouts taking place mid-month.

 

 

Google signs on with theta. Users can launch a node that puts an idle internet connection to work

 

Google Signs On as Network Validator for Blockchain Video Network Theta (link).

‘Eventually, Theta aims to have 31 external enterprise validators. Google Cloud is also becoming Theta’s preferred cloud provider with today’s announcement’.

‘“I can’t speculate on what will happen in the future, but we’re looking forward to working with users who want to join the Theta network,” Day said. “Users can launch a Theta Guardian node from the GCP marketplace. With a few clicks, they can deploy a Guardian and be peering with the Theta network.”’

 

Only the week before, Samsung was giving Theta some love see link.

From last Wednesday (2020-05-27) I have been running a node (see attached picture) to earn theta fuel tokens (market price) and my brother is going to be running a node using my theta tokens just as soon as he gets a more souped up machine. For the minimum requirements to run a guardian node see link and to test your bandwidth see link. A minimum stake versus the current network stake of 445m theta tokens as of 2020-06-07 looks like will earn a monthly reward of 468 theta fuel tokens. The formula for this calculation is ((n1 THETA staked to your node / n2 total THETA stake on the network) x 250,000,000 / 12.

 

If you’re interested in running a minimum stake node using my theta tokens then let me know. The minimum stake is 1,000 theta tokens.

 

A Theta Edge Node Cast/Worker can also put an idle internet connection to work but does not need to stake theta tokens (link).

Finally, you should never think it’s too late to get into bitcoin, or theta for that matter. Alphabet, the parent company of Theta’s new partner Google, as of 2020-06-10 has a market cap of $999B and a share price of $1,461 that back in 2004 was $50. The first real world transaction in BTC took place on May 22, 2010 when Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000BTC for 2 pizzas from Papa John and today it is just under $10,000, while theta is only 2 years old.