February Thoughts
Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade
Shanghai is a really nice city from the photos online and my Google Earth sessions. China doesn’t want anything to do with Bitcoin though, they have their CBDC Yuan already. Why is this Ethereum upgrade called the Shanghai upgrade? The Ethereum Shanghai Upgrade is named after the city of Shanghai because the developers of Ethereum held a meeting in Shanghai, China to discuss and plan the upgrade. The Ethereum Shanghai upgrade is a planned upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain that is expected to happen in March of 2023, or around that time. This Ethereum upgrade will allow people to withdrawal the Ethereum they have staked on the blockchain. Staking is basically holding crypto to verify transactions on the blockchain. The name is also a nod to the Chinese Ethereum community, which has been an important contributor to the development of Ethereum. One of the big changes happening is that there will be new chains called shard chains.
Shard blockchains are like a way to make a blockchain network work faster. A blockchain is like a big list of all the things that happen, like money being sent or information being shared. But when lots of people use it at the same time, it can get slow. Shard blockchains fix this by breaking the big list into smaller pieces, called "shards." Each shard is like its own smaller list, and all the shards work together. This way, more things can happen at the same time, so the network is faster. Will this upgrade bring the price of Ethereum down or up is probably what everyone is wondering. I don’t know.
Coinbase
Coinbase is a popular cryptocurrency exchange that allows people to buy and sell crypto and even stake for rewards on some coins. It’s probably the best we have for crypto in America but it does have its flaws. It started out giving a performance tab on your coins and tokens but stopped. The website went down when crypto pumped up last week and the performance tab went away and just never came back. Coinbase does have a help/support line that you can pretty much get in contact with them if something goes wrong but I have tried it a few times and they have helped me.
They offer a Pro version for $30 bucks a month but that seems high, most people don’t have millions of dollars on their account so I honestly feel like $2.99/month would be a better price. Then there are the staking Coinbase offers, which is only 1.5% on USDC (the main stablecoin we have, no it’s not Tether). Coinbase has a debit card you can easily spend your crypto or dollars anywhere, but everywhere seems to have a debit card now. Coinbase’s help and customer support chat they have is pretty helpful sometimes. I had a transaction that wouldn’t go through and they helped me find a way to cancel it. Overall, Coinbase is a reputable and secure option for buying and selling cryptocurrencies.
George & CryptosRus
This dude does a lot of crypto news and everything about crypto, most days two videos a day. One video in the morning at 830am and then another later in the evening around 9pm. George does the news and update on crypto for the first half of the video and then questions live for the rest of the video which goes about 45 minutes. I always wonder what I can ask him, but people pay him to answer questions. Most people just ask questions about if a crypto they have will go up and George talks for about 30 seconds or so about that coin they ask about. There are lots of crypto influencers out there but George seems to be the one who doesn’t try to get as many likes or follows on social media like most on Twitter. He doesn't seem to be on Twitter much but has a large YouTube following for his videos. It’s nice having a video to watch at night and get an idea on why the market moved a certain way.
Crypto so far in 2023
January was a major pump closing the last Sunday of the month up 40% since the start of the year. It could be a major bull trap and we go back down or keep going up, that’s what February will tell us. I told everyone in my January blog that the bottom was in and we would pump because I follow crypto probably more than the average person. Jim Cramer, the CNBC guy, timed the bottom perfectly also by saying sell on his show. I think it was a combination of the guy who went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said Bitcoin is going to zero, plus Jim Cramer saying to sell, and then Bitcoin being level for months. If you were doing the correct thing, you were scooping up satoshis under $20k and then when it went to $23k per Bitcoin you started to dollar cost average out. The dilemma is when the crypto price keeps going up in price and now you have less crypto because you sold some.
El Salvador the country had a nice month since they are invested so much into Bitcoin. They mine crypto there with volcanic energy, and just have a lot of Bitcoin. Fiji’s prime minister is thinking of making Bitcoin legal tender there, and there are countries in Africa that are looking towards Bitcoin. I think the major problem for cryptocurrencies in 2023 will be when people start talking about a Federal reserve cryptocurrency. There is already USD Coin on exchanges that has United States in it’s name and its backed 1 to 1 to the dollar. The Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC, will be programmable though where the government will be able to control everything and Americans won’t like that. Not sure what will happen to Bitcoin and the top 25 cryptocurrencies because the Federal reserve will want people to use their coin and not Bitcoin.
Be a nice human.