16th May 2022 > > The Terra fiasco yet again.

tl;dr

A Terra hard fork is a spectacularly bad idea.

Market Snap (at time of writing)

Market Wrap

A brief rally to over $31k has sadly petered out in the last couple of hours.

Occasional Series – Watford 1 Leicester 5

As Robin knows, we will always own bragging rights over Leicester for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJYtDPcd-fU

Yesterday, only very briefly, we were 1-0 up. If my memory serves me right that is only the second time we have been in that position at home in 2022.

Our very last win at Vicarage Road was getting Ollie the sack when we beat Man Utd. 4-1 back in November 2021.

It was quite a remarkable game, but the best summation was given by Christiano Ronaldo to an MUTV interviewer immediately after the final whistle (source: the CCC 22nd November 2021):

“I am over the moon about finally fulfilling my lifetime’s ambition of playing on the hallowed turf of Vicarage Road.

“The icing on the cake for me was that we only lost by three goals. I was rather expecting a right proper pasting.”

…

Gotta love football banter.

Watford fans are known to be some of the noisiest of all. We were finishing our final home game of the season singing:

“You must be s***

“You must be s***

“It’s only 4-1

“You must be s***”

Then Leicester scored again.

Quick as a flash, we made the appropriate adjustment to our song.

…

Our last game in the Premier League for at least a season is at Stamford Bridge next Sunday at 4pm.

How do you think that will go?

Not for the faint hearted I know but I do have a spare ticket to join me in the away end.

Who’s up?

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Terra, what next?

There are several proposals doing the rounds all attempting to rectify the Terra fiasco in some form or another.

One that appears to be gaining a head of steam is the idea to fork the Terra blockchain prior to all the recent shenanigans.

In my opinion this is a spectacularly bad idea for several reasons, but remarkably there is a precedent for it.

In July 2016 the Ethereum network suffered what has become known as the DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) event. An anonymous attacker took advantage of a flaw in the coding of a smart contract and made off with $50 BILLION of DAO tokens. Note that it wasn’t a theft as such – it was a perfectly legitimate use of the DAO.

A proposal was made to hard fork ETH prior to the DAO event, effectively reappropriating those funds. That hard fork is the ETH we know and love today.

A group of people – rightly in my opinion for what it’s worth – protested against this idea stating that it creates moral hazard, a concept which appears quaintly old-fashioned these days. These people vowed to keep the original blockchain live. It still functions today and is known as ETC – Ethereum Classic. For comparison the market cap of ETH is 244bn and ETC is 2.8bn so it’s obvious who won that argument.

Note that if you bought ETH before June 2016 (when it was trading for mere dollars) you will own the equivalent amount of ETC to this day. If you find yourself in that lucky position and need help tracking down your ETC, then I would be happy to oblige for no fee.

Disclosure – the CCC owns some LUNA bought at fractions of a cent in recent days. If this proposal to hard fork at an earlier date is accepted, my investment will go to zero. That isn’t the reason I am against it, but you would expect me to say that.

…

Other ideas include reducing the LUNA supply which ballooned during the collapse of the UST peg, for reasons discussed over the last few days in the CCC.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of centralised exchange Binance, has often come in for criticism in the CCC for his lackadaisical attitude towards compliance and regulation. He takes a very immature attitude to this subject when it should be core to everything that Binance does. Despite this, he does sometimes talk sense:

“Reducing supply should be done via burn, not fork at an old date, and abandon everyone who tried to rescue the coin.”

That is putting a very nice gloss on speculators like myself (in this particular instance) who think that maybe one can smell blood in the water, but if my purchase of LUNA is seen to be an act of goodwill so be it.