A basket currency refers to a monetary unit that is composed of a combination of different currencies. It is designed to provide stability and reduce the risks associated with relying on a single currency. The concept of a basket currency has existed for several decades, with notable examples including the European Currency Unit (ECU) and the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) utilized by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Creating a currency basket involves carefully selecting and weighting the currencies that will be included. The aim is to represent a diverse range of economies and minimize the impact of fluctuations in any single currency. The weights assigned to each currency in the basket are typically based on factors such as trade volumes, economic stability, and market value. Once the currency basket is established, it can be used as a reference point for exchange rates and as a benchmark for economic performance. By spreading the risk across multiple currencies, a basket currency can help promote stability and mitigate the impact of individual currency fluctuations.
The IMF publishes the exchange rates of the SDR on its website. The SDR is not available to the general public, and is used for a claim by the governments of any country.
The SDR, or Special Drawing Rights, is a basket currency composed of various international currencies. It is not available for purchase by the general public, as it is primarily used by governments. The weights assigned to each currency in the basket are based on factors such as trade volumes and economic stability. The exchange rates for the SDR can be found on the IMF website.
Through the innovation of the verus coin team, the first non-custodial decentralized on-chain basket currency was launched. The initial launch was for the Bridge.vETH basket currency, held by 4 reserves in an equal 25% weighting:
To buy the Bridge.vETH basket currency, download the Verus Mobile wallet from the app/play store.
On-chain of course! However, the currency basket index is easily viewable at the eth-bridge page at verus. Another resource used by p2p marketmakers, is the raw chain data presented at the raw.verus.trading.
Staking the Verus Coin is one of the simplest and most accessible ways of getting into cryptocurrency. This staking guide from developer & cofounder of the project explains the basics of doing it in the Verus Desktop wallet.
Below are the latest staking amounts used to win a block reward. Even though sometimes staking amounts are small & winning a proportionally high number of blocks, the staking mechanism does use the total wallet holdings in it's calculation - 10,000 VRSC vs 10 x 1000 VRSC will yield the same amount in the long run, but only 1000 VRSC in the wallet will not.
The above table is a wordpress plugin developed by Artist by request/bounty from KomoDeFi. It is a SPA written in Vue and uses a modified Rust Verus RPC Server for latest information directly from your browser.
Recently I was accused of analyzing a behaviour in a stake based voting system and ignoring some other activities, which are unknown to me - but I can imagine that some larger beneficiaries of the system (whales) are voting in a particular way. This led me to find what alternative voting systems existed. Most commonly voted on elections are a plurality based system, which is where the winner does not have more than 50% of votes, because there are many candidates. Currently in the komodo project, there is a simple 2 preference vote (yes or no) for effectively removing an inflationary aspect to the system.
Stake-based voting is a system of governance used in decentralized networks. It ensures that decisions made within the network are based on what's most beneficial for the community as a whole. A stakeholder is someone who has invested in or has some sort of ownership in the project. Stakeholders are given the right to vote on decisions related to the network, depending on how much they have invested or staked.
Stake-based voting is a type of voting system that uses tokens or coins as an indicator for one's voting power. It allows individuals to contribute funds to projects, organizations, or initiatives in order to vote on them. In this system, the more money a person contributes, the more influence they have over the outcome of the vote.
There are other types of voting systems that can be used in place of stake-based voting. These include: priority voting, approval voting, range voting, and instant runoff voting. Each of these methods differs from stake-based voting in terms of how votes are counted and weighted.
Priority voting involves assigning numerical values to choices in order to decide which is most important. This type of system allows voters to express how strongly they feel about each option by assigning different weights or priorities depending on their opinion.
Approval Voting is another alternative that allows voters to select multiple options and cast their ballots accordingly. Range Voting is a method where each voter assigns a score between 0 and 10 for each option being voted on. The scores are then totaled up and the highest scoring option wins the election. Instant Runoff Voting is similar but uses ranked preferences instead of scores; whichever option has the most number one votes wins the election regardless of total scores.
Stake based voting is a form of decision-making used within decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). But, there are other methods that can be used as well. One such method is reputation-based voting. This method relies on participants’ trustworthiness and reputation in order to determine their vote weight. The more trust the participant has from the community, the larger their vote weight will be. Another alternative is token-based voting. This system allows users to earn tokens by contributing to the network and those tokens are then used to cast votes. Additionally, token holders can also receive rewards for participating in the network’s governance decisions.
Another alternative is smart contract-based voting systems. This type of system uses smart contracts which are programmed with specific conditions that must be met before a vote can happen. This ensures that all participants understand the rules of how decisions will be made and helps reduce potential manipulation of votes or fraud. Finally, some DAOs use a combination of different voting systems in order to achieve consensus within their organization. By combining different types of voting systems, DAOs are able to create more robust decision-making processes which ultimately leads to better governance outcomes for their organization.
Without going into too much detail in this one blog post, here is a list of other voting systems:
Simply calling an election or some other governance proposal is one thing, but further considerations of a voting community can include:
There are numerous alternatives to stake-based voting. Each has its own merits and drawbacks. When it comes to security, blockchain technologies are in a class of their own. They can provide secure, verifiable voting solutions for a variety of applications. User-friendliness is another important factor when choosing a voting system. Some systems require more technical expertise than others, so it's important to consider the resources available
The komodo team has proposed to update the tokenomics of the project by presenting a set of changes to create more value for $KMD holder. The plan to make KMD issuance more deflationary consists of two parts:
- Part 1 - Reduce the active user reward from 5.1% to 0.01% APR (mid-2023 and around the Notary Node upgrade)
- Part 2 - Reduce the block reward from 3 KMD to 1 KMD (mid-2024).
The worldwide community vote announcement goes into the details of how to vote. With 8 days to go, there is a majority vote towards the reduction of the active user rewards of more than 2:1.
One of the earliest votes cast for the reduction of the AUR has a balance on the KMD main chain, and looking at the behaviour of this voter, they do collect their active-user reward - since voting, collecting twice a total of approximately 73 KMD.
The question must be asked, why? When this voter collects additional KMD.
Before we look at what jl777 says about the vote, let us consider the above user behaviour requires "work" to open a wallet and collect the rewards - consistently. Back in the origins of KMD, one of the bonuses of getting an AUR was to be able to spend this reward on new upcoming projects in the ecosystem without spending any principal amount of KMD.
Times have changed and the amount of ecosystem development has grown to a halt with the biggest projects currently being PIRATE and Verus with quite established user bases and more than 50% of the coin supply mined.
There is always concern from community on how a project is run - real world, online, government, private, familial or open source. The komodo project is not immune from community outcry for closer collaboration.
The user xJoe_McBeanus in the screenshot above challenged this article, which led me to find more information about governance & voting system alternatives to stake-based one - which I'm grateful for. To be aligned with community balance, here are some concerns xJoe has raised since the original publishing of this article.
Point #3 highlights one of the problems with a stake-based voting system. I have not verified the voting behaviour of the top wallets for the vote - but its easy to see that someone highly invested in the project would want to maximize their investment in this way - and; we can only hope that it benefits the whole community as well.
An unofficial community poll was conducted on discord where the vote was dead-locked in the time of polling. It must be noted several votes for the AUR reduction came from within the team.
If a high value stakeholder is voting in a way that dictates the outcome, then in a stake-based voting system, I would imagine it is to their benefit they would do this. it's not like the whales get more advantage by the reduction of the AUR compared to the minnows - so this falls in-line with one of the advantages of a stake-based system, that the higher stake voter is aiming to steer the project that benefits everyone.
Time will tell if the reduction in emission does win the vote in 8 days time, and futhermore whether it will create upward price movement when there is demand for the KMD coin.
Discord user allbits was kind enough to provide an example of using the Verus CLI tool to verify the file is associated with the identity it claims to be.
Look at the signature
cat filename.txt{ "hash": "fd58ff4f7f25a3eb2d48ce0b022c78162df66275c9f2257e071c5b97e9d94812",
"signature": "AdJ2GwABQSCjCvnuaFl4Crj1vRK7s3gPAGa7u3OktJVrSY6NQoj002JK4IcK9xx0yQue/LK0Kg7H6L+h42BTTZb9+zeLgGVs", "signer": "Verus Coin Foundation Releases@" }
Then run the Verus CLI using the signature value from the file./verus verifyfile "Verus Coin Foundation Releases@" "AdJ2GwABQSCjCvnuaFl4Crj1vRK7s3gPAGa7u3OktJVrSY6NQoj002JK4IcK9xx0yQue/LK0Kg7H6L+h42BTTZb9+zeLgGVs" ../Verus-CLI-Linux-v0.9.0-3-x86_64.tar.gz true
If it's true, then the identity and the signature match and you are assured what is claimed is true.
Here is the link to the discord message for the source of this info.
Last week my colleagues at open food chain tweeted this out, and it got me thinking to check how easy it was to find public agriculture data? My first search was very US centric, so I added a couple of countries I have interest in working in.
The first search produced the following results.
But this wasn't very useful to me, who has a casual interest in agricultural data. Admittedly, I know I know nothing, and there are thousands of people smarter than me on this subject and thousands of more AIs being programmed to decipher this information.
I will limit my search to at least a couple of countries I have an interest in doing some work in.
And when I follow these search results I am greeted with info in Greek & Thai languages! So it's not quite a dead end yet, I can look up agricultural data formats maybe?!
I have 20 years of on & off experience reading data on a wire and following protocol specifications to work out what is going on. Although I'm not an expert (anymore) on data formats, I have a few old tricks up my sleeve I can count on from time to time to get into the flow of the data.
So I am led to believe stuff exists - but I wonder how accessible this stuff actually is?
Through the development of open food chain solution of supply chain tracking and batch matching between suppliers, I've learned to really appreciated the UTXO model for it's simplicity and low barrier to entry for sharing data.
In a private presentation to the open food chain team, I have expressed that it is possible to share field data publicly and not in a data silo that becomes a cost center to an organization to secure & maintain.
Additionally, when a larger organization (for instance Bayer) buys out a smaller organization that has conducted field tests on larvae growth in certain areas, the larger organization more than likely has no interest in continuing or sharing the data from the earlier studies. Sometimes it's too hard to make available, and sometimes it is wrapped up in company policy, and sometimes it is tin-foil hat profit motives. As a public, we don't know.
The way to access agriculture data stored on a blockchain is the same as any other blockchain data - blockchain explorers & the explorer APIs. Wondering about scalability? Well of course, we can add caching between the client and the blockchain if it is a public resource. However, with anybody able to sync a public blockchain, getting a high performance data source is easy to connect to.
The game is a simple turn based economic business simulation game, like "Lemonade Stand" or "Dope Wars" or "Pizza Tycoon" or others from that era of games. It is currently in development, written as a light client targeting a komodo smart chain. The light client uses electrum client to sign the transaction and an explorer to fetch utxos & broadcast the signed transaction.
I asked Verus lead dev Mike T about the future of PBaaS light mode support in discord, to which he gave helpful responses that were encouraging to consider the future for supporting my game effort on a Verus chain as well.
Electrum will work for a PBaaS chain, but is insufficient to make decent apps that use even a medium amount of Verus features. We are moving to a Verus extended BitCore server for lite mode functions and deprecating ElectrumX for foundation or recommended use. The next update of Verus Mobile will be the first on the new interface, which enables it to access all of the new APIs, smart transaction capabilities, DeFi, etc., as well as information needed for z-transaction support in light mode, though to move z-transactions away from lightwalletd requires additional work. A new version of Verus Mobile with this interface is near ready, and has only been waiting for some authentication and ID provisioning protocol improvements that are coming along nicely.
https://discord.com/channels/444621794964537354/449638035999686677/1026638568065609778
So, whatever I created on a Komodo Smart Chain will likely work without any changes on a Verus PBaaS chain. Further, I asked about the bitcore wallet server that Verus is moving towards to support more of the Verus enhanced functions relating to the bitcore-server.
We have Verus enhanced servers in the VerusCoin repos. They have Verus capabilities exposed, and there are much more advanced enhancements in progress that will be pushed to the VerusCoin repos before PBaaS. As a dev, it should be obvious from the changes we already made, how it will work. Non-Verus or generic repos won’t support Verus capabilities any more than Electrum.
https://discord.com/channels/444621794964537354/449638035999686677/1028678720103399494
For the moment, and things to watch are still in the rpc client, as Mike mentioned here
So, it turns out that right now, we're using the Verus version of bitcoind-rpc. We plan to cover it with a Bitcore caching layer, but the full API will be exposed via that server. Here is the current version being used in testing, and it will be updated with new functions before release: https://github.com/miketout/bitcoind-rpc
https://discord.com/channels/444621794964537354/449638035999686677/1028847703913938944
I first looked at the Verus enhanced, then looked at Mike's fork of new development he has made.
Then in Mike's branch some simple rewiring of the existing methods call specs, by loading it with a no-wallet by default object - a method of enhancing an existing library I enjoy, which was used to disable zCash parameters requirement on public-only smart chains.
The subtle differences between the apisNoWallet vs apisWithWallet is clever, for instance Verus Identity method, getIdentity has different parameters passed to it whether there is a wallet loaded or not. Handy to know for the future.
Then we start to see the Verus enhancements come into the bitcoind-rpc library. In particular, the apisWithWallet have some of the cool features Verus DeFi offers - defining a currency & blockchain identity to name a couple.
The remainder of the commits didn't seem too interesting, with the addition of a httpserver for comms.
Bitcore is the software that makes a whole bunch of blockchain features possible. Bitcore integration in the komodo code base enabled high performance blockchain lookups - which Verus inherited as a friendly fork. The javascript library that is used with the explorer, had some further Verus enhancements for reserve currencies.
Then some PBaaS functions and identity added to the bitcore library.
This then showed up in a transaction on the PBaaS testnet VRSCTEST, showing that there's a new dimension of supporting game functions that can be used, to make compelling economic simulation games on Verus!
The explorer also supports nodejs v9, compared to the original komodo explorer that is supported with node version 4. The Tokel explorer also supports enhancements for displaying NFT information, but these have not been investigated yet.
Placeholder page for blockchain identity basics.
Placeholder page to currency definition.
We the consumer in this web3 world are told that it democratizes access to participation, influence & opportunity. In this video by Verus community member @creativeninja, the points of centralized components of the decentralized world are highlighted. And it begs the questions of which mix of decentralized function is ok?
The transcript from this talk is available at the KomoDeFi transcripts repo on github.
In the talk, Bradley mentions Infura, Alchemy & MetaMask as examples of dApps that run on centralized infrastructure. The article about blockchain nation states linked in the opening paragraph cites BNB Chain as this centralized infrastructure, but decentralized token distribution.
A network can be decentralized when it comes to its token distribution but at the same time run on a centralized infrastructure. Binance Smart Chain is a good example of that.
https://danajwright.medium.com/blockchains-as-nation-states-54662f7902ce
Governance means different thing to different parties, but tackling the blockchain governance problem is being done by multiple projects. In my experience with the Openfood Chain, the governance is centralized around the industry consortium by forming a governing foundation.
Another network could be decentralized when it comes to number of nodes and physical locations of nodes, but centralized when it comes to governance. Cardano is a good example of that model.
https://danajwright.medium.com/blockchains-as-nation-states-54662f7902ce
Bradley states:
consider Bitcoin the most well- known Fair launch blockchain protocol it had no Ico no pre-mine no VC company backing and no Founders funds
https://github.com/KomoDeFi/transcripts/blob/main/decentralization-why-it-matters#L10
The Verus Coin project also started in the same spirit. As a no-code solution for creating blockchains, the launch of the PBaaS mainnet approaching, decentralization for future projects has a bright future.
With some 15,000 discord users, it is the most number of possible users for further decentralizing new applications and protocols.
Paraphrasing what @creativeninja says of the former CEO of Twitter @jack opining for:
it's critical we focus our energy on truly secure and resilient Technologies owned by the mass of people not individual not individuals or institutions only that foundation will provide for the applications
https://github.com/KomoDeFi/transcripts/blob/main/decentralization-why-it-matters#L164
