Be careful about Ethereum. I think there's a lot of confusion about what exactly will be launching this year. Most people think it's the whole thing - i.e. a more scalable, PoS version of the Ethereum blockchain, but from my understanding it will literally be just simply a new chain that creates blocks via PoS consensus, but has no actual smart contract ability, or really any ability to do anything other than create blocks and move tokens.

It's been a little while since I've looked into it, but from talking to some Ethereum core devs last year it sounded like the smart contract functionality is potentially years out still. Maybe things have changed and I'm wrong, but I'm just saying you might want to check into that more closely.

Of course, who knows what the market price will do. Maybe it will skyrocket just because they released *something* and most people trading don't really know what's actually going on under the hood lol.

I wouldn't mind capitalizing on the ethereum spike. I'll have to keep an eye on the price, I was able to snag a full Eth during the lows, would love to sell it at the high and then turn it into 2 Eth when it goes back down.

Lots of speculation and things being thrown around. In reference to Yaba's comment below, that would be really funny if it turned out being that a PoS chain for Eth happened but it didn't do anything besides validate blocks. Hopefully they don't do what lots of other companies do and just try to re-invent themselves and end up being a disaster when they had something good going on for them the whole time.

Lets take a for instance.

The problem with ETH currently is scaling.
Lets say Veritaseum takes off and now VERI is doing all the stock trading for most of the 3rd world.

Basically, they are using a ton of ETH power to do their thing.

So, how feasible is it to split ETH, forking a new VERI-ETH?

My thoughts are that its not very hard, and it could be done seamlessly, and could be undone seamlessly.  It could an interesting way of scaling.

> The problem with the whole "priced in" scenario is that the market has never been able to price any event in. The asset simply becomes overpriced and crashes into its actual value

💪👍

The difference between PoS and dPOS is that dPOS is a **consensus mechanism** and PoS is not. Proof-of-Work is also a Proof-of-Stake and neither PoW nor PoS yield consensus as output. PoW is basically
> let ***h= SHA256(ak)***
***i*** = >  Miner who wants to add a block
***o*** => Transactions
***i pub*** => Public Key of ***i***
Proof-of-Work: find a nonce such that: ***SHA256 (h|i pub|o| nonce) < H***
Where ***H*** is the Difficulty parameter.

Where is the consensus 🤷‍♀️ 🤷‍♂️. The real function of PoS/PoW (besides that is a lottery for the block-reward and a Sybil-resistance Mechanism) is that it is a **clock**.

The very core problem of distributed consensus is proven by the **`FLP-impossibility theorem`**: "In an open, hence **>>asynchronous<<** network one cant reach consensus when only one node can fail"

asynchronous means open for everyone at any time. Since blockchain is about EXACT order of events, whose clock do you want to take for synchronization? Right no ones. **Who ever controls the time, controls the chain** (however an atomic clock wouldn´t even been sufficient due to network delays). So Nakamoto substituted time by entropic-difficulty. <-- this is the fundamental reason for PoW. 2^128 or 2^256 hidden bits of entropy or what ever you wish is universal more exact than human time could ever be. More hash-power does not mean that you are faster, simply that you have a higher probability since SHA is a [memoryless-function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorylessness).

What Larimer  did was *"fuck it, we go back to classical consensus from the pre Bitcoin era"*. dPOS is based on a ***synchronous*** = very small, very controlled consensus layer. `21 -fixed`. "Classic" means all-to-all communication. Like in any other BFT-System e.g. the nodes in a plane or nuclear power plant (Byzantine Fault Tolerance is old stuff). <-- THIS is why dPOS can only have 20-100 Witnesses. 100 nodes would all ready mean: `100x100=10,000` messages and then it is final. The Stake in dPOS is for the election only.

In PoS the Stake is a synchronization criterion for an **>>asynchronous<<** network (where everybody can join as a "Witness".)- this is why they talk about *"synchronicity-assumption"*. Vlad Zamfir made some [mistakes](https://pyrofex.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Incorrect-By-Construction.pdf) in "minimal CBC" but now Casper CBC is a beast.

Love the Meme. Thanks for your insights on Ether. After reading your posts U think I am getting a handle on trading Bitcoin. But Ether will require more study. The Dteem wallet spoiled me, so the Ether and EOS wallets are to complicated for me now 

I was HODLing Ether but decided to plow it into Steem. So much for diversification. 🥶