We are back to the end of another week with some exciting Chia news, both from Chia Network the company and from the community and other companies. Last week I was discussing about how we had to make our own news, and this week we did some of that as well as got a dose from Chia Network themselves later in the week.
The week kicked off last Sunday while we were still getting new entries to Ryan Jerome’s excellent Introduction to Trading Chia and added the launch page for that series to the How-To section in the menu above. I cannot describe how useful that series has been to me, as a novice crypto trader, so I suspect it has been very useful to a lot of you. And the best part is that you don’t even have to admit you are a novice, because after Ryan’s guide you know all the lingo.
Later on Sunday DFI (Digital Farming Initiative) launched version 2.0 of their Arbor Wallet. This is a really big deal to the Chia community, as DFI originally launched with high hopes that were quickly dashed by a few serious technical shortcomings. Now they have fixed many of those, and a few days later our very own Grizzo went through their source code and offered his thoughts, and grudging respect. Not easy to earn, that respect.
Next was more BlueBox timelord fun! I built a BlueBox at home and began compacting blocks, and put out the call to arms for others in the Chia community to do the same. In fact, I put out a call for assistance in building a community driven leaderboard to see who is compacting blocks and in order to compete with the fleet of BlueBoxes that Chia Network runs. Turns out we may have been too successful in bending the curve, as a community, and that we might actually be finished compacting even before we can build a leaderboard. We shall this week if there is enough time to make this a thing.
Then came a post from Ryan again that I think is one of the best published on the site so far. You should really go read it, I think everyone involved with investing should, but the gist is about emotions in investing and how easy it is to let our feelings about how an investment is doing to affect our decision making. It uses the allegory of Mr. Market to tell a warning, and one we should all heed. And of course he followed that up with another entry to the Introduction to Trading Chia and started getting into what I would consider more advanced terminology.
After the investment side knowledge we got an interesting explanation of the CAT standard by Grizzo, which gave me something to think about when covering CATs. So much of what defines one is defined in the TAIL program that we really cannot evaluate them the way we do an ERC20 token by just looking at the contract. We also need to look at the TAIL which is not stored on chain. So I will definitely be asking to see a copy of those prior to writing about any CATs in the future.
Then came a brief introduction to Trade Offers, which has been talked up by the Chia team but until this post by Grizzo had not seen myself. I think its pretty fantastic, and will enable real P2P trading between regular folks as a cheaper way of doing token swaps without needing to use anyone else’s infrastructure. Some chatter on Twitter the day after left me thinking that these trade offers might end up being a much bigger deal than I had originally considered as they allow for a decentralized exchange style system without needing a specific web front end gateway. This changes some of the regulatory risks in running those gateways. You can run a DEX on Reddit, or though email using trade offers. Fascinating stuff, and I can’t wait until they make their way back into the main client.
Capping off this week was an absolute metric ton of information dropped on us in the form of Chia Network’s December AMA. This week we were treated to Justin England’s lovely Christmas sweater as well as full-on Santa Gene who is bringing coal to all the naughty boys and girls – with the expectation that they not burn it in order to keep the carbon sequestered. In all seriousness, they answered a ton of questions about what they expect to see in the ecosystem over the next little while as well as some of the things they are working on. I think the biggest news to come out of there is the NFT standard they are working on. This is a huge deal, and I know a lot of people are waiting for a real NFT economy to start growing on Chia.
And last, but not least, we bought some stuff off the Stai store. Chia Fork Stai has launched a number of initiatives, one of which being a store where you can pay a small percentage of the bill (around 10% for us) in Stai coin. It was a neat experiment, but wasn’t a particularly good online shopping experience for my secret shopper. While I think they could definitely improve the customer experience, I think the endeavor is brilliant and I hope they keep at it until they get it right. There is a serious lack of anything to do with all the forks we are farming. The more utility in the ecosystem the better it is for everyone.
