I noticed that you can now earn BAT on Publish0x which is huge! I wanted to briefly share that with you and highlight the massive growth that BAT has seen over the past few months as well.
You may remember I made a video just last week talking about Brave and their creator programs and the rewards you can get for opting into seeing their ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XHtq-jgplM
If you check out https://batgrowth.com/ you can see how well BAT has been doing over the past several months and how it’s been growing rapidly.
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What exactly does crypto lending entail? How risky is it? What are the returns like? I prefer to use Nexo and Blockfi for my crypto lending and in this video, I’ll share exactly why that is.
After checking out the various platforms and getting many suggestions and recommendations, I ended up with Nexo and Blockfi as they were the only platforms that had good UIs, had a mobile application and a website for me to use on PC, and they very clearly show your gains and track them.
One thing I noticed a lot in this space was people focusing on the individual lending platforms tokens and the benefits around that. I want to be clear in that I’m only interested in a good platform with good rates and I’m not using a lending platform just for the platform-specific cryptocurrency it pays out.
The best way to lend is to do so with stablecoins so that you ensure they won’t lose value. While you can lend Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other more popular coins, you will get significantly fewer gains doing so. The argument could be made that Bitcoin and Ethereum have a lot more growth potential too but my investing is always about passive income. Fortunately for my strategy, Nexo and Blockfi pay between 8-10% interest on stablecoins per year paid out every day and compounded. The great part about all of this is that you don’t have to ever claim rewards like you may have to with staking, you will consistently earn every 24 hours and that will compound to make you more money without you having to involve yourself beyond the original investment.
So far I have made $1.44 USD from Nexo with a little over $300 USD split into USDT, TUSD, and DAI. Nexo pays out interest in the coin you have invested. I’ve made $1.02 on Blockfi from about $300 USD split into PAX, USDC, and GUSD. On Bockfi, I’ve chosen to be paid out in Bitcoin because I believe it will appreciate the most so I’m not compounding interest on Blockfi, but instead, I am now testing two methods of passive income to see which works better: compounding in stablecoins, and passive income and appreciation from Bitcoin. Keep in mind I also started investing a little later in Blockfi and the profits would have otherwise been about the same. This is also a way for me to test out the stability of these stablecoins by tracking their value and how these assets perform over time too which I will give updates on in my dividend portfolio reports going forward.
What is also really cool, is that you can then take loans once you have coins in your account as collateral. What this also means is you will never worry about getting your money back from lending because the people taking out loans always have more collateral on the platform than they do in loans they are taking out. They do this because they earn interest on their collateral drastically bringing down their loan interest.
*This is a LBRY first video meaning it appears on LBRY at least 1 hour ahead of everywhere else
How do you earn passive crypto? Will you try out lending after seeing this? Are there any platforms that you use to lend crypto and why do you prefer them? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below and don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!
You’ve probably been hearing the word DeFi a lot. It stands for decentralized finance. We’ll discuss how it’s different from centralized finance, the benefits and drawbacks, and what you can do with it, and why it matters. Let’s dive in.
**Video Timestamps:**
*00:00 Intro
01:42 DeFi & Examples
13:54 Benefits Of DeFi
21:25 Drawbacks Of DeFi
26:40 My Take On DeFi
30:15 Outro*
Many of the use cases for DeFi center around specific platforms, applications, and various blockchains, but the gist of it is that you can perform any financial transaction and use any financial tool that you could in the normal financial world but in a decentralized way.
The benefit of this is so that you can do these transactions at a cheaper cost without a middleman, you can do it freely without any restrictions, you can do it significantly faster, and you can do it privately. There are also new ways of making money that the average stock investor couldn’t take advantage of like liquidity mining or staking cryptocurrency.
A lot of DeFi is facilitated through the use of smart contracts. I will go more in-depth into smart contracts in another video but simply put, they enable you to perform a transaction with code attached. The most common form of this is to enable decentralized exchanges to trade between cryptocurrencies in a completely trustless way acting as an escrow service.
**These are some examples of what DeFi is used to achieve:**
• Transferring Money
• Lending and borrowing
• Stablecoins
• Exchanges
• Margin trading
• Derivatives
• Insurance
• Liquidity Mining & Yield Farming
• Airdrops
• Wrapped Coins
• Prediction Markets
• Staking
• Tokenized Stocks
• Non-Fungible Assets
Everything listed above was a service, product, application, or tool that DeFi offers, but what are some of the benefits of DeFi? What are some of the drawbacks?
**Benefits:**
• No middleman or gatekeepers
• You have total control and access to everything
• Open to everyone everywhere with no barrier to entry
• You don’t have to provide any personal information or KYC
• Solves remittance issues for transfers, namely transaction fees, and speed
• Typically transparent and open source
• Censorship-free
• Generally, no down-time and can be used 24/7
**Drawbacks:**
• Depending on what cryptocurrency you are using, transaction fees may be costly for active users
• Extremely volatile markets
• You must track everything for tax purposes
• Regulations vary greatly and can change at anytime
• Typically more complex than the centralized counterpart service/product/application
• Anyone can get involved easily allowing for more scams and sketchy projects
• There could be vulnerabilities in smart contracts that hackers could exploit
I love DeFi and think it’s the way of the future, but I will end with a caution that it’s becoming a buzz word and there are so many terrible DeFi projects that consider a high yield to be their use case which we have seen with projects like Titan from Iron Finance is not realistic or sustainable. My personal recommendation is to look into cryptocurrencies with products that are useful and don’t chase yields.
This was sponsored by OkEx exchange. You can currently take advantage of their multiple promotions to earn up to $150 in rewards before August 31st. Signup via my link here: https://www.okex.com/promotion/BHA0/ACE504832
What is the right way to invest? Do you prefer centralized or decentralized finance? What’s your favorite aspect of DeFi? Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!
**PS. Let me know what you think about me removing the border in this episode.
If you’re not on LBRY, sign up and get started here: https://odysee.com/$/invite/@ScottCBusiness:4
*Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and is purely for entertainment purposes. What you see, hear, or read is my personal opinion, and any statements made are based on my views and should not be misconstrued as fact. My crypto portfolio may or may not be simulated***
The question we aim to answer today is how safe & stable are stablecoins? Let’s dive into some failed examples of algorithmic stablecoins like UST, Basis Cash, and IRON and some new ones like USDD from Tron.
In this part of the series, we will cover algorithmic stablecoins while mainly taking a look at past failed coins like UST that recently caused a crash in the crypto market from Terra by Do Kwan and IRON by Titan Finance which saw a similar demise heavily promoted by Marc Cuban. There are several others we’ll look at but a common theme is these coins depeg and fail.
Here’s a list of all the algorithmic stablecoins shared on CoinmarketCap: https://coinmarketcap.com/view/algorithmic-stablecoin/ - Take a look through the list to see how many are NOT pegged to $1.
First what is an algorithmic stablecoin - https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/algorithmic-stablecoin. CoinMarketCap’s definition is a sound way of putting it – “designed to achieve price stability as well as balance the circulating supply of an asset by being pegged to a reserve asset such as the U.S. dollar, for example, gold or any foreign currency.” The concept being that you don’t have to provide a backing to the coin or collateralize it, but instead it can be balanced by issuing more coins when the price is over $1 or buy them off the market when it’s under $1 to keep the peg.
TLDR: The simple litmus test for a lot of these coins is to ask how they are able to provide yields. If they claim you can “stake” the cryptocurrency for inflation rewards, then you’re likely just really using a lending mechanism similar to what UST did with Anchor protocol. Every coin says they will be different, and seemingly most have not been.
For the full blog go here:
Publish0x: https://www.publish0x.com/at-scottcbusiness/how-safe-are-stablecoins-part-2-algorithmic-coins-xqeokjr
ReadCash: https://read.cash/@scottcbusiness/how-safe-are-stablecoins-part-2-algorithmic-coins-99abec4a
Hive: https://peakd.com/hive-167922/@scottcbusiness/ygmozfgb
These are all the different kinds of algorithmic stablecoins to give you a better idea of different protocols trying to address algorithmic stablecoins. However, as you can see by looking on Coinmarketcap, out of the handful of coins that are actually pegged, many have depegged in the past or their connected cryptocurrency has lost so much value that the project has no more confidence in it.
I personally hold HBD though I am still in the process of learning as much as I can about it and will soon be doing another interview with Dan from 3Speak to discuss why HBD is different from other stablecoins. I have dramatically pulled back on how much I rely on any stablecoins until I know more about them, hence all this research.
Do you hold any stablecoins? Do you trust algorithmic stablecoins? Were there just a few bad apples or all algorithmic stablecoins risky? Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!
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*Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and is purely for entertainment purposes. What you see, hear, or read is my personal opinion, and any statements made are based on my views and should not be misconstrued as fact. My crypto portfolio may or may not be simulated*
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Hey everyone, today I’d like to go through the growth over the past year for both crypto-monetized and blockchain social platforms. Let’s compare them to get an overview of how they all performed and grew.
So, we are going to dive in briefly to each platform to take a look at their statistics/user growth charts and or any information I can query from their staff.
https://www.uptrennd.com/stats - By far the most impressive for a new platform. The last two months they saw more than 13,000 users joining and have gone from just over 8,000 users in August to hitting 50,000 this month.
https://batgrowth.com/ - By far the most adoption and growth overall (not a social platform necessarily, but relevant to this conversation). They have over 346,353 users. From October 28th to December 6th they gained over 20,000 YouTubers alone. Congratulations to Brave & BAT.
https://www.publish0x.com/stats - Treading along steadily growing averaging between 2,500 and 3,500 new users per month. I’m actually surprised it’s not more!
https://steemworld.org/ - According to Steemworld there are currently 1,345,487 accounts. https://steemit.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/daily-steem-stats-report-friday-december-6-2019 - This says they are getting about 300 new users a day on average and 9,000-10,000 a month
https://lbry.tv/ - As per my request on Twitter they made a temporary link which may or may not work for you at the time of posting: https://traction.lbry.com/public/question/eeed5322-ef18-42f0-9c2b-9d0d1e8401a3. They were able to share with me the distinct network user accesses per month for 2018 and 2019. The blog version of this will share the images detailing this and I cover it in the video.
https://www.minds.com/ - Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any statistics and given they are a quasi-public company they cannot share this information ahead of their formal announcements, but the Co-Founder John Ottman said to me when asked about this “we are adding tens of thousands of news users mo
I recently had the chance to discuss Phemex with Jack Tao who is the CEO and co-founder there. We went over what Phemex is all about, what’s coming out next, and where they are headed over the next year.
They are running a very cool contest/giveaway where they’ve hidden a private key for a Bitcoin address containing more than 2.1 Bitcoin in it inside of a picture. This is a form of cryptography called Steganography. This is the image and Twitter link: https://twitter.com/Phemex_official/status/1217808220703473664
Phemex founders felt like something in the cryptocurrency industry was missing. As both traders and professional investors, we realized that professionalism, trust, and customer's orientated crypto companies were missing from the crypto world. That is why every day we work with the goal of creating a trustworthy company that can give back to its users and society. We work together every day to create a platform that allows users to transact with efficiency, simplicity and more importantly, trust.
These are some of the questions we went over:
• Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? – 0:17
• What does your average day look like? – 0:43
• Can you give us a brief introduction to Phemex? – 1:46
• What problem does Phemex solve? – 2:40
• How did Phemex get its name and what was the original idea or motivation to start it? – 6:55
• What are the next big updates for Phemex to release soon or that are in the works? – 12:26
• Where does Phemex fit in with other existing similar projects? – 15:39
• Where do you see Phemex going in the next year? The next 5 years? – 22:45
• So where can everyone go to learn more about this? – 26:43
Check out https://phemex.com/ for more information and to learn more about what they have to offer.
Some of the video and audio is laggy and I apologize, but it usually only lasts a few seconds.
Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!
In this video, we take a brief look at KingMex. They just launched their English version and it’s very new, but the main thing that makes this exchange interesting is that it enables you to do margin trading which is hard to find in the crypto trading world today.
A margin account in traditional trading is one that provides you the resources to buy more quantities of a stock than you can afford at any point in time. For this purpose, the broker would lend the money to buy shares and keep them as collateral. With KingMex, you can do the same thing, but instead you can margin trade crypto.
Considering right now 1% of institutional traders are doing 80% of the volume and margin trading on crypto exchanges, there is an uneven amount of participation. It’s good to have something new as an option and to show other exchanges it’s possible. I think any new development in the cryptocurrency space that gives users more functionality is a welcome one.
This is their website: https://kingmex.com/
You can follow them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KingMEX_com
Join KingMEX, experience the smoothest trading. https://www.kingmex.com/?inviteCode=QOETRX7C
Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!
In this video, I talk about the process of attempting to search something on YouTube and what's currently happening to the search and hashtags as a reaction to the multiple crises on their platform. Large companies, influencers, and brands will still show up in the search normally, but everything else is throttled and you normally see very old videos. Using any search engine restricted to video like Google, Duckduckgo, etc., you are able to find videos as you would normally, but the YouTube search is completely changed. It may be temporary and it may not be.
Let me know what you think.
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGRusdyzB2I
Let’s talk about minimalism. More specifically, my journey to becoming a minimalist. I feel it’s best described as the antidote to consumerism. But rather than describing it in one word, let’s break down the entire concept.
Now while I mostly talk about financial minimalism, I believe that the idea of minimalism can be applied to any faucet of your life. Before we dive into that I want to define what minimalism is for me because everyone seems to have a different definition for it. To me, minimalism is emphasizing on what you value the most and de-emphasizing what isn’t bringing you value. It forces you to reevaluate your life to bring more mindfulness into how you live your life.
For some it may be simplification like owning many sets of one outfit, for some it may be cutting out extra clutter, and for others it may be having a lot less things in general like throwing out or selling anything you haven’t used in 6 months which I did at the start of my minimalism journey. You could be someone who tries out different things to improve your lifestyle like cutting all your beverages with 50% water. You may be someone who appreciates sustainability by growing your own food, fixing things yourself, and simply finding a way to “make do, or do without.” You may be really focused on frugality and saving money wherever possible or you may just be a mindful minimalist who is mainly focused on cutting out things that do not bring you value and focusing on things that do bring you value. The focus on value has been my favorite aspect of minimalism (even though frugality is way up there) because it allows to not only still enjoy my life, but to enjoy in a more meaningful and mindful way with less stress and more money.
So in summary some of the different aspects of minimalism to me are: mindfulness, simplification, lifestyle foundation, frugality, sustainability, and value. I’ve also described lifestyle foundation previously which is the idea of building around what you need the most and doubling down on what brings you value while cutting out what doesn’t bring you value. It’s somewhat of a combination of frugality and mindfulness but I feel it needs it own point. I talk about lifestyle foundation and lifestyle inflation in this video: https://lbry.tv/@ScottCBusiness:4/financial-freedom:a
Of course, you observe all these practices, none, a mix, or just one, but I will say that undertaking any will improve your life. While not all can be so easily applied, they are all applicable to anyone’s lifestyle in one way or another.
A great example of this could be the type of clothes you wear or the car you drive. Aiming to impress usually is only impressing people that won’t be able to help you further your goals. For example, if I buy a $125 Gucci t-shirt, I might have more people at the local nightclub impressed or the cashier at Tim Hortons, but why would my clients, business prospects, and role models care about that?
A more extreme example could be owning a Lamborghini. While it would be very fun and I’m sure I’d be impressing tons of random people, my friends, and my family, why would that matter? If my goal is to be rich, I can’t get rich by spending my money nor will anyone who is rich care about how I spend my money. Now it’s different if your goal is actually to impress people, but then again, I would still prompt you to reevaluate your situation. Impressing people doesn’t make money because the people who you’re impressing usually cannot improve your life and you’ll go broke living this way because it’s unsustainable and counter intuitive. If you need a Lamborghini to pick up girls on a Friday night, then rent one.
Also, part of what minimalism is to me isn't always having less. I have two of any consumable thing I need to replace so that when I replace it, there are no concerns nor do I have to pay more for it when I need it right away. Great examples for this pandemic are emergency supplies and food. If you didn't prepare, then it was hard to get the things you did need. If you take minimalism to an extreme, then you won't be prepared for the worse. Again, it's not always about having less, it's about focusing more on what brings you the most value and improves quality of life
This is one of my last minimalism focused videos for a while as I’m going to focus more on blockchain but I’d like to hear from you. What are your thoughts on minimalism? Do you want to see more on it? How do you get the most value of out life? What is minimalism to you? Let me know in the comments below and don’t forget to follow, like, and share.
**This is a LBRY first video meaning it shows up on LBRY 1 hour ahead of any other platform**
There’s a lot of differences between investing in cryptocurrency and investing in the stock market, but what are they? What benefits are there to trading crypto or stocks and what are the drawbacks? Let’s dive in.
**Here are the benefits of cryptocurrency:**
• You can trade cryptocurrency 24/7 without time restrictions.
• Typically, the fees are negligible or very small compared to trading on regular exchanges. For example, my bank charges $10.00 per trade.
• There is no minimum purchase amount, nor do you have to have a certain amount of money to start trading as many exchanges require.
• Many exchanges offer ways to earn free cryptocurrency or give you registration bonuses you typically cannot get with regular exchanges.
• You could spend no money whatsoever, earn cryptocurrency, then trade what you’ve earned to generate a much greater profit. You can get started for free.
• You can buy fractions of a cryptocurrency in all cases while only some stock exchanges offer this.
• Cryptocurrency is highly liquid and can be used in day-to-day transactions instantly.
• You can use them for various things like staking, lending, collectibles, DeFi, or possibly as a utility like ENS.
• You can mine cryptocurrency and acquire it yourself.
• You can start your own cryptocurrency or token. I have tried this.
• Given you store your cryptocurrency off the exchange as you should, you should never be concerned with someone else restricting your access or from hackers stealing your funds.
• Cryptocurrency itself is highly secure and accurate, everything is tracked with 100% accuracy and everything is verified for integrity while fiat is not and is much more closely tied to stocks.
• You don’t have to pay holding fees like with a bank for fiat or for your stock trading account.
• How you use the coins after is anonymous or can be made to be anonymous should you choose.
• It’s very easy to transfer compared to withdrawing or depositing a stock and is much faster.
• With decentralized exchanges, it is easily available to anyone regardless of their banking services or location.
• Crypto transactions are made significantly faster than fiat making it very important for remittance payments and much more.
• Price is reliant on the entire network, not the company, and more accurately the current CEO of the company. Instead, it depends on the community, adoption, usage, and network. You don’t have to worry about one crazy CEO. Tron is a good example of how Justin Sun is a bad leader, yet the coin and community around it are very separate from his actions.
• You have all the responsibility and blame if something goes wrong on your end.
• Withdrawn crypto is easily tradeable aka liquid
• Withdrawn crypto isn’t fragile and isn’t easily lost.
• Cryptocurrency sell-offs do not have drastic negative impacts on the economy
• Many issues associated with a traditional stock are less likely if not unable affect cryptocurrency for example, if the product from the company wasn't being bought anymore, had a shipping issue, distribution issue, production issue, or say someone working there gets COVID and they shut it all down, you'll lose money.
• Based on code, instead of trusting them, you can verify.
• And possibly more?
**Here are some of the drawbacks to cryptocurrency:**
• Cryptocurrency is volatile.
• There is less accountability.
• User error can be very costly. For example, if you mismanage your keys, your crypto is gone forever.
• There is an underlying product/service/business behind every stock while only sometimes behind a cryptocurrency.
• Your crypto isn’t guaranteed or insured if for example the exchange you trade on gets hacked and you left your crypto on the exchange.
• The more decentralized you go, the less support you have.
• There is a lot of uncertainty in the space.
• There is very little regulation and many sketchy ICOs and projects that have exit scammed etc.
• There may be a lot of regulation coming to crypto that will negatively impact the space.
• Major players in finance are aiming to centralize cryptocurrency.
• You have all the responsibility and blame if something goes wrong on your end.
• There are very few trustworthy sources of authoritative information on cryptocurrency.
• If you do lose withdrawn cryptocurrency, you cannot get it reissued.
• Stocks have companies, products, employees, and an inherent value behind them that you are investing in.
• Taxation is confusing, inconsistent, and changing frequently for cryptocurrency.
• And possibly more?
Have I missed anything? Am I wrong on any of these? Do you prefer trading stocks or crypto? How diversified is your portfolio? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and don’t forget to like and subscribe as well!
***This is a LBRY first video meaning it shows up on LBRY at least 1 hour ahead of anywhere else.***