By Ross Ulbricht

I recently wrote this article about the Maker Protocol. The protocol is an Ethereum application that supports DAI, and DAI is a token that tracks the value of the US dollar. One of the hardships of prison is access to information. It can take weeks or months through the mail to research even a small topic or get a specific piece of data. Something that might take mere minutes with Internet access. So, I published that article without verifying some data, wanting to get it out while the mid-March crisis was still somewhat recent.

I had received values for the savings rate and stability fee, and they confirmed my hypothesis, but they were values from different days. I assumed the stability fee was less than the savings rate all the time because I didn’t realize how often and dramatically the rates were being changed. The best data I could come up with since then puts both rates around 8% pre-crisis, with the savings rate dropping to 0% post-crisis. I had recommended the savings rate be set to zero in the article, and so far, it has stayed there. …

by Ross Ulbricht

A follow-up to this article is here.

I read the Maker Protocol white paper recently. What a cool concept! The people behind Maker have created a cryptocurrency that tracks the value of the US dollar (a stable coin). You get all the benefits of a cryptocurrency without the crazy price swings. Naturally, it has become very popular, and hundreds of millions of dollars worth have been minted.

I dug further into Maker’s documentation, and read some articles about its recent collateral crisis in March 2020. There is no way I can get a full understanding of the system and what happened from within prison, but taking what I have read at face value, I believe I can contribute some ideas that will help keep this kind of crisis from happening again. …

by Ross Ulbricht

I read this article recently, and I have an idea for how to solve the problem it presents. The article is about how WhatsApp and other platforms with end-to-end encryption are being used to spread pedophilia. End-to-end encryption is essential for online privacy. Without it, service providers are able to eavesdrop on your communications, see your pictures and piece together your whole life. That might be okay if you could trust them to keep your information private, but they won’t. …

By Ross Ulbricht

I was told there were some questions about my wave labels in BbR #9, notably the intermediate subwaves of waves Ⓑ and Ⓒ of II. If you aren’t an Elliott Wave geek, you can safely skip this. Or, if you want to become an Elliott Wave geek, jump right in!

Taken out of context, wave Ⓑ could look impulsive at first glance. The 3rd wave extension in wave (C) makes wave (C) dominate the whole structure. Wave (C) is an impulse, so the whole thing starts looking impulsive. One could label (A) as (1), (B) as (2), 4 of (C) as (4) and 5 of (C) as (5). However, to me, this looks very ugly in the cycle-degree superstructure. Wave Ⓐ would have to be seen as a puny wave II that did not match the psychological extreme of wave I. Or, if you took the labels down two degrees, interpreting Ⓐ as (4) and Ⓑ as 1 of (5), the waves look way too massive to be of intermediate and minor degree. …

by Ross Ulbricht

I was glad to hear that my last post (BbR #9) got everyone thinking and talking about the future price of bitcoins. I have mentioned it before, but I just wanted to clarify why I am doing this series in the first place. As everyone knows, I was one of the first to recognize the potential of Bitcoin. I was a bit preoccupied at the end of wave ③ (I saw a chart of that peak for the first time at my own trial). But later, I saw that wave ④ was over before wave ⑤ had progressed more than 1%. …

By Ross Ulbricht

On December 10, 2019, I wrote the following (see here):

“A drop below the beginning of wave 2 (around $4,200) would invalidate the impulsive count of wave (5) because wave 4 cannot overlap wave 2 ...This would indicate a much greater likelihood that our second scenario is playing out.”

Since then, the price of bitcoins has dropped down to ~$4,000, fulfilling the above requirement. With the bullish count invalidated, the picture is becoming clearer. The cycle-degree bull market — from Bitcoin’s beginning to the ~$20,000 peak of late 2017 — is over. We are now in the last wave (wave ⓒ) of Bitcoin’s first cycle-degree bear market (the largest yet). …

By Ross Ulbricht

Every time a block is added to the Bitcoin blockchain, the miner who discovered it is rewarded with new bitcoins according to a schedule set up when Bitcoin was first launched. The reward started at 50 bitcoins per block and is cut in half every four years, eventually reaching zero. The next halving is set to occur in May 2020, reducing the reward to 6.25 bitcoins. This has led to speculation about how this event might affect the value of bitcoins.

The reasoning goes that, if the rate (or flow) of new bitcoins being added to the current total stock of bitcoins is reduced, then the value of all bitcoins should increase. This so-called “stock-to-flow ratio” is a measure of how hard a currency is (how hard it is to debase through inflation). The harder a currency is, the better it functions as a store of value, which is one of the essential properties of money. …

by Ross Ulbricht

Today is my birthday, my seventh in prison. More than any other day of the year, I feel the weight of the time I have lost, the years of my life I will never get back.

Time is priceless, yet it must be spent. It cannot be saved for later. These seven years are gone, spent in some of the many concrete and iron tombs that dot our countryside, spent struggling to make sense of fate and searching for meaning within the pain.

How were your last seven spent? Did you spend them in a way that reflects their scarcity and value, or were some of them wasted? …