Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple’s XRP – Daily Tech Analysis – March 18th, 2021

Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple’s XRP – Daily Tech Analysis – March 18th, 2021

The Guardian

Which team should you hate in place of Duke? Who is this year’s Cinderella team? Our writers break down the bracket for the NCAA tournament Jalen Suggs leads a Gonzaga team many believe will pull off a perfect season. Photograph: James Snook/USA Today Sports Who replaces Duke as arch-villains? Iona. Rick Pitino has resurfaced in New Rochelle despite facing no meaningful consequences from the NCAA following the FBI corruption probe that prompted his messy ouster from Louisville. Must be nice. These Gaels are a Cinderella by weight class only. BAG They’ve got it all: the blue-blood origin story that traces to a musty fieldhouse, the overpaid coach who colors outside the lines, a couple of hustle-playmaking white dudes for Jim Nantz to fall madly in love with. With no Duke or Kentucky in the mix, trust me, Kansas is the Evil Empire. And I’m not just saying that because I went to the workaday school on the other side of the Kansas-Missouri border. (M-I-Z!) AL No one truly can replace Duke; hating the Blue Devils is as venerable of a tradition in US sports as there is. However, many fans will make do with rooting against tainted head coach Rick Pitino, who is bringing his fifth different team, the Iona Gaels, to the men’s tournament. He may not be there long, however: the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference champions are facing heavily favored Alabama in the first round. HF Kansas come into this year’s tournament seeded third in the West Region and opposing teams will likely be extra motivated to knock out the loftiest of the blue-bloods in Indianapolis. TF Player to watch Cade Cunningham. Most draftniks have projected the 6ft 8in point guard, whose selfless, stylish game has drawn comparisons to Luka Dončić, as the No 1 overall pick in this summer’s NBA draft. He has posted monster numbers all season, and has also proven reliable in crunch time for the Cowboys. BAG This may very well be your last chance to catch Cam Thomas in an LSU uniform. The 6ft 4in guard has been absolutely brilliant in his inaugural season in Baton Rouge; his 22-plus point scoring average is the fourth-highest in the nation. But it’s how he does it – behind the arc, off the dribble, in traffic – that will leave you convinced that the next time you see him will be at the NBA draft. AL Cade Cunningham is projected by many to be the first pick in the NBA draft. While that doesn’t always – or even often – correlate to tournament success, he will make the Cowboys a much-watch team for as long as they are dancing. HF Many eyes will be on Gonzaga’s Jalen Suggs, who has a chance to cement himself as the second-best guard, if not the second-best player, in the draft class. Suggs who is averaging 14.3 points, 5.5 rebounds and 4.5 assists has been a lock for the top five in most mock drafts. TF Dark horse team to watch Loyola Chicago. Back in the NCAA tournament for the first time since their charmed Final Four run three years ago, the Missouri Valley Conference champions lead the nation in adjusted defensive efficiency and scoring defense, allowing a scant 55.5 points per game. I expect the ninth-seeded Ramblers to make things extremely uncomfortable for top-seeded Illinois in an intrastate second-round clash on Sunday. BAG Surely many will be tempted to write-off Liberty, a No 13 seed that would’ve made the bracket cut even if they had lost to North Alabama in the Atlantic Sun tournament final. But not only would the Flames have been dancing last year if it hadn’t been for Covid, they enter this year’s draw on a 12-game win streak built on stout defense and stingy turnover margins. AL The 12th-seeded UC-Santa Barbara Gauchos’ last tournament win was in 1990, but they have gone 22-4 this season, including wins in 18 of their last 19 games. Thanks partly to the rise of JaQuori McLaughlin, they have a solid shot at upsetting No 5 seed Creighton in their opening game. After that, who knows? HF Michigan State are one to watch this year, largely due to being handed an No 11 seed. The Spartans’ mix of talent and Tom Izzo’s tendency to get his players to play well in win-or-go-home situations should allow the two-time national champions to at least make the Sweet Sixteen. TF Cade Cunningham can cement his reputation as one of the best players in the college game. Photograph: Kevin Jairaj/USA Today Sports The most vulnerable No1 seed is… Baylor. The Bears won the Big 12 regular-season title for the first time in 71 years and earned the first No 1 seed in the program’s history, but a constellation of factors could see them go out early: they’ve vulnerable on the defensive boards (ranking 288th in defensive rebounding percentage), their offense depends heavily on three-point shooting (which can backfire in a single-elimination format), they’ve been dealt a brutal draw in the South Region and haven’t quite been the same after their 21-day Covid pause. BAG With star forward Isaiah Livers sidelined with a stress injury to his right foot, Michigan – despite a heroic run through the Big Ten tournament – seem ripe to go down as yet another disappointment for a historically underachieving conference. AL Michigan have the top seed in the East but they will be without Livers, their second-highest scorer. That leaves them open for an upset, particularly with No 2 Alabama looking dangerous. HF On the surface, Illinois have the easiest path of any No 1 seed this year, but many of the teams in the Midwest bracket began playing much better basketball towards the end of the season. They face the possibility of facing the most talented player in college basketball, Cade Cunningham, and a very good Oklahoma State team. TF One bold prediction Michigan crash out early. The Wolverines have been on the short list of national title contenders from the early days of the season, but the loss of centerpiece Isaiah Livers to a likely season-ending foot injury will prove fatal to their Final Four hopes. BAG Loyola Chicago does it again. AL No team will forfeit due to failed Covid-19 tests once the tournament begins. Fingers crossed, the NCAA’s attempt at creating a bubble goes as well as the NBA’s during last year’s playoffs, meaning there are no pandemic-related no-contests to come. HF Baylor may be one of the most talented teams in college basketball this year but have been slow to find the same form they showed before the program went on pause due to Covid issues. If they cannot shake off the rust, they might not last past the Elite Eight. TF The Final Four will be … Gonzaga, Florida State, Ohio State, Illinois. BAG Gonzaga, Alabama, North Carolina, Loyola Chicago. AL Gonzaga, Alabama, Baylor, Illinois. HF Gonzaga, Michigan, Ohio State, Oklahoma State. TF The winner will be… Illinois. Gonzaga came thisclose to breaking through for the program’s first national title back in 2017, when they pushed North Carolina to the limit in a title game marred by dubious officiating. This year’s Bulldogs are even better, but will end one hurdle short of becoming the first unbeaten men’s champion since 1976. The top-seeded Illini, led by the NBA-bound All-American pair of Ayo Dosunmu and Kofi Cockburn, are peaking at the right time and have the perfect balance of offensive firepower and defensive steel to break their own championship maiden. BAG Duke and Kentucky aren’t here. Kansas, Iona and Virginia, they’ve already beat. All the stars are aligned for Gonzaga, and a perfect season would make a fitting end for a formerly underdog program that have seen their high hopes dashed so many times in the past decade. And what better way to do it than in a finals rematch against the Tar Heels – the team that beat the Zags to the 2017 title. AL What a year to be the Person Who Always Picks Gonzaga. After going undefeated in the regular season, the Bulldogs were named the overall top seed. History isn’t necessarily on their side, the last Division I men’s basketball team to pull off a perfect season were the 1975-76 Indiana Hoosiers. Still freshman point guard phenomenon Jalen Suggs looks like the player to lead them to what would be (somewhat surprisingly) their first national championship. HF Gonzaga have been unstoppable this year, going undefeated. Led by Suggs and projected first-round picks Corey Kispert and Joël Ayayi, Gonzaga have the chance to run the table in March en route to a national title. TF

Should You Chase Ethereum Here Or Wait For A Pullback?

Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) – A few days before an energy crisis hit Texas, the state’s chief energy regulator issued an order to prioritize “human needs.” It sounded like a no-brainer: Divert natural gas supplies to homes and critical businesses and away from everything else deemed a lower priority.But more than 100 emails obtained by Bloomberg reveal how the move also sowed confusion as energy suppliers and Texas regulators struggled to determine which power stations should get preferential treatment as millions were plunged into darkness. The disarray meant some facilities that could provide power to the grid lost gas supply when they needed it most.One power plant that serves half a million customers saw gas supplies cut because of the way a pipeline company interpreted the state’s order. Utilities – and even some of the state’s own regulators – scrambled to figure out whether gas should flow to so-called cogeneration plants that provide both heat and power, because they typically serve industrial users but are also capable of supplying the grid. Gas producers, meanwhile, complained about their power being cut, choking off their own operations.“This may not be a cut and dry determination,” Mark Evarts, a director at the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, wrote in an email the morning of Feb. 14.The emails received by the commission show how woefully unprepared Texas was for the extreme weather and ensuing energy crisis, even though it has to contend almost yearly with hurricanes, drought and high winds. The confusion arose despite federal energy regulators saying in a report following a cold snap in Texas a decade ago that state regulators should clarify the priority they give to gas customers.Similar situations are likely to be occur as climate change is expected to bring more natural disasters and threats to power generation. While the recent experience in Texas highlights how the state is unusually dependent on power for heating, with almost two-thirds of homes equipped with electric heating, other parts of the U.S. are expected to follow that trend.The Railroad Commission emails obtained by Bloomberg are among the first state records regarding the February storm and subsequent outages made available by public information requests.The commission said in a statement that its orders were “a proactive step to prioritize natural gas deliveries for human needs,” including by elevating the priority of gas-fired power generation. State grid operator The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, also known as Ercot, said it was “appreciative” of the Railroad Commission’s orders. The state’s Public Utility Commission said it was “premature” to discuss individual factors that may have played a role in the outages.“In a crisis like this, there’s always some fog of war that leads to some misunderstanding,” said James Coleman, an associate professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law in Dallas, who focuses on energy.As the powerful cold blast and sweeping blackouts pushed electricity prices to historic levels in mid-February, gas supplies grew scarce as weather curtailments limited production. But gas producers also struggled to maintain output when their own operations lost electricity, leaving them unable to thaw frozen infrastructure and pressurize gas so it could be sent through pipelines.The Railroad Commission instituted emergency orders on the evening of Feb. 12, just about 48 hours before the Texas power grid came close to total collapse. The agency prioritized sending gas to residences, hospitals, schools and churches that could directly generate heat from the fuel. Direct use of natural gas for heat is more efficient than using it to make electricity, but well over half the state’s homes rely on the power grid for heat.Second priority went to power plants serving “human needs customers” – but officials at the commission quickly learned that it wasn’t always easy to figure out which facilities met that description.The Railroad Commission fielded questions from gas utilities trying to figure out if they were allowed to send supplies to cogeneration facilities. At one point, Ercot asked the commission for help keeping cogeneration units online after some had faltered due to a loss of gas supplies.“I would like to reach out to the pipelines and see if we can assure them that these units are exporting to the grid and that we do need them in order to restore electric service,” Woody Rickerson, the grid operator’s vice president of grid planning and operations, said in an email the evening of Feb. 15, the same day Ercot had called for rotating outages.In the early hours of Feb. 17, when millions were still without power, a managing director at Starwood Energy Group included the Railroad Commission on a message pleading for its gas supplier, Oneok WestTex, to restore service to the Quail Run Power Plant “as quickly as possible.” Oneok had cut supplies earlier that night, citing the commission’s order and leaving the gas-fired plant unable to serve its roughly 500,000 customers.“In these unprecedented times, I am sure you share our goal to support the restoration of the electric grid as quickly as possible,” Starwood’s Jeffrey Delgado wrote in an email at 3:02 a.m. local time.Oneok said in a statement this week that it followed the commission’s order and paused service only to “interruptible customers until they could establish they were serving human needs.” Once that was confirmed, the company said it shuttled gas to those facilities.It wasn’t just questions over the term “human needs” that created confusion. Eagleclaw Midstream, a private equity-backed pipeline company in the Permian Basin, said it needed special permission from the Railroad Commission so it wouldn’t face “a frivolous claim for significant monetary damages” for canceling an existing supply contract in order to send gas to a power plant in Odessa instead.“The issue is that we do not have the luxury of time!” Eagleclaw Chief Executive Officer Jamie Welch wrote in a message on Feb. 17. “Minutes and hours count.”But granting companies the ability to reroute supplies was the exact purpose of the order. Welch said this week that the commission responded promptly and the company was supplying the Odessa power plant within a matter of “a few hours.”Gas producers without electricity for their operations, meanwhile, frantically messaged well coordinates to regulators in the hopes of getting their electricity stored.“If I can get power back to [West Texas] we can supply 8,000 Mcfd+ back to the system,” one gas producer said in a message sent to the Railroad Commission by the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers on Feb. 17.“Targa can handle gas, but Navitas, WTG and DCP are all shut in or curtailed,” another said, referring to pipelines. “This is where the focus should be. We are doing everything we can to get our wells back online, but doesn’t do any good if the gas companies can’t move the gas.”It’s not yet clear how much of the shortfall in gas supplies to power plants was due to power outages versus well freeze-offs and other weather-related curtailments versus a lack of electricity.There might have been an easy fix to this problem: filling in a form that would grant certain companies the status of being critical to the grid and allow them to keep receiving power. But for much of the week, not even Railroad Commission Chairman Christi Craddick was aware that option existed.“I didn’t know that was an opportunity,” Craddick told lawmakers during a hearing on Feb. 26.The email exchanges show that it wasn’t until Feb. 20, after the worst of the crisis had passed, that Ercot sent a link to the application for critical-load status to the Railroad Commission, which then passed it on to more than 70 representatives of energy companies.“There’s still just so much we don’t know about,” said Coleman of Southern Methodist University. “A lot went wrong all at once, and I think that’s a clue that the solutions we should be looking at are network-wide things.”(Updates with federal regulators’ recommendations in fifth paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

Valid Points: Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake May Happen Sooner Than You Think

Eth 2.0 may be coming to a computer screen near you quicker than most anticipated, including the Ethereum developers.

Last week, Vitalik Buterin released a “quick merge via fork choice change” document – a lighter version of the Executable Beacon Chain for quick deployment. While only a loose technical document, the plan ostensibly serves as a notice against any further agitation from Ethereum miners as the merge would allow Ethereum to abandon mining in a rapid fashion.

The Executable Beacon Chain is a proposal to attach Eth 1.x – which we will now refer to as Ethpow (proof-of-work Ethereum) – onto the currently running proof-of-stake Ethereum: the Beacon Chain.

Related: Bitcoin Is Not a Stock

The proposal works by having slightly altered Ethereum software, like Geth or OpenEthereum, point its transaction flow at the Beacon Chain. Instead of miners packaging transactions into blocks, the Beacon Chain’s validators will verify and finalize transactions.

“The only change required on the ethpow side is that the client must have a communication channel with a trusted beacon node and must change its fork choice rule,” Buterin writes.

Why the rush?

A quickened transition schedule is being considered for a few reasons. One recent consideration has been rising tensions between mining parties and Ethereum developers as EIP 1559 and PoS come into focus. The former proposal is highly contested by mining parties, but has achieved enough support among developers to be included in July’s London hard fork. PoS, of course, would see mining done away with completely.

Developers, however, have the high ground in this fight. A quick merge to PoS would only require “at least one honest miner” in order to start the merge. Multiple honest mining parties pointing blocks to the Beacon Chain would entail a smooth transition, Buterin says.

Related: Bitcoin Volatility Index ‘BitVol’ Makes First Trade

Story continues

A quick transition to PoS does preclude the inclusion of multiple highly touted Ethereum tech stacks, at least for the moment.

Yet, at the end of the day a transition to PoS remains the goal of Ethereum developers, as it has been since before Ethpow launched. Any transition to PoS where Ethereum doesn’t lose its top dog position as the go-to platform for decentralized apps would likely be considered a victory.

Pulse check: Validator efficiencies

If you’re new to Valid Points and the topic of Ethereum 2.0 in general, be sure to check out our 101 explainer on Eth 2.0 metrics to get up to speed about terminology used throughout this newsletter.

CoinDesk’s Eth 2.0 validator node, Zelda, is humming along perfectly, earning roughly 0.0073 ETH or $13.12 per day.

While the amount of reward earned by our Eth 2.0 validator has not changed significantly over the past few weeks, I did notice a spike in Zelda’s computer processing power and a subsequent drop in her memory usage.

According to CoinDesk’s data dashboard, Zelda’s central processing unit (CPU) usage almost doubled from around 100% to 200% on Friday, March 12, and has stayed at these heightened levels ever since.

This suggests that Zelda is consuming more electrical energy in order to perform the same tasks it did before. For context, Zelda has four CPUs it can max out before validator operations are negatively impacted. Operating at a level of 200% suggests we’re using the max computing power of two out of four CPUs.

At the same time, Zelda’s usage of random access memory (RAM), which is the component of a computer that is reserved for temporary data storage, has gone down from around 4 GB to rough 2.5 GB.

This suggests the memory capacity needed for running this Eth 2.0 validator has dropped. Zelda has up to 16GB of RAM, enough for an average desktop computer to run various applications and demanding games. For Eth 2.0 validating, we use roughly 15% of total RAM, enough for tablet devices to use.

Ethereum validator rewards vs. mining rewards

It’s important to note that under a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol, whereby transactions and blocks are finalized through the process of mining, the aim would be to consistently max out a computer’s processing power and optimize all unused components of hardware for increasing the probability of earning network rewards.

Under Ethereum’s proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol, there’s no need to do either of these things. Despite operating below its computational capacity, Zelda still maintains an effectiveness of 100%, according to beaconcha.in. This is because, unlike mining, staking isn’t about competing for rewards against other validators through greater hashpower.

All validators who keep their operations up and running are rewarded on a consistent and regular basis in the form of interest on their stake. The only way to substantially increase the amount of rewards earned on the network is to stake more wealth in 32 ETH increments. (More on the reward dynamics of Eth 2.0 validators versus Ethereum miners here.)

The Eth 2.0 network does not reward aggressive increases in computing power nor sneaky optimizations to hardware. If anything, developers of the protocol are working hard to find ways in which the computational burden of being a validator can be reduced even further and updated so that even a mobile device could one day be sufficient for securing the network.

Going back to the mysterious changes in CPU usage and RAM, it turns out a code update was released by CoinDesk Director of Engineering Spencer Beggs last Friday in preparation for Ethereum’s upcoming system-wide upgrade dubbed “Berlin.”

As an Eth 2.0 validator, Zelda’s responsibilities can only be performed by connecting to both Ethereum’s PoW and PoS networks. The upcoming upgrade to Ethereum’s PoW network required Beggs to update part of our software, which likely triggered these changes in our energy consumption and memory usage.

This code update is mandatory for all Eth 2.0 validators and must be implemented by April 14, 2021, at the latest. If you’re a validator and haven’t yet made the upgrade, you can download and install the latest software releases for Berlin here.

Validated takes

Editorial on getting Ethereum to proof-of-stake as soon as humanly possible (Blog post, Ben Edgington)

Associated Press NFT artwork sells for $180,000 in ETH (Article, CoinDesk)

Bitcoin, baseball and new drama in the Ethereum 2.0 timeline (Video, CoinDesk)

DeFi lending protocolAlchemix raises $4.9 million in round led by CMS and Alameda (Article, CoinDesk)

How to create, buy and sell NFTs (Article, CoinDesk)

Factoid of the week

Open comms

Feel free to reply any time and email research@coindesk.com with your thoughts, comments or queries about today’s newsletter. Between reads, chat with us on Twitter.

Valid Points incorporates information and data directly from CoinDesk’s own Eth 2.0 validator node in weekly analysis. All profits made from this staking venture will be donated to a charity of our choosing once transfers are enabled on the network. For a full overview of the project, check out our announcement post.

You can verify the activity of the CoinDesk Eth 2.0 validator in real time through our public validator key, which is:

0xad7fef3b2350d220de3ae360c70d7f488926b6117e5f785a8995487c46d323ddad0f574fdcc50eeefec34ed9d2039ecb.

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