CryptoGram_0008: January 9, 2018

State of the Market:

For new readers:
Cryptogram is my personal journal of thoughts about cryptocurrencies and related topics. I am posting them on Steemit as a means of keeping a record of them. At the bottom of each post is brief summary of the general layout of this, and future posts. Thanks for reading. (Also to find other posts, search "cryptogram")

Getting into it...
First off, ETH is hitting new highs every day right now. My first inclination when fees were out of control and no one could get reasonably gwei priced txs through was that ETH would drop. Not so, it appears the increased activity is only driving the price up.

In other Ethereum new, I began experimenting with Radar Relay, https://radarrelay.com/. It is a decentralized exchange that use 0x protocol and interacts with you meta mask wallet. Currently it is in beta and there are no ZRX fees. This is good, because as cool as the platform is, the ETH fees alone make it irritatingly expensive to trade.

In reality, the only reason that I was wanting to trade on RR was because it seems to be the only exchange i can find offering BLOOM (BLT.) Currently trading around 2.00 - 2.25, I think it could be pretty solid. The caveat, is the team must lock up the excess tokens from the sale in escrow, if they don't, and the circulating supply is extreme, then the token has already reached a huge market cap. Hard to know what to do on this one. I dont like how they did their token sale, but nonetheless, it does seem like a good project.

My second set of thoughts this morning is in regards to blockchain data. For my own purposes i am attempting to pull the data for either hash rate, or difficulty from the zcash chain so that i can create my own difficulty vs time graph. However, i have no idea how to pull this data. Is the data recorded in the block chain? i assume so, but i guess i dont know for sure. I would expect it is in the header of each block.. but i dont know how to pull it. If anyone who reads this knows how to do this, i would be very interested to learn. In the mean time, if i find out anything ill either post it as a CryptoGram or as a linked alternate post.

Thanks for reading,
-libertyhound

Purpose of CryptoGram:
Currently in the crypto space it can be difficult to remember what you have discussed or been thinking from one week to the next. The rapid development of, and many changes in the space keep everyone on their toes. Now that I have been financially involved in the space for roughly a year, I realize that I would love to have my thoughts from 2017 written down somewhere. I believe having this information will help me stay focused, avoid repeating past mistakes, and hopefully help some other people, (anyone who decides to read this,) from making those same mistakes.

Briefly, I need a place to record my train of thought and that place will now be dubbed "CryptoGram"

My initial thoughts on the structure of this post will be:

• About 500 words
• Frequency of once a day to once a week
• Each post will have a number and date
• A snippet of top 5 cmc coins for price reference.
• I will always use these 5 tags, (unless of course there are drastic changes, but for now these will be the tags!)
  • bitcoin cryptocurrency ethereum cryptogram libertyhound