I don't know if this will be useful to anyone. So I write a line or two about every game I play, and decided to find all the incremental in my game journal and post them here. It starts with the latest games I've played and I think goes back to several years back. One thing I've realized is I have such a love-hate-hate relationship with this genre since I think I've hated 90% of the games and 100% of myself after each incremental phase. I usually angrily stop playing them for a while and restart them again, so this is more or less a journal of addiction, I suppose.
THE BEST GAMES I'VE PLAYED ARE THESE (no order):

Kittens Game
Antimatter Dimensions
Oil Tycoon

Honorable Mention: Eggs, Inc
The rest: more or less hated it
Additional comment if you decide to scan through it, I complain a lot, so it is perfectly reasonable and normal to think, "why the fuck are you even playing these games, idiot??".

------
Time Idle RPG
This game was confusing. It tells me the game's resources is time, where you get 1 of it every second, but that's not really something as unique as I assumed. It would have been cool if time as resources meant you used it to deal with something related to time. Maybe time travel? Maybe slowing and speeding time?
Instead time as resource buys you stuff like a library. And then you buy a camp or something. Honestly, I wasn't really feeling it.
2
Path of Idling
The biggest cardinal sin for me when it comes to incremental is when a game has a lot of features and it just completely throws them all at you instantly. The joy of a great incremental is how things slowly open up and each new achievement feels progress.
The game is a RPG game and these are the things that opened up for me in the first few hours.
Combat which includes normal fighting, dungeon, raid, boss, PVP (locked, but it just needs an ascend, which I haven't done)
Skills
Hero upgrades which include Passive (strength, defence, stamina, intelligence), Train, and a huge Tree
Town which you can buy workers who get you various things like gold, orbs, knowledge, etc. You can upgrade stuff here.
Quest that also includes Perks and Skill quests.
Gear which 5 equipment slots, plus craft plus trade plus smelt
Also gear for your Pet, which is also another tab!
Now, here is the thing. Because I have all of this pretty much instantly, I don't really know which ones are helping me go past a well. How is adding 10 points in strength helping me? Should I have added five in strength instead and five in defence? I have already bought 20 or so upgrades in the Tree, but I have no idea if I am made the optimal choice. There is no real excitement with getting new gear. And so on.
The dev has added a lot of features, now it's time to rework the game, and have the features take their time.
2
Idle Slayer
The game is like a super simple platformer. Your character is running and any enemy it hits, it automatically slays it. There is no HP, and all enemies die in one shot. Your only active play is jumping occasionally to grab coins or hit the flying enemies. Also, you have a run skill that has a cool down.
With the coins, we get new weapons that give us more coins. Enemies give us souls which is used for the prestige system that provides us with an interesting skill tree which provides a lot of choices on the path you want to do in terms of upgrades.
So far excellent, however, the game has an extremely serious issue of pacing. The game initially progresses so fast that in the first hour or so, you get almost all the weapons aside from the last two, which then grinds down to a snail pace. You can upgrade your past weapons, but they never really get into play again. Reaching high levels of past weapons sometimes gave me upgrades of that weapon of 10,000% but they still did nothing to my overall coin per second. I think the pacing needs to be fully reworked. It would have been nice to get new weapons after certain prestige cycles, so that every new weapon feels like we have passed a significant wall. The best part of an incremental game for me is to face a wall, and when I finally break it, I feel powerful again for a while. This game feels like this though, powerful powerful powerful powerful WALL........break it....WALL. And so on. I'm still playing it as I want to get some of the skills, but I feel like it could have been so much better.
4
Exponential Idle
A very back to the foundation kind of incremental. The premise is that you are a student and working on a formula. There is a neat story where as you progress in the game, your character progresses through university. Each upgrade gives you more and more automation until I reached a stage where I would check back once every 2 or 3 days, click a 2nd layer prestige reset, and close it. Meaning the game was something like 5 seconds of game player every 2 days. I just opened it for this review and realized I had reached the end game. The story wraps up and it tells me "You can take a rest. Travel a bit. Go outside!" NO, DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO GAME.
3
Factoid
Factoid & Spark should have the same review as they are almost the same game with only small differences. The games are the most basic kind of incremental, where you buy something with resources, until you get the next thing which gives you more of the resources. Both give you upgrades to speed things up, and finally prestige and it's own prestige upgrades. That's it. It's nice little change of pace from all the recent incremental that sometimes do too much, but obviously due to the very simple nature of it, it does eventually feel pointless, specially after you more or less open up everything and the prestige upgrades just keep repeating.
3
Spark
Factoid & Spark should have the same review as they are almost the same game with only small differences. The games are the most basic kind of incremental, where you buy something with resources, until you get the next thing which gives you more of the resources. Both give you upgrades to speed things up, and finally prestige and it's own prestige upgrades. That's it. It's nice little change of pace from all the recent incremental that sometimes do too much, but obviously due to the very simple nature of it, it does eventually feel pointless, specially after you more or less open up everything and the prestige upgrades just keep repeating. 3
Antimatter Dimensions
Easily top 5 incremental on mobile. Does everything perfectly. You progress nicely, and when new features open it, not only is it rewarding but more importantly, it keeps adding new dimensions (lol) to the game. I'd at the end game as I write this, and I realize that there was no point in the game where it felt stale. Each new prestige layer made the game feel fresh and almost like a new incremental game.
5
Melvor Idle
It seems this game was mainly aimed at Runescape players, which is probably why it didn't click for me. It also run extremely slow on my phone which also played a part in me not really getting into.
2
A Girl Adrift
The animation is really pretty and is a nice change of pace for incrementals, but I didn't really like the too much active play. Really had to keep going back and forth to different areas to do the fishing which got too repetitive for me.
You travel to different areas of the map to catch fish, which you get points and then you upgrade stuff, but I didn't really find any real excitement about the upgrades because I kept having to go back to previous areas to fish similar creatures.
3
Archer: Danger Phone
I'm really annoyed how terrible of a game this was. Two things I like, the TV show "Archer" and incremental games, and it's done in the most lazy manner. The game is the worst aspect of idle games where it's just a straight path of clicking the next upgrade with absolutely zero decision making. Every once in a while there is a mini game where Archer gets to shoot others but it's done in the most basic form of early 2000s flash games, where the animation budget is probably 3 dollars. Same static background and both enemies and Archer have just two animation frames. The absolute laziness of it is almost insulting to the player, because it feels like we aren't even worth the effort.
There is an Archer story in the game which develops really fast, which is the only positive part, but no voice acting is again another evidence that the creators of the game weren't given any budget for this.
1
Home Quest
This game is way too slow. You have to collect materials to build your settlement but everything takes time, so you click for a few seconds, and then you have to leave the game. Which I'm fine with, but the problem isn't the idle part of it, it's how the idle part of it combines with constant checking of the game which annoys me. I like an idle game where you forget to start the game for a day, you come up to a lot of resources, but this is a game which needs you to check back in every 30 minutes or an hour to really get anywhere. I felt that the micromanagement was getting worse as I progressed (without any actual thing to do when I am active in the game) that made me give up.
2
Idle Industry
This is probably an interesting game, but I gave up because the one thing I really disliked was the amount of resources and manufacturing that very quickly opens to you. You can buy raw materials, and you can either sell these raw materials or turn them into finished goods and sell them either. And each of these has several upgrade options (increase selling price, increase production, etc). Without even really getting too deep into the game, I have around 20 raw materials and around 30 finished products. A satisfying part of this genre is to have things slow open up for you, which gives me a decent feeling of satisfaction. But the money I got would quickly open up new products, so I would just jump ahead and purchase more expensive ones, and after a while I had a lot of materials and products at zero, and was instead focusing on latter ones.
2
Masters of Madness
Somewhat neat atmosphere and visuals, but too much active clicking. Click, upgrade to get more per clicks, get minions to get you some points without clicking, typical clicker, but with the added benefit of almost no idling. I like idling incrementals but clickers is a hard no from me.
1
Soda Dungeon 2
Basically similar to the first one, as far as I could tell. I did "finish" it but maybe I shouldn't have, since it really is the same thing from early on, specially once you get all the heroes and you kind of sort out which characters work best, then it's just the same. But because it was somewhat short and no real wall, it was at least easy to stick to it to the end.
2
Bacterial Takeover
Played for a decent amount and was actually more interesting that I thought, given the buttload of ad incentives. You create and upgrade bacteria, attack planets, and eventually go into a blackhole to prestige. Most of the game was good, but the part that killed it for me was the prestige system. Once you prestige, planets get super easy to attack, which becomes a lot of active play. I realized that each prestige was taking me at least 30 minutes to get to where I was, and it was just meaningless clicking. It got to a point where I was putting off prestige because it seemed like it would be a hassle so I stopped.
2
LogRogue
Cute graphics. The hero sort of hopping to hit the tiny monsters is cute to look at, but how long can you look at it and do nothing before you realize that it's boring? I suppose this is a game where it's just not for me. I don't like to have my phone open on a game and just watch it like a crazy person and do nothing. My rule is simple for incrementals. While the app is open, be active, if there isn't any choices to make, close the app while resources build up or whatever. I don't like it being open while I do nothing.
3
A Kittens Game
Incremental games are so strange. I get in and out of the phases. I loved this for so long and so obsessively that I wanted to only play incremental games. And then, just like that, I was wondering why the fuck I was wasting my time with this. Has happened countless times before.
But still probably the best incremental ever.
5
A Dark Room
An incremental cult classic of sorts but I don't find it really matches the genre. There is a bit of incremental at the beginning with people huts and stuff but then its just a ascii exploring game, which wasn't interesting to me.
2
Little Healer
Saw it mentioned in the Reddit incremental forum in one of the posts and thought it was a healer themed incremental which sounded neat. But it's like being a healer in a raid in World of Warcraft without any if the extras. Just a couple of bars representing your team mates and you healing them while they fight the boss. I didn't even like playing the healer in WoW so no way would I play this game.
1
Clickie Zoo
Started playing for a few days until I realized there a beta released with the dev reworking the game completely from scratch and releasing it as "Idle Zoo Tycoon". So, played that instead but this seemed like a game I would enjoy anyway.
4
Idling to Rule the Gods
The UI and one drawing if your character is really ugly enough to be distracting to me. The game, seemed interesting and I eventually was into it, but seems like a game that has been constantly being updated, which is not always a good thing, because features are obviously updated regularly to it, making the whole thing a bit bloaty.
I guess, this is the problem with this game for me, it's too fat. Also, one main part of the game is that your character creates Shadow Clones up to a maximum limit. Which is fine except the clones can't be made in offline mode. This might not be a big deal in its original web browser game but that doesn't work as well in a mobile format.
2
Realm Grinder
This is one of the really popular incremental and it's fanbase seems to love it for it's depth, but to be honest, I don't play these games for the depth, I play it for the simple dopamine rush of doing the same thing over and over again. It relaxes.
Although, I didn't even get to the depth part because I dislike games where it rushes in the beginning. I constantly bought buildings, got spells, and got upgrades without even looking at the description. Apparently, later on, we can get complicated race upgades, which seems not what I'm looking for in such a genre.
2
Spaceplan
A short (!!) incremental with an actual story (!!!). That's two cool points for it but unfortunately, the game mechanics of increment genre isn't so good. It's a space game with nice visuals and a great ending (cool music set to cool graphics) but the game itself wasn't really that fun. This same exact game would have been better in a different genre (maybe something like "Out There"?)
3
Zombidle
Felt like idle games again and this is the kind of examples that kept me away. Too much clicking and seems like advancement will start to get irritating since it relies on IAPs
2
Eggs, Inc
While I was playing it, Eggs, Inc was probably my favorite Android game I had ever played. But like most incremental games, there comes a moment when I suddenly stop and think, what am I doing?
Because there is something fascinating about Incrementals. Their addictiveness is in a way the whole point. An incremental is less of a game and more an act of electronic addictiveness. What's the point?
Eggs, Inc is a very well made and fun incremental but even the best in its genre is still pointless.
4
Castle Clicker
Supposedly a mix of incremental and city building but didn't really find out since the clickings were way to much. I know this is supposed to be the genre but I like the incremental part more than the tapping part. This seemed to be a good way to hurt your fingers.
2
Endless Era
This RPG clicker game is like other such games but with horrible GUI and animations. Tap tap tap. It's my fault for downloading such games. Why would I ever think this would be fun???
1
Idle Quote
An incremental game with a unique twist. This time we get to make up quotes! The first negative about the game and this irritates me a lot is most of the quotes are fake. A quick search on Google and this proves it. Quotes are generally attributed to Buddha or Ghandi or shit like that and it's usually fake like most quotes on the internet. This kills the major possible advantage of the game because I thought coming up with arbitrary words would at least give me some quotes to learn. Aside from the this, the game isn't fun either because it slows down very quickly meaning you combine words very slowly at a certain stage of the game and then it becomes a boring grind.
2
Monster Miser
An incremental game with almost no graphics. We just see character portraits of monsters which we buy and then upgrade until we buy the next monster. Eventually we prestige which gives us multipliers. The only game choice is choosing between two monsters with each new monster with unique benefits. Annoyingly there is a max limit which I wish didn't exist because I wanted to prestige so much that I would be over powerful in upgrading like that "Idle Oil Tycoon". Still, pointless but reasonably fun.
3
Pocket Politics
An incremental take on politics sounds fun but it's so generic that it could have been about anything. A Capitalist idle game or a cooking idle game, it wouldn't matter. IAP was also the usual shitty kind.
1
Time Clickers
A shooter incremental sounds like a cool twist but it's not a FPS like I imagined it would be. I'm just stuck in a room and I was shooting blocks. Upgrades didn't give me any enjoyment since I was shooting fucking blocks.
1
Tap Tap Fish - Abyssrium
I thought this was going to be relaxing incremental but the ridiculous and generic IAPs and all the social integeration spoil it. Too much time is spent in them asking you to buy or share or tweet or post or give them a blowjob. And there is nothing relaxing about that.
2
Cartoon 999
Incremental game about comic book writers, but not the marvel DC kind, it seemed to be the webcomic one and I think it's a Korean developer so all the characters and injokes made no sense to me. The whole thing was just targeted to a very specific audience.
2
Dungeon Manager
Incremental games need to be simple but this is beyond simple, it's just upgrade a fighter to level 5, go to next dungeon character, do the same, and just continue without any of the delicious balancing of upgrades like other idle games.
2
Final Fortress
Incremental games are already pointless but when it's super heavy on IAP than its also annoying, but when it always has bugs that doesn't register my offline earnings, then it just needs a uninstall in its face.
The zombie skin was also crappy.
1
Mana Maker
Here is how I know this clicker isn't very good. It doesn't make me hate all clickers and my life and mobile gaming in general for being so addictive and pointless.
So fail, sorry.
2
Infinity Dungeon
The usual incremental RPG that I should probably never play again. Starts simple enough and then gets more or a chore as you play.
1
Another incremental game which I had promised myself not to play anymore because they are so pointless and repetitive and endless. Well, this wasn't infinite and had a goal at 999 level so I thought it was good but while the humor was cute, the game did become very repetitive. Every 10 levels the slimes changed but after every 100 levels the whole thing restarted and while the monsters got stronger, I seemed to get even stronger. So the game became easier as I progressed and there was no more challenge. By level 800, I gave up.
2
Tap Dungeon RPG
Okay, I'm running out of ways to complain about those incremental RPG games that all have similar problems. It starts off reasonably fast and fun but soon it seems like I am in a data entry job. Doing the same thing over and over again with little changes.
1
Dungeon 999 F: Secret of Slime Dungeon
Another incremental game which I had promised myself not to play anymore because they are so pointless and repetitive and endless. Well, this wasn't infinite and had a goal at 999 level so I thought it was good but while the humor was cute, the game did become very repetitive. Every 10 levels the slimes changed but after every 100 levels the whole thing restarted and while the monsters got stronger, I seemed to get even stronger. So the game became easier as I progressed and there was no more challenge. By level 800, I gave up.
2
Tap Dungeon RPG
Okay, I'm running out of ways to complain about those incremental RPG games that all have similar problems. It starts off reasonably fast and fun but soon it seems like I am in a data entry job. Doing the same thing over and over again with little changes.
1
Tower of Hero
You start on the first floor of the tower and keep fighting your way up by summoning your heroes (by clicking) and recruiting other fighters, get upgrades, level up, and then, ugh, here is the typical incremental RPG part, restart, get items, and do it ALL over again.
There is something fun about restarting and getting slowly stronger each time but it also feels so pointless after a while. Such a pointless genre now that I have played a billion of such titles, heh.
3
Pageboy
Yet another incremental RPG which I have no idea why I downloaded because I'm sick of the genre. I played a pageboy to a knight who does the fighting while I collect the lot. I collect the loot, buy stuff for the knight, and eventually I restart to do the same thing again and get better items but this game I didn't even RESTART! Because fuck it! Fuck it!
2
Idle Warriors
The story is cute. Human population is regressing while monster population is on the rise. So the humans start enslaving monsters to mine for them! The brave warriors beat the crap out of monsters, kidnap the bosses, and enslave them. The animation of monsters slaving away while speech balloons above them talk about their wife and children is funny.
But the game itself is another RPG incremental which I should start staying away from. These games are like a chore for me nowadays because I'm doing the same crap again and again. The blame is probably on me because it seems like a reasonably solid game. But hey, fuck it, I PERSONALLY didn't enjoy it.
2
Tap! Tap! Faraway!
Any game that is remotely like Tap Titan scares me. They are addictive at first and very fast moving but after every restart gets more and more annoying. It soon turns into a time eating activity with the player having to redo the initial levels to get relics to get better items to progress further to restart to get relics to and so on until the player realizes how much time he is putting in the game for a repetitive activity.
2
Auto RPG
Now that is a title the game developers didn't spend too much time on. RPG battles are automatic but I can help out by clicking like a mad man. I started with one hero but would get additional members in my party as the story progressed. Party members receive skills as as they level up and while all the skill usage is automatic, it did give me a sense of progression which is extremely important in a RPG and which I think is usually lacking in incremental games. It usually starts feeling useless but in this game at least there are new maps, new members, and an actual end sight!
There is an infinity stage once the last boss is defeated but I am glad the infinity stage happens AFTER the end and it's not the game itself.
4
Merchant
Hire a hero and send on to battle. The battles is done automatically and takes time, starts with something short like 10 seconds with each battle taking longer. The loot is raw materials which can be used to craft equipment which also takes real life time with better items taking longer. The crafted items can either be sold or equipped to the hero to make him be able to fight stronger monsters.
I was worried I would hate the longer crafting and fighting times because I hate games which I have to watch for a task to finish but even though the durations for longer, I had more to do. However, I don't know what would have happened in the end game because I gave up on it. New maps were exactly like the first map just with different heroes but the progression was similar in each level which felt that I was doing the exact same thing all over again but with longer task times.
2
Idle Oil Tycoon
This is the best idle game I played. It's graphics aren't just minor, they are none existent. It's just numbers, so basic that my sister thought I was on a stock market app.
It's such a simple concept. Invest, get oil, upgrade then like other idlers restart to get a bonus and do the full thing all over again. When I finished the game, I played the unlimited mode which I played until the unlimited mode couldn't handle the numbers anymore.
5
Soda Dungeon
This kind-of Idle Dungeon was great. I started with weak ass fighters who would fight on my behalf while I collected the loot. I then got to use the lot to upgrade the sofa bar to recruit more adventurers. Not sure why it was a sofa bar. Maybe they wanted to make it a family game and not have alcohol? Sounds weird but the sofa element in a RPG game sounds weirder.
The game only hit a brick for me when, like most other incremental games, there is no real closure. Once I thought I bet the big bad guy, it just goes on, harder but similar enough with no end in sight. Eventually, we have to stop playing right, but it always feels a bit like a let down when I don't feel like I have finished the game.
4
10 Billion Wives Kept Man Life
The two games from this company, 10 Billion Wives and Kept Man Life, have similar strengths and weaknesses.
I liked the silly premises from both. In 10BM, I had to get married as much as I could, using the loves I collect to marry more expensive wives! In KML, I'm a boyfriend who doesn't work and I have to please my career gf so she would take care of me.
Both start reasonably fast and I was willing to grind through difficult parts but the end game is like a brick wall. Passing through it to get all the achievements is pretty much impossible unless one puts in way too many hours. And it's a shame because I really wanted to get all the achievements to see all the tiny little extra stuff.
3
Adventure Capitalist
One of the better incremental games, but now that I am out of the short lived incremental fan phase, I realized how dumb the genre is. Tap, tap, tap, upgrade, do this a million times, reset, and do it all over again like a moron. The game does deserve credits for me acting like a moron and playing it for so long but I also cheated and got free cash and then if occupying became even more pointless.
3
The Monolith
A combination of an incremental and a civilization building game seemed like an excellent idea and in some ways, it was, specially how we get to upgrade through the ages from cavemen to futuristic. But no offline feature means that the resets aren't enticing.
2
USSR Simulator
An incremental game that has a great theme (USSR!) but absolutely horrible to enjoy, even though I did stick to it. After a certain upgrades, the game just turned into me popping in the game, clicking an upgrade and then forgetting about the game for a few days.
2
RPG Clicker
They should call these games tappers not clickers. We are not clicking anything on a touchscreen device. Anyway, tap tap tap level up buy weapons tap tap and uninstall.
1
Logging Quest Logging Quest 2
[Review is for the original and its sequel]
There is not much of a difference between the game. I actually played them both at the same time because the actual game is offline. You choose your hero, send them to a dungeon, and then come back to the game after a while to see how well they did. I thought an offline RPG like this might be interesting but then, if you don't really play a game, how much fun can it be?
1
Another pointless incremental. I was in an incremental phase and got so many incremental games that I know realize were absolutely pointless.
Hit a tree, buy upgrades, get a new hero, and continue hitting a tree. Not much offline it seems which is what I like about incrementals.
1
Galaxy Clicker
A space incremental that should have been a lot of fun. You get to upgrade your spaceship and buy new ones and explorer new planets. But first of all, the interface is so ugly that it makes playing the game less enjoyable. And a lot of things I didn't really get no matter how much I would play like the full exploring planets. The spaceships were nice, so it could have been fun.
2
Megatramp
A pretty pointless incremental kind of game. You are a tramp and then you can collect money to buy upgrades to make more money, with no strategy needed, nor any effort needs to be made to hurt your brain cells.
1
Inflation RPG
It supposed to be some kind of incremental RPG, I think, which has you resetting and getting more powerful and then fighting monsters to get insane levels. It is very unique but I couldn't get into it.
2
Widget RPG
Are you fucking with me? This is button bashing rpg in the most extreme manner. You get a widget, so you don't even have to open the game and distract yourself from the button bushing. Just click the button and the game plays behind the scenes and gets you experience, loot, and kills.
It's a ridiculous idea that is fun for a few minutes to see what they come up with but there is only so much button bashing you can do.
2
Capitalist Tycoon
I downloaded this game because I was in an incremental/idle game phase and really enjoyed AdVenture Capitalist. But this game is nothing like that. On the surface, it seems similar, buy small investments, make money, buy bigger investments, and so on.
But with this game, there is no offline mode, and you keep having to wake up managers, AND the goal is to see how much you make in one year. Bah. I prefer the incremental approach which makes you build and build and build, not try to rush it in just a year.
2
Clicking Bad
An incremental clicking game that is themed after Breaking Bad. It is a fun idea it's a very simple game with little to do aside from the obvious of upgrading and upgrading. The only twist might be to balance out making lots of money selling drugs and not attracting the law but even that is only a small challenge at the start. Eventually, you will get enough upgrades to bring the law risk so down that it makes no impact on the game play.
2
Zombie Tapper
A super basic incremental clicker game with a zombie team. Click click click to eat brains, use brains (?) to buy zombies to do the brain eating for you and then buy upgrades for your zombies, and buy new zombies and it all feels very pointless.
1
Bitcoin Billionaire
I started to enjoy incremental games, but it needs to have a good offline mode, because I don’t want to just play a game where I keep tapping. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t play. I played it, and I played a lot of it, because I could reset the game (like most incremental games) and it gives you a small benefit where you could finish the full game a bit faster (it gives you bonus income). So, I kept finishing and resetting, and each time the start to finish would shorten, so I thought I would reach a stage where I could finish each start-to-finish in an instant! It didn’t happen. I got bored first.
3
Tap Titan
An addictive tapping game. Just tap on the creatures, level up, get new skills, hire heroes, and then reset and to it all over again to progress further. It’s an incremental game where it depends on resets to progress, but no real offline bonus, so you have to be playing online. Which got boring, so I installed an app that does the tapping for me, which is actually a stupid way to play the game, but this isn’t an attempt to prove to anyone my intelligence. Anyway, thankfully something went wrong and my progress got deleted, WHICH WAS A GOOD THING, because the game was extremely addictive.
4
God Squad
I’ve realized most incremental games are stupid. Tap on monsters to kill, collect gold, buy Roman Gods, level them up, fight other monsters, and then get bored.
1

We are on the cusp of some serious breakthroughs in crypto

Bitcoin Newcomers FAQ - Please read!

Welcome to the /Bitcoin Sticky FAQ

You've probably been hearing a lot about Bitcoin recently and are wondering what's the big deal? Most of your questions should be answered by the resources below but if you have additional questions feel free to ask them in the comments.
It all started with the release of the release of Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper however that will probably go over the head of most readers so we recommend the following videos for a good starting point for understanding how bitcoin works and a little about its long term potential:

Some other great resources include Lopp.net, the Princeton crypto series and James D'Angelo's Bitcoin 101 Blackboard series.
Some excellent writing on Bitcoin's value proposition and future can be found at the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute.
Some Bitcoin statistics can be found here and here. Developer resources can be found here. Peer-reviewed research papers can be found here.
Potential upcoming protocol improvements and scaling resources here and here.
The number of times Bitcoin was declared dead by the media can be found here (LOL!)

Key properties of Bitcoin

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Borderless - No country can stop it from going in/out, even in areas currently unserved by traditional banking as the ledger is globally distributed.
Trustless - Bitcoin solved the Byzantine's Generals Problem which means nobody needs to trust anybody for it to work.
Pseudonymous - No need to expose personal information when purchasing with cash or transacting.
Secure - Encrypted cryptographically and can’t be brute forced or confiscated with proper key management such as hardware wallets.
Programmable - Individual units of bitcoin can be programmed to transfer based on certain criteria being met
Nearly instant - From a few seconds to a few minutes depending on need for confirmations. Transactions are irreversible after one or more confirmations.
Peer-to-peer - No intermediaries with a cut, no need for trusted third parties.
Portable - Bitcoins are digital so they are easier to move than cash or gold. They can even be transported by simply memorizing a string of words for wallet recovery (while cool this method is generally not recommended due to potential for insecure key generation by inexperienced users. Hardware wallets are the preferred method for new users due to ease of use and additional security).
Scalable - While the protocol is still being optimized for increased transaction capacity, blockchains do not scale very well, so most transaction volume is expected to occur on Layer 2 networks built on top of Bitcoin.
Divisible - Each bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimals, which means you don't have to worry about buying an entire bitcoin.
Designed Money - Bitcoin was created to fit all the fundamental properties of money better than gold or fiat

Where can I buy bitcoins?

Bitcoin.org and BuyBitcoinWorldwide.com are helpful sites for beginners. You can buy or sell any amount of bitcoin (even just a few dollars worth) and there are several easy methods to purchase bitcoin with cash, credit card or bank transfer. Some of the more popular resources are below, also check out the bitcoinity exchange resources for a larger list of options for purchases.

Here is a listing of local ATMs. If you would like your paycheck automatically converted to bitcoin use Bitwage.
Note: Bitcoins are valued at whatever market price people are willing to pay for them in balancing act of supply vs demand. Unlike traditional markets, bitcoin markets operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Preev is a useful site that that shows how much various denominations of bitcoin are worth in different currencies. Alternatively you can just Google "1 bitcoin in (your local currency)".

Securing your bitcoins

With bitcoin you can "Be your own bank" and personally secure your bitcoins OR you can use third party companies aka "Bitcoin banks" which will hold the bitcoins for you.

If you prefer to "Be your own bank" and have direct control over your coins without having to use a trusted third party, then you will need to create your own wallet and keep it secure. If you want easy and secure storage without having to learn computer security best practices, then a hardware wallet such as the Trezor, Ledger or ColdCard is recommended. Alternatively there are many software wallet options to choose from here depending on your use case.
If you prefer to let third party "Bitcoin banks" manage your coins, try Gemini but be aware you may not be in control of your private keys in which case you would have to ask permission to access your funds and be exposed to third party risk.

Note: For increased security, use Two Factor Authentication (2FA) everywhere it is offered, including email!
2FA requires a second confirmation code to access your account making it much harder for thieves to gain access. Google Authenticator and Authy are the two most popular 2FA services, download links are below. Make sure you create backups of your 2FA codes.

Google Auth	Authy	OTP Auth
Android	Android	N/A
iOS	iOS	iOS

Watch out for scams

As mentioned above, Bitcoin is decentralized, which by definition means there is no official website or Twitter handle or spokesperson or CEO. However, all money attracts thieves. This combination unfortunately results in scammers running official sounding names or pretending to be an authority on YouTube or social media. Many scammers throughout the years have claimed to be the inventor of Bitcoin. Websites like bitcoin(dot)com and the btc subreddit are active scams. Almost all altcoins (shitcoins) are marketed heavily with big promises but are really just designed to separate you from your bitcoin. So be careful: any resource, including all linked in this document, may in the future turn evil. Don't trust, verify. Also as they say in our community "Not your keys, not your coins".

Where can I spend bitcoins?

Check out spendabit or bitcoin directory for millions of merchant options. Also you can spend bitcoin anywhere visa is accepted with bitcoin debit cards such as the CashApp card. Some other useful site are listed below.

Store	Product
Gyft	Gift cards for hundreds of retailers including Amazon, Target, Walmart, Starbucks, Whole Foods, CVS, Lowes, Home Depot, iTunes, Best Buy, Sears, Kohls, eBay, GameStop, etc.
Spendabit, Overstock and The Bitcoin Directory	Retail shopping with millions of results
ShakePay	Generate one time use Visa cards in seconds
NewEgg and Dell	For all your electronics needs
Bitwa.la, Coinbills, Piixpay, Bitbill.eu, Bylls, Coins.ph, Bitrefill, LivingRoomofSatoshi, Coinsfer, and more	Bill payment
Menufy, Takeaway and Thuisbezorgd NL	Takeout delivered to your door
Expedia, Cheapair, Destinia, Abitsky, SkyTours, the Travel category on Gyft and 9flats	For when you need to get away
Cryptostorm, Mullvad, and PIA	VPN services
Namecheap, Porkbun	Domain name registration
Stampnik	Discounted USPS Priority, Express, First-Class mail postage

Coinmap and AirBitz are helpful to find local businesses accepting bitcoins. A good resource for UK residents is at wheretospendbitcoins.co.uk.
There are also lots of charities which accept bitcoin donations.

Merchant Resources

There are several benefits to accepting bitcoin as a payment option if you are a merchant;

1-3% savings over credit cards or PayPal.
No chargebacks (final settlement in 10 minutes as opposed to 3+ months).
Accept business from a global customer base.
Increased privacy.
Convert 100% of the sale to the currency of your choice for deposit to your account, or choose to keep a percentage of the sale in bitcoin if you wish to begin accumulating it.

If you are interested in accepting bitcoin as a payment method, there are several options available;

BTCPay
Square cash
Stripe
Coinify
Wyre
Blockonomics (direct to your wallet)

Can I mine bitcoin?

Mining bitcoins can be a fun learning experience, but be aware that you will most likely operate at a loss. Newcomers are often advised to stay away from mining unless they are only interested in it as a hobby similar to folding at home. If you want to learn more about mining you can read more here. Still have mining questions? The crew at /BitcoinMining would be happy to help you out.
If you want to contribute to the bitcoin network by hosting the blockchain and propagating transactions you can run a full node using this setup guide. If you would prefer to keep it simple there are several good options. You can view the global node distribution here.

Earning bitcoins

Just like any other form of money, you can also earn bitcoins by being paid to do a job.

Site	Description
WorkingForBitcoins, Bitwage, Cryptogrind, Coinality, Bitgigs, /Jobs4Bitcoins, BitforTip, Rein Project	Freelancing
Lolli	Earn bitcoin when you shop online!
OpenBazaar, Purse.io, Bitify, /Bitmarket, 21 Market	Marketplaces
/GirlsGoneBitcoin NSFW	Adult services
A-ads, Coinzilla.io	Advertising

You can also earn bitcoins by participating as a market maker on JoinMarket by allowing users to perform CoinJoin transactions with your bitcoins for a small fee (requires you to already have some bitcoins.

Bitcoin-Related Projects

The following is a short list of ongoing projects that might be worth taking a look at if you are interested in current development in the bitcoin space.

Project	Description
Lightning Network	Second layer scaling
Blockstream, Rootstock and Drivechain	Sidechains
Hivemind and Augur	Prediction markets
Tierion and Factom	Records & Titles on the blockchain
BitMarkets, DropZone, Beaver and Open Bazaar	Decentralized markets
JoinMarket and Wasabi Wallet	CoinJoin implementation
Coinffeine and Bisq	Decentralized bitcoin exchanges
Keybase	Identity & Reputation management
Abra	Global P2P money transmitter network
Bitcore	Open source Bitcoin javascript library

Bitcoin Units

One Bitcoin is quite large (hundreds of £/$/€) so people often deal in smaller units. The most common subunits are listed below:

Unit	Symbol	Value	Info
bitcoin	BTC	1 bitcoin	one bitcoin is equal to 100 million satoshis
millibitcoin	mBTC	1,000 per bitcoin	used as default unit in recent Electrum wallet releases
bit	bit	1,000,000 per bitcoin	colloquial "slang" term for microbitcoin (μBTC)
satoshi	sat	100,000,000 per bitcoin	smallest unit in bitcoin, named after the inventor

For example, assuming an arbitrary exchange rate of $10000 for one Bitcoin, a $10 meal would equal:

0.001 BTC
1 mBTC
1,000 bits
100k sats

For more information check out the Bitcoin units wiki.
Still have questions? Feel free to ask in the comments below or stick around for our weekly Mentor Monday thread. If you decide to post a question in /Bitcoin, please use the search bar to see if it has been answered before, and remember to follow the community rules outlined on the sidebar to receive a better response. The mods are busy helping manage our community so please do not message them unless you notice problems with the functionality of the subreddit.
Note: This is a community created FAQ. If you notice anything missing from the FAQ or that requires clarification you can edit it here and it will be included in the next revision pending approval.
Welcome to the Bitcoin community and the new decentralized economy!

Do you want to earn Free Bitcoin? (Passive cryptocurrency earning)

The Video Game Creator- A parable for our day

An attepmt at explaining DeFi (this week...)

Warning, long post from my mornings contemplation. See https://twitter.com/markjeffrey/status/1300175793352445952 (Mark Jeffery 30 mins) for a video explaining DeFi.
This is my attempt at explaining DeFi.
I’m still learning this stuff, so any corrections are welcomed.
Links are provided for information, none are recommendations, nor referral links. Do your own research (DYOR) before investing :)
I’ll try not to shill YFI too much...
Not all platforms use the same mechanics as I describe, but I think I’ve covered the most common ones.

Stable coins
Crypro currency that is intended to maintain a level value. Normally with respect to USD $. Some rely on a trusted third party who has actual USD sitting in a bank account (USDT aka Tether, USDC…), others are trustless (DAI)

Maker
Lock collateral into the smart contract. Then DIA can be generated, and used for other things. DAI is designed to match the USD, and is completely trustless. You must have more value staked than the DAI removed (at least 150% over collateral) or you will get liquidated.

BTC on ETH
Bitcoin can not be directly used on the etherium chain. So, there are a number ways to make the value availble. Most involve trusting a 3rd party and the most common is wrapped BTC wBTC.
Notes WETH (Wrapped ETH) is used by some contracts to use ETH (direct use of ETH is not possible in some contracts) Unlinke WBTC, WETH is trustless as evrythign is done on the etherium blockchain (I think).

Lending
You deposit a valuable token onto a pool on platform, someone else borrows it. They pay interest to the pool. You get a proportion of the pools interest over time. When there is high demand for a particular token, the interest rate increases dynamically.
e.g. look at the interest rate model and click on the figure for
https://compound.finance/markets/USDC
Borrow rates increase lineally as more of the available pool is loaned. 2% at zero and 12.5% when the pool is emptied.
Earnings are lower than the borrowing rates because: There is more in the pool than borrowed. The platform takes a cut.
e.g. 50% of the pool is borrowed, the borrower pays 7.25%, but the lenders only get 3.38%. 3.38/0.5 = 6.76%, so about 0.5% of the interest is being taken by compound.
Different pools have different interest rate functions, DAI has an inflection point to maintain a buffer https://compound.finance/markets/DAI
The interest rate increases slowly to 4% until 75% of the available pool is loaned out. Then it’s much more expensive to borrow e.g. 16% APR at 90% utilisation.
When lending a single token into a single pool, you should always get the (slightly ?) more of same token back.

How lending works
You deposit ETH, you are given a token back as proof of participation in the pool (cETH for comound.finance).
The exchange rate for cETH to ETH is NOT fixed. Rather is changes over time. As the ETH interest is paid into the pool the cETH becomes more valuable compared to the initial deposit.
e.g. you deposit 10 ETH, and get 499.52 cETH. In a months time, you repay the 499.2 cETH cETH and get 10.1 ETH back. You have just gained 1%.

Taxes
In many jurisdictions, converting ETH to cETH would be classed as a taxable event (DYOR ! )

Lego Bricks
The cETH represents your ETH, so it has value. This means it can be used for other things...
Lego bricks is taken to mean that all these things fit together and you can sue them in different ways.

How borrowing works
You need to be over colarteralised to borrow from most platforms. So, if you deposit 10.0 ETH into a smart contract, you (currently) have $4,000 of collateral to work with. The platform may then let you borrow a % of your collateral in other tokens.
So, you can borrow $2,000 of USDC, to buy more 5 ETH. Then when ETH price goes up you sell $2100 back to USDC and repay the interest. Now you have 10.x ETH.
This is a form of Leverage, when the price goes up, you win. However, if the ETH price goes down, you risk being Liquidated. This means part of your collateral will be sold at the (lower) market price to repay your loan. There will likely be a penalty for you. (e.g. @ ETH = $300, 7.33 of your ETH is sold for $2,400, your USDC loan is repaid, and you keep the remaining 2.67 ETH and the 5 ETH you purchased.

Shorting
Deposit $8,000 collateral, Borrow 10 ETH and sell for $400 each. If the price drops to $380, buy 10.1 ETH and repay the loan and interest. You have just made $162 profit. However, if the price goes up you will still need to buy 10.1 ETH.

Flash Loans
A technomage creates a single transaction that borrows lots of money. Then within the same single ~13 second block uses it to do lots of complex things to hopefully make a profit. As it’s all within a single block, collateral is not required.
See https://mobile.twitter.com/nanexcool/status/1297068546023993349 for a transaction that made ~46,000 USDC profit (without collateral)
If this post is introducing you to the possibilities of flash loans, you are very unlikely to ever do one in the near future.
I think Aave is the most common source for flash loans.

Simple farming lending:
Simply put you token in which ever platform offers the largest interest rate. Moving to the best option costs gas (and attention).

Complex lending farming
Some platforms offer tokens in return for using a platform, so simple APR comparisons aren’t sufficient. If the additional platform token has high value it can distort the market.
E.g. when COMP was initially offered, it was profitable to:

Place collateral on compound.finance
Borrow BAT at 30%
Lend the BAT back to the same platform at 15%
Collect the COMP accrued due to interest paid and interest earned.
Sell the COMP on the open market.

This technique was made less favourable by compound changing the distribution model so smaller pools (like BAT) couldn’t be exploited in this way.

DEX
Decentralised exchanges range from ones that operate with depositing assets, trading with an order book and then withdrawing, to simple interfaces that allow you to swap tokens. of the latter, the most popular is uniswap.

Liquidity provision
The swap based DEX’s rely on liquidity providers (LP). Here you deposit equal values of two tokens e.g. USDC and ETH.
Then any time someone wants to swap USDC for ETH on the exchange, they add USDC and remove ETH from the pool.
Each time someone does a swap, they pay a fee to the liquidity pool and you get a share.

Impairment loss
However, if the price of one asset goes up, the pool with stabilise to have less of it. So you see an overall increase, but not as much as if you had just hold’ed.
See https://twitter.com/ChainLinkGod/status/1270046868932661248 for an example.
Hopefully, the fees accrued are greater than the losses.
https://twitter.com/Tetranode/status/1300326676451057664/photo/1

Stable coin pairs
If you restrict yourself to similar things (e.g. USD stable coins, or different versions of BTC on Ethereum), then the impairment loss is much reduced. Curve.finance focuses on such like for like pools and allows multiple tokens in a single pool.

Complex farming liquidity pools
Taking advantage of governance token rewards for using certain exchanges / pools. This can be done to boot strap liquidity and / or allow a decentralisation of the governance of the DEX.
The tokes received have value because of expected future income, or governance rights (which may be exploited for future income)

Yearn
Yearn is a group of smart farmer protocols that allow pooling to reduce gas costs and benefit from smart developers / contracts.
The simplest EARN take tokens / stable coins and place them in the highest yielding platform for that token. https://yearn.finance/earn
The yCRV vault provides USD stable coin liquidity within curve for trading fees, but also lending fees via Yearn pools for each stable coin (oh and it gets CRV governance tokens…).
Other vaults use more complex strategies. The collateral is used to generate stable coins that then generate income from interest rates, Liquidity provision fees, and accrual of governance tokens. Some governance tokens are sold, others are used to optimise the rewards from other platforms.
For example, see this video on the Link Vault (Mark Jeffrey 13 mins).
https://twitter.com/markjeffrey/status/1300175793352445952
I expect the ETH vault may be similar, but may include Maker to generate the stable coins (rather than borrowing on Aave).
This video is a good intro on curve / yearn products (DeFIDad 31 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP-4pJpKbRU
All of these steps can be done by yourself, however, gas costs would be significant unless you have a large amount invested. Yearn, and vaults pay fees to the YFI protocol.

YFI
YFI is the token for yearn. There are only 30,000 issued. So, you can not earn them, you can:
1) Stake them for governance rewards
2) place in a yYFI vauly to gain more FYI
3) Use them as long term Ventrue capital funds within a DAO (coming soon (tm) ).

YFII, YVFV etc.
Forks of the YFI with different tokens / fees.

YAM, Sushi, YFII, etc.
To be completed…

Synthetix
To be completed...

Finally:
This is not financial advice.
There are multiple risks which get larger as more moving parts are added.
Errors and omissions expected.
Do you own research.
Comments and corrections welcomed

small passive income while browsing the web

Introduction
If you were on the internet in the late 1990s, you might remember companies like "AllAdvantage" that promised to pay you to browse the web. You could install a program that tracked your browsing and showed you targeted ads at the top of the screen, then "AllAdvantage" would give you a cut of the ad revenue you generated.
These schemes largely disappeared after the dot-com crash. But Brendan Eich, the creator of the JavaScript programming language and cofounder and former CTO of Mozilla, thinks his company Brave Software has found a way to revive that old idea.
What is it?
Brave makes a browser based on Google Chrome that blocks tracking scripts and other technologies that spy on your online activity. As a result, it also blocks many web ads; if you visit any website using the Brave browser, you won’t see any ads. But Brave will give users the option to see ads that Eich says will respect your privacy. The ads will appear as desktop notifications, he says, not as replacements for the ads the Brave browser blocks. So you still won’t see ads on any website, but you might see them on the right lower corner of your screen. If you choose to see these ads, you’ll get 70 percent of the revenue they generate.
Eich hopes Brave can solve two of the web's most vexing problems the privacy and revenue problem by turning the traditional digital advertising model on its head. Today, ad networks pay sites for ad space and web browsers like Brave and Chrome deliver content from those publishers to users. Brave is trying to put the browser in the center of the advertising experience. Instead of paying publishers directly, ad networks would pay Brave, which will pass part of the money to users and keep a cut for itself.
By handling advertising in the browser on your device, Brave says it will be able to target ads without sending your data to the cloud, and protect your privacy. When you interact with an ad on Brave, the browser sends notice to the company's servers, but doesn't include any identifying information. Eich sees four sets of winners: browser makers get paid; users get paid, and get more privacy; advertisers can target pitches without running afoul of European privacy regulations; and publishers can survive in a world where many users are installing ad blockers.
Publishers and ad networks might bristle at the idea of putting browser makers in the middle of their business. But in recent years browsers have taken a more active role in shaping the web, instead of merely displaying a website’s content. Chrome now blocks ads on a small number of sites with particularly egregious advertising practices, while browsers like Firefox and Safari have added privacy protections. Meanwhile, browser plugins are giving users more control over their experience. There are Chrome extensions, for example, that let you change Facebook's color scheme, or change the way images are displayed on Pinterest. And of course there are extensions that block all ads.
Trying to win advertisers and publishers to a new model isn't Brave's only challenge. It also needs users. Eich says Brave has 15 million users and is growing.
Brave will give users a 70 percent cut of its advertising revenue, which Eich estimates could work out to about $10 a month. Brave will pay users with its own bitcoin-style "cryptocurrency” called Basic Attention Tokens or BAT, which has traded for as little as 24 cents over the past 12 months, according to CoinMarketCap. You can exchange the BAT you have received for viewing ads into USD, EUR, GBP, CHF and many more currencies.
The company offers a service through the cryptocurrency exchange Uphold to allow users to change, sell and buy BAT or donate it to publishers, and for publishers to exchange the BAT they receive for dollars. Advertisers like HomeDepot or recent campaigns included brands such as Verizon, Newegg, Chipotle, and PayPal/Honey, in addition to earlier campaigns by Amazon, Harry’s Razors, Intel, CBS, KIND snacks, Logitech, Lenovo, Grubhub, Belkin, Quickbooks, Evernote and some of cryptocurrency related companies, will be able to buy ads either with BAT or with traditional currencies.
Eich says Brave opted to create its own tokens using the Ethereum cryptocurrency platform in part to avoid regulatory requirements, such as verifying users' identifies, that partners like Uphold are better equipped to handle.
Estimated revenue? (depending on the country you live in the revenue can be higher or lower)
I made around 3oo$ so far this year using 3 devices, just for viewing some ads.
5 months so far july is not included if you calculate it down for 1 device, 100$/5months = 20$ a month just for viewing ads, you would need to buy risky stocks worth of 2000$ to get the same amount per month.
can only recommend everyone to try it, not every country has the same number of advertisers so you probably get the most out of it when you live in the USA.
If you are interested here is a quick guide how to set it up to get the max amount out of Brave:
Quickstartguide:
1 Download brave here
2 Activate the reward system (gif link below)Gif link
3 go into the settings an deactivate auto contribution and activate 5 ads per hour (image link below)image link
4 Create an Account on Uphold and connect it with your BraveBrowser.
Now you are good to go and can make some money on something you do anyway.
I hope this helps some folks in the community to make some extra bucks.
edit1:you can find more infos and support here:brave_browser & BATProject or www.brave.com
edit2:the earnings are depenging on the number of devices you are using and were you are living. Best paying countries: United States (69) United Kingdom (39) Canada (36) Australia (35) New Zealand (26) Germany (21) Ireland (21) France (18)( the number next to the country are the companies that are running ads on brave for this particular country, the more companies the more revenue )
you can find a full list with all countries and campaigns here: https://brave.com/transparency/
edit3:You don't need to browse to a certain website to receive ads, just browse as you are used to, play browser games, watch videos on youtube or do whatever you want.Sometimes Ads appear on the startpage looks like that https://i.imgur.com/5tohhRc.jpg and after some time on the right lower corner a clickable pop-up appears looks like that->https://i.imgur.com/CTGdVsu.png
edit4:If you want to import your bookmarks and settings from your old browser:on the right top corner of the browser is a button ->https://i.imgur.com/oi8EAri.jpg click it > than on settings > and than you got the option to import bookmarks and settings from your old browser.
If you want to sync brave between devices and for backups:type brave://flags/ into the adressbar and than brave sync into the search bar and acticate itif its enabled it should look like this https://imgur.com/a/tCMDgDjthan just click on sync ->https://i.imgur.com/oi8EAri.jpg
here is a guide ->https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021218111-How-do-I-set-up-Sync
edit5: Don't keep your BAT from free token grants to long in your browser, always send your bat to an external wallet or exchange like uphold, only tokens from free token grants have an expire date if they dont get used they go back to the bat pool. you can find more infos about this here -> https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018305731-Why-does-my-BAT-have-an-expiration-date-

"Read.cash Founder Threatens Ban & Permanent Fund Blacklist of 100 Users by Midnight London Time Tonight" Response from the read.cash founder

(Sorry that I post it here, the letters will be small, it would have been much better on read.cash, but it contains personal attacks on C. Edward Kelso and Shammah Chancellor, so I would have to ban me on read.cash for this post)
This is probably the most personal story I've ever published on the Internet on how your project will come back to haunt you and destroy your mind and your life.
CoinSpice should find enough "juicy" details here to humiliate me even further, I think they still could! I believe in their potential! Should I send you my nudes to post, CoinSpice, for you new article? (No, I'm not a girl, in case you're wondering)
Enjoy it if you like long reads. Warning: it contains quite a few jabs at some people.
So, you might have read this "piece" from afriendofsatoshi C. Edward Kelso Chief editor of CoinSpice https://www.reddit.com/btc/comments/i067py/readcash_founder_threatens_ban_permanent_fund/fznpi0x/
I'm really disappointed in CoinSpice. Anecdote from the past about them: my interview with them was terribly handled. I started the interview with them with "English is not my native language, so feel free to fix any errors you see in my answer", what did they write in CoinSpice? "We were able to determine that he is not a native English speaker" Seriously, "were able to determine", Sherlock?... why did you even need to publish that? To add a bit of a sensation? But this new piece from CoinSpice just breaks through the floor... I'm speechless... If you are ever offered to being interviewed by CoinSpice - run away! Save yourself!

What happened

28 July, 2020
An uneventful day on read.cash, people posting pictures of flowers, telling stories how they met their spouses, doing contests about who will sponsor whom, posting articles about teamwork and interviews with prominent Bitcoin Cash figures. Seriously, read.cash guys interviewed tons of Bitcoin Cash supporters (After the interview with CoinSpice I never gave anoter interview to anyone fearing it will be exactly unprofessional as CoinSpice - trying to get every little dirt the could dig out there)
micropresident (the guy who does not yet know he's going to, very professionally, like a normal stable developer he is, later go on to tell me "fuck read.cash") publishes a contest where he calls for memes that contain the following phrases: "Amaury the Socialist Dictator", "Marc De Mesel is Calvin Ayre Lite") promising up to 2 BCH in return (I believe, I didn't read his rules) for these memes.
Since a lot of read.cash users are from Philippines, Nigeria and other poor countries, where $300 is a lot of money (maybe something you will make in a year), people proceed to create these memes.
This goes directly against the rules of the site that everyone must agree before they sign up, directly violating the rule: "No name-calling, trash-talking, personal attacks or insults."
I log in to read.cash and notice the homepage full of low quality posts attacking Amaury, Marc, ABC, upvoted to no end, tons of boosted posts and Shammah giving $$ left and right for this stuff.
I publish 2 responses where I tell people to remove the memes that contain personal attacks or face a ban. https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/the-state-of-things-33c3d68a and https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/post-a4935cbd
Most of the people agreed and removed the offending memes and had no problem with it, many said they were sorry.
u/micropresident in a very professional manner proceeds to tell us to "fuck [ourselves]" and tells he's building a clone (non-moderated I presume). He also quotes us very calmly and professionally adding: "Complete bullshit" referring to rules of read.cash
CoinSpice proceeds to publish the "celebrity upskirt" kind of article "Read.cash Founder Threatens Ban & Permanent Fund Blacklist of 100 Users by Midnight London Time Tonight". Emphasis mine, I just can't stand this kind of language... this is yellow press at best. It only lacks "Reason #2 will shock you!" in the title...
So, back to the story.

Why do we even have this rule?

Is it because I'm an egomaniac that hates people? Is it because I'm secretly funded by BSV? Is it because Marc de Mesel donated nearly $100,000 to the fund? Is it because I love censoring people?
No, no and no.
It's because I want Bitcoin Cash adoption. I frankly wanted Bitcoin adoption since 2013, alas, the tiny blocks and huge fees won't allow that. So I had to switch to Bitcoin Cash which kept Bitcoin idea going.
Do you have a friend that is not deep into cryptocurrency? Tell him/her to join the Crypto Twitter. They will look at it for five minutes and tell you: "Are you crazy? These people are constantly attacking and mocking each other. What if I do something wrong? Why are they doing it? Are they mentally ill? Is this really the money of the future?"
This will be his answer for nearly every site or platform that talks about cryptocurrency.
It's everywhere. But with Bitcoin Cash somehow it's very ingrained into the nature. I understand, Bitcoin Cash was attacked so often that it became a second nature of some people to attack everything they don't like.
Don't like Amaury? Let's attack him! Why? Don't care! I just don't like him!
Don't like Marc de Mesel? Let's attack him!
Don't like CSW and Calvin? - Let's attack them. - But why? They don't do anything bad to us now. - Wait, are you one of THEM? Let's attack or you'll be attacked! Fuck you, you and you and read.cash, fuck yeah! Attaccckkk!!!
This all seems totally crazy to a newcomer.
But what do we want to achieve with read.cash? Getting newcomers to use Bitcoin Cash. Without the drama or craziness. Just some flower pictures.
Up until 28 July, 2020 this was the case. People were posting innocent pictures, got payments from the fund, tipped each other, sponsored each other, yelled at me for not getting paid enough.
Occasionally, we had some dissenters, like *****, who proceeded to tell spammers that they are "fucking cunts", got a warning for that, left forever, deleting all articles, returned, started attacking people again, got banned for that, started telling people on memo.cash how stupid read.cash is because we didn't manually ban the spammers and wasted time programming software to detect them...
Ok, weird thing - she seems to recommend people to join read.cash now, which is confusing, so I removed her name.
Then there were people who wasted hours upon hours of my day by asking stupid questions, who got blocked (from me, not from read.cash)...
But mostly things were okay with read.cash (not with me though). We've got 12,000 users, very few incidents, the fund got a donation from Marc de Mesel for nearly $100,000 which will pay new users for a year or so. We gave away money to 5,700 people (for free)!
I want to stress one part here. Marc has donated (unconditionally) more than 97% of the fund. More than 30 times more than all of the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem combined donated.
Read that part again. Marc donated 30 times more than everyone else in the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem combined! Unconditionally. I haven't received any condition about the donation use.
Marc even told us that he's willing to donate much more! Which we hastily declined, because read.cash is not profitable and it doesn't make sense to spend more than we would have gotten from ads if we were monetized.
read.cash can't be living off donations forever. It's unsustanable. So we spend via the fund approximately what we would have gotten if read.cash was plastered with ads.
But again, 12,000 users of read.cash is 97% MarcDeMesel's achievement.
That's 12,000 users of Bitcoin Cash.
Isn't "adoption" what you wanted?
Yet, the guy who said "fuck read.cash!", all the while getting top payments from the read.cash fund, proceeds to create a contest about "Marc is Calvin Ayre Lite"...
Told that this is a personal attack, replies "Complete bullshit!" (exact quote)
Note: Marc is actually OK with memes about him and asked us directly to revert our policy to allow the [offensive] memes It wasn't Marc's initiative, it was mine.
And it wasn't only Marc who were being mocked.
I'll admit right here - I don't like Amaury's actions, I don't like IFP (and I listed my reasons), but I'll warn/ban anyone directly attacking him on read.csah (not his thoughts, but just him). Wanna discuss how Amaury's idea about DAA is bad? Feel free! Wanna call him an idiot? Welcome to ban'sville, population - you. Well, usually a warning, then a ban if you insist on doing that.
The same will go for CSW, Calvin or anyone anywhere.

Are you crazy? Did you just say you'll protect CSW and Calvin? We've got a BSV shill here! Attackkk!!!!

No, no and no. We have no funds from BSV (as far as I know, the fund is non-custodial and permissionless - anyone can donate and cancel at any time), I've never contacted Calvin or CSW and I've been attacked by BSV people on multiple occasions and was accused of being a BSV shill on multiple occasions (besides people telling me to "fuck [my project]").
One thing I figured early on is that if you allow people to do something, you need to apply that rule to everyone.
Otherwise, you are a hippocrite and you should hang your head in shame.
If you allow people to mock and denigrate Amaury, Marc, BSV, BTC supporters, that's the fine line that you'll have to keep later on, when BTC and BSV supporters come. How come you're allowing people to mock a BTC supporter, yet you protect a BCH supporter? That's dishonest.
So we will have to allow BTC and BSV supporters to mock us and denigrate us. Because that's the rule. You allowed it!
They will be right.
So if we allow people to attack other people (even if I don't like them), everybody would be entitled to attack everybody.
That's where you start your journey to becoming a Crypto Twitter, where you will be attacked for nothing, where a snowball will roll on you (it did on me, but thats another story), where people would start to stalk you and try to ruin your life, because you like the coin they don't like.
That's a place which normal people won't ever join.
Read it again: No adoption for you, no world money!
So, you either have "no censorship" (which is really moderation) or you have normal people. Choose one, choose wisely, you won't be able to change it later.
We chose "normal people".
The plan was working fine (almost) until the eventful post.
But I will not revert this policy. I hope I explained why.

Koush: But you allow worse crimes to happen on read.cash!

Ok, here's a yellow press sensation worthy of coinspice.io! Listen carefully! #1 will shock you!
I am... one guy.
Yes, read.cash is a one-man shitshow.
I'm the backend developer, I'm the frontend developer, I'm the system administrator, I'm the moderator, I'm the policy maker, I'm the one who replies to 100+ emails daily on [email protected], I'm the one getting up to 200 notifications per day on read.cash, I'm the one who writes articles, I'm the one who wakes up at night when a server fails, I'm the one who logged 1000 hours developing read.cash according to my IDE's time tracking plugin, I'm the one responsible for the bug that took your money, I'm the one who returned you your money, I'm the one fighting spam, I'm the one writing code to catch spammers, I'm read.cash.
I'm the one responsible to keep 7,500 comments per day (that's one comment every 10 seconds, 24/7), 800 articles per day, 400 short posts per day clean. See the stats yourself, the damn thing is growing and growing...
It is an impossible task. But I do read every one of 100+ reports sent to me per day. And each one of them is a moral dilemma for me - what to do here. This guy has copied an article from the Internet, but edited it so that it looks like another article, what do I do here? Ok, this guy is posting non-sense - is that against rules? It's surely annoying, but doesn't violate the rules. What to do here? Now try this 100 times a day. This guy, Koush, I know, he's a good guy, but now he's attacking the only guy who really helped read.cash when no one else did? WTF do I do here?
That's why I'm always telling people to report anything that they see that violates rules. I can't be everywhere. I can't make the right decision every time too. I'm a regular fucking person. Two legs, two hands, one medium-sized brain.
Ok, to be honest, a few months ago I asked a developer friend to join me to help (paid with my own money, not using read.cash fund for that), so he helps some 10 hours per month. That helps, surely, not enough.
Though I'll still call read.cash we, as it is still a registered company.
BTW To be clear - I never got any money from the read.cash fund, but I spent more than $5,000 giving away. Here's a screenshot from an internal tool that I call "the random rewarder": https://i.imgur.com/ucQEvVM.png
As you can see, I'm entitled to about $1.31 - $1.39 for today, but I get $0.00. That was always the case, because I strongly believe that I must give it to people of read.cash to attract new users.
I also gave away 100% of the funds that came to me as tips on read.cash.
BTW Did you notice that on the screenshot the guy who said "Marc de Mesel is Calvin Ayre Lite" and "fuck read.cash" got the top payment from the fund, which is at the moment 97% funded by Marc de Mesel?
My friend, the developer, who joined me, told me a few days ago: "I read your history on read.cash, you sound progressively ..." "..depressive and passively aggressive," I ended his sentence, "I know."
Yes, I know. I'm pretty passive agressive already, because every day I met with demands from users. "Why am I not getting paid?" "I work for read.cash for 8 hours a day, why is my pay so low?" "I sent some money and now I have $0.01 less than I should?" "How do I get sponsors?" "I think this guy is cheating!" "Hey, our family of 20 people joined read.cash and it says that I have 19 colocated accounts on the same IP! That's not true!"
I loathe my morning, when I open my email and there's 50 new alerts from Sentry, there are 100+ emails from users demanding stuff from me, accusing me of being unfair, wrong, an idiot, telling me "fuck read.cash"!
etc.. etc.. etc.. daily grind.. I never experienced anything like that. I was always a lead developer or manager managing small teams of 5-10 people. Nothing close to this shit I experience now.
You get progressively less sensitive. You start to think that it's ok to just delete an email, since you can't reply to everyone. You can't research why someone of 12,000 people didn't get paid, since the algorithms are now so complex that you yourself will have to spend a week just researching one guy why he gets $0.10 instead of maybe $0.50... you have no idea who your users are. The project is out of your control. But you can't do anything, because it's not profitable enough to even cover the server costs, let alone hire additional programmer or a support guy.
Then one day you log and see the beautiful garden full of dog shit. Crappy memes. A guy telling you "fuck you, there's $25K for the clone of this!" Thank God Shammah didn't offer that $25K for my head...
You find this about the only guy who really helped read.cash with money and demanded nothing in return (not a single condition was made) being compared to a midget version of a guy who was in a FBI Top Wanted list!
Again, Marc says he's ok with this, I'm not! Whoever did this meme is an asshole, I don't have any other words for this human. (Yes, I would have been banned on read.cash for this alone. You can ban me here, I no longer care...)
You find yourself increasingly grumpy, angry towards those around you, your family, because everybody is angry at you in the Internet, people are demanding and people is attacking the only people you can trust (Roger, Marc)...
You think about your previous nice cozy job. You think about 5 recruiters sending you daily mails to just name the price to join their company. You realize that these 9 months you could have made maybe $100,000, maybe $200,000 sitting on your ass, managing 5-10 people like you always did.. Instead you spent 9 months, $5,000 in Bitcoin Cash, got grumpy and depressed.
You start to ponder why you do this and whether you should even continue.
That's your future, Mr. Shammah Chancellor!
That's the reality of running a social media platform with cryptocurrency.
I will be happy to see your platform, Mr. "fuck read.cash", grow and flourish, but I warn you - it's not going to cost you $25K, but much much more. It's going to eat you alive if you are mildly successful with it and you have a little bit of conscience.
You will be attacked, you will be spammed. People will tell you "fuck you!"
I honestly have no idea why you think you will fare better than yours.org or honest.cash...
What's your advantage? being censorship free, so that people can shit and pee on each other?
Then one day 9 months later, 12,000 users, $50,000 in tips later, a guy will come in and tell you "Fuck you, Shammah and your project! Fuck you! I'm building a clone for $5K of this shit of a platform!" You will look at the clock where it's 8pm, you will look at your inbox, where there's still 50 more people yelling at you.. you'll ponder why do you even do this...
That day you'll understand me, Mr. Chancellor. Or maybe not, I have no idea what kind of a human being you are. Maybe you're reading this and laughing madly: "poor pussy can't take a beating! boo-hoo! Get off the internet, you wuss!" Maybe that's your thoughts, I don't know. You certainly don't seem to care about other people's feelings dismissing them as "complete bullshit".
Well kept gardens die by pacifism is a wonderful read about this.

Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)

Peace, and out.
P.S. I remind people that there's an ongoing fundraiser going for mainnet.cash, so anyone agreeing with "fuck read.cash" policy of Mr. Chancellor should cancel their donations while there's still time. It's very easy to cancel. Don't give your money to idealistic fools like me.
P.P.S. I blocked u/afriendofsatoshi, so somebody please forward it to him so he can humiliate me further, only on coinspice.io! Subscribe now!

10-04 05:44 - 'Why DeFi will give birth to killer applications in the banking industry?' (self.Bitcoin) by /u/SMOEY removed from /r/Bitcoin within 14-24min

Marketing Strategies and Practices for Block chain Projects and Startups.

If you are a blockchain startup, open source project or decentralized protocol and believe that you don’t need the right kind of marketing to succeed, think again.
“Marketing” has traditionally been a weakness in the early lives of many tech startups for a variety of reasons. Most startups are often led by young or inexperienced CEOs or project leaders who come from a strong engineering or product mindset. These founders either don’t understand or don’t appreciate the value of marketing, and certainly that comes from a lack of experience or education on the subject. Most blockchain companies/projects founders are no different.
At the root of this situation lies a common and fundamental misconception: not knowing the true meaning and functions of marketing agency in mumbai .

Marketing Mistakes

Wrongfully, marketing is prematurely equated to shouting about a product prior to having it ready for the market to try. Others think that marketing is about hiring a PR firm, polishing a website, publishing a blog post, promoting on social media, designing a great logo with new colors and fonts, or producing videos about your product and Society Activation in Mumbai.
Unfortunately, during the ICO frenzy days, the term marketing has been bastardized around excessive usage of the above named activities. Therefore, marketing has received a bad rap in blockchain circles because it has been equated to pumping bad ICOs where the marketing consisted of purely unchecked promotion.
In the past few months, I have had several conversations with founders of blockchain related projects and companies who clearly didn’t seem to understand, let alone appreciate the value and priority they should be giving to doing a better job at marketing. When I challenged them on their marketing, or broached the topic, the responses ranged along the following flavors:
· We’re not ready for marketing until the next product is released and announced
· We have it in the budget for next year to hire a PR firm
· I’ve been doing videos that will air as advertising later
· We prefer to deliver first, and then talk about what we have done
· Marketing is expensive and we don’t have the budget now
· We hired a design firm and redoing our website with a new visual identity
· We don’t need marketing, we focus on our community on Reddit
All of the above are the wrong answers, and point to not understanding the various parts of marketing.

Marketing is a Process

So let’s start with the basics and further discuss what marketing is, or is not about. First, there are 3 parts to marketing:
· Product marketing – explaining what the product does (features/benefits), and how it is differentiated from others. Goal: Positioning the product.
· Corporate marketing – positioning the company and communicating its messages in a variety of means. Branding and Marketing Communications is a big part of it. Goal: Generate Awareness and Preference.
· Customer marketing (sometimes labelled as field marketing, direct marketing or content marketing) – getting in front of your target market to generate adoption, leads and sales. Goal: Generate Adoption and Loyalty.
The kind of marketing that is often deficient in blockchain companies or projects is Marketing Communications, i.e. how to strongly and clearly message in a few words what your project, company or product do for the usecustomer. But this must be done as a continuum. Messaging is not a single shot of sound bites around a launch event. To make it even more effective, it must be customized to the specific audience you are trying to reach: customers, investors, employees, media, influencers, partners, etc.
The process of creating the messaging is a complex exercise that has several layers designed to answering the WHY, WHAT and HOW of your value proposition. Many companies nail the WHY (Elevator pitch), but don’t follow through with the WHAT (Competitive positioning and Core value proposition), or the HOW (Product/Solution messaging and Technology differentiation).
Marketing is a process that evolves along a series of objectives, from Awareness, to Consideration, to Trials, and then Loyalty. Different tools are effective for each one of these steps. For example, thought leadership focuses on the awareness aspect and trying to shape the market by educating it. The brand leadership helps to influence the prospect’s perception towards you. You want to gradually progress from letting your target market care, understand, believe, then act to try your product and merchant onboarding agency in mumbai .
Here is the right order of progression for the following activities:

Brand Strategy
Positioning Statement
Messaging Elements
Visual Identity

Sadly, a common mistake I see is starting with the visual identity and thinking that it is branding. Often, that is the result of being led by an inexperienced CMO or one that came from the PCommunications side, or when the organization has hired a brand design firm instead of a brand strategy firm. Most brand design houses (and some PR companies) will tell you they will take care of your messaging and branding, but that is the tail wagging the dog. Brand strategy takes a very unique skill, and there are few brand strategy experts that do a great job with it. One brand strategy firm with whom I have had experience working with, is Brandsinger.
In a nutshell, if you are not occupying a position in the minds of users/customers (and the prospective market), then your brand value is zero. Someone else will come and articulate their value proposition better than you, and will subsequently occupy that position. If you are first to deliver a product, it may not matter. You need to be first in occupying that specific position in the minds of your target market. The battle is a battle of the minds, as rightfully spelled out in the seminal book on that topic Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind, a classic book that I have perhaps read over 20 times (over a course of 25 years), and almost memorized and put into practice accordingly. The sequel to that book, – Marketing Warfare, is also a must read marketing classic from the legendary Ries and Trout, the two authors of that series of work.

Blockchain Examples

Let’s give it some blockchain and cryptocurrency flavours.
Bitcoin occupied first the digital money position and still does to this point. Ethereum exploited a weakness in Bitcoin,- its ease of programmability and development platform potential, and it currently owns that position. All other (newer) blockchains have to attack Bitcoin or Ethereum as the reference points. Most of them have to raise the volume and intensity of their marketing in order to make an assault on these established leaders. It is always more expensive to attack than it is to defend a position.
ZCash and Monero have exploited the privacy niche. Coinbase occupies the safety ladder in cryptocurrency exchanges. Binance is trying to attack it with a me-too strategy focused on scale, and they are extending their brand with new services. LoomX has been good at becoming a Layer 2 leader for Ethereum. Take any other segment. For example, when you think file storage, you probably think Storj or Filecoin because that’s the position they are occupying. When you think prediction markets, you probably think of Augur or Gnosis. And when you think of stablecoins, Maker comes to mind.

Back to Basics

For those of you who know me from the blockchain market only (over the past 6 years roughly), you may not know that I’ve previously spent a long career in sales and marketing with a variety of positions and experiences in direct sales, field marketing, corporate marketing and several startups as founder and default chief marketer. More specifically, since I exited the operational world via my last startup in April 2013, I’ve written extensively about startup marketing in the early years of this blog. All of it still applies, as I focused on explaining the basics of market positioning, marketing strategy, messaging, brand strategy, and related marketing topics.
There is no point re-inventing marketing for the blockchain sector. So, I’m going to link to some basics that I’ve already written about. Here, I collected the 12 most pertinent blog posts into a single one that links to them: Startup Marketing Compendium of 12 Posts on Positioning, Branding, Messaging and more. Then I wrote one more, The Biggest Blind Spot of a Startup CEO is Ignoring Their Brand.
So please go read that series, and if you need help implementing some of that, don’t start by hiring a PR agency. Rather, take an introspective view, and hire the right marketing person first.
Another common weakness with blockchain companies is they fail to tell their stories in non-technical terms to the market. It is not enough to excite the developers.
And don’t just focus entirely on social media publishing. Unless you have 1 Million+ Twitter followers in your target audience, promoting on social media will only make a dent in your awareness goals.
Remember, marketing is not just writing a press release. It is not shouting from the rooftops. It takes finesse, planning, thought, accuracy, targeted actions, and iterations to get it right.
And timing is so important. Sometimes the marketing is way ahead of delivery, and sometimes it is way behind it, but when the timing and sequence are right, that’s when the magic of results happens.
Allow me repeat this: marketing is a process. Learn it, acquire experience in it, practice it, but don’t be amateurish about it.
About Us.
We are a local marketing and sales agency that help small/medium sized businesses and Start up. Established for over 10 years, our clients vary in size and cover a wide variety of business sectors. we see ourselves as active members of the local community helping local businesses by providing a variety of field marketing, btl marketing , door to door marketing, brand promotion, social media marketing, telemarketing, web and printed based marketing materials.
Contact Us.
Get in touch with us, we would love to discuss your marketing needs.
We love a good coffee and a challenge, so would be happy to meet up with you face to face.

Since Apparently Money is Too Hard in Tarkov?

Why aelf will be the DeFi leader among major public chains

small passive income while browsing the web

All you need to know about Yield Farming - The rocket fuel for Defi

Source
It’s effectively July 2017 in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), and as in the heady days of the initial coin offering (ICO) boom, the numbers are only trending up.
According to DeFi Pulse, there is $1.9 billion in crypto assets locked in DeFi right now. According to the CoinDesk ICO Tracker, the ICO market started chugging past $1 billion in July 2017, just a few months before token sales started getting talked about on TV.
Debate juxtaposing these numbers if you like, but what no one can question is this: Crypto users are putting more and more value to work in DeFi applications, driven largely by the introduction of a whole new yield-generating pasture, Compound’s COMP governance token.
Governance tokens enable users to vote on the future of decentralized protocols, sure, but they also present fresh ways for DeFi founders to entice assets onto their platforms.
That said, it’s the crypto liquidity providers who are the stars of the present moment. They even have a meme-worthy name: yield farmers.

https://preview.redd.it/lxsvazp1g9l51.png?width=775&format=png&auto=webp&s=a36173ab679c701a5d5e0aac806c00fcc84d78c1

Where it started

Ethereum-based credit market Compound started distributing its governance token, COMP, to the protocol’s users this past June 15. Demand for the token (heightened by the way its automatic distribution was structured) kicked off the present craze and moved Compound into the leading position in DeFi.
The hot new term in crypto is “yield farming,” a shorthand for clever strategies where putting crypto temporarily at the disposal of some startup’s application earns its owner more cryptocurrency.
Another term floating about is “liquidity mining.”
The buzz around these concepts has evolved into a low rumble as more and more people get interested.
The casual crypto observer who only pops into the market when activity heats up might be starting to get faint vibes that something is happening right now. Take our word for it: Yield farming is the source of those vibes.
But if all these terms (“DeFi,” “liquidity mining,” “yield farming”) are so much Greek to you, fear not. We’re here to catch you up. We’ll get into all of them.
We’re going to go from very basic to more advanced, so feel free to skip ahead.

What are tokens?

Most CoinDesk readers probably know this, but just in case: Tokens are like the money video-game players earn while fighting monsters, money they can use to buy gear or weapons in the universe of their favorite game.
But with blockchains, tokens aren’t limited to only one massively multiplayer online money game. They can be earned in one and used in lots of others. They usually represent either ownership in something (like a piece of a Uniswap liquidity pool, which we will get into later) or access to some service. For example, in the Brave browser, ads can only be bought using basic attention token (BAT).
If tokens are worth money, then you can bank with them or at least do things that look very much like banking. Thus: decentralized finance.
Tokens proved to be the big use case for Ethereum, the second-biggest blockchain in the world. The term of art here is “ERC-20 tokens,” which refers to a software standard that allows token creators to write rules for them. Tokens can be used a few ways. Often, they are used as a form of money within a set of applications. So the idea for Kin was to create a token that web users could spend with each other at such tiny amounts that it would almost feel like they weren’t spending anything; that is, money for the internet.
Governance tokens are different. They are not like a token at a video-game arcade, as so many tokens were described in the past. They work more like certificates to serve in an ever-changing legislature in that they give holders the right to vote on changes to a protocol.
So on the platform that proved DeFi could fly, MakerDAO, holders of its governance token, MKR, vote almost every week on small changes to parameters that govern how much it costs to borrow and how much savers earn, and so on.
Read more: Why DeFi’s Billion-Dollar Milestone Matters
One thing all crypto tokens have in common, though, is they are tradable and they have a price. So, if tokens are worth money, then you can bank with them or at least do things that look very much like banking. Thus: decentralized finance.

What is DeFi?

Fair question. For folks who tuned out for a bit in 2018, we used to call this “open finance.” That construction seems to have faded, though, and “DeFi” is the new lingo.
In case that doesn’t jog your memory, DeFi is all the things that let you play with money, and the only identification you need is a crypto wallet.
On the normal web, you can’t buy a blender without giving the site owner enough data to learn your whole life history. In DeFi, you can borrow money without anyone even asking for your name.
I can explain this but nothing really brings it home like trying one of these applications. If you have an Ethereum wallet that has even $20 worth of crypto in it, go do something on one of these products. Pop over to Uniswap and buy yourself some FUN (a token for gambling apps) or WBTC (wrapped bitcoin). Go to MakerDAO and create $5 worth of DAI (a stablecoin that tends to be worth $1) out of the digital ether. Go to Compound and borrow $10 in USDC.
(Notice the very small amounts I’m suggesting. The old crypto saying “don’t put in more than you can afford to lose” goes double for DeFi. This stuff is uber-complex and a lot can go wrong. These may be “savings” products but they’re not for your retirement savings.)
Immature and experimental though it may be, the technology’s implications are staggering. On the normal web, you can’t buy a blender without giving the site owner enough data to learn your whole life history. In DeFi, you can borrow money without anyone even asking for your name.
DeFi applications don’t worry about trusting you because they have the collateral you put up to back your debt (on Compound, for instance, a $10 debt will require around $20 in collateral).
Read more: There Are More DAI on Compound Now Than There Are DAI in the World
If you do take this advice and try something, note that you can swap all these things back as soon as you’ve taken them out. Open the loan and close it 10 minutes later. It’s fine. Fair warning: It might cost you a tiny bit in fees, and the cost of using Ethereum itself right now is much higher than usual, in part due to this fresh new activity. But it’s nothing that should ruin a crypto user.
So what’s the point of borrowing for people who already have the money? Most people do it for some kind of trade. The most obvious example, to short a token (the act of profiting if its price falls). It’s also good for someone who wants to hold onto a token but still play the market.

Doesn’t running a bank take a lot of money up front?

It does, and in DeFi that money is largely provided by strangers on the internet. That’s why the startups behind these decentralized banking applications come up with clever ways to attract HODLers with idle assets.
Liquidity is the chief concern of all these different products. That is: How much money do they have locked in their smart contracts?
“In some types of products, the product experience gets much better if you have liquidity. Instead of borrowing from VCs or debt investors, you borrow from your users,” said Electric Capital managing partner Avichal Garg.
Let’s take Uniswap as an example. Uniswap is an “automated market maker,” or AMM (another DeFi term of art). This means Uniswap is a robot on the internet that is always willing to buy and it’s also always willing to sell any cryptocurrency for which it has a market.
On Uniswap, there is at least one market pair for almost any token on Ethereum. Behind the scenes, this means Uniswap can make it look like it is making a direct trade for any two tokens, which makes it easy for users, but it’s all built around pools of two tokens. And all these market pairs work better with bigger pools.

Why do I keep hearing about ‘pools’?

To illustrate why more money helps, let’s break down how Uniswap works.
Let’s say there was a market for USDC and DAI. These are two tokens (both stablecoins but with different mechanisms for retaining their value) that are meant to be worth $1 each all the time, and that generally tends to be true for both.
The price Uniswap shows for each token in any pooled market pair is based on the balance of each in the pool. So, simplifying this a lot for illustration’s sake, if someone were to set up a USDC/DAI pool, they should deposit equal amounts of both. In a pool with only 2 USDC and 2 DAI it would offer a price of 1 USDC for 1 DAI. But then imagine that someone put in 1 DAI and took out 1 USDC. Then the pool would have 1 USDC and 3 DAI. The pool would be very out of whack. A savvy investor could make an easy $0.50 profit by putting in 1 USDC and receiving 1.5 DAI. That’s a 50% arbitrage profit, and that’s the problem with limited liquidity.
(Incidentally, this is why Uniswap’s prices tend to be accurate, because traders watch it for small discrepancies from the wider market and trade them away for arbitrage profits very quickly.)
Read more: Uniswap V2 Launches With More Token-Swap Pairs, Oracle Service, Flash Loans
However, if there were 500,000 USDC and 500,000 DAI in the pool, a trade of 1 DAI for 1 USDC would have a negligible impact on the relative price. That’s why liquidity is helpful.
You can stick your assets on Compound and earn a little yield. But that’s not very creative. Users who look for angles to maximize that yield: those are the yield farmers.
Similar effects hold across DeFi, so markets want more liquidity. Uniswap solves this by charging a tiny fee on every trade. It does this by shaving off a little bit from each trade and leaving that in the pool (so one DAI would actually trade for 0.997 USDC, after the fee, growing the overall pool by 0.003 USDC). This benefits liquidity providers because when someone puts liquidity in the pool they own a share of the pool. If there has been lots of trading in that pool, it has earned a lot of fees, and the value of each share will grow.
And this brings us back to tokens.
Liquidity added to Uniswap is represented by a token, not an account. So there’s no ledger saying, “Bob owns 0.000000678% of the DAI/USDC pool.” Bob just has a token in his wallet. And Bob doesn’t have to keep that token. He could sell it. Or use it in another product. We’ll circle back to this, but it helps to explain why people like to talk about DeFi products as “money Legos.”

So how much money do people make by putting money into these products?

It can be a lot more lucrative than putting money in a traditional bank, and that’s before startups started handing out governance tokens.
Compound is the current darling of this space, so let’s use it as an illustration. As of this writing, a person can put USDC into Compound and earn 2.72% on it. They can put tether (USDT) into it and earn 2.11%. Most U.S. bank accounts earn less than 0.1% these days, which is close enough to nothing.
However, there are some caveats. First, there’s a reason the interest rates are so much juicier: DeFi is a far riskier place to park your money. There’s no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) protecting these funds. If there were a run on Compound, users could find themselves unable to withdraw their funds when they wanted.
Plus, the interest is quite variable. You don’t know what you’ll earn over the course of a year. USDC’s rate is high right now. It was low last week. Usually, it hovers somewhere in the 1% range.
Similarly, a user might get tempted by assets with more lucrative yields like USDT, which typically has a much higher interest rate than USDC. (Monday morning, the reverse was true, for unclear reasons; this is crypto, remember.) The trade-off here is USDT’s transparency about the real-world dollars it’s supposed to hold in a real-world bank is not nearly up to par with USDC’s. A difference in interest rates is often the market’s way of telling you the one instrument is viewed as dicier than another.
Users making big bets on these products turn to companies Opyn and Nexus Mutual to insure their positions because there’s no government protections in this nascent space – more on the ample risks later on.
So users can stick their assets in Compound or Uniswap and earn a little yield. But that’s not very creative. Users who look for angles to maximize that yield: those are the yield farmers.

OK, I already knew all of that. What is yield farming?

Broadly, yield farming is any effort to put crypto assets to work and generate the most returns possible on those assets.
At the simplest level, a yield farmer might move assets around within Compound, constantly chasing whichever pool is offering the best APY from week to week. This might mean moving into riskier pools from time to time, but a yield farmer can handle risk.
“Farming opens up new price arbs [arbitrage] that can spill over to other protocols whose tokens are in the pool,” said Maya Zehavi, a blockchain consultant.
Because these positions are tokenized, though, they can go further.
This was a brand-new kind of yield on a deposit. In fact, it was a way to earn a yield on a loan. Who has ever heard of a borrower earning a return on a debt from their lender?
In a simple example, a yield farmer might put 100,000 USDT into Compound. They will get a token back for that stake, called cUSDT. Let’s say they get 100,000 cUSDT back (the formula on Compound is crazy so it’s not 1:1 like that but it doesn’t matter for our purposes here).
They can then take that cUSDT and put it into a liquidity pool that takes cUSDT on Balancer, an AMM that allows users to set up self-rebalancing crypto index funds. In normal times, this could earn a small amount more in transaction fees. This is the basic idea of yield farming. The user looks for edge cases in the system to eke out as much yield as they can across as many products as it will work on.
Right now, however, things are not normal, and they probably won’t be for a while.

Why is yield farming so hot right now?

Because of liquidity mining. Liquidity mining supercharges yield farming.
Liquidity mining is when a yield farmer gets a new token as well as the usual return (that’s the “mining” part) in exchange for the farmer’s liquidity.
“The idea is that stimulating usage of the platform increases the value of the token, thereby creating a positive usage loop to attract users,” said Richard Ma of smart-contract auditor Quantstamp.
The yield farming examples above are only farming yield off the normal operations of different platforms. Supply liquidity to Compound or Uniswap and get a little cut of the business that runs over the protocols – very vanilla.
But Compound announced earlier this year it wanted to truly decentralize the product and it wanted to give a good amount of ownership to the people who made it popular by using it. That ownership would take the form of the COMP token.
Lest this sound too altruistic, keep in mind that the people who created it (the team and the investors) owned more than half of the equity. By giving away a healthy proportion to users, that was very likely to make it a much more popular place for lending. In turn, that would make everyone’s stake worth much more.
So, Compound announced this four-year period where the protocol would give out COMP tokens to users, a fixed amount every day until it was gone. These COMP tokens control the protocol, just as shareholders ultimately control publicly traded companies.
Every day, the Compound protocol looks at everyone who had lent money to the application and who had borrowed from it and gives them COMP proportional to their share of the day’s total business.
The results were very surprising, even to Compound’s biggest promoters.
COMP’s value will likely go down, and that’s why some investors are rushing to earn as much of it as they can right now.
This was a brand-new kind of yield on a deposit into Compound. In fact, it was a way to earn a yield on a loan, as well, which is very weird: Who has ever heard of a borrower earning a return on a debt from their lender?
COMP’s value has consistently been well over $200 since it started distributing on June 15. We did the math elsewhere but long story short: investors with fairly deep pockets can make a strong gain maximizing their daily returns in COMP. It is, in a way, free money.
It’s possible to lend to Compound, borrow from it, deposit what you borrowed and so on. This can be done multiple times and DeFi startup Instadapp even built a tool to make it as capital-efficient as possible.
“Yield farmers are extremely creative. They find ways to ‘stack’ yields and even earn multiple governance tokens at once,” said Spencer Noon of DTC Capital.
COMP’s value spike is a temporary situation. The COMP distribution will only last four years and then there won’t be any more. Further, most people agree that the high price now is driven by the low float (that is, how much COMP is actually free to trade on the market – it will never be this low again). So the value will probably gradually go down, and that’s why savvy investors are trying to earn as much as they can now.
Appealing to the speculative instincts of diehard crypto traders has proven to be a great way to increase liquidity on Compound. This fattens some pockets but also improves the user experience for all kinds of Compound users, including those who would use it whether they were going to earn COMP or not.
As usual in crypto, when entrepreneurs see something successful, they imitate it. Balancer was the next protocol to start distributing a governance token, BAL, to liquidity providers. Flash loan provider bZx has announced a plan. Ren, Curve and Synthetix also teamed up to promote a liquidity pool on Curve.
It is a fair bet many of the more well-known DeFi projects will announce some kind of coin that can be mined by providing liquidity.
The case to watch here is Uniswap versus Balancer. Balancer can do the same thing Uniswap does, but most users who want to do a quick token trade through their wallet use Uniswap. It will be interesting to see if Balancer’s BAL token convinces Uniswap’s liquidity providers to defect.
So far, though, more liquidity has gone into Uniswap since the BAL announcement, according to its data site. That said, even more has gone into Balancer.

Did liquidity mining start with COMP?

No, but it was the most-used protocol with the most carefully designed liquidity mining scheme.
This point is debated but the origins of liquidity mining probably date back to Fcoin, a Chinese exchange that created a token in 2018 that rewarded people for making trades. You won’t believe what happened next! Just kidding, you will: People just started running bots to do pointless trades with themselves to earn the token.
Similarly, EOS is a blockchain where transactions are basically free, but since nothing is really free the absence of friction was an invitation for spam. Some malicious hacker who didn’t like EOS created a token called EIDOS on the network in late 2019. It rewarded people for tons of pointless transactions and somehow got an exchange listing.
These initiatives illustrated how quickly crypto users respond to incentives.
Read more: Compound Changes COMP Distribution Rules Following ‘Yield Farming’ Frenzy
Fcoin aside, liquidity mining as we now know it first showed up on Ethereum when the marketplace for synthetic tokens, Synthetix, announced in July 2019 an award in its SNX token for users who helped add liquidity to the sETH/ETH pool on Uniswap. By October, that was one of Uniswap’s biggest pools.
When Compound Labs, the company that launched the Compound protocol, decided to create COMP, the governance token, the firm took months designing just what kind of behavior it wanted and how to incentivize it. Even still, Compound Labs was surprised by the response. It led to unintended consequences such as crowding into a previously unpopular market (lending and borrowing BAT) in order to mine as much COMP as possible.
Just last week, 115 different COMP wallet addresses – senators in Compound’s ever-changing legislature – voted to change the distribution mechanism in hopes of spreading liquidity out across the markets again.

Is there DeFi for bitcoin?

Yes, on Ethereum.
Nothing has beaten bitcoin over time for returns, but there’s one thing bitcoin can’t do on its own: create more bitcoin.
A smart trader can get in and out of bitcoin and dollars in a way that will earn them more bitcoin, but this is tedious and risky. It takes a certain kind of person.
DeFi, however, offers ways to grow one’s bitcoin holdings – though somewhat indirectly.
A long HODLer is happy to gain fresh BTC off their counterparty’s short-term win. That’s the game.
For example, a user can create a simulated bitcoin on Ethereum using BitGo’s WBTC system. They put BTC in and get the same amount back out in freshly minted WBTC. WBTC can be traded back for BTC at any time, so it tends to be worth the same as BTC.
Then the user can take that WBTC, stake it on Compound and earn a few percent each year in yield on their BTC. Odds are, the people who borrow that WBTC are probably doing it to short BTC (that is, they will sell it immediately, buy it back when the price goes down, close the loan and keep the difference).
A long HODLer is happy to gain fresh BTC off their counterparty’s short-term win. That’s the game.

How risky is it?

Enough.
“DeFi, with the combination of an assortment of digital funds, automation of key processes, and more complex incentive structures that work across protocols – each with their own rapidly changing tech and governance practices – make for new types of security risks,” said Liz Steininger of Least Authority, a crypto security auditor. “Yet, despite these risks, the high yields are undeniably attractive to draw more users.”
We’ve seen big failures in DeFi products. MakerDAO had one so bad this year it’s called “Black Thursday.” There was also the exploit against flash loan provider bZx. These things do break and when they do money gets taken.
As this sector gets more robust, we could see token holders greenlighting more ways for investors to profit from DeFi niches.
Right now, the deal is too good for certain funds to resist, so they are moving a lot of money into these protocols to liquidity mine all the new governance tokens they can. But the funds – entities that pool the resources of typically well-to-do crypto investors – are also hedging. Nexus Mutual, a DeFi insurance provider of sorts, told CoinDesk it has maxed out its available coverage on these liquidity applications. Opyn, the trustless derivatives maker, created a way to short COMP, just in case this game comes to naught.
And weird things have arisen. For example, there’s currently more DAI on Compound than have been minted in the world. This makes sense once unpacked but it still feels dicey to everyone.
That said, distributing governance tokens might make things a lot less risky for startups, at least with regard to the money cops.
“Protocols distributing their tokens to the public, meaning that there’s a new secondary listing for SAFT tokens, [gives] plausible deniability from any security accusation,” Zehavi wrote. (The Simple Agreement for Future Tokens was a legal structure favored by many token issuers during the ICO craze.)
Whether a cryptocurrency is adequately decentralized has been a key feature of ICO settlements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

What’s next for yield farming? (A prediction)

COMP turned out to be a bit of a surprise to the DeFi world, in technical ways and others. It has inspired a wave of new thinking.
“Other projects are working on similar things,” said Nexus Mutual founder Hugh Karp. In fact, informed sources tell CoinDesk brand-new projects will launch with these models.
We might soon see more prosaic yield farming applications. For example, forms of profit-sharing that reward certain kinds of behavior.
Imagine if COMP holders decided, for example, that the protocol needed more people to put money in and leave it there longer. The community could create a proposal that shaved off a little of each token’s yield and paid that portion out only to the tokens that were older than six months. It probably wouldn’t be much, but an investor with the right time horizon and risk profile might take it into consideration before making a withdrawal.
(There are precedents for this in traditional finance: A 10-year Treasury bond normally yields more than a one-month T-bill even though they’re both backed by the full faith and credit of Uncle Sam, a 12-month certificate of deposit pays higher interest than a checking account at the same bank, and so on.)
As this sector gets more robust, its architects will come up with ever more robust ways to optimize liquidity incentives in increasingly refined ways. We could see token holders greenlighting more ways for investors to profit from DeFi niches.
Questions abound for this nascent industry: What will MakerDAO do to restore its spot as the king of DeFi? Will Uniswap join the liquidity mining trend? Will anyone stick all these governance tokens into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)? Or would that be a yield farmers co-op?
Whatever happens, crypto’s yield farmers will keep moving fast. Some fresh fields may open and some may soon bear much less luscious fruit.
But that’s the nice thing about farming in DeFi: It is very easy to switch fields.

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