"Real Value" Of CryptoCurrency

I think most people reading this would know about BitCoin and would have some vague ideas about trading in cryptocurrency (apps like WazirX and  CoinDCX). This article is meant for people who would want to start trading in cryptocurrency but have no idea where to start. It should obviously not be taken as investment advice.

The volatility in crypto markets is very high and there are macro trends and micro trends. The micro trends are very hard to predict for any cryptocurrency and for new currencies with less number of coins out there, the percentage change with these micro-trends can be massive in terms of numbers and thus it's advisable to tread carefully.  These trends are often because of trading bots and hypes perpetuated on internal groups. Although, that's something not to worry about if you understand the "real" value of that cryptocurrency. Any currency has value based on the number of people adopting it. So, the more projects are built using cryptocurrency, the more people get attracted to it, the more people use it. This adoption often shows compounded effect given a sensible leadership is heading the project with genuine social good in mind. Often at times the leadership gets' greedy and wants to manipulate the projects to benefit their own greed hurting the community at large that supported them in their endeavor. The current stage of a lot of adoption of this tech is based on the hope of growth and it has shown massive promises. 

As of now the sovereign funds, pension funds have not invested in these currencies and thus acts as an early investment. If any of these big cheque funds decide to pick up any cryptocurrency then it would totally change the shape of it. (Few million dollars is small number for them).

Real Projects are not replicas. 

As I said above the value of any currency is based on projects that use it. If your neighbourhood e-commerce store starts using a coin then you can buy stuff from them without getting into the national currency loop, thus making the currency more valuable. Obviously, every project helps but to truly have massive adoption of any cryptocurrency, the projects built on top of it cannot be "Replica of X in Crypto", the value lies in building something truly innovative and engaging for the community while leveraging the currency. 

If you are just looking for trends to understand so that you can invest, the first and foremost thing to realize it is that do not have a tunnel vision but a long term thought, here are some pointers that you can use. 

• Wallet address growth
• The blockchain's transaction volume and growth 
• Real Projects and adoption 
• dApp creation and usage growth 
• Community Address and Resolution of Technical Problems associated with scaling up
• GitHub work contributed to a blockchain 
• Developers adding to the blockchain. Are developers growing, stagnant or decreasing over time?
• Key partnerships that are adding value. Not just announcing the name of someone to put on your website but what the partnership is actually doing to drive adoption and value creation. (Partnerships with bigger currencies)
• Celebrity Endorsements and Influencer marketing 
• Reddit / Closed Groups Sentiment 

There are often Red Flags associated, which can be tracked down if you are watching very closely, these are, 

• How many ICOs are happening? Are we seeing an increase of more and more ICOs raising tens of millions of dollars with no working product?
• Is the growth euphoric or optimistic? 
• People will increase their risk appetite to try and get more return as higher returns become harder in the top 50 cryptos because most of that price action will have been exhausted. So investing in big players is indeed very stupid. They are fluctuating with micro-trends and have very little to offer in terms of growth and adoption. 
• What is the economic outlook in the traditional world? Negative sentiment among the community is to be feared as it spreads like wildfire. 

The biggest and most indicative is obviously Wallet Address Growth closely followed by transaction volume and growth.  Comparing this with other currencies and comparing it with it's own trends over the spectrum of months would give you a good long term measure of the currency's future. 

Is it advisable to invest your life savings in crypto? 
Obviously No. 

My advice would be to make bets to small unheard currencies in a way that losing that money would not affect you a bit. 5% - 7% of your savings at max. 

Also Worth Reading :  https://vaibhavgeek.blogspot.com/2017/06/blockchain-and-its-end-user-applications.html

Building Get Go Scalable Products with AWS - Webinar

Sheety Chatbots!

Sheety Chatbot!

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to build a notification chatbot which sends you notifications at specific time intervals and talks to you if you want to receive them or not.

For the purpose of this tutorial we are going to build a bot which checks every 5 minutes on a google sheet if the person has marked his work or not and notifies specific **subscriber** on their telegram/slack/skype account if they have. Instead of a google sheet you can ping a website for changes.

> subscriber - the user who has subscribed to the project via Telegram/Slack/Skype

We are going to use following stack for this purpose,

-   DynamoDB - subscribers and habits

-   AWS Lambda -

    -   serverless functions which is invoked when chatbot gets a message.

    -   a cron job which notifies the user for an update

-   Claudia.js - Wrapper to write chatbot for slack, telegram and skype

-   Cloudwatch Rules - To trigger lambda function every 5 minutes

   

Architecture.

In our database, we are going to have two tables - subscribers , sheetcells

Subscribers is going to have following columns,  

- id  

- slackToken  

- slackId  

- telegramId  

- skypeId  

- sheetId

Sheetcells is going to have following columns,  

- cell  

- value  

- last checked  

- type : enum [ “habit”, “goal”, “day” ]  

- subscriberId

For our main infrastructure, we will have cloudwatch event calling our notification lambda function (called as notifyLambda), which will send the message to our user. The conversations would be handled by separate lambda function which is called (

Time Management and Productivity

As someone who is data and productivity fanatic, this post is going to be about breaking the schedule, tracking the data while there is a schedule and there is not a schedule and how to measure more accurate metrics. 

(College Education - 2) What if you get 100K USD job after a 200$ course. Will you pay for college then?

If you have not read my previous article on college education, you can find the link over here. 

Why this pandemic is an ultimate test.

Humans have survived on the hope of a better future. The now is pretty irrelevant as long as there is the promise of a better future. We have led ourselves to narrate a sippy dream filled with brighter future of neon lights and disposable human connections. Nobody expected to be in a home lockdown, irrespective of the fact that's what we would have been doing anyway, the imposition of such comes as a big blow. Something more precious than the present has been taken away from us, the promise of a better future. 

The psychological impact of it is insanely high. We have to deal with someone, we have to live with someone we rarely have an honest conversation with, ourselves. This pandemic is also a long coming for so many issues that plagued society, we are looking at improved conversations on the division of labour between genders, mental health, social media addiction, unimpactful education system and so on. It is indeed an extraordinary situation where everyone seems to be stuck together (and yet alone) in an elevator that sometimes goes up, sometimes down, but the doors don’t open and the help button is broken.

And that is why this pandemic is an ultimate test for homo sapiens. 

We need to create reasons to find hope, because I am pretty sure this won't go on more than 3-4 months from now on. The vaccine would be prepared and when it does we should be ready to do what we always dreamt of. 

A study of shock induced air cavity in liquid nitromethane

A study if shock induced cavity collapse in liquid nitromethan from Vaibhav Maheshwari