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All of the round data referenced below can be downloaded from here. The data is part of a project that downloads round data periodically and uploads the csv.
Weekly Winners and Losers Leaderboard Now Live
I finally got around to adding weekly winners and losers to the Leaderboard. You can see the weekly winners here and the weekly losers here.They're really just the biggest winners and losers in the last 7 days from the time it was pulled. So for instance, if you check out weekly winners on Wednesday, it'll show the winners from prior Wednesday to today. I have it set to update once an hour.
You can also access it from Leaderboard and changing the Type dropdown to "Weekly Winners" or "Weekly Losers".
Vitalik
This week gave us an incredible meme featuring Vitalik and his... um... long position in Ethereum ahead of the merge:
Big news, Vitalik just opened a huge long position! pic.twitter.com/E1GkJFvCZb
— The Moon | Carl (@TheMoonCarl) August 30, 2022
Anyway, the merge is expected to be complete sometime between Sept 10 through 20th. All that being said, preparations are being made:
The bus outside Vitalik’s house when The Merge goes live
— LilMoonLambo (@LilMoonLambo) September 4, 2022
pic.twitter.com/WE6glB5s4G
Vitalik is interesting to follow on Twitter but he's unfortunately one of those people that bots target. So any discussion to one of his tweets is overrun with bot spam. If only AI was advanced enough to recognize these sophisticated spammers:
Vitalik had an interesting exchange with Peter McCormack about proof of stake compared to proof of work. McCormack argued proof of stake is essentially the wealthiest people setting the rules for everyone (sound familiar), while proof of work anyone with compute can help secure blocks through mining.
Because it's not a circular argument, it's a spiral argument. People with coins at time T secure the transactions at time T+1.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 3, 2022
Spiral arguments and circular arguments sometimes look similar to untrained observers, but they are fundamentally different.
Vitalik's argument is silly as it attempts a gotcha by introducing a time component. Yes, the rich set the rules, but the rich in T+1 may not be the rich in T! See? Spiral, not circular!
Vitalik also gave an interview with Noah Smith. Vitalik was asked about PoS security compared to that of PoW and here's how he responded (emphasis mine):
"Efficiency and security are not separate problems. The question is always: how much security can you buy for every dollar per year that you spend on paying for it? If a system has too little security, you can add security at the cost of printing more coins, and at that point you've regained security by sacrificing on efficiency. There are some deep economic reasons that I go to in this post for why proof of stake can buy something like 20 times more security for the same cost. Basically, participating as a proof of work miner has medium ongoing costs and medium entry costs, but being a proof of stake validator has low ongoing costs and high entry costs. It turns out that how secure you are depends on just the entry costs, as that's what an attacker has to pay to attack. And so you want your consensus system to have low ongoing costs and high entry costs, which PoS is great at. Additionally, there are differences in what options the two give you to respond to an attack: in PoW, you can only respond by changing the PoW algorithm, which effectively burns all existing mining hardware, good and bad, but in PoS you can have the protocol burn the assets of only the attacker , so the attacker pays a lot but the ecosystem quickly recovers."
So the rest of the stakers can get together and punish the attacker, which sounds fine. But that's the trade off. As the stakers have more centralized power, they can maybe reverse some transactions or prevent some people from participating in the network. We already saw this with a number of hard-forks meant to undo money lost due to bugs. But how much longer until you have a blacklist of bad people that aren't allowed on the network? Sounds familiar? Because that's the system we already have that crypto is trying to iterate on.
I still have to go through the rest of the interview and I may comment on it next week.
Action
Volumes are still in the shitter. We only had the 24-hour average pool size get above 20 a few times this week
ETH has been doing relatively well while BTC has not. It may be hype because of the upcoming-merge and it might just be worth it to hold some ETH so if a PoW fork proves even a little popular, you get a nice little dividend.
Winners and Losers
Again, you can see weekly winners here and the weekly losers here.
| Place | Account | Games Played | Won | Winnings Even Money | Average bet size |
| 1 | 0x7cb9fdbec630c7ca582937506f228540fe478a82 | 188 | 96.8091 | 30.9261 | 2.5332 |
| 2 | 0xe8c584efbd75404d2de8e3f167e6cfff0be156c7 | 1,173 | 40.2728 | 74.5805 | 0.3907 |
| 3 | 0xd145dab6864cf91c50f187568c9459a161f488f3 | 554 | 36.8659 | 21.2052 | 0.7545 |
| 4 | 0xb1db167e501829024db26e6c87def0cecc41d567 | 185 | 35.2144 | 15.8619 | 1.4416 |
| 5 | 0x9804786b67e61eb0855dd076ccd119c3c2ecd6ff | 27 | 25.2210 | 2.6668 | 4.9060 |
| 6 | 0xae1825c5ff36d23db8bba7d25d752771e9991d8c | 166 | 21.3564 | 1.7676 | 2.7048 |
| 7 | 0xd57051fa3cd71d5607a9650dab726f3313477145 | 281 | 20.9363 | 4.7043 | 2.4782 |
| 8 | 0x3e5126c8dd68db20246e51bc31cb087a28003d2e | 159 | 19.8973 | 23.6483 | 0.7462 |
| 9 | 0x021a0940fa2583ca87dc036719a1865b3b4bd00a | 247 | 19.8899 | 25.5273 | 0.5751 |
| 10 | 0x73960ad470d97c63caefa80dbdea2e9d3dbd72da | 92 | 17.8009 | 35.6017 | 0.5000 |
A really strong performance by our top dog. He's got quite a record with a total of 1,440 games. Although during that time he's only up 50, meaning he was down 40 prior to this week. Not super optimistic for his future...
Similar story with #2. He played a total of 7,624 games and he's up only 64 BNB throughout his life.
Let's see how the losers did...
| Place | Account | Games Played | Won | Winnings Even Money | Average bet size |
| 1 | 0x5616ee15a593dab14dfcac05055c58f23f560e05 | 360 | -216.9295 | -50.3399 | 3.5520 |
| 2 | 0xd820b68e7c4e822692a805567f4b57e832730533 | 706 | -73.2774 | -27.0066 | 1.4103 |
| 3 | 0x7f9f833f28ae5f5afa7a9714c9958cde3ec6f7aa | 480 | -63.4084 | -50.3320 | 1.2898 |
| 4 | 0x39205a6b63fb0d405b23ec8fbe736d6444e0f4d4 | 529 | -48.1372 | -44.5464 | 0.7682 |
| 5 | 0x79eb096e2d3958ca41bd78439b2af2f8802e6821 | 13 | -42.9333 | -6.1848 | 4.6570 |
| 6 | 0xa10a7ba683d8e5b7dfc5fa0744c15288bdabeba6 | 145 | -39.2359 | -13.0588 | 1.8235 |
| 7 | 0x5248528d370e90ee6f3aec2676c6513128955e0e | 2 | -38.4890 | -2.0000 | 19.2445 |
| 8 | 0x3ee033f2f2117e6e6444144561ea21a953f17561 | 70 | -36.5978 | -9.0046 | 4.9561 |
| 9 | 0x294186c789bc71fe2cbd36e9ae0aacaa29a86ce6 | 60 | -33.1584 | -6.4895 | 3.5894 |
| 10 | 0xe509034fa973423c86c509a4029dbdf94bd35373 | 94 | -32.9332 | -19.3861 | 1.5871 |
Hell of a week for our top dog. Losing 216 BNB in a week is a hell of a feat, even with BNB prices sub-300. It looks like he was trying to do some sentiment analysis and was really bearish and he just kept doubling down.
I don't consider sentiment analysis valuable in this timeframe. It might be useful on a tiny time frame (seconds/few minutes) or much longer (days). But if something bad happened it'll be too late unless it corresponds exactly with a round lock. And you don't get any more money for being more right. For instance, if you bet BEAR and the price drops 10%, you win your bet, same as if it dropped 0.01. So stuff like sentiment analysis, even if possible, is much more valuable when buying/shorting directly.
But our losers might love sentiment analysis, and of course we love our losers, so naturally we should love sentiment analysis as well.
As always, feel free to reach out with questions or comments or want my to highlight anything different on my weekly market recaps. If you like what you read and want to subscribe to receive an email when a new post is published, click here.
Good luck and bet responsibly!