Welcome to The Decred Drive. Every Thursday this brief newsletter highlights top-notch Decred content from the previous week.

This week DCR stakeholders are in the driver’s seat and working with conviction. Let’s jump right into it. Here’s this week’s spotlight action:

First and foremost, Decred’s 4th birthday was this week. It is a great time to reflect and appreciate how far Decred has come in just 4 years. It’s mind-boggling how much technology (especially software) can progress in such a short amount of time — can’t imagine where Decred will be in 6 years when Stakey turns 10 years old… it’s all very exciting.

2. The Decred Journal was published for January 2020. Big thanks to Richard Red, Bee, and others for all their effort on this publication. It really makes such a massive difference to have a core publication within the Decred community. Incredible piece of work. There is so much color published in the Decred Journals, covering all aspects of the Decred ecosystem — it’s an amazing piece to go through once a month. I can only imagine, as Decred grows into a much larger global community, we may need a large team of people working on this just to cover everything that is happening — but that is going to be a good problem to have.

3. “Decred On-Chain: Ticket Funding Rates” was published by Permabull Nino. These pieces are fairly technical, but always extremely insightful and worth working through. Permabull Nino’s DMs are open on Twitter if you have questions on his research/analysis. Follow up with him and maybe you’ll learn something valuable! There’s a real opportunity now to be an early bird at understanding Decred on-chain analytics — get there before the crowd. Checkmate, Ammar, and Permabull Nino are solid on-chain analysts to follow for everything Decred on-chain.

4. DCRComic, in traditional Stakey style, covers and review some of what Decred’s treasury has funded to date. Some really great initiatives have been funded by the Decred community so far... Imho, one of the very major and exciting undertakings is the DEX project. It’s going to be hard work, but the DEX could pay off big as a core piece of open-source infrastructure for years to come. Like Joel Monegro said on Decred in Depth, “If you’re walking into uncertainty, you want to walk in with people you’re certain about.” Personally, I couldn’t be more certain about the Decred community and development team working on the DEX.

5. Chris Burniske brought us back to an epic Placeholder post this week. If this post doesn’t make sense to you, read it again, and then again.. until it does. Imo, this post from Joel Monegro, “Sovereign Cryptonetworks”, is a cornerstone piece for the entire crypto space. It’s an absolute must-read… “While Bitcoin today has an advantage in terms of scale across the supply, demand and investor sides of the equation, Decred is better set up for long-term sovereignty thanks to its decentralized governance principles.” FACT.

6. As Dusty Decred says, and DCRComic agrees, “Not your keys, not your money. To delegate is to trust.” Or as Checkmate says, “Not your keys not your coins.” This week we saw many problems with staking ecosystems that are facilitated by centralized exchanges. Massive cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and Gate.io having all kinds of issues facilitating withdrawals of staked cryptoassets. Crypto is all about empowering the individual to safely and conveniently custody his own assets so that he doesn’t have to trust any other 3rd party. That is what we are here for. Decred is true to this mission.

7. Nice post here from Checkmate speaking to the sound fundamentals of Decred. As the bull market begins, get ready. Decred has erupted skyward in the past. Once it goes, there’s no turning back. All aboard!

8. On the Politeia front, get your votes in for Video Content Production for Decred from Exitus and Decred Fundamental Metrics Research Proposal — Phase 2 from Checkmate. Both very high-quality, value-add proposals. Also, a new proposal was published 4 days ago, Content Production for Decred in russian. So get your voting in for that one as well! In discussion on Politeia, we have two new proposals to examine before they go to voting — always best to ask questions and provide feedback on proposals before they go to vote.

9. Steve Good added $DCR as a payment option for his book, “Be Left Behind: Discover Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Before Your Grandma Beats You To It”. Would recommend checking Steve’s book out here. Steve mentioned he’s going to dig into Decred next — smart man. He won’t regret it!

10. Issue #27 of the Politeia Digest was published. Check it out on Block Commons! Goes in-depth on all Decred proposals currently in the works.

11. Last but not least, Marco and Clarissa Peereboom seem to be Master Chefs when it comes to making chicken parmigiana (one of my favorites). The whole Decred community is waiting for the annual Decred Banquet at the Peereboom’s house! :) Nothing better than writing some Decred code and then topping it off with a first-class meal! Really, congrats on this:

That’s all for this week. See you next week.

Thanks folks.

~

Dragon

@DecredDragon on Twitter