So a bit more on the crypto stuff I’m looking at. As always, definitely do your own research. If it doesn’t all sound absolutely crazy to you, it should. It’s just that sometimes crazy things still happen. (If you go look up Richard Heart, the guy doing all of this — I sincerely literally hope your first thought is something like “are you serious?”) But hey.

The three coins I’m most interested in are all closely related and I think I have a short way to explain the “why” for those who don’t know about them; all are positioned against scammy trading.

They’re Hex, Pulsechain and PulseX.

In short: Hex: Basically it rewards you for investing and holding, and not for trading.  You “stake” coins for a fixed period and you get an APY back. Additionally, if you “violate” your stake, i.e. end too early or late, you’re penalized — and the penalties go to people who don’t. Pretty good.

Pulse. Okay, these are crazy. First you have to get Ethereum(literally and figuratively). Ethereum is something like Bitcoin 2.0 — not only does it do “transactions,” but it also carries other coins, and can do automatic price setting and also stupid crap like NFTs. It works very well…but all the trades have fees that go miners, called “gas” and right now they are sky high. (Again, ethereum kind of means two things here — the “network” that everything is on, also called ERC20 — and also the “coin” you use to do the stuff, which is just called ethereum)

There’s about to be a copy of Ethereum/ERC20 called Pulsechain/PRC20, with lower fees and less waste. Now what is frankly pretty bat**** is that they’re not only copying the code, they’re copying the data. I.e., if you have any coins or nfts or whatever on Ethereum (the chain), there will be an exact duplicate of all of those things on Pulse.  There was already a “way” to get Pulse for “cheap” a while ago, called a ‘sacrifice.’ (This is wild word/tax jugglery, as in you don’t per se “buy” the coin bc taxes, you “sacrifice” coins and will be granted coins based on that, but since you get them before the launch they’re technically worth zero)

There’s another sacrifice going on right now though, for PulseX. PulseX is like Uniswap, if you know that — but basically what that is –it’s a coin used in Decentralized Exchanges, or DEXes. What that means is basically for certain crypto coins, you can buy or sell them without order books — it’s just a big computer in the middle that sets prices purely based on a supply in a pool; i.e. someone buys some out of the pool price goes up, and vice versa. Just lots of math.  Now, for this to work, you have to have a big pool of coins to work from. You incentivize these “liquidity pools” by having people put money in and guaranteed a tiny percentage for every trade that occurs. That’s what Uniswap and PulseX do.

Now, PulseX is having a sacrifice phase right now, best rates are locked in until jan 10. I will be doing some here, but you should do your homework if you decide to.

How this works is tough and it’s very very easy to get this wrong. Lots of opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot. Read lots of stuff on it:

One way to do it: You join a real exchange like Coinbase or Binance. But most of this stuff doesn’t work if you only have on an account in their thing — you need your own “wallet.” These are hard, but the standard is Metamask.  You’d have to convert to Ethereum, send that to your Metamask wallet — then possibly either swap to hex or “sacrifice” to pulsex.