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Author: ZiroomZi

Smart contracts (origins in 80s, 90s vs. 2013 ETH and 2020s Cardano)
We had a pretty interesting product update. We laughed, we cried, we all learned a little bit. Two and a half hours lots of stuff and I hope this gives you guys a good window into all the things that are happening. There's an enormous amount of complexity in Cardano and Goguen is no different. In fact that one slide showing all the interlocking dependencies and the moving pieces for it and just the sheer volume of things that are going on is, is an indication of not only the quality of the team but also the commercial reality of being a smart contract platform. In 2020 when I co-founded Ethereum our reference material was paper. We looked at things that Nick Szabo and people from the 1990s and 1980s wrote about and whether you were a Ricardian contract fan or you had programmed in Eiffel or you understood things like FpML basically it was an open field which gave us kind of a freedom to just do whatever we wanted to do but it also didn't give us a commercial reality of who's going to buy it? Who's going to use it? What do you need to do? The expectations in 2020 are vastly different from the expectations in 2013 and the reality is that there are massive deficits with Ethereum as designed today which is why Tezos exists and Algorand exists and why ETH2 is being constructed . It's why there are so many different players from Polkadot and others on down who have deep and detailed opinions about the things we need to do. If the ICO revolution hadn't happened, there was no notion of an ERC20 token and we were in a just different world.
We didn't have DeFi, any of these things and now in 2020 if you are to be competitive and build great things and actually invite real use and utility at a scale of millions and billions of people or government or Fortune 500 you need to have real good answers about a lot of different threats and things. For example, Marlowe, what it does is it leverages 20 years of history from domain experts like Willi Brammertz and over 30 years of history in domain-specific language (DSL) design from professor Simon Thompson and his team and it puts them together. It says for the first time ever we're going to have semantical clarity between the entrepreneur, the developer, the writer and the financial services infrastructure whether that be the banker, the insurance agent, the exchange, whoever that might be. Up until the totality of human history till today we have never had that semantical clarity. All four of those actors speak different languages and what we're doing with Marlowe as a DSL is an example of how you can unify and create a common language and experience between all of them today.
Marlowe, DSL, Glow, Plutus, IELE
Right now, you guys can go to the Marlowe playground and you can start using it and start building things and start having that semantical clarity and work with us and over a period of six months or so that will continue to evolve. Templates will evolve, applications will be constructed and those applications will work their way into Cardano applications and eventually they'll become cross-platform and work on things like (Hyperledger) fabric and other such things as we see industry and commercial adoption but it requires a starting point and Marlowe has evolved over a four year period through the hard labors of so many people to actually give us a great starting point. You can visually look at contracts and talk about their design. You can write them in JavaScript, you can write them in the Marlowe programming language. There's a Haskell side to things and you can see the power of this approach because of its design. You can prove things are correct, you can use theory that has existed for over 40 years like SAT solvers and reachability to actually show that you're not going to have a parity bug and that's just one example of one DSL of which many more will come. The point of DSLs is to give clarity to people in the industry. For example if we get into the health business and we start talking about medical records that will become a DSL to broker their movement and that same clarity and semantical unification will occur between doctors and hospitals, patients, governments, regulators and business professionals and they will now have a common language. So, Marlowe is an entry point and it's an example of how to build a DSL and evolve a DSL and bring the right people to the table.
When we look to things like Glow, from MuKn, this is an example of a team that's highly motivated and intrinsically across blockchain. When we look to the future and we say what happens when Bitcoin gets smart contracts? What happens when ETH2 comes out? What happens when people want to build cross-blockchain applications? Wouldn't it be nice to have a unification language and that's what Glow is basically all about. By strategic investments in that ecosystem, what Glow does for us is it ensures that we won't be left behind that Cardano has that and all Cardano infrastructure can benefit from that and Glow in turn will benefit from its embedding in our ecosystem. More users, more technology and ultimately because Cardano's the best. If you deploy in that direction it's the best experience. When you look to Plutus, Plutus is the unification language, it's the conductor of the orchestra and it pulls all of these things together and there were a lot of design requirements with Plutus that were quite hard from a theory viewpoint. We really cared a lot about resource determinism. We wanted to make sure that it was always predictable or at least as predictable as it can be to know how much it costs to do things because at the end of the day this is not a science experiment. These are not toys back in 2013. We had the luxury with Ethereum of just seeing what happened and the market makes strategic investments and they have to know how much their operating cost is going to be for their business model. We designed Plutus so that it would be one of the best programming languages on a long arc agenda of being a very practical on and off chain language to unify all the Cardano ecosystem. There are many objects in the ecosystem to operate, manipulate, instruments of value like native assets, identity, smart contracts onto themselves, DAOs, off chain infrastructure and you need a conductor that's capable of living in between all of these things and you need certainty that the code you're writing is going to work.
This is why we based it on an ecosystem that has 35 years of history and we as a company have invested millions of dollars in that ecosystem to modernize it and bring it into the 21st century especially for things like Windows support and working with partners like Tweag WebAssembly support, working on projects like compilation to JavaScript so that we can share that's there and our commitment is going to continue beyond that we are a founding member of the Haskell foundation working with Simon Peyton Jones and we're going to ensure that Haskell has compilation to ARM and that all of the technology that's required to keep that language competitive and actually make the language even more competitive will happen. It's very nice that Plutus is deeply ingrained in that ecosystem and that makes it a perfect conductor language. In the coming months we're going to talk a lot more about our relationship decay in IELE. If you live in the imperative object-oriented world and you want to do things a bit differently than the way things are done in the Haskell functional world then it makes sense to have an option that has the same principles as us which is why we reached out to Grigore years ago and established a commercial relationship with him. It's been the privilege of my career finding a way to resurrect that relationship so in the coming months we're going to talk a lot about how IELE fits into the Cardano ecosystem and the value it's going to bring in addition to the value of Marlowe, Glow, and Plutus.
Native assets
One of the single most important things about all of this is the native asset standard. One of the things we did not anticipate when we created Ethereum is just how pervasive the user's ability to issue an asset would be. We figured this would be an important thing, it's why we put it on a T-shirt back in the Miami conference in January of 2014 and we realized that from the color coin's project in the master coin project and one of the most important things is that we have the ability to issue not just a utility token but non-functional assets, security tokens and a litany of other instruments that hold value. Some ephemeral, some permanent, some with flexible monetary policies, some with fixed monetary policies, some from a central issuer, some from a decentralized issuer, some managed by a foundation, some managed by the community, some managed by fixed code that's immutable and the point of the native asset standard in the ERC20 converter is to establish a co-evolution of the technology and the commercialization of the technology. What we've been doing with ERC20 converter is using that as a way to create a conversation with those who want to migrate or build on Cardano and thinking through how are we going to create practical standards with our native assets. We already have enormous advantages with this standard over Ethereum. In particular the fact that your assets you issue on Cardano are treated the way that ADA is treated whereas in Ethereum you're a second-class citizen or ETH is treated differently from smart contracts. This first class citizen approach means that your assets will have the same governance access layer, to portfolio access and infrastructure that ADA itself has. Easier listing experiences, easier time with hardware wallets, easier time with wallet software. In general better user experience, faster transactions, lower transaction costs and then eventually for higher value tokens even the possibility of paying transaction fees over the long term in the native asset itself as if you were your own cryptocurrency.
Goguen rollout
You just simply cannot do this with the design of Ethereum and Ethereum 2. It's a huge advantage we have in our ecosystem and it's one that will become more pervasive over time now Goguen has already started. As a launch agenda the very first update to enable some Goguen era functionality was the metadata standard which meant that you could go from just moving ADA around to actually a whole litany of applications in the identity space and in the metadata space some of which we're aggressively negotiating on in commercial deals which we'll announce at a later date. The rollout of Goguen in terms of the system as we mentioned in the presentation will be principally done for the first iteration over a series of three hard fork combinator (HFC) events. The first of which is beginning this year in November December time frame and that's going to lay a lot of the foundations that will enable us to get to the second hard fork combinator event which will occur in Q1 of next year and we'll announce that specific date likely at the next product update and then the third one will happen shortly thereafter. They have to be spaced this way because it's just simply too cumbersome on our developers and also our partners such as wallet infrastructure and exchanges to try to do too much too quickly and furthermore there's an enormous amount of work as you've noticed on that slide to roll out Goguen. You have to do two things at once, you have to deploy the infrastructure but then you also have to populate the infrastructure and what's nice about the way that we've done things as you now see with the Marlowe playground the population of that infrastructure is occurring now today and with the ERC20 converter and the mint test net that's coming.
That's going to occur in November which means that that gives people time to start building and playing on our ecosystem in a safe sandbox so that when they deploy it to the mainnet they do it right the first time and they don't make an existential failure as we have seen with the DeFi space because at the end of the day once you go live you have a huge adversarial surface and everybody in the world is going to try to break the things you've done. It's very important that you do it right which means that you need time as a commercial partner and an application deployer to do it correctly. Parts of Goguen are indeed shipping this year, some have already shipped and we'll have another HFC event at the end of next month or early in December and throughout the first quarter of next year and likely the second quarter will complete the other two HFC events which will roll out full support for native assets, extended UTxO, the Plutus infrastructure and the Marlowe infrastructure. In the meantime we're also working on strategies about how we can ensure best integration of Glow and IELE into the Cardano ecosystem and as you've noticed there are three parallel teams that are working very hard. The Shelley team continues to upgrade the Shelley experience. Just today we've received a lot of concerns over for example the state pool ranking in Daedalus. Let me be very clear about something. There's no problem with the ranking software, the problem is the k parameter. It needs to be increased and the fact that things are getting grayed out is an indication that the ranking parameter is actually working right for the first time. So, k needs to go up but there are consequences of that and we need to improve the software to reflect those consequences but it is my goal to get k to 1000 before ideally d hits 0 because we really do want to have over a 1000 well-functioning stake pools but by no means is that the end of the story.
Improvements + project Catalyst
We need partial delegation and delegation portfolios. We need means for stake pool operators to communicate effectively and efficiently with those who delegate to them. We need improvements in SMASH. We need an identity center, we need a litany of improvements to Daedalus itself. Right now, today, there are more than four companies working full-time at doing just these things in addition to the Goguen updates that are occurring right now. That research thread and that development thread will continue. We've already seen seven CIPs including CIPs related to the reward function. We take them very seriously, we review them and there's enormous amount of discussion about how to create a fair and balanced system and we appreciate this feedback. It's a process and we ask for patience and we also remind people that we launched Shelley just at the end of July and despite that the ecosystem has more than doubled in size and it's been growing at an incredible pace and it's only going to continue and we're only going to see our best days ahead of us. Good things are coming down the pipe and it's becoming a much more holistic ecosystem from in performance improvements, to usability improvements, to better overall software for everyone.
There's no greater example of that than what we've been able to accomplish in the last three months for the exchanges in general. We're really proud of what we've done with the Adrestia stack and we're really proud of working with great partners like Binance and Bittrex throughout the last few months and we've had some certain challenges there but as a result of overcoming those challenges we have left behind an incredible enterprise grade listening experience that continues to get faster, continues to get higher quality and is secure and reliable 24 hours a day, seven days a week and we'll continue investing heavily to ensure that that only gets better for all of those partners whether they be an external wallet or their infrastructure like an exchange operator. We've had a lot of wins also on the governance side with the Voltaire Catalyst project. We have seen huge wins in participation going from small focus groups to now over 3500 people every single day coming into cardano.ideascale.com competing for 2250000 worth of ADA with fund2. That's just the beginning and every six to eight weeks that's going to increase in scale, in terms of the money and people, the quality... When we ask what is our developer acquisition strategy that's a major part of it because people know that there's money to be made in building on Cardano and that you have the right incentives to go realize your dreams and add value so just as these frameworks like the Marlowe playground and the Plutus playground and other such things like Glow come online and IELE come online the ability to build will be matched by the ability to discuss what to build and fund? What to build through a community driven process that includes greater and greater inclusivity. For example the next fund will include a voting center built right into Daedalus in addition to the cell phone application that we've already launched to vote and we will continue refining that experience relentlessly that's one of our fastest moving teams and I will remind you we are doing this in parallel to the Shelley workstream and the Goguen workstream that we showed you guys today. Finally there's Basho, not the next hard fork combinator event but HFC#3 which we anticipate in Q1 2021.
Sidechains, Hydra
I would like to include a sidechain protocol that allows the movement of value between independent systems through some form of blocking mechanism. We are currently examining and designing a protocol that we think fits very nicely into the way that our system works with mild modifications to the ledger rules. If that and should this be successful then that helps with one of the pillars of Basho interoperability and then the other pillar is scalability. Rob is hard at work working with technical architects and scaling up a team to start de-risking the Hydra protocol and others are hard at work evolving the science behind the Hydra protocol. We have seen great progress on all fronts to de-risk Hydra's roll-out and what's so beautiful about Hydra is it is our belief that the majority if not all of Hydra can be implemented in Plutus. As Plutus rolls out we have a natural constituency to run this infrastructure. The stake pool operators and we have a natural way without an HFC event or special accommodation of rolling out Hydra.
It's not really needed at this level of scaling capacity. We have an enormous throughput already 10 times greater than Ethereum as it is today and room to make it a hundred times greater than what Ethereum is today without Hydra. However as we de-risk this infrastructure solidify the protocols and get out all the kinks. What's so beautiful about it is that we will be able to when the time comes the community can roll out multiple implementations of Hydra so that there is diversity and there will be a natural group of actors to run those channels as we have seen for example with the Bolt spec and the Lightning ecosystem on Bitcoin. The contrasting difference between Lightning and Bitcoin and Hydra and extended UTxO and Cardano is we designed Cardano for Hydra.
Bitcoin was not designed for Lightning and as a consequence it's always more difficult for them to try to make meaningful progress whereas us there's no friction in that relationship. It just fits very nicely through so the roadmap is coming together and Cardano 2020 has definitely started to evolve into quite a mature ecosystem and what's really exciting is we're going from an ecosystem of potential to one of reality and instead of asking what could we do we're showing people what has been done and people are actually doing things every day.
Our commercial team is inundated with requests for coordination and cooperation and deployment. I get numerous emails every single day, well intended to very serious about people wanting to build on the platform and we're really excited about that. We're going to keep this steady systematic relentless march as you saw with the enormity of the news today. It's business as usual and it'll be exactly the same in November only there'll be more and every month. The velocity increases, we burn down the remaining story points to get these things done and things are happening very quickly and we just keep releasing and releasing and releasing and it's a very different time than it was even six months ago.
Community rules
What's so reassuring is we continue to have the best community in all the cryptocurrency space. It's the final point but it's one that I'm most proud of. You see people get to decide where they want to live, what infrastructure they want to deploy, on who they want to work with and when you have a welcoming warm and friendly community that is constructive and productive and their job is to help you get to where you need to go you want to work with those people. When you have a destructive or toxic community that's exclusive hierarchical and not invented here in their mentality people don't want to work with that community. Money can't buy that. I don't care if you have a bank account with four billion dollars or you're a central bank. You can't buy character and you can't buy culture, you have to make it and you have to earn it and if we've accomplished anything over these last five years from the 90 papers now and the million plus lines of code and the incredible releases that have happened and continue to happen we accomplished the greatest thing of all: we built a community to rival that of bitcoin's. I believe with that community we can realize the dream in the coming years of Cardano becoming the financial operating system.
For those who don't have one and giving open prayer and free economic identity to those who need it I am astounded by just how easy it is to roll these things out. They're super hard and complex under the hood but they just feel right and fit right and all the pieces are starting to come together in just the right way and I'm astounded by the fact that when we roll them out community members are there to receive them and take them to the next level.
Thank you all for attending the product update at the end of the month. This was a real good one, just as good as the Shelley one and we are now in the Goguen era with the first HFC event coming in the end of November and we're going to keep pushing them out. Every single one of them will add more capabilities and I encourage everyone to check out the Marlowe playground start building with it. Today things are happening really fast when the mint comes online at the end of November. Start playing around with that, start talking about the multi-token standard. If you're interested in a project our commercial division divisions always' open and you're going to see more and more progress from all entities in this ecosystem and some potentially major announcements before you can think it. Thanks guys it was a good day and thanks to the entire team that made all this happen I'm real proud of all of you.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5wADba8kCw

Edit: TL;DR added in the comments
 
Hey all, I've been researching coins since 2017 and have gone through 100s of them in the last 3 years. I got introduced to blockchain via Bitcoin of course, analyzed Ethereum thereafter and from that moment I have a keen interest in smart contact platforms. I’m passionate about Ethereum but I find Zilliqa to have a better risk-reward ratio. Especially because Zilliqa has found an elegant balance between being secure, decentralized and scalable in my opinion.
 
Below I post my analysis of why from all the coins I went through I’m most bullish on Zilliqa (yes I went through Tezos, EOS, NEO, VeChain, Harmony, Algorand, Cardano etc.). Note that this is not investment advice and although it's a thorough analysis there is obviously some bias involved. Looking forward to what you all think!
 
Fun fact: the name Zilliqa is a play on ‘silica’ silicon dioxide which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”
 
This post is divided into (i) Technology, (ii) Business & Partnerships, and (iii) Marketing & Community. I’ve tried to make the technology part readable for a broad audience. If you’ve ever tried understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum you should be able to grasp most parts. Otherwise, just skim through and once you are zoning out head to the next part.
 
Technology and some more:
 
Introduction
 
The technology is one of the main reasons why I’m so bullish on Zilliqa. First thing you see on their website is: “Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” These are some bold statements.
 
Before we deep dive into the technology let’s take a step back in time first as they have quite the history. The initial research paper from which Zilliqa originated dates back to August 2016: Elastico: A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains where Loi Luu (Kyber Network) is one of the co-authors. Other ideas that led to the development of what Zilliqa has become today are: Bitcoin-NG, collective signing CoSi, ByzCoin and Omniledger.
 
The technical white paper was made public in August 2017 and since then they have achieved everything stated in the white paper and also created their own open source intermediate level smart contract language called Scilla (functional programming language similar to OCaml) too.
 
Mainnet is live since the end of January 2019 with daily transaction rates growing continuously. About a week ago mainnet reached 5 million transactions, 500.000+ addresses in total along with 2400 nodes keeping the network decentralized and secure. Circulating supply is nearing 11 billion and currently only mining rewards are left. The maximum supply is 21 billion with annual inflation being 7.13% currently and will only decrease with time.
 
Zilliqa realized early on that the usage of public cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were increasing but decentralized, secure, and scalable alternatives were lacking in the crypto space. They proposed to apply sharding onto a public smart contract blockchain where the transaction rate increases almost linear with the increase in the amount of nodes. More nodes = higher transaction throughput and increased decentralization. Sharding comes in many forms and Zilliqa uses network-, transaction- and computational sharding. Network sharding opens up the possibility of using transaction- and computational sharding on top. Zilliqa does not use state sharding for now. We’ll come back to this later.
 
Before we continue dissecting how Zilliqa achieves such from a technological standpoint it’s good to keep in mind that a blockchain being decentralised and secure and scalable is still one of the main hurdles in allowing widespread usage of decentralised networks. In my opinion this needs to be solved first before blockchains can get to the point where they can create and add large scale value. So I invite you to read the next section to grasp the underlying fundamentals. Because after all these premises need to be true otherwise there isn’t a fundamental case to be bullish on Zilliqa, right?
 
Down the rabbit hole
 
How have they achieved this? Let’s define the basics first: key players on Zilliqa are the users and the miners. A user is anybody who uses the blockchain to transfer funds or run smart contracts. Miners are the (shard) nodes in the network who run the consensus protocol and get rewarded for their service in Zillings (ZIL). The mining network is divided into several smaller networks called shards, which is also referred to as ‘network sharding’. Miners subsequently are randomly assigned to a shard by another set of miners called DS (Directory Service) nodes. The regular shards process transactions and the outputs of these shards are eventually combined by the DS shard as they reach consensus on the final state. More on how these DS shards reach consensus (via pBFT) will be explained later on.
 
The Zilliqa network produces two types of blocks: DS blocks and Tx blocks. One DS Block consists of 100 Tx Blocks. And as previously mentioned there are two types of nodes concerned with reaching consensus: shard nodes and DS nodes. Becoming a shard node or DS node is being defined by the result of a PoW cycle (Ethash) at the beginning of the DS Block. All candidate mining nodes compete with each other and run the PoW (Proof-of-Work) cycle for 60 seconds and the submissions achieving the highest difficulty will be allowed on the network. And to put it in perspective: the average difficulty for one DS node is ~ 2 Th/s equaling 2.000.000 Mh/s or 55 thousand+ GeForce GTX 1070 / 8 GB GPUs at 35.4 Mh/s. Each DS Block 10 new DS nodes are allowed. And a shard node needs to provide around 8.53 GH/s currently (around 240 GTX 1070s). Dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL is possible and can be done via mining software such as Phoenix and Claymore. There are pools and if you have large amounts of hashing power (Ethash) available you could mine solo.
 
The PoW cycle of 60 seconds is a peak performance and acts as an entry ticket to the network. The entry ticket is called a sybil resistance mechanism and makes it incredibly hard for adversaries to spawn lots of identities and manipulate the network with these identities. And after every 100 Tx Blocks which corresponds to roughly 1,5 hour this PoW process repeats. In between these 1,5 hour, no PoW needs to be done meaning Zilliqa’s energy consumption to keep the network secure is low. For more detailed information on how mining works click here.
Okay, hats off to you. You have made it this far. Before we go any deeper down the rabbit hole we first must understand why Zilliqa goes through all of the above technicalities and understand a bit more what a blockchain on a more fundamental level is. Because the core of Zilliqa’s consensus protocol relies on the usage of pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) we need to know more about state machines and their function. Navigate to Viewblock, a Zilliqa block explorer, and just come back to this article. We will use this site to navigate through a few concepts.
 
We have established that Zilliqa is a public and distributed blockchain. Meaning that everyone with an internet connection can send ZILs, trigger smart contracts, etc. and there is no central authority who fully controls the network. Zilliqa and other public and distributed blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) can also be defined as state machines.
 
Taking the liberty of paraphrasing examples and definitions given by Samuel Brooks’ medium article, he describes the definition of a blockchain (like Zilliqa) as: “A peer-to-peer, append-only datastore that uses consensus to synchronize cryptographically-secure data”.
 
Next, he states that: "blockchains are fundamentally systems for managing valid state transitions”. For some more context, I recommend reading the whole medium article to get a better grasp of the definitions and understanding of state machines. Nevertheless, let’s try to simplify and compile it into a single paragraph. Take traffic lights as an example: all its states (red, amber, and green) are predefined, all possible outcomes are known and it doesn’t matter if you encounter the traffic light today or tomorrow. It will still behave the same. Managing the states of a traffic light can be done by triggering a sensor on the road or pushing a button resulting in one traffic lights’ state going from green to red (via amber) and another light from red to green.
 
With public blockchains like Zilliqa, this isn’t so straightforward and simple. It started with block #1 almost 1,5 years ago and every 45 seconds or so a new block linked to the previous block is being added. Resulting in a chain of blocks with transactions in it that everyone can verify from block #1 to the current #647.000+ block. The state is ever changing and the states it can find itself in are infinite. And while the traffic light might work together in tandem with various other traffic lights, it’s rather insignificant comparing it to a public blockchain. Because Zilliqa consists of 2400 nodes who need to work together to achieve consensus on what the latest valid state is while some of these nodes may have latency or broadcast issues, drop offline or are deliberately trying to attack the network, etc.
 
Now go back to the Viewblock page take a look at the amount of transaction, addresses, block and DS height and then hit refresh. Obviously as expected you see new incremented values on one or all parameters. And how did the Zilliqa blockchain manage to transition from a previous valid state to the latest valid state? By using pBFT to reach consensus on the latest valid state.
 
After having obtained the entry ticket, miners execute pBFT to reach consensus on the ever-changing state of the blockchain. pBFT requires a series of network communication between nodes, and as such there is no GPU involved (but CPU). Resulting in the total energy consumed to keep the blockchain secure, decentralized and scalable being low.
 
pBFT stands for practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and is an optimization on the Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. To quote Blockonomi: “In the context of distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the ability of a distributed computer network to function as desired and correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious components (nodes) of the system failing or propagating incorrect information to other peers.” Zilliqa is such a distributed computer network and depends on the honesty of the nodes (shard and DS) to reach consensus and to continuously update the state with the latest block. If pBFT is a new term for you I can highly recommend the Blockonomi article.
 
The idea of pBFT was introduced in 1999 - one of the authors even won a Turing award for it - and it is well researched and applied in various blockchains and distributed systems nowadays. If you want more advanced information than the Blockonomi link provides click here. And if you’re in between Blockonomi and the University of Singapore read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 2 dating from October 2017.
Quoting from the Zilliqa tech whitepaper: “pBFT relies upon a correct leader (which is randomly selected) to begin each phase and proceed when the sufficient majority exists. In case the leader is byzantine it can stall the entire consensus protocol. To address this challenge, pBFT offers a view change protocol to replace the byzantine leader with another one.”
 
pBFT can tolerate ⅓ of the nodes being dishonest (offline counts as Byzantine = dishonest) and the consensus protocol will function without stalling or hiccups. Once there are more than ⅓ of dishonest nodes but no more than ⅔ the network will be stalled and a view change will be triggered to elect a new DS leader. Only when more than ⅔ of the nodes are dishonest (66%) double-spend attacks become possible.
 
If the network stalls no transactions can be processed and one has to wait until a new honest leader has been elected. When the mainnet was just launched and in its early phases, view changes happened regularly. As of today the last stalling of the network - and view change being triggered - was at the end of October 2019.
 
Another benefit of using pBFT for consensus besides low energy is the immediate finality it provides. Once your transaction is included in a block and the block is added to the chain it’s done. Lastly, take a look at this article where three types of finality are being defined: probabilistic, absolute and economic finality. Zilliqa falls under the absolute finality (just like Tendermint for example). Although lengthy already we skipped through some of the inner workings from Zilliqa’s consensus: read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 3 and you will be close to having a complete picture on it. Enough about PoW, sybil resistance mechanism, pBFT, etc. Another thing we haven’t looked at yet is the amount of decentralization.
 
Decentralisation
 
Currently, there are four shards, each one of them consisting of 600 nodes. 1 shard with 600 so-called DS nodes (Directory Service - they need to achieve a higher difficulty than shard nodes) and 1800 shard nodes of which 250 are shard guards (centralized nodes controlled by the team). The amount of shard guards has been steadily declining from 1200 in January 2019 to 250 as of May 2020. On the Viewblock statistics, you can see that many of the nodes are being located in the US but those are only the (CPU parts of the) shard nodes who perform pBFT. There is no data from where the PoW sources are coming. And when the Zilliqa blockchain starts reaching its transaction capacity limit, a network upgrade needs to be executed to lift the current cap of maximum 2400 nodes to allow more nodes and formation of more shards which will allow to network to keep on scaling according to demand.
Besides shard nodes there are also seed nodes. The main role of seed nodes is to serve as direct access points (for end-users and clients) to the core Zilliqa network that validates transactions. Seed nodes consolidate transaction requests and forward these to the lookup nodes (another type of nodes) for distribution to the shards in the network. Seed nodes also maintain the entire transaction history and the global state of the blockchain which is needed to provide services such as block explorers. Seed nodes in the Zilliqa network are comparable to Infura on Ethereum.
 
The seed nodes were first only operated by Zilliqa themselves, exchanges and Viewblock. Operators of seed nodes like exchanges had no incentive to open them for the greater public. They were centralised at first. Decentralisation at the seed nodes level has been steadily rolled out since March 2020 ( Zilliqa Improvement Proposal 3 ). Currently the amount of seed nodes is being increased, they are public-facing and at the same time PoS is applied to incentivize seed node operators and make it possible for ZIL holders to stake and earn passive yields. Important distinction: seed nodes are not involved with consensus! That is still PoW as entry ticket and pBFT for the actual consensus.
 
5% of the block rewards are being assigned to seed nodes (from the beginning in 2019) and those are being used to pay out ZIL stakers. The 5% block rewards with an annual yield of 10.03% translate to roughly 610 MM ZILs in total that can be staked. Exchanges use the custodial variant of staking and wallets like Moonlet will use the non-custodial version (starting in Q3 2020). Staking is being done by sending ZILs to a smart contract created by Zilliqa and audited by Quantstamp.
 
With a high amount of DS; shard nodes and seed nodes becoming more decentralized too, Zilliqa qualifies for the label of decentralized in my opinion.
 
Smart contracts
 
Let me start by saying I’m not a developer and my programming skills are quite limited. So I‘m taking the ELI5 route (maybe 12) but if you are familiar with Javascript, Solidity or specifically OCaml please head straight to Scilla - read the docs to get a good initial grasp of how Zilliqa’s smart contract language Scilla works and if you ask yourself “why another programming language?” check this article. And if you want to play around with some sample contracts in an IDE click here. The faucet can be found here. And more information on architecture, dapp development and API can be found on the Developer Portal.
If you are more into listening and watching: check this recent webinar explaining Zilliqa and Scilla. Link is time-stamped so you’ll start right away with a platform introduction, roadmap 2020 and afterwards a proper Scilla introduction.
 
Generalized: programming languages can be divided into being ‘object-oriented’ or ‘functional’. Here is an ELI5 given by software development academy: * “all programs have two basic components, data – what the program knows – and behavior – what the program can do with that data. So object-oriented programming states that combining data and related behaviors in one place, is called “object”, which makes it easier to understand how a particular program works. On the other hand, functional programming argues that data and behavior are different things and should be separated to ensure their clarity.” *
 
Scilla is on the functional side and shares similarities with OCaml: OCaml is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. It has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. For all its power, OCaml is also pretty simple, which is one reason it's often used as a teaching language.
 
Scilla is blockchain agnostic, can be implemented onto other blockchains as well, is recognized by academics and won a so-called Distinguished Artifact Award award at the end of last year.
 
One of the reasons why the Zilliqa team decided to create their own programming language focused on preventing smart contract vulnerabilities is that adding logic on a blockchain, programming, means that you cannot afford to make mistakes. Otherwise, it could cost you. It’s all great and fun blockchains being immutable but updating your code because you found a bug isn’t the same as with a regular web application for example. And with smart contracts, it inherently involves cryptocurrencies in some form thus value.
 
Another difference with programming languages on a blockchain is gas. Every transaction you do on a smart contract platform like Zilliqa or Ethereum costs gas. With gas you basically pay for computational costs. Sending a ZIL from address A to address B costs 0.001 ZIL currently. Smart contracts are more complex, often involve various functions and require more gas (if gas is a new concept click here ).
 
So with Scilla, similar to Solidity, you need to make sure that “every function in your smart contract will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed due to gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems”. Scilla design story part 1
 
Some examples of smart contract issues you’d want to avoid are: leaking funds, ‘unexpected changes to critical state variables’ (example: someone other than you setting his or her address as the owner of the smart contract after creation) or simply killing a contract.
 
Scilla also allows for formal verification. Wikipedia to the rescue: In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
 
Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.
 
“Scilla is being developed hand-in-hand with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into the Coq proof assistant — a state-of-the art tool for mechanized proofs about properties of programs.”
 
Simply put, with Scilla and accompanying tooling developers can be mathematically sure and proof that the smart contract they’ve written does what he or she intends it to do.
 
Smart contract on a sharded environment and state sharding
 
There is one more topic I’d like to touch on: smart contract execution in a sharded environment (and what is the effect of state sharding). This is a complex topic. I’m not able to explain it any easier than what is posted here. But I will try to compress the post into something easy to digest.
 
Earlier on we have established that Zilliqa can process transactions in parallel due to network sharding. This is where the linear scalability comes from. We can define simple transactions: a transaction from address A to B (Category 1), a transaction where a user interacts with one smart contract (Category 2) and the most complex ones where triggering a transaction results in multiple smart contracts being involved (Category 3). The shards are able to process transactions on their own without interference of the other shards. With Category 1 transactions that is doable, with Category 2 transactions sometimes if that address is in the same shard as the smart contract but with Category 3 you definitely need communication between the shards. Solving that requires to make a set of communication rules the protocol needs to follow in order to process all transactions in a generalised fashion.
 
And this is where the downsides of state sharding comes in currently. All shards in Zilliqa have access to the complete state. Yes the state size (0.1 GB at the moment) grows and all of the nodes need to store it but it also means that they don’t need to shop around for information available on other shards. Requiring more communication and adding more complexity. Computer science knowledge and/or developer knowledge required links if you want to dig further: Scilla - language grammar Scilla - Foundations for Verifiable Decentralised Computations on a Blockchain Gas Accounting NUS x Zilliqa: Smart contract language workshop
 
Easier to follow links on programming Scilla https://learnscilla.com/home Ivan on Tech
 
Roadmap / Zilliqa 2.0
 
There is no strict defined roadmap but here are topics being worked on. And via the Zilliqa website there is also more information on the projects they are working on.
 
Business & Partnerships
 
It’s not only technology in which Zilliqa seems to be excelling as their ecosystem has been expanding and starting to grow rapidly. The project is on a mission to provide OpenFinance (OpFi) to the world and Singapore is the right place to be due to its progressive regulations and futuristic thinking. Singapore has taken a proactive approach towards cryptocurrencies by introducing the Payment Services Act 2019 (PS Act). Among other things, the PS Act will regulate intermediaries dealing with certain cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on consumer protection and anti-money laundering. It will also provide a stable regulatory licensing and operating framework for cryptocurrency entities, effectively covering all crypto businesses and exchanges based in Singapore. According to PWC 82% of the surveyed executives in Singapore reported blockchain initiatives underway and 13% of them have already brought the initiatives live to the market. There is also an increasing list of organizations that are starting to provide digital payment services. Moreover, Singaporean blockchain developers Building Cities Beyond has recently created an innovation $15 million grant to encourage development on its ecosystem. This all suggests that Singapore tries to position itself as (one of) the leading blockchain hubs in the world.
 
Zilliqa seems to already take advantage of this and recently helped launch Hg Exchange on their platform, together with financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners and Fundnel. Hg Exchange, which is now approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), uses smart contracts to represent digital assets. Through Hg Exchange financial institutions worldwide can use Zilliqa's safe-by-design smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities. For example, think of companies such as Grab, Airbnb, SpaceX that are not available for public trading right now. Hg Exchange will allow investors to buy shares of private companies & unicorns and capture their value before an IPO. Anquan, the main company behind Zilliqa, has also recently announced that they became a partner and shareholder in TEN31 Bank, which is a fully regulated bank allowing for tokenization of assets and is aiming to bridge the gap between conventional banking and the blockchain world. If STOs, the tokenization of assets, and equity trading will continue to increase, then Zilliqa’s public blockchain would be the ideal candidate due to its strategic positioning, partnerships, regulatory compliance and the technology that is being built on top of it.
 
What is also very encouraging is their focus on banking the un(der)banked. They are launching a stablecoin basket starting with XSGD. As many of you know, stablecoins are currently mostly used for trading. However, Zilliqa is actively trying to broaden the use case of stablecoins. I recommend everybody to read this text that Amrit Kumar wrote (one of the co-founders). These stablecoins will be integrated in the traditional markets and bridge the gap between the crypto world and the traditional world. This could potentially revolutionize and legitimise the crypto space if retailers and companies will for example start to use stablecoins for payments or remittances, instead of it solely being used for trading.
 
Zilliqa also released their DeFi strategic roadmap (dating November 2019) which seems to be aligning well with their OpFi strategy. A non-custodial DEX is coming to Zilliqa made by Switcheo which allows cross-chain trading (atomic swaps) between ETH, EOS and ZIL based tokens. They also signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a (soon to be announced) USD stablecoin. And as Zilliqa is all about regulations and being compliant, I’m speculating on it to be a regulated USD stablecoin. Furthermore, XSGD is already created and visible on block explorer and XIDR (Indonesian Stablecoin) is also coming soon via StraitsX. Here also an overview of the Tech Stack for Financial Applications from September 2019. Further quoting Amrit Kumar on this:
 

There are two basic building blocks in DeFi/OpFi though: 1) stablecoins as you need a non-volatile currency to get access to this market and 2) a dex to be able to trade all these financial assets. The rest are built on top of these blocks.

 

So far, together with our partners and community, we have worked on developing these building blocks with XSGD as a stablecoin. We are working on bringing a USD-backed stablecoin as well. We will soon have a decentralised exchange developed by Switcheo. And with HGX going live, we are also venturing into the tokenization space. More to come in the future.”

 
Additionally, they also have this ZILHive initiative that injects capital into projects. There have been already 6 waves of various teams working on infrastructure, innovation and research, and they are not from ASEAN or Singapore only but global: see Grantees breakdown by country. Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa's ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, etc. As some of you may know, Unstoppable Domains (UD) blew up when they launched on Zilliqa. UD aims to replace cryptocurrency addresses with a human-readable name and allows for uncensorable websites. Zilliqa will probably be the only one able to handle all these transactions onchain due to ability to scale and its resulting low fees which is why the UD team launched this on Zilliqa in the first place. Furthermore, Zilliqa also has a strong emphasis on security, compliance, and privacy, which is why they partnered with companies like Elliptic, ChainSecurity (part of PwC Switzerland), and Incognito. Their sister company Aqilliz (Zilliqa spelled backwards) focuses on revolutionizing the digital advertising space and is doing interesting things like using Zilliqa to track outdoor digital ads with companies like Foodpanda.
 
Zilliqa is listed on nearly all major exchanges, having several different fiat-gateways and recently have been added to Binance’s margin trading and futures trading with really good volume. They also have a very impressive team with good credentials and experience. They don't just have “tech people”. They have a mix of tech people, business people, marketeers, scientists, and more. Naturally, it's good to have a mix of people with different skill sets if you work in the crypto space.
 
Marketing & Community
 
Zilliqa has a very strong community. If you just follow their Twitter their engagement is much higher for a coin that has approximately 80k followers. They also have been ‘coin of the day’ by LunarCrush many times. LunarCrush tracks real-time cryptocurrency value and social data. According to their data, it seems Zilliqa has a more fundamental and deeper understanding of marketing and community engagement than almost all other coins. While almost all coins have been a bit frozen in the last months, Zilliqa seems to be on its own bull run. It was somewhere in the 100s a few months ago and is currently ranked #46 on CoinGecko. Their official Telegram also has over 20k people and is very active, and their community channel which is over 7k now is more active and larger than many other official channels. Their local communities also seem to be growing.
 
Moreover, their community started ‘Zillacracy’ together with the Zilliqa core team ( see www.zillacracy.com ). It’s a community-run initiative where people from all over the world are now helping with marketing and development on Zilliqa. Since its launch in February 2020 they have been doing a lot and will also run their own non-custodial seed node for staking. This seed node will also allow them to start generating revenue for them to become a self sustaining entity that could potentially scale up to become a decentralized company working in parallel with the Zilliqa core team. Comparing it to all the other smart contract platforms (e.g. Cardano, EOS, Tezos etc.) they don't seem to have started a similar initiative (correct me if I’m wrong though). This suggests in my opinion that these other smart contract platforms do not fully understand how to utilize the ‘power of the community’. This is something you cannot ‘buy with money’ and gives many projects in the space a disadvantage.
 
Zilliqa also released two social products called SocialPay and Zeeves. SocialPay allows users to earn ZILs while tweeting with a specific hashtag. They have recently used it in partnership with the Singapore Red Cross for a marketing campaign after their initial pilot program. It seems like a very valuable social product with a good use case. I can see a lot of traditional companies entering the space through this product, which they seem to suggest will happen. Tokenizing hashtags with smart contracts to get network effect is a very smart and innovative idea.
 
Regarding Zeeves, this is a tipping bot for Telegram. They already have 1000s of signups and they plan to keep upgrading it for more and more people to use it (e.g. they recently have added a quiz features). They also use it during AMAs to reward people in real-time. It’s a very smart approach to grow their communities and get familiar with ZIL. I can see this becoming very big on Telegram. This tool suggests, again, that the Zilliqa team has a deeper understanding of what the crypto space and community needs and is good at finding the right innovative tools to grow and scale.
 
To be honest, I haven’t covered everything (i’m also reaching the character limited haha). So many updates happening lately that it's hard to keep up, such as the International Monetary Fund mentioning Zilliqa in their report, custodial and non-custodial Staking, Binance Margin, Futures, Widget, entering the Indian market, and more. The Head of Marketing Colin Miles has also released this as an overview of what is coming next. And last but not least, Vitalik Buterin has been mentioning Zilliqa lately acknowledging Zilliqa and mentioning that both projects have a lot of room to grow. There is much more info of course and a good part of it has been served to you on a silver platter. I invite you to continue researching by yourself :-) And if you have any comments or questions please post here!

"Looking into Nexo's business model it's increasingly clear to me that they are insolvent due to chainlink's recent rise.
A brief introduction to how these crypto deposit/lending sites generally work, or are supposed to work.
You deposit a cryptocurrency. Someone else wants to borrow it against their own cryptocurrency as collateral (reasons typically are to get some funds without selling their own crypto, or for margin trading). The borrower pays an interest rate, the lender receives a lower interest rate and the middleman (in this case it would be nexo) takes a large cut of the difference.
A decentralized version of this is Aave. Centralised versions are crypto.com and nexo.
Typically stablecoins have the highest borrow and lending interest rate, because demand to borrow them is highest. Next is typically bitcoin/ethereum, and most ERC tokens are very low because there's little demand to borrow them. Chainlink has been close to 0 on the likes of Aave as well as binance for months, while nexo pays 5%.
Now, nexo's business model is a bit different. While they take deposits in LINK and pay 5% on them, it seems they do not lend out LINK or other cryptocurrencies. Instead they lend out fiat.
This means they are not lending out assets deposited by other users, like Aave and binance. Instead it would mean they are selling user deposits to fiat and then lending out said fiat.
Chainlink has been trading as low as $1.8 this year and mostly in the $3-5 range. No doubt chainlink deposits are very popular with nexo, there are lots of long term holders and the 5% interest rate they claim to pay is much higher than elsewhere. So this likely means they've taken a lot of LINK deposits and sold them to fiat.
So why is this a problem?
Well the way this business SHOULD work is:
User A deposits 1 BTC. User B borrows 1 BTC. A receives 1%, B pays 2%, and the middleman/nexo would receive the 1% cut.
Nexo doesn't care which way the price of bitcoin moves. It has one bitcoin as a receivable (that which B has borrowed) and one bitcoin as a payable (that which A has deposited). It's overall exposure is zero.
However, it's clear that nexo's business model is:
User A deposits 1000 LINK Nexo sells 1000 LINK for $5 each User B borrows $5000
So now, nexo has 1000 LINK as a payable, and 5000 USD as a receivable.
As you can see, nexo is essentially opening a large synthetic short on every asset that is deposited with them.
Now LINK goes to $8. Suddenly nexo has $5000 in receivables and $8000 in payables. Now consider this but with millions of dollars of LINK deposits. Nexo is now insolvent.
Look at the site yourself (if you trust it, I understand if you don't). You can confirm all this yourself. Their business model is not sustainable. This is the first crack. And absolutely explains why they have released the fraudulent short report. It's because they are close to insolvent.
Do you think it's a coincidence that they recently stopped paying interest in LINK and are paying in USD?
A corollary of the above is that your LINK deposits , or any deposits on nexo are not safe. They likely do not have enough LINK to honour all deposits.
Nexo likely received a load of chainlink deposits. Possibly millions of LINK. Chainlink has an attribute that there are lots of long term holders who would all love to receive interest on their LINK. The recent price increase in LINK means nexo can’t afford to pay back all their LINK deposits.
They likely sell LINK as it comes in. Which means they’ve been selling as low as $1.80 and are essentially short since then.
All it takes is one large positive news piece on LINK to seal their fate, and with oracle partnership, Microsoft partnership likely end of August and staking around the corner it could come very soon.
If this goes to news outlets that will take this information to whales that are self-interested in fishing for liquidations."
Any thoughts on this? Nexo going belly up as soon as Link moons?

This daily Reddit threads goal is to share referral program links in the form of a chain system. To be included in the referral chain; one must submit verification of referral completion (a screenshot will suffice) and their referral link via pm or in a response to the thread to keep it honest. We should all make money from this community. I aim to include as many referral programs possible.
Each referral comes with a warning if there is risk involved. I believe in full transparency.
If your looking for the best affiliate program, you've found it! We help each other here and everyday we change the links to share the wealth.
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Banks
Referral link-
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Card.com
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Stocks
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Dough is a commission free stock trading app which gives you a free stock (valued $2- $200) when you open an account via a referral link. No initial deposit is required, though you need to deposit $25 in order to make your first withdrawal (you can also withdraw your initial $25 too).
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Acorns is an online investing app (iOS or Android) which is offering a free $5 bonus for simply opening an account via a referral link, depositing $5, and keeping the money in the account until the 15th of the following month. You can then withdraw the money and close the account, fee free!
If you keep the account longer, they may charge you a $3 fee, so be sure to close it after the 15th on the following month from when you signed up.
Acorns is available on iOS and Android, or you can use their website.
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Cryptocurrency
Voyager: Free $25 worth of Bitcoin for trading $100 on the app. Open these link from mobile:
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Voyager is a crypocurrency trading app (iOS/Android only) which will pay you $25 in free bitcoin for trading $100 on the app.
Referral link-
iOS/Android
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Celsius is a cryptocurrency investing platform which will give you $20 for signing up using a referral code and depositing $200 worth of cryptocurrency.
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Everybody who has posted this on btc has been banned according to modlog. Total of 9 users so far. Don't post this on btc or you will get banned. If you get banned comment on this thread or PM me.

May 2020:

According to btc modlogs, mc-78 has been banned because he questioned the April report with this comment.

According to btc modlogs, BCH4TW has been banned because he questioned the April report with this comment.

March 2020:

According to btc modlogs, bch4god has been banned because he questioned the February report with this comment.

According to btc modlogs, ISeeGregPeople has been banned because he linked to this thread in his comment.

February 2020:

According to btc modlogs, whene-is-satoshi has been banned because he linked to this thread in his comment.

January 2020:

According to btc modlogs, cryptokittykiller's post has been removed for linking to this thread.

According to btc modlogs, bashcalf has now been banned for linking to this thread.

According to btc modlogs, EnterLayer2 has now been banned for this post pointing out that this thread has reached 1000 upvotes.

This article was posted by bitcoinsatellite on btc here. Once it reached frontpage it got deleted and OP was banned from btc and bitcoincash as a result.

Disclaimer: I am not and have never been affiliated with any of the mentioned parties in a private or professional matter.
Presumably in an attempt to smear a local competitor, Hayden Otto inadvertently publishes irrefutable on-chain proof that he excluded non-BCH retail revenue to shape the "BCH #1 in Australia" narrative.

• Scroll down to "Proof of exclusion" if you are tired of the drama recap.
• Scroll down to "TLDR" if you want a summary.

Recap

In September 2019, BitcoinBCH.com started publishing so called monthly "reports" about crypto retail payments in Australia. They claimed that ~90% of Australia's crypto retail revenue is processed via their own HULA system and that ~92% of all crypto retail revenue happens in BCH.
They are aggregating two data sources to come up with this claim.
One is TravelByBit (TBB) who publishes their PoS transactions (BTC, LN, ETH, BNB, DASH, BCH) live on a ticker.
The other source is HULA, a newly introduced POS system (BCH only) and direct competitor to TBB run by BitcoinBCH.com - the same company who created the report. Despite being on-chain their transactions are private, not published and not verifiable by third parties outside BitcoinBCH.com
Two things stood out in the "reports", noted by multiple users (including vocal BCH proponents):

• The non-BCH parts must have tx excluded and the report neglects to mention it (the total in their TBB analysis does not match what is reported on the TBB website.)
• The BCH part has outliers included (e.g. BCH city conference in September with 35x the daily average)

The TBB website loads the historic tx data in the browser but hides transactions older than 7 days from being displayed, i.e. you can access more than 7 days worth of data if you understand JavaScript and can read the source code (source).

Hayden Otto's reaction

In direct response to me publishing these findings on btc, Hayden Otto - an employee at BitcoinBCH.com and the author of the report who also happens to be a moderator of /BitcoinCash - banned me immediately from said sub (source).
In subsequent discussion (which repeated for every monthly "report" which was flawed in the same ways as described above), Hayden responded using the same tactics:
"No data was removed"

"The guy is straight out lying. There is guaranteed no missing tx as the data was collected directly from the source." (source)

"Only data I considered non-retail was removed"

"I also had these data points and went through them to remove non-retail transactions, on both TravelbyBit and HULA." (source)

He admits to have removed non-BCH tx by "Game Ranger" because he considers them non-retail (source). He also implies they might be involved in money laundering and that TBB might fail their AML obligations in processing Game Ranger's transactions (source).
The report does not mention any data being excluded at all and he still fails to explain why several businesses that are clearly retail (e.g. restaurants, cafes, markets) had tx excluded (source).
"You are too late to prove I altered the data"

"[...] I recorded [the data] manually from https://travelbybit.com/stats/ over the month of September. The website only shows transactions from the last 7 days and then they disappear. No way for anyone to access stats beyond that." (source)

Fortunately you can, if you can read the website's source code. But you need to know a bit of JavaScript to verify it yourself, so not an ideal method to easily prove the claim of data exclusion to the public. But it laters turns out Hayden himself has found an easier way to achieve the same.
"The report can't be wrong because it has been audited."
In response to criticism about the flawed methodology in generating the September report, BitcoinBCH.com hired an accountant from a regional Bitcoin BCH startup to "audit" the October report. This is remarkable, because not only did their reported TBB totals still not match those from the TBB site - their result was mathematically impossible. How so? No subset of TBB transaction in that month sums up to the total they reported. So even if they excluded retail transactions at will, they still must have messed up the sum (source). Why didn't their auditor notice their mistake? She said she "conducted a review based on the TravelByBit data provided to her", i.e. the data acquisition and selection process was explicitly excluded from the audit (source).
"You are a 'pathetic liar', a 'desperate toll', an 'astroturf account' and 'a total dumb ass' and are 'pulling numbers out of your ass!'"
Since he has already banned me from the sub he moderates, he started to resort to ad hominems (source, source, source, source).

Proof of exclusion

I published raw data as extracted from the TBB site after each report for comparison. Hayden responded that I made those numbers up and that I was pulling numbers out of my ass.
Since he was under the impression that

"The website only shows transactions from the last 7 days and then they disappear. No way for anyone to access stats beyond that." (source)

he felt confident to claim that I would be

unable to provide a source for the [missing] data and/or prove that that data was not already included in the report. (source)

Luckily for us Hayden Otto seems to dislike his competitor TravelByBit so much that he attempted to reframe Bitcoin's RBF feature as a vulnerability specific to TBB PoS system (source).
While doublespending a merchant using the TBB PoS he wanted to prove that the merchant successfully registered the purchase as complete and thus exposed that the PoS sales history of TBB's merchants are available to the public (source), in his own words:

"You can literally access it from a public URL in the Web browser. There is no login or anything required, just type in the name of the merchant." (source)

As of yet it is unclear if this is intentional by TBB or if Hayden Ottos followed the rules of responsible disclosure before publishing this kind of data leak.
As it happens, those sale histories do not only include the merchant and time of purchases, they even include the address the funds were sent to (in case of on-chain payments).
This gives us an easy method to prove that the purchases from the TBB website missing in the reports belong to a specific retail business and actually happened - something that is impossible to prove for the alleged HULA txs.
In order to make it easier for you to verify it yourself, we'll focus on a single day in the dataset, September 17th, 2019 as an example:

• Hayden Otto's report claims 20 tx and $713.00 in total for that day (source)
• The TBB website listed 40 tx and a total of $1032.90 (daily summary)
• Pick a merchant, e.g. "The Stand Desserts"
• Use Hayden's "trick" to access that merchants public sale history at https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com/merchanthistory/thestanddesserts, sort by date to find the 17th Sep 2019 and look for a transaction at 20:58 for $28. This proves that a purchase of said amount is associated with this specific retail business.
• Paste the associated crypto on-chain address 17MrHiRcKzCyuKPtvtn7iZhAZxydX8raU9 in a blockchain explorer of your choice, e.g like this. This proves that a transfer of funds has actually happened.

I let software aggregate the TBB statistics with the public sale histories and you'll find at the bottom of this post a table with the on-chain addresses conveniently linked to blockchain explorers for our example date.
The total of all 40 tx is $1032.90 instead of the $713.00 reported by Hayden. 17 tx of those have a corresponding on-chain address and thus have undeniable proof of $758.10. Of the remaining 23, 22 are on Lightning and one had no merchant history available.
This is just for a single day, here is a comparison for the whole month.

Description	Total
TBB Total	$10,502
TBB wo. Game Ranger	$5,407
TBB according to Hayden	$3,737

What now?

The usual shills will respond in a predictive manner: The data must be fake even though its proof is on-chain, I would need to provide more data but HULA can be trusted without any proof, if you include outliers BCH comes out ahead, yada, yada.
But this is not important. I am not here to convince them and this post doesn't aim to.
The tx numbers we are talking about are less than 0.005% of Bitcoin's global volume. If you can increase adoption in your area by 100% by just buying 2 coffees more per day you get a rough idea about how irrelevant the numbers are in comparison.
What is relevant though and what this post aims to highlight is that BitcoinBCH.com and the media outlets around news.bitcoin.com flooding you with the BCH #1 narrative are playing dirty. They feel justified because they feel that Bitcoin/Core/Blockstream is playing dirty as well. I am not here to judge that but you as a reader of this sub should be aware that this is happening and that you are the target.
When BitcoinBCH.com excludes $1,000 Bitcoin tx because of high value but includes $15,000 BCH tx because they are made by "professionals", you should be sceptical.
When BitcoinBCH.com excludes game developers, travel businesses or craftsmen accepting Bitcoin because they don't have a physical store but include a lawyer practice accepting BCH, you should be sceptical.
When BitcoinBCH.com excludes restaurants, bars and supermarkets accepting Bitcoin and when pressed reiterate that they excluded non-retail businesses without ever explaning why a restaurant shouldn't be considered reatil, you should be sceptical.
When BitcoinBCH.com claims the reports have been audited but omit that the data acquisition was not part of the audit, you should be sceptical.
I expect that BitcoinBCH.com will stop removing transactions from TBB for their reports now that it has been shown that their exclusion can be provably uncovered. I also expect that HULA's BCH numbers will rise accordingly to maintain a similar difference.
Hayden Otto assumed that nobody could cross-check the TBB data. He was wrong. Nobody will be able to disprove his claims when HULA's BCH numbers rise as he continues to refuse their release. You should treat his claims accordingly.
As usual, do your own research and draw your own conclusion. Sorry for the long read.

TLDR

• BitcoinBCH.com claimed no transactions were removed from the TBB dataset in their BCH #1 reports and that is impossible to prove the opposite.
• Hayden Otto's reveals in a double spend attempt that a TBB merchant's sale history can be accessed publicly including the merchant's on-chain addresses.
• (For example,) this table shows 40 tx listed on the TBB site on Sep 17th, including their on-chain addresses where applicable. The BitcoinBCH.com report lists only 20 tx for the same day.
• (Most days and every months so far has had BTC transactions excluded.)
• (For September, TBB lists $10,502 yet the report only claims $3,737.

No.	Date	Merchant	Asset	Address	Amount	Total
1	17 Sep 19 09:28	LTD Espresso	Lightning	Unable to find merchant history.	4.50	4.50
2	17 Sep 19 09:40	LTD Espresso	Binance Coin	Unable to find merchant history.	4.50	9.00
3	17 Sep 19 13:22	Josh's IGA Murray Bridge West	Ether	0x40fd53aa...b6de43c531	4.60	13.60
4	17 Sep 19 13:23	Nom Nom Korean Eatery	Lightning	lnbc107727...zkcqvvgklf	16.00	29.60
5	17 Sep 19 13:24	Nom Nom Korean Eatery	Lightning	lnbc100994...mkspwddgqw	15.00	44.60
6	17 Sep 19 14:02	Nom Nom Korean Eatery	Binance Coin	bnb1w5mwu9...552thl4ru5	30.00	74.60
7	17 Sep 19 15:19	Dollars and Sense (Fortitude Valley)	Lightning	lnbc134780...93cpanyxfg	2.00	76.60
8	17 Sep 19 15:34	Steph's Cafe	Binance Coin	bnb124hcjy...ss3pz9y3r8	57.50	134.10
9	17 Sep 19 19:37	The Stand Desserts	Binance Coin	bnb13f58s9...qqc7fxln7s	18.00	152.10
10	17 Sep 19 19:59	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc575880...48cpl0z06q	8.50	160.60
11	17 Sep 19 20:00	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc575770...t8spzjflym	8.50	169.10
12	17 Sep 19 20:13	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc202980...lgqp5ha8f4	3.00	172.10
13	17 Sep 19 20:21	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc577010...decq7r4p05	8.50	180.60
14	17 Sep 19 20:24	Fat Dumpling	Lightning	lnbc217145...9dsqpjjr6g	32.10	212.70
15	17 Sep 19 20:31	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc574530...wvcpp3pcen	8.50	221.20
16	17 Sep 19 20:33	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc540660...rpqpzgk8z0	8.00	229.20
17	17 Sep 19 20:37	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc128468...r8cqq50p5c	19.00	248.20
18	17 Sep 19 20:39	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc135220...cngp2zq6q4	2.00	250.20
19	17 Sep 19 20:45	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc574570...atcqg738p8	8.50	258.70
20	17 Sep 19 20:51	Fat Dumpling	Lightning	lnbc414190...8hcpg79h9a	61.20	319.90
21	17 Sep 19 20:53	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc135350...krqqp3cz8z	2.00	321.90
22	17 Sep 19 20:58	The Stand Desserts	Bitcoin	17MrHiRcKz...ZxydX8raU9	28.00	349.90
23	17 Sep 19 21:02	The Stand Desserts	Bitcoin	1Hwy8hCBff...iEh5fBsCWK	10.00	359.90
24	17 Sep 19 21:03	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc743810...dvqqnuunjq	11.00	370.90
25	17 Sep 19 21:04	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc114952...2vqpclm87p	17.00	387.90
26	17 Sep 19 21:10	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc169160...lpqqqt574c	2.50	390.40
27	17 Sep 19 21:11	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc575150...40qq9yuqmy	8.50	398.90
28	17 Sep 19 21:13	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc947370...qjcp3unr33	14.00	412.90
29	17 Sep 19 21:15	The Stand Desserts	Binance Coin	bnb1tc2vva...xppes5t7d0	16.00	428.90
30	17 Sep 19 21:16	Giardinetto	Binance Coin	bnb1auyep2...w64p6a6dlk	350.00	778.90
31	17 Sep 19 21:25	The Stand Desserts	BCH	3H2iJaKNXH...5sxPk3t2tV	7.00	785.90
32	17 Sep 19 21:39	The Stand Desserts	Binance Coin	bnb17r7x3e...avaxwumc58	8.00	793.90
33	17 Sep 19 21:47	The Stand Desserts	BCH	32kuPYT1tc...uFQwgsA5ku	18.00	811.90
34	17 Sep 19 21:52	The Stand Desserts	BCH	3ELPvxtCSy...4QzvfVJsNZ	36.00	847.90
35	17 Sep 19 21:56	The Stand Desserts	Lightning	lnbc677740...acsp04sjeg	10.00	857.90
36	17 Sep 19 22:04	The Stand Desserts	BCH	38b4wHg9cg...9L2WXC2BSK	54.00	911.90
37	17 Sep 19 22:16	The Stand Desserts	Binance Coin	bnb14lylhs...x6wz7kjzp5	18.00	929.90
38	17 Sep 19 22:21	The Stand Desserts	BCH	3L8SK3Hr7u...F3htdSPxfL	90.00	1019.90
39	17 Sep 19 22:30	The Stand Desserts	Binance Coin	bnb19w6tle...774uknv57t	5.00	1024.90
40	17 Sep 19 22:48	The Stand Desserts	BCH	3Qag8c4UYg...9EYuWzGjhs	8.00	1032.90