Digital Spacecast

Charting Chia's Course: Insights and Outlook for 2024's Green Blockchain

January 02, 2024 Jerod Moore (aka Digital Spaceport) Season 3 Episode 1
Digital Spacecast
Charting Chia's Course: Insights and Outlook for 2024's Green Blockchain
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Unlock the future of digital currency with us as we cast a discerning eye over Chia's prospects for 2024. From the echoes of a challenging year to the whispers of recovery, this episode offers a treasure trove of insights, including diverse price predictions and a robust SWOT analysis of the cryptocurrency. We're not just gazing into a crystal ball; we're laying out the concrete facts and expert opinions, including those of Chia farmers and investors, to arm you with the knowledge you need. Plus, we're making sense of it all for the uninitiated with beginner-friendly resources that promise to clear the fog surrounding Chia's innovative landscape.

Experience the powerhouse behind Chia's coin as we spotlight the legendary Bram Cohen, Gene Hoffman, and their cutting-edge contributions to the crypto market. In our exclusive conversation with Jack from Chia in China, we unpack the cultural currents propelling Chia's popularity across the Asia Pacific. This episode peels back the layers of Chia's network, exposing the strength of its security measures and the potential pitfalls for developers. It's a fine balance between opportunity and challenge, and we're here to navigate the nuances of partnerships, exchange support, and wallet functionality that could shape Chia's trajectory.

Peering over the horizon, we contemplate the strategic moves Chia might dance towards, including the lucrative realm of virtual private blockchain services. As the tides of regulation and banking sentiment ebb and flow, we weigh the threats against the glimmering prospects that lie ahead. Lastly, we offer a guiding hand to those embarking on Chia farming, with practical guides for GPU plotting and more. Join us for an episode that promises to be as enlightening as it is engaging, charting a course through the complex yet captivating world of Chia.

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Speaker 1:

So welcome to a forward-looking evaluation of Chia, the cryptocurrency that maybe you've heard of. If you're a member of this channel, you probably definitely have heard of them, but maybe you're new and you haven't heard of them in the past. Today we're going to be looking at some forward-looking stuff. We'll be talking about some of the things that have gone on the past year in 2023, but this is mainly looking at 2024. We're going to actually give you a couple of ideas around some of the things that I think could be in stock for Chia that are exciting. We're going to take a look at a full SWAT analysis. That's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that are on the horizon for 2024 for Chia, the company specifically. We're also going to drop and this is going to be fun to start off with a price prediction and I'm going to give a high side, low side and probably middle range price prediction where I think exactly probably will be, and we're also going to, at the end of this, talk about many different resources out there that I think are good for people that might be new. I'm going to show you guys some of those as we get involved in this video. So let's get started. I hope you guys are ready for a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:

So we can see the price of Chia today has crested into the 40 plus range and it has been a while since we've been there. How long has it been since we've been there? Well, if we go back we can see that it was actually April when we were last there. The end of April was when we were last in the 40 range and the beginning of actually January 2023, we were not doing too hot at all. We were in the 29 ish range right there. We did have a pretty big run up into February that held out until the end of April and after that point we of course had a downward trajectory that did culminate all the way in October with the big announcements of staff layoffs and also there were bringing on a market maker selling some of the pre-farm and some of the other things that were challenging to Chia this past year, in this past bear cycle that in 2024 look like they've overcome. So that's some points of optimism there. But definitely, looking at the price of where Chia is at today, I feel good as a Chia farmer. Tell me, if you are a Chia farmer, how you feel about the price of Chia right now, especially if you're a farmer. Now also, of course, investors are going to have probably a significantly different viewpoint on the price of Chia. If you happen to be an investor or a buyer of XCH itself, let me know in the comments below what you think is going to be the price targets. As a matter of fact, everybody go in the comments and drop what you think your 2024 price prediction is for Chia.

Speaker 1:

So to start out with, this is not financial advice. This is based upon where I have seen Chia in the past and this is guesswork. Anybody who tells you that they have more than guesswork going into this is lying to you. So this is guesswork and I base it on a couple of things. So I do see a low side for Chia in 2024. We'll start off with this. I see a low side for Chia in 2024 actually looking pretty darn decent. I see Chia potentially hitting 45 as its low side. So I do see a number up from here throughout the next couple of months and I do think that we should hopefully be to a point where the low side is somewhere in the mid 40s. I think that's a very real possibility and there has been talk of people saying there's a lot of resistance in the low 40s. We're going to find out whether we can break out of that. If we can't, then we might be back in the 30s. Of course, anything's possible here, but low side 45 seems realistic to me, midrange target. Let me talk about the conditions around what I think the midrange target are.

Speaker 1:

I think Chia took a lot of additional heat on the company itself, a lot of additional stress, a lot of additional scrutiny from external people who were invested in Chia during the last bear cycle, and I think that is going to be something that is reflected in what we saw with that price going down into the very low 20s briefly in October. I think that we've moved past that point in time. We're seeing a much more optimistic crypto ecosystem emergence. We're seeing Chia trend positively with the other crypto compatriots that it has in the ecosystem out there and I think it would not be unrealistic at all to see a midpoint price of about 75 for Chia. I think 40 was where we probably would have been at more towards the lead up to October had we not been hit with that Really bad news over several other companies and we're going to get to the SWAT analysis and why that particular thing. Keep that in mind. That's going to come back up in the SWAT analysis for sure. So midpoint, seeing a $75 price point, is something I think is actually pretty probable.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about the high side. This one's the exciting one. This one gets me rubbing my hands together. So IPO Chia, of course, has so much talk about IPO. That has fueled so much of why I am actually interested in Chia, but also that has fueled a lot of speculation from other people that are interested in Chia.

Speaker 1:

Now let me be the first to say Chia is not XCH. However, xch is an asset on Chia's balance sheet from the pre-farm. Chia and the community are not the same thing. This is not a SWAT analysis or a price prediction of the community. This is really just looking at Chia, the company, and what they very likely, in my opinion, are heading towards. This is not looking at all of this. Stuff could be done again for the community and it would be wildly different as far as what individual assets, what things are hot, what things are not, what things are trending, what the strengths, weaknesses, all of that stuff. It's going to look vastly different from a community analysis than it does from CNI, chia Network Incorporated the company analysis.

Speaker 1:

So this IPO We've all been waiting for it. Everybody's excited for it. We've had tons of hints around it. What part of that big implosion that we saw was actually the loss of their underwriter, which of course had a portion of liquidity I believe that was accessible by Chia to staunch them through towards a launch, and that was credit suites. That implosion After that happened, of course that was bad. Essentially, jean has mentioned several times he's he's, he's banked at some bad banks. So don't bank where Jean banks is something he has said before and certainly I'm going to try to stay. He should publish a list of where he banks, so other people can just not make that.

Speaker 1:

But we do see that IPO potential, really probably if, if we're looking at a bull market in 2024,. Let me just throw out more guesswork Because, again, this is all guesswork and none of this is financial advice. More guesswork to me indicates that we should probably see a bear market retraction. If, like that, we're not going to see the bear market, it's, it's gone. It's probably bull market from here on out, is my guess.

Speaker 1:

And if it is bull market from here on out, the best time for a crypto company to go public if they have the capability of doing so, and certainly we've seen with the Bitcoin ETF. It's not just I want it to happen, it's the Dux iron a row with the SEC and all this other stuff for you to go public or for you to get an ETF listing. So if we do see the potential for them to actually be able to time it on their timeline, hitting that IPO during a hotter cycle would be important. Certainly, you have a lot of the VCs out there and this is one of the things that was a big shift of the funds that were available in the crypto ecosystem when it was hot to invest in the crypto ecosystem before things like chat, gbt came out and revolutionized and showed investors the next thing that they jumped onto, and crypto fundraising, paired with the bear market and the downturn that crypto was having, paired with the regulatory outlook, was bad. So if they can time it, 2024 seems like a really good year to actually execute it, if they can time it, and so I hope that they can.

Speaker 1:

What price do I see if they're able to time it? Let me. Let me say I think this would be a finite window, that it's very, it's very much. Also, let me just say guesswork, of course, but what if we saw 350? I think if we see an IPO seeing Chia's price at 4XCH, at 350 briefly, not because it makes sense, let me be the first to say that not because it makes sense If they have an IPO, they're going to have a stock. That stock is not the same thing as XCH. There could be some incentivization, things that happen with them, things that happen with XCH in the future. It would be interesting to see, but certainly I think we could, if we are able to get that IPO happening this year. C 350 as some sort of a price target and hopefully, by the time you guys are watching this video, we are still in the forties and this is not heading towards the lower thirties, but I think we're going to be heading towards the mid forties in the next month or so. Here. That's what I think most of the rest of the crypto ecosystem is going to mandate almost, and so much of it is a rising tide effect.

Speaker 1:

The factors that I think are moving the price, and so the factors that I see moving the price of Chia right now, are really driven by the market maker. The market maker became a necessity and if you haven't taken a chance, go back. Watch the interview that I did with Gene Hoffman, ceo of Chia Network, on this. He talked about the market maker. Market makers are responsible for essentially taking out loans from a crypto company or you know an entity that has a lot to lend and being able to exercise that into funds that that company could be able to utilize and, as Gene talked about here, that did provide a liquidity asset window for Chia that was viable for them, for, he said in his words, for the foreseeable future. Now what are the impacts of that on the market price of Chia?

Speaker 1:

I think that that has a strong suppression on the natural price discovery of Chia, because the market maker is naturally going to be a greedy person, in my opinion. Now they don't have infinite supplies of XCH and you can, of course, follow the pre-farm funds and track that, but definitely they don't have an infinite supply of XCH, in that not having an infinite supply of XCH may give them an impetus to have much of that during their period where they have a loan on it needing to be executed. So they see, 40 probably is a incredibly attractive price point. Do they run out of it? Does Chia need more money. Do they have to go back to the market maker during whatever next period of loans they have? That's all really good questions, but I don't think it's likely that Chia, the company, themselves, has said we need to keep the price here. As a matter of fact, I think that's incredibly unlikely for them to have done. But the market maker just being a market maker, they're going to be in it for them and they're going to maximize their revenue as best as they can. Chia the company, of course would, in my opinion, have serious problems if they were saying you're going to artificially keep the price here of XCH, leading into an IPO, because that that XCH is an asset on Chia's balance sheet. So that would kind of be that would be some manipulation. I can't think that that would be good. So I think that's probably the biggest thing that we're seeing right now impacting the price of Chia. That's why, if the market maker was not here today, I do not think that we would see the price of Chia be going lower. I think that the sell pressure would actually be significantly different and we would see the price of Chia be significantly higher.

Speaker 1:

Next thing that I think is the most important mover of the price of Chia, the incredibly fully featured L1 they have brought about. That is being used for things like the climate action data trust and the tracking and interchanging of credits on the carbon markets. These are real world utility. This is real world utility. This is one of the biggest examples of real world utility in all of crypto. This is not JPEG monkeys. This is real dollars in cents flowing between businesses because of a reliable, trustworthy, underlying, auditable public blockchain that governments have agreed to use.

Speaker 1:

That's not common at all to have those kind of confluences happen with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is great at making some weird fringe stuff happen. Sometimes. They're really good at innovating with some really cool stuff, but this kind of buy in that we're seeing with the climate action data trust, with Chia as the foundational blockchain powering, it is something that definitely deserves recognition as not just a huge pin in the hat, but, as more and more people realize, this is a company that's delivering. That will make them, in my opinion, much more ready to onboard themselves if they have the same needs for a public, verifiable, trusted and even potentially private but yet public option for a company. So that could be banks. We've actually heard Jean talk about banks, autos, auto lending video games. These have all come up in the past as potentials and I think they're all really exciting and especially if we can see those bigger names come into Chia, that's probably the best thing that we would actually be able to do to actually increase not just the awareness of Chia but also the price of XCH, as more people would want to speculate. However, there's challenges there. We're not yet to the SWAT, we're still just looking at what's moving the price. This is going to be a bit of a long video. Drop your comments below and let me know what you guys are thinking about.

Speaker 1:

All of this also so persona of the characters behind Chia, I think, does not still to this day play a small part in actually Chia and its popularity and its success. I think you see names like Bram Cohen, gene Hoffman, richard Kiss, and you think to yourself these people actually know what they're doing, they have huge proven records of what they're doing and they're able to execute really well. And so, especially when you look at BitTorrent and Bram Cohen, that supersedes so much and he has changed the world in the past. When you look at eMusic and PGP and Gene Hoffman has changed the world they're trying, admittedly, to change the world again with cryptocurrency, for you know really good and really interesting reasons and use cases, but if they onboard and they make it, it is a cross the board going to be a credibility pin in the hat for all cryptocurrencies out there. Everybody should be behind Chia because if you're not, you're looking at a, you're looking at a scenario where it's hard for any company to ever be viable and that is not ideal for crypto companies. So hopefully everybody out there while they may not actually or they may have a competing product or competing L1, hopefully they can see that the success of Chia could tie into their future success and certainly the market viability of cryptocurrency in general and name recognition of cryptocurrency not having negative connotations that are easily assignable by senators. So probably the two things that are smallest impacting it in my opinion, are speculators and big caps looking for opportunities in anticipation of bull market run up. That probably is some people out there a little bit risky to be doing that in my opinion, but certainly I'm sure there's people out there looking at that.

Speaker 1:

And Chia right now not in the hundreds but not in the 200, still hanging around the mid 150 range and also probably the another thing that is actually stabilizing and also really smoothing out the curve effects that you might see else wise is the pairing that is, just XCHBTC pairs that are out there on various exchanges that they have a vested interest in making sure there's some price stability, so they could be. I mean, this is going to be talked about later. Those exchanges are not incredibly well known right now. They could be manipulating. They are not subject necessarily all of them to US regulations. So there's a lot of things that could be happening right now and that is actually going to be something that is critical that we're going to talk about. So I hope you've enjoyed us giving a Chia price prediction for 2024. And that also talked about what I think are some of the things moving the price of Chia right now.

Speaker 1:

So let's move on to the next part, which is our SWOT analysis, and if you're not somebody who has done these before, that's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Now when I say you know, weaknesses and threats, a lot of people are like those are the same thing. So let me phrase this like this Weaknesses already exist, inherent in the company. They are a owned deficit, if you would, and threats are an externality that could at some point happen. So those are the differences that you have there, and so let's talk really quick about the Chia strengths. So we're going to start the SWOT with the S, and that is Chia strengths, and one of those is that they have already done tremendous foundational work on an incredibly security first L1 product. That is huge. You have Graham Cohen, the mastermind, essentially behind most of what has happened here, and the team that has executed the actual deliverables has done, admittedly, an incredible job up to this point of creating from the ground up, which is very weird for crypto, because usually it's like a fork of a dog, of a something, but this is incredibly different because this is ground up new creation. Those are innovative products. That's another huge reason I am very interested in Chia is the fact that it has been built from the ground up, with different approaches, and that makes a lot of the deficiencies that we've seen in things like Bitcoin and Ethereum be easily addressed by Chia, because they came later and they got to look at the mistakes and the problems and, when they were developing, take those into account.

Speaker 1:

Next, we have to serve. We have to admit they survived a liquidity crunch in October. That was, in my estimation, something that could have ended the company. I actually was incredibly concerned that it could have ended the company. I had talked about prices that were incredibly low because I thought to myself, if Chia actually does go away here, the price of Chia will take a tremendous hit, and I just decided that it was better to be a pessimist in that stance because bear market survivability was not guaranteed. But definitely we're looking at a point now where they have proven out that they can come back and they can deliver and they are viable. They're not going away. They survived a liquidity crunch Huge strength. Next, there's a massive uptake of Chia happening in the Asia Pacific region and this is interesting and also challenging and also hard to understand and put a finger on, because the cultural differences are significant and I do hope to talk to Jack from Chia in China at some point in the near future to get his opinions about specifically the Asia Pacific region impacts that we're seeing on Chia, because there's a lot of interest and we're going to actually talk about one of those not in the strength category coming up here shortly.

Speaker 1:

Another is Tangem. Well, it's not your typical treasure. It is actually possibly not tainted like a lot of these other hardware wallets are, so they do have a secure implementation. It does look like a fairly decent solution. So that is actually a security win and a strength for Chia. Asic Time Loads the cost scale functionality of being able to engineer an ASIC that is faster than Chia's ASICs is ridiculously expensive, so it becomes incredibly unlikely that somebody would want to do that and as a result of not wanting to do that, you've got yourself a pretty secure piece of hardware, and that secure piece of hardware was talked about by Brandt and he did an AMA with some Chia engineers, so you should definitely check that out. Links to all this stuff in the description below. But the ASIC Time Lord AMA was recent and it is a fast piece of hardware. It increased the net security of the Chia blockchain quite a bit as well by having that. So really that is another check mark in the Chia strengths category.

Speaker 1:

Next, let's move on to the actual security budget and get a little bit more finite in what we're talking about when we're talking about the security of the Chia blockchain. So the Chia blockchain has tremendous net space right now that we're going to talk about an interesting outlier, but 30 exibytes essentially is a tremendous amount of net space to have. That is a lot of spinning hard drives. I mean, that is a lot, a lot of spinning hard drives. That is a freaky amount of spinning hard drives, and so that is a security mechanism that is tenuous, and we have people talking about further consensus changes jumping in, you know, accelerating timelines. These are things that I think need wider audience talking about it and I'm talking about we have hundreds of thousands of farmers, and for a couple of vocal people to ever make an impact on Chia and the consensus is a danger. We need to actually make sure that the masses of people are better heard. That's actually not necessarily going to be in the strengths we're going to talk about that one here coming up in just the next, the next segment, but we do have currently massive net net space security budget as a result of how many hard drives are out there and the fact that we have not yet hit a having cycle which is coming up, and that having cycle is also going to be something that we're talking about, but that having cycle could have impacts depending upon workloads for certain folks. That could be interesting. It is certainly something interesting to watch.

Speaker 1:

Another check this one's huge is data layer. Data layer holds so many possibilities for verifiable futures for Chia, and when I say verifiable futures, things that we may not have even thought about yet, products we may not have even thought about that could be verifiable. Certainly, some of them have been talked about. As far as the data and verifiable data that is owned by you as an individual and your incentivization, that could actually be tied directly into something like the Chia blockchain for an authenticity back end that could be used by all sorts of different people, because this really does fit into a blockchain use case of needing publicly auditable, mutually agreed upon, that did happen. That data does exist. This is the person at this time that owned it, information exchanges, so that is one of the things. That data layer underlying technology is still wildly, wildly important, and I think we're going to see that be some of the first huge products that the community is able to develop out there as well Checkmark, and in a world where timing matters, let's just say this one is just happenstance, but certainly I'm going to put it in the strengths, because current day is current day and where we see Chia right now heading into 2024, it is a, in my opinion, positive market experience for most cryptos out there heading into a bull run.

Speaker 1:

It does indeed look like there probably will be a bull run in 2024. Again, not financial advice. Don't go make decisions financially based upon what I said, but let me know in the comments below if you agree or disagree with me. I think it could be a bull market and if it is a bull market, they're in the right place. Hey, they survived, they made it to here. Reap those rewards.

Speaker 1:

Now let's move on to weaknesses. So this one is, I would say, interesting. Hopefully I can talk about things that you might not have heard of, but if you have weaknesses of Chia, drop them down below right now, before we start, and let's get started. So on to the weaknesses side of this equation. So some of the things that I think just jump out really off the bat at me as really large weaknesses are how difficult it is for new developers to get into Chia, and we don't see massive flights of developers into Chia. That's going to be a hard one to crack.

Speaker 1:

To be honest with you, chia is not easy and, as a result of that, chia education and outreach is challenging. Acknowledging that and finding ways to remediate that or to even create libraries on top of that. Not sure what the status of the SDK is, but definitely something that I am interested in. But the grants program was originally envisioned as something that would be actually able to help developer outreach. We didn't see that many grant recipients that turned into super duper successful. We do have some not to say there's not any but many of them have floundered, and so how the grants program went down actually became a center of a lot of controversy at one point for Chia. That was not a benefit to Chia at all. So it's good that they're taking some time to reevaluate their grants program right now and looking at what they're going to do as they move into the next iteration of the grants program, because I think that ties in very strongly to the Chia list outreach and education that they're probably going to need to do if they want people to onboard that are capable of developing in their native smart contract language, a crucial milestone for a smart contract based L1 cryptocurrency.

Speaker 1:

And the number two thing is certainly something that I am sure everybody on this channel would has told me at some point in time in the comments or something like that Major exchange support for Chia. We don't see Chia readily accessible on the mainstream major as an XCH on the mainstream major exchanges today. That makes onboarding new people that are interested in buying Chia hard. That is a form of price suppression as a result of that. Potentially it also could limit people from speculating. But definitely the ability to onboard into Chia as somebody who's interested in cryptocurrency is something that is hard to do if you're especially a US based person. That has to change. It made sense when the paradigm was that they didn't want to touch any of the pre farm. It made a lot of sense to me. That, however, has been broached. So providing liquidity if needed at some point to exchanges in the ability to have XCH be significantly more fungible does make a lot of sense to me at this point. Let me know what you think about that in the comments below.

Speaker 1:

The next thing is the wallet does have problems. The wallet can get into states where it's just certain things don't work out too well. I have a wallet that's like that. Granted, I've done about every stupid thing possible in that demonstration wallet and it has been a long lived wallet but there are NFTs that I can't move out right now. Even with 0.1 XCH as a fee just doesn't work. So there is something wrong fundamentally with that. Now, I was able to move the XCH out of it and I was able to move the cats out of it. However, there's a potential that that actually ties into the next issue here, and that is the mem pool. There does appear to be something I don't know what not necessarily working wonderfully in the mem pool at current, and whether or not that is something that gets overhauled is interesting to me. So I think there's some room for improvement as far as that.

Speaker 1:

Whether we see the block space increase doesn't necessarily make a big difference. We see a dust storm of XCH, as right now, which is inscriptions on Chia. The client is actually able to operate. If you have a non messed up client, perfectly fine. However, if you have a messed up client, I can't even tell you if that's what is the matter with my current wallet, but that's, of course, a very first hand recollection of what's going on. I talked to Josh about this and he said there was probably some coin pairs that I created an offer with at some point in time and like, just didn't cancel it or spend it out. I tried sending all the XCH to myself again to clear everything that didn't work out. So, yeah, there's potentially a pair combo or something like that that could be stuck out there still and that could be harming my ability to move things out of the mem pool, and that is not necessarily a great thing. I don't know if that's technically what's going on, but something is for sure going on with that wallet.

Speaker 1:

Next, onboarding high value like value add crypto compatriarch companies. This is a weakness in my opinion, because we don't see Chia doing this and we see a lot of other cryptocurrency companies out there actively soliciting getting working in partnership with other cryptocurrency companies and that does lead to exposure of that crypto one to crypto two kind of audience thing that grows the base of people interested developers, investors, producers, speculators, everybody and I think that's a good thing. So I would hope to see that happen a little bit more in 2024. Certainly, there is a lot of animosity almost, or hostility that seems to be prevalent in crypto Twitter, and I would urge the team to ignore crypto Twitter. Crypto Twitter doesn't even matter. Let's be honest. Crypto Twitter really doesn't matter. You're not. You're the only thing it matters for are mainly like the junkest class assets out there. So, yeah, that's that's one thing I hope to see in the near future.

Speaker 1:

Another weakness is there is headcount, that is, people that were working specifically on the chia client on the front end of it. I don't think we're going to see the cadence of releases that we had seen in the past At some point. Like you have a feature complete, it just needs security product, and like that should be at some point in time. Here the client itself has been developed by chia and like this is a chicken and egg thing, like what. This isn't in clear cut really weakness, but it is like it kind of seems like it. We don't have third party client developers that are working on desktop clients for chia. There's not separate implementations for the most part, aside from Mac and Maris, which is Docker based and not. I don't think that's easier for most people to get into, and I'm unaware of other client based implementations for the desktop that are capable of all the feature set cats and FTS, everything like the chia reference client is. So how the chia reference client evolves and the amount of effort that's been put into it and what effort gets put into it next, I think is something that's very interesting to look at. I think everybody should be thinking about that question Next.

Speaker 1:

This one was, of course, going to come up Nakamoto coefficient and we see that dropping precipitously due to no SSD. And no SSD is not a typical chia pool. They are the centralized chia pool, so you're binding your work essentially to their key set and you're producing the work for them with your storage and getting rewarded for it. And they do have. Let me not let me not just glance over this. They have the best compression technology out there. They have an incredibly simple client. It's a compelling case for somebody to use them, but at the same time, that is impacting the Nakamoto coefficient of chia. I think that impacts chia's ability to talk about themselves as the most decentralized blockchain without the potential for pushback from knowledgeable potential customers on that. That doesn't help them bring on new clients potentially, because these are people that are going to be validating what is said to them, not just you know some small business. This is you. Typically, the people that chia, to my knowledge, has been talking to are very large entities, organizations, and independent verification is going to be something that they do. So definitely, no SSD is a weakness, but at the same time, there is a chance that they're going to adopt a protocol change for their harvester, so that it may not, you may end up forming the blocks yourself, so that would be ideal if we see that happen.

Speaker 1:

The next thing is we see certain personalities in chia frequently, but we don't know that much about the company itself outside of that. That leads to an opaqueness, I think, for the community that is not something talked about, not something that most companies actually talk about. Sometimes they might call it culture or something like that. You might have a transparency report or they might put together some sort of forward looking statement on this is how we are doing things. That kind of insight doesn't seem to exist for chia, and so that would be one thing that would be interesting to see, because you don't have a lot of.

Speaker 1:

I mean, you know Jean, you know Bram, you know the faces out there that you see and what they say and stuff like that, but you don't know very many other people that are at chia, and so what their contributions are is something that I feel like it would be very beneficial to learn more about, because it sounds like a lot of these people actually do wildly interesting things. We've got a new puzzle out for chia, which puzzles are kind of the built in smart contracts that are capabilities of the chia blockchain by somebody that I never heard of before. So I think there's a lot of under the hood people that are brilliant, working on things and getting their horns tooted from something like marketing, which is the next weakness that she has, and that is because we don't have a ton of marketing and, honestly, if they're spending money and Jean has said this many times they're spending money on acquiring new customers. That makes a lot of sense. However, at the same time, there's a public perception of independent research that any company is going to do, and so having some sort of brand building, brand recognition, outside of that is something that I think could be beneficial. It's my take on it. You guys, let me know what you think the biggest weakness that you see, independent of what I've said, is with chia. Definitely, of course, no major exchanges has got to be like near the top of that. That is, that's a showstopper for so many people that I've talked to that are interested in chia, and then they're like, where can I get it? And you're like, let's get a VPN installed. And it's like, no, they're not going to do that. And they actually put you in a sus category immediately when you suggest that. So that is hard and cryptocom's app is functional and you can buy chia, but it is also not a very favorable experience for most people out there. So that is it's hard sell. Most people that have cryptocom are like I'm in it for, like the, the card and the rewards. They're not in it for the user experience of the app, because that is actually a horrible application to use on your mobile device. So, yeah, those are the weaknesses. Now this is exciting.

Speaker 1:

This part here is talking about the opportunities that could be present out there for Chia specifically that I see, and take a moment, go down in the comments, if you haven't yet, and tell me what you think the opportunities Chia should be jumping at or that you see are, and let's see if we talk about them here. The first one this is big the ETH Chia Bridge. I so this is where I was talking about the outreach with other crypto cryptocurrency companies and how that doesn't necessarily happen that much in Chia or at all in Chia, for what I can typically see, we could see and you see this huge in Ethereum ecosystem Companies playing with each other, working on their own tech. Having that ETH Chia Bridge could be a really easy way for people to get into Chia and also do whatever they wanted in Chia and exit back out. So same goes for people with their XCH that I want to play around in the ETH ecosystem, so those two could be really good cross pollinators. I see that as being a major opportunity for Chia. Of course, I've talked about this as a weakness, but let me also say it's an opportunity. The marketing, chia's marketing is a blank slate pretty much at this point. There's individual persona personalities, but there's no corporate, identifiable brand personality that Chia has, and so the definition of that in a public manner is something that I think would be really interesting to see Chia, the company, undertake in 2024. And I think it could have really big impacts for them as a company also as well.

Speaker 1:

Next, being in a position to relieve the market maker of their market making activities at some point could be an opportunity. If they have the cash flow that is and I mean they have a lot of headcount. I don't know exactly what it is today, but it has been very high in the past and I'm sure it's still pretty high for a cryptocurrency company. That amount of cash flow to fund that is not going to be trivial. They don't pay their employees and crypto, which forces them to go sell it at market rate to pay their mortgage and stuff like that they actually pay them in fiat. So that's a good, admirable thing to do, but definitely the ability to say market maker, thank you for getting us through that time. We don't need to entail your services. We're back to having the markets themselves show us what the value of Chia is and other entities at that point would start taking on market maker positions.

Speaker 1:

Is my, my strong guess that if there was accessibility through other major exchanges, that would be something that would be a super bullish indicator to me, because it would show that financially, the stability of the company has returned to where they were at. Whether or not they're that cash flow positive, we don't know. They're a private company. You could ask them on Twitter how much money they're making. They would probably decline to tell you, and they probably would have to decline to tell you because if they are going for an IPO, that would probably be skewed towards manipulation of a potential IPO listing. So it makes sense for them not to talk about that but at the same time, if there ever is a, let me say this as an opportunity.

Speaker 1:

If there ever is, at some point in time, a pivot from an IPO, I hope Chia jumps on that as an opportunity to make the best damned crypto pure company out there that could ever be, because that really is something that would be remarkably viable. Chia's technology is first class. That is an opportunity. If that ever turns out like the IPO is not going to happen, there is a way to spin that into like the best damn crypto company that is a pure crypto company out there. Onboarding more paying customers into virtual private blockchain. Virtual private blockchain is a very hot topic and it is great for industries that don't want to associate with crypto but yet want the securities that you can get with crypto. As far as multinational transactions, typically is what I've seen Chia hopefully can onboard some people into their virtual private blockchain offering. And, yeah, another opportunity is just that that redefining of the company and who they are publicly. I say that that's important to me because I think it's the perception and it's yet to be crafted, and so looking for that to happen at one point would be really something I think could be world class for Chia, especially because they are so unique where they're at. They're so unique how they've been created. They're so unique the challenging set of problems that they address.

Speaker 1:

All right, this last one is the dangerous one. Okay, these are the unknowns out there, these are the threats. These are not necessarily things that Chia has going on deficiencies currently, or anything like that. These are externalities that could be possibilities, but things that you would want to have on your radar Regulatory lines. I am not a lawyer, I'm not going to pretend to be a lawyer, but Is 100% of the selling of securities A? Okay? I would imagine, based upon other things I've read about other rulings and regards to ripple that they're probably okay. However, at the same time, I don't know, does that imperil an IPO? I don't know. So, like any regulatory lines like those are not just in regard to the sale of a portion of the pre farm. Those are also in regards to other things that may or may not exist out there in the regulatory ecosystem, which is fast evolving towards the future. It's evolving towards heavy handed regulations on the crypto industry, which is not probably, in my opinion, what we want to see happen. I've said it for a while and I think a lot of people have come over to my side over the past year, seeing some of the scary propositions that have been put out there, that if they were to be, oh my God, they would be bad. So that gets on to the next one. Why do regulations?

Speaker 1:

In general, the ability of crypto as an entity is actually not in an existential crisis. Bitcoin is not in an existential crisis. Everything else has some level of scrutiny on it and there is definitely a push in the United States for that, and maybe rightly so. The United States loses its mantra of being a tech leader in this field because if we are stupid enough to regulate it, we deserve to lose it. In my opinion, hostile banking environments for non-BTC players could be a thing if and when ETFs are a thing. So preferential treatment towards commodity BTC might be a thing that certain banks look at and try to delineate or draw lines between the rest of everything out there and Bitcoin, and it would actually prop up their bags to do that. So that's another. It'll probably manifest in lobbyists and regulations also, but that is another thing on the horizon that the entire ecosystem should be looking out for.

Speaker 1:

Another thing in the broader crypto ecosystem, if we are heading into a bull market, the flight of talent could be something that is significant and real and there could be. You know, it could be hard to maintain talent if, especially as a company that has developed a lot of core technologies already, like Chia has if they could look at it and say, hey, in the next year or two, there's a chance that I'm going to be not needed my position because the work I'm doing isn't being, you know, it's coming to a close in a year or two. They could start looking now for other places. That could happen in any crypto company at any time. But the talent that is actually capable of doing a good job writing and securing blockchain technology it is a small talent base, so that is a, I think, big threat to many companies out there. I hope that the talent that Chia has, which is not insignificant, is able to be retained, and sometimes that comes at a cost. So you know that isn't necessarily easy for satisfying some of the other things that we talked about.

Speaker 1:

This isn't trying to come up with perfect. This is just talking about all of it, and that's really what a SWAT analysis does is. It puts it all out there for everybody to talk about and make sure you sound off in the comments below with what you think could be on deck. Next, this one is always looming and it's the potential unknown attack vectors that have not been discovered through audits or just are. They were not just, they could be newly founded at any point in time from some piece of development work. So that's a massive, never ending, expensive, hard to mitigate concern that is everywhere and you never know what's going to happen until that bad thing happens. It seems like in cryptocurrency, oh wow, that happens a lot.

Speaker 1:

So, especially around the ETH Chia Bridge, that's that's a place where you got to keep your eyes, because that is probably the biggest risk that would be out there and, of course, steering public sentiment in a negative news fashion towards Chia wouldn't be good instead of steering it in a positive news fashion towards you and I think, also the overall. Every crypto company company out there should be looking at their public facing, messaging how they can appear to be not the problems that have have plagued cryptocurrency, and Chia really stands out as not actually being one of those problem players. But definitely there is much room for even growing and advancing that messaging and that helps further all crypto companies out there in their potential to not be viewed as just the next rug. So those are the biggest threats that I see there could be for other cryptos regulatory capture, issues around power utilization. The identification of certain activities is fairly easy to do, however, something as small as a Chia farm if you went really small with a Chia farm and you just had it BSSD's should be something that everybody could do under the wire and not have a concern about that, but certainly it is something that we need to think about. So, no SSD. I'm not going to put this in the threats, but just to talk about it. No SSD I heard three XE bite farmer is a thing. They have a three XE bite farmer. That is a huge farm and so that is right there. I don't know where to classify that. Honestly, we'll probably just have a whole like let's talk about no SSD thing at some point in the future.

Speaker 1:

Everybody, I hope you've enjoyed this forward looking assessment of where I think things could be going. And remember, none of this is financial advice. Do your own due diligence and be very wary of anybody that's trying to sell you anything in cryptocurrency that is like a product of cryptocurrency, like that is. There's a lot of that. I think that we're getting out of the worst of it Because people are getting awareness of it, but then it's like if we're starting another bull cycle, there will be another new crop of people that are brand new and they'll be like I'm going to get into everything and they will get absolutely wrecked. So also spread the word to people to be cautious of what they get into, because there's a lot of potential for economic harm and cryptocurrency and most people that just jump into stuff without doing a lot of independent research are setting themselves up for some disasters Everybody.

Speaker 1:

I hope you have enjoyed this, and so, if you're new to Chia and you're interested in getting farming, check out one of the two guides that I've released recently the Chia 2.0 GPU plotting and farming 2023 ultimate guide. If you are a official Chia user, like that'll be a specific type of compression that is not as big as the Giga horse platform, which is what I currently utilize and am replotting myself right now to see 19s, and you can find that guide in the how to farm Chia and GPU plot with Giga horse 2.0 for Windows hard drive mining guide, and those are both in the description below, as well as check the rest of the videos in this channel. We have a wealth of information on Chia and definitely take some time and check it out. Don't forget there's cheat sheets on digital spaceportcom. Everybody have a great one and I will check you guys out next time.

Forward-Looking Evaluation of Chia
Chia's Strengths in Cryptocurrency
Strengths and Weaknesses of Chia
Concerns and Weaknesses in Chia Network
Future Opportunities and Threats in Chia
Chia Farming and Guide Information