Someone mentioned the Haven protocol and I didn’t know what it was.
Sometimes I look into some of these sorts of things a bit.
Let’s have a look at this one. What does their documentation say?
https://havenprotocol.org/knowledge/how-does-haven-work/
To Paraphrase, if we call Haven “X” for short,
“Owning xCoin lets you convert your xCoin into xAssets by destroying the xCoin and creating xAssets in proportion to the price. This process is carried out in your own private digital vault”
But what is that?
Looks like it’s a smart-contract which claims it’s running cross-chain, but also seems to have some special relevance on Thor-Chain. That smart-contract implements a decentralised token market. A money-exchange running a constant running auction, like a money/share market only without the market makers.
Infinite liquidity they reckon, which is a bold claim. Illiquidity determines price usually.
So what’s the Thor chain?
Thor Chain
Seems like it’s a cross-chain chain, collecting blocks from other chains and making blocks of it’s own.
“THORNodes service the THORChain network, > which is intended to scale to 300 nodes”
In the scale of Oligarchy to Anarchy that’s the pretty Oligarchic. But.
“a VERY high churn schedule, kicking out nodes continuously.”
So potentially more people joining a queue to get to be a validator I guess.
If it’s going to be decentralized then it must be the case that I can run a node, and maybe a miner. How easily can we do that?
“Deploy a Kubernetes cluster”
That’s certainly fairly easy for people who are already using Kubernetes, which I am.
Well. At work. I’d have to set my own up.
So a full stack systems administrator and programmer can run a node, or you can just rent one in a rack in a data warehouse.
Anything else I need?
“To run a node, you must obtain a significant amount of Rune, currently 1 million Rune.”
Riiiight. How much is that in Bitcoin?
There’s a market on Binance.
Currently one rune is ten dollars.
That’s nearly 2000 bitcoin to run a node! That costs significantly more than a bitcoin miner.
I guess I won’t be running a node then.
Fronting that cash gets you the job of running a database and collecting the fees for doing so, and you get paid in Rune.
To be fair, Rune’s price has gone up 10x in the last year in dollars (3x in Bitcoin) so it only used to cost a million for
the job back then.
So that is Thor-Chain.
Haven
Haven is software you run on your computer that uses the that database run by those 300 deca-millionaire full-stack engineers.
They have a web-wallet:
https://vault.havenprotocol.org/
And they have desktop/mobile wallets:
https://havenprotocol.org/products/
It gives you a token balance in a small rainbow of token values, including some that should in theory stay stable as USD, and others using the same market mechanisms to stay stable with other not-on-Thor tokens.
Obviously tokens in all the colours can also be sent to other Haven users.
And not even the Thor-Chain millionaires can tell who is doing what.
You can prove it to the Feds though if they make you.
To run this market exchange which ought to keep all the balances in sync requires a stick to measure them all with.
That is their own token.
How do you get the tokens?
If you let your computer be involved in the technicals of running the software that connects to the “decentralized” database you can mine it on your computer for free.
You don’t even have to have a posh computer they reckon, or pay a lot for power.
Just be prepared to let your computer do the math that keeps track of where all the Haven-locked tokens are as you merrily exchange them with your friends who are also using Haven.
Keeping balances on their system is one thing but until the whole world has a Haven wallet you gotta be able to cash out somehow.
Bittrex isn’t that sketchy compared to the other centralized crypto markets, and they have a market where you can swap their Haven token for your real bitcoin.
There’s enough sellers and buyers in that market that the price of the token has gone from five dollars to eight cents and back.
It’s a very bullish looking chart.
But in theory it don’t matter, you fund your wallet with XHV tokens and then swap them into Gold or Yen or Bitcoin or Pounds and do your market-trading and paying of bribes or whatever between you and all your fellow Haven users.
So maybe we can mine some then if they reckon it’s that easy.
Sure enough, it uses a standardish mining software that’s used to mine Monaero.
Install that and make a wallet at vault.havenprotocol and feed the miner the wallet address and you’re done.
I left it running over-night, 12 hours or so, and have mined 10 cents worth of XHV.