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Obscure Cryptocurrencies and Where to Find Them

by Grayson Earle

January 27, 2020

I’m recently finished teaching a class at Eugene Lang entitled “Cryptocurrency: Money as Medium” which explores cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and artists who have engaged monetary systems in critical or otherwise interesting ways. As part of this course, I had my students participate in a crypto-trading game in which they were asked to spend $100 (play money) on two or three cryptocurrencies. This was intended to get them to pay attention to market fluctuations and do some independent research on various blockchain companies and projects.t

A few interesting strategies emerged, including the cynics investing in mostly Tether (a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar) as a rhetorical statement against the rampant speculation of cryptocurrency. Others weighed the volume of search queries on various currencies, or just made intuitive decisions based on design choices. At the end of the exercise, I revealed my choices as well: Monero (XMR), New York Coin (NYC), and Photon (PHO).

I chose Monero because it’s what my project Bail Bloc uses, and I’m just superstitious enough to invite a little luck. The latter choices were based solely on the extremely low value of the tokens. In theory, the token value could increase dramatically (or just as easily plummet). I told my students that I would actually invest the $100 to make our experiment more dramatic. This led to the question: “How would you go about buying those coins?” For more established assets like Bitcoin, this is fairly trivial. Set up a Coinbase account and click a few buttons. But all three of my picks are unavailable on Coinbase, so how could I possibly acquire them?

My first instinct was to purchase some Bitcoin that I could then trade for these other coins. I’ve done it before, so I know that it works in some cases. I opted to use Coinbase because of the ease of use, but another option is Local Bitcoins. I won’t detail how to sign up for these services, because that information is widely available elsewhere. The important part is, once signed up you can buy Bitcoin (among other coins) for US Dollars.

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_{Buying $100 worth of Bitcoin on Coinbase (including fees)}

Coinbase is a few different things. It’s important to make the distinction that in this case it is acting as both a wallet for my Bitcoin, as well as an exchange that sells Bitcoin for USD, for a fee. It is not ideal to leave the purchased Bitcoin in my Coinbase-controlled wallet, but I will soon transfer the money out, in any case.

Time to buy some Monero. After a bit of searching, I found CoinSwitch, a website that allows you to convert between currencies. In this case, I can convert BTC to XMR (Bitcoin to Monero). One convenient aspect of CoinSwitch at the time of writing this is that it does not require an account to convert small amounts.

_{Converting .00776 BTC for 1.02713 XMR}

It’s worth noting the exchange rate I’m getting. According to CoinGecko (again, at the time of writing this) .00776 BTC should be equivalent to 1.07 XMR. Clearly, I’m getting ripped off. This is unavoidable to some extent, though I did shop around a bit and found a better deal on SwapCoins.com. The moral of the story here is to look around a bit. I don’t want to shill any particular company in writing any of this, but if I am to give a realistic account of purchasing and exchanging cryptocurrencies, I need to give details.

_{Confirming that I want to send my BTC from Coinbase to the exchange, in order to be converted into XMR}

The idea with these exchanges is that they find buyers for your trading pair. So if I want to exchange BTC for XMR, they find someone who wants to trade XMR for BTC. The exchange takes a bit off the top as a fee. In this case I sent the .00776 BTC into escrow on SwapCoins. It takes a while to verify that I actually sent the BTC from Coinbase, and you will usually see that represented on exchanges with something like this.

_{Waiting for my BTC to be exchanged for XMR}

At this point it’s just a waiting game. You can optionally view the transaction on a block explorer, which will show in real time the transaction being processed.

_{At this point, it only has 1 confirmation and thus the exchange has not yet executed the trade}

But where does the Monero (XMR) go? I need to have a Monero wallet set up, with an address at which the coins can be delivered. The basic explanation of what a wallet in this context is: Software that allows one to access her crypto via a password. For a more in depth explanation of wallets, check out this great Medium article. In this case, I use MyMonero wallet which I’ve already initialized. Eventually, the XMR materializes in my wallet.

_{It is seen as a pending transaction since it is still being confirmed on the Monero network}

Now that I have the Monero in my possession, let’s review how this all happened. I purchased $80 worth of Bitcoin using Coinbase. I sent the Bitcoin to an exchange, SwapCoins, which asked for a destination Monero address. They facilitated an exchange that resulted in someone buying my BTC and sending the requested XMR. The XMR ended up in my wallet via the address I had provided the exchange. If you are confused or regard this process as a pain in the ass you aren’t alone.

Unfortunately, that was the easy part. I have no idea where to purchase Photon (PHO) or New York Coin (NYC). In fact, when I decided to purchase them I had little idea what either of these are. I picked these solely based on their low values and favorable abbreviated names, since I’m a New Yorker who loves Vietnamese food. I would wager that this is about the extent of the marketing strategy that’s gone into NYC to date, and my vapid decision making serves as some small evidence of its effectiveness. This is all part of the fun, though, and I’m hoping that this story will end up with me buying a beer in New York Coin at Keats Bar in Midtown, which was apparently the first business to accept the digital currency. I have serious doubts, of course, as my initial phone call with the bar led me to have an awkward conversation with a confused bartender.

_{Further evidence that I am New York Coin’s target demographic}

_{Some big news on the New York Coin subreddit}

There are two ways one can acquire NYCoin. I could attempt to purchase some for US dollars from a current holder, or I could mine it. The latter is essentially a process of tasking a computer with the job of verifying transactions on the network and creating new blocks of data (this is why it’s called a blockchain) that prove the record of transactions, the ledger. To set up a miner involves downloading mining software and running it on a dedicated computer. Since many people can mine a cryptocurrency simultaneously, there is a lottery system involved that rewards miners for being the first to solve an arbitrarily difficult math problem. The more miners there are on the network at any given time, the more difficult the problem is so that miners are adding new blocks at a predictable rate. This is an incomplete explanation of the process and certainly confusing for those unfamiliar with the topic, but in a nutshell: Run software on a computer that contributes to the upkeep of the ledger to earn some of the coins as a reward for doing so.

Regardless of whether I’m buying it or mining it, I need somewhere to put it. Cryptocurrency is held in a software wallet, which is a password protected interface that allows you to send and receive digital currency. Each cryptocurrency needs to be stored in a specialized wallet, so New York Coin provides one on its website. Installing it is the same process as any other software.

_{Installing the New York Coin wallet}

_{Once the software is installed it must synchronize to the network}

In order to use the wallet it first needs to be synchronized to the network, which means downloading the entire transaction history of the NYCoin blockchain. Once that’s up to date, recent transactions (including coins sent to me via mining rewards or other users) will be available for me to spend.

The only thing left to do is start mining. I downloaded CGminer which allows me to specify a wallet for hopeful rewards, and then sets to work verifying transactions on the New York Coin network. I can feel the additional heat being produced by my desktop computer while it begins participating in the network, which I appreciate in my cold Brooklyn art studio during this brutally cold time of year.

Rewards are unpredictable and it could take days before I win the aforementioned lottery. So for now, I’m left to wait.

Reflections on Money

by Kianga Daverington

September 1, 2020

This essay, written by Kianga Daverington of Daverington PLLC , was originally published in January 2020. The piece as been condensed for clarity.

Money is not a physical object like a coin, a bar of gold or a dollar bill. Money is at its core, a technology. It is a human invention designed to solve a specific set of human problems. Consider money, perhaps, in a new way. Think of money as a system for capturing time.

Time is the one thing we each have that is absolutely finite. We are born, we die, and the dash in between is all the time we have.

Think of production. We can usually produce more of some good by adding people to a task (also known as “WORK”). But we are still constrained by time. Whatever we produce is still limited by the amount of humans that can be organized to go into that production. Each of us possesses a limited amount of time available to us individually, so we need to convince or coerce others to add their time to ours if we want to achieve more than we can alone.

Out of this imperative, nations are born.

The most important quality of any particular form of money is how well it preserves the value of time over time. Can you buy the same amount of stuff or more in the future than you can buy today? If yes, congratulations - your money is accumulating time for you and future generations while you relax on the beach. If it takes more and more of a unit of money to buy the same amount of time in the future, well then I’m sorry, but that unit of money is getting weaker and weaker. It’s losing value or said another way – it’s losing purchasing power. The longer you hold it, the less it buys.

In a way, by purchasing goods and services, you are purchasing time. Every product and every service requires time to make and time to deliver - your time and/or someone else’s. The price therefore reflects the collective value of all the time put in. Money is a way we exchange time and move it around from where it is valued less to where it is valued more.

This is where prosperity comes from. It comes out of how well a society, collectively and each person, spends its time. How much time is spent creating and making? How much time is spent consuming? If we make more than we consume, we have something left over called wealth. If we consume more than we make, we are left with debt. You can’t consume what you don’t have, unless someone extends credit. Where does this “credit” come from? Basically –it’s made up.

Too much credit or debt eventually collapses and everyone is mixed up in the collapse.

If we understand that a unit of money represents a unit of time, and we understand time is limited, then a unit in a system of money with unlimited supply cannot have any value. This is the problem we are facing today with the world’s money supply. The supply of money in the world is increasing exponentially as central banks create money by giving loans to national governments, which is where our money comes from.

Our entire world financial system is a powder keg of debt.

National currencies today are known as fiat money, a currency without intrinsic value that has been given its power to be used as money by a government that says it is money by regulation. Wikipedia says, “Fiat money does not have use value, and has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.” Well said, Wiki.

A government’s job of maintaining the value of its national money boils down to a confidence game. On what basis do the people who use that government’s money believe it has value?

What happens to the money and those who hold it when the foundation of that belief begins to crumble?

The Four Courses of the Apocalypse

by Joyce E. Chaplin

May 3, 2020

Joyce E. Chaplin (PhD and MA Johns Hopkins, BA Northwestern) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. You can find her on Twitter here.

In our state of emergency, most Americans want to taste deliverance when they eat. Their wish is important. Humans mask their bare need to eat with culture: customs about when food can be taken, manners for how to consume it, equipment to prepare and serve it correctly, and shibboleths to restrict what can be eaten in the first place. Stockpiling, ordering take-out, gardening, pickling, cooking, baking—by expressing food preferences in a pandemic, US citizens demonstrate what they hope for and fear. What follows is a four-course menu based on popular quarantine options, all of them revealing that Americans hanker after normality. But what is normal? Life before COVID-19 had serious problems. #AloneTogether is a hopeful tag for social distancing. When we’re all, by definition, stress eating in various states of aloneness, are we also sustaining a United States that must, now and in the future, somehow hang together?

4 G 30 10A

We’ll start our meal with sourdough. On Twitter, ongoing convo about bubbly mothers is not about extroverted female parents. Mothers (or starters) are thick, fermented cultures of lactobacilli that, instead of baker’s yeast, leaven sourdough. Carefully cultivated, in jar or crock or Tupperware, starters look like loose, frothy dough. You measure some out for a bake, then tenderly feed the remainder some flour and water. True sourdough is vegan and is one of the world’s oldest foods, with each lactobacillus strain native to a specific place on Earth.

Sourdough is undeniably American. It was the sturdy fare of many a young man (or woman) who followed the call to go west, to wherever the urban supply line of brewer’s yeast gave out, whenever baking powder wasn’t yet commercially available. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, sourdough biscuits are the daily bread. Gold miners ate those biscuits, too, also sourdough flapjacks, fixed from treasured starters. Boudin Bakery claims (credibly) to be the longest continuously operating business in San Francisco. It was founded in 1849, when a Frenchman opened a commercial bakery, using a Forty-Niner’s sourdough mother, which the company says it’s tended ever since. (Bite into Boudin and you’re chewing on something roughly 170 years old.) Onward the bubbly mothers went, to the Klondike, site of the next gold rush. The “Sourdoughs,” as Alaska miners were called, are commemorated in Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925). This is the movie in which the Little Tramp and his cabin mate, snowbound together (sound familiar?), get so hungry that Chaplin’s character boils and dines on his boot, and then his roomie seeks to dine on him.

Alas, it’s this vignette, with one starved Sourdough hallucinating that the other is a tasty chicken and chasing him with an axe, that I cannot forget amid the pleasant twittering about rustic boules. What do people think they’re doing when they bake bread at home, one loaf at a time, or even two by two, as if handily adapting ancient divine advice for surviving an impending disaster? Historically, people didn’t do that. Baking whole loaves of bread consumes lots of fuel. The ancient Near East, ancestral land of small-grains like wheat and bread baked from them, lost most of its trees in ancient times—Lebanon and Egypt once had forests of cedar and pine. As timber dwindled, firing an oven got expensive. Quick-cooking flatbreads were what people made at home. In the tree-depleted old world, commercial bakers had to figure the cost of fuel into baking multiple loaves of bread in a large oven. For a fee, a baker might make room for household loaves, or even other cooking, for people who couldn’t afford much fuel. One way or another, it could take a village to bake a loaf of bread. In North America, however, settlers found plentiful wood—great for baking—until they cleared the woodlands nearest the settlements. At that point, they needed a Monsieur Boudin to bake them something other than quick pancakes.

I don’t think most of social media’s sourdough bakers know that their re-enactment of American pioneer autonomy defies a bigger history in which daily bread evoked connection to others, if not dependence on them.

Frankly, American sourdough smells like settler-colonialism, a fragrance of biscuits and flapjacks rising above the log cabins and mining camps that steadily eroded Indigenous land rights while cutting down trees on those lands.

It’s a myth that pioneering individuals or families settled the West—the federal government did that, through policies that favored the spread of white population. The ability to own and maintain a freestanding household (with an oven) is still a legacy of US racial and class privileges.

Maybe, at this point, you’d like a drink with your meal? Lots of other people are having one, or three. The marketing research firm Nielsen found that, compared to a year ago, March 2020 showed a 75 perecent increase in spirits sold, a 66 percent increase in wine sales, 42 percent for beer, and a spike of 243 percent in online alcohol sales generally. (March 2020 cannabis sales also soared in states where it’s legal to buy.)

That’s self-medicating to the point of disaster. An editorial in the Boston Globe pleaded for a ban on alcohol sales during the emergency shutdown, pointing out booze’s role in rising rates of domestic abuse. Under quarantine, vulnerable individuals are miserably close to abusers and distanced from helpers. The nuclear family was supposed to have been cleansed of the worst residues of ancient patriarchal rights. We’re now engaged in a painful test of how much of that work was done. Post-quarantine rates of divorce, (re)marriage, and births will reveal collective confidence, or not, in the American nuclear family, temporarily returned, as it has been, to a state of snowbound homesteading.

Take cheer, for the moment, in our second course, crab rangoon. Aggregate Uber Eats data about early-April deliveries identified this as the nation’s third most popular dish, trailing french fries and pad thai. What is it? Bits of crab (or imitation crab) and seasonings are blended into cream cheese. Dollops of the tangy mass are wrapped in wonton pastry, then deep fried. The crisp bundles are typically served with a sweet dipping sauce. If you think this sounds like bar food, you’re right. Crab Rangoon seems to have been invented at Trader Vic’s, the post-World-War II tiki bar that also claims to have invented the mai tai. Crab rangoon has no connection to Yangon in Myanmar. The fried parcels belong to the chop-suey canon of Chinese-American foods, the knowingly false concoctions that mingle something authentically Asian (like wonton pastry) with some kind of Americana (“Philadelphia” cream cheese), often featuring an expensive treat, like crab.

Is this cultural appropriation? Maybe. Though it was Chinese immigrants themselves who shrewdly sold chop suey to white customers to ensure their grandchildren would never have to work in restaurants. Are crab rangoons culinary abominations? Well, what isn’t? It’s not as if ballpark beer and hotdogs greatly resemble the lager and wurst homesick German immigrants tried to recreate in the United States. Let’s give chop suey and crab rangoon the benefit of the doubt, regarding them as gateway dishes for the timid Euro-American palate. Without those dubious chimeras, would pad thai have become the second most ordered thing on Uber Eats in 2020?

The Uber data proves another of crab rangoon’s essential qualities: it’s not home-cooking; food service workers make it. When it arrives with its jewel-tone dipping sauce, it’s proof that you didn’t have to cook. Even if you buy frozen crab rangoon, somebody else got it ready for you to heat up. For this second course in our pandemic dinner, it still takes a village. One commentator on the Uber Eats data wondered (with studied innocence) what chicken tikka masala and “crag [sic] Rangoon” could possibly be? Sadly, some Americans don’t enjoy any Asian cuisine. (Perhaps they also call COVID-19 the “kung flu.”) The “crag” for crab was probably just a typo, b and g are neighbors on the keyboard, after all. But that mistake conceals the dish’s inherent sociability. No one orders crab rangoon from a distant crag where they can’t get a phone signal. Just remember: if you order anything, add a tip. Everyone in food service is tired, underpaid, and risking infection.

I hope you’re not full, because here comes the main course and it’s Spam. This is neither home-made nor ordered from a restaurant. Each can of Spam yields a dense, pink, rounded-edge oblong that can be sliced or diced, then baked, fried, or microwaved. It predates the microwave, invented in 1937 by the Hormel Company to sell pork shoulder during the Great Depresssion. “Spam” vaguely promised shoppers some nice spiced ham. Spam hit the big-time during World War II, when the US government bought it in bulk to feed servicemen. It remains popular on Pacific islands, including Hawai’i, that have had large US military bases.

Spam is newly coveted because it’s shelf stable, a prepper protein the Greatest Generation bequeathed to us. It joins several related revivals. Backyard gardening and home canning are also on the rise, just as victory gardens and adaptation to food rationing supported war efforts in the early twentieth century. It must be said, however, that today’s prepping also descends from the bleaker survivalism of the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, Spam-stocked bomb shelters were not so much parts of a collective program to defeat the enemy as they were ways to outsurvive one’s neighbors. Nicely browned, Spam has a crisp keep-calm-and-carry on quality. But also a Dr. Strangelove sizzle.

Spam sales are part of pandemic enthusiasm for animal products, even those produced from factory farms—even though we should know better. Spam is a branded product. People have heard of it even if they’ve never eaten it. It’s the antithesis of farm-to-table, also of vegetarianism or veganism. It’s not just processed food, but highly processed—and cruelly so. Spam is extracted from hogs, a highly sentient and social species. They are bred in metal cages with concrete floors and slaughtered on an industrial scale. Producing protein this way is inhumane and environmentally unsustainable. And yet meat is a high priority for many Americans. On April 28^th, President Trump signed an executive order to declare meat processing plants “critical infrastructure.” He is indifferent to the hogs, and to the meat-industry workers who now cannot practice social distancing. Who cares about them? Recent analysis of the most-Googled recipes in each US state showed that iterations of hamburger or ground beef were the top choice in twelve states, chicken in five, pork in three more—twenty of our fifty states seek animal flesh. But whatever industrial meat’s current merits as comfort-food, we cannot plan to subsist on it in the decades to come.

Time for dessert? Maybe you’re trying to avoid “the COVID 15,” the fifteen extra pounds stress-eating is packing around some self quarantiners. How about a healthy orange? Fruit isn’t a bad choice. Even grapes or apples, which are little more than bags of fructose and water, with trace vitamins, are better than actual candy.

But, first, give thanks to the people who pick your fruit and to the natural world that makes all food possible. Agricultural piece workers have unenviable jobs that poorly match the attractive pyramids of bounty in the produce section. This isn’t one of those (vanishingly rare) problems that the pandemic has made better. Most US farm workers are undocumented migrants, to whom many labor regulations never apply. They are now, in the pandemic, categorized as “essential workers,” out of concern to maintain the food supply. But this means the workers can’t stay home, either to recuperate if they’re sick or avoid people they know are infected—and those two factors feed on each other, even out in the fresh air of a field of antioxidant-rich strawberries. If we want to continue to enjoy berries or oranges, we’ll need to reconsider the compromised labor conditions for agricultural workers in an increasingly exclusionist United States.

Also, whether we want to think about it right now or not, climate change is threatening most crops, including those, like citrus, that are Goldilocks-picky about their temperature and rainfall.

Now, back to those antioxidants. Many fruits (and vegetables) have super-nutritional qualities. These are critical for maintaining health. Your body will disintegrate from scurvy if you cease to ingest Vitamin C; the known range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and micro-nutrients have similar prophylactic functions. Together, they boost the immune system’s defense against infections, including COVID-19.

But fruit alone doesn’t ward off contagious diseases. We also need immunizations, which shield individuals from horrors like smallpox while giving populations the herd immunity that prevents outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and the like. Anti-vaxxers, the people who think inoculating children creates autism, preach instead the efficacy of diet. In parallel, right-wing survivalists are peddling pandemic decoctions of colloidal silver. Silver has antibacterial properties; these have no effect on viruses like COVID-19, however. Nor will an orange a day truly keep the doctor away. If anti-vaxxing survives the pandemic, can anything kill it? More to the point, if civic intelligence about science could also be described in terms of herd immunity, at what point might we be collectively doomed by the ignorance of a minority?

I offer a fortune cookie at meal’s end. And the fortune reads:

Eat wisely—#AloneTogether is forever.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

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