Good morning and welcome back to another edition of Inspiration Friday! Today is the first day of October, that’s crazy! As such I have a fun article about some great Fall news; as well as a few other techy articles. I hope y’all enjoy them!
Fall in NC expected to be brighter, more colorful this year
This is some exciting news, y’all! I do feel like last year the leaves died and fell pretty fast. Apparently, that can happen when they don’t get enough water (which makes sense) earlier in the year.
However, this year there are a ton of nature things going on (like la nina) that are helping to make this Fall more vibrant than ever! Ok, maybe not like a world record, but at least more vibrant than last year. Tay and I are stoked for Fall to finally be here! Goodbye hot, humid, gross summer days!
The Interchange: You can get +8% yield on USDC. Why? Follow the flow
This was a very interesting article that answered a question of mine. We have an account with BlockFi and currently use their credit card to get Bitcoin cashback rewards. That’s all fine and dandy and has been a lot of fun to be a part of.
However, BlockFi has another cool feature. They have this earn feature where we can earn an additional 4.5% on our Bitcoin if we keep it in the platform. We could also deposit USDC and get 8% yield!
As an aside, USDC is what is called a stablecoin. You give a dollar and a new USD Coin is created. You sell a USD Coin and it’s destroyed and you get your dollar back. That’s the basic idea.
So why 8%? How? That’s what I wanted to know and this article gave a good synopsis, but I’ll let y’all read it for yourselves :p
I did really like this quote towards the bottom that sums it all up: “Yielding 8% on USDC isn't a "scam," it's a function of risk/reward, and supply/demand.”
All in all, it’s obviously still a huge risk to utilize this feature as it’s not FDIC insured or anything like that. If BlockFi gets hacked and you lose your funds, then that just stinks for you. I wouldn’t say put your life savings in there or anything, haha!
SunDrive creates sustainable, cheap solar cells with world-record efficiency
This was a really neat article Tay shared with me about a new emerging innovation within the solar power industry. The big shift is that this company is using copper wiring instead of silver. It is 100 times cheaper, more abundant, and they even broke the world record for efficiency!
This means that solar power could now become a cheaper thing to acquire, which is pretty exciting!
My only question is why is silver the current standard? Don’t we use copper for literally everything electrical already? I don’t have that answer, it just seems odd to me someone hasn’t already done this.
How to Upload Data to Arweave
https://arweave.news/how-to-upload-data-to-arweave/
I used this article because it gives a cool example of some of the emerging blockchain technologies being made for storage. In previous articles, I think I’ve mentioned Storj before as another example. There is also IPFS and Filecoin that help accomplish similar things.
The idea is that we can now store files on these different decentralized blockchains. This is like the web 3.0 version of the cloud!
I’m very excited about this and am looking into how I can incorporate this into selling books. Like if I sell a book NFT, I could upload the actual file to Arweave, Storj, or Filecoin. Then when the NFT sells, I can give access to the file on the decentralized web, where it can live forever.
Instead of storing the file on Google Drive where if my account gets closed, the files are gone, if Google goes down, the files are gone, if it gets hacked, the files are gone, or if I accidentally delete the files, the files are gone.
If the files are stored on the “decentralized cloud” (as I’m calling it), then the lifetime of my NFT’s could be much, much longer.