Panos 🔼{X}🇬🇷

Why I am here and what motivates me to build in crypto: Growing up as a teenager in Greece during the 2008s financial crisis, I saw our economy crushed. For the next 10 years everything went downhill. Banks collapsed (and saved by the government with taxpayers money). Capital controls locked us out. Businesses shut down. I saw families unable to touch their savings, shops closing, hope fading. It hit hard and still stings. As a Greek, it’s personal. Even now, banks in Greece are a cartel squeezing everyone dry. Not that this isn't true in the other countries, but it is better. Here, banks charge for literally everything from ATM withdrawals, to banks transfers for both the sender and receiver (wtf?), 3% on every card swipe, and now they are also introducing a monthly subscription to keep your account open. It’s suffocating. Banks are not here to help anyone or anything, they are a chokehold on lives everywhere, trapping people and businesses in endless fees and limits. That’s why I dove into crypto, and then became a big DeFi advocate. For years, I have studied, used DeFi and blockchain and for almost 2 years now fighting and building with @AnodosFinance to simplify crypto and its potential to liberate. I’m driven by a vision to empower people and businesses to be their own banks, breaking free from the suffocating grip of this banking nightmare. And with XRPL's powerful and efficient tech, I see a future where millions control their money, without limits and restrictions. It’s personal, but it’s global. I am here and I'm building to contribute to the average person's financial sovereignty, free them from this cartel, and help hand control back to every person, every business, every dreamer. This broken system fuels me to keep pushing for a world where finance is onchain and our assets and data belong to us all, not the unnecessary middlemen.

GM! 🌞

GM 🔼🌞

Why the XRP Ledger and Avalanche Consensus Protocols have the best designs and the potential to lead the industry over the long term. A consensus protocol is an algorithm that is used to get nodes in a decentralized system to agree on the next valid state. In simple terms, consensus is the task of getting a group of computers to come to an agreement on a decision. There have been just three main approaches to the consensus problem throughout the history of distributed systems: Classical, Nakamoto, and recently, Avalanche. It's possible that you've heard of Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake being referred to as consensus algorithms. But they are not, they are often referred to as such for simplicity; they're Sybil resistance mechanisms (SRMs). SRMs are used to deter against Sybil attacks. A SRM isn't sufficient on its own to achieve consensus. It must be used in conjunction with a consensus algorithm. A Sybil attack is when a single node can flood the network using multiple identities to pretend to be multiple nodes and use them to gain a disproportionately large influence. Ideally, in a decentralized system, we want each node to represent 1 vote. If a node can pretend to be many different nodes and gain multiple votes instead, then it makes the system susceptible to attacks. The SRM is here to prevent this. In 2012, the XRP Ledger developers pioneered the Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA), a consensus protocol that is inspired by the Classical Consensus but with some modifications, and based on the Byzantine fault tolerance mechanism. FBA is used for its high throughput, network scalability, and low transaction costs. In FBA-based systems anyone can participate as a node with low barriers and decentralized control. Nodes choose who they can trust. Individual nodes make decisions that create system-wide quorums. The number of nodes required to reach agreement within a system is known as a quorum. FBA systems use the term "quorum slices" - a subset of a quorum that can persuade another relevant node to agree. An FBA system may be up to date and accurate without requiring all of its nodes to agree. The ability to choose whom each node trusts decentralizes the network. For a transaction to be approved on the XRP Ledger, the ledger requires at least 80% quorum approval. This means that the XRP Ledger is not vulnerable to a 51% attack because it does not use mining in its consensus algorithm. Proof-of-Work was the first mechanism to solve the double spend problem without requiring a trusted third party. The XRPL's consensus protocol solves the same problem in a far faster, cheaper and more energy efficient way. Since 2012, the XRPL has proven that the blockchain trilemma doesn't exist if the network and consensus protocol are properly and carefully designed. Then in 2018, a new type of consensus algorithm was introduced, called Avalanche Consensus. Following in Nakamoto's footsteps, the developers wanted to develop an algorithm that offered all of the advantages of Nakamoto Consensus (robustness, scale, decentralization), as well as all of the advantages of Classical consensus (speed, quick finality, and energy efficiency). Participants in Avalanche build confidence in the correct decision propagated by all nodes in the network after a validator picks other validators at random to inquire about their preferences. With enough confidence, a decision is finalized immediately. Unlike the Nakamoto Consensus, Avalanche does not depend on Proof-of- Work. In networks like Bitcoin, Proof-of-Work is necessary for both organization and security against bad actors. Although PoW could be utilized with Avalanche Consensus, Proof-of-Stake was chosen to force users to have an amount of tokens before being allowed to vote on transactions. Finally, Avalanche nodes operate only when there is work to be done, unlike Bitcoin and other systems based on Nakamoto's invention that necessitate continual action. There is no mining or polling involved in obtaining new blocks. Avalanche launched in 2020 and since then it has proven to be one of the most stable, efficient and decentralized systems. Conclusion: The mechanics of both the XRPL and Avalanche are amazing and have proven to be resilient with the potential to lead the blockchain future. It's the main reason why my top 2 crypto and bluechips are $XRP and $AVAX.