Roads Less Taken

A blend of programming, boats and life.

Spry Error Handling

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Work on Spry continues… in small spurts. :) One thing that I have pushed ahead of me for far too long is error handling. People interested in Spry have been asking about it and yes, I decided to start getting a handle on it.

In fact, I wrote this article last year but forgot to get it done and published!

Error handling is an interesting topic, earlier it wasn’t really much controversy around it but the advent of new techniques (Optionals etc) in combination with languages making… “interesting” choices (I am looking at you Go) has made this subject fairly hot. So what do we want in Spry??

Elrond and NEAR

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Back in 2018 I got into crypto currencies. I ended up focusing on Nano and built Canoe, a cross platform (mobile and desktop) wallet for Nano. Nano is crazy fast (one or a few seconds) and has zero fees. For payments it’s superb and the architecture of Nano is clear and simple. I still have a lot of respect for Nano, but… 2020 taught me one thing - smart contracts are actually not just a gimmick.

So for me, sorry, Nano is not a project “of the future”!

I accidentally got involved in the DeFi world in the CORE project, which runs on top of Ethereum. My contribution was just making a cross Discord/Telegram chatbot, RoboCORE, and writing a bit about “floor price calculations” but the whole DeFi landscape convinced me that smart contracts are an essential ingredient in a modern crypto currency platform.

Real true scalability is also mandatory, which IMHO really has to boil down to sharding, even if novel faster consensus models are damn cool like Avalance has (the Snowflake consensus protocol).

So back to googling and reading … and there are two projects that so far stand out in my book:

CORE Floor Price Musings

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I have already written three different articles explaining how CORE floor price can be calculated. But just a day or two back the CORE team decided that using the floor price concept in communcation doesn’t work out very well. Why? Because a LOT of people just can’t seem to understand it properly and keep perpetuating wrong conclusions around it. In short - people can’t understand math :)

A list of common misconceptions are:

  • Floor price is the “correct value” of CORE and that the current price then must be too high
  • Floor price is some kind of approximation and the price can actually go lower
  • Floor price is a technical analysis support level
  • Floor price can change if another market starts trading CORE lower
  • Floor price can never ever go down in USD value
  • Floor price can never ever go down in ETH value

And a whole bucket of other misconceptions - just pile it on! Let us start with an explanation of what floor price ACTUALLY IS and then go through the above list…

CORE Floor Price Short Howto

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In the previous two articles I explained the principles behind CORE’s floor price, the lowest price that CORE can reach and ended it all by explaining the “q method” that works for any number of CORE pairs. For lots of people that was possibly an overdose of math, so … here is the super short and lacking any explanations on why description on how to calculate floor price of CORE using the “q method”.

CORE Floor Price Over More Pairs

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In the previous article I explained the principles behind CORE’s floor price, the lowest price that CORE can reach. It’s a novel concept and a very interesting characteristic of CORE.

I showed the mechanisms involved and how to calculate the floor price, if we only have a single trading pair to worry about. I have also solved the equation for two trading pairs, that equation is currently used in RoboCORE with success.

But how to handle three pairs or more? Complexity seemed to spin out of control, but… it turns out there is a simple solution!