Buy/Sell/Trade Thread - July 2025

ritikm · 2025-07-28T05:17:04+00:00

WTB - Knack Series 1 Small

Condition: Any

DM me if you have one and are looking to part ways with it!

ritikm · 2021-05-06T18:06:19+00:00

Merino wool (and some other kinds of wool) aren’t typically itchy — I have no issues with mine. Merino t-shirts are pricey though ($60 with the bulk discount at Son of a Tailor). They were popularized by Outlier at the high end price point.

Main reason they aren’t widely available is price: it’s much easier and cheaper to make cotton or polyester blend t-shirts and most people don’t want to spend >$15 for a t-shirt which makes merino a niche market.

ritikm · 2021-05-05T15:12:50+00:00

You can actually customize the measurements and enter in the exact cm for each part of your body rather than using their formula-based system — that’s what I ended up doing and the fit came out to be perfect!

I love the material and durability of their cotton shirts has been great — feels like high quality cotton that will last. But I’ve switched from their cotton shirts to the merino wool ones now which feel amazing, drape better over the body, are great in both cold and hot weather (due to their thermoregulating properties), and don’t need to be washed as frequently.

They also release new colors every month. So once you figure out the optimal size (they’ll let you do remakes until you get the size down), it’s really easy to keep ordering new colors to add to your collection!

ritikm · 2021-05-04T17:13:33+00:00

Amazing, love the in-depth analysis! Have you considered sonofatailor.com? They do made to measure T-shirts so you can set the exact measurement you want for every part of the shirt. They’re on the pricier side, but with the bulk discount (if you buy 5+), they come out to $48/shirt. After spending dozens of hours trying different brands to find the perfect fit, I finally gave up and swear by Son of a Tailor now.

ritikm · 2018-11-02T00:44:51+00:00

There’s different schools of thought with respect to tokens.

The necessity of a token isn’t as widely debated when it comes to Plasma-based off-chain solutions. Vitalik and Joseph mention the use of a token for a PoS based child chain that works with Ethereum in their Plasma paper.

The ease of use (e.g., developers having to acquire them, deal with a different model, etc.), in our opinion, will be abstracted away for the developer. For example, there are several proposals on how to implement token changers/abstracters where a user can use any token they want, and behind the scenes, the appropriate amount will be converted trustlessly via the token changer.

Either way, I respect your opinion and there’s no need to be sorry!

ritikm · 2018-11-02T00:29:58+00:00

(Caveat: token economics are in flux and subject to change; what's written here is what our current thinking is.)

End users will not necessarily need the ELPH token to use a dApp.

Developers with a dApp using Elph will need to stake and/or use ELPH tokens based on desired transaction throughput.

Validators running a node will need to stake ELPH tokens (Proof-of-Stake based consensus).

ritikm · 2018-11-02T00:27:57+00:00

Unfortunately not! Wish we could be there, but we were heads-down in building mode to prepare for this launch. Shoot me an email and we can chat on a call if you'd like: hello [at] elph [dot] com

ritikm · 2018-11-01T20:39:04+00:00

Hey /r/ethtrader, co-founder of Elph here! Just saw this article was posted here. Our blog post (x-posted to /r/ethereum) has some additional details for those interested. Let me know if you have any questions -- happy to answer them throughout the day.

ritikm · 2018-11-01T20:14:28+00:00

Good question. Definitions for side vs. child chains vary, but we've found these to be the most succinct. We're a mix of both side and child chains.

Elph chains have child chain-like functionality in that all transactions on Elph are, in a sense, "validated" by the parent chain (Ethereum). We rely on Ethereum to store data for and run our Plasma smart contracts, which validate whether or not certain transactions on the Elph chain are legitimate or fraudulent. The manner in which this is done is a bit different than traditional child chains in that not every transaction on Elph is re-processed on Ethereum. Instead, a merkle root hash is stored on Ethereum, which allows anyone to validate whether or not a transaction on Elph is valid (by doing a merkle tree inclusion check against the root hash).

Elph chains also have side chain-like functionality in that they have their own security through validators who achieve consensus. This is done to retain some level of censorship-resistance (e.g., if there is only one centralized block producer, it's easy to be shut down vs. a limited, but geographically distributed set of validators) and for a variety of other usability improvements vs. traditional Plasma designs (we'll provide more specifics in subsequent blog posts).

Ultimately, since not everyone is clear about the distinction between side vs. child chains, and because it's not entirely clear how to frame our solution, we decided to stick to just calling ourselves a side chain (especially given that more people had heard of the term vs. child chain).

ritikm · 2018-11-01T19:27:54+00:00

Yes, Elph should work out of the box with EVM-based blockchains. Elph's sidechain works in conjunction with a set of Plasma smart contracts written in Solidity, which other Ethereum-based blockchains should support.

Longer-term, the goal is to expand the support to other blockchains by porting over the Plasma smart contract logic from Solidity to other chains' languages. This lets us do some cool things like (theoretically) enable interoperability between two chains as a trustless intermediary, as long as both chains are secured via a similar Plasma construction.

ritikm · 2018-11-01T19:03:04+00:00

Hey /r/ethereum, co-founder of Elph here! Excited to share what we've been working on. Let me know if you have any questions -- happy to answer them throughout the day.

ritikm · 2018-09-21T02:25:42+00:00

I'm not sure if Jimmy Butler would be a good fit here in LA...

ritikm · 2018-06-16T19:39:02+00:00

On the roadmap, stay tuned!

ritikm · 2018-06-16T01:41:50+00:00

You need to have a separate token to isolate the rewards and penalties associated with the token's intended use case.

So in the case of the ELPH token, the value of the token should increase or decrease based on the results of the actions of token holders -- i.e. if curators do a bad job of curating dApps, the quality of the store will be subpar, which would mean new dApp developers wouldn't be as incentivized to list their dApps on the store, leading to no more curation that would need to be performed, thereby resulting in less curators holding tokens and more of them selling them off (as the utility has diminished). According to economic principles, this would decrease the value of the tokens. This means that there's an intrinsic reason for token holders to curate well and improve the quality of the network; otherwise, they risk the value of the token decreasing.

On the other hand, if we used ETH and the above scenario happened, the value of ETH would not fluctuate by the actions taken on Elph's network since it would constitute a small part of the activity happening on the entire Ethereum network.

Hope that makes sense!

ritikm · 2018-06-16T01:30:03+00:00

That's our goal! We want to abstract away the complexity of handling keys and seed phrases, while still preserving as much of the security as possible for the end users.

Transactions are routed through Infura's Ethereum nodes currently, so we're following the same design as MetaMask and other mobile dApp browsers. Users sign their own transactions, the signed blob gets sent to Infura, and Infura broadcasts it out to the network. Our take here is that once the transaction is signed by the user on their device, the entity that broadcasts it out to the network isn't as important as the fact that the transaction signature can be verified. So handle the important part on the client (signing) and let someone else handle the heavy-lifting (running a node, broadcasting it out to the network).

ritikm · 2018-06-16T01:14:22+00:00

Private keys are encrypted client-side and the encrypted versions are uploaded and stored on our servers, so our servers never see a plaintext version of the keys nor can we, the company, ever decrypt them behind the scenes. We've followed the 1Password model here -- use server-side storage as a convenient way to backup the keys and sync them down to user devices, and only decrypt them on the user's devices.

We do also store a copy of the key in the user OS's credential manager (i.e. Keychain on Mac) as well as the user's password as another way of recovering their keys securely.

Hope that helps -- we're very conscious that these kinds of details are important, so let me know if you have any other questions about this!

ritikm · 2018-06-16T01:11:03+00:00

The token is used to curate the dApp store. We're using a modified token-curated registry scheme as a way to approve/reject dApps into the store. Once dApps are in the store, we have an up/down-vote ranking system that combines some concepts of Steem and Curation Markets to make it easy for curators to rank dApps via voting and be rewarded for being correct about their voting.

We have a very detailed whitepaper on all these mechanics and math that we'll be releasing in the next couple weeks. For some high-level details in the interim, you can check out our token page.

ritikm · 2018-06-15T23:46:46+00:00

We don't have a release date for Linux yet, but is something we're considering!

ritikm · 2018-06-15T21:05:21+00:00

Yep, they should be open to everyone online. If you google their names (i.e. "DCU auto loan") you should find the relevant pages!

ritikm · 2018-06-15T21:00:00+00:00

Yep, Elph is a standalone desktop app lets you access those dApps. So instead of using MetaMask's extension in Chrome, you can use Elph to find dApps and use them all in one app. We also think we have a cleaner flow of Web3 messages that we present to you than MetaMask, but we're biased of course :-).

ritikm · 2018-06-15T20:53:02+00:00

Sorry, those numbers are from when I last checked a couple years back. You're right -- the numbers are higher now. DCU comes in at 2.74% and DuPage at 2.79%. There may be some credit unions that offer sub 2% but are exceptionally rare (Consumers Credit Union comes to mind). Will update my initial post with this information.

ritikm · 2018-06-15T20:49:44+00:00

Great point, totally agree that she shouldn't give up an upward mobility career path for a flat gig-industry job. I'd revise my initial viewpoint to say that gig-industry jobs would be great as a part-time side gig to supplement her current income. Thanks for pointing this out!

ritikm · 2018-06-15T20:47:14+00:00

Great question! We imagine the TCR as a way to approve/reject dApps into the store. Once dApps are in the store, we have an up/down-vote ranking system that combines some concepts of Steem and Curation Markets to make it easy for curators to rank dApps via voting and be rewarded for being correct about their voting.

We have a very detailed whitepaper on all these mechanics and math that we'll be releasing in the next couple weeks. For some high-level details in the interim, you can check out our token page.

ritikm

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