Why I value my crypto altcoin portfolio in BTC and ETH and you should too
This is one of the top questions I get regarding cryptocurrency trading.
How do you know if you’re losing money? Won’t you lose money focusing on BTC value if (insert hypothetical scenario here)?
There are two issues here. The first is that some people don’t understand trading pairs and gaining value relative to trading pairs. The second is that other people don’t trust bitcoin to hold or gain value.
What are trading pairs?
Trading pairs are two currencies, traded against each other. If you were trading GBP and AUD, you wouldn’t be worried about the value in JPY, you’d be focused on growing value within the trading pair.
Example 1:
Trade 1: GBP > AUD
You’d patiently wait for AUD to rise or GBP to drop relative to each other then make a trade back to GBP.
Trade 2: AUD > GBP
You’d now be waiting patiently for AUD to drop or GBP to rise relative to each other.
JPY had no bearing on you gaining value in the trading pair.
They say, “But Ash, I bought my bitcoin with USD! I need to end up back in USD!”
That’s fine. It’s just two trading pairs.
Example 2:
We’ll use numbers for USD/BTC, letters for BTC/ANS (any alt and fiat are the same, just picked one of each).
Trade 1: USD to 1 BTC
Trade A: 1 BTC to 1k ANS ( then wait for gain in BTC value)
Trade B: 1k ANS to 1.2 BTC (then wait for gain in ANS value)
Trade C: 1.2 BTC to 1.2k ANS ( then wait for gain in BTC value)
Trade D: 1.2k ANS to 1.4 BTC
Trade 2: 1.4 BTC to USD (wait for higher USD value if necessary)
This is simplified, but it makes it easy to see that by focusing on using alts to increase your BTC value, you focus on increasing your BTC at cash out. The fiat value of ANS doesn’t matter for your trades, because it’s going to hugely fluctuate; it is going through two trading pairs after all.
Trusting BTC to gain/hold value
You understand the concept of gaining BTC, after all 1.4 BTC is better than 1.0 BTC, yet you’re still asking what about my fiat.
The issue here is your trust in BTC (or ETH if you’ve got ETH-based trading pairs) not you missing the concept of valuing alts in BTC.
You get the idea of aiming for more BTC, but you worry that the BTC won’t be worth USD or as much USD when you get it.
This is the most common issue I encounter, thought they voice it as “what happens if (insert 74 hypothetical situations here)”.
Your uncertainty is not in the soundness of the idea of trading to gain more BTC, but in not knowing if BTC will be worth fiat when you want to cash out to fiat. I trust that it will.
I can’t make you trust BTC.
I can tell you:
BTC has been around since 2009 BTC, while volatile, has an overall strong uptrend. BTC has crashed due to outside issues but has always recovered nicely. If a downtrend is a concern, it will be because of major news that you will be aware of. BTC is not your only exit option, you can also exit the crypto market through ETH, LTC, and Tether.
By delineating trading pairs and focusing on gaining value relative to your trading pair, you maximize your growth. Focus on building BTC/ETH (and potentially LTC) value while monitoring for major news impacting the viability of your primary in your trading pair.
Happy HODLing!
Ash
Original article and pictures take steemit.com site
Imagine that tomorrow you wake up and discover that you've been taken for all you're worth by an anonymous hacker. The thief has managed to steal everything that belonged to you and a good deal of others—$56 million worth of a new virtual currency that you've invested in, to be exact. You have a month to decide what to do.
This might seem like an impossible situation, the kind of pressure cooker that breeds hasty decisions, but it's exactly the dilemma that faced the developers and users of a new cryptocurrency and coding platform called Ethereum.
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In June, millions of dollars were stolen from a crowd-directed investment fund called the DAO and siphoned into a smaller version referred to as a "child DAO." The only way to get it back was with a hard fork that slipped a refund mechanism into the DAO and all its offshoots. This meant a change to Ethereum's code that split the currency into two versions, which users had to choose between by either updating their software or not. It was a risky proposal that threatened to permanently cleave Ethereum, and it had its share of vocal dissenters who saw the change as manipulating the system to "bail out" the DAO.
Mere hours after the fork began, however, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin called it: the fork was a success, with 85 percent of users moving over to the new version.
Users of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that inspired large portions of how Ethereum works, were watching the fork closely and tweeting with a heady mix of respect for the Ethereum community and perhaps just a bit of jealousy. You see, Bitcoin has been gripped with indecision amid a year-long debate over whether or not to fork the currency's software just like Ethereum did.
"When there's cash on the line even the most all-encompassing nerd becomes deeply conservative"
How did Ethereum manage to do in a month what Bitcoin seems utterly incapable of even coming close to pulling off?
The main factors may be Ethereum's relatively small community compared to Bitcoin, making it easier to come to a consensus, and how hard forks are built into the platform in a way that Bitcoin has never seen.
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"Politics are very much a part of Ethereum, just like with Bitcoin, but I think Bitcoin is just basically rotten with politics," said Stephan Tual, the French developer who designed the DAO alongside German brothers Simon and Christoph Jentzsch.
"The reason they can't coordinate," he added, "is because they hate each other."
While hate may be a strong word, the debate about whether to hard fork Bitcoin's software has reached critical levels of acrimony and ideological rhetoric about the virtues of decentralization. The furor led core developer Mike Hearn to slam the door on Bitcoin and brand the whole experiment a failure.
The bitcoin ecosystem is also extremely varied and everybody is trying to protect their interests without blowing the whole thing up, from the miners who make thousands of dollars for every block of bitcoin data they compute to the services that allow people to send money overseas or buy groceries with bitcoin. The system is entrenched, and changing anything at all elicits fears of a shake-up.
"A hard fork for Bitcoin would be like travelling on a train going 200 miles per hour going over a bridge," Tual said. "Someone says, to make it go faster we're going to send a bunch of nerds to go change the engine at the front. Who would volunteer?"
"Bitcoin will never evolve, and it will die, because what doesn't evolve dies"
In contrast, Ethereum is still a very young platform with only a few thousand users and one killer app: the DAO. Forking the system to save the one thing that Ethereum really had going for it, and that many people had invested in, was a no-brainer for most and easy to agree upon. In contrast, changes to Bitcoin are likely to advantage one group while having potentially dire economic consequences for many others.
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"For Bitcoin, the community is essentially riven and I'm surprised any changes get through at all," John Biggs, founder of Freemit, a Bitcoin service to send money abroad. "The ultimate problem is that you have to gain consensus and when there's cash on the line even the most all-encompassing nerd becomes deeply conservative."
Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, agreed that the largest difference between bitcoin and Ethereum when it comes to forking is "the differences between the two protocols' communities."
However, he also suggested after the hard fork on Wednesday that if Ethereum ever needs to fork again in order to solve a major problem, it may not be so easy. "Forks will only get more and more difficult to implement over time as the community grows," he wrote Motherboard in an email at the time.
The second reason for Ethereum's apparent ease in pulling off a hard fork compared to bitcoin, Tual said, is that hard forks are par for the course at this nascent stage of the platform's development.
The hard fork to refund the DAO's money was actually Ethereum's third—there's been one every time the software has been upgraded to a more powerful version—and there is even one on the horizon, since Ethereum is getting set to upgrade to a version called Metropolis.
In contrast, Bitcoin has only ever experienced one event that could be described as a hard fork, and it was basically an accident that occurred not because of a planned software upgrade, but a faulty block of bitcoin data.
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Ethereum is still a big experiment that can afford to have a few eggs broken at the moment, Tual said. "We haven't seen what Ethereum can do yet and it's just in alpha," he said.
The deadlock between competing corners of the Bitcoin community when it comes to hard forking, in contrast, spells doom for the currency, according to Tual. "As long as that's true, Bitcoin will never evolve, and it will die, because what doesn't evolve dies."
According to Biggs, Bitcoin's failure to evolve thanks to an inability to agree on a way forward means that centralized organizations—say, banks or credit payment processing companies—will be the ones to benefit from the technology simply because they're able to move faster when it comes to changing the system.
"I'm betting that true decentralized cryptocurrencies will eventually become a sideshow in a corporate blockchain circus," Biggs said.
For Ethereum, riding on the high of a successful fork, a similar fate might seem like a distant possibility right now—but proponents of the platform would do well to heed Buterin's warning and wonder: for how long?
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that Stephan Tual is German and designed the DAO with his two brothers. In fact, Tual is French and designed the DAO with two German brothers, to whom he is not related.
Original article and pictures take vice-web-statics-cdn.vice.com site
There is a slight difference between how to buy bitcoins and where to buy them. How to is all about the wallet and exchanges and the typical sources. Where to buy bitcoins digs a little deeper into some of the alternatives to exchanges and setting up your own shop that takes bitcoins.
Some larger areas have bitcoin ATMs. The prices are comparable to exchanges. This is a convenient process. Looking at the prices for the middle of November 2017, these are the prices at a bitcoin ATM in the United States. The dollars are US dollars. 0.01 costs $90.80. 0.001 costs $9.08.
Another source for bitcoins is eBay. A typical posting reads something like this, “0.001 bitcoin to your wallet. Pay with Paypal.” The seller wants a selfie of you holding your passport or driver’s license so they can compare your face to the ID and your name with the Paypal account. This 0.01 bitcoin costs $19.99. This is on a day when a bitcoin is selling for $8.
Another eBay seller is offering 0.01 bitcoin for $95. This seller has the same rule about the selfie with ID and matching the name with the Paypal account. On the market, 0.01 bitcoin is selling for $80.
If you are at the beginning of understanding bitcoins, be careful. Another seller is selling a gold plated physical bitcoin in a protective acrylic case for $11. The seller makes it clear that it is a commemorative coin. That’s a good thing because there is no such thing as a real physical bitcoin. However, someone not very knowledgeable about bitcoins might think that they are actual coins.
If you start accepting bitcoin for a service you offer or when you sell your car, you will become part of the movement toward having people become more familiar with using bitcoin.
When it comes to spending bitcoin, more stores are accepting them. Overstock, Intuit, Microsoft, and DISH network accept bitcoin as a payment method. eGifter sells more than 200 different gift cards accepting bitcoin as payment for the card. There is no additional fee for paying with bitcoin.
One of the reasons for brick and mortar store to be slow in adopting bitcoin as a payment type is the volatility of bitcoin. There were fears of selling an item one day and having bitcoin plummet the next day. This could cut into the store’s profit margin. Another factor is that every transaction requires verification and this can take up to 30 minutes.
If you purchase bitcoin and keep it in your wallet, it is very easy to convert it into cash or withdraw it to your bank account. An exchange such as coinbase is connected to your bank account and that is one way to withdraw money into your bank account. This is a way of using your bitcoin currency while you wait for more businesses to accept it as payment.
Original article and pictures take the-bitcoin.info site
Are you the person who moving forward to get interested more on the online networking braches and also have some business tricks in the online community? Are you the one who are stronger business activates in the online communities and have to maintain a profit gaining business that leads you to the certain successful most profitable path? This page will clearly explain something new about the word money and what its need and also why it is to be keep safe, more over the alternate way to produce safety for your money with the help of virtual money.
Money- the king slayer
There is big black market has move on with our society with unimaginable condition. More people running their life more furiously without mercy. The human mind is enclosed of love, care, satisfaction, helping tendency and some more positive habitual actions. But now everyone lost all their positive actions and developing lots of negative attitude because of earning more money. Since money becomes everything for the people they come forward to go any edge for the money. This money will bring them to the most aggressive ay in order to make them survival. Since there is a sign that tells that money will be the only user that helpful to survival of life. Most people are thought about their family future. In order to stable their family they involve in mischievous things for others. More over the concept is to damage the other only for the survival of the own shelter.
Easy way available:
If you are not comfort to move on to get more profit and increment through the real world, then you can go on with the virtual world. By moving on with Imaginary world you can gain some virtual money that can be used for some more real life processes by the real money transaction process. By using that virtual money we can use the online wallet usage and also the cash transfer through wallets and also for all the inline works. Moreover we can perform all the process through that money. Now a day most networking corporate are interested on using that virtual money because of the reason that virtual money makes an illusion between the people that used to gain more profit economically and also business successively. Among those a speculated way is bit coin.
About that:
Bit means the discrete virtual memory that memory will be used as the money in this method, by using the wallet we can provide much amount of money can be stored digitally that totally made the every transaction in the safety manner. In order to maintain the safety we can convert our cash into the bit coin and can be saved in the wallet. And the money is transferred to different wallet that will be quite easier for transaction.
Verdict:
If you feel forward to make your money as safe one and also easy to handle then you can go on with the bit coin.
Original article and pictures take bitcoinis.fun site
Zuper Coin is an open source, peer-to-peer, community driven decentralized cryptocurrency that allow people to store and invest their wealth in a non-government controlled currency, and even earn a substantial interest on investment. This means anyone holding Zuper Coin in their wallet will receive interest on their balance in return for helping maintain security of the network.
Do you wish you could secure your future with financial stability in a safe way? Are you tired of Centralized banking and the misleading promises of third party lenders?
Gain financial freedom with a secure and practical alternative to centralized banking. With Cryptocurrency, you are on the path to financial independence you have always wanted with a secure method to achieve it. Identity theft, lack of personal connection with banks and incentives that never pay off become unbearable when you want to make your money truly work for you. This is not an investment tool; it is the investment tool you need to jump start your financial security!
Why ZuperCoin
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Profits are calculated Daily and can be Withdrawn fortnightly. if required, just accumulate and withdraw
Original article and pictures take www.zupernetwork.com site
The cryptocurrency scene is filled with start-ups and companies that are looking to get a portion of Bitcoin’s market share. Few have ever gone head-to-head with Ethereum, and with good reason: creating a platform capable of developing decentralised applications (DApps) and smart contracts takes time and lots of sustained effort—it is not an easy proposition. Yet, Cardano is not only aiming to emulate the second biggest cryptocurrency platform in the world but surpass it.
Here is everything you need to know about the platform;
The Problem
Since its inception, Ethereum has been the foremost platform for smart contracts and decentralised applications (DApps). As with most, the platform has some disadvantages, but because there has been no real competitor in the space, Ethereum’s flaws have mostly been overlooked.
For one, the Ethereum network is quite slow, and there are some questions about its overall security. Secondly, Ethereum uses the proof-of-work protocol, and it is notoriously energy-inefficient, expensive to maintain, and transactions are not as fast as they can be.
The Solution
Cardano aims to launch a platform that addresses all the flaws that plague Ethereum. Smart contracts and decentralised applications (DApps) can be built on Cardano, but at lower cost, with more security and with better scalability than Ethereum. This is quite impressive if you consider the fact that Ethereum is the fastest growing cryptocurrency platform of 2017.
Also, Cardano uses the superior proof-of-stake mechanism, meaning better energy efficiency and faster transactions.
The Team
Cardano was launched by IOHK, a blockchain development firm under the leadership of early founder and former Ethereum CEO, Charles Hoskinson.
The company is being managed by The Cardano Foundation, led by Chairman, Michael Parsons (FCA). Parsons has over 25 years’ management and consulting experience in the banking industry. He is one of the leading experts in blockchain-technology (and how they can be applied to financial solutions) in the U.K.
He is joined on the foundation by other equally qualified and experienced professionals.
The Market
The current cryptocurrency market cap exceeds $500 billion, meaning new entrants into the market have ample room for growth. Furthermore, by positioning itself as a direct competitor to Ethereum, the world’s second biggest crypto company with a market cap of over $68 billion, Cardano is targeting a segment that holds over 13% (and growing) of the total cryptocurrency market share.
If they can deliver everything they are promising and successfully pull users off the Ethereum platform, then Cardano may be the next big thing in the cryptocurrency sphere.
The Competition
As mentioned above, Cardano is going after one of the biggest boys in the market, and they believe they have the personnel and the technology to compete favourably. The biggest challenge they are likely to face is: Ethereum is in the process of converting from Proof-of-work (PoW) to Proof-of-stake (PoS), removing a chunk of the advantages that Cardano’s platform has over it.
However, Cardano still has enough extra functionality that it stands as a notable alternative to Ethereum, and in a market segment worth ~$70 billion, that is not a bad thing at all.
The Business
With its platform, Cardano is creating a “stage” for even more blockchain-based applications. While their main focus is building a decentralised economy that will modify the finances of developing markets, the platform has the potential for much more.
Cardano was also built with regulatory oversight, along with sufficient protection for the privacy of their users. By doing this, they are attracting a portion of the world population that are wary of how regulations may affect their crypto investments.
Furthermore, Cardano is one of the first cryptocurrency platforms whose wallet has an in-built cryptocurrency-to-fiat exchanger, making its use very convenient for customers.
The Return
Cardano’s token, ADA, was released for trading in October 2017, and since then, the cryptocurrency has grown by over 1600%. Early investors have undoubtedly made back their original investments, and prospective investors will be encouraged by how fast and steadily the company is growing.
Transparency
Cardano has a very public foundation with well-known members, they have a community on social media (Facebook, Twitter, and Slack, to mention a few). Their code is also open-source, and they have a GitHub page where their codes and smart contracts are available for scrutiny and contribution.
For now, their computation layer is still in the works, so DApps cannot be developed on the platform yet, however, their settlement layer is fully-functional, meaning you can buy, sell, and trade ADA.
Likelihood of Critical Mass
Cardano was launched in September 2017, and they’ve scheduled the completion of their computation layer for 2018. As a result, the platform is far from achieving critical mass. However, Cardano was built with a democratic governing system that will allow the project evolve independently over time, using a revolutionary treasury system to fund itself and ensure sustainability.
How long the platform will take before amassing enough users to achieve self-sustainable growth is unknown at this time, but given how fast Cardano has been growing, and how well it was designed, attainment of critical mass is a matter of when not if.
In Conclusion, Cardano is an interesting investment option. To be regarded as a notable rival to Ethereum is no easy feat, but to come out with a—arguably—better platform shows a well-run and well-executed operation. All these, combined with ADA’s current growth points to a promising cryptocurrency platform and (token).
Disclaimer: The information contained herein is not intended to be a source of advice and the information and/or documents contained in this website do not constitute investment advice.
Original article and pictures take blog.digitalassetdb.com site
Bitcoin mining is the method through which each and every transaction is validated and added to the blockchain or the public ledger. It is also the process by which new Bitcoin tokens are released. Those having internet access and appropriate hardware can take part in the mining process. Bitcoin mining includes consolidating latest transactions into specific blocks and attempting to resolve a computationally challenging equation. The miner who solves the equation first gets to save the subsequent blocks on the blockchain and eventually claim mining rewards. In fact, these rewards that incentivize mining, continue to serve as the processing fees linked with the transactions arranged in a block as well as the freshly released BTC or Bitcoin tokens. During Bitcoin mining, the mining hardware runs a hashing function (that is, two rounds of SHA256) on a block header. For every new hash that is worked on, the Bitcoin mining software will make use of a completely different number (known as the nonce) as one random component of the block header.
