January 24, 2019
Exciting news found me late tonight by way of below tweet:
So, for the upcoming Samsung flagship S10, to be released within the next few weeks, we can expect to find a cryptographic wallet for blockchain assets built in. Samsung being a Korean company, and Korea being one of the countries with the highest crypto trade volume, this will serve as a great catalyst for further awareness and adoption of crypto-assets.
Now, while Samsung of course is a major player being the No.2 in smartphone sales, it will be interesting to see if Apple will follows this development and built their own solution for cryptographic key management. Apple, playing the privacy card for a few years now, will maybe stop the silly arms race around the number of camera lenses on the back of our phones, and instead further push smartphone solutions in our lives for sensitive data around identity, health and finance.
On top of that, I can only imagine how these wallets and their integration with existing micro-payment solutions like ApplePay, Alipay, SamsungPay, etc., will decrease friction, increase ease-of-use and ultimately lead the layman towards greater security and awareness around Bitcoin and other crypto assets.
January 23, 2019
Just in time for the financial dinosaurs meeting in Davos at the WEF2019, the Bank of International Settlement has dropped a paper on Bitcoin and it’s Proof-of-Work economics, going into length why the Bitcoin fee markets won’t work to incentivize miners keeping the blockchain safe:
“The conclusions are, first, that Bitcoin counterfeiting via “double-spending” attacks is inherently profitable, making payment finality based on proof-of-work extremely expensive. Second, the transaction market cannot generate an adequate level of “mining” income via fees as users free-ride on the fees of other transactions in a block and in the subsequent blockchain.” Raphael Auer
While pretty much everything the paper states is correct at face value, the paper doesn’t uncover anything new about Bitcoin and its underlying mechanisms to solve the double-spend problem. The halving of the Bitcoin block-reward will eventually lead to a fee market financing the miners energy expenses. BIS argues that Bitcoin will suffer from the tragedy of the commons, as the demand for low transaction fees (tx fees) will decrease security and make payments unreliable, with confirmation periods of days, months and even years. Indeed, miners will have to be compensated through tx fees, but Satoshi Nakamoto himself pointed this out even before Bitcoin went live:
“There will be transaction fees, so nodes will have an incentive to receive and include all the transactions they can. Nodes will eventually be compensated by transaction fees alone when the total coins created hits the pre-determined ceiling.” Satoshi Nakamoto, November 2008
Thus, we have had plenty of advance notice of the problems miners might face with making honest block creation economically feasible. We could just point out that tx fees will certainly rise along with increasing transaction volume, Bitcoin value and diminishing block rewards. 
But honestly, we only need to worry about the fee market if we falsely assumed Bitcoins value proposition was ease of use or convenience. Instead Bitcoins main value proposition is being the hardest money in the world, the perfect store-of-value for high time-frame individuals who anticipate we won’t exchange greenbacks with each other by the time we are a space faring species in 2050. The last Bitcoin will be mined sometime in the year 2140. As the network grows in size and value, a consensus on how to fund future network security will, undoubtedly, be found in time.
While looking at the some of the proposed solutions today, which include assurance contracts and dynamic block size and dynamic minimum fee, I was yet again reminded why Bitcoin is digital gold really:
January 22, 2019
The price action in GINcoins has not been pretty to look at the past few days, and while this doesn’t make me nervous, the time calls for a closer look at GIN performance and development.
An unfortunate side-effect of the cryptopia hack has been the omission of the only centralized, in other words fast, exchange that GIN was trading on. While I’m personally happy with using the decentralized CryptoBridge exchange, particularly GIN saw it’s major volume traded on cryptopia. While GIN has no fault whatsoever in having been listed on cryptopia where user funds have potentially been stolen, GIN was to fault for only having listed on two small exchanges so far. At least, GIN has reacted fast on the liquidity shortage and has within days arranged a listing on crex24. While crex24 is also just a small exchange with questionable reputation, the team around GIN promised a major exchange listing would follow before the end of QII, solving any current or future liquidity bottlenecks.
Another development that has impacted the price of GINcoins more severely, is the increase of mining power unsustainable since being the most valuable coin remaining on a Lyra2Z hashing algorithm. The problem arose when Zcoin forked their network to a new hashing algorithm in December last year and for-profit miners were pushed to use their specialized mining hardware to now mine GIN. Their hardware was not fit to mine the more valuable Zcoin on the new hashing algorithm, and thus resorted to mine and sell daily profits in GIN. The price pressure weighed heavily, and GIN declined from a December-high of 0.0005 BTC to a new all-time low at 0.0002 BTC.
Again, the team behind GIN reacted quickly and rolled out a new hashing algorithm pioneered by veil, who went live just a few days ago. However, GIN didn’t resort to simply update its algorithm and have the miners get back to business, they also implement changes to their blockchain trying to make it as secure as Bitcoin against 51%-attacks. By using the Komodo Delayed Proof of Work, which is in effect a “proof-of-bitcoin” via the op_return function, GIN is hashing a backup state-of-the-blockchain in the world’s most powerful computer network in existence: Bitcoin. A reversal of transactions and successful attack within GIN is hereby reduced significantly.
While “proof-of-bitcoin” promises incredible security right now, I’m not sure how Bitcoin core developers will react to the increased demand for its blockchain space.
As Lopp and Casatta point out on twitter, op_return functions can be considered as spam, with core developers drastically limiting this function in the future. Possibly, smaller blockchains would be forced to look for alternatives to this security utility yet again.
GIN
Masternodes
January 21, 2019
In Part 1 of my 2019 Coin Radar I wrote about a handful of cryptos I’ve been following closely in 2018 and will continue to do so in 2019. In this Coin Radar Part 2, I’d like to highlight some serious small cap cryptos that have the potential to make a lasting impact on the crypto space and offer very marketable tokenomics.
TL,DR: I’d like to buy VEO / BIS / COV / PASC / POLIS / HNS / VBK / KMD / TRAC
Amoveo (VEO) 0.021 BTC MCap: n/a Rank: #2600
The Amoveo platform is trying to fix prediction markets on the blockchain with a smart contract and lightning enabled platform that allows its users to, bascially, bet against each other. I noticed VEO because its Founder Zack Hess is followed by some influential people, like Naval Ravikant and Nic Carter on Twitter. I then noticed he’d been in an upheaval with his previous employer Aeternity. I like that Zack is very hands-on with his project answering random user questions on telegram for example and giving up-to-date recommendations regarding his development and the technical specifications of VEO. I also think, despite the lackluster adoption of Augur, prediction markets will be a major use for blockchains in the future. Amoveo seems to be a hidden gem that might
just capture, at least part of, this market through its grass-roots community building and conviction to develop a truly trustless system.
Bismuth (BIS) 0.00005 BTC MCap: 3 Million USD Rank: #500
Bismuth is one of those coins periodically hyped on crypto-twitter, and caught my interest when it was reviewed by Altcointrader Nik. I like that this coin is laser-focused on technical execution and is therefore actually lagging behind in marketing itself as the next Ethereum. I think being behind in marketing is not a bad thing while we’re in a bear market as it gives the dev-team time to focus on developing its tech and debugging everything they built very carefully. And Bismuth should have lots of technical challenges as it’s the first Python-programmed blockchain, potentially being very secure to code on and enabling so-called private smart-contracts, which should be in high-demand once blockchain technology permeates into mainstream usage.
Covesting (COV) 0.00006 BTC MCap: 4 Million USD Rank: #401
I tried day-trading crypto about 1 year back. I failed miserably at it. Yet I know that there a many successful day-traders reaping in daily profits consistently. Covesting is the platform where the average Joe like you and me can follow those professionals trade-by-trade. Professionals on the other hand charge a small fee to do the work, and will publicize their profile including their past performance. Covesting takes a cut in the middle facilitating the match and also offers an exchange platform to make the experience seamless. Platforms like eToro and copyfx that offer copy-trading for traditional stocks and bonds have increased in popularity over the past few years. I expect swiss-based Covesting will be no-less popular with traders in the future.
Pascal (PASC) 0.00005 BTC MCap: 5 Million USD Rank: #354
PascalCoin is a nerdy little coin that tries to out-Bitcoin Bitcoin. It’s name is derived from the programming language it’s written in: Pascal. The coin is fairly unique in that it’s very decentralized, with no pre-mine, no ICO, no dev-rewards (though that has recently changed), and purportedly higher transaction count, better anonymity and ease of use. PASC is a coin I don’t think will succeed in the long-term as a currency, but I imagine it to survive as a community product that will find lots of new enthusiasts if (ever) the market is going to pump again. I’m cautious concerning the claim that PASC has a “deletable” blockchain, which is a big warning sign in to me in terms of immutability. Nonetheless, PASC makes me curious and I will keep monitoring the price action as well as the community and development over the course of the next year.
Polis (POLIS) 0.00025 BTC MCap: 5 Million USD Rank: #363
Polis is a Masternode coin that is a little over a year old now and has consistently delivered an ROI of 140%. Of course, the fiat value of the coin has seen significant volatility with the ATH being a stunning $45 in January of last year. The anonymous team behind Polis markets the coin as having a decentralized governance, which you can follow for yourself with the votes going on at polispay.org. Most impressive about Polis is that they have actually managed to push out crypto-enabled credit cards, while projects like TenX is continuously falling short of delivering anything substantial in their quest to issue crypto-cards. Should Polis continue to maintain its value and eventually release information on the team behind the scenes, it is definitely a coin I will consider loading up on.
Handshake (HNS) pre-ICO
Handshake is an open-source project with the not-so-small goal of changing todays internet infrastructure. In a nutshell Handshake is supplementing DNS and the way our computers interact with domain names nowadays. If successful, Handshake will make this interaction more secure and decentralized. Handshake came on my radar by way of the very smart Eric Melzer. Looking at the list of sponsors at handshake.org should immediately make it clear to anyone in the crypto-space that this is a high-profile project, lacking no funding to possibly realize its goal of changing the internet.
Veriblock (VBK) pre-ICO
VBK has just recently come to my attention when James Lopp tweeted about it, and I find the idea behind it pretty genius. VBK provides a solution for smaller blockchain projects to remain secure from 51% attacks through Bitcoins massive hash power. VBK uses the Bitcoin op_return function to store hashes of ALT-blockchains in the proof-of-work done for Bitcoin. An attacker would thus have the impossible task of re-writing the Bitcoin history in order to overwrite the ALT-blockchain. Lopp pointed out that VBK already uses 20% of the op_return transaction output of the bitcoin network and this number is expected to rise even further, showing the existing demand for “proof-of-bitcoin” use cases.
Komodo (KMD) 0.00018 BTC MCap: 71 Million USD Rank: #57
Similar with VBK, Komodo also offers “proof-of-bitcoin” on its blockchain to help itself and other smaller blockchain projects to protect against 51%-attacks. In addition to VBK though, KMD also offers other platforms features like coin issuance, cross-chain interoperability. I think KMD has an edge at being laser-focused on b2b scenarios to increase the value of its platform. The team behind Komodo is working hard to offer blockchain as a service in a modular fashion for any business that might deem this new technology useful. A great example of this is the recent on-boarding of GIN for their “proof-of-bitcoin” technology.
OriginTrail (TRAC) 0.000005 BTC MCap: 6 Million USD Rank: #327
There is existing consensus in the space that supply chain management will be hugely inter-twined with blockchain technology in the future. Wallmart, IBM, Maersk, VeChain are all working towards a future where you can trace and verify your daily consumer goods on the blockchain with ease. I think these use cases are not just hope-driven, but have real-life impact and a value and think will indeed be big for consumers and companies alike. OriginTrail is a European project aiming to bring the future about early, and it is team who delivered tons of good news in 2018. I’ve only discovered TRAC when they launched Masternodes on their network, but the progress TRAC has made in the whole of last year is impressive: discuss with European Parliament Members at the European Commission in Brussels, launching the TraceAlliance and signing up over 50 businesses, work on EU-funded
project with the University of Wageningen and partnering with Oracle in blockchain technology. Once OriginTrail moves out of testnet, this is a coin to keep close attention to.
January 15, 2019
Today marks the launch of two very interesting projects that have been under development for several years:
Grin, a new cryptocurrency that implements the Mimblewimble protocol described in an anonymous paper dropped into the #bitcoin-wizards IRC chat in 2016 by pseudonymous Tom Elvis Jedusor. Mimblewimble was originally intended as a bitcoin improvement protocol, but the grin developers are launching the protocol into an independent project.
Grin has three interesting features:
it is launched with no direct investors, no premine, no ICO, and no founders reward. It is run completely on community donations.
not only was the initial protocol proposed anonymously, but the current dev-team is mostly pseudonymous as well.
grin supposedly offers great new tech to scale anonymous transactions differing very much to Bitcoin and the two leading privacy coins Monero and Zcash.
Unlike Bitcoin, there are 100 million dollars of VC money invested into special-purpose vehicles to mine Grin. This means that a lot of the hacker development ethos will get washed out by changing the composition of the early holders. Bitcoins organic launch without any professional investment early on, is unlikely to ever be possible again.
urbit, a clean-slate redesign of personal computing that has been in development since 2002, has launched its software on the ethereum mainnet. Urbit is interesting for several reasons, of which I try to explain two:
it is completely new software trying to rebuilt how computer software has been working since pretty much the 1930s. Urbit is to todays operating systems, what Windows is to BIOS, and that in form of a decentralized architecture written from the ground up with distributed & federated functions only. A natural drawback of re-inventing the computing stack is, that it creates new concepts that are hard to grasp.
this is a political one, Founder Curtis Yarvin is a controversial figure, who has been credited with contributing to the alt-right movement.
Learn more about Grin here and read the primer for urbit here
January 14, 2019
Last year I spent most of my time reading up on blockchain technology and the crypto-space. I’ve gone deep into crypto twitter, discord, telegram and found great materials on medium, theblockcrypto, coindesk. While my portfolio was loosing money all through 2018, my brain gained in knowledge all through that same year. I feel much better prepared to invest in legit projects this year, and I also think the space itself has developed in a positive and solid direction. Just like Altcoin Trader Nik did last month here, I wanna publicize the coins I have on my radar for 2019. I hope I can look at this list with a satisfactory smile again in Jan 2020.
TL,DR: I’d like to buy BTC / ETH / DASH / XCZ / GIN / XEL / MARC / BLOCK / SWM / SPANK
Bitcoin (BTC) Price: ~3.500 USD MCap: 62 Billion USD Rank: #1
Obviously, Bitcoin is King (52% Market Dominance) and will remain king. The way bitcoin was conceived 10 years ago, sets it up for success against its crypto competitiors. The way central banks and politicians undermine economic fundamentals by printing FIAT money, its set up for success against central bank issued paper. The way its uncensorable digital gold sets it up for success with everyone else.
Ethereum (ETH) 0.03 BTC MCap: 12 Billion USD Rank: #2-3
An update in form of a hard fork to the ethereum blockchain is coming on Jan 16th. There are a ton of changes coming up with reduced blockrewards leading pack. Other changes include reduced gas fees, more effective state channels, all of which should bode well, for one of the most used and most innovative blockchains out there.
Dash (DASH) 0.02 BTC MCap: 600 Million USD Rank: #15
I was not a big fan of Dash until I recently got more and more into the Masternode space and found beauty in the economics of MN-networks like Dash. More importantly though, Dash has found great success as medium of exchange in Venezuela. With the surging inflation, the local governments grip on bank accounts and the bolivars uncertain future being pegged to a centrally controlled e-currency, people in Venezuela are flocking towards decentralized cryptocurrencies in droves. Dash has seen massive growth with due to low fees and instant transactions. It’s a beautiful example and give Dash all the credit they deserve for enabling this monetary revolt. Plus, being the first Masternode innovator and having a market dominance in the MN space similiar to BTC in the whole crypto space, Dash is here to stay.
Zcoin (XCZ) 0.0015 BTC MCap: 30 Million USD Rank: #92
Zcoin was the first cryptocurrency to implement the zerocoin protocol, a privacy protocol proposed by Johns Hopkins University professor Matthew D. Green in 2013. It was an improvement proposal to the Bitcoin protocol, adding anonymity to Bitcoin transactions, which was eventually not implemented due to fears of undetectable malicious coin inflation. Zcoin has since addressed these concerns and just recently supported the elections of the Thai Democratic Party with blockchain technology. Zcoin looks to me like an idealistically run project by its Founder Poramin Insom, which huge upside potential.
Gin (GIN) 0.00025 BTC MCap: 4 Million USD Rank: #385
Read my article on GIN from a few days back. In just 16 days the node count on GIN has gone up by 13%, with the GIN platform now hosting 6750 Masternodes. All these hosting fees are paid in GIN, which should put supply and demand at an equilibrium latest when the emission halvening hits in March. With licensed shared Masternode hosting on the horizon I expect the node count to rise even faster, which will push demand for GIN even more.
XEL (XEL) 0.000009 BTC MCap: 2 Million USD Rank: #485
XEL is another of those idealistic blockchain projects I love. While there are plenty of decentralized computing projects that have raised millions in funding during the last bull run, XEL is basically community run since its initial founder backed off from the project. In contrast to other projects XEL is itself a programming language that enables the avid user to code and verify the tasks run on a decentralized network by themselves. XEL has brought many new ideas, such as lower lock-rate with higher search space available to computation nodes, or individual work verification, that can bring loads of demand for computer resoureces, and therefore XEL, to the platform.
MarketArbitrageCoin (MARC) 0.0001 BTC MCap:7 Million USD Rank: n/a
Read my posts on MARC here and here. This is my gem going into 2019. The arbitraging platform is about two weeks away from going online. Locked coins in MNs increasing to 67%, with price doubling over last two weeks. While the idea of arbitraging and automated trading is not unique idea, the execution with a freely exchangeable masternode coin certainly is. The coin promises a handful with passive income from trading on top of masternode block rewards. The only competitor worth mentioning (ARB), which is centralized and possibly a scam coin has a full supply valuation of USD 30 Million. There are only 800.000 coins in circulation today. A great masternode coin with potential upside from rewards and automated trading.
Blocknet (BLOCK) 0.0004 BTC MCap: 7 Million USD Rank: #254
Similar to the much-hyped and ultra-well financed Polkadot protocol, which does not have a working product, Blocknet is a community governed project with a MVP for cross-chain interaction. While I admittedly don’t understand much of the tech, I can see an active community gathering around Blocknet that is eager to vote on the issues of the team lying ahead. I’m staying away from the project for now, as I haven’t been able to go through the tech as much as I wished, and want to wait for the impact the recent elections on budget and coin emission have. That being said, the interaction between devs and community as well as the progress that has been made in development are stunning and worth a close watch from my side.
Swarm Fund (SWM) 0.0004 BTC MCap: 10 Million USD Rank #225
I read the Swarm whitepaper after their ICO in 2017 and there was so much to like about it. I’m also convinced that tokenized securities or asset backed securities (ABS) are a big use case for blockchains and cryptocurrencies. I thought Swarm made great progress when I heard about the platform tokenizing exchange traded stocks of the Robin Hood investment platform. Recently, Swarm begun to have Masternodes running on their platform in beta mode. Disappointingly though, with the platform being 1+ year old, there are still only 6 investable funds listed on Swarm. I would have expected hundreds of options being offered by now. I do understand that Swarm wants to sail safe waters in terms of compliance and SEC approval, and hope that 2019 is the year Swarm can bring about new financial opportunities in a decentralized fashion.
SpankChain (SPANK) 0.000003 BTC MCap: 7 Million USD Rank: #267
It’s gonna be a make or brake year for SpankChain, a project set out to help adult content performers receive money in an censorship-resistant way. The platform has recently laid of 30% of its staff, after their raised funds are already running thin. Spank has also had a major setback, with their SpankBank being hacked in October and 30,000 USD being compromised. The whole hack had a fairly happy ending with the funds being recovered in return for a juicy bug bounty, but it did shake investors confidence in the technical abilities of the team. On the plus side, famous SpankChainer @brennasparksxxx, was voted a TOP10 influencer in blockchain-land by reputable news-outlet coindesk in 2018. SpankChain is now hard at work to monetize their payments tool to businesses in and outside of the cryptosphere, and shifting its focus from adult entertainment to business adoption of its tech. The looming question for SPANK remains why it needs to exists, and whether Bitcoin+Lightning can’t offer the same utility?
Click here for 2019 Coin Radar Part 2/2
January 11, 2019
We have seen a lot of volatility in the markets again these past few weeks and my portfolio has recently dipped in USD value. Never mind however, since I’m always striving to accumulate more BTC. On that front I am really happy about the price development of MARC, which I wrote about earlier.
Since writing that post the price for MARC is trending upwards at around 9.000 Satoshi, meaning that one MARC MasterNode is now worth roughly BTC 0.09 or USD 360.
What is more interesting to me though than daily price activity, is how the coin metrics develop. There are now more than 500 MARC Masternodes online, which result in more than 65% of the total circulating supply being locked-up. If this trend continues upwards of 70% of circulating coin supply, sell pressure for MARC should be drastically reduced and the price continuing its positive trend. The increase in Masternodes has also significantly reduced the block rewards I am receiving, which I think of as a positive sign. While my first 2 Masternodes spilled out rewards every 2hours, nowadays I have to wait for rewards ~8hours. Again, a relieve on the price pressure through those selling their daily/weekly rewards.
Now, I am looking forward to the devs at MARC to have some more good news in the next weeks and get the platform online by Feburary. As soon as daily profits from arbitraging will have to buy back marc at market price it should yield even greater for the price action of the coin.
MARC
January 4, 2019
Simple POS Pool Shared Masternodes In search for an effective way to reinvest Masternode rewards, I came accross Simple POS Pool which has served me well in the last few months. Simple POS Pool allows users to deposit a plethora of coins into their system wallets and then stake those coins in pools or submit them to shared Masternodes. The fee structure is straightforward, with 3% charged on staking rewards and 5% charged on Masternode rewards. While Simple POS Pool is centralized and offers no trustless solution to pool your coins, it is trusted by a large community (+5.000) and has been around for the longest time among the big shared MN services. I use Simple POS Pool only as an intermediary staking pool for the rewards not locked up trustless on the GIN platform. Since the new year they support the creation of MNs worth >$100 and offer dedicated Masternode servers for those interested. So long as GIN doesn’t offer shared MN services yet, I will have to go with this centralized and anonymous platform. In the end, I am happy it exists as my risk exposure is fairly limited with only depositing my earned rewards, and I can take advantage of compound interest with smaller coin collateral.
Masternodes
GIN
January 3, 2019
One of my most exciting investments late 2018 has been Market Arbitrage Coin (MARC), a platform being built for fully automated crypto arbitraging. MARC is not just a bot that will execute arbitraging opportunities on the top crypto exchanges , but also a masternode coin that is rewarding early investors with a massive ROI, currently at ~1000% per year.
MARC KYD
Of course, this percentage is just a snapshot of the coin right now, and we will see massive volatility with coin emission being this high. In the end, the MARC devs have to create demand for the coin, which is the platforms utility token, by building a superior trading bot with an easy to use UX/UI for everyday crypto customers. I expect the ROI to fall significantly within the next few weeks and months, with more coins being available on the exchanges, and then the MARC masternnode rewards competing in ROI with its own arbitraging profits.
The developments I saw the last few weeks have been very promising. While an exploit in the chain was used by hackers to re-route blockrewards to their wallet, the exploit was fixed once noticed by the team. A complete hard fork of the chain and swap of all coins in users’ wallets and on the exchange was performed more swiftly than I have seen in any other project. Shortly after, MARC then successfully listed on CryptoBridge and went on a sprint to get listed on Masternodes.pro and KYD-certified. Potentially huge could be the listing on UK-based exchange CryptoFlow, who will offer a near-instant MARC/FIAT pair by the end of January. A FIAT on-ramp is something many teams and users wish for, and MARC seems to get one earlier than many TOP 20 coins.
Now, the best news regarding MARC’s Arbitraging solution came just in time for the new year. The dev team behind Denys Westerhold released a staking webwallet that will be utilized in the platform later on, and they went online with live trading insights that show the semantic parsing of the exchanges for arbitrage opportunities and summarizes the funds used to achieve a certain spread%.
MARC is by all means an ambitious crypto project that has yet to deliver a working product. However, up until now the team behind MARC has delivered on their roadmap and seems poised to build the best arbitraging bot for 2019.
MARC
Masternodes
December 31, 2018
These 15 charts are exactly what i love Quartz for. They show us how 2018 was the best year in history to be alive. I think it’s so important to highlight the positive developments the human kind takes in all this craziness we’re witnessing every day. So what has improved?
- the share of global energy that came from renewables passed 10%
- some 6.7 million additional sq km of the worlds oceans were put under environmental protection
- we’re continuing to save more endangered species
- global poverty is declining
- 90% of the worlds population now has access to electricity
- global adult literacy continues to rise to new all-time-high with 90%
- global infant mortality continues to drop to new all-time-lows
- maternal mortality continues to fall
- childhood stunting is falling
- teen pregnancy is dropping
- tuberculosis is occuring less and less
- malaria cases are becoming rarer
- one girl is enrolled for every boy in school
- global parliament seats held by women at new all-time-highs with 24%
That is encouraging and beautiful to read. It is also motivation to keep going and focus on an area we’re still lagging behind: protectiong more of our environment and further closing further gaps of inequality. Cheers to an even better year 2019!
December 29, 2018
The market-turmoil at the end of the year leaves me rather unphased. Not because the swings in FIAT-BTC value does not affect my portfolio as well, but because I own coins like GIN. And of course, because the Gluehwein over Christmas is doing the rest of calming me down…
But what is GIN? The GIN platform is the easiest way to setup and host a MasterNode for coins like DASH, Zcoin or small-cap alts like MARC. The GIN coin is the platforms utility token and will pay for the hosting and the services that come with it (server updates, support, portfolio tracking).
GIN node count
GIN itself is a PoW & MasterNode coin, in which half of the block rewards go to miners and the other half to MN-holders. A GIN MN requires a collateral of 1.000 GIN which is very roughly $1.500, with an annualized ROI of somewhere around 80%. Now, this figure will change very soon, with the GIN blockreward halving every year and the first halving forecasted to occurre come Feb-Mar 2019. There is speculation how the halving will reflect on the price of the coin, considering that GIN-coins are the sole currency accepted for hosting on the GIN platform. Naturally, the price of GIN is entirely dependent on whether the team behind GIN can remain market-leaders in what has become a competitive MN-hosting space.
I am confident in GIN staying ahead of the game and my coin values going up, not down, for several reasons:
- GIN is the first turn-key MN hosting platform.
- GIN is an officially registered company in the UK.
- GIN team is NOT anonymous.
- GIN offers an innovative solution to drive mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.
There are other reasons why I like this project monthly AMAs, weekly blogs, constant additions to coins listed, API features and mobile APPs being built, shared MN on the roadmap.
I do reinvest my earned GIN rewards at Simple POS Pool currently as this is the best option around to earn reward for collateral below 1.000 GIN. I am excited about the prospect of running a shared GIN MN right on the GIN platform, reducing my counterparty risk and using GIN as my one-stop-shop for all things MasterNode.
GIN
Masternodes
December 27, 2018
Go check out the latest What Bitcoin Did with Trace Mayer Then, and if you already have all your BTC on private wallets, prepare some BTC on your preferred exchange. Then, on 3rd January 2019 withdraw those BTC to test whether exchanges work with minimum reserves and show that bitcoin can scale up to 35 mln transfers within 48 hours!
More info
BTC
December 27, 2018
It’s a few days more and we can all greet a new year! Precisely four more days and the great bear markets of 2018 will have finally ended. The question remains what we will see in 2019, bear or bull? I remain optimistic short-term, mid-term and long-term. Yes, we probably won’t see new all-time highs like we did in 2017, or at least I would be absolutely surprised (& delighted). But I have a feeling that 2019 will see a more stable market with a slight uptrend. It would be good if BTC and CoinMarketCap could stabilize around 200 bln in 2019 with BTC leading the pack at 120 bln. Whether we willl see this right from the start is doubtful. I think Q1 of 2019 will see some significant volatility with up- & downswings between $3.000 and $5.000.
However, come spring, with questions around EU-Brexit, China-US trade war, SEC ETF decision and the launch of Baakt being answered and/or more certain, a positive trend both for traditional stocks and cryptos should develop. Of course the fundamentals of both stocks and cryptos must be in order and convinving but I have never felt better about bitcoin, the fair valuation for ETH and progress coming out of some of the 2017/2018 ICO projects.
For me 2018 was a year with lots of FIAT and crypto being lost in the market. I have not withered the explosion of last year’s bubble without making some significant cuts in my portfolio. At the end of the year though, I am confident in saying, I’m holding no more shitcoins that I now nothing about. While I went into 2018 with loads of shitcoins in my portfolio that I had accumulated based purely on twitter shills, all my coins this time around are handpicked - by me. Of course, I was influenced by twitter, medium, youtube, telegram and shills all over the web but I did my own research, and know what I have my money in right now.
BTC
MARC
GIN
Masternodes
December 25, 2018
Stocks are headed for the worst year since the financial crisis in 2008. 
In fact, Bitcoin outperformed most traditional assets such as the S&P over the last decade by a long shot. On it’s way to become the new risk-free global reserve currency, bitcoin has withered a laundry-list of obstacles developing from an enthusiasts’ hobby to a $300 bln. pound gorilla. From the take-down of silk road, the failure of Mt. Gox, forking attacks from shitcoin miners and macro-economic threats such as trade-wars, censorship-attemtps around the world and withering analysis from so-called economic experts, bitcoin lived in a swamp and survived. The honey badger of money doesn’t care, it’s here to stay, to empower us with a new form of economic freedom. Bitcoin has changed my life and I couldn’t be more excited for 2019, trying to accumulate more BTC.
December 14, 2018
Today, I was asked for some must-read crypto articles. I think a good way to start this new micro.blog is to share some of my favorite sources for everything crypto related:
Newsletter:
Unbankd
Marty’s Bent
MIT Chain Letter
Podcasts:
What Bitcoin Did
Unchained
The Flippening
CryptoStreet
Nik Carter
Dan Held
Bobby Lee
Riccardo Spagni
Richard Heart
Jameson Lopp
Notsofast
Recent Articles:
Passive Income & MasterNodes by Spoonzus
BTH, ETH prices down more than fundamentals by Chris Burniske
Christmas Altcoin Wishlist by Nik Patel
Last updated 14.12.2018
BTC
Crypto
