Category Archives: Bitcoin (BTC)

Here are some examples of financial news headlines from the last few days:

Bitcoin finally hits $10,000!?—?The Economist, Nov. 28th, 2017

Bitcoin surpasses the $10,000 milestone!?—?CNBC, Nov. 28th, 2017

BITCOIN SOARS ABOVE $11,000!?—?The Guardian, Nov. 29th, 2017

News outlets haven’t even had 24 hours to let the “10K” news simmer and it already climbed to $11,500. By the time they published the “11K” piece, it already dropped back to $9,000. Then, as soon as they entered the last word on their “Bitcoin is crashing!” article, it’s back at $11,000 per BTC.

Amazing! But this is not unprecedented.

We’ve seen this before, back in 2013, a media frenzy when Bitcoin was approaching $1,000 that fueled that year’s bubble. In January of that year, one bitcoin was trading at around $15.00, rocketed to $266 by April, and then crashed back to $50 really quick. By November, it had already broken $1,000, peaking at $1,242 on Mt.Gox. That’s an almost 100-fold increase in 11 months, an order of magnitude larger than this year’s (2017) 10-fold run up.

Funny thing is, the charts then are almost identical to the ones today, and news articles look exactly the same. Just add one zero.

The media gobbles this up because people are fascinated by this stuff. Stories of people finding 5000 BTC in an old hard drive that they bought for $25 in 2009, a man throwing away 7500 BTC by accident and scouring a landfill to try and find it, a man buying pizzas for 10,000 BTC?—?It’s the sizzle to the steak and it sells.

The Other Side

People love it when things go up, but what goes up must come down, and Bitcoin is not immune to this. History shows three major “Bitcoin Bubbles”, and a LOT of volatility in between. Swings of 20–30% in one day are not uncommon in the Bitcoin world, but to most people this can be quite terrifying. For example, in the same day when Bitcoin broke $11,500 a couple of days ago, Bitcoin crashed back to $9,600, and lost 20% of its value overnight.

It isn’t just that, there are more. There’s that time it crashed from $260 to $50. Bitcoin was declared dead.

My $200,000 bitcoin odyssey

December 5, 2017 flippener

This was not what I expected to be doing with my October. But there I was, on a flight to Hong Kong, hoping I would be able to retrieve $200,000 worth of bitcoin from a broken laptop.

Four years ago, I was living in Hong Kong when a fellow journalist named Mike and I decided to invest in bitcoin. I bought four while Mike went in for 40; I spent about $2,000 while he put in $15,000. At the time, it seemed super speculative, but over the years, bitcoin surged and Mike seemed downright prescient. I had since relocated to Los Angeles and had been texting Mike about the 2,000 percent rise in our investment.

Strangely, I wasn’t getting much of a response from him. He had 10 times as many bitcoins as I did — shouldn’t he at least have been excited? Finally, when the price of one bitcoin broke $4,000 this summer, I sent him this message: “You do still have those bitcoins right?” That’s when he broke it to me: “Maybe not …”

Here’s what happened: At some point in 2013, Mike had rightfully become concerned about security. He initially kept his coins in an exchange called LocalBitcoins. Exchanges are commonly used to buy and sell cryptocurrency, but you shouldn’t keep your coins there. The most infamous bitcoin scandal to date was when Mt. Gox, an exchange based in Japan, lost 850,000 of its users’ bitcoins.

Exchanges can also suddenly close, as some did in China this year when the Chinese government suddenly made them illegal. Any serious cryptocurrency investor will tell you that your coins are best kept in “cold storage” (an offline hardware wallet). That’s what I’d done with mine, but Mike hadn’t gone that far three years ago when he started thinking about security. Instead, he set up a software wallet. It was a good step, but he would soon learn, it was not foolproof.

What the Fork? 3 Bitcoin Hard Forks Scheduled for December, More to Come

December 4, 2017 flippener

Super Bitcoin, Bitcoin Platinum, Bitcoin Uranium, Bitcoin Cash Plus, and Bitcoin Silver could threaten the Bitcoin ecosystem.

As Bitcoin continues its rapid journey to unprecedented heights, the plot thickens: at least three Bitcoin forks have been scheduled for the month of December, with more to follow in January, February, and March of 2018. Bitcoinist questioned if the sudden rash of Bitcoin forks was “the dawn of the ‘initial fork offering’”.

Bitcoin Fork Pens (Image: BTC Keychain/Flickr)

Super Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash Plus, Bitcoin Silver, Bitcoin Platinum, and Bitcoin Uranium (which has the quaint ticker symbol ‘BUM’) are all on the menu. Each of these coins claims in its own way to solve the issues of scalability and centralization that have plagued the Bitcoin network, although none of them really seem to have proven that they have the technological basis to do so.

For example, Bitcoin Silver (BTCS), which claims to be making “cryptocurrency accessible to the rest of the world”, claims to have an “incredible team consisting of financial experts, blockchain developers, telecommunication influencers, international law experts, and local business ventures” that are based all over the world. However, none of the identities of any of these supposed team members are anywhere to be found.

Will the bitcoin bubble burst?

December 3, 2017 flippener

A pillar analysis of the market shows a promising future for cryptocurrency, despite the naysayers.

One of the biggest hurdles bitcoin has faced throughout 2017 has been poor journalism around the cryptocurrency, along with uneducated opinions from many so-called “experts” within the financial industry.

Jamie Dimon famously labelled the currency a “fraud” suitable for murders and drug dealers, while the chief economic advisor of Allianz said in September it should be worth half of what it was trading at back in September when it was edging US$5,000. I wrote about this in my last article when the price fell back to US$3,600.

Peter Switzer, a prominent and well respected financial commentator, was asked for his thoughts on the cryptocurrency around the same time in September. However in a more honest approach he advised he had chosen not to invest stating “I subscribe to the view that I don’t invest in things that I don’t understand”, further quoting Charlie Aitken’s reference to bitcoin being a “bubble”.

Bitcoin price chart (Image: geralt/Pixabay)

The real negligence here has come into play, as there have been few signs that many of the most prominent financial commentators actually understand the cryptocurrency. Myopia has hit many individuals we have historically trusted to understand financial markets.

Despite the numerous comparisons, the cryptocurrency boom displays very few characteristics to Tulip Mania outside of a huge price spike. Many more similarities are found in comparison to the oil rush in the 1850’s, which was actually the largest wealth transfer of this magnitude prior to the evolution of cryptocurrency. Those involved in it simply understood that the world was moving away from the horse and cart, and into a realm where oil would become an essential pillar of the economy. In the same way, currencies are changing and they are about to have a profound impact on everyday life.

It’s time those around the financial industry, especially those giving financial advice and opinion, actually understood the currency, and what its technology really means for the future of currencies.

Cash, Gold, 2X?—?What the fork!

December 2, 2017 flippener

Repost from HackerNoon

After all, what was going on with Bitcoin in the last few months?

It looks like, in the last few months, Bitcoin has made friends with forking. When I wrote about Bitcoin forking the last time, I didn’t expect there would be this many so soon. But hey, here we are, trying to make sense of what the hell is happening in the crypto world.

Bitcoin fork pen and bitcoin keychains (Image: BTC Keychain/Flickr)

With this article, I try to put everything that has happened since Bitcoin Cash in a proper order that would become anyone’s go-to article for learning about Bitcoin forks between August 2017 and November 2017.

🍴 But first, what is a fork?

“You don’t need a silver fork to eat good food.”?—?Paul Prudhomme

You can think of blockchain ledger as a stack of pages. Every full node in the network keep a copy of this stack of pages with themselves. Everyone’s copy of the ledger is exactly the same because everyone followed the same set of rules to build it.

So, if there are ten people in the network, each of them will have a copy of the ledger that would look something like this:

A Beginner’s Guide to Cryptocoin Mining

December 1, 2017 flippener

Is it worth your time to mine for cryptocoins?

Mining cryptocoins is an arms race that rewards early adopters. You might have heard of Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency that was released in early 2009. Similar digital currencies have crept into the worldwide market since then, including a spin-off from Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash. You can get in on the cryptocurrency rush if you take the time to learn the basics properly.

Which Alt-Coins Should Be Mined?

If you had started mining Bitcoins back in 2009, you could have earned thousands of dollars by now.

At the same time, there are plenty of ways you could have lost money, too. Bitcoins are not a good choice for beginning miners who work on a small scale. The current up-front investment and maintenance costs, not to mention the sheer mathematical difficulty of the process, just doesn’t make it profitable for consumer-level hardware. Now, Bitcoin mining is reserved for large-scale operations only.

Litecoins, Dogecoins, and Feathercoins, on the other hand, are three Scrypt-based cryptocurrencies that are the best cost-benefit for beginners. At the current value of Litecoin, a person might earn anywhere from 50 cents to 10 dollars per day using consumer level mining hardware.

Dogecoins and Feathercoins would yield slightly less profit with the same mining hardware but are becoming more popular daily. Peercoins, too, can also be a reasonably decent return on your investment of time and energy.

As more people join the cryptocoin rush, your choice could get more difficult to mine because more expensive hardware will be required to to discover coins. You will be forced to either invest heavily if you want to stay mining that coin, or you will want to take your earnings and switch to an easier cryptocoin.

How to Claim the Bitcore / Bitcoin ‘2nd Snapshot’ Airdrop

November 19, 2017 flippener 4 Comments

I’m a bit of a fan of Bitcore (BTX) as is clear from my BTX blogging history – largely, I confess, because it has so many airdrops! Who doesn’t like free coins?!

Less than a week after the last 25% airdrop on 30 October (based on how many BTX you own), there was another airdrop on 2 November (based on how many Bitcoin/BTC you own) – both taking place in parallel with the weekly 3% airdrops. It’s raining free Bitcore coins!

Naturally I claimed it. The process is covered fairly well in the official 2nd Snapshot description on Steemit. It is effectively a second version of the airdrop back in April that gave me my first BTX.

However, getting the private key to your BTC account as required by that description can be tricky, so here I’ll explain how to do it if you’re holding your Bitcoin in Electrum as per my previous posts.

To be eligible you need to have held Bitcoin on 2nd November in a wallet you control, i.e. one to which you have the private keys, and you will get 1 BTX for each 2 BTC. Log into your Electrum Wallet go to Wallet -> Private Keys -> Export, then enter your password and wait a few moments. Look for the address containing your Bitcoin in the left column and copy the private key from that right column:

Electrum Export Private Keys screen (Image: BIUK)

It’s this key that you paste into the Bitcore Wallet console as described in the Steemit description linked above. Note, as ever, as soon as you have exposed a private key you may have compromised your wallet security (you can see in the screenshot to be safe I had already moved out my Bitcoin from the wallet before making the claim). At this point, if you want to be completely safe, you should wipe the wallet before using it again.

Anyway, that’s it done – the new BTX should appear in your Bitcore Wallet straight away if it works, otherwise check that you used the correct location address for your BTC on 2nd November.

It worked for me – my 5.8 BTC gave me 2.7 more BTX, so in total currently worth about $50/£40 – not a bad freebie!

Bitcoin (BTC), News

Bitcoin briefly jumps more than 11% after news Square is testing the digital currency

November 17, 2017 flippener

Bitcoin briefly surges more than 11 percent Wednesday after news that Square’s payments app Cash is testing support for the digital currency.
The gains brought bitcoin within 10 percent of its record high hit last Wednesday.
However, the controversy over the best way to improve bitcoin’s transaction speeds and costs remains unresolved.

Bitcoin has again recovered quickly from a sharp drop.

The digital currency briefly surged more than 11 percent Wednesday to a high of $7,336.80 , according to CoinDesk. That’s within 10 percent of its record high of $7,879.06 hit last Wednesday. Bitcoin had fallen 30 percent below that record over the weekend amid controversy over the digital currency’s future.

In the established stock market, a decline of at least 10 percent from a recent high sends a stock into “correction” territory, and a drop of at least 20 percent marks “bear market” territory.

Wednesday’s gains in bitcoin came after news that Jack Dorsey’s company Square is testing support for bitcoin through its payments app Cash. Early on Wednesday, Credit Suisse analysts published a report on the Square news describing how the “bitcoin buying option could help stock.”

SegWit2x’s Failure Confirms Bitcoin’s Status As Digital Gold

November 16, 2017 flippener

When 10,000 Bitcoins were used to buy two pizzas, the digital currency was a truly decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that operated across the globe instantly.

Today, the price has risen nearly a million-fold, but the network is no longer quite as functional as it was back in those days.

Bitcoin still struggles with its identity, as many would like it to revolutionize money, but they are equally happy sitting on hordes of it and watching it appreciate in value faster than perhaps any other asset in history.

A single dollar invested in Bitcoin on the original Bitcoin pizza day would be worth over $3 mln today.

While upgrades have been made to Bitcoin along the way, it looks like Bitcoin is becoming less of a payment network and is instead evolving into digital gold. The failure of SegWit2x, which aimed to decrease transaction costs and improve confirmation speed, failed for a number of reasons.

Some of them were good, and some were mere straw men. But at the end of the day, one thing is clear: there is clearly no rush to increase Bitcoin’s capacity.

After Declines, Bitcoin Comes Back Stronger

November 14, 2017 flippener

They say a bad penny always turns up. While the saying may refer to an unwelcome guest, the same could be said for Bitcoin, according to recent analysis by CNBC. Based on chart evaluations, Bitcoin price has always increased substantially after dips greater than 20 percent.

The rise in Bitcoin prices for the four previous dips over 20 percent were substantial. On average, the cryptocurrency posted 61.5 percent gains in each cycle after substantial sell-offs. This astounding number has lead to an increased desire among insiders to ‘buy the dips’ – to purchase Bitcoin during the lows and realize the substantial gains as the price continues to rise.

Bulls and bears and Bitcoin, oh my!

The most recent drop over the weekend spurred on by the death of the SegWit2x hard fork proposal from the New York Agreement, appears to be no different. After more than 20 percent declines, the price has already recovered peaking in recent trading over $6,500. This response seems to indicate that the fundamentals underlying the recent increases in price are real.

Bitcoin Investors UK