Category Archives: Opinion

Cash, Gold, 2X?—?What the fork!

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)
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:

Read more: HackerNoon

A Beginner’s Guide to Cryptocoin Mining

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.

Bitcoin mining (Image: Pixabay)
Bitcoin mining (Image: Pixabay)

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.

Read more: Lifewire

Taming the Power-Hungry Blockchain Beast with Decentralized, Clean Energy

Throughout history, every great breakthrough often came with negative consequences and side effects.

Think about Marie Curie. Her research on radioactivity is what makes X-rays possible today. Unfortunately, her discoveries and remarkable research are also what killed her.

What about the Internet? It’s the most revolutionary invention for generations and holds countless opportunities that benefit billions of people around the world. However, cybercrime has never been higher and expected to reach $2 tln by 2019.

It’s the same story with Blockchain. The technology has the potential to revolutionize every industry it comes into contact with. However, its biggest application remains in the cryptocurrency industry.

Cryptocurrency Mining Farm (Image: M. Krohn/Wikimedia)
Cryptocurrency Mining Farm (Image: M. Krohn/Wikimedia)

And with the current excitement surrounding this industry, it’s easy to overlook the side effects that come with such a disruptive breakthrough.

Energy-craving Blockchain can have devastating consequences for the environment
Mining popular cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, requires extremely powerful computer hardware that can solve complex mathematical equations. To run these computers burns up a lot of energy, mostly from non-renewable fossil fuels.

And as the price of the digital coin sores so too does the number of people looking to get in on the action.

Read more: CoinTelegraph

Bounty Hunters Heavily Utilized in Bitcoin, Altcoin World

A bounty is a reward paid out for the completion of a certain task.

In the “Old West,” sheriffs used to post bounties in order to encourage bounty hunters to capture dangerous criminals. This concept is alive and well in today’s world and the cryptocurrency space has made it a core concept of its very special culture. In the crypto world, bounty rewards are almost exclusively paid in Bitcoin and ICO tokens.

Star Wars Bounty Hunters (Image: PopCultureGeek/Flickr)
Star Wars Bounty Hunters (Image: PopCultureGeek/Flickr)

Bitcoin faucets

Bitcoin faucets are websites or apps that dispense rewards in the form of Bitcoin. Visitors can claim this reward in exchange for completing a captcha or task as described by the platform. The main revenue stream from this faucets comes from advertisements.

Back in 2009, Bitcoin faucets used to pay up to three Bitcoin per hour. With today’s Bitcoin prices, that would net around $19k. It’s important to note that back then the Bitcoin price was just a fraction of a cent. Nowadays, faucets pay rewards in “Satoshis,” which is a hundredth of a millionth Bitcoin.

Bounty campaigns

In the ICO space, a bounty program is an offer made by many startups which enables individuals to receive compensation for performing marketing tasks, reporting bugs or improving a product or service. Blockchain startups that plan to hold a crowdsale often allocate a certain percentage of their total tokens to such a campaign.

Bounties are mainly found on forums like Bitcointalk and bounty networks. There are rarely any barriers of entry at all and the only thing a bounty hunter needs to do in order to participate is submit a link to his work. This submission will then be checked by the admin of the campaign who will decide if the submission deserves a reward or not.

Read more: CoinTelegraph

Can Blockchain Save Us from the Internet’s Original Sin?

What’s wrong with this picture?

The front page of The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday:

“Amazon Lures 238 Bids for its Second Home.”

It’s not a good thing that a single company can get the political leaders of so many American cities and states to scramble over each other to try to lure $5 billion in spending on some new buildings.

The story shows that Amazon’s influence over American urban life is far more than one company deserves: over tax policies, over city planning decisions, over the aesthetics and culture of our communities. Society’s interests lie in sustaining a dynamic, innovative and evolving economy, not one in which hegemonic companies have oversized sway over everyone’s decision-making.

The Rebuke of Adam and Eve by Domenichino (Image: Wikimedia)
The Rebuke of Adam and Eve by Domenichino (Image: Wikimedia)

This is the core problem of centralization in the internet age – a pet topic for those of us who believe the ideas behind blockchain technology can point us toward a better economic model.

Amazon is not alone, of course. But it’s in a very select group. An acronym has emerged to define the small club of digital behemoths to which it belongs: GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple).

Two other WSJ stories this past week bring home the distorting influence of two other members of that club. One was Christopher Mims’ column about Facebook’s “master algorithm,” which in determining what we see and read is literally dictating how we think. The other was about Google winning the quantum computing race, a prize that will afford the winner unimaginable competitive advantages in data-processing capabilities.

Meanwhile, with my iPhone 6’s screen cracked and its functionality deteriorated since I upgraded to iOS 11, I’m tempted to switch to a Samsung phone, but don’t want to lose all the data and connectivity that the Apple universe has locked me into. And I know that with the Android OS, I’d just be getting Google’s version of the same dependency anyway.

Read more: CoinDesk

How To Profit From a Bitcoin Crash

Every time there is a crash in cryptocurrencies, the alarm bells ring out and panic often ensues.

People predict the end, see the bubble popping and sell off for a loss.

Bitcoin price chart (Image: geralt/Pixabay)
Bitcoin price chart (Image: geralt/Pixabay)

However, there is another way to look at it, and that is to see a significant drop as a buying opportunity and a chance to profit.

How to profit

There are a few ways to try and cash in on a sharp fall in price of cryptocurrencies. Some are more effective than others, and some more suitable for different types of crashes or currencies. It is up to the investor to decide.

There are five methods described below that can help turn a sickening crash into a chance to make more money than before.

A lot of these methods are well known, and almost cliched, but the real difficulty is not simply knowing them, it is being brave enough to enact them in the face of a collapsing market.

Read more: CoinTelegraph