Below is an additional note with regards to portfolio allocation that I think is helpful that I wrote on November, 2017 on LinkedIn. Although I am more optimistic about ETH long term, I think ideal portfolio allocation right now is a combo of ETH + BTC:
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Mining rewards are paid to the miner who discovers a solution to the puzzle first, and the probability that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is equal to the portion of the total mining power on the network. Participants with a small percentage of the mining power stand a very small chance of discovering the next block on their own. For instance, a mining card that one could purchase for a couple thousand dollars would represent less than 0.001% of the network’s mining power. With such a small chance at finding the next block, it could be a long time before that miner finds a block, and the difficulty going up makes things even worse. The miner may never recoup their investment. The answer to this problem is mining pools. Mining pools are operated by third parties and coordinate groups of miners. By working together in a pool and sharing the payouts amongst participants, miners can get a steady flow of bitcoin starting the day they activate their miner. Statistics on some of the mining pools can be seen on Blockchain.info.
The brainchild of Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, Zcash is a further iteration of the zerocoin project. It is fundamentally the same as Bitcoin but it provides an extra layer of security and anonymity. But as per the development team, it’s not because they want to endorse illegal activity.
According to Kornfeld, even those who believe they are conducting ICOs in complete good faith could face serious repercussions when regulators do act, especially if prosecutors think they’ve made misleading statements. “If [prosecutors] think that you’re really bad,” he says. “They can say, hey, you deserve 20 years in jail.”
That’s all transactions are—people signing bitcoins (or fractions of bitcoins) over to each other. The ledger tracks the coins, but it does not track people, at least not explicitly. Assuming Bob creates a new address and key for each transaction, the ledger won’t be able to reveal who he is, or which addresses are his, or how many bitcoins he has in all. It’s just a record of money moving between anonymous hands.
Zcash, a decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency launched in the latter part of 2016, looks promising. “If Bitcoin is like http for money, Zcash is https,” is how Zcash defines itself. Zcash offers privacy and selective transparency of transactions. Thus, like https, Zcash claims to provide extra security or privacy where all transactions are recorded and published on a blockchain, but details such as the sender, recipient, and amount remain private. Zcash offers its users the choice of ‘shielded’ transactions, which allow for content to be encrypted using advanced cryptographic technique or zero-knowledge proof construction called a zk-SNARK developed by its team. (Related reading, see: What Is Zcash?)
^ Jump up to: a b Lee, Timothy (5 November 2013). “When will the people who called Bitcoin a bubble admit they were wrong”. The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 11 January 2014. Retrieved 10 January 2014.
The advent of Bitcoin and its stellar rise over the last few years has investors pouring their money into cryptocurrencies by the millions. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects achieved impressive returns, as well as dramatic declines.
A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money, or the money paid by subsequent investors, instead of from profit earned by the individuals running the business. Ponzi schemes are designed to collapse at the expense of the last investors when there is not enough new participants.
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Some nodes are mining nodes (usually referred to as “miners”). These group outstanding transactions into blocks and add them to the blockchain. How do they do this? By solving a complex mathematical puzzle that is part of the bitcoin program, and including the answer in the block. The puzzle that needs solving is to find a number that, when combined with the data in the block and passed through a hash function, produces a result that is within a certain range. This is much harder than it sounds.
How hard is it to mine Bitcoins? Well, that depends on how much effort is being put into mining across the network. Following the protocol laid out in the software, the Bitcoin network automatically adjusts the difficulty of the mining every 2016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks. It adjusts itself with the aim of keeping the rate of block discovery constant. Thus if more computational power is employed in mining, then the difficulty will adjust upwards to make mining harder. And if computational power is taken off of the network, the opposite happens. The difficulty adjusts downward to make mining easier.
The primary purpose of mining is to allow Bitcoin nodes to reach a secure, tamper-resistant consensus. Mining is also the mechanism used to introduce bitcoins into the system. Miners are paid transaction fees as well as a subsidy of newly created coins, called block rewards. This both serves the purpose of disseminating new coins in a decentralized manner as well as motivating people to provide security for the system through mining.
#Binance to add USD to #Crypto trading pairs soon. This will make getting started much easier for new investors and could be a huge boost to the #cryptocurrency market! Sign up here: https://www.binance.com/?ref=11386338 http://thebitplex.com/2018/03/23/binance-malta/amp/?__twitter_impression=true …
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Much of the trust in Bitcoin comes from the fact that it requires no trust at all. Bitcoin is fully open-source and decentralized. This means that anyone has access to the entire source code at any time. Any developer in the world can therefore verify exactly how Bitcoin works. All transactions and bitcoins issued into existence can be transparently consulted in real-time by anyone. All payments can be made without reliance on a third party and the whole system is protected by heavily peer-reviewed cryptographic algorithms like those used for online banking. No organization or individual can control Bitcoin, and the network remains secure even if not all of its users can be trusted.
No investor wants to put their money into a cyber currency that doesn’t have a good developer community to keep things modern and new. This reduces investor confidence and thus threatens a cryptocurrency’s long-term existence.
I told him that Lehdonvirta had made a convincing denial, and that every other lead I’d been working on had gone nowhere. I then took one more opportunity to question him and to explain all the reasons that I suspected his involvement. Clear responded that his work for Allied Irish Banks was brief and of “no importance.” He admitted that he was a good programmer, understood cryptography, and appreciated the bitcoin design. But, he said, economics had never been a particular interest of his. “I’m not Satoshi,” Clear said. “But even if I was I wouldn’t tell you.”
These two features have now been replicated in dozens of new systems inspired by Bitcoin. One of those systems is Ethereum, proposed in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin when he was just 19. Ethereum does have its currencies, but at its heart Ethereum was designed less to facilitate electronic payments than to allow people to run applications on top of the Ethereum blockchain. There are currently hundreds of Ethereum apps in development, ranging from prediction markets to Facebook clones to crowdfunding services. Almost all of them are in pre-alpha stage, not ready for consumer adoption. Despite the embryonic state of the applications, the Ether currency has seen its own miniature version of the Bitcoin bubble, most likely making Buterin an immense fortune.
The first timestamping scheme invented was the proof-of-work scheme. The most widely used proof-of-work schemes are based on SHA-256 and scrypt.[23] The latter now dominates over the world of cryptocurrencies, with at least 480 confirmed implementations.[24]
In my opinion, there are no real issues with Ripple. But some consider Ripple to be centralized since big companies are backing it. So if you consider yourself a blockchain purist then Ripple may not be the one for you.
Bitcoin has become very popular this year and will become even more popular in the year to come. It seems Bitcoin is more of a risk to invest in due to the problems that can occur in terms of losing bit coins. There is more regulation now in compliance based markets and there is looking to be much more activity in 2018 was more businesses consider Bitcoin services and benefit from increases prices.
Which blockchain prevails? Quite simply, the longest valid chain becomes the official version of events. So, let’s say the next miner to solve a block adds it to B’s chain, creating B2. If B2 propagates across the entire network before A2 is found, then B’s chain is the clear winner. A loses his mining reward and fees, which only exist on the invalidated A -chain.
This turns out to have been a major oversight, because identity is the sort of problem that benefits from one universally recognized solution. It’s what Vitalik Buterin, a founder of Ethereum, describes as “base-layer” infrastructure: things like language, roads and postal services, platforms where commerce and competition are actually assisted by having an underlying layer in the public domain. Offline, we don’t have an open market for physical passports or Social Security numbers; we have a few reputable authorities — most of them backed by the power of the state — that we use to confirm to others that we are who we say we are. But online, the private sector swooped in to fill that vacuum, and because identity had that characteristic of being a universal problem, the market was heavily incentivized to settle on one common standard for defining yourself and the people you know.
(“Cory” is Cory Doctorow, my friend and business partner at my website, Boing Boing. He’s not a bitcoin enthusiast, but I knew he’d be able to figure out how to retrieve the master private key from the word list.)
Nakamoto’s extensive online postings have some distinctive characteristics. First of all, there is the flawless English. Over the course of two years, he dashed off about eighty thousand words—the approximate length of a novel—and made only a few typos. He covered topics ranging from the theories of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises to the history of commodity markets. Perhaps most interestingly, when he created the first fifty bitcoins, now known as the “genesis block,” he permanently embedded a brief line of text into the data: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
The Wall Street Journal (Oct 24, 2017) notes that less than 10% tokens have actual products (Coin Offerings Are Hot, but What Are They?). It’s generally a bad idea to invest in an ICO with no actual product and that’s the case for the vast majority of ICOs right now.
Where all this may lead to is a constellation of linked crypto-currencies and blockchains, with all sorts of uses: stores of value, means of exchange, mechanisms for transferring assets and verifying transactions, whatever. The original bitcoin may remain at the centre of this constellation—or not. Whether its price recovers from last year’s slump may not matter. Whoever and wherever he is, Mr Nakamoto can be proud of having unleashed a wave of financial innovation, and founded what looks set to become a sizeable new branch of the global IT industry.
Litecoin, launched in the year 2011, was among the initial cryptocurrencies following bitcoin and was often referred to as ‘silver to Bitcoin’s gold.’ It was created by Charlie Lee, a MIT graduate and former Google engineer. Litecoin is based on an open source global payment network that is not controlled by any central authority and uses “scrypt” as a proof of work, which can be decoded with the help of CPUs of consumer grade. Although Litecoin is like Bitcoin in many ways, it has a faster block generation rate and hence offers a faster transaction confirmation. Other than developers, there are a growing number of merchants who accept Litecoin.
Each block is created in sequence, including the hash of the previous block. Because each block contains the hash of a prior block, it proves that it came afterward. Sometimes, two competing blocks are formed by different miners. They may contain different transactions of bitcoin spent in different places. The block with the largest total proof of work embedded within it is chosen for the blockchain.
Here’s how it works: Say Alice wants to transfer one bitcoin to Bob. First Bob sets up a digital address for Alice to send the money to, along with a key allowing him to access the money once it’s there. It works sort-of like an email account and password, except that Bob sets up a new address and key for every incoming transaction (he doesn’t have to do this, but it’s highly recommended).
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