Tuesday, January 10, 2017

India's Demonetization Is A Success And Bodes Well For Bitcoin and the Digital Economy.

On the 8th November 2016 when Modi cancelled the 500 and 1000 rupee notes, and gave the populace 50 days to exchange old notes for new legal tender, the international press condemned and vilified the move. One must ask if they really had India's best interest at heart.

By any measure this demonetization effort has been a success. India is a country where at every election people die. Yet this unanticipated move was without protest and practically bloodless. In one move Modi have dragged his backward and feudal people screaming and kicking into the 21st century and internet banking. I would consider this one move to be the awakening of the Indian tiger.

We can be sure that every Indian young or old, male or female would now know of Modi Narendra and what he did for India. ( I would lay bets that there are people in the USA who don't know who Obama is or that Trump is the president elect.) By financially empowering every Indian with an awareness of the knowledge economy he will move India forward faster than with any other development route possible.

Bitcoin companies like Zebpay, Unocoin and Coinsecure have mushroomed in member and users and a system like Africa's Mpesa may not be too far off. Hopefully their system will not be monopolise by some giant telco like Safari-com in Kenya, choking of competition and development.

India is on-boarding users to bitcoin at a rate of over 100,000 a month. Such growth cannot be ignored by governments of the world at large. The only question now is, which country will be the first to adopt bitcoin as a national currency. The one that does will be a very rich country indeed going forward.  

Monday, January 2, 2017

Growing your bitcoin stash - now is the time using, "The Magic Of Compound Interest".

How to use the most powerful tool in finance to grow your bitcoin stash.

I came across Bitcoin in December 2013 and bought my first bitcoin in February 2014. I was very hard to buy bitcoins in those days. Over the next 3 years I have made and lost bitcoins checking out project and getting caught in several scams and outright exchange failures.

Investing in bitcoin
For the newbie just purchasing your fist bitcoin or part of it is a great experience. Most will get it directly from a friend, at a meetup from a bitcoin ATM or a bitcoin exchange. After that it's a case of adding to your stash on a regular basis or buying when price action starts to happen again as it does every few months. The biggest one in my experience is the run-up from $237 to $1020 in just over a year.

The Magic of Compound interest.
With compound interest we double our principle in just 7 years at 10%. The idea is to utilise this principle to our benefit. If you only want to make a one off capital investment your options are.

1) Purchase bitcoin
2) Purchase hardware to mine bitcoin
3) Purchase cloud mining contract - Use the most reputed Genesis mining
4) Purchase Ghash units on Hashnest

Of the above purchasing bitcoin outright and holding is the quickest and safest. Mining for bitcoin will require you to have some computer knowledge and the return is often less than your investment. On average it will take a year to recover your investment as the ROI decreases with every difficulty increase. Cloud mining contract is similar to purchasing your own miner except it cost more and takes even longer to recover your investment. Lastly is what we are talking about utlilsing hashnest hashing units purchases.

Go to Hashnest  https://www.hashnest.com  sign up for an account, deposit some bitcoin and purchase either AntS7 hashes or AntS9 hashes. The advantage of this system is that you can easily convert your hashes into bitcoin anytime you choose. All you do after this is keep reinvesting your daily dividends. Using this process you will double your capital investment in six months. The return is about 0.4%  compounded daily. Always keep an eye on bitcoin price trends and exit when you feel uncomfortable. Getting in and out and switching between AntS7 and AntS9 is fun, Best of all your liability is limited and worst case you get to keep your mining hardware.

Caveat : This assumes that the price of bitcoin and hashing difficulty remains constant which is not. As difficulty increase your return and price of hashes will decrease. It is counter balance by the increase in price of bitcoin. If mining of hashes becomes unprofitable for 10 days in a row, the market will close and you can claim the physical miners and get them shipped to you. At time of writing 3/1/2017 the price of bitcoin have been increasing and so this has been a very good strategy.

If you want to just purchase cloud mining on Genesis Mining go to this link
https://www.genesis-mining.com  Use my affiliate code aOi345 and get 3.5% discount on your purchase. Purchasing cloud mining with your credit card is also a way to convert your fiat into bitcoins.

Get A Coinbase Wallet and purchase your first bitcoin using your credit card.



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Bitcoin Donation Address

Thursday, October 27, 2016

For My Friends - A Bitcoin Update

Update 12 February 2017

Bitcoin price today is USD2007. It's price have grown steadily from 700 to 1100 and dropped back to around 800 and 900 only to recover with a couple of days. Price escalation is driven by demand with more and more people worldwide knowing and finding a use for bitcoin. The dips have mainly been caused by knee jerk reactions from events initiated by the People's Bank Of China (PBOC) in it's attempt to regulate and control the bitcoin industry in China.

It is a fact that 80-90% of bitcoin mining occurs in China. With the manipulation of trading volume by the Chinese exchanges in order to seem bigger than they are it was even thought that China dominated 90% of bitcoin trading worldwide. This was found to be absolutely not the case when after the PBOC stopped margin trading and forced the exchanges to charge fees.

It now emerges that Japan is the country with the highest bitcoin trading volume. The regulators have been very much bitcoin friendly. There is even a TV game show call Bit Girls which uses cryptocurrency based on bitcoin. Japan is even expected to make bitcoin legal within 2 months.

https://exchangewar.info/

https://translate.google.co.nz/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://bitgirls.io/en/&prev=search

https://news.bitcoin.com/countdown-bitcoin-legal-payment-japan-two-months/


Published 27 October 2016

It's been over a year since I last met most of you and spoke to some about Bitcoin. Much have happened and I know I must have sounded like a cranky idiot pushing some kind of scam. I assure you all that my intentions were genuine.

I saw in Bitcoin, a way to bypass the bad governance structure we have back home, because control of debt and the issue of money is what feeds corruption and bring down standards of governance. Before you say that money must be backed by government, I say no. It is what we as individuals choose as a means to transact. Because it is a contract between 2 people only no one else need to be involved. Ie no need for trusted third party. With bitcoin this is now possible. It is a currency that is used the world over and has liquidity anywhere in the world be it Venezuela, Malaysia or the USA.

Since the last time we met bitcoin was price at $238USD Today 13 months later it is $685USD That is nearly a threefold increase. To just think of bitcoin as money is to miss the woods for the trees. Bitcoin with a capital "B" stands for the platform or protocol like the internet, and. the small "b" stands for bitcoin the currency.

I write this today because much have changed over the year and the protocol and ecosystem is very much more developed and expanding.

1) For the investment minded this article may interest you. It is too much of a read so read at your leisure. In essence a financial management company is predicting the price to go to $848USD They predicted $650 previously but that has been surpass.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-27/needham-raises-bitcoin-price-target-848-heres-why

2) Banks are now hoarding bitcoin to protect against ddos attacks. This is where hackers control billions of computers now used in the Internet Of  Things to attack servers, swamping it with so much request that the real messages cannot get through. This could also be a reason on why there is a spike in the bitcoin price.
https://bitcoinira.com/news/2016-10-26/much-hated-bitcoin-becoming-saving-grace-banks-2008

3) Countries are now openly warming up to the technology. In the past they stopped short of banning it because of the fear that they could lose the technology innovation. That attitude has changed

Japan where Mt Gox trading exchange went down taking over 600 million in customers funds is actually leading the way with recognising bitcoin as money and dropping the 8% sales tax.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/japan-officially-recognizes-bitcoin-and-digital-currencies-as-money
http://www.coindesk.com/japan-may-drop-8-bitcoin-sales-tax/

South Korea always the antagonist after surpassing them in shipbuilding and even consumer electronics cannot let that go. They are planning to put their currency on the blockchain
http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_business/767235.html

India a country with 1.2 billion people is hard on the tracks of pushing this technology on the population with one company they have the fastest growing bitcoin user community in the world. Unocoin and Zebpay. India has the largest remittance market in the world and it is estimated that bitcoin will save the country 1 billion in fees that is an extra 1 billion that will go to the Indian people instead of Western Union, Zebpay says that they are onboarding 20,000 users a month.
http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/10/09/bitcoin-adoption-in-india-may-surge-during-diwali-festival/

Consumer adoption is also growing with the first token voting system being introduced to a Japanese TV game show. You purchase these digital tokens issuerd on the Counterparty bitcoin protocol and send it to the girl you like. This is a game show with 14 million viewers.
https://news.bitcoin.com/cryptocurrency-tv-show-bitgirls/
This is just a short jump to actual political voting systems which will probably be used in municipal elections first. It cost very much less as you don't have to print the ballot papers.

Of course the gambling and porn industry will be the first to adopt. Netbet is the first legal betting company to accept bitcoin.
https://blog.bitpay.com/netbet-accepts-bitcoin/

The Swiss are always quick off the mark because they have to be. From 11 November Swiss Federal Railway ticketing will accept and dispense bitcoin. That is 14,000 machines acting like bitcoin ATM's. https://www.sbb.ch/en/station-services/services/further-services/bitcoin.html

Of course the online gaming industry is fast adopting blockchain technology with Spells Of Genesis about to be launched and many to follow. http://www.spellsofgenesis.com/ This is actually interesting because it introduces the concept of digital assets. The most valuable is the Satoshicard which is being sold for up to $6000USD.

There have been many digital currencies and tokens released since Bitcoin and most are useless scams. But there are genuine innovations one of which is Ethereum which seek to introduce a worldwide internet computer processing smart contracts. This of course may take another 10 to 20 years to perfect. Another company Blockfreight seeks to replace the existing shipping documentation system with one based on the blockchain. In short everything that we do that involve finance and assets will be influenced by blockchain technology and companies are rushing fast to be the first.

Today marks the release of Zcash which I think is Bitcoin 2. It is a big improvement on Bitcoin with privacy and governance features addressed. Already it is expected to be priced more than bitcoin when it hits the market. What is important is that there is no premine or pre-allocation to the developers. They start mining coins into existence from coin no 1. Will it take over bitcoin? Maybe not but will run very close beside it because people with assets and companies moving large sums of money will use it.

One of the weakness of bitcoin is that it is not anonymous. If you are a supplier and you know the bitcoin account of that supplier you can effectively trace the customers and the amount of transfer. You can get the complete history. This problem is solved with Zcash and the governence structure is what will attract the rich and wealthy.

So what can you do about it. Read up more to learn more about the technology. Purchase some from friends, a bitcoin exchange or use Local Bitcoins to purchase peer to peer.
https://localbitcoins.com/country/MY

If you want to invest in bitcoin startups then go to this site and see their offerings from time to time. This is investing in seed rounds. Like investing in Google when they were asking for $1 million. Deals we will never get unless you are a large venture capitalist.
https://bnktothefuture.com/

Till we meet again.


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Thursday, June 9, 2016

Issuing National Currencies On The Bitcoin Blockchain

The cashless society is upon us and like it or not governments will want a secure digital currency for which they control value, quantity and rate of issuance. The good news is that they do not have to hire teams of developers and consultants to put in place this digital currency. They can issue these tokens on the Bitcoin Blockchain at a cost 0.05 XCP ( less than 10 cents ) using the Counterparty platform.

Why issue their digital token on the Bitcoin Blockchain ?
The answer - SECURITY, SECURITY, SECURITY. No other system can achieve the level of security of the Bitcoin blockchain proof of work consensus system, currently secured by greater than 200 Peta hashes of mining power.

Anybody can issue tokens but giving the tokens value is another matter. Governments can confer value to their digital tokens by making them legal tender and mandating that only such tokens be accepted for paying taxes and government services.

Digital currency issued on the Counterparty platform will be smart money. Ethereum style smart contract will soon be a feature of Bitcoin. It is only waiting on discussions to be finalised and a vote by XCP token holders by the end of June or early July.

Bitcoin blockchain imposes a 10 minute block confirmation time frame, however developers at Storj another token using the Counterparty platform, have implemented micro payments using offchain solutions similar to the proposed Thunder and Lightning network. All that is needed for implementation is CSV which is very near activation at 90% adoption and Segwit which should follow shortly. Off chain transactions will be instant and at scale. 

Mainstream adoption will require an easy to use wallet on smart phones and SMS phones. There is already a mobile wallet Indiesquare, operational for Counterparty tokens, which can be easily adapted to function with a single token. Extending bitcoin wallets to SMS phones should not be too far away either.


In conclusion, governments can already issue secure digital currency on the Bitcoin platform at very low cost and retain full issuance and value control. For those who claim that they do not trust governments to issue currencies, Get Real, That will never change. The only difference is that this process can be more transparent. Bitcoin will always remains as an alternative backup currency, should the natives lose confidence in the government issued variety.

Update 3/1/2017: The cost of a bitcoin transaction still holds this system back but micro transactions and payment channels are coming.

Bitcoin will be many things including being a currency, a settlement layer and a reserve asset.