https://imgur.com/a/PSN3i

cant embed, used image tags and removed s from https but nothing worked. Fun few days.

If you include the buffet comments from 2014 he's also way behind the 8 ball. Irrelevant noise really hence why he's asked and gives an opinion. Pretty much worthless. He even admits he doesn't know anything, just like he did then. Not sure why people would take stock in his words regarding something he self admittedly knows 0 about.

P.s it is a bubble

[Crypto and security]

Crypto and security

Since more and more people are getting into crypto I thought I would make a short post about security. Crypto gets a bad name in the press as they jump on anything that involves controversy or hacking in crypto. The truth is, as a normal user you can be (as far as I am aware) close to 100% safe with your funds if you take the correct measures.

Storing

The safest way to store your crypto is undoubtedly using a cold wallet. I would recommend the ledger nano s. Only buy one from the official site otherwise there is a risk it is compromised. Your ledger stores the keys to the blockchain and is not connected to the internet. Leaving money on exchanges is incredibly dangerous. An exchange is a central point of attack just like banks and are targeted by hackers all the time. Exchanges are also dangerous because inside jobs can cause extraordinary damage and leave a lot of funds missing.

Transfering crypto

It is absolutely essential that when you send crypto to someone you check the address you have pasted. There is malware that can change your clipboard to the hackers address and they receive your funds. When sending from your ledger you have the luxury of checking the address and amount on that as well, DO IT.

Visiting exchanges & online wallets

It is absolutely crucial that you either input the address manually or use a bookmark for exchanges and wallets. Phishing attempts are rife and google don't seem to care. Sometimes if you search "myetherwallet" on google the first hit will be to a phishing site with a similar address. If you visit this site and send some funds they will likely be gone.

This is what you should be looking for


Password protection and two factor authentication

For storing passwords for exchanges safely you can use software like KeePass, it's good to use for all password protection! For all exchanges it is absolutely crucial you use Google authenticator. It adds tremendous protection. I would strongly suggest getting an old telephone for this, if you use your current telephone and it gets lost or damaged, you have a huge ballache. For extra protection you can buy a cheap new phone just for Google authenticator. There are probably even safer ways to do it, but you're miles ahead if you do this already. When setting up Google authenticator be sure to keep the initial backup when generating a code for the first time since if your phone breaks, you have quick access to the codes again.

Extra cold wallet protection

When using the ledger nano s you are given a 24 recovery phrase in case you lose your ledger. This recovery phrase in the wrong hands or lost is game over for your funds. One of the safest and not too inconvenient ways to keep yourself secure is:

• Split your passwords into two parts (words 1-12, 13-24)
• Keep your ledger and password phrases separate
• Print the passwords offline onto steel sheets (I bought symbols to punch into the sheets)
• Keep the steel sheets at separate locations, ideally with people you trust

Separately the password sheets you've created are useless. It's not a bad idea to not tell who you've given the sheets to, but now I'm being cynical. Or am I?

Before you go through all of this palava, how about reading a book about the psychology of investment cycles and behavioural finance. Then making a rational/sensible decision might be a bit easier.  

https://www.sharesmagazine.co.uk/article/the-psychology-of-investing

It's all very well showing people how to secure their coins but that in itself just shows how risky it is to invest in this space.

I would put a high probability on this thread being dead in a few years time. It's really scary that unqualified people are still ramping these coins up all over the internet.  

Ace I believe you are confusing the volatility of the investment with the nature of a decentralised currency. The beauty of cryptocurrency is that it is decentralised, but that also means you have to take total responsibility for your own coins/tokens. Think about it like this, if you had 100k Sterling at home in cash then you'd also want to secure it. If putting it in the bank wasn't an option (as it isn't for crypto) then you'd probably get a safe, a safety deposit box or something like that. Or maybe you would exchange it to something that was easy to store and held value (gold?) You'd also back it up by having a spare key or giving a trusted person a backup way of getting your funds in an emergency.

The volatility of the investment is another thing altogether. I'm still amazed how cynical people are and that they can't even consider that any cryptocurrency could be succesful. My personal opinion is that perhaps 90% of the coins/tokens will go to the wall - this is partly because there is so much competition in each sector. Just as a couple of examples - in the field of logistics you have Walton, Modum, Veechain, Ambrosus, as well as new ICOs such as CargoX and many more - probably only one or maybe none of them will be successful. Then you have 'privacy coins' like Verge, PivX, Monero, Zcash and more. Quite possibly only one of these will succeed. But if you hold the one that does then you will have hit the jackpot.

It is interesting that you use the word unqualified, but what would provide a qualification in this context? Is it possible that you yourself are dismissing everything without fully understanding it yourself?

I am not disputing the technology at all, it's clear a revolution that is taking place. I have big issues with fundamentals, valuations and regulation (or lack of it).

Mike Novogratz who is a huge Bitcoin bull has even said that it's due a big correction and has gone even further to cancel the launch of a crypto based hedge fund. Why do you think that is? I will tell you why, it's because he doesn't want to damage his reputation on Wall Street as a result of his clients losing large sums of money.

With regards being qualified to comment, I would take a lot more notice of what Warren Buffet says over some random on an internet forum like Reddit. In my opinion, the crash needs to happen sooner rather than later. It will save a lot of people from losing a lot of money.

Forgive my ignorance, (or feel free to highlight it) but won't other people gain an equal amount of money?

I am not sure what you are trying to say here. A crash doesn't benefit anyone invested, unless you are short of course. That can only be done properly on bitcoin at the moment. Given crypto currencies are supposed to revolve around Libertarian principles it does seem a bit of a strange comment!

I can get a proper short on
Bitcoin
Ripple
Ether
Bitcoin cash
Litecoin
Bitcoin Gold

You could short ADA, Monero and Zec with Bitmex although volumes on the last two are very well and ADA is too new to tell @Bitmex. Bitcoin action is amazing on there though, its fascinating to watch. What do you use at the moment typhoon? Some sort of spread betting?

Affiliate link below,  10% fee discount for users; https://www.bitmex.com/register/fCpg0h

Here is a guy I follows response to some of the common FUD that comes up and some of the exciting things. https://twitter.com/Beetcoin/status/935460412262375424

Crazy dip last night, the failed breakout from 6th/7th has sent me really bearish.

A Machine Learning algorithm walks into a bar.
The bartender asks, "What'll you have?"
The algorithm says, "What's everyone else having?"

oops

Well much like the recent Barnier slide they can work out what it is likely to look like from the UK's red lines, it's going to look like EU-Canada. Which took several years to negotiate. With the exception of the US all non EU trade deals will be smaller than EU-UK so less likely to cause massive forecasting errors.

And subsequent deals with non EU countries?

What about them? They cannot be as attractive as the deals we would get as part of the EU as we are a less attractive market. The access the deals provide will be far less meaning the incentives countries have to offer good deals will also be reduced. They will also take a long time to negotiate and we simply don't have the manpower or expertise to perform many deals at once.

Well one thing is for sure, if we take such a negative mindset about what we can achieve we certainly won’t do it....

Who would you offer a better deal to as an outside party- 27 EU countries with 508m people or the population of the UK with 65m people.

Depends what they are offering.....

8x the number of people? Maybe 5.5x when you factor in spending power?

How many people are there in the rest of the world outside the EU?

So you agree the EU has more bargaining power as a collective?

This isn't really true. If you are selling goods then a market of x is still attractive when compared with a market of 5.5x (where does this come from by the way ?) if x is a big number.

You need to factor in the inherent protectionist nature of the EU to understand attractiveness and then bargaining power.

I just reduced the 8x population figure down some as 8x the spending power didn't feel accurate. Can you expand on the protectionist nature? Doesn't that also lead to us getting a worse deal with the EU also? a quick google lead me to believe its not particularly protectionist but we'd have to trust the experts again

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/08/14/the-eu-isnt-protectionist-its-one-of-the-most-open-economies-in-the-world/

Well much like the recent Barnier slide they can work out what it is likely to look like from the UK's red lines, it's going to look like EU-Canada. Which took several years to negotiate. With the exception of the US all non EU trade deals will be smaller than EU-UK so less likely to cause massive forecasting errors.

And subsequent deals with non EU countries?

What about them? They cannot be as attractive as the deals we would get as part of the EU as we are a less attractive market. The access the deals provide will be far less meaning the incentives countries have to offer good deals will also be reduced. They will also take a long time to negotiate and we simply don't have the manpower or expertise to perform many deals at once.

Well one thing is for sure, if we take such a negative mindset about what we can achieve we certainly won’t do it....

Who would you offer a better deal to as an outside party- 27 EU countries with 508m people or the population of the UK with 65m people.

Depends what they are offering.....

8x the number of people? Maybe 5.5x when you factor in spending power?

How many people are there in the rest of the world outside the EU?

So you agree the EU has more bargaining power as a collective?

I agree there is a huge market way bigger than the EU, once a deal with the EU is sorted.

I'm not disputing the RoW market is bigger, but we will clearly get a worse deal as we have less bargaining power. And we will get a somewhat poor deal with the EU who are at least mildly incentivisted to make leaving an unattractive option. Or at least not an attractive option.

We also have a long period of economic uncertainty whilst these deals are being sorted.

Well much like the recent Barnier slide they can work out what it is likely to look like from the UK's red lines, it's going to look like EU-Canada. Which took several years to negotiate. With the exception of the US all non EU trade deals will be smaller than EU-UK so less likely to cause massive forecasting errors.

And subsequent deals with non EU countries?

What about them? They cannot be as attractive as the deals we would get as part of the EU as we are a less attractive market. The access the deals provide will be far less meaning the incentives countries have to offer good deals will also be reduced. They will also take a long time to negotiate and we simply don't have the manpower or expertise to perform many deals at once.

Well one thing is for sure, if we take such a negative mindset about what we can achieve we certainly won’t do it....

Who would you offer a better deal to as an outside party- 27 EU countries with 508m people or the population of the UK with 65m people.

Depends what they are offering.....

8x the number of people? Maybe 5.5x when you factor in spending power?

How many people are there in the rest of the world outside the EU?

So you agree the EU has more bargaining power as a collective?

Well much like the recent Barnier slide they can work out what it is likely to look like from the UK's red lines, it's going to look like EU-Canada. Which took several years to negotiate. With the exception of the US all non EU trade deals will be smaller than EU-UK so less likely to cause massive forecasting errors.

And subsequent deals with non EU countries?

What about them? They cannot be as attractive as the deals we would get as part of the EU as we are a less attractive market. The access the deals provide will be far less meaning the incentives countries have to offer good deals will also be reduced. They will also take a long time to negotiate and we simply don't have the manpower or expertise to perform many deals at once.

Well one thing is for sure, if we take such a negative mindset about what we can achieve we certainly won’t do it....

Who would you offer a better deal to as an outside party- 27 EU countries with 508m people or the population of the UK with 65m people.

Depends what they are offering.....

8x the number of people? Maybe 5.5x when you factor in spending power?

Well much like the recent Barnier slide they can work out what it is likely to look like from the UK's red lines, it's going to look like EU-Canada. Which took several years to negotiate. With the exception of the US all non EU trade deals will be smaller than EU-UK so less likely to cause massive forecasting errors.

And subsequent deals with non EU countries?

What about them? They cannot be as attractive as the deals we would get as part of the EU as we are a less attractive market. The access the deals provide will be far less meaning the incentives countries have to offer good deals will also be reduced. They will also take a long time to negotiate and we simply don't have the manpower or expertise to perform many deals at once.

Well one thing is for sure, if we take such a negative mindset about what we can achieve we certainly won’t do it....

Who would you offer a better deal to as an outside party- 27 EU countries with 508m people or the population of the UK with 65m people.

Well much like the recent Barnier slide they can work out what it is likely to look like from the UK's red lines, it's going to look like EU-Canada. Which took several years to negotiate. With the exception of the US all non EU trade deals will be smaller than EU-UK so less likely to cause massive forecasting errors.

And subsequent deals with non EU countries?

What about them? They cannot be as attractive as the deals we would get as part of the EU as we are a less attractive market. The access the deals provide will be far less meaning the incentives countries have to offer good deals will also be reduced. They will also take a long time to negotiate and we simply don't have the manpower or expertise to perform many deals at once.

Why is everyone going on about how terrible they are? Not seeing it at all, Sarah has been very solid throughout the show, has an existing business and a decent idea. It's super low risk and almost gtd to make money, chances of it kicking off and making him £20m are pretty slim but it's pretty much a shot to nothing, far worse places to put £250k.

James is a young city chancer who did very well on the corporate ladder and wants to have a crack at his own ladder - fairly reasonable chance he dusts the 250 and cant make it work, tiny chance he smashes it and builds a monster. For totally different reasons to Sarah once again way worse places to stick £250k, if you've got the roll for a gamble like this.

I think they are both pretty good, Sarah would have gotten funding from virtually any corporate lending facility and James would have found backing at some point in the few yrs with his charming/networking manner, everyones talking like neither of them could lace their shoelaces, don't get it.

I loved this, great TV, some massive donkery and some good stuff in there, if i has to be critical I'd say that the tasks were a little samey, more money making tasks where selling to actual people would be nice - would like to see some changes to the structure but can't wait for next year already. Think people take it all way too seriously and forget it's a bloody TV show!

Guy got caught faking an industry accreditation on his website. Hard to imagine any corporation following in after that. Very shady guy, wouldn't touch him with a barge pole personally.

Sarah is pretty boring, if it wasn't for Sugs shes largely drawing dead on doing anything other than making a small amount of money. Remember all her competitors with exactly the same branding and packaging? No inspiration, her yellow dress during the presentation was the only bright thing about her.

Great tv and finish but its awfully boring during the last few weeks when we find out half the people left have no chance with their current business model.  Such a waste of time, and who knows whether there was an actual exciting business plan out there.

Budget Shark Tank which could be so much more.

Isn't Quantum computing a huge problem for all encryption we currently use?

Yes. Going to be a fun few years when uncrackable encryption can no longer be relied upon.

This goes over my head very quickly but is reasonably clear: https://github.com/theQRL/Whitepaper/blob/master/QRL_whitepaper.pdf

https://medium.com/the-quantum-resistant-ledger/be-prepared-for-quantum-computing-era-bb1a9ec6cd35
https://singularityhub.com/2017/11/05/is-quantum-computing-an-existential-threat-to-blockchain-technology/
https://www.sciencealert.com/google-s-quantum-announcement-overshadowed-by-something-even-bigger

Ah, QRL, forgot about those guys as I believe they lie somewhere between a scam and delusion.

https://github.com/jplomas 2nd Developer is an NHS consultant, can't find any evidence for the first guy, Peter Waterland but I believe he works for the NHS too. Suspicions around the forming of their Foundation, or lack of. I wouldn't be backing these guys to actually solve this problem. I will add I haven't looked into them properly for the above reasons so its possible I've just been a bit blinded. Definitely an interesting play if these worries become a bit more mainstream. Hopefully, Quantum Computing gets developed by the right people first.

One of the great things about crypto is it cannot currently be hacked.

fyp. Google quantum computing and Shor's algorithm. If there is a sudden non-linear advance then Bitcoins will be trivial to steal. A few blockchains are already researching hash-based rather than elliptical curve cryptography.

Isn't Quantum computing a huge problem for all encryption we currently use?

Isn't SHA 256 a hash function? Past my level of technical expertise but very curious about this subject. ould you provide examples of the hash-based projects?

Everything seems to have tanked about 30-40% over the last 24 hours.

Great time to buy some cheap coins! Bitcoin is due to fork tomorrow so I will be going into that for the free fork coin.

By what definition, are these things cheap? 

Surely forking can't create value.  If my company has 100 shares and tomorrow I decide to issue 100 new ones, I have not got a cent richer. 

They aren't shares in the same company though, they are shares in a slightly different company. Forks allow for competing technological ideals to emerge from the same blockchain, which is cool because the market can then decide which protocol they value higher. I think theoretically the sum of the two network values is always lower than the original network, but because of human psychology, it feels like a discount to buy one bitcoin and receive Bitcoin and Bcash. Furthermore, Bitcoin Cash was a contentious fork, meaning that after this happens, a weight has been lifted from the community who are now free to choose which protocol they would like to support or they can just hold both.  Bitcoin price hasn't really moved because of the forks since bitcoin cash/gold. Most of the newer forks are shitty knockoffs with little to no dev team designed to steal peoples private keys and therefore actual bitcoin.

The latest price surge came after the Segwit 2x fork was called off. Price on November 8th ~7300. Market let people anticipating the fork as a good thing sell off and then started this latest charge to 20k. Segwit is a second layer scaling solution that allows more transactions per each bitcoin block by reducing the data each transaction requires.

In theory forks are bad because the network security is reduced as the hashing power leaves to go to the new network. In reality, the forks often have little value to miners because the chains are a shitty knock off. The only real Fork of value (BCash) has significant miner support because the people behind it control a significant amount of hashing power. They are against Segwit as it removes their exploit called ASIC Boost. Also, large blocks favour miners like themselves as they are more difficult to mine providing an advantage to the bigger mining operations who can take advantage by mining a block and not broadcasting it to the network immediately, allowing themselves to work on the next block. This increases miner centralization which is bad in the long term, as it would prove to be an easy avenue of attack for governments or other bad actors in the space.

The large block argument comes from previous years where Bitcoin blocks were not full. This meant people could send money for extremely low fees, and the bitcoin miners were happy with the rewards of more bitcoin. Now blocks are full, we are seeing fees rapidly increasing which is where the scaling debate comes from. I believe Bcash will run into problems as their blockchain is moving faster, which means they will reach the next Halfening, the block where bitcoin rewards for mining a block are reduced. You cannot have low fee transactions forever, especially as at some point there will be no rewards for mining a block.

Someone recently made this; https://forkgen.tech A DIY bitcoin fork generator! My favorite option is the angle of the logo.

Just to explain a bit more about why people who are involved in bitcoin typically hate Bcash, apart from things like Asic Boost. Roger Ver, one of the other people behind it, whose been sent to jail for selling bomb making materials in the US previously owns bitcoin.com. Bitcoin.com has a wallet that includes Bitcoin Cash prominently, leading to many noobs mistakenly losing their coins. Many of the companies involved in the space have refused to use scaling solutions like SegWit, whilst continuing to moan about high fees/slow transactions. They also fail to group transactions correctly, increasing fees their consumers pay. BCash has pumped wildly several times, and often in strange circumstances, see the Coinbase addition this week as well as BitHumb going down on the 14th of November at the peak. If this wasn't enough Craig Wright is also on the BCash team, a man who previously claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto the creator of Bitcoin, who couldn't provide any proof, which should be easy as many of the early bitcoin mined we know belong to Satoshi. Roger Ver also allows people to refer to him as Bitcoin Jesus, if that didn't give you enough of an idea what a bellend this guy is.


Links: https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/asicboost-the-reason-why-bitmain-blocked-segwit-901fd346ee9f

https://fork.lol

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/segwit-segregated-witness.asp