Separatists, Central banks, and Strange New Currencies

I currently am enrolled in a microeconomics course on money. In this class, I can't help question if physical currency will exist in the future. I think it may very well not. A possible indicator of this comes from the REPUBLIC VENETA. This separatist group has indicated that they will issue their own digital currency. This currency has a major difference from other currencies like bitcoin because it will also have a central bank. This is such a major deviation from typical cryptocurrencies, I hesitate to even call this Venetian digital currency a cryptocurrency.

This declaration brings some questions to mind. One being, how can a decentralized currency have a central bank? In normal cryptocurrencies, blocks are solved and rewards are given to miners. This is how coins come to be. However, a central bank also has the ability to create and regulate currency. This makes the supply of money potentially less stable, at least from the perspective of people besides the central bank. One perk of most cryptocurrencies is that the supply of bitcoin at a future date is quite predictable. Whereas, the supply of US dollars, for example, is in a way, up to the whims of the Federal Reserve.

According to their website, the Venetian Central bank will also be able to  “... purchase public securities issued by the Venetian Government, always paying with the digital currency.” This practice is known as quantitative easing. This practice can increase the supply of money in an economy, as securities are traded for what is, in essence, cash.

A final note that that is interesting is the following statement: “Moreover, the Venetian citizens who will demonstrate their efforts as activists for the Venetian Republic, will be rewarded receiving a proportional amount of digital currency, in according to the service provided.” I wonder what exactly they mean by this and what services they want. Only time will tell.

Woes of Cryptsy

My money might be stuck in Cryptsy. Everyone says not to keep your money in an exchange. It’s a known fact you shouldn’t do it. Just like how everyone should know you need to backup your wallet. But have I used an unbacked up wallet? Yes, and I learned my lesson. Have I kept money in an exchange longer than I needed to? Well yes, that is true as well, and I might now be paying the price.

For a few months now people on Reddit have been warning of the dangers of Cryptsy, and encouraging people to not use the exchange. It seems that they were right. The exchange has just recently put up this message on their site.

In essence, it describes that one of the altcoin wallets they used had a trojan that stole roughly 13,000 BTC and  300,000 LTC. Depending on the exchange rate at the time, it is about $6 million dollars (using 400 for BTC and 3 for LTC). This event happened over a year ago.

Like a bank, Cryptsy didn’t actually need to have all its bitcoins on hand to in order to continue to operate. As long as it had enough for day-to-day operations, it could get by. However, as I mentioned before, many people raised questions about Cryptsy and its ability to continue to operate. This in essence caused a run on the bank. For the past few weeks bitcoin withdrawals have been restricted, and now the entire site seems to be stopped. Fortunately, I got most of my assets off the exchange. I just have a few fragments of a bitcoin that are stuck.

Another writer has provided a more in-depth analysis if you are interested, which can be viewed here.

The Return of the Bitcoin

I recently got a new desktop computer. With windows 10 now out, I thought I would upgrade my laptop to windows 10. But before this, I wanted to ensure that I could use my wallet backups correctly. I previously had encrypted my wallets in a 7 zip file, and had that 7 zip file saved to a few locations, a portable hard drive, a thumb drive, a Google drive, etc. I thought this would be a flawless system, as I used a strong password and the encryption should keep out any predators. The only issue that came was, I forgot the wallet encryption password. Oh dear.

I saved some of the wallets, I still had in still in use, but I was missing some.

In fact, enough time passed that I managed to forget the password to this set as well, despite my password hint.

At this point I decided to try my first brute force attack. I downloaded a program to crack my password. I soon realized that this method would take, more or less, forever. The program does very specific things very well. For example, if you lost a 3 digit all numbers pin, it would be ok for that. Fortunately, I realized I saved my password in my password vault. So after much worrying and quite a bit of effort, the great crisis was averted.

Free dogecoin offer to newcomers

If you have been following my blog for a while, but haven't yet got any dogecoin for yourself, now is a great time to do it! Follow this link for an article that gives step by step directions to get 400 dogecoin totally free, for a very short amount of time.

http://bitcoinnewschannel.com/2015/12/31/giving-dogecoin-to-spread-the-word-about-cryptocurrency/


Happy New Year and to the moon!

Video: Life in a Chinese Bitcoin Mine

I found this very interesting video on life in a bitcoin mine in china. The video actually taught me a few things, one of which is that bitcoin is legal in China for ordinary citizens. This misconception isn't all that surprising considering China's love of censorship; after all, even Facebook is blocked in China. This site, gives more detail about bitcoin's legal status in China. Anyways, enjoy!

Mining again?

The last time I mined was way back in in January of 2014. I actually didn't get anything for it either. The blocks for bitcoin were too difficult.

This time, I have mined a more feline cryptocurrency, Nyancoin to be exact. I used the QT wallets integrated miner. I downloaded minerd here. From here ( I think, I had to google it again) I jumped on http://xpool.net . http://xpool.net as the Server, 8870 as the port, and my wallet as the username. I also set my type to pool mining, as I actually wanted to get something, as opposed to playing the crypto lottery. ( as you may know, solo mining means you have to solve a whole block on your own.

The mining had minimal results and in a few hours I got maybe ⅓ of a nyancoin. I also mined this morning for a few hours and got ¼ of a nyancoin. Overall, it is very slow progress. I have a pretty well made computer, and I get 24 kilohash/ second on average. But to truly get meaningful results, I would need to buy an ASIC.

I also only mined when the difficulty was quite low. The difficulty was at 3.3 at one point and I could not get any shares ( shares are a proof of work, and more shares when a block is solved means you will get more of the reward). With bitcoin, my shares never added up high enough to actually get any bitcoin sent to my wallet. With Nyan however, this was not the case.

Overall, it was fun to actually mine something! I recommend trying it out!

Qoinpro review

Nearly two years ago, I signed up with qoin pro. The idea behind the site is you get free cryptos daily. This sounds great but, the site gives so little crypto, you will never actually get anything.

My balance for coins I actually care about are next to nothing. Worst yet, the withdrawal fees are so high I can’t get anything.

BitCoin

BTC

0.00002060774

0.00000002630

59.00%

0.00000004182

Your BitCoin balance:	0.00002060 BTC
Minimum transaction fee:	0.00010000 BTC
Minimum amount:	0.00015500 BTC

DogeCoin

DOGE

1.12645061934

0.00197690616

59.00%

0.00314328079

Your DogeCoin balance:

1.12645061 DOGE

Minimum transaction fee:

4.00000000 DOGE

Minimum amount:

1.34615384 DOGE

Maximum you can send:

0.00000000 DOGE

LiteCoin

LTC

0.00041519675

0.00000036252

59.00%

0.00000057641

Your LiteCoin balance:	0.00041519 LTC
Minimum transaction fee:	0.00100000 LTC
Minimum amount:	0.00126390 LTC
Maximum you can send:	0.00000000 LTC

They do make some cool banners.

You can even sign up under me here. Although, there isn't really a point.

Below is the front page.

I love the nonsense of this page. “Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe”

What does that have do to with anything? There is no interest involved in this site at all.

In short, while Qoinpro is not a scam per se ( be careful of the daily coins you need to pay to unlock. They basically will never return their value [those kind of are a scam]) it won't make you any money. I suppose you would have better luck with facuets.

On a final final note, some of the altcoins are actually withdraw-able, like Feathercoin. But I don't really have an interest in that at this time.