Swashbucklin' some Coin -- Yo Ho

My adventures shifting my funds into the cryptocurrency world 

[swashcoin]

Become a "Moonshibe"!

Very well done my fellow shibe! You’ve come this far and now you are only one click away from bringing you closer to the moon! 

I decided to pledge to this silly buy and hold thing, since i am already holding Doge what the hell. It is possible one day crytpos of all flavours will be all the rage and prices will spin up but if not, no big deal.

[swashcoin]

CLICK HERE to support ProTip - Peer to Peer Tipping for the Web

A digital wallet in the browser that rewards online creators for their work | Crowdfunding is a democratic way to support the fundraising needs of your community. Make a contribution today!

Also possible to directly fund this initiative with a bitcoin donation

1ProTip9x3uoqKDJeMQJdQUCQawDLauNiF

which you can verify as listed on their Indiegogo page, but you can see they crafted the wallet address to show ProTip at front of sequence. These are people who have been working on ideas to push good aspects of bitcoin culture and find a way to make a career. Their point seems to be this, to automate it so the person who donates only has to do it weekly and they can see where they spent their time, and bitcoin addresses are picked up from those websites. Then all the transactions are bundled so its just one tiny fee to send many tips - that means if you only donated 50c split 10 ways most people would get almost everything because only a few cents would be done for all the tips rather than per address. 

Weekly auto-tipping which is private and you just load a little into your tipping wallet, all goes to the artists. They often have to get 10,000 or more visitors to their websites before internet advertising starts to give them anything they can really pay for the costs and time - probably 10 or 100 times that. Whereas with tipping just 50-100 followers who tip would likely be far more effective in funding regularly (assuming they then could make time to create more often their materials). if you tip people it may mean they can make more of what you enjoy seeing and that is a world changing idea - then they may be able to remove conventional advertisers  or sponsors from the equation and be more free to be themselves.

[swashcoin]

Found it, bought a fair bit today, It's on an upward tear, which is usually a bad time if you're a trader but I'm not. This teenager in front looked like he bought a whole bitcoin B-)

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Searching

For the Australian bitcoin Atm, I am there according to Google maps but not seen it yet. By the way, just read that Kuwait will sell oil for bitcoin, holy crap.

[swashcoin]

Invitation to try Bitcoin

Experiments in reality -- Step 1. Find a bitcoin exchange - Australia, Europe, USA, Asia they all have them -- Step 2. Figure out how to send money to it -- Step 3. Purchase bitcoin - perhaps just $20-$30 (now you own some Bitcoin) -- Step 4. Get yourself a wallet online (blockchain.info) or on your phone (airbitz) -- Step 5. In the future you'll be able to buy something - you can already from many large companies, particularly in the information technology industry.

I am writing this because i research various things, to attempt to benefit people, and the dharma. Honestly, many of my things appear weird but i have a very good track record of seeing the writing on the wall. I have been programming computers since i was 11 years old, and i completed a B Sc in computer science. I am an avid internet user, it is my speciality. What is happening right now is just like when the internet started to go main-stream. Deceptively simple thing that has wide reaching consequences. Software written to benefit everyone - open, freely offered, lovingly maintained, tested, secured, improved to solve everyday issues. After the last big financial crash some very clever people did bring together the best of internet and create something unstoppable - that is called "disruptive" because it can't help but get adopted and used to build things - applications, systems that replace what was used before.

Banks were once holding assets, giving some money to people with good business ideas, paying people interest. They became something different - something that is more parasitic, that makes life harder and reaches deeply into governments. That is a tool to fund all kinds of unspeakable government growth into strange areas of insane military power, surveillance - much of which is only to fuel economic war. Many stories tell of how wars were really fought for great financial risk and reward and banks were behind it because it literally was done on a scale and price never heard of before the great world wars. Central reserve banking was the great tool to fuel this - and war always involves issuing pay, bonds, to cover. I am no expert but i hear this from a lot of directions and it sounds far more reasonable and in tune with history than anything else.

Many people, even though they don't understand how it works or what it is feel this is the first time they actually owned something. Why? Its very technical, mathematical ... its numbers, in electronic form - why would they feel it is like really owning something? Perhaps it is because its not issued by a government or subject to a bank who will just be able to freeze your account. In such cases, you have a very limited currency token - its really not yours - its really the banks and/or government money. That might seem to you now to be safe, reliable ... but is it?

Money is subject to a lot of inflation these days, and its going to get worse and accelerate in many countries due to the rapid, printing of money to "stimulate" the economy (to inflate). That robs the buying power of our savings, and is your bank keeping up with that in interest? How about fees, how about your travel and its frozen because you are in a foreign country to protect you from fraud. Things are starting to slide toward banks offering nothing but a problem for you. Banks allow you to pay electronically right - well, that is approaching free now, using bitcoin you pay just a few cents and only when you send some bitcoin to someone else. You won't find a cheaper way than using bitcoin, or another coin based on the same technology. The network that transfers the value safely is owned by all its users collectively and it rejects attempts to be taken control of by one group by design. So now Banks and Credit Card companies offer a service that is dramatically noncompetitive and thus doomed to obsolescence. At some point things are going to inevitably move into another financial crisis but this time the bubble is BIG - much bigger by all accounts than in 2008 where the US barely could afford (or perhaps couldn't) to bail out certain banks. The banks that were too big to fail did fail. In fact apparently there aren't many big banks left in the US now, only a few. Is that because of mergers or because a lot of banks have failed. There may be many small banks spread around the country but the larger ones are few. The amount of money in circulation in the US has been expanded by 4.5 Trillion recently and more details are here http://www.theguardian.com/…/us-federal-reserve-end-quantit…

So, why Bitcoin, well its an escape hatch - learn it now - get a few. It is where most of the investment, IT expertise, and new start-ups are now. Big investment in venture capital, university clubs and general concensus that this is the most under-rated super technology that really is world changing. We can't say internet and websites didn't change things - this is to organisations, finance, banking as internet was to snail mail, advertising, media communications, telephones ... etc. Industry all completely converted leaving only a small remnant of companies - those who adapted leaving those who failed to adapt irrelevant. Such is the hard to deny level of sophistication of a peer to peer, decentralized way to send units of value to trade, pay, purchase or support crowdfunding. It could change elections, company structures, shares, asset management, trading and its very programmable this new money as well as beyond borders. It is invincible unless everyone is convinced the world over to change to a new version of software - if anyone tries that out the software has a way of rejecting any corruption, if people try to modify who owns an amount or change the data that is also rejected.

So get some, and sit with it, just own a bit and you will see the world change rapidly and you will feel part of that. You will be the change and things will find a new way that in all probability reduces the problems we have with the current ever more inefficient, insecure, unfriendly banks and governments manipulated paper that is beginning to lose value way faster than your salary and cost of living grow!

[swashcoin]

This is the most lucid and damning commentary on alleged leaked emails detailing business inner working at GAW miner.

Today i also discovered i was certainly shadow banned for questioning announcements and comments by Josh Garza account on Hashtalk.org

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GAW comes to the end of many it's supporters patience.

Recently GAW miners and its CEO Josh Garza have continued a long series of failure to deliver on promises. Now its opponents have unleashed a stinging article about emails that are leaked and apparently verifiable as signed by the DKIM key related to the email domain used by staff of GAW miners. Counter denial and accusation that these emails have had their contents edited - including from people in the email who say they received the originals keep bad press once again uncertain. So slowly the supporters and community dwindle but many stick it out to see if Paycoin XPY and its related ecosystem mature into a functional tradeworthy coin for merchants and buyers to use.

There is a lot i could say in the negative but i try to just say that this is where its at - people still waiting. There are serious annoyances in the form of a locked up Zencloud mining website where the XPY i have invested pays out daily for stake holders. Its been a week since i could withdraw and only very vague statements about risks, hack attempts, database verification and "soon" keep coming. I heard today that Paycoin deposits are working again, great, how about withdrawal - thats kind of more important isn't it. So ... we wait, we wait for the "give me two weeks to get this done" that the CEO last said about the ongoing saga of either the Honour program to buyback paycoin or the Mastercard XPY linked debit-card to spend XPY openly via normal credit card networks. 

It's been an ugly saga of attack from critics and scam callers - talk of investigations by SEC in the US. The websites running these stories tend to be fringe crypto-currency websites and blogs - so its hard to know if facts were checked. I will say that the surviveability of GAW miners in this environment of negative press has been unexpectedly long. I have written on the forums that things start to smell fishy because of the long lockout of the website being just like when other Cryptocurrency businesses have gone bad and blamed it on getting hacked. Later same businesses tended to be accused of stealing their own funds by draining BTC wallets. So that was what my prediction was after being a strong defender of patience and "wait and see" attitude and time invested on hashtalk.org - the forums created and used by GAW and its customers but open to all Cryptocurrency interested individuals. That forum has been easier to enjoy than radical and mindless negativity and insults on other forums where moderation is not in play.

I have never been censored that i have noticed, and my reputation on hashtalk is relatively good. So thats where we are. I wrote of my investments with GAW miners long ago - i made about 60% ROI - could have gotten more if i pulled out earlier. I was kind of drawn in by the conversion of unprofitable cloud mining products into the XPY "hashstakers". Those lock up money in their staking "wallets" until the term is over - which is pretty dodgy seeming. The idea is that many elements such as making the XPY quite scarce were going to help it stabilise at $20US value. A lot more XPY was mined during the short POW phase than i think GAW expected - people abolutely hammered it even if GAW had quite a few petahash of SHA256 to compete with. I even remember someone getting a block solo mining with their wallet when they just started the blockchain. So the market became a frenzy of selling of POW mined XPY and the value never really made it to the target. What was surprising was just how long it took to decline though, very slow value correction rather than usual shitcoin dump and death. So GAWs XPY has been very different because of the trust of it's community and this was a truth that was known and talked up by Josh Garza.

I do wonder how much XPY GAW has sold off though - because selling off tokens/units of XPY that you basically created out of thin air - thats shitcoin ponzi. XPY was a massive pre-mine, MASSIVE, and any coin that did that was completely untrustworthy to a lot of the wider cryptotrading community. That was locked up in special high interest paying Prime Controllers that GAW was going to sell to distribute the ownership to many people. That part has always been kind of secretive with just random facts about one or two prime controller owners. Like many of their statements and announcements its very slippery to say if they are doing the right thing or simply trying to make the appearance of the right thing. Regular statements and announements tended to revitalise buying up of the XPY on markets. This is a great demonstration that will be the example of how a company can start their own coin and be charismatic and maintain its life for an extended part of a year - because at this point the good will to see this through to mainstream adoption seems way too unlikely.

Thats my story, of me and my following so far of XPY summarized. Worth the money in life-lessons alone.

[swashcoin]

The GAW paycoin saga

For me the last 2 or more weeks have been a bit of a ride. People all speculating, evaluating and buying in or bailing out with the GAW miners and Zencloud mining scene.

I only invested to be part of the ride, and i doubled down - converted everything to go with the new strategy to make a paycoin ecosystem for mining via proof of stake and trading.

I am participating a lot in Hash talk and occasionally i look at the hate/sceptic angle. The sceptics are mostly called out as trolls and thats relatively justified as they don't really produce any fact or logical criticism that stands. Many of them openly express harsh sentiments toward the CEO of GAW who they even say has another name.

Meanwhile back in Hashtalk and GAW, Zencloud things moved very fast and furiously. XPY - GAW's paycoin (as another earlier paycoin existed) wallet and a proof of work mining phase for a remaining amount beyond the 12million premined for investors and mining customers. Those 500,000 (exact number unknown of coins held a good price - it is flagging as it is mined furiously. A lot want to hold it as it will be propped up by a $20 a coin trade rate when GAWs paybase becomes operational.

There is so much you could speculate but this is the basics of it. A lot of the hashlet products were available to upgrade or "reserve wallet" for PoS stakeholding at an accelerated rate. This is really the only path towards possible profitability GAW had. So on one hand, so far GAW has operated in good faith - but on the other many of their announcements are vague and point more to what may be allowed or is expected rather than have any kind of genuine guarantee. That is why many customers stay, because the promise is hopeful and guarantees are worthless anyway in this kind of business.

GAW has bought various companies - they released a PaySave browser plugin announcement. Some were critical because it had testimonials before its really released. It is an existing product known in an earlier incarnation as Zincsave. I think the business rules, currencies and way it saves (via cheaper processing instead of via coupons autoapplied) shows it will be half new and half old in design and coding. Sceptics called it out as a sham - but that kind of assumes many things and they were unable to really posit any kind of reason why that would be so. So its more like another product people look forward to try and use. Something that can turn around the likelyness that claims of being able to use paycoin to make purchases with amazon, walmart and other companies. The plugin creates some kind of middle man effect that creates an additional pay button on certain vendors sites - that is what i believe was explained but i can't verify that without getting real access.

There is talk that only verified customers will be able to trade Paycoin at $20 or whatever the real price they set turns out to be. It does need to be close to $20 to justify the sales (revenue) generated for Hashstakers - in a pre-sale because those will generate between 0.75 and 0.9 XPY over 3 months. That means if the value of Paycoin is not maintained those are already in danger of not returning ROI and profit in terms of the $USD price of 9.95 to 11.95 that they were sold at in the last weeks.

So its a very wild and big thinking push to really get a coin off to a promising start and make mining work for smaller and larger investors alike. Most customers seem to be aware that it could be a failure but also realise it is up to the customers to make it a success. If customers lose heart and the business doesn't take off then the customers also stand a risk of lose their investment.

Its probably worthwhile buying XPY at todays lower prices - it has been going for between 0.03 and 0.05 over the first days but today some exchanges have it at under 0.02. This is a big operation so there is a higher than the usual chance paycoin will gain. The operations of GAW seek to stabilise the price and control the supply/demand relationship such that there is a stable profitability to stakehold (Proof of Stake) mine the coin.

[swashcoin]

Found Hash poetry on Hashtalk

We few, We happy few.

When asked why he doesnt sell his Primes the Hasher said.

What’s he that wishes so? My hasher, Hashmoreland? No, my fair hasher; If we are mark’d to fail, we are enow To do our Crypto loss; and if to hash, The fewer men, the greater share of Bitcoin. God’s will! I pray thee, sell not one hashlet more. By Jove, I am not covetous for gold, Nor care I who doth feed upon my hashes; It yearns me not if hashlets their profits wane; Such outward things dwell not in my desires. But if it be a sin to covet Bitcoin, I am the most offending soul alive. No, faith, my hashers, wish not a hashet to sell. God’s peace! I would not lose so great a Bitcoin As one man more methinks would share from me For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more! Rather proclaim it, Hashmoreland, through my host, That he which hath no stomach to this Currency, Let him depart; his hashlets shall be bought, And Fiat for cashout put into his purse; We would not hash in that man’s company That fears his investment to fail with us. This day is call’d the feast of hashian. He that ROI’s this day, and comes safe Profit, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d, And rouse him at the name of hashian. He that shall ROI this day, and see Profit, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say “To-morrow is Saint hashian.” Then will he strip his screen and show his hashlets, And say “These hashlets I had on hashian’s day.” Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember, with advantages, What hashes he bought that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words- Josh the HashKing, Volder and Craig, Jmordica and Zen_eric, Amber and Vcollective- Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red. This story shall the good hasher teach his son; And Hashin Hashian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered- We few, we happy few, we band of Hashers; For he to-day that Hashes his coin with me Shall be a Hasher; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in the world now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they did not invest, And hold their Fiat cheap whiles any speaks That Hashed with us upon Saint Hashin’s day.

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Modern art homage/rippoffs at 4 bitcoin for one.

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Guerrilla ATMs

Ok - something Nerd glorious - as a public service to show whats happening.

Bitcoin is migrating back and forth with the money people know $, euro, yen etc but some governments threaten it. There are people creating "guerrilla ATMs" or portable bitcoin (or other coin) vending machines. So you can have a meetup with people who WANT TO DEAL with bitcoin, spending, receiving, trading and you can sell onsite at the current rate bitcoin receiving the local currency. This is tech you could go home and build!

http://bitcoinmacroeconomics.com/2014/10/10/blocktech-demo-ammo-can-crypto-atm/

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Mastercoin and Omniwallet beta

After hearing on a youtube from Hashers United conference about Mastercoin i was playing with their beta. I transfered in $2 worth of btc 0.005 and since then i couldn’t get it out or trade internally for their mastercoins. So it is hardly beta, more like pre-alpha. Beta indicates some level of functionality. It can read the blockchain sure, but i bet that isn’t their code. Most of their code is unfinished or buggy, or both. Idea is sound though, they hope to be offering Bitcoin 2.0 services - i think it is a bit soon to wank on with such hype. Bitcoin feels itself like 0.8 version so its not ready for some start up to make 2.0. I guess if they are veterans in the industry of 2-3 years maybe they could say that. Whatever, just be warned if you play with Omni wallet not to put in too much. I just wanted to snap up a few master coin on their market - beta is often very functional and so i would love to be trading in there while its early days. Now i am a beta tester reporting bugs to their market trying to get my $2 of BTC back lol

[swashcoin]

This Blog is not just copying other links X11 and Scrypt-n mining alt-coins - hold them and see if they gain value.

While it could be nice to have a link feed on bitcoin, I am writing my own personal journey of discovery, fun and entertainment. To me it is a bit like playing some old "railroad tycoon" game. People think they might get rich, well they might, but if it was that easy the money would be divided over everyone else who heard. That is what we see now, a game of diminishing returns and impermanence.

I still mine with my tiny rig of USB miners. I was running a few video cards too but that became fairly pitiful of late - my once huge deluge of dogecoin now is just nothing. Days and days might only get me 300 doge. I see a lot of sad youtube videos where people called it quits with their home made mining rig - having got in too late. Perhaps the electricity bills were too high - this is why i tend just to use computers and graphics cards i have operating anyway since i have a network of computers i use for video streaming and other tasks. I have computer power i can, within reason, repurpose. I am not so greedy as to buy 6 video cards and use the electricity.

So i investigated, mostly thanks to Multipool.us being such a comprehensive pool, using X11 and Scrypt-n.

If you turned off your mining Rig or you heard nVidia cards are no good, look at X11 mining. Search it out - i have ccminer running x11 (cudaminer i had before for scrypt). A card that had trouble getting 400khash now gets 2000khash - at least of that X11 kind of hash. People report less heat from the video card, that means less chance of it getting killed off sooner by mining burn-out. Less heat means less electricity burned - but still i am not sure if it really pulls less electricity since my card is at 99% GPU usage.

X11 via Multipool has been earning me Darkcoin and Urocoin which it seems the pool deems most profitable. I believe i will try to hold these coins until later.

Scrypt-n - using the Scrypt:2048 algorithm option on cudaminer is mining a little Vertcoin for me. I followed this guide to some degree http://give-me-coins.com/support/n-scrypt-guide/

These algorithms are designed to prevent coins from being pwned by the central mining companies and their ridiculous ASIC based farms. Some mining companies still use a lot of video cards so soon cloud-mining will be available, but why isn't it available yet for X11 and Scrypt-n - probabaly because its not poor return enough for them to "share" ie contract it out to you. They always keep it for themselves until they need to get a quick ROI by contracting it out.

Probably not so immediately profitable but these are coin you could hold and if you prefer the mining way than the trading way. Though if you are going to hold perhaps buy some

What if you stopped this because house/room was too hot. Well with northern hemisphere winter hitting soon, you can instead of using other energy or heaters - use your rig as a heater. Then you get some 2 things for the price of one effect - this is in the world of design (even permaculture farming) - known as making use of the waste product.

[swashcoin]

Testing Zeus Hash (and others)

So there was a giveaway for new sign-ups to Zeushash of 1Gh/s of SHA256 and 0.1Mh/s of Scrypt. It was a VERY slow sign up because the confirm emails got stuck in spam ... but eventually i set up my account and added Google Authenticator.

The site is extremely simplistic, one of my pet hates, elegant does not mean retarded. On the other hand you can see your per-block income.

They don't seem to explain their overheads but i read somewhere that for SHA256 it is 3c per Gh/s which seems unrealistic and very bad for profit. That is reflected in the tiny income for bitcoin mining - even if it is admittedly a free GH.

The Trade Menu allows you to buy more mining contracts, lifetime, like Genesis, ZenCloud and others - but if there is an advertised overhead it isn't where i have found it yet. I read in another review about their high electricity costs. So many cloudmining rental companies seek to rip you off, they want to get their guaranteed cut and leave you the leftovers. It is expected for them to make money sure, but if they play on ignorance and hype this shows they have no long-term business acumen. They don't admit they are uncompetitive in the market or no promise to reduce the overheads as the others have said they would.

So, i think it would be very, very slow to ROI your mining contract investment with Zeus. Only worthwhile if you bet on them getting their shit together in future and remaining (becoming) competitive. I may buy a few Mh of Scrypt Litecoin mining and keep my eye on them but only if i get some cryptocurrency spare to play with.

Zeus is another company who i guess see the evolution of manufacturer to cloudmining offer. What we need to know is if they have competitive mining hardware coming in future - i have a feeling somehow they are struggling there.

[swashcoin]

Still buying into Cloud Mining

My current strategy is to diversify holdings of Cloud Mining contracts.

Find a couple of other companies that are somewhat fair with their maintenance and/or electrical charges and have some competence.

I am still buying contracts little by little - i haven't found any serious issues yet with GAW miners/ZenCloud and Genesis Mining. Both offer somewhat buggy websites but they do a great job considering how fast they had to get up and running and continue to innovate products.

Recently the value of Bitcoin, and the Altcoins which are mostly valued by comparison to Bitcoin went to freefall. All this trading i actually had more profitable days! I believe this is because more blocks were mined because blocks are made up of transfer transactions. Now its settling and recovering its previous value.

You may have read about the 30,000 bitcoin @$US300 sell wall seen on one of the exchanges. It didn't drop the value of bitcoin, it was gobbled right up - i think this was a time of people re-evaluating trust in bitcoin. A certain number sold because they were short term investors, once they were out it started to recover. I can only think the sale price of 300 when the value was still at 330-340 was because either they tried to drop the market value OR they needed 9 million dollars quickly.

Whatever happened i feel it was a good show, good time to watch how the mind reacts greedily to tiny lost profits - which was wrong because mining produced more even if bitcoin bills for electricity were higher. I feel this also shows that when more daily sales are processed through bitcoin merchants getting more wide spread, mining will get a small boost. So bitcoin mining has a good outlook for the next few months.

People talk about the new generation of hardware ASICs about to land impacting the difficulty of mining. We'll see ...

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Waiting for Bitcoin to move after a whale dumped a sell order of 31000 bitcoins @$300 each

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WTF Reddit Gold

Some kind of crypto or digital gold you can buy with Reddcoin from a bot - in Reddit i guess ...

Welcome to ReddCoinGoldBot Wiki!

This bot will allow you to buy Reddit Gold using ReddCoin. You can also send Reddit Gold to another Reddit user using this bot.

------

I found that while looking at the reddcoin roadmap - where  they are really developing a lot of changes with Reddcoin - taking features from other coin code such as Etherium ...

Crypto"currency" is thus not as much a currency as an application platform and database, with apps (wallets), mining/keeping track (could be in wallet or not), programability, rules.

Reddit is adding the ability to add some id, avatar, contact info into coin. So i guess the tipping community tools are going to be able to show where coin came from while keeping coin potentially anonymous (or the opposite - if you want to be known)

That's my gist of what i read, but in these days of absolutely hopeless journalism my blogging seems to often be at least honest that i am just trying to understand. I see people putting forth stories based on pure conjecture, inexperience and assumption which you can't necessarily detect other than when you find someone writing a rebuttle or disagreeing comment under such articles.

Main point, i just found Redgold and WTF = i really don't know but can only surmise it is another "fun" asset for playing around with in reddit that may gain value i guess if you can buy and sell it (which i believe you can at least on Reddit where the bot is that accepts and gives Reddcoin.

I once read about future beings made of code that spawned children by building out a new being with different parts of themselves and things/ideas they had. Those beings use pict language - i guess something between Memes and Icons or Heiroglyphs --- but they sent them very fast to each other rather than using sound or verbal speech.

So child coins are spawned from blockchain ancestors with innovation from the parent developers. The coins lifeforce is the energy we put into valuing and trading, owning and cherishing or hating them.