Daily Crypto Nooooooz

[jackielove4u]

Clumsy Report on Alcurex and some other exchange stuff

Note 1: there's a GRS-ETH pair on Coinexchange, but the (tiny tiny) volume doesn't show on Coinmarketcap.
Note 2: the GRS-UNO pair on Topia is no more.

Note 3: Hmmm . . . Alcurex says, 'Alcurex is a multi-exchange trading platform . . . '
Wow! It is! I placed an order on Alcurex; it executed; then showed up as 'Bittrex' on Alcurex; then I found it on Bittrex's list of GRS trades. Next, got more info in the troll box: if you're trading on Alcurex, you're also trading on Poloniex, BTC-E, and Bittrex.
Note 4: if I am wrong, please correct me: Alcurex's Twitter, Bitcointalk, and Reddit are all dormant. The troll box is too quiet.
Note 5: Got a reply from Support. Have moved coin on and off. 2FA is not mandatory.


Note 6: what's going on here?: http://pricemycoin.com/currencies/groestlcoin/  I see 'Buy GRS with fiat,' but it seems no.

Note 7: https://cointopay.com/ I have an account with these guys, but haven't used their service yet.

Note 8: 'Lonely Highway Delivery Guy': if you are visiting Krypto HQ at Lake Muir, W.A., you can buy meat and beer with GRS.

Finally, here are our two Chinese exchanges: https://www.btc100.com/ and https://www.yobtc.com/trade/index.shtml?coinId=34

nice notes. you are missing coinpayments payment processor and litebit euro exchange

Extra Note One: dang! Jackie is right: https://www.litebit.eu/en/buy/groestlcoin -- and here I can slip in something I want to say: the description of what sort of food groestl is? that's on Page One of Bitcointalk?  My call would be to delete it, and I mention that here because litebit's description of GRS is a beauty.

Extra Note Two: bingo! https://www.coinpayments.net/supported-coins

Extra Note Three: sigh. Would like to hear how others are faring on Alcurex. I find it so slow and clunky, but I am a hopeless trader. Maybe it's just me.

[jackielove4u]

lol u editted my message instead posting a new one (because ur a mod now).

anyway, can you tell me exactly which sentences needs to be removed so i can pass that forward.

PM sent.

[indiamikezulu]

Where do they get these guys?

When Sheng says, ' . . . the deflationary nature of digital currencies would mean that they would not function well as a currency or medium of exchange in modern economies,' s/he really means, 'There's a guy with a gun standing off-camera, so if I know what's good for me, I'd better say what they told me to!!'

And when Sheng says, 'Bitcoin . . . does not have inherent value,' what s/he really means, 'So many Chinese people mined and bought so many Bitcoin that here I now am in the studio with a guy with a gun standing off-camera!'

And when Wiedmann claims that 'instant bank payments would put an end to most citizens' interest in digital currencies like bitcoin,' what he really means is: 'God, we're incompetent! We didn't see the crash coming in 1929! We didn't see the crash coming in 2008! Under our management, the world is completely and utterly bankrupt out the wazoo! Our security is so bad that pimply-faced geeks in their moms' basements in Outer Botswanistan can hack our systems, and here I am bad-mouthing cryptos because they're faster than our system. I'm such a hypocrite I should rush into the kitchen and drown myself in the sink!'

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-national-currency-economy-collapse/

[indiamikezulu]

https://mobike.com/global/

' . . . we accept all major Credit or Debit Cards and PayPal.'

No particular plug for Mobike here. Just the thought that GRS would be a better fit for this project.

[indiamikezulu]

' . . . there is relatively little virtual currency use among organized crime groups.'

http://www.coindesk.com/eu-report-digital-currency-use-by-organized-criminals-is-rare/

[indiamikezulu]

Guys, there's a time-line of events at the bottom of the article. I'm going over it now, will post again later.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/bitcoin-risks-splintering-as-civil-war-enters-critical-month?cmpid=socialflow-facebook-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

[indiamikezulu]

More on 'Back-Stop Coin'

One idea that I have stuck with is that 2.0 cryptos don't just simply make all 1.0 cryptos redundant.

But through 2016 and into 2017, it wasn't an easy argument to maintain. But today it's not so hard. Check this (Disclaimer: I own heaps of Eth.):

' . . . ICOs have managed to raise ridiculous amounts of money (in Ethereum) through their ICOs. For example, the Cosmos ICO raised $16 million, the Status ICO raised $95 million, and the Bancor ICO raised $153 million.'

https://storeofvalue.github.io/posts/why-is-eth-crashing/

But even this morning, Ethereum is worth eighteen thousand million, though the amounts mentioned in the quotation total less than two hundred. Even ten times that amount shouldn't be so destabilizing.

Next: 'Many don't have anything close to a product except for marketing materials and a well written white paper with fancy graphics.'

This is refreshingly honest.

So, could we say then that NOT having such ICOs is a GOOD thing? I think so. It gives you a crypto-currency/safe-haven of a 'solid' type, which you can use as 'home base,' which you use as a 'back stop.'

[indiamikezulu]

' . . . Bitcoin owners are reluctant to use the cryptocurrency given its rate of appreciation . . . '

https://cointelegraph.com/news/retailers-turn-their-backs-on-booming-bitcoin-trade-magazine

This is unproblematic for us: Once upon a time, we expected early adoption to be followed by mass adoption – it just didn't turn out that way. For a range of reasons.

And all the time – nine years now – I've been avidly following the never-actually-ended GFC. This involves astronomical increases in debt, of which national currencies are a 'manifestation.'

Then Wall Street – always way behind the intellectual curve – begins to realise that cryptos like 'BTC' and 'GRS' are 'hard-capped': the Fed can't print them.

So, for a year or a decade, safe haven will run stronger than mass adoption.

[indiamikezulu]

This from our Slack. Gonna dump it here, and re-read it at dawn:

'Bitcoins always affect prices of other altcoins due to its uncertainty.
What will happen on August 1?
User activated soft fork (UASF) SEGWIT for Bitcoin Improvement proposal it will be live on that date.
CATCH
a POSSIBLE CHAIN SPLIT (RISK).
There will be two BITCOINS:
1. BIP Bitcoin - The New Bitcoin
2. Legacy Bitcoin - Old
-If at any point on or after August 1st, the BIP BTC chain becomes the chain with most accumulated (POW), both BIP BTC nodes as well as Legacy nodes would switch to the BIP BTC chain. The Legacy BTC chain should be discarded, resolving the situation. It would have been a temporary split.
-This means that the Legacy bitcoins can quite literally disappear if the BIP BTC chain overtakes the Legacy BTC chain. Therefore, It's not recommended that you buy or accept any Legacy BTC.
What to do on August 1?
1.) Make sure you don't have any BITCOINS on Exchanges or any Custodial wallet (Coinbase, Coins.ph)
2.) Make sure you own your own wallet where you control your private keys.
3.) Do not send transactions for few days or weeks after the fork happens.
4.) One it's known exactly what happens when the fork is live, make sure to use correct wallets to store correct coins.
5. ) Be patient and hold tight'

[indiamikezulu]

Why is this possible? / What causes a split?


Some of this is a repeat of the text above, but it's good and clear. For a few days, readers, we're just gonna dump any good info here and over at Reddit Groestl Coin (and IndiaMikeZulu has a 'lounge room' on Slack. We'll be following developments closely over there too).


'There is no actual BTC in your Bitcoin wallet: there are only private keys which are used to unlock and then transfer ownership of BTC stored in the Bitcoin system. BTC never actually leaves the Bitcoin system. A split creates a clone of the original cryptocurrency, but with modifications preventing the two cryptocurrencies from actually being the same; after the split, you cannot send coins from one side of the split to the other. After the split, your private key can be used to unlock your coins on both the original system and the modified system.

It's like if someone got their hands on a copy of thegoogle.com database and created super-google.comstarting with the google.com database but with different features. You could use the same login credentials to login at either google.com or super-google.com. But after the clone was created, if you received mail.google.comemail, it would not show up at mail.super-google.com, and vice-versa. Similarly, you can use the same private key to spend money on the original currency or the modified currency, but after the split they diverge.

Anyone can create a split. It only requires a few lines of code changes. But splits only matter if people of economic significance actually use the split (ie. they must run the modified software).

Splits happen in the following situations:

- In a contentious hardfork.
- In a user-activated softfork (UASF) which lacks both majority mining power at the time of activation and near-unanimous support from the economy. If it has one or the other, then a split does not result.
- In a BIP9-style miner-triggered softfork where a very large number of miners are lying about their enforcement of the softfork. (Unlikely.)

What happens to my bitcoins in a split?

It's similar to a stock spin-off. You have x BTC beforehand, and afterward you have both x BTC and x "BTC-X". But very importantly, your wallet will not magically know that it is now able to unlock both currencies. If your wallet is not updated to account for the split, then you will only be able to spend one of the currencies, probably the more "status-quo" one. Another possibility is that your wallet could be updated, but only to support a different currency than it would've otherwise, not to support both. It is not unreasonable for wallets to support only one currency, since they really weren't originally designed/intended to support multiple. But if your wallet only supports one of the currencies, then you will usually end up throwing away some or all of the other currency when you next send coins after the split, as a side-effect of the transaction -- this is called "replay".

Value is unpredictable. Like a stock split or spin-off, you'd vaguely expect the value of BTC immediately before the split to equal the sum of the values of "BTC" and "BTC-X" immediately after the split. But if a split like this is anything close to a 50-50 split (in relation to economic adoption/value, not node or miner adoption), then the whole thing will probably be unbelievably, catastrophically messy, which may result in the combined value crashing. On the other hand, if the minority currency is pretty small and things don't get too messy, the minority side could be speculatively overvalued (similar to altcoins) without affecting the majority side too much, causing the combined value to rise somewhat.

Which side of the split is the real Bitcoin?

That depends on a wide variety of factors, and to some degree it is subjective. The most important factor is which currency people/businesses/exchanges accept: if for example one currency is accepted by 95% of the pre-split economy, and the other is accepted by only 5% of the pre-split economy, then the 95% one is probably truly Bitcoin, and the other one can be considered a Bitcoin-derivedaltcoin. Note that mining power has very little influence here.

Some might say that both currencies post-split are valid incarnations of Bitcoin, but it is my philosophy that only one Bitcoin can exist at any one time; any uncertainty is only a temporary feature, and at least in hindsight there will be a single unbroken path from Satoshi's original Bitcoin to the current one.

What should I do to secure my bitcoins?

First of all, remove all bitcoins possible from banks/exchanges/"hosted wallets". If you can't export your private keys, then you don't actually control the bitcoins. This is a good idea in general, but it's especially important in case of splits. If you're using a Bitcoin bank, then you will have no control over what happens to your coins. Quite possibly, the bank will end up stealing/losing one of the currencies that you should have access to, either through greed/malice or technical incompetence, and the currency they throw away might well be the only one that ends up having any long-term value.

Possible splits are usually predictable some time in advance (see the next section). If in doubt, avoid sending transactions or trusting received transactions 12 hours before and up to a few days after the split time, and check the forum for more news. If a major split happens, I will very likely make a post and news item explaining how to handle the situation. Coins at rest are not at risk.

Generally, after a split:

- If you want to completely ignore (ie. discard) one of the currencies, and your wallet is already set up to ignore that currency, then you don't have to do anything.
- If you want to completely ignore (ie. discard) one of the currencies, and your wallet is set up to support only that currency, then you might be able to change the software's settings after the split, or you might have to switch to different wallet software.
- If you want to use both currencies at the same time or sell one of the currencies, then you will probably have to follow a somewhat-complicated series of steps possibly involving running some extra software in order to cleanly split your coins and eliminate the possibility of replay.

What are SegWit, BIP148, UASFs, and "UAHF", and how do they relate to this? / When might a split happen?

SegWit is a set of changes to Bitcoin which increases the max block size, among other improvements. Under its initial BIP141/BIP9 deployment plan, there is almost no chance of a split.

A user-activated softfork (UASF) is a general method of deploying softforks (like SegWit). UASFs have been done in the past, both by Satoshi and after Satoshi left. Unlike the BIP9 deployment method originally planned for SegWit, a UASF does not require any miner cooperation. A UASF can fail, but only through insufficient economic adoption, not by any miner action. However, splits are more likely with UASFs than with BIP9 deployments, especially when the UASF is done on a compressed schedule. (For ideally-low split risk, a UASF would take about a year to activate.)

BIP148 is one specific UASF. It is intended to activate SegWit. It activates and may cause a split on August 1. If it succeeds economically, it will activate SegWit by November.

The large Bitcoin miner Bitmain announced that they might engage in a (nonsensically-named) "user activated hardfork" ("UAHF") shortly after BIP148 activates if BIP148 has any success. This would definitely cause an additional split, resulting in up to three currencies: BIP148-Bitcoin, Bitmain-coin, and (depending on the degree of BIP148's success) status-quo-Bitcoin. As mentioned previously, if you have x BTC before the split, you'll be technically able to claim x of all three of these currencies after the split.

The next time when a split is predicted to possibly happen is therefore August 1, 2017 at midnight UTC.'

[indiamikezulu]

'Outside' influences on cryptos: https://cointelegraph.com/news/ari-paul-tuur-demeester-look-forward-to-up-to-1k-bitcoin-fees

In-house influences on cryptos: http://www.coindesk.com/segwit2x-boycott-bitcoins-uasf-isnt-backing-august-deadline/

[indiamikezulu]

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-miss-first-bip-148-deadline/

[indiamikezulu]

'The prospect that further interest rate rises may well be much more gradual, if they happen at all, shouldn't have been entirely unexpected given the risks involved in trying to withdraw stimulus and raise rates at the same time . . . '

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2017/jul/14/investors-cheered-as-us-rate-hike-expectations-fade-business-live?page=with:block-59686305e4b0a11877b39f1e#block-59686305e4b0a11877b39f1e

' . . . the Fed maintained it would be a "considerable time" after the end of quantitative easing before they would hike the Federal Funds Rate.' -- this was late 2014, about two-and-a-half years ago. But the cynics have been saying bluntly, since 2009, that the global economy would end up in an unholy bog of low inflation/low interest rates/low growth/open-ended on-and-off QE. Well, so far, the predictions of the cynics have been the most accurate.


https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2014/10/29/fed-cuts-monthly-asset-purchases-to-0-as-qe-comes-to-long-awaited-end/#266ded5572c1

[indiamikezulu]

But on the lighter side

'The Bank of Italy is receiving communications from some of the citizens attesting to the autonomous creation of "scriptural euros" and the use of the so-called "created" sums for the alleged payment of debts . . . '

Awesome! Go, those folks!

http://evokeagents.blogspot.com.au/2017/06/bank-of-italy-creation-of-scriptural.html

[indiamikezulu]

Interesting article:

'Our team, experienced in penetration tests on cryptocurrency stock exchange, currency exchange and other FinTech businesses . . . '

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@w4cky/how-we-hacked-yet-another-cryptocurrency-stock-exchange


[Got a reply, from an IT guy, at our Lounge Room:

''pen testing' is network security testing. it covers technical and social aspects of locating and securing weak points in a network. as well as testing for unsecured network ports or buggy applications that allow 'backdoor' entry, it also tests staff protocols. a common test is to drop a few nondescript usb flash drives around the staff car park in the hope a staff member will pick one up and insert it into a work computer. their curiosity will get it inserted and then the hidden malware will do its thing on the network.' ]