This is fresh right out of the oven. Popular cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex has halted all transactions on BTC until BIP91 goes through. This is in anticipation of the mass selling of BTC than many pundits have predicted in the coming week. Now it also seems like my plan to go in for BTC at the 11th hour hoping for a incredibly low price might be foiled. I'm just going to have to get my Bitcoin from other exchanges.
In other news, the digital soap opera seems to have come to a nice ending as miners and users hold hands and come to an agreement on the direction to take, ending an impasse that has ran for way too long. Moving forward, we will be looking at a short runway of ups and ups, with fresh investors coming on board in the next wave looking for a pot of gold at the end of the cryptocurrency rainbow. This, I believe is the beginning of the final lap before the bubble finally goes boom, in 2019. If you just got onboard the crypto train, hold on tight, this is gonna be one hellava ride. This is your captain Eugene Tay, The Alpha Mind signing out. You know the drill, subscribe, like and share. Don't get left behind.
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I personally believe that cryptocurrency is the future and, like it or not, it's going to be the biggest talking point for the next three years; but don't just take my word for it - I caught up with Bob Ang, one of Singapore's pioneer in cryptocurrency trading, when Bitcoin was just worth barely a hundred dollars. It's not inconceivable for Bitcoin to hit 5,000 USD per BTC by the end of 2017 or mid 2018. If you have heard about cryptocurrency but haven't yet got behind the wheels, it's time you subscribe to my channel and get your regular dose of crypto news. Don't get left behind. The cryptocurrency hype and bubble isn't a new thing for me. I've seen it through the dot com bubble during the time I was a student and hopeful of my future. The bubble burst just as I graduated and I found myself holding an expensive certificate for an industry that people were getting out of. As a network engineer majoring in programming, I found my hourly rate was $2.20. I remember telling the interviewer that 7-11 paid more and he nodded emphatically. Your grandpa would probably remember the 1929 Wall Street Crash if he was still around. That was the beginning of a 12 year long depression. The signs were similar: excessive speculation, followed by a mini crash as investors started to sell stocks at a rapid pace, exposing the market's shaky foundation. Confidence dipped. People panic. Boom. Every toppled over like a house of cards. I'm willing to bet my left ball that cryptocurrency is headed the same way. The early movers, the risk takers, the visionaries, will be the one to make their new fortune. Wealth changes hands. When it comes to money and the financial market, I place greater emphasis on understanding social behaviour than I am of reading candlesticks. One book I highly recommend every newbie cryptocurrency trader to read is Ralph Nelson Elliott's book titled Nature's Law: The Secret of the Universe. The Elliott Wave Principle talks about 5 wave characteristics that reflects the psychology of the market. If you want to forecast how the future will look, just study what history has thought us. A fellow cryptocurrency trader, Roger Bryan, believes that we are in the second wave and it's marked by the following characteristics:
Third wave theory will display the following characteristics:
Fourth wave theory starts with mass adoption and normality to the markets. Regulations get slapped down to prevent fraud and scams. Everyone gets a chance to invest in coins like you do in equities today. No more overnight Lambos. The trends listed above aren't meant to discourage you. This should in fact motivate you to get in the game while there's still very strong opportunity to make some money. If you educate yourself instead of blindly following trends, you can save yourself a lot of heartache. For anyone over the age of 30 this might be the biggest investment trend opportunity you'll see in your lifetime. Previously I spoke about Pump & Dump scam. This has evolved into a Pump & Hold scam. The cryptocurrency universe is insane and even when you thought you have all the answers, it has a way of not going as planned. You can do all the research like what I have been doing but speculation and stupidity is still going to rule the day. The era of non-governance is about to end soon if you believe what I wrote in my previous article with regards to Elliott Waves Principle. Someone tipped me off on Chaincoin a couple of weeks back and that its about to moon. Doing my read up on the coin, I found absolutely nothing about it that was worth the hype. There was this big deal about Masternode going around and I must admit that it is a brilliant concept, but why Chaincoin and not Dash? In fact they are exactly on the same platform but Dash community seems to be more active than Chaincoin. Maybe…just maybe, it might be the poor man’s version of Dash? But I wasn’t buying it. Chaincoin mooned, my friend doubled his investment, I was bumped for not putting some money in. Told my friend to cash out while he had the chance because I was dead certain it’s going to collapse, but he said the forums and experts said to hold and create a buy wall. Now that made even lesser sense. The crypto world has been making money off pump and dump. My first thought was if you’re going to be holding, I’m going to cash out and make my profit and buy in again when the price dips. And that’s exactly how it turned out. Those who cashed out early made it, those came later to the party got burnt. Next day I got a beep on my phone for a tip off for the next coin - Syndicate. It’s all the rage on YouTube and forums.
That just pisses me off. Talking about coin speculation is a definite way to get hits but when all these speculations are not backed by any sound research, it’s just gonna be disastrous for the community as a whole. I’ve a rubric for deciding if a coin is worth investing it. - Does it have a strong community backing the coin? - Does it provide any real world value or solution? - Is it all concept or have they produced something to show for? - Are there any other coins that can do the same thing or similar? - Do YOU believe in what it does? The last point is important to me. There are so many coins out there. I placed money on a few of them myself and I’m happy doing so because I like what the coin is about. I may not get a Lamborghini out of it, but I’m happy to support something I believe in. I’m usually skeptical when there’s too much hype over a coin when it was previously unheard of. Read, research, participate. The best way to not get scammed is to be knee deep in the community of the coin you’re buying in. That way even if the whales are playing the pump and dump game, you’re not going to be affected by the hype. Not all these coins that get pumped are bad. It’s the hype followed by the quick disappointment that give these coins a bad rep. Help to spread the word. The slower we can stave off noobs from getting burnt, and from whales from gaming the system, we can hopefully push for a bit more time for the rest of us to make money before the G men come up with policies to protect us from ourselves. As always, please subscribe to my channel and share this video with your friends. Can we still make money through mining? What is the future of mining going to be? Is it better to own a rig or just get a cloud mining contract? This is a must-watch 10 minute video for anyone thinking about getting into mining. If you're confused, like me, after reading the negative comments on the forums, the best way to get your questions answered is to go talk to someone who is solely mining to earn his coins and not through trading, or watch my videos as I do it for you. I'm going to get me a rig and see for myself if all this is true. I also managed to get me a deal with Mark for any Alpha Mind/CryptoCentral fans who want to get in on the mining action. Leave a comment or PM me for information about buying a rig. As always, please subscribe to my channel to get your regular crypto news and updates. This is an update for my previous post on the impending Bitcoin Fork and what you should know. Many of you have heard of the fork by now and how it’s affecting the market. People I spoke to expect that there will be little action in the cryptocurrency market till Bitcoin stabilizes. So 1st August is a very big deal. The User Activated Soft Fork, BIP 148 will take place then whether the miners support it or not. If there is indeed a split between miners and users, and as of now, that is certainly the case, we will be seeing two types of Bitcoin token. Bitcoin 148 for those going with the upgrade and Bitcoin Legacy for those following the current chain.
Then it’s a race to see which protocol gains more traction. The good news is that each Bitcoin would effectively be copied to both chains, so the casual holder don’t have to worry about what goes into the sausage. Your Bitcoin is safe….. BUT… There’s a big BUT here. It’s safe only if you actually have direct access to your Bitcoin. That means you either have it stashed away in your e-wallet where you have the private key access to it or it’s in your hardware wallet in your possession. If your BTC is used to purchase other altcoins or held by a service provider that isn’t upgrading to BIP148, your Bitcoin is effectively in the legacy chain. A few things can happen following August 1st. Scenario A – BIP148 soft fork gains majority of the votes, goes hard fork, killing off the legacy chain value and the Bitcoins attached to it. Scenario B – BIP 148 don’t get the majority of the votes and reverts to legacy chain, thus killing off all the Bitcoins that were transacted on the upgraded chain. Scenario C – BTC doesn’t get to fork for some reason, and BTC continues to languish in its every increasing scalability issue and another coin, probably like LTC, surpasses it. The reason why BTC is so sluggish now is that people are not transacting in BTC because you may send or receive either BTC 148 or BTC legacy. And imagine the coin that you are holding becomes worthless tomorrow. So people are waiting to see what happens. If you have some time on your hands and feeling nerdy, you can read more on the SegWit soap opera here, here, here. For the fourth weekend in a row, you’ll be hearing me say – don’t panic; and for the fourth week in a row, you will see that come next week many of you will be kicking yourself in the butt saying – why didn’t I buy this coin when it’s down. Jangan Tension. In case you haven’t already noticed, the market takes a bloody shower once a week. It’s volatile but predictable. My baby Litecoin has been doing me proud. I recommend that coin a month ago and I’m going to say it again – go buy Litecoin. Today, I want to talk about the market for next week. Many people are holding out on Bitcoin because of the impending fork. Naysayers on forums are forecasting doomsday level catastrophe for Bitcoin, and to them I want to ask – where do you get that analysis from? From where I’m looking at, Bitcoin is gaining more recognition in the mainstream market today as the next best thing to stored value since they found gold. The limited supply, the decentralize nature of cryptocurrency, makes Bitcoin even more valuable in times of financial market uncertainty. Right now, only a tiny fraction of the world’s population have their hands on Bitcoin, and if all signs are showing that crypto is going mainstream, then Bitcoin is going to only go up in value with experts saying that it might hit 5k by the end of this year, and 55k per Bitcoin by 2022.
The rich folks are already throwing money into Bitcoin so that’s a no-brainer right there, but what about the average Joes who can’t afford to buy even one Bitcoin, even when the prices are down? That’s when I say – get on Litecoin. I don’t’ foresee Litecoin ever surpassing Bitcoin in the near future, but it does provide lots of growth opportunities for people with smaller pockets. After all, it’s better to make some money than none at all. The worst thing you could do for yourself is not act on any of my advice. I foresee the market to be sluggish the weeks leading up to 1st August, which is a good time to get in if you have some spare cash lying around. I would say do yourself a favour and stay away from dodgy coins and instead put your on coins with some solid foundation. One particular coin I want to talk about is Ark. They have done some remarkable work and has also recently announced a collaboration with Ledger hardware wallet making it one of the few coins to be natively supported by Ledger along side more well known names like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Zcash, Dash, Ripple and Stratis. I wish you guys the best in your trading and mining. Hit the subscribe button now, to get your regular dose of crypto updates. My name is Eugene Tay, the Alpha Mind, signing out. In this beginners guide series to cryptocurrency, I'm going to strip away the jargons and break down what is cryptocurrency all about and why you should be onboard if you aren't already. The question I got a few days ago was this: If bitcoin is digital currency and is used to transfer money or buy things online, how is that any different from PayPal or Amazon? The aim of bitcoin is to decentralise control of how money exchanges hands. Traditionally, you depend on banks and other intermediary like PayPal/Amazon to make the transfer for you. These businesses are the trusted authority and it helps you pay or transfer money with confidence. You know your money is going to get to the other person and in return the goods that you buy will come over to you.
In return, these businesses charge you a fee for the service. What if... What if you could bypass the middle man, and somehow programme an app that you can send directly to the other person. Say you want to buy a t-shirt from a designer. And instead of buying it through Amazon and paying him through PayPal, you send him this secured programme that contains your money, and the money is released to him once he sent over the t-shirt. That way the transaction is directly between you and the seller. There is no middle man fees. You can be anywhere in the world, and still trade with people who is connected to the internet without relying on credit card machines or a PayPal account. Now the question is, if this is so good, wouldn't this spell trouble for traditional businesses and - god forbid- the end of PayPal? There are still many more years before this sort of payment gain mainstream recognition. There's been a petition to get Amazon to accept bitcoin but so far it's been slow moving on that front. I suspect it has more to do with Amazon's close relationship with PayPal that makes it hard for Amazon to jump on the crypto train. The financial industry will be disrupted for sure, like what Uber did to taxi services, and they will have to innovate to remain relevant to their customers. Gone are the days that banks can just get rich bloating on transaction fees and exchange rates. Subscribe to this channel to get more cryptocurrency news. So I've been spreading the good word on cryptocurrency and the too-good-to-be-true opportunities to make money. These are some of the frequently asked questions (FAQ) I get: 1. If it's all digital currency, how do you get money?
You use your fiat currency. That's the paper money that you currently have in your wallet. Through an e-wallet service, you can exchange money to Bitcoin or Etheruem, which is the de facto coin used for trading and buying alternative coins. Think of the bitcoin like your USD and the ETH as the Euro. It's recognised over the world. You can get your money back by using the same function to exchange digital currency to fiat currency. There's a small fee charged for this exchange, of course. 2. How do you make money in Cryptocurrency? There are a few ways to make money. Contrary to popular belief, trading in Cryptocurrency is NOT the only way you can earn a coin or two, though it it's the most popular because of news of people turning millionaires "overnight". You can trade in bitcoins and altcoins like you would for currencies in Forex. Except cryptocurrency is much more volatile and unregulated. You can also mine for coins using your computer. Though the yield from that from a home computer isn't going to be worth your time or utility bill. Serious miners have specialised systems and run multiple systems in a large room called a mining farm. I will cover mining for the poor man specifically in another article. You can also lend your bitcoin to sites that do margin trading and make a bit of money from that. Lastly, you can take part in activities provided by some of these tech companies that pay you in coins. Like Steem for example. It's like YouTube, but you get paid in coins for putting up content. Or like Gilgam.es which is an e-sport company that pays you coins for playing games. 3. Is it safe? What happens to my money when the bubble burst? The bubble burst is more devastating to traders. For the casual investor, you can park your money in a safe coin like bitcoin or Litecoin, maybe even Etheruem, Monero or Ripple. Just put your money there and check back a few years from now. The bubble that traders are talking about is the massive fluctuation of money in the Altcoin market where people are pumping in money in hopes to flip a profit when the value rises within a short span of time. Not all coins are good or worth that sort of investment. Some coins never make it past investment stage. The early investors who cash out make it, the late comers die a horrible death. It happened with the dot com bubble of ’98; it happened with the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. 2018 is looming on the horizon. See a pattern here? 4. If it's that good why aren't more people doing this? Because people don't trust what they don't know and if something is too new or hard to understand it remains in the realm of the tech geeks until someone makes it mainstream. Remember the days of the internet or social media? How long were they out there before you picked it up? Same as Cryptocurrency. The money making opportunity is too good to be true. We are used to banks giving us lousy returns or insurance companies giving us between 4 - 6% per annum. The more savvy investor makes 9% through other portfolios, the very good ones maybe make 20%. In cryptocurrency, the everyday Joe and Jane like you and me can make 20 - 50% a week. Sounds too good to be true? I've done it on a fairly regular basis, and of course, I have lost just as much in some weeks. However, the market is still bullish and if invest wisely, you can maintain a pretty healthy portfolio. 5. I heard it's a Ponzi scheme. Wouldn't someone run away with my money after they made enough? Yes and no. There are hundreds of coins with newer ones coming out every other day. If coins confuse you, think of them as apps designed by tech companies with a certain use. Some apps are crap and some are good. If you blindly put money in as an investor to back the the crap ones, you stand a chance to fall prey to scams. That's why I always recommend that you do your research first and don't just follow trends. 6. I don't know how to trade. Can I still profit from this? Where do I begin? Yes you can. There are sites that help you manage your portfolio for a fee. I tried trading on my own but quite frankly I don't have the stomach for it. It's tough work and time consuming. You also need to be wise in hedging your bets in other revenue generators. Ideally you get yourself into private groups that pool their money and skills for a common cause. These are often based on referrals, so start hanging out in forums and chat groups to get acquainted with people. Or if you like how I'm managing my portfolio, you can join me and my collective for the ride. Connect with me and we can have a chat. If you found this useful, please subscribe to my channel, like and share my video with all your friends. Don’t get left behind. The poster child of cryptocurrency has been facing scalability issues. The current blockchain infrastructure cannot handle the increasing transactions and will eventually come to a grinding halt. Two solutions were proposed – are BIP148 and SegWit2x. Unfortunately both solutions are pointing in different directions making a workable compromise highly challenging. Without getting into the technicalities of it, what this means is that we might see Bitcoin split. This doesn’t bode well for Bitcoin holders, miners, and businesses. Staying status quo isn’t going to work either. So what do we do? You might have heard this word being used with relations to Bitcoin in the recent months. Fork.
There’s a hard fork and soft fork. What?! Forking happens when a coin gets an upgrade and experience compatibility issues. In a soft fork, there is a new path created that is compatible to the old *nodes. The Blockchain now contains new nodes and old nodes. The goal for soft fork is that in time to come, the new nodes will be the majority and then it can take over the chain as the defacto standard and force a chain wide implementation, causing the old nodes to be redundant. Hard fork can’t be arsed with backward compatibility. They just say, “fu(k you” and start their own new chain. They run parallel but under different rules and are incompatible. So now you’ve two sets of coins with different value, one under the old name, and then one with the new one. In time, it’s a race to see which is the more dominant coin. Effectively, it’s a new coin but it starts off with the pool from the old coin. You can see why it’s troubling. This is why people are getting worried about Bitcoin and why some people see this recent dip in BTC value as the end of cryptocurrency. Last week, the Bitcoin community has reached an 80% consensus to go with Segwit2x, which is a hard fork. BIP 148 is going to enforce their soft fork come 1st August. This will cause all ready nodes, which is about 80% as well, to begin enforcing the new rule. Then in the third corner, we also have a Craig Wright, the so-called Bitcoin creator that no one takes seriously, who says that he and the 20% of Bitcoin community are going to stick to the old non-segwit protocol. That’s what’s causing miners to stop mining because they don’t know if the coins they mine will have any value after the fork, whichever way it takes. Which is why investors have been pulling out to wait and see what happen. For me, I’m going to go in while the market is low and capitalize on the confusion. I do not believe that Bitcoin’s time is up. There’s shit loads of technical papers to read online. You can go check out if you like, or if you don’t have the time, then subscribe to my channel where you can get the condensed version of cryptocurrency topics in 3 minutes. If you found this article useful, please like and share this. Don’t leave your friends behind. *A node is anyone who possess the blockchain ledger which consists of miners, wallet owners, or anyone else providing the service to allow the ledger to be store on their system. |
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