Ask about Crypto Cryptocurrency?

Disclaimer: Any information contained on this forum is provided as general market commentary, and does not constitute investment, financial, trading or other sort of advice.

Do You Use Cryptocurrency?

  • Yes.

    Votes: 8 23.5%
  • No.

    Votes: 20 58.8%
  • I love it.

    Votes: 4 11.8%
  • I don't trust it.

    Votes: 9 26.5%

  • Total voters
    34

upnorth

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Just saw an article on Ars Technica that made me wonder how good and secure Cryptocurrency actually is. Maybe too secure some times as one so called Cold Wallet is at the moment holding back assets on more then $137 million.

The QuadrigaCX message from the board of directors.
Dear Customers,
An application for creditor protection in accordance with the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) was filed today in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court to allow us the opportunity to address the significant financial issues that have affected our ability to serve our customers. The Court is being asked at a preliminary hearing on Tuesday February 5 to appoint a monitor, Ernst & Young Inc., as an independent third party to oversee these proceedings. For the past weeks, we have worked extensively to address our liquidity issues, which include attempting to locate and secure our very significant cryptocurrency reserves held in cold wallets, and that are required to satisfy customer cryptocurrency balances on deposit, as well as sourcing a financial institution to accept the bank drafts that are to be transferred to us. Unfortunately, these efforts have not been successful. Further updates will be issued after the hearing.
QuadrigaCX

Pamela Morgans article gives a good view on the issue IMO as also Ars Technica raise a key question.
it’s a good bet QuadrigaCX didn’t follow any of these best practices. It’s an equally good bet that most competing exchanges don’t either. And that raises questions about the judgement of people who continue to entrust their funds with these services.
 

Weebarra

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I voted no because i don't use it nor do i know much about it but after reading that article, i want to vote for i don't trust it either. Not really the currency as such but the people who are in charge of storing it. Quite clearly the person in charge of it didn't take precautions against such an event and i personally can't believe that no one else had access to the encryption keys so yes as stated in your OP, maybe it is too secure.

Thankfully, i'm skint, i have no money real or otherwise so it will never affect me :p
 

LoLs

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Dec 16, 2016
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Cryptocurrency is secure depend on how you use it. From that article. the one who lost assets is the cryptocurrency exchanger. And that make them owe the lost of assets to their customer.

Before deciding it is safe or not and vote, you should understand the very basic first.

* Private key It's the secret key that gives you access to spend your Bitcoin, move your Bitcoin, as well as prove you actually own it. You should never shows or share private key to anyone!

"The private key must remain secret at all times because revealing it to third parties is equivalent to giving them control over the bitcoins secured by that key. The private key must also be backed up and protected from accidental loss, because if it’s lost it cannot be recovered and the funds secured by it are forever lost, too.”

more detail about security principles, visit this article

* A cryptocurrency exchanger or a digital currencyexchange (DCE) is a business that allows customers to trade cryptocurrencies or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies.


Should you store your asset/cryptocurrency on Exchanger? NO.
Exchanger is for trading,.. send your asset there to trade, and after all done, withdrawal it to your own wallet where only you can have the access (private key)

If you don't hold the private key, is not your Bitcoin.

If the question it is secure or not, for me yes it's secure. But if we talking about SAFE in term of value, check this chart. You can be billionaire like these, or may lost everything if Bitcoin lost it's value.

ZSiB2bK.png
 
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L

Local Host

I've only used it back in the day when wasn't exactly popular (and ended up making good money when the fever hit on 2017).

However I don't like how it's being widely used nowadays, my main concern being the fact companies are looking at ways to exploit it in order to make cash.

Like how some websites and software currently pack hidden miners (it's worse than ads).
 

upnorth

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Good basic information video, and then there's this.
Nicholas Weaver made no bones about it: he really, really dislikes cryptocurrencies.

Speaking at the Enigma security conference in Burlingame, California, last week, the researcher at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute characterized bitcoin and its many follow-on digital currencies as energy-sucking leeches with no redeeming qualities. Their chief, if not only, function, he said, is to fund ransomware campaigns, online drug bazaars, and other criminal enterprises. Meanwhile, Weaver said, there's no basis for the promises that cryptocurrencies' decentralized structure and blockchain basis will fundamentally transform commerce or economics. That means the sky-high valuations spawned by those false promises are completely unjustified. He also said investors' irrational exuberance just adds to the unviability of cryptocurrency.

Myth: Cryptocurrencies are useful for paying for things.

In fact, Weaver laid out a variety of reasons why cryptocurrencies make a poor substitute for the use of payment cards, checks, and old-fashioned cash to pay for goods and services, either online or at brick-and-mortar businesses. For instance:

Cryptocurrency transactions are expensive. Because cryptocurrencies are supposed to have no central authority that can reverse a transaction, they are "fundamentally incompatible with the modern financial system." As a result, obtaining digital coin requires (1) giving an exchange cash and waiting around until the exchange converts it into dollars, (2) being given credit by the seller, or (3) holding onto cryptocurrency balances over an extended period of time and being subject to turbulent swings in valuation. People who try to bypass the exchanges and the waiting game they require risk ending up like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who last year lost more than $70,000 in a bitcoin transaction. Not only does the buyer have to incur the the exchange fee and delay, but most sellers do as well. As a result, cryptocurrency transactions have artificially high fees built into them.

Cryptocurrencies are deflationary. That means the longer someone holds onto a cryptocurrency, the more goods and services it will buy. That creates a replay of the failed gold standard following World War I and beyond, when unbridled deflation ensued as currencies were based on fixed amounts of gold. "In a deflationary currency, rule one is never spend your currency, lest that 10,000 bitcoin pizza fill your stomach with a Breaking Bad pile of regret a few years down the road," Weaver said. To illustrate, he displayed a slide depicting the now-iconic image the massive pile of cash accumulated by fictional meth dealer Walter White in the AMC television series Breaking Bad.

Cryptocurrencies are hard to hold. Ask just about anyone who has stored large amounts of cryptocurrency in a "hot wallet," that is, an Internet-connected computer. They will almost inevitably say their wallet has been stolen. That makes cryptocurrencies a major inconvenience and liability.

Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies rely on a permissionless chain of hashes to verify a public ledger of all previous transactions. The rise of cryptocurrencies has spawned renewed energy in "permissioned" or "private" chains that supposedly can be used in new ways to keep records. The problem, Weaver said, is that these chains have existed for decades in the form of hash chains and have already been used for just about anything that could benefit from it. "For all of those who say 'blockchain will solve X,'" Weaver said. "The only thing it solves is you now know the person knows nothing about X." What's worse, Weaver said, is that public blockchains are woefully wasteful and inefficient. Contrary to what blockchain proponents say, the requirement that many computers participate in resource-intensive "proof-of-work" computations has nothing to do with securing consensus. Instead, it's required to prevent so-called Sybil attacks that subvert a peer-to-peer system by creating a large number of fake nodes. The result is that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies waste what Weaver said is an "obscene amount of resources." A central authority that designated 10 trustworthy entities could generate the same blockchain with "10 Raspberry Pis using less power than an incandescent light bulb." Ultimately, Weaver said the only things cryptocurrency is useful for paying for are ransoms and conducting other illicit transactions. He noted that, years ago, cryptocurrency advocates held up WikiLeaks and the now-shuttered adult-services website Backpage as legitimate beneficiaries of digital coins. Those arguments lost much of their weight as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange came under scrutiny for alleged sexual assault and other alleged misdeeds while Backpage founders came under federal indictment. And even if there were legitimate businesses flourishing under cryptocurrencies, the vulnerability digital coins face raises questions about their long-term viability. Remember the skyrocketing transaction fees that nearly hamstrung bitcoin in 2017?

No doubt, Weaver's take on cryptocurrencies will touch off well-meaning dissent from crypto-anarchists, who prefer math and code to banks and governments. But for this reporter, who for close to a decade has covered digital coins from the sidelines—most recently chronicling the suspicious case of a Canadian exchange claiming it lost $137 million of customers' holdings—the talk was confirmation bias in action.

This answers one of my question.
In theory, there are no central authorities that control cryptocurrencies. In practice, quasi-central authorities abound. Consider the 2016 bailout of The DAO, a crowdsourced investment fund, after hackers swindled it out of $50 million worth of Ethereum. The hack exploited a loophole in a "smart contract" that was intended to use computer code, rather than a court of law, to enforce a legal agreement. Ultimately, some members of the Ethereum community voted to void the contract in a move that was at polar opposites to the "code is law" ethos of smart contracts.

Similar debacles challenging the decentralization claim have played out since. One was a bug in an Ethereum wallet platform that froze $280 million worth of the digital coin. Another example is the Augur prediction market. While billed as decentralized, it relies on people to determine is a prediction is correct. That has led to a determination that the Democrats wouldn't take control of the US House of Representatives in 2018.

Source : Fire (and lots of it): Berkeley researcher on the only way to fix cryptocurrency


More good information on cryptocurrency on BBC's Iplayer that plays the show " Who Wants to Be a Bitcoin Millionaire? " for 10 more days. Available for UK only.

BBC iPlayer - Panorama - Who Wants to Be a Bitcoin Millionaire?

@Weebarra does that link work for you?
 
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Weebarra

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Good basic information video, and then there's this.


This answers one of my question.


Source : Fire (and lots of it): Berkeley researcher on the only way to fix cryptocurrency


More good information on cryptocurrency on BBC's Iplayer that plays the show " Who Wants to Be a Bitcoin Millionaire? " for 10 more days. Available for UK only.

BBC iPlayer - Panorama - Who Wants to Be a Bitcoin Millionaire?

@Weebarra does that link work for you?



Good read @upnorth and yes that link works fine for me, i would need to sign in to view it though.
 

upnorth

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ChemicalB

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Sep 14, 2018
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Today, everyone can do online trading, but definitely it requires a minimum of preparation, a basic knowledge with regard to the cryptocurrency and, with regard to the trading, you can't improvise investor and bet only on your luck.
Doing online trading could be very risky because there is the danger of losing your money.

All these rumors towards the cryptocurrency has led people and professionals to invest on this asset. Therefore, most of the people want to make more money focusing on the cryptocurrency because they think they can get, in a very simple way, the high gains.
This may be true, but it is necessary to consider the volatility of these new financial tools.
 
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upnorth

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Efforts to recover millions in crypto-cash from the digital wallets of a man who died without revealing passwords to access them have hit a snag. The wallets have been found to be empty. The discovery was made by a firm appointed to oversee QuadrigaCX after the death of founder Gerald Cotten. It expected to find the wallets full of C$180m ($137m; £105m) in crypto-cash deposited by the coin exchange's customers.
 

Lizzzaaa

New Member
May 5, 2019
1
I am also fond of cryptocurrency. At one time, she earned money on bitcoin and ethereum, and of other small coins. I visit this site ICO | BTCIndex and follow the news there. Of course, now in the cryptocurrency market decline, so it became harder to earn. But still, still not so bad. Trading is profitable, if you approach wisely, mining is also not unprofitable
 

mediator_ram

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May 2, 2019
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Cryptocurrency is the future but still, without proper legalized status it might turn into a problem because in my country holding cryptocurrency is an offense. So waiting for it to become a legally tendered currency.
 

dJim

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Mar 12, 2016
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Thats true. I use bitcoins for example to pay my VPN provider. u can buy many things with Bitcoins now. :) Most of the time i use them for the dark web.
Yes and not, sorry i dint explain the point, is correct you can buy some " normal " services via web or dark web, but alot companys give particular services wich c an be payed with their coins in most cases ( and yes there are many legal company who do that )
 

upnorth

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