this is a great inforgraphic. Beginners should take a look at this as a simple steps for ICO.

Both of these uses similar tech and hardware but I still prefer Ledger as it has a better reputation and it did not have a precedent of hack.

If you google trezor hacked.. u will find discussion about trezor. FUD or not, I leave it to you to comprehend.

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@tomshwom/lessons-from-the-trezor-hack

But if you google ledger hacked, you wont find any news of it ever happening prior..

These are my ICO since jan

1. Experty (hardcap reached in pre-sale)
2. ArcBlock (hardcap reached in a day)
3. MediChain (presale at this moment)
4. Dragon (ICO in 2 days)

Dragon and MediChain are going to be great ICO launches as well. Pay attention to them

Good luck to all!

Round 2 of bounty has started!

This is the most anticipated bounty that I have been waiting for.

Anyway Week 1 should be 13.-2 to 19.02, since we are to report each monday. 

Hi Bounty Manager,

This is my update on the signature campaign for Week 4 (27.1 - 02.2)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1118743;sa=showPosts

For this week, I have done 17 quality posts, of which 2 quality posts were on the ANN thread.

Please see my posts. I have ensured each post is carefully crafted and above 50 words.


Please assist in updating my stakes.

Thanks for the hardwork counting stakes!

jaredl

This statement by Arun Jaitley was read differently by differently people. Most mature investors read this as a positive since it is India talking about imposing regulations to prevent illegal money activities and expressing positively about using blockchain.

What is the best way of preventing illegal activities and controlling the entire monetary system? Having a blockchain based currency so that all transactions can be seen and monitored by the government. Complement this with KYC by all banks and exchanges so that trades between bitcoin or even monero to and from the state-backed crypto can be monitored as well.

We will start seeing such a system being launched by countries who wants to exert full control over the monetary system and they will continue to allow cryptoexchanges as it will allow more international trading to take place. India and China will likely to be the first to implement this and they will become world leaders in finance. This is my take of the situation.

Once states launch their own blockchain currencies, all crypto will gain in value as there are more credibility in the system. OTC trading of crypto will be even more easier too. I am holding on to my portfolio of crypto and adding on to it to wait for this massive move, to be triggered by governments.

With the cheap prices right now, it is a good opportunity to pick up ETH and NEO.

These will be the first to rise in value once the bull market returns. And the next bull will see ETH and NEO reach $2000 and $400 respectively.

As for altcoin, you can also look at XSpec and AChain. XSpec is a privacy coin with probably the best tech out there. AChain is another smart contract blockchain which is accumulating DApps on its blockchain right now but still unheard of, likely to see more buying activity with its next fork; it's interesting feature is that it allows forks of its main chain to a separate coin rather than an ICO.

As for ICO, since ETH is cheap now, it is a good opportunity to buy ICO now. Look at ArcBlock and MediChain. ArcBlock has a great team, lots of VC interest and a great marketing campaign.

There are many bad news in January coming one after the other.
South Korea regulations, hacking of Nem in japan, India clamping down on illegal activities using bitcoin..

This overshadow news like Line getting into crypto and Samsung making mining chips.

The trend is that countries are trying very hard to regulate the crypto market and talking the market down. But major companies
are getting into the crypto world especially giants in Asia.

This price drop will continue for a while more as more and more countries come out with measures to regulate crypto. There will likely be more news about regulations during the G20 summit from 8th Feb to 13th Feb. So be ready for it.

But I opine that after the Chinese New year, we may start seeing lots of Asian players start buying up all these cheap cryptos. We are talking about Asian players with millions and billions to spend. Note that a lot of hedge funds with millions have been set up in recent months... they are eyeing the market carefully and will buy up all these cheap coins once the market settles.

I only treat ratings websites as a announcement site as the ICO being rated may have sponsored the post or review. However if an ICO is doing such marketing as sponsored posts on ratings sites, it could be worth the time to do some research on it.

I have discovered some good ICOs on such ratings sites. Recently I have discovered ArcBlock as well as Experty.

However it is still very important that you do your own research and due diligence. I cannot stress enough to everyone that is

participating in ICO that we must do our own research and not rely on review sites or rating sites.

With so many ICOs happening monthly, we should tighten our selection criteria so that we only pick the best to invest in.

If you do your own research, you will find that 4.5 out of 5 on some ratings sites can be worth nothing and it is still the best

to rely on your own due diligence and your own gut in selecting where to invest your money.

This is a very uneducated post. Most investors will not be selling their ABT tokens if it is in loss. With a low ETH price at the moment, the price of ABT will also be low anyway. So it is wise for investors to hold for a while before selling if they are intending to flip their tokens.

And in the low run, ABT will rise in value.. so why would there be a loss? Do research about this ICO before posting unnecessary negativity. While at this moment, the entire crypto market is dropping in value, but one cannot deny the long term bull of cryptos. Hence with a project like ArcBlock, the value of the token will rise so long the dev team is able to achieve their milestones.

One of the most interesting ICO coming up on 3rd Feb is ArcBlock. It has already hit a 80k kyc which means that a lot of investors are highly interested in this ICO. its telegram group has gone above 50k participants as well. I have yet to see another ICO with such a draw.

The interesting part about this ICO is that this project has the same ambitious goals as some projects like EOS to solve current blockchain issues like scalability and speed but ArcBlock intends to do this by building a platform that incentivizes developers to contribute resources towards the ecosystem. This short description does not do justice so you should read their whitepaper at arcblock.io if you are interested.

I would say that its ability to attract so many investor to its ICO is beyond what most ICO has been able to do. So if u are looking for a ICO that is already drawing in a lot of investors... this is it.

I have been getting emails and telegram private messages asking me what is ArcBlock. It does seems that there are many investors who are getting more and more interested in ArcBlock. The number of interested parties are increasing by the day. I have never gotten so many messages asking about a particular ICO compared to ArcBlock.

I foresee that this ICO will be very successful given the large number of KYC and the large interest from investors recently, whom I presumed did not managed to get into the KYC. This would mean that there will be a lot of buyers waiting on the sideline for this ICO to end and then to buy from the cryptoexchanges.

Expect to see multiple fold gains for ArcBlock tokens. Just hold on tight!

At this moment, I would think only NEO is able to compete with Ethereum. NEO is also launching many ICO and it allows GAS to be generated.

Many are also arguing that NEO is the China version of Ethereum and we all know that when China is involved, their companies can go head to

head with anyone.

However all these blockchains are having challenges regarding their scalability and speed. ArcBlock is building the platform for blockchain 3.0 and aims to solve the speed and scalability issues.

I do not see ArcBlock as a competitor and I think that ArcBlock will build a platform that will really solve lots of current blockchain issues.

Actually all the reasons being raised about bitcoin are not wrong. Transaction costs are high and fees are high, it is not anonymous and it is centralized. But there are similar issues with fiat as well as with gold for that matter.

Have you tried transferring money across to a different country? There are similar fees and transactions can take days. It is not anonymous and transfers are controlled by banks and agents. And btw countries spent millions printing and managing their fiat currencies.. not exactly more efficient than POW.

Gold? That is worst. Transaction fees at the bank where you are buying gold are not cheap. Ant not to mentioned storage costs if u are buying physical gold. And if you think you can avoid transaction cost by buying at a shop, do not forget goods and services tax when you buy gold at retail. And if you tell me gold is centralized, then you must be dreaming.

Bitcoin has its faults but they are not more than fiat currencies or gold. But bitcoin has already captured the attention of people around the world and most perceived BTC as a storage of value ... very similar to how people look at Gold.

Unless BTC loses its fundamental reason for being able to be a storage of value, else it will maintain its value; even though it can fluctuate wildly.

bitcoin has never been anonymous and has never hide your  transactions on the blockchain. If you had purchased bitcoin from any exchange that accepts fiat from your
bank account, then your identity is not anonymous. It will be easy to link your transactions on the blockchain back to your bank account.

This has been the spirit of bitcoin ever since the start. The only way to be anonymous with Btc is to buy your btc with cash and via peer to peer such as localbitcoin.
At this moment, to be anonymous you will have to use coins like Xspec, Monero etc.

With the growing regulations such as in SK, it will be even less anonymous.

i think there is a business case for privacy coins like monero and xspec..

This news of Switzerland wanting to become a crypto nation is great news. It will move crypto currencies into greater credibility when a country adopt cryptocurrencies and mint their own crypto coin too.

However I think the reason for Switzerland to want to mint their own crypto coin is that they want to regain their position as the top destination for keeping money and wealth. They have been losing to a few other countries in terms of attracting wealth.

Creating this crypto is a way for Switzerland to gain a lead before other country mints their own crypto coin.

Will this coin have privacy features?
This is something debatable. If Switzerland wants to attract top dollar into their country, they will have to incorporate privacy features so that the wealthy who wants to keep their wealth private can do so.

But whatever it is, so long countries start recognising the potential of crypto currencies as well as the blockchain, it is a big boost to the crypto community.

 

Have you taken a closer look at these 3 whitepapers? Does each of these ICO have a actual business need or real world requirement?
What is the quality of the team and who are their advisors?

What is the total supply of tokens that they are attempting to sell? Have they come up with a prototype of MVP?

These are just some of the questions you should ask when evaluating ICO.

For myself, there are 3 ICO that meet my requirements.

Arcblock, Experty & MediChain.

There are too many ICO launched each month and the quality of many ICO are questionable... so you will need to be careful about choosing the correct ICO.

Take a look at these 3 ICO and see for yourself what do I mean by a good ICO.

thks

I presume that we are discussing about KYC in US. So long your transaction is above $20,000 the exchanges will have to send your information to the government. This can be for the purpose of preventing money laundering but it is also for the purposes of tax collection.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/29/coinbase-internal-revenue-service-taxation/

I feel that KYC is an important step towards regulating the crypto industry and that all of us should be open to such KYC and/or taxation.
With KYC and regulations, the crypto industry will become more recognized and one day crypto assets will be treated as a real financial
asset and not a speculative tool.

For those of you who are staying in US, you should strive to report your crypto earnings accurately so as to avoid any issues with the government services.

And for those ICO, it is key that they implement KYC. With KYC, we may be able to finally open ICO to people in several countries which was previously banned.

Bitcoin as a blockchain is secure. And with the number of miners in the bitcoin ecosystem, it will take a lot of resources to hack bitcoin's blockchain.

One of the concern with bitcoin miners is that the mining power is mostly with a handful of miners in China, but with the clamping down on mining activity in China, most of the miners have moved overseas and the mining activity is now more spread out.

We are also seeing more miners getting on the btc mining despite it getting more difficult. As more miners get onto btc mining, it becomes more difficult to hack the btc.

However do not confuse security of btc with privacy as many guys think that their transactions are "secured" meaning no one can see their transactions. Bitcoin blockchain is transparent and anyone who knows your wallet address or if you had transferred your bitcoin from a known exchange such as coinbase, it is not difficult for the government to know about the transactions you had and how much btc u possess.

Yes. The overwhelming KYC applications and the marketing hype surrounding this project indicates that it is very highly likely that the public sale will be sell out within a couple of hours. This is building up to be one of the fastest ICO sales.

For those who missed out of the KYC, the next avenue will be to buy from the exchanges once it is listed. If we do believe in the future of this project, we can buy the tokens from the exchanges and hodl it.

Looking at the ArcBlock Whitepaper, the next milestone is in Q3 2018 when they will release the Open Chain Access Protocol (RC1). That is one of the key milestone for ArcBlock for this year and I expect the price of ABT will rise multiple folds in Q3 2018. This means that there are still plenty of chances for us investors to support the project and profit from the rise from now til Q3 2018.

Lets all support ArcBlock!

If you gotten into the KYC, congratulations! If you did not, just wait for the listing on the exchanges and grab the ABT tokens then.

This is the key ICO I am involved in for 2018.