Develcuy, I was wondering if you could post the steps again for getting involved in your Steemit project. I'm hoping to start writing there again and it would be nice to get the boost, as well as give others a boost.

Also.... ctya, Unthinkingbit, I am trying to sync my wallet and it's getting hung up on block 319999, 7 days ago. This is the first issue I've had with this wallet recently. Do I need to upload different receiver files? Let me know ASAP as for all I know, I may be part of the problem.

Update: I shut down my wallet and then tried to restart it, and this time the error message I get is "failed to connect to best block." So... I officially have wallet problems. What should I do? The first thing I'll try is to download the entire block chain from the beginning, but I won't start that until tonight. Please let me know if there is anything else I should try first.

Congratulations on the launch of DNotes 2.0!

I am looking forward to seeing the new and improved DNotes Vault. I'm also looking forward to trying out the cold or deferred staking. I already have plans to run a wallet on a friend's server and use it to stake the DNotes in my vault.

I'm wondering if the new wallet will have something like a scrape address, so that staking rewards can be directed to a different address. I'm thinking with the CRISP benefit for unmoved balances in the DNotes Vault, it might be nice to direct minting rewards to different addresses which could be spent, traded, or what have you. I'm a big fan of preserving (and growing) my principal and when needed selling the minting rewards.

Once again, Congratulations! Great work, team!

The main issue with ICOs is that they are very easy to set up. The projects they supposedly back are not so easy to implement. It takes discipline, time, effort, and resources to actually follow through with the great idea. For this reason, even the well intentioned ones can end up failing because they plain don't have the follow through.

In my opinion, the best way to protect yourself from investing in an ICO that either was a scam to begin with or tried and failed is to get to know deeply one or two solid projects. From there you can get a sense of what it takes to actually carry out a successful complicated cutting edge project. When you are familiar with the winners, you'll be able to rule out the losers before putting any money into them.

I know of three truly solid projects going on in the cryptospace right now. I'm not saying they're the only ones by any means. They are ones I know about. I'm going to link to each one's thread. I encourage you to get to know these projects (regardless of whether or not you decide to get involved in any way), study them, and use them as a way to develop your own standards for how to judge whether or not a new project has real work and deliverables backing it up, or if it's all talk and hype. It can be extremely difficult to properly discern that, but it is necessary.

If you happened to have gotten burned on an ICO that never delivered (I've been there!), try to get past the sense of embarrassment and loss you undoubtedly feel and try to identify what you might have missed and why. Were there some glaring red flags you ignored? What were they? Did the development team consistently miss deadlines and then gave all kinds of incomprehensible reasons that sounded good? Were you outright lied to? The failures can also help you learn. Most importantly, how did the bad ICO differ from what goes on in a solid project?

OK, here are the solid projects:
DNotes
DMD Diamond
NEM (Unlike DNotes and DMD Diamond, the NEM forum thread is not a main place where the devs disseminate information. You'll need to get on the appropriate Telegram channels for that info).

Another Bitcointalk user drew my attention to this site, which is a very comprehensive list of Bitcoin scam sites: http://www.badbitcoin.org/thebadlist/index.htm

This article is a great place to start. It explains a bit about how scams in general work and what to look for. The rest of the site is pages and pages of scam websites. It's worth skimming through the list because you'll see just how similar all those scam sites are to each other and you'll note the different ways there are of parting Bitcoin holders with their Bitcoin, especially those new to the industry.

http://www.badbitcoin.org/tips/index.htm

Here are a few of the scam types I have encountered:

Bitcoin doublers--claim to double your Bitcoin in a short time. Variations of that include ridiculously high returns in very short times. I've seen legitimate returns of around 25% annually, but it's not super common. I'd be suspicious of anything higher than that.

Cloud mining schemes--Cryptocurrency mining is generally not profitable unless you own your own equipment, have access to cheap power, and know what you're doing. Most people dabbling into it will lose money at it. Many people mine for fun. You're not going to put your money into some site, leave it there for a few months, and profit by others mining for you. Many of those sites are scam sites. Others are well intentioned but won't make it. Either way you'l lose funds. When a "cloudmining" site is actually profitable, it's likely they are investing in other ways and simply calling it "cloudmining" for their own reasons. In that case, you'd want to know how they are actually making their money and if it's something you'd like to get involved in.

Trading schemes--Day trading can be very profitable... if you have lots of startup capital, know how to program bots, and know what you're doing. Most people are going to lose money on this practice. There is no "secret" to trading that is guaranteed to turn a profit every time. Variations on this include arbitrage trading, which means you take advantage of the different prices on different exchanges. That can sometimes be done, but it's not as easy as it sounds, and there are transaction fees for transferring funds between exchanges, and in truly open markets, those gaps close rather quickly. More often than not persistent arbitrage is a sure sign of some other issue lurking. For example, if a trading platform disables withdrawals of a certain coin for longer than normal wallet maintenance purposes, that coin's price will go down on that exchange as people holding that coin wanting an exit will sell it to obtain a coin where withdrawals are not disabled. So... you can buy that coin cheap, but you may or may not ever be able to withdraw it.

Lending schemes--I've not seen this as much, but they're out there. You "invest" your Bitcoin and the service loans it out at loan shark rates and shares the interest with you when the loans get paid back. I've just never figured out who the borrowers are who would pay such loan shark interest rates...

Great project idea--otherwise known as an ICO. Most ICOs have turned out to be money grabs with no return whatsoever. They may have started off with good intentions, but it actually takes a lot of time, effort and resources to bring such grand ideas to fruition. The problem with most "project ideas" is that they're all talk and hype and no delivery. How do you tell the difference? That is the hardest, in my opinion. You have to ask hard questions. You need to evaluate deliverables. That's not easy in such a new industry, but it's necessary. The best way to evaluate an ICO is to compare it with a truly solid project. I know of two in the cryptocurrency industry that I consider to be especially solid. You can get a real sense of what a solid project looks like by following their threads. Even if you don't invest in the product, you can at least gain a type of standard to set against other projects that do interest you.

Here are the two projects I endorse: DNotes
DMD Diamond

You can also check out the NEM project. However, the forum thread is not the main place where the devs disseminate information. You'll have to get on the various Telegram channels to keep updated. It is also a solid project.

There are certainly other good projects out there. The above are the ones I know about and I suggest them as a means for you to develop your own standards about what makes a solid project versus one that is all talk and hype.

What a great resource! Thank you for sharing it. I will definitely bookmark it, and I think I might share it in a standalone thread.

The article on how to spot a scam is very thorough, even better than the lead article in this thread, though that article is decent.
http://www.badbitcoin.org/tips/index.htm

It's worth just perusing the list of the many scam sites they have labeled as such. For one, you get a strong feel for how similar they all are to each other.

My favorite trading platform is BitTrex, but I also use Poloniex and Cryptopia.

For keeping up with news in the cryptocurrency industry, I highly recommend DCEbrief.com and coindesk.com.

For education, DNotesEDU.com is pretty good.

As far as a general all purpose resource, you can't go wrong with CoinMarketcap.com. That's your one stop shop for finding out all the basic information and links for each coin that has active markets as well as a few that don't.

For the third time, SpectroCoin told me they will not help me recover my account and once again, they are blaming my country's rules. I'd love to get a lawyer involved, but that can get expensive. All I'd want is for the lawyer to help them figure out an acceptable workaround. Looking into options.

There's also the possibility of filing a report with the London police. They have a convenient online reporting tool.

I don't know about the other NEM ICOs but Bankera's SpectroCoin has effectively stolen all my funds. I got burned in a previous ICO (not NEM related) last year. I think I'm pretty much done with ICOs for good, even if they are NEM based. The advantage of having more and more NEM tokens is that it brings interest and visibility to XEM and the NEM technology, and over all will increase transactions, which is good news for XEM harvesters. The tokens themselves, though, are likely not worth that much.

There are two potential issues going on.

The first is the issue of trying to censor exposure to anything cryptocurrency related. It's possible that may be going on, though I rather doubt it, but even so, there remain multiple sources of information on all things cryptocurrency-related. Advertising on those sites tends to be better targeted anyway if it's crypto-related, so it seems that's where cryptocurrency ads will go.

The second issue is that within the cryptocurrency industry, sadly, there are lots of scams, including many ICOs, and those are the ones most likely to pursue advertising on more general sites like Twitter and Facebook. Those scams are a blight on our industry. I'm pretty sure that's the real intended target of censoring on the part of the big social media networks. Although I'm not advocating for complete removal of all such ads everywhere (free speech and all), quite frankly, any large site that does anything to reduce the amount of scam ads is doing the industry a favor. Hopefully our industry can get to the point of self regulating that.

That is so true with writing. I find on my projects that I have to cut, cut, cut, to its most essential component. I tend to think it's not enough, but the limited word count insists otherwise. And, it turns out, it really is enough.

What I liked most about your explanation is that it doesn't pit people against each other (a la conspiracy theory), just points out that the fallout is the inevitable result of certain structural factors in our economy. It would happen this way given that structure even if all the people involved are total saints who truly want the best for everyone (although I guess the saints at the top would be quicker to start changing the structure to better reflect their intentions).

I thought this quote from the White Paper is one of the most succinct and understandable explanations for the background sense of economic malaise that's endemic to our times:

A Look At Current Money Systems
Inequitable money creation systems lead to instability

There exist numerous problems with modern monetary economics, particularly around inflation and the economic instability that can result from fractional reserve lending and quantitative easing. These phenomena do not affect every participant equally. Economies that rely on printing money rather than production operate to the benefit of those with earliest proximity to newly printed money (the wealthy and the government who have the greatest capacity to borrow), allowing them to circumvent inflation at the expense of everyone else in that economy. This leads to speculative financial bubbles that threaten economic stability, as investment is driven from productive assets to speculative ones. This rising debt increases the chances of both private and government default.

When credit bubbles burst in debt-based economic systems, it puts stress on the banking system’s reserves — or the level of money banks hold to back the loans they create. Bank customers rushing to withdraw their savings due to collapsing confidence in the economy expose the fragility of debt-based banking systems when they discover their funds are not available because the modern banking system is a game of musical chairs. This was seen recently in the western world during the height of the Greek government-debt crisis when Greek banks closed and placed limits on ATM withdrawals in 2015, denying customers access to their own legal property.[11]

It looks like the most recent price drop in NEM corresponds to BTC losing another $1000 on its price. Usually, NEM corrects for that but it takes a day or two.

That's awesome to see you all on Steemit! I hang out there sometimes, though have been busy lately. Anyway, I set all my accounts to automatically upvote everything @dnotesglobal publishes, and when I'm actually on Steemit, I'll resteem your posts too. You could get some real traction in that community I think.

I sent the url to Unthinkingbit and asked him to double check that it's working as expected. I had to learn how to use Filezilla, which wasn't too hard, but had a bit of a learning curve. Once he says it looks good, then I think we can get the info out to whoever needs it.

I've got all my receiver files moved to an http:// domain, so hopefully that is helping with the wallet syncing issues.

How is CoinsControl doing with its wallet updating?

Wow! It's one thing after another for NEM, isn't it? Thinking positively, I guess this could extend the buying opportunity for picking up more XEM. Exchanges being slapped with KYC warnings is pretty much inevitable no matter where in the world they are. It used to be thought that only US exchanges had to deal with that stuff, but that is definitely not true. Hopefully Coincheck and its traders cooperate and this turns out to be no more than a little bump in the road for them.

I enjoyed reading this article. Although I have yet to figure out day trading (well, how to do it without losing money anyway), I can totally relate to how getting involved in the cryptocurrency industry has provided a new source of financial hope in a world where it is really tough to make ends meet on any kind of regular job. It's neat to see how these little groups are forming where women can talk shop about crypto as well as share in the daily joys and struggles of each others' lives.

I've traded in markets where it was clear bots were at work so I know people use them. I agree with what a lot of other posters said here, which is that you still have to program the bot, which means you need to know what your trading strategy is, then the bot can carry it out for you 24/7.

If I ever figure out day trading, I'll probably use a bot. I'm just not much of a trader so it hasn't been a priority.

You're going to have to do a lot of networking in this industry to get connected to the right people who have resources to implement your idea, or who possibly have already thought of it.

This forum is a great place to network. Wishing you all the best

Here's another seriously undervalued post: