Interesting to read all your opinions.

I agree that there are more women involved in cryptocurrencies than most people think, and that they don't necessarily advertise their gender.

I agree that it shouldn't really matter, though it's interesting.

In my case, I picked a gender neutral handle (not deliberately as I chose my handle for other reasons). I got called "mate" and "he" a lot, and for the most part it wasn't really relevant to try to correct it.

Generally men are more interested in technology, coding, that sort of thing, and in that regard I'm not the exception. However, when it comes to the relational aspect of cryptocurrency, we women have an advantage. We tend to make connections because we're naturally relational and that gives us an edge over those who tend to be more narrowly focused on the technology.

It's also definitely true that cryptocurrencies provide an opportunity for income that is well suited for the stay at home mom. I personally have done all my crypto money making online. I've never gone to any sort of meetup, and I've worked it around my schedule which includes family and work and plenty of home management.

I personally never experienced any sort of discrimination or other kind of mistreatment for being a woman in this space. The only exception to this has been that I've occasionally been sent inappropriate pictures of sexualized women from men who undoubtedly thought I was a man and one who would enjoy such pics. Thankfully, most of the people I've encountered here of either gender are way more professional than that.

One of my favorite coins is DMD Diamond, so I do like to tell folks that Diamonds are a girl's best friend

But who's going to volunteer to have their tokens burned? Not I!

I think the number of tokens is fine. Many of them are tied up in masternodes anyway.

That's quite a pump today. I wonder what exactly got everyone in a buying frenzy? I mean why today, in particular? I was going to buy more this afternoon--I had to work in the morning--and turns out I missed an amazing window. That's what I get for having a life

Looks like another great time to buy some more NEM. Those dips are lifesavers that way

That's a very broad question. Here are a few:

1. Make sure you know something about what you're buying. Don't go into it blindly.
2. Don't stop with Bitcoin. Look into the altcoins
3. Get to know this space as an industry, not a speculator's playground.
4. Network and build relationships. That's where your greatest assets and capital lie.
5. Be cautious about leaving large amounts of funds on exchanges.
6. Only invest what you can afford to lose.
7. Use Dollar cost averaging to get into good long term positions.

How's that for a start?

It's not too late to get into Bitcoin as an investment but I wouldn't do it now. I'd wait at least a few days until the Bitcoin futures market gets established. If enough people playing that market choose to short Bitcoin, that is likely to send its price back down. Then you can buy your Bitcoin and get in.

Bitcoin currently enjoys the privileges that come with first mover advantage. But that advantage is starting to wear thin because there are other coins that do certain things better than Bitcoin ever can, especially given that consensus on how to update the technology can't be reached so BTC is starting to fork all over the place.

Transaction fees are becoming a huge problem. I paid 0.001 BTC to move some out of BitTrex today. There was a time when that wasn't a big deal. But now with BTC being worth $16,000, that price tag comes to $16 just to move my BTC from one place to another. If BTC price ever goes higher than $40K, then that BitTrex withdraw fee will cost more than what an international wire transfer costs.

Any altcoin that develops a smooth and legal itself to fiat gateway that's comparable to what Coinbase provides could very easily become the coin that replaces Bitcoin and kicks it off its number one first mover advantage spot.

It's been nice to get that weekly dividend from Bankera, even though still in ICO phase. I'm really looking forward to when I can move my BNKs to my NEM wallet and start getting those payments in XEM.

What's interesting is that in terms of USD, DMD's spectacular price decrease (from over $16 to $13) still has DMD sitting with a USD price higher than it's ever been. Remember how just last week it was a struggle for DMD to crack $10? Now, after the price has fallen, we have DMD easily over $13. It won't be long before buyers start taking advantage of the current "dip" to increase their holdings. In fact, with the imminent opening of Bitcoin shorting, if I were sitting on any Bitcoin that I didn't want to convert to cash, I'd be putting it into some kind of stable altcoin that will hold its value regardless of what happens to BTC--a coin just like DMD in fact

Any news on finding a new exchange for Devcoin since the abrupt departure of Coingather?

On another note, have admin lines been added to the more recent receiver files yet?

This BTC pump has been crazy. I wonder what BTC will look like in a few days when people start shorting it on the futures market, and what that will do for altcoins that are traded with BTC such as NEM.

I bought and sold some Bitcoin today as a way to get into fiat (so I could, you know, spend the money on bills and such), and with BTC's price changing so much it was rather nerve wracking. Add to the mix that Coinbase (my gateway into fiat) had functionality issues due to high traffic and even temporarily disabled Bitcoin sales for a time and it made for an interesting morning.

Price stability is going to be a huge determinant for mainstream adoption. Whichever coin can hold its price relative to USD regardless of what BTC is doing is going to have a better chance of mass adoption. And once there is a direct gateway from that coin into fiat, without having to go through BTC, then the value proposition of that coin in terms of mainstream adoption increases exponentially.

The more I know about cryptos the more I am coming to appreciate what an ingenious project DNotes is. I think Alan Yong is doing all the right things from a business perspective. Circumventing the whole ICO way to raise funds is also very smart. I'm not totally against ICOs, per se, but I see good reasons why it's to DNotes' advantage to not ever go there.

Price stability on DNotes, especially if coupled with a smooth direct crypto to fiat gateway, will be huge. Case in point: today I sold a portion of one of the coins I hold at a high for Bitcoin. Then I converted the Bitcoin for USD. This particular trade worked out well for me as I managed to catch both the coin and Bitcoin very close to their highs. However, with Bitcoin rising or falling by more than a thousand dollars in one day, it would have been very easy to have gotten caught in a rapidly falling market while still in Bitcoin. That actually happened a few months ago and I ended up having to hold onto the BTC for a month until its price came back up.

This sort of high stakes three way trading game that I'm forced to play each time I want to cash out some of my cryptowealth for USD (say to pay bills or go Christmas shopping) is fine for me because I come in with plenty of experience (I've been in this space since March of 2013 and have had lots of practice), but is absolutely insane for a newbie. And if all you want to do is make an exchange, you could easily lose several hundred dollars worth in a matter of minutes or hours. That's not going to work for the general public.

If a coin can hold its value steady relative to USD (steady and gradually rising), and smoothly transition from crypto to USD without having to go through other intermediaries (like Bitcoin or Ethereum), it's going to be ripe for mass adoption. In fact, when the coin pulls that off, there won't be so much need to even use the crypto to fiat gateway because so many other businesses will be OK accepting that coin in payment for goods and services. The next step after that, of course, would be for the coin to have a price that is even more stable and less volatile than USD. Then it can have a stabilizing effect on USD and other fiat currencies.

I'm really looking forward to 2018 in terms of DNotes!

On a long term basis, you could buy NEM now at 29 cents, or you could wait a few months and buy it at 50 cents or a dollar.

With that said, there probably will be dips on the way up, so my advice would be for you to plan your purchase over the course of a few weeks. Allocate a certain amount to spend each week, watch the market and buy when it's pulling back a bit.

That's very interesting. That reminds me I recently heard that bank technology is archaic. I was watching this video explaining the upcoming NEM Catapult wallet and it mentioned that banks use a messaging system called SWIFT to communicate with each other that is 40 or 50 years old. And anything that wants to interact with banks has to be compatible with that messaging system. Like you said, it's easier to maintain than to upgrade to something that would work a whole lot better.

So if block chain technology can adapt better than that, it very well might give the banks a run for their money...

Tip #8: Organize your forums and other communication platforms

This one is actually huge. If you did your homework and actually researched a few altcoins you have surely discovered as many new forums as the number of altcoins you studied. Some coins have multiple forums and several other means of communication.

As a case in point, take the coins in my portfolio. I currently hold NEM, DNotes, DMD Diamond, STEEM and VIVA. I've got dust in a few other coins, but those are the main ones. So NEM, DNotes, and DMD Diamond each have threads on this forum and I follow them. NEM, VIVA and DNotes also have their own forums, although the forum I'm referring to for DNotes is not exclusively dedicated to DNotes. STEEM has its own entire social media site and within that site you can follow the important people involved in STEEM development for news and discussion. In addition to all that, NEM has its own Telegram channel (which I used to be part of), DMD Diamond has its own Slack channel, STEEM has at least one chat group on Rocket Chat and VIVA has a presence on Basecamp and Discord.

You see how it works?

When it comes to getting involved in the cryptocurrency industry, communication channels multiply at an alarming rate.

And when you invest in a particular altcoin, it is very important that you keep up with that coin's news and other communication, which means you have to very regularly catch up on its thread here, its own forum, and its various relevant chat groups. In other words you'll be doing a lot of reading and interacting. If you don't, you could miss some very important information affecting your holdings. Case in point. One of the other coins I hold that I didn't mention above is FIMK. FIMK also has its own thread here, its own forum, and who knows what else. I unfortunately ignored the FIMK channels but continued to hold the coin. And then one day it was announced that the development energy was going to shift to this coin called HEAT. I could be wrong but I believe during a certain window of time you could exchange your FIMK for HEAT on a one to one basis. I wasn't paying attention and missed that window. The last time I checked HEAT was worth a lot and FIMK was practically worthless. And you could trade 200 FIMK for one HEAT, or something like that. So because I wasn't paying attention rather than holding a winner, I'm now bagholding a loser which is not likely to ever go anywhere, though the development team supposedly is still working on it.

With the above said, I will say that any coin that you have to monitor very intensely is likely to wind up being a loser. However, when you've acquired large amounts of a coin at cost, you don't want to take chances, especially at the beginning, so you need to be keeping tabs on its news. When the coin has proven itself to be stable in the news department, then you might be able to relax the intensity a bit, but you never want to stop monitoring it altogether.

Since for every coin you hold you're going to be following around three to five communication channels, you need to keep them organized. You can use bookmarks in your browser, a list with hyperlinks in a spreadsheet or word document. There might even be an app for keeping track of such things.

The bottom line: come up with a system that works for you for keeping all those channels straight and ensuring that you will visit them regularly and make it happen.

Every so often I run into an article that talks about how few women are involved in this industry compared to men. My suspicion is that there are more women involved than anyone realizes; they're just not putting their gender front and center.

What do you all think?

https://moneyish.com/ish/all-the-reasons-why-women-can-be-the-future-of-cryptocurrency/

Thanks! Hopefully if anything comes of it, the information will make it to this thread. At this point this thread is my only contact with NEM happenings, though I occasionally check the NEM forum too.

Weirdly enough I've never had any major issues with being a woman in this industry. It's very possible that it was fortuitous that I picked a gender-neutral moniker for this forum. I've had lots of people assume I was male (calling me "mate," referring to me as "he," etc.) and I haven't made a point to correct them. I've also never yet attended any sort of actual event in this industry where real people get together. I guess I love the part where you don't have to dress up and go anywhere, but can comfortably do your trading, forum chatting, networking, etc., all from the comfort of your own home, and often with a baby on the lap. In that sense, this is probably the most mom-friendly industry I've ever worked in!

Those are great points too. I think the reason the banks are slow and expensive when it comes to wire transfers (especially to customers) is in part because they can. Up to now they have not had any competition so no need to refine those processes. But when it comes to taking my money, they are fast. It takes seconds to process a credit card payment, for example. In other words, I think wire transfers, ACH deposits, and all other kinds of bank account to bank account transfers could be done faster and cheaper using the current infrastructure. And now with the block chain entering the scene as a competitor they will. At that point we'll be able to more objectively evaluate which system is truly better for those metrics.

You're right about system downtime, though that's not entirely unheard of in block chain based payment systems

Those are some really great points you raise, and you're right, the article misses them, which I can understand why. To include everything going on would necessitate writing an entire book! The points you make, especially the part about participation, I've had an intuitive sense about those things but hadn't been able to articulate them like you just did. I guess that's why I'm involved. I've mentioned many times before how with cryptocurrencies, I'm able to participate in financial adventures that were previously only reserved for the rich, such as lending to margin traders, investing in micro-loans, etc. So yes, participation is a big thing for me.

What the article did well for me, was clearly lay out what cryptocurrencies' original purpose, value, and function really is--to essentially fuel decentralized applications. I hadn't really wrapped my head around that particular concept before.