So.... who wants to buy some MAAS presale tokens??

I agree that from a non-technical side BTX seems like a "why would they even make that" coin.  When you consider the period in which it was originally conceived/developed/released BTC was in the early-ish stages of even TRYING to come to some tech agreements to resolve the scaling (and other) issues present on the bitcoin chain.

BTX was a clear technological leap forward for BTC, with many of those hotly debated changes already implemented at release (or on the short to mid term roadmap).  BTX is what bitcoin cash should be, but BCH was created more out of greed and a hunger for control by a small few core whales and developers, whilst BTX was made to truly just SOLVE THE DAMN PROBLEMS.

BTX is still ahead of the curve by a fair margin against BTC or BCH, although with agility comes a loss of certainty/stability, BTC is what it is because of it's perseverance and stability over time as a commodity (not price-wise but continued existence wise).  If BTX were to make a concerted effort to really highlight it's technical merit and how/why it could do what BTC does only faster and better there could be a serious boom to it's acceptance and uptake. 

Right now it's treading water in the "also ran" territory unless/until the team really starts to push just why this coin could be so much more useful.

ALL the major carriers (USPS/UPS/FEDEX/DHL/Royal Mail/etc...) have fairly straightforward and easily accessed APIs.  If I was a more adept developer I thought the same thing a while back, conditional smart contracts for physical goods are lacking a decent verification system that doesn't involve an active third party.

Downside is I could put a TN into the contract, ship you a velvet elvis photo instead of the gold bullion you ordered and the contract will still execute, so there's still a substantial trust issue in play there, but I do think this would be a VERY nice feature to have for contract creation.

Maybe even have it check for insurance/insured value if that's possible to help remove a small part of the trust issue at hand.

Not all ICOs are securities (although most probably are based on SEC's broad statement), even then participation as a citizen is less a concern for the individual as much as it could be for the development team (soliciting illegal securities is a no-no).

With how the blockchain works it would be INSANELY laborious for the IRS/NSA/ETC... to investigate or even identify an individual citizen who holds illegal ICO securities tokens, and I highly doubt they'd give enough of a crap to try to do it even if it was relatively easy unless that individual was a whale (6 digit and up transactions/holdings).

The real takeaway I got from the recent announcements is US citizens shouldn't (or are at least discouraged strongly) from participating in ICOs, especially those of a fund/dividend model design, but the real warning read to me more that they say that because the citizen investore would have little if any recourse to recover their funds or even claim securities fraud at this time.

I'm sure there's work being done at very high levels to understand what this all means and how they WILL eventually regulate it, but right now I think it's just very much a buyer beware situation.

There's already some really good and VERY secure methods of communication (electronic and otherwise).  I see ZEN's encrypted messenging as a nice bonus and adding to it's utility but not it's defining feature by a long shot.

ZEC's success is obvious today and they've carved out a nice chunk of the "privacy" based crypto pie, but ZEC has shortcomings.  Being such a big player they're a less agile project and being able to pivot in today's world is critical for success (unless you hit it out of the park on your first at bat).

ZEN builds on ZEC's success but is bringing new/different/and almost certainly better security and privacy enforcing features to that codebase as well as leaving room for growth and new development as needed.

Thankfully now that the team's early growing pains seem mostly sorted and the recent rack record I could see ZEN come to be toe to toe with ZEC in the not too distant future (certainly technologically, if not value wise as well).

ZEN has some ambitious dev goals that when (if?) they pan out will likely become new best practices in the anonymous crypto world, and the broader crypto sphere too.

I "mostly" agree with this sentiment.  IOTA at face value when it came out just looked like another stab at a DAG based currency, but it also appeared to be in it's infancy with it's valuation derived from an ICO.  As a general rule, I'm exceptionally wary of ICO based coins/tokens, for various reasons not worth going into here.

Byteball is technologically and use case very similar to IOTA, but it's also far ahead in development, market penetration, and now edging towards real world use case adoption.

At the end of the day, when the crypto hype train slows down it will be those with a reliable and useful technology people want, and/or coins that have real world transnational utility.  I see GBYTE strongly already having the first, and getting better each day.  GBYTE also is now on the fast track to encourage vendor adoption so it's utility as an actual currency will become more and more possible.  Those together give me high hopes for the byteballers.

NOW WITH THAT SAID, recently I did some looking into IOTA, and I do like it.  I see some really potential here too, but it seems much more nascent and the current value/market cap I don't see as representative of their true current stage of development (overvalued).  I've bought in a small amount both on PnD spec, and failing that a long term hold with optimism they can deliver something truly good.

If I had to choose though I'd be byteball all day over IOTA, since it's note zero sum, i'm hedging a little on IOTA and hoping they can really shine.

So... what is currently the most efficient non-paid (sp) skunk miner?  I'm seeing about 51mh on cc 2.2, palgin is still around 47 from what I see.

As I understand it the "airdrop" is designed in such a way that recipients lose all future bounties the moment they sell.  My guess is the distribution and current pump is by design for non-bounty holders to make incredible money while once the drop finishes a cataclysmic drop will occur when all those bounty holders try to finally cash out.

I don't discredit the project itself, because I haven't looked into it deeply at all simply because this sig campaign/pump scheme looks like a newly designed "dev" mass profit model.

The coin may have a future but i'm VERY skeptical of the validity of the current valuation.

There's a TI related thread with a WEALTH of information: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1940567.0

As always, read read read and when you're done read some more.  Then come back with the questions, not to sound begrudging but MOST of what you could possibly want to know is already clearly spelled out across this forum and only a handful of threads.  I spent months absorbing information before I started to really dig and ask questions (more or less). 

Glad to help if you need something specific though, I have a 1080ti dedicated rig and run one in my standard desktop.

After signatum had it's first halving I moved back to DGB-skein, with 3 tis and one 1060 i'm netting close to 900dgb a day, so $10-$14/day, seems close enough to optimal and I don't have to jump algos constantly.

The only payments are the gas fees which are inherent in any ETH contract, the creators gain nothing from those fees.  They DO get money from those who bought into the ICO but that's an investors decision.  The cost to get the airdrop was negligible, and it was entirely optional, so pay and hope the tiny cluster fraction gains value, or don't and have no worries about your own money.

Small boost from min8ng community, but mostly HLM.

Agree that this is creeping along too slowly, i'm about ready to offer my presale tokens and maybe buying back in when it gets moving again.

You could evaluate against ETH and LTC too, as they're direct trading pairs too.  This is a general issue I have with crypto since I care about and track my portfolio in USD but since anything outside BTC/ETH/LTC requires a transition to one of those to cash out we have a multi-variate value calculation that's a royal PITA to track easily.

MANY coins have gone through extreme and prolonged downturns, only to rise from out of nowhere.  Look at ethereum over the past 12 months.  I'm not saying BTX is destined for anything but a downturn in and of itself is no reason to worry if you like and believe in the project.

PR stunt more than anything.  Considering WAVES is based in Russia it's completely unsurprising.

That kind of monstorous gain simply from buying and holding is likely not going to happen again.  It's clearly still possible to get "lucky" and hit 1000x level gains in rare situations and this year has had more than a few 100x opportunities. 

Personally I only have 3 holdings I consider LONG term (cold wallet, planning to leave alone for years.  Everything else I see as mid-term (within the year) or short-term (riding daily high/low).

I highly suspect the true bubble will burst as many of this years biggest ICOs are slowly unable to deliver on their promises and devalue substantially leaving many spec investors out money.  If/when that happens a lot of the easy money flowing in will dry up forcing sell-offs without the predatory buy-in recoupment we've been seeing this year.

It'll be much like the dotcom burst when the unicorn companies all started filing for bankruptcy.  A good lesson there though is even with NASDAQ being shredded in the late 90s a good number of companies survived and thrived and some savvy investors still did VERY well in tech over the following decade. 

In an attempt to seek, develop and foster a uniform terminology, I thought I'd start a list of common distribution types and their definitions.  I'm starting it based on my common understanding, but obviously welcome feedback/suggestions and will revise and add to it as time passes, as needed.

1) Mined - coin is distributed via proof of work by hashing, typically using a CPU, GPU or ASIC see bitcoin

2) Proof of Stake - coins are generated by a hash function, but is based on holding coins on an active and online wallet/service that maintains a complete and valid blockchain for that coin see Condensate
2a) Delegated Proof of Stake - PoS done via proxy, coin holders can typically vote their smaller holdings to a large stake pool and earn shares see ARK
2b) Hybrid PoS/PoW - A chain may be secured by both cryptographic hashing work and staking in various combinations see Decred

3) Masternode/Secure Node/Static Node/etc...  very similar in function to proof of stake but requires a pre-determined amount of coins to operate a "node" and generally provides higher staking rewards and some level of share in network transaction fees see PIVX

4) Airdrop - (read: GIVEAWAY, but those aren't allowed on BTCT) this is an early distribution of a coin or token, for free or near free (i.e. completing a registration form).  many coins purporting to be airdropped are not true airdrops but one of the following
4a) Airdrops can occur in various fashions and may have some pre-requisite, such as holding a different coin that is linked to the new coin (see: stellar), receiving coins for holding the same coin (see byteball), holding a token that is used for linked distribution (see WAVES), completing a registration form and providing a delivery address (see NEM) and various other simplistic methods, usually aimed at getting the coin into as many peoples hands as quickly as possible.

5) Bounty - Coins paid for some service provided to a given coin/token campaign, usually in the early stages of development (see Deep Onion)
Bounties can take many forms but common examples include: signature/avatar wearing in promotion of the coin, translating announcement threads into non-English languages, promoting the coin/token on social media, recruiting additional participants in these functions, etc...
generally speaking bounties ARE NOT airdrops, as they require work on the person's part to receive their rewards

6) Swap - a coin swap is a not uncommon ocurrence, in which a developer decides that an existing coins blockchain and codebase lacks the ability to be easily developed in a way they desire.  In a swap existing coins are exchanged (usually 1:1) with a new coin, the old coins are burned (lost) and the new coin is given to the person making the swap. (see BlockNET)
from a technical perspective there are not always clear reasons a swap is truly necessary, a soft or hard fork may be easier or equally functional, but this is a use case made by developers based on their plans and technical expertise

7) Snapshot - An image taken of a blockchain at a specific moment in time, this is then used to create and credit those same private keys with matching coins on a new blockchain that may or may not be related to the original. (see BTX (bitcore))

Fork(hard) - An existing coin and blockchain has code changes that make future block propagation to the chain incompatible, in the event enough people maintain hashing the OLD chain, a hard fork will occur effectively generating 2 tokens/coins from 1 original.  In effect it's the same as a snapshot, but the snapshot moment is carried on in perpetuity in both directions. (see Bitcoin Cash)

Related terms:
Fork (soft) - A code update to a blockchain that while necessary to utilize new functionality, is not inherently incompatible with the way blocks are found or propagated, in a soft fork both old and new clients can continue using and sharing coins on the chain without a need to divide those pools into different coins.

Burned - when coins are "destroyed" typically by being sent to an address that has no private keys known or held by anyone or anything and thus can never be retrieved

Hashing - the process of searching for a cryptographically significant number that follows the coins formula of block generation (complicated crypto math)

Pre-mine - amount of coin that is created via PoW prior to releasing the ANN and codebase that is typically held by the developer see DASH

Fair distribution - typically a PoW coin is termed to have a fair initial distribution if there's NO or VERY SMALL pre-mine and PoW is released for public mining at the same time the developers initiate the chain allowing anyone paying attention to hash the coin from the start see SIGT
and many more I'm sure I'm not thinking of that will hopefully be contributed by YOU!

ICO - Initial Coin Offering, similar in nature to an IPO in the stock trading world.  ICOs are usually offered at a % premium in some model that rewards early investors more than those that contribute later.

Pre-ICO - A new-ish term that is basically just an ICO before the ICO.  Although these may appear redundant they are often done to develop funding for bootstrapping initial development/team creation in anticipation of the full ICO which is intended to provide operating capital and/or funds for the service offering of the coin.

Coin - a digital representation of a single unit of a cryptographic asset held on a blockchain typically this will be a unique chain for that coin asset

Token - frequently used interchangeably with "coin" but has a common difference in usage.  Tokens generally represent an on-chain asset that is managed using a secondary coin/token's chain (see ERC20)


and many more I'm sure I'm not thinking of that will hopefully be contributed by YOU!

Lol, good point, I'd suppose the one doesn't matter nearly as much as the zeroes.

If that was true there would only be a single anonymous coin in existence.  Thankfully there ARE multiple projects, with varied approaches to developing and providing anonymous transactions.  Some are better than others, some may have flaws others don't, and anonymity only works so far as you trust the code.

Truthfully DASH's "anonymity" is functionally non-existent if someone was truly determined enough to trace the payment, Monero had their glitch early this year but are on track for a strong run.  ZEC and it's derivatives are taking a novel approach to anonymity and have yet to be shown flawed to any serious degree, and the sleeper zerocoin is still out there too.

I don't even know what form WAVES anonymizing functions will take (RingCT/ZEC/Zero/???) but I hope it's a strong implementation, and is just another of a growing list of useful features of the platform.

WAVES real potential as I see it, is being first to market with a good looking, functional, and LIQUID decentralized exchange.  Everything else should be secondary to that, there's other projects out there trying to build the same (BLOCK/ARK/etc...) and being first to market gives a BIG advantage.