[Datum - http://www.datum.org]

Hello everyone,

Been a while, I've been super busy here lately, but I wanted to take a minute to discuss a new project I've invested in and why I strongly believe it's worth your time to look into it.

Datum - http://www.datum.org

Datum is a new token used to establish a global data marketplace.  I'll spare you the sales pitch, their website does a fine job of covering the details.  But one thing I think it fails to discuss adequately is how Datum could literally change the world.

(TL;DR version:  Jobs are scarce; poverty sucks; Datum will get you free money for the anonymized usage data you already generate all day anyways)

Let's face it, jobs are dwindling.  Automation, increased efficiency of production methods and the digital age mean that human effort has become more and more optional.  The vast majority of employment that remains simply can not sustain a basic existence, much less allow a budding family to prosper.  Soon, there simply won't be enough employment to go around, and short of recycling poor people into new tires for the rich, society is going to have to come up with a better plan.

Well, the good news is we already have that better plan, but it's 'very scary' for the world powers.  Basic Income.  The idea is that governments would gift everyone, universally, a uniform amount on a monthly basis to use for whatever they want.  Poverty would be eradicated over night.  Every month would feel like Christmas (if that's your thing).  Shopping sprees would replace the dreaded monthly ritual of trying to juggle their finances without actually having enough money to pay the bills life imposes.  Where does this 'free money' come from?  Higher sales taxes, probably.  But again, this concept is absolutely terrifying for the established world order.  They're used to staying rich off the efforts of the poor.  No poor people means they either need to start paying reasonable wages or doing their own work.  So... Basic Income, as wonderful as it sounds to me, is no where near a reality.

"What does this have to do with Datum?", you're probably asking yourself.  Well, when it comes to something as huge as a massive restructuring of the world economy, someone needs to be first mover, the tip of the spear, the dragon's tooth.  

Datum literally pays you, via data buyers on it's marketplace, for things you're already doing anyways.  No additional effort from you is required.  Do you use Facebook?  With Datum, you'll get paid to use Facebook.  Do you use Twitter?  Paid to use Twitter.  Do you... drink beverages?  Yes, Datum will literally pay you to drink beverages, whichever ones you already prefer, at whatever rate you already do that at, from whatever beverage vendors you already choose.  I realize this sounds magical, and a bit too good to be true.  But here's how it works: Someone out there wants to know what you 'like' on Facebook.  They want to know what you're tweeting about.   They want to know what kind of beverage is in your cup.  They really don't care who you are, just what your habits and patterns are, because that's how they make decisions.  They want to know these things very badly, and they already pay big money to companies like Google and Facebook for that data.  Money those big companies do not share with you, because up until now, no one ever forced them to.

Datum will change all that, by empowering you to directly sell your data at rates you specify to whoever you want.  And in this way, Basic Income starts to become a reality, and somehow, it did it without one speck of legislation being passed, no new taxes, it completely circumvented the spectrum of obstacles carefully placed by the rich and powerful to prevent this from happening.  They don't have a choice in the matter, this is happening whether they like it or not.

Will Datum pay you enough to pay your monthly bills?  No, not a chance.  Maybe some of them but the idea that you can just switch over to this income stream and quit your job:  not happening.  But that's fine, it's still free money and it's the start of something bigger.  Once the rest of the world see's that this is possible, that they can't stop us, it will snowball.

I am unaware of any other blockchain projects with such vast potential to change the world for the better.

So, how can Datum help you financially?  Three ways.  One, as outlined above, requires nothing from you but patience.  By summer of next year, rollout of the first transactions on the Datum network will begin.  You can sign up and participate at no expense.  You do not need to buy any Datum now to do it, in fact you'll be paid in Datum so you really don't need to buy any, ever.  Everyone should do this, it's free money.

The second is basically to 'mine' Datum, by operating a storage node on your home or business internet.  Any modest computer will do, and it won't use up much of your bandwidth.  This will also generate Datum tokens (DAT) for you, which you can then go sell on the open market.

The third, and perhaps most profitable path, is to buy up DAT tokens during the Datum ICO token sale (which is going on right now), and then hold onto them.  In order for buyers of data to actually pay creators of data, they'll need to buy your DAT in the marketplace.  Once the current supply of 3 Billion DAT is circulated (1.5 Billion of which are for sale), there will never be any more.  So at a rate of roughly 1 ETH to 25,000 DAT, you can buy this new commodity and hoard it.  

If you get in on the ICO, you get DAT for 1.2 cents per, or less (there's early adopter bonuses in effect, described more on their website).  However, when it comes time to actually start using, earning, buying and selling DAT, it's entirely realistic to expect it will trade at or above $0.25 per - 20x growth!  Spend 1 ETH now, wait a year, sell it for $6000.  And the rate will just keep going up over time as more users sign up and more data buyers realize this is the most affordable way for them to get the data they need. 3 billion may sound like a lot but spread out between the 3 billion internet users in the world today, that's only... 1 per user.  If a persons usage data is worth $1 USD per person per month (and it is, it sells for a lot more than that already, except you don't get any of that), then each DAT could be worth $1 per.  So really, $0.25 per DAT is a bit of a pessimistic estimate.  Long term, the sky is the limit with this.

If you're like me, the first thing you may have concerns about here are privacy and security.  Don't worry: the Datum team has really thought this through and their website outlines all the specifics.  Basically, before your data is put on the marketplace, anything that identifies who you are is removed from it.  The buyers may, if you choose, get to know a little bit about you in broad terms, what zipcode you live in, your approximate age, etc, but (unless you deliberately choose to share this information), they do not get to know your name or anything specific about you.  Once uploaded to the cloud, your data is very securely encrypted, and only you control the keys to that data.  

So that's it, Datum means free money for you, several different ways.  If you're able and willing to invest in the project now, it could mean *a lot* of money for you.  

http://www.datum.org

Obviously I've read up on this a lot, and I'm happy to answer any questions as best as I'm able, but also their website has a really handy little chat window that connects you directly to their support staff who are very helpful.

Hi all,

Some of you, especially MCO holders, may have read my other MCO threads calling it a scam and predicting the collapse of it's price on Aug 31st.

I wanted to put a new thread out there before I delete or substantially edit those old ones.

I've had a chance to hang out on the MCO's slack lately, and I've had a lot of my questions and concerns answered directly by the Monaco team.  

Now I read my earlier threads and they seem like FUD.  Perhaps eerily prophetic FUD in one case but still... unfounded paranoia.  It's very possible that bots and whales were manipulating the value of MCO in the run up, but it's pretty unlikely that MCO had anything to do with it.  The only possible motivation for them to do so would be selling off their tokens, which they didn't do, and have stated very clearly they won't do (at least not any time soon).

As for the scam accusation in regards to potential residual income from MCO profit sharing, some of that came from confusion on my part about how it's structured.  A big component of it is that as people 'cash out', their token gets 'burned'.  So less left in circulation, and the remaining ones cash out for higher values.  That changes the math significantly.

I've invited the MCO team over to respond directly to my earlier posts to see if they can clarify better exactly what did / didn't / will / won't happen, hopefully we'll hear from them soon.

Now actually looks like a good entry point for picking up some MCO, or averaging down your buy-in if you're already underwater.  As news in the next month comes out clarifying some of the uncertainty that has hung overhead so far, it looks poised for strong gains.

If you have specific questions or concerns about MCO please leave them below and I will do my best to get them answered.

Hi all.

Well I've had it with the bots, hype and whales screwing with the exchanges, so I'm taking my earnings and original buyin back to coinbase.

I've gotten a bunch of free coins during my two weeks of trading, which ones do you think I should keep and let appreciate long term and which ones should I just sell now?

SYS
ARK
MCO
SPHR
LSK
XLM
CURE
QWARK
GEO
MTL
FLO
ADT
MUSIC
XVG
SC
CFI
DASH
BAT
VIA
EBST

I guess I'm inclined to keep:
ARK, MCO, SPHR, LSK, QWARK, BAT, VIA, DASH, CFI

and sell:
EBST, SC, XVG, ADT, FLO, MTL, GEO, CURE, XLM

Sound about right?

Looks like it.  Steady growth for the last... lot of weeks.  It feels like it's at the bottom of the latest correction from the last bump.  I've got a bit on this one and I'm going long with it.

I don't really know much about Ark though.  Anyone know about upcoming events/news with them?

[CURE] curecoin.net

I was digging through the exchange's selection of dirt cheap coins lately when I found this and thought I'd check it out.  Really cool stuff.

CureCoin is a distributed protein folding network used for research in solving diseases and (I think) curing cancer.  I'm a little murky on the specifics of protein folding, honestly it's pretty complex.  But it's doing good stuff, and it takes a lot of CPU horsepower, so the good folks at Stanford University came up with Folding@Home, which uses peoples home computers to collectively equal the power of multi-million dollar supercomputers.  CureCoin has partnered with them to create a crypto-currency based on letting users earn Cure coins by participating in this research.

Good stuff.  I like it.  So I'm trying it out, you can mine with either SHA256 to secure the cypto-coin network, or CPU/GPU mine to actually fold proteins.  Either way gets you Cure coins.  More info on this at the link.  It's very simple to setup, like any other mining.

Wouldn't you use all that GPU horsepower currently mining various versions of Bitcoin copycats on something actually productive?  Sounds like a winner to me.   

I'm not sure what the investment potential of [CURE] is.  The chart looks pretty healthy, volume is low but there's still enough variation going to get some good trades in.  I bought a good sized chunk of it and I'll report back with the results of that here later.

The Monaco slack op just told me, literally, 'buy 10000 MCO and you'll never have to work again'.  

'$90,000 a year forever'.  

Let's do the math on that.  For one, currently 10000 MCO = $200,000.  That's a lot of money to wager on speculation that MCO card volume will ever reach the levels necessary for 1 MCO to return $9 USD per year.

What would it take to achieve that in terms of CC volume?

1 token of 30 million, so 1/30 millionth of 1% of the card fees.

9$ * 30 million * 100 = 270 billion in fees, per year, to make that happen.

typical CC fees = 1.9 - 2.0% of each dollar spent via CC's

270 billion times (100 / 1.9 = 52.6) = 14.2 TRILLION per year in CC transactions handled by Monaco cards to make the '1 MCO = $9 a year' statement true.

To clarify, last year the entire United States spent, on all credit cards, all transactions, roughly 3.2 Trillion.

MCO is at this point not approved for use in the US, or India.  So Europe is basically their market.  

MCO would have to be the only card used by anyone in Europe, and they would have to spend collectively 450% more than America does for MCO's estimates to be true.

But they're still pushing this concept that buying 10000 MCO means you won't need a job anymore.  More realistically, 1 MCO might get you $0.09 cents per year, so 10000 of them would get you $900 yearly from an initial investment of $200,000.

Sounds like a ponzi scheme to me.  MCO is one 'referral system' away from being the Cutco of credit cards.

Hello, I'm considering other exchanges than Bittrex to trade on.  They are simply over-run with bots, and I don't think they care because of how profitable the bots are for them.  So that will never change.

Does anyone have any exchanges they would suggest?  Ideally ones with the least of a bot problem, maybe one of them identifies orders that come from bots?  That would be ok, or even better, one that bans them outright.

Thanks.

So I'm watching OMG when I noticed it's having a really nice day, surging up steadily.

I think, ok, i'll get in on that, and try to place a bid in for a little under market.  Instantly my buy is sniped by 1 sat by someone with a much larger order.  I figure that's just how the market goes, whatever.  So I try a couple other bids. Every time, the same large sized order snipes my bid by 1 sat.

How is this possible?  It's fine to snipe someone at random, that happens.  But my bids were all over the place, and every time, 1 sat snipe guy sat right over me with a large order.  He wasn't sniping other users, just mine (even though, as far as I know, Bittrex won't tell you who placed an order, there is no good way to identify who an order came from although the size and bid amount can be a clue).

The only way that could work is if almost all of the trades currently going through are from a network of bots trading to each other, co-ordinating their bids to make sure that if you buy, it's at slightly over market rate or better.  They congest the bids with their own orders to make sure you can't get in at a decent deal.  And gradually, the price moves up (as it has been).  Until one moment, they all liquidate in unison, back down to where it was before this began.

Careful with OMG right now.  I believe the surge you are seeing in price is false and manipulated, and as soon as they can, they'll drop it right back down.

The price will crater on the 31st.  Buy it back after it does, it'll probably recover a lot of value.  But it's being inflated right now by bots and a dumptruck of money, so that when the devs can sell their coins on the 31st they'll get more for them.

It's fun to see if you can out trade their pump-bot.

It follows the same pattern and just keeps escalating the scale of it.

It buys coins in a way that inflates the price, in mass and several pages at a time.   When the price inflation has gained enough momentum to no longer need this, at the new higher levels, sell off most of the coins bought at the cheaper prices.  Save some for after a lull in the activity to drop all at once in a way that thoroughly depresses prices enough the bot can buy them all back again at cheaper price.  Then rinse, repeat.

If you time it right you can make a ton off this but take care, it could stop any time.  As soon as they turn off the pump-bot, the price will deflate.  Especially when the 31st hits and MCO staff start liquidating their coin, tripling the circulating supply currently in use.

[SYS] - Syscoin.org

This is a really great pick dbt1033 mentioned so I picked up some after looking into it a bit.

But the more I read about it, the more I think Syscoin has a legit chance to make the Top 100 coins in no time.

It has some really innovative features that all tie in well with business both big and small, for example:

* A decentralized marketplace

* Encrypted messaging

* Arbitrated escrow for marketplace transactions

* Wallet aliases (much easier to remember than bitcoin wallet id's)

They were the first coin to use Lightning Network, months ago even while BTC still tries to hash out the details.  So their transactions take a fraction of a second while BTC transfers still take 20 minutes <-> 2 hours.

It has a very active development team and professional management.  These features aren't 'in development'.  They're fully functional, right now.

Their market cap is only $82 million right now, with 527,139,802 circulating supply ($0.16 per coin).  That's grotesquely undervalued.  Even a smallish startup gets $150-$200 million when they get snapped up by a bigger fish, and most of them are meh at best.  Personally, I think Syscoin is a much better organization than most of those gone-before-you-heard-of-them startups, and is easily worth 3x it's current market cap.

So I've doubled my initial investment in this coin and I'll be hodling it for a long time, it's not going anywhere but up.

Website: [ http://syscoin.org/ ]

Just buy in the dips and someone will be along shortly to pump it up to new ATH's.  Then sell at the peak, wait for the bears to drive the price down to half of it's previous floor and a couple hours later they'll do it again.  It's been happening the last two days and I think it'll happen right up to, but not beyond, August 31st.

I think MCO wants their coin to be valuable so when the app releases and they're able to sell their coins (which according to their ICO description, they can't do until the release date), they can dump a bunch off and make a ton.

Don't get caught holding the bag!

Lately I've been trading a lot and I've had a chance to watch how the bots work.  It's really annoying.  But aside from that, I'm starting to feel like they, long term, leech value out of the coins and essentially hand it to the exchanges and bot operators.

They all work with the same basic premise: Track the exponential moving average, the volume of trades, and when it goes beyond the middle range (right on the line), either buy or sell under certain conditions.

Which sounds reasonable enough so far, if it's just the same thing a person could do, why not let a bot do it, right?

Here's why I feel they're a toxic component to the trading process:

1) They don't care at all about what the coin is about, it's fundamentals, management, nothing other than it's EMA score.  They would literally trade dog turds around if the market was volatile enough.

2) They cut humans out of the process unless the humans don't mind getting the short end of the stick.  The only way to get your trades in on a bot-infested coin is to either take current market value or keep your offer so close to it that you might as well have.  If you try to buy too far below a coin value, they make an offer 1 sat higher than yours.  If you try to sell too far above coin value, they make an offer 1 sat lower than yours.  By the time you get your trade in, the price has already changed enough that it's probably not a good trade anymore.

3) They work against natural market dynamics.  In a botless world, the actions of a coin's team and the fundamental laws of supply and demand dictate a coins value.  But in the bot's world, the only thing that matters is 'is it high' or 'is it low' (and, a bit, what is the current volume).  So if a great coin gets good news (like GEO did recently), and as soon as the coin starts to climb a bunch of people start selling... that's why.  The price rose enough to make it profitable to sell, so they will.  Which then drives the value down until it's back in EMA range.  Bots are fundamentally incapable of HODLing.  That's not what they're there for.  And if this reaction drives value down enough to spook human investors into selling, eventually the value goes down below EMA and the bots will buy the coins right back to repeat the cycle again in a moment.

This cycle ultimately removes volatility from a coin, while constantly edging it downwards.  I think the steady downwards trend is because of trading fees, but maybe it's because humans eventually get fed up and leave.  I'm not sure.



So... that's my rant about why bot's are screwing up crypto exchanges.  Thoughts on this?  Possible solutions or strategies for mitigating these effects? 

I've been giving some thought to programming a "brainless" bot that just takes commands from me as to what trades I want to make, and then it does the 1 sat snipe BS the actual bots do, to make sure my trade has a better chance of happening.  But otherwise, it wouldn't make any decisions and it wouldn't have an autopilot.   Maybe that's what's needed?  It feels like a cheap trick that edges out other humans from the process so I'm reluctant to take those steps... but I want my trades to be successful so that has to take priority.

Here's an example of a trading bot ("gunbot") along with detailed descriptions of how it works:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1715214.0

Lately the GEO team has been ironing out a few wrinkles in the system, and it looks like they're almost ready to go live with them.

Updates:

* New / Better website - Vastly improved Mapbox - Withdraws restored

* Beta release of new GEO app for Android / iOS

* Migration to Ubiq blockchain

* Ability to attach other coins to Geo coins

* Businesses can drop Geocoins and their own private coins within specified stores / venues


After three years of development, it looks like GEO is ready for the big time!  

This coin is going to get pumped in such a major way.  It's consolidated over the last week from earlier activity, and looks like a good time to stock up.

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New Mapbox preview  (now with 3D buildings!):



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Some early Youtube videos of the new app:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCVXaNvSfw4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEIgzu_iTL8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNs6N0EdD8Y

Mods:  Please move this thread if you think it belongs somewhere else, this was my best guess.

Hi all,

In the last few days, I've used about 0.05 BTC to get 0.00375 BTC worth of various coins, free (but with some risk).  It's working out so well I thought I'd outline the process and maybe see if more experienced traders have some suggestions / tips for me since I still have much to learn.

So far I've got:

0.55 MCO, 2 ADT, 20 XVG, 8 MUSIC, 50 SC, 6 CFI, 30 XLM, 0.005 DASH, 4 BAT and 1 VIA.  

Most of those in the last 48 hours, 3 of them in the last half hour.  Many aren't worth much at the moment, but who knows what the future holds.

---

The method is obvious but here's a detailed description:

Step 1: Find some promising alts.  I look for shitcoins with high volume, high volatility that haven't just recently pumped and are not on the slow death spiral of a dead coin.  

Step 2: Buy those coins.  Either buy one or two at a time with HALF AS MUCH as you can afford to lose if it doesn't work out, and be patient, or buy a bunch all at once and also be patient.  Naturally you get more of the coin at the end if you make a larger investment, but you might be waiting a while for it to increase in value enough to convert it.  Don't spend all your BTC, you may need it.

Use the (on Bittrex) "Studies" -> "Moving Average" -> "Type"="Exponential" tool to draw a line over the candlesticks that shows the rough value of what the coin should be.  If it's way over that line DO NOT BUY.  Good time to sell though.  If it's way under that line it might be a great time to buy, but do not sell (very good time to buy more if you've already bought in, more on that in a sec).

Step 3: Either watch the coin closely or setup automatic sells.  It's unrealistic (in the short term) to try to sell half the coins at twice what you got them for, I've found it's a lot faster to aim for 5-10%.  So if the coin cost 1$, and you bought 20 of them, to end up with one free you setup your sell like:

1$ * 20 = $20 buyin (roughly, add the exchange fees)

$20 / 19 = $1.052 or $1.06 to cover it completely plus fees.

So sell 19 of the 20 at $1.06 and keep the remainder for yourself.  You can raise the sell rate some too if you feel lucky, then you make money AND free coin.  

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If the coin drops in value after you bought it, be ready to buy more so you average your buy price down.

If you bought the 20 for $1, but it dropped to $0.60 (Oh no!), buy more at 0.60 and your average buy per coin price will go down significantly

Ex:

You already spent $20, and got 20 coins

Now price is $0.60, so you spend, say, $24 and get 40 more

Now you have 60 coins you spent $44 for, so your average buy in is $0.73 - That's a much easier target to hit from $0.60 than $1!  Make sure you're at the bottom of the dip though.  You can do this several times if necessary, and the nice part is as the price goes down, your purchasing power goes up, so if say... the coin totally tanked to $0.20, now you can buy 5x as much for $20 as you could have when it was $1... which will drop the price a lot.  So don't panic!  On a related note... save some BTC for this emergency maneuver when you're buying the initial altcoins.

If you averaged your buyin per price down to $0.73, and you still only want one free coin, now the sell target is:

$44 / 59 = $0.745 per, or $0.75 to cover the fees too.

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If you are feeling brave, one thing you can do is keep buying and selling the same coin as it dips and raises.  I've done this today with MCO to great effect.  Big swings! Each time you buy high and sell low, that averages your buy price down even more by the amount you gained from the high/low transition.  After selling at a high, wait for the whales to dump!  They always will, it will brutalize the coin value, and you can easily lose those gains you worked for by selling too late or buying back in too soon!

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So that's it, pretty simple.  Good luck!  Any pros care to share their tips?  Maybe I could improve this strategy?  Thanks!

I decided to buy a few random dirt cheap coins at the Bittrex minimum order of 50k sat

I got XVG, ADT, and MUSIC

I figure the most I could lose is about $2 each so why not.  They might blow up. 

XVG already up a little.

Anyone else do this?  Has it ever worked out great for you?

Looks like any time now, to me.

The hype artists have pumped, the whales have dumped, the bag holders have gotten impatient and sold, and the whales bought it right back.

The cycle will begin again soon.

Looks like speculation of the news dropping on 8/31 is building up hype

Finally!

Maybe it's getting ready to make a move?

It's one of my long term holds so I won't be selling even if it does.  But anyone else have any thoughts on this one?

I think they have a nice plan charted way out into the future and can demonstrate a functional product right now.  Also they seem very socially conscious, they'll just give you some XLM if you ask for it.

Anyone else getting murdered on altcoins the last 48 hours?

Seems like BTC goes up, alt's go down....

I'm holding, and have snagged a few free coins / profit selling 90% at +20%, but lately my folio is looking like a sea of red.

Do alts eventually regain lost value from BTC appreciation?  Or is it a one way street, BTC up, Alts down?

So far, BAT, VIA, CFI seem to be gaining despite the trends in my other holdings.  

I'm really disappointed in Dash.  I was expecting great things for that with it's diff rate constantly reaching new heights but so far it doesn't seem like diff is actually making much of an impact on it's price.