With more than 1,100 cryptocurrencies and a total market cap of approximately $150 billion circulating in the market today, this ‘next-gen gold’ has taken the financial world by storm.
The question of their survival, which enveloped this fintech invention in the beginning, has now been replaced by the question of the extent of its evolution and adoption. Industry skeptics raised concerns regarding the new "currency’s” power to disrupt the financial landscape as we know it and lead world economies to lose financial control to the hands of the common man.

Even when many countries and companies ‘banned’ the use of the digital currency, its rapid growth and mass adoption by technology aficionados and leading global firms (such as Microsoft, Virgin Galactic, Shopify, and Tesla) led to its strengthening in today’s fiscal society.

According to a report by PwC, cryptocurrencies have been called one of the “greatest technological breakthroughs since the Internet.” They have also been called “a black hole” into which a consumer’s money could just disappear.
 These two stark contrasting statements are the reason why cryptocurrencies have inspired more debate than actual commerce.


Read full post at: http://www.businessinsider.com/list-top-cryptocurrencies-analysis-comparison-2017-10?IR=T

Read full post at: https://themerkle.com/5-most-common-mistakes-novice-cryptocurrency-traders-make/

A lot of people are starting to show an interest in cryptocurrency trading. While this is a positive development, there are some pitfalls novice traders will need to watch out for. These mistakes are rather common and can end up costing new traders a few thousand dollars worth of cryptocurrency if they are not careful. With the following pitfalls in mind, there should be far less risk when it comes to cryptocurrency trading as a whole.

Japanese financial services conglomerate SBI Group has announced a partnership with Huobi to engage with cryptocurrency.

In an announcement today, SBI said it would be launching a virtual currency exchange early next year.

Huobi is set to benefit from increased exposure to Japanese markets in light of China’s exchange shutdown, as reported by Nikkei Asian Review.

“...The company’s trading system and operations know-how, which has a four-year management record, will be leveraged,” the announcement reads. “While virtual currency transactions are rapidly expanding, we will use our highly secure system as weapons to bring in customers.”

When the price rallies unabated and seems to be able to reach the moon, we can be certain that a short-term top is around the corner. Can I pinpoint the top? No!

Can the market continue higher and make me look like a fool? Yes, it certainly can!

However, cashing in profits, especially after such a vertical run is a good strategy. I believe, it is time for Bitcoin investors to start booking partial profits on their investment positions. They will get ample opportunities to re-establish long positions at lower levels when the correction starts.

The introduction of Bitcoin futures trading in just a few days will bring forth a number of short sellers who are likely to bet against the incessant rally. For the first time, the Bitcoin bulls will be face to face with the bears, who will have the tools to short sell the cryptocurrency.

It is difficult to predict whether the short sellers will force price downwards leading to a long liquidation or the bulls will force a short squeeze from the bears. Considering the uncertainty, it is wise to reduce the risk.
 read more at: https://cointelegraph.com/news/cryptocurrencies-not-bubble-solve-money-problems-angellist-co-founder

AngelList Co-founder Naval Ravikant has claimed that Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies have what it takes to solve the money problems of different kinds of people around the world. He added that the general public is looking for potential alternative places to store their money and watch it grow.

In his presentation at the Token Summit II that was held in San Francisco, California on Dec. 5, 2017, he talked about the phenomenal trading performance of the leading digital currency Bitcoin and the other virtual currencies and the reason behind it. He claimed that Bitcoin’s staggering upward movements are driven by the people’s hunger for an alternative investment that meets their needs.

He claimed that the fear by some market observers that Bitcoin is nearing ‘bubble’ territory is unfounded. However, he has not ruled it out entirely, but he claimed that the fiat currencies are also a bubble that never pops.

read more at: https://cointelegraph.com/news/cryptocurrencies-not-bubble-solve-money-problems-angellist-co-founder

Some altcoins are designed to be "memory intensive" to avoid use of ASICs to mine them.

Does the RAM refered to here, mean the RAM of the computer or the RAM on the GFX card itself.

When looking at passmark these two GFX cards get almost the same score 8687 vs 8773: GTX 1060 (3GB) vs GTX 1060 (6GB) comparison on passmark

For gaming the ram can be important for having high-resolution textures in ram. But how much does it matter for hashing memory intensive hashes?

Some Context...

I am setting up the seed nodes for the altcoin I am developing for learning purposes.

In chainparams.cpp I have changed the vSeeds vector to what I hope will be my seed nodes, by adding the IPV4 addresses of my servers.

I have one seed node with the ip address XX.XX.140.199

and my other one is ip address XX.XX.138.152

I have changed the IP addresses to the ones above, and RPC ports to 22736 in

chainparams.cpp on line 123

chainparamsseeds.h on line 11 and 12

contrib/seeds/nodes_main.txt line 1 and 2

chainparamsbase.cpp on lines 35, 48, 62

THE ERROR...

When I build this and run GELFd which is equivalent to bitcoind (but I renamed it), I get this error:
Error: Unable to bind to 0.0.0.0:22736 on this computer (bind returned error
Address already in use (98))
Error: Failed to listen on any port. Use -listen=0 if you want this.


Have I chosen a bad port? Or is there some other issue here that I'm not seeing?

When I run netstat I can see that the port I have chosen is not in use by something else

What are altcoins?

Altcoins, meaning "alternative coins", is another term for cryptocurrencies (other than Bitcoin). Since Bitcoin's release in 2009, many have noticed its crucial advantages over government money, while also giving recognition to the fact that some of its aspects can be improved upon. That has lead to the appearance of hundreds of different altcoins, which are all ultimately based on the same technology of the Blockchain but are designed differently in some ways, in order to achieve different goals.

Bitcoin Price Rips Through $15,000

Throughout the first week of December, the bitcoin price has been rising at a breakneck pace. In the past day alone, bitcoin rose more than $2,000, clipping past the $13,000, $14,000, and $15,000 markers in quick succession. This morning, the bitcoin price threatened to break through $16,000, too, but the rally ultimately stalled at a global average of $15,549.

Read more at: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-price-goes-parabolic-cannibalizes-crypto-market/

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I have come across the API from cryptocompare.com which fetches data from various exchanges.

I do not understand the some values returned from the API call

https://min-api.cryptocompare.com/data/pricemultifull?fsyms=BTC&tsyms=INR&e=Unocoin

Questions

Difference between LASTVOLUME and LASTVOLUMETO


Difference between VOLUME24HOUR and VOLUME24HOURTO


Difference between TOTALVOLUME24H and TOTALVOLUME24HTO

 

Which exchanges would you suggest for security? Which ones to avoid? How to tell a good one from a bad one?

Anyone know where to get tick by tick, or at least, by the minute, trade data from the main exchanges globally for the top 10 currencies by market cap? Preferably, data since inception but, at the minimum, 6-12 months of data would be great.

Lets say you have added enough USD to trade with so you pick BTC to trade altcoins with.
You buy Altcoin X for let's say order total 0.5 BTC
BTC goes up in value but Altcoin X in USD has jumped big time in value
In BTC terms you have lost as BTC's value increase is more than Altcoin X
You sell Altcoin X but you get less BTC, in USD terms you happy, profit both up
BTC drops in value to the USD, you got less than you started with now what?

Do you ignore the USD value and measure only in BTC to get your base currency/crypto currency to use for measuring profits trading Altcoins?

I just cannot get my head around it. Any advice and help/direction will be appreciated.

I'm trading altcoins on a daily bases using Bittrex. Now, i'm doing it by buying Bitcoin for fiat, then exchanging bitcoin for alts, as most people.

Now, when buying alts, i'm checking prices against fiat. For example, i'm buying at 1.5$ and selling at 3$.

Am i doing it wrong? I mean, as you know Bittrex shows $$ value of each portfolio and i managed to gain some profit, but why are most Youtubers talking about prices in satoshis? I mean, at the end of the day i'm cashing out fiat...

2 months ago, i tried trading against satoshis but it was a mess - i buy something at 14k satoshis, bitcoin keeps growing so my alt can never again go to 14k satoshis, price is "dropping" as my alt can't follow, but when i wonder why "price dropped" and check against fiat - i'm actually doing well....

What's the catch?

Question: Cryptocurrencies keeps crashing and then rising. Is there cause for concern?

Answer:

Cryptos are eerily volatile, and the challenging part is that they’re so correlated that it’s hard to hedge against cryptos within crypto land. However understanding their fundamentals as well as technical analysis (reading charts) could protect you from BTC/ETH’s adverse swings. (Read more: Dangers in Cryptocurrency Investing)

If you want to learn fundamental analysis, you will have to read the white paper of coins that you want to invest. It will explicate all the details about the coin its purpose and how it works. A word of caution, white papers are highly technical and would be hard to understand for the masses. As part of assessing market sentiment and understanding fundamentals too, you can also install reddit in your mobile and join crypto subreddits (like /r/EthTrader or /r/CryptoMarkets/). (See more: A Guide To Fundamental Analysis In The World Of Cryptocurrencies)

For technical analysis, you can learn from various online sources the basics. A good example is Investopedia : http://www.investopedia.com/university/technical/

Question: Cryptocurrencies keeps crashing and then rising. Is there cause for concern?

Answer:

Cryptos are eerily volatile, and the challenging part is that they’re so correlated that it’s hard to hedge against cryptos within crypto land. However understanding their fundamentals as well as technical analysis (reading charts) could protect you from BTC/ETH’s adverse swings. (Read more: Dangers in Cryptocurrency Investing)

If you want to learn fundamental analysis, you will have to read the white paper of coins that you want to invest. It will explicate all the details about the coin its purpose and how it works. A word of caution, white papers are highly technical and would be hard to understand for the masses. As part of assessing market sentiment and understanding fundamentals too, you can also install reddit in your mobile and join crypto subreddits (like /r/EthTrader or /r/CryptoMarkets/). (See more: A Guide To Fundamental Analysis In The World Of Cryptocurrencies)

For technical analysis, you can learn from various online sources the basics. A good example is Investopedia : http://www.investopedia.com/university/technical/

Question: How do you buy cryptocurrency?

Answer:

You can buy cryptos at any exchange. The easiest way and safest (in a legal sense) is Coinbase. Just go to https://www.coinbase.com/ and create an account. Link your account with your credit/card or bank account and you’re good to go! (See more: Crypto Guide 101: Choosing The Best Cryptocurrency Exchange)

We’re also in the midst of releasing a comprehensive guide on how to get started investing/trading in cryptocurrencies, since we understand that the crypto world is very intimidating, especially for starters. We’ll keep you updated!

I am learning about the Bitcoin core code, and am attempting to make some small changes for learning purposes.

I am trying to implement logic that sends a portion of a block reward to an address decided by the developer, when any miner on the network successfully mines a block. My understanding is that I will need to change / add one of the outputs of the coinbase's transaction in miner.cpp at the function CreateNewBlock() by adding something like this to the vector of outputs in the coinbase transaction.

coinbaseTx.vout[1].scriptPubKey = <scriptPubKey with developers chosen address>;

Then, I will need to update the validation rules in Validation.cpp so that hackers couldn't change the address I added in miner.cpp to their own address, to bypass sending some of their reward to the fixed address.

My question

Firstly, how do I send some of the mining reward to a hardcoded address?


Secondly, how would I add this address to the validation rules such that nodes can verify this new rule when a new block is mined?

Read more at : https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/why-is-bitcoins-price-so-high/

Bitcoin’s price has risen stratospherically, a fact that leaves many minor players in the market with massive gains and many bigger players millionaires. But is this a bubble? Are the gains real? And are the bitcoin whales in for a sad Christmas?

First we must understand what drives bitcoin price and, in particular, this boom. The common understanding for current growth leads us back to institutional investors preparing for the forthcoming BTC futures exchanges.

The primary theory about the astonishing rally being put forward by investors on social media is that bitcoin will soon benefit from big institutional money injections via the introduction of the first BTC futures products. CBOE Global Markets and CME Group are launching new futures contracts on December 10 and December 17, allowing investors to go long or short on bitcoin. This ability makes bitcoin far more palatable to big investors who are currently flooding the market to make profits if and when the bitcoin price falls.

Read more at : https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/why-is-bitcoins-price-so-high/

More than $70 million worth of bitcoin was stolen from a cryptocurrency-mining service called NiceHash following a security breach, causing the company to halt operations for at least 24 hours.

Andrej P. Škraba, head of marketing at NiceHash, said to The Wall Street Journal that approximately 4,700 bitcoin had been stolen from a bitcoin wallet, an online account that stores the digital currency. Bitcoin wallets, like other online bank accounts, have been targets of hackers in the past.

Read full post at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-may-be-missing-in-bitcoin-heist-1512625176