Hello people,

Watched plenty of videos, read lots of articles on this and seems like most experts are in the opinion that the Crypto market has somewhat built stability in the current levels and has more upside potential as opposed to downside.

Is this true?

Hello guys,

Just wanted to run a poll to get a rough idea if Blockchain/Cryptos has attracted both males and females alike!

In a world where females compete with men alike, I am just curious to know if the fairer sex are jumping the bandwagon to get their fair share of wealth. I have never really seen too many women with lambo dreams and wonder how much females the bitcointalk forum has seemingly attracted 

[1. 51% Attack]

Hello folks,

Just compiled a list for sharing some technical terms relating to Bitcoin/ Blockchain technology which are worth knowing. Please note this is a summarized list and I have excluded terms that I considered as very common and known. Hope it helps in learning even a little in this vast topic.

1. 51% Attack
When more than half of the computing power of a crypto currency network is controlled by a one entity or group, and they are in a position to issue conflicting transactions on the network if they have malicious intentions to do so.  

2. Block Height
The number of blocks connected together in a blockchain.

3. Block Reward
Block rewards also known as coinbase are the only way in which new coins are created on the Bitcoin network. When a miner mines a new block he is given a block reward. The reward given is halved every 210,000 blocks which happens approximately 4 years and currently the reward is 12.5 BTC.

4. Confirmation
When a new transaction is included in a block and verified, it receives the first confirmation. Thereafter when a block is created every 10 minutes a transaction is reconfirmed by the network.

5. Consensus
Consensus in a decentralized network is achieved when the participants agree not only on the validation of transactions that would be added to the network but also in deciding the rules/ regulations and all major and minor improvements to a network.

6. Cold Storage
Methods of storing cryptocurrencies  offline. Suitable for long term storage.

7. Cryptography
Mathamatical and computer science algorithms used to encrypt & decrypt information and used in a blockchain addresses, hash functions & the blockchain.

8. Dapp
Daap is a open source application that is decentralized, has its data stored on the blockchain, incentivized in the form of tokens and operates on a protocol that shows proof of value

9. DAO
Decentralized autonomous organizations is a business which is run electronically through rules that are encoded as computer programs which is also  known as smart contracts.

10. Double spending
Occurs when a sum of money is spent twice

11. Ethereum
An open sourced, public blockchain based decentralized platform for apps that run smart contracts. Ethereum aims to solve a multitude of the world’s problems including issues associated with censorship, fraud, third party interference etc.

12. Fork
The updating of a cryptocurrency/blockchain protocol is known as a fork. A fork can be backward compatible ( a soft fork where old rules are still valid) or cannot be backward compatible ( a hard fork where old rules become obsolete and its mandatory to follow new rules)

13. Genesis Block
The first block in a blockchain

14. Halving
Bitcoin has a finite supply of 21 million and the number of Bitcoins generated per block decreases by 50% every four years. This is called “halving” and the final halving will take place in the year of 2140

15. Hash Rate
A performance measure which expresses the mining power of a mining network and is expressed as hashes per second

16. Mining
The process of using computer power to solve mathematical calculations inorder to validate transactions in the Bitcoin/Blockchain network. Mineres are paid a transaction fee for the transactions they confirm and are awarded Bitcoin for blocks verified.

17. Multi Signature
Multi signature address provide added security to Bitcoin transaction by requiring more than one key to authorize a transaction

18. Node
Any computer that connects to the blockchain is known as a node. A node could be a full node or a light weight node. A full node enforces all of the rules of a blockchain network.

18. Oracles
A bridge connecting the real world with the blockchain by providing data for smart contracts

19. Pool
A network of miners who work together to mine a block and thereafter split the reward among the participating miners. Mining pools combine their resources to increase the probability of mining a block.

20. Scrypt
A cryptographic algorithm used by Litecoin which uses less processing power compared to SHA256

21. SHA256   
Cryptographic algorithm used by Bitcoin. Compared to Scrypt, SHA256 uses a lot of hash power and processing time resulting in the miners forming mining pool for the combination of resources to increase processing power.

22. Smart Contracts
Self-executing contracts where the terms of the agreement are coded into computer programs and exist across a decentralized blockchain network. Smart contracts enable trustless transactions and agreements to be carried on a peer to peer basis in a trustless fashion without the need of a central authority, legal system or a external enforcement mechanism.

23. Solidity
Ethereums programming language used to develop smart contracts

24. Testnet
A alternative version of the main network used by developers for testing purposes

Hi everyone,

We all been there and still do it but everyone does things differently . That is when I was in my FOMO mentality I was sleepless and agitated. How did you experience it? So curious to know

Hello people!

Was looking at CMC and was wondering few years down the line what we will be able to see in this list and how long it will be?

Reality is we are very early in this industry and the pace at which projects are coming up and the technology is changing does anyone believe in HODLING cryptos anything other than Bitcoin and Ethereum?

I feel it's a buzz word used to create a FOMO effect

Hello,

First I need to say, I am few months into the world of crypto and a absolute newbie in terms of the technical aspectof things, so please bear with me in my effort to learn and understand.

In my understanding segregated witness was introduced as a solution to solve the problem of transaction malleability, this is where anyone could do small modifications which changed the transaction ID and subsequent transaction hash but not the content. This necessarily dint cause any problem to the function of the Bitcoin network but prevented more complex features being added such as lightning network and smart contracts. While addressing the transaction malleability problem of Bitcoin it also addressed the much contentious scaling issue surrounding Bitcoin.

A Bitcoin transaction could be considered as having two parts, that is the transaction data  & signature/witness data. Signature data verifies the persons involved and authenticates they sent/received the transaction. In SegWit this signature data is considered important only when transaction is being validated and of no value thereafter.

In a normal Bitcoin transaction both transaction data and signature data are included within one block and there is just one transaction hash, however with SegWit being implemented signature data is removed from the blocks and two hashes are created. That is a regular hash for the transaction data and a witness hash for the both transaction and signature data. Segwit by default discards the signature data and retains information only of the witness hash. This would essentially mean, though a transaction could be located it might create a problem when trying to identify the parties involved.

In essence what I understand is Segregated witness may result in making the authentication and legal proof of electronic contracts and transaction significantly difficult. In a world where individuals and companies are moving towards implementing electronic contracts and transactions on the Bitcoin network it is important to ensure transactions proved and authenticated in case there any legal issues and Segwit in my understanding does not faciliate this and for this reason it might affect the rate at which Bitcoin is adopted in coming years! What will be the solution to address this? Can someone please explain in simple terms considering I am pretty much of a noob and take time to understand. :-)

Thank you.

Hi,

First I don't want anyone to take offense on my question. For me it's purely for knowing more n more about this forum.

I have gone through numerous post on Bitcointalk in my pursuit of getting to know more n more stuff and familiarising my self with the forum itself . During this what I noticed was there are a huge number of Jr members with high activity and zero merits .

Checked the activity history for a few and all they do are bounties. What I was thinking was, can this permanently be the case or is there any restrictions in terms of activity or time period one can continue to be in a Jr member who has Zero merit?

My observation really made me realize, whoever who bought up this merit system is praiseworthy. I mean seriously or imagine with the amount of bounties that are coming up it would have been a forum with so much of shit posters.

I personally feel a restriction in terms of no of posts or time frame for a person to be a Jr member can further help this forum? I may be wrong so hope to hear opinions/suggestions with this regard!

[1. Does Bitcoin have a scaling issue?]

Hi guys,

Wanted to share with you newbies about the contentious topic of Bitcoin scaling. I have jotted down the issue in a Q n A form for easy understanding. Hope you find it knowledgeable.

1. Does Bitcoin have a scaling issue?

    The user base of Bitcoin has seen drastic growth. From being a project with just  a few dozen tech enthusiast as its followers, it has managed to have
    a user base that exceeds more than 10 million. With wider user adoption accompanies the problem of the number of
    transactions going up and resulting in the need to process hundreds of thousands transactions on a daily basis. Bitcoin has not had major changes
    done and essentially operates like it did during in its inception and is unable to process transaction fast enough.

2. Why cant Bitcoin process transactions efficiently?

    This is because the block size limit of 1 Mb in the Bitcoin network.

    For anyone who does not know how Bitcoin works, all transactions that take place in the network are recorded in a public and immutable ledger
    named as blockchain. The Blockchain is  sequence of blocks, each of these blocks are a cryptographically sealed set of transactions that have occurred
    in the network during the last ten minutes. Each block is permanently added to the end of the blockchain enabling a user to verify all transactions
    accurately.

    The current block size enables 3-7 transactions per second and with the growing rate of Bitcoin it is a problem which keeps compounding each day.

3. How does the block size limit impact the Bitcoin network?

    A small block size limits the number of transactions that could be processed within a second and this could result in the system being clogged up on a
    day when there a high number of transactions. This can result in transactions not being processed for hours or even days. Additionally the speed at
    which transactions are processed also depends on the amount of transaction fees set by the senders and this results in a market of transaction fees
    and users have to set a higher transaction fees to get their transactions processed faster.
  
    Of recent times transaction times and fees of Bitcoin have seen dramatic increases and this is a existential threat to cryptocurrencies.
 
4. Has there been any solutions to the Scaling problem?

    The scaling issue has been scrutinized by the Bitcoin community for years, in 2015 two Bitcoin improvement proposals were introduced namely BIP
    100 and BIP 101. Both these proposals aimed to increase the block size limit, the first proposed to adjust the limit by what seemed fit by the miners
    and the latter proposed a one time increase of upto 8 Mb. Both proposals did not come through and of recently there are two different solutions
    namely Bitcoin unlimited and Segwit.

5. How will Bitcoin Unlimited and Segwit address the Bitcoin scaling issue?

    Bitcoin unlimited was introduced as a direct result of previous failed attempts at resolving the block size limits by completely abolishing it and allowing
    miners to create blocks of arbitrary sizes and broadcast them across the network, competing with each other for a place on the Blockchain.

    Segwit was initially introduced to fix a unrelated problem known as transaction malleability, where anyone could do small modifications which changed
    the transaction ID ( and subsequent hash) but not the content. This does not create a problem for the Bitcoin network but it prevented the
    development of more  complex features such as second-layer protocols and smart contracts. Transaction malleability was fixed by removing
    transaction signatures and storing it outside the base transaction block, this results in the transaction weighing much less and more transactions
    fitting into one block and allowing transactions to be processed with greater throughput and without having to change the block size. Activating Segwit
    avoids the need for a hardfork.

6. Why Bitcoin Unlimited has not been implemented yet?

    Strong opposition for this proposal is mainly because it would result in Bitcoin being more centralized. Removing block size would result in a
     Blockchain bloat. Currently with a transaction level of 3-7 per second the blockchain is over 100 giga bytes and assuming Bitcoin goes into mass
     adoption the blockchain would very easily grow to several petabytes ( 1 Petabytes = 1000 Terabytes). Therefore only big companies would be able to
     afford the finances required for storage space, powerful computers and adequate bandwidth to process such huge amounts of data and as a result
    wiping off small scale node operators.

7. Bitcoin has Segwit activated, so is the scaling issue of bitcoin been solved?

   Segwit increases the block capacity resulting a higher number of transaction being processed per second.However depending on how fast Bitcoin is
   being adopted the limit might be reached in coming years/decades resulting in a need to increase capacity once again and therefore this has been
   addressed by some as being a temporary fix. Resistance to Segwit resulted in the hardfork of Bitcoin cash which chose to implement a larger block size
   as opposed to changing the transaction structure.

8. Moving forward?

    Increasing number of wallet providers have added Segwit support including major players such as Ledger, Trezor, Kraken, Electrum and coinbase the
    largest wallet provider in terms of transactions. The adoption increases the percentage of transactions that use Segwit and as a result bitcoin fees
    would see a reduction. In addition, the development of lightning and similar second layer protocols that would enhance the scope and potential of
    Bitcoin. These developments could be considered as a part of a important step in shaping Bitcoin to be the widely adopted currency in the world.

[1. Token Utility]

ICO's are getting hotter by the day and more and more different youtubers are coming out and giving their opinions on varying ICO's. There are undoubtedly good reviewers but sometimes you just want to be able to better decide for yourself rather than solely basing our decisions on something someone else says. We decide our things in real life so I strongly believe it should be the case for our cryptocurrency investment decisions as well. We could use the youtube reviewers to fill the gaps of our understanding. Hope this article makes u better at deciding rather than simply following the hype seen so much in this space.

1. Token Utility
A token has to have a strong use case and has to fit into a larger ecosystem (large usergroup) for it to be successful.

2. Community
How strong of a support the ICO has, this includes support from various individuals such as tech experts, crypto reviewers, media and wider public etc. Just because a project has a large telegram following does not mean it has community support, it is quite easy to have a huge member base in telegram by simply creating a airdrop with a huge referel programs.

3. Legitimization
This feature could be gauged by looking at how much institutional money is flowing into the ICO, experienced board members, how strong the KYC/AML requirements are, proper filing and simply the overall regulation of the ICO.

4. Sustainable Business model
The ICO should aim at solving a existing real world problems. Be vary of ICO's promoting sex, drugs, gaming etc.

5. Experienced Team
The website should give clear details about the team and each members LinkedIn profile should be viewed. If there is a doubt you could directly contact a team member to get information about his/her involvement with the ICO.

6. Smaller Hardcap
Smaller hardcaps have more room to grow and it is in the opinion of experts that in future more ethical and realistic hardcaps would be more common place.

7. Working Prototype
The ICO should ideally not be raising money for a mere idea but to finance a product/platform that has a already working prototype. Sometimes it should also be noted that finances are needed to put a idea into a working prototype and in this situation other factors should be carefully evaluated, for example a solid team or established partnerships.

8. Partnerships
Partnerships with leading companies would most definitely be a strong backing for any potential ICO, however the authenticity of such statements should be checked thoroughly. This could be done by checking for a official publication of the partnership or directly contacting the company in partnership with the potential ICO.

9. Scaling Solutions/ New Blockchains/ New Protocols
Blockchain is a new technology and it is now solutions are introduced to make the technology work better and blockchains for different purposes are being introduced. Therefore these kind of projects has a huge upside potential for investors and deemed very popular.

10. Thorough Whitepaper
A detailed and well explained whitepaper is always a must. If you are not a technical person you could always refer to a experts view on the whitepaper. As a extra step you could independently carry out a plagiarism check on the whitepaper as it should be noted some ICO's have contents copied from other projects.

11. Transparency
The company website should clearly state all details of the ICO in their website and should have a support system that would readily answer questions posed about the ICO.

[Currency Tokens]

Hello Peeps,

Hope this article comes in as useful when making your cryptocurrency investment choices.

After the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009, the underlying technology which was perceived to aid as a peer to peer payment system only has been put to use for varying functions. With the overwhelming number of cryptocurrencies in circulation and the staggering amount of ICO's that are taking place, knowing the type of digital token your investing is essential as it could serve the purpose of filtering out worthless projects.

Find below the main token types currently found,

Currency Tokens

1. These tokens act as online currencies or can be used as a store of value
2.The most notable being Bitcoin core.

Tokenized Securities
1. Also known as Equity securities or Securities tokens
2. These tokens give ownership of a company to the holder and is similar to company securities/shares. As a result these are governed by the US Securities and exchange commission and other global financial regulators
3. The tZero ICO is a security token offering

Utility Token
1. Also known as App coins and User coins
2. These tokens provide access to a Blockchain platform, product or service.
3. These do not give ownership to a holder and therefore currently not fallen under any regulatory restrictions.
4. The Binance coin is a classic example of a utility token, holders are able to cut their transaction fees by 50% when they have a Binance token balance.

Asset Token
1. These are digital tokens that represent a physical asset or productt
2. A project known as Goldmint holdings are digitizing and tokenizing physical gold holdings. This enables difficult to store assets to be bought online easily.
3. These tokens are not preferred among investors due to low upside potential, that is the value of the token usually does not exceed the value of the asset.

Reputation Token
1. Given to users of a Blockchain platform
2.The reward can symbolize a users reputation or merely awarded to the user for his active participation in the platform.
3. The Steem power awarded on the Blockchain powered social media platform Steem is the best example of a rewards token.

[Proof of work]

Hello,

Thought to share about some concepts widely used but never really made a effort to learn in much detail until today. I have simplified the concepts as much possible so its easily comprehensible to any newbie as myself. If I  have missed out or wrongly stated anything please let me know. Hope its useful!

The concepts of Proof of work & Proof of stake have risen due to the consensus mechanism inherent in blockchain technology. Consensus mechanism is the process of collectively agreeing on the content to be added to a distributed ledger which is also more commonly known as a blockchain. The purpose of the consensus mechanism is to ensure the validity of information added, this in turn in prevents double spending in the case of a currency, or invalid data being added to the block chain.
There are several consensus mechanisms but for purpose of this article I would contrast the currently most discussed methods, which is Proof of work (PoW) and Proof of stake( PoS).

Proof of work
Bitcoin utilizes a proof of work (PoW) system and works in the following manner,
1. A set of transaction is bundled into a memory pool (mempool)
2. Miners verify each transaction in the memory pool by solving a mathematical puzzle
3. The first miner to solve the puzzle is awarded with newly mined bitcoin also knows as block reward
4.The verified mempool now addressed as block is attached to the block chain.

Proof of Stake
Under this method there is no need to solve a mathematical puzzle instead, a creator of new block is chosen based on their stake. Stake is the number of coins/tokens one possesses. Under this system all tokens/coins have been already created so there is no block reward instead the miners would get a transaction fee

Differences between proof of work (PoW) VS proof of stake (PoW)

Cost and Engery
PoW – Very energy intensive as it requires very high computational power which is required to solve complex mathematical computations

PoS – Fraction of the energy is required compared to that of PoW and is considered as the greener and more environmentally friendlier consensus mechanism. Due to the low energy and low cost the PoS has becomes more dispersed as opposed to PoW where mining has been increasingly reserved for large scale operations.

Security
PoW – Forking of blockchain is not desired as it is unhealthy for a network and can lead to instability. Under PoW system if a blockchain is forked miners will have to chose between the blockchains or if they plan to support both blockchains their computational power has to be split. As a result from an economic perspective forking is generally discouraged under a PoW system

PoS – This system does not inherently discourage forking and therefore when the blockchain is forked it can possibly result in a problem knows as “nothing at stake”. This essentially happens when a validator/miner receives a duplicate copy of their stake for a newly forked blockchain and he is able to sign off on both forks and potentially claim twice the amount of transaction fees as a reward and double spend their coins. A participant is not required to increase his/her stake to validate transactions on multiple blockchains and results in no economic incentive preventing the nothing of stake problem in the PoS system. A potential future solution to this issue is the introduction of a deposit system that would be introduced by Vitalik Beauterin in his proposed proof of stake consensus protocol named Casper which is a expected to be implemented for Ethereum in future possibly in 2018.

Centralization
PoW – High risk of centralization mainly due to the reason mining being a expensive process and therefore reserved predominantly for large scale operations. This is contrary to the main principle advocated by blockchain technology which is the concept of decentralization

PoS – A fairer concept in which the amount of network control granted is directly proportional to the the amount invested in the token/coin.

Guys,

Does anyone here know of any individual/telegram group or whatsapp group etc that gives accurate predictions on cryptocurrencies based on TA and other news factors?

For example someone predicting a market downturn as a result of the recent cryptocurrency exchange hack?

These kind of details are very much important for any person who plans to engage in swing trading, which is what I plan to do as well :-). Any help is very much appreciated!

Thank you

Was recently going through a article about atomic swaps which was rather a new and interesting concept for me. I do understand at a macro level of how such a technology could impact the transfer of one cryptocurrency to another without the aid of an exchange but I fail in my understanding how this would render crypto currency exchanges as being obsolete? How will this affect trading activities if this technology takes over and adopted in coming years? Would appreciate if someone with good insight to explain this to me!

For anyone who is not familiar with this concept or a crypto newbie I have tried summarizing the article in my words.


1. Atomic swaps is a concept that claims to allow for the direct, peer-to-peer transfer of cryptocurrencies across different blockchains.

2. Atomic swap has been a concept having its presence for several years though the real implementation or focus of developers to bring it to force is
    seen rather recently. The compelling reason for this shift is predominately due to the increased focus on cryptocurrencies which has attracted the
    interest of not just the investors but also the interest of hackers as well.

3. Since the advent of cryptocurrencies there have  been quite a few notable crypto currency exchange hacks and as the world moves further with this
    industry its no secert that the currently functioning exchanges are under immense threat of holding their customer funds. Basically having money on
    exchanges is like giving up custody of your assets to a third party. Atomic swaps seems to be addressing this problem by enabling users to hold their
    private keys without relying on others.

4. As per the article atomic swaps currently do happen and that is between different blockchains built on similar code (decred, litecoin & bitcoin-
    executed) and swaps between cryptocurrency tokens on the same blockchain with decentralized exchanges such as OX. However cryptocurrencies
    running on blockchain with much different code has to have purpose built tools for these atomic swaps to take place.

5. Apparently creating atomic swaps between cross chain platforms are highly complex and some say its not gonna happen in the next few months.

    

From my understanding the only way to get merit is through members or have I seem to be missing something?
Are there additional ways in which we might receive merit? Maybe by the amount of time we are logged in on the forum, the number of responses we get on our posts despite not getting any merit for it?

Guys, there's something called negative and positive trust scores. I see certain signature and airdrop campaigns require a neutral or positive trust score.

Can anyone tell me examples of when I will receive a negative trust score?

Thank you

Hello guys!

First I need to say I am  a newbie and like everyone else I have lots to ask.

I love this forum and I am really determined to become a valuable contributor in future. I have researched this topic and what most people say is to work your way up you need to contribute to this forum.

At the outset I understand that the topics we bring up and the responses we give need to be of high quality but I feel this response is more of a broader term and there's more to it.

Can someone give me more insight about this in more detail and is there ways to know the impact of what we post? Do high post views n replies matter?

I have asked questions and posted responses following the set protocols but on two or three occasions it was removed, I was convinced I was contributing but seemingly I have not, so I want to be clear on what is really expected when the forum says, we need to contribute. Thank you.

Hello guys,

I am rather new to this forum and still pretty much in the learning phase of all rules and regulation and general know hows.

When going through other members I have seen some members who have high activity levels but are not in the usually designated position that corresponds to their level of activity.

To be more clear, I saw one member having a activity level of 96 but still a junior member! Can someone explain or provide me with a link which explains this? Tried looking but failed to so :-(.

Thanks a lot

Guys, I have been following this project since sometime, its a project carried out by a company based in the Switzerland. Recently they announced that there will be no public sale and instead offering a 35 Million swiss frank Airdrop! From what i read and know this is like the biggest airdrop ever to take place.

My question is, if they have sold tokens to institutional investors wont they have a problem in the team offering such a big airdrop to the general public?

Does anyone know anything about this project? Can someone explain to me why they chose to move this way? Airdrops are understandable but one as big as this? Any views. Thank you.

Hi guys,

Was analyzing the price movement of BTC and by the looks of it seemingly having a triple bottom at a price of around 7000 and other indicators also seemingly support this text book theory.

I am still very much early into my Technical Analysis and from the theory I have read, seemingly a triple bottom occurs in a long downtrend and a sign of a bullish reversal. I honestly dont have any experience dealing with this kind of situation so was just wondering if anyone can give me a approximation of the probability of this taking place? If so what kind of run up can we expect?

Hope I am clear in what I want to ask.

Thank you

Zebi is a new coin dealing with India's big data, knowing the breadth and extent of India's data I personally feel this project is a real deal, and the team behind it are exceptionally talented.

With a low market cap still I strongly feel this is a good investment, however I am looking forward for some educated input as to their views on the same and a possible price prediction possibly by the end of 2018. Thank you.