ILCoin (ILC)

[ILCoinDev]

MINING DIFFICULTY EASILY EXPLAINED

What is mining difficulty? The blocks of a cryptocurrency are encrypted (hence the name cryptocurrency). To overcome that encryption and forge the block, which also produces new coins, a certain amount of processing power must be applied. This processing power is called the hash rate. The difficulty of the block is called the hash. The hash adjusts automatically after a certain number of blocks have been forged depending on how much hash rate is applied to solve the hash of the blocks. The amount of hash rate needed to solve the hash of a block is called the mining difficulty.

As more miners want to mine a cryptocurrency, more computers are connected to the mining node causing an increased hash rate to be applied to solving the blocks. This causes the blocks to be solved very quickly, but also causes the mining difficulty to increase accordingly when it adjusts automatically. As mining difficulty rises, the value of the cryptocurrency needs to rise at the same time so miners can retain the same value for their hashing power. If the value doesn’t raise, miners begin to gain less and less money mining the same cryptocurrency with the same hashing power.

What does this mean for you? Nothing! You use only ILCoin, remember? Sit back and relax: The ILCoin Development Team takes care of this for you because we do not share mining privileges. This is for your information only. However, if you are also using another cryptocurrency, there is some merit in understanding what the mining difficulty does and how it affects the cryptocurrency you use.

[ILCoinDev]

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ALL BITCOINS ARE MINED?

The short of it is: No one knows.

At this moment, it’s all just speculation. Some argue that the price of Bitcoin will be worth nothing when this comes to pass, while others believe that due to the lack of additional Bitcoins, the value will increase.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that this will not come to pass for roughly 100 more years. Imagine Bitcoin 100 years ago. You can’t. It didn’t exist. There will probably be another technology available for currency exchange in the future and thinking about that time you worried when all the cryptocurrency was mined will make you chuckle at yourself.

[ILCoinDev]

WHAT IS A SIDECHAIN?

A Sidechain can be described as a parallel blockchain element to a blockchain. It allows a safe environment for testing code, running new applications, and for sandboxing new features. It wouldn’t be independent, however. A sidechain would need the blockchain to function. They allow for something called “Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-of-Work” (1).

Information could be shared between the two with an informatic connection called a “two-way peg”; which is just a fancy way of saying information can be passed between the blockchain and the sidechain at will through a communication portal. While sidechains may be a great advancement in blockchain technology, they are far from perfected. Many see them, in their present state, as security risks. With market values reaching into the billions for some cryptocurrencies, any chance there could be a security issue is too much of a risk to be taking.

1. https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/963.pdf

[ILCoinDev]

ICO RISK

Please consult a financial advisor before making any decisions about investing.

If you look online, you will find a bunch of information that will tell you, “Yes, you should invest in an ICO.” Websites will just give you the positive aspects of investing in an ICO without telling you the risks involved. Then, perhaps they will even go on to give you a short list of ICOs they recommend. ICOs are like any investment risk; you may lose. Whenever looking at an investment of any kind, you always want to look for the ideal standard: Low Risk, High Return of Investment. Even if you were to find a potential investment opportunity that appeared to be in such pristine circumstances, there are still other factors to consider.

Underfunding can, for obvious reasons, cause you investment to become a poor one. If underfunding is extreme, the project will fail. However, there is a hidden benefit to underfunding; if the ICO is successful, less people will receive the tokens which (if the tokens are interchangeable) could drive up the price in the marketplace as few people will possess them. This rarity is the core principle behind the cryptocurrency Unobtainium.

Overfunding can be a bad thing also. An ICO that is too successful could have the opposite effect and could potentially cause the value of each token or coin to reduce as the market could be flooded with everyone wanting to trade massive quantities of a token everyone already owns.

Fraud, while not quite as prevalent in today’s ICO market, is still a factor. Will the company I want to invest my money in complete their end of the deal once the ICO is over? Unfortunately, there were a few bad apples in the beginning of the ICO era. They caused a distrust within the cryptocurrency ICO community that hasn’t, and won’t, go away easily. Trust is a fragile thing; hard to obtain and easy to break.

[ILCoinDev]

MARKET CAP

Please consult a financial adviser before making any decisions about investing.

“Market cap measures what a company is worth on the open market, as well as the market's perception of its future prospects, because it reflects what investors are willing to pay for its stock.”
-Fideliy.com

Market capitalization, or market cap, for a cryptocurrency is simply how much the cryptocurrency would be worth if you were to add up all of the circulating supply and multiply it by the value of the crypto. For example, Bitcoin stands at $195,353,900,080 USD at the time of writing this article. There are 16,813,025 BTC circulating at this time and each one has a value of about $11,619.20 USD.

What does this information mean for you? The per-share price of a cryptocurrency is thought to convey some sense of value relative to other cryptocurrencies, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The market cap is a rough estimation of a company’s worth, and should, therefore, be a rough starting place when considering doing business based off of financial interests alone. If you believe in a company or a company’s product, that is another reason altogether to invest in a company which looking at market cap might not help.

[ILCoinDev]

THE BENEFIT OF DECENTRALIZATION

“Imagine you lived in Syria right now. Your central infrastructure is destroyed, as is your money. You don’t want the war, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Now your house is gone, your friends and family are dead, your banks are bombed out and you’re cast out, adrift, homeless and penniless. Even worse, nobody wants you. The world has shifted from open borders to building walls everywhere. You’re not welcome anywhere, you can’t stay where you are and you’re broke.
But what if your money was still there, recorded on the blockchain, waiting for you to download and restore a deterministic wallet and give it the right passphrase to restore it?”
   -Daniel Jeffries

Decentralized systems are much harder to attack. It is much easier to uproot a weed if there is a stem attached to the roots. Centralized systems are much easier to destroy with a ‘decapitation’ of the body.

Don’t believe your country would do such a thing? Remember the Australian Craig Wright?

“Police gained entry to a home belonging to Craig Wright, who had hours earlier been identified in investigation by Gizmodo and Wired, based on leaked transcripts of legal interviews and files. Both publications have indicated that they believe Wright to have been involved in the creation of the cryptocurrency [Bitcoin].” (1)
   -The Guardian

But let’s imagine another situation. What if you owned a great deal of cryptocurrency and lived in a country where it became illegal to do so? Before 2014, it was legal to trade cryptocurrencies freely in EVERY country. Last year, many countries banned cryptocurrency usage within its borders. (2) An early investor with 10,000 Bitcoins (or perhaps only a couple thousand, even) would now be sitting on a retirement.

Decentralization, anonymity, without national borders, downloadable public ledger system… These are all favourable points towards using cryptocurrency. Sure, there are also counter arguments; there are always valid points to both sides of a story. This is why fiat currency will never go away. But, that is for another topic!

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/bitcoin-founder-craig-wrights-home-raided-by-australian-police
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_bitcoin_by_country_or_territory

[ILCoinDev]

MINER’S FEE AND VALIDATION

Mining is needed to ensure fairness and for keeping the network stable, safe and secure. The miner’s fee is a very tiny amount you pay (fractions of a crypto) to perform a transaction. As you make a transfer of money (whether it be from one account to another or to pay for a service), the payment must be verified by a miner to assure that there isn’t any discrepancy.

Through private-key cryptography, the miners are able to assure that the amount sent is from a wallet that approves the transaction. If this process wasn’t included in the transfer, anyone could send coins from your wallet to another wallet just by knowing your public key (wallet address). For this checking process, the mining fee is charged. It is more than a fair trade for keeping your investment safe and making sure no one is spending your hard-earned cryptocurrency.

Most services that receive cryptocurrency as payment require a certain number of verifications before they consider the cryptocurrency to be securely transferred. This is because for every verification, a block has been mined. If a transaction has 6 verifications, 5 blocks have passed after the block that contained the transaction. This assures that the block that contains the transaction wasn’t soft-forked and orphaned (see our post “Forking Cryptos”).

[alex35rus35]

what for a coin ilcoin test?

[ILCoinDev]

what for a coin ilcoin test?

Greetings alex35rus35,

Perhaps you could ask again rephrasing the question. I don't understand.

[ILCoinDev]

THE PYRAMID SCHEME

A lot of potential users of cryptocurrency choose not to get involved due to fear that it is eventually a scam and a pyramid scheme. When, in reality, they participate in a pyramid scheme on a daily basis; it just works differently than they are taught. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I was growing up, I was taught that you go to work and you get paid for doing so: That’s how the world works. …And it does work, to a certain extent. However, there is one catch. Time is a limited resource.

Money works like a pyramid; it starts at the top and flows down to everyone else. In fact, there’s a pyramid on the dollar itself. That’s the irony of it. Printed money is more of a pyramid scheme than cryptocurrency. The money is minted at the top of the pyramid by central banks and then slowly trickles down to everyone else. The problem being, it is well-filtered many times before you receive any. In fact, the only reason you have any money at all is because you had to labour for it or take out a loan (not including illegal methods such as theft).

Think of economics as you would any game in life. You want to maximize the advantages for your team. Those who control the flow of money do nothing different; maximizing the advantages for those on their team and keeping it for as long as possible. This is why every economic system of the world has distributed money from the top down. This means most of the money never really leaves the top. Since money is power and power is an advantage in the game, no one wants to willingly give it up. Today, the richest 1% of the world’s population own more than half of the world’s wealth.

I’m not suggesting a solution. Up until now, this is how life has been and is currently. Don’t believe in the allusion of fiat currency being any more fair than a cryptocurrency.

[ILCoinDev]

SHA-256

SHA is an acronym meaning ‘Secure Hash Algorithm’. It is secure because the input/output is essentially a one-way street. You can enter any value of any length and the encrypted output will always be the same fixed length. This makes it impossible to decrypt and decipher the original input without the hash key. The public key is 256 bits long however it is generally hashed to produce an address 160 bits long for convenience. This is the reason it is named 256.

[ILCoinDev]

BTC OR XBT?

What, if anything, is the difference between these two ticker symbols?

There isn’t any difference in value because, at the same time, both ticker symbols are used to describe the same cryptocurrency. Both of them refer to Bitcoin (BTC) but are used interchangeably depending on the place you found them. For example, Bloomberg uses XBT as does xe.com. The reason Bitcoin is often shown with the ticker symbol XBT is because of the ISO 4217 (the standard for currency codes). (1) The “X” represented in the ticker symbol defines that the currency is a non-governmental unit. One could argue that the symbol should then be XBC because it is representing “Bit” and “coin.” Alas, this symbol was already in use. Hence, the final ticker settled at XBT. For now, they are interchangeable; XBT for regulatory purposes and BTC for everything else.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217

[ILCoinDev]

THE PRICE OF SHARING

There are more than 2000 crypocurrency ATMs in the world spread out across 60 different countries. (1) Of those ATMs, over 900 support Altcoins. These numbers only stand to see a dramatic increase in the next couple of years. But what is the cost of interacting with them? That depends on the cryptocurrency you want to use.

Matt Weinberger wanted to purchase $1 USD from a Bitcoin ATM in Las Vegas, United States of America. (2) After putting $11 USD into the ATM, he was told it still wasn’t sufficient enough to process the transaction. Due to the value of Bitcoin, the mining/transaction fee was about $40 – $45 USD at the time. Because Matt Weinberger wasn’t familiar enough with cryptocurrency, it caused him a bit a grief and a loss of $11 USD.

A commonly parroted phrase within the cryptocurrency community is that Satoshi Nakamoto intended for Bitcoin to be “a fast, secure and inexpensive means of making payments without using the traditional financial system.” Although not entirely true, I can understand where the basis for this assumption comes from considering the original Bitcoin whitepaper states “The cost of mediation [of third parties] increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions.” (3)

This would have been feasible to digest when Bitcoin was around the $100 USD value for each coin. Now, with the value soaring above $10,000, it doesn’t seem likely that Bitcoin can fill the niche for which it was created. ILCoin, while not yet distributed through ATMs, could be the perfect solution for filling every day transactions with mining/transaction fees averaging in the factions of a US Cent. We have the goal of making ILCoin available all over the world through ATM services. Our intention is to allow individuals as well as small and medium business to trade easily and cost-effectively using our cryptocurrency.

(1) https://coinatmradar.com/charts/#cryptocurrency
(2) http://www.businessinsider.com/buying-bitcoin-from-las-vegas-atm-2018-1
(3) http://satoshinakamoto.me/whitepaper/

[ILCoinDev]

CLOUD MINING

Do you know where Bitcoins come from?

In a traditional economy, the governing body prints bills so that people have money. In currencies like ILCoin and Bitcoin, it is necessary to mine them to obtain them (SHA 256, POW). To do this, miners use a special software that solves complex operations and, in return, they are compensated with some cryptocurrency. This is the reward from mining (the block reward) and what causes more people to want to mine the currency.

But it is not as easy as it sounds. Each time a block is forged, the mathematical difficulty of a block’s encryption increases. A PC or laptop - like the one you have in your house - doesn´t have the necessary power to mine cryptocurrencies for long. That´s why miners use special devices for this process. Avalon Miner, Antminer, or Ebit Miner are example names of special mining equipment. These devices produce a lot of hashing power and require a lot of electricity to work; making them expensive to maintain.

This is the reason why cloud mining emerged. Cloud mining is the process of mining Bitcoin, or any other alternative cryptocurrency, utilizing a remote datacenter with shared processing power between any number of individual computing devices. This type of cloud mining enables users to mine Bitcoins or alternative cryptocurrencies without managing the hardware. In most circumstances, the mining rigs are housed and maintained in a facility owned by a company specializing in mining and cloud mining.

Types of Cloud Mining

In general, there are three forms of remote mining available at the moment:

•   Hosted Mining
Lease a mining machine that is hosted by the provider.

•   Virtual Hosted Mining
Create a (general purpose) virtual private server and install your own mining software.


•   Leased Hashing Power
Lease an amount of hashing power without having a dedicated, physical or virtual computer. (This is the most popular method)

What are the benefits?

Here are some reasons why you might want to consider cloud mining:

•   No noise
•   No expensive electricity bills
•   No ventilation problems with hot equipment
•   Not technical issues with the mining equipment
•   Minor investment

[ILCoinDev]

BITCOIN IS ONYMOUS, ILCOIN IS ANONYMOUS

If you get fiat currency as change from your grocery store, does it matter who had it before you? Knowing that money was previously used to purchase pornography, drugs, or used to pay someone for a corrupt deed, would you not accept it as change and use it to provide for you and your family? If you owned a flower shop and a known member of the mafia wanted to order flowers for his mother, would you turn away the business because the money might have been gotten through ill-gotten means? What the money was used for isn’t what matters. What matters is how you got it and how you use it.

Attempts to limit the Bitcoin blockchain come about which have the intention of flagging accounts that are tied to “illicit” activities. Chainalysis, Elliptic, Skry, and now Bitfury’s Crystal are all such programs which have the aim of limiting blockchain activity. Bitcoin was built upon the idea that you don’t have to trust a person to receive money from them. The blockchain assures you will receive what is rightfully yours in a transaction. With a currency that has no borders, such as cryptocurrency, who is to say that money was gotten legally (or illegally) since not all laws apply to every country?

ILCoin still believes in anonymity. ILCoin still believes that you have the right to trade with whomever you choose. It should be a freedom that all people can express. Our blockchain is completely anonymous and limits users from perusing around transactions. If you know the wallet address, you can monitor its actions. But, that is information privy to the users of the address. It is none of our business, or anyone else’s, where you get your money and how you plan to spend it.

[ILCoinDev]

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COMMODITY AND FIAT MONEY

The US Dollar is backed by two things: the US government and the people who believe it has value. In times past, the US Dollar was a commodity money; meaning, it had a physical backing of gold. If you wanted, you could even decide to exchange the currency for actual gold. Since about 1971, the US government stopped this policy due to the fact that, when times are tough, people horde valuable resources. If your currency is backed by a precious resource, such as with commodity currencies, the flow of economy slows drastically as people don’t want to let go of their money.

Since the 1970’s, the US Dollar has been a fiat currency. As mentioned in the first sentence, it is backed by the value of the issuing party and the trust that it is worth something; not its worth in gold or silver. Since the Federal Reserve has more flexibility to control supply and demand of currency, it is more able to limit the impact of major economic shocks, such as the financial crisis of 2008-2009. It's fair to argue that the Federal Reserve's efforts to limit the impact of economic crisis could have unforeseen long-term effects, based on the additional money that has been put in circulation, versus a gold or silver standard that limits how much money circulates. However, using a commodity standard has historically had a much worse, opposite effect during crisis as people horde it. So long as the government can keep the balance of supply and demand stable, fiat currency is the better choice between the two.

As cryptocurrency enthusiasts, we can take key factors away from this information. Cryptocurrency is much like fiat currency in that its value is backed by the issuing party and the trust in its users that it is worth something. It has yet to been determined whether its limited supply is a strength or a weakness in comparison to its fiat relative. In the beginning, ILCoin was backed by gold; following the golden standard. Now, it has severed that bond and has its own independent value and is backed by its community, development, and development team. We strive to make ILCoin revolutionary. Some of the upcoming developments (now in development) will be game-changers…

[ILCoinDev]

SCAM COIN OR… SOMETHING MORE?

How can you tell if it’s worth your time/money? The market cap of cryptocurrency as a whole has grown in the past year; it now stands at over 400 billion dollars. As that cap grows, the number of scammers has grown with it. More and more people are falling victim to cryptocurrency scams due to the amount of crypto newbies that are just getting started the cryptocurrency world. As such, it is difficult to decide which cryptocurrency or token is a good investment.

The internet is full of people who believe they know a scam coin when they see one. Do some quick searching and you will see that when it comes to scams, everyone is an expert. There are even people who say every cryptocurrency is a scam, and they won’t buy anything unless it is with cold, hard cash. At the time of writing this article, there are over 1500 cryptocurrencies listed on coinmarketcap.com and not even ILCoin (it’s a conspiracy) is one of them. While it isn’t always clear which are scams and which are true cryptocurrencies, it is fair to say there are a few general guidelines which you should always take into consideration.

Company name changes are a huge red flag. Some developers/development teams change their company or product name to accommodate for the latest news trend. ILCoin, in the past, was a commodity currency. Hey, it seemed like the right thing to do in a time when cryptocurrencies didn’t have anything backing them except someone’s promise that it was real. However, even though we have since-then changed our policy, earned an independent value, and undergone an internal shift in managerial structure, that doesn’t mean we change our name. ILCoin bought two years ago sold by ilgamos is still the same ILCoin today.

When a company spends more on its public relations (PR) and marketing than it does on its development, you need to watch out. This is the kind of cryptocurrency that will have a website to sell you the crypto but will not even have a wallet online; much less an offline, mobile, or desktop wallet. ILCoin isn’t very widely publicized. While a heavy dose of PR is in our plans, we firmly believe that the development should be sound first. What would we promote? Promises? It is better we boast about our developmental achievements.

Any time the investment strategy of a token or cryptocurrency heavily promotes recruiting your friends/family and promises to reward you for doing so, beware. There’s nothing wrong with a company wanting you to share the information about the company with the people you know. Word-of-mouth advertising is an incredibly effective way to spread news of your product. When you get guaranteed rewards for recruiting, that’s when it smells of trouble.

As a developer of ILCoin, this author can testify first-hand how difficult it is for a cryptocurrency exchange market to put attention to your application to become a part of their site. There is an article written on that very subject called “Becoming Part of an Exchange Site.” However, not being part of an open exchange is considered a red flag. This is because the self-proclaimed cryptocurrency may not even have enough back-end development to be compatible with an exchange. An investigation should be undertaken before deciding whether or not you should place your trust in a cryptocurrency with this limitation.

If you cannot find simple information about a company? You may be heading for problems. Without finding a company’s street address or information such as where they registered the blockchain, it would be unwise to become involved financially. Any time basic details are missing, there is a red flag.

Depending on who you speak to, there are TONS of reasons more why you shouldn’t trust a cryptocurrency. Most of those reasons are grey areas and subject to bias. Others, are situationally-based or conditionally-based. For example:

•   Big Premine
   -ILCoin is a centralized, decentralized hybrid and we do not allow outside mining. There is an article about it called “De/Centralization.”

•   Owners/Devs have big wallets
   -A lot of times, the development teams are early investors in their own work purchasing a lot of their own coin for next to nothing when it is first released. Is it wrong to believe in and invest in your own product?

•   Daily trading volume way bigger than market cap

•   Lack of website, or website down for days

•   Owners/Devs failed at one coin, created another
   -Depends on the previous cryptos they were working on. Were they legit or scams themselves?

•   Coin uses same exact source code with same parameters like another coin
   -Starting out with a source code that resembles another cryptocurrency isn’t a bad thing. An exact copy of said cryptocurrency probably is, but even ILCoin is based from the code of Bitcoin; highly modified, but based off of Bitcoin.

•   Scam warnings posts being deleted from the forum

•   Invisible team, No project
   -Members of our team can be viewed on our website at ilcoincrypto.com. You may notice there are only three shown on the website. Not everyone who wants a job wants to be in the limelight. This author chooses to remain anonymous and go by the title ‘ILCoinDev’ because fame of any type does not suit me.

•   The company professes to be dedicated to a noble, altruistic cause
   -There can be great causes out there, but make no mistake: No one works for free without expecting some kind of beneficial outcome. Cryptocurrency is a great idea and has changed how money works, but it is also a business.

•   The company’s operations are located in a foreign country
   -It is hard to believe people put this on their list of red flags for a cryptocurrency. Everyone is a foreigner to someone. Americans are foreigners to Europeans. Europeans are foreigners to Koreans. With cryptocurrency being constantly penalized legally in an ever-increasing number of countries, sometimes the base of operations is best suited within another jurisdiction.

[ILCoinDev]

BACK UP YOUR WALLETS!

It would be nice to collect the amount of money lost in cryptocurrencies. It isn’t even necessary to include the money from scams. Nor do we need to include the money from bad investments. To become incredibly rich, all that would be needed is the non-recoverable money people have lost while safely stored inside their undisturbed wallets; wallets that will remain undisturbed. Forever… Because the owner lost the password/private keys/storage device/mobile device/all of the above.

An article has already been posted here regarding paper wallets. Many, many articles have been written in the past few years by many different authors covering how to safely store, back-up, and recover your wallet. You wouldn’t open a bank account and then neglect to write your transaction PIN down some place safe. Neither should you create a digital wallet for storing digital assets without saving the information some place safe.

Back-up your wallets! Do it now!

Store your password, recovery phrase, and private key some place safe. Or… store them each in different safe places. If using one of ILCoin’s online web wallets, do not forget to save your URL! We can not find it if you do not.

[ILCoinDev]

GIVING GIFTS THAT GIVE

Birthday, Christmas, Mother’s/Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Weddings, House Warming Party, Baby Shower, Naming Ceremony of Child, Bayrams, Epiphany, Bar/Bat Mitzvah, Tet, and New Year’s Day are just a few of the occasions where gift giving flourishes. Depending on where you are from on this planet, different gifts are considered acceptable for different occasions. On most of these occasions, money is a completely acceptable, if not impersonal, gift.

Giving the gift of cryptocurrency would be, in this author’s opinion, a step above a monetary gift of another kind; especially if the recipient does not know how to use cryptocurrency. It could spark an interest in them. They may want to learn all about how to use it if not just for the moment so they can convert it into a governmentally issued fiat currency. Even still, this creates more fluidity and daily volume for your preferred cryptocurrency thereby helping to increase its value.

Or it could be that their gift of cryptocurrency suddenly doubles in value; effectively increasing the value of the gift they receive. This could, in turn, also stimulate the recipient to want to invest even more into their account. Watching their invested gift grow even further could motivate them to also give cryptocurrency to others. Advertisement by word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful ways to spread information about a product.

Some words of wisdom for those considering giving the gift of cryptocurrency this year:

Don’t give wallets to people you aren’t willing to teach about cryptocurrency. If you give the gift, be prepared to follow through with the learning experience. In the end, we all benefit from more people knowing about cryptocurrency.

Regardless of who you give the cryptocurrency to, place an expiration date on the gift. Tell them they need to transfer the cryptocurrency to another wallet before a certain date. This will ensure they know enough about the money to create a new wallet and make a transfer. This will also ensure that anyone without an interest in the product won’t put to waste perfectly good coins.

How will you prevent the coins from going to waste? Keep back up information (including the expiration date) about each wallet you give. If by that date they have not completed their end of the gift giving experience, there is a way for you to recover the funds. No, I’m not saying steal from your loved ones. I’m saying some people just don’t have an interest in cryptocurrency. This also helps to prevent a lost wallet if they lose the back up information. Remember, they are newbies just learning how to use cryptocurrency.

This year, share your love for cryptocurrency with your loved ones!

[ILCoinDev]

IS CRYPTOCURRENCY A MONEY OR AN INVESTMENT?

…or both?

While originally designed to be used as an alternative to traditional currencies, we find that a lot of users involved with cryptocurrency do not spend it; instead, holding on to it as a means of investing money similar to the stock market. Investors will purchase them and follow their trends and market value just as they would the items in a stock portfolio. Most cryptocurrency users will utilize cryptocurrency as both an investment and a money; saving a large portion for investment purposes and assigning another portion to be spent freely.

Some cryptocurrencies have seen the investors (not the spenders) as a dilemma. Not that it’s a bad thing to only invest in cryptocurrency, but without contributing to the liquidity of a currency, the overall value and usefulness can be affected significantly. To counter this, some cryptocurrencies have implored added features or gimmicks that promote spending and not saving.

Recently, ILCoin has become a part of the FreiExchange market for cryptocurrencies. Freicoin is their resident currency and has a demurrage fee (1). “Demurrage forces freicoins to circulate at deliberately high rates. Separation of money's roles as store-of-value and medium-of-exchange allows money to flow when it is needed, in good times and bad.” The demurrage fee for Freicoin is a flat 5% yearly fee which is automatically deducted from each currency owner and is used to help reimburse miners. This will ensure owners of the coin will use the coin and not just sit on it and lose 5% each year.

1) http://freico.in/