bitcoin – Crypto-corner

Don’t invest in Bitmain.farm without reading this first!!

There’s a new service that is claiming to do cloud mining under the name “Bitmain.farm” and I just saw their ad on one of the crypto websites I visit regularly, so I decided to research more about it.

What raised my interest (and suspicion) was the unusually high return rate that they advertised, so I will lay down my finding here for you.

First, let’s see what exactly is being advertised:

bitmain-farm-ad (2)_LI.jpg

At first glance, the words that stand out: Bitmain, 8% per day and “secure” (scammers really love to boast about how safe and risk-free their offers are…)

Why do I think this is a scam? Well, keep reading (or watch my video below if you’re not keen on reading much).

The first red flag for me was the 8% return. I’ve been in the crypto and online money making business since 2014 and I can tell you that there is NO legitimate business opportunity that has ever been able to offer anything close to that. It’s only hyips that do this kind of claims and these are ponzi-type of schemes that only rotate money for a short period of time and then disappear, usually leaving hundreds or thousands of people in the red.

This is going to be the case with Bitmain.farm too, mark my words. I’ve reviewed loads of similar schemes and I used to post videos to warn people about them back in 2016 but I haven’t done it in a while and I feel it’s time to spread the word again. There are so many newbies that came in this space since then, offering an easy prey for the scammers and it’s our duty to stop them or at least make it harder for the bad actors to scam us.

Let’s continue with my research so you don’t get the impression that I’m writing only on personal conviction or without anything to back up my claims.

Bitmain.farm’s website doesn’t reveal any information about the people who are behind it, nor its location (more red flags) and on top of that it was registered in August 2019 while Bitmain – the actual company and their official website (bitmain.com) has been around since 2007.

In this case, I am convinced that the person who is running Bitmain.farm is fraudulently using the name of the biggest mining and chip producing companies (Bitmain) because their brand is really well-known around the world. For many years Bitmain has been the leading company in mining, responsible for more than 80% of the market share in ASIC producing chips and controlling one of the biggest mining farms Antpool. You can see all of this on their official website and please note that there’s absolutely NO information there about this cloud mining service that Bitmain.farm is claiming to do.
Weird, right?
If you operate such service, wouldn’t you have a link or some type of promo about it on your own official webpage?
Damn right you would.
Except, if you’re not at all running such service and not even aware of it.
Which is the case here. I can say that with great conviction too since it was noted by a user on trustpilot – one of the respected websites for reviews and feedback from users.

Annotation 2020-01-06 180132.jpg

After a quick browse through the comments here it becomes clear that Bitmain.farm is nothing but a scam website and like many others before it, it runs the all-too-familiar ponzi scheme that pays for the first few withdrawals, just enough to make people feel easy and to encourage them to promote it to their friends and followers. Like with many other hyips, users are able to withdraw in the first days/weeks because it is known that the more-cautious members will put in small amounts, then try the withdraws before they deposit the bigger chunks of their capital. This is the strategy that makes people feel confident that the website is “real” and that it pays, so they go bold and start putting in more money and getting their close circle involved too.

There is a 8% affiliate commission offered to members, which is enough to make those early “investors” share it with many others and thus, the scam grows fast, the money keeps coming in, alas, not much of it is ever going out. Here are a more comments from Trustpilot supporting this very scenario:

Annotation 2020-01-06 182026

Annotation 2020-01-06 181754

In addition to this I also browsed through one of the oldest forums: bitcointalk and the lesser-known “beermoneyforum” where I found more comments and reviews that confirmed everything I laid out above.

Annotation 2020-01-06 180523

Annotation 2020-01-06 183258

All in all, these reports and comments should be enough to make you keep away from the Bitmain.farm website and avoid loosing money in their ponzi scheme but if you aren’t convinced yet, I hope you will use my research and take it a step further and conduct your own due diligence. At least, I hope this post will help you make an informed decision and will challenge you to do more research.

As far as cloud mining goes, there are really not many opportunities that are legit or profitable for the end user, which is also why I have not been involved with these for quite some time. Out of 30 or more offers I reviewed over the past year, I only picked one that I trust and this is only because I know the people who run the mining. I’d like to note here that I used to be a big proponent of Genesis Mining – one of the first cloud mining companies (which is still running today) and I do have a couple of Zcash and Dash contracts with them since 2016 but I am very disappointed with them since 2018 when they abruptly ended my Bitcoin mining contracts when the mining difficulty rate jumped a lot and the mining became un-profitable for a period of a few months. My contracts were “open-plan” which meant they should run for at least 5 years or more, but they were shut down after just 2.5 years, so in the end, I cannot recommend them either.

For more great crypto content (market analysis, news and more) sign up for my Crypto Newsletter from this link.

It’s 11 years since Bitcoin’s first block and the birth of Blockchain.

It’s January 3rd 2020 and today marks 11 years since the Genesis Block being mined back in 2009. For those who missed my Crypto Jargon series, a genesis block is the first block of a blockchain. Modern versions of Bitcoin number it as block 0, though very early versions counted it as block 1. The genesis block is almost always hardcoded into the software of the applications that utilize its blockchain and it’s a special case since it does not reference a previous block, and for bitcoin and almost all of its derivatives, it produces an unspendable subsidy.

The hash of the genesis block is: 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f

It has two more leading hex zeroes than were required for an early block and what is unique for this hash is that it contains a quote from the front page of The Times newspaper – one of the most respected British media outlets which reads:

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”

This was probably intended as proof that the block was created on January 3 2009, as well as a comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking.
Additionally, it suggests that Satoshi Nakamoto may have lived in the United Kingdom and in my opinion it is very likely that he (or they) be British or at least European since it is not very common for an American to quote British media. This is just a personal conviction of course. The fact that the white paper was released in English (and well-written too) also points to the fact that he (or they) is most likely a westerner despite the Asian pseudonym.

The detail : “second bailout for banks” also suggests that the act of a supposedly liberal and capitalist system, rescuing banks in this manner, was a problem for Satoshi. Hence why we take it as given that the purpose of bitcoin’s conception was something to do with challenging the current monetary system and opposing the threat of a centralised, self-serving, elitist, banking dictatorship.

The raw hex version of the Genesis block looks like this:

Although the average time between Bitcoin blocks is 10 minutes, the timestamp of the next block is a full 6 days after the genesis block. One interpretation is that Satoshi was working on bitcoin for some time beforehand and the The Times front page prompted him to release it to the public. He then mined the genesis block with a timestamp in the past to match the headline. It is also possible that, since the block’s hash is so low, he may have spent 6 days mining it with the same timestamp before proceeding to block 1. The prenet hypothesis suggests that the genesis block was solved on January 3, but the software was tested by Satoshi Nakamoto using that genesis block until January 9, when all the test blocks were deleted and the genesis block was reused for the main network.

What is also interesting about the Genesis block is that the first 50 BTC block reward went to address 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa but this reward cannot be spent due to a quirk in the way that the genesis block is expressed in the code.
It is not known if this was done intentionally or accidentally. It is believed that other outputs sent to this address are spendable, but it is unknown if Satoshi Nakamoto has the private key for this particular address, if one existed at all.
Many years later the much-hated impostor Craig Wright attempted to claim ownership of the bitcoin invention, going as far as claiming he was Satoshi himself but was repeatedly disgraced by not being able to produce the private key to this address, later claiming that he was afraid to do so, even though he was so desperate to be regarded as the creator of bitcoin. In a court ruling last year, Wright was disproved once again and was ordered to pay half of his bitcoin fortune (that he claims to have mined in the early years) to the estate of Dave Kleiman whom he was in business partnership with for some time.

While the original Genesis Block contained 50 bitcoins, people have been sending the address bitcoins in tribute to Nakamoto since the early days of the system. These donations and tips take on an even more symbolic meaning as its quite possible that they are unable to be spent when they join the original address. It’s unknown if Nakamoto’s intent was to not let the 50 bitcoins in the original block be spendable or if it was an oversight, but the Genesis Block has become synonymous with Nakamoto and exists as both the backbone of the entire project and as a kind of shrine for fans of Nakamoto to throw their bitcoins into, kind of like a wishing well.

Youtube’s crackdown on crypto content

This Christmas many of the most avid YouTube content creators in the crypto space got an unexpected gift… a channel strike accompanied with the removal of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of their videos.

It’s a complete crypto mayhem in fact and many are having their most popular videos taken down in the eve of Christmas. What a way to celebrate ey?

I’m probably least affected since only a few of my videos received the strike but other creators such as Chris Dunn, Heidi, BTC Sessions, Ivan On Tech and Chico Crypto are reporting a much bigger scale of the attack coming from Youtube right now.

It’s no secret that YouTube has been suppressing some channels’ content for years, many of the creators I’m following have expressed concerns over the past couple of years and reported that their views have dropped by more than 50%, in some cases even worse. I myself have had similar situation with my own channel in the past year as well. The difference this time is, that right now we’re seeing people’s videos being taken down for “violating community guidelines” which is a very broad excuse and could include anything from having referral links or donation address in the description, to actually soliciting financial advice and a number of other finance-related activities that are deemed violation by Youtube. What makes no sense at all to me though, is the fact that many of the videos that are being removed, are in fact from a couple of years ago. I spoke to Ivan On Tech and he’s had a few videos removed that were from 2018. The videos I had removed, were even older – from early 2017… so what exactly has triggered this YouTube crackdown and why is it mainly affecting videos from times past… is yet to be revealed.

You can see, both of my videos are educational, one is about the Segwit upgrade and what it actually means, the other one is about a hard fork called Bitcoin Gold which occurred in 2017 and I reported about it – without any financial advice or other call to action to my viewers, which means there’s little room left for YouTube to justify this action and I do not expect them to get into the specifics on why and what did they deem as inappropriate. They rarely get into such details. I will keep you updated on this but the bottom line is, we are using a centralized platform and we are all at the mercy of those who control and run YouTube as a private company despite providing public service. It’s what centralized authorities do. They can decide whose content stays visible and as if it’s up to them, we will only watch make-up tutorials and nonsense-driven “LOL” type of content. This is always recommended by Youtube, even if you’re not into that kind of time-wasters. It’s non-political, non-threatening and most of all, makes people spend their time on un-important stuff – exactly what the ruling elite wants from their subordinates.
However, if their control spreads more and affects even more content creators, its popularity will be threatened and it opens the door for decentralized platofrms like LBRY to get in the game and win over the crypto community. Steemit unfortunately requires a video link, so it’s not really an alternative, but LBRY is offering the option to upload content directly and this is why many of the creators are now moving over there to avoid having their videos removed again. The only downside to this is that it’s still early days for LBRY and only a handful of users know about it, so it will be a long while before we get to use it on its own. YouTube is still having the highest discovery and that is unlikely to change any time soon.

—- (added on 26th Dec)—-

Today IBS Intelligence reported in an article that due to public outcry from the crypto community, Youtube has reinstated the videos that were removed. The excuse was rather vague and came as generic as one can expect from YouTube – they blame it on a rogue algorithm which was done as an error.
However, some argue that this was linked to the expanding regulatory issues surrounding the COPPA – the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which for the past few years has been applied to more and more services and recently involved YouTube changing their terms yet again, asking everyone to comply with even more restrictions.

Like it or not, the fact is that YouTube is essential to all vloggers today and is the most popular platform even after a decade. In my case, YouTube videos helped me tremendously in the early days when I was learning about crypto and this type of censoring of educational content (and not even the really risky, trading or ICO shilling content) is giving us some food for thought. Despite this being played out as an error, it raised the awareness of vloggers about the risks of their content being censored without even being issued a warning. The result is: more and more content creators will now diversify their platforms and we will see Bittubers, Dtube, LBRY and others gain more traction in the future but will they manage to provide the much-needed alternative with a reasonable traffic and greater discovery than what they currently offer is questionable still.

Types of Forks in Crypto Explained.

Welcome to another edition of my short series “Crypto Jargon”.
In these series, I break down the complex terminology we use in reference to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

In this article are featured the following acronyms for software changes and upgrades (known as software forks):

Soft Fork (SF)
Hard Fork (HF)
User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF)
User-activated Hard Fork (UAHF)
Miner-Activated Soft Fork (MASF)
Contentious & Non-Contentious Forks.

These are some of the types of forks most commonly referred to, so let’s explain the differences.

First, what is a fork?

In programming terms, a fork is a (permanent) modification, upgrade, divergence or simply any change in the original code of a software.

Forks generally happen in the crypto world when new “rules” are built into a blockchain’s code. Sometimes a fork is used to test a process, but with cryptocurrencies, it is mostly used to implement a fundamental change or to create a new asset with similar (but not equal) characteristics as the original.

There are two main types of programming fork: hard and soft.

A Soft Fork is an upgrade in the software that is compatible with the original version. When the changes are implemented, they are backward compatible, meaning that even users who haven’t upgraded to the new software, are still able to run their nodes and mine blocks on that blockchain. In the case of Segwit for instance, which was a soft fork on the bitcoin blockchain, users and node operators could choose if they want to run the older version (legacy) or the new version (segwit) of the protocol. And still, to this day there are certain economical nodes, such as the Blockchain.com Wallet and KeepKey for instance, which are running the legacy version and you can tell by the wallet address – a Legacy Bitcoin address begins with the number 1 while a Segwit wallet address begins with the number 3.

A User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) is when a soft fork is activated on a specified date and is enforced by full nodes; a concept sometimes referred to as the economic majority. A UASF requires a lot of industry support and coordination. Originally Segwit was going to be implemented as a UASF and as a response to that Bitmain, a major mining firm, announced A contingency plan against it in the form of a User Activated Hard Fork UAHF which they did anyway and thus Bitcoin Cash was born.

A Hard Fork is an upgrade in the software that requires all users to switch to the new version of that software. It is not backward compatible, meaning that anyone who wants to mine blocks on that blockchain has to use the latest version of the code.

It can be a “Planned hard fork” – which is simply an upgrade to the protocol that had already been made clear in advance by the project developers and there’s no conflict in its implementation. Usually, a high-degree of consensus from the project developers and the community would have already been reached, before the hard fork occurred. Examples of a planned hard fork is Monero’s hard fork in January of 2017, which saw the addition of a new privacy feature known as Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) and the 2019 Ethereum change to a Proof Of Stake protocol which was announced years ahead of implementation.

In this regard it’s also known as a non-contentious hard fork which means everyone upgrades and moves on.

The opposite is a “Contentious hard fork“, which is not being accepted by everyone and some users decide to continue running the older version and this way the chain splits into two: one path which follows the new, upgraded blockchain; and one path which continues along with the old blockchain version. This is how Ethereum Classic was created and also Bitcoin Cash when it split from Bitcoin in 2017.

A hard fork can also be initiated if a 51% attack occurs, or due to a bug in the system so it doesn’t always create a new coin.

A User Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) is where developers add a mandatory rule set to change the node software. These changes make previously invalid blocks become valid after a flag day, which does not require a majority of hash power to be enforced.

The most significant example for applying UASF and UAHF is the forking of Ethereum.

In May 2006, Ethereum started The DAO project. But a month later the project was hacked and a sum of about $55,000,000 was stolen. This amounted to more than 10% of the circulating supply of Ether at the time. After the incident three solutions were suggested:

To accept the theft and do nothing
To roll back the Blockchain to the time before the theft which would be through a hard fork
To accept all the transactions to the hacker’s wallets false and return the money back which would be done as a soft fork.

The Ethereum community chose to go with the second proposal, but some users weren’t happy with that. They assumed that “code is law” and is the main concept of cryptocurrency. These users accepted the theft and decided to stick to the original version without any rollback, so when the hard fork was executed, there were two chains. One that is known as Ethereum, ETH, and another, known as Ethereum Classic, ETC.

The signaling for consensus on a fork proposal can also be handed to the miners which are known as a Miner Activated Soft/Hard Fork (MASF).

There are also Accidental forks – a rare occasion when two or more blocks have the same block height, forking the blockchain. Typically occurs when two or more miners find blocks at nearly the same time. It can also happen as part of an attack.

As you probably know I also post these definitions on my YouTube channel, here’s my episode with today’s terms:

If you liked this article, you will most certainly love my eBook “Crypto Jargon A-Z” – this is the most up-to-date publication of its kind. With over 700 terms, acronyms and trading slang, it contains everything related to cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech – all the complex terminology we use in media articles, blogs, forum chats, social media posts and of course video content too so go check it out on Amazon at one of the following links:

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🏆Exchanges I use for trading crypto:

►Binance
►Kucoin
►Bittrex
►Bitfinex
►HitBtc

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Where I buy crypto:

►BitPanda (Europe)
►Cex (Global)
►Coinmama (Global)
►Changelly (good for instant coins swaps)(Global)
►Payeer (Europe, Asia, alternative to paypal)
►Bitfinex
►Coinbase (USA, EU, Africa) Get $10 worth of Bitcoin on your first $100 crypto purchase with this link: http://bit.do/coinbase_join

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Where I store my crypto:

Ledger Nano – the best hardware wallet (offline storage)
Trezor – also one of the best wallets out there.
Exodus – desktop wallet
Coinomi – mobile phone wallet with instant coin swap feature
Crypto.com – mobile wallet and exchange

CYA, CYOA, DYOR, ELI5, IMO & YABC Explained.

Welcome to another post from “Crypto Jargon” – the series where we break down the complex crypto terminology. Today’s article features the following slang acronyms:

These are acronyms mostly used on chat forums and twitter and haven’t quite made it into the mainstream yet, so if you happen to spot them and not sure what they stand for, keep reading:

CYA
CYOA
DYOR
ELI5
IMO
YABC

Starting with CYA and CYOA are referring to pretty much the same thing Cover Your Ass or Cover Your Own Ass and can mean two things:

First, it is referred to as covering your digital footprint, your online activity in order to not be identified. But more often it is used simply as a warning about careless investments of those who are new to the crypto space. It means that one should do a lot of research before they make a buy position of a cryptocurrency and make sure they set a stop-loss to protect against possible reverse in the market.

In that respect, similar usage has the acronym DYOR which stands for: Do Your Own Research. Not to be confused with the luxury fashion house of Dior. The warning here is that you really must protect yourself against losses and scams by doing a lot of research and mainly, Your Own Research, rather than just following other people’s advice blindly, which can get you in trouble.

There are too many Shills, Trolls and Scam artists, who can easily misguide you and cause you great losses. So, most of the influencers and content creators would always tell you to Cover Your Ass by Doing Your Own Research. By the way, Shill and Troll are terms I cover in another article in these series so look in the description here for the link.

Another common expression on forums and chat rooms is ELI5, which stands for: Explain Like I’m a 5-year-old, basically calling for a simple, easy to follow explanation of something that is usually more complex. Just what I am doing here with these series.

IMO, in My Opinion, I am doing a good job, wouldn’t you agree? This is what IMO stands for.

And lastly, YABC means “Yet Another Bitcoin Company” or it can also be used as “Another Blockchain Company”. It’s a term indicating that there is really nothing special with this specific company and that it is just trying to jump on the Bitcoin/Blockchain trend for more gains. There are thousands of companies that want to be associated with Bitcoin just to appear as cool and in 2017 there were many instances where businesses added the word Bitcoin or Blockchain to their brand name and saw huge increases in revenue as a result.

As you probably know I also post these definitions on my YouTube channel, here’s my episode with today’s terms:

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🏆Exchanges I use for trading crypto:

►Binance
►Kucoin
►Bittrex
►Bitfinex
►HitBtc

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Where I buy crypto:

=== ===

Where I store my crypto:

Ledger Nano – the best hardware wallet (offline storage)
Trezor – also one of the best wallets out there.
Exodus – desktop wallet
Coinomi – mobile phone wallet with instant coin swap feature
Crypto.com – mobile wallet and exchange

DAPP, DAO, DAC, DAICO, DLT & DIF EXPLAINED.

Welcome to another edition of my short series “Crypto Jargon”. In these series, I break down the complex terminology we use in reference to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

In today’s article: What is a

DAPP
DAO
DAC
DAICO
DLT
DIF

It seems we are stuck with the letter “D” today, so let’s get started.

First let’s look at the definition of DAPP, which stands for Decentralized Application – an application that is run by many users on a decentralized network on many computers instead of one, single unit and therefore is outside the purview and control of a single authority.

A standard web app, like Amazon or Twitter, runs on a computer system that is owned and operated by an organisation giving it full authority over the app and its workings. There may be multiple users on one side, but the back-end is controlled by one single organisation. In the context of cryptocurrencies, a dApp exists and runs on the blockchain network in a public, open-source, decentralised environment and is free from control and interference from any single authority. With trust-less protocols.

For example, a developer can create a Twitter-like dApp and run it on a blockchain where any user can tweet messages. Once posted, no one – including the app creators – can delete the tweets. Editing may be possible by the sender, but the original tweet would be retained forever. Many such applications use Ethereum smart contracts as their back-end code since Ethereum was built with the purpose of being a platform that specifically caters to the creation of dApps.

DApps can also serve as an acronym for Distributed Applications, which are software applications that are stored mostly on cloud computing platforms and that run on multiple systems simultaneously. The systems run on the same network and communicate with each other in an effort to complete a specific task or command.

The next acronym in this episode is DAO which in cryptocurrency terms stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Also known as a DAC (the C stands for cooperative), so the DAO is a company or organization, that could carry out business according to rules that are encoded as smart contracts, needing no human management.

These rules are not susceptible to one person’s permission or control and cannot be changed by anyone person’s decision.

The best-known attempt at creating such an organisation was called “The DAO” and was hacked soon after it launched in June 2016 resulting in a loss of a third of its funds. The Ethereum developers just wanted to reverse the huge hack, it was accepted by consensus, but a small group wanted to retain it as it was before the hack, as they “believe it goes against their core values”. This led to Ethereum being hard-forked the following month and splitting to ETH (Ethereum) and ETC (Ethereum Classic). The DAO is often cited as one of Ethereum’s biggest stumbles to date.

Moving onto DAICO – an acronym for Decentralised Autonomous Initial Coin Offering. A type of capital raising, originally proposed by Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum). DAICOs have many features different from regular Initial Coin Offerings, but the most prominent feature is that the investors in a DAICO can take back their funds if the relevant project team does not fulfil certain conditions. In this respect, it acts similar to a STO which I explained on the previous episode of Crypto Jargon, you will find it popping up here right now or also in the description box of this video, so check it out.

Next is DLT – Distributed Ledger Technology. What is a Distributed Ledger then? In most simple terms this is publicly shared, replicable and synchronised data, spread across multiple networks, across many computers. It is a dynamic, independently maintained database, unlike a central ledger that is kept by a central agency, such as a bank and usually is not publicly accessible. So, DLT is the technology behind a Distributed Ledger.

And the last one for this article is DIF, an acronym for Decentralised Identity Foundation. This is a group of businesses and organisations working together to build a globally accepted identity verification system. The DIF uses blockchain technology to create a system that doesn’t require a centralised authority for purposes of identification.

As you probably know I also post these definitions on my YouTube channel, here’s my episode with today’s terms:

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🏆Exchanges I use for trading crypto:

►Binance
►Kucoin
►Bittrex
►Bitfinex
►HitBtc

=== ===

Where I buy crypto:

=== ===

Where I store my crypto:

Ledger Nano – the best hardware wallet (offline storage)
Trezor – also one of the best wallets out there.
Exodus – desktop wallet
Coinomi – mobile phone wallet with instant coin swap feature
Crypto.com – mobile wallet and exchange

ICO, IEO, STO, IPO and FREECO Explained.

Welcome to another informative article of Crypto Jargon. Today I will explain the terms behind the following acronyms:

ICO
IEO
STO
IPO
IMO
FREECO

So, let’s start with the most well-known I guess – ICO. It’s been explained in a hundred videos already and you might have seen my video from a couple of years ago, so I’ll keep it short and sweet.

ICO stands for Initial Coin Offering and it’s a form of crowdfunding a crypto-related project at a pre-launch stage.

ICOs are frequently used by developers of a new crypto currency to raise capital.

Since the first Initial Coin Offering in 2013 by Mastercoin, ICO have become a very popular method for investors to obtain tokens at low prices. At the same time, they have also been used by many scammers for illicit funding of dubious or non-existent projects, which put pressure on many government bodies to set regulatory framework for ICOs in 2017. China, India and America are currently amongst the few governments that require KYC registration for participants in ICOs.

While 2017 was the year of ICOs (thousands were launched back then), 2019 is the year of IEOs – this stands for Initial Exchange Offering and it’s a crowdfunding similar to an ICO but which relies on having an exchange or a number of exchanges that function as a counter-party. Developers mint the project’s tokens and send them to the exchange, which will then sell the tokens to individual contributors. It is more convenient in the way that the tokens are received directly into the users accounts in that exchange and they can start trading them without the nuisance of having to remember which wallet they used when they placed their orders for the Initial Coin Offering and then having to claim them and move them into the exchange once they are listed, a process that could in some cases take months and be quite a challenge for those who are not very tech-savvy.

STO stands for Security Token Offering and it’s a step further into providing more security for the investors. Similar to an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), an investor is issued with tokens representing their investment but unlike an ICO, a Security Token Offering represents an investment contract with agreed minimum returns or a return of the invested amount upon failure to meet this agreed minimum.

IPO is the original term that this stem from – it stands for Initial Public Offering and the event in which a company “goes public” selling early shares of their business in exchange for funds. This term gave birth to the crypto-specific term ICO but the two have major differences. IPO is about selling shares with a price are determined by the profitability of the company and its expectancy for future performance while ICO is about selling tokens that do not represent equity, not shares from the company, their price is based purely on hope and speculation about potential future performance of that project.

Now, about IMO – this is not a term related to cryptocurrencies or investments in any way, but I thought it belongs to this list purely because of the spelling similarities.

It stands for In My Opinion and it’s widely used on social media and could be confused with an IPO, so I thought I’d insert it here just to be on the safe side.

Lastly, there’s a term that isn’t used very much, FreeCO – Unlike a traditional ICO where investors are required to send money before the project launches, in a FreeCo, you just have to register with the project, and you get some free coins. You only get to invest later when the project is up and running. You won’t really find many of these but it’s worth mentioning it, I guess.

As you probably know I also post these definitions on my YouTube channel, here’s my episode with today’s terms:

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🏆Exchanges I use for trading crypto:

►Binance
►Kucoin
►Bittrex
►Bitfinex
►HitBtc

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Where I buy crypto:

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Where I store my crypto:

Ledger Nano – the best hardware wallet (offline storage)
Trezor – also one of the best wallets out there.
Exodus – desktop wallet
Coinomi – mobile phone wallet with instant coin swap feature
Crypto.com – mobile wallet and exchange