A few weeks ago I reported about the new initiative from the Horizen Project developers to spread awareness about crypto by giving away free zatoshis – the smaller denominations of their native cryptocurrency called ZEN.
In my episode of the Crypto Corner show on YouTube in December, I spoke to Rob Viglione – co-founder of Horizen and we discussed the reasoning behind the decision to open this faucet and give away small portions of their coin to users from all over the world. You can find the video here.
For new users here’s how this works: the faucet is in simple terms a website (of a crypto node) that awards users with small amounts of a coin for free. Some faucets also require certain tasks to be completed but not this one. You will have to register with an email and for those who weren’t happy that the amounts were very small, there’s now an additional bonus feature that rewards users up to 2.2 times higher amounts if they are willing to join the Horizen community. After all, this is the main purpose of the giveaway. Growing the community and the support for their coin.
For those who are already users of the faucet, you can pump up your rewards by going to the Bonus tab on the website and you will have the option to add up to 3 social media accounts. If you do that, you will receive the higher rewards. See the screenshot below.
Also, don’t forget that for each consequitive day you visit the website and claim a reward, you get slightly more than the previous day. It goes like this:
Day 1 – typically around 3k zatoshis
Day 2 – 1.2 times more
Day 3 – 1.4 times more
Day 4 – 1.6 times more
Day 5 – 1.8 times more + Bonus round that can go up to 1ZEN but in most cases it’s 0.25 ZEN which is still much more than the previous days so make sure you get to day 5 and after you claim the regular reward, refresh the page and click the bonus round icon which will turn from grey to blue-ish (this is how you know it’s active and you can do the bonus round).
Day 6 – you get 2 times the amount you got on Day 1.
After that it resets and you start another 6 day period as described above.
The faucet is open to be used every 20 hours, so you have to wait for 20 hours between claims, it can be more than that but if you leave it for much longer, you will miss and will start from Day1 again.
Lastly, if you’re still not sure what ZEN is and why should you care, check out my previous posts where I explain more about it and join their free forum where you will find more useful information and tutorials.
If you are interested in joining this cool giveaway, follow this link to the faucet’s website.
people are now transacting millions of dollars’ worth in bitcoin in a single transaction, for fees below one dollar………
The invention of Bitcoin is arguably the biggest threat to the banking system already revolutionising the way money is being exchanged and transacted. There’s no doubt that in the past few years the cryptocurrency gained popularity and much respect from all fin-tech sectors for its ability to offer a faster and much cheaper alternative to cross-border money transfers, along with some other use cases that made it a factor in finance that can no longer be ignored or ridiculed (that was a popular practise in the early years of its lifespan).
Besides being censorship-resistant, Bitcoin offers the ability of true ownership and self-management of your own capital, without the need of a third party involvement. For the first time since the modern monetary system was invented, people are able to have unlimited and permisionless access to their own capital.
There are millions of transactions happening on a daily basis and while this is not news, I want to draw your attention to the fact that people are now transacting millions of dollars’ worth in bitcoin in a single transaction, for fees below one dollar. Remarkable, right?
The twitter account @BtcBlockBot reports about such large transactions and this month alone, it reported about more than 20 of them. Out of these, only one incurred a larger fee (80 usd for a billion dollars’ worth of bitcoin) possibly transacted by Bitfinex as reported by the bot on January 14. In contrast, the rest of the whale transactions are all at the cost of just a few cents each. On January 20 for instance, a transaction of 51511 bitcoins estimated at around $450 million were moved from one wallet to another for a fee of just $0.25 (USD) – yes, a single quarter, which really can’t get you anything in the western world these days. This equates to a fee of effectively 0%, with 0.25/450,000,000 on the calculator outputting an odd number in scientific number format and this could have even been an overpaid fee, with the transactor likely having the option of paying an even lower fee, under the $0.1 range, if they didn’t mind waiting a bit longer and could have saved 30% in fees by upgrading to SegWit and 16% more than that if there was a full upgrade to a native SegWit-Bech32 address.
A few more examples:
January 3 – $468 million USD was transacted for a fee of just 0.0000268btc which comes to $0.23;
January 9 – $466 million USD transfer incurred a fee of $0.71
January 15 – $465 million USD (53,911 BTC) was transferred for a fee of $0.29 (3360 sats)
January 16 – a whopping 124946 btc (that’s over 1 billion USD) was moved at a fee of just $0.48 USD.
January 17 – a transfer of 52,511btc (half a billion USD) was costing just $0.35
All of this just goes to show that while still struggling to be accepted as a currency, bitcoin is really doing a good job as a means of exchange – one of the qualities of money.
The volatile nature of the cryptocurrency is still an issue for the end-user, especially in the retail sector where price stability is essential, but even if bitcoin fails to deliver the “digital cash” promise for the smaller, day-to-day use cases, that doesn’t stop it from achieving its more ambitious goal – disrupting the banking industry and giving the power to us – regular folks who want to have a greater control over our own capital by avoiding the third party intermediaries and their ever-so-high fees and restrictions of transacting.
In a previous article by Crypto Jargon, we explained the difference between a coin and a token. So now, let’s break down the types of coins and tokens that are currently most commonly used in crypto. In this post I’ll break down the following:
STABLECOIN
VIRGIN COIN
PRIVACY COIN
SHITCOIN
SCAMCOIN
EQUITY TOKEN
UTILITY TOKEN
SECURITY TOKEN
Starting with Stable Coins which were born in opposition to the very volatile nature of cryptocurrencies in general.
As you know, prices of most cryptocurrencies fluctuate in extremes, sometimes by more than 100% in a day or even in hours, so the necessity for traders to have alternatives gave birth to these so-called “Stable Coins”.
Typically, a stable coin is an asset (not a currency), which offers price stability characteristics. It is mainly designed to be used as a unit of account or as a store of value. Most stable coins today are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to another stable asset, like silver, gold or a fiat currency such as US dollar.
Some prominent examples of stable coins are USDT, PAX, TUSD and USDC.
Many exchanges that do not operate directly with fiat money, are using stable coins as alternatives to the fiat money these coins are pegged to. Stable is used in this case as a broad term of course, as the US Dollar itself is not 100% stable but as a world reserve currency, it is accepted as the standard for determining the Bitcoin value worldwide so most stable coins are fixed to be at 1:1 ratio with the US DOLLAR for that purpose.
Virgin Coin is simply a term referred to a brand-new coin acquired through mining that has not yet been used in a transaction and not being spent yet.
Privacy coin is, as the name suggests, a type of cryptocurrency that has privacy features, such as enhanced level of anonymity or masking layers that obfuscate the addresses of its sender and receiver. Since Bitcoin is not fully anonymous but all its transactions are traceable and publicly visible, some alt coins are focusing on providing anonymous features in order to compete with it. Such coins are Monero, Zcash, Dash, Zen and many others.
Now when we mention Scamcoin and Shitcoin, it becomes clear what we’re talking about – something that is not very legit or at least, not very trustworthy.
Shitcoin is a term typically given to those alts that have no use or potential value. It could be any new altcoin that is not mainstream or does not add innovation to the market. In the trading world, however, this is not necessarily a bad term. Traders don’t avoid a coin because it has weak fundamentals. They care mostly about TA and often would trade these for short term gains. However, if you see yourself as an investor rather than a speculator, you should not really touch these, simply because they don’t have a future in the long term.
A “Scamcoin” on the other hand, is a term referring to a cryptocurrency that is dubious in nature and doesn’t have any specific tech behind it. Its sole purpose is to make its “creators” rich and usually becomes a subject to Pump’n’Dump practices and market manipulation until it loses all value. Bitconnect and Onecoin are two such examples of Scamcoins – no real tech in them, no use-case and heavy MLM compensation plans to attract new investors. Stay away from any MLM crypto is my advice, I’ve never seen a decent cryptocurrency come out from this network marketing model. Ever.
Moving onto Tokens.
Tokens are different from coins due to the fact that they are created as smart contracts on an existing blockchain such as Ethereum, EOS, Stellar, NEO and others.
Tokens have various functions, they can be protocol tokens – those that act as a platform on which to build decentralized applications (DApps) such as Gnosis, Stellar.
Other types of tokens can be utility tokens.
A Utility token is a unit of currency consumed in a process, providing access to a product or service. For example, an arcade token that gets used when a videogame is played or a coin like Binance (BNB), which is used to pay exchange fees, hence the word “utility”, because it has used.
Security tokens are tokens on the blockchain that represent real assets. An example of a security token would be shared in a company-issued on the blockchain.
A token is considered a security if it fulfils the following criteria:
It is an investment of money
The investment is in a common enterprise
There is an expectation of profit from the work of the promoters or the third party.
Because these tokens are deemed a security, they are subject to government regulations. Examples: Tezos and Polymath.
Commodity tokens – these are tokens backed by real-world commodities, whether it is gold, silver or oil. The rate of these tokens depends on the rate of the commodity backing it. For instance: Digix, El Petro and others.
Last but not least, collectible tokens (Cryptokitties, RarePepe).
These tokens represent a virtual collectible unit, like baseball cards, adorable kitties or memes. And they are built on the blockchain.
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:
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:
There have been a number of crypto exchanges that recently delisted privacy coins from their platforms. The likes of Zcash, Monero, ZEN, PIVX and many other privacy oriented coins have been taking a beating from the regulated exchanges due to compliance concerns raised after the FATF ruled them unfit to meet AML criteria and threatened to follow up with closures, and other compliance penalties to those who do not follow their “Travel Rule” about reporting all details on their customers transactions.
Is this a WAR on PRIVACY COINS? What is the future of anonymity in crypto?
These are two of the questions discussed in my recent chat with Rob Viglione – co-founder of ZEN (Horizen) – a privacy oriented coin and multi-facet crypto project that is working toward creating greater privacy to the end-user.
This is my Crypto Corner video podcast episode #80 and you can watch it here in its entirety:
And lastly, here is my top choice for safe storage of my top cryptocurrencies, check out the Ledger Nano S, it can store a large selection of coins, it is a definite MUST HAVE.
Kucoin exchange is having a great choice of cryptocurrencies, all the most popular coins are listed as well as many lesser known ones and their bonus features are what really sets Kucoin exchange apart from its competition….
I’ve written about my preference to Kucoin exchange on a few occasions and I will point out here the top 5 things I consider to be the main points of advantage over other exchanges.
Now, I am not trying to say that Kucoinis the best exchange out there, I wouldn’t go as far as to claim it is better than Binance, Bitfinex, Bittrex or the other giants on the market, after all, we all know that liquidity is king and this is why Binanceis always coming on top of the list when comparing exchanges. However, there are a few things that Kucoin does differently and these make it one of my top exchanges to use, so here we go.
Choice of coins.
Kucoin exchange supports a great variety of small-cap altcoins that are often in their infancy which makes it ideal for those who prefer to trade the less-known coins for greater gains. It is not unusual to catch a winning trade with 10x or more gains on a low-cap cryptocurrency (experience needed*) and this is one of the main reasons why many traders prefer Kucoin over the more established competitors.
“Buy with Fiat” option.
Kucoin exchange is one of a few that offers the option to buy crypto directly with a credit card on their platform which for many is an important feature when starting their online trading experience.
Lesser fees.
Compared to many other exchanges, Kucoin exchange has trading fees starting at 0.1% which is below the industry standard (most commonly fees range between 0.15% to 0.25%), with the option to reduce your fees further by holding a certain amount of KSC which is the native Kucoin token.
Numerous competitions.
The incentives run by Kucoin exchange are a great way to get some extra coins for free. Whether by taking part in competitions or completing tasks. These are happening pretty much every week.
Regular airdrops to token holders.
If competitions are not your cup of tea, then you can just get lucky one day and find out that you’re being awarded an airdrop simply for holding a certain coin. This happened to me on a few occasions (see screenshots below), most recently for having some Tron in my account which was a nice bonus.
They do airdrops quite often and they always make announcements about these on their telegram news channel so it’s good to keep an eye on these.
And here’s an EXTRA point to make: The Kucoin Bonus offers.
Members of this exchange can make additional profit from the KCS – the Kucoin native token that pays a daily bonus for holding the tokens and the second offering is the commission-based affiliate side of the business that will bring some extra coins to your wallet should you choose to promote them.
I am taking advantage of both of these bonus offerings and I am getting small rewards on a daily basis paid to me for holding some KCS coins and from the fees that Kucoin collects from the trading activity of my peeps so while this is by no means big money, it’s still something extra that comes passively and without any effort, so it’s worth considering it.
The bottom line is: Kucoin exchange is having a great choice of cryptocurrencies, all the most popular coins are listed as well as many lesser known ones and their bonus features are what really sets Kucoin exchange apart from its competition so go check it out here >>>kucoin-exchange <<<
My favourite hardware wallet – Ledger Nano is having a massive sale offer ALL WEEK.
I’ve been using the Ledger devices ever since I got my first Bitcoin and throughout the years they improved their devices so much.
Ledger has been a solid little vault since the early days but the latest model and the upgrades to their firmware made it even better. Gone are the days where we had to choose between only 3 or 4 coins to store, the early Nano S model was having a very limited capacity but with the latest upgrade to its firmware, we can now store up to 10 different coin apps on the device and there are over 1000 to choose from.
What’s even better, the latest model – NANO X can store over 100 and it even has a Bluetooth option to navigate it from your mobile phone on the go – which is what I’m doing most of the time and this has really changed everything for me. I used to store smaller amounts of my coins in cloud wallets just to have the convenience to use them when I’m not at home or on short travels where I don’t carry my laptop with me but since I got the Nano X I don’t have to worry about this anymore, I just sync it with my phone app and I’m able to access all my crypto assets from anywhere – how good is that.
I’ve posted many tutorials on the Ledger devices over the past few years, the latest one was my Start-to-Finish tutorial on how to set up your Nano X device and how to restore it as a previous device – if you have already used a previous one, so make sure you check these out too.
So, if you’ve been eager to get your hands on one of these devices, now is your chance to get them at a great discount all week…
Yes, it’s really a week-long black Friday event and the sales are now ON. Click the banner below or to the right ——>>>
or use this link to get the discount offer straight from their official website.
I am taking advantage of both of these bonus offerings and I am getting small rewards on a daily basis paid to me for holding some KCS coins and from the fees that 
