Digital gold

Bitcoin is often being described as digital gold. Same as gold, it is scarce and being mined and released into circulation at a fairly predictable rate. It is impossible to counterfeit. It is fungible, meaning some gold is not better than any other gold. It is divisible to a high degree. It can be anonymous.

It has most of the properties of gold, but improves them. It’s much easier to transfer, for one. Which means it is also easier to steal large quantities of. If you steal a ton of gold, people will notice when you try to carry it with you on the plane. If you steal 100 million worth of Bitcoin, you can carry it in your head or on a USB stick.

Continue Reading

Wrote another article for the Reflex Capital blog: ICO or IKO about why I think ICOs make little to zero sense.

Czech version is also available, as usual.

Continue Reading

Maybe you’ve heard about the recent attack on Bitcoin Gold exchanges, where the attackers stole some BTG using a form of double-spend attack.

Now, you might start to wonder: How is that possible? The genius of blockchain is in preventing exactly this type of attack. But this crucial property holds only under certain network conditions. Let’s explore how such an attack is possible and what you can do to protect against it.

Continue Reading

This article closes the series about dumping Bitcoin forks, which started with this post. In the previous instalments we introduced various ways how to claim and dump them. The most valuable forks were described in more detail. This article will sum up all the other forks I claimed and dumped, since they do not deserve their own full post.

Make sure, before doing anything, to read the safety notice in the introductory post. To be honest, none of the forks in this post are worth the time unless you have hundreds of BTC (in which case, you probably don’t need to bother anyway) or you have a lot of spare time on your hands. Or you do this for fun, like I did.

Continue Reading

It becomes increasingly difficult to write something about particular fork, as they are getting indistinguishable. This time, we’ll dump BitcoinX (BCX). So in this article I will focus more on yet another method of claiming, which is mildly interesting, without commission and can be used for many forks.

As usual, go read the Safety notice in my initial post in this series), if you haven’t done so yet.

About BitcoinX

So BCX is yet another fork, with a pretty homepage listing all the same stuff all the other forks do. As far as I can tell, the only change they did is move the decimal point in balances, so for every 1 BTC you get 10000 BCX. The rest is pretty much the same, but then again, who cares anyway, am I right or am I right?

Continue Reading

If the ways I dumped Bitcoin Cash, Gold, Diamond and Super were too boring for you (they were, indeed), this time we’ll get our hands a bit more dirty. If you follow this story, you will become richer. That is, richer with knowledge, because there is not much to be made off dumping Bitcore (BTX).

As usual, go read the Safety notice in my initial post in this series, if you haven’t done so yet.

Continue Reading

Getting into more obscure forks (but believe me, there are many more to come), I decided to do a double take, because I got rid of these two the exactly same way. The previous cases were both 1:1 forks, meaning you got one unit for one BTC. This time we’ll see first case of unit change, which I think is a clever trick, to be honest.

If you haven’t done so yet, please read the Safety notice part in my introductory post to this series.

Continue Reading

The second most prominent Bitcoin fork was created about three months after Bitcoin Cash, which I wrote about in previous part of this series. If BCash wanted to solve the capacity problem by increasing block size, Bitcoin Gold (BTG) tried to “democratize” mining. The financial interests of their creators might also have played a tiny bit of a role in creating them, I suspect.

If you haven’t done so yet, please read the Safety notice part in my introductory post to this series.

Continue Reading

Bitcoin Cash or BCash (BCH) was the first prominent fork, which started all the later craze by it’s relative success. If you are going to claim just one fork this should probably be it. Contrary to common sense, at the time of writing this article, it’s valued at about 15% of Bitcoin value.

If you haven’t done so yet, please read the Safety notice part in my introductory post to this series.

Continue Reading

Bitcoin can be forked. It’s almost a magical process, doing a fork. Money, raining from the skies. You will realize how magical it seems, once you try to explain how the fork works to someone not familiar with cryptocurrencies and blockchain in general.

What do you mean? You have some bitcoin, and then suddenly you have also some other coin? So the original bitcoin is split in two? Does Bitcoin lose half of it’s value then? But how can you just create new money? Who is paying for that?

Continue Reading