Bitcoin on Netflix

This is a short post I just had the urge to write after watching a recent movie I will try not to spoil it for you by writing to much about it!!!

I recently watched a movie on Netflix called "Banking on Bitcoin", I thought how the hell can they make a movie on this but to my surprise it turned out to be a very good movie. Don't read any further as I will talk a little about the movie.

The movie starts at the beginning of where Bitcoin came from and who created it, it kind of gave me the idea about doing some blog post on the way they structured the movie. It covers both the good and the bad side of bitcoin (Silk Road). The movie has plenty of interviews with powerful people involved in bitcoin around the beginning and shows the troubles they got into when bitcoin was not fully understood. A prime example of this was when Charlie Shrem one of the founders of the bitcoin foundation.

The movie can give a better understanding of what is involved in bitcoin and who is involved in it. People that I have told to watch it have all had mixed feelings about with some saying its just a faze and will pass while others wanting to find out more such as ways to buy bitcoin. One thing I can say is it is really worth the watch and judge for yourself what you think of it.  Below is a short trailer of the movie and remember you can watch it on Netflix (or some dodgy site) not condoning that method do.

  

Bitcoin and the weather :)

This is may be slightly off topic but this past week it has got me thinking a bit more about it, let me first explain how.

This last week in Ireland we have been hit with very bad weather, now some might say this type of weather was small compared to say the USA but for us in Ireland it was huge the worst in almost 60 years I think. It was called hurricane Ophelia and by god it cause a fair bit of damage around. I caused quite a bit of damage in my house and also I had to go on a quest to find my kids trampoline to my surprise was not damaged to much in the garden of my neighbors garden 5 doors down. We also lost all electricity for 3 days which got me thinking how much we rely on it for so much of our living. I was wondering how would bitcoin be of any use to me in these type of circumstances compared to cash.

With most bitcoin in order for you to spend it you need some type of access to a device that requires power which is all good if you have power. So for my example I was sitting at home in the dark knowing that I will have to make a trip to a shop to buy some things like food and batteries. (TIP, buy the good ones) and decided if all I had was bitcoin I would have not been able to make the transaction and would have properly been ok in the long term :) but just imagine if this was to drag on for a few weeks and our only method of payment was bitcoin we would have been in trouble.

Now I understand that this may be very far fetch and someone out there will tell me you can still use bitcoin by using the paper wallets but just for this purpose lets just say you cant. With all my talk of how good bitcoin is I never thought of it from this point of view.

Although bitcoin is good it is always worth while to have a saving of cash that you can get to even if the power is gone for any period of time and try not to rely to much on power as I think we will experience more of these days of bad weather in Ireland anyway.

Remember to always have a back up plan!!!        

Dark side of Bitcoin

With all my talk about bitcoin and how good it is going to be for us all, I have to talk a little about the shady side of it and other crypto currency's. With bitcoin and most other coins their main punch line is by always saying how safe and private it is and that no one will ever know what you are doing. Is this a good thing or  a bad thing? History is a great way of learning and helping us understand what might happen in the future.

Back in 2013 saw one of the biggest storms to hit bitcoin when the closure of online marketplace called silk road occurred. Silk road was a go to place for anything illegal that people wanted ranging from drugs to paid hits on people and anything in between. The way it would work is if you wanted to buy drugs you would pace your order on silk road and pay for them using bitcoin with no one knowing who you are, the drugs would then be sent anywhere you want them to be sent.

This gave bitcoin a very shady and illegal identity which I believed set it back for sometime. When silk road was shut down there was a lot of talk that maybe bitcoin might be banned but thankfully this never happened. (YET)

In 2017 we again had more trouble associated with bitcoin when a group of hackers hacked many government and private buildings which was know as the WannaCry attack. These hackers held any information they had taken for ransom that could only be paid for using you guessed it bitcoin. This again brought both positive and negative attention to bitcoin.

As you can see there is negative things done with bitcoin but for me this will be done no matter if they are using bitcoin or cash its going to still happen.         

Impact of crypto on our banks

What does the future have in store for banks have you noticed in more and more shops that you go into that they are now accepting bitcoin as a payment method alongside credit card payments, wow such a change in the last year or so. With more shops accepting this type of payment there is no wonder that the banking system will come under more pressure as most people don't trust our banking system (well i don't anyway) maybe someone reading this is involved in banking that right about now is giving out about my stupid opinion.

 I think over the last 100 years banks have been robbing us blind or better said robbing us and we know they are robbing us. Take for example in some banks if you lodge your money in it could take hours before you can use it or even withdraw it all in the mean time you will be charged for doing this.

So Mr Bank you want me to lodge my hard earned money into your bank and in return you get to charge me for spending my money (confused scratch of the head moment) just crazy. Now let me be the first to say even with crypto currency you will be also charged a certain amount to use it (dam they all want our money) but the big difference will be that it is such a small amount that you don't really notice it.

I have no hassle paying a small amount in bitcoin while I use bitcoin to help maintain the network it runs on, but paying a large amount to a bank that then pays the top dogs massive amount of money all in the meantime I cant get anyone on the phone to talk to if I have a problem is just crazy. We as a society have already moved so much in terms of money, ancient times we would have used gold as our main form of currency then some bright spark decided gold was to heavy to carry around and made paper money and then that was to heavy so we moved more into credit cards system and now we are going to end up more into digital money in terms of bitcoin which.

Believe me when I say it but you will start to notice that more and more shops will start to accept bitcoin as payment method which will be great for everyone but not for banks. We will start to keep the money we make and stop giving it to the corrupt banks. I know this was a bit of a rant post about banks and may have veered off topic a bit but as always it is just my opinion.

Thanks for reading!!!!!!!!     

Storing your Crypto Coins

So you have a bundle of coins such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Neo to name a few that you bought of an a exchange such as Bittrex and you are wondering how do I keep them safe and keep away the evil cyber people from getting them. For these coins you want to take a similar approach to what you would do if you had Fiat money or gold, you want to keep it safe such as a bank safe.

However, like most people I don't own a bank safe so I have to try the next best thing. The joys of holding any amount of coins is that they do not take up much room at all, the maximum size would be the an average USB. Below I will give you 3 ways in which you can store your coins but the key thing to remember is to always hold your private key (PRIVATE) as this key will allow you to access your funds.

1. Paper Wallet (For Bitcoin)
This method is probably the best and safest method to store your coins as it allows you to have complete control over your wallets. These are simple to make and free (something that is good and safe is free now that's a first). The first step is to go here and start the process for Bitcoin, follow the steps carefully and download the client to make the wallet offline. I wont give all the details of how to do it as I don't want to risk making a mistake and in turn maybe you making a mistake. As i stated before keep the private key safe and never give it to anyone, the public key is the key you can show people as you can only lodge bitcoin to this address. When you have done all the steps and stored all the private keys that you were given you can print something like the picture below.

  Now you are free to use your bitcoin and be part of the future. My own tip to help me keep my bitcoin paper wallets safe is to print out a few and store the private keys with people that I trust this might not work for all but its just my tip.



2. Hard Wallet
This method can be done by using your own USB and storing everything on there or else buying a USB that is designed to hold coins. An example of this would be the Ledger nano. This is a good peice of kit but will set you back around €70 give or take. It allows you to store quite a few coins on it with ease and gives you a running balance of each coin. The nano is encrypted so again you will have to remember a password or seed to gain access to the funds. One of the biggest advantages of the nano is it allows you to most of your coins in one place which is very handy and easy to keep track of.

3. Online Wallets
Online wallets are handy if you plan on using your coins often, but don't keep to much on them at any one time. You can have an online wallet on any of the major exchanges and you can also download some wallet clients to have them as apps on your computer. The biggest problem with all of these is the possibility of getting hacked or also a major exchange closing down with all of your coins. So my advice here would be to ONLY use this method for short term holdings and remember you don't have complete control which is something you want to have, you would never give your money to someone you don't know to mind it for you or would you? Below is a sample picture of the program called Exodus which is an wallet that you download that you can store your coins on.

Other Coins

To start this I hope by now you understand that they are many other coins out there not just bitcoin. Bitcoin may be the mother coin but they are loads more that may do a better job. Below is a list of some of the coins that I really like and also have a small amount of. I will try and give a brief description about the coin.

Omise-Go: Think of omise-go (OMG) to be like a ATM machine. You buy a OMG token is like buying a ATM machine and every time someone uses the ATM you get paid a small percent of the fee as your token will be validating the transaction. The main purpose of OMG is to allow people to use many other currency's to make a transaction. In Thailand, McDonald's have introduced the OMG system and can now accept many major crypto currency's.



Waves: This coin is similar to Omise-Go in some ways but its main function is to allow anyone to create a coin based on the waves platform. For example I can make a WIT coin that can only be used in WIT without having to learn much about the tech behind it. This can allow anyone to delve into their own coins for whatever reason.








Ethereum: This is the backbone of many coins that have been created over time, its one of the main competitors of bitcoin. The main function of Ethereum is to allow other coins to be created using its code however, this is not the same as the Waves coin because you need to be a lot more tech savvy to do this.







Neo: This is the exact same as Ethereum and was created by the Chinese to fight Ethereum. It is used for building other coins on its code. One clear advantage of holding NEO coin in your wallet is it allows you to generate Gas which in itself is worth a lot. So basically it is a dividends coin meaning the more you hold the more GAS you will get.




These are the main coins that I hold for the long-term and don't plan on getting rid of for a few years at least. I did not include Bitcoin in the list as anyone involved in holding coins should at least have some Bitcoin to their name.

Thanks for reading!!!!
   

Rich people talk Bitcoin

So here you are thinking to yourself is bitcoin for me or is it just for the tech savvy of this world. Like most people I knew very little about bitcoin but with the power of Google I found out everything that I needed to know about bitcoin such as my biggest question will it last is it just a faze that everyone is talking about. I decided to have a quick Google (best thing ever) to find more information and I was amazed as to what I found. If bitcoin was not going to last long term then by right there would be not to many famous people putting bitcoin into their pocket (meaning hardware wallet).

To name a few celebs that have invested in bitcoin are;

Ashton Kutcher: Ashton recently invested in a company called  BitPay which is a bitcoin processor that allows merchants to accept bitcoin payments. Most people know Ashton from the Tv program "Two and a Half Men" but he is a grade A investor with investments in Spotify, Airbnb, Foursquare and Uber so he is a man of good investment ideas.

Music World: These is very broad are as many music people have all started to talk more about bitcoin such as rapper NAS, singer Lilly Allen and Mel B and world's best Snopp Dogg just to name a few. With many artists of the music world now willing to accept bitcoin as a payment method to get their music which allows for more adoption by the public of bitcoin.







Richard Branson and Bill Gates: They both have recently stated that bitcoin is not just a flash in the pan and will be here for a long time. With two such powerful people openly talking about bitcoin for me that is all I need to know about it's future and that it is here to stay.  









Now as you may be aware ( I hope that you are) that if you search you will find a lot more info out there you just have to look for it as I don't fancy trying to spoon feed you everything ha ha. Thanks for reading