Tag: cryptocurrency

Money is Sacred – How I lost my bitcoins – Cryptonomics

A lot of people believe that money is evil, or the love of money is the root of all evil. I don’t believe that. In fact, I think the opposite. Money is actually sacred – it’s this potent condensed form of energy which can be used to benefit people. Money is powerful, and it’s beneficial to show it respect. Let me tell you a story about what happens when you don’t show respect for money, about how I lost my bitcoins.

Thanks so much to everyone sharing the videos and podcasts. I really like it when you do that!

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Losing My Bitcoins

In March 2017 I was living in Guadalajara, seems like a lifetime ago. Bitcoin was around $1200. Dash was around $40. I’d been learning a lot about Dash and I thought, this is the future. They’re focused on UX, they’ll have treasury funding for important projects.

I’d also just seen Dash rocket up from around $15, and I felt the fear of missing out. I hastily decided to sell my remaining bitcoins for Dash.

I looked up an exchange, Bleutrade. They had a trading pair with Dash on there. I deposited my remaining bitcoins, about 1/3 of my net worth at the time. Thus, my first key mistakes.

Simple Lessons

Lesson: pause, reflect, meditate, breathe, before I make any financial decision. I might miss an opportunity by taking a step back, it’s true. But I can make many more mistakes by being hasty.

When I use a new exchange, or even use an old exchange for the first time in months, it’s beneficial to check their reputation. Are there many complaints on the web saying that they’ve been waiting a long time for withdrawals? That’s a red flag. I make a small deposit, trade and withdrawal first, to confirm their trustworthiness.

No Response

After I’d put in the money, I realised that they didn’t have the trading pair I wanted. So I withdrew the bitcoins. I waited an hour, and the withdrawal still hadn’t processed. Okay, that happens on some exchanges, sometimes they need to pull funds from cold storage. I put in a support request and waited.

After a week, they still hadn’t replied. Eventually they locked me out of my account and the support request was deleted. Ah. Oh dear. Oh no oh no oh no. I’d lost 1/3 of my net worth.

So it looked like they’d straight ripped me off, shut me down, shut me out, and in crypto, with an exchange in a foreign country, I had no apparent recourse.

Around that time, a couple of other misfortunes occurred. I was using my phone in public after dark and it was plucked from my hands by a moto-thief. A friend was unable to fulfill an agreement and I lost my payment for a new laptop.

Capitulation

I started thinking a lot about it, trying to come to grips with what I’d lost, my own hand in it. Just a week before I’d read some story about someone using a phony ATM in Latin America and losing thousands of dollars. I thought there’s no way I’d be that careless. Obviously the universe had other plans. I absolutely had been that careless, and I’d paid the price.

I thought, I could have spent that money on anything. I could have gone to Las Vegas and ordered tables, champagne, taken trips around Mexico or the world, given it to charity, to a friend in need. I could have blown it all on trifles and I’d still be better off. But I hadn’t, I’d kept the money to myself, like the archetype of an old miser in his one room shack, tying his pants with twine because he didn’t want to buy a belt, dying alone, a millionaire, very rich and very dead.

Then one night I was going to sleep, probably still with some emotional turmoil. I had a vision. A figure in a white hooded robe appeared in the darkness and started to speak. It said they were running things behind the scenes.

“We know you perceive what we’re doing as bad. It is the revelation of a spiritual lesson. Some of what you have has been taken from you, so you can better learn the value of what remains.”

Then the figure was gone.

I came to grips with losing the money, and I learnt this lesson… Being respectful of money does mean saving it, it also means spending it to improve the quality of life for yourself and those around you.

The price of hospitality

When my parents last visited me in Guadalajara, we went to a little kitchen and got breakfast. One of the old men there, don Carlos Robles, paid for our meal, just to show my parents some Mexican hospitality, to welcome them to the city and country.

My parents were amazed, they’d never experienced such hospitality in their lives, that someone you’d never met would buy you a meal just so you could feel at home. Old fashioned Mexican hospitality. For the small price of 150 pesos, he’d changed my parents’ ideas of hospitality forever. Maybe you know now what I mean when I say: money is sacred.

When I enter the temple, I take off my shoes and hat, to show respect for the gravity of what is taking place. When I pick up a knife, I become present, because of the potential for injury. Likewise, when I touch silver, I first put on my gloves. People die for money, people kill for it. The proper understanding and correct intention can use it to create and sustain life, to bring joy and health. Yes my friends, money is sacred. When I touch it, I will remember its power and wonder: is this the most blissful use of this potent energy?

I should note that I did actually get my bitcoins back from Bleutrade, it just took a long time – about 20 months. You’ll hear more about that in the next episode.

Shout outs

I’d like to give a shout out to Milos, who sometimes comments on the Cryptonomics Facebook page. A month ago he left this review:

I love Kurt’s videos. He constantly publishes interesting and substantive content, mixed with high quality editing and thought provoking topics. I look forward to seeing his influence grow in the Fintech sphere over the next few market cycles. Cheers!

Milos sometimes disagrees with what I say, and even so he supports his positions with reason and with respect. Thanks Milos.

Thanks again to everyone who shares these posts, the videos and podcasts. That’s really cool of you!

I’ll leave you with this gentle blessing: may all your lessons hard-learnt, be well-learnt. Stay grateful my friends.

You can listen and subscribe on Anchor and other podcasting services here:

Cryptonomics – Money is Sacred – How I lost all my bitcoins

Safe Assets for Crypto Cowboys and Girls – Episode 191

The Story: Secure investments to lock up crypto gains

Many people invested in cryptocurrencies are first-time investors, and seeing swings of 10% or 20% a day has created risk-tolerant beasts with intestines of pure tempered steel, willing to gamble on the latest ICO with the chance of 1000% gains. Some of them did indeed find those gains, but they don’t necessarily know how to hold onto them. If they get caught up in the hype of a crypto bubble without having locked up their gains, they might eventually see their net worth dwindling down to a percentage of its former glory. So, once you get the gains, how do you keep them?

Here are three investment vehicles that you might consider, which can significantly reduce the risk in your portfoilio:

1. Precious metals

Gold and silver have been used as money for thousands of years, because of their utility as a stable store of value. It’s likely that these precious metals will keep up with inflation, and it’s possible that they may even outpace it. The precious metals markets are flooded with gold and silver certificates, which are often sold without any real metal backing. That means that the prices might be much lower than if it reflected only the physical metal supply.

2. ETFs

“ETF” stands for “exchange traded fund”. ETFs are basically baskets of shares or bonds, sometimes encompassing an entire stockmarket or bond market. They tend to have very low fees compared to mutual funds, as low as 0.04%, and many of the best ones outperform actively managed mutual funds. That means you get a better return a a lower price. Some of them pay dividends, quarterly or even monthly, which is a great way to start building a passive income.

3. Insured peer-to-peer lending

Peer-to-peer lending can be risky, because you’re probably lending small amounts to each borrower, and in the case of default, it’s unlikely to be profitable to chase up each individual. However, some platforms will offer insurance to lenders, so even if the borrower defaults, your money is safe.

In this episode, Kurt runs through these investment vehicles with much lower risk profiles than crypto, explaining how you can use crypto gains to put yourself in a better position for your long-term goals. Join me on another wealth-creating, wealth-preserving episode of … The Paradise Paradox!

Disclaimer: I’m not telling you what to do with your money; I don’t know what you should do with your money. All I’m doing is presenting some of my own decision-making processes.

The Eps:

Bitcoin Boom Bust – The Crypto Market Cycle – Episode 189

Crypto Crash January 2018 – Episode 188

The Links:

Money: Master the Game – Tony Robbins

Unshakeable: Your financial freedom playbook – Tony Robbins

JP Morgan’s imaginary silver hoard explained

Gold and silver streamers offer a conservative way to invest in metals

World silver demand

ETFs to buy in February 2018

SPHD ETF report

Safe investments to lock up crypto gains

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please become a patron on Patreon, or have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit.

We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:

Audio Player

To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.

Bitcoin Boom Bust – The Crypto Market Cycle: Episode 189

The Story: The four stages of the digital currency cycle

The crypto market reached 830 billion on January 8th 2018, and now by February 6th, it’s taken a sharp drop to 300 billion. Speculators all over the world are shaking their heads until they hold their heads and wondering why, what happened. Nobody has any clear answers, but it can be enlightening to look at the patterns that normally play out in this market.

  1. The boring phase. Savvy investors are quitely putting their cash in, developers are plunking away at their keyboards in dark basements. On the surface, nobody really cares about crypto. The only news that reaches the mainstream is sensational pieces about future technology, or witchhunts for Satoshi Nakamoto. The total market cap goes down, or sideways.
  2. The organic growth phase. New investors start getting involved, hobbyists and techies who see the potential of the technology. The media starts running some stories about the price action during the odd spike or drop. The market cap goes up, slowly and steadily.
  3. The hype growth stage. The greater public start hearing more about it, and seeing the price action makes them start sweating. They feel the fear of missing out, and they decide to invest. The market gets into a feedback loop with big media – media notices the price action, hypes it, leading to more buying, leading to more more price action and media attention. At this stage, you’ll start to see people on social media saying how Bitcoin can only go up, saying it’s a new paradigm. The market cap might jump up more than 10% in a day.
  4. The dead phase. Nobody knows exactly how it starts – perhaps a whale takes profits, and the price drops suddenly. Pretty quickly, all of the investors for the fear of missing out, decide they will exit based on the fear of loss. The media declares Bitcoin and digital currency dead once again, and slowly they lose interest.

Soon enough, the cycle restarts, and we enter a new 3 to 9 boring months where, from the outside, nothing seems to happen.

Of course, history never repeats exactly, but by being aware of these patterns we start to have an idea where things are headed, and wherever we are on the path we can learn to be grateful for the opportunities that we do have. Join Kurt on a roller-coaster ride of emotions from terror to gratitude in this spine-tingling, spine-rattling episode of… The Paradise Paradox!

The Eps:

Crypto Crash January 2018 – Episode 188

Bitcoin over 9000 – Time to take profits! Episode 184

Don’t get Goxxed – Bitfinex, Bittrex & Coinbase

Bitcoin’s path to ruin – Episode 185

The Links:

Crypto Crash – Lessons for the patient, and those who wish to be

Bitcoin’s uncertain future

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please become a patron on Patreon, or have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit.

We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:

Audio Player

To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.

Crypto Crash January 2018 – Episode 188

The Story: Bitcoin drops! Let’s prepare for the next bull run

Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market in general took a huge hit in mid January 2018, with the total market cap dropping from around $750 B to under $450 B. This happens periodically, as the young market sees new media attention and new money flooding in from hobby investors and big institutions.

If you haven’t seen this kind of crash before, if you’re new to the market, this type of thing can seem very alarming, and it might have caught you off guard. For others, this is just part of the natural cycle of an emerging market where high volatility is expected. While newbies feel stick to their stomach watching the Bitcoin rollercoaster, experienced speculators watch calmly and take advantage of the bargain basement prices.

In this episode, Kurt explains the signals to look for next time when the market is getting overbought, including the general sentiment on social media, people getting sucked up in the mania and getting agitated at any criticism. Kurt also explains how this time presents an opportunity, where media attention will likely drift away from the crypto market, allowing prices to consolidate, forming a foundation for the next bull run.

How can you turn this crisis into an opportunity, and how can you learn from it? These questions and more are answered in this bone-rattling, price-exploding, price-imploding episode of … The Paradise Paradox!

The Eps:

Bitcoin over 9000 – Time to take profits! Episode 184

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please become a patron on Patreon, or have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit.
We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:

Audio Player

To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.
Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.
If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.

Don’t Get Goxxed – Bitfinex, Bittrex & Coinbase

The Story: Stay safe from counterparty risk

A lot of money is flowing into the digital currency market, and certain exchanges such as Bitfinex, Bittrex and Coinbase are having a hard time keeping up with all the orders.

Bitfinex has quickly implemented deposit fees for deposits under $1,000, and withdrawal minimums of $250 or more. They’ve also increased the confirmations required for deposits, for example, Dash deposits now require 9 confirmations instead of 6, and sometimes even when the 9 confirmations are reached, the funds are still not available. Withdrawals can now take 24 hours to process – a long time to sit and sweat wondering if your money will ever come out.

Perhaps these are just symptoms of a market expanding, with infrastructure not fit to deal with increasing demand. However, it’s possible that they’re indications of greater problems. When it comes to money, it doesn’t hurt to be careful.

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please become a patron on Patreon, or have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit.

We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:

Audio Player

To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.

Bitcoin’s Path To Ruin – Episode 185

The Story: Is Bitcoin destined for failure?

If you got into Bitcoin early, it was probably because you saw the long-term potential of a platform that could disrupt the banking and central banking industries, holding governments accountable and limiting their power. You were probably a starry-eyed idealist who believed that real change was possible, by changing the systems that we all use, and hopefully, those stars have not yet left your eyes. If you got in more recently, you might hold the somewhat less principled position of “We’re all getting rich off this Internet nerd money!”

If you’re the second kind of speculator, you might fold as soon as times get tough, your position torn out easily like the shallow roots of a clover. If you’re the first kind, you might persist even when things are looking bad, because you knew that you had very good reasons to enter the market in the beginning.

Conditions have changed for Bitcoin, with high transaction fees from $1-$3, which rule out the microtransactions, small transactions and use for developing nations which idealists once believed made it unique. According to Mike Hearn, the Bitcoin developer who quit in January 2016, there are people on the team who don’t believe in the fanciful visions of its creator, and never saw it as anything more than a potential platform for large settlements. Hearn declared the experiment over, a statement that was easy to overlook for many, considering how often Bitcoin has been pronounced lost.

The team remains prudent and risk-averse, which makes sense for a multi-billion dollar project, but it also means the programmers on the team who are excellent are not free to innovate, which makes Hearn’s departure seem much more sensible in retrospect. With transactions that can take hours and fees 100x its competitors, the project is already years behind. In today’s world where invention and innovation are common, playing it safe can be a death sentence.

In this episode, Kurt presents the case that the Bitcoin experiment is on the path to ruin, likely being sustained by all the points in its favour, such as brand recognition and network effect, but eventually falling further into inutility, and likely causing misery for many. Join me on this value-investing tail of hope, disillusionment and suspense in the next episode of … The Paradise Paradox!

The Eps:

Infiltrators: Bitcoin paranoid – Episode 162

The Links:

The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment – Mike Hearn

Video format wars – Wikipedia

I looked into SegWit, and here’s what I saw – Nathan Hourt a.k.a. Modprobe

Dilbert comic – Catching up

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please become a patron on Patreon, or have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit.

We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:

Audio Player

To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.

Bitcoin over 9000: Lock in profits! – Episode 184

The Story: Why to sell cryptocurrency when the price is exploding

Bitcoin is over $9000 USD and people are going bananas. In cryptocurrency discussion groups, there are rumours that mass adoption is finally taking hold, that everyone’s grandma is buying BTC, or even that the dollar is crashing against Bitcoin. Meanwhile, using cryptocurrency remains more difficult than programming a VCR, and addresses continue to look like computer errors. Mainstream interest has piqued, but as long as the user experience remains poor, mass adoption is unlikely.

Nevertheless, people in the community are going crazy over the rise in price. It’s tempting to believe it will go up forever, a mistake many have made in markets and paid dearly for it. The longer the mania over the price continues, the more likely a correction – but nobody can say exactly when, how, or how much.

As many have made small (or large) fortunes in this market, and people are so hyped, that’s a sign that now is the time to be prudent, and to consider how much of your net worth you really want to have sitting in volatile space age Internet nerd money. Times like these can be good to put some money into more stable assets, such as cash, or perhaps precious metals. Selling small amounts at a time means you can be adaptive to changing market conditions – remaining open to selling more if the price keeps going up, and having the chance to buy if the price slips.

Life is about risk management. You can’t make the perfect move, but you can be flexible enough to prepare for different scenarios, and you certainly can be humble enough to see the possibility of different scenarios. Nobody knows how high Bitcoin or other cryptos will go, and nobody knows when it will crash. Accounting for the lack of knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article or video is intended to be financial advice. I don’t want to tell you what to do with your money and I don’t know what you should do with your money.

The Eps:

Bitcoin, Dash and digital currency for beginners – Episode 181

Infiltrators: Bitcoin Paranoid – Episode 162

Dash vs Bitcoin: which will achieve mass adoption first? – Episode 154

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please become a patron on Patreon, or have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit.

We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:

Audio Player

To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.

Bitcoin, Dash and digital currency for beginners – Episode 181

The Story: The dream of cryptocurrency and what to do about it

Most people hear the word “Bitcoin”, they don’t think much of it, or they think only about drug markets on shady parts of the web. Bitcoin, Dash and digital currency in general are similar to the Internet itself in some ways. If you can think back to 1995, you might remember people saying how the Internet was full of paedophiles, pornography and other undesireable material – a place for nerd and perverts, but certainly not for regular people. Today, almost everyone who has the resources to access the Internet uses it on a regular basis, from shopkeepers in London to monks in rural Thailand. A technology which was once only for a few, quickly became a necessity for everyone.

Free digital currency – currency not controlled by any government – may be the greatest breakthrough in monetary technology since coins were first minted. However, just as with the Internet, the benefits are not obvious to most, unless they have a need to escape the restrictions of normal money. Farmers in Argentina use these currencies to escape the will of banks telling them how to grow and what to grow. Activist organisations such as Wikileaks use it to accept payments when governments try to block them. Impoverished Venezuelans use it to smuggle in food to feed their families, as the national currency collapses before their eyes. If you want to send money across the world cheaply, or to find a way to save money so it isn’t eroded by inflation, or you have a desire to see a better world where everyone has a chance to live comfortably, could a currency such as Dash or Bitcoin help you?

In this episode, Kurt discusses the dream, the highest ideals of digital currency – ending war and providing a means for the masses to escape poverty and reach prosperity, removing power from central banks and holding governments accountable to the public they are supposed to serve. He also gives an overview of how to acquire Dash or Bitcoin, some pitfalls to avoid losing your money, and some ways you can earn this currency.

Join us in an industry-disrupting episode of … The Paradise Paradox!

Disclaimer: Nothing in this video or podcast is to be construed as financial advice.

The Eps:

Dash vs Bitcoin – Which will reach mass adoption first?

Bitcoin vs Dash – Ridiculous comments about Dash

Why Amanda B. Johnson loves Dash

The Links:

Dashforce News

Travelling using Dash by Joël Valenzuela

Dash Nation Slack or Dash Nation on Discord

What is Bitcoin? video

Where to spend Dash

Spend Bitcoins

Purse.io – buy Amazon gift cards

Bitcart – buy Amazon gift cards

Coinmarketcap

The Cash:

If you enjoy our posts, please become a patron on Patreon, or have a look at The Paradise Paradox’s page on Steemit where you can join, earn money, and upvote our posts to help support the show! You can also find a lot of additional content which is not posted on this site, with Kurt’s posts on Steemit.

We really appreciate all of your contributions! Every cent and satoshi we receive lets us know that we’re doing something worthwhile, that you are entertained by our program, and that you’re starting to question what you know more and more. Please be generous. Donate to The Paradise Paradox. Or buy some stuff on Amazon using this link. Or buy some of our great T-shirts here.

The Episode:

Audio Player

To download the audio, right click and press “save as”.

Remember to subscribe on iTunes or subscribe on Pocket Casts.

If you enjoyed the episode, don’t keep it a secret! Feel free to share it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, or your office bathroom wall.