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Summary: Everyone knows that when you give your assets to someone else, they always keep them safe. If this is true for individuals, it is certainly true for businesses.
Custodians always tell the truth and manage funds properly. They won't have any interest in taking the assets as an exchange operator would. Auditors tell the truth and can't be misled. That's because organizations that are regulated are incapable of lying and don't make mistakes.
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First, some background. Here is a summary of how custodians make us more secure:
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Previously, we might give Alice our crypto assets to hold. There were risks:

• Alice might take the assets and disappear.
• Alice might spend the assets and pretend that she still has them (fractional model).
• Alice might store the assets insecurely and they'll get stolen.
• Alice might give the assets to someone else by mistake or by force.
• Alice might lose access to the assets.

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But "no worries", Alice has a custodian named Bob. Bob is dressed in a nice suit. He knows some politicians. And he drives a Porsche. "So you have nothing to worry about!". And look at all the benefits we get:

• Alice can't take the assets and disappear (unless she asks Bob or never gives them to Bob).
• Alice can't spend the assets and pretend that she still has them. (Unless she didn't give them to Bob or asks him for them.)
• Alice can't store the assets insecurely so they get stolen. (After all - she doesn't have any control over the withdrawal process from any of Bob's systems, right?)
• Alice can't give the assets to someone else by mistake or by force. (Bob will stop her, right Bob?)
• Alice can't lose access to the funds. (She'll always be present, sane, and remember all secrets, right?)

See - all problems are solved! All we have to worry about now is:

• Bob might take the assets and disappear.
• Bob might spend the assets and pretend that he still has them (fractional model).
• Bob might store the assets insecurely and they'll get stolen.
• Bob might give the assets to someone else by mistake or by force.
• Bob might lose access to the assets.

It's pretty simple. Before we had to trust Alice. Now we only have to trust Alice, Bob, and all the ways in which they communicate. Just think of how much more secure we are!
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"On top of that", Bob assures us, "we're using a special wallet structure". Bob shows Alice a diagram. "We've broken the balance up and store it in lots of smaller wallets. That way", he assures her, "a thief can't take it all at once". And he points to a historic case where a large sum was taken "because it was stored in a single wallet... how stupid".
"Very early on, we used to have all the crypto in one wallet", he said, "and then one Christmas a hacker came and took it all. We call him the Grinch. Now we individually wrap each crypto and stick it under a binary search tree. The Grinch has never been back since."
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"As well", Bob continues, "even if someone were to get in, we've got insurance. It covers all thefts and even coercion, collusion, and misplaced keys - only subject to the policy terms and conditions." And with that, he pulls out a phone-book sized contract and slams it on the desk with a thud. "Yep", he continues, "we're paying top dollar for one of the best policies in the country!"
"Can I read it?' Alice asks. "Sure," Bob says, "just as soon as our legal team is done with it. They're almost through the first chapter." He pauses, then continues. "And can you believe that sales guy Mike? He has the same year Porsche as me. I mean, what are the odds?"
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"Do you use multi-sig?", Alice asks. "Absolutely!" Bob replies. "All our engineers are fully trained in multi-sig. Whenever we want to set up a new wallet, we generate 2 separate keys in an air-gapped process and store them in this proprietary system here. Look, it even requires the biometric signature from one of our team members to initiate any withdrawal." He demonstrates by pressing his thumb into the display. "We use a third-party cloud validation API to match the thumbprint and authorize each withdrawal. The keys are also backed up daily to an off-site third-party."
"Wow that's really impressive," Alice says, "but what if we need access for a withdrawal outside of office hours?" "Well that's no issue", Bob says, "just send us an email, call, or text message and we always have someone on staff to help out. Just another part of our strong commitment to all our customers!"
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"What about Proof of Reserve?", Alice asks. "Of course", Bob replies, "though rather than publish any blockchain addresses or signed transaction, for privacy we just do a SHA256 refactoring of the inverse hash modulus for each UTXO nonce and combine the smart contract coefficient consensus in our hyperledger lightning node. But it's really simple to use." He pushes a button and a large green checkmark appears on a screen. "See - the algorithm ran through and reserves are proven."
"Wow", Alice says, "you really know your stuff! And that is easy to use! What about fiat balances?" "Yeah, we have an auditor too", Bob replies, "Been using him for a long time so we have quite a strong relationship going! We have special books we give him every year and he's very efficient! Checks the fiat, crypto, and everything all at once!"
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"We used to have a nice offline multi-sig setup we've been using without issue for the past 5 years, but I think we'll move all our funds over to your facility," Alice says. "Awesome", Bob replies, "Thanks so much! This is perfect timing too - my Porsche got a dent on it this morning. We have the paperwork right over here." "Great!", Alice replies.
And with that, Alice gets out her pen and Bob gets the contract. "Don't worry", he says, "you can take your crypto-assets back anytime you like - just subject to our cancellation policy. Our annual management fees are also super low and we don't adjust them often".
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How many holes have to exist for your funds to get stolen?
Just one.
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Why are we taking a powerful offline multi-sig setup, widely used globally in hundreds of different/lacking regulatory environments with 0 breaches to date, and circumventing it by a demonstrably weak third party layer? And paying a great expense to do so?
If you go through the list of breaches in the past 2 years to highly credible organizations, you go through the list of major corporate frauds (only the ones we know about), you go through the list of all the times platforms have lost funds, you go through the list of times and ways that people have lost their crypto from identity theft, hot wallet exploits, extortion, etc... and then you go through this custodian with a fine-tooth comb and truly believe they have value to add far beyond what you could, sticking your funds in a wallet (or set of wallets) they control exclusively is the absolute worst possible way to take advantage of that security.
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The best way to add security for crypto-assets is to make a stronger multi-sig. With one custodian, what you are doing is giving them your cryptocurrency and hoping they're honest, competent, and flawlessly secure. It's no different than storing it on a really secure exchange. Maybe the insurance will cover you. Didn't work for Bitpay in 2015. Didn't work for Yapizon in 2017. Insurance has never paid a claim in the entire history of cryptocurrency. But maybe you'll get lucky. Maybe your exact scenario will buck the trend and be what they're willing to cover. After the large deductible and hopefully without a long and expensive court battle.
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And you want to advertise this increase in risk, the lapse of judgement, an accident waiting to happen, as though it's some kind of benefit to customers ("Free institutional-grade storage for your digital assets.")? And then some people are writing to the OSC that custodians should be mandatory for all funds on every exchange platform? That this somehow will make Canadians as a whole more secure or better protected compared with standard air-gapped multi-sig? On what planet?
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Most of the problems in Canada stemmed from one thing - a lack of transparency. If Canadians had known what a joke Quadriga was - it wouldn't have grown to lose $400m from hard-working Canadians from coast to coast to coast. And Gerald Cotten would be in jail, not wherever he is now (at best, rotting peacefully). EZ-BTC and mister Dave Smilie would have been a tiny little scam to his friends, not a multi-million dollar fraud. Einstein would have got their act together or been shut down BEFORE losing millions and millions more in people's funds generously donated to criminals. MapleChange wouldn't have even been a thing. And maybe we'd know a little more about CoinTradeNewNote - like how much was lost in there. Almost all of the major losses with cryptocurrency exchanges involve deception with unbacked funds.
So it's great to see transparency reports from BitBuy and ShakePay where someone independently verified the backing. The only thing we don't have is:

• ANY CERTAINTY BALANCES WEREN'T EXCLUDED. Quadriga's largest account was $70m. 80% of funds are in 20% of accounts (Pareto principle). All it takes is excluding a few really large accounts - and nobody's the wiser. A fractional platform can easily pass any audit this way.
• ANY VISIBILITY WHATSOEVER INTO THE CUSTODIANS. BitBuy put out their report before moving all the funds to their custodian and ShakePay apparently can't even tell us who the custodian is. That's pretty important considering that basically all of the funds are now stored there.
• ANY IDEA ABOUT THE OTHER EXCHANGES. In order for this to be effective, it has to be the norm. It needs to be "unusual" not to know. If obscurity is the norm, then it's super easy for people like Gerald Cotten and Dave Smilie to blend right in.

It's not complicated to validate cryptocurrency assets. They need to exist, they need to be spendable, and they need to cover the total balances. There are plenty of credible people and firms across the country that have the capacity to reasonably perform this validation. Having more frequent checks by different, independent, parties who publish transparent reports is far more valuable than an annual check by a single "more credible/official" party who does the exact same basic checks and may or may not publish anything. Here's an example set of requirements that could be mandated:

• First report within 1 month of launching, another within 3 months, and further reports at minimum every 6 months thereafter.
• No auditor can be repeated within a 12 month period.
• All reports must be public, identifying the auditor and the full methodology used.
• All auditors must be independent of the firm being audited with no conflict of interest.
• Reports must include the percentage of each asset backed, and how it's backed.
• The auditor publishes a hash list, which lists a hash of each customer's information and balances that were included. Hash is one-way encryption so privacy is fully preserved. Every customer can use this to have 100% confidence they were included.
• If we want more extensive requirements on audits, these should scale upward based on the total assets at risk on the platform, and whether the platform has loaned their assets out.

There are ways to structure audits such that neither crypto assets nor customer information are ever put at risk, and both can still be properly validated and publicly verifiable. There are also ways to structure audits such that they are completely reasonable for small platforms and don't inhibit innovation in any way. By making the process as reasonable as possible, we can completely eliminate any reason/excuse that an honest platform would have for not being audited. That is arguable far more important than any incremental improvement we might get from mandating "the best of the best" accountants. Right now we have nothing mandated and tons of Canadians using offshore exchanges with no oversight whatsoever.
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Transparency does not prove crypto assets are safe. CoinTradeNewNote, Flexcoin ($600k), and Canadian Bitcoins ($100k) are examples where crypto-assets were breached from platforms in Canada. All of them were online wallets and used no multi-sig as far as any records show. This is consistent with what we see globally - air-gapped multi-sig wallets have an impeccable record, while other schemes tend to suffer breach after breach. We don't actually know how much CoinTrader lost because there was no visibility. Rather than publishing details of what happened, the co-founder of CoinTrader silently moved on to found another platform - the "most trusted way to buy and sell crypto" - a site that has no information whatsoever (that I could find) on the storage practices and a FAQ advising that “[t]rading cryptocurrency is completely safe” and that having your own wallet is “entirely up to you! You can certainly keep cryptocurrency, or fiat, or both, on the app.” Doesn't sound like much was learned here, which is really sad to see.
It's not that complicated or unreasonable to set up a proper hardware wallet. Multi-sig can be learned in a single course. Something the equivalent complexity of a driver's license test could prevent all the cold storage exploits we've seen to date - even globally. Platform operators have a key advantage in detecting and preventing fraud - they know their customers far better than any custodian ever would. The best job that custodians can do is to find high integrity individuals and train them to form even better wallet signatories. Rather than mandating that all platforms expose themselves to arbitrary third party risks, regulations should center around ensuring that all signatories are background-checked, properly trained, and using proper procedures. We also need to make sure that signatories are empowered with rights and responsibilities to reject and report fraud. They need to know that they can safely challenge and delay a transaction - even if it turns out they made a mistake. We need to have an environment where mistakes are brought to the surface and dealt with. Not one where firms and people feel the need to hide what happened. In addition to a knowledge-based test, an auditor can privately interview each signatory to make sure they're not in coercive situations, and we should make sure they can freely and anonymously report any issues without threat of retaliation.
A proper multi-sig has each signature held by a separate person and is governed by policies and mutual decisions instead of a hierarchy. It includes at least one redundant signature. For best results, 3of4, 3of5, 3of6, 4of5, 4of6, 4of7, 5of6, or 5of7.
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History has demonstrated over and over again the risk of hot wallets even to highly credible organizations. Nonetheless, many platforms have hot wallets for convenience. While such losses are generally compensated by platforms without issue (for example Poloniex, Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Gatecoin, Coincheck, Bithumb, Zaif, CoinBene, Binance, Bitrue, Bitpoint, Upbit, VinDAX, and now KuCoin), the public tends to focus more on cases that didn't end well. Regardless of what systems are employed, there is always some level of risk. For that reason, most members of the public would prefer to see third party insurance.
Rather than trying to convince third party profit-seekers to provide comprehensive insurance and then relying on an expensive and slow legal system to enforce against whatever legal loopholes they manage to find each and every time something goes wrong, insurance could be run through multiple exchange operators and regulators, with the shared interest of having a reputable industry, keeping costs down, and taking care of Canadians. For example, a 4 of 7 multi-sig insurance fund held between 5 independent exchange operators and 2 regulatory bodies. All Canadian exchanges could pay premiums at a set rate based on their needed coverage, with a higher price paid for hot wallet coverage (anything not an air-gapped multi-sig cold wallet). Such a model would be much cheaper to manage, offer better coverage, and be much more reliable to payout when needed. The kind of coverage you could have under this model is unheard of. You could even create something like the CDIC to protect Canadians who get their trading accounts hacked if they can sufficiently prove the loss is legitimate. In cases of fraud, gross negligence, or insolvency, the fund can be used to pay affected users directly (utilizing the last transparent balance report in the worst case), something which private insurance would never touch. While it's recommended to have official policies for coverage, a model where members vote would fully cover edge cases. (Could be similar to the Supreme Court where justices vote based on case law.)
Such a model could fully protect all Canadians across all platforms. You can have a fiat coverage governed by legal agreements, and crypto-asset coverage governed by both multi-sig and legal agreements. It could be practical, affordable, and inclusive.
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Now, we are at a crossroads. We can happily give up our freedom, our innovation, and our money. We can pay hefty expenses to auditors, lawyers, and regulators year after year (and make no mistake - this cost will grow to many millions or even billions as the industry grows - and it will be borne by all Canadians on every platform because platforms are not going to eat up these costs at a loss). We can make it nearly impossible for any new platform to enter the marketplace, forcing Canadians to use the same stagnant platforms year after year. We can centralize and consolidate the entire industry into 2 or 3 big players and have everyone else fail (possibly to heavy losses of users of those platforms). And when a flawed security model doesn't work and gets breached, we can make it even more complicated with even more people in suits making big money doing the job that blockchain was supposed to do in the first place. We can build a system which is so intertwined and dependent on big government, traditional finance, and central bankers that it's future depends entirely on that of the fiat system, of fractional banking, and of government bail-outs. If we choose this path, as history has shown us over and over again, we can not go back, save for revolution. Our children and grandchildren will still be paying the consequences of what we decided today.
Or, we can find solutions that work. We can maintain an open and innovative environment while making the adjustments we need to make to fully protect Canadian investors and cryptocurrency users, giving easy and affordable access to cryptocurrency for all Canadians on the platform of their choice, and creating an environment in which entrepreneurs and problem solvers can bring those solutions forward easily. None of the above precludes innovation in any way, or adds any unreasonable cost - and these three policies would demonstrably eliminate or resolve all 109 historic cases as studied here - that's every single case researched so far going back to 2011. It includes every loss that was studied so far not just in Canada but globally as well.
Unfortunately, finding answers is the least challenging part. Far more challenging is to get platform operators and regulators to agree on anything. My last post got no response whatsoever, and while the OSC has told me they're happy for industry feedback, I believe my opinion alone is fairly meaningless. This takes the whole community working together to solve. So please let me know your thoughts. Please take the time to upvote and share this with people. Please - let's get this solved and not leave it up to other people to do.
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Facts/background/sources (skip if you like):

• The inspiration for the paragraph about splitting wallets was an actual quote from a Canadian company providing custodial services in response to the OSC consultation paper: "We believe that it will be in the in best interests of investors to prohibit pooled crypto assets or ‘floats’. Most Platforms pool assets, citing reasons of practicality and expense. The recent hack of the world’s largest Platform – Binance – demonstrates the vulnerability of participants’ assets when such concessions are made. In this instance, the Platform’s entire hot wallet of Bitcoins, worth over $40 million, was stolen, facilitated in part by the pooling of client crypto assets." "the maintenance of participants (and Platform) crypto assets across multiple wallets distributes the related risk and responsibility of security - reducing the amount of insurance coverage required and making insurance coverage more readily obtainable". For the record, their reply also said nothing whatsoever about multi-sig or offline storage.
• In addition to the fact that the $40m hack represented only one "hot wallet" of Binance, and they actually had the vast majority of assets in other wallets (including mostly cold wallets), multiple real cases have clearly demonstrated that risk is still present with multiple wallets. Bitfinex, VinDAX, Bithumb, Altsbit, BitPoint, Cryptopia, and just recently KuCoin all had multiple wallets breached all at the same time, and may represent a significantly larger impact on customers than the Binance breach which was fully covered by Binance. To represent that simply having multiple separate wallets under the same security scheme is a comprehensive way to reduce risk is just not true.
• Private insurance has historically never covered a single loss in the cryptocurrency space (at least, not one that I was able to find), and there are notable cases where massive losses were not covered by insurance. Bitpay in 2015 and Yapizon in 2017 both had insurance policies that didn't pay out during the breach, even after a lengthly court process. The same insurance that ShakePay is presently using (and announced to much fanfare) was describe by their CEO himself as covering “physical theft of the media where the private keys are held,” which is something that has never historically happened. As was said with regard to the same policy in 2018 - “I don’t find it surprising that Lloyd’s is in this space,” said Johnson, adding that to his mind the challenge for everybody is figuring out how to structure these policies so that they are actually protective. “You can create an insurance policy that protects no one – you know there are so many caveats to the policy that it’s not super protective.”
• The most profitable policy for a private insurance company is one with the most expensive premiums that they never have to pay a claim on. They have no inherent incentive to take care of people who lost funds. It's "cheaper" to take the reputational hit and fight the claim in court. The more money at stake, the more the insurance provider is incentivized to avoid payout. They're not going to insure the assets unless they have reasonable certainty to make a profit by doing so, and they're not going to pay out a massive sum unless it's legally forced. Private insurance is always structured to be maximally profitable to the insurance provider.
• The circumvention of multi-sig was a key factor in the massive Bitfinex hack of over $60m of bitcoin, which today still sits being slowly used and is worth over $3b. While Bitfinex used a qualified custodian Bitgo, which was and still is active and one of the industry leaders of custodians, and they set up 2 of 3 multi-sig wallets, the entire system was routed through Bitfinex, such that Bitfinex customers could initiate the withdrawals in a "hot" fashion. This feature was also a hit with the hacker. The multi-sig was fully circumvented.
• Bitpay in 2015 was another example of a breach that stole 5,000 bitcoins. This happened not through the exploit of any system in Bitpay, but because the CEO of a company they worked with got their computer hacked and the hackers were able to request multiple bitcoin purchases, which Bitpay honoured because they came from the customer's computer legitimately. Impersonation is a very common tactic used by fraudsters, and methods get more extreme all the time.
• A notable case in Canada was the Canadian Bitcoins exploit. Funds were stored on a server in a Rogers Data Center, and the attendee was successfully convinced to reboot the server "in safe mode" with a simple phone call, thus bypassing the extensive security and enabling the theft.
• Over $200m has been stolen impersonating users of cryptocurrency platforms by one group alone. Here's a list of 10 social engineering attacks against corporate companies. Here's an even larger case. While verification methods are improving, so are methods of identity theft and social engineering. We now have sim swapping and deep fake videos to contend with. Hackers have massive database sets of personal information they can utilize. As the sums at stake increase, so to will the level of effort criminals are willing to undertake. Obscurity for an insecure system will only postpone an attack until the "jackpot" is large enough.
• The very nature of custodians circumvents multi-sig. This is because custodians are not just having to secure the assets against some sort of physical breach but against any form of social engineering, modification of orders, fraudulent withdrawal attempts, etc... If the security practices of signatories in a multi-sig arrangement are such that the breach risk of one signatory is 1 in 100, the requirement of 3 independent signatures makes the risk of theft 1 in 1,000,000. Since hackers tend to exploit the weakest link, a comparable custodian has to make the entry and exit points of their platform 10,000 times more secure than one of those signatories to provide equivalent protection. And if the signatories beef up their security by only 10x, the risk is now 1 in 1,000,000,000. The custodian has to be 1,000,000 times more secure. The larger and more complex a system is, the more potential vulnerabilities exist in it, and the fewer people can understand how the system works when performing upgrades. Even if a system is completely secure today, one has to also consider how that system might evolve over time or work with different members.
• By contrast, offline multi-signature solutions have an extremely solid record, and in the entire history of cryptocurrency exchange incidents which I've studied (listed here), there has only been one incident (796 exchange in 2015) involving an offline multi-signature wallet. It happened because the customer's bitcoin address was modified by hackers, and the amount that was stolen ($230k) was immediately covered by the exchange operators. Basically, the platform operators were tricked into sending a legitimate withdrawal request to the wrong address because hackers exploited their platform to change that address. Such an issue would not be prevented in any way by the use of a custodian, as that custodian has no oversight whatsoever to the exchange platform. It's practical for all exchange operators to test large withdrawal transactions as a general policy, regardless of what model is used, and general best practice is to diagnose and fix such an exploit as soon as it occurs.
• False promises on the backing of funds played a huge role in the downfall of Quadriga, and it's been exposed over and over again (MyCoin, PlusToken, Bitsane, Bitmarket, EZBTC, IDAX). Even today, customers have extremely limited certainty on whether their funds in exchanges are actually being backed or how they're being backed. While this issue is not unique to cryptocurrency exchanges, the complexity of the technology and the lack of any regulation or standards makes problems more widespread, and there is no "central bank" to come to the rescue as in the 2008 financial crisis or during the great depression when "9,000 banks failed".
• In addition to fraudulent operations, the industry is full of cases where operators have suffered breaches and not reported them. Most recently, Einstein was the largest case in Canada, where ongoing breaches and fraud were perpetrated against the platform for multiple years and nobody found out until the platform collapsed completely. While fraud and breaches suck to deal with, they suck even more when not dealt with. Lack of visibility played a role in the largest downfalls of Mt. Gox, Cryptsy, and Bitgrail. In some cases, platforms are alleged to have suffered a hack and keep operating without admitting it at all, such as CoinBene.
• It surprises some to learn that a cryptographic solution has already existed since 2013, and gained widespread support in 2014 after Mt. Gox. Proof of Reserves is a full cryptographic proof that allows any customer using an exchange to have complete certainty that their crypto-assets are fully backed by the platform in real-time. This is accomplished by proving that assets exist on the blockchain, are spendable, and fully cover customer deposits. It does not prove safety of assets or backing of fiat assets.
  • If we didn't care about privacy at all, a platform could publish their wallet addresses, sign a partial transaction, and put the full list of customer information and balances out publicly. Customers can each check that they are on the list, that the balances are accurate, that the total adds up, and that it's backed and spendable on the blockchain. Platforms who exclude any customer take a risk because that customer can easily check and see they were excluded. So together with all customers checking, this forms a full proof of backing of all crypto assets.
  • However, obviously customers care about their private information being published. Therefore, a hash of the information can be provided instead. Hash is one-way encryption. The hash allows the customer to validate inclusion (by hashing their own known information), while anyone looking at the list of hashes cannot determine the private information of any other user. All other parts of the scheme remain fully intact. A model like this is in use on the exchange CoinFloor in the UK.
  • A Merkle tree can provide even greater privacy. Instead of a list of balances, the balances are arranged into a binary tree. A customer starts from their node, and works their way to the top of the tree. For example, they know they have 5 BTC, they plus 1 other customer hold 7 BTC, they plus 2-3 other customers hold 17 BTC, etc... until they reach the root where all the BTC are represented. Thus, there is no way to find the balances of other individual customers aside from one unidentified customer in this case.
• Proposals such as this had the backing of leaders in the community including Nic Carter, Greg Maxwell, and Zak Wilcox. Substantial and significant effort started back in 2013, with massive popularity in 2014. But what became of that effort? Very little. Exchange operators continue to refuse to give visibility. Despite the fact this information can often be obtained through trivial blockchain analysis, no Canadian platform has ever provided any wallet addresses publicly. As described by the CEO of Newton "For us to implement some kind of realtime Proof of Reserves solution, which I'm not opposed to, it would have to ... Preserve our users' privacy, as well as our own. Some kind of zero-knowledge proof". Kraken describes here in more detail why they haven't implemented such a scheme. According to professor Eli Ben-Sasson, when he spoke with exchanges, none were interested in implementing Proof of Reserves.
• And yet, Kraken's places their reasoning on a page called "Proof of Reserves". More recently, both BitBuy and ShakePay have released reports titled "Proof of Reserves and Security Audit". Both reports contain disclaimers against being audits. Both reports trust the customer list provided by the platform, leaving the open possibility that multiple large accounts could have been excluded from the process. Proof of Reserves is a blockchain validation where customers see the wallets on the blockchain. The report from Kraken is 5 years old, but they leave it described as though it was just done a few weeks ago. And look at what they expect customers to do for validation. When firms represent something being "Proof of Reserve" when it's not, this is like a farmer growing fruit with pesticides and selling it in a farmers market as organic produce - except that these are people's hard-earned life savings at risk here. Platforms are misrepresenting the level of visibility in place and deceiving the public by their misuse of this term. They haven't proven anything.
• Fraud isn't a problem that is unique to cryptocurrency. Fraud happens all the time. Enron, WorldCom, Nortel, Bear Stearns, Wells Fargo, Moser Baer, Wirecard, Bre-X, and Nicola are just some of the cases where frauds became large enough to become a big deal (and there are so many countless others). These all happened on 100% reversible assets despite regulations being in place. In many of these cases, the problems happened due to the over-complexity of the financial instruments. For example, Enron had "complex financial statements [which] were confusing to shareholders and analysts", creating "off-balance-sheet vehicles, complex financing structures, and deals so bewildering that few people could understand them". In cryptocurrency, we are often combining complex financial products with complex technologies and verification processes. We are naïve if we think problems like this won't happen. It is awkward and uncomfortable for many people to admit that they don't know how something works. If we want "money of the people" to work, the solutions have to be simple enough that "the people" can understand them, not so confusing that financial professionals and technology experts struggle to use or understand them.
• For those who question the extent to which an organization can fool their way into a security consultancy role, HB Gary should be a great example to look at. Prior to trying to out anonymous, HB Gary was being actively hired by multiple US government agencies and others in the private sector (with glowing testimonials). The published articles and hosted professional security conferences. One should also look at this list of data breaches from the past 2 years. Many of them are large corporations, government entities, and technology companies. These are the ones we know about. Undoubtedly, there are many more that we do not know about. If HB Gary hadn't been "outted" by anonymous, would we have known they were insecure? If the same breach had happened outside of the public spotlight, would it even have been reported? Or would HB Gary have just deleted the Twitter posts, brought their site back up, done a couple patches, and kept on operating as though nothing had happened?
• In the case of Quadriga, the facts are clear. Despite past experience with platforms such as MapleChange in Canada and others around the world, no guidance or even the most basic of a framework was put in place by regulators. By not clarifying any sort of legal framework, regulators enabled a situation where a platform could be run by former criminal Mike Dhanini/Omar Patryn, and where funds could be held fully unchecked by one person. At the same time, the lack of regulation deterred legitimate entities from running competing platforms and Quadriga was granted a money services business license for multiple years of operation, which gave the firm the appearance of legitimacy. Regulators did little to protect Canadians despite Quadriga failing to file taxes from 2016 onward. The entire administrative team had resigned and this was public knowledge. Many people had suspicions of what was going on, including Ryan Mueller, who forwarded complaints to the authorities. These were ignored, giving Gerald Cotten the opportunity to escape without justice.
• There are multiple issues with the SOC II model including the prohibitive cost (you have to find a third party accounting firm and the prices are not even listed publicly on any sites), the requirement of operating for a year (impossible for new platforms), and lack of any public visibility (SOC II are private reports that aren't shared outside the people in suits).
• Securities frameworks are expensive. Sarbanes-Oxley is estimated to cost $5.1 million USD/yr for the average Fortune 500 company in the United States. Since "Fortune 500" represents the top 500 companies, that means well over $2.55 billion USD (~$3.4 billion CAD) is going to people in suits. Isn't the problem of trust and verification the exact problem that the blockchain is supposed to solve?
• To use Quadriga as justification for why custodians or SOC II or other advanced schemes are needed for platforms is rather silly, when any framework or visibility at all, or even the most basic of storage policies, would have prevented the whole thing. It's just an embarrassment.
• We are now seeing regulators take strong action. CoinSquare in Canada with multi-million dollar fines. BitMex from the US, criminal charges and arrests. OkEx, with full disregard of withdrawals and no communication. Who's next?
• We have a unique window today where we can solve these problems, and not permanently destroy innovation with unreasonable expectations, but we need to act quickly. This is a unique historic time that will never come again.

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Thoughts?

Preface
Full disclosure here; I am heavily invested in this. I have picked up some real gems from here and was only in the position to buy so much of this because of you guys so I thought it was time to give back. I only invest in Utility Coins. These are coins that actually DO something, and provide new/build upon the crypto infrastructure to work towards the end goal that Bitcoin itself set out to achieve(financial independence from the fiat banking system). This way, I avoid 99% of the scams in crypto that are functionless vapourware, and if you only invest in things that have strong fundamentals in the long term you are much more likely to make money.
Introduction

Stakenet is a Lightning Network-ready open-source platform for decentralized applications with its native cryptocurrency – XSN. It is powered by a Proof of Stake blockchain with trustless cold staking and Masternodes. Its use case is to provide a highly secure cross-chain infrastructure for these decentralized applications, where individuals can easily operate with any blockchain simply by using Stakenet and its native currency XSN.

Ok... but what does it actually do and solve?
The moonshot here is the DEX (Decentralised Exchange) that they are building. This is a lightning-network DEX with interchain capabilities. That means you could trade BTC directly for ETH; securely, instantly, cheaply and privately.
Right now, most crypto is traded to and from Centralised Exchanges like Binance. To buy and sell on these exchanges, you have to send your crypto wallets on that exchange. That means the exchanges have your private keys, and they have control over your funds. When you use a centralised exchange, you are no longer in control of your assets, and depend on the trustworthiness of middlemen. We have in the past of course seen infamous exit scams by centralised exchanges like Mt. Gox.
The alternative? Decentralised Exchanges. DEX's have no central authority and most importantly, your private keys(your crypto) never leavesYOUR possession and are never in anyone else's possession. So you can trade peer-to-peer without any of the drawbacks of Centralised Exchanges.
The problem is that this technology has not been perfected yet, and the DEX's that we have available to us now are not providing cheap, private, quick trading on a decentralised medium because of their technological inadequacies. Take Uniswap for example. This DEX accounts for over 60% of all DEX volume and facilitates trading of ERC-20 tokens, over the Ethereum blockchain. The problem? Because of the huge amount of transaction that are occurring over the Ethereum network, this has lead to congestion(too many transaction for the network to handle at one time) so the fees have increased dramatically. Another big problem? It's only for Ethereum. You cant for example, Buy LINK with BTC. You must use ETH.
The solution? Layer 2 protocols. These are layers built ON TOP of existing blockchains, that are designed to solve the transaction and scaling difficulties that crypto as a whole is facing today(and ultimately stopping mass adoption) The developers at Stakenet have seen the big picture, and have decided to implement the lightning network(a layer 2 protocol) into its DEX from the ground up. This will facilitate the functionalities of a DEX without any of the drawbacks of the CEX's and the DEX's we have today.
Heres someone much more qualified than me, Andreas Antonopoulos, to explain this
https://streamable.com/kzpimj
'Once we have efficient, well designed DEX's on layer 2, there wont even be any DEX's on layer 1'
Progress
The Stakenet team were the first to envision this grand solution and have been working on it since its conception in June 2019. They have been making steady progress ever since and right now, the DEX is in an open beta stage where rigorous testing is constant by themselves and the public. For a project of this scale, stress testing is paramount. If the product were to launch with any bugs/errors that would result in the loss of a users funds, this would obviously be very damaging to Stakenet's reputation. So I believe that the developers conservative approach is wise.
As of now the only pairs tradeable on the DEX are XSN/BTC and LTC/BTC. The DEX has only just launched as a public beta and is not in its full public release stage yet. As development moves forward more lightning network and atomic swap compatible coins will be added to the DEX, and of course, the team are hard at work on Raiden Integration - this will allow ETH and tokens on the Ethereum blockchain to be traded on the DEX between separate blockchains(instantly, cheaply, privately) This is where Stakenet enters top 50 territory on CMC if successful and is the true value here. Raiden Integration is well underway is being tested in a closed public group on Linux.
The full public DEX with Raiden Integration is expected to release by the end of the year. Given the state of development so far and the rate of progress, this seems realistic.
Tokenomics
2.6 Metrics overview (from whitepaper)

• Name: Stakenet.
• Ticker: XSN. Currency type: Coin.
• Consensus: Minting Proof of Stake, Trustless Proof of Stake.
• Coinage: Enabled, 24 hours.
• Encryption Algorithm: X11.
• Block generation time: 60 seconds.
• Block size: 1-4 MB.
• Final block reward: 20 XSN.
• Block reward distribution: 45% Masternodes, 45% staking, 10% treasury.
• Masternode collateral: 15 000 XSN.
• Governance: Decentralized democracy.
• Funding: Decentralized treasury, no initial coin offering, no premine.
• Lightning Network: Activated on mainnet.
• On-chain scalability: 240 tx/s. On-chain transaction costs: ~0.00001 XSN/kB.
• Off-chain scalability: Theoretically infinite tx/s.
• Off-chain transaction costs: Virtually zero.
• Cross-chain interface: Lightning Swaps, Tokenization Swaps.

XSN is slightly inflationary, much like ETH as this is necessary for the economy to be adopted and work in the long term. There is however a deflationary mechanism in place - all trading fees on the DEX get converted to XSN and 10% of these fees are burned. This puts constant buying pressure on XSN and acts as a deflationary mechanism. XSN has inherent value because it makes up the infrastructure that the DEX will run off and as such Masternode operators and Stakers will see the fee's from the DEX.
Conclusion
We can clearly see that a layer 2 DEX is the future of crypto currency trading. It will facilitate secure, cheap, instant and private trading across all coins with lightning capabilities, thus solving the scaling and transaction issues that are holding back crypto today. I dont need to tell you the implications of this, and what it means for crypto as a whole. If Stakenet can launch a layer 2 DEX with Raiden Integration, It will become the primary DEX in terms of volume.
Stakenet DEX will most likely be the first layer 2 DEX(first mover advantage) and its blockchain is the infrastructure that will host this DEX and subsequently receive it's trading fee's. It is not difficult to envision a time in the next year when Stakenet DEX is functional and hosting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trading every single day.
At $30 million market cap, I cant see any other potential investment right now with this much potential upside.
This post has merely served as in introduction and a heads up for this project, there is MUCH more to cover like vortex liquidity, masternodes, TOR integration... for now, here is some additional reading. Resources

• Whitepaper https://stakenet.io/Stakenet_Whitepaper.pdf
• Quick rundown https://medium.com/stakenet/multi-currency-wallet-and-lightning-swaps-stakenet-solution-7d0dafe99105
• X9's contributions to LTC https://medium.com/stakenet/litecoin-foundation-and-x9-developers-announce-collaboration-510ca985b6
• Exertive Proof of Stake https://medium.com/stakenet/exertive-proof-of-stake-epos-4a999807f9e4
• Great write-up of Cross Chain Proof of Stake (i.e. stake XSN, receive BTC) https://medium.com/stakenet/posw-weekly-ccpos-cross-chain-proof-of-stake-de1ac87055cd
• The Cypherpunk Standard of Banking https://medium.com/altcoin-magazine/the-cypherpunk-standard-of-banking-88f84a834180
• Most recent Dev Update https://medium.com/stakenet/xsn-core-dev-update-july-12-2020-72cac6050377 https://medium.com/stakenet/xsn-core-ledger-update-july-20-2020-a446e7f7af4
• Further reads https://medium.com/stakenet

TLDR; No. Do you want to make money? I'd start with learning how to read.

Regards!! I'm Jesús Zambrano, member of the Hispanic community of NANO for a long time. Last thursday, we had an interesting and enjoying Ask-me-anything at Binance Spanish community on telegram with the people behind NANO, Colin LeMahieu (Founder and Executive Director) and Zach Hyatt (Proyect Manager), where we take advantage of their kindness and willingness to ask them some questions and share opinions about de currency. I will share a compilation of some of the questions and answers.
-(Admin) ¡Welcome Binancians to our following AMA!
I will explain how AMA works; we will have three (3) segments.
Segment #1: I am going to ask to our guests five (5) questions and then they will answer them.
I will be explaining the rest of the segments as we conclude one of them.
-(Admin) Today we have the great pleasure of having Colin (Founder and Executive Director) and Zach (Project Manager) with us in our chat room. Could you give us a little introduction about you?
- (Zach) Hi everyone, I am Zach Hyatt, the Project Manager at the Nano Foundation and am excited to help answer questions about Nano. I live in Austin, TX where it is quite hot right now!
-(Colin) I’m Colin LeMahieu, founder of Nano. I’m a computer engineer and I’ve worked at companies like Qualcomm, Dell, and AMD. I have been working on Nano for about 5 years now and I’m really excited to talk with people who are interested as well!
-(Admin) It is a pleasure for us to have you here, I have to say that on a personal level, I have been a follower of the project for a long time now, so it is incredible for me to be able to count on you tonight, we will start with segment # 1, with the questions I have for you.
Feeless transactions and in record time! What is NANO? Can you give us an introduction to the project?
-(Colin) Nano’s goal is to solve problems with other cryptocurrencies and make sending value fast and fee-less. It has a unique design to allow us to accomplish this. We want people to have the option of using decentralized digital money instead of fiat money anywhere in the world. Nano is accessible and easy-to-use today and we plan on keeping it focused on these goals.
-(Admin) Thank you for answering my first question, I am delighted with the features offered by the project, every week they are updating and making important changes that help to improve the ecosystem that surrounds the team.
Here you can find all the weekly updates: https://nano.org/en
Previously the project was called RaiBlocks, it appeared for the first time in an ad in Bitcoin Talk in 2015. Can you tell us why a name change came up later?
-(Zach) Yeah, absolutely. Although the original RaiBlocks name has a special place in our history, it was difficult to pronounce in some areas of the world and caused confusion with certain users. We decided to move to a shorter name that not only was easy to pronounce but also reflected the fast, efficient nature of the protocol.
-(Admin) A short and quick name to pronounce, definitely NANO is perfect to define it!
My third question is the following; I had seen a very interesting gif early in the chat and it is just about the question that I came to ask.
Currently, NANO has 100% of its tokens in circulation and these tokens were distributed through Faucets, so it meant that any user with a computer could get coins simply by completing some captchas, can you tell me which has been the experience of users when using this method?
-(Colin) The faucet was a great way for us to distribute coins to people who have never used it before. Cryptocurrencies that use mining end up distributing only to people who have money to buy the mining hardware and this is unfair. We had a lot of people from Indonesia and Asia in the beginning of our distribution and at the end there were a lot of people from South America, Venezuela and Brasil that were getting most of the Nano from the faucet. We think this was a fairer way to do it and it got Nano into the hands of people in different locations, and it had a very positive impact on their lives.
-(Admin) This is incredible! thanks for your answer!
Can you tell us about what the Open Representative Vote is about and how it protects the network?
-(Zach) Nano uses voting to get confirmation on the network instead of mining and the nodes on the network that create votes are called Representatives. Open Representative Voting allows people who have a Nano balance to pick whatever representative they want to vote on their behalf. This allows the people who hold Nano to decide who generates consensus instead of mining companies. The voting process is very efficient and is a big part of what allows Nano to be fee-less and use very little energy.
-(Admin) Very good! The last question on my part:
Nano PoW is your new approach, I have read a pretty interesting example with emails, can you explain what it is about?
-(Colin) Nano PoW is a research project we’re doing in order to create a proof of work algorithm that uses less energy than other popular algorithms. Since Nano is fee-less, there must be a method to limit transactions going onto the network, which this PoW achieves. With the goal of using more memory in the process instead of CPU cycles in order to generate proofs, this new Nano PoW will help prevent ASICs from being able to cheaply send lots of transactions. It’s important for a cryptocurrency that’s used around the world to be energy efficient and green so continuing our research on this is important to us.
-(Admin) https://medium.com/nanocurrency/nano-pow-the-details-ba22a9092d6f
Thanks for your answers, Colin and Zach! I have a video, taken from your YouTube account that I would like to share with the community
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh9pA8UCUrI
Can you tell me what we see in this video?
-(Colin) This is a video of how fast our transactions send and receive. You can see it takes less than 1 second to finish which means you can use it as a currency.
- (Zach) The wallet was made by developers in our amazing community, it is called Natrium. It really shows how fast Nano is and how it is easy-to-use!
-(Colin) You can also see how simple it is to use. You just scan, enter an amount, and send. There are no complicated setting which is great for new users and great for adoption.
- (Zach) And the best part is, there were no fees at all for that transaction. In fact there have never been any transaction fees on the Nano network ever!
-(Admin) Great! That's why I wanted to share it with everyone, yesterday I could try the wallet and it is really spectacular to use, thank you very much for that excellent explanation, please stay with us, now comes the part in which our users participate
Segment 3, community questions
Q -First congratulations on your project, it is amazing. Now, does nano BlockChain have another use besides making transactions?
A - (Zach) Thank you! Nano has always been focused on transfer of value and will continue to maintain that focus. The overall design is aimed at doing only this so it can remain fast, efficient and fee-less.
Q -Good evening! I understand that thanks to its architecture called "Block-lattice", each individual provides the computing power necessary to verify their own transaction, thanks to this they do not use miners to confirm transactions and they do not apply commissions of any kind. My question is: How did this occur and how difficult was it?
A - (Colin) It’s simila, transactions are validated by votes from the representatives, not by the PoW. The PoW is a way to slow down how fast people can create transactions so they can’t spam the network.
Q - Do you have any short or long term projects so that transactions using $NANO were anonymous?
A - (Colin) Long term we want to see what privacy options exist and are fast. Most privacy schemes make the transactions very big or slow to process and it’s important for things to remain quick and efficient so we can have fast transactions.
Q - We are living in Venezuela many changes in the cryptocurrency sector, the integration of crypto for service payment and product purchases is already a reality. What agreements has NANO made with service stores to integrate it as a means of payment? I want to pay my movie ticket with NANOS
A - (Zach) Thanks for your interest in Nano. We are always looking for ways to allow everyone to use Nano in as many places as possible. Although separate from our organization, we are aware of the efforts of the Nano Venezuela organization and try to support them when possible in bringing Nano to as many people and stores in Venezuela as possible.
Q - (7 questions made from one persone at once)

1. How do you manage to make your transactions virtually instantaneous?
2. How do they create part of the company's livelihood if no fees are charged for transactions?
3. Why does $ NANO consume so little electricity?
4. Requirements for a medium-sized company to adopt nano correctly as a means of payment?
5. Since 100% of the $ NANOS are distributed, I have seen something in Medium that talked about `` Nano PoW '', could you tell me a little more about how it works? What profit will the person / institution get that puts hardware for their PoW? Will more $ NANO be created apart from those already in circulation?
6. What do the representatives earn for putting their vote and validating blocks if 100% of the $ NANOS are already created / issued?

7- Since your policy / slogan / commandment is to be a cryptocurrency without fees, shouldn't you force exchanges in which $ NANO is present that they don't charge withdrawal fees?
A - (Colin)

1. Transactions are fast because they’re validated by voting. The votes get transmitted around the world in milliseconds and all people have to do is count votes to confirm the transaction.
2. We use the Dev fund to pay for developing the Nano protocol. The Nano protocol is a free tool that other people can build businesses on. We have ideas for businesses that can use fast, free money in order to help people send money to their family in other countries or pay microtransactions. It’s similar to Linux, it’s free but big companies use it because it saves them money.
3. Nano uses little electricity because we use voting for validating transactions. Voting is just sending data over the internet which is power efficient.
4. You can run a nano node with 40-60$/mo using cloud virtual machines
5. Nano pow is just a more efficient way to slow people down from sending transactions to the network
6. The most important thing is: why does a company want to use cryptocurrency? They want to use it because it saves them money on bank fees, etc. Since 40-60$/mo running a node is less expensive than their bank fees, they want to participate in the network to keep it going and save them money.

Q - Knowing all this about Nano, could you say that Nano is one of the most energy-efficient, Ecological friendly currencies in existence?
A -(Zach) Absolutely. We care about making a positive change in the world and so pride ourselves on leaving as little energy trace possible in the world. It may just be the fastest, most efficient transfer of value available.
Q - If the nano protocol had not passed the Red4Sec signature security test, would it have any vulnerability today?
A - (Colin) The Red4Sec audit didn’t find any critiral vulnerabilities in Nano. In fact they did the audit twice because they couldn’t find anything wrong and that never happened before.
It’s important for us to keep the code high quality and we will do audits again in the future because it’s important to make sure everything is secure.
Q - I'd like to see more development of Nano by using SMS on our phones to avoid the problem of no Internet connection at the moment
A -(Zach) As much as we like the idea of SMS, unfortunately it is not a secure network so managing Nano transactions over it brings some unique requirements. However we are always innovating and trying to make Nano as easy and accessible as possible so hope advances can help over time make it more accessible in this area.
Q - What plans do you have to close this 2019 to increase adoption in Latin America?
A -(Colin) We are very excited about the passion we see in the south american community. We would love to make it down to VE however in the mean time follow nanoVE for updates and meetups - there may be one near you soon!
Q - How will you make the adoption and use of $ NANO continue to increase especially in markets where other cryptocurrencies are gaining more ground?
A - (Colin) Our focus is to build tools people need to accept cryptocurrency. Right now it’s still difficulty and expensive. One thing we’re making is the device Appia which can accept cryptocurrency similar to a credit card. We made this device very inexpensive and can connect over wireless so it can be used in markets or resturaunts or other places cryptocurrency is not yet available.
- (Admin) Thank you very much for your answers! You are the first guests that answer all the questions of our users, you are amazing guys!
@AndyNano It was amazing to meet you, I learned a lot from you
@FundacionNanoVE Thanks for making this happen! excellent work
@nano_isam Thanks for everything buddy!
-(Zach) Can we ask a question to the channel?
What are the top things Nano can do to help you in your daily lives?
-(Colin) My question: How do you store cryptocurrency safely? Where do you back up your seed so it isn’t lost or stolen?
A - In Venezuela we currently have a problem with conventional payment processors, they are very slow, it would be great to be able to see people using NANO to make their purchases at any store in Venezuela, 0 commissions and instant transactions, is what we need
A - Fast transactions are what can help society the most, and except that, the best thing is that it is very cheap ... from there it is addition, those are the main characteristics that we look for the most
A - encrypted file in a pendrive
A - Nano is a direct competition to the vast majority of Cryptos, in transaction speed and that it is literally free to send or receive, nothing to wait for 5 hours or the next day when you pay for items or services with Crypto, let's increase the adoption of nano!
-(Colin) Question: Are there barriers to using Nano in your country right now?
A - No barriers in Venezuela
A - No barrier what is lacking is greater diffusion in means to give greater projection and that the adoption arrives. Here I am to support NANO!
A - There should be no barriers to the payments we wish to make, freedom above all
-(Colin) Fantastic!
- (Zach) Thanks everyone, I have to go but I appreciate all the awesome questions and answers!

On 10th November I have created a new account on the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. Binance accounts need to be associated with an email account and I created a free ProtonMail account for this purpose.
The reason for choosing ProtonMail over say Gmail or Yahoo is due to the fact that Protonmail is more secure. Basically, I thought that my Binance account would be safer if it was associated with a ProtonMail email account as was any Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency deposited in the same Binance account.
My internet connection does not use a fixed IP address and in order to login into this new Binance account, I need to open my new ProtonMail email account, open an email that is sent from Binance and click on a confirmation link in the email to confirm that the IP address indicated in the email is mine. Without clicking the confirmation link, I cannot access the Binance account.
Email confirmation is also required for withdrawing funds from Binance, as is probably the case with any other major cryptocurrency exchange. In other words, if one loses access to the email account that is associated with a cryptocurrency exchange account, that person can no longer withdraw any cryptocurrencies from the account. This practically means that both the account and any Bitcoin and/or other cryptocurrencies in the account will become useless.
Anyway, to continue with my story, on 18th November I tried to log in into my new Binance account. I entered my email/username and password, inputted the 2FA code from Google Authenticator and I got the usual pop-up message from Binance stating that I need to confirm my IP address by clicking the confirmation link in an email sent from Binance.
So I opened the ProtonMail site and I entered my email address, password and 2FA code. To my surprise, I was unable to log in successfully as I got a message stating that my ProtonMail account has been disabled for abuse or fraud.
I immediately sent an email to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) as indicated in the message and asked for my account to be unblocked. The next day, I received the following reply from ProtonMail:
“The account was automatically disabled by our anti-spam system due to a suspicious activity. The account will not be enabled.”
I wrote to ProtonMail again and explained to support that I did not use the email account for any illicit purposes. I also explained to the ProtonMail staff that I need to access the email account because it is tied to a Binance account. However, the next day ProtonMail's support replied in the following manner:
“Your account cannot be enabled since we believe that it is for abuse.”
I send another email to the ProtonMail abuse team and explained to them that without access to the ProtonMail account I will lose access to the Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies worth €500 that are stored in the Binance account that is associated to the disabled email account. I also asked the ProtonMail staff if they could escalate the ticket to management or if they will be willing to help me if I become a paid ProtonMail customer.
I received no reply to my email so the next day I sent another email to the abuse team and pleaded for help. I told ProtonMail’s support that I do not even need to send emails from the deactivated account. I explained to support that the only reason why I need to access the email account is to be able to read emails from Binance and click on any confirmation links.
ProtonMail’s next reply was the following:
“Our team has examined your account once again and it will not be enabled. You will not be able to access your messages anymore or reuse the account.”
I really cannot understand why ProtonMail’s staff have treated me in this manner. My disabled account was just a few days old when it was deactivated. I only had a few, maybe six or seven emails, in the inbox folder with three emails coming from ProtonMail and the rest coming from Binance.
The thing is that, as far as I know, I did not even send a single email before the account was disabled. How did ProtonMail 's staff come to the conclusion that I wanted to use the email account for abuse? I am not stupid so if I wanted to use an email account to spam somebody, I surely would not use an email account that is tied to a cryptocurrency exchange account!
Not knowing what to do, I did a Google search to see if other people have been burnt by ProtonMail’s support after getting their accounts disabled. Not surprisingly, it seems that there are many other ProtonMail users who had their accounts disabled because of some “faulty” anti-spam filter. Apparently many users got their accounts suspended because they were using a VPN service while using their ProtonMail account. I too have a subscription to a VPN service and I would not exclude that ProtonMail’s spam filter flagged my account as suspicious due to the fact I was using the VPN service at the time.
While I can understand that no anti-spam filter is perfect, the real problem is that ProtonMail does not seem to care about its existing customers and potential future customers. I doubt that ProtonMail’s staff have done any effort to examine my mailbox and those of other disabled accounts.
Anyway, it is unfortunate that I had to learn the hard way the mistake I made in thinking that I would be better off in using ProtonMail to secure my Binance exchange account instead of Google, Yahoo or some other email service provider. While ProtonMail might be more secure, I am not aware that Google and Yahoo deactivate accounts for accessing the email accounts over a VPN network or for no other valid reason. What is the use of using a more secure email service if there is a high risk of getting email accounts disabled without doing anything wrong?
Although I will probably never get hold of my €500 worth of Bitcoin again, I hope that at least anyone thinking of using ProtonMail for cryptocurrency exchange accounts, work related accounts, bank related correspondence or even for personal use will find my story useful and will consider all pros and cons before taking a decision.
The fact that my ProtonMail account was disabled is kind of having my €500 worth of Bitcoin being held hostage by ProtonMail. ProtonMail does not have access to the cryptocurrencies in my Binance account but neither do I at this point. It is like I had two different keys to unlock the repository where the cryptocurrencies are stored and ProtonMail confiscated one of the keys. There is no need to say that I have worked hard for those €500, but what if I had €5,000 or even €50,000 worth of cryptocurrencies in that Binance account? How many cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency exchange accounts will be lost forever because of ProtonMail’s actions?
ProtonMail’s “faulty” anti-spam filter is probably doing the company more harm than good. However, it is only ProtonMail’s fault for not doing anything about the issue, playing the bullies game, pretending to examine disabled accounts while providing no real evidence of abuse and being insensitive to the fact that disabled accounts can lead to loss of money, loss of business or loss of personal data.
​
UPDATE on 26th November: After providing proof that I am not a spammer, ProtonMail's abuse team contacted me this morning to inform me that my account has been enabled. I can confirm that the email account is working fine again.
Thank you ProtonMail for your understanding.

Regards!! I'm Jesús Zambrano, member of the Hispanic community of NANO for a long time. Last thursday, we had an interesting and enjoying Ask-me-anything at Binance Spanish community on telegram with the people behind NANO, Colin LeMahieu (Founder and Executive Director) and Zach Hyatt (Proyect Manager), where we take advantage of their kindness and willingness to ask them some questions and share opinions about de currency. I will share a compilation of some of the questions and answers.
-(Admin) ¡Welcome Binancians to our following AMA!
I will explain how AMA works; we will have three (3) segments.
Segment #1: I am going to ask to our guests five (5) questions and then they will answer them.
I will be explaining the rest of the segments as we conclude one of them.
-(Admin) Today we have the great pleasure of having Colin (Founder and Executive Director) and Zach (Project Manager) with us in our chat room. Could you give us a little introduction about you?
- (Zach) Hi everyone, I am Zach Hyatt, the Project Manager at the Nano Foundation and am excited to help answer questions about Nano. I live in Austin, TX where it is quite hot right now!
-(Colin) I’m Colin LeMahieu, founder of Nano. I’m a computer engineer and I’ve worked at companies like Qualcomm, Dell, and AMD. I have been working on Nano for about 5 years now and I’m really excited to talk with people who are interested as well!
-(Admin) It is a pleasure for us to have you here, I have to say that on a personal level, I have been a follower of the project for a long time now, so it is incredible for me to be able to count on you tonight, we will start with segment # 1, with the questions I have for you.
Feeless transactions and in record time! What is NANO? Can you give us an introduction to the project?
-(Colin) Nano’s goal is to solve problems with other cryptocurrencies and make sending value fast and fee-less. It has a unique design to allow us to accomplish this. We want people to have the option of using decentralized digital money instead of fiat money anywhere in the world. Nano is accessible and easy-to-use today and we plan on keeping it focused on these goals.
-(Admin) Thank you for answering my first question, I am delighted with the features offered by the project, every week they are updating and making important changes that help to improve the ecosystem that surrounds the team.
Here you can find all the weekly updates: https://nano.org/en
Previously the project was called RaiBlocks, it appeared for the first time in an ad in Bitcoin Talk in 2015. Can you tell us why a name change came up later?
-(Zach) Yeah, absolutely. Although the original RaiBlocks name has a special place in our history, it was difficult to pronounce in some areas of the world and caused confusion with certain users. We decided to move to a shorter name that not only was easy to pronounce but also reflected the fast, efficient nature of the protocol.
-(Admin) A short and quick name to pronounce, definitely NANO is perfect to define it!
My third question is the following; I had seen a very interesting gif early in the chat and it is just about the question that I came to ask.
Currently, NANO has 100% of its tokens in circulation and these tokens were distributed through Faucets, so it meant that any user with a computer could get coins simply by completing some captchas, can you tell me which has been the experience of users when using this method?
-(Colin) The faucet was a great way for us to distribute coins to people who have never used it before. Cryptocurrencies that use mining end up distributing only to people who have money to buy the mining hardware and this is unfair. We had a lot of people from Indonesia and Asia in the beginning of our distribution and at the end there were a lot of people from South America, Venezuela and Brasil that were getting most of the Nano from the faucet. We think this was a fairer way to do it and it got Nano into the hands of people in different locations, and it had a very positive impact on their lives.
-(Admin) This is incredible! thanks for your answer!
Can you tell us about what the Open Representative Vote is about and how it protects the network?
-(Zach) Nano uses voting to get confirmation on the network instead of mining and the nodes on the network that create votes are called Representatives. Open Representative Voting allows people who have a Nano balance to pick whatever representative they want to vote on their behalf. This allows the people who hold Nano to decide who generates consensus instead of mining companies. The voting process is very efficient and is a big part of what allows Nano to be fee-less and use very little energy.
-(Admin) Very good! The last question on my part:
Nano PoW is your new approach, I have read a pretty interesting example with emails, can you explain what it is about?
-(Colin) Nano PoW is a research project we’re doing in order to create a proof of work algorithm that uses less energy than other popular algorithms. Since Nano is fee-less, there must be a method to limit transactions going onto the network, which this PoW achieves. With the goal of using more memory in the process instead of CPU cycles in order to generate proofs, this new Nano PoW will help prevent ASICs from being able to cheaply send lots of transactions. It’s important for a cryptocurrency that’s used around the world to be energy efficient and green so continuing our research on this is important to us.
-(Admin) https://medium.com/nanocurrency/nano-pow-the-details-ba22a9092d6f
Thanks for your answers, Colin and Zach! I have a video, taken from your YouTube account that I would like to share with the community
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh9pA8UCUrI
Can you tell me what we see in this video?
-(Colin) This is a video of how fast our transactions send and receive. You can see it takes less than 1 second to finish which means you can use it as a currency.
- (Zach) The wallet was made by developers in our amazing community, it is called Natrium. It really shows how fast Nano is and how it is easy-to-use!
-(Colin) You can also see how simple it is to use. You just scan, enter an amount, and send. There are no complicated setting which is great for new users and great for adoption.
- (Zach) And the best part is, there were no fees at all for that transaction. In fact there have never been any transaction fees on the Nano network ever!
-(Admin) Great! That's why I wanted to share it with everyone, yesterday I could try the wallet and it is really spectacular to use, thank you very much for that excellent explanation, please stay with us, now comes the part in which our users participate
Segment 3, community questions
Q -First congratulations on your project, it is amazing. Now, does nano BlockChain have another use besides making transactions?
A - (Zach) Thank you! Nano has always been focused on transfer of value and will continue to maintain that focus. The overall design is aimed at doing only this so it can remain fast, efficient and fee-less.
Q -Good evening! I understand that thanks to its architecture called "Block-lattice", each individual provides the computing power necessary to verify their own transaction, thanks to this they do not use miners to confirm transactions and they do not apply commissions of any kind. My question is: How did this occur and how difficult was it?
A - (Colin) It’s simila, transactions are validated by votes from the representatives, not by the PoW. The PoW is a way to slow down how fast people can create transactions so they can’t spam the network.
Q - Do you have any short or long term projects so that transactions using $NANO were anonymous?
A - (Colin) Long term we want to see what privacy options exist and are fast. Most privacy schemes make the transactions very big or slow to process and it’s important for things to remain quick and efficient so we can have fast transactions.
Q - We are living in Venezuela many changes in the cryptocurrency sector, the integration of crypto for service payment and product purchases is already a reality. What agreements has NANO made with service stores to integrate it as a means of payment? I want to pay my movie ticket with NANOS
A - (Zach) Thanks for your interest in Nano. We are always looking for ways to allow everyone to use Nano in as many places as possible. Although separate from our organization, we are aware of the efforts of the Nano Venezuela organization and try to support them when possible in bringing Nano to as many people and stores in Venezuela as possible.
Q - (7 questions made from one persone at once)

1. How do you manage to make your transactions virtually instantaneous?
2. How do they create part of the company's livelihood if no fees are charged for transactions?
3. Why does $ NANO consume so little electricity?
4. Requirements for a medium-sized company to adopt nano correctly as a means of payment?
5. Since 100% of the $ NANOS are distributed, I have seen something in Medium that talked about `` Nano PoW '', could you tell me a little more about how it works? What profit will the person / institution get that puts hardware for their PoW? Will more $ NANO be created apart from those already in circulation?
6. What do the representatives earn for putting their vote and validating blocks if 100% of the $ NANOS are already created / issued?

7- Since your policy / slogan / commandment is to be a cryptocurrency without fees, shouldn't you force exchanges in which $ NANO is present that they don't charge withdrawal fees?
A - (Colin)

1. Transactions are fast because they’re validated by voting. The votes get transmitted around the world in milliseconds and all people have to do is count votes to confirm the transaction.
2. We use the Dev fund to pay for developing the Nano protocol. The Nano protocol is a free tool that other people can build businesses on. We have ideas for businesses that can use fast, free money in order to help people send money to their family in other countries or pay microtransactions. It’s similar to Linux, it’s free but big companies use it because it saves them money.
3. Nano uses little electricity because we use voting for validating transactions. Voting is just sending data over the internet which is power efficient.
4. You can run a nano node with 40-60$/mo using cloud virtual machines
5. Nano pow is just a more efficient way to slow people down from sending transactions to the network
6. The most important thing is: why does a company want to use cryptocurrency? They want to use it because it saves them money on bank fees, etc. Since 40-60$/mo running a node is less expensive than their bank fees, they want to participate in the network to keep it going and save them money.

Q - Knowing all this about Nano, could you say that Nano is one of the most energy-efficient, Ecological friendly currencies in existence?
A -(Zach) Absolutely. We care about making a positive change in the world and so pride ourselves on leaving as little energy trace possible in the world. It may just be the fastest, most efficient transfer of value available.
Q - If the nano protocol had not passed the Red4Sec signature security test, would it have any vulnerability today?
A - (Colin) The Red4Sec audit didn’t find any critiral vulnerabilities in Nano. In fact they did the audit twice because they couldn’t find anything wrong and that never happened before.
It’s important for us to keep the code high quality and we will do audits again in the future because it’s important to make sure everything is secure.
Q - I'd like to see more development of Nano by using SMS on our phones to avoid the problem of no Internet connection at the moment
A -(Zach) As much as we like the idea of SMS, unfortunately it is not a secure network so managing Nano transactions over it brings some unique requirements. However we are always innovating and trying to make Nano as easy and accessible as possible so hope advances can help over time make it more accessible in this area.
Q - What plans do you have to close this 2019 to increase adoption in Latin America?
A -(Colin) We are very excited about the passion we see in the south american community. We would love to make it down to VE however in the mean time follow nanoVE for updates and meetups - there may be one near you soon!
Q - How will you make the adoption and use of $ NANO continue to increase especially in markets where other cryptocurrencies are gaining more ground?
A - (Colin) Our focus is to build tools people need to accept cryptocurrency. Right now it’s still difficulty and expensive. One thing we’re making is the device Appia which can accept cryptocurrency similar to a credit card. We made this device very inexpensive and can connect over wireless so it can be used in markets or resturaunts or other places cryptocurrency is not yet available.
- (Admin) Thank you very much for your answers! You are the first guests that answer all the questions of our users, you are amazing guys!
@AndyNano It was amazing to meet you, I learned a lot from you
@FundacionNanoVE Thanks for making this happen! excellent work
@nano_isam Thanks for everything buddy!
-(Zach) Can we ask a question to the channel?
What are the top things Nano can do to help you in your daily lives?
-(Colin) My question: How do you store cryptocurrency safely? Where do you back up your seed so it isn’t lost or stolen?
A - In Venezuela we currently have a problem with conventional payment processors, they are very slow, it would be great to be able to see people using NANO to make their purchases at any store in Venezuela, 0 commissions and instant transactions, is what we need
A - Fast transactions are what can help society the most, and except that, the best thing is that it is very cheap ... from there it is addition, those are the main characteristics that we look for the most
A - encrypted file in a pendrive
A - Nano is a direct competition to the vast majority of Cryptos, in transaction speed and that it is literally free to send or receive, nothing to wait for 5 hours or the next day when you pay for items or services with Crypto, let's increase the adoption of nano!
-(Colin) Question: Are there barriers to using Nano in your country right now?
A - No barriers in Venezuela
A - No barrier what is lacking is greater diffusion in means to give greater projection and that the adoption arrives. Here I am to support NANO!
A - There should be no barriers to the payments we wish to make, freedom above all
-(Colin) Fantastic!
- (Zach) Thanks everyone, I have to go but I appreciate all the awesome questions and answers!

The Crypto King Report January 10th: KuCoin Picks (Today’s Pick: HST), NEW ICO Picks (2 New Ones!) BNTY (800%), KCS (500%), DRGN (600%), DBC (150%), ELIX (100%), SNOV (150%), PURA, EVX, STRAT, NEO, TRX, POWR, ADX (NEO link), ENJ(Wallet), ICX, XEM, and ARDR
I appreciate all my loyal followers! For tips and strategy hours before being posted to the message boards follow on Reddit, Instagram: JaketheCryptoKing and Twitter: JbtheCryptoKing. And now on Discord: https://discord.gg/qTjQp8W (join the group to reach me directly and see posts early!). If the title is a foreign language to you read my Cryto-101 post and let’s go from there: https://redd.it/7m48ne . See posts first in the new Subreddit: TheCryptoKingdom. Remember in trading minutes matter, hours are eternities.
I wanted to start this post with saying the Kingdom has grown incredibly fast. The amount of requests and messages these last few days have grown exponentially. Before I delve into today’s topics I wanted to reach out and say thank you to all of those that show positive support and learn from these posts. If you couldn’t tell these posts are put together for free daily, and take hours to compile the information, and even longer to write it coherently and eloquently. On my Discord I have Donors that help make all this possible. Here is a thank you to all of you that have allowed me to continue researching and providing strategy in a shill laden field!
January Market Updates and 1-Month Holds: STRAT, NEO, ICX
These can be looked at as a buy and hold regardless of news or price fluctuation. Everyone wants to be a day trader but if you miss the 100% pop will the 8% you made day trading be worth it? For some coins yes, the fluctuations are significant enough that day trading makes sense. However, for those who want the ability to hold an alt coin for more than a few days with the expectation of it beating the market returns of BTC and other alts you have to understand the market conditions and what the future holds. No one is perfect, but as we all know ETH has spiked greatly this week due to its upcoming fork. If you do not understand why that would be, baby steps, I will explain that in a future post (forks and their Macro market impact is an entire post on its own). We also had negative news come out of both China and Korea this week. Given Asians are the top traders by volume the one place we do not want bad news in Crypto, is Asia. So what we are experiencing is a double whammy, ETH is up and negative Asia news has driven alts down. This has happened many times in the past including as early as 10 days ago with the BTC forks and the alt market crash. When forks occur investors move money from alt coins to the “forking” coin, in this case ETH. Therefore, all other coins will dip as investors are specifically seeking to purchase ETH for the short term. That coupled with negative Asia news places us where we are today, 2 red days . However, if you were holding a diversified portfolio of my picks from this week we are actually up a solid % from the last 48hrs instead of the bloodbath most alt owners are dealing with.
Update Binance is accepting new traders again: https://www.binance.com/?ref=15316928
Now that that market updates have been discussed evaluate January HOLDS! (NEO, ICX, STRAT)
(Some information is unchanged as I am buying and accumulating throughout January)
NEO (BUY and HOLD), is an important hold (and accumulate) in all portfolios as it is hands down the Asian Ether. NEO has one of the biggest January’s of any coin and is up over 100% since I recommended it originally. NEO has meetups in Dublin, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London the first two weeks of January. Everyone sees the upcoming calendar and realizes the next 2 months will provide more exposure than any 12-month period in crypto history. NEO is the latest addition to the buy and HOLD list. They end the month of January speaking at 2 of the largest blockchain conferences in the world. This will be one of the strongest plays for January 2018. I would slowly stock up on this one on dips (especially on days like today!). DBC a coin on NEO’s platform (a prior moonshot up 100+%) is also speaking at this convention!
STRAT (BUY and HOLD). I truly love talking about this coin. I enjoy my % returns on moonshots but this tech, the team, the coin, and especially the 1-month vision I truly believe in. I have an interesting update!!! STRAT is developing a Breeze wallet with Tumblebit which makes Bitcoin transactions private through the STRAT network. The biggest problems with BTC is its transparency and its speed. STRAT will help alleviate the transparency aspects for those who want to conceal how much they send/receive. A wallet that manages to conceal your BTC holdings (makes it similar to privacy coins). STRAT’s money for advertising has been saved with the anticipation of a high volume publicity campaign upon release of their new wallet and ICO platform. Once funds are spent advertising the STRAT ICO platform, their 2 flagships are announced, and their wallet is functional (all happening this month) I expect the price not only to trend north but more than double if not triple. I wouldn’t be surprised to see 100%-300% returns on a fairly safe crypto investment (normally the riskiest coins provide this monthly). Their twitter confirmed the 2 ICOs coming out in the next few weeks, when the official announcement is made we are looking at 100-200% gains.
STRAT is on the cusp of being able to host ICO’s for other companies. This is extremely valuable technology and they’ve announced it will be ready to go this week. Would anyone like to know the going rate of an ICO? 20-40BTC. Per ICO these small companies and their coin holders are making $250k-$600k at the current BTC prices. This is a very big business. They’ve also announced 2 Flagship ICOs that will be available on their STRATIS network in January. The platform to host ICOs goes live this week, and within 2 weeks we find out which ICOs STRAT is hosting, then their wallet and advertising rollout. This should be a very positive 2 weeks for STRAT. As the crypto market continues to expand, the need for new ICO platforms will expand as well. This is my safest, favorite coin for January. They are also extremely active on their Twitter updating and hinting at the 2 flagship ICO launches, this type of hype building increases market cap!
ICX (BUY and HOLD) ICX has had about a 50% run this week and continued to perform yesterday. This is again a good opportunity as it dipped, as the whole market did, to buy as I am still very bullish on this coin. The price will trend north until the end of the month where the blast off will occur. The Koreans love this little coin so much it is hosting its first blockchain conference in the tallest building in Seoul at the end of January. This will be enormous exposure for a coin which Koreans are already in love with. Their mainnet although once delayed was promised to be released prior to their January conference. Based on big news and Asian trading volume this should continue to trend North. Asians trade more than Americans. Koreans are the highest volume trading country in Asia, and they happen to love ICX. ICX should continue to trend north leading up to their conference in the end of January. This is an accumulate on dips until the January 25th conference. I am not sure we will see many more dips unless BTC has a run to 25k but continue to accumulate, this should trend north toward $20 by the end of January.
Ahhh everyone’s favorite part of the day (mostly because 75% of my moonshots mooned in 1 week or less )
Today’s Moonshot KuCoin Pick: HST
Referral link for KuCoin: https://www.kucoin.com/#/?r=1cH1M
HST is my moonshot today and is currently located on KuCoin! The reason I like HST so much (besides it being undervalued, down 20% over 2 days, and a low market cap on KuCoin) is what HST stands for. It is a decision token that specializes in voting. Being from the U.S. I was just a part of an election they are still trying to unravel. If voting was done on the blockchain which is what HST created we wouldn’t have to worry about government bodies manipulating votes and year-long investigations that go nowhere. Long story short, HST is undervalued, has a very small circulation of total coins, should recover a minimum of 20-30% due to alts being down the last 48hrs, upcoming conferences, and KuCoin’s open membership will flow $$ and new traders into these coins! I believe HST should skyrocket as it gets added to new exchanges (as DBC did 48hrs ago, 50% for being added to Huobi and I told you guys about it a week ago). HST, will go from being in a niche market to one that is readily adopted by most governing bodies and employment groups that require voting. This was a year of election disasters(and fraud) and I presume the blockchain will help benefit the voting structure of governments and businesses alike. With a market cap of around $100million I expect this to be a billion-dollar market cap coin by Q1’s end. (Prediction: 10x in value within 2.5 months). The entire market is supressed right now because of the ETH fork, this one should be spring loaded to pop once funds flow out of ETH following the fork.
Individuals that aren’t only traders and investors in the blockchain/crypto world understand valuable tech. They understand the purpose of what blockchain was supposed to do with governments and financial institutions. BTC was created (anonymously) following the 2008 market crash (housing, stock, etc). The populations of the world were too reliant on debt laden governments and private national banks. Voting was a mess and underprivileged people around the world had no access to money because private banks and governments did not care to provide small loans or to care for the most impoverished people.
From here coins like EVX and HST are born! HST is my moonshot for today and I expect it to appreciate heavily following the upcoming alt correction. However, I would also make room in your portfolio for yesterday’s suggestion: EVX. EVX is unique because it fills multiple niches that other coins with a market cap 10x its size on 3 large exchanges do. EVX ensures you can use foreign currencies to directly buy EVX coins (in case you didn’t want to use crypto) directly from their wallet platform. They allow instant money transfer across borders specializing in micro loans to underdeveloped parts of the world. They provide direct payments and lending services at a fraction of the cost of other blockchain companies. EVX combines the benefits of 4 or 5 of the top 20 cryptocurrencies. EVX is a payment platform, lending platform, money transfer service, and foreign currency exchange specifically designed for the underprivileged and underbanked. With a market cap of $98million as I’m writing this I fully expect it to appreciate to above $200million following the market correction from the negative Asia news and the forking forks. Many coins on exchanges are working on their Alpha or Beta version of their platform, EVX has its platforms working, it’s coins being exchanged, and is looking to land on a bigger exchange. While unheard of amounts of $ are flooded into KuCoin, coins like EVX should begin to moon immediately following the market correction. I expect EVX, HST and PURA (Monday’s pick) to join our list of Moonshot winners as we approach the conferences, and as the market over corrects from a forking fork and negative Asian news. The Chinese food will be late tonight! (This is a joke, if this offends you I am sorry I make fun of lazy fat American using Coinbase all the time).
The last 48hrs of the market has been a bloodbath. I am most proud that those reading have learned how to HOLD as our specific coins, moonshots, and favorites that have been posted about have actually managed to not lose an overall % if you were diversified. This means we’ve created a Kingdom of HOLDERS with Cojones. I am proud of this fact! The whales will not be able to take advantage of Plankton forever.
Regarding moonshots that have already entered the outer atmosphere…KCS will continue its dominance as KuCoin is one of the few exchanges accepting new traders. Another very positive thing for us KuCoin early entrants is that Binance (started accepting again ‘ocassionally’) and Bittrex have suspended allowing new traders. That means guys like you are flocking to alternative exchanges (like KuCoin) to get involved in the crypto world. KuCoin has increased their daily volume every single day for the past 2-week, their twitter eagerly displays this info, and they updated their servers to handle significantly higher trading capacity. More money flowing into altcoins means the market caps will increase accordingly. Look for our moons to continue mooning. Remember moonshots are NOT to be day traded, they will likely end up on major exchanges which is when they will have their true moon. You could have made 70-100% on DRGN, BNTY, or KCS my first week posting moonshots, but if you held them, you would have made 600%. I have increased my portfolio % in moonshots as they’ve been outperforming all other sectors of crypto. This allows me to HOLD while still finding new moonshots! Remember Princes and Princesses of the KINGDOM HOLD through the red day. The reason our moonshots haven’t dropped in value is the whole KINGDOM is not selling. I am proud you’ve all lost your training wheels! HST and EVX are the undervalued moonshots I am doubling up on!
PURA is a coin predominantly traded on KuCoin and my pick from Monday! It’s trading at 4000 Satoshis at 10am (as I am writing this), I expect 5500-8000 Satoshis to be approached if not surpassed by the end of the week (depending on when the market corrects to the Asia news). There are minimal sell walls and this one should be off to the races once a few big buyers are holding. In September PURA updated their systems to have INSTAPAY, PRIVATEPAY, MASTERNODES and FAIRMINING. Unlike the ridiculously slow BTC, ETH and LTC network PURA lets you send coins instantly (seconds literally). This is what makes INSTAPAY so impressive. What about Privatepay? It lets you send the crypto using a private wallet. MASTERNODES allow anyone to mine PURA on their computer creating a larger PURA network. With a wallet already out, a mining platform set up, one of the smallest market caps on KuCoin (98million), and ways to send crypto instantly and privately I expect PURA to rival many of the larger cap coins. If PURA makes it to a larger exchange I see an easy 3x here. If PURA hits $1billion as a market cap which is very achievable within months of arriving at a larger exchange this coin will be a 10xer. Finding coins that can appreciate 10x with an exchange listing and minimal news is a very difficult thing to find. PURA may be with the company of DRGN, BNTY and KCS, time will tell.
SNOV was my pick 2 days ago and it appreciated nicely (a nice 50% run yesterday). It is still a favorite of mine with room to grow. Their calendar shows a very VERY active January and I expect the publicity to continue to increase the coin’s market cap. Yes, we’ve all experienced a nice gain and I always follow my rule, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. However, we have to compare SNOV to other recent moonshots. Anyone who has sold a moonshot to date has lost out as my first 4 picks KCS, BNTY, and DRGN are up the highest %s. This demonstrates that HOLDING is as important as monitoring important times to buy and sell. I’ve added $$ (well BTC) to KuCoin as the opportunities here are much more significant than on Binance and Bittrex with new $$ and traders flowing in and new coins being listed regularly there are endless possibilities. 3 days ago money flooded into BTC as you could see in the BTC price rise. I predicted this 48hrs prior that institutional money would get involved within the next 72hrs, and we had our 20% BTC price climb. What happens immediately following a BTC price climb? The alts respond! I expect SNOV, PURA, EVX, and HST (today’s!) to all respond more significantly to the market rise because unlike BNTY they have yet to have their 700% price climb.
HST should begin its trend north once the public realizes how undervalued it is, how much it can change society and voting, and when these ETH forks are over. EVX is my moonshot from yesterday with a likely correction to the on sale prices occurring this afternoon or following the ETH fork. PURA should have one of the highest return rates in the next 72hrs when compared to alternatives on KuCoin. However, SNOV should continue to trend north as new traders flock to KuCoin snapping up cheap shares. BNTY should continue its rise as it gets added to a new exchange and provides actual bounties for digital tasks (so cool!). DRGN is not left to die by Disney and is leading the charge to get on Binance (they also have a production deal coming up!). I am extremely bullish on DRGN even at a 600% increase this week. I expect a Disney associated press release in the next few weeks and a new exchange listing. KCS will win because it is one of the few exchanges still accepting new traders, AND they give 90% of the trade commission back to KCS holders and as referrals. This type of referral and KCS dividend is unheard of in exchange marketplaces. DBC is downright amazing, combining AI and the blockchain. The moonshots have all increased, yes, but a moon is not a 70% increase. HOLD.
Tomorrow we will most likely not have another moonshot. Even though the market is significantly undervalued right now. I’ve provided 3 moonshot coins at depressed prices, HST (#1), EVX (#2), and PURA (#3), which should be plenty for you to allocate your funds around. This drop in alt coin price is something all of you should be taking advantage of. Look what happened 5 days after the last huge BTC price correction, the total crypto market cap set a new ATH. Guess what is about to happen in a week? A new ATH!
If I were moonshot shopping today (which I am, thank you ETH price), I would allocate 50% to HST, 30% to EVX and 25% to PURA (I’m just seeing if you can count that adds up to 105% ;), 20% to PURA).
Now that most people’s favorite section is finished let’s discuss ICOs!
Crypterium and Covesting met their hard caps :/ but the good news is most of you were involved in these ICOs. When an ICO meets its hard cap it is clear there was significant interest and a greater likelihood of mooning immediately after exchange listing. Both the two I am now presenting I expect to reach hard caps in the coming weeks.
ICO 1: KYC Legal: KYC Legal (please use the referral as I make no $ spending countless hours researching these ICOs and coins ) referral: https://bookbuild.kyc.legal/?ref=23734776ffa2051a83eb8bc1
The first I am presenting is a new favorite of mine because of the all so dreaded KYC form. Know Your Customer. If you’ve completed an ICO recently you know the form I’m talking about. The form they give you at the end, after you’ve sent your .5eth but before they will release their tokens. Basically stating you understand this market is unregulated, etc. Well a blockchain token has in essence solved this problem. I HATE KYC forms and if the KYC system was set up in a way in which you wouldn’t have to fill out that form repeatedly for every ICO it would be more convenient for all investors and ICO companies. KYC Legal intends to do just that. According to the founder DR, “This is a simple and quick way to complete client identification procedures, which can then be used to verify the client’s identity during various financial operations (so-called KYC (“know your customer”) requirements that financial institutions and companies working with the money of private individuals use to identify and verify counter parties before starting a financial transaction). This niche is completely untapped and I HATE KYC forms enough to think this is a brilliant idea. They are calling it a “Universal alternative to Personal IDs,” on the block chain. Brilliant concept and there are 2 days left to receive the 38% discount from the final price. A 38% gain prior to token sale completion is significant, imagine what will happen when the hard cap is reached and it hits the first exchange. KYC Legal: https://bookbuild.kyc.legal/?ref=23734776ffa2051a83eb8bc1
ICO 2: HOQU Referral: https://www.hoqu.io/?ref_id=7e8ace30413be0fe224fa60d3e57868f
According to HOQU directly, “HOQU is a decentralized affiliate platform combining the performance-marketing model with blockchain technology. The aim of the project is to create a decentralized ecosystem, which will be used to build CPA services, ranging from affiliate programs to affiliate networks and related products. HOQU integrates advertisers, networks and affiliates into a single platform, significantly reducing the financial costs for all market participants.” Currently we have decentralized markets for advertisers, networks, and affiliates, HOQU intends to combine all 3 into one platform on the blockchain. This satisfies the need to fulfill a niche market. Not to mention their team is exceptionally active posting on twitter and doing shows across the U.S., currently at a crypto convention in Las Vegas. This is an active team (not a scam hiding in Eastern Europe or Asia) with a niche implementable platform. I see this being a true moon candidate following listing on an exchange!
Please use my referral, thank you: https://www.hoqu.io/?ref_id=7e8ace30413be0fe224fa60d3e57868f
All below information has been updated on Wednesday at 10am EST. This will help individuals follow what information has been repeated/edited.
January Buy and Holds Stated Above: ICX, STRAT and NEO
A few other winners for the short term (not my top 3 but ones I am holding)
TRX (BUY) TRX has been a target of FUD attacks for almost a week slashing the price by almost 50%. Many coins prior to huge pumps are FUD attacked. With a game coming out this month and a huge drop in the alt market I expect TRX to come storming back. They’ve monetized gaming and it’s level of success will be felt within the next few weeks. I do not know if you played Cryptokitties but it crashed the Ether network. TRX is a much faster and less expensive network to process information on. I expect the game this month to be the second that monetizes gaming through cryptocurrency leading to TRX’s short term success. I’d expect another 100-300% returns leading up to the release of a game on their TRX platform.
TNB (BUY) Although the price has increased almost daily there is good reason for it! TNB has a BETA version of the Android and IOS wallet being released this month. This is one of the few coins that didn’t take a beating yesterday. Being able to take your funds with you is exceptionally important. Having a good looking interface is equally important. TNB looks to accomplish both tasks this month. It is also one of the cheapest coins on Binance, a plus for those looking for cheap coin acquisitions! I like TNB as a cheap Binance coin with truly significant potential.
(This paragraph remains unchanged) My 3 favorite short term plays based on conferences for the next 2 weeks are: WAVES, ARK, and SONM. These 3 are all at events in the next 2 weeks of January (Waves and ARK are at a conference in Miami I will be attending!). The cost of attendance to these conferences start at $1,000 (I will need tips to cover costs !). However, they provide exposure to the top individuals and founders of coins with billions of dollars in market cap. In comparison to other coins speaking at the largest January events WAVES, ARK, and SONM’s price has not appreciated this week in correlation to the others. They are also the smallest market cap coins presenting at these huge conferences. This provides an opportunity to purchase WAVES, ARK, and SONM at an undervalued price. As their conferences in mid-January approach I expect their price to trend north rapidly, peaking on the day of, or day after the conference. These should be focal points if you shy away from moonshots (which you shouldn’t!).
XEM(BUY), They had their pop 2 days ago and has since decreased with the rest of the market!! Each coin has a specific reason for their being undervalued. Catapult, which is version 2.0 of NEM is to be released very soon. There is nothing better to build awareness and test out their new Catapult network they’ll be releasing this week, then a worldwide hackathon and a new update to their NEM network. XEM will have a pop this week when Catapult goes live, followed by a 4-week awareness rally driven by a worldwide hackathon.
POWR(BUY), Is one of the few coins supported by an actual government (Hi Aussies!) A county that struggles with power grid failure could succeed in implementing the first cryptocurrency related directly to trading power and electricity on the blockchain. I expect a strong future from POWR. Expect to see significant returns in the next 72hrs while the alt markets come back with force.
ADX (BUY), has had an impressive run but taken a recent dip. It remains a favorite of mine for multiple reasons. One of my favorite parts about ADX is they have a profitable platform already for coin holders. This is essential for every coin. Without a platform for a functioning coin, the coin is just unique code using up electricity. ADX advertised space on EasyJet boarding passes successfully last month and now is selling over 1 million more advertising spaces. This is a profitable coin with a strong future already occurring. ADX wins because NEO wins, Asian markets enjoy trading even more than the U.S. currently. This trend should continue as ADX continues its trend north. Their next partnership or announcement will lead to the next big pop in price, but as far as a coin goes, this is a safe option with stable returns that has a functioning and profitable platform.
ARDR(BUY) Honestly, Bittrex is beginning to frustrate me (as I’m sure you too!). I haven’t received my IGNIS and ARDR has been unable to be sold, bought, or transferred in weeks. I recommend moving $ to KuCoin and enjoying these insane %s. However, currently like many of you I have a large holding in ARDR which I still believe strongly in but would like the opportunity to sell if I choose! Their platform successfully launched Jan 1st. All those NXT you’ve been holding for the free IGNIS are used specifically on the ARDR block chain. With a new platform and coins to be used on it this will be a positive week for ARDR with exceptionally high returns correlated with the new platform and IGNIS’s continued appreciation. I believe ARDR and its new network will experience positive publicity and a successful launch of IGNIS. I would continue to buy and hold as the ARDR network gets rolling.
Some Lovely Followers Requested I Provide Addresses for “Thank You’s and Holiday Cheer” Here are 4 address to help provide my girlfriend with presents so I can spend more time researching! What is 5% of the 200% I earned you this week?
ETH: Address: 0xdef6b4415635d15b0dc50e7039ef73c33e622f22 LTC Address: LiTtwXUMCMmch5oKUXfrXMqXWnG6jLg3qD BTC Address: 1LFLx3cXD1xiqCrupZJKf8p6pR23JRZWtP DASH Address: Xi9637XDyW2Q6wtRyGLsNXbJHj4UZ2M3kN (cheapest way to send!) KCS Address: 0x56d0a5b42a8313c36d8fe7a37ee3ccade7e4e6e1
XMR Deposit Address:44tLjmXrQNrWJ5NBsEj2R77ZBEgDa3fEe9GLpSf2FRmhexPvfYDUAB7EXX1Hdb3aMQ9FLqdJ56yaAhiXoRsceGJCRS3Jxkn XMR Deposit ID: b72e438346259f2828feaec4b04f0a95034b6364853f6f33d2370f57a37a1753