Episode-1997- Brandon Todd on Cryptocurrency
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Brandon is a crypto currency evangelist with 3 years of experience using/trading crypto currencies and about 1 year experience mining Bitcoin and other crypto currencies.
After 1st hearing about bitcoin on TSP Brandon turned his commute into an education on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
He has had lots of success with picking the right altcoins for speculative investments and is thinking about how he can get into trading more often to leave his day job some day.
Brandon joins us today to discuss Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies that you should check out.
Join Us Today to Discuss…
- The difference between Etherem and Bitcoin
- Why are there 2 Ethereums today
- What was Ethereum’s DAO hack all about
- What is Dash and why should you care
- What is Maidsafe and why should you care
- What is Factom and why should you care
- How are crypto currencies like Monero and Dash more private than Bitcoin
- What is counterparty? and how you can make your own crytpo currency today
- What are the different types of wallets, whats best for you
- What are exchanges and when you should use them
- What is shapeshift.io and why you should care
- What are good sources of how to stay up to date in this fast moving space
Resources for today’s show…
- Join the Members Brigade
- The Year 1997
- Join Our Forum
- Walking To Freedom
- TSP Gear
- PermaEthos.com
- TspAz.com
- The Granddaddy’s Gun Club
- Bullhead Fishing Forum – A new little site I started
- Living Freedom Podcast
- Let’s Talk Bitcoin Podcast
- TSP’s Stock on Empire.Kred
- Set Up a Coinbase Account and Get 10 Dollars Worth of Bitcoin when you Fund Your Account with 100 Dollars of Bitcoin
- ShapeShift.Io
- CryptoSkim.com
- How’s It Gonna Be – Third Eye Blind
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I’m going to bet against the Cryptocurrency. Fix the house, plant the garden, save seeds, grow the trees, and then some Silver and Gold. I know Jack loves the Crypto, but as JHK says: Techno Narcissism. You will get burned. They will shut it down. I know Jack will tear me a new one on this so let it fly buddy and yes I’m still sticking to Tomatoes and Peppers
I have made over 16K in the last year in crypto, so I definitely think your dogma is making you myopic.
LOL!
If you’re not careful, you could certainly get burned on some of the altcoins, aka scamcoins. I’m only investing as much in cryptocurrency as I’m willing to lose, and that’s only in BTC, ETH and LTC, for right now.
Tulipomania
I stop on my way home from the farmer’s market every Saturday at a convenience store with a bitcoin atm and buy $20 worth at a heavy premium. I do so because it is extremely easy with no banking info as required by coinbase and gemini and I am not concerned about the value of bitcoin that day. I just buy $20 a week.
I buy 4-5 oz of silver eagles a month. About $50 of ammo a month. Spend $20 a week on canned goods, rice, and beans a week.
You can buy $5 worth of bitcoin a month, a silver eagle, a bag of rice, 5 cans of beans, and a box of ammo for less than $50/month.. Along with filling up every plastic bottle you can gather with water. If you can not afford to do that, you really need to re-evaluate your situation and get up off your ass and become productive.
I am really interested in where you are getting silver, ammo, rice, and 5 cans of beans for under $45.
Jonathan, you can pick up a silver eagle for around $20 locally at a coin/pawn shop or online. Same with a 20 rd box of ammo. Discount groceries have 10 lb bags of rice for $3 and cans of beans for less than a buck each. At least where I live in the southeast.
I’d like to make one correction to the show about Shapeshift.io. It actually allows you to exchange between any supported currency, not just Bitcoin to altcoins. You can swap any variation you want. They also have an Android app.
Another site I’d recommend is Cryptrader.com
That site has some very powerful tools of technical trading. It also has a completely customizable dashboard that will let you track live technical graphs of all the exchanges and any coin that is listed on them. You can even track the same coin in different exchanges. I think he charges a subscription now but the community in there is great.
Thanks for that info Rick. I am actively seeking a good trader group to get in with to bounce ideas off of and see what others in tech trading are doing right now with a lot of these assets. I’ve had great success with picking the right projects to invest in, but I need a better picture of when to exit and get out of the way for a while. Seems like thats where a good platform/tech trader community can be seriously beneficial.
Ty Rick for that correction! Yeah, man i was frazzled and didn’t say half of what I wanted too. Lots of stuff to keep track of with this topic. Also I sort of jumbled up the question on wallets. I wish I could do that question over, lol. On that topic I would like to recomend Jaxx.io wallet, its a good multi currency wallet that supports BTC,ETH,DASH,ETC,ZCASH and a few others. Also I didnt mention hardware wallets either.
jaxx.io
coinmap.org
Brandon you did a good job explaining many complex topics. I have my favorite coin – Dash – and so far just stick with that. I think any of the top 5-10 are pretty good for short – medium term. It is crazy how volatile they can be – I am ahead so that is good but 2x or 3x in a month is hard to get used to.
Yeah Joe thank you! It is so crazy right now, seems like an updraft to a tornado or something. I don’t know what to make of it. Too many things happening to keep track of. Massive buying now out of Japan after Japan now has paved the way for crypto currencies in their country. Also renewed interest from wall st from the recent ETF news again. Also at anytime mining consensus could reach the threshold to adopt segwit or other. And thats just Bitcoin! I again give caution to investing anything you can’t afford to lose. But I must say 200x gain in 2016 feels pretty good considering all the flack I have taken from family, co workers, acquaintances. I will revel in this a little bit. I am absolutely not bragging because that’s not my style, but does feel good I must say to finally be right about something so crazy, lol.
I will definitely come back to this episode and listen again once or twice more knce I understand more about crypto.
But tbh, I was lost about 15 mins in.
Great info but I was hoping for something more basic for the uninitiated.
Hey PatLEO thanks for listening! Hey tell you what, if you have any questions please feel free top email me at brandon@cryptoskim.com and I’ll get back to you within a day or 2. So much to talk about, so many questions, I know how you feel.
Funny you posted that PatLEO. I’m getting ready to listen to the podcast again.
Maybe if enough interest builds, Jack can add a spot on the expert council to cover crypto questions.
Why do idiots reproduce so much?
‘Cuz Brawndo has what plants crave… LOL
Just listened to this episode today. Great stuff. Glad Brandon mentioned Jaxx in a comment. It has Shapeshift integrated in the app so it’s super easy to convert between supported coins. It doesn’t have the same level of security as Coinbase but I consider it like paper cash in a wallet. You shouldn’t carry everything you own but it’s a convenient way to have some coin with you. It’s also easier and more secure than the exchanges
Interestingly I listened to Vin Armani – 05/08/17 (33 minutes in) making a prediction that bitcoin might be a giant bubble – the fact that so many people are buying into it and increasing its value, but that it doesn’t seem to have a lot of fundamental value – he questions where the value is coming from, and fears people are jumping in, but not really able to use bitcoin, due to the high mining fees – ie. buying a $1.50 cup of coffee is going to accrue a $1.50 mining fee (and as you’ve mentioned the time it takes to transfer is very slow)
He feels it will be like blackberry was in 2007 – had 50% of market, now 0%.
That 4 million $ worth of wallets have such a low balance that those people can’t make a transaction without eating the entire amount.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on his prediction?
I disagree and here is why, inside coinbase I can convert BTC to Ether, Litecoin or Dollars in seconds.
BTC conversion can be very swift so you end up with what I have been saying.
BTC becomes the gold of crypto, no one wants to spend it. The rules are known, the value is that it is the first, it has been attacked by every single mechanism the system has and it is still standing.
Tech will fix some of the issues but it won’t matter. If you look at Japan the Yen to BTC market is now the second most liquid market in the world. When Japan legitimized BTC with a new law it opened up more than we are currently seeing.
You will likely see the Japanese equivalent of an ETF before long.
It always goes back to this, there will only ever be 23 million BTC in existence. That is all, ever. As long as BTC is fungible into other crypto, you have a store of value and a huge trust net in BTC.
Erin, great questions! I can easily understand why most people are skeptical about Bitcoin if relatively new to the space. Bitcoin is revolutionary because its the 1st system that has been able to make digital information that cannot be copied over and over, that is maintained in a DECENTRALIZED manner. When we think of digital information, we all think of something that can be copied and pasted over and over, right? Well before this the only way to solve this problem was to have a centralized authority issue keys or licenses, and even that system is constantly being spoofed!
Bitcoin is a messeging system where anyone can join, send a message through a decentralized network of nodes, which you don’t have to trust because the cryptography behind the exchange is standard crypto(sha256, and ECSDA), that has been excepted by the best in the world as secure. What also gives this messaging system security is that a hash that qualifies to wed a block and thus win a coinbase amount for that node is SCARCE. If you don’t think so, try and go make one. So that is the underlying architecture and security that is a fundamental value proposition. What gives it its price, is the free market. Because the market has decided that this thing is what many people want and or need it has a price and thus a perceived value.
Lastly I would argue that the people that want to use a currency are the ones that give it value, not an authority lording over it. So I would say, what then gives the US dollar value? The answer is the people. Many people think its “the full faith and credit of the USA”, this is just a promise, its not the value. The emperor wears no clothes with the USD. It has value because we all use it, just like bitcoin, but unlike bitcoin the USD has no real natural scarcity, its artificial, its a promise and its a promise they continue to break over time(inflation).
Now for the second part of your response, yes bitcoin has a huge backlog of unconfirmed transactions right now because it cannot scale for the number of users right now. This is a feature, not a bug. Right now bitcoin is keeping 32 billion dollars of other people’s money safe and that is a difficult thing to do. Bitcoin is built to adapt slowly through consensus, so that it makes the right call, feature not bug. If you feel this is too slow of a system for small retail transactions, I would not disagree with you. That is why we have open sourced competition. Lets the games begin! This is also why I like to use many cryptos.
Sorry for the long response, thanks for asking such good questions to get us all thinking!
I am not saying this to brag only to make a point.
A few weeks ago my Coinbase account had about 18.5K in it. This is made up of Litecoin, Bitcoin and Etherium.
Since then I have sold about 4 MSBs in BTC, so 200 in.
I have made about 100 dollars in BTC from referrals for new accounts.
So net input is about 400 USD in BTC.
I have also purchased 550 dollars in SWT which I used BTC out of my account to do and I bought 500 dollars of DASH, taken from my BTC balance as well.
So 1150 out less 400 in, net loss is 750.
So what is my Coinbase balance as of this post? $25,481.43
Total gain 6900 and keep in mind this was when everyone was screaming bubble and that the opportunity had past, etc.
Again yea BTC has a problem, but as Brandon says it is due to a feature. So what happens when the problem is solved, what happens when the problem is fixed even 50% of the way?
Well, confidence goes up, more want to buy, then what?
I am not saying you can’t lose money here, I am not saying this is an investment for everyone, I am saying when you simply say negative things about BTC they are usually in ignorance of reality.
I have no issues when a person says “this investment is not for me” but when people seek to infer that the dollar or pound is more stable than BTC, I do like to point out how wrong that has been.
Why? I wish I had seen the light when BTC was under a dollar, that is why!
And my balance today? A bit over 34K! This is actually starting to make me nervous!
Thanks so much for these explanations – the more you learn the safer you feel – for people to have invested $32 billion is quite phenomenal!! I wish I’d made some purchases when I heard James Corbett talking about it 2-3 years ago as well.
I liked your comment about the people giving the currency the value, not the authority lording over it… there is such a push for this
– it seems there is going to be a mighty battle against tor and cryptocurrency by the powers that be. Once again, Vin Armani’s rundown on the hackers using ransomware and asking for payment to be in bitcoin – a reason for the government to crack down on cc, because now it is a threat to the entire world!
Yeah there will be people that will rush to blame bitcoin for these things. I like what Andreas Antonopoulos had to say on this where he said,”blaming bitcoin for this ransomware attack is like blaming a duffle bag full of money for a kidnapping”. Kinda funny when you think about it like that. Also we cant turn our backs on technology just because there are some negative use cases for it. It all comes down to this in my opinion. Do you believe that people are largely good or bad? I think most rational people would agree most people are good and don’t want to hurt others because they know that’s how they want to be treated. Same with the internet, you can download child porn, you can meet up with someone to cheat on your spouse easier, ect ect ect. We can do bad things because of the technology what is the internet. But because most rational people understand that more good will be done with the internet than bad, we all agree we should not destroy it forever and turn our backs to it. This is the same with every major technological advancement. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will do more good for humanity than bad and that is a fact. This is what people will start to realize, this is the beginning of the death of the superstate.
Indeed, “it is a threat to the entire world”, cuz ransomware, is flatly dumb.
Just don’t buy into it, for over a decade ransomware has been a problem, most of the people doing it take credit cards! Yea really. they sit in Romania or Ukraine or Russia and only hijack people outside their own nations (specifically the west) so no one can or will do anything.
In fact using BTC for this is stupid and it smells of .gov bullshit to me! Why? Because many people would have no idea how to pay with BTC, that is why. It would take a lot longer to get it done for most with BTC.
Also now the money is sitting in those known public addresses and about a million white hat hackers are just waiting for one sochi to move out of one of them!
And again they CAN NOT SHUT THIS DOWN. It just doesn’t work that way. It is like shutting the internet down, in fact that would be the only way to shut down block chains.
Indeed Jack, I would not be surprised 1 bit <– pun intended, if we found some links to US intelligence agencies involved in some way. Funny how US was largely un affected, they are quick to blame North Korea, and the fact that our very own NSA was using the same exploit they seemed to have used. If it was a gov, I'll bet those funds never move, wasn't ever their goal. We will see.
It’s very interesting to see the movement in those 3 addresses –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2ZOh_hokvw
– in at about 55 minutes.
They were asking for $300 ransom, yet the amounts sent were like $9, or $600, $300, etc – and had only received $35 000
But if I understand, if you drill back in those addresses, the movement of bitcoin is very weird – 1.5 billion bitcoin has moved through one of them, and they currently have 4.7 million; but they have specific amounts in round numbers coming in and then precisely 5 minutes later it all goes out to different addresses – this is happening continually – that it doesn’t look like a normal transaction ledger – more like laundering.
What VA curiously questions is that these transactions could be purposely causing the blocksize problem by being so large – giant amounts, mining fees.
He tweeted on May 4th – if I was a central bank trying to degrade a blockchain, I’d inflate price and volume with fake trades, making it slow and expensive.
He has some other very interesting observations – well worth a look – possible ties to the 2 rogue agents (jailed) who had a part in Silk Road hacking.