Category: #Freedom

Mother Nature Quotes

Joseph Werner: Diana of Ephesus as allegory of Nature, c. 1680

Mother Nature (sometimes known as Mother Earth or the Earth Mother) is a personification of nature that focuses on the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature by embodying it, in the form of the mother.

Mother Nature image, 17th century alchemical text, Atalanta Fugiens

The word “nature” comes from the Latin word, “natura”, meaning birth or character (see nature (philosophy)). In English, its first recorded use (in the sense of the entirety of the phenomena of the world) was in 1266. “Natura” and the personification of Mother Nature were widely popular in the Middle Ages.

As a concept, seated between the properly divine and the human, it can be traced to Ancient Greece, though Earth (or “Eorthe” in the Old English period) may have been personified as a goddess. The Norse also had a goddess called Jörð (Jord, or Erth).

“… Mother Nature is punishing us, …, for our greed and selfishness.

We torture her at all hours by iron and wood, fire and stone.

We dig her up and dump her in the sea.

We sink mine shafts into her and drag out her entrails – and all for a jewel to wear on a pretty finer.

Who can blame her if she occasionally quivers with anger?”

Pliny, Pg. 176 – Robert Harris, Pompeii

“Harmony is about bringing things into balance and knowing how to go from sunrise to sunset.

Mother Nature teaches this to us, in so many ways, each and every day.”

Jaeda DeWalt

“Those who train their hearts in natural wonder shall forever know the rivers, forests, wildflowers, and oceans, as friends.”

Atalina Wright, ‎”Wild Riverbanks”

“Nature isn’t cruel, but unconcerned with human frailty.”

Melissa Febos

“The simplicity of life is universal. Mother Nature is a wonderful teacher.”

Steve Leasock

“Autumn is the time of year when Mother Nature says, “Look how easy, how healthy, and how beautiful letting go can be.”

Toni Sorenson

“The Earth is nothing but phlegm spat out by the Sun, and our immediate solar system a whirlwind of boulders.

There is no “delicate balance.”

A.E. Samaan, From a “Race of Masters” to a “Master Race”: 1948 to 1848

If you can’t be in awe of Mother Nature, there’s something wrong with you.

Alex Trebek

“Only after the last tree has been cut down.

Only after the last river has been poisoned.

Only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.”

Cree Indian Prophecy

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better.”

Albert Einstein

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

Lao Tzu

“Nature is man’s teacher.

She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumines his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.”

Alfred Billings Street

“We are all visitors to this time, this place.

We are just passing through.

Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love, and then we return home.”

Australian Aboriginal

“The world is not to be put in order.

The world is order, incarnate.

It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.”

Henry Miller

“O Nature, gracious mother of us all,
Within thy bosom myriad secrets lie
Which thou surrenderest to the patient eye
That seeks and waits.”

Margaret Junkin Preston

“Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony and beauty may reign supreme.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“The world will burn for a hundred years.

Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust.

How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.“

Rick Yancey

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Hy there to all of you out there, white, black, yellow and avatar 😋🤣 people around the WordPress world !

Hope you are all well and safe in these troubled times we live on this beautiful planet of ours !

I come before you, to ask for your opinion and what you would like to see explained in my posts !?! Just let me know and I will try my best to accomodate your requests !

Thank you for your time !

Bitcoin mining and the Luck Statistic

Bitcoin Mining and the Luck Statistic

• 0. Introduction

My aim is for any brand new miner to be able to determine just how unlikely any run of bad luck is, and so reduce the overall level of panic amongst miners.

Mining panic has been exacerbated by reports of accidental block withholding attacks, and a stratum vulnerability.

Wouldn’t you prefer to know if your panic was actually warranted? 

• 1. Gambler’s fallacy

For miners who have been around for more than a year or two seen good and bad luck (unless they mine at a “Pay per share” pool, in which case they are not subject to luck at all) and know that it will even out in the long term.

However, every new miner striking a run of bad luck will flail around, looking to escape to another pool that is not having bad luck. This sort of response to random events can be thought of as a type of gambler’s fallacy. 

• 2. Bad Luck lasts longer

Another reason that makes us mis-judge mining luck is that when we mine, we mostly experience bad luck.

In fact if you go to the trouble of working it out, your hours of mining will be about one-quarter good luck and three quarters bad luck. Why? Bad luck takes longer, good luck rounds take much less time. 

• 3. Assessing luck over time instead of blocks

Another mistake made by novice miners is to assume that the extremes of luck will be the same for all pool over any time frame. This is wrong for two related reasons:

The more blocks are solved the closer luck approaches 100%

Because the timeframe for luck to to approach 100% varies depending on number of blocks solved, comparing various pools’ luck over the same time period is invalid. Instead we need to compare luck over similar number of blocks.

• 4. The luck statistic, the Erlang distribution, PDFs and CDFs

I’ll try to avoid terms like “variance” and “median” and “maths” in order to not scare away too many readers, but we do need a definition:

Luck = Mean (expected shares per round / actual shares per round)

Luck statistic = mean (actual shares per round / expected shares per round) 

i.e. Luck = 1/Luck statistic

I would much rather just refer to the ‘Luck statistic’ as luck, but due to our psychological preference to assign luck a scale where bigger is better, we need both measures – “Luck” as a shorthand for “How much am I earning as a percent of what I expect to earn”, and the “Luck” statistic. Just keep in mind the larger the ‘luck’ statistic, the worse the ‘luck’.

The luck statistic is negative binomially distributed, but can be very closely approximated by a known and well understood distribution ( Erlang distribution ) which makes calculating probabilities simpler. 

The approximation becomes more accurate as difficulty increases – think of Euler’s (1 + 1/n)^n approximation to e as the comparison of an exponentially distributed random variable (Erlang distribution shape parameter = 1) and a geometrically distributed random variable (Negative binomial distribution, size parameter = 1, probability = 1/n). 

In case you’re worried about the approximation leading to significant error, at current difficulty you’ll won’t see a probability error greater than 0.0000000001.

Visualising the Erlang distribution:

The PDF is the probability density function, which indicates how probable it is that the luck statistic will be some arbitrary value.  

The CDF is the cumulative distribution function, which indicates how probable it is that the luck statistic will be greater than or equal to arbitrary value.

Both plots illustrate:

The luck statistic tends closer to 1.0 as the number of blocks over which the statistic is averaged increases

Extremes of luck are more likely when the luck statistic is averaged over fewer blocks.

• 5. Managing Income Variance

Luck averaged over more blocks means fewer extremes, so more blocks in less time means as a miner you will experience less variation in payout – but also means that you’ll be increasing the size of pools that are already large.

You can avoid this by adjusting your timescale expectations – try to focus on weekly income, or income per retarget and you’ll be less affected by income variations. Wait about one hundred blocks and income will be around +/- 20% of expected.

Your other option is to mine at a pool that has a pay per share (PPS) reward method, but this has a couple of downsides. The first is that since the pool is smoothing out the income variations for you, if they don’t manage that risk properly they could bankrupt themselves, and leaving you with lost income. The other problem is that since PPS is risky not many pools want to provide it so you won’t have many options about where you can mine.

• 6. How can you calculate the CDF probability yourself?

If you want to manage your expectations without using a PPS pool you need to know what to expect. Not just the reward per share but the typical range of values you might encounter in some time frame. So, how can you calculate the CDF probability yourself? If you have some experience with statistics or coding knowledge can use R or mathematica  or even python, but you can also use the Wolfram Alpha website. By entering the luck statistic and the number of blocks over which the statistic was averaged, you get the lower tail probability of that statistic occurring.

CDF [ErlangDistribution[nblocks, nblocks], luck statistic]

For example, if the luck statistic was 1.1 over one hundred blocks is that quite unlucky or just a little unlucky? Enter: 

CDF [ErlangDistribution[100, 100], 1.1]
The result is 0.84, so for 84 times out of one hundred re-runs of one blocks, we’d see luckier blocks. Not that unlucky – 1 in every six re-runs would be unluckier. 

• 6. How can you calculate the probable luck outcomes yourself?

Rather than assess how lucky or unlucky your pool has been, planning requires you to  estimate how unlucky is could be in future. Let’s say you plan to be able to manage a monthly worst case of 0.999 (one one in a thousand re-runs of the months blocks would be worse), and your expect your pool to solve around 50 blocks in that time.

quantile(ErlangDistribution[50, 50], 0.999)
This results in a luck statistic of ~1.495, or a luck of 1/1.495 = 66.9%

• 7. I need something easier.
Or less statisticky, anyway.

OK, I hear you. My fun != your fun. This chart gives you the expected luck percentage (and it’s all bad luck) for bad luck with a 1/3 chance of that luck or worse occurring (not very unlucky) to bad luck with a 1/10000 chance of that luck or worse occurring (really quite unlucky). Use it to either plan for the future or get an idea of how lucky you’ve been.

For example, my pool solves ten blocks at a luck of 80%, is that really bad? Not really. It’ll happen around 20% of the time (1/5 chance of that luck or worse occurring). Maybe I just want to make sure I can cope with a 1/thousand bad luck run of five hundred blocks (~67.5%).

8. Summary

Variance in income reduces as a function of number of blocks solved.

Variance in income is not a function of time.

Learn how to plan for bad luck, and to check that your pool’s luck is not impossibly bad.

organofcorti.blogspot.com is a reader supported blog:

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Happy Children’s Day

Your Silence…

Silence is the absence of ambient audible  sound, the emission of sounds of such low intensity that they do not draw attention to themselves, or the state of having ceased to produce sounds; this latter sense can be extended to apply to the cessation or absence of any form of communication, whether through speech or other medium.

Sometimes speakers fall silent when they hesitate in searching for a word, or interrupt themselves before correcting themselves.

Discourse analysis shows that people use brief silences to mark the boundaries of prosodic units, in turn-taking, or as reactive tokens, e.g., as a sign of displeasure, disagreement, embarrassment, desire to think, confusion, and the like.

Relatively prolonged intervals of silence can be used in rituals; in some religious disciplines, people maintain silence for protracted periods, or even for the rest of their lives, as an ascetic means of spiritual transformation.

Joseph Jordania has suggested that in social animals (including humans), silence can be a sign of danger.

Many social animals produce seemingly haphazard sounds which are known as contact calls. These are a mixture of various sounds, accompanying the group’s everyday business (for example, foraging,  feeding), and they are used to maintain audio contact with the members of the group.

Some social animal species communicate the signal of potential danger by stopping contact calls and freezing, without the use of alarm calls, through silence.

Charles Darwin wrote about this in relation with wild horse and cattle. Jordania has further suggested that human humming  could have been a contact method that early humans used to avoid silence. According to his suggestion, humans find prolonged silence distressing (suggesting danger to them).

This may help explain why lone humans in relative sonic isolation feel a sense of comfort from humming, whistling, talking to themselves, or having the TV or radio on.

See Also:

With 💚

Best Pool Rules

Best Pool Rules

In my opinion, more or less in order:

1)  Lowest fees

1a)  Shares transaction fees

1b)  Any pool that does NOT share transaction fees should be rejected from consideration (which, unfortunately, is most, if not all, Chinese based pools)

2)  Reasonable variance – You need to get paid often enough to be happy. This is a tough one.

Variance is the close cousin to “Luck”.

The luckier a pool is, the more blocks it finds relative to its hashing speed, and the less variance it will have.  But its not a real thing!  “Luck” could change any microsecond.
 “Luck” is just mathematical statistics – over a long enough time period, all pools will average out to 100% luck.

Luck Statistik for 14 Blocks

You need to understand Variance:

A big pool finds more blocks, but distributes the earnings out to more miners.  

A small pool is just the reverse:  it finds fewer blocks, but pays those earnings to fewer people. Over the long run, Rule #1, well, rules.

3)  Wind-up/Wind-down time – Most pools use some leveling algorithm.

4)  User Interface – That doesn’t matter much if you have a few miners.  If you have hundreds, the difference can be thousands of dollars a Year.

Notes:

A) In the long run #2 & #3 really don’t matter much.  Both pools show your hashing rate in minutes, payouts just lag on Kano compared to Slushpool, but would continue longer if you changed in the future

B) Bigger is not better.  Sure Antpool is #1 in size, in no small part to Bitmain using their own pool (no fees for them!).   Your profit will be determined mostly by rule #1 – lower fees mean more profit.

C) More, smaller, pools is healthier for the blockchain.  If you can live with the variance, support the pool with the longest average payout you are happy with.

D) For pools with long ramp up times that are relatively small, like Kano, you MIGHT suffer due to difficulty changes while you ramp up.

For smaller pools, make sure you understand what happens to your efforts (based on their scoring system) when a difficulty change occurs.

Executive Order 6102

History Lessons,
never to be forgotten!¡

Executive Order 6102 is an executive order signed on April 5, 1933, by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt “forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States.”

The executive order was made under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, as amended by the Emergency Banking Act in March 1933.

Summary

  • Forbade ownership of quantities of gold coin, bullion, and gold certificates worth in excess of $100 (about 5 troy ounces), with exemptions for specific uses and collections;
  • Required all persons to deliver excess quantities of the above on or before May 1, 1933 in exchange for $20.67 per troy ounce;
  • Enabled Federal funding of Exchange Stabilization Fund using profit realized from international transactions against new Federal reserves.

The limitation on gold ownership in the United States was repealed after President Gerald Ford signed a bill legalizing private ownership of gold coins, bars, and certificates by an Act of Congress, codified in Pub.L.93–373,which went into effect December 31, 1974.

The stated reason for the order was that hard times had caused “hoarding” of gold, stalling economic growth and worsening the depression as the US was then using the gold standard for its currency

On April 6, 1933, The New York Times wrote, under the headline Hoarding of Gold, “The Executive Order issued by the President yesterday amplifies and particularizes his earlier warnings against hoarding.

On March 6, taking advantage of a wartime statute that had not been repealed, he issued Presidential Proclamation 2039 that forbade the hoarding ‘of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency’, under penalty of $10,000 and/or up to five to ten years imprisonment.”

The main rationale behind the order was actually to remove the constraint on the Federal Reserve preventing it from increasing the money supply during the depression.

The Federal Reserve Act (1913) required 40% gold backing of Federal Reserve Notes that were issued. By the late 1920s, the Federal Reserve had almost reached the limit of allowable credit, in the form of Federal Reserve demand notes, which could be backed by the gold in its possession.

Source:
https://wikipedia.com/

Bitcoin – Happy Pizza Day

Pizza Day is a day of regret.

We all know the story. Laszlo Hanyecz buys two Papa John’s pizzas and some lucky guy got 10,000 BTC on this day 12 years ago. The story is like that of Peter Minuit buying Manhattan Island for $24. We can hardly believe that such a thing was possible given its value today.

The story has a lot of interesting angles.

It was the first real-world good or service purchased with bitcoin.

It established bitcoin’s price, since the two pizzas cost about $41, one BTC was about $0.0041.

There’s also Laszlo, a guy whose innovation was mining bitcoin using GPUs (graphics processing units). He acted like a drunken sailor spending 100,000 BTC on pizzas, as he did the same deal several more times that month.

RENT-SEEKING DAYDREAMS

The part that everyone fantasizes about is being that guy that bought the 10,000 BTC for $41.

We don’t fantasize about being Laszlo because we aren’t GPU programming experts. We can, however, imagine being the guy on the bitcointalk forums offering to buy bitcoin for a couple of pizzas.

Pizza Day brings out that daydream of being a bitcoin billionaire from having made a single brilliant trade. We all hate the actual guy that made this trade because we want to be him. We see the guy as lucky, as having won the lottery and we are envious.

This fantasy is borne of a fiat mentality.

This hierarchy of values comes from fiat money. The desire is to be lucky instead of good. We would rather do no work and make money rather than provide goods and services and get paid.

It’s telling that the regret is about missed-out luck rather than missed-out innovation.

It’s easier in a fiat world to dream about being the guy that sold pizza than being the guy who had the foresight to mine with GPUs.

This is fiat accomplishment, getting lucky with money, versus real accomplishment which is earning the money by providing goods and services to the market.

Most people would rather get lucky being associated with an innovator than be the innovator themselves !!!

The Laws are Unjust

As we’ve seen over the many years that this rag has been written (and beyond) companies who are able to fund whole teams dedicated to data security have been wholly ineffective at storing that data safely.

With the passage of this new law EU officials are actively putting citizens in harm’s way by irresponsibly trying to force bitcoin users to collect and store each other’s data. This is if you believe that is the actual intention behind this move.

In reality, this move likely serves as a pure intimidation tactic to coerce people to use trusted third parties when transacting with bitcoin.

A heavy handed shove into easily controlled vectors. If too many users are in control of their own private keys, run their own nodes, and are up to date on best privacy practices when transacting it is much harder to stop bitcoin.

And make no mistake, these people want to stop bitcoin at all costs.

They do not want you to be free.

They are quickly losing their grasp of control on the populace and they are moving as quickly as possible to clamp down in an attempt to retain control.

You are not meant to have privacy in their eyes. You are inherently a criminal in their eyes. These people think you are disgusting cattle who needs to be led at every turn.

It does not have to be this way. You do not have to succumb to the madness of these people. All it takes are a few decisions.

Speak up!

Act!

Disobey!

There is a silent majority out there who knows this type of attempted control is inherently wrong.

It is anti-human!

It is evil!

This silent majority needs to begin developing the courage to speak up.

Call out the abject insanity of allowing unelected institutions like the Financial Action Task Force write freedom restricting guidelines that get adopted by governments like the EU.

Learn how to run your own node, how to produce your own private/public key pairs, and how to destroy chain analysis heuristics with privacy best practices.

Make the tyrant’s job as hard as possible!

Disobey!

Stand up and defend freedom in the Digital Age by actively defying their unjust laws.

“If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he obligated to do so.”

It is your duty as an individual to disobey these incredibly invasive and tyrannical “laws”.

If you don’t disobey your progeny may not have the opportunity to. The time to counter punch is right now. Get on it.

Source: https://tftc.io/

Seven common mistakes crypto investors and traders make?

Cryptocurrency markets are volatile enough without making simple, easily avoidable mistakes.

Investing in cryptocurrencies and digital assets is now easier than ever before. Online brokers, centralized exchanges and even decentralized exchanges give investors the flexibility to buy and sell tokens without going through a traditional financial institution and the hefty fees and commissions that come along with them.

Cryptocurrencies were designed to operate in a decentralized manner. This means that while they’re an innovative avenue for global peer-to-peer value transfers, there are no trusted authorities involved that can guarantee the security of your assets. Your losses are your responsibility once you take your digital assets into custody.

Here we’ll explore some of the more common mistakes that cryptocurrency investors and traders make and how you can protect yourself from unnecessary losses.

Losing your keys

Cryptocurrencies are built on blockchain technology, a form of distributed ledger technology that offers high levels of security for digital assets without the need for a centralized custodian. However, this puts the onus of protection on asset holders, and storing the cryptographic keys to your digital asset wallet safely is an integral part of this.

On the blockchain, digital transactions are created and signed using private keys, which act as a unique identifier to prevent unauthorized access to your cryptocurrency wallet. Unlike a password or a PIN, you cannot reset or recover your keys if you lose them. This makes it extremely important to keep your keys safe and secure, as losing them would mean losing access to all digital assets stored in that wallet.

Lost keys are among the most common mistakes that crypto investors make. According to a report from Chainalysis, of the 18.5 million Bitcoin (BTC) mined so far, over 20% has been lost to forgotten or misplaced keys.

Storing coins in online wallets

Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges are probably the easiest way for investors to get their hands on some cryptocurrencies. However, these exchanges do not give you access to the wallets holding the tokens, instead offering you a service similar to banks. While the user technically owns the coins stored on the platform, they are still held by the exchange, leaving them vulnerable to attacks on the platform and putting them at risk.

There have been many documented attacks on high-profile cryptocurrency exchanges that have led to millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency stolen from these platforms. The most secure option to protect your assets against such risk is to store your cryptocurrencies offline, withdrawing assets to either a software or hardware wallet after purchase.

Not keeping a hard copy of your seed phrase

To generate a private key for your crypto wallet, you will be prompted to write down a seed phrase consisting of up to 24 randomly generated words in a specific order. If you ever lose access to your wallet, this seed phrase can be used to generate your private keys and access your cryptocurrencies.

Keeping a hard copy record, such as a printed document or a piece of paper with the seed phrase written on it, can help prevent needless losses from damaged hardware wallets, faulty digital storage systems, and more. Just like losing your private keys, traders have lost many a coin to crashed computers and corrupted hard drives.

Fat-finger error

A fat-finger error is when an investor accidentally enters a trade order that isn’t what they intended. One misplaced zero can lead to significant losses, and mistyping even a single decimal place can have considerable ramifications.

One instance of this fat-finger error was when the DeversiFi platform erroneously paid out a $24-million fee. Another unforgettable tale was when a highly sought-after Bored Ape nonfungible token was accidentally sold for $3,000 instead of $300,000.

Sending to the wrong address

Investors should take extreme care while sending digital assets to another person or wallet, as there is no way to retrieve them if they are sent to the wrong address. This mistake often happens when the sender isn’t paying attention while entering the wallet address. Transactions on the blockchain are irreversible, and unlike a bank, there are no customer support lines to help with the situation.

This kind of error can be fatal to an investment portfolio. Still, in a positive turn of events, Tether, the firm behind the world’s most popular stablecoin, recovered and returned $1 million worth of Tether (USDT) to a group of crypto traders who sent the funds to the wrong decentralized finance platform in 2020. However, this story is a drop in the ocean of examples where things don’t work out so well. Hodlers should be careful while dealing with digital asset transactions and take time to enter the details. Once you make a mistake, there’s no going back.

Over diversification

Diversification is crucial to building a resilient cryptocurrency portfolio, especially with the high volatility levels in the space. However, with the sheer number of options out there and the predominant thirst for outsized gains, cryptocurrency investors often end up over-diversifying their portfolios, which can have immense consequences.

Over-diversification can lead to an investor holding a large number of heavily underperforming assets, leading to significant losses. It’s vital to only diversify into cryptocurrencies where the fundamental value is clear and to have a strong understanding of the different types of assets and how they will likely perform in various market conditions.

Not setting up a stop-loss arrangement

A stop-loss is an order type that enables investors to sell a security only when the market reaches a specific price. Investors use this to prevent losing more money than they are willing to, ensuring they at least make back their initial investment.

In several cases, investors have experienced huge losses because of incorrectly setting up their stop losses before asset prices dropped. However, it’s also important to remember that stop-loss orders aren’t perfect and can sometimes fail to trigger a sale in the event of a large, sudden crash.

That being said, the importance of setting up stop losses to protect investments cannot be understated and can significantly help mitigate losses during a market downturn.

Crypto investing and trading is a risky business with no guarantees of success. Like any other form of trading, patience, caution and understanding can go a long way. Blockchain places the responsibility on the investor, so it’s crucial to take the time to figure out the various aspects of the market and learn from past mistakes before putting your money at risk.

Source: https://bitcointalk.org/

Seven common mistakes crypto investors and traders make?

Cryptocurrency markets are volatile enough without making simple, easily avoidable mistakes.

Investing in cryptocurrencies and digital assets is now easier than ever before. Online brokers, centralized exchanges and even decentralized exchanges give investors the flexibility to buy and sell tokens without going through a traditional financial institution and the hefty fees and commissions that come along with them.

Cryptocurrencies were designed to operate in a decentralized manner. This means that while they’re an innovative avenue for global peer-to-peer value transfers, there are no trusted authorities involved that can guarantee the security of your assets. Your losses are your responsibility once you take your digital assets into custody.

Here we’ll explore some of the more common mistakes that cryptocurrency investors and traders make and how you can protect yourself from unnecessary losses.

Losing your keys

Cryptocurrencies are built on blockchain technology, a form of distributed ledger technology that offers high levels of security for digital assets without the need for a centralized custodian. However, this puts the onus of protection on asset holders, and storing the cryptographic keys to your digital asset wallet safely is an integral part of this.

On the blockchain, digital transactions are created and signed using private keys, which act as a unique identifier to prevent unauthorized access to your cryptocurrency wallet. Unlike a password or a PIN, you cannot reset or recover your keys if you lose them. This makes it extremely important to keep your keys safe and secure, as losing them would mean losing access to all digital assets stored in that wallet.

Lost keys are among the most common mistakes that crypto investors make. According to a report from Chainalysis, of the 18.5 million Bitcoin (BTC) mined so far, over 20% has been lost to forgotten or misplaced keys.

Storing coins in online wallets

Centralized cryptocurrency exchanges are probably the easiest way for investors to get their hands on some cryptocurrencies. However, these exchanges do not give you access to the wallets holding the tokens, instead offering you a service similar to banks. While the user technically owns the coins stored on the platform, they are still held by the exchange, leaving them vulnerable to attacks on the platform and putting them at risk.

There have been many documented attacks on high-profile cryptocurrency exchanges that have led to millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency stolen from these platforms. The most secure option to protect your assets against such risk is to store your cryptocurrencies offline, withdrawing assets to either a software or hardware wallet after purchase.

Not keeping a hard copy of your seed phrase

To generate a private key for your crypto wallet, you will be prompted to write down a seed phrase consisting of up to 24 randomly generated words in a specific order. If you ever lose access to your wallet, this seed phrase can be used to generate your private keys and access your cryptocurrencies.

Keeping a hard copy record, such as a printed document or a piece of paper with the seed phrase written on it, can help prevent needless losses from damaged hardware wallets, faulty digital storage systems, and more. Just like losing your private keys, traders have lost many a coin to crashed computers and corrupted hard drives.

Fat-finger error

A fat-finger error is when an investor accidentally enters a trade order that isn’t what they intended. One misplaced zero can lead to significant losses, and mistyping even a single decimal place can have considerable ramifications.

One instance of this fat-finger error was when the DeversiFi platform erroneously paid out a $24-million fee. Another unforgettable tale was when a highly sought-after Bored Ape nonfungible token was accidentally sold for $3,000 instead of $300,000.

Sending to the wrong address

Investors should take extreme care while sending digital assets to another person or wallet, as there is no way to retrieve them if they are sent to the wrong address. This mistake often happens when the sender isn’t paying attention while entering the wallet address. Transactions on the blockchain are irreversible, and unlike a bank, there are no customer support lines to help with the situation.

This kind of error can be fatal to an investment portfolio. Still, in a positive turn of events, Tether, the firm behind the world’s most popular stablecoin, recovered and returned $1 million worth of Tether (USDT) to a group of crypto traders who sent the funds to the wrong decentralized finance platform in 2020. However, this story is a drop in the ocean of examples where things don’t work out so well. Hodlers should be careful while dealing with digital asset transactions and take time to enter the details. Once you make a mistake, there’s no going back.

Over diversification

Diversification is crucial to building a resilient cryptocurrency portfolio, especially with the high volatility levels in the space. However, with the sheer number of options out there and the predominant thirst for outsized gains, cryptocurrency investors often end up over-diversifying their portfolios, which can have immense consequences.

Over-diversification can lead to an investor holding a large number of heavily underperforming assets, leading to significant losses. It’s vital to only diversify into cryptocurrencies where the fundamental value is clear and to have a strong understanding of the different types of assets and how they will likely perform in various market conditions.

Not setting up a stop-loss arrangement

A stop-loss is an order type that enables investors to sell a security only when the market reaches a specific price. Investors use this to prevent losing more money than they are willing to, ensuring they at least make back their initial investment.

In several cases, investors have experienced huge losses because of incorrectly setting up their stop losses before asset prices dropped. However, it’s also important to remember that stop-loss orders aren’t perfect and can sometimes fail to trigger a sale in the event of a large, sudden crash.

That being said, the importance of setting up stop losses to protect investments cannot be understated and can significantly help mitigate losses during a market downturn.

Crypto investing and trading is a risky business with no guarantees of success. Like any other form of trading, patience, caution and understanding can go a long way. Blockchain places the responsibility on the investor, so it’s crucial to take the time to figure out the various aspects of the market and learn from past mistakes before putting your money at risk.

Source: https://bitcointalk.org/

19 Million bitcoin in Circulation

Source: https://coinpayments.com/

Blockchain Spectrum

The Blockchain Spectrum

Now, even if someone does not have the drawbacks of decades-long experience and mental models with a specific asset class, it is still very hard to understand Bitcoin.

Why? Because Bitcoin is the intersection of many, many different fields.

To truly understand Bitcoin, there is no other way than being a polymath.

Even if one has made it as far to (a) realize Bitcoin is something completely new and solely using existing heuristics and mental models will not work and (b) with Bitcoin, more than anything else, we do not know what we do not know — understanding still requires a very broad set of competences.

The correct approach to understand when one starts going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole is therefore to assume one knows nothing and any experience and insight one has from previous aspects of life brings
very little to the table.

First principles thinking is required.
We can, however, try to define a little deeper what Bitcoin is. Below is listed some different ways of wrapping one’s head around Bitcoin.

Not an exhaustive list.

A living organism

Bitcoin is Free and Open Source software. It is not a piece of IP owned by a centralized joint-stock company that needs to optimize for the bottom line of the next quarter and is incapable of cannibalizing itself. Since the Bitcoin whitepaper was released and the
genesis block was mined, we have seen an explosion of experiments, ideas and creative geniuses get involved in Bitcoin and crypto as a whole. To think of Bitcoin as a living, technological organism that adjusts, develops and constantly changes to survive can be useful.

A religion

Money, as many have learned and realized in recent decade, is just a social
construction we are all part of. The value therefore comes from the amount of true believers.

Continuing this line of thinking, one could describe the religion as consisting of:

  • Prophet: Satoshi. No longer present. Impossible to ask questions.
  • Convictions: Decentralization.
  • Rituals: Running nodes. Mining. Hodling.
  • Holy scriptures: Bitcoin whitepaper. As with all holy scriptures, people interpret them in their own way.
  • Sacred objects: Genesis block, lowercase bitcoin
  • Sects: Different interpretations resulting in different factions/sects: small blockers, big blockers, etc.

An emerging economy

  • The consensus protocol can be thought of as the constitution
  • The society as the constituency (users on the demand-side; miners on the supply-side)
  • Core developers as the executive department who write the code and execute on the strategy, but amendments to the protocol (i.e., constitution) require approval from the constituency)
  • The native token is the internal currency
  • The investors underwrite the currency

Additionally, many one-liners and memes exist to describe Bitcoin. Not an exhaustive list.

  • Sound money
  • Digital gold
  • “An insurance policy against an Orwellian future”
  • “A tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme”
  • Censorship- judgment & seizure-resistant money
  • Peer to peer digital cash
  • Swiss Bank account in your pocket
  • Unstoppable and uncensorable hard money

Source: https://backed.ai/