Tag: #Free

Running bitcoin – Hal Finney

Wonder In Peace Bright Mind

Join Honorary Chair Fran Finney and the Running Bitcoin Challenge Committee as we honor legendary cypher punk, Hal Finney.

This is THE EVENT that combines Hal Finney’s love of running and Bitcoin and is raising funds and awareness to help defeat ALS, which ultimately claimed his life in 2014.

You are challenged to run (or walk, roll, or hike) the equivalent of a half marathon — cumulatively or all at once — by the end of January 10, 2023.

From wherever you are, spread the word about Bitcoin, participate in a healthy activity, feel good about doing your part to defeat ALS, and start the year off right

Hal Finney, one of the earliest bitcoin contributors, died eight years ago from complications of nervous system disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

His spouse, Fran Finney, is now organizing a half marathon to raise funds for ALS research via bitcoin.

The “Running Bitcoin Challenge” is set to take place between Jan. 1 and Jan. 10. The timing of the occasion leads up to the anniversary of Hal Finney’s “Running bitcoin” tweet, in which Finney famously disclosed he was deploying a Bitcoin node.

There is no set location — participants can choose to join anywhere they wish. Players are encouraged to either run, walk, roll or hike the equivalent of a half marathon (Hal’s favorite distance) either in one go or over the entire 10-day period.

Donors contributing at least $100 will receive an official shirt with the half marathon’s logo, while the event’s top 25 fundraisers will get a Hal Finney collectible signed by his wife.

As of Wednesday morning, the event has already managed to secure nearly $10,000 in bitcoin donations.

An advocate of cryptography and digital privacy, Finney was the recipient of the first-ever bitcoin transfer from the network’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

The bitcoin community often suspected Finney was Nakamoto, a claim he consistently denied. He reportedly found out about his condition in 2009 and decided to move away from the project.

Hal’s name is high in the Bitcoin pantheon as one of the first people to voice support for Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention and for being the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi.

He was, for a time, considered one of the top contenders on the list of potential Satoshis himself (many in blockchain who reject Dr. Craig Wright’s statements still falsely believe Finney to be Bitcoin’s real creator).

Hal, who referred to himself as a “cypherpunk,” was a cryptographic activist who went from developing video games to working on the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) project in the 1990s. He described his PGP work as “dedicated to the goal of making Big Brother obsolete.”

PGP creator Phil Zimmerman hired Hal as his first employee when PGP became PGP Corporation in the early 2000s. He described Hal as a “gregarious man” who loved skiing and long-distance running.

Despite gradual paralysis that eventually forced him to stop working, Hal continued to code software and follow the Bitcoin project.

Almost as famous as his 2009 tweet is his “Bitcoin and me” post on BitcoinTalk.org in March 2013, the last he’d ever make.

It’s a long post, and Hal was “essentially paralyzed” at the time, using an eye tracker to type. Forum stats show the post has been read over 278,000 times.

“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away,” he wrote. “I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test.

I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”

Hal himself always denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, adding later that he’d sold most of the Bitcoins he mined (at pre-2014 prices) to pay for his treatments. He also mentioned putting some in a safe deposit box for his children.

“And, of course, the price gyrations of bitcoins are entertaining to me.

I have skin in the game.

But I came by my bitcoins through luck, with little credit to me.

I lived through the crash of 2011.

So I’ve seen it before.

Easy come, easy go.”

Hal Finney
www.runningbitcoin.us
Admiration and great Respect
With 🧡

Happy New Year 2023

Only One Wish for 2023

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

The obedient must be slaves.”

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet. Thoreau’s writing is heavily influenced by his own life, in particular his time living at Walden Pond. He has a lasting and celebrated reputation for embracing non-conformity, the virtues of a life lived for leisure and contemplation, and the dignity of the individual.

Portrait of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), 1847. Private Collection.
Heritage Images / Getty Images

A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.

His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail.He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.

Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist. In “Civil Disobedience”, Thoreau wrote: “I heartily accept the motto,—’That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—’That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. … But, to speak practically and as a cit­i­zen, unlike those who call themselves no-gov­ernment men, I ask for, not at once no gov­ernment, but at once a better government.”

Legacy

Thoreau did not see the huge successes in his lifetime that Emerson saw in his. If he was known, it was as a naturalist, not as a political or philosophical thinker. He only published two books in his lifetime, and he had to publish A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers himself, while Walden was hardly a bestseller.

Thoreau is now, however, known as one of the greatest American writers. His thinking has exerted a massive worldwide influence, in particular on the leaders of non-violent liberation movements such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom cited “Civil Disobedience” as a major influence on them.

Like Emerson, Thoreau’s work in transcendentalism responded to and reaffirmed an American cultural identity of individualism and hard work that is still recognizable today. Thoreau’s philosophy of nature is one of the touchstones of the American nature-writing tradition.

But his legacy is not only literary, academic, or political, but also personal and individual: Thoreau is a cultural hero for the way he lived his life as a work of art, championing his ideals down to the most everyday of choices, whether it be in solitude on the banks of Walden or in behind the bars of the Concord jail.

Henry David Thoreau Quotes

“I was not born to be forced.

I will breathe after my own fashion.

Let us see who is the strongest.”

Henry David Thoreau, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…”

Henry David Thoreau

“The question is not what you look at,     but what you see.”

Henry David Thoreau

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

Henry David Thoreau

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.

I love to be alone.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

There is no play in them, for this comes after work.

But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things…”

Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience and Other Essays”

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land.

There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

Henry David Thoreau

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.

Now put the foundations under them.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“All good things are wild and free.”

Henry David Thoreau

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Our life is frittered away by detail.

Simplify, simplify.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden and Other Writings”

“We need the tonic of wildness…

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

We can never have enough of nature.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden: Or, Life in the Woods”

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

Henry David Thoreau, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours…”

Henry David Thoreau

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.

It is not so bad as you are.

It looks poorest when you are richest.

The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.

Love your life, poor as it is.

You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.

The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.

I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“As if you could kill time without     injuring eternity.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”

Henry David Thoreau

“There is no remedy for love but                 to love more.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Things do not change; We change.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

Henry David Thoreau

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately                     or in the long run.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”

Henry David Thoreau, “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

Henry David Thoreau

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

Henry David Thoreau, “Familiar Letters”

“I do believe in simplicity.

It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit.

When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms.

So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real.

Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”

Henry David Thoreau

“The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves.

Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes.

Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.

…The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free!

It is the freedom of a prison-yard.”

Henry David Thoreau, “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“…for my greatest skill has been to want but little.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

Beware of Scams !!!

Beware !!!

Just as the crypto industry is expanding and getting local adoption from individuals, co-operations, organisations and few countries  the same rate at which we have crypto enthusiast increasing in number which i see so worrisome and also a call for major concern.

Reason been that as more people get involved in the crypto business the more scammers are likely to increase their technique and the more scammers get recruited.

To avoid walking on scammers path, requires to be well informed of every new technique they can ever deploy against their potential victim.

To stay off scammers path users must:

  • Avoid phishing links.
  • Make sure to pay attention to the spelling of the website, as well as their URL as this can reveal whether it is a phishing site or not.
  • Never invest in a project without a well structured community
  • Pay close attention to the engagement within the community for suspicious activities
  • Ensure you assets are off CEX
  • Be more smart and less greedy
  • Don’t jump into a project/coin only based on the hype from advertisers (especially twitter)
  • Avoid any “too good to be true” investment
  • Avoid send me 1$ and I’ll send back 2$ scams, no matter how reputable is the account calling for that
  • Protect your coins (keep your coins on your wallet, use hardware wallet where possible, never give out wallet’s seed, keep backup seed offline)
  • Don’t be greedy and/or illiterate.
  • Be sure to feed yourself with necessary knowledge, if you want to invest.
  • Knowledge from experience is good but you can also take legitimate one from other people.
  • Not everything that is being offered to you is true. Do not be deceived.
  • Be careful who you are trusting.
  • Always be skeptical !!!
  • Enable Two-factor authentication for all your accounts.
  • Using of firewalls.
  • Installing an up to date anti virus software.
  • Use strong passwords and yet easily accessible ones for your convenience.
  • Stay away from malicious links or attachments you come across on the web.
  • Make sure your private keys are well stored and in hard wallet
  • Make sure your passwords are not vulnerable online to attacks i.e don’t store passwords online or any website
  • Whenever a stranger message you first for a business or an investment, it is a Red flag.
  • Someone who doesn’t know you would want you to make big money, another Red flag.
  • Whenever they introduce a” business opportunity” to you and then hasten you in order make you take a hasty decision it’s not  genuine, they are trying their best to make you take a fast decision without telling your loved ones and friends who will discourage you.
  • It is safer to  assume anyone you don’t know, communicating with you is a scammer until it is proven otherwise.
  • Read the whitepaper and research well of the company where you are going to invest because many scams are done by this method.
  • Check whether it is genuine or fake.
  • Scammers are constantly upgrading their scam methods and anyone can be the next target.
  • Loss doesn’t just happen due to an internal or intentional mistake, and when it does happen everyone has a similar sense of remorse and risks that are absolute consequences.
  • You’ll be fooled many times by those scammers that have maintained a well structured fake community.
  • They can hire those PRs and people talking inside their community to make it look like they’re a legit community.
  • As for their workers, they’ll just tell that they need engagement but the purpose of it, they’re not talking about it because that’s what the main purpose it.
  • And that’s to make it look genuine that they have real people inside the community. But in reality, it’s all fake people that they’ve hired just to make discussions all over their place.
  • It’s safe to say as well that it’s not just the crypto industry that is not safe for newbies, everything that talks about money is not safe for everyone.
  • Crypto is the latest thing and in the last 5 years it become so successful that scammers make this as their paradise as there are a lot of naive investors in the market.
  • Do your investigations, and don’t listen to influencers and believe them.
  • Think that this is your hard earn money so you need to be careful where you are going to invest it.
  • Don’t be Greedy.
  • Don’t jump on it like a hungry cow.
  • Don’t trust the sweet words they offer you. Most of them are too good to be true but they will always sound inviting to invest with.
  • Make a wall to not fully support them unless they have proven themselves worthy of that kind of respect.
  • Always be in doubt. That will be the shield that will protect you from being scammed.
  • Must simply assume that our coins are never really safe despite our best efforts, so it is important to always be on alert and protect our coins to the best of our ability.
  • Improve the security of your coins by an important margin by buying a hardware wallet, since they are very secure devices and they are relatively cheap, instead of risking storing our coins in our computers or at an exchange.
  • Always good to know how to make technical and fundamental analysis so that you can get specific information what is the situation of the projects you want to invest
  • Many projects are delivering a good testament, but they always ended into a scam , so we need to be smart enough and have a lot of preparation before investing or trading

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.

Controlled Supply

Bitcoin

“A fixed money supply, or a supply altered only in accord with objective and calculable criteria, is a necessary condition to a meaningful just price of money.”

Fr. Bernard W. Dempsey, S.J. (1903-1960)

In a centralized economy, currency is issued by a central bank at a rate that is supposed to match the growth of the amount of goods that are exchanged so that these goods can be traded with stable prices. The monetary base is controlled by a central bank. In the United States, the Fed increases the monetary base by issuing currency, increasing the amount banks have on reserve or by a process called Quantitative Easing.

In a fully decentralized monetary system, there is no central authority that regulates the monetary base. Instead, currency is created by the nodes of a peer-to-peer network.

The Bitcoin generation algorithm defines, in advance, how currency will be created and at what rate. Any currency that is generated by a malicious user that does not follow the rules will be rejected by the network and thus is worthless.

Currency with Finite Supply

Block reward halving
Controlled supply

Bitcoins are created each time a user discovers a new block. The rate of block creation is adjusted every 2016 blocks to aim for a constant two week adjustment period (equivalent to 6 per hour.)

The number of bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. The result is that the number of bitcoins in existence will not exceed slightly less than 21 million.

Speculated justifications for the unintuitive value “21 million” are that it matches a 4-year reward halving schedule; or the ultimate total number of Satoshis that will be mined is close to the maximum capacity of a 64-bit floating point number. Satoshi has never really justified or explained many of these constants.

Cumulated bitcoin supply

This decreasing-supply algorithm was chosen because it approximates the rate at which commodities like gold are mined. Users who use their computers to perform calculations to try and discover a block are thus called Miners.

Motivation Formula

Motivation = (Expectancy X Value) / (Impulsiveness X Delay)
  • Expectancy : How likely you feel you’ll succeed
  • Value : What you’ll gain from succeeding
  • Impulsiveness : Your natural inclination to put things off
  • Delay : How much time you have to complete the task

Add it up, and the result is your current level of motivation. 

The less confident you are, the less exciting the outcome, the longer you have to get it done … the more likely you are to put it off.

Leave a trail…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.

He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature”.

Following this work, he gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays “Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “The Poet”, and “Experience.” Together with “Nature”, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson’s most fertile period.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world.

Emerson’s “nature” was more philosophical than naturalistic: “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.”

Emerson is one of several figures who “took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.”

He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him.

“In all my lectures,” he wrote, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.” Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

As a lecturer and orator, Emerson—nicknamed the Sage of Concord — became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States.

James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, commented in his book My Study Windows (1871), that Emerson was not only the “most steadily attractive lecturer in America,” but also “one of the pioneers of the lecturing system.”

Herman Melville, who had met Emerson in 1849, originally thought he had “a defect in the region of the heart” and a “self-conceit so intensely intellectual that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name”, though he later admitted Emerson was “a great man”.

Theodore Parker, a minister and transcendentalist, noted Emerson’s ability to influence and inspire others: “the brilliant genius of Emerson rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along new paths, and towards new hopes”.

Emerson’s work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present.

Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson’s influence include Nietzsche and William James, Emerson’s godson. There is little disagreement that Emerson was the most influential writer of 19th-century America, though these days he is largely the concern of scholars.

Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and William James were all positive Emersonians, while Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James were Emersonians in denial—while they set themselves in opposition to the sage, there was no escaping his influence.

To T. S. Eliot, Emerson’s essays were an “encumbrance”. Waldo the Sage was eclipsed from 1914 until 1965, when he returned to shine, after surviving in the work of major American poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane.

In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom repeatedly refers to Emerson as “The prophet of the American Religion”, which in the context of the book refers to indigenously American religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science, which arose largely in Emerson’s lifetime, but also to mainline Protestant churches that Bloom says have become in the United States more gnostic than their European counterparts.

In The Western Canon, Bloom compares Emerson to Michel de Montaigne: “The only equivalent reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne.”

Several of Emerson’s poems were included in Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language, although he wrote that none of the poems are as outstanding as the best of Emerson’s essays, which Bloom listed as “Self-Reliance”, “Circles”, “Experience”, and “nearly all of Conduct of Life”.

In his belief that line lengths, rhythms, and phrases are determined by breath, Emerson’s poetry foreshadowed the theories of Charles Olson.

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.

Happy Children’s Day

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/