Exodus

Is Decred a good project and should you buy Decred DCR?

chanman · Dec 30, 2017 · Leave a Comment

I first heard about Decred from Boxmining’s awesome YouTube channel and I started watching the price when it was around USD 35 around September 2017. Since then, I’ve been looking to buy Decred.

I had also seen it as an option in my Exodus wallet and it would be easy to ShapeShift some Bitcoin into Decred.

It’s been on my watchlist for a few months now and I like it as a coin as opposed to an ICO token. It’s a coin like Bitcoin, Dash, Litcoin, Monero, Zcash.

However, what really pushed me over the edge and got me buying Decred in the past week or so was watching a recent great series of 6 short videos between Tai Zen and Decred Jesus, where they discuss what Decred is and whether this is a good investment. I’m going to show these videos in full below:

What I like about Decred

It looks to solve Bitcoin’s governance problem

One of the major problems that Bitcoin has is who decides on significant questions. Questions such as ‘Should Segwit be incorporated into Bitcoin?’ The power in who decides this question lies with the Bitcoin miners. Miners perform an essential function in Bitcoin and crypto in general by verifying and validating tranactions before they get added to the blockchain.

What’s wrong with miners having this power?

If miners don’t want this change such as Segwit, then the only way for this to happen is for a hard fork to happen. This is where developers split the code and change elements of it to something else. This has happened with Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Decred is known as a ‘Goverance Coin’, as solving this problem is a major feature of the project. It does this through a mix of Proof of Work (POW) and Proof of Stake (POS) model.

This means that people that own Decred will get a say in major questions as to Decred’s future direction.

In a nutshell, those that own Decred will be eligible for a ‘ticket’ in a random lottery and those ticket-holders get a chance to vote on these issues.

There is a fantastic current example of this happening right now, where Tai Zen (from the above videos) has submitted a marketing proposal to the Decred community asking for Decred (USD 245,000 worth) to execute the proposal. (This money would come from the Decred war chest that Decred Jesus referred to the in the videos above)

This was posted on the Decred reddit here and this reddit refers to the Politeia on Decred’s site, where Tai Zen submitted his proposal for the Decred community to discuss and debate. Holders of Decred (POS) will have the right to vote and decide on this.

Isn’t this a very civilised and democratic way of doing things? It is also closer to the dream of cryptocurrency enthusiasts in that decision making power isn’t as centralised as it is in some other currencies/projects. For example, in Ethereum, Vitalik has a huge influence on what happens to the project.

It’s a true coin as opposed to an ICO token

I wrote about why this important to me here.

It looks to have a great team and a great community behind it

Here are the developers behind Decred: https://www.decred.org/contributors/

The advisors are first rate too: Charlie Lee from Litecoin and Jimmy Song from Bitcoin.

For a sense of the community, check out the Decred subreddit. and the Decred YouTube channel.

Where could it get to in price?

It has a limited supply just like Bitcoin, with a maximum supply of 21 million DCR. Check out the screenshot from coinmarketcap.com below:

I love a limited supply because that encourages an upward price move when demand starts to increase.

I can see it getting to USD 500 in 2018 and USD 1,000 in 2019, and USD 5,000 in 2020.

Should you buy Decred?

I’m gutted to miss out on buying Decred at USD 35, when I first started looking at it. The main reason I didn’t get in was because I had cash flow issues in the past few months.

Reasons I would recommend that you buy Decred are:

Great development team, advisers and highly engaged community. This gives me confidence that constant improvements and new features will be released in the short, medium and long-term.
Because of the limited supply and the organic growth of the project, I can’t see too much on the downside with regards to price.
The infrastructure is there is support further adoption of the currency i.e. there is a wallet like Exodus that supports storing it
I see solid (if not spectacular) returns in Decred. I see this as a solid addition to your crypto portfolio.

How big should your investment in Decred be?

My holding of Decred is currently 3% of my portfolio (holdings report to follow in an imminent blog post). I plan to increase this to 10% in the next month. I think this is an investment comparable to Monero, Litecoin and Dash.

How can you buy Decred and how can you store it?

I bought it using ShapeShift within my Exodus wallet. I used my tiny piece of remaining Ethereum to buy Decred on 26th December 2017 (£54.44 worth).

AND my wife very kindly gave me 1 Decred (DCR) as my Christmas present, so I took the opportunity to buy more Decred. I bought some Bitcoin on Bittylicious (my preferred way of buying BTC from GBP) and swapped this for Decred using ShapeShift within my Exodus wallet on 28 December 2017 (£323.32 worth).

Further resources on Decred

Official Decred website

Official documentation subdomain on Decred

Linda Xie’s Beginners Guide to Decred

The 3 best Bitcoin wallets for storing your bitcoin (BTC)

chanman · Nov 12, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Having the right Bitcoin wallet is absolutely fundamental to getting involved in Bitcoin.

Without one, you can’t send your purchased Bitcoins to a Bitcoin address. In which case, you can’t buy Bitcoin.

A Bitcoin address is like a bank account, except you hold the keys to that account, whether on your phone, on your desktop or on a hardware wallet.

We talked before about the important factors in choosing a wallet.

In this post, I’m going to tell you about the three best Bitcoin wallets and these are the three that I use personally myself.

I actively use three wallets. This is because I don’t want to put all of my eggs in one basket. I don’t want to have all my coins in one wallet in case something goes wrong with that wallet and I end up losing all of my coins in one go. If that wallet was indeed compromised, I’d rather that I had put some of my holdings elsewhere. It’s a simple way of spreading out the risk.

The 3 Bitcoin wallets I recommend and use myself

Electrum

This was my very first Bitcoin wallet. I did a lot of research at the time before I made the choice to use Electrum. This was back in May 2017 when I made my very first bitcoin purchase. Bitcoin and available Bitcoin information has exploded even since then.

I chose Electrum because the official Bitcoin site (Bitcoin.org) compared it very favourably against other Bitcoin wallets. Check out this wallet comparison on the Bitcoin.org site.

This image is also from the Bitcoin.org site:

Advantages of Electrum are:

It’s lightweight, meaning that you don’t have to sync to the blockchain before using it.
You can also choose fees that you’re willing to spend on sending Bitcoin.
It’s highly recommended by the official Bitcoin.org site
It’s quick to open on your machine and very quick to send a transaction and to receive one
No frills or complications

Disadvantages are:

Because it’s a desktop wallet, it’s not as secure as a hardware wallet like Trezor (more about this below)
Doesn’t look as attractive as Exodus (more about this below)

Overall thoughts about Electrum as a Bitcoin wallet

It’s a great wallet for beginners as it’s easy to install and to setup. You get to learn very quickly the details behind sending and receiving bitcoin.

Exodus Wallet

exodus best bitcoin wallet — A screenshot from the official Exodus website

I started using this wallet after the debacle of the Ethereum node wallet that I was using.

Exodus is a desktop wallet, meaning that you download it to your computer. I wrote about how I set up the Exodus wallet for myself in this post here.

I’m a big fan of this wallet because:

It supports and stores multiple coins (Bitcoin, Ethereum and altcoins). This is a huge plus point in Exodus’s favour. One of the challenges of cryptocurrencies is that each coin (and there could be many that you hold) has its own wallet for storing them in. Say you had holdings in 10 different crypto projects, each with their own coins. The worst case scenario is that you use 10 wallets for 10 different coins. Imagine having to set up 10 wallets, write down 10 different sequences of back up pass phrases?
it’s visually attractive. Look at that screenshot above. Just gorgeous, particularly when you compare it to most other wallets out there.
It has Shapeshift built in, so that you can buy other coins without leaving the wallet to do so. So for example if you had 0.5BTC in your Exodus wallet, you could use Shapeshift and convert 0.1BTC into Ethereum or into Augur or into any of the other coins that Exodus supports storage of.
It’s very easy to send and receive Bitcoin and other currencies. You simply open the ‘wallet’ section of the Exodus wallet, choose the coin you want to send/receive and use the address provided to receive or follow the instructions to send.

Disadvantages of the Exodus wallet

The main one is that it’s transaction fees to send Bitcoin can be higher than you might find with other wallets. Exodus acknowledges this and the higher fees are because they want transactions to be fast. The fees need to be higher than competing transactions to incentivise the miners to process the Exodus transactions faster. (More info on this from Exodus is here.) If fees are important to you, and you send a lot of Bitcoin, then maybe Exodus is not the solution for you in these regards. However, these considerations don’t really bother me as I’m more using Exodus (and my wallets in general) as a place to store and hold crypto long-term.

Overall thoughts about Exodus as a Bitcoin wallet

I strongly recommend considering Exodus.

Download the Exodus wallet from the official site here.

Trezor hardware wallet

Trezor is my first hardware wallet. I wrote about setting up my own Trezor wallet here.

Advantages of the Trezor wallet

It’s a hardware wallet. This immediately makes it safer and more secure than almost every wallet available. There are two types of storage: hot storage and cold storage. Hot storage is any that is connected to the internet to operate. So desktop wallets and mobile wallets are hot storage. Cold storage is where the wallet is not connected to the internet to operate. So hardware wallets (like Trezor, Ledger and Keepkey) and paper wallets are cold storage.

Disadvantages

It’s not free and it’s not that cheap at EUR 89. But that’s a small price to pay for the peace of mind that your Bitcoins that you hold on it aren’t going to get hacked and lost.

Overall thoughts about Trezor as a Bitcoin wallet

Bottom line is I LOVE it. It feels like one of the most secure options out there for Bitcoin storage. Psychologically, I feel that my Bitcoin is safer within my Trezor wallet. That’s not to say that I feel that my other solutions are unsafe, but there’s a feeling of greater relative safety with a hardware wallet and Trezor was the first one I tried and loved and that’s why I’m such fan of it.

Buy the Trezor wallet on the official store here.

Conclusions

If I had to choose one bitcoin wallet to use for storing my bitcoin, it would be Trezor.

Why? Because a hardware wallet is widely acknowledged to be the safest form of storage. It’s safer than a web wallet or a desktop wallet.

However, my ideal bitcoin wallet setup is using multiple wallets that I like

Why? Because it reduces the risk that losing access to one wallet has. It spreads your assets across different wallets so that in the event that you lose one, you haven’t lost everything.

Of the three Bitcoin wallets I’ve recommended above, I would split my holdings by putting the biggest amount of bitcoin into the Trezor hardware wallet, and keep smaller amounts in your Electrum and Exodus wallets.

Tell me about your favourite Bitcoin wallets in the comments below!

How I bought my first Litecoins, using Exodus wallet, Shapeshift and Changelly

chanman · Sep 4, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Today I bought my very first Litecoins.

I knew it was a coin buying day because on my way home from work, a friend of mine whatsapped to laugh that I should close up my blog. I knew he was referring to the day’s softness in the cryptomarket.

China had announced that it was cracking down on ICOs and this had caused a sea of red amongst all coins. Look at this from coinmarketcap.com today (4th September):

I wasn’t too fussed by my friend’s glee. Instead, I welcomed this.

I don’t hold leverage (I’ve learned the hard way that this is dangerous).

And I’m ‘buy and hold’. 10% down, 20% down and I’m not too fussed.

This is just noise that is actually a buying opportunity.

Why buy Litecoin?

It fulfils the criteria I laid out in my previous post on what I look out for in buying cryptocurrencies.

In particular and in addition:

Litecoin is a top 5 coin that I was always going to buy for my portfolio.

It’s seen some serious upward movement in the last six months, indicating that there’s some strong weight of money coming into the coin. Look at the below:

Litecoin chart for last 12 months (source coinmarketcap.com)

Today was an opportunity to buy it on a pullback. Look at the chart above.

The price of LTC hit USD 90 on 2nd September and dipped to USD 62 today on the 4th September.

This would be termed blood on the floor in traditional markets but in crypto, this sort of volatility is to be expected.

So I’m looking at a quality coin on an upward trajectory, which had a pullback today.

It was time to buy in.

Buying Litecoin (LTC) through Exodus wallet and Shapeshift

Exodus wallet has Shapeshift built in. So I compared the exchange rate with Changelly and the Bitcoin to Litecoin rate were pretty similar.

On Changelly it was: 1 BTC = 61.99956402 LTC

First, I opened up my Exodus wallet and went to the ‘exchange’ function. You get a screen like:

Then you switch the desired number of Bitcoins that you want to exchange (can’t be more than you have in your wallet) and if you’re happy with the rate, you click exchange.

This will automatically send the Litecoins that you’ve received in exchange for Bitcoin to your Exodus Litecoin wallet. Easy.

The whole process took less than an hour to complete. Mostly just waiting for the coins to exchange.

Buying Litecoin (LTC) through Changelly

I didn’t have enough Bitcoins in my Exodus to get all the Litecoins I wanted, so I went to Changelly to get some more.

As with the Monero (XMR) trades I did, I moved some Bitcoins to Changelly and swapped these, this time for Litecoins.

Again, super easy now.

exchanging Bitcoin to Litecoin — Slightly different exchange rate to that quoted above earlier in this post

And then I transferred these to my wallet.

Let me know if you’ve invested in Litecoin (LTC) and whether you took advantage of the pullback today in the comments below!

The biggest obstacle I can see that might block mass cryptocurrency adoption

chanman · Sep 2, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Following on from the last post about testing Exodus wallet, yesterday (1st September 2017) I went onto their Slack channel (exodusmovement.slack.com) to find out more about their product.

There was a guy on there called @rhyso who claimed to have lost 2 BTC and some other coin totalling USD 12,000.

Ouch.

He seemed genuine and he was blaming Exodus for creating an alleged security flaw. In a nutshell, by Exodus sending a link for restoring your wallet to your email, this could have given hackers a way into your Exodus wallet.

As at today, I don’t think this has been resolved and I don’t know whether @rhyso’s claim re the security flaw was correct. Let’s wait and see before passing judgement on Exodus’s wallet.

However, whilst almost everyone was sympathetic to @rhyso’s situation, one Slack user pointed out that @rhyso shouldn’t have had USD 12,000 sitting in one wallet anyway and certainly not in a hot wallet.

The bigger issue however is this:

As cryptocurrencies grow in value (price), and people’s holdings grow and grow, how do you securely store that amount of coins?

Think about this:

If you had 10 Bitcoins (BTC), bought at USD 100 (total cost = USD 1,000), and now BTC’s price is close to USD 5,000, so your BTC total holding is worth USD 50,000.

Say that the price moves to USD 10,000 in 2018, which is totally possible.

Your total holding is worth USD 100,000.

Now if you had USD 100,000 in actual US dollars, you would be comfortable having that in the bank.

(You would even be comfortable having USD 10 million in the bank, although I would split that across 5 different banks to reduce the risk of a bank failure destroying my capital)

However, how would you store USD 100,000 worth of Bitcoins?

You certainly wouldn’t put it all into a hot wallet (web wallet, local computer wallet). You’d be worried all the time about being hacked or losing access to your coins.

So you might then only store them in cold storage like a hardware wallet like Trezor or a Ledger Nano S.

But even then, would you be comfortable having that size of holding in one Trezor wallet? Or split across two Trezor wallets?

Thinking back to @rhyso’s predicament, it would really hurt to lose USD 12,000 in one go.

It would REALLY hurt.

So applying this to our conundrum of how to store USD 100,000 of Bitcoins, what amount would you be okay losing in one go?

For me USD 12,000 would really hurt.

Would USD 5,000 hurt? Hell yeah.

Would USD 2,000 hurt? Yes but a lot less.

Would USD 1,000 hurt? Yes but not as much. It would be bad but not too painful. I would chalk it up to experience and look at improving my security.

So if I would only store USD 1,000 worth of Bitcoins onto one hardware device, if I had USD 100,000 worth of Bitcoin in total, that’s 100 hardware devices!! How would you physically manage this many devices? You couldn’t. That would be 100 devices and 100 pin codes and 100 24xword recovery seeds.

It would be impossible. And in the meantime, Bitcoin’s price could double again, and your total holding would now be worth USD 200,000. So you’d now have USD 2,000 on each hardware device.

That’s getting to the uncomfortable stage.

The only answer would be to raise your risk tolerance levels and get comfortable with bigger amounts on your hardware wallets, say USD 10,000 of Bitcoins on each.

The next question then is where do you physically keep your hardware wallets?

You might be okay putting your 10 hardware wallets in a safe in your house, whilst keeping your recovery seeds and pin codes physically separate. But that’s still all in one basket.

Or you could split them and put some into a safety deposit box at a bank but there is still an element of physical risk there too. See this article on UK safety deposit boxes. It’s not as straightforward as proponents in the cryptocurrency space make out.

This must be a real problem to anyone who bought Bitcoins at USD 30/BTC who’ve now seen their investments rise into the millions (in USD). How would you safeguard this? How would you sleep?

To be frank, I would be shitting my pants.

Millions in fiat currency in the bank is not the same as having millions in coins in wallets that you control and are ultimately responsible for.

This, then, is why I think that until this is solved, mass adoption of cryptocurrencies might not happen.

At least not to the stage where it replaces fiat currency.

A lot of people have in excess of USD 100,000 in surplus cash. And a lot of people have a lot more than that.

For these people, the peace of mind of having this in a bank, where the bank or government will guarantee this to a point, must be very reassuring.

At this point in time, without the same sense of security and peace of mind for cryptocurrency assets of the same size of holding (USD 100,000 and beyond), then I just can’t see how we get to that level of adoption. Where normal people hold large amounts of cryptocurrency.

And if as everyone who is in this space currently is right, that cryptos are going to the moon :), then in a few years’ time, a lot of people will have very large holdings indeed.

Mass adoption is the next level up even from that though. That level is where my family and friends hold Bitcoins and other coins. It’s where they have serious amounts of money in cryptocurrency. And where most importantly, they feel as comfortable holding this amount as they do holding fiat currency in a bank. We’re a long way from that though, but I hope we get there.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Testing out the Exodus Wallet

chanman · Aug 31, 2017 · 7 Comments

After the debacle of my Ethereum node wallet, I decided that I needed to try out some new wallets:

To spread out my coins across different locations, so that if one failed for whatever reason (node not syncing, getting hacked, forgetting password and seeds), then at least it wouldn’t be as bad as if I’d had all my coins in that basket.
To see which wallets have a better user experience (speed of syncing, ease of receiving and sending, user interface etc)

I’d heard from a video by CoinFOMO on YouTube that the Exodus wallet from exodus.io was worth checking out.

Its main USP is its good-looking design and its ability to hold different coins in the same interface.

Up until now, I’ve had Electrum wallet for my Bitcoin, Ethereum node wallet for my Ethereum (ETH) and MyMonero wallet for my Monero.

I’ve bought a Trezor hardware but I’m yet to unbox it and set it up.

Today, I downloaded the Exodus wallet and it was very easy to set up.

The interface is very intuitive. The screenshot below is after I sent a test amount of 0.001 BTC to the Exodus wallet from my Electrum wallet. It took about 20 minutes for the BTC to show. The view below is of the wallets available: Bitcoin, Electrum and Litecoin. You could see more coins like Dash and Augur and Golem, but I’ve chosen to hide them from view.

In the next screenshot below, I’ve switched to the Portfolio view, which is like a pie chart (although in this case, it’s all in BTC and so all in one colour.)

As soon as you’ve added some assets into the Exodus wallet, you’ll be prompted to back up your wallet. This means adding a password to open the wallet next time, and also for you to write down your 12 word seed recovery.

The screen below is after I’ve sent more Bitcoin (0.05 BTC) and also some test Ether (0.1 ETH). You can see that it’s more like a pie chart now.

All in all, it’s really easy and the rich, graphical interface is a joy to look at, particularly after using very functional wallets so far.

The next very valuable and interesting feature of Exodus, which I’m yet to try is the inbuilt integration with Shapeshift.io. This allows you to exchange coins for other coins (as long as the Exodus wallet supports those coins).

All in all, I’m very impressed with the Exodus wallet. It looks great and it’s really easy to use.

I haven’t read anything negative about the safety element of it, but for now, no news is good news. And for added peace of mind, I won’t be putting in large amounts of cryptocurrency. Yet.

I’m definitely going to be spreading my coins around and I recommend that you do too.

Let me know your experiences of Exodus in the comments below!