Best Stories on Crypto: Insights, Advice and People
On the last day of 2018, let’s remember some of the most popular exclusive stories on Cryptonews.com.
Source: iStock/Anna Skvortsova
Here’s a handpicked collection of our articles on cryptocurrency published this year.
(Find the best articles on blockchain here.)
Ross Gerber: “The Biggest Mistake I Ever Made Was Spending My Bitcoin”
The price of Bitcoin has been turbulent as ever over the past couple of months. New investors have rushed to claim a stake in the riches as early adopters have sold piles of cryptocurrency for millions more than they paid. All the while, phones have been ringing off the hook at investment firms, where potential new clients want to know what the heck to do with their new wealth. We asked Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment advisor with USD 650 million in assets under management, for his take on the “bubble” so many others have forecast.
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What Six Nobel Laureate Economists Have to Say About Crypto
Cryptocurrency has been dividing people since its inception. Some believe in it religiously, some are convinced it’s a sham, still others hate crypto but love blockchain. The number of different groups of opinions is infinite. But a group of people whose opinions should count for something, even in the decentralized and seemingly anarchistic crypto world, are economists. More precisely, economists who have received the Nobel Memorial Prize for their work.
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Exclusive: “There Is an Organized Campaign Against Us,” Says Tether
Media reports about Bahamas-based Deltec Bank accepting suspicious transactions is part of an “organized campaign” against their customer Tether, Leonardo Real, Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) at Tether, the most popular stablecoin, told Cryptonews.com, without specifying who’s behind this campaign. According to him, this is all “misinformation” designed to hurt Tether itself.
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The Initiative Q Saga Offers Crypto Important Lessons
Initiative Q hasn’t even been launched yet, but it already has a reputation. Founded by former PayPal, the online payments giant, employee (and founder of Fraud Sciences Corp., acquired by PayPal in 2008) Saar Wilf, the startup is inviting select individuals to sign up early to its payment network and encouraging them to enlist their friends.
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From Eels to Eyeglasses – Exploring Japan’s Crypto Pay Revolution
Although many Japanese are happy to propagate Western stereotypes that cast the country as a futuristic, neon-lit tech wonderland, bustling with IT-proficient techno-nerds, the secrets of Japan’s tech success are actually grounded in the unglamorous world of government policy. In the postwar period, successive governments targeted growth industries in niche tech sectors.
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What Would You Do to Recover Lost Bitcoins?
Volatility, flash crashes, hacks and scams: life in the crypto demimonde can be tough, but perhaps the worst fear of every trader is the harrowing possibility that, after earning a tidy profit in bitcoin or ethereum, they lose their wallet signature or air-gapped drive.
As nightmarish as this sounds, it actually does happen.
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How Russia’s Billionaires Have Gone Bonkers for Bitcoin
There are few hotter issues in Russia right now than cryptocurrencies. So it may come as no surprise to hear that many of the country’s most influential, super-rich elites have a finger firmly planted in the crypto pie.
In fact, it seems almost everyone wants a piece of the action – from post-Soviet era oligarchs to twentysomething entrepreneurs and second-generation rich kids.
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10 Dangerous Traps For Crypto Traders
The field of behavioral finance, which combines the study of psychology and finance, teaches us that there is a range of cognitive biases that can can affect your decision-making process when it comes to making investment decisions.
To help you to prevent yourself from making avoidable trading losses, you will learn about the ten most common cognitive biases that can affect your cryptocurrency trading in this guide.
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How to Make a Profit in a Bear Market
2018 has been a tough year for crypto investors. Bitcoin has declined by more than 60% and leading altcoins have lost up to 90% of their value. Nonetheless, there are still traders who are making bank in the crypto asset markets despite the bear market.
In this guide, you will discover how you can deploy a market neutral trading strategy to potentially generate a trading profit despite the difficult current market environment.
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As Bitcoin gets more and more media attention, use of the word “bubble” is multiplying by the day. The “experts on everything” are calling cryptocurrencies a new tulip mania and publicly warning of the crypto world’s dangers and horrors. But are all bubbles really so pointless? And do they all leave loss and misery behind? Aren’t there cases of bubbles which were actually useful for the world?
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Cryptocurrency Are a Boost to the Financial System, Not a Threat
Some of the world’s central bankers believe cryptocurrencies are a threat to the stability of the global economic system.
“What concerns me most,” Yves Mersch, an executive board member of the European Central Bank, said in January, “is when financial market infrastructures such as stock exchanges enter this business. That poses a major threat to financial stability.”
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Someone, Please, Make Crypto Exchanges Simple!
Just as the internet moved from being highly technical in its terminology and design to a place for everyday people, the crypto world is in desperate need of a user-friendly makeover. The frustration is clear, but what exactly is being done about it? In many cases what you sacrifice for security and usability is aesthetics, perhaps in the case of the Bitcoin Core wallet.
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It’s Still Early Morning in Crypto
People unfamiliar with crypto often ask the most challenging questions:
“How come we rarely see cryptocurrencies in everyday life?”
“If crypto is so great, why isn’t Amazon accepting it as payment?”
I get it. People are barely beginning to reap the benefits of cryptocurrencies. Practical uses are still experimental. Very few know where to even find them.
But savvy investors are peering ahead into the future.
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Reading Crypto Price Forecast? Take it With a Large Grain of Salt
As more skeptical readers may have already realized, these predictions are almost always wrong. But in a climate where the public are eager to jump on the cryptocurrency gravy train, and where there’s much to be gained by whipping up a bullish mood, they aren’t going to stop anytime soon.
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Meltem Demirors: Psychology is the Main Challenge for Crypto Adoption
“Long term, the biggest adoption challenges remain psychological,” Meltem Demirors, a cryptocurrency investor, Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares, a crypto focused investment company, told Cryptonews.com.
“People will tell you it’s infrastructure, custody, trading venues, indexation, and a number of other market design problems. I fundamentally disagree,” she added.
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How the Growth of Robo-Advisors Could Boost Crypto
Mainstream economists and financial advisors appear, for the most part, intent on advising people away from cryptocurrency. They say that crypto is too ‘volatile,’ that it’s used only for ‘illicit’ purposes, and that the crypto-market is the ‘perfect bubble.’
Yet aside from Bitcoin proving itself to be fairly resilient in the face of recent market turbulence, there could be another reason why advisors may become likelier to recommend crypto in the near future.
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Crypto Markets Are Almost Deaf to News From the Outside World
Traditional markets respond to the news all the time, so much so that news analytics companies have now become significant drivers (and distorters) of stock values and commodity prices. However, to what extent can the same be said for the crypto market? Is it influenced by world events, political developments, and the release of national economic indicators?
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Are You Sure There is No Backdoor to Your Coins?
Ignorance of how cryptocurrencies and blockchains work is a big moneymaker, at least if the growth industry in articles, websites, and comparison tools dedicated to explaining crypto is indicative of anything. But it would also seem to be a profit-generator in another, more marginal way.
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“Why No One Sends Me Money?” Stories From Crypto Support
Possibly, every industry has them: the people whose job is to make it easier for every customer to use the company’s products.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that cryptocurrency-related services also have their support desks, especially given how young the industry is – hardly anyone can be expected to need no help from day one.
What is it like to offer help with problems with such a new technology?
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‘Nocoiner’ Dispute Ends Up Questioning Value of ‘Coiners’
The cryptocurrency world is no stranger to elitism. That singular feeling of social elevation and superiority has already appeared more than once among crypto evangelists in the past, and recently it appeared yet again in the form of a certain advertisement projected from Times Square, New York.
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It’s All FUD: Reports of Crypto Vulnerabilities Are Often Exaggerated
Much of the world is scared of crypto. The U.S. Federal Reserve officials have deemed bitcoin a threat to financial stability, economists regard bitcoin as a giant ‘bubble,’ and banks have suggested that cryptocurrencies present a significant threat to their business models.
It would seem that such fear has now infected perceptions of crypto’s cybersecurity.
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Bitcoin Has Become a Secrecy Device for Trustless Couples
Lying in a relationship is nothing new. In a 2017 survey, three quarters of Brits admitted to having lied at least once to their partners, while a 2014 survey found that 33% of Americans with joint bank accounts hide money from their partners.
It’s into such a deceptive culture that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been born, providing spouses, girlfriends and boyfriends with a fancy new tool for hiding things from their significant others.
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Crypto Learns How to Lobby, But Whose Interests Are Being Served?
Money is power. This may be an old cliché, but the existence of lobbying groups in Washington, London and other centers of power would suggest that it contains a grain of truth, at the very least. In the US alone, USD 3.37 billion was spent on lobbying policymakers in 2017, while the annual total has topped USD 3 billion every year since 2008.
Lobbying is big business, which is why the ascent of cryptocurrency is now bringing crypto- and blockchain-based businesses into the lobbying arena for the first time.
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How Bitcoin Made One Man’s Life Journey Worthwhile
When I look back over the past 3 years, it is staggering how much my life has changed, and Bitcoin was a huge factor in that. Late 2015/early 2016 was the darkest period of my life.
I was falling further into debt failing out of a university program I didn’t yet realize I hated, my social life was little more than getting drunk several nights a week, and I had no constructive hobbies – nights alone were often spent compulsively playing computer games.
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