Awesome! WhatsApp Now Lets You Send Files of Any Format

Have you ever felt like wishing of sending any type of file immediately to your friends and office colleagues on WhatsApp directly, instead of just contacts, images or documents?

Well, now you can…

The latest version of WhatsApp for Android and iOS now allows users to send and receive any type of files, whether it’s .mp3, .avi, .php, zip files, or even APKs.

The company last month rolled out this feature to its beta users for Android, and now after being tested successfully, the feature is being released to all WhatsApp users in the latest public update for iOS and Android.

The ability to send any file types also works on the WhatsApp-Web client.

And of course, there’s a file-size limit:

• Android users can send files up to 100MB
• iOS users can send files up to 128MB
• While WhatsApp-web users can only send up to 64MB

To send any file format you just need to select ‘Document’ from ‘Attach.’

Additionally, the latest update of the app will allow you to select photos and videos straight from the camera screen.

WhatsApp is continuously updating its app to provide an exceptional experience to its over one billion users while keeping security in mind.

Last year, the popular messaging app launched video calling feature, end-to-end encryption, and two-step verification to all of its users.

The next app update will possibly include emoji search, which is currently being tested by WhatsApp beta users.

Josh.ai raises $11 million for a premium home automation system with a smarter AI

One of the promises of voice-based computing is the ability to make home automation simpler – something that major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple and Google, are now tackling with their own voice assistants and smart speakers. But their solutions are still somewhat clunky, both in terms of the software interface for configuring your smart home and the voice commands you use to take actions. That’s where the startup Josh.ai comes in.

The company has now raised $11 million to design a better voice-controlled system for smart homes, and will later this year release its own hardware dedicated to this purpose.

Headquartered in Denver with offices in L.A., Josh.ai is the product of serial entrepreneurs Alex Capecelatro, CEO, and Tim Gill, CTO. The two previously worked together on a social recommendations app Yeti, which had begun its life as At The Pool, and was sold back in 2015. Gill, who had previously founded and sold Quark (Quark XPress), had joined Yeti as a technical advisor, and wrote a number of the algorithms used in the app.

Following the sale of Yeti, the two teamed up again to work on a project in the smart home space – something they were both interested in for personal reasons.

Gill, for example, had spent years developing his own home automation system – his version of Mark Zuckerberg’s “Jarvis” – to run inside the large residential property he was building in Denver.

“He was well underway in building the house and understanding what the competition looked like…what the product offerings looked like,” explains Capecelatro. “And he was pretty dissatisfied with what was out there.”

Meanwhile, Capecelatro was also building a home for himself in L.A., and running into the same problems.

“I was just amazed that all of the big automation systems – Crestron, Control4, and Savant – they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the [user interface] looks like it’s from the 90’s,” he says. “It was weird that for a ton of money in my home where you want to have a delightful experience, the best offerings on the table just weren’t that good.”

The founders saw a need in the market for something that sits above mass market solutions, like Apple’s Home app, or Alexa’s smart home control, which focus more on tying together after-market devices, like security cameras, smart doorbells, or smart lights like Philips Hue.

They founded the startup Josh.ai in March 2015, and shipped the first product the following year.

The solution, as it exists today, includes a kit with a Mac mini and iPad, and software that runs the home. After plugging in the Mac, Josh.ai auto-discovers devices on the network. It can identify those from over 50 manufacturers. For example, it can control lighting and shades like those from Lutron, music systems like Sonos, dozens of brands of security cameras, Nest thermostats, Samsung smart TVs, and even more niche products like Global Caché’s box for controlling IR devices (such as your “not-so-smart” TVs).

The automatic speech recognition (AKA speech-to-text) portion of Josh.ai’s system is handled in the cloud, while Mac mini handles the natural language processing to know what your commands mean.

What makes Josh.ai unique is not just its software interface, but how users interact with the system. You speak to the voice assistant “Josh” to tell the home what to do. (You can also change its name if that’s an issue, or even pick from a variety of male and female voices and accents.)

“Josh,” or the wake word you’ve chosen, precedes your command, which can be spoken using more natural language. The system is better than many when it comes to interpreting what you mean, by nature of its single-purpose focus on home automation.

For instance, you can tell Josh to “turn it off,” and it will know what “it” means because it remembers what it had turned on before. Or you can say, “it’s hot in here,” and Josh will know how to adjust your thermostat.

It can also deep-link to streaming video content, so you can ask to watch “Planet Earth,” and Josh will turn on the TV, switch to the right input, launch Netflix, then start playing the show.

Josh.ai supports “scenes,” as well, allowing you to configure a number of devices to work together – like lights, shades, music, fans, thermostats, and other switches. That way, you can say things like “turn everything off,” and Josh knows to shut down all the connected devices in the home.

Where the system gets really smart is in its ability to handle complex, compound commands – meaning controlling multiple devices in one sentence.

You can say to Josh, “play ‘Simon and Garfunkel’ and turn on the lights,” for example. Or, “play ‘Explosions in the sky’ in the kitchen, and play ‘Simon and Garfunkel’ in the living room.” Other systems could get tripped up by the “and” and the “in the” in the artists’ names, but Josh.ai understands when those words are a break between two commands, and when they’re part of something else.

The current system – which was largely designed for high-end homes – is sold by professional integrators at around $10,000 and up, depending on the components involved. To date, the team has sold more than 50 and fewer than 100 installations.

Josh.ai can work over your Echo or Google Home, if you prefer, and includes interfaces for iOS, Android and the web. But the company is now preparing to launch its own, farfield mic solution in a new hardware device that’s built specifically for use in the home.

While the new hardware will perform some basic virtual assistant type tasks – telling you the weather, perhaps (the company isn’t confirming specific features at this time) – the main focus will be on home automation.

Above: a tease of the new device

The hardware won’t be a cylindrical shape like Echo or Google Home, but will be designed with an aesthetic appeal in mind.

It also won’t be super cheap.

“It will still be a premium product, but it will be a lot less than where the current product is. And the idea is this will enable our mass market rollout in probably a year to eighteen months,” notes Capecelatro, speaking of his plan to keep bringing Josh.ai’s technology to ever larger audiences.

Josh.ai, a team of 15 soon to be 25, recently closed on $8 million in new funding, largely from the founders’ personal networks. The investors’ names aren’t being disclosed because they’re not institutional firms. To date, Josh.ai has raised $11 million, but has not yet added anyone to its board.

Google Chrome Bans Chinese SSL Certificate Authorities WoSign and StartCom

As a punishment announced last October, Google will no longer trust SSL/TLS certificate authorities WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom with the launch of Chrome 61 for not maintaining the "high standards expected of CAs."

The move came after Google was notified by GitHub's security team on August 17, 2016, that Chinese Certificate Authority WoSign had issued a base certificate for one of GitHub's domains to an unnamed GitHub user without authorization.

After this issue had been reported, Google conducted an investigation in public as a collaboration with Mozilla and the security community, which uncovered several other cases of WoSign misissuance of certificates.

As a result, the tech giant last year began limiting its trust of certificates backed by WoSign and StartCom to those issued before October 21st, 2016 and has been removing whitelisted hostnames over the course of several Chrome releases since Chrome 56.

Now, in a Google Groups post published on Thursday, Chrome security engineer Devon O'Brien said the company would finally remove the whitelist from its upcoming release of Chrome, completely distrusting the existing WoSign and StartCom certificates.

"Beginning with Chrome 61, the whitelist will be removed, resulting in full distrust of the existing WoSign and [its subsidiary] StartCom root certificates and all certificates they have issued," says O'Brien. 

"Based on the Chromium Development Calendar, this change should be visible in the Chrome Dev channel in the coming weeks, the Chrome Beta channel around late July 2017, and will be released to Stable around mid-September 2017."

Last year, Apple and Mozilla also stopped trusting WoSign, and StartCom issued certificates for their web browsers due to their number of technical and management failures.

"Most seriously, we discovered they were backdating SSL certificates to get around the deadline that CAs stop issuing SHA-1 SSL certificates by January 1, 2016," Kathleen Wilson, the head of Mozilla's trusted root program, said. 

"Additionally, Mozilla discovered that WoSign had acquired full ownership of another CA called StartCom and failed to disclose this, as required by Mozilla policy."

The problems with WoSign certificate service dated back to July 2015 and publicly disclosed last year by British Mozilla programmer Gervase Markham on Mozilla's security policy mailing list.


According to Markham, an unnamed researcher accidentally found this security blunder when trying to get a certificate for 'med.ucf.edu' but also applied for 'www.ucf.edu' and WoSign approved it, giving the certificate for the university's primary domain.

For testing purpose, the security researcher then used this trick against Github base domains (github.com and github.io), by proving his control over a sub-domain.

And guess what? WoSign handed over the certificate for GitHub main domains, as well.

Starting from September 2017, visitors to sites using WoSign or StartCom HTTPS certificates would eventually see trust warnings in their web browsers.

So, websites that are still relying on certificates issued by WoSign or StartCom are advised to consider replacing their certificates "as a matter of urgency to minimize disruption for Chrome users," O'Brien said.

WangGuard Plugin Author Shuts Down Splog Hunting Service Due to Trauma and Death Threats

After seven years of developing and supporting the WangGuard/SplogHunter service, José Conti has shut down the server permanently due to the stress and trauma associated with maintaining it. Conti is a WordPress plugin developer and consultant, and a member of the WordPress España translation team. His WangGuard pluginidentifies and blocks sploggers, unwanted users, and untrusted users on WordPress, Multisite, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce sites. It is currently active on more than 10,000 sites.

Speculation about why the service shut down was running rampant after Conti had collected donations via an Indiegogo campaign in October 2016 to fund support and server costs. Since that time SiteGround stepped in to sponsor WangGuard, eliminating the server costs. The only costs that remained were Conti’s time and effort that he put into supporting the plugin.

“My purpose with WangGuard was never money,” Conti said in his post explaining the reason for the shut-down. “I could have made WangGuard a paid plugin at anytime, and actually had a plan for that for years. But I didn’t do it because there is something inside me that would never let that happen. It was never, I repeat, never my plan to get rich with WangGuard, and I assure you that I could have done it easily: simply charging each of my users 24€/year, would have meant an income of more than 2 million euros per year. I just had to distribute a version of WangGuard I had collecting dust, with a checkbox on WangGuard’s server administration options but I never got it done. No matter the other reasons, which only people very close to me know: I simply didn’t want to, nor did I want to be a millionaire.”

Mafia Death Threats and Trauma from Exposure to the Dark Web: The High Cost of WangGuard’s 99.9% Accurate Detection of Splogs

WangGuard has long been known for its nearly perfect detection of registration spam. Not only did it completely block unwanted users, it also removed them from the database. The plugin was unrivaled in both accuracy and price – all users got everything the service offered for free. In order for WangGuard to provide its 99.90% accuracy, Conti bolstered the algorithm with manual curation and reviews.

“WangGuard worked in two different ways: as an algorithm that I had been refining for seven years, and which was getting better as the sploggers evolved, so that it was always one step ahead of them, and also as human curation, in which I reviewed many factors, among them sites of sploggers to see if their content could improve the algorithm and make sure that it worked correctly both when it was blocking or not blocking a site,” Conti said. “The great secret of WangGuard was this second part. Without it WangGuard would not ever have become what it was.”

Because of how effective WangGuard was at stopping unwanted users, Conti said for four years he received “almost daily death threats from mafias for making them lose millions of dollars.”

Through the process of manually curating splogger sites, Conti caught a glimpse of the some of the darkest places on the web, which he said had a damaging psychological impact on him.

“For seven years, I have visited places where I saw pederasty, pictures, and videos of murders (by razor blades, by gutting live people, by beheadings, dismemberments, to name a few), real videos of rape of all kinds (children, women, boys), photos of accidents in which people were totally disfigured, bizarre actions that I did not even know existed, and a very long ‘and so on,’ which I do not want to expand on,” Conti said.

The effects of viewing these types of websites every day took their toll and Conti decided to close the splog hunter service.

“Finally, a few months ago, I broke down,” Conti said. “I disappeared from everywhere and fell into a depression. The seven years of working at WangGuard finally took a toll on me. I had nightmares because of all the macabre deaths I had seen, an obsession with protecting my children from pederasty, OCD, depression, and many other symptoms. It took me about 6 months to recover (and honestly, I may be deceiving myself, since I do not think I completely recovered my life).”

I asked Conti if clicking through to the websites was necessary for maintaining the service. He explained that while WangGuard blocked emails, domains, IPs, and ISPs, without his manual curation of visiting the domains and clicking the links, users could get a lot of “sleepers” – registered and active accounts that remain silent until one day with a 0day vulnerability or a bug fix, they attack thousands of websites. The sleepers also wait to perform actions like create millions of sites on thousands of WordPress multisite installations in order to create a lot of bad content/links.

“Visiting many domains, I was able to minimize this problem,” Conti said. “The way I worked not only fixed the current spam / splog problem, but the wizard and database also fixed any future problems with sleepers.”

Another reason he visited the domains was to figure out what he needed to block, whether it was an email or a domain. The domain could be a spam domain or possibly a free email service.

“By visiting a website, I could detect whether it was a phishing website or a site camouflaged as an email service in order to try to cheat WangGuard,” he said. “I saw a lot of ‘techniques’ for trying to cheat WangGuard at Black Hat specialized forums. I had been subscribed to many spam/sploggers forums for investigation. Every time that a user described a real technique for cheating WangGuard, it was fixed immediately.”

If you’re still using the WangGuard plugin, it may continue to work but not nearly as well as in the past. Conti said that some parts of the code work without the API, but the most important parts require the 

Why Bitcoin Is Going To The Moon – Buy & Hold For Dear Life!

Have you been following the recent developments around Bitcoin?

If so, you may have picked up on some FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) around the world’s favorite coin!

Let’s recap the most recent developments in such a way that you’ll understand them:

In recent months, people are saying Bitcoin has a scaling problem. The Bitcoin network can only handle 5-8 transactions per second. How can it ever compete with credit card transactions, which are processed at thousands per second?

Bitcoin has, in the past, mostly been developed by the Core development team. Core has come up with a great solution for scaling, called SegWit. I won’t bother you with the technical details. But rest assured that the SegWit software has been finished for a year and well tested.

Since SegWit couldn’t get enough consensus in its support, it has never activated. But now, another team of developers have taken the SegWit code, modified it and called it SegWit2x.

SegWit2x, is basically SegWit with a transaction block increase hard fork a few months later. The Core team does not approve of SegWit2x, saying it’s being pushed through at too high a speed. And with only 80% consensus instead of 95%.

The Core team also does not like the block size increase, since increasing the block size does not scale up the number of transactions per second by a whole lot. But at the same time, bigger blocks make the blockchain a lot bigger. This means fewer people will want to run a copy. This, in turn, means that Bitcoin will become more centralized. Something that goes against the original vision of Bitcoin, where decentralization plays a big role.

On top of that, the fact that Bitcoin was recently having lots of problems with transaction processing, is because somebody was spamming lots of small transactions to make it seem like it was having problems scaling up. This has been done to push the big-block agenda, which leads to more centralization, which leads to more power for Bitcoin miners.

People are also fearing a chain split. In such an event there will be two Bitcoins, one of which will be the real one and the other will be a so called ‘altcoin’. In the event of a chain split, you’ll own Bitcoin on both chains. What happens to their prices?

Not any single person is calling the shots in Bitcoin. It’s not run by a company. It does not have a CEO that makes all the decisions on how it scales up.

All this uncertainty is understandably pretty scary to a lot of wannabe Bitcoin owners!

You’d think that all this is a big downside to Bitcoin. But in reality… nothing could be farther from the truth!

Why This Is The Best Time To Get Started With Bitcoin

As they say in the software world: “It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.”.

And that’s precisely what’s true for Bitcoin. You see, it has already been through a lot. Bitcoin has survived the Silk Road collapse and the Mt. Gox collapse.

There are plenty of people with interests in fiat money who absolutely detest Bitcoin and want to see it die. They’ll try to attack it in every way possible: in the news, legally, through manipulation of its price, etc.

Bitcoin has survived all that for as long as it’s been around. So we can conclude that that Bitcoin is indeed a resilient coin.

It’s true that there is currently a big fight going on over how to scale up Bitcoin. But in the end, very few people in the Bitcoin community want to see it fail. Sure, the miners want greater control over it. But they do not want to see it fail. Altough Core developer Luke Dashjr does claim that SegWit2x will fail and that its purpose is to stall SegWit.

The whole kerfuffle seems like a big deal now. But in reality, there will be a lot more scaling debates in the future. Software is never ‘finished’, and this is true for Bitcoin as well. It will have to continue scaling and we will reach many more crossroads, just as we are now.

So why is this the best time to get started in Bitcoin?

Because everybody is having the FUD-shudders, which is keeping Bitcoin’s price down.

But Bitcoin will most likely survive its scaling, meaning that its price is only going to increase in the long run!

Bitcoin Isn’t Going Anywhere… Except Up!

We only have to look at a handful of recent developments in order to see where Bitcoin is headed in 2017 and beyond.

1. Delaware Regulation

Take for example the fact that the state of Delaware has recently passed historic blockchain regulation. This regulation concerns amendments to state law that make it perfectly clear that you are entitled to trade stocks on the blockchain. This is pretty strong evidence that Delaware considers the blockchain as a thing that is here to stay. The blockchain is a public ledger of transactions, that are guaranteed to be untampered with. There are many conceivable applications beyond Bitcoin. The fact that the state of Delaware embraces the blockchain, is good news for anything blockchain-powered. And that means Bitcoin, too!

2. Five Reasons

Or take for example these five reasons why Bitcoin is here to stay. The article eloquently discusses a number of reasons why Bitcoin is going to be staying with us for a long, long time. The arguments mainly come down to the facts that Bitcoin is an invention whose benefits are very compatible with our existing lifestyles. And you can also easily try it out, because the entry barrier is so incredibly low. Bitcoin is not a fad. At some point, people thought the Internet was a fad too. We all know how that went.

3. Bitcoin Fanboyism In Thailand

Let’s also have a look at what Bitcoin is doing in Thailand. Citizens are now just beginning to catch the so called “Bitcoin bug”. Some Thais are purchasing cryptocoin mining equipment en masse in order to mine their own cryptocoins. There is currently a nationwide shortage of hardware due to the high demand. Other Thais are accepting Bitcoin in their stores. One 80 year old noodle shop has just started accepting Bitcoin. Thai trade volumes have skyrocketed. Bitcoin is becoming more and more visible in Thailand, and frequently makes the news.

4. Returns on Investments

More and more people who have been successful at getting good returns on Bitcoin investments, are crawling out of the woodworks to share their experiences. It’s a long story. But the long story short is that, while Bitcoin might be in short term bubbles one after another, in the long term it will likely do really well. So buying & holding is a really great strategy for those who want to get in on the action, but have no experience in trading. More and more people will get wind of this. More people will buy. Then people will take some short term profits. Bitcoin will keep cycling like this all the way to the proverbial moon.

5. Expert Predictions

Jeremy Liew, successful Snapchat investor and partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a company that aims to accelerate disrupting innovations, predicts that the demand for Bitcoin is only going to go up. With the world becoming more and more uncertain as time goes on, people lose trust in fiat money and want a safe place to store their cash. So what do they do? They move some of their cash into Bitcoin, which is starting to become more and more of a safe heaven as a store of value. Especially in the long run. Depending on who you ask, Bitcoin can reach a price of between $5000 to $1 million within 3-5 years.

6. South Korea Prepares For Bitcoin Legally

South Korea knows Bitcoin is coming and is preparing for it legally. They are changing the Electronic Financial Transactions Act. This will mean that traders, exchanges, brokerage firms and others that participate in the Bitcoin ecosystem, will have to register themselves with the Financial Services Commission in. By doing so, South Korea makes a strong statement that it is willing to regard Bitcoin as real money.

7. Japan Testing Bitcoin In 260,000 Stores

At first, Bitcoin payments will be rolled out to a few hundred glasses stores in Japan. After that, the rest of the 260,000 will follow. Mass adoption like this will force Bitcoin to scale up and, dare I say it, succeed. It’s sink or swim time for Bitcoin. I’m betting it’s gonna swim!

Will Bitcoin Win?

But wait… there exist more than 800 crypto coins now. How do we know that it will be Bitcoin that will emerge the victor, and not some other altcoin?

Let’s think rationally about it. It’s true that there might exist a lot of altcoins. But most of these are so called shitcoins that will never go anywhere. At any given time, it’s the top 10, or maybe the top 20 coins, that even remotely stand a chance at becoming one of the top dog coins in the world of tomorrow.

From the top 20 down, market caps and volumes start sinking really hard. These coins aren’t being traded very actively in comparison to the coins higher up in the list. And momentarily, the top 10 is dominated by Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Stratis and a handful of others.

Let’s run by a few to explain why I think they won’t surpass Bitcoin:

1. Ethereum

Ethereum was designed to be able to run applications on the blockchain. It’s supposed to be a sort of global, decentralized super computer, on which people can run applications for Ether tokens. Ethereum is therefore not really a store of value, such as Bitcoin. Ethereum offers a lot of functionality, because people have to be able to develop applications for it. This is all really great and all, but it also means Ethereum has a larger attack surface.

Ethereum has temporarily broken multiple times now, when its blockchain was used for ICO’s of many coins, the lion’s share of which are shitcoins that are never going to go anywhere. Ethereum has promise, but much like Bitcoin, it is wrestling with scaling problems. Bitcoin is much simpler than Ethereum and doesn’t offer anywhere near Ethereum’s functionality. But, it has also never broken down. All the more reason to stick with Bitcoin as a store of value, for the time being.

2. Ripple

Ripple was designed to make life easier for banks in one country to send money transfers to banks in other countries. Currently, banks are using the Swift system for this. Swift takes a long time and is fairly expensive. This is a great example of why blockchain holds such tremendous power. Swift transfers go past several clearance points, overseen by (presumably) trusted human workers. These human workers don’t work for free. Everybody needs to skim something off the top. Not so with blockchain.

The blockchain will transfer money without any human oversight. The blockchain is so trustworthy that it doesn’t even require trust. It’s trustless. Much like the fact that you don’t need to ‘trust’ the sun to come up tomorrow, because you know it will. Much like the fact that you don’t need to ‘trust’ gravity to be around tomorrow all day long, because you know it will. Ripple is a very low priced coin, which is in use by a fraction of banks today. But more are joining the Ripple network to do cheap and fast money transfers. This coin can get really big when the whole banking world jumps on top of it.

A little bit of Ripple gets shredded with every transaction, making it deflationary by nature. It will only become worth more due to this. All in all, this is a great coin to buy & hold. But keep in mind that it’s designed for banks… so maybe Ripple won’t gain widespread store and supermarket acceptance, such as Bitcoin will in the near future.

3. Litecoin

Litecoin is very similar to Bitcoin. In fact, people are using it as a hedge against Bitcoin crashes. When Bitcoin comes down, Litecoin usually goes up a little. Litecoin has the tendency to sit around certain price points for a long time. It hovered around $15 for a long time. Then around $30 for a long time. Then it had an outbreak to $50. Then it fell to around $45 and, you guessed it, is now hovering around there for a long time.

Litecoin might very well become a popular alternative to Bitcoin, especially if Bitcoin becomes so expensive that people will start looking for alternatives. Litecoin is already scaled up in the past, since it has already successfully implemented SegWit, even though it didn’t really need it at the time. So you might say that Litecoin is better managed than Bitcoin.

It could break out at some point. But for now, it’s still much smaller than Bitcoin. Bitcoin was also around the same price points as Litecoin is now. So you never know where it’s gonna go. But Bitcoin has the first mover’s advantage. While I foresee both Bitcoin and Litecoin growing, I do not foresee Litecoin surpassing Bitcoin anytime soon.

4. Stratis

Stratis is currently number 10 in the coin list by market cap. So why do I want to discuss this coin and not numbers 5 through 9?

Stratis stands out to me. The Stratis Platform aims to offer Blockchain-as-a-Service. Blockchain isn’t just useful for public money transfer ledgers. It has many conceivable uses. Many items in this world need to have their authenticity verified, such as concert tickets, expensive jewels, etc. All of these products could potentially be labeled with blockchain addresses, which the owners can then use to verify their authenticity.

In the old economy (the one from previous decades), the transfer of these products required not a blockchain but a humanchain. A chain of fallible and flawed humans that verify the product’s authenticity at every step. Take diamonds, for example. A diamond is dug out of hole in the ground and then makes its way to your local jewelry store. The tracking of a diamond’s journey used to involve many humans, every step of the way.

In the future, blockchain will replace the humanchain. The blockchain will cost many people their jobs. I suggest those people buy some Stratis. They’re going to need it in a world where people are continuously and relentlessy being replaced by automation.

Stratis is a stand-out coin. Like Ripple, it’s aimed at big finance. Big finance coins are great ‘buy & hold’ material. Through intensive usage, the big finance world can increase this coin’s value by quite a lot. It’s still relatively cheap, too. If you decide to stock up on this, you’ll still be very much an early bird.

Stratis isn’t really a store of value like Bitcoin, though. So like Ethereum, it might not be able to dethrone Bitcoin, for that very same reason.

Getting Active With Your Bitcoin

Some people don’t want to simply buy & hold, but would rather get a bit more active with it. The obvious answer is to start trading. If you want to trade, then you better get your mindset right first. Trading with a broken mindset, is like digging a ditch with a rake. You’ll be spinning your wheels and getting nowhere fast.

If you want to become a trader, then you will have to spend at least a few dozen hours learning Technical Analysis, or TA for short. Technical Analysis is the noble art of learning to recognize what a coin is going to do next, based on nothing more than its price movements. So that means you’re neglecting all developments around the coin that you might read about in the news. It’s 100% pattern analysis.

Technical Analysis is very difficult to learn and you’re going to make some losses on some trades before you start scoring wins.

Some people will try to ride a so called ‘pump & dump’, where a group of people will pump a coin and then dump it. The idea is to buy the coin before the pump, and sell it somewhere before the dump. However, informed insiders have already likely bought the coin before the pump was announced. They score all the gains. This leaves the uninformed non-insiders holding a bag of dumped shitcoins.

Yet another option, is to commit some of your Bitcoin to a revenue sharing opportunity. There exist many such opportunities. Most of them are ponzi scams. I must confess that I once fell for such a scam, which promised 7.2% daily returns on my Bitcoin.

That’s a deal that’s too good to be true. With 7.2% daily returns, you can start with an investment of 0.2 Bitcoin, reinvest 100% of your earnings, and you’ll own all the Bitcoin that could ever exist (21 million) after 266 days!

However, among the shedload of ponzi scams, one really great revenue sharing opportunity can be found. And that is USI-Tech, all the details of which you will find explained on https://retireonbitcoin.net. Long story short: they profitably trade your Bitcoin, keep some for themselves, and give some to you.

USI-Tech has been the talk of the town in recent months. They offer between 0.75% to 1.25% daily returns on your Bitcoin. On business days only, by the way.

You’ll be buying €50 packages and slowly but surely turning them into €70 packages. The returns on capital may be used to rebuy more €50 packages. Due to the fact that you will have to recommit your daily returns on capital in order to set yourself up for an exponential growth curve, your actual daily return percentage (over your whole committed amount of Bitcoin) will actually be closer to 0.5% per business day.

That’s still more than your bank will give you per year, this day and age.

Long story short, USI-Tech’s revenue sharing has the potential to give you significant returns on capital in the long run. But at the same time, it is not high enough to be a blatant ponzi scam, such as the 7.2% opportunity that I described earlier (and which shall remain unnamed).

USI-Tech is starting to look more and more like a real company, seeing as how they are now appearing in mainstream news after having organized a convention. The owners are constantly making public appearances and are very transparent about everything.

According to the owner of “Retire on Bitcoin”, he recently spoke with USI-Tech insiders, who confirmed to him that they had seen USI-Tech’s trading records with their own eyes. Rumor has it that the company will soon produce proof of its activities publicly, in a bid to create more trust all around.

Whatever you decide to do, never commit more Bitcoin than you are willing to lose.

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Disclaimer

This article does not officially dispense financial advice. You are entirely responsible for any actions you may take based on the information herein. The author participates in the USI-Tech revenue sharing program that is discussed on https://retireonbitcoin.net.