Blockchain and ICO Udemy courses

April 21, 2018

9266

ICO

seandotau

There is a growing amount of courses appearing on Udemy around blockchain and ICOs. 140 to be exactly on blockchains and 35 for ICOs. If you are looking for the basics of ICOs check out the course below from Jonny Fry. The course is clear and concise and provides a great intro into ICO and Investment. “Jonny Fry is a blockchain, crypto economics, ICO and funds specialist, with over 25 years experience as CEO of an asset management business which he floated in London with over £1 Billion under management . His focus has been on the dynamics of financial innovation, advising on ICOs, Tokenomics, Crypto funds,he is a regular speaker and writer on these topics and is co-founder of TeamBlockchain Ltd.“

Jelurida, Nxt, Ardor, Ignis, Mumbo Jumbo

November 22, 2017

7271

ICO

seandotau

When you first come across new words and logo’s in the crypto space it feels so confusing. It’s also difficult to understand especially when you come across something like this: “The token sale itself will be conducted on the Nxt blockchain platform. JLRDA tokens are not transferable or tradable between accounts and for 1 JLRDA, the crowdsale participant will receive 1 IGNIS at the time of Ardor Genesis Snapshot. For 1 JLRDA token the participants in the IGNIS crowdsale will receive 1 IGNIS coin at the time of the Ardor Genesis Snapshot. The last batch of 100 M JLRDA tokens will be reduced by up to 20 M tokens allocated by Jelurida for promotional and marketing use.” What the heck? Then read this summary here. Even Arthur Penzl who provides updates from the Nxt community states: $NXT, $IGNIS, $ARDR — picking the right one to invest in IS complicated. Hopefully the picture below will help. Jelurida is the over arching corporate identity that owns the IP rights of Nxt. Nxt is a platform written in Java and is it’s own blockchain. Ardor is like Nxt 2.0. It incorporates the fundamental features of Nxt but has extra features such as messaging and voting […]

Why you should give one IOTA about IOTA

November 3, 2017

8909

ICO

seandotau

IOTA is a public distributed ledger technology that instead of using a blockchain, uses a tangle of blocks. The diagram below shows how this tangle of block is usually represented. Taking this one step further, these blocks only have one transaction within so infact, it’s not really a tangle of blocks but a tangle of transactions. Hence IOTA quotes “As such it has no Blocks, no Chain and also no Miners.” Wait, no miners? How are transactions confirmed? How is consensus achieved? Each transaction that is made on the network has to confirm 2 previous random transactions in a process called “tip selection”. This effectively means the users are the miners and this removes the power struggle that is seen in Bitcoin where different parties are motivated by different factors leading to lots of infighting and disagreements. This also means there is no need for transaction fees. Let’s take a step back and learn about the name. What does IOTA mean? IOTA is the 9th letter of the Greek alphabet. It means a small or tiny amount. As an acronym, IOT represents the Internet Of Things. The “A” could mean Architecture, Array, Application, take your pick. Because IOT devices are […]

Is there a right way or a wrong way to write ICO whitepapers?

October 24, 2017

7427

ICO

seandotau

I’ll never forget the first whitepaper I read in the blockchain space. No chocolate fish for guessing which one. It was the Bitcoin whitepaper of course! I was procrastinating mainly because I was scared. Scared because the 9 pages felt like hieroglyphics. In the end I bit the bullet and when my daughter was born in September 2014 I took 4 weeks off to read the whitepaper that I had mentally prepared myself for. Oh, I also helped my wife out as well :). The 9 pages to 2 hours to read but 2 months to digest. I knew the words I was reading but couldn’t understand what I was reading. Fast forward 3 years and I never thought I would be reading 2-3 whitepapers a week. Anyone can read whitepapers and the average length these days ranges from 10-30 pages. They come in all shapes and sizes. There’s the traditional academic 1 or 2 column with an abstract whitepaper such as Siacoin, IOTA and Augur. These are characterised by including lots of mathematics and black print. Storj lived a little dangerously and added colour to the traditional academic paper. This was only to the diagrams though. Humaniq expanded on this and put […]

Decentralized storage wars. Storj v Sia v Filecoin v Maidsafe

October 3, 2017

5469

ICO

seandotau

If you have an interest in decentralized storage you would have heard of the likes of Storj, Siacoin, Maidsafe and Filecoin. There are numerous articles comparing various ones to each other which I’ll highlight below but won’t go over. This article focuses on the token supply, circulation and rate of issuance of Storj, Siacoin and Filecoin. First of all, to get a background on Sia, Storj, Maidsafe and IPFS/Filecoin read the links below: Nov 2015: Although a bit dated this link is a great read from Taek, a Sia core developer/founder, writing about Sia v Storj v Maidsafe. What’s also neat is Shawn Wilkinson (super3) the co-founder of Storj joins in and provides constructive counter arguments in favour of Storj. Mar 2016: Taek provides a view of Sia v IPFS here. Apr 5 2017: Bitcointalk discussion on Storj v Sia May 19 2017: Here is a background into Storj providing a useful 1 paragraph comparison to Sia and Maidsafe. May 31 219: A good discussion on Sia v Storj. Can they work together long term? Jul 4 2017: This brief article pitches Sia and Storj head to head. Jul 8 2017: Another article comparing Sia v Storj v Maidsafe Aug 4 […]

How to run a second ICOs and keep the supply* the same

September 28, 2017

7694

ICO

seandotau

Storj is developing a next-generation cloud storage solution. They ICO’d on 19 May 2017 but they actually did one prior on the 18th July 2014. This is a summary tracking the supply of the old tokens to the new tokens. Executive Summary Total initial supply 500M *The supply was actually reduced in the second ICO by ~75M as a sweetener. Current total supply: ~425M Distribution model? They’re working on it. A closer look. Here is a link to the original “crowdsale”. Total Supply: 500,000,000 Distribution: 70% bitcoin sales, 15% for developers, 15% for the community They accepted bitcoins and used Counterparty to create and manage the SJCX tokens. Note that in their second ICO they did a conversion to ERC20 tokens. ie they used the Ethereum platform instead. Reasons for this change: 1) Bitcoin fees were too high. 2) long transaction confirmation times. The conversion from SJCX to STORJ was done on a 1:1 ratio. They ended up receiving 910 bitcoins to this address 132aBrspLgL54cm9eQfGNFLGqXwBRQrugc worth ~$460,000USD. Bitcoin back then was around $500USD! This meant that 910 btc x 38,500 stjx/btc = ~35M tokens created. There were a lot of people on bitcointalk wondering what would happen to the rest of the […]

Scanning ICO contracts on Etherscan

September 22, 2017

9520

ICO

seandotau

When you see announcments like Monaco ICO final stats: 71,392 ETH raised (~US$25m), 8752 investors, average price paid per MCO: US$2.88, MCO created: 9,476,400 or The Bancor TGE attracted 10,885 buyers with more than 15,000 transactions sent to the address for purchases during the event do you ever wonder where the numbers come from? Do you ever wonder how you could cross check these numbers if you had a spare 5 mins in your day? I did and here is how. Because money is being poured into smart contracts in the form of ether to the Ethereum network, you need to grab the Ethereum blockchain in order to query or inspect it. Online service such as Etherscan are great as well. In fact, I’ll be using Etherscan in my examples here. The first step is to find the ICO smart contract address. Etherscan provides an easy way to search for a particular ICO. The tricky part is that the initial ICO contract address might not be readily apparent. It takes a bit of digging around. For example the Monaco ICO deposit contract address is 0xacE62F87aBE9F4eE9fd6E115D91548DF24ca0943. For Bancor, it’s 0x1f573d6fb3f13d689ff844b4ce37794d79a7ff1c Once you have the contract address, in the case of Monaco […]

Making Money with Monaco (ICO)

September 19, 2017

6181

ICO

seandotau

My interest in crypto debit cards comes from the desire to be able to buy my groceries. That would definitely be one measure of success in the utility of bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. However, companies like SpectroCoin can be quite expensive in terms of fees and lately have been reducing their limits based on “the change in European Union Regulation 648/2012, known as the 4th Money Laundering Directive (4MLD), which will take force on June 26, 2017” and in the latest news “will no longer maintain or issue Visa Prepaid Cards to cardholders outside of the European territory.” The Monaco project certainly looked interesting on the outside. That was until I dug a little deeper and it didn’t start well. The Whitepaper Accessing it A whitepaper is usually the first point of call when trying to understand an ICO but it was no where to be found on Monaco’s website. Googling it revealed a copy though. Why would the whitepaper be removed? Apparently: “Whitepaper was a Token Sale document and the Sale finished in June. We will replace it with a more updated research paper soon that includes new information.” Should I rephrase the above to: “We don’t have actually […]