So you've heard about Bitcoin and you are wondering how you can make money from it?

The first thing you will read about is 'mining' and that is not nearly as productive as it used to be, also you need to take into account the price of mining equipment, then there is cloud mining which I've not yet invested in (and am very sceptical of). You could just hoard Bitcoin and wait for them to raise in value, but I think its a good idea to diversify.

So a good choice is to invest in assets which produce a dividend, these assets are 5 that I personally have invested in and would recommend for various reasons, but the main things to be considered when buying an asset are : The development team behind the asset, The ROI, The ease of use, Potential for capital gains. I have rated each asset on these factors.


So  without any further adieu and in no particular order here are the Crypto S.I Top 5 for Autumn 2015

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Dash Masternode    

At a cost of 1000 Dash which is the equivalent of 10.2369BTC ($2405), This is by far the most expensive asset on this list, however it also has the best development team behind it. Dash formerly known as Darkcoin is the 6th most popular of all the alternatives to Bitcoin and has remained popular thanks to leading features such as DarkSend and InstantX which provide anonymity and near instant transactions respectively. Also bear in mind that (allegedly) Bitshares and Ripple both have the means to manipulate their market value so that would make Dash 4th.

A Masternode is an integral part of the network and can be set up quite easily by following one of the various tutorials that can be found online (Here's the best one), once you have staked the needed 1000 Dash you can expect to earn DASH daily, The figures vary depending on many things but I calculate it to be around 15-25% per year. 

There are some people who are getting together on the Dash Forum here and sharing the cost of a masternode, so you could own a 10th of a masternode for 100Dash, this is a good idea, but you need to be aware of who you are investing with and do your due dilligence.

The development team behind the asset : 8/10
The ROI   6/10
The ease of use 3/10
Potential for capital gains 8/10
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BtcPop are a UK based P2P lending company, but that's not anything unique. The Thing about these guys is that they offer shares in their own platform, This is exciting, as short term loans is a massive industry in UK let alone worldwide.

On the BTCPop platform you can buy shares in both BTCPOP and Ardeva (A well known ID verification company), The dividend is paid directly into your btcpop wallet on the 1st of every month and you are free to withdraw it immediately or buy more shares. Since being introduced the shares have risen in value, and in a blossoming industry I can only see this trend continuing. 
Dividends are a direct portion of the revenues that these companies make.

The development team behind the asset : 8/10 (ArdevA 9/10)
The ROI   4/10 (ArdevA 2/10)
The ease of use 8/10
Potential for capital gains 8/10 (ArdevA 9/10)

 *between starting this article and publishing it I realised Btc pop shares had almost doubled in value during the month of September, and Ardeva shares had quadroupled, Looking at the lack of shares for sale I can see the prices only rising especially when Ardeva start paying a worthy dividend (although exactly how they will monetise is a bit of a mystery to me, the same was said about Google in 2001)
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These next two assets come from the NXT ecosystem, which as far as I'm concerned is the first and still the best Bitcoin 2.0 project. NXT is the only real competitor to the much anticipated Ethereum, although they are quite different, NXT benefits from having a fully functional decentralised platform, There are loads of features of NXT that you may find interesting such as proof of stake, NXT-Freemarket (which is a working competitor to OpenBazaar) and the amazing 'Supernet'.

The best thing about NXT is that it is decentralised, but you do not need to download an entire blockchain to use it. The 2 assets that I've chosen on the Nxt platform are both available on the asset exchange and they are:
MMNXT 979292558519844732 assetid - A market making assets which makes a steady daily profit, dividend is paid weekly every friday. It's around 0.5%-1% depending on how much money the fund has generated.
Coinomat 7474435909229872610 assetid - A rival to the heavily funded Shapeshift.io, Coinnomat is a simple hassle free way to trade crypto currencies without having to sign up and trades are completed within minutes. The interface (website) is arguably not as slick as Shapeshift, and the platform definitely has less funding, but we can all buy into this platform for as little as we like, whereas Shapeshift is having funding rounds via Bnktothefuture with a much higher minimum buy-in. A small fee is charged per transaction and a percenttage of this is is given as a dividend to shareholders, this is not always paid on time and obviously would change depending on the success of the service.

The development team behind the asset : MMNXT 7/10 (Coinomat 6/10)
The ROI   MMNXT 7/10 Coinomat(6/10)
The ease of use 8/10    -- tutorial can be found here 
Potential for capital gains 8/10 (Coinomat 9/10)
* I have given Coinomat a 9/10 mostly based on my view that trading between cryptocurrencies in this frictionless way will see a huge explosion in traffic sooner or later, no matter which altcoin comes to prominence, even if one of these recently touted nonsensical bank sponsored blockchain projects achieves critical velocity 

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 So that's my top 5 for autumn 2015, this is by no means an exhaustive list of whats available, and I invite you to comment on any that I've missed out, I also want to give a special mention to SuperNet and CounterParty as they are introducing plenty of new assets, It's also worth noting that Some very exciting projects Pangea, Augur and Ethereum are nearing completion and may well feature next season, if you want to be ahead of the game then check out the links.

I also have not included BTCPop trusted investment pool, which is guaranteed and pays out every few days.

This is my own personal view, I do hold shares in each of the assets, and you should take financial advice before risking your funds as their value can go up or down. I think that qualifies as a responsible disclaimer.

Follow us on twitter @crypto_si

Thanks for reading and good luck!

So you've heard about Bitcoin and you are wondering how you can make money from it? The first thing you will read about is 'minin...


What is MIM? It's known by various acronyms, and it means Man In The Middle.

MIM is a type of scam which some clever idiot decided to attempt to use against me. I was quite lucky not to get caught out as it was only the local bitcoin feedback system that saved me from losing £2000.

So here's how it works,
   The scammer makes a request with me at the same time they contact someone else and offer to sell them something, they then tell their buyer to deposit the payment into my account, Once the money has been deposited into my account I will send the scammer Bitcoin thinking that everything is fine and it's just another trade, however the scammers buyer will never recieve the goods they have paid the scammer for, and when they go to the police to get some much deserved justice, they only have my bank details as evidence, I dont know what happens to me after that but I'd assume I would have to re-imburse the scammed buyer and try to get my Bitcoin back from the scammer, which as we all know is nigh-on impossible.

So how did I avoid it?
  I was fortunate that The LocalBitcoin Platform is very difficult to scam with, There were a few factors in the trade which raised my suspicion, firstly the scammers account was under 24hrs old, a big red flag. Secondly The scammer seemed very very keen to do the deal off the localbitcoins platform, and wanted the bitcoins released extremely quickly. Finally during the negotiations of the deal, an alert appeared above the users name stating that they had violated terms of service, Together all these factors are enough to alert a seller to be EXTRA vigilant, and usually it would spell the end of any negotiations for most traders. On this occasion I was too fast to hand over my bank details so the scammers buyer did actually deposit £2000 into my account, she had no clue what bitcoin was!

How did things end?
  My situation got particularly complicated because the scammers buyer actually paid the money to me, at this point I needed to find the buyer and return their money, When I asked the scammer for ID they sent me the victims passport so luckily I had enough information to actually find the victim and contact her, the problem was that she was not home when I called but I was convinced at this point she had been scammed. I then had to be certain that whoever came forward claiming to be the victim was indeed the victim and not the scammer.



How can this be avoided in the future?
  I'm not too sure it can be stopped fully, but I think a good way to protect yourself is to ask for the 'buyer' to send you a picture of the receipt used to deposit funds, and have this receipt say TO PURCHASE BITCOIN, surely no 'victim' will be silly enough to buy something and write something totally different on the receipt when requested to. In this situation personal ID is really no protection at all.

What is MIM? It's known by various acronyms, and it means Man In The Middle. MIM is a type of scam which some clever idiot decided to...

I am thinking of making a video to help people with lending techniques for both btcjam and bitlending club. They will be based on the techniques that I'm using which have been successful for me.

I had a conversation about it with someone on google hangouts just now, so though I would share my advice via my blog for the rest of you:



hi
yes, ok I was thinking of making a little video for youtube on the subject
my methods were initially to follow some of the top investors, then I started to follow everyone I invested in, spending 0.01 on each investment (1BTC total -100 loans)
Avoiding rep-loans and people with accounts less than 3months old
people who paid on the due day would be unfollowed and people who paid far in advance would be noted and I would continue to follow them. 
I then invest more in early payers and nothing in late payers, after 1-2 months of this I have a core investment base of about 50-60 borrowers, and when I get an email about their listings I invest in them. once per week I may look for new borrowers. 
I was hit by investing in people in ltcGear, so in future I will be wary of going too heavily into one loan type. I hope this helps.

--------------------------------------
This of course is just the tip of the Iceberg of my investing knowledge, so I will try to get a video together sometime this month, if there is anything in particular that any of you would like to learn about, dont hesitate to drop me a message and I will add it to my plans.

I am thinking of making a video to help people with lending techniques for both btcjam and bitlending club. They will be based on the techni...

I have been meaning to blog about BTCJam for some weeks now, but i've been to interested in funding loans and watching payments come in to bother to share my experience with you all.

I do somewhat regret my decision not to blog earlier as since I've started to use BTCJam I've also found out and started to invest in Bitlending club.  It does mean that I will be giving a slightly less glowing reference to BTCjam in light of using it's far superior rival BitLending Club.



Anyway let my critique begin........

BTCJam is a crowdfunding platform for people and organisations to take out loans. These loans are funded by the crowd, made up by investors (like me) who are willing to invest and wait for the repayments (with interest of course). The beauty of this concept is that it means that the banks and payday loan companies can keep their noses out of our financial affairs, and hopefully people can borrow at lower than loan shark rates and people can invest with a better return than the nonsense 5% you will get on an isa this year. Of course holding an isa is a lot easier than searching through the bogus loans on BTCJam to find the gems, but in the last 2 months (which was also my first two months) I've made over 30% ROI, unheard of in banking terms and possibly a little far fetched in stocks and equities. also take into account i'm not an experienced lender and i've fallen foul to plenty of fraudulent loans.

Fraudulent Loans......
I don't want to harp on about the level of fraud found on this site, because it really isn't a deal breaker for me, there a few really annoying things about the site which I will get onto in a bit, but generally, the fraud loans are quite easy to spot and haven't proven enough of a problem to take my impressive earnings down too badly. Let me clarify a fraudulent loan is a loan made by a fraudster impersonating another person, not a loan where the person loses interest and leaves the site or doesn't bother to return, or where they run into trouble and then simply run away. Often investors on BTCJam label people as fraudsters just because the loans gone bad, I call that being a sore loser. :)

The main problem with BTCJam is that the site itself takes payment from the moment the loan is activated, so even if the loan is fraudulent then BTCJam get paid, this is obviously bad as it means they have less incentive to weed out the bad loans before they are offered and financed. Not to suggest that BTCJam don't care if it's users get defrauded or not, but it's clear that they still get paid.

Censorship.......
The biggest bug I have to bear with Btcjam is the level of censorship on the site, they won't allow the sharing of websites or the use of certain words in your comments and loan applications, while they will cite that this is to 'protect you', it's clearly just a way of them trying to have a little more control over users communication than they should be attempting to gain, this for me is the single reason for me to ever leave the site (won't happen anytime soon though, the profit is too good). I get the feeling that if BTCJam become successful they will go the way of Apple, Paypal and HP and but users a distant second to profits. But that's all speculation.

Verification.................
BTCJam does the usual KYC stuff, I've already uploaded enough information to them to make stealing my 'identity' a piece of cake, I'm not to clingy with my 'identity' so it's ok, but it may prove a problem for others who want to borrow on the site. however I cannot see a way around this style of verification and the BTCjam system is quick and painless, I had my documents verified within 48 hours.

All in all BTCJam has become one of my most used sites, and a great place to meet new people and learn about what's happening in the crypto world, and while I don't feel it's the best in it's genre, I feel you should all definitely sign up and make a bit of interest on there. So from me it gets a solid 3/5

I have been meaning to blog about BTCJam for some weeks now, but i've been to interested in funding loans and watching payments come in ...

So you've decided to buy Bitcoin, and you have no idea how to get your hands on the stuff?



I was thinking about this today and decided to write a quick blog post to explain to people (beginners in particular) what they should expect from the journey into Bitcoin.

This is only for people in the UK, if you are based outside of the UK then I suggest you google 'BUY BITCOIN in xxx' obviously replace xxx with your country :) Also this has been written for OCT 2014, things change, and they change quickly so I will try to blog about this once every few months.

Buying Anonymously......


1)LocalBitcoins.com

If you don't want to give anyone your name, address, date of birth, bank details, D.N.A or shoe size, then simply open an account with these guys. you can chose to verify what you want and you can use TOR with this website. Look for adverts selling via cash deposit or cash in person. Once you've opened a trade you can talk to the seller and arrange to meetup or get their bank details to make the deposit. Crypto S.I sell on this platform and haven't had any problems buying and selling via this method. If you don't want to meet anyone then cash deposit is perfect.


2) BitBargain


The main issue I have with BitBargain is that there are not enough sellers and so prices are not quite as competitive as LocalBitcoins, however I've not personally used this service so I can't really comment, but as far as I know it's good and worth checking out.


Forfeiting your privacy...

If you are prepared to part with your privacy then there are some very good services available, usually these are not instant like the anonymous options but prices are usually slightly better 5%-10% discount roughly. There are some very professionally run exchanges available to use, I have picked out 3 which I am signed up to. Be ready to sign up and upload your personal identification documents. Also at the moment there are no UK banks taking payments on behalf of exchanges so you will have to pay SEPA or international transfer fees to upload your money.

1) Coinfloor

My last blog post was all about these guys, this is my usual exchange of choice, almost 1 year old and a really good service. The 2 best features are the simple clean interface, and the decent order book size.

2)Bitstamp

The Standard by which ALL exchanges are set. As far as I'm concerned Bitstamp was the first serious Bitcoin exchange, does that mean it's still the best? It definitely has the biggest order book of the 3 exchanges I use, and has all the security features that you would expect from a Bitcoin exchange. The only thing I'm not comfortable with is that the exchange is not UK based which does make me wonder what would happen if you had a problem with the service, but saying that I'm not aware of anyone who has had any problems with them, and considering how well used they are this is a great achievement. Sign up, upload your docs and buy or sell bitcoin.

3)Netagio


Netagio, the new kids on the block, but the first to have recognised standards implemented and audited, a very professional service, based in the UK. A decent sized order book considering how new they are, and they sell both Bitcoin(XBT) and Gold(Xau) on the same platform which is a nice twist considering most Bitcoin believers are also fans of gold. I rang these guys to ask a question, Local rate number and somebody answered, and to top it all off she answered my question, no holding or transferring or answer machines. I will do a full review on these guys soon.

4)Bittylicious


Bittylicious is not an exchange, but it is a way to buy Bitcoin quickly and easily. Unfortunately you do need to part with privacy for many of their options, but they provide so many different ways to pay, and most of them will have you receiving your coins very quickly. If you only want a small amount then you can buy anonymously. The prices are not as good as the exchanges, but for beginners Bittylicious is a good place to start. They also allow you to buy quite a few altcoins.


Best of the REST...

Basically, there is no 'rest'! Apart from mining (which is pretty much for hobbyists only), the only other ways of buying Bitcoin are usually too expensive for what they are worth or are provided by smaller lesser known companies. Other companies like Circle, don't accept deposits from UK. There are new companies cropping up all the time, so if I've missed anyone you feel is worth a mention then feel free to message me, or comment below.

Buying from Crypto SI

I Have an advert on Localbitcoin, you can buy from me directly here: Or click the advert on the right 

For latest news, follow my twitter here: https://twitter.com/Crypto_SI

Thanks for reading and welcome to the wonderful world of Bitcoin!

So you've decided to buy Bitcoin, and you have no idea how to get your hands on the stuff? I was thinking about this today and dec...

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