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FinTech

John McAfee Interview: Antivirus, Equifax 137 Million User Hack, US Banks & Bitcoin to $500K

Published Sept 7 2017, Romania

Not feeling so well today so I rested and watched an interview with John McAfee about the state of Cyber Security. John is an intelligent, outspoken character who started McAfee antivirus back in the 80s, then I remember him being in the news, on the run and being deported regarding his neighbor in Belize being murdered a few years ago. (He appears suspicious.) Now heā€™s peddling security software again, and crypto opportunities. I took some hopefully pertinent notes from the talk.


Interviewer: Whatā€™s the state of Cyber Security in 2017?

John M: We have none.

While you are watching your phone, your phone is watching you. This is just a fact of life.

The anti-virus paradigm is no longer functional, it doesnā€™t work. And Iā€™m the person who invented it. Viruses arenā€™t the problem, hackers are. Itā€™s a reactive paradigm, and thatā€™s the problem. We have to become proactive. (Heā€™s developing a product ā€œSentinelā€ to ID the hackers coming in.)

Smart phones are spy devices. Google: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. –Ridiculous.

Everybody exercises different degrees of privacy hundreds of times a day. We are humans, we live in an imperfect world.

On Cryptocurrency:

How secure is Bitcoin? I think itā€™s extremely secure. On the other hand, people put crypto wallets on their smartphones, and over half of smartphones are infected with key-logging software.

Pornography–the first thing the site does is download a rooting software. After the jailbreak, they download a keylogger. Only takes seconds, and from that point on, somebody is watching. People pay the porn sites to push keylogging software on to phones.

If you have an online wallet, an online account, the next day your money may disappear.

We all have secrets, yes? So why are we giving our data to companies?

Why do we use the cloud? It makes life easy, I can access my data from anywhere. The Cloud is OK for some types of things.

Bitcoin is a New Paradigm of Money

Whether bitcoin or Ethereum or Monero or whatever, you need to Educate yourself, it is easy to lose your money in Crypto

Offline wallet: trezor, seed keys display on the trezor, not on desktop. Donā€™t keep your wallet on any device.

Future security: Look 4 hacker, not the malware.

The world is on a dangerous cliff. Weā€™re allowing these devices to master us, not the other way around.

At least a dozen big nation States have the power to bring down another nationā€™s power grid.

I didnā€™t hear anything about the $500K for bitcoin in the talk, but I may have dozed off when he said it. I did find he said that in twitter in July of 2017: ā€œI Promise to ā€˜Eat My Own Dickā€™ If Bitcoin Doesnā€™t Reach 500k In Three Yearsā€Ā  Seems like just a bit of click bait.

Categories
FinTech

Some Items to Research When Studying Altcoins

 Investing Checklist
Investing Checklist

What Are some good rules of research when looking at an Altcoin?

I was watching the above video, by Carter Thomas, a software programmer who’s knowledgeable about finance and marketing, and he mentions a number of useful indicators of a solid company:

    1. Team: who’s working on it?
    2. Community: what sense of a gathering is there?
    3. Wallet: do they have one, and is it easy to use?
    4. Do they outreach and care about everybody?
    5. Revolution Piece: Do they talk about social issues?

For myself, I like to check out GitHub to see what the source code says: is there any developer/project activity, is the coin just a copy or fork of another coin?

Categories
Education FinTech Leela

Investing Advice: You Become What You Meditate On!

When I think of investing, I think of Warren Buffet.

Invest in yourself
Invest in yourself

Currently I’ve been studying bitcoin and watching Michael from Boxmining and Andreas Antonopoulos on youtube alot.

Boxmining and Andreas Antonopoulos on youtube
Boxmining and Andreas Antonopoulos on youtube

Then I think, but I spend time every day in meditation as well. So that’s also a kind of investing. Adi Da, my spiritual teacher, says “You become what you meditate on.” Therefore, study or meditate on something good, contemplate someone who is doing good!

You become what you meditate on. This Law summarizes the Process whereby I become your unique Advantage. As My devotee, although you perceive beings and things and phenomena of all kinds, you are in Communion with Me. As My devotee, you are concentrated in Me. In the midst of all that arises, you constantly give your attention to Me through your practice of the Way of the Heart. When you Contemplate Me with devotion, you are Contemplating the Divine Reality, Which is Full, Perfect. When you feelingly-Contemplate Me, you are Contemplating the complete Divine Revelation.

from Avatar Adi Da Samraj

Categories
FinTech

What Is Bitcoin?

  1. A decentralized peer-to-peer network (the bitcoin protocol)
  2. A public transaction ledger (the blockchain)
  3. A set of rules for independent transaction validation and currency issuance (consensus rules)
  4. A mechanism for reaching global decentralized consensus on the valid blockchain (Proof-of-Work algorithm)

from: Mastering Bitcoin, 2ed, Chapter 1, by Andreas Antonopoulos

It’s always a lot easier for me to “anchor” an idea to make it stick, when I have some pictures to go with it!

Categories
FinTech

How To Stop Paying Coinbase Fees

I watched a youtube video recently which told how to do it free. Basically, coinbase also runs gdax, which is a more complicated interface but has the same capabilities as coinbase. So create an account with gdax, and save a few percent with every altcoin transaction. (You can save 4% by using a bank account rather than a credit/debit card.)

Hello People. I am totally new in bitcoin. I downloaded Exodus, and when I simulator a bitcoin transaction of 0.001 (send) and it says that the fees are 21$. Is it correct? for sending 4$ I have to pay 21$?

–Taken from an Exodus forum on Tuesday, July 22, 2017.

Unfortunately, the bitcoin price of a transaction is rather a lot nowadays, because the blockchain is getting more transactions per 10 minutes than will fit in the blockchain. Hopefully, the segwit code will help alleviate that in the short run, and lightning will work in the long run.