What are Yubikeys?

These Yubikeys are super useful. They are a hardware two factor authentication (2FA) product. This is the most secure 2FA option you can have.

Basically if you tie this with your Google account or crypto exchange accounts, NO ONE can steal your stuff even if they had your password and access to your phone.

Because with a security key like this one, they need to have physical access to your Yubikey AND know your password in order to access your stuff.

How can you win one?

Like before, we will hold a random drawing. This is how you can qualify:

• Write a review for one of the products listed here: https://cryptocanary.app/discover/browse.php
• OR submit a new product here: https://cryptocanary.app/add/

Doing EITHER one of the above actions will qualify you for the drawing.

We will draw the winner from the next 30 people who qualify. (So you have a 1 in 30 chance of winning)

Hurry though! Contest closes when 30 people qualify!

Note: if you live outside of the U.S. then I’ll just send you equivalent payment via PayPal/crypto.

Have any questions? Ask us in our Telegram group!

The post Yubikey giveaway contest by CryptoCanary! appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year everyone! Thank you for being a part of our extended crypto family. 

As a token of our gratitude, we’re going to run a giveaway contest with Kong until 1/1/2020. 

What is Kong? 

They are gorgeous physical notes that look like fiat cash notes, but they have a fixed # of Kong tokens associated with each note (and time-locked via smart contracts). 

Their notes come in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, and 500. Since the Kong tokens are time-locked inside, you can carry it in your wallet and give it away to others as if it were fiat cash. 

You can scan any note via NFC to verify how many Kong tokens are on that particular note. See the Kong whitepaper for more info.

How many are we giving away?

Kong has graciously agreed to supply us with 6 prizes to give out:

1. A Grand Prize winner will get a Starter Pack with 1, 5, 20, and 100 Kong notes.
2. 5 other winners will get a Single Pack with a 1 Kong note.
3. Winners will be randomly drawn from everyone who qualifies. 

I want some! How can I qualify? 

Super easy to qualify, just complete these 3 steps:

1. Sign up for their email list here.
2. Follow their Twitter account.
3. You must have an account on CryptoCanary as well.

Want extra entries into the contest drawing? 

• Just write 1 new review on CryptoCanary and we’ll give you additional entries associated with your email address!

Have any questions? 

Feel free to hit us up on Telegram @cryptocanaryapp or shoot us an email team@cryptocanary.app.

Best wishes and good luck!

The post Holiday giveaway contest with Kong (physical crypto cash)! appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.

To our broader crypto community, we have an exciting announcement to share with you today! We’re working with CryptoTrader.Tax to introduce their hassle-free and affordable crypto tax software to you all and they’re also our first sponsor. 

If you’ve visited CryptoCanary recently, you may have noticed CryptoTrader.Tax banners on every project review page. If you click on any of those banners, it will bring you straight to their website. 

Additionally, they have graciously offered to all of our members a 10% discount on their products. Just use the code: “CRYPTO10” when you check out to receive the discount. This is a limited time offer (lasts until mid-December) so if you’re looking for software to help you clean up your crypto trades before the tax deadline next April, then you should definitely purchase one of their options before the offer ends. 

p.s. David Kemmerer, the CEO of CryptoTrader.Tax recently appeared on Pomp’s podcast Off the Chain. You can listen to the episode where they discuss the latest regarding crypto taxes here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/blockworks-group/off-the-chain/e/65297010

What is CryptoTrader.Tax?

CryptoTrader.Tax is a simple yet powerful online tool that helps you figure out the gains/losses that you’ve accrued during your crypto trading/investing. 

First, you import your trades by connecting to your exchanges’ APIs or manually via CSV. Second, you add in any potential transactions that are considered income. Then third, you review the results and then generate the Form 8949 that you need to send to the IRS. It’s as simple as 1, 2, and 3! 

For more advanced users, have no fear, CryptoTrader.Tax can handle any situation. It supports 35+ exchanges, but for anything else, you can input those transactions using their manual exchange template. Furthermore, you can easily select from 3 different accounting methods to choose from to minimize your tax liability – FIFO, LIFO, and HIFO. And finally, besides the standard Form 8949, you can also download a wide range of useful reports and even direct import files for both TurboTax and TaxAct! All of these features make your life much simpler if you require some flexibility for your bitcoin tax reporting. 

I’m interested, how much does it cost? 

One of the best parts about CryptoTrader.Tax is how affordable their prices are! Their lowest tier is only $49 and their highest tier is $299 per tax season. The tiers vary mostly based on how many trades you have and the level of support that you desire. But of course, don’t forget the 10% off if you use our code: CRYPTO10 before mid-December! For more info about their tiers, check out their pricing page. 

The post We’ve partnered with CryptoTrader.Tax! appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.

As CryptoCanary grows, it becomes increasingly hard to maintain the high-quality level of user-generated content that you, our users, demand and deserve. 

Recently, we saw some groups come in and massively brigade their favorite projects. While their enthusiasm is definitely welcome, we noticed that many of them were just copy/pasting each others’ reviews or submitting very low-value content (i.e. “will go to the moon”, “team is great and project is great”).

Our preference is to not delete or otherwise interfere with any organic discussion/content submitted to our site. We prefer to let the community see a wide range of perspectives and let them judge others’ opinions for themselves. 

However, in some cases, the content itself is devoid of value and negatively drags down the overall quality of CryptoCanary. In those rare and limited cases, we will remove those user-submitted reviews. 

When removing content, we will do so transparently (OP will get notified via email) and we will only remove content that violates the rules outlined in our Community Guidelines. 

Please do check out the guidelines and let us know either in Telegram or via email if you have any questions or suggestions. 

Hope to see you around CryptoCanary and thanks for being part of the Flock!

P.s. do you think we missed any important rules in our guidelines? If so, please comment down below with what other rules we should add!

The post Check out our new Community Guidelines! appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.

If you haven’t been to CryptoCanary lately, we encourage you to take a look. We’re currently implementing a major site redesign to make it way more organized and easier to find the info you’re looking for!

New rating system

The most important change is a newly-activated rating-scale system. Instead of our old scale – which measured from Very Shady to Very Legit –  our new rating system measures three different, but very important, dimensions: Team Quality, Info Quality, and Track Record. 

These dimensions enable users to offer more nuanced insights when ranking crypto projects. It also provides fellow Canaries richer information about the projects. 

Specifically, reviewers can now offer ratings of 1-5 for the following dimensions: Team Quality, Info Quality, Track Record.  

What the additional dimensions measure 

As users rank each of these dimensions, we urge them to ask themselves the following  questions: 

Team Quality: Does the team behind the project reflect professionalism? Do they have the kind of relevant experience that makes you confident they can deliver? (Or are they mostly no-name, semi-anonymous people appear to be in it for a quick cash grab?) 

Info Quality: Are you able to find the information you are looking for on their website, whitepaper, etc. and is the information high-quality? Or are key insights missing or is it low-quality and loaded with errors or mistakes?

Track Record: Has the project delivered on its promises? If not, are there sufficient explanations why key milestones were missed? Or has the project been a series of missed deadlines undermining your confidence in the project? 

What about my old reviews and ratings?

As far as handling the old ratings/reviews, we gave it a lot of thought and decided a straightforward approach was best. 

Under the old model, if users rated a project 4 stars or “Lean Legit”, under the new system, this review would rate 4 stars for each of the 3 dimensions. In other words, your average rating in the old environment will stay the same. 

However, we recognize that users may feel their old reviews do not adequately capture the additional details such as Team Quality, Info Quality, or Track Record. So, we invite them to revisit the old ratings/reviews and update them where appropriate.  

Questions or suggestions? 

We’re always looking for ways to make our site more valuable to our users and we’re open to your questions and comments. Drop us a line at team@cryptocanary.app or reach out through our Telegram group https://t.me/cryptocanaryapp/.

The post We’ve improved our rating system! appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.

It was a far-ranging interview, covering an array of topics: from what got Ting interested in crypto-projects in the first place, to how his new rating platform works, to how his team manages “review-bombing”, and many other topics. 

It makes for an entertaining conversation and we encourage you to listen to the full  interview here.  However, below we’ve selected some choice segments to share with you.  

Brent: Can you give us the quick version of what CryptoCanary is, who you are, and how you ended up running the site?

Kevin: In terms of CryptoCanary, it’s a community-powered rating and review system. So, anyone can participate and share their wisdom and their experience about various projects in space to help each other out. 

I like to explain it as like Yelp, or TripAdvisor per se, for the crypto space. How did I come across this idea… I am actually a content creator. I have an educational media group called Bitcoin for Beginners, and we put out content teaching people about the tech side and the financial side of cryptocurrency. 

We have a pretty large beginner group and we found that a lot of them have fallen for shady projects or didn’t know how to do research properly, because all the information is spread out. You have to check Reddit,  Twitter, Bitcoin Talk, YouTube, etc. It’s a lot of information spread out everywhere, it’s hard to find and that makes it easy for people to fall for bad actors and scams. And so this was what spawned out of that idea. We trying to solve that problem.

Brent: Is there any contingency for a review attack? If somebody came in and was like, “No, we’re the Substratum community we hate Icon” or whatever?

Kevin: Yes, that is definitely a concern and we’ve seen that a couple of times.  

But we don’t want to stop that altogether because, ultimately, we want [CryptoCanary] to be open, along the ethos of crypto,  which is [about] decentralization and a democratic approach. 

There are some things we can do from the product side to help. For example, we show when reviewers join the site, and how many reviews they’ve posted. So, if you’re visiting this page like Substratum, for example, and you see 10 people in a row – who all just joined the site a week ago and all left only one review saying good things about Substratum – you instantly have a red flag.

The second point is, besides that, we also just want to let people easily see opinions or perspective on both sides. 

Like in Amazon, when I take a look at a product, I look at the best reviews and the worst reviews, take both of them into account and ask myself – after weighing them both together – if I want to buy that product or not. 

Similarly, we just want everything to be in the open and let people sift through them and make a decision for themselves. 

Brent: Have you run into any like any serious roadblocks along the way?

Kevin: We’re just continuing to improve [the site] and listen to the users – what they what to see on our site and then deciding how to improve it from their feedback. 

I’m redesigning the website right now, which is a perfect segue to the last thing I want to mention. We are currently working with a blockchain incubator program based in Phoenix called Polyient Labs. They’ve been really helpful. They’re helping us with is with the site redesign, strategy, analytics, and much more. 

Right now, when you look at our site, it works, but it looks like it was bootstrapped together. It looks like it’s just more for the functionality rather than optimized for aesthetics, branding, or giving people the right information. Polyient is helping us think UX first.  

Brent: What is your monetization method here? Is it going to end up becoming a subscription site?

Kevin: We are thinking about exploring a subscription model – not for users like you and I – but for businesses or projects on the other side that potentially want to interact with users. Or customize their profile page to drive people to the Telegram group. 

Another idea is that we can help companies run their rewards/marketing programs. This is not available yet because we’re trying to get to a solid state for our retail users and average crypto investors [first] before we try to explore various business models to monetize.

Brent: How many users do you now have? 

Kevin: So far we’ve collected about 400 registered users and I believe we have like 600 or so total reviews. But in terms of visitors, we have roughly 2000 a month. 

Brent: Do you have any competitors?

Kevin:  There are some, but they are primarily just crypto review sites. Those are the most generic ones, like some ICO-review review sites have expanded to review projects and exchanges and wallets and stuff like that. There are also some sites focused on scammy projects but their focus is a little more niche than ours. 

Brent:  Have I missed anything about CryptoCanary?

Kevin: Just one more thing I think would be great to mention about the project. 

So we have this community-source component, which is what we’ve been talking about so far. 

But another cool thing that I think might be useful for people like your listeners, is that we do want to have an automatic or programmatic approach to scrape stuff from websites. Or use APIs and grab information – like how active is [a project’s] GitHub development? Or how active are their social communities? 

Info like that can give a really high level [view] or metric that people can go and see the health of a project. So for example, let’s say they go to just some random project and see its GitHub activity. [If] their GitHub hasn’t been active, that could be a big discussion point.

Brent: Awesome. Thanks for coming on Kevin. I’m excited to see where [CryptoCanary] goes. 

The post Highlights: CryptoCanary interview on CryptoBasic podcast with Brent Philbin appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.

Some quick facts

• Energi is a blockchain project originally forked from DASH by founder TommyWorldPower
• Instead of ICOs, the team released NRG tokens in rounds of airdrops or “Earndrops” as they called them.
• The founder of the project TommyWorldPower is a cryptocurrency Youtuber.
• If you agree or disagree with Fez’s analysis of Energi, feel free to chime in here: https://cryptocanary.app/review/Energi

Whitepaper

The whitepaper starts by announcing their plans for world domination… sorry, I meant mass adoption. They intend to do this by absorbing and innovating on the most advanced technology in the space – smart contracts and infinite scalability – and implementing their four step solution: Trust, Awareness, Usability and Availability. 

The whole whitepaper is constructed of very nicely written fluff – there is not a single piece of substance in the entire 26 pages. Not a single piece of technical information. Just a lot of buzzwords and promises. Now I’m not asking for a 126 page whitepaper for which I need a PhD in computer science to understand, but I do want to know what their technical plan is and how they intend to achieve it.

An incubator program is also discussed to allow other projects to launch dapps on the Energi blockchain. These projects and end users will be supported by four programs run and created by the Energi team. These are:

• Energi Defense & Energi Bureau of Investigations
• Energi Development Portal
• Energi Marketing toolkit

Energi Defense & Energi Bureau of Investigations (EBI)

“Energi will work with relevant law enforcement agencies and as cryptocurrency exchanges and other institutions to provide more protection, wherever possible, for Energi projects to protect their respective users.”

What do they intend to do and how? If the project is going to aid law enforcement in tracking and identifying scammers and hackers, could they also enable the government to identify any or all users of their cryptocurrency? Or will they freeze the funds or even reverse the transactions? None of those scenarios sound very censorship resistant to me.

Economics

I have to admit, I am by no means an expert in economics, and the following section is purely my opinion – but the economics of the Energi project just doesn’t seem sustainable to me. I will go into my reasoning behind this shortly but first, let’s dive into some of the economics. 

The first thing to mention is the lack of a supply limit. Each and every month, the supply will grow by 1 million NRG tokens, with no hard cap in sight. At the time of writing this currently stands at 20,143,894 NRG (31^st August 2019). In under two years, their circulating supply will double.

The monthly emission is distributed as follows:

• 40% Treasury
• 40% Masternode owners
• 10% Staking Rewards
• 10% ‘Backbone’

Treasury

As for the Treasury, it’s not unusual for a project to have a Treasury like this. This allows them to control funds via on-chain governance or a DAO, which is made up of masternode owners who are able to vote on how funds are allocated. No complaints from me on this element of the payout breakdown.

Masternodes

When we take a look at the masternode figures, we see that the 40% or 400,000 NRG are distributed across all the masternodes, so we can expect the payout to owner to drop once more masternodes are added to the network.

The cost of owning a masternode at the time of writing is 10,000 NRG which works out at approximately $53,000. This figure is slightly less than mentioned in this Youtube video. The discrepancy is due to a dip in the market between recording the video and finishing this article. Now I’m not sure about the rest of you but I don’t have $53k that I could gamble with on a mid-cap project like Energi. 

Energi is the fourth most expense masternode to launch according to the masternode.online tables. But when you compare the ROI at 66% to that of DASH for example which is 6% you can see why people may want to own a masternode. If we think with a logical mindset, we should be asking ourselves if a 66% ROI is sustainable, and whether there is enough liquidity in the market to be able to sell if we decided we wanted out? With a current trading volume of $450k I would say that being able to sell is unlikely for most masternode owners (without taking a huge hit to their average price). 

Staking

Again, Energi comes in at number four, but this time on Stakingrewards.com’s list of highest staking yields. With a yield of 44%. This is derived from the 10% allocation every month – 100,000 NRG. The reward breakdown to individual stakers is dependent on the total amount staked across the network.

• Estimated Monthly Reward Rate = (user stake / total stakes) * 100k NRG

But again, having liquidity in the network is essential for selling any gains that you may be able to make, and even stakingrewards.com labels this one as ‘Risky’.

I suppose the benefit to staking Energi is you can stake as little as 1 NRG token. Now I have no idea why you would want to do that, but you technically could.

Backbone

The Backbone is the founder’s personal wallet, which will grow by 10% or 100,000 NRG indefinitely. At present that stands at 2,000,000 NRG, which can be spent by the founder without any oversight from the ‘DAO’. The white-paper justifies this as completely fair:

“The Backbone is allocated by Tommy, Energi’s creator. Its original design was to function as Tommy’s incentive to create Energi (as there was no ICO or premine, and Energi was fully funded by Tommy) At a modest 10% allocation, this was felt to be very reasonable to the early Energi community, who joined Energi from Tommy’s original Youtube fanbase.”

If the total supply had been capped and his funds locked away for a set amount of time, I may have accepted it more, but something just doesn’t sit well with me regarding a 10% cut of an undefined supply. Also this 10% is being allocated to one individual, not spread across the network. It is a potential 100,000 NRG that could be dumped on the market on a monthly basis. And at the current price, that represents a $500,000 dollar paycheck for Tommy every month.

Now I’m not saying that Tommy is gonna cash is his paycheck every month – he knows it would likely kill the project – but he could if he wanted to.

Another potential risk is that there’s nothing in place to stop him from taking a controlling share of the masternode network. Every month he could launch up to 10 masternodes. Again, he is unlikely to do this with his entire balance, but over time he could build a controlling share of votes across the network. Masternodes have only been active on the project for 11 months… How many of the 874 existing nodes are controlled by Tommy? 

But my main concern about NRG’s economics is its sustainability. You have 600,000 NRG released every month and a considerable amount of that could very easily be added to open market. The market is determined by supply and demand, and from the current liquidity, it seems like the selling pressure every month could quickly dwarf any buy pressure. So without a repeat of the 2017 altcoin season or some serious project hype, seems like continued negative price action is in store for the future of NRG.

Team

When you check out the Energi team page on their website, you may ask yourself why only 4 of the team members have a LinkedIn page tied to the website. With a little digging, you can find the other members of the team, but I found it somewhat disheartening that I had to dig so hard for it in the first place. 

Furthermore, not all of their team members are experienced in their respective fields. I personally look for team members that have come from some corporation that really shouts top-level professional. In case that’s not there, I would settle for another cryptocurrency project that’s had previous success. But in the case of Energi, we have neither, and this concerns me.

Of course please don’t take this as me saying that they don’t know what their doing. In fact, they are far more experienced than I am… but are they experienced enough for me to trust them with my money? I am afraid not.

Red Flags

There are two main things I found in my research that concerned me:

1. A post on Reddit creatively titled; ‘Where are my tokens?’ It discussed the lack of distribution of funds from the airdrop across all of the rounds undertaken. This lack of organization to release funds on time rings some alarm bells. This has been attributed to a delay in the audit required before sending funds. But regardless of the reason, it is not the best way to keep your community happy.
2. Their Github is dead. No commits in three months… I am hoping this is due to all the team working hard on implementing the smart contract protocol so it can be released on time in Q3 2019. But I am not sure if this will be the case.

Summary

I have to be honest and say I kinda feel bad about this article and the associated video. I am usually so positive about new blockchain/crypto projects. I particularly like fresh, interesting, and innovative projects, but in my personal opinion there is nothing like that in this project. And I am super concerned about their token economics model.

Of course as I have repeated several times this is my opinion, and rather than take my word to be final, I would prefer each and every reader that is considering investing in Energi to do their own due diligence.

If you have a differing opinion about the Energi NRG project and would like to share it with the rest of the crypto world, you can chime in here: https://cryptocanary.app/review/Energi

I have included a list of reference I used in my own research as a starting point for you below.

Resources: 

CoinmarketCap:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/energi/

Energi Website: 

Bitcointalk thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4912743

Energi Explorer:

https://explorer.energi.network/

Github:

https://github.com/energicryptocurrency

Energi whitepaper:

https://www.energi.world/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/energi_whitepaper_v1.62.pdf

Reddit: 

https://www.reddit.com/r/energicryptocurrency/

Engeri Blog: 

https://medium.com/energi

TommyWorldPower channel: 

https://www.youtube.com/user/Tommy77724/videos

LinkedIn profiles: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommy321/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlucchese/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolynseet/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbuechler/

Masternode stats:

https://masternodes.online/currencies/NRG/

The post Energi NRG project – Is it shady or legit? You decide! appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.

You can listen to the podcast here, or you can read the following transcript.

Q: Kevin, tell us more about yourself and your journey into the cryptocurrency and blockchain worlds.

A: I started off my career by working for several Silicon Valley startups for two years, and then I really got drawn into crypto in 2017. The biggest project at a time was Bitcoin.

That’s when I started a beginner-focused media and education company around mid 2017, and I just kind of went down the rabbit hole from there. 

So, fast forward a couple years. That’s what led me to create CryptoCanary, which is my current focus. On the highest level, I would describe it as TripAdvisor or Yelp for the crypto world.

Q: What was the inspiration behind CryptoCanary?

A: Well – the media and education company I mentioned – [it has] a pretty large community where people can chat with each other, share ideas and learn together. 

A lot of people were being targeted and affected by scams or just shady projects out there. We also found that there’s great info out there people are writing and sharing that helps prevent [investors] from falling to trap, but those are [harder] to find. 

And so that’s what we wanted to tackle with CryptoCanary. We wanted to help people get the information they need [to] become more informed about what they’re dealing with when they come across various [cryptocurrency] projects, products or services. 

Q: Are scams a big problem for the crypto world?

A: That’s really interesting. The crypto world is excited [about projects] because the represents freedom, decentralization and open access for everyone. And anyone from all around the world can get involved. 

That’s really the beauty of it. It also has other features like privacy, censorship resistance, which means anyone can build coins or hold coins, and no one can stop them. Those are good things.

But it also can be a honeypot for bad actors. Because they see this as a really easy, private and anonymous way to target people and steal their money. 

My point is: the [appealing] features of cryptocurrency can also make it easy for bad actors to take advantage of people.

Q: How does CryptoCanary aim to solve all these problems?

A: The high-level approach is that we bring together info in a very easily digestible format. Part of that comes from the information that we scrape from online sources and grab automatically from APIs. 

The user-generated portions [of CryptoCanary] are the reviews, the ratings and the shared experiences and wisdom.  The crypto world helping each other out, per se. 

That’s the whole point: we don’t want some central authority dictating everything for us, and dropping a lot of different rules and regulations to save people from scam projects. We in the crypto world can do this on our own and help each other out; help each other learn and avoid the bad stuff. That’s what we’re trying to enable.

Q: Is CryptoCanary just about helping people avoid scams or can it help crypto users in other ways?

A: That is a really great question. 

We don’t only help people focus on the bad stuff. On a general level, we just want to help people cut down time finding the information they need to make good decisions. So, you can find perspectives –  good and bad – in terms of how they view certain projects. And so that’s what we provide people besides just a way to avoid scams.

Q: I understand you’re working with Polyient Labs. Can you tell us a little bit about Polyient and what you’re doing with them?

A: Yeah, I’ve been really lucky to work with Polyient. They’re a great team. I actually met them at a conference in San Francisco and was able to connect with them and start a conversation. 

We ended up starting in their incubator program, based in Phoenix. And so far, it’s been amazing. They were super helpful with strategy, but also diving into smaller details like design, and so forth. So It’s been an absolute pleasure working with Nick [Casares] and Brad [Robertson] and other people on the team. And I can’t recommend them enough for other projects that are looking for a way to just grow, improve their company and accelerate their timeline.

Q: Where are you right now with CryptoCanary? And what are you focused on in the upcoming future?

A: Right now we’re working with Polyient to redesign and refresh our entire website and make it better, more clear, and optimize it in terms of various workflows. 

After that, we’re going to focus on growing our initial user base. We’re currently at roughly 400 registered users. After the design, rebrand, and refresh, we’re going to be exploring financing to accelerate our growth even more. And I’m excited to work with Polyient each step of the way.

A: You founded Bitcoin for Beginners. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that project and get into some of those details briefly?

A: What we do there is make beginner-focused content for people who are interested in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and want to learn more in a safe, friendly and focused way. 

We created free content for them, like “how-to” videos and articles, explainers, and various news coverage. And [we’ve] covered things on both the tech side and the financial side. 

We’ve grown that to an audience of over 100,000 users since we first started. We have a YouTube channel for long-form video content, a website full of written tutorials, and there’s a pretty large Facebook group as well. 

Q: What would you say is the biggest misconception or misunderstanding about Bitcoin? And how about cryptocurrencies in general? And what should the general public know about cryptocurrencies? 

A: I would say for Bitcoin, that is definitely the most popular project in this entire space. 

And [as far as] general misconceptions, I guess a lot of people might still think that it’s mostly used for dark-web stuff or illegal activity. But actually, research has shown that in recent years, people are actually using it for other means, like investments, store of value, and more. Even institutions are getting into Bitcoin.

So that’s really exciting for Bitcoin. And in terms of cryptocurrency in general, there’s definitely a lot of them out there, which can be kind of confusing for the general public. But a lot of companies are working hard to find good use cases for different crypto technology and token technology. And a lot of people investing their time and money to build up the space and make it more mature.

Q: How do you see this space evolving in the next 5 to 10 years,

A: That’s really exciting because Bitcoin has been around for about 10 years. This is still a really young space, and there’s a lot of room to grow and mature. 

I’m someone with a tech background, so I’m really excited to see [cryptocurrencies] improve the ability to scale and get a lot of people using it. We’ll be able to see a lot more use cases open up and just different ways of using the technology that we haven’t even imagined yet.

The post EPN Interview with CryptoCanary CEO, Kevin Ting appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.

What’s happening in Litecoin land?

For Litecoin enthusiasts and investors, there has been an abundance of news and drama in 2019. From the August halving to dusting attack to Miami Dolphins partnership to the recent news of Litecoin Foundation troubles, there has been plenty to digest and consider. In this article, we’re going to mainly focus on the Foundation funds drying up and seeming lack of development happening for the core protocol. 

First concern – development

Worries about Litecoin being a dead project reached a feverish pitch when a Litecoin foundation chat was leaked on Reddit. In the chat, you can see the top leaders, including Charlie Lee, lament that developers are not interested in working on the Litecoin protocol. They also mentioned that new technical updates such as Confidential Transactions were not moving along as fast as initially promised. With the Litecoin GitHub repository showing very few commits/updates in 2019, many Litecoin investors became worried that they are invested in an essentially dead project. 

Second concern – low funds

The Block Crypto also released a report in mid-August detailing the Litecoin Foundation’s funding issues and questioning how long of a runway they have left. Specifically, they noted that the LF has only received ~$575k worth of donations since mid-2017 with the vast majority of that coming from Charlie Lee. With the bear market + inability to generate revenue, the LF only had ~$96k left after Q1 of 2019 with no recourse in sight. This funding squeeze caused several foundation members to take a pay cut in Q1. Many investors are concerned because the LF is an integral component of driving adoption and progress for the Litecoin project. So having a way to fund their operations is important to ensure that the project continues to improve.

Charlie Lee responds

After these articles and reports dropped on social media, Charlie Lee quickly came out to address both concerns on Twitter.  

First, in terms of development, Charlie stated that during all of Litecoin’s existence, only a handful of developers (him and 5 others) have ever worked on Litecoin’s protocol. Furthermore, he explained why their GitHub page shows little activity even though they have been developing. Without going into too much technical detail, here are the 2 main reasons he shared:

1. They have been merging Bitcoin code to the Litecoin repo (remember, Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin). This action doesn’t generate new commit dates on GitHub though.
2. The main developer primarily codes on his personal codebase and then merges it with the main Litecoin repository at a later date. This will cause a flood of commits to happen all at once. 

Charlie mentioned that this has always been the operating procedure for Litecoin and that people also called Litecoin dead in the past for having seemingly no development. 

Now not everything was simply a misunderstanding though. Charlie admits that he dropped the ball with implementing privacy tech that was promised many months ago. He stated that he’s been focusing more on adoption lately and hasn’t had as much time to focus on development but will now shift his focus back to development. This definitely seems true because Litecoin was able to land an impressive partnership with the Miami Dolphins, an American Football team based in Florida, to become their official cryptocurrency. 

Second, in terms of funding, Charlie said that the Foundation has always been a lean operation, and while their reserves did take a hit, they are now generating more revenue and signing partnerships. He also pointed out that the LF only existed as of 2017 whereas Litecoin has been around much longer. So therefore, he argues that the project will be fine even if the LF disappeared one day. 

What’s next for Litecoin?

Looking ahead, there are some interesting developments for Litecoin. On the development-side, it seems like Charlie was a man of his word. On Aug. 20, 2019, Charlie announced that Grin coin developer David Burkett has now joined Charlie and another developer in the efforts to integrate MimbleWimble privacy technology into the Litecoin protocol. This news is super welcoming to those who have been waiting patiently for new technical upgrades on Litecoin. 

On the adoption side, Litecoin Foundation announced on June 2019 that they have partnered with Bibox Exchange and Ternio to offer a debit card through which users can spend their LTC. U.S.-based customers can register for the card and soon start to use their coins in merchants/shops around the world once the card is ready and shipped out to everyone. 

Should we be concerned?

After hearing all this news, you may be asking: is Litecoin still silver to Bitcoin’s gold? Or is it just a glorified testnet that will fade into oblivion? Personally, I think Litecoin will be fine. With a warmer crypto market and renewed development focus from Charlie Lee, it looks like promising days are ahead. 

Furthermore, on the mining side, Litecoin still continues to dominate mining for its Scrypt algorithm and while total network hashrate has fallen, it is still at a healthy level. 

What do you think?

These are just my personal thoughts and analysis about Litecoin’s recent events. However, I would love to hear your thoughts as well. If you feel strongly about this project at all, please help out other investors in the crypto world by leaving your experience here: https://cryptocanary.app/review/Litecoin. 

The post Recent Litecoin drama… should LTC fans worry? appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.

Quick note: If you have your own opinion about KBC (or other crypto projects), please share it with the entire crypto world at CryptoCanary! Here’s the link to KBC’s page for easy access: https://cryptocanary.app/review/Karatgold+coin

Parent company – Karatbars International

To begin, we researched the parent company of KaratGold Coin, Karatbars International. Karatbars International is a German company founded in Stuttgart in 2011 with a branch in Singapore. They sell gold products online to an international customer base. According to the website, all of their gold is produced and sourced from Turkey. Originally, the company only participated in the gold market; however, since 2018, they have started selling with cryptocurrency too. 

The company’s vision that they try to sell is that the current fiat-based monetary system is flawed, and if the financial system collapses, gold will be the replacement of currency. Therefore, they believe it is important and lucrative to own gold. Karatbars International wants people to buy their card and CashGold products. These are easily exchangeable pure gold pieces in small units that will be “more transaction friendly” if fiat collapses. Finally, they expect gold to be a good investment and believe investors would benefit from gold value appreciation. 

Karatbars International is led by CEO Harald Seiz. He appears on stage and in promotional videos often and is promoted as their visionary and prominent leader. Also, he has his own Wikipedia page that covers the publication of his five books. Two of the books are sold on Amazon called “The Future of Money” (the role of gold in the money system) and “Think Big” (general entrepreneurship). 

The company produces various interview promotional videos in order to appear as if the media is interested in the company. For example, in one interview style video, the New York Stock Exchange was in the background of the video, but the company has no ties to Wall Street at all. This is a technique often used as image building to give viewers the impression they are “Wall Street insiders” when they actually are not. 

Karatbars products – cards and CashGold

Now, let’s talk about their products. First, their Mini Gold Bar Cards, start from one gram of pure gold embedded in the card. Second, their CashGold is banknote-like paper with tiny gold bars embedded (.1 g of gold). These mini gold pieces are sold at 20-30% higher price than the same quantity of gold elsewhere. Therefore, the premium makes it a much more impractical starting point as an investment; however, some argue that the smaller quantities of gold make it more accessible and practical if the monetary system collapses and if fiat money disappears. Overpriced or not, it is not a “scam” in the purest sense of the word because you receive a real product after paying for it.

Karatbars’ free affiliate program

They have two “business opportunities” in which people can participate. First, you can open up a free account to participate in their affiliate program. It is a “business opportunity” in which you sell Karatbars products for a small commission. However, the products are expensive and the commission is very low, making this very difficult to succeed using the affiliate program. This seems to be a free alternative to their real paid objective, which is to build a team. We will touch more on this second “business objective” later. 

Up until now, everything seems legit and checks out. However, during our research, we did encounter many red flags, which we will explain now. 

Red flag #1 – MLM structure

Their business model is selling products through Multi Level Marketing (MLM), even before cryptocurrency became apart of it. In our opinion, any company that has crypto and MLM should definitely be further investigated. This is based upon history and the number of companies with similar business models that have exited or collapsed. Because of this, Karatbars International tries to downplay the MLM structure and makes it really convoluted and difficult to learn about how it works. However, their compensation plan includes building a team by recruiting people, who then recruit more people, and in doing so, they receive different bonus levels. This is very typical of Multi Level Marketing. 

It is also important to discuss their pre-crypto phase packages. As stated before, the free affiliate program is only a method of getting people to participate in the real “business opportunity.” In order to participate in it, they need to “pay to play,” which is a very visible pyramid scheme. There were four different packages (bronze, silver, gold, and VIP), where 10% of what you pay is real product value and 90% of investment is for the privilege to recruit new members and get higher commissions. 

Red flag #2 – Regulator warnings

Karatbars International has also received multiple warnings from regulators as well as court convictions. In 2014, the Canadian financial Authority, AMF, issued a public warning about Karatbars International. In 2016, Karatbars was convicted in a court trial by the AMF and the company and 2 promoters were fined. The Dutch financial authority, AFM, also issued a warning to the public about Karatbars. Finally, the Bank of Namibia labeled Karatbars a pyramid scheme (illegal in Namibia) in 2019. 

Red flag #3 – Non-existent crypto bank

In a Medium article in June 2018, Karatbars announced the “world’s first fully-licensed cryptocurrency bank”, named KC Bank to be opened in July 2018 in Miami, Fl. This crypto bank is also mentioned and included in their white paper. However, it has been almost a year since its announcement, and it has yet to be created. In recent material, they are still talking about the bank project which is now due in September/October 2019, but we have no evidence of that actually happening.

Now, we must touch on their foray into crypto. Initially, they created the KaratBank Coin, but they later renamed it to KaratGold Coin (ticker KBC). It’s an ERC20 token on Ethereum with a white-paper promise of its own mainnet in the future. The ICO for KBC was offered to the existing MLM affiliates in 2018; however, ICO affiliate commissions were oddly only 1 level deep. 12 billion KBC were issued with the promise of gold backing for them, but the issuer of KBC and operating the KBC ecosystem is a separate entity called Karatbit Foundation, which is located in Belize. Karatbars International, which sells the gold products, and Karatbit Foundation, which sells and operates the KBC coin, are separate entities. Also, Karatbit is not regulated so it may be difficult to legally enforce the gold backing. 

Red flag #4 – Contradictory white-paper claims

The WP begins with 2 bold claims about KBC. First, they say that KBC is backed by actual, safely stored gold, and second, they say that the price can never plummet. Also, they say that a certain amount of KBC can be exchanged for a certain amount of CashGold. Later on, the white-paper says that KBC involves high level of risk, it is not tied to the purchase of CashGold, the value of KBC is not related to CashGold, and a total loss of money invested in KBC can’t be excluded. Which claims are true? The extravagant claims in the beginning or their more tempered claims at the end?

Red flag #5 – Blatant price predictions

In their white-paper, they make blatant price predictions which is always super shady. They say the “value is expected to rise sharply” and “forecasts predict a further increase up to $10 per coin.” However, KBC is still valued at less than $.05 per coin. Besides its gold backed claims being contradictory, they also state the KBC has nothing to do with any company, shared profits, dividends, or interests. Without any gold backing, is it just a worthless ERC20 token?

Red flag #6 – Deceptive “Binance listing”

They also publicized a very deceptive claim about their Binance “listing”, making people think that their coin was tradable on Binance. However, KBC was not being traded on Binance, rather it was simply listed on the Binance info page, which offers information about various projects, regardless of whether or not they are being traded on Binance. KBC can only be traded on a variety of shady exchanges, most notably HitBTC.

Red flag #7 – Non-existent mainnet 

They promised a “revolutionary” KBC protocol (KBC mainnet) to be released in early 2019; however, it is now promised for September 2019. Furthermore, the white-paper does not explain anything about the protocol or about why it is “revolutionary.” Also, the low amount of Github does not spark any confidence that anything is actually being developed. 

Red flag #8 – Botched Gold independence day event

The team also seriously botched their heavily hyped 4th of July Gold Independence Day event. They made an announcement that 100 KBC would be exchangeable for 1 gram of gold. However, on that day, nobody was actually able to make the exchange. A few days later, Josip Heid, and executive of the company, back tracked and said that the exchange could only be done with Karatbars’ soon-to-be-launched gold ATM’s and that KYC would be necessary to combat scammers. After that, CEO Heiz announced that KBC would have “no business” until October. 

Before the Gold Day debacle, the KBC price rose; however, after, the price of KBC crashed heavily. On July 3, 2019, KBC was priced at about $.12, but after the failed Gold Day, it rapidly declined to a low of $.02. For perspective, 1 gram of gold (spot price) would be $45, which means at the highest KBC price of $.12, KBC holders should receive $45 worth of gold for $12 worth of KBC. However, the CEO has not kept his promise yet, and we have no reason to believe it would be fiscally possible to keep it. Furthermore, the price drop seems to reflect that investors don’t have confidence that the token is backed by gold or that the promise will be honored. 

Red flag #9 – Mysterious KCB coin

Finally, there is a mysterious second coin in this ecosystem that we do not know much about. Now in the business packages, investors also receive a second coin called KCB, but the function and difference to KBC is unclear. KCB is not listed so the price is whatever the company says it is, and they continue the claim of “gold backing.” During the future mainnet launch, KBC and KCB are supposed to be “forked” into one new coin. 

More bold claims made about their mainnet launch are that they will distribute CashGold ATMs all over the world, release a blockchain based smartphone, launch the KC Bank, and according to the announcements, all of this will happen in September. However, we are very skeptical about all the delays and promises for many reasons as you can tell. 

Final thoughts

In conclusion, we are very suspicious of Karatbars International and the KaratGold Coin. Due to the major red flags, MLM, price predictions, lack of Github development, breach of confidence after Gold Independence Day with regards to the already contradicting “gold backing”, and all the “too good to be true” claims. We would be very surprised if it were not a scammers operation. However, our own opinion is only based on the information we reviewed, so everyone has the right to come to their own conclusion. Nevertheless, we have near 0 confidence in this company/coin being able to keep their promises. 

If you have information to share about Karatgold coin (KBC), please share it with the world here: https://cryptocanary.app/review/Karatgold+coin!

The post Karatbars & KaratGold coin (KBC) – Deeper look at 9 red flags! appeared first on CryptoCanary Blog.