For instance, the transactions on the network do not involve personal data. It is therefore possible for a bitcoin owner to protect their data to a certain level.

An individual can also spend bitcoins without involving their name in the details. Only the account is connected to where they receive the Bitcoins.

Bitcoin was created to be a trustless mode of currency to be used across the globe. Together with the reasons above, it is easy to assume the Bitcoin is anonymous.

However, the address linked to the account of a Bitcoin holder can be tied to their real identity. This makes it possible to know where they came from. The reason is, Blockchain keeps a permanent record of every transaction on a public ledger which can be accessed by anyone.

The true nature of Bitcoin is described as pseudo-anonymous. To ensure no one links your address and identity, you are advised to use a new address each time you make a transaction.

Bitcoin transactions in brief

The best way to understand this is to understand how cryptocurrency works. There are inputs and outputs in every Bitcoin transaction.

The inputs are represented by your account where the bitcoin is sent from. The output on the hand is the account the received the bitcoin. A transaction may be required to move from one or more inputs to one or more outputs.

Most people achieve transactions by merging several smaller inputs and outputs. For instance, two inputs controlled by an individual would be merged to buy an item for 1.5 Bitcoin. They become one transaction. This will also demand the involvement of many inputs since there will be a change of address. For the example above, the buyer’s address will receive extra 0.5 Bitcoin.

How is anonymity compromised?

There are several ways this could happen. Consider the following:-

• The connecting nodes can lead to the discovery of a transaction origin. Bitcoin runs on a P2P network that is not completely secured.
• Sometimes a Bitcoin users may include their personal identity, for instance on an exchange. This happens mostly when giving a delivery address for purchased goods. The transaction can be easily tied to the buyer’s identity. This is in the case where the input address transaction is tied to the identity of the buyer.
• The Bitcoin transaction takes place on a public ledger. This means, Bitcoin are open to all and the addresses can be traced. A group of Bitcoin addresses can be tied together. If there any individual’s identity tied to any one address, others in that same group are also tied.

Can you use Bitcoin anonymously?

Yes. You can achieve anonymity by:-

• Using more than one wallet for every transaction
• Using mixing services to hide your tracks. https://mixertumbler.com/  is a high-quality and trusted bitcoin mixers with good reputation.
• Using online wallets. Active services store all bitcoins entrusted to them. Though they are vulnerable to hacking, they can help hide your transactions.

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The recent decline in the crypto market has corroded on most portfolios. Unless you are an experienced trader, you are probably not able to shorte the market. With that said, a significant price adjustment is something that might be good for the cryptocurrency ecosystem in the long run. After months of what looks like free-fall prices, it’s easy to understand why proprietors are skeptical. Let’s take a thorough look at significant errors in the crypto market, how they originated, and finally how the market can potentially eradicate them.

How did we end up here?

A number of reasons can send a market down in a negative trend. Fundamental analysts report unfavorable market conditions, otherwise called fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), while technical analysts point to factors that buy fatigue and unsustainable volume. When the market value increases by 30 times during a year, like several cryptocurrencies did, it is often a simpler reason. Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, released a tweet in December 2017 that sums up well;

Charlie Lee said, “When crypto goes up too fast, it exceeds its real value. A downturn for consolidation is normal. How long the decline lasts and how big it is everyone’s guess. “

For those who have not got it before, Charlie Lee announced that he sold all his inventory of Litecoin in mid December. In a rational market environment, investors would have interpreted this news as a very bad signal. Instead, many people reacted with euphoria in a fiery bull market.
Charlie was just called a non believer, and much more on Twitter. In the months that followed the statement, the total market value went from over $ 800 billion in January to $ 250 billion in early April. It’s a 70% decline that eventually showed Charlie’s statement was correct.
Now you can ask – How is this good?

Speculative bubbles

According to Investopedia, a speculative bubble is usually caused by “excessive expectations of future growth, price increases or other events that can lead to an increase in activity values.” As prices rose, the more fresh money went into the market in the hope that it would continue. The transparent new actor in the market knew very little about the basis and technology of its investments. They were told that the new technology had the potential to change lives, thus the potential to give them a lot in value creation and gain. Without exploring their recent investment acquis, the new participants received almost instant satisfaction by seeing their assets go up in value. Family and friends were involved, and it would seem that the first ever rise-only market had been found.

You will often hear people say, “I came for the money and stayed for technology.” In many ways, rising prices are the best form of advertising for an otherwise unknown class of assets and technology. Many have received a deep gratitude for blockchain and the benefits it promises. It creates a curiosity to understand how your investments work. So when does speculation get bad.

Focus on wrong things

We can get some insight into the crypto market by looking at an older market with the big history, the stock market. A private company’s leaders only focus on building a profitable and sustainable business in the long run. When a company decides to become public by issuing shares in a listing, the primary focus, by law, is to serve its shareholders. The company’s board members are subject to intensive review of a board whose primary objective is to increase the price of the company’s share value. This narrow focus can result in short-sighted features that favor immediate revenue and cost savings, over important and long-term goals such as growth, innovation and positioning for long-term survival.

In the stock market, quarterly reports and annual accounting results are presented as measurable performance indicators. With the absence of similar firm references in the cryptic environment, the market was forced to place great emphasis on alarming news alone. The PR and marketing team went into an endless race against each other to generate hype. Market participants made it clear that they came in as speculators who want to sell at a higher price so that the teams responded accordingly. The following types of events are something that was used repeatedly, as often rewarded and strengthened the market reaction.

• Advertising of partnerships, often without major substance.
• Rebranding
• Listings on new exchanges
• Announcements about forthcoming announcements
• Specific rumors that were spread. (eg, Dragonchain is in dialogue with X, who is the manager of X. Conclusion; Dragonchain discusses a partnership with X. Buy before it is announced.)

Look back at the fundamental

You will usually not read about the necessity of having an expensive coin to work in whitepapers. When a project generates more users, the natural effect should be an increase in the price. This is where the bull market went wrong. Projects ignore the long-term goal of growing their userbase, and instead take shortcuts in the form of marketing flu and hype. In a bear market, the same type of hype-driven news is not close to deliver a an equally large impact.

This property is precisely what makes the bear market healthy

When the same old tricks lose their effect, projects have a choice. They can decide to focus on creating value and achieve the product’s original vision, or they can give up. Many teams choose the second option. In this way, the market has lured out poor quality projects. If a coin’s case was never legitimate initially, the project would die when the market satisfaction disappears, and the rising prices stop. Furthermore, the integrity and work ethics of the project members themselves are tested. Those who trust that their project will deliver real value must show endurance.

The cleaning effect of the bear market extends. The same new market participants who were rewarded for buying crypto despite lack of research began to feel the consequences. They also have an opportunity to quit or resume. Once the market they once knew changed to unknown territory, many took their losses and left. For very many, it was just about quick, easy money. Who’s left after they’ve left the scene? The believers. Those who take the time to investigate their investments, and learned about the real potential of crypto and blockchain technology. This knowledge convinces them, with confidence that their investments will eventually return. Those who never had faith in the first place disappear. Weak hands go away. Strong hands remain.

A bright future

This market is not the first bubble pattern that has affected the cryptocurrency market, and it will probably not be the last. Lack of research went unpunished, and almost every coin made significant gains. As a result, people became comfortable with buying everything. Scams and fast ICOs were allowed to succeed. When the market turns into a more positive sentiment, we can expect investors to be much smarter as a result of experience.

On the other hand, many coins gained 10x and even with 100x by generating a lot of hype without any sufficient substance to justify it. Now, with a smarter base of market participants, the crypto projects must focus more on differentiating their products and platforms based on a real value. This can be a catalyst that leads to competence enhancement throughout the crypto ecosystem.

Those who really improve and develop the technology will be the ones left behind.

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Presearch is a search engine that rewards their users with crypto tokens for searching through the platform.

How does it work?

• For each search, either it is a search through Google, Twitter, Etherscan or any other connected platform, you will earn 0.25 PRE tokens.
• The current price of the PRE token is approximately $0.06.  You can earn up to 8 tokens per day, which means that you can earn up to $0.5 per day, which equals to $15 per month.
• Presearch is listed on multiple exchanges and has a marketcap of over $9 million. Check the coin on Coinmarketcap here.

Read more below the image.

How to sign up for the Preseach reward program

1. Register a new account on Preseach here.
2. Follow the step by step instruction to learn how to use the platform
3. Optional – add the addon to your browser to automatically use Preseach for new searches.

Google Chrome extension – Firefox extension

You can also set Preseach as your default Google Search engine on Chrome, just follow the instructions here.

Notes:

• To be rewarded you need to use the platform for at least 60 days.
• You need to earn  1000 PRE tokens before being able to withdraw.
• Preseach is currently doing a referral program where you can earn 25 PRE tokens ( $1.5) per referral. Both you and the referral with receive 25 tokens. The reward is sent after the referred user has been active on the platform for 60 days.

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A dear child has many names and you will find this kind of trading referred to as gearing, margin trading, stock credit or leverage. In short, margin trading is to invest borrowed money.

There are several players who offer gearing with cryptocurrencies. Here you must be aware that there is an extreme risk associated with this.

What is gearing?

Gearing an investment would mean to borrow money from your brokerage house to invest a larger amount of money you have available. By taking up credit you will, even with a relatively modest equity, invest large amounts and get a correspondingly high return when you hit. We enter the gear as a ratio such as (1:10).

If you have $1000 in equity and invest them in an altcoin that is credited $100 with a gearing on (1:10) you invest $10,000. If the stock price rises 10% from $100 to $110 you would have earned $100 (10 * 10) , but since you dig a margin trade and could buy ten times more shares, you earn $1000 (10 * 100) instead .

It is easy to see how gearing may seem alluring to many. The general man in the street usually does not have much equity that can be invested, and then gearing is the only way to earn the really big amounts. Some online brokers offer gearing up to 1: 400! Then you can make investments with $40,000 yourself with only $100 in equity. This is not recommended for cryptocurrency trading.

Risk of margin trading and leverage

As most of us know, return and risk go hand in hand. Margin trading gives accelerated profit when you hit, but it also provides equivalent accelerated losses when the market goes wrong.

Looking at the example above, by allowing the crypto rate to decline by only 10% to 90kr, you have suddenly lost the entire amount you invested. If the stock price drops more, you end up owing more money than the original investment.

There is therefore considerable risk associated with high gearing and one should be very aware of what choices are made before committing margin trading. It is recommended to read up on trading strategies beforehand to increase the chance of sucessfull trading. Timeforcrypto.com is a good source for information about trading for beginners through their podcast and blog.

Many of the webmasters will not be responsible for a greater amount than what is stated on your investment account with a given online broker. This can thus help secure you from uncontrolled losses when margin trading. If you reach the boundaries where the loss is similar to the capital you have available, usually the position you have ended immediately and the loss will be realized (liquidated).

Example for margin trading

Imagine that you do a trade with a 1: 100 margin. In this case, you invest 100$ in something, and with maximum gearing you can afford to trade with 10,000$ even if you only bet a hundred bucks.

This is an extreme example, and with such a high gear you will rarely succeed. On the other hand, it may make sense to use some gearing in some cases. A trader rarely needs to leverage hundreds of times the investment.

If you are going to trade with margin trading you must of course choose a web broker who offers this. Also, one should find a web broker that allows as high gearing as you want, as most crypto brokers offer fairly low gearing.

If you only want to try this without taking any risk, they also have an exercise account where you can trade fictitious money through a free demo (the above mentioned services offer a free demo of their services).

Where can I do margin trading?

There are several solid online brokers that offer magrin trading for cryptocurrency. Below we list a couple of them. All the players mentioned here are solid, safe companies that are strictly regulated and where your investments are completely safe.

Bitmex

Bitmex is the most liquid crypto margin trading platform in the world and allows its users to trade some of the most popular cryptocurrency pairs. At Bitmex, you can trade with up to 100x margin, and all contracts are done in Bitcoin (BTC). Here you can margin trade Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, Ethereum, Tron and Ripple.

Link: Bitmex.com/

eToro

A somewhat unusual webmaster that has become incredibly popular. It is based on a social platform where users can see what trades everyone else is doing. You can even set your settings to automatically copy the users with the best return. It is discussed passionately around the subject and there is much to learn here.

Etoro offers trading with the following cryptographic values: BCH, BTC, DASH, ETC, ETH, LTC and XRP

Link: Etoro.com

Plus500

One of Europe’s largest online agents. Here you can trade anything from cryptocurrencies, ETFs, options, CFDs, commodities, currencies, stocks and funds. They give you a gear of up to 1:50 which should be more enough for any reasonable person.

Plus500 has a well-developed trading platform for browser, desktop and smartphones. They offer more than high gearing and a wide range of trading opportunities and analysis tools.

Plus500 offers trading with the following cryptocurrencies: BTC, BCH, ETH, LTC, XRP and IOTA

Link: Plus500.com

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Krios is a decentralized advertising platform, where businesses get the chance to collaborate with all needed participant in the industry through the platform.

The blockchain based platform is intended to be used as an affiliate & campaign management platform. Advertisers will get the opportunity to connect with promoters that fit their demographics and audience.

ICO (Finished May 2018)

The project launched their PRE-ICO in November last year, and the main ICO finished mid-May this year. ÌCObench has stated on their page that the project raised over 20 million USD, but this is unlikely. The team refuses to publish the amount that was raised in the ICO, which is suspicious.

Red Flags

The development of the project started after the Pre-ICO in November 2017, meaning that the team has had ten months to develop the project.

CEO Christopher Quinlan

The CEO of the project has a website, which can be accessed here.

A user on Bitcointalk noted that he had made some very inaccurate statements in the “about Chris” section.

It is stated that the Krios platform has received $20 million in revenue in its first year. The platform is not even live, so this is impossible. If this is the amount the ICO received in the crowdsale, the statement is still wrong, as collecting investor funds for a project is completely different from company revenue.

Misleading Advertisements

The following Krios AD was shared on Facebook, where it reached over 1.5 million individuals.

Instead of giving informative information about the project, the true intension of the AD seems to be to trick naive investors, by making them believe that this is the new “bitcoin” and advertises themselves as the project that was disrupting the digital marketing industry, yet the platform was not even live at that point, and the project was efficiently disrupting nothing at that point of time. The coin is being promoted as a “Crypto Currency” when in reality it is a basic Ethereum token.

Additionally, the price is mentioned. Many people who are not familiar with crypto don’t understand the concept of supply in cryptocurrency, a low value is for them an insentive to buy it, as they compare it to Bitcoin, which is worth thousands per token. The ad further claims that the tokens price is 0.07 cents per token, when in reality the tokens cost 0.07 DOLLAR (significant difference). This might be the creators fault for being a bad writer, but still shows huge incompetency for an advertisement that is promoted to over one and a half million people.

Manipulating Bitcointalk ANN

Source: Krios ANN

After the project received a lot of FUD on Bitcointalk because of red flags with the project, the ANN thread was filled with several pages of nonsense from users which clearly had no knowledge of the project.

Several BTCT users are suspecting that this is done to suppress the negative attention the project has received.

Most likely, this is either targeted paid advertising (people can get people from low-cost countries to post on Bitcointalk, hence the replies that are not making sense (e.g. example in the picture, talking about the ICO when it finished in August). The other option is bots that create automatically generated content.

Key Advisor – David Drake

David was one of the most renowned ICO reviewers on ICObench, until he got suspended for violating the rules after it became known that he manipulated ICO reviews for pay and that he sold his picture to ICO projects without actually assisting the projects.

It should be said that David Drake also has supported several genuine projects, but having him as the only advisor, when it is known that he primarily contributes with nothing but a well known name to add to projects for credibility while charging enormous amounts for it. The fact that he has been an ICO advisor for over 80 different companies in just a year, clearly proves the point.

Other Red Flags

• The KRI token has been delisted from Idex.
• Medium blog – No activity since ICO launch in January.
• Pretty much all blockchain projects release their code for transparency. Krios has released no code to the public, and the project doesn’t even have a Github, which may suggest that there is no development.
• The platform has no need for the KRI token, and the token value is unlikely to ever reach ICO price.
• Cease and Desist order from NASAA in an operation intended to stop cryptocurrency scams (source).
• The exchange promised that they would be listed on a top-5 exchange platform after ICO – this never happened.
• Telegram groups is heavily moderated every individuals raising conserns gets banned.
• Token price during the ICO was up to $0.1 per token, while the project promised that the post-ICO market price guaranteed would be $5.

Conclusion

If you don’t want to read the full article, check out the last bullet point above, as it says it all. When a project GUARANTEES 50x return on investment, it is a scam.

It is clear that the projects have a never-ending list of red flags. There is no viable return of invest on this token, and the team behind the project has proved time after time to be dishonest and tricking their investors.

Likelihood of the Krios project to be a scam: Extremely high – Do not invest

[wp-review id=”4494″]

Author: Gustafio
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