Avoid using Cryptsy

After a while I went back on Cryptsy, to see what happened. the vertcoins I mined at the launch, were worth 20 cents, they rose up to 60 euro, but I did not sell them “they will get more value over time”, now are worth 2 euro, what a pity.
Anyways, I mined them in a day, so I did not lose money…
The main problem is that I went to withdraw… there were many bitcoins missing from my account! I was remembering there were around 20 euro, but right now it’s empty! How it’s that possible?!?
I check withdrawals, and I see one made one month ago, to the address b928d5c7a81a40713407d40a8bf1e92ded1a59d1. (invalid address)
Possible??? I did not get any withdrawal confirmation email!!
I contact support and this is their reply:

your coins have been moved to a cold storage wallet for better security

For security???? Without notification?? This is stealing! If, with the “security” excuse they get 20 euro from the thousands of users they have, it’s a lot of money!!!

Now I have to see if I will get back the bitcoins, I asked support hours ago, but no response yet…

Outsourcing? Be careful!

IMG_20141111_083209At work, some months ago, I got a simple idea to sell to my customers. Nothing really complex, just a simple tool to make gift wrapping more pretty. I could have done it by myself, but not at the right price point.
So I went on Alibaba and I did a custom order from a chinese company.
I got the stuff, exactly as I expected, I was happy.
I planned to launch  my idea in a few weeks, on time for Christmas, when this morning I receive an email from the chinese supplier.
The email is addressed to all of their customers (obviously all in clear text, there’s no privacy for them) and it says “new hot sell 2014”: they are selling my fucking tool as it was their idea!!!!!
Not to mention that I made a small batch just to test the waters, so the unit price that I paid was much higher than the one that new customers will get, because I was the one who paid the molds!!!!!
So, now I have dozens of competitors that can launch my idea on the market before that I could launch it as I wanted!!!
You can imagine how much I’m pissed off right now…

Purse.io – It’s already arrived!

(Continues from part 2)
A few hours after lowering my discount from 30% to 15%, someone ordered me the look thatI wanted, and this afternoon the shipment already arrived!
Thanks to Amazon I got a 15% discount, and thanks to Purse.io I got an additional 15% discount by paying in bitcoin!
I didn’t expect that it would arrive so fast! Probably who bought it had Amazon Prime and chose overnight shipping.
I paid 0.251 bitcoin (66 euro) a book with a 90 euro cover price – double win!

The only drawback is that you need to keep you eyes open: once you click on “shipment received”, bitcoins will change hands, so you must be sure that you actually got your stuff!

The purse.io experiment

For a gift, I want to buy an anatomy book on Amazon. It’s the perfect chance to try purse.io!
Purse it’s a service that allows you to buy bitcoins with credit card… by buying gifts on Amazon wishlists!
For example: Jack has 1 bitcoin, Brian wants to buy it with his credit card. The system pairs buyers with sellers, Brian buys a gift to Jack, and, when it’s delivered, bitcoins are released.
It’s possible then to insert a discount over the stuff. For now I chose a 30% discount, maybe if tomorrow nobody got it, I’ll change it.
Will it work? We will see in the next days!

Some brokerage sold my data!

Today I received a call on my office number from +35924812890 (Bulgaria), where an indivudual speaking a very poor english, almost unintelligible, wanted me to open a new trading account.
What made me really scary was: how the hell they got my work number??? I’m almost paranoid to give my numbers and emails around, I don’t mix work and leisure, who gave it to him?
Usually, when I join something not extremely important I even write a fake number, which I take note on my password manager, so in the extremely remote event that I really need to get called, I just say that I changed mobile operator and I got a new phone number.
I asked who gave him my data, he said “you left your business card at a trading event” – absolutely impossible!!! I insisted on this, but he hung up, and if I call back the number a voice says the number is wrong..
Probably some broker employee got access to customer data and decided to sell them to black hat marketers for nice money…
I get goosebumps thinking how easily I sent my id card scans to the various brokerage companies that I tried in those years…

Free martingale gambling

http://freebitco.in/?r=64169Everyone thinks that a martingale it’s a fast and easy way to make money. What’s that?
Simply speaking, it’s doubling the bet after a loss. It looks so easy
to win at this game, but, statistically, it’s not impossible to lose
ten times in a row, and the loss will become huge.
Anyways, if
you want to try, Freebitco.in just created a free martingale. You get around 300 satoshi for free every hour, you can try to multiply them with
the free automatic martingale game.
It’s interesting to try it, because you can see how easily you can make money, but also you can see that you can lose the whole capital in a few seconds. Amazing.

Summer pause… or not?

Since right now everyone is going to holiday, I decided to pause all my Expert Advisors. In summer the volume is lower, the economic news are less, I’m in holiday also, and I don’t want the robot to read the signals wrongly.
Moreover, the revenue for the last year was… pitiful… honestly I have only Ray Scalper on my list, and it’s not exactly a champion…
I’m moving towards bitcoin trading, there’s more volatility and I can do manual trading more easily.
I’m not sure to turn on again the MetaTrader VPS again in september…
What do you think about this? Do you know some good EA?

No more cloud mining for me

For some reason, cloud mining is enticing me. If you remember, when bitcoin started to be popular, I rented some gigahash on eBay.
I invested 5 euro and I got only 2 back, because at the moment to mine, the most profitable sha256 coin were terracoins… but their value crashed just a few hours before cashing them…
Now, with the network difficulty that has increased exponentially (every hour, in the whole world only 150 bitcoins can be mined, so, the more are mining it, more hashpower is needed=, those gigahashes would be totally useless…
Also cex.io is enticing, but with those prices it’s impossible to get a return on investment, it has been designed for day trading. Buy low and sell high, being careful to the network difficulty: every two weeks it drastically increases, making the value of a GH/s plummet.
On March I found an offer on bitcointalk: someone from Belgium has 15 antminer S1 (worth $9000, with 2700 GH/s power) and is selling shares, distributing profits to shareholders, with an 8% fee.
I calculated the ROI, and, supposing a 20% difficulty increase, I could have made an easy 10% in 6 months.
Not bad, I told myself, and I sent 0.14 bitcoins. Unfortunately, some forum trolls made those guy realize that he could disappear with the shareholders money and… even if he had honest intentions in the beginning, as he registered with his real name, phone number and address, after the first payment he disappeared…
So… I invested 0.14 bitcoins and I only got 0.02… anyways, I saw that the difficulty has increased much more than a 20% that I supposed in my calculations, if I was lucky, I would have got just half of them!
Then, watching on Whatmine, I saw that it was the right time to mine Peercoins. I rented some gigahash for 48 hours on MiningRigRentals, but I didn’t calculated correctly the difficulty that I set up for the worker: it was too high and the first 12 hours of rent were wasted. And at that point mining Peercoin wasn’t worth…
And then the last one, Cryptsy and their mining contracts. Crazy prices, so for the first batch I give up. But, for who invested in the first batch it was an awesome deal! Until all shares were sold, the price would have been fixed, and slowly increased over time, to artificially create demand.
Buying immediately, the price was 0.018 per share, after 24 hours 0.0185 and after 48 hours 0.019. Who bought them at 0.018, after just three days could have sold them for 0.0225!!!
And then Cryptsy did a second batch, I blindly bought a share! But, I didn’t realize that this time the shares were much more and the minimum order was ten times the previous batch! A disaster! Too much offer and small demand made the price crumble to 0.11! Damn!
I tried to hold the share for a few days, the price rose a little, but, since the difficulty readjustment was near, I dumped it, at loss. A few days later, without a valid reason, the price bumps to a point that would have sent me to breakeven.
Fuck.