From the smouldering ashes of the financial crisis, my interest in economics was born. From reading blogs and news articles to the birth of Bitcoin, my knowledge and understanding of our financial world grew. But how could I put my knowledge to use and be financially rewarded?
The decentralised, peer to peer, blockchain disruption is under way and the doors are open to anyone who has an internet connection. Cindicator is a decentralised, community driven platform that uses hybrid intelligence to provide financial market indicators. It now has over 95,000 individual analysts who send their predictions into the Cindicator ecosystem. These financial predictions are then enhanced using artificial intelligence to refine the data and make the forecasts more precise.
I came across the Cindicator project in late January 2018 whilst doing my weekly research of new and exciting start-ups that are based on blockchain technology. Reading about the project on Cindicator’s website really got me excited so I quickly registered to become an analyst and started making predictions. To my amazement, at the beginning of February I received an e-mail from Cindicator notifying me that I had finished in the top 20% for the month and I had been rewarded with Ethereum.
I’ve carried on making my predictions and have been fortunate enough to earn a reward each month so far. I think Cindicator is a unique system that provides powerful financial indicators. Many analysts providing unique insights in a decentralised manner produces more accurate market indicators than large groups of analysts working together.
You don’t need to be working in the City of London to be rewarded for your financial insights! Thanks to the very smart and easy to use Cindicator App you can now participate in making predictions in both traditional and crypto markets, any time and any where! New questions are frequently loaded into the app, answer as many as you wish.
The Cindicator App makes it easy to filter questions between past and future and between crypto and traditional markets. The questions themselves can be binary where there is a sliding percentage scale to indicate the probability of an event happening. For example, what is the probability of a particular cryptocurrency increasing by 10% over the next ten days.
Questions can also be price related; these require a more specific forecast by entering a price range for a commodity or cryptocurrency within a specific time span. For example, what will be the minimum and maximum price of Gold Futures during the following day. Conditional based questions are also offered.
Every month you have a good chance to be rewarded for your insights by receiving Ethereum directly into your Cindicator wallet. Withdrawals are permitted once you have reached a balance of just 0.01 ETH.
Making regular predictions in Cindicator has prompted me to research and learn about new and exciting projects in the crypto space. Indeed, during my time as a Cindicator analyst I have found that the more predictions I make, the more market knowledge and experience I gain.
Many of us have read the news reports about high levels of inequality in the world today and many have experienced the adverse effects of unfettered globalisation. Economic analysis clearly shows that since the financial crisis of 2008/09, the major fiat currencies of the world have been manipulated and devalued because of central bank interference.
When fiat currency is spent locally, much of it’s value disappears from the community and into the hands of multinational corporations.
In response to this centralised manipulation, a few paper based local currencies have been born. Whilst some of these have had a moderate uptake, their use is limited by a lack of community awareness, small scale business adoption and the fact that they remain outside of the digital domain.
Cryptocurrencies are, by their nature digital and decentralised (peer to peer). They are free from manipulation by centralised authorities. What if there was a platform that allowed decentralised trading of cryptocurrencies and smart tokens without having to rely on a counter party for liquidity? What if this platform also allowed communities to easily create their own digital currencies and smart tokens by simply using a chat bot?
Such a platform exists and it is called the Bancor Network. Once registered on the Bancor Network one has access to a unique decentralised trading environment. The growing range of smart tokens on the Bancor Network are fully liquid for each other due to the Bancor Network Token (BNT). What this means is that the availability of a smart token for trading is not dependent on other parties selling the same quantity of the smart token.
The number of potential use cases for community currencies that will be created on the Bancor Network is huge. Bancor can revolutionise the way money is created and how it is used and therefore change the world economy for the better.
It’s been one of biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap for a long time and many of us are familiar with Ripple and it’s cryptocurrency XRP. However, what use does it have for the individual investor? Is anyone actually buying anything with Ripple? Are there any businesses out there that accept XRP as a means of payment?
The Ripple network is basically a cryptographic layer over the traditional banking system. It facilitates faster and cheaper interbank payments and remittances. XRP provides the liquidity for these transactions.
Ripple frequently announce that they have signed agreements with major financial corporations which boosts sentiment and drives more investment in XRP. However, some of these large financial institutions will use the Ripple system to transfer fiat currencies and commodities without having a requirement to use XRP. Ripple looks like a great company with excellent technology but what can XRP really be worth if there is no requirement for their corporate clients to use it?
I think that many small investors are buying XRP as a speculative trade because they hear Ripple partnering with major financial institutions and therefore believe that the currency will rocket in value at some point in the future. That may well be true but I am becoming a bit sceptical.
Another important point to mention is that 100 Billion XRP were created but only 38 Billion have been released so far. Releasing billions more XRP in the future will no doubt have an impact on it's price. Just recently Ripple placed 55 Billion XRP into escrow to ensure certainty of total supply.
The price of XRP is less volatile than many other cryptos but after a recent climb to $0.25, it has started to drop back. Is it time to move out of Ripple and into some higher growth alt-coins?
When Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was created as a result of the hard fork on August 1 2017, many investors did not expect this new cryptocurrency to compete with Bitcoin (BTC). Despite an initial price rally in August, the value of BCash declined during September and October, eventually being worth just 0.052 BTC by October 21.
After the Bitcoin hard fork (SegWit2x) was called off on November 8, the price of BCash started to rally. There were many claims on social media that BCash was the new Bitcoin, that this was the start of the “flippening” and that many loyal Bitcoin holders were heading for the exit because Bitcoin would now not scale due to it’s high fees and slow transaction times.
Was there really a mass exodus out of Bitcoin for these reasons? Certainly the price of Bitcoin declined by approximately 20% over the next few days. However, the massive surge in the BCash trading volume and price could not be explained solely by investors moving out of Bitcoin. There was clearly new money piling into BCash, mostly through the South Korean exchanges.
I would argue that there were also some underhand tactics by the BCash team in order to attack the Bitcoin network. On November 9 the Bitcoin mempool started to increase in size dramatically, eventually reaching 160,000 unconfirmed transactions (the mempool stores Bitcoin transactions that are waiting to be confirmed). Was this huge increase in unconfirmed transactions due to investors desperately trying to get out of Bitcoin or had the network been a victim of an attack involving many tens of thousands of small spam transactions? Once the mempool was congested, BCash and it’s supporters were able to make substantiated claims that Bitcoin was now dysfunctional, useless and a sinking ship.
I realise that the BCash team are doing their utmost to promote their digital currency, but do they really need to obtain validity by launching network attacks on Bitcoin and then pointing to the damage caused in order to claim that Bitcoin is finished and is no longer a functioning system.
At present BCash does have much lower fees and faster payments due to it’s 8mb block size. However, many people have overlooked the fact that the Bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP148) user activated soft fork (UASF) took place on the Bitcoin network back in August and as a result the block size has increased slightly beyond the previous 1mb limit.
The weekend of November 11/12, 2017 was certainly an historical and pivotal moment in the Bitcoin story thus far. My guess is that there will be more battles between the current and future Bitcoin hard forks as we journey on through the ever expanding crypto universe.
