Educational and Training Links: 

CryptoVersity – an online school to help you be better prepared to understand the crypto space. (Wealth District sponsored link) https://cryptoversity.com/ref/204/

iCoinPro – an online training platform to learn about the industry and be tutored in trading skills. (Wealth District sponsored link)   https://icoinpro.com/WealthDistrict

Exchange Links:

Most of these exchanges today are centralized. Meaning they are controlled by a company that assists in your activities of buying, trading and storing your coins. They hold the private keys to the wallets they provide so they are not as safe for long term storage. Once you do your business on these platforms you should hold your coins on a hard wallet.

Coinbase – the world’s most popular exchange (Wealth District sponsored link) http://bit.ly/2FvjPcN

Binance –  fastest-growing exchange for trading with hard to find coins. https://binance.com/?ref=13180220

Kucoin – newer exchange based in Hong Kong (Wealth District sponsored link) https://kucoin.com/#/?r=1fyd6

Bittrex – is a next generation crypto trading platform built and operated in the United States. https://bittrex.com

Gemini – a US exchange for large investors. https://gemini.com

PAXFUL – a peer to peer marketplace for buying and selling Bitcoins, like LocalBitcoins (Wealth District sponsored link) http://bit.ly/2EXozqE

Decentralized Exchange Links:

Decentralized exchanges are somewhat new and not as popular as they will be in the future. The face that they are not centralized but are P2P exchanges they operate with less fees. These too have wallets on them but they are designed by the nature of the service to off load your coins to a wallet that you control.

IDEX – One of the newest Ethereum exchanges and many many claim that it is the most advanced Ethereum DEX, supporting limit and market orders, gas-free cancels with the ability to fill trades immediately without waiting for confirmations. https://idex.market/eth/ref;;

EtherDelta– One of the very first Ethereum exchanges. Deposit, withdraw, and maker transactions are all free. https://etherdelta.com

Hard Wallets:

Ledger Nano S – a hard wallet trusted by millions around the world. https://wealthdistrict.com/ledger

TREZOR Wallet – The easy-to-use hard wallet. https://wealthdistrict.com/trezor

KeeperKey– hard wallet system. https://keepkey.com/

Desktop Wallets:

Exodus Wallet – the easiest and most attractive wallet you will find anywhere. https://exodus.io

Electrum Bitcoin Wallet – focuses on speed, simplicty, and low resource usage. https://electrum.org

Hot Online Wallets:

Blockchain Wallet –  a very good hot or online wallet where you can buy as well as hold. https://Blockchain.info 

MyEtherWallet – a very good Ethereum walet that holds ERC-20 coins. This is a hot or online wallet where you can buy as well as hold and you do hold your own private keys. https://www.myetherwallet.com

Reference Sites:

Coin Market Capitalization – An exhaustive list of more than 1500 cryptocurrencies with current pricing. https://coinmarketcap.com

CryptoCompare – A great site to research cryptocurrencies before you purchase them. https://CryptoCompare.com

Coin Check Up – An exhaustive research source for over 1500 cryptocurrencies with the current pricing, market cap, and links to everything you need to evaluate a coin. https://coincheckup.com/category/digtital-currency

Token and ICO Database – a must have source for new coin offerings with cryptocurrency coins database. You can find upcoming token sales and running tokens. TokenMarket manually vets projects listed. https://tokenmarket.net/blockchain/all-assets

ICO release dates

https://tokenmarket.net/ico-calendar

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I want to you to be aware of a couple of things about the Crypto space and to be careful how you invest your money. As I have said many times in this book you are your own bank and you must be self-reliant.

First let’s take the world as we know it. There are 7 + billion people on this planet and most of them are poor. These folks think of you and I, the ones who can afford this book to be rich. Even though they are poor they are just as smart as you and I. They love their families like we do and would do anything to provide for them. Even steal and cheat you to do it. Yes, that is a fact. Some can justify that you have so much that you’ll not be hurt by being robbed of your Bitcoin. You will recover. Others will just flat out hate you for your good fortune and want to take it from you without one bad feeling. So be assured if you allow yourself to be vulnerable, these folks they will exploit you and rob you of everything.

Now that we have that settled I want to discuss a few ways they can. One easy way is to use your greedy nature against you. They will make all kinds of claims of doubling your money and returning daily nearly a double-digit interest all in the attempt to get you to join. If you haven’t got much to invest they’ll encourage to have others to join and use your sales ability to scam your rich friends. They will devise an unstainable multi-level investment scheme that’s hard for anyone to refuse. If you bite and put your money into it they will play you and your friends by paying as promised. This will allow them to grow the platform into a mega million-dollar pyramid and one day when you try to log in the site…… it will be gone. You’ll feel like a sucker and worse all your friends will think so too. Don’t be fooled by these stupid schemes.

These are called HYP’s or High Yield Programs or Platforms. Yes, if you get in early you can play it and make some money but if you that they will end in disaster. If you know that these are wrong, and someone will get hurt you need to grow a conscience and quit. These programs are bad for all the legitimate Cryptocurrency investing and will bring government involvement to this space with unrealistic rules and regulations.

Another easy way to get scammed out there is for you not to have good security practices in place like multiple strong passwords, and email accounts, hard storage wallets and multiple other safeguards. For example, there are all types of Phishing schemes going on. That’s were hackers create false sites to catch emails and passwords. They create false websites that look like legit ones and lead you in only to get your username and password. It is simple for them to do this without you even realizing it. You try to use your email and password and it doesn’t work then the submit button and it sends you to the real site and you just think something went wrong. They now have your email or username and password for that site. You never expected it. So please make sure you are on the correct site before you use your username and password.

I just come across a good google extension that verifies sites to be correct and not scammer sites. It’s called METACERT a free Google Extension that sets at the top right corner of your browser on the same level as the address bar. It lights up as a green shield when you are on a legitimate site and is black on something questionable or that has not been evaluated as safe. The app was created by Metacert https://metacert.com who have several other solutions that you will learn about on their site. However, I really like the web browser extension for keeping me from making a fat finger mistake that could take all my bitcoin.

The post Bitcoin Pitfalls and Scams appeared first on Wealth District.

Mobile Wallets: Score 3.5

Mobile wallets are some of the most convenient wallets in the crypto space but beware. While using a mobile wallet is convenient they frankly make me a little nervous because they are very vulnerable due to the nature of the device3. I believe them to be risky much like an online hot wallet is or should I say even more risky than a online hot wallet. Just like your computer your phone is open to malware, keyloggers, and viruses Only in a special situation would I use one of these mobile wallets. I would not load more than a couple of hundred dollars at a time on a mobile phone and that only for conveyance while possibly traveling in a foreign country.

In my last blog I discussed the Online or Hot Wallets. I did not go into Mobile Wallets very deep then but mobile wallets are Hot Wallets because they are online and on cellular networks too. This duel network thing makes it even risker to use a mobile devise as a wallet. As a matter of fact, I think they are about 10 times hotter than a simple online wallet. One reason for that is most of us can hardly make simple function changes on our phones without a teenager. So, if we are in charge of our own security in the Crypto space then we are in trouble.

A study done by High-Tech Bridge who studied phones with Google Play apps having high downloads of up to 100k, 93 percent had at least three medium risk vulnerabilities. With this record, it’s easy to see that most mobile cryptocurrency wallet apps employ poor security opening you up to hackers. We are constantly on the move using different hot spots and WIFI connections in public places. This alone creates a big risk to getting hacked.

Additionally, we get hundreds of notifications each week asking us to visit web sites we don’t know anything about and if not notified we’d never visit them. Facebook requests from people we don’t know wanting us to connect. This social media thing is getting out of hand and all of this continues to complicate our ability to keep our information confidential and safe. Why would you want to put any Banking or Cryptocurrency wallet on a phone? This is insane and if I were you and I had a wallet app on my phone I would remove it.

The post Wallets & Security: Part 2 appeared first on Wealth District.

Any discussion about Cryptocurrency will quickly wind up talking about Wallets. There are good wallets and not so good ones. Then there are wallets you may want to stay away from. In this writing, I hope to familiarize you with the common types and what to look out for.

Some wallets are completely web-based using your web browser much like a digital online banking platform. These online wallets are called hot wallets. The difference between our hot wallet and regular bank account online account is that if your bank gets hacked they will ensure your funds. So, don’t feel like you are safe using an online wallet in crypto. In the crypto world, you are on your own and you are your own bank. There are also mobile wallets, desktop versions, paper wallets, and hard wallets.

Over the next few weeks, I will introduce you to each so subscribes now to this blog and get regular notices when new articles are available. I promise you will not want to miss the information shared here. In these blogs, you’ll find out the unique differences between the different kinds of wallets and how safe they are to keep your coins.

On this post, we will discuss the Hot Wallets and how best to use them. Hot Wallet is a term given to wallets that are online wallets or connected in some way to the internet as opposed to coins that are in cold storage. Cold storage is the term for offline wallets. So online is hot and hardware offline is cold storage.

So if we are talking safe places to keep your coins we need to use cold storage but there is one problem with cold storage it can be cumbersome to move them quickly. You could say it takes a little time to thaw them out. Not really but allegorically you could say that. Cryptocurrency values change quickly and sometimes minutes of delay could mean thousands of dollars of missed opportunity or a large loss in value. So if want to trade you will need to move some coins to a exchange to make the trades to increase your position in a particular buy. wanting to trade in your coins you might.

Most exchanges have wallets, so you can hold your bitcoin there on the exchange as you make your purchases. Once you buy what you are going to buy you need to start making plans to move the coins to another wallet that is more secure. Exchanges have gotten better over the years, but you still hear people refer to the famous Japanese MtGox fiasco of 2014. Nearly 70% of all Bitcoin trades were made on the MtGox Exchange. When they filed bankruptcy protection 850,000 bitcoins evaporated with a worth USD value of $450,000,000. Its founder Mark Karpeles is still in jail to this day for his part in the shady practices of the exchange. It is debatable but not the less he is paying off the mismanagement of the exchange. MtGox was not the only exchange that has closed over the short history of Bitcoin but at this point, there has been 36 total that has closed. We are still in the wild west of Cryptocurrency at this point. While not a traditional exchange Bitconnect, more of a high-risk lending platform just shut down. The announcement was blamed on cease and desist letters from the States of Texas and North Carolina regulators

Of all hot wallets, these exchanges are the most vulnerable to hacks and business downturns like the big pullback we had this week. Most likely we may see more who are spending like drunk sailors while the markets are soaring and get caught short when things go south. The point here is that exchanges are not the place you need to be holding coins.

As a matter of fact, all hot wallets are subject to unexpected exposure to threats. While some hot wallets have nothing to do with trading or exchanges they still can be hacked. Blockchain.info is one of the most popular Bitcoin Wallet besides Coinbase. Both of these hot wallets provide good security but they are still hot and can be compromised at some point. For large institutional investors or traditional type of private investor, Coinbase has an added level of security called Vault Storage. The service has a 48-hour delay for withdraws and have several layers of people who need to sign-off on any transactions. The service comes with a hefty annual fee of 0.12 percent a year. Kind of pricey but considering the alternative it is a solution for many. In closing let me stress again that I do not think they are safe for any long-term storage. However, hot wallets are very useful because they user friendly and very flexible. They can be used for certain types of activities safely if you implement proper security. However, you don’t have control of your private keys with many platforms and that leaves you vulnerable to losing your coins to either hacks or the financial strength of the platform and not protected if they go out of business. So here it is in a nutshell, if its HOT don’t get burned by moving your coins to a cold storage. I’ll cover that in one of my next blogs. Stay tuned and check back by subscribing to Wealth District.

The post Wallets & Security: Part 1 appeared first on Wealth District.