Tales from the Crypto Keeper: Item #002

Hey everyone! Hope your day is better than mine... so far, I'm a sniveling mess. The weather has been so icky in Montreal these days, I wonder if summer will ever come. And now I have lost my voice. But hey, I can still type, right?

So let's get on with it.

I'm realizing the utmost importance of doing my research on my coins, and holding onto them when I really think they are worth something. So this bring me to my newest additions this weekend on the Tales from the Crypto Keeper (a name I have to give credit to my boyfriend for coming up with, so thanks BRIAN!)

IPFS and the dawn of Shift and Rise (in my portfolio)

IPFS (interplanetary file protocol) is a new protocol in the works that is aiming to decentralize the web. Yep, you read that right: using the blockchain as a file system. I'll try to explain what I understand of it in the best way I can.

When you look at my website - a big pile of nothing right now, you are sitting wherever you are, say in Tokyo, waiting for these bytes of information to travel from the server the files are on. Let's pretend the website is in California, because I think that's where MediaTemple has their machines. These bytes are going all the way from Cali, to Harajuku district and take a bunch of time to travel and disappoint the user with my nothing website.

This is what HTTP does, simply send copies of bytes of data from point A to point B. Once this cute Harajuku girl closes her websites, it's on its way to slow death. The data will stay in her cookies, probably maybe, Google will cache a version, etc. But eventually, without anyone accessing my website, the only true copy will remain the file on the machine that runs the web server I pay for. The day I stop paying for it, that data will also eventually get destroyed.

The cute Harajuku girl will never again see my shitty website, no matter how hard she tries to look for it. This is relative because I don't mess with Deep Web so who knows how long things really survive without being served... But anyhow, for the most part, the data is gone (sort of), the page is gone.

With IFPS on the other hand, anytime someone accessed my page, even for the very first time, it would start proliferating itself into different hashes on the blockchain, effectively creating copies of itself in many places. Since hashes don't die, neither would the data. Anytime someone access my page, the data would be accessed from these hashes, and put back together. This would provide a way of never silencing any data, rendering it eternal and forever accessible. And also making it faster to serve. This is the Permanent Web.

I don't know about you, but this sound like Ghost in The Shell stuff. Sounds like history could never erase itself. And we can't erase our own history over here in the "real", so why in this new world that we call the internet?

I will live on the internet, forever and never die if I put enough of my data out there.
said me.

Enter Rise and Shift

I looked into both of these coins with my newfangled mantra: good coins have good marketing - and better logos. Haha, no joke, I legit looked at both of these at first because they had nice logos and they were in the bottom of the list when I was shopping for some new friends.

Rise is going to use a delegated proof of stake platform that will provide UIs to build your own platforms for assets and sidechains. So anyone would have the tools to create their own coins and tokens, without being a developer. This is either a good thing or a bad thing? But I like the idea, because I end up at festivals where they have their own currency... so this makes sense.

Shift is a fork of Ark, a super interesting (ether-based?) token aiming to become the Google of the blockchain, using the IPFS and MainNet. So what's shift going to do? Shift is aiming to become the new web. They want to make it a place that is advertisement-free, data gathering-free, basically TOR as the web. It's a neat concept, one I'm going to keep my eyes very closely. I know not enough about it, but enough that I threw money at it.

And now that I've talked about both of these, I'm most likely going to be showing some love to Ark. All of these coins have a great website and pretty marketing, but Ark seems to be the one with the biggest community behind it. That being said, Rise and Shift are dang young so maybe it's just a matter of time. I will be joining all the slack channels to see what's up. But the buzz on bitcointalk.org about both of the latter are encouraging.

Other blockfolio updates

• Ethereum is inching its way up the ladder for the biggest players in the blockchain, while BTC dominance is still losing ground, yikes! (I'm so-o-o not dissing bitcoin, I'm planning on buying/trading into it in the very near future.) This investment is hitting up to an over 600% ROI as of today.
• ReddCoin, baby. I am so glad I bought that 300k now, a source of stress for me over the last few weeks where it was just losing me money and making me want to cry. All in all, we are looking at a 180% ROI and I put quite a bit of money in there, so yeah, C3P0 dancing.
• The biggest winner is definitely DigiByte!@# That thing is blowing up, it's looking like an Ethereum-ranked investment for me. Holding onto my 12k for a long time on this one and its blessed ROI, well over 200%!
• Stratis, still climbing my blockfolio rankings, with an ROI looking to hit the high 60s by the end of the week. I'm most likely going to getting out the big guns on this one. Just waiting for another heavenly dip.
• The BasicAttentionToken is still rising at a sweet pace. This is most likely a long-term hold for me because I really see the use of a token that gives the user back the power. Imagine Minority Report and Episode 2 of Black Mirror, with the BAT token: no more death by over-stimulating constant ads. ROI is at 76% and climbing.
• Litecoin is doing okay, for me, not worth mentioning much about it, haha, but it's not losing me any money? :p

Coins on sale!

• PIVX is not doing so good in my blockfolio right now, but that's okay, I'm planning on hodling this quite a bit longer. Probably not long term, but it's healthy-looking fo rme right now, even with my ROI in the red.
• Voxels is being finicky. I am literally making less than a penny on this right now. I have thought of cutting my losses at this point, because it would be like nothing ever happened, but this is something I will just watch very closely and get into the communities to find out what's happening.
• XEM is looking tastier and tastier: Japan loves this coin and I love Japan. So this might be where my VOX coins money ends up moving to. That would be long term for sure.

And now, time for yet another periodontist appointment... I'm sure I'll eventually tell you THAT whole story eventually, but for now, keep on cruising, hodl on to your loved ones and see ya next time!

xoxo