Thank you both for your feedback, we will add this feature to the next version of the article.

We greatly appreciate your input!

Greetings fellow cryptocurrency-fanatics,

At Anycoin Direct we have started to create essential guides for new cryptocurrency users to learn about the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
We believe these short guides will help new users in understanding this technology and making sure their funds are safely stored and transferred.

This newly published guide is about block explorers and how you can use them to track transactions. After someone has created a transaction on the bitcoin network, they will receive a transaction ID (TXID).
Our article aims to teach new users how they can use any TXID to track a transaction within a block explorer and view the specific details.

We have published this guide on Medium, here is the link to the article.
This guide is the second article we have written and we would appreciate it if you could provide us with any feedback.

With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team

Hello junapudiraj,

The way Bitcoin works is that coins which have not yet been spent (Unspent Transaction Outputs or UTXO’s) are linked to a specific public key. This public key is in turn linked to the private key of the address.

The private key can be compared to a password and proves ‘ownership’ of certain addresses. Without this private key it is not possible to send any coins from the address since you are unable to prove your ownership of the address. As Bitcoin evangelist Andreas Antonopoulos said: “If you don’t own your private key, you don’t own your bitcoins.”

In this case it is not possible to convert your non spendable BTC to spendable BTC without the private key. We would therefore recommend that you search for a backup of the private key.

If you have any further questions, feel free to send us a DM.

With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team

Hello ironfeast,

Great to hear that you are interested in creating your own cryptocurrency. Since you are already creating your own Proof of Work coin, we suggest the following guide:

https://naivecoinstake.learn.uno/

We believe that chapter 2 of this guide might be a good place to start your research.

If you have any further questions, feel free to send us a DM.

With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team

Hello timmy333,

We can see that you are in need for some coins on the BTC Testnet to facilitate some testing. As you stated, most of the popular faucets for TestNet are temporarily disabled because of the flooded network.
To enable you to make the necessary transactions we have just sent you 0.5 from one of our Testnet wallets. Unfortunately we cannot send you more than this since because our supply of Testnet coins is rather limited.

Good luck with your test transactions and let us know if everything worked out!


With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team

We have decided to add several of the suggestions you stated. In the beginning there is now a short piece about private keys and exchanges. Furthermore we have also added bitcoin.org as an example of where to find community recommended wallets for bitcoin.

Check the implemented changes here: https://medium.com/@Anycoindirect/choosing-a-cryptocurrency-wallet-5d0f9771245a

Hello Srujan007,

A hybrid variant of the consensus-algorithms PoW and PoS, works by allowing consensus to occur through both proof of work mining and proof of stake.
There are several kinds of methods that could be considered a hybrid implementation of these consensuses, but in general they will aim to reach a balance between the miners and the stakeholders.

One example of a crypocurrency that utilizes this hybrid consensus algorithm is Espers (ESP). You can find their whitepaper here.
This coin has achieved distributed consensus by successfully having implemented a combination of these principles.

Another cryptocurrency that is going to use a combination of these two kinds of algorithms is Ethereum.
Their algorithm is called "Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget", of which you can find the technical paper here.
In the near future we can expect the implementation of this new algorithm on the Ethereum network.


With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team.

Thanks for the feedback! You are right that we have not given any explanations specifically regarding tokens.  The plan is to make more guides in the future, including one to explain the difference between coins, tokens and protocols. This current guide should serve as the first stepping stone to help new users choose a wallet, later we will delve deeper into explaining the differences between the type of coins and tokens.

Thank you for your feedback, we realize this is the next question users would ask themselves. We do like users to make their own decision after being informed as to which wallets suits them best. As for the websites you suggested, we will see if we can use Bitcoin.org in the guide so that new users have a broad selection of wallets to choose from. We fear that Cryptocompare is a little too much, and that this site would possibly overwhelm new users with the abundance of wallet-clients they can choose from.

1. Thank you for this advice, we plan to make a separate guide for private and public keys as it is a very complex topic. However, a short explanation should be presented in this guide as well.
2. Good one, we do not want to be too negative against exchanges though. We will try to include it in the part of private keys, as on exchanges you do not control your own private keys.
3. As for your third point, we are considering making guides specifically for a few of the most popular clients. In this guide we didn't want to promote any specific coin or wallet this time to remain neutral.

Again thank you very much for your input!

Hello fellow crypto-enthusiasts,

As a cryptocurrency broker we are always looking to find ways to make cryptocurrencies more accessible for everyone. We have noticed that for new users there is a very steep learning curve when starting with this technology. To help beginners out we wanted to create short but essential guides for them to get involved in the scene. In order to make sure they have enough knowledge to use the technology  and make sure their funds are safe we believe these short guides will prove to be resourceful for new users.

Making sure your funds are safe and secure starts by choosing the right kind of wallet. The first guide we have made has just been published on Medium in order to get some feedback and input before publishing it on our website.
Check out the guide here.

As this guide is the first article we have written specifically to help users make the right choice concerning which wallet to pick, we would appreciate any feedback to improve it further!

With kind regards
The Anycoin Direct team

Hello Lucasgabd,

If you create an account on blockchain.info you can add a watch-only address. Without entering your private key you can get updates on this address via SMS or email without giving up the security of own wallet.

With kind regards,

The Anycoin Direct team

Hello Cointosser99,

When a miner successfully solves Bitcoins PoW algorithm and mined a block, this block reward will be distributed to the miner that solved it. It is distributed by the miners adding it as the first transaction on a block. This transaction has no inputs, but only an output to the miners wallet address. That miners wallet address also has a private key, but it does not work by generating a private key and public address that contains the block-reward. The newly generated coins will just be send to the miners address. From that address the coins can be spend to any other address in the network, like a regular Bitcoin transaction.

We hope that this explanation gives you a better insight as to how the block rewards are distributed.

With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team

As we stated in our previous post, there was a bug in the boot-loader of the new firmware patch that may have caused this problem for you. This only applies to the Trezor One.
If you have enabled passphrase encryption, then this could be the reason as to why you were not able to fix it yet.

The following thread on Reddit has a guide that may help you out in regards to the issue you are experiencing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TREZOR/comments/8u96pv/missing_wallets_after_162_update_and_have/

We hope that this thread will enable you to resolve your issue, so that you are able to use your Trezor to access your wallets again.

Hello TUMAS,

It could be that your TREZOR is not fully synchronised yet after the firmware update. There is no need to worry if you have the recovery seed and you verified that the coins are in that address via a blockexplorer. Give your hardware wallet some time to see if the coins will be displayed eventually. You can always at a later point restore your wallet by using the seed for recovery.

A few more users have experienced problems after running a firmware update, it seems there is was a bug in the boot-loader that comes with the new firmware patch.
This means would mean that any firmware update may result in a wiped device. In that case you will have to restore your wallet via the recovery seed either way.

If you have any further questions, feel free to send us a DM.

With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team

Hello reikenboats821,

There are several options for you to choose from to get your hands on an Ethereum address. You will have to choose a wallet that fits your needs, and that wallet will be
able to provide you with an address. The Mist wallet is a desktop client you can use, and is available for download here.
Another option would be to create a wallet on a platform like blockchain.com, which also can provide you with an Ethereum address.

If you are planning on storing and holding coins of a significant amount, we suggest you look into hardware wallets like the Ledger.

With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team

Hello SK Funky,

As this is a bitcoin discussion thread we will try to compare Proof of Stake with Proof of Work. An explanation of the Proof of Work function used in bitcoin can be found in the bitcoin whitepaper here. After years of development on bitcoin some developers came up with the concept of Proof of Stake. This concept revolves around 'staking coins' in order to receive rewards rather than using hashing power to receive a miner reward. For a full comparison between the different methods of rewarding the users of the dedicated network check out the following guide here

After you understand the difference between these consensus systems it is time to look at one of the first applications of it. We suggest you check out Peercoin to see the first coin that marketed itself as a Proof of Stake coin. Understanding the way their 'staking' process looks like will help you understand other Proof of Stake coins on a much higher level as well.

If you have any further questions on this topic, feel free to send us a DM.

With kind regards,

The Anycoin Direct team

Hello elementus,

First we would like to help you understand that blockchain technology is not synonymous with cryptocurrencies even though the two are closely related. A blockchain can be set up in such a way that users would have to register and have zero anonymity. Please check out the tutorial offered by IBM on the following website. This will provide you with some insight on how the blockchain can be used in a real life business cases.

As you will learn in the tutorial, cryptocurrencies and the blockchain are closely related but the two paths have diverged. All the factors you have described can be adapted and customized per blockchain. For example if the government wanted they could also have centrally controlled nodes validating all transactions on the blockchain. To focus your question of transparency on cryptocurrencies we suggest you check out the following website. This concept could help legitimize transactions to a certain extent and help people see how legitimate their transactions are.

We hope this info will help you gain some more insight on the issue.

With kind regards,

The Anycoin Direct team

Hello jerry0,

We understand if you have invested in many different altcoins it might seem like a lot of trouble to download each individual wallet. However, as you stated yourself, leaving them on an exchange is not the safest method of storage. The same goes for multi-coin wallets, both these kind of wallets don't give you access to the private keys making you dependent on 3rd parties to store your coins. One of the main advantage of cryptocurrency is that it gives you the opportunity to be your own bank. To live up to this concept users must control their own private keys. Then again, if you are investing small amounts  leaving them on an exchange will only leave you open to a small risk.

There are also other reasons to install the dedicated wallet of each coin. First of all if you are investing in a coin it is wise to see what kind of network they are offering. Installing a wallet of the concerning coin is a great way see how well the network operates and what the team is capable of. When choosing a wallet we always recommend our customers to download the wallet officially recommended by the community. So for greencoin you should just visit the website: http://greencoin.life/ and download the wallet recommended on the website itself.

With kind regards,

The Anycoin Direct team

Hello Oschoir,

There are a lot of different questions you are asking here so we will try to answer most of them. When a miner forms a block he choses transactions based on several factors such as the transaction fee, age of the coin and size of the transaction. All transactions and other related information stored in a block creates a unique blockheader related to these factors. However, every second there are new transactions being added to the mempool. This means the transactions included in the block are also constantly changing leading to a different blockheader as well. On top of this each miner makes their own unique block and miners can choose to add their own transactions.

It is important to understand that this does not impact the chance of mining a block since you are trying to calculate the hash of the blockheader. Whether the nonce changes or the included transactions change they have an equal chance of finding the hash below a certain value. 


With kind regards,
The Anycoin Direct team