On top of that, Russia is blessed with natural resources. It is the largest producer of crude oil and natural gas in the world. Russia is a leader in the exports of metals such as Copper, Nickel, Gold, Cadmium and Aluminium. It is one of the top producers of diamond and coal. It is also one of the world leaders in the iron and steel industry.

Hi All,

I have just over £500 to spend and I'm not sure where I should be investing this.

Do I buy a small fraction of a bitcoin or buy 2 ethers?

What would you do?

I'm looking for some long term investment.

Also, i'm hoping to contribute £100 per month towards either one but not sure which direction I should be taking.


Many Thanks

You have extraordinary skills if you see devs dumping their coins. Do you see it like Neo sees the Matrix?

Just to let you know that SONM will be listed on Binance Exchange, And this update would explode the value of SONM (from ground to the MOON).

Current value:

SONM $0.084460 (36.12%)

And soon, it will be added on Bittrex and might exceed the value of Golem and iEXEC.

This is very much awaiting project that you might not too missed.

Bitfinex have stated that for practical reasons S2X won't be Bitcoin - https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/223

Coinbase have acknowledged there'll be two chains if it happens and it may take several days to access them - https://blog.coinbase.com/update-on-the-bitcoin-segwit2x-hard-fork-69426f14bc85

These are two of the biggest players and their actions have confirmed that the NYA thing will do exactly what it aimed to avoid.

I can see the Chinese miners being mindless enough to crack on until they realise it's worthless, but I don't see why anyone else is going to bother any more.

Is S2X in the bag or will it be yet another toothless boogeyman?

^^^ This is why I dumped my IOTA

Everyone knows that as the lead tech dev, your job is to spend your time FUDDING your more-scalable competitors who are offering cheaper transactions.  Case in point:

Bernays' vision was of a utopian society in which individuals' dangerous libidinal energies, the psychic and emotional energy associated with instinctual biological drives that Bernays viewed as inherently dangerous given his observation of societies like the Germans under Hitler, could be harnessed and channeled by a corporate elite for economic benefit. Through the use of mass production, big business could fulfill the cravings of what Bernays saw as the inherently irrational and desire-driven masses, simultaneously securing the niche of a mass production economy (even in peacetime), as well as sating what he considered to be dangerous animal urges that threatened to tear society apart if left unquelled.

Bernays touted the idea that the "masses" are driven by factors outside their conscious understanding, and therefore that their minds can and should be manipulated by the capable few. "Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos."[64][65][57]

Propaganda was portrayed as the only alternative to chaos.[66]

One way Bernays reconciled manipulation with liberalism was his claim that the human masses would inevitably succumb to manipulation—and therefore the good propagandists could compete with the evil, without incurring any marginal moral cost.[67] In his view, "the minority which uses this power is increasingly intelligent, and works more and more on behalf of ideas that are socially constructive."[68]

Unlike some other early public relations practitioners, Bernays advocated centralization and planning. Marvin Olasky calls his 1945 book Take Your Place at the Peace Table "a clear appeal for a form of mild corporate socialism." [69]

What are the most amazing benefits of mediation ?

Think bitcoin is in bubble territory? You ain’t seen nothing yet, says one cryptocurrency expert, who believes its value needs to surge by about 300 times over the next several years to be considered a legitimate currency or risk retreating into obscurity and obsolescence.

Bitcoin, the No. 1 cryptocurrency, has drawn outsize attention over its parabolic rise—and the recent, brutal plunge it has been enduring in recent trade.

Some market participants, however, make the case that despite its roughly 260% year-to-date rise BTCUSD, +3.32% it has to clear a far more stratospheric value hurdle to evolve into a practical form of money alongside fiat units like the U.S. dollar DXY, -0.23% Europe’s euro EURUSD, +0.2265%  or British pound GBPUSD, +1.4480%

A single bitcoin was worth about $3,568 in recent trade, off lows of the past few days, according to data site Coindesk.com, amid regulatory headwinds in China and critical comments from Wall Street pros like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.’s CEO Jamie Dimon.

Still, a bitcoin would need to be worth a stunning $1,000,000 to be a bona fide monetary unit, says Iqbal Gandham, U.K managing director at eToro, a trading platform.

Check out: Bitcoin at crossroads after shedding billion in value

In other words, the digital currency would need to see a 300 fold run-up from its current level. To be sure, Gandham isn’t making a prediction; though he believes the currency has the ability to scale such lofty levels, Gandham thinks that bitcoin needs to climb to such a level to be truly viable as a monetary unit.

To understand why is to understand the tiniest component of bitcoin—the Satoshi. Named after the purported creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. A Satoshi is equal to 0.00000001 bitcoin.

Put another way, one bitcoin contains 100 million Satoshis.

Satoshi’s value in dollars equated to $0.0000356819 at last check. Gandham argues that a Satoshi needs to be equivalent to a single penny, which it would when one bitcoin is worth $1,000,000.

“It is the Satoshi with which people will buy a cup of coffee,” Gandham told MarketWatch. He said using bitcoin now to purchase goods and services, as one would with dollars, isn’t feasible because bitcoin hasn’t reached the necessary economies of scale.


An actual Satoshi note that is redeemable for real money.
“People don’t use a bar of gold to buy things, they use subdivisions of gold,” he said, saying that using bitcoin now to purchase items is like using a bar of gold to purchase a beverage or a meal.

Gandham also said bitcoin really needs to get to that million-dollar mark in the next few years. Some are already wagering that it will get close: John McAfee, founder of his namesake antivirus software company says bitcoin is headed to the $500,000 level within three years.

“It needs to get there in the next few years if it is really going to work,” Gandham said. “People will only spend the subdivision of bitcoin—and you can only spend the subdivision—if they are of reasonable value,” he said.

Bitcoin has been in the buzzy consciousness of average folks for the better part of the past decade. Created at the height of the financial crisis, it has emerged for some as among the clearest alternatives to government-backed currencies.

Bitcoin bulls argue that much of the modern currency world is a product of a manufactured economy, in which central banks print money to boost economic growth, putting bitcoin and other digital currencies, like Ethereum, in position to be considered on par, if not better than, their fiat counterparts in terms of their economic utility.

Against the backdrop of easy-money policies, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.29% the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.18%  and the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.30%  are all at their highest levels in history, while the 10-year Treasury note TMUBMUSD10Y, +0.76% with prices moving inversely to yields, seeing yields near historic lows.


Jamie Dimon Calls Bitcoin 'a Fraud'
Because bitcoin is decentralized from central banks or governments, individuals can conduct transactions without an intermediary. That is part of the appeal of bitcoin.

What’s more, digital currencies are underpinned by the so-called blockchain, a digital ledger that cannot be altered. For many, the blockchain—the promise of and applications that can run atop these computerized ledgers, such as innovative ways to execute and record stock trades, document loans or track property records—are the most crucial and lucrative aspects of the digital-currency realm.

So far, the ambitions of bitcoin cheerleaders haven’t translated in to a killer application, as Apple Inc.’s AAPL, +1.01% founder Steve Jobs would say. Meanwhile, growing scrutiny over bitcoin activity in China and comments from Dimon, who called the currency a “fraud,” has proved the biggest drag on so-called cybercurrencies.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of the No. 2 digital currency, Ether on Ethereum’s blockchain, recently sounded warnings about the current hype and rapid rise of digital currencies on financial site Financial Magnates.

“I indeed think that we are in a bubble because all the cryptocurrencies are rising and people have a feeling that they will always continue to rise. A lot of projects are raising more money than what they would be able to in the normal VC market, and sometimes there is no match between the necessity and usefulness of the project and its ability to raise money. Additionally, this market is still young and people still don’t know how to differentiate between projects that will exist in the long term and those that won’t.
If bitcoin, and other digital currencies, can surmount its obstacles, it could take off, says Gandham.

That is because there are finite number of bitcoins that can be digitally mined, as is done by “miners” using powerful computers solving complex problems to create the crypto units and support the blockchain infrastructure.

Only about 21.5 million bitcoins will ever exist, based on its underlying code. It is estimated that about 16 million bitcoins have been mined so far, with only a portion of those in current circulation. Market participants also estimate that bitcoins will max out in 2141, about 124 years from now.

That is a relatively tiny number of bitcoins for a currency with ambitions of being a global currency. That is also why the value of Satoshis carry such significance. By comparison, there are approximately 1.56 trillion Federal Reserve notes in circulation as of July 12, according to the Federal Reserve. There are about $13.6 trillion dollars in circulation, according to the Fed, as of August 2017.

While bitcoin cannot be increased once developers and miners hit the limit, Gandham says, subdivisions can be increased to, say, a conversion rate of 500,000,000 Satoshis to every one bitcoin, for example, greatly expanding the supply of Satoshis.

That level of growth may help smooth out bitcoin trading, and perhaps make it less volatile on a day-to-day and intraday basis.

“If bitcoin is at a million dollars the day-to-day valuation change will be insignificant to the actual value,” Gandham said.

Can anybody explain to me the huge price difference of 500$ between China and USD? Is the market this inefficient?

Bitcoin’s more-than 20 percent slump this week on China’s reported plans to shut down cryptocurrency exchange trading has investors speculating when it will drop below the key psychological level of $3,000. But the level to watch may be just beyond that threshold: $2,877. Not only is that bitcoin’s intraday high on Aug. 4 -- about the time the digital currency’s most recent leg up began -- it’s also bitcoin’s current 100-day moving average. For Chris Weston, IG Ltd.’s chief market strategist in Melbourne, $2,877 is a “key line in the sand” and “the bulls will want to see this hold,” he said.