Ethereum is a lot of things to different people. At its core, however, it is a ground-breaking technology that not only allows users to send cryptocurrency to others without the need for any middleman, but is also programmable!

Bitcoin revolutionized the world of financial settlement following its launch in January 2009, and Ethereum builds on Bitcoin’s innovation of peer-to-peer electronic cash to add programmability. This means that it serves as the backbone of an immense and yet fast-growing world of financial services, games, and other applications, all of which are decentralized.

So, what’s the secret sauce? The ETH blockchain is programmable thanks to something called smart contracts.

Smart contracts, first proposed in the early ’90s by prominent cryptographer Nick Szabo, are intended to automatically execute actions when a condition is met via code. And since it’s code, there’s no more need for trusted intermediaries, arbitrations, and enforcement. Exceptions,
whether malicious or accidental, are eliminated.

Thanks to these smart contracts, Ethereum allows the deployment of permanent, immutable decentralized applications that users can interact with. This spurred the growth of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) at the turn of the decade, where applications started providing the services normally offered by financial institutions like banks, exchanges and brokerages.

Ethereum’s programmability also allows other digital currencies to be transacted and even exist entirely on the ETH blockchain. This includes countless other cryptocurrency coins that use Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard as well as Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, that represent ownership of a digital asset.

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Tired of holding different assets and want to trim your portfolio? You’ve got some Bitcoin sitting around; you want to sell it to pay off some unexpected costs, and you’re wondering just how to sell Bitcoin?

Or have you simply got some Bitcoin with a custodian and are getting worried about the collapse of both custodians and banks these days? They’re certainly not getting any safer, and when they go down, depositors always seem to be last on the list.

This guide will look at exactly how to sell Bitcoin, covering the pros and cons of the different options as well as complications caused by custodial and non-custodial storage.

Contact us to learn all about selling Bitcoin and how to go about it in the safest possible way with the full article.

Before You Sell Bitcoin

Despite the fact that selling Bitcoin isn’t difficult, there are a few things you do need to figure out before pulling the trigger.

1. What Currency Do You Want?

2. How Do You Currently Store BTC?

Bitcoin was mined with the CPUs of enthusiasts’ computers in the early days, before exchanges, mining pools, and worldwide adoption. The first Bitcoin miners had a decent chance to win their block reward operating solo, but these days you’d be hard-pressed to do so with anything short of a mining farm.

Most of the original cryptocurrencies could be mined. It’s on the wane now, but there are still mineable cryptos that use a consensus mechanism called “proof of work.” Proof of work depends on a certain level of difficulty, which in turn requires a certain amount of computing power to mine.

So, what is cryptocurrency mining, and why are there entire farms devoted to the task? Let’s find out.

What is Cryptocurrency Mining?
Another name for a blockchain is a distributed public ledger. This describes a blockchain as being a record of transactions that exists on a decentralized public network of computers called nodes.

Transactions made on this network are grouped into what’s called a “block.” It also contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block’s contents. This gives the blockchain its famous quality of immutability—changing a single transaction in the past would change the block’s hash and break the established chain.

This hashing and grouping of transactions together into blocks is called “block production.” Blocks are also verified once they are produced. In a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, block production and verification are done by nodes called miners.

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Initial coin offerings may feel like a thing of the past, but that’s because the blockchain industry has moved on. You can still get in on the ground floor of exciting blockchain start-ups, and one of the best ways to do it in 2023 is via an initial token offering.

There are many different vehicles that blockchain start-ups use to raise funds, and many of them now involve the sale of tokens rather than coins. Not every new project needs its own blockchain anymore!

So, what is an initial token offering, and how does it differ from an initial coin offering? Perhaps even more importantly, how do you find and take part in an ITO?

Get in touch for the full article on ITOs, as well as reports on ICOs and more.

What is a Token?
The difference between a token and a coin in cryptocurrency is often misunderstood. The two terms are even used interchangeably!

For context, a coin refers to a cryptocurrency that is native to a blockchain and is used for transactions, fees, and everything else. It’s the primary digital asset on that blockchain, such as BTC on Bitcoin, Ether on Ethereum, ADA on Cardano, and so on.

A token, on the other hand, is a digital asset that resides on a particular blockchain. You could argue that ETH and BTC are native tokens when it comes to their respective blockchains, but the word “token” is better used to refer to the many thousands of ERC-20 tokens that live on the Ethereum blockchain.

The ERC-20 standard is crucial to the history of tokens because it has allowed developers to create their own tokens atop Ethereum. These tokens could then be used for different purposes within different dApps or protocols.

For example, the LINK token powers the Chainlink decentralized oracle network. USDC is a wrapped token called a stablecoin, representing actual fiat dollars held in a bank vault. UNI is the governance token of the Uniswap protocol. These tokens allow all sorts of different use cases for services, platforms, or dApps that are built atop other blockchains (in this case, all of the above are Ethereum tokens).

Cryptocurrency is a decentralized and relatively unregulated area of finance that has both pros and cons. Decentralization tends to be a uniformly positive thing, but a lack of regulation does mean that you’ll often see scams like the infamous crypto exit scam.

To protect your wealth and safely navigate the shark-infested waters of crypto, educate yourself about what can go wrong. That way, you’ll find it easy to avoid scams and enjoy a far more rewarding experience in crypto.

So, for all about crypto exit scams and things to be careful of during your crypto journey, keep reading!

What is a Crypto Exit Scam?
There are a lot of crypto scams out there, but the crypto exit scam is especially nefarious because it’s the developers of a project who are responsible for orchestrating the fraud.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of crypto projects out there, and more are being created each and every day. Marketing is one of the key considerations for many of these projects since however good the tech they’re developing is, they won’t get anywhere without a community willing to back them.

A crypto exit scam is all about this sort of marketing. You’ll hear terms like “shill” being bandied around a lot—shills, put simply, are people being paid to spread the word about or support a project.

It’s not just the developers who may be involved in a crypto exit scam, however. They might be using individuals with a lot of clout to shill their project—just like FTX employed a legion of celebrities for the job, an exit scam can definitely involve influencers.

In fact, a lot of “crypto YouTubers” are suspected of participating in exit scams. One of them, Ben Armstrong, a.k.a. “Bitboy,” was even publicly accused of such by the CTO of Ripple, David Schwartz.

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Binance Smart Chain is a blockchain built and supported by Binance, one of the world’s largest crypto companies. It’s also one of the most popular ecosystems of dApps out there, so if you’re serious about crypto, you need to know how to use BSC!

Detractors will point to BSC’s relative degree of centralization and the fact that it emerged practically as a copy of Ethereum, but neither of these factors takes much away from BSC’s strengths. It’s a cheap, fast, and relatively secure blockchain that just about anyone can use.

So, how can you get started exploring BSC? We’ll answer that question and a whole lot more in this article!

What is BNB Smart Chain?
Formerly known as Binance Smart Chain, BSC is one of two blockchains under the aegis of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange and its crypto ecosystem. The original Binance blockchain, referred to as the Binance Beacon Chain, is distinct from the Binance Smart Chain in many ways.

The most crucial difference between the two is that Binance Smart Chain, or simply BSC for short, is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and supports smart contracts.

That means developers can set up and run dApps on BSC or even port dApps directly from Ethereum. This is more common than you may think, given that dApps on Ethereum tend to suffer from expensive gas fees. Making small transactions on any blockchain is very prohibitive when gas costs tens or even hundreds of dollars, and that was the situation
Ethereum users faced throughout much of 2021.

BNB Smart Chain, in direct contrast, is very cheap to use. Of course, anyone with a little blockchain know-how is well aware that everything is a trade-off—Ethereum’s gas fees are a result of adhering to the strictest of security and prioritizing decentralization.

BSC, on the other hand, jettisons decentralization in favor of scalability, meaning speed and low fees. It uses a consensus mechanism called Proof of Staked Authority (POSA), where validators have to stake native currency but also be approved by Binance.

In fact, many of BSC’s 21 validators are operated by Binance themselves. This allows the network to work fast, needing to waste little time on consensus, but it’s hardly the permissionless, decentralized utopia that blockchain idealists talk about. Still, it’s fast and cheap, and that serves the purpose for plenty of users.

The Ethereum Name Service, commonly known as ENS, is Web3’s answer to DNS.

DNS, or the Domain Name Service, was a vital internet development that allowed the linkage of a human-readable domain name, like “cryptomarketcap.com,” to an IP that a computer could understand.

IP addresses weren’t that bad, but typing in an easy-to-remember domain name is still far simpler than having to memorize and enter a series of up to 10 or more digits.

Cryptocurrency addresses, such as your wallet’s public keys, are even worse. Addresses, hashes, metadata, and other things that get registered on blockchains like Ethereum are very difficult to remember.

With enough effort, you may be able to remember your own Ethereum wallet address. But what about those of your family, friends, crypto exchange, business associates, and so on?

That’s where ENS comes in. Using the Ethereum Name Service, you can buy a “.eth” domain and link it to your wallet address. Every time you need to receive a payment or enter your wallet address, you can now simply use your new ENS domain.

When Was Ethereum Name Service Launched?
The Ethereum Name Service was first launched in March 2017, but it was pulled back and rescheduled due to various issues.

The team and community discovered two issues with the auction registrar smart contract. Despite fixing the first bug, the team decided to call off the launch upon the discovery of the second.

Derided by critics as nothing more than a joke or a meme, that is exactly what Dogecoin began as. Created as a joke for crypto enthusiasts in the early days of the technology, Dogecoin hit the headlines with various publicity stunts, including a fundraiser aimed at sending the Jamaican bobsleigh team to the 2014 Olympics.

Despite being the OG meme crypto, Dogecoin does in fact run on its own dedicated blockchain. Similarly to Bitcoin, Dogecoin remains a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, but it also has an inflationary economic model. This characteristic has seen trials of its use as a cash alternative since it is not as good a store of value as many other cryptocurrency tokens.

When Was Dogecoin Launched?
Dogecoin was launched in December 2013 as a hard fork of Litecoin, which in turn had previously forked away from Bitcoin. This makes Dogecoin a spiritual descendant of Bitcoin itself, even if its original purpose was to poke fun at the original.

The concept of Dogecoin was created around the then-popular internet meme of a Shiba Inu and the word ‘dog’ being misspelled by adding the letter e.