Just a quick note today. I wanted to get my ICX and PIVX off the Binance exchange and into wallets where I control the keys. Actually it turned out to be dead simple, but here are a couple of quick tips if you’re trying.

Firstly ICX (ICON); this is currently an ERC20 token on the ETH chain, so it should be dead easy to put into MEW (MyEtherWallet) linked to my Trezor. Well it turns out it is, however a while back it wasn’t! There is still information out there about adding ICS as a custom token:

Information about ICX

It turns out that’s no longer needed but if you’re searching it could cause confusion. Either way, if you go and try to add the custom token MEW will tell you it already exists do no damage done.

Secondly PIVX; you will find that by default PIVX makes 10% of your coins into zPiv which is, I believe, part of their privacy system. If you want to stop that behaviour, which I did, just to keep things simple, then you can do it by editing the config file in the wallet. Details are here:

https://pivx.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/30000026578-how-do-i-stop-the-wallet-from-automatically-converting-piv-to-zpiv-

You may have noticed that I’ve not added any images to posts since I started blogging again this year. For whatever reason, images had broken completely. They didn’t show on posts, they didn’t even show in the media library where I was met by a grid of grey icons and even clicking through into the image didn’t show it. Oddly clicking to edit the image actually did show the image, so it was clearly there somewhere!

Thankfully, I finally figured out what was broken and now things are working again 🙂

There are so many posts out there about broken images but none of them seemed to fix things for me. The majority talked about these three things:

• Disabling all Plugins and then seeing if that worked.
• Resetting the Theme to a default WP theme.
• Using a plugin to rebuild thumbnails.

None of those worked for me.

So in the end I decided to look back to an old post from 2010 and see if that had images also not showing. It turned out that the images didn’t work there either. That led me to believe that this was a global issue not something related to new posts. I then used the browser to show the source of the post I was looking at. That enabled me to get the actual web link to the image. When I put that in its own browser window it finally gave me a useful error message. Essentially I didn’t have permission to view the file.

With that information to go on I went looking to see what the permissions should be on the uploads directory where my images are stored. The general consensus seemed to be that 755 was suitable.

Therefore I used the following command from an SSH terminal:

CHMOD -R 0755 ./uploads

This recursively sets 755 permissions on all the folders and files in the uploads directory (assuming you’ve already navigated using the “ls” command to the folder holding the uploads directory).

Excitingly, my media library now works:

Turns out another Exchange, this time BitGrail, has been hacked. It does rather re-enforce the very sensible guidance of don’t leave anything on an Exchange that you can’t afford to lose. BitGrail has had approx $170M of Nano (previously Raiblocks) stolen which has had rather a nasty effect on the price! Raiblocks is looking precisely like one of those investments that I rather wish I hadn’t made… I missed the big pump and got in high. I’m now just wondering if it will last the course and get back to where it was. Rather hoping it will, especially as it’s trading on Binance now as then I can look at getting out with small profit. Right now it’s at literally half the price I need it to be at to get out with profit… so we’re some way off 🙁

I said at the start that there might be some one liners! Well this is one, Binance came back online.

Slow day today as Binance has been down all day! A little scary, but to be fair to them, they have been doing a professional job on the support front. Regular updates every two hours on Twitter. Follow @Binance_2017 for info. Apparently they had a DB failover issue and then had to resync. Now given that they have millions of users that’s going to be one hell of a resync! Fingers crossed they are back up sometime in the small hours as planned (4amUTC on 9th).

In other news, the Coin Ticker app that i’ve been using for my portfolio view has had a major update. Nice new portfolio view that shows change and more coin info. However, they did remove one thing I find critical which is the view of the amount of BTC each coin amounts to. Thankfully again decent support. I contacted them on Twitter and had a reply within a couple of hours saying that it would be back in an update soon.

A few things today:

1. BTC is making a great effort to break out of the downward trend. It’s not clear that it’s made it yet, but it has gone up over $2000 today, so some significant progress. It’s now a case of wait and see if it can make it up over the $8500 mark and then over $9000. I think if that holds then there is a good chance we’re on the up again.
2. FUN has seen a massive rally today… which I actually caught :). The whole concept of waiting out the dips and having faith in the stuff you buy paid off, literally. I managed to cash out my FUN at the 895 and then 860 mark which made me 0.03 profit on my trade. All in all, a huge success as I didn’t blow it by getting greedy. FUN then dipped all the way back to 700 so I’m very happy to have timed things right.
3. Lastly I’ve now found another app (actually loads) but this one seems pretty good so far, that does alerts. I’ve set them so that my phone will alert me when FUN hits 625 and 750 as these are interesting areas to buy in or at the least to start watching carefully. Here is a link to the app:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/acrypto-bitcoin-price-tracker/id1305881380?mt=8

I’ve had no time today, so this is more of a diary entry than anything else!

BTC maybe has hit the bottom of the pull back. Not sure by any means, and so many conflicting pieces of analysis it’s fairly safe to say that no one knows, but it did dip under the $6000 mark a couple of times and maybe has made a double bottom move. There is now some growth and we are back into the $7700 range which was previously a strong level of support.

A very quick post just with some resources on Verge. I bought a little Verge a few weeks back just as another of the mainly privacy focused coins that I have a few off. Firstly here is the main website:

https://vergecurrency.com/

This is one of the coins which it is apparently still profitable to mine, although I think as it has grown in popularity recently that is gradually changing. Anyhow, the main thing I needed to do was setup a local wallet. To do that I went here:

https://verge-blockchain.com/howto

This has a useful guide which allows you to download the blockchain as a ZIP file and then install, prepare the client, and sync. It avoids the usually very slow process of syncing the chain for the first time, which is great.

I’m now up and running.

One of the things the recent crash has made me think through is the concept of Stop Loss orders (essentially an order put lower than your buy price to get you out with a minimal loss if the market drops). Most of my trades in the past have been longer term… i.e. I’m buying into something which I’m invested in for the long term (by which I mean 1-3 years). These are projects that I believe are well run and will grow over time. Whilst that doesn’t mean I don’t care what happens in the short term, it does mean I’m less worried about a temporary drop. Thus I’ve not really got into the habit of using a Stop Loss order. However, I’ve recently moved back to try more short term trading, i.e. trading within the period of a few days or a max few weeks. My aim as discussed was to get to a point of making a few 0.01s a month.

Unfortunately I’ve been somewhat caught out, by the recent price drops. So much so that the coins I held have turned into somewhat longer term holds!

Partly that’s OK, because I followed my earlier advice not to invest where I wasn’t reasonably confident, however it has meant that I’m holding a bigger position than I would have liked and ultimately right now the amount of BTC I hold is lower than it was before.

This got me thinking about the Stop Loss order and how to use them effectively. It seems that the best option would be to allow some room for the market to fall a little below your buy in price. After all, it’s hard to judge the perfect point to enter, however, you should aim not to lose more than say 5% of your trade value. That minimises risk and lets you live to fight another day! So my suggestion would be to calculate the value below buy price that minimises your loss to 5%, unless the coin seems to swing wildly in which case look at recent troughs and consider setting just below that level. That way you allow for a “normal” drop so that doesn’t trigger the sell, but if it drops further you can get out.

If you’re interested to know about how to put these orders in, below are a couple of examples:

Here is a useful article on Steemit about setting Conditional order (Stop Loss orders) on Bittrex.

Here is a useful video covering the functionality of the Binance exchange