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Growth for Maza

For those of you wondering about the price of Maza, I want you to know that I think about it as well.  Right now, the best way forward that I can think of is creating a digital good that we can pay people to work with in Maza and charge people to get access to.  This is simpler than allowing someone to purchase a physical good because the price margin on things in a store are small.  Margin is the difference between the price the store owner had to pay to get the item and the price we pay to take the item home with us.  Also, the store owner needs US Dollars to pay their supplier (right now) so they would have to trade most of their Maza for US Dollars thereby possibly reducing the market value.

The power of Maza is stronger when the seller does not owe many US Dollars to anyone else in the production of their good or service.  This is why I push for digital goods, but some physical goods or services could still be traded.  A service would be something like shoveling snow for someone.  If you own the shovel, then you don’t need to sell the Maza and it’s value to the community has increased.

Digital goods could be an electronic picture,  or maybe some information that was put together, like a book.  Recently the CEO of FaceBook, Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress as questions grew about the information he had gathered about the websites’ users and if he was selling it.  This is proof that electronic information has a high value now.  We can have services that run with Maza where people pay with Maza for the electronic information and in turn all the people who helped create that information also get paid.

The real question is what electronic information can we create together and who can we sell it to?

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The way that I trade alt-coins for fun

The real value is in bitcoin, but a lot of us like to speculate in this market.  I found this technique on a VLOG by Trevon James.  [Quad Squad] I guess it was his friend Craig’s suggestion.  I don’t use the Jaxx wallet, but I was able to adapt the idea to Coinigy.  I think of this as one of those new fidget spinners.  It keeps you out of trouble by keeping you balanced and busy.  (Warning: Trevon does let some curse words slip in from time to time)

So I use one account on an exchange with a lot of alt-coins available.  I bought a balanced supply of 4 alt-coins.  I use Coinigy to keep an eye on the total balance where ever I am.  When a coin’s bitcoin value is up over my alloted amount, I sell some to bring the balance down to the allotted amount.  When the coin value is down, and I have some spare bitcoin, I buy back in up to the allotted amount.  It is also good that the trading fees tend to be around 0.25% which makes it affordable to make many trades.

Traditionally people try to find a “bottom” of a market and go “all in”, but this balanced approach pushes you to buy and sell only a little at a time.   You can do this with dollar value or bitcoin value depending on what platform you use and how you make it work for you.

So far, this idea is working well.  The account is up in bitcoin value (so far) and I get to participate in daily trades.  This account is only 10% of my holdings, so I can afford to loose it all.  Another risk that I forgot to mention is that there may come a time where you can’t recover your coins from off of an exchange because of an event like a hacking.  This is another reason to use only a mall portion of your total bitcoin holdings.

If you want to do more of a traditional trading approach, I suggest you go to The Rational Investor.

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Downside risk

While investing, one thing to try to protect yourself from is downside risk.  What happens if your investment looses value?

One thing that I have tried to do is invest in projects that return fiat/cash monthly and buy bitcoin to pay me back.  That way, if the market price of bitcoin drops, these investment would buy more bitcoin at the cheaper price to add to my collection.

Another point is that selling bitcoin for fiat/cash is not it’s only use or way to get out of bitcoin.  There a companies that accept it for payment.  I like to use Purse.io and have people buy Amazon wish-list items for my bitcoin at a discount!

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What gives bitcoin value?

The value of bitcoin is a difficult question because so many miss it the first few times they hear about bitcoin.

  • One value is a set supply.   This helps to build confidence that this token will be scarce in the future. There will only be 21 Million bitcoins according to the software today.  We are not quite sure how many dollars the federal reserve has created since it was found out that they created secret loans to corporations during the 2007 financial crisis.
  • Another value is uncensored transactions.  Today it seems that more and more people are not allowed to make transactions with others according to the powers that be. You might even say that we may be creating the enemies of the future by denying them the ability to transact in the present.
  • Bitcoin grows in price and value as more people are able to transact inside the network and less people need or want to convert the bitcoin into fiat/cash.  Though, there are people who buy bitcoin to look to “cash out” later with great fortunes.  Others say bitcoin will crash to zero as there are not enough dollars to hold the price up to the market price as everyone trades back into fiat/cash.
  • We are the value.  As we continue to transact inside the network, the network gains value.  Imagine a small community who trade gifts as they help each other create things of continued use for the group.  If their basic financial needs were able to be met, you could start to see the wealth of the community grow.

These are the things that I have learned in my time with bitcoin.  I hope they help you to think of bitcoin a little differently.

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Where does the bitcoin price come from?

There are several exchanges on the Internet that host trading of bitcoin 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  With all of the buying and selling on the order book, just like in the stock market, a price is discovered.  Right now, in 2017, the prices on the exchanges do not match up together as much as they used to.  In fact coinbase, one of the easiest exchanges to buy from in the US, has one of the highest prices.