Safe Crypto Show S01E05 - Raiblocks, Intel Meltdown, & the Ripple conspi...

Our latest episode ... took me an extra day to get it out due to sound problems that required much tweaking.

1. Topic #1 --  weekly review of the top five crypto’s of the week.
1. Bitcoin - a sideways week.
2. Ripple - Now number two on coinmarketcap.com - up 36,000% in 2017. I still don’t own any, and probably won’t.  Too many red flags with ripple for my taste - e.g. the large percentage of ripple owned by the founders, whose net worth now exceeds facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg.
3. Ethereum - Moved much higher this week - will it break out even more if it surpasses US$1000 per eth?
4. Bitcoin Cash - Another sideways week for BCH with a big drop the last couple of days. I think the market is saying “what’s so special about bitcoin anyway?”
5. Cardano - continues it’s upwards rip from last week!  Last week I urged caution and now you probably all hate me!  Well, this week will be no different - hate all you want, I prefer rational trading choices and I have no rational reason to own Cardano, especially now.  At some point hodlers are going to take profit - it’s been a huge run-up -  and the higher it goes, the more likely that event will be triggered, which will cause a cascade of selling. If you’ve made a mint on Cardano - fabulous (I’m envious of your profits!!). Personally I would be getting into the proverbial bunker right about now by selling into a diverse array of less bubbly crypto.
2. Topic #2 -- news segment -- “Intel Meltdown bug and the ripple conspiracy” -
1. Intel ‘Meltdown’ - will bug affect crypto exchanges?
1. What is it? - The meltdown bug, one of three hardware bugs exposed by a Google researcher allows malicious software to read otherwise encrypted data being processed by your CPU. There are fixes, but these fixes can drastically slow execution time by 5% at minimum - that may not seem like much, but in the server market where each second is precious, this puts a big squeeze on those who rely on fast hardware - and this includes those who run crypto exchanges. At the very least, the cost of hosting for these exchanges is going to go up - possibly by a significant margin. Will they absorb the cost or pass it on to traders?
2. Links:
1. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-03/everyone-affected-why-implications-intel-bug-are-staggering
2. Ripple conspiracy - some in the crypto community believe that big banks and governments are conspiring to bring crypto to heel - to control it before it goes out of their control for good.
3. Links:
1. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-04/anatomy-crypto-nightmare-ripple-ceo-now-richer-zuckerberg
3. Topic #3 -- Interesting Token SEGMENT.
1. NExt is RaiBlocks - symbol XRB
1. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/raiblocks/
2. https://raiblocks.net/
3. Core attractions: zero fees -- yes, really … zero!, near instant transaction ~around a second in most cases, massively scalable - won’t slow down in the future, strongly decentralized early distribution.
4. Drawbacks: it’s ONLY a currency -it doesn’t do smart contracts, it has a small network as compared to top currencies so not as well tested, it’s new - hard to break through all the early movers, it’s name isn’t so great IMO (but maybe they are in-process of rebranding)