Tools to Trade Cryptocurrency from Singapore

iPhone wallets

• Bread Nice and simple, supports BTC only.
• Jaxx Supports a large list of cryptocurrencies. Supports import from BTC paper wallets, even those that are BIP-38 encrypted.

Buy and sell crypto from/to SGD

• Coinhako
• Coinbase
• FYB-SG

Both Coinhako and Coinbase work in Singapore with xfers, which is a payment gateway located in Asia. You can transfer SGD to xfers from a local Singapore bank account (DBS or HSBC for instance). At the time of writing (December 2017), xfers is going through maintenance issues.

FYB-SG allows only purchase of BTC. You can fund FYB-SG with a local bank transfer in SGD. Prices on FYB-SG are often higer than coinhako.

View the balance of wallets

• Bitcoin: Bitcoin Block Explorer
• Ethereum: Etherscan.io

Buy crypto not listed on exchanges

• Shapeshift: allows you to swap a crypto currency for another.

Store crypto safely

Hardware wallets

• Trezor: supports BTC, BCH, BTG, DASH, LTC, ZCASH, ETH, ETC
• Ledger Nano: supports many more (XRP,...)

Paper wallets

• Bitcoin: https://www.bitaddress.org
• Supports encryption of paper wallets (password protected with BIP38)
• Decrypt a private key previously encrypted with a password and display various formats (can be useful when using Electrum for instance) 
• Ethereum: https://www.myetherwallet.com

Extract crypto from paper wallets

• iOS: Jaxx (supports BTC, Bitcoin Cash and ETH). This is the easiest way because it allows you to simply scan the private key with your phone and it prompts you for a password if you used BIP38 encryption. 
• MacOS: Electrum (supports BTC and Bitcoin Cash)

Safely store paper wallets

• Rent a safety box from your bank (DBS, HSBC for premium customers only)
• Rent a safety box from Certis Cisco

Autonomous, Trustless and Unstoppable (Part 5): 3 Examples of Blockchain Tech Applied to Finance

The previous two videos (part 3 and part 4) described the blockchain ideas from a technical point of view with the example of Bitcoin. This video lists some of the organisations that are actively working on platforms with ideas derived from blockchain concepts that can be of use to the financial industry.

• Post-trade processes: R3 which is a distributed ledger platform targeted at banks and specifically does not rely on a chain of blocks. 
• Cross-border payments: Ripple. 
• Smart contracts: Ethereum, the virtual machine / language / programming environment to write decentralised applications and smart contracts.

Shooting location: Singapore Botanic Gardens. Recorded in July 2016.

Andreas Antonopoulos Explains the Looming Bitcoin Hard Fork

Andreas (who wrote Mastering Bitcoin) was at the SMU in Singapore on Monday March 20th to talk in front of a packed auditorium.

He asked the audience: "who in this room heard about the hard fork?"
He went on to ask what are the fundamental reasons behind the current bitcoin divide. He said it essentially shows a split between 2 cultures: the culture of hardware and the culture of software.

People who develop hardware are used to long development cycles, extensive testing in order to avoid very costly recalls. People developing software -such as myself- are used to very short development cycles and higher tolerance for errors. Bugs in productions can be fixed with patches. There is a necessity for constant maintenance. Software that is not maintained eventually rots.

Trustware is a new type of development that has the tough aspects of both software and hardware: it's hard to write, hard to test and hard to maintain. Shipping a new version is painful because it requires consensus. It is also the beginning of problems that you cannot foresee until the code is live.

The workarounds you introduce with trustware (Andreas used the example of a 2011 bug fix in Bitcoin core to avoid an issue when popping 4 arguments from the stack) remain baked into the consensus rules forever.

Trustware is a new type of development that we are yet to learn about.

A few quotes

"the most secure companies online are those that are open and public". Attempting to protect data within walls is eventually futile because it gets hacked from the inside.

About private blockchains:

"The market will eventually decide. Until then, let them build it, let them call it a blockchain."

About ICOs:

"Don't be in it to trade, be in it to learn"

Christmas in Kuching

Over Christmas this year I spent three days in Kuching in Sarawak, Borneo. The initial impression you get when walking around the city centre: everything looks a bit run down and could do with some fresh paint. The Batik Boutique Hotel where I stayed was getting old but the staff was very accommodating, happy to upgrade me to a better room and helpful with planning excursions.

Christmas period is very quiet. Most shops are closed. Coffee shops are still open though.

Surprisingly the town is much more animated at night: woke up at 3am when a group of car tuning dudes were trying out their engines right outside the hotel. They looked like they were preparing for a Fast and Furious night race. There is an active motor racing culture in Kuching. Several cafes have a garage or car racing theme. The best one is Feast and Furious which shows off actual racing cars and motorbikes collected by Alex 'Stmrock' Wong, a local biking fan.

Lots of quirky little cafes. Even in low season people queue up at Black Beans Coffee to buy some freshly ground Sarawak coffee.

If you're into lavish dinner buffets you can find good ones for under MYR100 (SGD30) at the Carvery, the Hilton Waterfront Cafe and the Pullman.

Going to Kuching from Singapore is quick (the flight lasts a bit more than an hour). I paid SGD360 return during the Christmas period when booking 2 days in advance.

Going from the Kuching airport to the city centre by taxi is less than MYR30.