HodlingMoon - First Edition

Dear Crypto-Lover,

Welcome to the very first edition of HodlingMoon! Let us tell you guys that we're so excited, we are so happy, we are really so thrilled to be right now sharing the most amazing, glorious, super-exciting magazine of the year with all of you guys!

Yes, we love crypto. And, luckily, so do you. We are not ashamed to say it. We spend way to many hours online. We look at the charts too often. We sometimes forget about our friends and family. We dream of world domination and we have a very libertarian mindset.

Crypto is like the wild Wild West, a whole new continent to be explored, adventures to be had, containers full of gold to be mined and adventures to be experienced. To ride the exciting waves of bull markets and to get plundered by evil robbers. To see new towns pop up when there is news of a new potentially huge gold-mine, only to see it turn rapidly into empty ghost towns when the excitement turns out to be based on nothing but a scam.

We are about to embark on a new journey, publishing a weekly Steem-Exclusive digital magazine. Our philosophy is to be entertaining for crypto veterans and to be informative for crypto newbies. We'll bring the news, opinions and other strange phenomena in HodlingMoon style straight into your timeline (if you subscribe by following of course). Don't worry, we will not buy your Facebook or Google information or spam your e-mail box. We like coffee, followers, upvotes and resteems. We also like your suggestions in the comments; do you have a particular Quote, Meme, Scam, Shill, Fact or Lingo to share with us? It just might appear in the next edition of HodlingMoon!

On behalf of the editorial team,

May the Spirit of Satoshi live forever in your hearts and minds,

@fitzgibbon

Do you remember that panic rush that happens when you suddenly wonder where you left your keys? The adrenaline pours through your systems and in utter panic you fumble in every pocket of your coat, your pants and your bag, only to find the keys were in your hands all along.

Maybe you haven't noticed it, but the panic gets less every time it happens. After a while, people learn from their experiences. That feeling of shame, looking around hoping that no one saw you frantically searching for something already in yours hands, changes into the proud feeling of being in control: "Where are my keys??? Let's check my hands first. Oh yes, I'm a genius."

"Bitcoin is dead."

Do these words make you go straight for your smartphone, checking the status of your portfolio? You might get used to it. Bitcoin is sentenced to death all the time. At the time of writing Bitcoin has died 273 times in total and 42 times in 2018. Bitcoin is declared dead by news outlets every time regulations and legislations are enacted that outright ban the crypto-currency. Countries that have tried to ban Bitcoin with legal measures: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ecuador, Morocco, Macedonia, Vanuatu, and Vietnam. But even in these countries the governments are losing this whack-a-mole game. New digital currencies pop up all the time and code can be rewritten much faster than legislation.

"Long live Bitcoin!"

The Bitcoin system, with its miners, investors, developers and users, is designed for being resilient, to able to withstand attacks. Hackers have been trying to break the system continuously since 2009. Major Bitcoin merchants (namely exchanges like Mt. Gox and Bitfinex) have been breached and over 1 million BTC has been stolen. But the Bitcoin system itself has remained unbroken. The code that it runs on has been updated and upgraded many times, countless clones of the system have already been launched and new features are designed and implemented all the time.

"What is Bitcoin?"

With all these changes in the code, with clones starting their own systems, with new projects starting similar networks but with differences in the way the system works, it's becoming very difficult to answer this question. In fact, nobody knows anymore. The most hardened crypto veterans say they don't understand Bitcoin. But most of them do firmly believe that their preferred version of Bitcoin is here to stay. And that blockchain will revolutionize the way the world and the internet works.

The platforms built by Daniel Larimer are all founded in one common theme, how to best serve a community by developing and releasing free market solutions to secure life, liberty, and property rights. This highly philosophical viewpoint is very often misunderstood. While Dans products are outperforming nearly every other blockchain in terms of security, scalability, speed and fee-costs they didn't get the highest attention in the crypto community at first. This comes from the fact that Delegated Proof of Stake, the consensus model developed by Daniel, which is the at the core of Bitshares, Steem & EOS, is heavily being criticized for being partially centralized. EOS, which is Dan's latest project is set to launch in June 2018, but is already within the top 10 cryptocurrencies.

The world is not anymore what it used to be, no, no, no! APPICS is the next generation social network. It will empower its users, reward them with cryptocurrency, be completely transparant, make it easy to share photos and videos and will have a simply magnificent mobile app! Unlike on any other popular social media site, where 100% of the platform’s value goes to the shareholders, APPICS enables all users to earn a fair share, as well as influence in the network, through a cryptocurrency reward-token (XAP). And you can get a part of it right now:

https://ico.appics.com/login

Steemit has already successfully introduced the concept of turning “likes” into currency, and we all know how amazing, glorious and super-exciting the Steemit platform is. The APPICS team has been working hard on their product a for over a year now. Steemit has introduced the opportunity to launch smart media tokens on their Blockchain, this was the perfect opportunity for APPICS to be born.

What are you waiting for? Grab a piece of this pie, it's delicious!

"Crypto Snowflake"

An overly sensitive person, incapable of dealing with the volatility of the crypto markets. The snowflake incessantly raves about how much money you could have made if you would have bought coin x on date y, continuously posts pseudo-news (like re-brands and possible partnerships) on coins the snowflake holds, never ceases to talk about how price is up by so much in the past days and how coin X is about to 'fly to the moon'.

The true nature of the crypto snowflakes comes out in a bear market, where their pattern of conversation degrades from 'buy the dip'-variations, to emotional utterances of disbelief, hope, fear, distress, depression, ultimately resulting in selling off in silence. These people can often be found congregating in heavily moderated Telegram groups with likeminded individuals, notoriously dubbed 'crypto safe spaces'.

We at HodlingMoon like a lot of things. But we don't like crypto snowflakes. This is partly why we do not mind bear markets. If a continued long spell of downtrends is in play, it only reduces the amount of cringy snowflakes on Twitter. The less snowflakes, the more attractive the crypto market becomes. With every step towards the zero-valuation, our bullish sentiment increases.

As for financial advice, let us remind you, we could be wrong. Stay safe out there!

In the first edition of our soon-to-be world famous magazine, how could we not start with HODL in our CryptoLingo column? Hodl (often written HODL) is a slang term and Internet meme that is used in the crypto community when referring to holding onto the coins instead of selling.

It originated in a December 2013 post on the Bitcoin Forum message board by an apparently intoxicated user who posted with a typo in the subject, "I AM HODLING." His statement about he could not spot the highs and lows of the market caught on massively in the community and went viral almost instantly.

In the meantime, the term started a life of its own. Many have since then claimed the term to be an acronym for 'Holding Onto them for Dear Life". In 2017, Quartz listed it as one of the essential slang terms in Bitcoin culture, and described it as a stance, "to stay invested in bitcoin and not to capitulate in the face of plunging prices." After 4 years of extensive usage of the term, we can safely assume HODL to be the favorite mantra of crypto-currency holders.