Does Bitcoin Make Good Sense?

 

What is the hottest technology development of 2013? Most experts will point to the rise of bitcoin.

Bitcoin is on the rise as a digital currency used worldwide. It is a type of money controlled and stored entirely by computers spread across the Internet. More people and more businesses are starting to utilize it.

Unlike a plain U.S. dollar or Euro, bitcoin is also a form of payment system sort of like Paypal or a credit card network.

You can hold on to it, spend it or trade it. It can be moved around cheaply and easily almost like sending an email.

Bitcoin allows you to create transactions without revealing your identity. Yet the system operates in plain public view.

Anyone can view these transactions which are recorded online. This transparency can drive a new trust in the economy. It even resulted in the downfall of an illegal drug ring, discovered shuffling funds utilizing bitcoin and shut down by the U.S. Government.

In many ways bitcoin is more than just a currency. It's a re-engineering of international finance. It can dissolve barriers between countries and frees currency from the control of federal governments. However it still relies on the U.S. dollar for its value.

The technology behind this is interesting to say the least. Bitcoin is controlled by open source software. It operates according to the laws of mathematics, and by the people who collectively oversee this software. The software runs on thousands of machines worldwide, but it can be changed. Changes can only occur however when the majority of those overseeing the software agree to it.

The bitcoin software system was built by computer programmers around five years ago and released onto the Internet. It was designed to run across a large network of machines called bitcoin miners. Anyone on earth could operate one of these machines.

This distributed software generated the new currency, creating a small number of bitcoins. Basically, bitcoins are just long digital addresses and balances, stored in an online ledger called the "blockchain." But the system design enabled the currency to slowly expand, and to encourage bitcoin miners to keep the system itself growing.

When the system creates new bitcoins it gives them to the miners. Miners keep track of all the bitcoin transactions and add them to the blockchain ledger. In exchange, they get the privilege of awarding themselves a few extra bitcoins. Right now, 25 bitcoins are paid out to the world's miners about six times per hour. Those rates can change over time.

Miners watch bitcoin trades through electronic keys. The keys work in conjunction with a complicated email address. If they don't add up a miner can reject the transaction.

Back in the day, you could do bitcoin mining on your home PC. But as the price of bitcoins has shot up, the mining game has morphed into a bit of a space-race. Professional players, custom-designed hardware, and rapidly expanding processing power have all jumped on board.

Today, all of the computers vying for those 25 bitcoins perform 5 quintillion mathematical calculations per second. To put it in perspective, that's about 150 times as many mathematical operations as the world's most powerful supercomputer.

And mining can be pretty risky. Companies that build these custom machines typically charge you for the hardware upfront, and every day you wait for delivery is a day when it becomes harder to mine bitcoins. That reduces the amount of money you can earn.

Why do these bitcoins have value? It's pretty simple. They've evolved into something that a lot of people want and they're in limited supply. Though the system continues to crank out bitcoins, this will stop when it reaches 21 million, which was designed to happen in about the year 2140.

Bitcoin has fascinated many in the tech community. However, if you follow the stock market, you know the value of a bitcoin can fluctuate greatly. It originally sold for $13 around the early part of 2013. Since then it has hit $900 and continues to move up and down wildly on a daily basis.

The real future of bitcoin depends much more than on the views of a few investors. In a recent interview on reddit, Cameron Winklevoss one of the twins involved in the Facebook lawsuit with Mark Zuckerberg and an avid bitcoin investor, predicted that one bitcoin could reach a value of $40,000. That is ten times what it is today antminer s19.

A more realistic view suggests that speculators will eventually cause bitcoin to crash. It does not incorporate the ability to utilize its currency in the retail environment, seemingly a must for long term success. Its wild fluctuations also make it a huge risk for investment purposes.

Still bitcoin pushes the boundaries of technology innovation. Much like Paypal in its infancy, the marketplace will have to decide if the risk associated with this type of digital currency and payment system makes for good long term business sense.

Luxurious Apartments - Defining Contemporary Urban Living

 Portland is an amazing city to live in. Many travelers are attracted to this beautiful city and the charm and beauty of this city always entice people to stay here longer. If you already live in Portland City, then you would know what a wonderful place Portland is. There are perfect luxurious and affordable rental apartments for everyone that shines above the rest.

Expect everything in a modern urban rental apartment

The residences at luxurious apartments are the definition of contemporary urban living. Step inside and be greeted by lofty ceilings, luxurious hardwood flooring, and oversized windows that bring in an abundance of natural light while offering expansive views of this beautiful city. The well appointed kitchens, equipped with whirlpool appliances including refrigerator, dishwater, disposal and microwave oven, stainless steel appliances and natural stone countertops, are everything you could expect in a modern urban rental apartment. Oversized balconies on each floor provide the perfect amount of outdoor living space.

Rental Apartment living is a Real Treat in Portland

Big things are happening in the heart of Portland. Portland rental apartments and condos are springing up all over the district and offering exceptional amenities as -

Private Decks or Patios

The rental apartments are a great place to chill out or get some work done. The stylish lounge is complete with a catering kitchen, WiFi and a plenty of cozy seating. You can sit back and relax with your neighbors, surf the web on your laptop, or step out to the private courtyard for some fresh air. Make yourself at home. It's yours after all.

Gym

You can get in shape and lead a healthy lifestyle in the fitness center. The fitness center is designed to make workouts fun and appealing. It may also feature a generous stretch area. You are sure to appreciate the oversized skylights that run the entire length of the room, letting in a flood of natural light.

Exclusive private place

Luxurious rental apartments are landscaped with mature trees, evergreen shrubs and seasonal flowers. You can consider it your exclusive private place. It's a rare and ideal environment for a respite from your action-packed city life.

Tennis Court and State-of-the-Art-Waterfront Clubhouse

It is an exciting and sophisticated space where residents can find both a wealth of activity and a peaceful haven. Sit back and bask in the sun on lounge chairs, share some wine on custom-made modern benches or enjoy the billiards room and screening lounge with your neighbors perfect ten condo.

Lobby

Step through the dramatic entrance into a grand lobby and get inspired by nature and modern urban living. You will be left in an awe to give a nod to the concierge, and then stop at the kiosk to get updates on packages, dry cleaning and service requests. High-speed elevators whisk you up to your front door and to the many amenities.

Portland is a friendly place to live and work. From a single guestroom in a luxurious apartment to a fabulous lobby, each rental apartment is elegantly and professionally decorated to meet your highest standards living.

How to Determine an Exchange Rate

 

An exchange rate is the cost for exchanging one currency for another. Exchange rates oscillate regularly throughout the week since currencies are being actively traded. That makes the price go up and down. The price for a currency on the market differs from the rate you will get from your bank when you exchange currency.

Market Exchange Rates

Traders and companies buy and sell currencies around-the-clock during the week. In order for a trade to take place, a currency must be exchanged for another. For example to buy British Pounds (GBP), another currency must be used to buy it. Regardless of what currency will be used a currency pair will be created. If U.S. dollars (USD) are used to buy GBP, then the exchange rate is for the GBP/USD pair.

Understanding an Exchange Rate

If the exchange rate for the USD/CAD pair is 1.0950, that means one U.S. dollar costs 1.0950 Canadian dollars. The first currency in a pair always stands for one unit of that currency. The exchange rate shows how much of the second currency is necessary to buy one unit of the first currency. In other words, this rate tells you how much it costs to purchase one U.S. dollar using Canadian dollars.

In order to figure out how much it costs to buy one Canadian dollar using U.S. dollars the following formula should be used: 1/exc. rate. In this case the position of currencies will switch (CAD/USD).

Conversion Spreads

When people go to the bank to exchange currencies, it is most likely that they won't get the market price that traders get. This is because the bank will markup the price to make a profit. If the USD/CAD rate is 1.0950, the market will say that to buy one U.S. dollar it costs 1.0950 Canadian dollars. However the bank says it may cost 1.12 Canadian dollars. This difference represents the profit. If you need to calculate the percentage discrepancy, take the difference between the two exchange rates and divide it by the market exchange rate as follows: 1.12 - 1.0950 = 0.025/1.0950 = 0.023.

Currency exchanges and banks compensate themselves for this service. The bank offers cash, while traders do not deal in cash in the market. To get cash, processing, wire or withdrawal fees will be applied to a forex account. For most people who are looking for currency conversion, getting cash momentarily and without fees, but paying a markup, is a reasonable compromise usd buy sell.

Determine Your Needs

If you need a foreign currency, you should use exch. rates to calculate how much foreign currency you need as well as how much of your local currency you will need to purchase it.

WordPress Website Design for Small Business

 

Developing a small business website can be a time-consuming and sometimes downright frustrating experience. The process usually starts by asking the people in your immediate circle if they can recommend someone to help. These leads to introductions to friends, family and colleagues that might do website design on the side as part of a freelance practice or perhaps hobby. While these people are always eager to help and usually have the best intentions going in, they almost always fall short and end up getting hung on something; delaying the development of the website. This is not only time consuming but also demoralizing as the small business owner starts to lose momentum and usually just gives up. Leaving them with either a dull web presence or none at all.

To avoid this, many small business owners take matters into their own hands.

Designing a website yourself can be challenging. But with the right solutions and tools, it can be a fun and fulfilling experience. So, where do you begin? The first step is researching a Content Management System or CMS. The CMS will be the shelf and shell that holds and presents your website content, including pages, blog posts and the like. The most effective (and affordable) Content Management System on the market today is WordPress. WordPress is not only easy to learn and use; it also very search engine friendly and displays nicely on a mobile device. Using WordPress to develop a website will require a few hours of learning and tinkering but the end result will be complete control of your website and that is empowering.

WordPress comes with several design options. WordPress uses themes to create the look and feel for your website. It helps frame and layout the content you enter. There are two kinds of themes. The basic kind that come free when installing WordPress and the premium kind that run anywhere between $25-$120. Most small businesses will fork out the extra money for a premium theme simply because it eliminates the "cookie-cutter" format and allows for increased customization to help make your small business website look clean, professional and trustworthy. The money invested in a premium theme will be far less than paying a freelance designer or website design firm Web Agency.

Even if you decide to hire a agency or website design shop to develop your WordPress website, the costs associated will be much less than if they develop the website from scratch. In fact, most Web design companies will prefer to use WordPress anyway and will be able to quickly customize your website; shaving weeks of the timing to launch the new site. Feel free to Google "WordPress" or "WordPress Website Design" and poke around to learn more about your options.

5 Must Have WordPress Website Design Plugins

 

WordPress has become an interface of choice for webmasters to create responsive customized websites. It allows creating a feature rich website even without any deep knowhow of complex HTML or CSS programming. Apart from user friendliness its main solid demand as a preferred website design platform has been the availability of diverse plug-ins that allows added functionality to a website like analyzing and optimizing a website for SEO, making a website mobile friendly, automatic generation of website sitemap and many other functions. However discretion is needed in choosing WordPress website design plug-ins as some plug-ins heavily slow down the website.

In this article we will present 5 of the very important WordPress plug-ins that greatly benefits a WordPress website design & functionality:

Essential WordPress Plugins

1. Yoast

Developed by Joost de Valk, Yoast is a great WordPress plug-in that allows for website to be search engine friendly. This plug-in allows for auto creation of a website's sitemap, editing of robot.txt, easily SEO optimize the website's Meta title, Meta description, content and image attributes. It gives suggestions to make a website SEO optimized for various customized keywords which is a very handy feature in targeting a website for rank in search engines. It also allows setting correct canonical tag for multiple version of a web page to point to the correct version of a web page to search engines.

2. WordPress Google Analytics

Another plug-in by Joost de Valk, it allows to easily monitor the WordPress website traffic and analyze the visitor of the website page, examine click through rate and to show the stats on the blog itself. Another wonderful feature is the integration of Google Analytics and Google AdSense which allows monitoring and improving the website performance.

3. Contact Form 7

This WordPress website design plug-in developed by Takayuki Miyoshi allows creation of contact forms for website visitors. It allows to receive queries from visitors and to easily filter spam messages Web Agency.

4. Flamingo

Flamingo plug-in is to be used in tandem to Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin which allows the messages submitted through contact form to be easily saved into a database. This allows for easy record and retrieval of visitors messages.

5. W3 Total Cache

This WordPress website design plug-in developed by Frederick Towens, allows improving website user experience and web page speed. It facilitates in reducing the website load time, increase in server performance and reduce the bounce rate of a website.

5 Benefits of Choosing SMM Panels

Today, SMM marketing is quite important as far as social media marketing is concerned. These services are quite important for the growth of any business out there. Therefore, managing advertisements carefully is quite important. If you are on a strict budget and you have a busy schedule, you can try out SMM reseller panels. They offer a lot of benefits, such as driving sales and boosting conversion rates. In this article, we are going to take a look at some of the major benefits of choosing SMM panels.

1. Lots of Traffic

One of the primary benefits of these services is that they can help you get traffic for various platforms. For example, they can help you get a lot of Facebook comments, Instagram followers and YouTube subscribers. Apart from this, they can also help you get a lot of website traffic.

The great thing is that the traffic you will get is organic as it comes from real profiles. Therefore, you won't be at the risk of getting caught.

2. Fastest Solution

With SMM panels, you can easily promote your business. You cannot get a lot of comments the moment you have published a post. The reason is that there are already tons of posts on social media websites.

Another problem is that many people tend to skip ads if they are not appealing. Therefore, it is better that you go for SMM panels. They can help you to achieve your goals in a short period of time while making sure you are on the safe side.

3. Automation

Another beauty of SMM panels is there they are properly organized. In other words, they allow you to sort your orders without any problem. Apart from this, you won't have to face any problem whether your order is being processed or not. The reason is that these panels are automated. You have special systems that are responsible for controlling the panels and their function. Therefore, every single order is processed and managed.

4. Timely Delivery

Another problem is that some orders are not delivered in a timely fashion. However, if you go for an SMM panel, it will make sure that every order is delivered on time. The great thing about SMM panels is that they provide instant likes, comments, subscribers, and other services. As a result, they boost your confidence level and improve the chances of your posts being seen Cheap smm panel.

5. Quality Response and Affordable Services

If you search the internet, you will find a lot of SMM panels. Many of these offer reasonably priced services. Since there are a lot of competitors, you can get your desired panel at a reasonable price. Therefore, it is possible to get a panel that can meet your needs without breaking the bank. So, you can buy a social media marketing service to ensure your business gets a lot of traffic for better conversion rates.

Long story short, if you have been looking for a great SMM service, we suggest that you take your time. This is important if you want to get the most out of the service you will get. After all, you do not want to end up wasting your time and money.

What is the Right Real Estate Closing Gift?

 

Being a real estate agent in PA, it had been drummed into my head that we needed to find a way to get our clients to remember us. The huge thing with the four walls, roof and windows just wasn't enough. Postcards, closing gifts, telephone calls were all suggested. I did all the above, but had some trouble coming up with closing gifts that were appropriate.

The gift of wine was my first choice. Personally, I like wine for its medicinal purposes as well as its taste. One day I was running out the door to attend a friend's dinner party and grabbed a bottle of wine from our wine rack. As I looked at the bottle in my hands, I asked myself "Where did this come from?". The label wasn't familiar, not a brand of wine I had bought before. Was I possibly re-gifting this bottle of wine? Who had given it to me in the first place? Then the horror dawned on me, was it possible that the $50 bottle of wine I had given my clients was sitting lost among other bottles of wine in their wine rack. Or worse yet, had they unknowing re-gifted it to someone else not remembering that I was the great Realtor who gave it to them! O.K. so I scratched wine off my list of closing gifts.

Gift cards to restaurants and gift baskets also were "deep sixed". What if the meal at the restaurant was terrible? Even good restaurants have bad days. Well, they probably would remember me then, but did I want them to remember me as the Realtor who gave them a terrible meal? Restaurant gift cards then seemed a little chancy. As for gift baskets, we all know what happens after the all the good stuff is gone. The rest languishes around for awhile and may-be gets stored in the pantry until it is thrown away. Once the basket is gone, do you really think it could have been that memorable that they will remember me when it comes time for them to move? Most people only move every six to seven years or so.

Then it hit me, what about a portrait of the new home they had just purchased. I know they are really excited about the home and loved it even before they move in. Would they like a home portrait? Would they hang it? I wasn't really sure, but I found an artist who did home portraits. At my next closing I presented it to my clients. They told me they loved it! What else did you expect them to say to my face? Several months after they moved into their new home, I received phone call from them. They again thanked me for the portrait and told me how many nice comments they received about it during their open house. I then decided to give my clients from the past year portraits of their homes for Christmas. These I just dropped by during my travels. Most of my clients were not even home. Much to my amazement, I received thank-you notes from all of them employee gifts.

From now on I would give home portraits as closing gifts.

The only problem was the expense. With an engineering degree and having taken art classes since I was ten, there must be a way I could figure out how to do them on my own. Well I did. Although, I still practice real estate occasionally, I am now running my own business House Portraits Online and have been providing Realtors with affordable home portraits to use as closing gifts ever since.

Are You Friends With Benefits? Rules for Women

The single most important thing a woman must know when she engages in a friends with benefits relationship is that it is very dangerous to convince yourself that a casual sex relationship is destined to turn into a romantic drama where the fantasy of Mr. Right Now is going to turn into a reality of Mr. Forever. This is why a woman must be in control and realistic about what she is looking for. Having said that, giving you the necessary cautions of a friends with benefits affair, then let's get onto the fun stuff!

There is nothing new about dating. Dating is about socializing with many different people in order to have some fun, develop who you want to be, and maybe find a lifetime companion. The beautiful benefit of dating today is that a physical relationship, that's sex, is no longer taboo.

A courting couch can now be thought of as an interesting place to try out the latest and greatest sexual positions rather than a barrier for your libido.

So ladies, Rule Number 1: When you embark on a friends with benefit arrangement, understand that secretly hoping to manipulate the situation into a commitment is against the rules. Not against the rules of online dating, but against the rules of maintaining your dignity and power.

Some people believe that casual sex is degrading for women. This is an absolute myth. You only become exploited or degraded if you allow it. Learn how to engage in sex as effectively as possible but always in the service of your own objectives.

Rule Number 2: Your objective in a friends with benefits relationship is to have someone to have sex with when you want to without the emotional involvement of a committed relationship. That's it. You want to go out, have fun, with a member of the opposite sex and every now and again get tangled in the sheets. No apologies, no promises.

You may be building your career, going to school, or just not interested in getting married or being in a committed relationship. It doesn't matter what draws you to a friends with benefits relationship. What does matter is that you enjoy the casual sex. You have to turn off your "gal pal" chatter or family objections if they tell you that you should be settling down.

That decision, that one where you decide that you are ready to look for Mr. Forever, is completely up to you. And, despite the ticking of any sort of internal clock, doesn't rely on the calendar. After all, there is always adoption friends with benefits meaning and rules!

Rule Number 3: If you desire a commitment at some point in the future, but just not from your friends with benefits guy, then own up to it. Be smart with casual dating and casual sex. Face it, we are in an age of sex before love. You can enjoy an uncommitted sexual relationship without feeling obliged to justify it with a commitment.

You will know when the right one comes along. And when that happens, you will have the power to handle it because you will be confident as a result of your successful casual relationship. You will know that it's different and behave differently than in a friends with benefits, casual sex, no strings attached dating affair. Don't be afraid to have fun. And don't be afraid to toss the ideal of a commitment to the wind until you are ready for it.