Bitcoin Governance: Neither A Democracy Nor A DictatorshipGeorge Siosi SamuelsBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingNov 14In loom of the upcoming Bitcoin #HashWars, there’s been a lot of talk about the “failings” of Bitcoin, Nakamoto Consensus, and Bitcoin’s social governance. Below I will explain why I think that everything that is happening is, in fact, part of the original design — and I will do so using examples from nature and history.Long ago, mighty empires such as the Romans, Turks, and Mongolian Hordes owed much of their financial, social, and military strength to the wisdom of wolves.How so?In the Roman foundation myth, it was a she-wolf that nursed and sheltered the twins Romulus and Remus after they were abandoned in the wild by order of King Amulius of Alba Longa. She cared for the infants at her den, a cave known as the Lupercal, until they were discovered by a shepherd, Faustulus. Romulus would later become the founder and first king of Rome. The image of the she-wolf suckling the twins has been a symbol of Rome since ancient times and is one of the most recognizable icons of ancient mythology.From the Mongolian side:In the Secret History of the Mongols, the Mongol peoples are said to have descended from the mating of a doe (gua maral) and a wolf (boerte chino). In modern Mongolia, the wolf is still seen as a good luck symbol, especially for males. In Mongolian folk medicine, eating the intestines of a wolf is said to alleviate chronic indigestion, while sprinkling food with powdered wolf rectum is said to cure hemorrhoids. Mongol mythology explains the wolf’s occasional habit of surplus killing by pointing to their traditional creation story. It states that when God explained to the wolf what it should and should not eat, he told it that it may eat one sheep out of 1,000. The wolf however misunderstood and thought God said kill 1,000 sheep and eat one.But why does this matter in the world of Bitcoin?Bitcoin is inspired by nature, just like past empires were. From Small World Network design to the non-reliance of any one leader.Competition vs Collaboration: Two Sides of the Same CoinBitcoin’s self-governance system is sound – through competition, paradoxically, all parties learn how to cooperate and collaborate (as you see now in the self-organisation of pools and miners for the Bitcoin-BCH #HashWars):The strength of individuals is the strength of factions. The strength of factions provides strength to the individual.“For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.” ~Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle BookOver time, people misunderstood the governing structure of wolf packs, much like people misunderstood Bitcoin over the first decade (perhaps Satoshi is responsible for that, having disappeared for a while).When the average person thinks of wolf packs, they may think of vicious, alpha-driven hierarchical groups. Unfortunately, this isn’t the whole truth.Although the notions of “alpha wolf” and “alpha dog” seem thoroughly ingrained in our language, the idea of the alpha comes from Rudolph Schenkel, an animal behaviorist who, in 1947, published the then-groundbreaking paper “Expressions Studies on Wolves.” During the 1930s and 1940s, Schenkel studied captive wolves in Switzerland’s Zoo Basel, attempting to identify a “sociology of the wolf.”A key problem with Schenkel’s wolf studies is that, while they represented the first close study of wolves, they didn’t involve any study of wolves in the wild. Schenkel studied two packs of wolves living in captivity, but his studies remained the primary resource on wolf behavior for decades. Later researchers, would perform their own studies on captive wolves, and published similar findings on dominance-subordinant and leader-follower relationships within captive wolf packs. And the notion of the “alpha wolf” was reinforced, in large part, by wildlife biologist L. David Mech’s 1970 book The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.Wolves (and other animals, including humans), display social dominance, he notes; it just isn’t always easy to boil dominant behavior down to simple explanations. Dominant behavior and dominance relationships can be highly situational, and can vary greatly from individual to individual even within the same species. It’s not the entire concept of wolves displaying social dominance that was dispelled, just the simple hierarchical pack structure. [source]Wolf packs are neither democracies nor dictatorships. It is only during hunts that hierarchies provide a purpose (coordinated action) but, outside of that, the hierarchy breaks apart. Some would say their form of governance is more meritocratic, which has also been echoed in the Bitcoin world.So, as you can see, half-truths often make their way into the Wild, even if not entirely accurate (if you’re used to social media, you’ll know this to be self-evident). In my opinion, this is what happened to Bitcoin.Sure, one could argue that our world is filled with many species other than wolves. However, in the United States, wolves proved so pivotal to the ecosystem, it changed rivers. This is why I use wolves as an analogy in terms of what Bitcoin is doing to the world – it is changing the flow of [financial] rivers. It is harmonizing our global financial ecosystem.And with this shift in money itself – money being one of the key factors of how civilisations have evolved and/or operated – we may see an answer to the question, “if democracy has its flaws, what comes next?” Bitcoin will push that new governance solution forward, and it may not be democratic.With the Bitcoin-BCH #HashWars at our doorstep (November 15, 2018), now is a time to go back to Bitcoin’s origins and learn more about how and why it started. It is the womb from which all current cryptocurrencies were birthed. How will you prepare for the world’s greatest transfer of wealth? Share your thoughts below.

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CryptApp WordPress Theme Changelog 2018.11.09 – version 1.3 * Gutenberg plugin compatible * Latest wordpress version 4.9.8 compatible * Updated latest version of all third party plugins * Updated documentation 2018.07.27 – version 1.2 * GDPR Compliant update in comment form, mailchimp form etc. * Packed with - Layer Slider 6.7.6 * Packed with - Revolution Slider 5.4.8 * Packed with - WPBakery Page Builder 5.5.2 * Packed with - Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer 3.16.24 * Packed with - Envato Market 2.0.0 * Fix - Option for change the site title color * Fix - Add target attribute for social media * Fix - Bulk plugins install issue * Fix - Unyson Page Builder Conflict * Fix - Twitter feeds links issue * Fix - Iphone sidebar issue * Fix - Buddypress issue * Fix - Youtube and Vimeo video issue in https * Updated designthemes core features plugin * Updated language files 2018.04.27 – version 1.1 * Unyson Demo Content Updated Source div.wpob_template_main.wpob_template_main_1{display: none;} .wpob_template_main_1{ background-color: #eee; max-width: 700px; height: 210px; border-width: 7px; border-color: #bbb; margin-top: ; margin-bottom: ; margin-left: ; margin-right: ; padding: 20px; } .wpob_template_main_1 .wpob_box_heading{ background-color: ; padding-top: 0px; } .wpob_template_main_1 .wpob_box_heading_text{ font-family: 'Oswald', serif;

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Below the table you can read more about the casino review methods and tips how to choose a trusted bitcoin casino. Check out our detailed review of best bitcoin cash casino sites of 2020. Find out the pros and cons of investing in bitcoin cash casino’sBitcoin casino winners: Geisha Story - 457.8 ltc  Fantasy Fortune - 700.8 ltc  Cloud Tales - 383 eth  Leonardo’s Loot - 434.5 usdt  Classic Fruit - 694.7 btc  Jazz It Up - 103.2 dog  Secret of the Stones - 364.3 usdt  Juice'n'Fruits - 217.9 bch  Kitty Cabana - 91.5 btc  Mr.Vegas - 58.2 dog  Roman Legion Extreme Red Hot Firepot - 5.1 bch  Cops N' Bandits - 338.9 btc  La Cucaracha - 479.9 ltc  Wild Shark - 351.9 usdt  Vintage Win - 653.4 usdt  Payment methods - BTC ETH LTC DOG USDT, Visa, MasterCard, Skrill, Neteller, PayPal, Bank transfer.The welcome bonus for new players covers the first four deposits into an online account. They are presented as choice between eur or bitcoin (btc). Each deposit bonus also offers free spins. 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The casino regularly updates the no-deposit promotions page. In general, the no-deposit bonuses at silver oak vary between $15 and $100. The amount is determined by the bonus code you enter. Vegas casino runs using bitcoin betting and it offer more than just online casino games. Users can also engage in sports betting using the bitcoin site. A variety of popular sporting events can be found on the platform with corresponding betting markets where you can place your own wagers on the outcomes. Play bitcoin casino games, level-up & get rewards Signature Dice is one of the oldest games out there; bitcoin just brought about the next iteration. The first ever bitcoin game was a dice game, and it offered advantages never seen before, like more than 60,000 numbers to choose from on each role in a distinct “lower than” or “higher than” manner. Best bitcoin casino sites for june 2020 – top 3 list. 5/5 (8 ratings) 1. 5 btc + 100 free spins. First deposit bonus is 157% up to 1. The most commonly used units in bitcoin casino gambling are milli-bitcoin (mbtc). For example, if you deposit 1 bitcoin, it will be converted into 1000 mbtc. You can play games via those 1000 units of your bitcoin deposit. The world of bitcoin gambling is vast, vibrant and abundantly entertaining. On our website you will learn a lot about the best casino and table card games brought to you by world’s cream-of-the-crop online bitcoin casinos, where you can enjoy poker, blackjack, roulette, baccarat, and dice, as well as their (even more engaging) live dealer versions. Bitcoin games, bitcoin slots, baccarat, blackjack, video poker at mbitcasino. Mbitcasino has a virtually endless supply of casino games. Needless to say, our slot machines are the most expansive of our offerings. We offer traditional 3 line and 5 line slots as well as the newest video slots. We spend an enormous amount of time playing on each casino and verifying its fairness if we don’t like a casino, or think it is dangerous — then we don't list it on this page. This list only contains trusted bitcoin casinos and sportsbooks our reviews are written with attention-to-detail and aim to cover every possible question Social Networks Member Activity 0 Forum Posts 0 Topics 0 Questions 0 Answers 0 Question Comments 0 Liked 0 Received Likes 0/10 Rating 0 Blog Posts 0 Blog Comments Share:   Forum Statistics 1 Forums 0 Topics 0 Posts 0 Online 1,096 Members Our newest member: Веб камеры секс русских девуше... Tags Forum Icons: Forum contains no unread posts Forum contains unread posts Mark all read Topic Icons: Not Replied Replied Active Hot Sticky Unapproved Solved Private Closed  Powered by wpForo version 1.7.4

Blogs on Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Altcoin, Localbitcoin, Stablecoin and Blockchain | CoinscloneBitcoin blogs, Cryptocurrency blogs, Altcoin blogs, Blockchain blogs, Stablecoin blogs, Decentralized exchange software blogs.The future of cryptocurrency is bright and cryptocurrencies are trending all over the world due to the internet payments gets accepted by most of the companies. Cryptocurrency is the trending payment nowadays. More investors are now interested in investing their money on these cryptocurrencies, and the increase in demand for cryptocurrencies will increase the prices as well! Well, Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency leveraged by the traders here. This is what referred to as Altcoins! Which means “Alternative to Bitcoins”. Altcoin is a cryptocurrency created similar to a Bitcoin. These coins are being created from diverging the Bitcoin Consensus rules or else by developing a new cryptocurrency from scratch. Most popular Altcoin use the same fundamental as used in the Bitcoin creation. This is going to be relatively easy since Bitcoin is a free and open source platform.  As discussed, an altcoin is an alternative for Bitcoin with an abbreviation of “Bitcoin Alternative”. There are hundreds of altcoin which are being launched and appeared every single day.It is important to note that some altcoins innovate by experimenting with valuable characteristics which Bitcoin does not offer. The characteristics include peer to peer nature, ability to be mined, etc are the core component of most of these new coins. Many of these coins are actually based on the framework provided by Bitcoins. There are thousands of alternative coins available in the crypto market. It is essential that users know what these currencies stand for and the framework on which they actually work before investing in them.Bitcoin is considered to be the supreme cryptocurrency for now. Most Altcoin function as Bitcoin clones but come up with small differences. These differences also include speed of the transactions, distribution methods, the algorithm of hashing among others.Some altcoins are relatively made to solve particular problems or for a particular use. These alternate currencies can now be used in buying domains and hostings. Some of the platforms such as Ethereum are revolutionary and can change the way the Internet is actually functioning. To create your own altcoin is not going to be a tough process. It is now pretty simple with some cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum which can create altcoin.If a person is interested in creating your own altcoin they can check out for either a perfect Altcoin developer or Altcoin Development Company to get their work done.Okay, now coming to the question, here are a few ways which we could suggest you go with:Provide the complete details of your coin including a unique Coin name, an abbreviation of the coin with exactly three letters,  and the icon of the coin.-> Pick the right algorithm and identify the scarcityWhen it comes to the algorithm, you are given a choice between the two! On selecting the algorithm, if your settings are on default you will be answered with block rate, the initial value per block, and halving rate. However, if you need to change them, yes you can!These coins are completely composed of new currencies which are available in the market which has the major intent of piggybacking for the success of bitcoins. While altcoins are in the market for many years from now, there is an increasing number of cryptocurrencies which are being added to the markets!People invest in altcoin for the following set of reasons:Cryptocurrencies are traded in different ways and it uses several algorithms. So, here are the primary characteristics which you need to consider before investing in Altcoin exchangeA cryptocurrency wouldn’t be much of use if they aren’t sold out. Therefore, before investing, you need to do a complete study of who and where it is accepted. Some coins are simply built for other purposes and are not designed for the exchange of goods! Some of the cryptocurrencies are widely accepted similar to Bitcoin, while some other currencies can only be exchanged for other currencies.There is no assurance indicator which will tell you if the coin you are investing is going to reap you with profits! Right off the bat, the altcoin which you require to buy should have a clear purpose to be stated. In the simplest words, there must be a particular problem which your coin should be ready to solve.Stopping with use case won’t help you right away! There must be a problem your coin should be solving and the Altcoin which you are planning to invest should also have some solution to the problem which it needs to solve. The solution should be viewed from a practical factor too! It will be really easy to say replacing the internet with Blockchain Technology! But it is hard to say how you are doing with it!One more thing you need to look out before investing in the project is the group of players who are involved in creating your own altcoin. You need to check whether the team is an experienced team or a group of players providing rich results or the entrepreneurs with hands-on experience in altcoin creation service. Anyone who is trading or investing in cryptocurrencies must know that markets are subjected to risks. Popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, ethereum have shown a desirable growth in the crypto industry! But the same cannot be in the case of new currencies and altcoins.A cryptocurrency’s market capitalization is the entire worth of all coins in circulation. So know the daily trading volume of the cryptocurrencies. It is indispensable to note down the daily trading volume than the market capitalization.To create altcoin there can be diverse steps involved. On the other hand, there are a rich set of advantages available in the market.Many countries have imposed regulations and taxes for transactions between geographical countries. Therefore, Altcoin can be much beneficial since there is no government to impose taxes on the exchange of currency and users can avoid unwanted losses as well!Since fiat currencies have become literally ineffective nowadays, these alternative coins can be a very smart move as this currency is not regulated by any countries and hence people can secure their earnings henceforth by saving much money.A government or a country has the complete right to cancel the ownership anytime which you possess, except the cryptocurrency. Since no government is involved here, you are the owner for every single unit of your coin which you have purchased!Once you make your own altcoin you would definitely come across this question! What would be the best Altcoin to invest? Will it be beneficial? And blah blah!Yes here is the list of a few Altcoin which you can give a try!Litecoin is one of the oldest altcoins in the crypto town. This was created in 2011 which is a digital currency with certain enhancements made. It has resolved a lot more issues from Bitcoin which includes the speed of the transactions as well!This currency was originally created in 2014 in which is one of the biggest cryptocurrency with the origin of China. Similar to Ethereum, this platform is designed to develop applications such as Smart Contracts, ICO’s, etc.This Altcoin is over a high improvement compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum currencies. Bitcoin being a digital currency, Cardano is a dapp building platform which has also solved a lot of issues associated with Blockchain projects.This is a relatively new coin which has launched in 2017. This has been a great platform for developers to build decentralized applications. This is the digital currency which was launched in 2014 with the name called Xcoin and later renamed as Darkcoin and finally to Dash in the year 2015.Dash has gained popularity in the crypto industry, with its significant advantages over Bitcoin.Ripple is the most crucial cryptocurrency which is on trend in recent days. Ripple is already been funded by banks and financial institutions which means that most of the regulated in the cryptocurrencies. Though the future isn’t written already but is not hard to imagine how the landscape may play out! The world is already built on the keen information that altcoin and their respective blockchains handle and transact on a daily basis, allowing for such networks which are demanded futuristic society.  Multi-faceted altcoin which can seamlessly integrate into all the products which are sold by the markets. However you think about it, the future of Altcoins is rather interesting and certainly intriguing.With desirable changes which are already made and are going to happen, altcoin creation service is feature-packed benefits to the traders by boosting their profits to the higher level which is undoubtedly true. There are a plethora of Altcoin Development Company in the market! If you need one, you can get in touch us since we provide top-notch services in the field of Altcoin with desirable Altcoin price.However, never fail to remember the key points which we have discussed already right before investing in Altcoin creation.If you are not sure of the services which we offer, here you can have a look at:Having queries? Need a coin right now? Why still waiting in the wings?Contact us right away to get your application developed!

Cryptocoins Cryptocoins is the most complete free vector iconpack of your favourite cryptocurrencies. Available in webfont & SVG format for taking advantage of small file sizes and unlimited scalability, Cryptocoins are perfect for usage on the web right where they belong. Use them all or just the ones you need. Docs & Demo Demo: demo.html file contains simple webfont demo labs.allienworks.net/icons/cryptocoins (out-of-date, but animated, ha!) Download: clone or download ZIP directly from GitHub Installation There are many ways/formats how to use Cryptocoins. The fastest and recommended way is via SVG directly. Or use the webfont version if you want to include all icons at once: via SVG recommended when you need just a few icons in your project Webfont version ideal when you want to include all icons at once Pro tip:Learn how to generate icon webfonts it's even better when you only include those you really need NPM package npm i cryptocoins-icons 3rd party Packages Built on/with Cryptocoins, these are maintained by the community. Use at your own risk: React compoments @kirillshevch/react-cryptocoins Requesting new icons Initial release contains just a fraction of Altcoins. If you're missing your coin, please let me know so I can include it in next release. Since there are many requests lately and I can hardly keep up, I have to ask you to follow these guidelines: open a new issue in this repo fill in the template (coin name, ticker symbol, link to official logo etc.) (optional) you can include HEX code of the main color used in coin's branding and bitcointalk thread link (not mandatory, but saves me time) (optional) you can notify me on @AllienWorks Twitter (also, helps spreading the word) This is all completely voluntary work, so if you want to support my efforts or speed up the addition of your coin, please donate. Donation addresses are found below (if you don't see your coin, let me know and I'll send the address afterwards). Author Martin Allien Website: allien.work Keybase/contact: martin_allien Twitter: @AllienWorks Tip me crypto and support further development! Updates Version Changes 2.7 contributor @quoid added Ark (ARK), Byteball (GBYTE), Bytom (BTM), Cardano (ADA), QTUM (QTUM), SALT (SALT), Zcoin (XZC) thanks much! + correctly renamed LISK LSK and BCC BCH 2.6 fixed webfonts (again) & added webfont demo file, icons: added Bitcoin Cash (BCC), Decent (DCT), EOS (EOS), Golos (GOLOS), Monaco (MCO), NEO (NEO), OmiseGO (OMG), Particl (PART), Tezos (XTZ) 2.5 added Basic Attention Token (BAT), IOTA (IOTA), Gnosis (GNO), Radium (RADS) 2.4 added Gulp task to optimize and check SVGs via Travis CI, published npm package, re-added webfont version 2.3 added Heat Ledger (HEAT), Iconomi (ICN), Incent (INCNT), Komodo (KMD), Breakout (BRK), Breakout Stake (BRX), PIVX (PIVX), Triggers (TRIG), UBIQ (UBQ), Florincoin (FLO), Golem Network (GNT) + switched to MIT licence 2.2 removed webfont version, switched to "rolling release", added Ardor (ARDR), AuroraCoin (AUR), Blockfreight (BFT), GameCredits (GAME), Augur (REP), Waves (WAVES), Z-Cash (ZEC); updated Decred (DCR), Neos (NEOS), Stratis (STRAT) 2.1 updated Peercoin (PPC), added AudioCoin (ADC), Bitsend (BSD), The DAO (DAO), Europecoin (ERC), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Goldcoin (GLD), Groestlcoin (GRS), Kobocoin (KOBO), LBRY (LBC), Pinkcoin (PINK), Reddcoin (RDD), RISE (RISE), Sia (SIA), Salus (SLS), SynergyCoin (SNRG), Steem (STEEM), Stratis (STRAT), BitSwift (SWIFT) 2.0 tweaked styles for separate namespace (see issue #7), fixed Ripple (XRP) typo, added Digitalcoin (GDC), DigixDAO (DGD/DGX), Facton (FCT), Jumbucks (JBS), Lisk (LISK), PiggyCoin (PIGGY), Rubies (RBIES), Sarcoin (SAR), SterlingCoin (SLG), Tether (USDT), Zeitcoin (ZEIT) 1.6 added Aeon (AEON), Synereo (AMP), Anoncoin (ANC), Bata (BTA), Clams (CLAM), Cloakcoin (CLOAK), Decred (DCR), Neos (NEOS), Gulden (NLG), OKcash (OK), Omni (OMNI), Scotcoin (SCOT), Storj (SJCX), Startcoin (START), Syscoin (SYS), Transfercoin (TX), Vanillacoin (VNL), Verge (XVG), updated Rubycoin (RBY) 1.5 added DigiByte (DGB), DogeCoinDark (DOGED), EmerCoin (EMC), Ethereum (ETH), MintCoin (MINT), MonaCoin (MONA), MicroCoin (MRC), NeuCoin (NEU), Novacoin (NVC), Rubycoin (RBY), updated BitBay 1.4 added BitBay (BAY), Diamond (DMD), Franko (FRK), I/O Coin (IOC), LiteDoge (LDOGE), MasterTraderCoin (MTR), Monetary Unit (MUE), Sapience AIFX (XAI), Primecoin (XPM), updated BitStake (XBS) 1.3 updated Darkcoin Dash, added Infinitecoin (IFC), Vertcoin (VTC), NEM (XEM), DNotes (NOTE), Rimbit (RBT), GetGems (GEMZ), VeriCoin (VRC), ARCHcoin (ARCH), BitStake (XBS) 1.2.1 added optional cryptocoins-colors.css for coloring all icons/coins 1.2 added Bytecoin (BCN), Gridcoin (GRC), KoreCoin (KORE), MaidSafeCoin (MAID), Quark (QRK), SuperNET (UNITY), Viorcoin (VIOR), VPN coin (VPN) + updated BitShares (BTSX BTS) 1.1 added Stellar (STR), FuelCoin (FC2), BanxShares (BANX), NuBits/NuShares (NBT/NSR), BitcoinDark (BTCD), YbCoin (YBC), BlackCoin (BC), Mastercoin (MSC), Feathercoin (FTC), Sync (SYNC), PotCoin (POT), OpalCoin (OPAL), Shadow (SDC) 1.0 added Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Namecoin (NMC), Dogecoin (DOGE), Peercoin (PPC), Darkcoin (DRK), Ripple (XRP), Bitshares (BTSX), Counterparty (XCP), NXT (NXT), Monero (XMR) Licence Released under The MIT License consicon

Russia has apparently overtaken China in gold hoarding following US sanctions, with the question remaining: when bitcoin? Some Russian cryptonian with apparent ties to Kremlin said soonish. Others said the claim was fake news. Welcome to 2019 where opinions are aplenty, but facts less so. And welcome to this addition of News of News. Packed session starting with the growing bitcoin infrastructure. Americans can now exchange their penny coins for bitcoin at Walmart or other supermarkets where kids bring their piggy bank. This is now live with Coinstar allowing Americans to buy up to $2,500 worth of bitcoin by receiving a voucher which is then redeemed after going through AML/KYC. One place where you don’t need AML is Decentraland where there appears to be a mini “scuffle” after DistrictX seemingly threw in the towel. Apparently they were expecting the virtual world to launch with better graphics and animations and adult content is illegal in some countries anyway, they seemingly said. Something no one cares about except for those who may have bought some land near the adult town. Apparently some patches were sold for relatively cheap before this throwing-in of the towel was announced. Insider trading, someone shouted. Who knows. If you have no clue what we just said, you’re not alone. Devs will defuse the bomb during the forking of Constantinople on the 27th of February must be one sentence that probably has some NSA guy rolling his eyes over yet another false alarm. Not a real bomb guys, but a bomb of sorts might be the fact that nChain has filed 48 patents for blockchain technology in 2017. China apparently leads, with businesses there filing 32% of all global patents. Merica second with 92 global patents (29%), followed by Australian businesses with 40 patents (13%). UK then forth with 11% of all global patents for blockchain technology. How Australia is grabbing all these patents, or China which has banned crypto exchanges, is not clear. Yet what may be a bit more clear is that Polkadot is coming. They’ve announced proof of concept number three and this has a granddaddy. That being 2/3rd Byzantium Fault Tolerant Proof of Stake that appears to be a modification of Casper The Friendly Ghost. Aaaaaa, ethereans may be screaming right now. Muh Casper! With names like Polkadot, however, and Grandpa, maybe there’s no reason to worry. Apparently they’re planning to launch by the end of the year. Pol, cus kadot is too long, might be scalable at launch with their “your own blockchain” approach which is sort of like sharding. Whether it will be good for eth we don’t know but with price at $114, you’re probably broke anyway so go sell some donuts at Uniswap which now gives eth for them? “Part of the reluctance of some companies and other entities to engage deeply with the technology is the lack of clarity from government bodies and the accompanying fear of building on shifting regulatory sand,” Sheila Warren, Head of the Blockchain project at the World Economic Forum’s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution told Trustnodes before adding: “Wyoming’s move mirrors that of several emerging economies, who are trying to provide regulatory and legal clarity. We expect to see similar clarifications of legal status from other government bodies. More crypto asset bills will follow in 2019.” That’s the same WEF as the one putting the Davos show. Jeremy Allaire of Circle will apparently be there. We’re told he’ll “be on a panel with economist and crypto-skeptic Ken Rogoff.” There will be a livestream. Tis sort of the crypto Davos this year. Globalization 4.0. Fourth Industrial Revolution. How automation is starving the poor and can take all the blame cus who wants to give peasants a real say in national governance through a jury style peoples’ parliament or citizens referendums. Blame the bots instead before they rise to demand BOTS RIGHTS NJOOOWWWW. “If you aren’t familiar, Kadena was founded by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino in 2016 after leading JP Morgan’s blockchain group. The pair went on to raise $15M from Devonshire (Fidelity), SV Angel, SIG, and Asimov Ventures in order to create a full stack blockchain platform that leapfrogs existing smart contract blockchain solutions like Ethereum. Kadena’s platform is already being used by several Fortune 500 companies to improve operational efficiencies and data management in the healthcare and insurance industries, along with new solutions being developed for asset management, construction and energy sectors. One of the biggest problems for enterprises adopting the blockchain is that despite all the hype, it’s incredibly difficult and complex to get projects off the ground. On January 23rd, Kadena is tackling this issue with a frictionless private blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) made available on AWS marketplace for free. Rather than all the complication and expense associated with buying hardware, installing it in a data center, buying expensive licenses and and figuring out how to install the software, Kadena will enable everything in three clicks and at no cost. Kadena’s ScalableBFT: Community Edition will be free to use and supports up to 4 nodes and 2,000 transactions per second.” The title of this was: “JP Morgan Blockchain Spin-Off Kadena Launching New Enterprise Solution on AWS Marketplace.” So the only noteworthy bit here might be that JP Morgans’ billionaire CEO talks all sorts about crypto, but then funnels plenty of money towards trying to incorporate the technology so as to remain competitive. “This Friday, Dash, the leading e-commerce and payments-focused cryptocurrency, will celebrate its fifth birthday. Dash is amongst the top 15 most valuable cryptocurrencies, and is one of the very few that presents a real world use case to end users, particularly populations with limited access to financial services, and those demanding cheaper, faster payments alternatives to today’s flawed credit cards.” 2014 was that long ago huh. Feels a bit like yesterday with all these bitcoin clones launching in a then primarily bitcoin only world. Plenty vanished. Some did well though. Litecoin! Who would have thought. Anyway, there’s a December 2018 Exchange Review and we’re going to paste the summary they sent: “Binance is still the dominant exchange comprising 10.6% share of total volume. The top 25 exchanges captured 89.7% leaving 10.3% for the remaining 75 exchanges included in the exchange review. TFM (Trans-fee mining) and No-fee exchanges have gained market share from fee exchanges. Order book and web traffic analysis continues to show TFM exchanges are unstable and volumes are not organic. Bitfinex, Kraken and Bitstamp maintained the most stable markets in December, while exchanges CoinBene, Bitforex, IDAX showed thin markets combined with high volumes. Average order book depth down for the top 5 markets across all exchanges has fallen steadily, decreasing 22% since November. Crypto-to-crypto exchanges have considerably higher average volumes than fiat-to-crypto exchanges, likely due to lower friction and regulatory oversight USD is bitcoin’s dominant fiat pair. BTCKRW volumes have declined sharply due to Bithumb’s sharp drop in volume last month USDT is slowly but surely losing market share to a host of competing stablecoins BitMEX volumes are up month-on-month since October despite a recent report from SCMP claiming that they are losing approximately 15% of users from the US and Quebec.” We’re told we should ident when quoting at length, but, it would probably appear as just one or two lines on smartphones so, just watch out for where the quote opens and closes. “Perhaps you’ve been following, at least in passing, Michael Terpin’s $224 million lawsuit against AT&T, initially filed last summer, alleging the company’s gross negligence in allowing for a SIM swapping-based theft. Now, there’s been a new development in the case: Terpin and his legal team believe they have identified the primary person who initiated the SIM swap, and are filing a new civil suit, including a RICO Act claim, against that person, Nicholas Truglia, 21, a New York City resident. Truglia allegedly lived high on the hog before being arrested last November on charges related to another SIM swapping case. The suit also makes allegations against Truglia’s unnamed confederates in the infamous “OG Users” gang, which has been responsible for many other SIM swaps and cryptocurrency thefts this past year.” Well, we’re kind of done. Although we could talk a bit about what exactly they’re planning to do in regards to the Beacon chain and that Ethereum 2.0 roadmap because it isn’t very clear. From what little we understand, they’re launching a new blockchain that kind of has nothing to do with PoW eth except that the two are linked through what can be described as Proof of Burn. As in there’s a planned mechanism whereby you can send your eth to the beacon and well now you have beacon eth, you can’t get back to PoW. Nor can you really move the beacon eth until sharding which is expected god knows when. So why on earth was Hybrid Casper ditched – or why it isn’t going live now – when it has nothing to do with this beacon stuff, does remain a puzzle. As is now a puzzle just how exactly this uprooting is meant to work or be incentivized. PoW obviously has the difficulty bomb, but that’s to make mining impossible. Not to make the movement of eth funds impossible by individuals who maybe have it locked up in a ten years smart contract or whatever. It just appears to be getting messy and the time-line for a full transition may well be a decade. In addition to obvious complexities of how does a wallet keep up with  beacon eth and PoW eth. How do smart contracts, which now have to move. In which case, why should they move to the beacon instead of somewhere else if they’re forced to move anyway. It just appears the whole thing hasn’t been quite thought through or communicated, except for through whispers or reading between the lines. Like when the Metropolis devs were basically: oh, we didn’t know it was going to take so long. Let’s then get rent storage and pruning out and improve the PoW chain because – – –  – presumably because they wanted to say it’s going to take forever. Well, we’ll see. We’re called Trustnodes. Not eth nodes. Not crypto nodes. Not bitcoin nodes. So if eth can or can not keep up doesn’t quite matter as far as we’re concerned, but it would be nice to have a bit more transparency so that ethereans can better understand whether devs are just lost or whether there’s a clear way of getting somewhere. var object = $(".bsaProContainer-" + sid + " .bsaProItemInner__img"); var animateThumb = $(".bsaProContainer-" + sid + " .bsaProAnimateThumb"); var innerThumb = $(".bsaProContainer-" + sid + " .bsaProItemInner__thumb"); if ( objectWidth > 0 && objectWidth != 100 && scale > 0 ) {

News Corp is a network of leading companies in the worlds of diversified media, news, education, and information services.Sun online have exposed the British gangs impersonating real companies in scams known as "clone fraud" to steal money from savers across the globe and the UK.A CRIMINAL gang boasting of ripping off millions from savers using investment scams including celebrity Bitcoin adverts is today exposed by The Sun.Our reporters have infiltrated a British gang impersonating real companies in scams known as "clone fraud" to steal money from householders.The brazen crooks have revealed how victims are duped over the phone into making investments for sums of cash from £5,000 up to more than a million but never receive a penny of their money back.Victims are asked to invest in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin – illegally advertised online using celebs’ faces such as Sir Richard Branson and Lord Alan Sugar – or even stocks and shares.Our investigation comes as financial journalist Martin Lewis sues Facebook over the failure to stop scammers using his image to advertise Bitcoin trading and other investment schemes.The crooks based around the globe – many of them Brits trading on the City of London's reputation - steal hundreds of millions from householders which they splurge on property, sports cars, champagne and drugs.Fraud cops estimate British savers lose almost £200million-a-year with the real figure thought to be much higher because many victims are too ashamed to report their crime or unaware they have been scammed.We have spoken to several scam victims including a vulnerable 79-year-old who was robbed of £18,000 but still believed the fraudsters were working on getting his money back until he spoke to The Sun.Another victim is a tube worker who was fleeced for £16,000 after being lured into investing in Bitcoin falsely advertised using the faces of Sir Richard Branson and journalist Martin Lewis.Celebs including Lord Sugar, Mr Lewis and Mr Branson have all complained about the use of their images on adverts and had no knowledge of the Bitcoin investment schemes.The victims - many of them aged over 60 - have told of their devastation and sense of helplessness after being duped in a crime which is on the rise with up to 750 fresh police reports a month.Now The Sun has been able to expose a gang boasting of how it rips off savers from a base in south-east Asia.Our undercover reporter, posing as a candidate to work as a scammer, was introduced to one of the brazen fraudsters by a middle-man claiming to be a recruiter based in England.Smooth-talking Dan Lea, 37, who is the director of his own Brit-based cryptocurrency investment firm, boasted how he placed “hundreds” of candidates with firms.The recruiter, from Basingstoke, Hampshire, told how “aggressive phone monkeys” who have their “morals completely turned off” can get people to buy “dog s***” or “cat s***”.Lea, said to earn up to £750 after placing a candidate, boasted over the phone: “You need to be aggressive and smart, on your toes and wow that person in the first five seconds – people buy from people – they don’t buy products.“If somebody likes you, they will buy from you - dog s***, cat s*** or a Ferrari.“The morals have to be completely turned off, so if you’ve got morals you ain’t going to get it.”Lea then set up a group WhatsApp conversation introducing our reporter to “James”, a Brit managing a gang of 40 scammers working in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, who boasted they are ripping off savers.There is no suggestion Lea, who acts as a recruiter, himself defrauded victims over the phone.In a follow-up call James, speaking from Cambodia, brazenly told our reporter how they “fabricated” companies to steal money from “stupid” and “greedy” people.A whistleblower has told how James's bogus investment firm is similar to one previously run by Brit Toby Nelhams who was convicted of fraud last year in Cambodia.Nelhams was originally suspected by Thai police of involvement in the murder of Brit fraudster Tony Kenway last year but has not been prosecuted and is no longer thought to be wanted over the crime.The gang pay developers to create swanky websites and route numbers through financial centres such as Hong Kong to con savers – while regularly creating new company names to imitate real firms.James boasted the criminal outfit, mainly employing Brits, was a “Wolf of Wall Street” scam making £750,000-a-month with staff splurging victims’ cash on “beer”, “drugs and hookers”.He added: “What we do is very unethical, if you have no moral dilemmas you’ll do very well in this business.“We go after people who have money and are greedy enough and stupid enough to send us their money and that’s how we’re able to pay our brokers 20% on any account they open.When asked whether people will get their money back, a laughing James replied:  “No, they are not going to get that money back – we’ve got brokers who open three, four, five accounts a month.“They’ve got very nice apartments and they like to go out at the weekends and spend their money on drugs and hookers. I’ve done it for ten years myself. Majority of our guys here are Brits“We typically deal with US stocks - we’ve worked with Twitter in the past, Facebook, Goldman Sachs. We’ve just dealt with a couple of IPOs – anything basically.“Some of the best emails I’ve seen come in people have spent hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars complaining ‘you’re a sophisticated scam’.“And when you hear that, you think, ‘yeah, that’s exactly what we are’ and when you tell us we’re sophisticated you make us proud because then we’ve done our jobs well.”A number of fraud gangs have also used online adverts with celebrity endorsements to con people into investments – particularly Bitcoin trading.Adverts using famous faces such as Virgin entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, businessman Sir Alan Sugar and financial journalist Martin Lewis have appeared on Facebook and the web alongside fake quotes.Insiders have told how this craze followed a spate of American celebrities including boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr, actor Jamie Foxx, and model Paris Hilton backing legitimate Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading firms.One company our investigators identified is known as Zuercher Capital – which claims to be based in Zurich, Switzerland.In fact its shady web domain is registered in Barbados and a phone number used to set up the website has previously been linked to a poker and banking scam.The company’s website and logo – designed to look legitimate and similar to banking giant UBS – allows victims to see their cash online on fake platforms but which they can never withdraw.We recorded them on the phone after they had duped London tube worker Simon Aidoo, 54, who lost more than £16,000 after investing in a bid to pay for private treatment for his wife’s arthritis.Whistleblower "Steve", who used to work in the industry and whose name we have changed, explained the Zuercher business was a typical clone fraud scam.Steve said: “They are all selling either stocks or shares, Bitcoin, binary or fake art – the product doesn’t matter.“It’s whatever the buzz is at the moment they just monitor Bloomberg and CNBC to see what’s in the news. But Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are exploding because they’re easy.“They target the UK, Australia and New Zealand, also Europe but not America because of the penalties.“If they [phone fraudsters] are very good they can make £4,000 or £5,000 a week – and that’s as good as you’ll get [opening accounts] on the phone.“Then loaders who come in for bigger amounts after an opener are a different animal altogether - you can put a zero on that.“They are seriously ruthless people. And then above that you get in to the people running show who are the owners, work it out for yourself, they are ripping off millions off.“Guys have bought houses in America or Europe with the money. They spend it on motorbikes, girls, drugs.“It’s a crazy lifestyle. You get paid every week, company organises parties once a week which can be pretty spectacular. They take over a bar or a club and just go mad – champagne, drugs and girls.”A team of fraudsters based in Sofia, Bulgaria, had been making up to £250,000-a-week according to insiders and were linked to fraud gangs in Madrid.The Sun identified one 20-year-old member of the gang, from Liverpool, who boasted online about buying flash TVs and watches with the cash he made from defrauding Brits while working abroad.The con man's mum initially lied by claiming her son had never worked in the European country despite a Facebook picture showing the pair together while he claimed to not be "doing that anymore".Police have told how the fraudsters generate their call data through a number of methods including buying it on the dark web, hacks, phishing or even bogus telephone marketing surveys know as vishing.But UK authorities are struggling to pursue the crooks with City of London police stating roughly 50 per cent of all fraud and cyber crime originating from abroad.A spokesman for the force, which leads nationally on investment fraud crime and is now investigating Zuercher Capital, added: "Never take up offers of investments on the spot from cold calls."Unlike most other crimes, fraud and cyber is often committed by criminals who never come into contact with their victim."Banks HSBC and Barclays, whose logos appear on Zuercher Capital's website, denied any links to the fraudsters and have taken steps to remove their branding from the web page.Recruiter Lea refused to comment when approached by The Sun on camera and denied ever speaking to our undercover reporter "Tony".We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368. You can WhatsApp us on 07810 791 502. We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours. Venomous tarantulas the size of dinner plates on loose in UK Eminem fans chaos as thousands of bags 'dumped on floor' after London gig Britain's longest heatwave in 42 years set to end with rain ahead Elon Musk calls Brit hero who saved Thai boys from cave a 'paedo' Wills & Kate unveil official photos to mark Prince Louis' christening France's celebrations marred as two fans die and cops clash with supporters Lisa Armstrong wows with new look as she catches eye of 90s singer Dan Corsi Sex text minister barmaid says she's 't***ies and teeth' in online profile Katie Price goes topless on the beach with toyboy Kris Boyson in Thailand Families told to drain paddling pools to stop vampire horseflies breeding©News Group Newspapers Limited in England No. 679215 Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF. "The Sun", "Sun", "Sun Online" are registered trademarks or trade names of News Group Newspapers Limited. 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volume":8433195.1518}]Basic Attention Token(BAT)Price $0.116Market Cap$142,144,203.44#ccpw-ticker-25665 .ccc-chart-header{background:#1c71ff}#ccpw-ticker-25665 #ccc-chart-block .exportBtnTop,#ccpw-ticker-25665 a.tabperiods.tabperiods_active,#ccpw-ticker-25665 er-25665 .coin_details{border:1px solid rgba(28,113,255,.16)}.ccpw-container_chart #ccpw-ticker-25665 .coin-container:after,.ccpw-container_four #ccpw-ticker-25665 .coin-container:after{border-color:#ccc !Important}Moving Digital Advertising to the BlockchainFacebook and Google are known as a social media network and search engine, respectively, but the bulk of both company’s revenue actually comes from advertising. In fact, in 2017, $95.38 billion of Google’s $110.9 billion in revenue came from advertising and $39.94 of Facebook’s $40.65 billion revenue did too.With Google accounting for 63.2 percent of all online search traffic and Facebook hosting 2.27 billion users, these juggernauts are unstoppable forces. Subverting them is difficult when Google’s Android OS is running on over 2 billion devices, Chrome has a 62 percent market share of web browsers, and the Facebook app is preinstalled on most mobile and desktop devices, regardless of OS.Content creators from bloggers to podcasters, vloggers,and more depend on ad revenue to continue working. Businesses depend on advertising and marketing to raise brand awareness and create paying customers.But spending on these ads gets hard to justify when one in five internet users between the coveted marketing ages of 18 and 35 use ad blocking software. And only 10 percent of mobile device time is spent browsing the internet – the rest of our time is spent in apps like Facebook.Tracking the effectiveness of an ad campaign across all these channels (social, desktop, mobile, app, search, etc.) is a difficult task. And since most marketing, PR, and advertising is done by third-party agencies, tracking needs to be done to meet contractual service-level agreements (SLA).This is where BAT and the Brave browser come in.Browsing a Brave New WorldBrave is a free, open-source web browser based on the Blink engine used by Chromium, Google’s open-source Chrome clone. For those unaware, here’s a brief timeline of web browsers to understand Eich’s contribution and heritage:In 1995, there were two major internet browsers – Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Navigator pioneered many of the features we still use online today, including cookies, frames, and JavaScript. It was widely regarded as the better browser.Unfortunately, it couldn’t compete against Microsoft, which bundled IE with its Windows OS.The demise of Netscape was the focal point of the 2001 antitrust lawsuit filed against Microsoft by the U.S. government. Software wasn’t free in those days, and Microsoft was accused of restricting Navigator, Opera, and other third-party browsers from competing.During this time, America Online (now part of Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon) was pushing to become a web portal the same way Facebook is today.Netscape Navigator’s code served as the basis for Firefox, an open-source browser still in use today that was developed by the Mozilla Foundation non-profit and Mozilla Corporation for-profit. And it’s not just the code – the Mozilla organizations were created by Netscape.Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Gecko, Necko, and the rest are the evolution of Netscape’s classic internet suite of tools.A few years later, in September 2008, Google launched its own freeware Chrome browser that began taking share from both Firefox and IE.Brave and BAT represents the culmination of Eich’s lessons learned in the early days of Internet browsing and his attempt to continue what he started with a new monetization model. It also represents a return to the early days of internet advertising that many of you may not remember.Brave integrated BAT into its browser to block ads at the site level, and instead serve them through the browser itself.By incentivizing users with BAT for viewing ads, the hope is it can create a sustainable crypto economy. Ad blocks create smart contracts that are stored and tracked on the Ethereum blockchain. User browsing data is tracked (again, at the browser level, reducing the need for on-site cookies, which most ad blockers, including Brave, block) anonymously, and ads are targeted theoretically better than Facebook and Google can.Of course, in-feed advertising tactics like influencer marketing and sponsored posts are already big marketing trends, so Brave and BAT have a long fight ahead for market adoption.But it’s not fighting alone – Brave so far has over 3.1 million monthly active users at last count on July 31, 2018, and that number could be well over 5 million by year end.The two big questions remaining for Brave Software are whether it can draw in enough advertisers to make a dent in Facebook and Google’s oligopoly. And if it does, it better gear up for another vicious battle against this generation’s tech giants.Basic Attention Token SummaryWeb browsing is a big business, and Brave Software co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich is one of the godfathers of that business. After fighting the long fight with Netscape and Mozilla, Eich created the new open-source Brave web browser, which is monetized using the Basic Attention Token.Eich is a legend in the online community, and his attachment to this project helped solidify partnerships with publishers and advertisers.BAT is awarded at the browser level and is so far only available for the Brave browser (which is based on Google’s open-source Chromium code).Users are rewarded BAT for viewing and engaging with ads, with a percentage paid to the publisher and Brave Software. BAT can then be used to purchase premium content or ad blocks.BAT can also be cashed out on a variety of cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s an Ethereum token supported by all ERC20-compatible tools.With these pieces in place, BAT has all the makings of the next big thing in cryptocurrency: micropayments, a built-in platform, real-world use cases, and adoption on all three sides of its marketplace.Still, Brave and BAT aren’t without controversy – in fact, Brave has recently taken heat for collecting tips on behalf of publishers who haven’t opted into the system – and it’s only a matter of time before Basic Attention Token gets the attention of the sleeping giants it’s taking market share from.The author is not currently invested in any crypto token, coin, or asset mentioned in this article.More:CoinsBasic Attention TokenIndustriesAdvertising Internet Media AdvertisingBasic Attention TokenInternetMedia 2,011 1 Brian Penny 108 posts Brian Penny is a former Business Analyst and Operations Manager at Bank of America turned whistleblower and freelance writer. In addition to Crypto Briefing, you can find his work focusing on financial regulations on Fast Company, Forbes, Huffington Post, and his blog, Thought for Your Penny. You might also like More from author Coin Guide What Is Chainlink? Introduction to LINK Token Coin Guide What Is Monaco? Introduction to the Crypto.com MCO Token Coin Guide What Is Electroneum? Introduction to ETN Token Coin Guide What Is Waltonchain Network?  Introduction to Waltoncoin WCT Token var bs_ajax_paginate_947854901 = pagin_token":"5f6a255"}'; Prev Next var bs_deferred_loading_bsd_relatedposts_615177902_2 = in_token":"ee687a1"}'; #bsnp-178810487.bs-newsletter-pack bs-newsletter-pack input.bsnp-input:focus + sletter-pack.bsnp-t1 np-178810487.bs-newsletter-pack .bsnp-button{background-color:#a60000!important} News, And Only When It's NEWSSign up for our editor's picks, crypto trade updates, and DARE reports!Whitelist Me!You can unsubscribe at any time, and we NEVER sell your info. 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SubscribeStay TunedTwitter Join YouTube Join Telegram Join Linkedin Join RSS Subscribe Top Stories News XRP Will Be First Of Many Huobi Crypto Futures Paddy Baker Jan 26, 2019 0 Huobi is preparing to release XRP derivatives contracts in the "very near future," as the exchange seeks to provide… BitTorrent Tokens Sell Out In 15 Minutes Jan 28, 2019 Cardano Price Analysis: Bulls Are Getting Ready Jan 25, 2019 Litecoin Could Become A Privacy Coin This Year Jan 29, 2019 Ripple CEO Takes Aim At Bitcoin During World Economic Forum Jan 25, 2019 Mastercard Is Grabbing All The Blockchain IP It Can Handle Jan 25, 2019 ShinhanCard Makes First Transaction Using OmiseGO Jan 28, 2019 var bs_ajax_paginate_1142261962 = ,"page":"2-col-right"},"_bs_pagin_token":"a144e34"}'; Prev Next 1 of 7Upcoming EventsFilter EventsSort By:dateDateTitleContinent:AllAllAfricaAsiaEuropeNorth AmericaOceaniaSouth Americajanuary 20192019wed30jan6:00 pmwed10:00 pmCrypto Briefing Connect - New York6:00 pm - 10:00 pmFollowers HomeOur TeamContact UsTerms And Conditions Crypto Briefing - ICO and Cryptocurrency Analysis, News, Features, Ratings and Reviews - Cryptocurrency News, Digital Asset Analysis, & Blockchain Updates HomeNews & AnalysisNewsAnalysisOpinionSecurity TokensBlockchainTradingResearchDARE: Digital Asset Report & EvaluationCode ReviewsICO ReviewsToken Progress ReportsEducationCoin Guide All 101: Coin Basics A-D E-J K-N O-S T-Z Coin Guide What Is Chainlink? 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Introduction to ETN Token var bs_ajax_paginate_2139031123 = page":"2-col-right"},"_bs_pagin_token":"82bbc59"}'; Prev Next var bs_deferred_loading_bsd_1772324773 = age":"2-col-right"},"_bs_pagin_token":"7309080"}'; var bs_deferred_loading_bsd_1808292573 = age":"2-col-right"},"_bs_pagin_token":"95f7357"}'; var bs_deferred_loading_bsd_534643904 = age":"2-col-right"},"_bs_pagin_token":"63784cc"}'; var bs_deferred_loading_bsd_1890860827 = age":"2-col-right"},"_bs_pagin_token":"b99bcfb"}'; var bs_deferred_loading_bsd_448106673 = age":"2-col-right"},"_bs_pagin_token":"1e87cf2"}'; var bs_deferred_loading_bsd_1768089579 = age":"2-col-right"},"_bs_pagin_token":"028dfeb"}'; Live DataCoins And CapsCrypto ExchangesTo The Moon!RektEventsEvents – ListEvents – CalendarAfricaAsiaEuropeNorth AmericaOceaniaSouth America한국어中文新闻Contact Us HomeCoin GuideWhat Is Basic Attention Token? Introduction to BAT and Brave ShutterstockCoin GuideA-D What Is Basic Attention Token? Introduction to BAT and BraveIt takes bravery to continue going to bat against tech's heaviest hitters. By Brian Penny On Dec 30, 2018 2,011 1 What Is Basic Attention Token?Basic Attention Token is an Ethereum-based ad-exchange platform connecting publishers, advertisers, and users on the blockchain. BAT is the ERC-20 utility token used on the platform and it is integrated in the Brave web browser, letting users tip content creators with BAT – which can then be used to purchase ads through its Google-like advertising platform.Both BAT and Brave Software were founded by Brendan Eich, the inventor of the JavaScript programming language and co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox. Eich insists they are separate projects, although VC firms like Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital and more invested over $7 million in both projects.BAT gained plenty of attention in November 2018 when it was listed on both Coinbase and Circle. The BAT cryptocurrency is accepted by some major content publishers, including Vice, Barron’s, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Vimeo (as part of its deal with Dow Jones Media Group). It’s an early front-runner for content-based adoption.Of course, there are others competing – Steem, Tron, and other blockchain-based content platforms are all promising a better way to connect creators and consumers.What separates BAT from that pack is its direct focus on digital advertising. Digital advertising is a huge business, pegged at $209 billion in annual revenues and surpassing TV ad spending as of 2017. Google and Facebook’s ad platforms alone account for 73 percent of this spending.Fixing pain points in this industry involve tracking user engagement, return on advertising spend, and understanding how to better target ads across today’s omnichannel platforms. If BAT proves the concept, it’ll be ripe for acquisition from one of these digital ad giants.Given Eich’s pedigree, however, it’s much more likely he’s creating an open-source giant to compete with the giants of the tech industry.And BAT isn’t the only blockchain or crypto ad platform hoping to disrupt this industry. There are dozens of competitors rushing to replace everything from Getty Images and Shutterstock to PRweb, Dropbox, HARO, Facebook, and Google with blockchains.Before exploring whether or not the BAT platform can accomplish its lofty goals, let’s explore how the BAT crypto token is performing on the cryptocurrency market.BAT Cryptocurrency Market PerformanceThe peak price of BAT so far was $0.86445 on January 9, 2018. As of December 30th 2018, the circulating supply is 1,221,699,089 BAT (out of a total supply of 1,500,000,000). The supply is fixed, and BAT can not be mined.BAT is generated when a user views an ad. The user receives a portion of BAT proportionate to his or her engagement. The Brave browser receives a portion, and the remaining portion is paid to the content publisher hosting the ad.BAT tokens are spendable for premium content on the BAT platform, along with ad blocks on a Google AdSense-like platform.The Basic Attention Token ICO occured in May 2017, raising $35 million (156,250 Ether) in 30 seconds. One billion BAT was sold in the ICO, 300 million was set aside for a User Growth Pool, and 200 million was created for the development team.BAT rewards from the UGP include up to 5 BAT per month for early adopters of the Brave Browser.In addition to its recent Coinbase and Circle listings, BAT can be bought, sold, and traded on a plethora of cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Upbit, IDCM, Bittrex, CPDAX, and CoinBene. Over $13 million in BAT is traded on a daily basis and trading pairs include BTC, ETH, USDT, and fiat currencies like USD.Because BAT is an ERC-20 token, it’s supported by any ERC20-compatible wallets, including the Nano Ledger S and 35943000,"value":0.318408

Read + Share 280 minute read WORDS is a monthly journal of Bitcoin commentary. For the uninitiated, getting up to speed on Bitcoin can seem daunting. Content is scattered across the internet, in some cases behind paywalls, and content has been lost forever. That’s why we made this journal, to preserve and further the understanding of Bitcoin. Remember, if you see something, say something. Send us your favorite Bitcoin commentary. A Cover Letter to Ray Dalio In this epic piece, Robert Breedlove takes a massive dive into Bitcoin, and presents one of the most solid cases for Bitcoin that’s out there. That said, it’s not always easy to get the very busy (and skeptical) Ray Dalio’s of the world to sit down for a few hours, so I hope this cover letter can encourage him to have an open mind, and give Bitcoin a few hours of his time. ROI on those few hours could be bigger than any return he’s witnessed in his highly illustrious and successful career. Bitcoin is most definitely not an “easy get”. Most ultra-bullish Bitcoiners only become that way due to a deep understanding of the history and properties of money-as-we-know-it, the technology behind Bitcoin, macro, micro and behavioural economics, as well as the dynamics of start-up companies and technologies in bootstrapping themselves and realising network effects. Less technical people observe the IQ density of the space, through its industry leaders and broader development community, which allows for a high level of believability-weighted decision making. I believe you have one of the best grasps of these concepts in the world, so I ask that you humour me for a few minutes to allow me to demonstrate just how much Bitcoin aligns with your personal views and fundamentals. This journey isn’t quick — the most dedicated Bitcoiners have put in thousands of hours of research and knowledge development, as well as many hundreds of days “in the saddle” with exposure to the whims of the Bitcoin Rollercoaster. I hope that by the end of this letter you will at least consider revisiting the topic of Bitcoin with a bit more depth. Bitcoin has been likened by some to be reflective of a startup organisation; currently heading into its Series B fund raise. Bitcoin is a well-oiled “un-organization” with founders but no CEOs, many volunteers but no employees, where the best ideas are developed and implemented by consensus regardless of who proposed the idea, and provably non-diluting equity available to anyone who is willing to trade their energy for it. This is all baked into the code, and it is radically transparent for anyone wishing to participate in the ecosystem. So transparent, that an individual can verify anything they need to about the Bitcoin network by simply running some software on a very basic computer setup in the order of $200 and with the most basic of internet connections. It may likely be one of the best real-life examples of an Idea Meritocracy at play — the cultural paradigm that you originated at Bridgewater. Idea Meritocracies are microcosms of what a “truly free” market should be. There aren’t many, if any, examples of free markets in the wild; except of course, Bitcoin. The competition in the Bitcoin space is merciless, where the best products having a shelf-life of months before being made redundant by superior products. Most industry leading service providers will find themselves competing with a free product not long after establishing themselves. As at date of writing, the Bitcoin space even meets several criteria of the “theoretical” perfectly competitive market. Bitcoin’s nature as an open-source, public, encrypted, distributed ledger means that the blockchain guarantees radical transparency, property rights and homogeneity of product, at zero or near-zero transaction and storage cost. The factors of production (labour, equipment, and capital) are mobile to the extent that only a communication link and a power source is required to participate in the ecosystem. Developing on top of Bitcoin requires no permission, and if entrepreneurs have a good enough idea, securing start-up capital is not a difficult barrier to entry to overcome. Information asymmetry, low number of market participants, and externalities from use of non-renewable energy to mine will all be resolved in time, most likely by the end of this decade. The critical thing to note is, although there are relatively few people who own the majority of Bitcoin now, once Bitcoin is spent in the future during the redistribution phase, it is spent forever — there are no reprints. If you want your Bitcoin balance to stay the same or increase, you must be creating value for someone. There is no free lunch with Bitcoin. A central tenet of your school of thought is open-mindedness, and I encourage you to suspend disbelief and allow yourself to be immersed in high quality Bitcoin content; whether through attending a Bitcoin-only conference, books, podcasts, or even attending your local casual Bitcoin meetup. When meeting Bitcoiners in the real world, you are guaranteed to witness more IQ packed into one small place than you have ever witnessed in your life. Bitcoin was created and fostered by the most radically open-minded, and the development of its technology over time was only possible through radical open-mindedness in the developer community, and of the wider user community once improvements were thoroughly scrutinised and ready to be implemented. I’m sure that a lot of these arguments have hit home — after all, you personally coined the majority of the arguments I used to present The Case for Bitcoin. It is daunting and confusing to step into such a revolutionary realm, but you will find that if you are willing to radically open your mind, your fundamentals are 100% aligned with Bitcoin’s. Bitcoin Price Will Always Be Too Expensive if You Don’t Believe in Its Revolution Inlife, there is nothing worse than hesitation. I often see people spend a lot of time hesitating before they finally never take action. These people always imagine that there might be a better time. They wait for the perfect moment, which never comes. These people somehow make the choice to live with regrets about the actions they might have taken. With Bitcoin, I have a feeling that a lot of people have been going through the same thing for several years now. When Bitcoin price was $1K, they were reluctant to buy it because they thought Bitcoin was too expensive. It was the same thing when Bitcoin reached $2K, then $3K, and finally $5K. Many of these people then literally jumped on Bitcoin when it reached $20K at the end of 2017. Today, Bitcoin is around $8.5K after reaching $10K in early February 2020. This sudden drop in price is once again questioning these hesitant people. At the heart of their hesitation is the same question that comes up again and again: I’m going to disappoint some people, but the reality is that Bitcoin will always be too expensive if you’re one of those people who don’t fundamentally believe in it. I will explain why in this story. With the approach of the third Bitcoin Halving, and an excellent beginning of the year for Bitcoin price, many people began to wonder if they were missing the Bitcoin train. The same people who weren’t interested in Bitcoin when it was $3.3K at the end of 2018, became interested in Bitcoin when it reached $10K. How do you explain this strange psychological phenomenon? Quite simply by the feeling of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). These people are non-believers who are simply afraid of missing out on the Bitcoin opportunity. They’ve been thinking about buying Bitcoin for months, even years, but never dare to take action. Bitcoin would be too complicated if you listen to them. There are risks of losing what you own. There are no guarantees on your Bitcoin like you can have guarantees with your fiat currency stored in a bank account. This list is far from exhaustive, but is representative of what many people will tell you to justify not taking action by buying Bitcoin. In addition to these justifications, people who hesitate will tell you that Bitcoin is too expensive. They are waiting for the best time to buy Bitcoin. To these people, I often say the following: When Bitcoin price is $10K, and you choose not to buy Bitcoin, what criteria do you think it is too expensive based on? Generally, you think Bitcoin is too expensive because its price was $3.3K at the end of 2018. At the end of 2018, you had doubts about the $3.3K price because Bitcoin was in the middle of a very strong and prolonged bear market. Indeed, Bitcoin seemed to you at that time to be simply a system for geeks who dreamed of revolutionizing the current monetary and financial system. You became interested in Bitcoin when the media started talking about it when its price exceeded $2K in June 2017. Rather than trying to understand why Bitcoin was a revolution, and how it worked, you simply told yourself at the time that you were going to wait until it dropped below $1,000 to buy it. And then, Bitcoin’s price soared to $10K by the end of November 2017. When Bitcoin surpassed $15K in December 2017, you finally took the plunge for fear of missing the train. Bitcoin quickly reached $20K in a hurry, and you felt reassured. The speculative bubble that formed around Bitcoin price as a result of this widespread euphoria burst throughout 2018, and you panicked. You lost a lot of money. This prevented you from buying Bitcoin again when it was at $3.3K. Generally speaking, there is no such thing as the best time to take action in life. You will always find a reason to wait. And by the time you do, it will really be too late. Then you will be in a worse position than if you had taken action right away when you were offensive. Since there is no such thing as the best time, it is up to you to create the perfect conditions. These conditions are created when you take direct action with a positive mindset. There is no better time to buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin wasn’t too expensive at $3K, just as it wasn’t too expensive at $10K or $20K. In order to be able to judge what a correct price for Bitcoin might be, you need to understand what Bitcoin is. Once you understand how Bitcoin works, and how it is a complete paradigm shift from the current monetary and financial system, you will be better able to judge its price. Bitcoin is limited to 21 million units. This is true today, and will still be true in 10, 25 or 50 years from now. There are currently 7.8 billion people on Earth. When there are 10 billion people on Earth around 2050, there will still be 21 million Bitcoins available. That is very small. So the demand for Bitcoin is going to explode. With the extreme scarcity of Bitcoin, you don’t have to be an expert in the law of supply and demand to understand that Bitcoin price will literally explode. An interesting exercise then consists in comparing Bitcoin and its $160 billion capitalization with the valuation of other markets: The first thing that stands out is that the capitalization of Bitcoin is currently negligible in comparison to these other markets. Applying a simple rule of three, this would give us a price of about $4.2 million for one Bitcoin. This figure may sound crazy to you, but it clearly isn’t if you have complete confidence in Bitcoin and what it is trying to build for the future. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in Bitcoin, its price will always be too high, and you will never take action. Bitcoin has been advancing at its own pace since its creation by Satoshi Nakamoto on January 3, 2009. It has proven to be a special case since its price is not correlated to any other asset. Launched in complete anonymity, Bitcoin has become in just over 11 years the only credible alternative to the current monetary and financial system. Bitcoiners are growing in numbers, and even its fiercest opponents are really starting to fear it. This is the ultimate proof that Bitcoin continues to move in the right direction. Once you’ve taken the time to understand what Bitcoin is, and why the total paradigm shift it proposes is a revolution, you will clearly no longer have any doubts. You will be able to truly believe in Bitcoin. If you don’t trust Bitcoin, and that is your right, it will always seem too expensive to you. A psychological brake will always prevent you from taking action, and you may have regrets in the future when you realize that you missed the Bitcoin train. It’s up to you to know what you want to do for your future with full knowledge of the causes. Bitcoin’s Habitats As I have argued previously, Bitcoin is a living organism. But where does this organism live, exactly? As with many questions in the world of Bitcoin, exact answers are hard to come by. Living things have fuzzy edges: beginnings and endings are hard to pin-point, differentiation is more-or-less arbitrary, and what was classified as a wolf today might evolve to be a dog tomorrow. Bitcoin has no rigid specification, no absolute finality, no fixed development team, no final security guarantees, no scheduled updates, no central brain, no central vision, no kings, and no rulers. It is a decentralized organism, organically evolving without central planners. The lack of any centralization is the source of Bitcoin’s beauty, it’s organic behavior, and it’s resilience. Bitcoin is everywhere and nowhere, which makes figuring out where this thing lives a daunting task. However, it turns out that there is a space it lives in. Multiple spaces, as we shall see. While classifying the habitat of a decentralized organism isn’t trivial, we can look at the constituents of Bitcoin to make the task a bit easier. As outlined in the last article of this series, Bitcoin lives across domains, with one foot in the purely informational realm (ideas and code) and one foot in the physical realm (people and nodes). An awareness of Bitcoin’s environment(s) might help to better understand this new form of life. No organism can be meaningfully studied in isolation, and Bitcoin is no exception. As Alan Watts pointed out, one has to be aware of the basic unity every organism forms with its environment. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the organism-environment(s) we are dealing with. As outlined above, Bitcoin’s ideas and code inhabit one realm, and Bitcoin’s people and nodes inhabit another. To stick with tradition, let’s call the physical realm “meatspace” and the purely informational realm “cyberspace” — even if, as always, the lines might be fuzzy around the edges. The “soul” of Bitcoin, so to speak, lives in cyberspace. There, Bitcoin absorbs useful ideas and incorporates them into its code. As with all living things, something is useful if it helps an organism to survive. While Bitcoin has various self-regulatory mechanisms to react to the environment, new ideas may be necessary for survival if changes are drastic enough. The “body” of Bitcoin, like all bodies, is living in meatspace. Nodes, hard drives, cables, and other things come together in an intricate dance, pushing around electrons, changing zeros to ones and vice-versa, making sure that Bitcoin’s heart beats about a thousand times a week. Living things have an interest in staying alive, and the Bitcoin organism is no exception. Bitcoin found an ingenious way to ensure that it stays alive: it pays people, as Ralph Merkle pointed out. People — and increasingly, organizations — are incentivized to keep it alive. They shape the physical world to Bitcoin’s liking, feed it energy, renew its hardware, and update its software to keep it alive. The fact that Bitcoin pays us to keep it alive opens up a third space: a space of financial transactions, value, and mutual beneficial exchange. Let’s call this space “finspace.” To understand finspace, we will have to examine the other side of this coin. So far, we only examined the side with an uppercase B: the Bitcoin network. But there is also bitcoin — with a lowercase b — which is the unit of value itself, brought into existence by every copy of the ledger. These bitcoins, while deeply embedded in the amber of the ledger, are traded worldwide on various markets and marketplaces. And since these bitcoins — and their value — are critical for Bitcoin’s survival, we will have to recognize finspace as the third space this strange beast lives in. Note that finspace, strangely enough, is solely inhabited by bitcoin with a lowercase b. In total, we can identify three distinct environments which the Bitcoin organism inhabits: Understanding these habitats becomes increasingly important, especially as the climate in one — or more — heats up. The three spaces outlined above — cyberspace, meatspace, and finspace — have different restrictions; different climates, so to speak. In short: they operate under different rules. Once these rules change drastically enough, people will say that “the political climate is heating up” and reports on “the coming financial climate” will be written. Citizens will be unable to speak and act freely. If things change drastically enough, people will rise up in protest, or, if all else fails, flee. Cyberspace: While we don’t have precise words for it, it is obvious that the climate in cyberspace has changed quite drastically in the last two decades or so. The idealistic, utopian ideas which were the foundation of most of the internet were perverted by the advertisement-driven surveillance companies which are the giants of today. People and politicians are slowly waking up to the strange reality we are living in: the fact that Facebook can manipulate moods and sway elections is as disturbing as the fact that Google knows you better than you know yourself. Edward Snowden showed that the most paranoid netizens were right all along: everyone in cyberspace is under constant surveillance, without suspicion, by default. While the western world does not immediately feel the repercussions that come with living in a constant state of surveillance, Chinese citizens are gathering first-hand experience with each passing day. In the western world, the consequences are advertisements which range from annoying to spooky. In China, the consequences are frozen bank accounts, an inability to buy train or plane tickets, elimination of creditworthiness, automated fines for trivial offenses, and more. Voicing the “wrong” opinion — online or not — can lead to restricted access to schools, hotels, and jobs. And after ruining your life with the flip of a bit you will be publicly named as a bad citizen and the government will take away your dog. If that doesn’t sound dystopian enough for your taste I bet that it will be in a couple of years. Remind yourself that this is only the beginning. In the “free” world, things are more subtle. Multiple efforts are underway to curb net neutrality, the very cornerstone of the internet. Legislation is being passed which is inherently incompatible with the laws of cyberspace. It seems like the last battle of the Crypto Wars is yet to be fought as politicians are calling for “responsible encryption” and the ban of certain CAD files. Companies are in charge of the speaker’s corners of cyberspace and are making arbitrary decisions on what can be uttered by whom and what is off-limits. Bitcoin knows no borders, no jurisdictions. However, it has to conform to the laws of cyberspace — and if these laws change, e.g. if large parts of the world block Bitcoin traffic and/or the usage of TOR, the Bitcoin organism will have to adapt. Meatspace: Meatspace climate differs wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some bastions of freedom still exist, but once you try to board an international flight it becomes obvious that your right to privacy and your freedom to bring a bottle of water with you are null and void. Protests across the globe indicate that the powerless are fed up with the powerful, who do everything they can to stay in control and solidify their positions of influence. History shows that governments do not shy away from using their power. In 1933, Executive Order 6102 was signed, effectively forcing the whole population of the United States to hand over their gold and gold certificates to the government. Yes, seizing bitcoin is way harder than seizing gold — in some cases even impossible. But it would surprise me if those who currently control our money — the governments and central banks of this world — would simply roll over and let Bitcoin march on unhindered. Governments have a monopoly on violence, and they are able and willing to abuse this violence in their own interest. With Bitcoin, however, people can flee a country with their wealth intact. While this is definitely not easy, and not something I would wish on anyone, it is now possible. Finspace: Where should I even begin? The current, debt-based financial system has an appetite for printing money which is beyond belief. Quantitative Easing (QE), Negative Interest Rate Policies (NIRPs), currency wars, hyperinflations, and a looming recession are just a few of the recipes of the global instability soup which is currently brewing. The current financial system seems so far removed from common sense and reality, that all the jargon in the world won’t be able to stabilize this house of cards. People know that our money is broken, which is why they flee to buying real estate, stocks, and all kinds of complicated financial constructs to preserve their wealth. In the current system, you have to be an investment expert just to hold your value. And we haven’t even talked about the looming recession, and the virtual inevitability of the next financial crisis yet. Yes, governments might be able to kick the can down the road by printing ever more money. But no road is endless, and the experiment which is fiat money will come to an end, one way or the other. How bitcoin will react to a catastrophe in finspace is anyone’s guess. Some people might flee from their failing fiat currency into bitcoin, using it as a risk-off asset. Others might sell bitcoin to buy something they consider more stable, such as real estate or land. A rising number of people will identify bitcoin as the best money we ever had, shunning other assets and other monies on the quest to stack as many sats as they can. However it might play out, Bitcoin is the cure for many of the current system’s ills. It is hard money which doesn’t devalue over time. It is an incorruptible system which forms the basis of a new financial reality. In addition to the above, it seems to have many indirect effects. It lowers the time preference of those who use it. It incentives users to have better personal and operational security. It incentives individuals and companies to have better digital hygiene. It propels the development of chip manufacturing and encryption technology. While Bitcoin definitely influences its environments and vice-versa, how Bitcoin reacts to drastic changes is yet to be seen. Bitcoin lives on the internet, as Ralph Merkle points out. The internet, however, is not a necessary requirement for Bitcoin to work. Bitcoin is text — pure information — and every system capable of transmitting (and storing) information is a potential habitat for the Bitcoin organism. The internet just happens to be the most suitable habitat which currently exists, since it is the most efficient system to transmit information we have to date. Cyberspace: The Bitcoin organism could migrate to other environments, and multiple efforts are underway which enable Bitcoin to spread to places where access to Internet infrastructure is limited or non-existent. As of this writing, Bitcoin transactions (and LN invoices) have been sent via radio waves, mesh, and satellite networks — just to name a few. All of these can be seen as Bitcoin conservation efforts, so to speak. Whether we will see the migration of Bitcoin to another system in the decades and centuries to come depends, in essence, on whether the internet will remain any association with identities to work. In Satoshi’s words, “The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of individual trades, the ‘tape,’ is made public, but without telling who the parties were.” An interesting feature of this transparent setting, discussed by Satoshi and by many other early Bitcoin contributors and researchers, is the all-or-nothing nature of its privacy guarantees. A trusted third party can, indeed, promise to keep your sensitive information safe from potential kidnappers, robbers or stalkers, while still being forced to provide any detail to more powerful political entities (nation-states with their tax agencies, financial authorities, secret services, etc.). In a (pseudo)anonymous but public setting, it’s safe to assume that in every case where the latter type of adversary is able to access sensitive financial information, the former type will find a way as well. When somebody’s privacy on the timechain is broken, it is broken to the benefit of all snoopers with an internet connection: governments, bandits, hackers, business competitors, personal enemies, haters, ex-spouses, etc. This should serve as a strong incentive for users to protect their “on-chain” deniability, thus protecting fungibility for all. Bitcoin base-layer transactions, on the other hand, already show perfect fungibility internally. What this means is that, although every transaction is public, there is no public data about who, within a certain transaction, was in control of the private keys that spent a specific input, or who is now in control of the private keys that will spend a specific output. Bitcoin’s rules assure us that the total amount of satoshis spent with all the inputs is equal to or less than the total amount of satoshis “locked” in all the outputs (transaction can’t create inflation, they can only leave out “blockspace fees” for miners). But there’s technically no way to be sure, from public timechain data alone, if a transaction with 10 inputs and 10 outputs is moving satoshis from one payer to ten payees, or from two payers to one payee, or from one entity to himself. Of course, some probabilistic inferences are possible, based on heuristics and common patterns, but nothing can be proven with public timechain data at the individual transaction level. While having one or more entities controlling the outputs is trivial, having more entities controlling the inputs is a little bit trickier, requiring some real-time coordination among all the payees before the transaction gets broadcasted. Luckily, though, the atomicity of Bitcoin transactions is such that this process doesn’t require any trust among different, unknown payees. This fungibility feature of Bitcoin transactions has been part of Bitcoin’s design since the very beginning, but its privacy implications were explicitly pointed out by different contributors only later on. Finally, in 2013, the label CoinJoin was created by Gregory Maxwell, to refer to the best practices a bitcoin wallet should implement in order to fully leverage such preexistent internal fungibility. Many variants of the technique have been proposed over time (PayJoin, JoinMarket, CoinSwap, P2EP and Zerolink implemented in wallets Wasabi and Samourai), all with the same goal: taking advantage of the fundamental fungibility of the protocol. Another dynamic with the potential of boosting Bitcoin’s privacy is its layerization. Upper layers of the protocol stack, like the Lightning Network, don’t need to use the timechain to confirm every single transaction; rather transactions are only used as “anchors” to open and close “contracts” enabling payments elsewhere. Satoshi already imagined such kinds of “payment channels” early on: “The parties hold this tx in reserve and if need be, pass it around until it has enough signatures. […] They can keep updating a tx by unanimous agreement. The party giving money would be the first to sign the next version. If one party stops agreeing to changes, then the last state will be recorded at nLockTime. If desired, a default transaction can be prepared after each version so n-1 parties can push an unresponsive party out. Intermediate transactions do not need to be broadcast. Only the final outcome gets recorded by the network. Just before nLockTime, the parties and a few witness nodes broadcast the highest sequence tx they saw.” This did not turn out to be the exact way payment channels have been introduced (it was flawed), but they are now a common tool for many Bitcoin users. They can be used directly or collectively via routing. While often presented as a “scalability” solution, the Lightning Network and, in general, Layer 2 techniques have the big privacy advantage of massively reducing the amount of public information available on the timechain. Of course, it was not trivial to implement privacy best practices in everyday bitcoin wallets and tools. First of all, while reducing the amount of information leaked on-chain, Layer 2 techniques and CoinJoin often increase the amount of network-level information to manage and protect (mostly because of the need for real-time interactivity, up-to-date lists of reachable peers, publicly available liquidity, etc.). The Lightning Network, in particular, was not really easy to bootstrap until a protocol upgrade was adopted by users in late 2017. While CoinJoin, unlike the Lightning Network, was possible to implement in theory since day zero (although with many practical challenges regarding coordination, liquidity and amount obfuscation), most actual bitcoin wallets didn’t bother to find a way to do it. By not doing so, they consolidated a dangerous trend: The large majority of on-chain transactions were considered as created, signed and broadcast by one single entity, in complete control of the private keys associated with all the inputs. Bitcoin transactions started to be seen as always one-to-one or one-to-many. Thus, one of the most effective fungibility features of the protocol hasn’t actually been turned into a wallet best practice until very recently, even though it has always been available. But there’s more, unfortunately. Other, simpler best practices, included in Bitcoin’s design as trivial defaults, have been mostly ignored by tool builders who have been less concerned with privacy and more focused on user experience during the early years. One obvious example is address reuse. Satoshi’s words about the anonymity of public keys were written under the assumption that users would generate a one-off address every time they received bitcoin, which would then be discarded after it’s spent again and never reused. (Maybe the word “address,” itself, wasn’t a good choice after all, being often linked to permanent references: email, IBAN, ecc.; while the word “invoice,” now used for Lightning Network transactions, would have been a cleaner choice.) Implementing this design was not entirely trivial either (especially before the introduction of HD wallets which made it easier to re-derive thousands of keys with just one “master” backup). So we ended up with massive reuse of static addresses, decreasing the entropy and facilitating analysis and deanonymization. Users started to link the same address to their profiles on forums, social networks and blogs. For many early users, making a payment meant giving the payee a complete overview of all their past and future financial life in Bitcoin. Another major incident was the proliferation of “light clients”: applications unable to download, validate and store the timechain directly, but able to store private keys and query other nodes (in the best cases, a trusted third party, like a wallet provider; in the worst cases, random nodes, in so-called “SPV wallets”) for the validity of the transactions involving the corresponding public keys. Besides creating a systemic risk in terms of security, these clients become a common hazard in terms of privacy. Some other minor implementation best practices have been initially overlooked by tool providers in this regard (including privacy-oriented coin selection, merge-avoidance, change management, etc.), but, for the most part, these three practices represent the basis for the heuristics employed by “chain-analysis” companies hired by eavesdroppers to spy on Bitcoin users. As of today, most of these problems have brilliant technical solutions and modern tools that implement them. But it’s difficult to push the best practices (which sometimes present small but existent coordination costs) in an ecosystem already “drugged” with easy, if dangerous, shortcuts. And privacy, as they say, loves company: Even if you have the best tools and follow the best practices, it doesn’t really help if you are the only one doing so (in fact, it may even hurt by making your efforts stand out in comparison, putting you under the spotlight). In Part 2, we’ll look at some of the techniques that are threatening our privacy as bitcoin users, common misconceptions about privacy, and finally, how innovations in Bitcoin are going to make privacy more secure and easier to maintain. A Treatise On Bitcoin And Privacy Part 2: Don’t Be Misled By Red Herrings In Part One of this treatise, we examined the fundamental relationship between Bitcoin and privacy by going back to the beginning with the whitepaper. In spite of some excellent privacy preserving options  that have been available to users since those early days, we seem to have taken a few wrong turns. But to fix it, in order to make Bitcoin’s privacy “great again,” we must be able to distinguish between real privacy and red herrings that can only lead us further off the path. Bitcoin is an effective system to transfer and store wealth, but that wealth has first to “enter” the system somehow, very often coming from fiat money. (Of course, you can also earn satoshis directly in exchange for goods and services you provide, instead of buying them with fiat.) Fiat-enabled bitcoin on-ramps (often known as “cryptocurrency exchanges”), acting as liquidity bridges, created huge privacy problems in Bitcoin. In order to manage fiat, exchanges will have to use traditional bank accounts. In order to get those, they have to meekly accept all the rules, conditions and limitations banks require. Traditional fiat banks, in turn, will pass over the extremely complex and heavy “compliance” burden they received from governments and regulatory agencies, including that concentration of economic illiteracy called “KYC/AML regulation.” So, fiat-to-bitcoin bridges will almost always end up demanding a scary amount of personal information from their user, linking that information to a few deposit and withdrawal addresses (often incentivizing continuous reuse) and then even hiring “chain-analysis” companies in order to follow, trace, tail and stalk all the previous and following economic activity on-chain. The first and most important reason for doing so is because these on-ramps are scared to lose the privilege of having a fiat bank account. Bitcoin was, is and will always be considered a “borderline” reality by governments and government-sanctioned legal cartels like modern fiat banks. Thus, it’s realistic to assume they would close down operative accounts to any exchange which couldn’t guarantee the same level of financial surveillance that fiat banks routinely enact. For this reason, fiat-enabled gateways not only keep promoting wrong and dangerous uses of the Bitcoin protocol, discouraging security best practices and hiring “chain-analysis” spy companies: They often even go to great lengths to publicly praise “KYC/AML” nonsense regulations and to push the narrative that “Bitcoin is completely traceable,” marketing some probabilistic assumptions as “legal proofs” and ignoring even the existence of the fundamental privacy features of the protocol. For a while now, these businesses have been freezing or confiscating users’ accounts because of what theoretical “chain-analysis” heuristics (dishonestly promoted as “facts”) suggest these users may have been doing way before or way after their interaction with the exchange, basically trying to break fungibility in Bitcoin. We often see this happening for activities that aren’t even explicitly considered illegal in the specific jurisdiction under which they happened: online gaming, adult services, political campaigns, etc. Anything considered even remotely controversial has been depicted as forbidden, and any statistical guess about “on-chain” activity, based on common patterns and typical tools, has been depicted as “proven.” Of course, there’s nothing really proven in “chain-analysis” heuristics, so the spy companies arbitrarily decide how many “on-chain hops” to look for, arbitrarily assuming who is doing what. Even assuming that such heuristics are correct (they have never been 100 percent reliable, and they are less and less so each day, while Bitcoin developers build better tools and Bitcoin users start employing best practices), this behavior is unacceptable. It is the digital equivalent of your physical bank sending private investigators to follow your every move for days after you withdraw cash at the ATM, and then freezing or confiscating your bank account entirely if that PI comes back with a report that says that “you may have,” with some probability, engaged in controversial actions with that cash. More recently, this shady behavior has extended beyond some generically controversial activities engaged by “somebody somehow connected with customers” to encompass even the very act of trying to use Bitcoin’s security and privacy best practices! In January 2020, a company that operates a regulated exchange froze a customer’s account once they discovered possible hints that somebody, possibly the customer himself (but after some “hops” following the withdrawal transaction, that is, not even directly), was using a wallet enabling privacy best practices. Again, imagine your physical bank sending a private investigator to follow your steps for days after you withdraw some cash at the ATM, and then freezing or confiscating your bank account if that PI reports that says that “you may have,” with some probability, closed your shutters at home, or pulled your shower curtains while naked, or put a lock on your personal journal, or used HTTPS within your web browser! Furthermore, the specific message to the customer was tragically hilarious: It said that the business “can’t condone activities such as peer-to-peer (sic!) mixing or gambling.” All this while talking about Bitcoin, which is literally a peer-to-peer protocol whose transactions can natively work as mixers, and coming from a business that operates in cryptocurrency trading, which some consider not that different from gambling! There have been many reactions from Bitcoin users and analysts to these dodgy examples of behavior, many of which are based on logical fallacies or straight-on distortion of the facts. A classical example is the absurd notion that “Bitcoin users should not use privacy best practices, because that’s dangerous.” The pseudo-argument goes something like this: Since some overzealous business may use unreliable heuristics to accuse you of adopting privacy and security best practices that they have arbitrarily defined as “unacceptable,” possibly freezing or even confiscating your account, or flagging it as “suspicious,” you should just stop using those security best practices and move to insecure alternatives instead. In other words, to use our physical bank example, since your bank might flag your account if the PI they sent after you comes back with a report that says that you may have, with some probability, used some privacy best practices a few days after a cash withdrawal, you should just stop closing your shutters while home, or pulling the shower curtains while naked, or putting a lock on your personal journal, or using HTTPS within your web browser. This is nonsense, of course. If anything, it’s not using privacy and security best practices that would turn out to be extremely dangerous — not just for your financial safety but also for your physical safety. Reminder: Bitcoin’s privacy is all-or-nothing! Once a business is able to attach your physical identities, not just to an on-chain address but also to all the future and past history connected with it, all it takes is a little leak (by the business itself, by its spy-contractors or by one of the countless government agencies which will receive and pass along that information) to direct very dangerous enemies to your doorstep. Incidentally, the pseudo-argument is flawed more fundamentally as well: Even if you were so reckless as to decide to trust this third party with a complete account of your future and past transactions, in spite of the risk to your physical security (and that of your loved ones), you may achieve the very same result just by sending it the cryptographic proofs of all the inputs you ever signed (either on-chain or on upper layers), allowing the meddling gateway to read through each of your CoinJoin or Lightning Network routing — all without giving up generic privacy best practices. You are still risking a leak, but at least you are not giving every random guy with an internet connection an easy way to deanonymize and stalk you (and others you interact with). Usually this red herring comes with some distorted vision of Bitcoin’s utility. “If users just want to invest in bitcoin as an uncorrelated financial asset with some disinflationary features,” they say, “then they don’t need privacy at all.” This pseudo-argument is severely flawed. Here’s the bad news: Gold was, for many many centuries up until 1933, a typically “uncorrelated financial asset with some disinflationary features” that people in the United States and elsewhere could invest in. But then came Executive Order 6102. Gold was confiscated all across the nation, and all the investors who didn’t protect their privacy (which was especially hard with “paper gold,” kept in custody by trusted third parties eager to comply with the order, but also pretty hard with actual physical gold, difficult to hide in large amounts or to smuggle across a border) had to give it to the government. A good general heuristic is this: If you are a privileged “first-world” investor, with a good KYC identity, and you are looking for some kind of investment that is politically uncontroversial now and likely to remain that way, then you will soon be able to access that type financial product from you favorite fiat bank. If that describes you, don’t even concern yourself with complex stuff like private keys, blockchain fees, addresses: leave the real protocol to real users. Just call your good old bank over the phone and ask to buy some “bitcoin-flavored risk”: certificates, futures, ETNs, ETFs, CFDs, etc. If, on the other hand, you are not as privileged (like the majority of the world population today, which doesn’t have a KYC-friendly identity), or if you think that the financial asset you seek is a bit controversial today already or likely to become so in the future, then you will eventually need some very strong privacy techniques to acquire it and to safely store it, since “legally compliant” exchanges, brokers and marketplaces will do everything they can to keep you out of it or take it from you. A second typical reaction, even more absurd, is to suggest “privacy altcoins” as a “solution” to this problem. A regulated exchange will flag your account if you use best practices such as CoinJoin, or Lightning Network, or address-reuse-avoidance. Then, instead of bitcoin, just use some illiquid bitcoin-clone whose design has been altered in such a way that it’s said to offer “more fungibility,” right? The superficial problem with this approach is that such “magic privacy coins” don’t actually exist in the real world. On one hand, that’s because most of the changes marketed as “privacy improvements” are either entirely fake or greatly exaggerated. They also tend to come with serious trade-offs which make these clones otherwise unusable at scale over the long run (usually including a completely centralized development process, trivial to compromise). On the other hand, even if such a coin were to exist, from a technological point of view, it couldn’t work in practice from an economical point of view. Remember: Privacy loves company. A huge chunk of the bitcoin economy and its users would have to move to the very same bitcoin-clone as you. Otherwise, your transactions will have a lower liquidity and a smaller anonymity set, regardless of how perfect and sci-fi-worthy the privacy tech you are using is. There are variants of this red herring which are based on some kind of “bimetallic standard” idea: Those proponents will suggest that you use bitcoin as your fundamental store of value (which centralized illiquid clones can’t be for obvious economic reasons), and then add a particular “privacy altcoin” for privacy in transactions. Of course that can’t work in most real-world scenarios. Assuming that the payer and the payee both use bitcoin as a long-term store of value, the payee would have to move satoshis from his personal storage solution to some kind of market (regulated or not, it doesn’t really matter here) with the same privacy issues as any other bitcoin transaction; then exchange those satoshis for altcoins on some low-liquidity shared order book with very low privacy; and then move the altcoins over their native system with a low anonymity set to an address provided by the payee. Then the payee would have to repeat the same steps in reverse. The privacy guarantees of the whole process would be, overall, way lower than a normal bitcoin transaction performed following the best practices. Of course, these guarantees can be increased if either the payee or the payer “batch” many transactions in one big altcoin reserve, exchanging satoshis only once, way before or way after the single individual transactions. But this would require the altcoin to be a reliable store of value for long periods of time — which illiquid and centralized bitcoin-clones (often crippled by unbalanced trade-off choices between privacy features and other very delicate aspects) can’t be. The deeper problem with this approach is that, even if feasible, it would become completely useless pretty quickly. The very same reasons that convinced some regulated exchanges to actively discourage or even prevent their customers from adopting privacy best practices on Bitcoin, would readily convince the very same exchanges to just delist any “privacy-focused” bitcoin-clone. The “smaller” the altcoin, the weaker the incentive to list it. The “bigger” the altcoin, the stronger the regulatory pressure to delist it. It’s as simple as that. Some weak attempts at steel-manning this approach focus on the distinction between mandatory privacy and opt-in privacy. “With Bitcoin,” the altcoin proponents say, “you are not forced to use the fungibility features at the protocol level, so it’s easy for the exchange to ask you not to use them. But with my altcoin, you have no choice, so the regulated exchange will also have no choice but to allow you to use them.” Again, this is nonsense; it’s not true that a privacy feature can ever be “mandatory at the protocol level.” As the history of Bitcoin teaches us, it’s mostly about tools: Even when the base protocol includes strong fungibility capabilities, if the most widespread tools don’t leverage them, then people will simply not use them. They’ll just resort to using whatever is easy and available, even if that mean adopting bad practices instead. It doesn’t matter which protocol you use: If the tools are inadequate, so is your privacy. Just as you can have a bitcoin wallet that is incompatible with CoinJoin and that forces address reuse, you can also have a monero wallet that leaks confidential information about amounts and always constructs “ring-signatures” between every single user and himself. If such a wallet is widespread, spy companies can assume such behavior as common and build de-anonymization heuristics. Of course, altcoin proponents may just build and market tools that actually use the privacy features already present in their clone at the protocol level. But then again they would need just as much time, money and effort that is required for building and marketing tools that actually use the privacy features already present in Bitcoin at the protocol level. A more useful distinction to examine is the one between privacy features that are economically convenient to use and privacy features that are costly to use. The perfect (bad) example would be that of “shielded transactions” in the altcoin Zcash: Since they take way more space inside blocks, and way more computation time to be verified and signed (making this last action almost impossible on a light client), economic incentives push the already-few users of the coin to “unshielded” transactions, which are just an outdated version of the traditional bitcoin ones. As a direct effect, many users will think they have “more privacy” when this process, in fact, makes tracking and deanonymizing far easier. An indirect effect will be that the very few users who do decide to pay the extra cost for “shielded” transactions will find themselves within an even smaller anonymity set, ending up exposed instead of protected. An opposite example would be the Lightning Network on Bitcoin: Since block space is expensive, users often have strong economic incentives to switch to payment channels to save fees, reducing the “timechain footprint” to just opening and closing channels. Ultimately, it’s not surprising at all that some of the most vocal proponents of the “CoinJoin is risky because your account will get flagged” narrative turn out to be also promoters of new, illiquid “privacy” altcoins, which they hope to push to profit from “pump-and-dump” schemes. Same old story: “Bitcoin’s fees are too high: buy my low-fee altcoin!” or “Bitcoin signatures aren’t quantum-proof: buy my quantum-ready altcoin!” or “Bitcoin’s smart contracts aren’t flexible enough: buy my Turing-complete altcoin!” or “Bitcoin is not fungible enough: buy my privacy altcoin!” Are there real solutions and ways to mitigate the threat that regulated exchanges pose to the privacy and the security for Bitcoin users, beyond the red herrings? Yes: many. The ultimate solution, albeit very slow, will eventually come from the evolution of the market. While more and more resources will leave the fiat world to enter Bitcoin over the years, more and more parts of the bitcoin economy will move from fiat gateways to satoshi-denominated trades among users. Gateways will still be important, but gradually less so, making their bargaining power lower and lower over time. Fiercer competition will also help: People will be happy to leave meddling PI-hiring banks who force them to keep shower curtains open if they have alternatives. Another mitigation will come from the evolution of Bitcoin tools. While more and more modern wallets will make it harder to reuse addresses or merge inputs, and easier to coordinate CoinJoin rounds, regulated exchanges will have a harder time forcing their customers to use only old, outdated or inferior wallets instead. Yet another mitigation will come from the adoption of the Lightning Network. Since block space in the base layer will become more expensive, users will be strongly incentivized to route transactions over payment channels instead. It will be harder for regulated exchanges to arbitrarily ban customers due to a probabilistic link between the satoshis they deposited or withdrew on the Lightning Network, especially when the latter will be ubiquitous, thanks to economic incentives. Additional improvements may possibly come from the next protocol upgrades in Bitcoin, especially the one called “cross-input Schnorr signature aggregation.” This upgrade will make coordinating with several different parties within CoinJoin rounds extremely convenient, from an economical perspective. Another hope comes from the idea of decentralized exchanges (DEXes). So far, they suffer from liquidity limitations and their security remains tricky: While the Bitcoin “leg” of any trade can be easily trust-minimized, the fiat leg remains ultimately trust-based, making complex and expensive escrow mechanisms necessary. (In turn, escrow mechanisms tend to prove very difficult to decentralize effectively.) Your privacy is in your hands — just keep calm and be diligent. Don’t submit to dangerous privacy violations. Don’t reuse addresses. Use CoinJoin. Close your shutters when you’re at home. Pull the shower curtains when you’re naked. Put a lock on your personal journal. Use HTTPS when surfing the web. In the end, Bitcoin fixes this. The Astrology of Bitcoin Bitcoin is undoubtedly one of the most interesting developments in both the financial and technological sectors in recent times, presenting a radical alternative to traditional centralised banking, and claiming to act as a digital alternative to gold. As would be expected with such a radical development, it has met with vehement opposition and fervent support in near equal measure, with detractors claiming it is another case of tulip mania, while supporters claim it is the most significant financial development since the adoption of legal tender, forecasting Bitcoin to replace all centralised forms of currency and usher in a new era of decentralised trade and decentralised banking. Aside from the financial and technological factors, Bitcoin is also incredibly fascinating from an astrological perspective, with a birth chart that is equally interesting to learn about as the currency itself. Many pieces have been written on the chart of Bitcoin, some from the perspective of “modern astrology”, but also some from the perspective of traditional forms of the art such as Jyotisha or Hellenistic astrology, including a very interesting piece on the application of Zodiacal Releasing to the development and price action of the cryptocurrency. In this piece we will present a thorough analysis of Bitcoins birth chart though a house by house survey, highlighting the real world manifestations of each placement, focusing on the price movement, technology, and public perception of the cryptocurrency. A second article will soon be published detailing the application of Zodiacal Releasing and some other predictive techniques to the development of Bitcoin. We will begin our investigation by examining the foundational strength of the chart, through the lens of the triplicity rulers of the sect light, the lot of fortune, the ascendant, and the medium coeli The triplicity rulers of the sect light can give us a good indicator of the overall strength of the nativity, along with providing us some information on whether early/later life will be the more positive part of the natives life. In the case of Bitcoin, the prognosis here is not a positive one. The first triplicity lord, Jupiter, is in fall, placed in the Capricorn, the sixth house, in the terms of Mars. The second triplicity lord is the Sun, also in the 6th House,  albeit in the terms of Jupiter. The participating triplicity lord is Saturn, which is placed in Virgo, (2nd house) in the terms of Mars. None of the planets are particularly well placed, meaning that the nativity has a poor foundation of strength from the perspective of this technique. We can see here an early indication that Bitcoins fate will be subject to many reversals, and the charts foundational strength will be weakened.. This does not, of course, completely deny success to the currency, but it is a strong debilitating factor in the chart, and will give more weight to the negative predictions made for the currency. The Ascendant and Midheaven are also placed in Fire signs, so the judgement on the strength of the triplicity lords of the sect light will extend to these points also, making for a very poor prognosis on the foundational strength of the chart. Aside from these three points, it is important to also examine the Triplicity Rulers of the lot of fortune, as this too has a significant influence over the strength of the nativity. Vettius Valens says that if the rulers of the sect light and other points are poorly placed, well configured triplicity rulers of the lot of fortune can sometimes salvage success for the nativity. In the case of Bitcoin, the triplicity rulers of the Lot are much better placed than the rulers of the sect light, with Venus (secondary ruler), and Mars (Co-operating Ruler) both in exaltation and their preferred sect.  The primary triplicity lord, the Moon, is also reasonably well placed, both in the birth chart and on the other days of the Moon. From this we can see that all three triplicity lords of the Lot are all relatively well placed, which will go a long way towards compensating for the glaring weaknesses revealed by the triplicity lords of the sect light. It is written that the triplicity lords of the Lot being well placed can often make the native lucky in life, and attain high rank through fortuitous circumstances. Bitcoin was certainly made at a “fortuitous” time, following on from a global recession, when faith in fiat currency was at a low point. It could be argued that the strength of the Lot is one of the reasons why Bitcoin always seems to bounce back when it seems as if all hope is lost, and that even the most extreme crises experienced by the currency thus far have always been followed sooner or later, by an equally extreme recovery. These techniques serve as a tool for determining both the severity of the difficulties in the life of the native, and also the heights of success indicated by the chart. From our analysis here it can be inferred that the “baseline” condition of Bitcoin will not be very positive, however it may achieve sudden, albeit short lived, success from time to time. A cursory examination of the history of the currency will prove this to be true, as the price of Bitcoin is constantly subject to both rapid increases and decreases in price, with the price fluctuating by up to 20% a day in some cases. For assets such as stocks or precious metals, such fluctuations are virtually non-existent, with even the most extreme fluctuations in price seldom exceeding 10% in a day, generally occurring in times of crisis or global financial upheaval. BTC has the Descending Node in the first house, and this placement has proven to have an incredible influence over the currency, and as with all placements in the first house, has had a profound impact on the nature of the nativity. There are no precise predictions given in any Hellenistic texts for the Descending Node in the first house, with this placement being notably absent from Rhetorius the Egyptians significations for the nodes in the houses. This does not, however, stop us from gaining valuable information from this placement, as we are aware of some core principles of the descending node which we can use to make forecasts for its placement in the houses, even when no specific information is given. In the case of Bitcoin, the “dissipating” and “reducing” effects of the node have manifested through the currency being decentralised and split into countless different pieces, the descending node acting directly on the ascendant here in a most interesting fashion. Free of the limitations of the human form, the descending node has much more leeway here to manifest its effects, and has quite literally dissipated the very being of Bitcoin, offering a striking example of a pure, direct manifestation of the node’s effects. The node is aspected by neither benefics nor malefics, so its effects will not be “filtered” by the influence of any planets. The only planet in aspect is Mercury, which is making a sign based opposition to the node here. The impact of the node in this case certainly has a Mercurial character, with the effects of this placement pertaining largely to finance and technology. The dodecatemoria of the ascendant can also tell us interesting things about the nativity, often pointing out an area of particular focus in the life of the native, or one of symbolic importance. In the case of Bitcoin the dodecatemoria of the ascendant is at 10 Libra, in the terms of Mercury. The third house of communication is a very appropriate placement for an entity such as Bitcoin, with the terms of mercury bringing the financial/technological significations into play. Not a revelatory placement, but a good example of the accuracy of this lesser known technique. The second house in Bitcoins chart is Virgo, with the out of sect malefic, Saturn, placed here. The second house will be quite important for Bitcoin, given that its primary function is to be a store of value and financial asset. Having Saturn here does not bode well at all for the fledgling cryptocurrency, with the house containing the out of sect malefic usually pinpointing an area of difficulty in the life of the native. Aside from being out of sect, Saturn has no triplicity Rulership here, and is in the terms of Mars. It is however, receiving an opposition from Venus, which will be expected to produce some difficulties. It also sends an Antiscia to Aries, the sign of Saturn’s fall, which will be another weaking factor for the planet. We will delve into this Antiscia placement in more detail later, for now we will note that it will have an adverse effect on the condition of Saturn. The trine from Jupiter, Mars and Sun will improve the planets condition somewhat, making the difficulties forecast by this placement much more manageable. The prediction for Saturn in the 2nd is for illnesses and great reversals of fortune, along with the native often being an “agitator of great public disturbances”. There is also the prediction for the native to “waste their inheritance”. This forecast is quite interesting in the case of Bitcoin, as the mysterious “father” of the currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, has almost 1 million BTC in a wallet which remains untouched to this day. There are numerous theories as to what will happen to these Bitcoins, some say that Bitcoin SV founder Craig Wright is Satoshi, and he will sell all of the Bitcoin one day in an effort to make Bitcoin SV the number one cryptocurrency. Others say that the wallet is lost, and it will never be opened. Others still say that Satoshi will only use the wallet in an emergency. Whatever the case, astrology would point to a reversal of some sorts resulting from this wallet, as it represents the “inheritance” of Bitcoin, being an asset withheld from the currency by its founder(s) for future purposes. We can see here that Saturn has most certainly delivered on its promises with regards to reversals, with btc being one of the most volatile assets on the market today, subject to huge fluctuations in price, often dropping by more than 10% of its value in a single day. The illnesses and injuries have manifested as the many hacks and security issues which have plagued Bitcoin from the beginning, with the Mt Gox hack being a notable example here. The agitator of public disturbances is another signification which is clear for all to see, with huge regulatory concerns, along with a bad reputation among many members of the public proving to be recurring issues for Bitcoin. The effects of the ruler of this house in the 7th will be seen through the forks that have emerged from Bitcoin, and the infighting between the founders of the currency. Bitcoin Cash is the primary example of this. The planet which rules the second house can also give us a hint as to the likely cause of any losses of income/employment are likely to be for the native. With Mercury as ruler of the second we can expect mercurial subjects such as technology, finance, and writing to be some of the contributing factors to any losses of income experienced by Bitcoin, and it is quite obvious that this has proven to be true. The only non-obvious result of this placement is the difficulties experienced by Bitcoin as a result of the countless hit pieces that have been published by journalists and critics of the cryptocurrency, which have contributed to many “losses of income” in the case of Bitcoin. The third house of Bitcoin chart is Libra, and it contains the Imum Coeli, meaning it will also signify fourth house matters, along with any placements here having the strength of an angular planet. While there are no natal placements here, we can see the antiscia of Venus placed here, a very auspicious placement having both domicile rulership and angularity. What we can infer from this placement is that hidden matters, and the “foundation” of the currency will both be points of strength. The “foundation” here will manifest as the brilliant technology and team working behind Bitcoin, along with the large base of support that the currency has. The hidden matters will manifest as the currencies ability to avoid regulation, and benefit from much of the clandestine activity associated with BTC in its early years, when it was the currency of choice amongst deep web drug dealers, and also many international crime gangs. Another obvious manifestation of the hidden significations here is the currencies security and cryptography, two decidedly fourth house matters which have proved incredibly beneficial for Bitcoin, and are perhaps two of the greatest strengths possessed by the currency. It would also be expected that the currencies “parents’ will be another point of positive focus in its development, and this has proved to be a complicated matter, as will be shown later. However we can most certainly say that Bitcoin’s founders were very talented and innovative people, who equipped the currency with the technological foundation which would prove to be a key influence in propelling the currency to the heights which it has experienced in recent years. Venus here would also suggest a good old age, however this is less certain, due to some other placements, and also taking into account that we are dealing with an Antiscia here, which will reduce the strength of all predictions made. The fourth house is Scorpio and contains no major placements, having no natal planets, antisica, dodecatemoria, or even contra antsica. The ruler of the 4th is Mars, in the 6th house, which would indicate death abroad in the case of a human nativity. In the case of Bitcoin its “death” is very likely to occur abroad, as most of the money flowing in and out of the cryptocurrency comes from outside of Ireland. This will, however, not be a very strong forecast, as you generally want a prediction to be mentioned three or more times before you are certain of it happening. The 5th house is Sagittarius, and while it does not contain any natal planets, it does contain the Anstica of Jupiter, Sun and Mars, along with the Dodecatemoria of Jupiter. Turning our eyes first to Jupiter, we see that these placements are hugely positive for the greater benefic, with the Antiscia and Dodecatemoria having domicile rulership in Sagittarius, a potent combination that  greatly strengthens what is one of weakest natal placements in the chart. Jupiter in the 5th promises the native wealth, honour, and health, along with a position of power and prominence. As this is a night chart, and we are dealing with “secondary” placements, we can expect these predictions to be reduced in intensity, however they do serve as key astrological indicators of the incredible success enjoyed by Bitcoin, and show us how what seems like a very weak planet in the chart, can make some very positive predictions given its hidden strength revealed to us by the Dodecatemoria and Antiscia. The Sun is also well placed here, having triplicity rulership, along with being conjunct Jupiter. A key consideration in judging the condition of these points will be the superior square they receive from Saturn. This aspect changes what would have been a very positive placement, into one promising difficulties and setbacks to accompany all the good fortune predicted by this configuration. The square from Saturn will have a limiting and reversing effect on the predictions here, facilitating the negative side of fifth house matters, such as losses from speculation, to manifest in the life of Bitcoin. It seems that no matter what way you look at things, all the positive predictions and placements of Bitcoin are hampered by the influence of the greater malefic, something that has proven true time and time again over the lifetime of the cryptocurrency so far. All of its amazing price rallies were followed by severe rapid declines, and regulatory efforts from governments and banks have been a thorn in the side of Bitcoin for many years. Even in discussions about the currency online and in person you will notice the influence of Saturn, for every fan of BTC there is a detractor, for every John McAffee there is a Peter Schiff, the malefic influence of Saturn always rearing its head as soon as the Jupitarian optimism shows its face. This is not to say that either side is right or wrong, it is merely an observation from the “perspective of Bitcoin” as if it were a native. In the context of an individual chart, the malefic influence will be experienced always from the natives perspective, not necessarily from the perspective of “the other”. The effects of Saturn in superior square will be somewhat offset by Venus making an inferior square to the placements in this house. This will not eliminate the impact of Saturn, but it will soften it somewhat. For Jupiter, this placement will be strong, as it has both term and house rulership. For the Sun it will be above average, as it has triplicity rulership and is in the terms of Venus. For Mars it will be average, as it does not have term or triplicity rulership. We cannot of course, pass over the firth house without mentioning the associations of this place with gambling, speculation, and financial gains. The plethora of placements here will signal that these factors will be highly significant in the development of Bitcoin, and given the strength of these placements, it would be expected that this will be a very positive area for Bitcoin, and this has most certainly proven to be true. The meteoric rise of Bitcoin from being a fringe item of curiosity, to one of the most talked about financial assets in the world, was hugely influenced by speculation, and the reputation of the currency as an easy way to make a quick buck. This was most clearly illustrated in recent years by the bull run of 2017, and the associated mass hysteria that accompanied it. People with no prior interest in trading or cryptocurrency were now flocking to Bitcoin, seeing it as somewhat of a golden goose which would deliver them to wealth and financial freedom. It cannot be denied that this speculative interest proved hugely influential in the development of Bitcoin and was largely responsible for the astronomical rise in prominence that the currency experienced over the past few years. These placements offer us a striking example of the power of the antisica and dodecatemoria, as without examining these hidden placements, we would have little idea on the astrological root of how fifth house matters such as speculation came to have such a profound impact on Bitcoin, and how many Jupitarian matters came to have such a positive effect are pretty unfortunate given the cypherpunk origins of Bitcoin. While Satoshi might have been the NSA, then Bitcoin clearly isn’t. Enjoyed the article? Donate to the Bitcoin Takeover project: 37EmPGG6mw2BSq54WVEs8EJJToNZXopKV4 Stock-to-Flow Influences on Bitcoin Price This article attempts to completely invalidate the statistics behind the idea that there is any stock-to-flow relationship to Bitcoin price. The proposed Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model is shown to be seriously deficient due to the serial correlation in the residuals. The Engle-Granger method is shown to be not usable as a test for cointegration due to requirements for the test not being met. The Johansen method is similarly invalidated. Finally, an Auto Regressive Distributed Lag model (ARDL) is built to test for cointegration. The ARDL model does not falsify the stock to flow relationship. Thus whilst many tests have been able to be shown to be incorrect or have series errors, we have been able to reject the hypothesis that stock-to-flow does not have an important non-spurious influence on the US dollar price of Bitcoin. Medium is relatively limited for mathematical notation. The usual notation for an estimate of a statistical parameter is to place a hat on top. Instead, we define the estimate of a term as [ ]. e.g. the estimate of β = [β]. If we are representing a 2x2 matrix, we will do so like this [r1c1, r1c2 \ r2c1, r2c2] etc. Subscripted items are superseded by @ — eg for the 10th position in a vector X we would normally subscript X with 10. We will instead write X@10. Scientific method is difficult for most to comprehend. It is counterintuitive. It can lead to conclusions that do not reflect personal beliefs. It takes a foundation in the method to understand this basic fundamental concept: it is ok to be wrong. This should be something that is taught in school. If we are afraid of getting it wrong, we will never propose anything new. The history of scientific discovery is therefore by its’ very nature surrounded in serendipity. Things that people discover by accident can be just as important as (or more important than) whatever it is they originally set out to do. Their original ideas might have been incorrect or inconclusive, but the things they discovered on the journey built the framework for those who follow. According to the great modern scientific philosopher Karl Popper, testing a hypothesis for an incorrect outcome is the only reliable way to add weight to the argument that it is correct. If rigorous and repeated tests cannot show that a hypothesis is incorrect, then with each test the hypothesis assumes a higher likelihood of being correct. This concept is called Falsifiability. This article aims to falsify the statistical analysis used thus far to verify the stock-to-flow model of Bitcoin value, as defined in Modelling Bitcoin’s Value with Scarcity[14]. To falsify a hypothesis, first we must state what it is: Null Hypotheses (H0): Stock to flow does not have a measurable influence on Bitcoin price Alternative Hypotheses (H1): Stock to flow does have a measurable infuence on Bitcoin price Readers of the first article in this series3 will note that we have swapped around the null and alternative hypothesis. Readers will also note we are looking specifically at price, not market cap. In [14], PlanB chose to test H0 by fitting an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression on the natural log of the market capitalisation of Bitcoin and the natural log of the stock-to-flow. There was no accompanying diagnostics nor any identified reasoning for the log transformation in both variables, other than the idea that a log-log model can be expressed as a power law. The model did not take into account the possibility of a spurious relationship due to non-stationarity. In 3 we explored some alternative models, including ones that do account for the possibility of a spurious relationship. We tested carefully stock to flow and price with both DFGLS and KPSS tests to verify from both directions that both variables were in fact non-stationary. However, the stock to flow variable is not something uninfluenced by the halving events, where the “flow” is literally cut in half. This is more akin to a structural break, rather than a non-stationary increase. Thus we test each halving period’s stock to flow for stationarity with the DFGLS and KPSS test, as well as the entirety of the variable with the Ziffer-Andrews test for stationarity (which was developed to deal with such structural breaks). Ordinary least squares regression is a way to estimate a linear relationship between two or more variables. First, let us define a linear model as some function of X that equals Y with some error. Y = βX+ε where Y is the dependent variable, X is the independent variable, ε _is the error term and _β _is the multiplier of _X. The goal of OLS is to estimate β such that ε is minimised. In order for [β] to be a reliable estimate, some basic assumptions must be met: In the first article of this series 3 we tested the first three of these assumptions. We will now test the fourth — that is how bad is the serial correlation in the residuals (and can we fix it?) We begin by looking at a scatter plot matrix of the lags of the residuals. Serial correlation will show up here as essentially a straight line from the lower left corner of each individual graph to the upper right corner. Figure 1 — Scatter plot matrix of Residuals v Lags of Residuals — High correlation shown all the way back to 20 lags The visual evidence in figure 1 is quite damning. There is serial correlation heavily present. We can confirm this with the Breusch-Godfrey test. The null of the test is no autocorrelation present. Figure 2 — Breush-Godfrey test for autocorrelation — can reject the null with a high degree of confidence. We can reject the null in Figure 2 for all lags in the test. This confirms our visual inspection results of autocorrelation in the residuals. Prais-Winsten regression assumes the residuals follow an AR(1) process and accounts for it via the “rho”. Below, we can see the original OLS in figure 3 and the Prais regression in figure 4. In figure 4, we also see the values of the Durbin-Watson statistic — first for the unchanged OLS, and then after accounting for serial correlation. Figure 3 — Original OLS regression results Figure 4 — Prais-Winsten regression results. Durbin-Watson is for this case interpreted as the closer to 2, the less likely there is to be serial correlation in the residuals. As we can see, the Prais-Wnisten regression accounts for the serial correlation, however the influence of stock to flow appears greatly diminished, and in fact in this instance, we cannot reject the null hypothesis (that stock to flow does not have an influence on price). In 1, we used the Johansen test for cointegration. One of the key assumptions in that test (and the simpler Engle-Granger test) is that both variables are non-stationary. We tested for stationarity in 3 using the DFGLS test and the KPSS test and concluded that both variables were non-stationary. However, conceptually it can be seen that the halving events are more like structural breaks in the stock to flow variable. Thus here we test for stationarity using those tests within the halving epochs. Figure 5 — first halving epoch We can conclude for the first epoch, that there is insufficient evidence to reject that stock to flow is non-stationary. Figure 6 — second halving epoch For the second epoch, the evidence is more clear — the stock to flow variable is definitely stationary for the second epoch. Figure 7 — third halving epoch In the third epoch, the evidence is overwhelming that stock to flow is stationary. There appears to be a trend toward stationarity through the epochs. The Zivot-Andrews test for unit root allows for structural breaks in the series, which conceptually aligns with how the halvings impact the flow (and consequently the stock to flow ratio). Clearly the Zivot-Andrews test works well here and agrees with the broken down DFGLS tests. Log(Stock to Flow) is stationary. I(0). This would be fantastic news if Log(price) was also stationary (it would mean the original OLS PlanB did was valid), however it is non-stationary — the Zivot-Andrews test cannot the null. In 3, we naively assumed stock to flow was integrated order (1) and price was integrated order (1). However, these test show that stock to flow is integrated order (0) and price is integrated order (1). The Johansen test was used to test for cointegration in 3 — the problem is, we cannot mix orders of integration in this test. We cannot mix them in the simpler Engle-Granger test, either. There is only one possible test that the author is aware of that can deal with mixed order integration — the ARDL bounds test. Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models regress the dependent variable on its lags and on the lags of one or more additional regressors. ARDL models can, among other things, be used for the estimation and testing of level relationships. Key contributions in this area are [12] and [13]. For a succinct exposition of ARDL models in the context of cointegration, see [5 & 6]. An important feature of the ARDL model is it allows us to investigate relationships between mixed orders of integration. Figure 8 — ARDL model on daily data. We can see stock to flow has a significant long run influence on price. Figure 9 — Bounds test for a level relationship. We can reject the null hypothesis of no level relationship easily at the 10% critical level, further providing evidence to the s2f claim (NB we are looking at the I(0) variable s2f). Figure 10 — Showing the long-run (LR) influence of stock to flow on price The bounds test for a level relationship in the ARDL model provides very robust evidence to reject the null hypothesis and conclude that stock to flow does have a significant influence on the US Dollar price of Bitcoin. Further research is required as the coefficient for the long run parameter is significantly lower than the OLS parameter. Future research should focus on improving the ARDL specification, including adjusting for confounding or potentially effect mediating variables (such as the difficulty adjustment). Follow me on twitter: @btconometrics or visit my website: https://btconometrics.com for further information. The Number Zero and Bitcoin Satoshi gave the world Bitcoin, a true “something for nothing.” His discovery of absolute scarcity for money is an unstoppable idea that is changing the world tremendously, just like its digital ancestor: the number zero. Many believe that Bitcoin is “just one of thousands of cryptoassets”—this is true in the same way that the number zero is just one of an infinite series of numbers. In reality, Bitcoin is special, and so is zero: each is an invention which led to a discovery that fundamentally reshaped its overarching system—for Bitcoin, that system is money, and for zero, it is mathematics. Since money and math are mankind’s two universal languages, both Bitcoin and zero are critical constructs for civilization. For most of history, mankind had no concept of zero: an understanding of it is not innate to us—a symbol for it had to be invented and continuously taught to successive generations. Zero is an abstract conception and is not discernible in the physical world—no one goes shopping for zero apples. To better understand this, we will walk down a winding path covering more than 4,000 years of human history that led to zero becoming part of the empirical bedrock of modernity. Numerals, which are symbols for numbers, are the greatest abstractions ever invented by mankind: virtually everything we interact with is best grasped in numerical, quantifiable, or digital form. Math, the language of numerals, originally developed from a practical desire to count things—whether it was the amount of fish in the daily catch or the days since the last full moon. Many ancient civilizations developed rudimentary numeral systems: in 2000 BCE, the Babylonians, who failed to conceptualize zero, used two symbols in different arrangements to create unique numerals between 1 and 60: Babylonian cuneiform was a relatively inefficient numeral system — notice how many more written strokes are necessary for each number symbol — and calculation using it was even more cumbersome. Vestiges of the base-60 Babylonian cuneiform system still exist today: there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 6 sets of 60 degrees in a circle. But this ancient system lacked a zero, which severely limited its usefulness. Ancient Greeks and Mayans developed their own numeral systems, each of which contained rough conceptions of zero. However, the first explicit and arithmetic use of zero came from ancient Indian and Cambodian cultures. They created a system with nine number symbols and a small dot used to mark the absence of a number—the original zero. This numeral system would eventually evolve into the one we use today: The first known written zero: from the Bakhshali manuscript which contains pages dating back to the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. Inscription K-127 bears the earliest zero ever discovered—dated from the 7th century, it was discovered in the 19th century in Cambodia. In the 7th century, the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta developed terms for zero in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division (although he struggled a bit with the latter, as would thinkers for centuries to come). As the discipline of mathematics matured in India, it was passed through trade networks eastward into China and westward into Islamic and Arabic cultures. It was this western advance of zero which ultimately led to the inception of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system—the most common means of symbolic number representation in the world today: When zero reached Europe roughly 300 years later in the High Middle Ages, it was met with strong ideological resistance. Facing opposition from users of the well-established Roman numeral system, zero struggled to gain ground in Europe. People at the time were able to get by without zero, but (little did they know) performing computation without zero was horribly inefficient. An apt analogy to keep in mind arises here: both math and money are possible without zero and Bitcoin, respectively—however both are tremendously more wasteful systems without these core elements. Consider the difficulty of doing arithmetic in Roman numerals: If you thought you were bad at arithmetic using numbers, just try doing it with letters. Calculation performed using the Hindu-Arabic system is significantly more straightforward than with Roman numerals—and energy-efficient systems have a tendency to win out in the long run, as we saw when the steam engine outcompeted animal-sourced power or when capitalism prevailed over socialism (another important point to remember for Bitcoin later). This example just shows the pains of addition—multiplication and division were even more painstaking. As Amir D. Aczel described it in his book Finding Zero: Roman numeral inefficiency would not be tolerated for long in a world enriching itself through commerce. With trade networks proliferating and productivity escalating in tandem, growing prospects of wealth creation incentivized merchants to become increasingly competitive, pushing them to always search for an edge over others. Computation and record-keeping with a zero-based numeral system was qualitatively easier, quantitatively faster, and less prone to error. Despite Europe’s resistance, this new numeral system simply could not be ignored: like its distant progeny Bitcoin would later be, zero was an unstoppable idea whose time had come: Zero’s first function is as a placeholder in our numeric system: for instance, notice the “0” in the number “1,104” in the equation above, which indicates the absence of value in the tens place. Without zero acting as a symbol of absence at this order of magnitude in “1,104,” the number could not be represented unambiguously (without zero, is it “1,104” or “114”?). Lacking zero detracted from a numeral system’s capacity to maintain constancy of meaning as it scales. Inclusion of zero enables other digits to take on new meaning according to their position relative to it. In this way, zero lets us perform calculation with less effort—whether its pen strokes in a ledger, finger presses on a calculator, or mental gymnastics. Zero is a symbol for emptiness, which can be a highly useful quality—as Lao Tzu said: More philosophically, zero is emblematic of the void, as Aczel describes it: Drawing analogies to the functions of money: zero is the “store of value” on which higher order of magnitude numerals can scale; this is the reason we always prefer to see another zero at the end of our bank account or Bitcoin balance. In the same way a sound economic store of value leads to increased savings, which undergirds investment and productivity growth, so too does a sound mathematical placeholder of value give us a numeral system capable of containing more meaning in less space, and supporting calculations in less time: both of which also foster productivity growth. Just as money is the medium through which capital is continuously cycled into places of optimal economic employment, zero gives other digits the ability to cycle—to be used again and again with different meanings for different purposes. Zero’s second function is as a number in its own right: it is the midpoint between any positive number and its negative counterpart (like +2 and -2). Before the concept of zero, negative numbers were not used, as there was no conception of “nothing” as a number, much less “less than nothing.” Brahmagupta inverted the positive number line to create negative numbers and placed zero at the center, thus rounding out the numeral system we use today. Although negative numbers were written about in earlier times, like the Han Dynasty in China (206 BCE to 220 BCE), their use wasn’t formalized before Brahmagupta, since they required the concept of zero to be properly defined and aligned. In a visual sense, negative numbers are a reflection of positive numbers cast across zero: Zero is the center of gravity for our entire numeral system, just as money is central to any economic system. Interestingly, negative numbers were originally used to signify debts—well before the invention of double-entry accounting, which opted for debits and credits (partly to avoid the use of negative numbers). In this way, zero is the “medium of exchange” between the positive and negative domains of numbers—it is only possible to pass into, or out of, either territory by way of zero. By going below zero and conceptualizing negative numbers, many new and unusual (yet extremely useful) mathematical constructs come into being including imaginary numbers, complex numbers, fractals, and advanced astrophysical equations. In the same way the economic medium of exchange, money, leads to the acceleration of trade and innovation, so too does the mathematical medium of exchange, zero, lead to enhanced informational exchange, and its associated development of civilizational advances: The Mandlebrot Set: one of the most famous examples of a fractal, a mind-bending mathematical structure formed with complex numbers that models the geometry of nature and its intrinsic complexity. One of the best known examples of mathematical beauty, this fractal exhibits infinite depth, breadth, and non-repeating self-similarity. Zero is a necessary prerequisite to such fractal modeling. Zero’s third function is as a facilitator for fractions or ratios. For instance, the ancient Egyptians, whose numeral system lacked a zero, had an extremely cumbersome way of handling fractions: instead of thinking of 3/4 as a ratio of three to four (as we do today), they saw it as the sum of 1/2 and 1/4. The vast majority of Egyptian fractions were written as a sum of numbers as 1/n, where n is the counting number—these were called unit fractions. Without zero, long chains of unit fractions were necessary to handle larger and more complicated ratios (many of us remember the pain of converting fractions from our school days). With zero, we can easily convert fractions to decimal form (like 1/2 to 0.5), which obsoletes the need for complicated conversions when dealing with fractions. This is the “unit of account” function of zero. Prices expressed in money are just exchange ratios converted into a money-denominated price decimal: instead of saying “this house costs eleven cars” we say, “this house costs $440,000,” which is equal to the price of eleven $40,000 cars. Money gives us the ability to better handle exchange ratios in the same way zero gives us the ability to better handle numeric ratios. Numbers are the ultimate level of objective abstraction: for example, the number 3 stands for the _idea _of “threeness” — a quality that can be ascribed to anything in the universe that comes in treble form. Equally, 9 stands for the quality of “nineness” shared by anything that is composed of nine parts. Numerals and math greatly enhanced interpersonal exchange of knowledge (which can be embodied in goods or services), as people can communicate about almost anything in the common language of numeracy. Money, then, is just the mathematized measure of capital available in the marketplace: it is the least common denominator among all economic goods and is necessarily the most liquid asset with the least mutable supply. It is used as a measuring system for the constantly shifting valuations of capital (this is why gold became money—it is the monetary metal with a supply that is most difficult to change). Ratios of money to capital (aka prices) are among the most important in the world, and ratios are a foundational element of being: An ability to more efficiently handle ratios directly contributed to mankind’s later development of rationality, a logic-based way of thinking at the root of major social movements such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. To truly grasp the strange logic of zero, we must start with its point of origin—the philosophy from which it was born. Zero arose from the bizarre logic of the ancient East. Interestingly, the Buddha himself was a known mathematician — in early books about him, like the Lalita Vistara, he is said to be excellent in numeracy (a skill he uses to woo a certain princess). In Buddhism, the logical character of the phenomenological world is more complex than true or false: This is the Tetralemma (or the four corners of the catuskoti): the key to understanding the seeming strangeness of this ancient Eastern logic is the concept of Shunya, a Hindi word meaning zero: it is derived from the Buddhist philosophical concept of Śūnyatā (or Shunyata). The ultimate goal of meditation is the attainment of enlightenment, or an ideal state of nirvana, which is equivalent to emptying oneself entirely of thought, desire, and worldly attachment. Achievement of this absolute emptiness is the state of being in Shunyata: a philosophical concept closely related to the void—as the Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh describes it: Or, as a Buddhist monk of ancient Wats temple in Southeast Asia described the meditative experience of the void: A direct experience of emptiness is achievable through meditation. In a true meditative state, the Shunyata and the number zero are one and the same. Emptiness is the conduit between existence and nonexistence, in the same way zero is the door from positive to negative numbers: each being a perfect reflection of the other. Zero arose in the ancient East as the epitome of this deeply philosophical and experiential concept of absolute emptiness. Empirically, today we now know that meditation benefits the brain in many ways. It seems too, that its contribution to the discovery of zero helped forge an idea that benefits mankind’s collective intelligence — our

There are countless resources for web designers and developers on the market, but which stand out? We’ve tried to pick some that are new and interesting, based on our experience with web designers and developers.Below you’ll find short reviews and recommendations of real-life tools for web designers and developers. There are WordPress themes, website builders, design bundles and many more links that we hope you’ll find useful for your next project!ListingPro represents the best experts can do in terms of WordPress directory websites. It has been the #1 bestseller in the directory and listings industry, and it has received five stars for customer support based on 400+ reviews. There are over 6,000 directory startups and people are regularly launching new directories like Yelp, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Meetup, Capterra, and others. ListingPro is super easy to use and it’s a complete package, you don’t need to pay for additional plugins. Entrepreneurs can get started quickly, there is no need to have special experience or coding skills, the process of building your directory website is quick and straightforward. You’ll find at least 40 important features for your future directory business. You can start making money with built-in options like paid plans and ad campaigns management, which are already integrated with PayPal, Stripe, and 2Checkout.The price for a basic license is $69 and it includes lifetime updates, 1-Click demo import, an easy setup assistant, detailed documentation and more.You should always be usability testing your websites — it’s as important as the design or the functionality of the project. You have to be sure that your visitor’s experience is the one you designed it to be.Userfeel is super simple to use. You hire a tester, who you choose from different criteria like age, gender, country, language and web experience, and you end with a video where you see exactly what is going on your website. You can give testers specific tasks and multiple choice questions to answer during the test. There is no limitation in the number of tasks, as long as everything can be done in 20 minutes.You can make annotations on the video, and download it or upload on YouTube, so sharing with your team is easy.For $49 you will get a desktop video test of one usability tester using your website, with his/her voice comments, and their mouse movements around your site. This will be completed by the tester’s written answers to the questions you have asked when posting your project.Web designers need lots of resources, and DealJumbo has been helping them to save money since 2013 with awesome deals and huge discounts for premium fonts, beautiful graphics, and mock-ups. They have special sections for under $10 products, and for items with even greater discounts. You’ll also find exclusive deals which can be found only on their website. Check it daily, and pick what you need. You can download 1580+ free fonts and graphics right now, all with a commercial license. You can also subscribe to receive a daily newsletter with new deals. Brizy is an excellent WordPress page builder that can be used without skills, experience or coding knowledge to visually create gorgeous websites that can easily compete with premium designs made by branded companies or talented web professionals.You can use 150 pre-designed blocks, or start from scratch, you decide. Both options are super simple to start and 4,000 icons are waiting to be used. The ease of use and user experience are outstanding, with a clutter-free interface that doesn’t get in the way (and lets you actually design your website!)It’s free to use, and they also offer a pro version. Building your new website with Brizy it’s a breeze.Deeezy is a wonderful design deal for web designers and developers, where premium and free fonts and graphics can be found at extremely low prices. Everything is delivered with an extended license, so you can use the items for unlimited commercial projects.actiTIME timesheet software suits businesses of any size. It’s easy and user-friendly, but powerful enough to provide business owners and managers with all the data necessary for successful decision-making.You can use actiTIME for simple time tracking, team or work scope management, data accounting and much more. Check their highly detailed features page. Try all features of actiTIME Online timesheet for free for 30 days.With NOTISM, you can easily gather feedback from your team or clients, share designs for review, turn static screens into interactive prototypes, and boost your workflow. It helps to stack all your ideas in one place and easily share them with others via preview links or simply invite them to your account.Goodie is a great web development service where you will get a high-quality website for prices starting at $999, a reasonable price for what you will get. You will work only with experienced and friendly developers who can make you a stunning website.Codester is a complete marketplace for web designers and developers, packed with thousands of great products. It’s a one-stop shop, as everything you need is there: PHP scripts, app templates, all kind of website themes, and even more good stuff. Always check the Flash Sale page where huge discounted items are being sold.Designhooks is a favorite place for web designers and developers because they find high-quality resources for free. Yes, everything is free: PSD Mockups, Sketch files, HTML templates, WordPress themes and more. The website is very well structured and you can easily find what you are looking for.For only $59, anybody can create a stunning website with the Uncode WordPress theme. There are 50 premade concepts and 200 layouts to choose from, and a powerful builder – Visual Composer — which will get you on your way to a pixel-perfect website.Pixpa’s easy, drag-and-drop website builder enables you to create your own beautiful portfolio website, with built-in e-commerce functionality, without any coding experience. Choose from fully customizable, stunning website themes to showcase your work. Your mobile-ready, online portfolio website comes with all the features and tools you need to grow your creative business.Format is a pixel-perfect, free to use HTML template that is a perfect fit for designers, agencies, web studios and freelancers. Some of the features include pop-up video, a smooth overlay for portfolio, and scroll animation. Format has a premium touch which you normally can find at expensive themes, not free as this one.ContentSnare will help you forget chasing the customers for the content they promised you. With just three small steps, the software will do the job for you.First, you create “requests” with all the pieces of information you need from the client. There are templates that you can choose from, or you can build one from scratch. Just specify a due date and a follow-up schedule. Let Content Snare do all the client chasing instead of wasting your precious time. Content Snare will notify you when something is ready for approval. Lock it in, or request changes before checking it off. It’s very simple and effective.uSocial is not just a user-friendly builder of “Like” and “Share” social buttons. It has a metadata builder that can make shares more attractive in social media, and eventually drive new traffic to your website. Buttons have a trendy design, there are lots of placing options, and a share counter. It boasts clean code with asynchronous loading and well-developed quality layouts.As the name says, this is a logo design platform where you can have your design ready on the spot. Pricing starts at $29 and the results are excellent.With uCalc, you can make a calculator or form without coding skills. A calculator is created with an easy-to-use editor and can suit any industry: from funny quotes for entertainment websites to calculations of service costs and sending orders by email or mobile.You can build a custom calculator by dragging fields and adding their values to a formula – all in as little as 10 minutes!InkyDeals is among the best places to find digital assets with huge discounts. There tons of items available: bundles, graphic design, photography, fonts, vectors and much more. There is even a free section as well.Crellois a simple visual editor that can be used for animated posts, digital ads, printed designs, and social media posts. There is a huge library of illustrations, templates and photos to choose from.Turning visitors into subscribers and customers can be a hard task. MailMunch is a great tool to use for just this. You can easily build all kind of forms: embedded, top bar, pop-up, landing page and more, without writing a single line of code. MailMunch is effective. With over 900,000 users, Elementor is considered the number one WordPress page builder on the market. The tool is lighting fast, everything happens in real-time, and you don’t need to have any coding skills or previous experience.Use Elementor with your favorite or customized theme. Change themes and still keep all your designs. Landing pages, homepages, posts, portfolios, products. Elementor can be used to design any page or custom post type on WordPress.This computer and internet monitoring cloud-based software allows tracking user activities on any PC remotely, from any location or device. The price starts at $7.99 per user per month.With more than 500,000 users, UptimeRobot will check for any website downtime from different locations on the map and let you know very fast so you can react. There is a free forever plan for five-minute monitoring intervals, start with that one and upgrade anytime you need. InvoiceBerry is a powerful, yet very simple-to-use invoicing software that can be used for creating and sending fully customized invoices, tracking expenses, creating reports and much more. The pricing starts from $15 per month, an affordable cost for any freelancer or company.Branding your business is often difficult but it doesn’t have to be. StickerYou is your one-stop shop for making your brand stick with custom vinyl stickers, labels, decals, and more. You can order any size, shape, and quantity. Start branding today and make what matters stick!Foxy is a powerful hosted cart and payment page that allows you to sell anything, using your existing website or platform. It supports more than 90 payment gateways and alternate payment methods (ex: Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net, Amazon Pay, Bitcoin, Apple Pay) and quickly integrates with Webflow, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and anywhere you can add a link or embed HTML. It is literally loaded with tons of options and features. Pofo is a graphically polished, interactive and easily customizable WordPress and WooCommerce theme that can be used to build stunning websites and eCommerce store. The theme contains 25 ready homepage demos, 210+ pages and 150+ stylish and nice looking ready elements. Check the demo, it will be quality time well spent. With RumbleTalk anybody can add a web chat on its website, without writing a single line of code. Your website visitors will highly appreciate that they can easily discuss with you and get info or your help. It’s an effective and budget-friendly way of increasing the conversion rate. WrapPixel features admin templates, UI kits, mega bundles and even freebies. WrapPixel focuses on having fewer items but with the maximum possible quality.Our thanks to Mekanism for sponsoring this post, and helping to support Design Shack.Join our 30,000+ members to submit your designs, collect inspiration, and more.If you subscribe, we will use your email address to send one newsletter every week, and occasional promotions from us and our partners.By clicking, you agree that we may process your information in accordance with our privacy policy.Carrie is the chief writer at Design Shack, with years of experience in web and graphic design. Sports fanatic. Information junkie. Designer. True-believer in karma. @designshack on Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google+ RSS Feed About / Membership / Advertising & Sponsorship / Privacy

35+ Best Free Stock Image Sources For Your Website In 2018 When choosing images (photos, icons,  or illustrations) for your website, social media post,  blog, ebook, or advertising, it is important to select images you can legally use. Maybe you have been paying $1-5 per image, did you know there are absolutely free images to use? This is where free stock photo sites are beneficial. Copyright restrictions are no laughing matter, particularly to the owner of the copyright. Finding an image online from a website,  social media post,  or blog does not give you the legal right to reuse the image in any way. In fact, many bloggers have been embroiled in litigation due to using images which they were never given the right to use; hence, they were not compliant with copyright restrictions. Unless the owner of the photo clearly, and without restriction, gives you the right to use their photography, your use of that image places your business at risk for severe financial repercussions. Would you be OK with someone stealing your work? You would probably be rather upset about it. For photographers, their lifeblood is the images they create, photos which often become unauthorized, but beautiful totally free stock photos in rogue blog posts. Because of this, they will do anything and everything at their disposal to protect their interests, including filing lawsuits against rogue websites that use their images without written consent. That does not mean, however, that you can’t find free stock photo websites which offer website builders no-cost options. Royalty free images exist that allows you to be entirely in-line with copyright restrictions. My list of the best free stock photo websites can help an online business find appropriate, enticing images for their content without risking litigation or reputation. While free images are readily available online, it remains important that online business owners pay attention to restricted use policies. If you are seeking a collection of high resolution images with creative common licenses, you’ve come to the right article. WHAT ARE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES? Before we get to the best free stock images section, I would like to quickly go over potential restrictions involved with creative commons licenses. If you are already versed in this area, please skip down to the resources. If you are not, I suggest you understand a few creative commons licensing concepts so you can make sure that you and your online business remain protected. Many free stock images or public domain images still require attribution, make sure to read the license on the photography website Free Image Websites Have Creative Commons License Restrictions There are two main restrictions you should pay close attention to before using a stock photo. For example, is there a restriction in place for modifying the image? Just resizing the image to fit your WordPress feature image article section would not violate such a restriction, however, taking the photo into photoshop for enhancement or alterations might. Additionally, pay attention to photo restrictions which involve commercial or non-commercial use. In Creative Commons, non-commercial implies that the image will not contribute directly to financial gains. It is best to use only free stock images which allow alterations and can be used for commercial purposes. This eliminates any potential risks for confusion between the owner of the image and you, the website owner. Copyright laws protect photography, artwork, and fonts. Even if you buy an image from a website, read the license agreement. Make sure you have the legal right to use the image in the manner that you plan. Licenses may limit you to online use only or only 10,000 printed copies. Images, both free or paid, should have easily discernable licensing agreements. If you cannot find a license agreement for an image you want to use, don’t  risk it. Look for two phases to assure the photos you are downloading are free and for commercial use. You need to see a Creative Commons Zero license. It should include the notation “without attribution.” You can find further information on licensing issues on Wikipedia. Google image search and a number of websites which can be used both commercially and without attribution will show up in the results. The first few results are likely to be advertisements, so pay attention. Many paid photo businesses offer a few free images, or, they simply advertise under the free stock photo keyword as a way to drive business to themselves. This is unlikely what you are looking for, so make sure you look below the paid ad results. You want creative common license photos or stock photo places that will allow you free use of their images for personal and commercial projects. There are numerous free stock photo options below is our list of what we consider to be the most useful and highest-quality of the group. Always read the copyright restrictions, even on public domain photos. A creative commons zero photo can still require attribution. My List of 13 Amazing Stock Photography Sites At No Cost Burst is the brainchild of Shopify for royalty free images. Shopify has made its vast collection of well-curated images, which promote diversity and inclusion, available for both personal and commercial use. Shopify makes available 100% free stock photography derived from its own internal photography sessions. The results are a stunning group of photos for download showcasing ethnic and gender diversity. Burst can help blogs that focus on trending news or millennial content thrive without footing big content licensing bills. Burst being backed by Shopify means that this free image content is trusted and top-quality. Fancy Crave collaborates with independent photographers. They offer curated photo packs suitable for web design, social media, and advertising or for personal use as desktop images. You can use fancy crave to create an impressive logo, or slick infographics, on a slim budget. Remember, just because you use an image as a logo and that image is a former shell of itself does not mean that licensing obligations are not still in play. Fancy Crave helps remove the risk of using an unauthorized image in your brand’s logo, which down the line could cost you a pretty penny. Gratisography is the work of Ryan McGuire, a talented photographer with an eye for whimsical and eclectic interpretations of everyday objects. I have used his images to improve conversions on clients websites. If you need a “statement” photo, this should be your first stop. Subject matter includes animals, nature, people, urban and whimsical. This is a great option for unique, eye-popping content for ebooks, blog articles, and even social media memes. I have to say Ryan McGuire has contributed immensely to my collection of free content. The wide variety of photos from ISO Republic makes finding that perfect picture easy. Categories include food and drink, technology, architecture, city and urban. You can also find seasonal categories for things like holidays. Social media posters, website designers, and businesses of any size will find the images they need. You can sign up for their email list and get photos delivered to your inbox daily. Pexels touts itself as the “best free photos for blog posts” Pexels selects photos from a variety of sources and offers them in one easy-to-navigate website. You might say that Pexels is the “Kayak” of free photos. The search bar is at the top of the page. Just beneath the search bar, you will find two choices. One choice is for “trending” or popular searches while the other is for “new” and recently added photos. Using the new option may allow you to get a jump on an image before it becomes saturated on social media. A slew of unique and interesting photos come from the 22-year-old owner of Picjumbo. Viktor Hanacek lives in the Czech Republic and he’s an avid photographer who has a particular and rare eye. There are 16 categories from which website owners can download from. From transportation to architecture and from fashion to food and drinks, Hanacek’s modern, trendy undertaking really enhances the visual experience of anyone’s blog content creation. Pixabay has one of the largest image libraries of free of copyright restrictions. Choose from over 1.2 million free stock photos. Not only does Pixabay provide photos, but you can also find illustrations, vector graphics, and videos. Pixaby is the best known and most popular free stock photo website online today. The search engine choice allows you to filter for the type of image that you need. If you choose to browse the Editor’s Choice photos, expect the crème de la crème of Pixabay’s curation. No matter what kind of project you are working on, Pixabay is a solid choice for the image you need. The downside, unfortunately, is that Pixabay’s extreme popularity among bloggers and social media hubs can often mean Pixabay’s  photos are saturated. Raw Pixels offers both free and premium high quality images (coming later in 2018, creative bundles will be available for purchase by download). Stay in the free section to find bright and charming commercial and personal use photos. Raw Pixels offers a unique curated selection of public domain artwork. The images are digitally enhanced and provide a treasure trove of images suitable for vintage websites and book illustrations. Print and frame them for resale if you wish, or, use them as featured images in blog content. Founded by its creator, Daniel Nanescu, SplitShire shares Nanescu’s professional photographs to the world. He believes that 10-years of passionate photography should not go to waste on dusty hard drives. This is a massive win for any online business on a budget. No matter what reason you need stock photography, you will find beautiful photos at StockSnap. StockSnap adds versatile new images on a weekly basis. Cooking, animals, landscapes, and architecture in addition to business categories like money, office, computers, and schools await you. StockSnap offers more categories than most free photography sites, giving the online business a more all-around experience. You will find over 150 categories – birds and bridges to deserts and trucks and everything in between. The downside is you might end up perusing beautiful stock photos for longer than your allotted time for due to all the fresh options! Stunning landscapes abound on Unsplash. If you need a book cover or stunning backdrop for your home page, odds are, you will find it on Unsplash. Contributed by top photographers whose talent is only exceeded by their generosity, new photos are added weekly. With over 300,000 free downloadable stock photos awaiting you at Unsplash, you will have more options than you ever expected. Life of Pix is a free website that offers high quality, high-resolution images for personal or commercial use at no cost. Some of their photos are absolutely stunning. They offer a wide variety of trendy, artsy eye-popping visual experiences that can be added to your dull blog posts (well, they will not be boring anymore). You can use Bing’s search engine to quickly and easily download public domain photos or vector graphics by filtering to creative commons zero usage or commercial purposes. Simply visit Bing.com and search whatever type of image you are looking for. In the below example, I searched for “sunsets.” Select “Images.” On the right side of your screen, click “Filter.” By clicking “filter,” you will add a new nav bar. That nav bar will have a “license” drop down. Foodies Feed is a stock photo trove for food bloggers or anyone needing food-themed visual content on a regular basis. They are released under a Creative Commons Zero license (CC0.) It was started by Jakub Kapusnak as a side project, but the website blossomed into a full themed stock photo site. Users can also sign up to receive premium bundles of photos under three different tiers of monthly pricing. The lowest tier allows for non-commercial use while the middle and premium levels allow for both commercial and personal purposes. Negative Space specializes in high-resolution art photos. They are curated by hashtag and are free to use under the Creative Commons Zero license. Each photo is vetted to adhere to the community’s visual standards. They also offer different kinds of tutorials for things like web design and mobile app design, as well as tools for web developers. If you cannot find what you are looking for, you can click through to Shutterstock and save 20%. Freestocks is a moody, artsy collection of stock photos licensed for free under Creative Commons Zero. Artists join the community and photos are carefully vetted for high-quality images. You can search through significant categories, and each photo you find cannot be stocked on any other website. Although they are free, you will not see these images on other sites. Of particular note are the fashion photos, which achieve a high fashion, editorial quality and feature extensive collections. Picography has been around for about three years and provides high-resolution photos under the Creative Commons Zero license. The photos are highly curated, but there aren’t many in each category. Users can click through to Shutterstock for more extensive collections of pictures based on the category chosen in Picography. The photos feature a lot of up close and alternative angle images. These are unexpected takes on everyday life, nature, and technology. There’s even a category for hospitality. Moment, or MMT, features scenes from nature, work, and macro among other categories. It was started by Jeff Betts, a UX/UI designer looking to provide quality images to designers. Each photograph is free, and designers can use all photography on the site for free under the Creative Commons Zero license. Shopify and Canva both featured MMT recently. The look of the photographs is bright and clear. Many have eye-catching colors and exciting angles. Skitterphoto is a public domain photo site started by two Netherlands photographers frustrated by the lack of quality photos available on the internet. There are quality, vetted photos across a variety of categories. One useful feature is the “admin picks” category. Users can find new images in collections that might not have been seen otherwise. The photos have bright processing. They are dramatic photos of nature, technology, people, and a great collection of start, conceptual shape-oriented pictures. Little Visuals is no longer updated, but users can find quality photo archives arranged by weeks. The creator of the site, Nic, passed away in 2013, and the family is collecting donations in his memory to donate defibrillators to public areas. It was initially organized with an email list. Sign up and receive seven high-resolution photos every week to use however you want. Though this is no longer updated, there are quite a few promising photos in the collection. The photos are free to use under CC0, but the family appreciates donations in his memory. Death to Stock Photo is a site that offers a free collection of stock photos available under CC0 for use, and a premium tier with more exclusive choices. Premium tiers are $12 for the first tier and $28 for the second. Both offer access to over 2000 images while the top tier provides choices for designers to sell images. Free content is available in email bundles. Sign up to receive the bundles for download. Content eventually moves to the premium section, but each week new content is available for your inbox. IM is a website of free tools for designers. It includes not only high-quality stock photos but access to website templates. You have access to hosting, building, and creative tools. It is powered by Google and Amazon. You can upgrade to a premium account at $350 per year to build unlimited sites. It includes blogging and e-commerce sites. You build sites using blocks of information that are customizable. Design options are simple and easy with beautiful images. New Old Stock finds vintage photos now housed under the public domain and makes them available to find and use all in one place. Most photos are available for non-commercial use, and many can be used commercially. Users link the photo back to the original provider and must read that provider’s terms of service for commercial use. There are also curated premium packs for designers looking for something done for them. Rather than selling photos, the curator is selling a service for convenience. Pro photo packs are also available for use commercially. Jay Mantri makes his photos available for free under the CC0 license. Photos are arranged in chronological posting order. The site is not updated regularly, but users can find quality images around a variety of subjects. Examples of his photos are also on Instagram. The images feature nature and outdoors extensively. The theme involves analog styles of film featured in digital format. Though the images are high resolution, many of the mimic the grain of analog film for a nostalgic feel. Kaboom is a one-woman stock photo site. Photographer, Karolina, provides the bulk of the images and each photo is available for use for free commercially and noncommercially. Several famous online publications have sourced photos from this site including HuffPost, Forbes, and Lifehacker. The images center around themes of lifestyle and interior design. You can search photos in a variety of ways including by category and also by complementary color palates. There’s also a lifestyle blog for endless inspiration. Shotstash is a startup stock photos collection available under the Creative Commons Zero license. You can use photos commercially and non commercially though the site does not make allowances for other brands. The site has an excellent search feature, and many photos are arranged around a theme. Photos are high resolution and are clear, bright tones. Although the categories are not extensive, there are a few exciting themes such as finance. They also have a newsletter to notify you about new offerings. Styled Stock centers around lifestyle themes with many photos in white based flat-lay. These are perfect for bloggers in lifestyle, fashion, and home tips as well as coffee book style media. They are crisp and brightly colored. You can search based on category and then further filter the photos based on a color theme. From there, choose either the newest image or the most popular to set the search. Images can be used commercially and non commercially. The collection is continually growing, and new things are available each week. If you want a website where you can find more creative photos, this is the best place to go to. Instead of categories like “computer” or “work,” you will see images like people, animals, food, or nature type photos. What makes this website very interesting, not only can you search these images by category, but you can also search by the dominant color. Each photographer has a different style that accentuates the artistic vibe in the pictures. With Loud colors and vibrant tones, all photos have its own creative story to tell its viewers.   Raumrot has a good selection of high-resolution photos that you can use for commercial or personal use. All of the images on the website are categorized into sets, which makes it relatively easier to browse through the entire library. The difference between this site and all the others is the fact that all the pictures on this website are set into packs of 20 or more images when you search, and can also be downloaded the same way. If you are looking for a specific kind of image, which you can use for magazines, posters, online posts, etc. This website will have the most selection. Snapwire allows you to download fresh branded content from a community of over 500,000 visual artists and photographers.  The photos are free to download and has a wide selection starting from fitness, food, cars, people, animals, etc. One of the best features of this website is you can request a personal photo from the community of visual artists and photographers. They can shoot custom content at scale and on brand. If you are a photographer yourself, the site offers daily challenges, which you can join in to earn some extra cash. The images on this website, are also used by over 2000 companies all over the world, which makes it quite accessible.  The only downside to this is, if you want to make use of the custom content, you will have to pay for their services. The price starts at $75. Tookapic is the ideal stock image site to go to if you are the type to post on Instagram on a daily basis. It has a vast selection of free images, which you can use for your “photo of the day” post. They have crowdsourced, authentic images that busy marketers or bloggers can use to amaze, engage, and convert their target audience into potential customers without worrying about the licenses or costs. The website has a total of 12,000 + stock image selections, which you can download. It includes lifestyle, urban, rural, people, business, technology, transportation, etc. Free nature stock is a nature photographer’s haven. A project that was developed by the talented Adrian Pelletier, this website provides everyone with free landscape photos. Here you will find some of the most beautiful nature locations, and the best part of this website is you can get new photos every day. The site is very updated, so if you need a couple of new photos to post that has to do with nature, this will be the best place to go to. Travel coffee book is another good website, especially if you are a traveler. This site has all kinds of high-quality travel photos which you can use to post on your social media accounts, websites, or blogs. If you like taking a lot of photos while you travel, you can also upload them to the website so that other people can make use of your material. The content on this site is free and can be used any way you want without a license. The website also has a distinctive filter tool, which allows you to filter posts by text, audio, video, quotes, links, and chats. There’s also an option to search for photos by date and month. Photo collections takes a different approach to stock image websites. All of their photos have in-depth and beautifully detailed pictures, which capture the natural beauty of the subject. The site has breathtaking close-up photos of animals, landscapes, transportation, nature, people, food, etc. By using any of these stock photo websites that do not charge a penny, you gain access to free content that can vastly improve your blog content and eBooks without putting your company at risk. Making sure that the images you use commercially are legal is vital. The web is full of options making it easy, simple, and cheap to gain access to incredible commercial use images.

Sometime in late 2012, I learned about a new system of transferring value via the Internet. It was a peer-to-peer distributed system, analogous to BitTorrent, a system for transferring files. I had no idea that this would be a way to generate income and support sustainable community development, which would soon become my life’s work, but I was so fascinated by this new concept, I immediately converted a little bit of that week’s paycheck to “Bitcoins.” Years later, some people are surprised that I am still involved and still promoting it as a path to sustainability and a better planet. They read their mainstream media articles and ironically ask: “Isn’t it controlled by the NSA?” “Isn’t it the Bilderberg’s method of forcing us all to accept a cashless society?” “Won’t it use more electricity than the entire world in 2020?” “Isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto really a CIA operative?” “How could you be planting fruit trees in the tropics yet still be participating in this capitalist system of transferring value that is surely controlled by the CIA, the NSA, the Russians, and every government and nongovernment conspiracy group in existence?” Well, let’s start at square one. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash, IOTA and about 1,300 others are names given to open-source, peer-to-peer, distributed ledger systems. They are multiple-entry accounting ledgers, distributed across millions of computers globally. They are made secure by the constant confirmation of the other computers on the network. They are kept honest by the open-source code that is reviewed and tested by thousands of volunteer and paid programmers. This technology was primarily developed for transferring value, but it has many other uses as well. It can register land titles on a secure and immutable blockchain. It can transfer shares in companies and organizations. It can manage Internet voting, micro-credit systems (such as on Reddit) and much more. Even more important are the societal implications. Poor people in “unbanked” areas (such as most of Africa) can access cheap and fast money transfer systems via SMS on a $20 cell phone. The unbanked can become their own bank, cutting out the middleman. Rich central bankers can’t simply steal money from the middle and lower class just by pressing the “print” button. Whistleblowers and defectors from abusive corporations and corrupt government agencies can sign messages and receive payments anonymously (using privacy-oriented currencies such as Monero, Dash and PIVX) without risking their lives. You can send millions of dollars across the globe in minutes for just a few cents without waiting days for the legacy banking system to get its act together (and paying upward of $80 in the wire system). And as for the criticisms—and there are many—I say, it’s a free market! Are you worried the NSA controls Bitcoin? You have 1,300 other choices. Are Bitcoin transactions too expensive? Try Litecoin. Are Ethereum transactions too slow? Try NEM. Do you think a currency should be inflationary to prevent hoarding? Use PIVX. Is Bitcoin not anonymous enough for you to pay for a VPN service in China? Use Verge or Dash. Worried that the blockchain will get hacked by a quantum computer, if those ever get invented? Use IOTA or QRL (Quantum Resistant Ledger.) Power consumption concerns? Plenty of cryptocurrencies have a lower power consumption and are way more efficient than Bitcoin. Again, you have 1,300 choices and counting. I am still participating because the concept of a distributed ledger has no political philosophy, no economic system and no centralized control. If I give you a case of bananas and you trade me two cases of bananas a week later, and I write in a notebook that there was a trade deficit and that I owe you 18 dollars, and you sign it, we have a pretty secure record, provided we both trust each other not to change the ledger. What if I write that I owe you 230 zingzangs? That would work, too, as long as we both agree that 230 zingzangs is worth a case of bananas. And it would sure help if other people recognize that the zingzang ledger and value transfer system is secure and are willing to sell a case of bananas for 230 zingzangs. Of course, they wouldn’t be so keen to trust the zingzang ledger if it was just a notebook held by one person and the value transfer system required a pen and the physical presence of both parties. But throw that ledger onto millions of computers, secure it with the strongest cryptography in existence, and add a thriving market of vendors and exchanges who accept that currency unit, and you have a cryptocurrency—with more “intrinsic value” than the dollar and euro could ever hope for. Many people ask me if I think Bitcoin will continue to be successful or if other cryptocurrencies will take its place. Some insist that only one cryptocurrency will become the “favorite” and all others will fall to the wayside. I think that no one can predict the future, but competition definitely results in a healthy market. I also think that Bitcoin’s days are numbered. Recently, the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks have been slow. Network congestion has resulted in transactions sometimes being delayed for hours. Transaction fees have been as high as $15 or $20—still way cheaper than a Western Union or international wire but not as cheap as most other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is still a favorite as it was the first on the scene, but once merchants and exchanges begin to adapt, I believe that Bitcoin will dominate less and less of the market. It can only be updated and improved so much without a complete overhaul of its code. Whereas four years ago, most of the “altcoins” were clones of Bitcoin with a few minor changes, nowawadays many newer cryptocurrencies have been written from scratch by teams of professional developers with years of experience in this field. We even have coins such as IOTA that don’t even use a blockchain. Developers produced a new system called the “tangle,” which is resistant to hacking from quantum computers, a common but far-fetched, in my opinion, criticism of Bitcoin. One way to understand cryptocurrencies better is to compare them with traditional fiat currencies. Many people have criticized cryptocurrencies as “not being backed by anything” and having no intrinsic value. Well, aside from being backed by more computing power than the top 500 supercomputers in the world combined, a network of millions of users, and a secure multiple-entry accounting ledger, they are right that there is no physical asset behind, say, a Dash token or a Monero token. But, the problem is, then they go right back to using the U.S. dollar or the euro in their daily lives, as if that is somehow a better choice for their electronic transactions. The word “fiat” is Latin for “Let it be so.” Currencies created and managed by central banks are called “fiat currencies” because they exist simply due to the government decreeing their existence. This chart shows the success periods of fiat currencies that were considered the “world reserve currency” at one point. And the next image shows a selection of the utter failures of various fiat currencies over the past century. These currencies are no longer backed by gold (though when they were, even as far back as the Roman Empire, the government simply thinned out the gold when it needed more money.) A central bank printing more money and lending it to big banks is an act of legalized theft. While popular Keynesian economists such as Paul Krugman will argue that a currency needs to be inflationary in order to be useful, gold and silver (both deflationary) functioned perfectly well as money for 6,000 years before governments used legal force and other shenanigans to convince their citizens to switch to pieces of paper. The U.S. dollar is said to be backed by “the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.” Anyone who has paid attention to the U.S. national debt or the economic situation in the past few decades knows that the U.S. government does not have much faith or credit left, and neither do most of the other major governments. The entire world economy is resting on the U.S. dollar, and other major fiat currencies are in a similarly poor situation. Central banks across the world are printing money like crazy, almost as if they are in a race to see who can devalue their currency the fastest without it collapsing. Governments are using this money to fund wars, subsidies for factory farms, grants for cruel scientific research on animals and other nasty things. Every time we earn or use a dollar or a euro, we are adding value to them and supporting the folks who fund these things. What’s worse is that every time they print a currency unit, your own savings goes down in value. They are a group of corrupt bankers stealing money from you to pay for their nefarious activities. They can do this because they control the money supply. You can certainly help fight this by using gold and silver when possible, but for electronic transfers, cryptocurrencies offer a far more ethical way to transfer value than the tokens of the central bankers and a far more convenient and safe way than trying to get 2 kilograms of gold across national borders in a timely manner. Let’s talk about the future. Will the 1,300 cryptocurrencies become a “one world currency?” Will we become a “cashless society” by using IOTA to send an international transfer? No way. My personal vision for the future does include government currencies gradually falling by the wayside and becoming obsolete but not to be replaced with only digital systems. I think gold and silver will return to their traditional role for in-person cash transactions where people do not want to deal with digital technology. And I think a variety of cryptocurrencies (but not Bitcoin) will take over the role of government currencies in electronic transactions, domestic and international wires, microcredits and person-to-person payments. Furthermore, we can increase the use of barter systems and ledgers (such as Barter Business) to reduce the need for currency in general. Let’s face it, the world’s economic systems have a long way to go before they can be considered fair and ethical. One of the most fundamental changes we can make is in the value systems upon which our economic activity is based. In conclusion, I’ll say this: Many of us realized that every time we bought meat, milk, leather or any other animal product, we were supporting a very cruel industry that hurts the environment and billions of sentient beings. Now it’s time to realize that any time we use the U.S. dollar or another currency that is centrally managed by corrupt politicians, we are agreeing that it has value, supporting their unethical activities and putting up with the perpetual devaluation that robs us of our savings. But anytime we trade that euro or yuan or U.S. dollar for cryptocurrencies, gold, silver or something else of lasting value such as high-quality grafted mamey sapote trees for our tropical permaculture farm in southeast Ecuador, we are voting for a better world and adding value to the things that are much harder for governments and multinational corporations to control. Making ethical decisions doesn’t end just with what we eat. The unit of value that we use to buy that food matters, too. I know most people eating a fruit-based vegan diet are very concerned about guiding their lifestyle in a more ethical direction. Obviously, using the petrodollar or another fiat currency as the fundamental basis for all of our monetary transactions is far from where we want to be. So here are my tips for getting out of the rat race and into the rabbit hole: 1. Find out which of your friends are interested in cryptocurrencies and encourage them to install wallet apps on their phones so that you can interact among yourselves using ethical money rather than Central Bank-issued toilet paper. 2. Find out which of your friends are interested in precious metals and encourage them to use small-denomination gold and silver coins to settle debts between friends. I would love to be able to pay my friend a gram of gold when I owe him $55 or one of my Lakota silver ounce coins when I owe her $18. And there’s something much more satisfying about receiving a precious metal coin rather than a flimsy piece of paper with some old politician’s face on it. 3. Diversify your savings as much as possible into my favorite assets: cryptocurrencies, gold, silver and fruit-producing land in the tropics. 4. Get educated. Read about the Austrian school of economics, monetary policy and the history of currency, trade, barter, etc. Even just a little reading into nontraditional economic theories will open your mind about how much our financial systems shape our world. 5. Following steps 1 and 2, find out how many ways you can use cryptocurrencies and precious metals in your daily life! When I lived in the United States, I used to buy Whole Foods gift cards with bitcoins so that I could buy my organic fruit using sound currency for at least one step of the transaction. I also bought gift cards for Amazon.com and gas stations with cryptocurrency. I found a website that allowed me to top up my cell minutes with crypto. I bought gold and silver coins from Amagi Metals, a precious-metals dealer that accepts BTC. You’d be surprised how easily you can get away from the “almighty petrodollar” if you just install a few apps on your smartphone and get the hang of transacting in alternative currencies. Peter Csere: ‘I Want This to Become a Worldwide Movement’ Explore all Raw Vegan Transformations! Peter Julius Csere joined friends Jason Kvestad and Jay Kaiser [a.k.a. Jay Yogi] in forming the growing Ecuadorian community of raw vegans Terra Frutis. Peter has also spearheaded the nearby Fruit Haven project and continues to organize, consult and do “boots on the ground” work for additional raw vegan communities. Wow that was well packed with information! Great write up Peter! And Brian for hosting this! Absolutely! Peter was the right person for this story and did a fantastic job. I am grateful to have published this in Fruit-Powered Digest. Thank you for all the work you do at Terra Frutis! Very well written article with awesome information in a form that the average user can understand.. I did want to point out while IOTA has quantum resistant possibilities (will require forking, and causing serious headaches for legacy coin holders), QRL will be resistant from genesis block forward. Thanks for the info! I have some QRL as well in my portfolio. Join thousands of readers and get “Top 10 Tips for Supercharging Your Life” for free! Enjoy Fruit-Powered Digest, a natural health magazine and the leading raw vegan magazine. Also, get a free gift from Fruit-Powered's Brian Rossiter's: Top 10 Tips for Supercharging Your Life!

Ahoy, matey! You probably came here for some funny stories about Jack Sparrow and his homies. I have to tell ya, that you will have no luck this time as the title is just a (shark)clickbait. Unfortunately, this situation depicts the actual crypto world more accurately than you would think. Most of the people who venture into this strange land of uncertainty are daydreaming about the romantic, entertaining, happy ending stories. But I have to tell ya, there lies more under the surface. This dreaded battlefield is much darker, more contradictional, full of blood, treachery, and conspiracy. Very much alike the Caribbean sea was in the real Golden Age of Piracy. So, avast ye. Lets head to the crows nest and hoist the Jolly Roger! Were setting sail for the Cryptobbean sea! I bet you now think that this guy went crazy. I assure you this is not the case. After examining the crypto topic for a while and reading the good, the bad and the ugly, I wanted to put the things into a different perspective. There are typically two types of articles. The ones which tell you that crypto is the new black, and you just cannot ignore it because that is the holy grail which will evolve the financial world into its next level of existence. Oh and of course that you have to jump on the bandwagon, otherwise, you are damned and will remain in the stone-age forever. The other side is where everyone tries to emphasize the values and the rock-solid belief in the current financial system which permeates the economy of the world. These people tirelessly reminding you that this crypto phenomenon is just a mirage, a house of cards, a Ponzi scheme brought to you by the Devil himself (or worse). It is extremely hard to decide which side is right and which is wrong as the waves of information are so contradictory. If you ask me (maybe you are not, but I will tell you anyway), both and neither. To better understand my standpoint lets wrap up the facts a little bit (and dont forget to start the background music :)). Captain Morgan If you have ever held a glass in your hand of the golden liquid called, Original Spiced Gold then you have already met his name. The good ol Henry Morgan is grinning at you from the label with his badass smile. He is probably the most famous pirate who ever sailed the Seven Seas. Why is this relevant, you may ask? Well, me hearties, there is an equally famous, legendary and even more mystical captain on the Cryptobbean sea. He is called Satoshi Nakamoto. No one knows who he(or she?) really is, but he was the one who published the source code of the first cryptocurrency and wrote his famous whitepaper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System on 31th of October in 2008. He sounded his voice a few times since then and faded into the mist again. There are multiple gossips in circulation out there about his identity. My favorite prospect is Nick Szabo, and not just because he has Hungarian blood in his veins too. He is an extremely smart cryptographer, a true believer, supporter and influencer of the crypto tech scene. If you want some proof of these statements just check out this interview made by Tim Ferriss, or read this very interesting piece from him, calledShelling Out: The Origins of Money. I think no more words needed on this, so lets move on. The Battlefield Just as centuries ago on the Caribbean there is a raging war on the Cryptobbean sea these days. The opponents are all over the battlefield. At one side, like the navy in the old times, there are the authorities who are fighting against the whole crypto phenomenon. They try their best to ban, regulate and hamstring the other players in the game in the interest of guarding their estates (fiat currencies and the ruling financial system) and keep their valuation intact. Then there is the other side, the pirates of the Cryptobbean. You may incorrectly assume that they are all the same, but alas, not all kind of pirates created equal. There are at least three groups we should distinguish. Privateers Back in time, they were private persons with ships, often ex-soldiers, semi-employed by one of the great empires. They had the so-called letter of marque, which encouraged and allowed them to attack and capture enemy ships and take them as prizes. In terms of the modern crypto world, I see them as the perfect analogy for the numerous developer groups and their organizations. They take the original idea of the blockchain and build new solutions on it. Despite they are following the rules (especially the codex) and laws they are fighting both against the authorities and each other in hope of the greater profit. Just like in the old times there are completely law-abiding ones but there are also profit-seeking, bloodthirsty bastards amongst their ranks. Buccaneers These rugged, tough folks were selling their services to the highest bidder and had no regrets (and probably no soul). They were plundering coastal towns, took their possessions and often burned them down. I recognize these people these days as the swindlers of the crypto world. Seemingly they are similar to the previous group but have no ethics and nothing valuable to show up in the end. They are the ultimate scammers, who have the only intention to rip you off through fraudulent products, Ponzi schemes, and worthless ICO-s. Corsairs Finally, the Barbary privateers belonging to distant and unknown empires. They were dreaded as they did not know mercy or law besides their own. Calling a privateer on this name was a huge offense so you could guess the nature of their reputation. Nowadays these are the often mentioned hackers, who does not sow just harvest. They are tirelessly searching for the security holes of exchanges, online wallets, and any other opportunities to take advantage of the anonymity and the irreversibility of the crypto transactions. They are heavily responsible for the lack of trust in the crypto assets. The Flagships The Satisfaction This was the name of the flagship of the aforementioned Captain Morgan. Needless to say, this is the Bitcoin in our little analogy. The first and most well-known cryptocurrency in present existence. It is not the fastest and far from perfection, has its struggles and hardships, but there is a crew onboard working tirelessly at the pumps to expel the water leaking into the ship. Seeing their endeavors we can still state that there is hope that these technical improvements will bring back the glory of Bitcoin, beyond its current hyper-volatile speculatory nature. Queen Annes Revenge This name probably sounds familiar to most of you. It was the flagship of Edward Teach or better known as Blackbeard. Despite I cannot point a single similarity between this dreaded pirate and the weird young Russian genius, Vitalik Buterin this ship symbolize Ethereum in our little story. It follows closely the former one in popularity but in some aspects, it is a totally different animal. Bitcoin was developed as an alternative to old-school money. Ethereum is more of a platform which provides a programming language which enables the creation of smart contracts/applications and fuels the ecosystem with its own currency (Ether). The Endgame Henry Morgan, Edward Teach or Ching Shih? Now you have the basics. The table is set. The battle is on. I do not fool myself or anyone else telling I have the slightest idea who will win or survive at least this battle. Of course, will not close this article without some thoughts on the outcome. As I told that I cannot see the future, I will only paint a picture for your mental eyes about the fate of these iconic leaders. I truly believe that it depicts the possible outcomes pretty accurately. Henry Morgan fought a lot of battles. won and lost, arrested and escaped, paroled and even had a semi-legal political career in the New World. Lived a very controversial life but finally, he was defeated by his own demons. A licentious lifestyle packed with gambling and heavy drinking made him walk the plank of his own ship of life. Blackbeard had his share of battles and wrangles with the law, but unlike Hanry Morgan, he fought until the end. After the Queen Annes Revenge run aground a sandbar and appeared to be damaged beyond repair he made the Adventure his flagship and returned to piracy despite receiving a pardon. The death came for him in the name of Lieutenant Robert Maynard, who chased and defeated his team using deception. He fought with all his power, but soldiers outnumbered him. Later they examined his corpse, noting that it had been shot five times and cut about twenty. What a spirit. Ching Shihs story is a little bit different. It could be an early retirement success story by itself ( shout out if you want to hear her detailed tale ). Her story started in China where she worked as a prostitute then married to a well known pirate captain. She took part in the family business and after the death of her husband, she emerged into the leading position. Under her government, the Red Flag Fleet became unconquerable and was thriving. Whole empires feared their power. Long story short she was offered and accepted an amnesty later and became one of the few captains who retired from piracy. She was accepted and granted privileges by the government and lived happily ever after. Ok, not forever, but unlike the others, she died in bed surrounded by her family. Conclusion All of these three outcomes are (were?) possible at this (some?) point. As someone who is charmed by the idea of financial independence and early retirement, I feel obliged to put my bets on the latter one. So, me hearties! What do ya think? How will the story of the Pirates of the Cryptobbean come to an end? I bet we will see a lot of keelhauling amongst them. There will be led few mutiny where the captain will walk the plank. Of course, many of them will be captured and dance the hempen jig or rest in Davy Joness locker. But how many will become like Madame Cheng? Please share your opinions in the comments below (and dont shy away from revealing your rank, ranging from landlubber to old salt).

The Rare Pepe economy is real, and there’s serious money behind it Photo via Pinkypills/GettyImages (Fair Use) Remix by Jason Reed Trading images of Pepe the Frog is now a booming business. Pepe the Frog‘s decade-long journey from webcomic character to everyman meme to alleged hate symbol has been a topsy-turvy one, but his importance to the meme economy cannot be denied. The trope of trading and collecting “Rare Pepes,” distinctive images of the famous frog, has been part of meme culture for years. And now there’s real money behind it. A February article from Reddit’s Meme Insider, a parody trade publication dedicated to serious coverage of memes, explains how the fictitious market for Rare Pepes became a booming business. [Placeholder for http://imgur.com/a/vu9y7 embed] The piece, by pseudonymous redditor JeffTheDunker, describes how the Rare Pepe economy initially functioned on a system of “Good Boy Points,” a largely fictitious currency that people would trade for new and unique images of Pepe. It started out circa 2015 as a 4chan in-joke about an autistic kid who would exchange “Good Boy Points,” earned by doing chores for his mom, for precious “chicken tendies,” and somehow they became the dominant imaginary currency of the Rare Pepe economy. Good Boy Points were unsustainable, though, because there was no accountability in the system: Anyone could fabricate their Good Boy Point totals. In short: the points just weren’t real. Additionally, the idea that there was value—even imaginary or purely social value—in Rare Pepe memes caused the demand for Pepes to go up, and the market to become flooded by new content. “When [Rare Pepes] breached mainstream media outlets, early adopters and speculators around the globe packed their bags for good, as the Pepe had, in their minds, become useless,” JeffTheDunker explains in Meme Insider. In early 2015, a poster on 4chan’s /r9k/ board, incensed at the mainstream popularity Pepe was starting to enjoy, tried to kill the meme by distributing  a collection of more than 1,200 Rare Pepes, labeled “the end is nigh, hope you cash out now.” 4chan called this Pepe massacre “the Peppening,” and it led to posters jokingly watermarking their best Rare Pepes “do not save”: The watermarks obviously did nothing to protect the Pepes, other than making them uglier, and the Rare Pepe economy looked doomed. But what if there were a way to regulate Pepes and make them impossible to copy? We’ve seen Rare Pepes traded on Craigslist before, where physical drawings or printouts of the frog that were offered in exchange for cold, hard cash—sometimes as much as $100. We’ve even seen them sell on eBay for nearly $100,000—probably as a joke. But JeffTheDunker also suggests there’s a real demand for unusual digital images of Pepe, even though it seems like those images should be trivial to replicate. Enter: the blockchain. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin use it to make sure that digital money is unique to its owner and can’t simply be copied or faked, and now it’s being applied to Rare Pepes. A blockchain-based platform called Counterparty lets users make anything into a unique digital token, and “anything” now includes Rare Pepes. On the Pepe trading hub RarePepeWallet.com, you’ll find hundreds of Rare Pepe images, all formatted to look like trading cards. Each exists in a limited quantity, anywhere from one to thousands, and no new copies will ever be issued. Traders can buy and sell the Pepes using Counterparty currency, but they prefer a cryptocurrency called PepeCash, which currently trades at 302 PepeCash to the dollar. The selection of Pepes for sale, as JeffTheDunker points out, is a little weird right now: Because the site was created by crytocurrency nerds, many of the Pepe trading cards for sale there are Bitcoin-themed. There’s one called “Shitcoin Pepe,” and one named after mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. These aren’t necessarily the Pepes that posters on 4chan and Reddit would consider “dank” (most Pepes aren’t presented in card form, after all) but their rarity makes them a commodity. A one-of-a-kind card called “OnlyOnePepe” is currently on sale for the PepeCash equivalent of $11,589. Meanwhile, the “Top Cuck” Pepe, with 10,000 copies in circulation, can be yours for less than a dollar. The universe of Rare Pepes is constantly expanding, too. There are already more than 500 distinct cards, and collectors can submit their own original Rare Pepes for consideration. All it takes is a payment of 4,000 PepeCash (roughly $13), a dank idea, and some design skills. The rules for approval are stringent: Submissions must be ORIGINAL.  Our rareness quality team examines each Pepe for rareness. (no stealing!)  Our experts understand that lots of Pepe’s borrow  from each other to an extent, but try to add as much Original content as possible.   Also make sure your Pepe is dank.  Check latest submissions on the directory to compare. This manual approval process means none of the 1,200 compromised Pepes from the 2015 “Peppening” is likely to show up on the site. Some of them may still be dank, but they’re no longer rare. One thing you’ll notice about the selection of Pepe cards—and the Rare Pepe trading community at large—is that they don’t carry even a whiff of Pepe’s status as an alt-right, white supremacist, pro-Donald-Trump icon. “Most of the community don’t think Pepe is an alt-right thing. Some (like me) think that we should Make Pepe Great Again and free him of that connotation,” Pepe trading enthusiast Django Bates told the Daily Dot via email. “Also, you have to be aware that Pepe as a symbol of hate and racism by alt-rights is a merely North American thing. The rest of the world does not see Pepe in that context. But our Rare Pepe trading community is global. We have people from Japan, Spain, France, the U.S., Switzerland (myself), Russia, Turkey, South Africa and many other countries. “Pepe is a meme. If alt-right idiots use it for there bullshit, then be it. Pepe is much greater and does not care about them. Pepe is a mirror. And a mirror is not racist, just because a racist is using it.” So, instead of Trumpist Pepes, you’ll find card designs like My Little Pepe, which might be the most expensive Rare Pepe ever sold. It recently changed hands for 1 million PepeCash (currently about $3,300). The proud owner of My Little Pepe, alias American Pegasus, told the Daily Dot, “Only one of these exist, and it belongs to a tier of the rarest pepes of all—uniques with only a single card issued.” “But that Pepe wasn’t listed for sale in Counterparty,” American Pegasus continued. “Instead the seller only would accept cold hard PepeCash. A million of them to be exact. And so I’m darn glad I had some handy, and was able to score the trade.” We’re a long way from Good Boy Points now. The Rare Pepe economy is based on real money, and PepeCash is starting to take off. A recent price jump seems to have been triggered by a January Vice article and an article Wednesday in France’s Le Monde that introduced Rare Pepe Wallets to a new group of meme fanatics. Unlike most other digital currencies, this one is tied to the enthusiasm for an underlying product: Pepes. Even though you don’t need PepeCash to buy Pepes, Pepe enthusiasts find it nice to own for a number of reasons. “PepeCash offers a fun and abstract way to value Rare Pepes apart from their underlying Counterparty value,” American Pegasus explained. “As we know, with money, the value is in the utility. There are several exciting PepeCash-only features being planned, such as an entire exchange based off PepeCash and a Pepestarter crowdfunding platform. Ultimately it’s best for the Pepeverse to have a highly liquid asset like this that can act as a base token for all things Pepe.” No matter how much money you dump into Rare Pepes, though, you’ll never own them all. There are a handful of one-of-a-kind Pepes, and some of their owners may have lost the passphrases to their Pepe wallets or may never sell their precious rares. Regardless of how formal and secure the Rare Pepe Economy gets, though, it wouldn’t be Pepe without a little trolling. Cryptocurrency blog Bitcoinist calls Rare Pepe Wallet “a satirical indictment of the altcoin markets,” especially the novelty digital currencies that are either jokes or shabby get-rich-quick schemes. Remember Dogecoin, the currency named after a Shiba Inu dog meme? “In what can be seen as a satirical jab at this growing [altcoin] culture, Rare Pepes create a metaphorical representation of the pump and dump absurdity and legitimizes it through the use of the Bitcoin blockchain’s immutability,” Bitcoinist’s Ryan Strauss wrote in November. The people trading Rare Pepes and PepeCash don’t see them as just another flash-in-the-pan alternative currency, though. PEPE is going to be the next DOGE, only bigger. DOGE was just a shitcoin clone, PEPE is a counterparty asset that can literally rarify memes — 🐔ActualAdvice_BTC (@ActualAdviceBTC) February 13, 2017 Dogecoin, for example, was just a rebranded Bitcoin running on the same technology. PepeCash is different because of its connection to the Rare Pepe cards themselves, which are fun to collect and desirable to meme aficionados on their own terms. “I deeply believe that it is a lot more interesting as Dogecoin, which was only a currency,” Bates told the Daily Dot. “This is not just a currency. It is Blockchain driven meme assets you really can own. It is also helping to develop Counterparty, the protocol that is used to create and trade these assets.” On the Rare Pepe Traders group chat, there’s plenty of excitement about the PepeCash boom, but it’s also clear that the traders and card creators have a passion for the meme. “With pepetrading there are several things coming together as an extra: Memepower, Curiosity, Human nature of collecting all sorts of stuff, Hope for profit, Community, Interest in Blockchain Technology and above all – the lust to make fun about everything and everybody,” Bates wrote. “It’s the mix of it all.” One Rare Pepe designer, Nymity Nymz, told Le Monde, “I think these are just the beginnings of an industry,” and said it’s even possible he could live on his Pepes someday. Nymz, who described himself to RarePepeNews.com as a “Rapper, Ghost writer, FinTech Guru,” also told the site that the reason he creates Rare Pepes is “for 2020.” A Rare Pepe, he said, “is something that has the potential to outlive us all.” Jay Hathaway is a senior writer, specializing in internet memes and weird online culture. He previously served as the Daily Dot’s news editor, was a staff writer at Gawker, and edited the classic websites Urlesque and Download Squad. His work has also appeared on nymag.com, suicidegirls.com, and the Morning News. Pure, uncut internet. Straight to your inbox.

This is part of "Blockchain Decoded," a series looking at the impact of blockchain, bitcoin and cryptocurrency on our lives.June 22, 2014. Jackson Palmer, a self-identified "average geek," is high in the stands at a Nascar race at Sonoma Raceway, California. He is an Australian man in his 20s. He has zero interest in racing. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine it would come to this.He surveys the scene. Below him: a tremendous crowd. The overwhelming blare of engines. Hurtling round at tremendous speeds: the #98 Moonrocket, a high-performance racing car. No different from the other cars on the track, except for one crucial detail. window.console && console.log && console.log("ADS: queuing inpage-video-top-5adac3b0dd12c for display"); var cbsiGptDivIds = cbsiGptDivIds || []; cbsiGptDivIds.push("inpage-video-top-5adac3b0dd12c"); On the bonnet of the car: a dog. A Shiba Inu, more commonly known as a "Shibe," the dog made famous in the Doge meme that was popular in 2013. Emblazoned on top: the word "DOGECOIN" in all caps. Below: "digital currency".Palmer describes the situation using words like "crazy," "surreal" and "nuts." He remembers this moment as a "reality check." Dogecoin was a tweet, then it was a cryptocurrency worth money in the real world. Six months later, he watched as a joke that he'd made in passing somehow manifested itself into something tangible. A Dogecar in full flight.It reminded Palmer how insane the world could be. This is the story of Dogecoin, the joke that became too real for its own good.The Dogecar, in all its glory. Chris Graythen / Getty Images The next big thingDogecoin is a cryptocurrency, a form of digital money that, much like bitcoin, enables peer-to-peer transactions across a decentralized network. One important difference: bitcoin is the original blockchain proof-of-concept. Bitcoin is ground-breaking. Bitcoin is (some believe) world-changing tech with the potential to transform how money works in the 21st century.Dogecoin is a digital coin with a picture of dog on it. "It is a puzzle to me why Dogecoin is so highly valued," says Adrian Lee, a senior finance lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney. Blockchain Decoded Blockchain explained: It builds trust when you need it most What is bitcoin? Here's everything you need to know Bitcoin: Big in investing, but still lousy for buying a sandwich YouTube star wants a cryptocurrency payday for you every day At one point Dogecoin was worth $2 billion. It's difficult to make sense of that. "Dogecoin is an easily replicable coin," Lee said. "I don't know how it distinguishes itself from Bitcoin. I really think it has to do with being established early. "And also the dog."If you've spent any time on the internet during the last decade, you've probably heard of the Doge meme. The iconic Shibe, his inner monologue expressed in comic sans with broken modifiers: "so scare," "much noble," "wow." Now Playing: Watch this: Dogecoin explained: The joke cryptocurrency worth serious... 1:48 At the peak of the meme's popularity near the tail end of 2013, Palmer, an Australian marketer for one of the world's largest tech companies, made a joke combining two of the internet's most talked-about topics: cryptocurrency and Doge. It was a joke taking aim at the bizarre world of crypto and bitcoin's multiple derivatives. "Investing in Dogecoin," Palmer tweeted, "pretty sure it's the next big thing."The tweet got a lot of attention. For laughs, Palmer decided to keep the joke going. He bought the Dogecoin.com domain and uploaded a photoshopped Shibe on a coin. He left a note on the site: If you want to make Dogecoin a reality, get in touch.Animal Crossing, featuring the in-game currency "Bells". Nintendo The bell tollsOn the other side of the world, Billy Markus, a video game-obsessed software engineer at IBM, saw Palmer's note. He'd just finished "Bells", a project he was working on in his spare time. Bells was a cryptocurrency named after money used in the Nintendo game Animal Crossing. It was 2013, the original crypto gold rush. Markus saw that bitcoin's code was open-source. He decided to take a weekend and do something weird. He tried to create his own cryptocurrency for "sillies," as he put it. Bells was weird as hell. The major difference between Bells and regular cryptocurrencies was the rewards: they were completely random. If you mined bitcoin, using a decently powerful home computer, the rewards were consistent. If you mined Bells, there was no telling whether the reward would be one Bell or 500 Bells. And that's because Bells wasn't meant to be serious, it was a digital currency based on a video game about animals who live in a village and go fishing together.The cryptocurrency community didn't really get the joke. "People were just trashing it," laughs Markus, who quickly discovered there was very little crossover between crypto-obsessives and gamers."I was like alright, I retire," says Markus. "I don't need to do this anymore."But then Markus read Palmer's message on Dogecoin.com. That was the moment Billy Markus decided to come out of crypto retirement. Alain Pitton/NurPhoto via Getty Images Ctrl+F bitcoinWhen Palmer didn't immediately respond to Markus' offer to help build Dogecoin, he started working on it anyway. "Dogecoin," says Markus, "from 'that seems like it's funny' to actually doing it, took about three hours. It's almost trivial to create a new cryptocurrency."It was a find-and-replace job. Ctrl+F 'Bitcoin,' replace with 'Dogecoin.'Markus freely admits to finding large chunks of bitcoin's source code completely incomprehensible, but knew enough to change a few core elements for Dogecoin. For example, Markus created 100 billion dogecoins (as opposed to bitcoin's 21 million) and made them easier to mine. (Dogecoin is already close to being mined out, while bitcoin's final coin will be mined in 2140.) He changed the font (to comic sans of course) and changed every mention of the word 'mine' to 'dig' (because dogs don't mine, they dig...).And then, during his lunch break, Markus set Dogecoin live.Moving at light speedPremining: the act of gathering cryptocurrency before launching your coin into the public domain. Almost everyone serious about launching a cryptocurrency does this.But Markus and Palmer didn't premine any Dogecoin. Because they weren't serious about launching a cryptocurrency. "We thought it was this big joke that would die off," laughs Palmer.And according to Markus, Palmer wasn't even sure how to mine a cryptocurrency. Markus had a relatively powerful gaming PC, with two graphics cards, so he was officially the first person to mine Dogecoin. But given the the nature of mining (which gets increasingly difficult as the currency is mined) Billy's computer was no longer powerful enough to mine Dogecoin after about five minutes. Markus split what he'd mined 50-50 with Palmer and that was that. Both got about $5,000 of Dogecoin.And that's all the Dogecoin either man would ever own.In online crypto circles, Dogecoin became popular very quickly. Forum threads moved rapidly. The name Dogecoin echoed throughout dark corners of the internet.But Reddit was almost certainly the main driver in Dogecoin's rapid rise to crypto stardom. The Dogecoin subreddit exploded almost immediately, and with that explosion came the infrastructure any cryptocurrency needs if it is to become successful: mining pools, services. Now Playing: Watch this: What the heck is blockchain? 1:49 "It was moving at light speed," explains Markus. "Within minutes we were like, 'Wow, this is way out of our control."But it was the Reddit "tipping bot" that drove Dogecoin into the stratosphere. If a user posted something to the effect of, "hey 'dogebot' tip this person five dogecoin," that Reddit user would automatically receive five Dogecoin. People were sending Dogecoin back and forth in a feel-good exercise that cost very little money in real-world terms."I liked it," says Markus. "At the time, Dogecoin wasn't worth anything, but getting five Dogecoin felt better than getting two cents."Reddit users were sharing Dogecoin back and forth constantly, which expanded the user base of Dogecoin and, as a result, increased its value as a cryptocurrency. "Pretty much everyone who used Reddit had Dogecoin," says Palmer. "I think that was key to its success."Enlarge ImageThe 2014 Jamaican bobsled team, holding Dogecoin t-shirts. Crowdtilt A force for goodJanuary 2014. Jackson Palmer is already three drinks deep at a trivia night at his local pub in Sydney. His phone starts buzzing. It doesn't stop buzzing.Earlier that night, Palmer and the Dogecoin community had brainstormed a ridiculous (but completely brilliant) idea. For the first time in a decade, Jamaica's bobsled team had qualified for the Winter Olympics, but it didn't have enough money to attend. As huge fans of the comedy "Cool Runnings," Palmer and the Dogecoin crew decided to do something about it.They chucked up a Dogecoin address onto the subreddit and asked for donations. Hours later they'd raised $25,000.That's when Palmer's phone started vibrating off the hook."I was like, 'Quick we need to get back to our computers,'" laughs Palmer.So Palmer and friends stumbled home from the pub, picked up a six-pack of beer for good measure and set about figuring out how to send 26 million Dogecoins to the Jamaican bobsled team.It was a gesture that symbolized the early spirit of Dogecoin.In Markus' words, they were allergic to the word "invest." Both Palmer and Markus donated all their Dogecoin to these massive charity initiatives. They helped build water wells in Kenya and raised money to help train assistance dogs for autistic children. "We wanted to create something that was a force for good," explains Palmer. But as the community grew, the initial spirit in which Dogecoin was launched was difficult to preserve. People started to care about the price of Dogecoin. They were literally and figuratively invested in it. And that terrified Markus."I don't mind if someone spends ten bucks and gets some Dogecoin," says Markus. "It's like buying a movie ticket or something, that's fun. "But when someone puts $20,000 in? That makes me really, really uncomfortable."Markus began clashing with members of the community. For him, Dogecoin was still crypto "for sillies," but here it was ballooning into a currency people were trading for real money. In his view Dogecoin was a silly thing that should remain silly. Many in the community disagreed.Eventually he decided enough was enough."I was like, "Okay, this is dumb. I don't want to be the leader of a cult.""Markus decided to bail on Dogecoin. MoolahIt was Moolah that pushed Dogecoin to the brink.Palmer describes it as "PayPal for cryptocurrency." From the very beginning, Palmer was cynical.Run by a British man calling himself Alex Green, Moolah was a cryptocurrency exchange designed to help people buy and sell Dogecoin. They infiltrated the Dogecoin community with startling efficiency.Alex Green began by doling out Dogecoin in exchange for upvotes on the Dogecoin subreddit. He also donated generously to charitable causes the community were involved in, like $2,500 to a cancer charity, or $3,000 to help get the Dogecoin Nascar vehicle on the track.The community loved it. Soon Moolah began hiring people from the Dogecoin community for key positions in the company. "Alex Green started building his business on top of Dogecoin," says Palmer. Markus, watching from afar, wasn't a fan. Now Playing: Watch this: Cryptojacking: The hot new hacker trick for easy money 1:43 Despite removing himself from the day-to-day workings of Dogecoin, Markus attended a Dogecoin convention, organized in part by Palmer. He wanted to catch up with some of the old gang. By chance, he ran into representatives from Moolah, who were at the bar guzzling Cristal at $200 a bottle. They poured a glass for Markus."I was really uncomfortable," remembers Markus. "I said, 'whatever's going on here I just don't want any part of it.'""I just passed the glass to someone else."Many key figures in the Dogecoin community shared Markus' suspicions, particularly Palmer, who was wary of Moolah from the beginning. But when concerns were raised they were mostly shouted down by a community that enjoyed the free currency being sent their way. Later Moolah began soliciting the Dogecoin community for investment dollars and plenty donated Dogecoin to the cause. Why not? Moolah had been generous in the past. It made sense to repay the favor. Moolah received over $300,000 from the Dogecoin community, across three separate rounds of investment.And then it all came crashing down.Months later, October 2014, Moolah went completely bankrupt. The Dogecoin community would end up losing every single cent they'd invested. The situation got worse. An ex-girlfriend of Green got in contact with Palmer and other members of the Dogecoin community. She revealed that Green was actually Ryan Kennedy, who was notorious in the UK anime community for running companies terrifyingly similar to Moolah.Suddenly the UK police were involved. After a three-year investigation, Kennedy faces multiple charges of fraud and money laundering. At a preliminary hearing in Bristol Crown Court on September 2017 he denied all charges. A request for comment was sent to Kennedy's Defence Lawyer, but we've yet to receive a response.His trial is scheduled for September 2018. But Kennedy had to answer to more serious, disturbing crimes. In May 2016, he was tried and convicted on three counts of rape with three separate women. According to press reports he smiled as he was being led from court."Ryan Kennedy convinced his victims they had no choice but to do as they were told," said senior prosecutor Ben Samples. "He was emotionally, sexually and physically abusive, putting his needs above all else."Ryan Kennedy is currently serving an 11-year sentence in a UK prison.Remember this momentIn the months after Moolah's bankruptcy, Palmer struggled. He distanced himself from Dogecoin. From the community. From cryptocurrency as a whole."The energy I was putting into it wasn't helping me from a mental health perspective," he explains. The famous Dogecoin. Much cryptocurrency. Dogecoin Like Markus, Palmer decided to bail on Dogecoin.Palmer has re-emerged on the cryptocurrency scene. He now runs his own YouTube channel. He has no interest in launching another cryptocurrency and has little to do with Dogecoin. He calls himself a crypto skeptic. "Cryptocurrency is a solution in search of a problem," he says.What problem did Dogecoin solve?"I don't think it solves anything," he says. "If anything, it exists as an educational tool. It's a reminder that we can't take this stuff seriously. "I hope people see Dogecoin and say, I'm not going to put all my money into this. Because right now there's a dog on a coin and it's worth half a billion dollars."Outside of the occasional donation, neither Palmer or Markus owns any significant amount of Dogecoin.Back in January 2014, Markus posted a message on the Dogecoin subreddit; an ode to the community and what it had achieved. One year later, in the wake of the Moolah disaster, it had been reposted. An attempt to recapture the spirit in which Dogecoin had been founded. It was a timely reminder of what had been lost."I have no way of knowing how transient this all may be," Markus wrote of Dogecoin, two months after creating it.He wrote about how proud he was -- of the community, of the money they'd raised for various good causes. He thanked everyone for the incredible amount of work they'd put in. "I would like everyone to remember this moment," he said. "My hope is that Dogecoin will always be remembered fondly." window.console && console.log && console.log("ADS: queuing replay-wide-top-5adac3b0dd12c for display"); var cbsiGptDivIds = cbsiGptDivIds || []; cbsiGptDivIds.push("replay-wide-top-5adac3b0dd12c"); The Smartest Stuff: Innovators are thinking up new ways to make you, and the things around you, smarter.Rebooting the Reef: CNET dives deep into how tech can help save Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Share your voice Post a comment Tags Blockchain Decoded Culture Internet Computers Bitcoin Nintendo window.console && console.log && console.log("ADS: queuing mpu-plus-top-5adac3b0dd12c for display"); var cbsiGptDivIds = cbsiGptDivIds || []; cbsiGptDivIds.push("mpu-plus-top-5adac3b0dd12c"); window.console && console.log && console.log("ADS: queuing mpu-bottom-5adac3b0dd12c for display"); var cbsiGptDivIds = cbsiGptDivIds || []; cbsiGptDivIds.push("mpu-bottom-5adac3b0dd12c");