unaccountable to financial regulators. If they keep growing, U.S. policymakers, in particular those in the state of New York, will have to stomach the loss of their dominance over dollar clearing. But because stablecoins represent a powerful neutral financial infrastructure, the U.S. should welcome their ascendance regardless.

It’s no secret that banking is highly politicized, often in informal or hard to apprehend ways. The overt politicization of the N.Y.-based correspondent banking system represents a tax on all users. Embedded in each transaction is a slight risk of censorship. Dependence on the system means submitting oneself to an American aegis. The harder it is to extricate yourself, the more you are subject to the demands of the administrator.

Banks and payment processors have also become more politicized, as they have begun to “de-risk” (read: de-platform) individuals and industry sectors with whom they disagree politically, or where they consider implied compliance costs too significant to be worth the hassle.

In February, I wrote that U.S. regulators should embrace the potential of stablecoins as continued instruments of dollar dominance. I stressed the potential welfare benefits of allowing savers in countries with inflationary regimes to engage with currency substitution without relying on the bank sector. Since February, the outstanding supply of stablecoins has grown from around $5.5 billion to $16 billion and their daily settled value has grown from about $1 billion daily to $4 billion daily. This phenomenon is no longer localized to the crypto industry. It has begun to cause geopolitical reverberations.

First, stablecoins make for an excellent tool to avoid capital controls in oppressive monetary regimes. Chainalysis has reported that tether (USDT) is extremely popular in China, even recently exceeding bitcoin’s (BTC) usage in the region. It’s important to understand that the popularity of stablecoins or “crypto-dollars” is not solely due to their digital nature but because of the transactional freedom that they offer to users.

China’s financial system is highly digitized already. Crypto-dollars like tether offer a fundamentally different value proposition from AliPay or the state digital currency, DCEP, because they are bearer assets not subject to the same level of surveillance or transactional restrictions. Their digital nature isn’t what sets them apart; it’s the fact that you can permissionlessly accept or send any quantity of crypto-dollars with nothing more than a smartphone and trade it on a vast network of exchanges and brokers worldwide.

Today, crypto-dollarization is in full swing in places like Venezuela. Recently, Venezuelan President-in-exile Juan Guaido has begun promoting the usage of AirTM, a crypto-focused remittance company, to send U.S. dollars (USD) seized from the Maduro regime by the U.S. Treasury to health-care workers in Venezuela. Startups like Valiu are offering users digital access to the USD thanks to established crypto-financial infrastructure like LocalBitcoins. Crypto-dollars make sense because U.S. banks do not service Venezuelan users, even if regular Venezuelans are not formally sanctioned.

See also: Alejandro Machado – Venezuelans Look to Crypto-Dollars for Financial Security

Crypto-dollarization works because stablecoins are, for the most part, unencumbered by the shackles of the U.S. banking system. The largest issuer, Tether, relies on a network of offshore banks, and remains frustratingly outside the purview of the New York regulator, the Department of Financial Services (despite a long campaign to bring Tether to heel). Stablecoin issuers treat the IOUs as bearer instruments, and generally do not seek to police user behavior when a transaction does not involve the issuer. Users only need a relationship with the issuer if they are redeeming or creating stablecoins with bank dollars. By granting a measure of transactional privacy and not embedding political conditions into transactions, stablecoins are the closest thing to digital cash we have today. Notably, it is the private sector, not the state, that has delivered on this promise of digitally native cash.

But these tools are wearing blunt with overuse. The more the U.S. threatens sanctions, the greater the incentive for its peers – allies included – to seek out alternatives. The more risk-averse and puritanical banks become, the stronger the tailwinds for non-bank alternatives. The more dissidents are de-platformed from U.S. payment processors, the better neutral alternatives start to look.

See also: Pascal Hügli – Hyper-Stablecoinization: From Eurodollars to Crypto-Dollars

Perhaps catalyzed by the growth of stablecoins, or more likely by the announcement of Facebook’s libra or China’s DCEP, various branches of the Federal Reserve are now industriously pursuing a “digital dollar.” But would such a project, regardless of its final form, grant transactors the autonomy that they deserve? Would a digital cash system produced by the Fed consist of an instant-settling, private bearer asset, as is the case with physical cash? Would an American central bank digital currency be able to credibly guarantee that its rich database wouldn’t be plundered in real time by Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as Larry White has wondered?

Today, the U.S. is still the center of gravity as far as bitcoin and the crypto-dollar ecosystem are concerned. This is a significant advantage that should not be squandered. Policymakers should be thanking their lucky stars that a putative successor to the U.S’ financial infrastructure is a largely American phenomenon. The U.S. can continue to muddle down an increasingly exclusionary path and punish subscribers to its financial infrastructure by burdening them with political dictates, or it can embrace a neutral alternative. Self-disruption would be a significant bullet to bite, but it suits the U.S. Values like liberty, privacy, free enterprise and personal autonomy are embedded into our Constitution and social fabric. One can hardly think of a better nation to underwrite a shift to a truly neutral payments and settlement infrastructure.

See also: Nic Carter – Policymakers Shouldn’t Fear Digital Money: So Far It’s Maintaining the Dollar’s Status

While dollar infrastructure is likely to remain dominant far longer than some critics allege, it’s undeniable that banking and messaging have been deputized into carrying out the political objectives of their administrators. As relations with U.S. allies sour and China grows its sphere of influence in Asia, viable alternatives will be created. And if the DCEP is any guide, these alternatives will not encode strong privacy protections for end users. The U.S. is clearly suited to be the steward of a politically neutral payments technology, if our leaders can rise to the challenge.

If the U.S. chooses to marginalize crypto-dollars and punish their issuers, not only will they suppress a burgeoning American industry, they will also push users into even less accountable alternatives. While most stablecoins are backed by dollars in bank accounts – and are hence somewhat subject to governance – a subset are issued natively against crypto collateral like ether (ETH). These projects are more automated and lack the vectors of control and the linkages to the banking system that characterize convertible stablecoins. While still small, crypto-backed stablecoins like dai (current supply $455 million) take a more crypto-anarchist approach, and are harder to surveil or influence. More draconian regulation of crypto-dollars would not eliminate the category. Instead, it would push users into these slipperier alternatives.

The architects of these public digital dollar solutions should take a leaf from the private sector’s book. Users simply crave the qualities of cash, this time in a digital context. Far from being a dangerous techno-utopian fantasy, a genuine cash standard on the internet is simply a restoration of what was once ubiquitous and normal: transactional privacy and autonomy. These qualities are not for criminals but for everyone. And if policymakers dig in their heels, the private sector will only push back harder by providing the service that users demand – but this time outside policymakers’ sphere of influence.

2015. She holds an MA in digital art and philosophy.

These days I spend most of my time tweaking the code of a bitcoin wallet that runs in Terminal. Based on Libbitcoin, it’s built to work over Nym Technologies’ anonymizing mixnet. I call it the Dark Renaissance wallet.

It’s mostly a learning exercise to hone my C++ skills, but the Dark Renaissance wallet is a harbinger for what is to come.

Working with a small, focused and ideological team, my comrades at PolyTech are upending some of the key assumptions on which the crypto industry has been built, and are plotting an all-out privacy offensive.

Our mission – the Dark Renaissance – is strategic and philosophical. At a personal level, it relates to a lifelong obsession with the philosophy of technology, and an intense awareness of the power of software.

It represents a desire to reconnect with bitcoin’s crypto-anarchist roots and fend off the forces of surveillance that creep into every aspect of our lives in 2020.

But first, it requires an understanding of the distant past.

Like the ancient Irish poets, the filí, programmers have the ability to alter reality with an utterance. Code is an incantation, an act of summoning ideas and inclinations into material reality. It is a conduit between the sphere of ideation and that of politics and sociality. 

But technology isn’t merely the product of ideas – it actively shapes belief systems, reconfiguring the world in which it is applied.

Programmers know this: When a user’s behavior is influenced by code, it’s called opinionated software. When a user is manipulated for corporate interests, it is known as a dark pattern.

Software also has unintended consequences. Released into the wild, code propagates ideology in unpredictable and chaotic ways. Inevitably, it backfires, and innovation flows through human society, irrespective of, and indifferent to, political difference. 

To what extent technology is informed by and produces belief systems has haunted me throughout my adult life.

It has also given me dreams. I believe it is within humanity’s power to reshape the narrative by which technology is formed. In doing so, it becomes possible to take back the reins of runaway technological innovation and re-orientate human destiny.

Crypto is at the front line of this struggle.

I came to crypto through encryption. I saw hash functions as a kind of abstract poetry that spoke of the secrecy of nature and the unknown.

Crypto was immersed in a romantic glow. In Ethereum’s early days, I believed I was witnessing the emergence of Skynet. It was the promise of Turing Complete, general computation and if artificial intelligence was going to emerge anywhere, it would be there, I believed at the time.

It was my doomer phase, and Ethereum was a source of dark fascination. Inspired by the Ethereum yellow paper, I wrote my master’s thesis in 2016 on what I felt was a sadomasochistic dynamic between natural language and code. It included an erotic poem featuring a kind of vampire DAO (far before I had familiarized myself with the unicorns and rainbows that better represent the Ethereum community).

But while my approach was unconventional, the idea dates back to a problem as old as philosophy itself. To borrow a metaphor from computers, human experience consists of abstractions: mere interfaces that we interact with. Base reality occurs on a lower level, corresponding to hardware and raw machine code.

This hierarchization of reality – of partitioning nature into the more and less real – occurs across philosophy in different guises and names. For some philosophers, such a partition gets us no further in understanding the “things-in-themselves.” Humans are encased by a sphere of representation, wholly cut off from an inaccessible and inhuman outside.

At the time, I believed the reality hierarchy had a linguistic equivalent. At the bottom were operational languages such as computer programming. At the top were descriptive, natural languages.

With this philosophical backdrop, code acquires a profound metaphysical weight. It became a way to transmute the lowest level of reality into human experience.

The DAO hack was the first crack in this worldview.

Implicitly, I maintained at the time that natural language was somehow inferior to the perfect objectivity of code.

Not only that, but I believed the behavior of technology within capitalism – its tendency toward monopolization, value-extraction and surveillance – was technology’s true nature revealing itself.

Martin Heidegger – a philosopher known for supporting the Nazi party and for transforming Western philosophy – calls this tendency Gestell, or enframing. 

According to Heidegger, technology is a process of dismantling, quantifying and repackaging for export. In modernity, it has captured humanity, reducing people and everything else into a resource, a “standing reserve” to be exploited by the technological regime.

An equally controversial philosopher called Nick Land takes this process and gives it an agency. 

According to Land, technology exposes an inhuman intelligence optimizing itself at the expense of the human. Stimulated by finance and a strange, contorting temporality, this inhuman intelligence is climbing its way up the reality hierarchy, threatening to replace the human as the world’s top predator.

It might sound like science fiction but crypto is full of this kind of rhetoric. Early efforts toward smart contracts promise nothing short of optimizing humans out of the equation. The blockchain is described as pure, trustless and incorruptible, turning all that it touches into glacial, inalterable code.

Ethereum’s infamous experiment in corporate governance, The DAO, echoed this language.

As Ethereum Classic fans will no doubt remember, The DAO was a high-profile fundraising campaign for a decentralized incubator. Its marketing spoke of “the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code” – a phrase whose irony is hard to forget.

Due to a vulnerability discovered in Solidity smart contracts not long after its launch, The DAO was subject to a re-entrancy attack, in which a hacker exploited a function within the code to drain 3.6 million ether out of it.

Following a heated discussion that resulted in the birth of a new cryptocurrency, ethereum classic (ETC), Ethereum developers implemented a controversial upgrade to refund DAO investors.

The DAO episode exposed many myths about blockchain, but this one stands out: Despite claims to the contrary, crypto contains an inextricably human element.

I spent the subsequent years following the ebb and flow of Ethereum software development as a reporter for CoinDesk.

For two years I attended every single Ethereum core developer call. I tracked decision-making on the platform like a jealous lover, refreshing Twitter handles, expanding sprawling GitHub discussions, quietly watching chat groups.

During this time, Ethereum faced the fallout of its DAO refund and dealt with the challenge of informal, decentralized governance. This challenge was intensified by a few simple facts: Ethereum has a leadership that is ideologically opposed to authority, and a vision that is inclusive to the point of being meandering.

Criticisms aside, Ethereum was in uncharted territory. And despite the odds, the platform managed to keep its course, even with pressure from monetary interest pulling it from each side.

Over time, I understood the mistakes I had made. Ethereum is not Skynet, and code has much more in common with natural languages than the raw mechanics of primary nature. I learned that sometimes, developers actually trade efficiency for readability; favoring clear, modular code over code which is fast.

I also learned power exists on all decentralized networks, but it is typically nameless and therefore unaccountable. Over time, power relations solidify. Networks become institutionalized and the rift between users and developers deepens.

Software, I decided, is a social good, like water and clean air. To maintain the balance of power, coders must elevate those around them. They must discourage passive user-ship, inspire users to become active network participants and train the next generation of coders to replace them.

Armed with a newly found focus, I left the Ethereum beat to join the Rojava revolution in North Syria.

Inspired by the writings of Kurdish ideologue Abdullah Ocalan, the Rojava revolution sprang up during the Syrian Civil War. Its supporters maintain that the nation-state is an abstraction badly suited to the Middle East. In its place, Rojava is pioneering new forms of decentralized social organization.

But it is not merely a social organization that binds Rojava together. Rather, Rojava is governed by a collective idea: the concept of democratic modernity.

In his five-book manifesto written from Turkish prison island İmralı, Ocalan essentially agrees with Heidegger’s “Gestell” – there is a reductive, exploitative process at work within modernity. 

But Ocalan does not identify this process with technology. According to him, it is the logic of capitalist civilization itself.

The task of democratic modernity is to decouple technology from globalization. In its place, new modernities can be built, based on a plurality of logics – not merely Western-style reductionism that has come to dominate the world.

In Rojava, learning is paramount. People are encouraged to develop “xwe zanîn,” or self-knowledge, inspired by the Ancient Greek maxim “know thyself.” This is a project of remembering, of resurfacing histories worn away by globalization.

Here, I spent my time establishing technical academies. Inspired by the scientific centers of the ancient world, like Plato’s Academy and the House of Baghdad, our goal was to train a new generation of philosophical programmers.

But my time in Rojava was cut short. 

During the nine months I spent there, the risk of a Turkish invasion weighed heavily. It cast a dark shadow across all of our work, like a storm cloud looming in the distance.

Finally, the storm came, and the sky rained bullets and bombs. Disguised as a man, I was among the last foreigners to cross the border to safety before the death count started to rise. 

I found myself at the Devcon5 Ethereum conference in Osaka, Japan, one week after leaving Syria. 

With friends on the front line, I found it hard to look people in the eye. Ethereum’s unicorn-punk aesthetic set against the backdrop of war was hard to stomach. 

Sleeplessly refreshing the Syrian Civil War subreddit and Syria Live Map on my phone, I watched the war play out in total horror.

Airstrikes, bombings, body counts. On stage, well-meaning developers called for diversity and social justice, innocent to, or oblivious of, the blanket of physical safety that surrounded them. 

It was overpriced and sparsely attended. At a panel on Ethereum-based mixers an audience member warned that facilitating “bad guys” through privacy-tech could alienate the “average user” – a statement that was met with broad approval.

Maybe it was my state of mind, but it felt like the dissonance between cryptocurrency’s stated aims and its material reality was reaching a fever pitch. The general effort toward compliance was not only enabling certain forms of oppression but at times actively supporting it. 

At that moment, I decided that anonymity is where all philosophy of technology collides. In technical terms, it is synonymous with freedom. Practically, it can mean life or death. 

Since then, I have set about orchestrating the Dark Renaissance.

The Dark Renaissance is a revolution within cryptocurrency. It is a rallying cry to all who still believe in crypto’s true potential. It calls for a rebirth back to bitcoin’s original principles: to be autonomous, censorship-resistant and dark-by-design.

While crypto-anarchist in origin, bitcoin has lost its way. Rather than empowering black markets, it has allied with state and corporate interests – traded its radical potential for mainstream adoption.

But by suppressing its crypto-anarchist roots and whitewashing its aims to appeal to bankers, crypto has cut itself off from its source of power. The Dark Renaissance seeks to resurface that power, to allow the truly disruptive potential of cryptocurrency to realize itself.

That truly disruptive potential lies in cryptocurrency’s ability to extend the space of illegality outward: to increase the remit and power of unauthorized black market activity and strip resources away from the nation-state.

Our methods are part educational, part software production. We are setting up the PolyTech Academy, where technical skills are taught in tandem with a philosophy curriculum.

Read more: Code as a Weapon: Amir Taaki Wants You to Join the Real Crypto Revolution

Through education, we want to elevate the culture of the cryptocurrency space, to create a community of active network participants and to inspire a new generation of programmers to succeed us.

In our code, we build tools to practically enforce our ideology. Advocating autonomy, anonymity and censorship-resistance, we will lead with the launch of several financial products, and iterate into a full-fledged dark financial system.

These tools will enable us to create a new economic paradigm. We are building financial networks to disintermediate local economies away from the state and large banks, and to usher in a more democratic alternative.

Rather than controlling people through mechanism design as much crypto-economics often intends to do, we are instead seeking to inspire people – to create a vision of technology that empowers people from within.

We are in the midst of a turning point. Technologists today are faced with a choice: Either passively advance the interests of a system fated for destruction or undertake a psychic reversal.

Benedetto has always been a material girl -- not in the Madonna kind of way, but as a wild child of fabrics. Her great-grandfather came from Austria in 1896 to New York City’s Lower East Side and made coats and boleros out of other immigrants’ furs. Her family has been in textiles ever since. But when Benedetto came of age, she didn’t want to simply carry on. As much as she loved the business, she hated its waste.  The $800 billion global apparel industry, with its ever-faster fashion, has become famous for its squander. It slurps up water like no tomorrow -- literally, because at this rate, it will cause extreme scarcity in countries like China and throughout Asia by 2030, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group. And every year, fashion manufacturing produces 92 million tons of solid waste, most of which goes to landfills or up in smoke. Last year Burberry was called out for burning $37 million of clothes and goods rather than selling them at a discount -- a common practice to maintain a brand’s luxury shine. (The company announced in September that it will no longer destroy its inventory.)And it’s not just clothes. Up and down the industry’s supply chain, there’s excess material coming out at the seams. “I saw a massive problem: factories, mills, retailers, brands sitting on hundreds of billions to literally a trillion dollars’ worth of unused raw material,” Benedetto says. Related: Startup Knickey Is Improving the Business of Women's UnderwearOne day a few years ago, as she sipped on a tall decaf skim no-whip mocha, she became determined to solve the problem. Benedetto, an attorney and now 38, had also been studying the potential of blockchain, the record-keeping technology that fuels everything from Bitcoin to cloud storage. And she realized the technology could be used to upgrade one of the oldest forms of commerce -- and make a dent in the garment industry’s waste.Her idea was this: She’d use blockchain to track the industry’s excess fabric, enabling it to be easily identified and resold. As it turns out, other kinds of startups and policy leaders are exploring similar concepts. “There is exciting potential for blockchain technology to improve our ability to capture the economic value of resources along the supply chain,” says Jahda Swanborough, lead, environmental initiatives, World Economic Forum. “This includes waste.”Making money from waste is as old as waste itself. It goes back to farmers turning manure into fertilizer, and today it drives companies to use discarded cow fat for jet engine lubricant and turn steel slag into cement. Economists call the concept of turning waste into dollars “by-product synergy,” or BPS. “But it has to have the double whammy of also avoiding an environmental negative impact,” says Deishin Lee, Ph.D., who wrote a seminal paper on BPS while teaching at Harvard Business School. In one example she cited, Dow Chemical Company looked at six manufacturing plants and identified a potential $15 million of annual cost savings, and a reduction of 900,000 million BTU of fuel use and 108 million pounds of CO2 emissions. In many industries, says Lee, BPS still holds untapped value. But it isn’t always easy to manage. To find waste, you need to track the process that creates it. And blockchain, advocates say, can be a powerful tool for doing just that. “It’s a trust machine,” says Eric Piscini, former blockchain lead at Deloitte and CEO of Citizens Reserve, which is about to launch a novel supply-chain tool using the technology. “And it can track and trace things from their source to the customer.” A handful of companies have already seen it work. Plastic Bank in Vancouver has been using blockchain since 2018 to reward people in developing countries for recycling plastic garbage, which is then turned into pellets or flakes. The new “ocean-bound social plastic” is sold at a premium to companies like SC Johnson, which is using it to make Windex bottles. “One of our problems is how to get people to trust us when we say this plastic delivered this impact,” says cofounder and CTO Shaun Frankson. “With blockchain, it’s unquestioned.” So far, Frankson says, the company’s programs have kept more than 10 million pounds of plastic out of the ocean, while generating a profit. Related: With Latest Funding, Sampurn(e)arth Strives to Create Positive Impact Socially and EnvironmentallySimilarly, in Atlanta, a startup called Goodr uses blockchain to get surplus food to charities that feed the hungry. Rolled out last year, the company charges restaurants and other donors for pickup and, in return, helps them unlock new tax deductions by documenting the gifted food through the blockchain tool. According to the company, it’s on track to be in 10 cities by the end of the year and so far has rescued 1.2 million pounds of food.Benedetto has also seen initial success in taking on textile waste. Last year, following her latte brainstorm breakthrough, she launched a company called Queen of Raw. It’s an online bazaar for leftover fabrics that’s powered by blockchain and AI, and it maps and tracks unused material in factories and warehouses all over the globe. The platform matches the textiles to buyers in the same location, thereby reducing shipping costs and pollution. (The fashion industry has long had “jobbers,” or people who buy this kind of excess and then sell it to designers, but Queen of Raw makes the process far more efficient.) The site also encourages customers to make Pinterest-like vision boards, which prompts recommendations for new fabric rescues hot off the factory floors. Queen of Raw takes a commission on every sale.But that’s the simple part of Benedetto’s plan. After winning a WeWork Creator Award for $360,000 in January, she fast-tracked a second blockchain tool. It’s called Materia MX.When a brand buys a monthly subscription to Materia MX, it’ll get a customized supply-chain management system that’s designed to expose excess yardage and waste (water, chemicals, dollars) as they occur in real time. “Let’s say I am the farmer,” Benedetto offers. “I get an alert on my phone and enter ‘I just took 500 pounds of raw cotton to X mill to get spun into thread.’ I upload a certification that it’s 100 percent organic, click, and save.” The mill operator does the same when he receives the cotton, and up through the chain. The idea is that the brand can see why its waste is happening -- for example, a mill throwing out material because of a designer making changes too late, according to Timo Rissanen, Ph.D., assistant professor of fashion design and sustainability at Parsons School of Design. Materia’s data can then help the company become more efficient going forward -- and be rewarded financially for taking action. As soon as the brand gets an alert of surplus fabric, even finished clothes, it can sell the excess immediately on Queen of Raw, without racking up storage fees. Everyone wins -- Benedetto, twice. Related: The Young Founder of This Celebrity-Loved Activewear Company Shares Why You Should Always Trust Your InstinctsHow hard will it be to get companies and suppliers to share sensitive data? That’s a significant challenge for blockchain and BPS, says Piscini. But he and Benedetto believe that with time (and perhaps incentives), that can be overcome. “We have already saved close to 1 billion gallons of water, and we’ve saved businesses well over $10 million in just a few months,” says Benedetto, who now has a team of 10 and predicts she’s close to making a profit. If her grand vision comes true and big brands stop wasting material, what happens to her business? “Are you kidding?” says Benedetto. “That means everyone will be on our software solution. We’ll help solve the water crisis. It’ll be sweet.” Jon Horowitz is dedicated to helping brands with grow their social footprint by aligning with influencers and creating innovative content. In as little as seven months, the Entrepreneur Authors program will turn your ideas and expertise into a professionally presented book. Are you paying too much for business insurance? Do you have critical gaps in your coverage? Trust Entrepreneur to help you find out.

College, Dong Nai Province, Vietnam) and MA. NGUYEN VAN DUNG (Financial Accounting Department, Lac Hong University, Dong Nai Province, Vietnam) ABSTRACT: Since the introduction of the Internet in the early 1990’s, the adoption of Internet technologies grown exponentially. Most new echnological applications are either used or developed by using Internet technologies. Blockchain technology, which was used to invent the best-known crytocurrency Bitcoin. The Blockchain technology has significantly affected accounting. This article presents an overview on the Blockchain technology and analyses relationships among accounting, accounting information system and the Blockchain technology. Keywords: Accounting, accounting information system, Blockchain. 1. Introduction Blockchain technology has experienced exponential growth and innovation is driven by developers, start-ups and enterprise in all areas. The World Economic Forum has listed blockchain as one of the top ten emerging technologies of 2016 (CMA U Lakshmana Rao and Pandurangiah 2018). Major changes in established business systems can take place very quickly in our times. Those business that are not prepared suffer irreparable damage. Similarly, those in higher education should also be prepared for this upcoming major shift in business information systems, not just in the MIS field, but in accounting, banking, finance, economics, law, and beyond. People across the world have been demanding more “transparency” in corporate and government dealings, and blockchain public ledgers can also satisfy this global need (Brandon 2016). Distributed Ledger Technology, the so-called Blockchain, is revolutionizing the Internet. On the other hand, the Internet itself is changing, following the requests of those who wish that it became not only a place of information exchange, but also a virtual place to exchange actual values. Blockchain is set to be one of the most disruptive technologies to impact a variety of industries. One of these industries is accounting, with the introduction of blockchain the way that transactions are processed, retained and data audited will be vastly different. To understand these impacts we have to first examine the history of Blockchain technology (Iansiti and Lakhani 2017). Today, the information about blockchain technology has attracted a lot of attention. However, one thing that people may know less about is that blockchain technology has a great influence on Accounting and is certainly a technology trend that employees in Finance - Accounting math cannot be "ignored" in the future. 2. Overview 2.1. Blockchain Technology Currently there are many different documents about Blockchain. In this article, the author will summarize some concepts to help us better understand Blockchain and its activities. Blockchain has been enabled by a set of modern technologies including the internet, open-source peer-to–peer protocols (BitTorrent), rapid digital communications, enormous computing power, and modern cryptography. It is an electronic shared, replicated, distributed (organizationally and geographically), and decentralized transactional file. CIA is a central trait of a blockchain since a transaction is committed in real time to the blockchain and connected via a hash to all those transactions that came before it. The transactions persist forever and cannot be deleted nor modified. To ensure availability, the entire block chin of transactions is continuously replicated across many servers so that there is no central point of failure. Privacy is guaranteed by rigid credential checking techniques and protected through modern encryption (Brandon 2016). Blockchain is a technology that is based on distributed ledgers. The ledgers consist of “blocks” of information that are tied together cryptographically. This allows multiple parties to view the contents inside the block while what is inside the block remains protected. Common characteristics of blockchain include real-time distribution, authentication of each block by consensus (use of cryptography), and validation of each block. It is difficult to alter the historical records as each transaction and addition is time stamped. The blockchain also includes programmability to execute certain transactions without further action by users (U.S. House). The blockchain is further described as “a digital ledger of economic transactions that is fully public, continually updated by countless users, and considered impossible to corrupt. It is a list of continuous records in blocks” (Carlozo 2017). In the study of CMA U Lakshmana Rao and Pandurangiah (2018) said that, Blockchain is a kind of distributed database and is one of the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) where data is recorded, stored and sorted into blocks. Unlike centralized database, in Blockchain data is stored in various participating nodes. Blockchain is an enumerated list of records containing information. The individual enumerated records are called blocks and chained together using a cryptographic hash that is linked to previous block. Together these blocks are called as distributed ledger. The origin of the block is called genesis block and is the starting point of the chain. The data stored in Blockchain are immutable which means blocks created once cannot be altered without having cascading effect on previous blocks. Since it is distributed ledger technology, Blockchain facilitates peer-to-peer transaction without involvement any other third party. A Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger can contain financial or non-financial transactions replicated across the network on peer-to-peer network using cryptography. Bitcoin is a type of unregulated digital currency know as cryptocurrency. Whereas, Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that enables and maintains Bitcoin transaction ledger over peer-to-peer network without central authority. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a technological protocol that enables data to be exchanged directly between different contracting parties within a network without the need for intermediaries. The network participants interact with encrypted identities (anonymously). Each transaction is coded and added to an immutable transaction chain. This chain is distributed to all network nodes (ledgers), thus preventing the alteration of the chain itself (Iansiti and Lakhani 2017). Blockchain technology was developed to aid in the operation of cryptocurrencies, most notably Bitcoin. It essentially is a new way of storing information online securely and with greater transparency. Most online information is currently stored on servers, including cloud technologies. Data using this model is only as secure as the server that it is located on as the entirety of data is placed in a single location. Data on servers are also not transparent as they can only be viewed by users that have access to the server. Blockchain technology utilizes a different method of storing data, instead of storing the entire data set on a single server, data is fragmented into blocks stored over multiple servers using a peer-to-peer network. Each block of the data is verified and then assigned to a server where it will be stored. Blocks that relate to the same set of data is strung into a chain. Data is secure as multiple servers in multiple locations hold data and it is practically impossible to hack all the necessary servers to obtain the full set of data. Further, data contained in each block is inherently resistant to modification and can only be altered by accessing all data in the entire chain. The inability to access the entire chain by an unauthorized person creates a safe environment and leads to data being widely viewable, which in turn leads to greater transparency as data can be viewed but not altered by multiple users (David Rose and Volschenk 2018). Figure 1: How Blockchain works Source: (CMA U Lakshmana Rao and Pandurangiah 2018) 2.2. Blockchain and accounting Blockchain is an accounting technology, which deals with transfer of ownership of assets and maintaining ledger of accurate financial information. Use of Blockchain can increase the potential of accounting profession by reducing the cost of maintaining and reconciling ledgers. This may be a threat to accountants as automated reconciliations take away the work of accountants. But, Blockchain empowers the accountants that an asset exists with proven authenticity. However, the economic reality or economic value has to be validated by accountants (CMA U Lakshmana Rao and Pandurangiah 2018). Blockchain technology may represent the next step for accounting: instead of keeping separate records based on transaction receipts, companies can write their transactions directly into a joint register, creating an interlocking system of enduring accounting records. Since all entries are distributed and cryptographically sealed, falsifying or destroying them to conceal activity is practically impossible. To explain the notion of Blockchain-based accounting some researchers use the term Triple-Entry Accounting which is described as an enhancement to conventional double entry accounting where the accounting entries of the involved parties are cryptographically sealed by a third entity (the Blockchain). (Grigg 2005, Mills, Wang et al. 2016) Fig. 2. Centralized vs Distributed Ledger Source:(Bansal and Batra 2018) Blockchain is an accounting technology, which deals with transfer of ownership of assets and maintaining ledger of accurate financial information. Use of Blockchain can increase the potential of accounting profession by reducing the cost of maintaining and reconciling ledgers. This may be a threat to accountants as automated reconciliations take away the work of accountants. But, Blockchain empowers the accountants that an asset exists with proven authenticity. However, the economic reality or economic value has to be validated by accountants (CMA U Lakshmana Rao and Pandurangiah 2018). Blockchain Technology can be potentially used in accounting and audit function. Blockchain ensures traceable audit trails, automated accounting and reconciliations, tracking of ownership of assets, authentication of transactions. Blockchain can be used as a source of verification for reported data. The days of sample based will soon be a history, as the auditors may soon use Blockchain Technology to test the entire population of transactions of a period under audit. This will extensively improve the level of assurance (CMA U Lakshmana Rao and Pandurangiah 2018). According to Blockchain accounting applications are sometimes called “triple entry bookkeeping”. In double entry bookkeeping, every transaction is entered twice: as a debit and as a credit. With blockchain there are three entries that occur: the debit, the credit, and the cryptographic signature of the transaction. There are really three parties also, such as: the buyer, the seller, and the blockchain network. With the blockchain, all of the transactions exist on many networked computers instead of just one mainframe (or server farm) with backups. The concept is similar to that of the US DOD Arpanet that was the foundation for the Internet. A distributed network with many servers and communication lines was built so that the loss of one (or a few) would not take the entire system down. For the accounting application it is possible that the account balance part of the application data would remain in a relational form on the organization’s mainframe or server and the transactions would be placed in a NoSQL blockchain, as illustrated in the figure 3 below. Figure 3: Blockchain is secured in terms of compatibility of has string (Source: Brandon 2016, Sarkar 2018) However, the advantages of blockchain in accounting go far beyond just providing a more efficient and secure IT process for large organizations. Both internal and external accounting audit procedures involve confirming transactions and balances that are stated on the organization’s financial books. However, the transactions on the blockchain ledger can be confirmed as true and accurate without having a third party auditor confirm these transactions. This accounting application of blockchain can be extended beyond a single company. Now consider this on a countrywide or even worldwide basis for all organizations and their vendors and trading partners. If there was just one blockchain, instead of one for each company, then the redundancy reduction and cost/time savings would be huge. Essentially blockchain provides an automatic capability to verify accounting transactions between multiple business partners while maintaining data privacy. Conceivably external audits could be fully automated, and thus, the role auditors would be significantly reduced and perhaps even completely eliminated. The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation is already testing a blockchain distributed ledger in short term lending markets to reduce risk and allow financial firms to share information in real time. (Pilkington 2015) Blockchain had put an end to the traditional methods of billing, documentation, processing, registering, inventory systems, and paying for business. The technology will allow companies to record both sides of a transaction simultaneously in a shared book in real time, rather than keep audited records of financial transactions in separate privately created databases or accounting books. The need for traditional double-entry accounting will disappear, as the legality of accounting will be fully automated. Therefore, consideration of issues related to the use of the blockade accounting infrastructure in the block is important and relevant (Aleksy Kwilinski 2019). 2.3. Blockchain and accounting information systems Today, companies are trying to implement Blockchain into their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, particularly for tasks such as procurement and supplier management. Blockchain ledger-based technology can simplify the procurement process because it enables secure recording of transactions in a way that can lead to unprecedented transparency and increased operational efficiency (Tysiac 2017). Potekhina and Riumkin (2017) said that Real-time Blockchain Accounting System (RBAS) is a software solution that enables transactions of currency, financial derivatives, and other digital documents between two or more counterparts, stores the transaction data in cryptographically protected blocks whose integrity is verified through the process of mining, and allows the composition of financial statements at any time. For companies and their stakeholder to obtain all the benefits provided by the technology it is necessary that a RBAS possesses the following properties: fist, Transparency - the transactions must visible in real-time as it is the case with bitcoin; second, Immutability - there must not be a programming possibility to change any data once they were entered, to ensure this, the company using the system must not control the mining power; Third, Accessibility – the data must be easily accessible to a broad range of stakeholders. Financial statements are prepared at regular intervals and sum up what has happened in a firm’s ledger throughout a certain period. An auditor then issues an opinion on the accuracy of the financial statements. Outsiders, such as investors and credit risk managers, have to trust both that the auditing is thorough and unbiased and that the firm has not given false information to the auditor. That is, the concept of trust is critical in both the preparation of the financial statement and in the auditing process. This is where the Blockchain technology behind the bitcoin can play an integral role. 3. Discussion and Conclusion It may be remarked that while the landscape for Blockchain technology is still in its infancy, its potential is transformational. Blockchain transaction tools offer the greatest opportunities for change in various accounting mechanisms, and creating a new platform to reshape the accounting and accounting information systems. Blockchain is arguably the most discussed technology of this decade and there is every reason for that. As a sort of indestructible and incorruptible ledger, blockchain accounting offers to record data in a way which can be simultaneously accessible by auditors and regulators. This could potentially reduce the need for accountants to record transaction in separate locations with almost no way to consolidate and validate the same. Blockchain accounting is capable of providing a much more transparent and secured accounting framework to track transaction and assets. Hence traditional accounting is at the verge of a disruption which will redefine the role and need of accountants in an industry. Instead of record keepers, accountant will soon require to become interpreters and direct facilitators in decision making. Blockchain came to the world’s attention thanks to its role as the underlying technology behind Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency. However, Blockchain has much farther reaching possibilities than digital currency. Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, has the potential for applications in the stock market, banking, and beyond. One industry that is sure to see disruption from Blockchain is accounting. From audit to bookkeeping, Blockchain has the potential to improve efficiency, reporting, and data access in a way never before seen. REFERENCES: Aleksy Kwilinski (2019). Implementation of blockchain technology in accounting sphere. Academy of Accounting and Financial Studies Journal, 23(2), 2-3. Brandon, D. (2016). The blockchain: The future of business information systems. International Journal of the Academic Business World, 10(2),33-40. Carlozo, L. (2017). What is blockchain? Journal of Accountancy, 224(1), 29. Rao, U. L., & Pandurangiah, S. (2018). Blockchain Technology Will it Disrupt or Discipline Accountants? The Management Accountant Journal, 53(6), 42-46. David Rose, & Volschenk, E. (2018). Blockchain & Accounting. https://vincents.com.au/blockchain/7. 7. Grigg, I. (2005). Triple entry accounting. Systemics Inc journal, 15(4). riple_Entry_Accounting /links/57e99c4408aed0a291304588/Triple-Entry-Accounting.pdf 7. Iansiti, M. and K. R. Lakhani (2017). The truth about blockchain. Harvard Business Review, 95(1), 118-127. 8. Mills, D. C., Wang, K., Malone, B., Ravi, A., Marquardt, J., Badev, A. I.,. .. Kargenian, V. (2016). Distributed ledger technology in payments, clearing, and settlement. https://globalintelhub.com/wpcontent/uploads/2013/07/2016095pap.pdf 9. Pilkington. (2015). Research Handbookd on Digital Transformations: Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 1784717762. MỐI QUAN HỆ GIỮA KẾ TOÁN, HỆ THỐNG THÔNG TIN KẾ TOÁN VÀ BLOCKCHAIN ThS. Nguyễn Cao Quang Nhật Khoa Quản trị Kinh doanh, Trường Cao đẳng Sonadezi ThS. Nguyễn Văn Dũng Khoa Tài chính Kế toán, Trường Đại học Lạc Hồng TÓM TẮT: Kể từ khi Internet ra đời vào đầu những năm 1990, việc sử dụng Internet đã tăng lên theo cấp số nhân. Hầu hết các ứng dụng công nghệ mới đều được sử dụng hoặc được xây dựng dựa trên công nghệ Internet. Trong thời gian gần đây, công nghệ Blockchain đã thu hút sự chú ý trên thế giới với vai trò là công nghệ cơ bản của loại tiền điện tử Bitcoin. Công nghệ Blockchain có ảnh hưởng lớn đến Kế toán. Bài viết này trình bày nội dung cơ bản của công nghệ Blockchain và phân tích mối quan hệ giữa kế toán, hệ thống thông tin kế toán với công nghệ Blockchain. Từ khóa: Kế toán, hệ thống thông tin kế toán, Blockchain. / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / Nguồn Tạp chí Công thương: -accounting-information-system-and-blockchain-technology-72768.htm Doanh nghiệp viễn thông • SJC2 • Mobifone • Apple • Matt Hancock • Huawei • TSMC • Vsmart Aris 5G • Google • ICT • MOMO • TT-TT • MACOS • BIG • IOS 14 • Phan Tâm • Online • WIDGET • Facebook • Mã độc • Trí thông minh nhân tạo • Trung Quốc • MACHINE • Samsung • Ấn Độ • Sim • Smartphone • Thiết bị đầu cuối • Chính phủ Anh • Sapo GO • Boris Johnson • Băng thông rộng • Cục Viễn thông • Học máy • Thương mại điện tử • TIKI • Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng • Bộ thông tin và truyền thông • ANSSI • Thủ tướng Anh • Mạng di động • MAKE • Jonathan Galindo • 5G • Bộ TT-TT • SAPO • TIKTOK • Thanh toán trực tuyến • Công nghệ thông tin • Tập tin • Vnpt • An ninh mạng • Cáp quang biển • Bộ TT&TT; • Vietnam • IPhone 12 • Data • Tập đoàn Huawei • Cáp quang • GCHQ Giấy phép số 1818/GP-TTĐT do Sở Thông tin và Truyền thông Hà Nội cấp ngày 05/05/2017 Đơn vị chủ quản: Công ty Cổ phần Công nghệ EPI * Chịu trách nhiệm: Nguyễn Thanh Tùng Địa chỉ: Tầng 5, Tòa nhà Báo Sinh Viên VN, D29 Phạm Văn Bạch, Yên Hòa, Cầu Giấy, Hà Nội Tel: (024) 3-212-3232, số máy lẻ 2947. contact.baomoi@epi.com.vn BÁO MỚI tổng hợp và sắp xếp các thông tin tự động bởi chương trình máy tính

future? Find Monero (XMR) price prediction below. Contents1 What is Monero?2 XMR Coin, Its Uses2.1 XMR Price Today3 Monero Price Forecast 2019 According to the project’s official site, Monero is a secure digital cash, which is maintained by a network of users. It features ring signatures, confidential transactions, and unseen adresses to darken origins, destinations and sums of transactions. In fact, this cryptographic currency is untraceable. FYI: Ring signatures are created by any member in the group of users. It is not possible to determine who has created such signature. By the way, Monero was forked in summer 2018, which led to emergence of new privacy-focused digital coin called MoneroV (XMV). XMR is a well-known product which is traded on the most exchanges. It is based on the CryptoNight PoW hash algorithm featuring significant algorithmic differences. This privacy-centric cryptographic currency is also used in Darknet. Its skyrocketing in 2016 (from 50 cents to 12 dollars within 12 months) was even linked by Wired with Darknet druglords activity. The price of the coin is dependent on the general situation on the crypto market. As of 14 December 2018, in holds 12th place by market cap according to CoinMarketCap. Factors that may drive Monero higher in the near future include: Monero is a well-known brand, which is widely used for anonymous transactions. It firmly holds position in top 20 by market cap and is not going to leave it. The coin has a long history, which prove its popularity and usefulness. According to Kevin Rooke, a cryptocurrency enthusiast from Toronto, the platform had 25,188 active adresses per day as of beginning of September 2018. This is a splendid indicator (8th on the market) and good sign, especially comparing with majority of cryptos on the market. The virtual currency is considered by some gurus as a steady participant of the crypto market. Many coins of the past years went into oblivion, but this one remained. There is an opinion that Bitcoin blockchain is becoming more and more transparent and for this reason it is possible the growth of strong anonymous coins like Monero. However, there are some factors that might negatively affect XMR value: Policies of some exchanges (especially Japanese ones) prohibit anonymous cryptocurrencies. In the future, development of AML and KYC procedures in crypto exchanges sphere may unfavorably affect such coins as XMR. The market’s downcome influenced all cryptos in a toxic way. Even large-cap and long-standing inhabitants, like ETH and Litecoin suffered a lot. There were criminal uses of Monero, in particular, AlphaBay, Shadow Brokers, and WannaCry cases. As revealed by Malte Möser, Kyle Soska, Ethan Heilman et al. in their article “An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain” (2017), some XMR transactions would be vulnerable. Based on these factors, we assume that the price of the most well-known anonymous cryptocurrency can reach $100 in early 2019, provided that the entire market starts to grow. In general, we can assume that XMR price prediction for 2019 is promising. Disclaimer. This information should not be treated as a basis of your investment activity. We gave an estimated figure, which may vary depending on the “weather” in the cryptocurrency market. However, the factors above may play significant role in determining the future price of Monero. We recommend users to do their own research before investing and trading. Monero (XMR) Price Prediction 2019 – Up to $100?5 (100%) 2 votes

while my partner, Kyle Rea of cREAtiveCastleStudios finishes our graphics!If you haven’t read the first part of this, you may catch up so on my post here;StableCoin Definition.Simply stated, a StableCoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to another asset. Or, a global digital currency solely unrelated to a central entity. StableCoins make for practical usage of cryptocurrencies by allowing for secure, convenient transactions without the high volatility traditional cryptocurrencies hold. Now let’s move on….Types of Stablecoins: Asset-Collateralized vs. Non-CollateralizedDefine Asset-Collateralized StableCoins.The socially agreed upon currency most countries use is termed ‘fiat’, which literally means ‘something that was created without effort.” Until 1971 world currencies were backed by gold. Before printed money; diamonds, silver, gold, land, estate and other goods were used as means for barter. Shifting from an asset backed currency to the current fiat system left centralized banks, governments, financial technologists, private entities, and economic experts with the concept of Asset-Collateralized StableCoins. These specific StableCoins’ purpose is to tokenize stable assets on a blockchain serving as a digital currency for means of speedy, secure and stable daily transactions. Stablecoins in this category should be guaranteed to exchange 1 : 1 StableCoin for its underlying asset.Define Non-Collateralized StableCoins.One argument states, fiat is not backed by any tangible asset, therefore; why should cryptocurrency only have value as an Asset-Collateralized Coin? Opposing argument suggests currency must have some agreed upon “value”. Non-collateralized stablecoins were created as a medium. This digital currency is not backed by any real-world or cryptocurrency asset, but instead, maintains value by its users expectations maintaining a certain value. The main Non-collateralized approach is the Seigniorage Supply (Algorithmic) StableCoin Model. (Read further for detailed analysis)Each Category Broken DownI’ve separated three different types of asset backed coins, one non-collateralized and a group of hybrids, in hopes of a more simplistic understanding. As you can see in the photo.Looking back, the first Asset-Collateralized StableCoin we discussed was Fiat- Collateralized. You can find that publication here:Second, we covered Crypto- Collateralized StableCoin’s. That article is right here:Now we are going to switch things up a bit and visit the only Non-Collateralized StableCoin Category.Seigniorage Supply (Algorithmic) StablecoinsDefinition.Seigniorage Supply or Algorithmic StableCoins the only noted Non-Collateralized StableCoin. They’re an algorithmically governed approach to expanding and contracting a cryptocurrency’s money supply. Modeled after central banks’ management over their countries’ monetary supplies, Algorithmic StableCoins use algorithms to automatically increase or decrease StableCoins for a low volatile digital currency.“Special thanks to Robert Sams for the development of Seigniorage Shares and insights regarding how to correctly value volatile coins in multi-currency systems.” Vitalik Buterin states in his 11.11.2014 publication “The Search for a Stable Cryptocurrency”. Sams published the Algorithmic StableCoin concept earlier that year. Crypto-enthusiasts and centralized companies created White Papers shortly after.AdvantagesAbsence of Collateral. No tangible asset required. This StableCoin is created or destroyed by an algorithm, lessening errors from users.Autonomous. Cryptocurrency not influenced by outside markets.Decentralized.Trustless, onchain ledger providing secure digital currency.Stable. Theoretically protected against crypto volatility related to; automatic value adjustments based on market supply/demand.Supported. Many financial technology experts support Algorithmic StableCoinsDisadvantagesComplex. The rule-based system is integrated with complex logic, making understanding difficult for average investors and consumers.Futuristic. Relies on own future demand for successful StableCoin.New technology. Unproven successful methodology related to new, complex concept.Regulations. Real-world bonds are considered securities. Algorithmic StableCoin Bonds run the risk of also being classified as such, risking benefits of decentralization.Example.The Seigniorage Supply or Algorithmic StableCoins method uses ‘Smart Contracts’ that automatically expand and contract the supply of Non-Collateralized currency using algorithms to maintain value.Said StableCoin has a $1 value. The price drops to $0.80, indicating supply of StableCoins is higher than demand. The algorithm uses seigniorage to buy ‘said’ StableCoin, thereby decreasing supply and pushing price back to $1.In event price continues to remain under $1, and no remaining profits to purchase more of the coin’s supply; seigniorage shares are then issued. These are essentially “bonds” used to raise funds for network users. “Bonds” promise seigniorage profits to buyers. Users are essentially investing in the growth of Algorithmic StableCoins supply. When said StableCoin trades above $1, the algorithm issues additional tokens increasing supply until price returns to $1. Profits collected are termed “seigniorage”.Criticisms.From The Swiss Finance Institute; Didier Sornette and Richard Senner released a publication stating recent use of Quantitative Easing (QE) tried to restore the US economy by flooding the market with new bonds. With that, they add, “QE was not overly effective because it did not channel new liquidity to ordinary people, who would have a high propensity to consume.”Others claim “bonds” are merely a bet your investment will remain stable or grow. Preston Byrne closes his critique of a recently failed Algorithmic StableCoin, “An investment scheme backed by introducing new investors… and not backed by income-generating assets can be called a number of things. I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide what name you will choose to give to this one.”“If executed well, this type of stablecoin will unlock rich possibilities for crypto holders since it will be decentralized, efficient, and free of counterparty risk. The approach is promising, albeit in need of testing.” Says Nat Wittayatanaseth on her Medium Publication. (Nice to meet you, Nat! Fabulous work!)Seigniorage Supply (Algorithmic) StableCoins could potentially collapse in a cryptocurrency black swan event. A successful Non-Collateralized stablecoin could radically change financial technology, consumer trade and society views both; value and money. However, an unsuccessful Algorithmic StableCoin can be catastrophic and dramatically impact cryptocurrency.Photo credits: Miko Matsumura, Tyler Winklevoss, Cameron Winklevoss, Roger VerEnd.Part 5/10 of Alyze Sam’s 2019 Complete StableCoin GuideThis concludes the small ‘short’ from an upcoming E-book. Stay tuned for more, and help a lady trying to serve the Women In Blockchain and The Tech News community out. How?Tell me what you think.‍I’ve been a hospice nurse for the last 11 years!What am I missing?What would you add?What’s your personal opinion on StableCoins?Am I working this Medium thing correctly (probably not! Haha!)I’d love to professionally discuss, collaborate and connect with you all. Would love any feedback, positive and negative; as I’m only here to improve and educate myself/others.So, how can we mutually benefit one another?💻 Let’s Connect on Social Media 📱-@LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/AlyzeSam/-@instagram: instagram.com/AlyzeSam/-@Twitter: twitter.com/@AlyzeSamSpecial thanks to my new BFF and fellow Rick Sanchez C137 nerd, Matthew BardelebenMattyB3 actually wrote an article here on Medium that caught my attention. Related to his informative and entertaining talent, I reached out and asked if he’d collaborate with me as a personal favor. I tricked him and this upcoming Ebook is the result! YES! (Haha) He’s been a great blessing! From running around editing my chatty-word salad, to giving incredibly gifted content, he’s a huge asset. I can’t wait to work more with him on as many articles as he’d like!You can find this brilliant goofball ball giving away free education in these locations;-@LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/m-Bardel/-@instagram: instagram.com/MattyB3/-@Twitter: twitter.com/@MattyB3-Latest Medium promoting #InternationalWomansDay here.Who’s going to be in sunny San Francisco, CA the last week of March?My good friend and new business partner, Wesley Williams is an extremely impressive, multifaceted attorney and blockchain genius. Wes and I will be speaking for TheBlockchainSociety and Deloitte.I am partnered with CryptoCentral.io We are proud sponsors of this event and hope to do more in the future.Wikipedia noted- awarded entertainer, Live Crypto trader/educator, and my work hubby “Goku” aka Kyle Rea will also be joining us.This is a private event, but if you’re interested, give us or the TheBlockchainSociety.ca a shout out. @visnuth is a wonderful gentlemen, we can’t wait to meet in person.I hope you’ll tune in. We promise to act like professionals at the event seen here. But! On the way, we will road tripping together. Filming. This will be fun for everyone. 😜.

Alcoa smelter, which, crucially, was still connected to massive electrical lines. The large buildings where aluminum was made, called potrooms, would be filled with shipping containers stocked with 325,000 mining machines. Most important for Milam County, Bitmain promised to create between 400 and 600 jobs. New industry would replace the old.In August, James Kyle, Bitmains vice president of North American business development, appeared in front of county officials considering a tax abatement. Seeking to make Bitmain feel at home, Steve Young invited Kyle to his 1,300-acre ranch that night. Well feed you and water you, he promised. Young, 67, had won the Republican primary for county judge-executive and was weeks away from an election that, in a red county, was considered a formality.Young picked up brisket from Thorndale Meat Market, a barbecue joint lauded by Texas Monthly, and stocked his stainless steel refrigerator with Shiner beer. Some 40 guests, including Kyle, the sheriff, and the district attorney milled about on a long patio overlooking a pasture where cattle gnawed on Bermuda grass. Towering silver transmission lines cut across the property, connecting to the former Alcoa site and future Bitmain home. Observing the scene, Kara Clore, the executive director of Rockdales Municipal Development District, thought of the Saturday Evening Post article. I was like, This looks exactly like that picture, Clore says. Just like 50 years later or 60 years later.As Kyle sipped Shiner, Young remembers him talking about how Bitmains facility could someday feature more than mining. Kyle said Bitmain may later invest in the development of artificial intelligence for self-driving cars.They had a lot of great ideas, says Young, a tall, sturdy man who often sports a cowboy hat over his curly white hair. And I think, Shit, if they do half of what theyre talking about, it will put Milam County on the cutting edge of technology.Instead, Milam County and other communities have learned a real-life lesson about the elusive promise of virtual currency.Power Draw Bitcoin mining conjures the image of a college sophomore pecking at a laptop while taking rips from a bong. But that hasnt been the case for a while. At least not for anyone who wants to make a profit.Successful crypto miners use custom machines that solve the puzzles required to build a blockchain and unlock the limited supply of bitcoins that become available roughly every 10 minutes. The more mining machines you have, the better the odds of winning. (Operators sometimes combine into profit-sharing collectives known as pools.)The process consumes enormous amounts of energy, and cheap electricity is a must. One of the most popular machines, Bitmains AntMiner S15, draws about 1,600 watts of power. Thats about equal to the energy consumption of a microwave oven. But mining machines arent used on occasion. To optimize the chance of earning coins, the top mining operators run hundreds or thousands of miners 24/7. Imagine your electricity bill if you were constantly zapping instant oatmeal in hundreds of microwaves all day, every day. In Rockdale, Bitmains planned facility was supposed to consume 500 megawatts, enough to power more than 400,000 average US homes.Rockdale was hardly the only, or first, place that caught the bitcoin bug, as its value soared 20-fold in 2017, to $20,000 that December. Central Washington, with its cheap hydropower, was a natural draw; by 2018, there were more than 50 mining operations in the region. Dennis Bolz, a commissioner for the Chelan County Public Utility District, recalls a Japanese businessman flying in on a private jet and announcing he wanted energy on the spot. It was like a gold rush, Bolz says.Upstate New York, also home to cheap hydropower, was another landing spot. In March 2018, the city council in Plattsburgh, New York, enacted the first crypto-mining moratorium in the US after heavy electricity use by miners caused residents rates to skyrocket. Several communities in Washington followed Plattsburghs lead. In Lake Placid, New York, before crypto-mining had even taken hold, local officials called for a moratorium in May 2018. Speaking to the Lake Placid village board, one resident said of bitcoin miners, according to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, I dont mean to sound sharp, but I think they would come here and rape our electric department.Opponents of crypto-mining questioned whether communities received enough benefits for the electricity that was devoured. Anyone who understood mining realized the potential for employment was minimal. The machines run on their own and require minimal support. But as bitcoins value rose along with concerns about energy consumption, companies started promising massive investments and job creation.In Massena, New York, Blockchain Industries proposed a $600 million facility that would create 500 jobsif it could get subsidized hydropower. The plan was scuttled in March 2018 when the New York Power Authority, concerned about whether mining operations would create enough jobs, imposed its own moratorium on bitcoin miners. A consultant for Blockchain Industries warned that the decision would cost Massena and New York. Technical trends are bypassing us, she said.Texas is about the weirdest place Ive heard for bitcoin mining.David Yermack, New York UniversityAnother mining facility did open in Massena last year. Coinmint started operating at an old Alcoa smelter, promising 150 jobs in the first 18 months, according to a Coinmint statement.Bitmain had a similar idea for its North American expansion. Based in Beijing and founded in 2013 by Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan, Bitmain was the crypto industrys blue chip company. Last September, it filed for an initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In the filing, Bitmain reported $953 million in adjusted profit in 2017and roughly the same amount in the first half of 2018.The companys revenues had soared during the gold rush, increasing from $275 million in the first half of 2017 to $2.2 billion in the last half. Those machines humming in central Washington and New York? The majority were made by Bitmain. It was estimated to supply about 75 percent of mining hardware worldwide in 2017 and hosts two of the largest bitcoin pools. Bitmain also mines on its own and hosts others companies mining hardware. As of June 2018, according to its IPO filing, Bitmain had 11 mining centers, all in China, with room for 200,000 computers.Flush with rapidly growing profits and faced with increasing hostility from the Chinese government, Bitmain sought to extend its mining operations to North America last year. It followed others to central Washington, cutting the ribbon on a $20 million facility in Walla Walla in November. It also looked toward Texas.That wasnt a logical choice. Texas is hot and humid, which is not ideal for mining, because the computers require cooling; energy prices are about average for the US. David Yermack, an NYU finance and business professor who has studied cryptocurrency, says that other than Venezuela, where Nicolas Maduro virtually gives away electricity, Texas is about the weirdest place Ive heard for bitcoin mining.Tough Times The closure of Alcoas facility and the adjacent power plant, operated by Luminant, werent the only hits Milam County had taken in the past few years. Two hospitals closed, eliminating another 200 jobs and making the county a health care desert. In January 2010, following Alcoas departure and amid the Great Recession, unemployment in the county hit 12.5 percent. Former laborers left families behind to work in the West Texas oil fields. The sidewalks and parking spots on Rockdales Main Street are typically empty, as are many storefronts. A sign in front of the Rockdale General Store promises Ceep Feed, spoiling the intended bird pun of cheep feed.A quarter-mile east of downtown, the Rainbow Courts Motel, a smattering of cottages set among towering pecan and oak trees, has operated continuously since 1918. In the last years of Alcoa, owners Joan and Dan Ratliff hosted prominent international guestsChinas minister of coal once stayed with an entourage. But weekday business travelers disappeared with Alcoa and Luminant. The Ratliffs now rely on weekenders who come for weddings, reunions, and barbecue. Theyre managing to hold on, but another hotel in town recently filed for bankruptcy protection.Local officials tried several strategies to combat the slump. In 2017 they formed a county-wide economic development group. When Amazon announced plans in September 2017 to build a second headquarters, Drayton McLane, the billionaire former Houston Astros owner and a Milam County native, recommended the county make a bid by dangling the 33,000 acres at the old Alcoa site. The countys proposal, dubbed Blue Sky, highlighted the Alcoa property, Texas business-friendly atmosphere, and the proximity to research universities. The bid didnt make the final cut. But Milam Countys long-shot attempt landed in The Wall Street Journal.About the same time, Rockdale High School won a state football championship, its first since 1976, rallying from a 21-0 deficit in the title game. Building permits increased in 2017 and 2018 as sprawl from Austin marched east. Sales tax and property tax revenues rose in 2018. At the heart of the increased optimism was reuse of the Alcoa property.The route to Alcoa passes from Rockdales picturesque rolling hills and wildflowers to a far grimmer site. I went on a gloomy April morning after a rainstorm. Near the entrance to the facility, five or six black vultures brunched on roadkill. A dozen more perched on the side of the road. Behind a steel fence, a mountain of aluminum debris sat near the potrooms.But the site couldnt have looked more promising for Bitmain, which had noticed Milam County in part because of the Amazon bid. The smelter featured more than a dozen potrooms, each a few hundred yards long. Clore first learned in February 2018 that someone was interested in the property. For a while we didnt know what kind of company it was, she says. In economic development you work in code names.Bitmain went by Dory Creek, apparently chosen to align Bitmains AntMiner machines with the Dorylus, a large breed of African ant. Dory Creek notified Clore it was working on a project that would create 400 to 600 jobs. When she inferred that Dory Creek was involved with crypto-mining, based on its electricity needs, Clore talked to officials in other communities with mining operations. They told her mining sites typically employed fewer than 15 people, nothing near 400. But Clore wasnt deterred, even after Bitmain revealed itself in the summer of 2018. She sought and received assurances about job creation, because of the size of the facility: Theyre like, No, this is going to be the largest data center in the world.The operation would accommodate an estimated 325,000 mining computers, dwarfing Bitmains other facilities combined. According to former Bitmain employees and Milam County officials, the company was negotiating to pay 3 to 4 cents a kilowatt-hour for electricity, about half the average for an industrial client in the area and among the lowest in the country. It seemed like the countys rebuilding efforts were paying off.Mike Brown, the longtime editor of the Rockdale Reporter, broke news of the plan on July 19. Strike up the band and have it play Happy Days Are Here Again, he wrote. Charles Miles, a rare Rockdale millennial and owner of Miles Styles barber shop, thought some of his many friends who had left for better job opportunities would have a reason to move home. Clore started fielding phone calls from tech entrepreneurs. Bitmain pledged to work with vocational programs and retraining schools for tech jobs. It hired Perry & Perry, a local construction firm, and scheduled a fall job fair to find employees for a planned 2019 opening.At the Rainbow Courts Motel, the Ratliffs saw business pick up from Bitmain employees and out-of-town contractors. They hoped for a return to the Alcoa days. We were really hoping the business travel would ramp up because of it, Joan Ratliff says.On August 13, the Milam County Commissioners Court approved a 10-year tax abatement for Bitmain, under which the company would get an 80 percent property tax discountfor the first five years. With the abatement, Milam County still would have collected an average of $700,000 in taxes per year for 10 years from the planta boon for a county that takes in about $12 million annually. The abatement agreement promised no less than 350 jobs, with 140 scheduled to come in 2019.Young says Bitmain had also considered the sites of former Alcoa smelters in Tennessee and New York but received a chilly response. So when we heard they were looking at us, we embraced that, he says. We let them know the first chance meeting them, We want you here.Young had been a lawyer in Houston for many years before retiring to Milam County to serve as a public official. He lists his phone number on his Facebook page, Moving Milam Forward. He campaigned on a message about building a future and putting Milam Countys lost decade in the past. Things were getting better: the swagger of the Amazon bid, the state championship, higher property values, now Bitmain. The company seemed to embrace Rockdale, too. Kyle and site operations manager Todd Dougherty attended Lions Club and Rotary meetings.Price Plunge Even as Rockdale welcomed Bitmain, the foundation of the mining operation was eroding. Bitcoins value steadily declined throughout 2018. In the fall, the drop accelerated; from November 12 to December 16, the value of a bitcoin fell roughly by half, to $3,195, from $6,327, making it hard for even professional miners with cheap electricity to earn a profit. An estimated 600,000 mining machines worldwide were unplugged. The hash rate, which is the total computing power used on the blockchain, declined by 13 percent. Bitmain, with its revenue tied to mining activities, lost $500 million in the third quarter, according to CoinDesk.Progress slowed at the Rockdale site, where a few hundred mining computers had been installed. Dozens of new employees were supposed to be hired each month at the end of 2018 as the facility ramped up, but a hiring freeze around November kept the staff at 14. Clore says Bitmain kept delaying the job fair. Upgrading the substations and renovating the potrooms proved trickier and more expensive than projected. Previously, when Bitmains North American employees looked to China for funding, they joked that all they had to do was send an email. Now, requests went unfulfilled.In early January, Young heard that Bitmain would close the mining facility before it had ever gone online. He tried contacting Kyle. But when Young reached the VPwho had dined on barbecue at his ranch months earlierhe found that Kyle didnt know anything either: He had already been laid off. I didnt know who to talk to, Young says. I had no clue what was going on.Former employees estimate that 80 percent of Bitmains 3,000 workers lost their jobs in December and January, including about 200 of 250 people who worked in North America. Nine of the 14 employees in Rockdale were let go. This spring, Bitmains IPO filing lapsed on the Hong Kong exchange. Rumors of impending bankruptcy swirled in the crypto community on Twitter and Reddit.This town, this community, this county really needed something uplifting.Joan Ratliff, motel ownerThe company would not confirm the number of jobs lost. Spokesperson Nishant Sharma referred to a Bitmain statement published in March that said the company had adjusted our personnel at the end of 2018. It was a difficult but necessary decision as we continue to build a long-term, sustainable and scalable business, the statement said.In early 2019, Young says, three Bitmain executives, including two from China, visited Texas. Instead of one of the largest bitcoin mining facilities in the world, they offered a nebulous new plan: Bitmain now expects to start mining operations later this month with what Rockdale officials believe will be 20 to 40 workers.Kelly Ballew, who grew up in Milam County, has been working at the site as a facilities manager, but Bitmain declined WIREDs request for a tour. Sharma also declined to discuss specific plans for the site, including the number of jobs or capacity of the facility. Like many companies, changes need to be made in order to be successful, Sharma says via email. Downsizing of the facility was necessary to keep up with the changing market demand.The tax abatement was never finalized. Clore told Bitmain executives they no longer qualified, because it was based on the job projections.At the Rainbow Courts Motel, the Ratliffs realized something had changed when Bitmain employees stopped booking rooms without explanation in late December. The Ratliffs are no longer counting on an infusion of weekday business travelers. It was disappointing and upsetting, Joan Ratliff says, because this town, this community, this county really needed something uplifting.Views of downtown Rockdale, with its numerous vacant storefronts.Crypto Winter Crypto winter struck elsewhere too, sabotaging many of the economic promises made during the gold rush. In November, central Washingtonbased mining company Giga Watt filed for bankruptcy, ending its multimillion-dollar plans to host miners. Giga Watts staff had already been cut to 13, from 70.Coinmint began operating its facility at the former Alcoa plant in Massena last May. According to Prieur Leary, Coinmints chief technology officer, the company has 80-plus employees at the site. The facility was supposed to create 150 jobs by the end of this year. Leary says Coinmint has 40,000 mining machines operating and is installing 29,000 more.In recent months, the value of bitcoin has risen again, to more than $12,000. The hashrate rose 10 percent the first week of May, signifying a pickup in mining. But municipal leadersburned by unfulfilled promisesarent counting on a surge in jobs. I dont see how that is possible given the very low labor-to-capital ratio and the highly mobile capital upon which their industry is built, says Plattsburgh mayor Colin Read via email. His town lifted its moratorium but has seen scant interest from miners.In central Washington, Malachi Salcido, owner of the crytpo-mining firm Salcido Enterprises, estimates there are now about five big mining operations in the region, down from 50 to 60 at the height of the boom. He says the companys low labor cost has helped it survive. Other companies that operated in the region and tried to get to scale had 70 to 80 employees, he says. We were 50 percent larger and doing the same thing with 12. Salcido has lived in the region most of his life and says the bitcoin rush has had little enduring impact. Think about a parade that goes through town, he says. It makes a lot of noise and catches a lot of peoples opinion and then leaves. Theres no durable lasting change.Aside from bitcoin mining, central Washington has numerous data centers, fruit orchards, and wineries. Milam County is still searching for its break, but folks dont seem bitter about the experience. Clore keeps in touch with some of the Bitmain workers who had been planning the site. I was truly sad for them when they got laid off, she says.Young recently announced that a development group was marketing three tracts of land in the northern part of the county for solar farms that could generate about 600 megawatts of electricity. The total investment on the project is expected to be about $500 million. In May he convened an economic summit featuring McLane, a state representative, and an official from the governors office.They discussed how to attract new businesses. Whether youre selling feed for cattle or mining cryptocurrency, if the market goes sour youre just up the creek, he says. Going forward with this county, we cant tie ourselves to one group. We cannot be a one-company town kind of deal, and thats what happened here.In April, Young also took a phone call from a Canadian number. The caller said he represented a European company that wanted to inquire about a move to central Texas. The business? Crypto-mining.More Great WIRED Stories The second coming of the robot petThe infrastructure mess causing countless web outagesThe cypherpunks tapping bitcoin via ham radioDisneys new Lion King is the VR-fueled future of cinemaYouTubes shitty robot queen made a Tesla pickup truck Torn between the latest phones? Never fearcheck out our iPhone buying guide and favorite Android phones Hungry for even more deep dives on your next favorite topic? Sign up for the Backchannel newsletter

the FCA published two pieces of research: qualitative interviews with UK consumers and a national survey of 2,132 respondents last December.The survey showed that 7% of the respondents who haven’t bought any cryptocurrencies so far would consider it in the future. “We estimate that only 3% of the overall sample [have acquired cryptocurrencies],” the FCA said.Among other things, the survey also found out that over 70% of those surveyed haven’t heard of cryptocurrencies or didn’t know how to define one. Also, only 8% of all cryptocurrency owners completed ‘deep research’ before purchasing, with 16% doing no prior research. Around 40% of cryptocurrency owners expect to hold it for 3 or more years, while half of them report selling some or all of it already, the Authority said.However, when it comes to the qualitative interviews, it revealed some interesting personal stories that many in the cryptoverse could possibly identify with. “Consumers’ cynicism about mainstream news, their wider attitudes to life, and the sources of influence they were exposed to all played a significant role in shaping their decisions to purchase crypto assets and determining what they did with them once they had made purchases,” researchers concluded.Also, they claim that the majority of respondents purchased cryptoassets believing they were getting involved with what many of them described as ‘next big thing’ and trusted in the inevitable rise in value of their cryptoasset holdings due to the potential for future large-scale uptake of the technology.“These consumers had purchased cryptoassets without a strategy for divestment, and despite most of them purchasing cryptoassets that had lost value, they had not sold them,” researchers said.However, there is also a minority of respondents, which differed significantly in their attitudes to the trading and longer-term reliability of cryptoassets.Let’s take a closer look at each of the 17 stories:Abdul heard about cryptoassets while he was a student at secondary school in Northern Ireland. During his A-levels, he watched Bitcoin’s price rise. At that time, he decided he was “more interested in writing a business plan” than further study, so he chose not to attend university. At the time of the interview Abdul worked in Manchester running a business organising music events, and as a freelance graphic designer. Abdul first purchased and traded Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin in November 2017“ to get an understanding of things”. He relied on one “expert” friend for all his cryptoasset purchases and trading decisions. For example, after a tip from this friend, he purchased “a pre-market buy-in coin” Pareto PXT at £250, which he said had increased to £2,250. He sold some of this and used the rest to purchase the initial coin offering (ICO) indaHash. Abdul hopes to build his own understanding and ability to read price graphs, so he does not have to rely on his friend and can continue to supplement his income making profits on cryptoassets.___Kyle lives in Manchester where he is studying modern history with economics at university. Kyle “partied hard for a few years” but now runs the volleyball team and has stopped smoking cannabis, which has allowed him to have enough money to purchase cryptoassets. Before studying, Kyle worked as a broker in binary options. After graduating he hopes to work in either recruitment or sales. Kyle dealt with cryptoassets when he was 16 to purchase illegal drugs online, but it was “only when I was 20 or 21 when I saw it as an investment”. Kyle bought £1,100 worth of Bitcoin, Ripple, Tron, Excelen, Appcoin and Elastos with his student loan in January 2018. His purchase was made “at the worst possible time” by his own admission, as the value of Bitcoin plummeted just a few weeks later.___Neil is a personal trainer who works part time. After dropping out of university due to concerns about his student debt, he now lives at home with his mum and sister. He works as an Uber Eats driver to supplement his income and is hoping to grow his personal training clientele in the next six months. In his spare time, he likes to take up new hobbies such as cooking or different fitness classes. Neil first heard about cryptoassets and Bitcoin when he read an article about the dark web. In March 2017 he bought £2,000 worth of Bitcoin with all his savings. In 2018 he took some money out of Bitcoin and spread it into a bundle of eight ICOs. When he was interviewed he was waiting for his holdings to grow–at the time they reportedly stood at £500.___Luke lives in Birmingham with his girlfriend and young children and is a partner in an independent tattoo studios business. He also runs an online clothes company. Luke had previously invested in Forex, losing £200, which he said he was comfortable with because he was learning to trade and anticipated the risk. Luke is aware that he does not know much about cryptoassets but wanted to be involved “before it gets mainstream”. He says he is always trying out new things and new investments and received much of his advice from two online influencers, one of which he considers a “mentor”. Luke purchased £1,200 in cryptoassets, which at the time of the interview he valued at £1,620. He is currently holding Bitcoin and Litecoin and previously also purchased Ethereum.___Angela lives with her boyfriend in a house they own together in London. She works in HR for a luxury fashion company and hopes to be promoted to a senior HR role. Angela had read about the rapid rise in value of cryptoassets in newspapers and magazines such as Business Insider, the New York Times and the Independent. She has several friends who work in ‘financial services’, who would talk about investments in cryptoassets and stories of others making gains–something that “made it seem much more legitimate”. For her, the catalyst for investing was when her company hired a new temporary director who had purchased cryptoassets, who shared his view that Litecoin was the next cryptoasset to increase in price. Angela purchased two Litecoins at £650, deciding not to consult her boyfriend or peers who knew more about the market:“I wanted to feel like I did it on my own.” She felt that Bitcoin was a “safer investment” but couldn’t afford to buy a “whole one”, so instead preferred to buy two whole Litecoins.Her purchase fell quickly, and at the time of the interview was worth £86 in total. Angela regrets her decision to buy cryptoassets: “I only did my research after I had already bought them, which is when I started reading about how a lot of people created ‘hype’ around particular cryptocurrencies.”___Ashton has recently moved out of his parents’ house to his own rented house and is working as a musician in a wedding band. He reports that another ‘job’ is daily spread betting from which he makes around £500 per month. Ashton started purchasing cryptoassets in March 2017. He had heard about Bitcoin and was intrigued by stories of people becoming multimillionaires. However, he thought he had missed his chance and was instead investing in the S&P500 Index. He then moved all his savings (£13,000) to Ethereum after he saw some comments on Investopedia. After six months of poor results with Ethereum he moved all his value to XRP (Ripple), as he thought he could get better returns. In December Ripple’s value increased sharply and Ashton said his purchase was worth £150,000. However, he didn’t sell until he had lost 90%of his portfolio value. In April 2018 he decided to diversify his portfolio and acquired another six types of cryptoasset. He believes that it will “pull through” one day, and that he will be able to retire early as a millionaire in the next few years.___Fred lives in London in a shared flat and is working as a video content creator for a tabloid newspaper. He received some inheritance money a couple of years ago, which is in a current account and he is not sure what to do with it. He has been researching hedge funds on Google to work out how to invest his money. Fred first heard about cryptoassets from his brother who had purchased some. However, his decision to purchase some came after talking to a taxi driver, who said he had put himself through college with profits from “investing” in cryptoassets. Fred purchased £300 spread across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, which he said at the time of the interview was now worth £95. Fred regrets his decision to purchase cryptoassets, and believes it was a bad idea: “Looking back I am ashamed of my investment and losing money.”___Rick dropped out of university after two years because he felt “it was a waste of time”. Since then he has worked in insurance and real estate, and now works part-time at his family’s company, which imports and distributes electric parts. He is also doing an online business course and says his future looks “dire, but education is the light at the end of the tunnel”. He lives with his parents. Rick became interested in cryptoassets because they were “the word around town” – his friends were talking about how they could be a way to make a lot of money. In early 2017 he bought £350 of Ethereum and Litecoin and later traded it all for Cardano and Tron. In late 2017 he valued his cryptoassets at £1,500 but he did not cash out because he thought they would grow even more. Rick reported that his portfolio’s value fell to £500, when he decided to keep his cryptoassets and wait for them to regain value in the future. Rick also convinced his parents and girlfriend to buy Cardano – which he felt to be the “safer option”.___Damien lives in Brighton with his wife and two young daughters. They plan to become debt-free in the next year and apply for a mortgage. Damien also hopes to run his own post-graduate course. Damien became involved in cryptoassets after being invited by a friend to an event run by ‘Omnia’, a multi-level selling and trading system for cryptoassets. He then joined the Trading Coin Club, through which he bought and traded ‘TCoin’. He initially purchased £700 worth of TCoin, which at the time of interview was valued at £500. Damien has decided to make further cryptoasset purchases and is “looking into buying a bundle”, as he believes that “with cryptos it’s now or never”.Elena moved to England from Bulgaria last year to pursue a career as a writer. She is “comfortable financially” from her previous work in marketing and she works part-time in an admin role at a local orthodontist surgery. Elena has a relatively long history with cryptoassets as she previously worked as a marketing director for one of her friend’s ICOs. Elena knows how external influences can drive market movements, therefore affecting cryptoassets’ value. Elena has purchased many cryptoassets and recently bought Polkadot with €60,000, reporting a profit of €40,000. She valued her current cryptoasset holdings at €200,000 at the time of the interview. Her main influence is a friend whom she describes as a ‘genius’, and whom she believes is well connected to an ‘inner ring’ of cryptoassets influencers-such as founders of ICOs.___Justin is an artist and concept designer for film and TV. He switched careers 10 years ago from working in a bank. He loves his job, particularly as he’s not tied to a desk and can explore his passions for film, gaming and new developments in these fields. He likes to keep up with the news and follows a number of international channels. Prompted by his boss at the time, he invested in Orange shares in 2001 “without much research” and sold out five years later. Justin is convinced that cryptoassets will be the currency of the future. He compared them with the internet, saying that it too was only for experts at first, but has since exploded and is now a key part of people’s lives. He purchased £2,000 of various cryptoassets in several consecutive instalments using “money I could afford to lose”. He valued his portfolio at the time of interview at just under £1,500. Justin gets his news mostly from specialised online magazines such as Coindesk, CoinMarketCap and AMBCrypto.___Sandy lives in London with her partner and two sons. She works part-time as a book designer and home-maker. She learned about “financial investments” from her step-father and brother, who are “businessmen and love money,” and had experience of buying stocks in 2016. Sandy was first exposed to the cryptoassets world through mainstream newspapers such as the Guardian and the Independent. She purchased £2,000 of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, and at the time of the interview she said she had £800 in her holdings. Sandy says she “doesn’t care about the profit”, but rather is a big believer in “cryptoassets having a bright future”. She wants to have her “foot in the door” because of the promise she sees inthe technology.Maria used to work as an accountant in Portugal. She invested all her savings in a restaurant there in 2008 which went bankrupt. In 2014 she moved to London seeking a well-paid job, and since then has been working as a cleaning lady and cookin the care home where she lives. Maria first heard about cryptoassets on Portuguese news channels in January 2017, which she says suggested that buying them would be “the best investment you will ever make”. Maria bought £100 worth of Ethereum because Bitcoin was too expensive, and she couldn’t “buy a whole coin”. Initially when she was making money she “was really excited and checked it once or twice a day. But after it started to fall I stopped looking, now I only check it once a month”. She said at the time of interview that the value of her purchase dropped to £17. However, Maria recently bought £5 in Ripple after seeing adverts on the Facebook page of an e-money provider she subscribes to and has an account with. She hopes cryptoassets will pick up again and make her a lot of money in the future.___Karina lives on her own and works as a police officer on a knife crime team. In her spare time, she is completing a degree in English language. She holds shares at the value of £500 in Lloyds and TSB, which she received from her mum. Karina first came across cryptoassets after reading a tweet by a music artist who was allowing purchases of his album with Bitcoin. Later she was influenced by the mainstream media to purchase Ethereum, Bitcoin and Litecoin at £1,500 in August 2017 – she felt that the media’s message was “get on the boat now or you won’t be getting on it at all”. She reported that her purchase increased by £700, at which point she sold her initial crypto-asset purchase and has kept the increase.Karina was influenced to divest her initial purchase by the media when she found they no longer predicted price increases in Bitcoin but focused on when it would crash. She considers herself lucky not to have lost money, but now wants to watch the market from afar and is not planning any future purchases of cryptoassets.___Eric recently graduated with an MPhil in microbiology and has been looking for a job since May. He and his wife have lived in Aberdeen for 10 years. Eric is extremely well informed about technology: he has been learning about computer software since he was nine years old, and coding is one of the hobbies he is passionate about – as well as offline and online video games. He started by purchasing £1,500 worth of assets in Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano and Tron in September 2017 to “assess their development”. A month later he exchanged it all forTron and Cardano. He suggested that Tron was a “good short-term investment” because it had a “great PR strategy” and hence a “profitable hype around it”. He concluded that Cardano was instead a good “long-term investment” because of the technology it supported. Six months after his first purchase Eric cashed out £11,000, which contributes to his living expenses.___Jake lives near York with his wife, after his two adult children left the family home. He is interested in financial products in general and has invested in both shares and gold in the past. He wants to “build a financial future” for him and his wife, as they have faced some big medical expenses lately and he’s concerned about his pension. Jake became interested in cryptoassets because the financial publications and newsletters he follows (e.g. Creating Wealth and The Palm Beach Daily) started featuring blockchain. He sees cryptoassets as a “short term investment”, as he thinks that “the market is still in its infancy” and therefore unpredictable. He only trusts Bitcoin, as he thinks the other cryptoassets will simply follow the same trends, and he’s suspicious about the number of new tokens appearing. He purchased Bitcoin six times in the past 18 months (£500/£1,000 at time), reportedly selling each time after making a 200% profit. He cashed out when he saw market trends declining. While he doesn’t rule out buying again, he said he would do so when he sees the start of a new positive trend.___Nick is a college student living with his parents and working part-time. He is studying business and wants to get an apprenticeship in London. He saved money for two years which he recently used to buy a car, of which he is very proud. He describes his iPad, iPhone and car as his “assets.” Nick is heavily influenced by ‘celebrity’ investors he follows on social media, who post about making lots of money by investing in cryptoassets. Nick believes: “If you are brave enough to risk the gamble then you can make lots of money, but you are more likely to lose money.” Nick came across cryptoassets for the first time when he was 10 years old. He needed Bitcoin to buy a “football team for my FIFA videogame”. Currently he wants to buy cryptoassets but has spent his money on his car, so is waiting until he is able to save up enough again.

post-ICOs battling for investment. Strong projects will be rewarded and with an emphasis on authenticity, knowledge and education. The summit, taking place from the 19-20 February at Limassol’s Carob Mill, will welcome some of the industry’s brightest minds from researchers and CEOs to crypto bloggers and tech experts. So, with this in mind, here’s 5 Nakamoto’s Den Speakers we can’t wait to see. We just love a seminar with straight talking On Yavin scheduled to appear. An online marketing expert for the blockchain, crypto and technology space, On Yavin understands the hard-work and detail needed to execute winning strategies in these fields. On Yavin is the Founder and CEO of Cointelligence, a company that conducts essential research and analysis for the ever-changing crypto economy. When it comes to the advancement of crypto and blockchain tech, Yavin is a thought-leader with a significant contribution to make. He’s therefore sure to offer plenty of intelligent insights when he joins the panel at Nakamoto’s Den. The Contentworks Agency team caught up with On who commented: With Cyprus proving to be another important hub for blockchain and crypto developments, I am really looking forward to speaking at Nakamoto’s Den and meeting the crypto community there. Alexis Nicolaou is certainly one to look out for at the eagerly anticipated conference. As well as being the Director responsible for Grant Thornton Cyprus’ Distributed Ledger Technology services, Alexis Nicolaou is also currently completing his MSc in Blockchain and Digital Currencies at the University of Nicosia. This is a first-of-its-kind course offering up-to-date information and guidance that can be readily applied in today’s advancing crypto sphere. Mr Nicolaou has also been involved with numerous  technology start-up projects. He brings over 25-years of C-Suite experience in the accounting, finance, media, content production and electronic banking sectors to the panel. Alexis told us: It is a pleasure and an honour to be invited to speak at Nakamoto’s Den. An event that promises to put Cyprus in the forefront of blockchain developments, at a time when the Cypriot Government is also formulating its strategy for the adoption of the technology at public and private level. A crypto and blockchain entrepreneur, Toni Lane Casserly co-founded CoinTelegraph.com. A site which focuses on news and analysis from the blockchain/crypto/finance sector and CULTU.RE which seeks to revolutionise the governance of business. She’s an Advisor to many notable companies, funds and family offices including The United Nations, HSBC, Bosch and Cisco. With such hands-on experience, Toni Lane Casserly is a panel member we can’t wait to take notes from. Nakamoto’s Den seeks to educate and enlightening those with a fascination for advanced technology. Theodosis Mourouzis will share a wealth of knowledge comprised from his career as a Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies and Programme Director of the MSc in Business Intelligence and Data Analytics at the Cyprus International Institute of Management. He is also the Managing Director of Cyprus Blockchain Technologies LTD and therefore has first-hand experience of this very fast-moving sector. Robby Schwertner also known as CryptoRobby is a notorious blogger with a passion for the crypto sector and blockchain start-ups. The very nature of his job requires him to keep his finger on the pulse and as a regular speaker at blockchain conferences around the world, he’s sure to make an eloquent and well-informed contribution to the panel. Robby Schwertner’s crypto insights are published globally with his LinkedIn profile having a large following. The panel at Nakamoto’s Den is extensive and these are just a few of the many contributors we’ll be heading along to see. At Contentworks we’re thrilled to be Media Partners for this event and can’t wait to network with like-minded people. If you’d like to arrange a meeting during the conference to discuss blockchain  marketing, please contact us today. BlockchainCryptocurrenciesEventsTeamTech Influencers Rate this article (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Contentworks > The Content Bar > Tech > Nakamoto’s Den Speakers We Can’t Wait To See

was the chief executive of crypto hardware manufacturer Bitmain, has been entirely silent on Twitter and hasnt shown his face at any industry events.While some suggested that he threw in the towel, catalyzed to quit due to the 80% correction in the Bitcoin price, new reports say that Wu is coming back. And he is coming back with something up his sleeve.Meet Matrix, a Crypto OTC PlayPer a report from The Block, which cited sources close to the cryptocurrency heavyweight, Wus startup will be launching in the coming 30 days. Matrix will purportedly be a multi-faceted crypto services business, which will focus on asset management, custody, and over-the-counter (OTC) liquidity provision for its institution-grade clients.This confirms a March report from CoinDesk and Primitives Dovey Wan, who both stated that Matrix will be a services provider for crypto firms and those looking to delve into this space.According to one source, Bitmain, in an odd twist of fate, will be Matrixs first notable client. Whats odd about this is that Wu was rumored to have left Bitmain, of which he still owns a purported 20.5% stake in, on bad terms, with some stating on Twitter that he and his compatriots on the firms C-suite disagreed on certain subject matters.Regardless, The Blocks sources state that Matrix will likely provide Bitmain with custodial and lending services, presumably for the mining firms large (and ever-expanding) Bitcoin stash and its expansion plans.One familiar with the matter even stated that Matrix, with Bitmain in tow, may even become the biggest OTC desk and asset-manager overnight, noting that the desk of Wus new company should have access to liquidity not seen before in the industry.Further contradicting the reports of a bureaucratic tussle, a source said, relations are great between the two.Aside from Bitmain, it is unclear if Matrix has secured any relationships with other firms, yet it is believed that the company is in active discussion with prospective clients globally.Likely to be a Successful VentureData suggests that Matrix may see widespread success with its OTC offering, which gives an opportunity for miners to cash out and institutions to cash in without causing wanton volatility in the underlying cryptocurrency market.Reported by The Trade last week, upwards of 60% of all cryptocurrency trades made in 2018 were related to the OTC market, which is a figure that executives like Binances Changpeng Zhao have cited before. With so much of the Bitcoin market being predicated on back-room deals, Matrixs entree into institutional services will likely gain traction and mature the market greatly.Whats more, Matrix will likely be focusing its sights on China, which is where it has the largest sphere of influence due to its Bitmain roots. Qiao Wang of Messari explains that while regulated cryptocurrency trading is banned in China, he believes that the largest Bitcoin market in the world is OTC in China. With there being few respected players as it stands, the introduction of Matrix is unlikely to go unnoticed.I have a growing belief that the largest Bitcoin market in the world is OTC in China.This market is incredibly opaque, and that's what makes analysis of relationships between macro and Bitcoin so difficult.Highly recommend this Bitmex piece on China: https://t.co/HlJqlofX2z Qiao Wang (@QWQiao) May 27, 2019Matrixs sudden launch comes as Bitcoin mining, Bitmains primary source of revenue, has seen a massive resurgence. As spotted by researcher Kevin Rooke, the mining difficulty of the Bitcoin network has recently hit an all-time high.Simultaneously, the blockchains hash rate has begun to near previous all-time highs, signaling that miners confidence is starting to return. This will likely bode well for Wus venture, which is seemingly partnered with Bitmain as aforementioned.Bitcoin mining difficulty has just hit an all-time high.The network is stronger than ever. pic.twitter.com/cWgMtQ5xZ3 Kevin Rooke (@kerooke) May 31, 2019Download our Free Cryptocurrency BooksSignup to download our eBook Collection.We will also send our weekly newsletter on a Friday lunchtime with the latest Crypto News & topics from Blockonomi. No Spam, ever.You will receive 3 books: Bitcoin, Ethereum & Lightning Network + All Future Books.You have Successfully Subscribed!

March 26, 2019, and released on the Unchained podcast. Listen to the episode on Unchainedpodcast.com, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Pandora, Soundcloud, TuneIn, iHeart, Overcast, Stitcher, and many other platforms. "Crypto Mom" certainly delivered on her reputation.In a fireside chat that I moderated, Cmr. Peirce (pronounced "purse") was as candid as one would expect a federal regulator to be. "A lot of resources are expended in just trying to figure out how you can be compliant with our rules," she said. Referring to reports that software developers do work-arounds to not run afoul of U.S. financial regulators specifically she said, "I hear that and I think, Wow, it’s sad to me that those resources can’t be spent in a more productive way. … It also makes me want to say, come talk to us, tell us where the pain points are and tell us what we could change so you wouldn’t have to engage in effort that ultimately you don’t think is serving investors.”She described the source of her seeming support or at least open attitude to the crypto industry, especially compared to the other SEC commissioners. "I really identify with some of what’s driving people in this space, which is a desire to look at the world with fresh eyes and say, are there things we can do things better?" she said.Mentioning that her area of influence is in the regulatory sphere, she said, "When I came to the SEC, one of the things I hoped to work on was, in general, the agency has not been great on innovation, so this was a natural area for me to be looking at."In discussing her well-known dissent to the SEC's decision not to approve the Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF, which is where much of her reputation as "Crypto Mom" came from, she explained why she disagreed with the decision. Part of it stemmed from her belief that it was based on concerns about the underlying markets, which is beyond the SEC's purview. Plus, she added, "I did think there was a whiff of merit regulation in this, which was essentially us saying, we don’t think this product will be good for investors. I don’t know whether that particular product or another exchange-traded product based on cryptocurrency will be good investors but I think investors can make that decision better than I can."Our interview also unpacked some of the mysteries of how the agency works. She described the process that occurs when something like an application for a Bitcoin ETF is submitted to the SEC, whether or not there's a lot of disagreement amongst the commissioners about how to regulate crypto, how much they work to persuade each other to come over to their side and whether Chairman Jay Clayton's opinion overrules everyone else's or whether majority rules.We also extensively covered initial coin offerings, in particular what will happen to the hundreds of ICO issuers that had initial coin offerings that look much like the ICOs that have already had enforcement actions against them, such as Munchee, Paragon and Airfox. Though things only trickle up to the commissioner level in certain instances, so she wasn't sure about what enforcement actions might be in the pipeline, she did urge any ICO issuers who think they fall in this category to self-report to the SEC, as Gladius did.Other topics we discussed include forthcoming SEC guidance for the crypto space, the Token Taxonomy Act and why she thinks the accredited investor requirement is "saying, wait a minute, you’re telling me I have to be rich in order to get rich?"In discussing how the SEC would regulate decentralized exchanges. Cmr. Peirce urged people creating such software to come talk to the SEC. However, she said, “I don’t want someone who’s written code to worry that she’s going to be blamed for something that someone else did with her code. I don’t want to outlaw writing code.”In response to the first pre-submitted question from the audience about whether or not U.S. financial regulators have so far been too zealous in regulating the crypto space (the questioner here stated the "ZERO legit projects" are based in New York specifically because of the New York Bitlicense), Cmr. Peirce responded, "generally, people who are in the regulatory community are sort of dismissive of the space in a way that misses that point, which is ... there’s real potential for us to change the way people interact with each other across the globe and to bring more people into our economy which is good for all of us as we draw in talent from more and more places into this area of crypto.... We also have to think about, are we preventing people from doing things that are beneficial for society were it not for our regulatory system?"To find out how she agrees with Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, a company famous for its regulatory arbitrage strategy, listen to the episode on Unchained.I’m a crypto/blockchain journalist and host of the Unchained and Unconfirmed podcasts. I’m working on a book about the history of the crypto space to be published by Pub...

the cryptocurrency boom at that time was still to happen. However, in the eyes of experts, this new coin initially had a number of advantages, and therefore it was accepted by the darknet markets of Alphabay and Oasis, after which followed a real price explosion of the Monero cryptocurrency.The main feature of this cryptocurrency was its complete anonymity. Therefore, today it is among the top three coins, with the help of which drug barons, distributors of prohibited entertainment, etc., can do their illegal work. In addition to Monero, Zcash and DASH are also in the top three of such anonymous digital assets.Bitcoin initially positioned itself as an anonymous cryptocurrency. However, in fact, it turned out that it is not. If you know who owns a particular Bitcoin wallet address, you can easily track every transaction. This situation does not suit the users who want the history of purchases and transactions to be kept secret, even if the address of the wallet suddenly becomes known to law enforcement agencies that can connect it to the identity of the owner.Therefore, the dark web needs the most anonymous cryptocurrencies, which allow excluding the tracking of expenses. This sparked an unprecedented interest in assets like Monero, DASH, and Zcash, which offered an unusually high level of anonymity. As a result of increased demand, the price of such coins began to rise. 👉MUST READ Grin and Beam Both Greatly Outperforming Monero and Zcash Monero was created by a group of enthusiast programmers who initially perceived the project as a hobby.At the heart of the encryption protocols used are the ideas of the American mathematician Bernstein.The American exchange Kraken was the first one to launch Monero trading. It introduced three pairs – XMR / BTC, XMR / USD and XMR / EUR.The supply of coins in the network is not limited. Initially, the number of XMR will be 18.4 million, which is supposed to be implemented until 2022. Then the system will be supported only by fans of mining. The search for a new unit will take 2 minutes, and the reward for the signature will be 0.6 XMR.Currently, XMR on the CoinMarketCap website ranks 13th among the most capitalized cryptocurrencies.Monero is a popular coin that is used quite a lot for private transactions. It sits in the top 20 by market capitalization and is not going to leave it. The coin has a long history, which demonstrates its popularity and value.Now one can see an increase in the number of companies and online stores supporting payments using Monero. This will influence the price of it. The biggest jump in the value of this coin occurred at a time when representatives of the Apple Store talked about the possibility of using it. At the same time, this payment instrument is more utilized by users for conducting exchange operations.As indicated by Kevin Rooke, a crypto-enthusiast from Toronto, at the start of September 2018, the platform had more than 25 thousand active addresses per day. This is a great indicator and a good sign, especially compared to most coins.Some experts consider virtual currency as a regular player in the cryptocurrency market. Many coins crashed in a couple of years, but not Monero.There is a point of view that the Bitcoin blockchain is becoming increasingly transparent, and this has caused the development of products with high anonymity. For example, Monero is becoming more and more active.However, we combined some factors that can adversely affect the price of XMR:Politicians of some exchange platforms (especially Japanese) ban anonymous cryptocurrency. In the near future, the introduction of AML and KYC procedures at exchanges may adversely affect XMR and its analogs.The fall of the market had a negative impact on the entire crypto-industry. Even the most stable cryptocurrencies on the market, for example, ETH and Ripple, suffered greatly.There are real cases of illegal use of Monero, in particular, the cases of AlphaBay, Shadow Brokers and WannaCry.According to Malte Moser, Kyle Soska, Ethan Heilman, and others, in their article “An Empirical Traceability Analysis in the Monero Blockchain” (2017), some XMR transactions had a potential vulnerability.Taking into consideration these facts, we predict that the price of the most popular anonymous digital asset can reach $100 in the first half of 2019, provided that the whole market starts its “bearish” trend. In conclusion, it can be assumed that the forecast for the XMR rate for 2019 gives great promise.Retail Row, a popular online gaming sales portal, including the famous Fortnite, has started to accept XMR as payment for its services. This was reported by Monero representatives on their Twitter account. Monero became the only cryptocurrency Retail Row decided to cooperate with, preferring it over serious competitors with higher capitalization — Ripple, Litecoin, and others. As reported, the company's security specialists insisted on this choice. This fact also adds points to Monero.Despite the fall in capitalization, the number of Monero network users is gradually increasing, and this is encouraging.All this means that the prediction of Monero’s price may well be different, but the vast majority of web users are interested in its growth. According to the analysts from Longforecast, the price will be in the range from $554 to $638 in April 2020 and up to 810-945 dollars by December 2020.Finishing the analysis of the Monero cryptocurrency, it is worth noting that it has great potential for growth in 2020-2025, which, by the way, is being observed right now. We should not forget that in comparison with Bitcoin, Monero is a younger project, which means that it has more potential for further growth.Against the background of a growing capitalization and an increase in the overall popularity of the cryptocurrency market, there is no doubt that the uptrend is about to come. Nowadays, one can get information about Bitcoin and Blockchain from everywhere. That could be forums, social media, and even books. This trend has become so popular that even directors have started to shoot movies about it. We selected the 10 best films about the main cryptocurrency so you can find that one which you would like the best.   Nowadays, one can get information about Bitcoin and Blockchain from everywhere. That could be forums, social media, and even books. This trend has become so popular that even directors have started to shoot movies about it. We selected the 10 best films about the main cryptocurrency so you can find that one which you would like the best.  With the beginning of cryptocurrency hype, documentary filmmakers are also interested in the blockchain and the opportunities it provides.However, few people know that there are documentaries that shed a realistic light on “digital gold” and describe their positive and negative sides without embellishment. We picked the top 10 films that describe the history of Bitcoin.This movie will give you the possibility to know better the earliest users of Bitcoin technology. It discusses the features of revolutionary cryptocurrency technology, and its potential and ability to change people's lives. Erik Voorhees, Gavin Andresen, and Charlie Shrem took part in the creation of this documentary.The film deeply analyzes the successes and falls experienced by the early users of the currency since Bitcoin was released in 2008. Throughout the film, its creators tried to find a so-called harmony between regulation and innovation. The movie reveals various points of view on topics related to Bitcoin, as well as talks about how technology pioneers contributed to the creation of blockchain technology. If you are passionate about innovation and legal regulation, you should definitely watch this film.It is a Dutch documentary that gives answers to questions about what Bitcoin is, how to pay with it and why it has become so popular. The film is focused on the speeches of crypto-enthusiast Roger Ver, who is called Bitcoin Jesus. He explains in detail how this currency operates. The movie mainly revolves around Ver, who has devoted his life to the promotion of the use of Bitcoin. It also analyzes the mining industry in China. Other prominent Bitcoin-angels, such as Andreas Antonopoulos, also appear in the film.Furthermore, the film focuses on the performance of Roger Ver in Japan, a country that is supposedly drawn to Bitcoin much more than others. If you would like to master your knowledge of Bitcoin, this film is clearly for you.This film was prepared specifically to answer lots of issues about Bitcoin that exist in the public space, including what Bitcoin is and what its consequences for society are. The creation and further development of the first form of digital currency is described here. Bitcoin is a currency that is not currently controlled by modern monetary institutions, but by people using it. “Magic Money” analyzes the origin of the currency and its key functions. It also addresses the point of whether this currency is really the solution for the whole society. The movie seriously investigates the mysterious origin of the revolutionary currency and what outcomes it may have for the future of our world.Unlike other similar films, it does not concern the history of cryptocurrency but rather its practical use. During the film, businessmen from different countries of the world express their opinions about Bitcoin as the main payment instrument. 👉MUST READ Best 10 Blockchain Books 2019: 10 Books You Should Read First The film was directed by Torsten Hoffmann and appeared in 2015.It explains the following features of digital assets:This film traces the evolution of money from the ancient times to Wall Street’s commercial centers.It is mentioned how Bitcoin is in many ways different from any other currency created in the history of mankind, and how it could blow up the minds of most people since the currency is decentralized and reliable from the point of view that it does not have official intermediaries and every user has the ability to independently monitor transactions within the network. Bitcoin challenges traditional banking and monetary systems. The producer of the film wanted to stress how much the new currency would violate the usual monetary systems we are all used to.Filmed in 2014, it is one of the first documentaries about Bitcoin and other coins. In this film, the author talks about how he has become interested in BTC and how, through participation in the Bitcoin community, he learned about the global influence of this breakthrough technology on our world.The essence of the picture is an optimistic view of virtual money. Here we consider the history and features of cryptocurrency. Special attention is paid to the personality of Satoshi Nakamoto, who managed to create the unique money that grabbed the attention of the whole world. The film tells about important events in the Bitcoin system, offers a more detailed overview of the virtual currency and its features. During the filming, interviews were given by many famous people, including the Winklevoss brothers, Vitalik Buterin and others. According to many experts, this film received the greatest publicity in the cryptocurrency environment and has many good reviews.“The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin” is a film that documents the unpredictable journey of Bitcoin. It covers all Bitcoin-related events that have ever led media headlines. 👉MUST READ Hollywood-Made “Crypto” Proves to Be Anti-Crypto Movie, Allegedly Sponsored by JP Morgan The film was released in 2016. This is a social test about the legal points of Bitcoin as a digital currency. The filmmakers went to Scandinavia, which they showed as an example of how applicable digital currency is in a person’s life. The film is a documentation of a social experiment. The authors of the film examined the question of how people are ready to use cryptocurrencies in everyday life.The movie captures moments of how cryptocurrency creates freedom from pre-established financial institutions, even for the average citizen of the country. It also demonstrates the benefits that consumers can derive from the use of revolutionary digital currency.From the name of the film alone, one can already draw conclusions about its features. The documentary movie tells about the life of young spouses who give themselves the task of living for three months using only the cryptocurrency. The main intrigue is that they started the experiment immediately after their wedding.The film consists of two parts that are related. The first tells about Bitcoin, the problems of using it, its features, and other aspects. In the second part, the young couple films their attempts to live on the cryptocurrency.“Life on Bitcoin” clearly showed how rarely cryptocurrency is found outside of large cities and how hard it is to convince vendors to accept Bitcoins as payment.This is a 53-minute documentary film. It conducts a detailed study of Bitcoin from the position of a participant in the global economic system. The film raises the question of whether the technology behind Bitcoin cryptocurrency can upgrade the modern world. In 2014, this tape was awarded in the nomination for “The most creative cinema.” 👉MUST READ Bitcoin Profit Review: Too Good to Be True The plot of this film is developing rapidly. It contains all the secrets associated with the emergence of Bitcoin, and also describes the fundamentals of technology, the political background and the ability of Bitcoin to transform the financial sector. In addition, the directors included the points of view different venture capitalists have on cryptocurrencies.The film tells the story of how the main cryptocurrency Bitcoin was created. Let Satoshi Nakamoto remain anonymous, but the personalities of the people with whom he made his creation are well known. One of them, Gavin Andresen, talks about his experience of communication with Nakamoto. He explains why the idea of ​​creating Bitcoin is ingenious, and how it fundamentally differs from earlier cryptocurrency projects that remained unfulfilled.The movie shows the importance of BTC as a means of payment, as well as the uniqueness of the Bitcoin network from a technical point of view. In addition, the film tells the stories of Bitcoin-evangelicals Erik Voorhees and Trace Mayer.

highest level since May 21, 2018 and the price has seen an approximately fivefold increase since the beginning of this year. The rising price pushes the coin to the fourth place with a market value of more than $8.50 billion among the Top 100 cryptocurrencies, followed by BCH and EOS. Considering the recent performance of LTC, its scheduled August halving may stir waves in the crypto world. In an exclusive interview with CoinNess, Litecoin Foundation board member and core developer WANG Xinxi shed light on probable price and hashrate changes of LTC as well as the current situation of the Litecoin Foundation, which was co-founded by WANG and Charlie Lee in 2017.Background Story WANG was doing a Ph.D. program when he first knew about Bitcoin. It was only until 2011 that he began investing in the then-novel digital asset and thus diving into the crypto world. Two years later, Litecoin drew his attention with a faster speed and lower cost of transfer. LTC, together with BTC, constituted WANGs early investment portfolio, the majority of which remains unsold.WANG made his decision to join the Litecoin community in 2016 while he could have become a Bitcoin developer.I think the Litecoin community was more focused on meaningful things, and thats what I want to do. The Bitcoin community, on the other hand, always found itself drown in political struggles and conflict of interest. People have already been tired of the tricks of WU Jihan and Craig Steven Wright, not to mention the BCH and BSV drama, WANG explained.Compared with Bitcoin, the Litecoin team was fairly small, but WANG believed the latter had a more promising future, making him more willing to contribute to.Road To Success Litecoin is considered the silver to Bitcoins gold. To some, however, this popular and impressive slogan was the only reason for the coins success. Was it?Charlie Lee defined Litecoin as a daily payment tool as it has a faster speed of transfer yet costs less. Bitcoin, with its security and stability, is more suitable to be a store of value. Instead of competing with each other, this means the two coins will develop in a complementary fashion based on their own sphere of competence, according to WANG.The lack of innovation is a prevalent gripe of Litecoin. Its core code was forked from Bitcoin except for adjustments to partial parameters and the adoption of Scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, a sequential memory-hard function requiring asymptotically more memory. This, in turn, brings Litecoin an undebatable value of being a test net of Bitcoin.May 11, 2017 saw the activation of SegWit at the block height of 1201536 on Litecoins mainnet, which spurred the Bitcoin communitys activating SegWit at the block height of 481824 in over three months on August 24 the same year, said LIAO Xiang, CEO of Litecoin mining hardware manufacturer LightningAsic and founder of BTG.WANG added, Litecoins piloting nascent technologies like SegWit actually means a lot for not only itself but also Bitcoin. The Lightning Network and Atom Swaps will even build a stronger and seamless connection between them. In other words, where a Lightning Network-powered Bitcoin payment is supported, Litecoin works in the same way.WANG also pointed out that Litecoin is much more than a test net, which should never have a market cap, and it is the multiple use cases that have pushed its market cap up to billions of US dollars.Do Something Meaningful And Make A Difference Charlie Lee previously revealed that the annual budget of the Foundation is no more than $100,000, with a large portion from donations and commercial incomes.In fact, I had to pay the registration fee for the Foundation by myself. In addition to donations, we have been trying a couple of methods to raise money to maintain operations, for example, selling T-Shirts and hardware wallets, WANG said,adding that the Foundation once raised tens of thousands of US dollars, which turned millions in 2017 as the LTC price spiked but shrank quickly last year during the crypto winter. Having spent more than $100,000 in 2018s Litecoin Summit, WANG admitted that the Foundation has less than $200,000 in its pocket.The scale of a team largely depends on the capital it holds. The more funds it raised, the bigger the team could be and vice versa. Litecoin is of no exception. Most of the team members require nothing from the Foundation or earn a low wage at most, except two full-time workers COO Keith Yong with half of his original wage and developer Loshan T., WANG said.When asked whether a low wage level will disappoint team members and cause a negative influence on the Foundations operations, WANG firmly stated,No one in the team really cares about their wages regardless of being a full-time or part-time worker. We are here because we believe in Litecoin and that what we are doing is interesting and significant. My colleagues and I talk about the Foundation in a merry and light-hearted atmosphere every day.Since the beginning of 2019, the Litecoin Foundation has been reaching out to a range of possible collaborators and signed agreements with the K-Pop production company of C&U Entertainment Global, premier kickboxing league Glory, and leading crypto-friendly accommodation booking platform Travala. Currently, WANG is working with Rebecca Yang, the Chinese ambassador of the Foundation, on building a Litecoin community in China to deepen their engagement with Chinese LTC holders.While stepping up its efforts in making LTC serve more use cases, WANG in particular mentioned some upcoming big news of Litecoin within two months.But not now. We will make official announcements in due time, WANG added.LTC Price Striking Year-High, Is It Overrated? With the LTC price reaching its year-high levels recently, rumors have it that the coin has been overpriced.WANG gave his reply as follows:We cant control what other people think of us. Apart from the price, we are eyeing Litecoins long-term performance.He further explained that the BTC investor count is four times more than LTC; according to the network effect, the LTC market cap should have reached one-twenty-fifth of BTC.If the BTC price seems to be appropriate, how come the LTC price is exaggerated?Much is expected of the Litecoin halvings contribution to the LTC price, as history has taught us that such an event always tends to push up the price to a new record high.Prices are unpredictable, the Litecoin halving in two months will impact the LTC price for sure, though, WANG said.He further elaborated on three factors to influence the LTC price. First of all, the halving leads to a change in the inflation rate and breaks the balance between supply and demand, resulting in a price surge. Besides, the majority in the Litecoin community are eager to overweight LTC in their investment portfolios while having been looking forward to the hype around the halving. Community sentiment, in WANGs eyes, is the most essential point. Positive sentiment could push the LTC price to a sky-high; neutral or negative sentiment may cause nothing drastic. The price can grow in an irrational and unpredictable way, WANG stressed, adding that the current price might be the top considering how much it had gained in the past months.Besides the price, the hashrate change is worthy of attention. Litecoin will see its mining reward halved from 25 to 12.5 coins per block, which might lead to miners to cease operations, and then result in the increasing risk of 51% attacks.WANG, however, has never worried about that. The last halving in 2015 did lead to a decrease in hashrate, while the attack did not happen. Moreover, launching attacks on Litecoin, the fourth largest cryptocurrency, has not been easy. The halving, together with the LTC price, the miner price, mining technologies, and many others, will all play a role in Litecoins hashrate change. The launch of new mining machines such as Antminer L5 and Innosilicon A6 + with high hashrates may push up the network hashrate of Litecoin. In general, the hashrate may not decline necessarily, and there is little chance for a 51% attack, WANG said.Crypto enthusiasts are desperate to witness the upcoming event, and most of them want to make a killing through this chance. WANG, as the main figure behind Litecoin, cares more about the coins further development. His words revealed a firm belief in Litecoin throughout the interview. As he puts it:Litecoin is a promising coin, and we want to do something meaningful, making a difference in the world.Visit to get real-time crypto news.Altcoin Magazine (@Alt__Magazine) | TwitterThe latest Tweets from Altcoin Magazine (@Alt__Magazine). Our goal is to educate the world on crypto and ultimately totwitter.com

technology of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin? This article gives a brief explanation of the structure of the current money and payment system and the functioning of blockchain technology with Bitcoin as an example. It further elaborates on the advantages of DLT and its difference to the current design of the monetary system. The last chapter summarizes the different ways of how DLT can be used in our current money and payment system. The current monetary systemIn the current monetary system, commercial banks are the main provider of liquidity in the economy. They create money when they purchase securities, mostly when they make loans: banks purchase the signed loan contracts or other assets, recognize them as an asset in their balance sheet and credit the sum of the loan contract / the value of the asset in the account of the creditor / seller of the asset [1]. The crucial difference between commercial banks and non-banks is that banks are allowed to hold deposits of customers on their balance sheet as a liability and thus can create these deposits without having to finance a direct liquidity outflow [2]. Bank deposits are “account-based” money since they are always itemized in a bank account and thus in the balance sheet of a bank. The commercial banking sector uses a different type of liquidity, the so-called “reserves”. These reserves are created retrospectively by central banks when they buy securities from the banks after commercial banks have created deposits [3]. Banks need reserves to be able to transfer deposits to other banks and for converting them into physical cash, which can then be withdrawn. Cash is the only form of money that is “value-based”: It can circulate on a peer-to-peer basis while the central bank has no insights over who holds the cash. Cash has the status of legal tender. Bank deposits thus are a claim of a bank’s client on physical cash. However, these claims on physical cash are the main medium of exchange in our modern economies. The Bank of England for example, only creates 3%, whereas commercial banks create 97% of the total money supply in Great Britain [4]. According to the ECB Statistical Data Warehouse, the Euro is made up of around 13% Cash and 87% bank deposits. Besides physical cash, which can only be accessed when being withdrawn against bank deposits, central banks do not have a connection to the non-bank sector, the so-called “retail market”. Central banks’ main influence lies in the “wholesale market” (interbank market), in which banks trade with each other and settle transactions. Central banks do not control the quantity of reserves and therefore cannot control the quantity of money in the economy. They rather supply any amount of reserves demanded by the banking system at a given interest rate [3]. Therefore, the money supply can be extended limitlessly, which defines the so-called fiat currencies. By altering the interest rate at which banks can borrow reserves, central banks try to facilitate or exacerbate deposit creation by the banking sector since short-term interest rates on reserve loans influence all major interest rates in the market [5]. The main aim of monetary policy is to maintain a predefined inflation rate, mostly around 2%. Since cash yields zero interest, central banks effectively cannot push market interest rates below zero. This barrier is referenced as the “zero lower bound” and has been the main motivation for targeting a positive inflation buffer [6]. DLT-based crypto assetsThis highly complex monetary system is challenged by blockchain technology — a technology out of the family of new DLT. The first and most famous application is the Bitcoin network, which was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. It enables a digital, decentralized, peer-to-peer monetary system in which a digital value called Bitcoin can be transferred without the need for a trusted third party [7]. In the current monetary system, (central) banks act as trusted third parties that affirm that the sender of the money owns a greater or equal stock of money, that the money is transferred from the senders’ account to the receivers’ account and that any party cannot double-spend any money they hold. In the blockchain, all transactions are linked by cryptographically chaining bundles of transactions (blocks) to the previous block of transactions, which is also cryptographically chained to the previous block of transactions and so forth. This design ensures that the party that wants to spend bitcoins has to possess the respective amount of Bitcoins in the first place, either by receiving Bitcoins through a transaction or by receiving newly created Bitcoin as a reward for validating transactions. Most of the crypto asset schemes are designed as open and permissionless blockchains, in which anybody can participate and perform both of the following functions: firstly, use the system as a transfer mechanism and secondly, validate the transactions by participating in a worldwide proof of work mechanism (PoW) [8]. This mechanism is used by the majority of crypto assets and ensures that no one can double-spend any money or create money by implementing transactions from nowhere into his digital wallet. The PoW mechanism secures that the participants in the validation market only confirm valid transactions: They have to calculate an iterative computational puzzle, which consumes energy they have to pay for in fiat currencies. As a reward for this energy-intensive process, the validator that first solves the computational puzzle, which on average takes 10 minutes to be solved, receives newly created coins. The validators are therefore referred to as “miners” since they “mine” new tokens when they validate the transactions. If they worked on a validation of a block with invalid transactions, the other participants in the market would neglect the block and thus would not use it as the previous block to which a new block of transactions is linked to [9]. Advantages of DLTDLT brings enormous advantages: Fiat-backed stablecoins issued by the private sectorAn already existing way to transform fiat currencies via a DLT system is to tokenize fiat money deposited at banks or payment institutions. Each of these tokens must be backed by a currency unit deposited in the account of the cooperating payment institution. This is a 1:1 coverage, which is why such a token is also called a (fiat-covered) stablecoin. Holders of stablecoins must trust issuers that all tokens are fully covered by fiat money deposits and that they would actually “get paid out” their claim to fiat money in the same amount — even in situations of economic distress. Since 2019, the first companies have been using their e-money licence to issue a fiat-based regulated stablecoin, thereby bringing the “blockchain euro” into the real economy. These include the German start up Cash-on-Ledger and the Icelandic start up Monerium. Commerzbank has also conducted numerous test projects with the tokenization of the euro. However, the most famous stablecoin project is certainly Libra, which the Libra Association around Facebook’s subsidiary Calibra announced in the summer of 2019 and is scheduled to be launched in 2020. However, Libra is not designed to become a classic stablecoin backed 1:1 by a fiat currency, but by a basket of currencies consisting of various fiat currencies and short-term government bonds. As a result of intensive discussions with regulators and governments, it can be expected that Libra will not be implemented in the planned form and not at the planned time. It is more likely that significant conceptual changes will take place to meet the requirements of regulators and governments. However, the Libra shows how easily such stablecoins can be created and also stresses the advantages of using DLT in the context of payment systems, and is therefore largely perceived as a “game changer”. Central bank digital currenciesCentral banks are monitoring the crypto asset-sphere attentively and during the last years, various central banks around the world conducted their own research with respect to issuing an own digital currency (central bank digital currency, CBDC). By altering the design of the crypto asset-schemes from permissionless to permissioned distributed ledger systems, most disadvantages of the blockchain-design of private crypto assets like scalability issues and low transaction throughput can be eliminated. Moreover, CBDCs would comply with current regulation [11]. In such permissioned systems, the central bank would be the only party that can create new coins and accountable validators, such as national central banks or commercial banks, would validate the transactions [15]. Motivations for a CBDC issuanceOne motivation to use DLT in this context is that private crypto assets might not be able to break the strong network effects money has and thus will not bring mainstream adoption of this new innovative technology. Central banks or licensed stablecoins providers could use the trust and adoption of our current government backed fiat money to apply the new technology in form of a stable CBDC or as a private, regulated stable coin. Another rationale of implementing a DLT-based CBDC would be to update the decade-old infrastructure of the current payment system with its many intermediaries and clearing houses [8]. Currently, central banks do not see impairment in the effectiveness of their monetary policy by private crypto assets due to a lack of high transaction volumes, market capitalization and interconnectedness with the real economy. However, in the future, crypto assets that are more efficient or global stablecoins that are based on a basket of currencies like Libra could become an impediment for monetary policy [13]. The effectiveness of monetary policy will mainly depend on the interconnectedness of the private crypto asset economy and the FIAT-money economy. If the interconnection was weak and the replacement of bank deposits as a medium of exchange was large, central banks’ influence would diminish [16]. Securing monetary policy effectiveness by issuing its own CBDC would therefore be another reason to implement a DLT-based CBDC. Moreover, central banks currently play a minor role in providing a means of exchange for the general public since the vast majority of transactions takes place in bank money. Another reason to introduce a CBDC might therefore be to preserve central banks’ role as the issuer of a risk-free medium of exchange in case further digitalization drives out physical cash from being used [17]. Wholesale vs. retail CBDCWhile most of the advantages would counteract private crypto assets only if central banks used DLT in the retail market , they could start to use blockchain technology in the wholesale market (wholesale CBDC). Since DLT allows for easy upscaling, central banks could first widen their access to their balance sheet to all banks and possibly other financial institutions. This could bring an end to the current tiered-banking system, in which smaller banks must hold accounts at bigger banks which then hold the accounts at the central banks [14]. It would also provide higher efficiency, resilience, competition and less credit risk in the payment sector since all participants could settle their transactions and hold customer deposits in risk-free central bank money [18]. By using DLT in the wholesale market, 50–80% of the processing and bookkeeping costs are estimated to be saved due to the peer-to-peer transactions in the interbank market [19]. In order to realize the full advantages of DLT for every participant in the economy, central banks and academia currently discuss whether central banks should issue a DLT-based programmable form of digital central bank money not only for financial institutions, but for the general public (retail CBDC). Such a retail CBDC system can be designed in different ways. The different ways to implement a retail CBDC available to the general public is shown in Figure 1 (see below). Current retail CBDC projectsAmong others, the central banks of China, Sweden, Bahamas and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank intend to issue a DLT-based retail CBDC soon. The idea of providing non-banks with central bank accounts was advocated by James Tobin in 1987 and named as “Deposited Currency Accounts”. His motivation was to alleviate the moral hazard of banks that emerges due to the provision of bank deposit insurance by the state [20]. By providing a riskless, digital medium of exchange, the central bank would reduce the scope for moral hazard. DLT could help to efficiently provide accounts for anybody at the central bank. CBDC could even be designed like physical cash in a “value-based” fashion as a digital, riskless, medium of exchange which would counteract the decline in cash usage [6]. Furthermore, a retail CBDC could also be remunerated by bearing interest. This design would enable a new monetary policy instrument for central banks which directly influenced the holders of CBDC. If (high denominated) physical cash was abolished, interest bearing CBDC could circumvent the zero lower bound because it could bear negative interest rates. Furthermore, it would enhance the competitiveness of the banking system since CBDCs would directly compete against remunerated commercial bank deposits. However, If the interchangeability between commercial bank deposits and CBDC was given, a digital bank run could create a strong outflow of central bank reserves, forcing banks to hold a higher fraction of deposits backed by central bank money. This would indeed make bank deposits more secure but could in theory lead to an end of fractional reserve banking in which banks only refinance a small percentage of the money they create [18]. In fact, DLT enables central banks to be the sole issuer of money, like the Chicago Plan in the 1930s had foreseen [21]. In recent years, economists, activists and political parties campaigned for a modern version of Irving Fishers’ “100% Money” called “Sovereign Money”. Proponents of this structure of the monetary system contemplate to spend money into existence when the real economy needs additional money to grow — either via transfers from the central bank to parliament or via a citizens dividend [22]. Distributed ledger technology could facilitate this idea by tying money creation to the development of the real economy via smart contracts that automatically create new money when certain conditions are met [19]. The former chief economist of Deutsche Bank even beliefs that the introduction of such a 100%-CBDC system would bring a chance to restart the Euro as a more stable and future-oriented currency [23]. Among others, the former governor of the Spanish central bank believes that this transition could lead to a far more stable banking and financial system and could provide the reasoning for a dramatic liberalization of the banking sector which would foster competition between banks and Fintechs in the market for loans [24]. In order to prevent bank runs and a theoretical transition to a Chicago Plan-based monetary system, CBDC could be exclusively created via open market operations. In this option, the central bank would circumvent the commercial banks by buying securities such as government bonds directly from anybody who wants to hold CBDC. Prohibiting a direct conversion from bank deposits into CBDC prevents a drain in bank liquidity since bank deposits stay in the commercial banking sector — even if significant amounts of CBDC were used for transactions [25]. Alternatively, CBDC could be tiered into two differently remunerated types of CBDC. If a certain CBDC threshold is exceeded in the central bank account, the amount of CBDC above this threshold would bear zero or negative interest rates, making it unattractive to hold CBDCs in large quantities and as a store of value [26]. How can DLT change the current monetary system?As depicted above, there are various ways of using DLT in the current monetary system (see Figure 1): A digital currency can be issued either by a central bank or by a private organisation such as a bank, an e-money institution or even an unregulated organisation as a stablecoin. Also instead of a currency, money can be digital as well. Recall that a currency is a government-guaranteed mode of exchanging value. Money has the same goal of exchanging value but is not a government-enforced currency. A currency is the euro or the US-dollar, money can be Facebook’s Libra or any other means of exchange. Put differently, a currency is a “de jure” mode of exchanging value whereas money is a “de facto” mode of exchange. If a digital currency is issued by a central bank, it would be a digital central bank currency (CBDC). A retail CBDC could be issued directly by the central bank to the end customer (Direct model), could be distributed via banks to the end customer (i) as a claim against the bank (Indirect model) or (ii) as a claim against the central bank via escrow accounts (Hybrid model). As a third form of CBDC, a “machine CBDC” would also be possible, in which machines have access to the CBDC. Figure 1: Typology of programmable money (Source: own Illustration) ConclusionIn this article, we have shown the different ways of how DLT can be used to transform our current money and payment system into a more technological advanced, futuristic, reliable and safe system. DLT can provide tremendous benefits with respect to payment efficiency and settlement speed. Further DLT-based systems enable smart contracts that have the potential to automate business processes tremendously. We showed that either the private sector can make use of the technology and back the tokens on the blockchain by respective deposits, making it a private “Stable coin” or that the central bank itself could issue digital money that could then be transferred via DLT. In the last decade, the private sector has been very innovative in the use of DLT and has issued more than 5,000 crypto assets, e.g., Bitcoin, Ether and Co. In the last year, stable coins have received more and more attention. Stable coins are crypto assets that are backed by real assets, such as fiat currencies, government bonds or precious metals, to reach a high degree of price stability. Now it is time for central banks to participate in the process of innovating and digitizing the money and payment system. Central banks can use DLT to issue their own digital currencies (CBDCs) and insofar can make use of the features of DLT. RemarksIf you like this article, we would be happy if you forward it to your colleagues or share it on social networks. More information about the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center on the, on, or on. Prof. Dr. Philipp Sandner is head of the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (FSBC) at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. In 2018, he was ranked as one of the “Top 30” economists by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), a major newspaper in Germany. Further, he belongs to the “Top 40 under 40” — a ranking by the German business magazine Capital. The expertise of Prof. Sandner, in particular, includes blockchain technology, crypto assets, distributed ledger technology (DLT), Euro-on-Ledger, initial coin offerings (ICOs), security tokens (STOs), digital transformation and entrepreneurship. You can contact him via mail (email@philipp-sandner.de) via LinkedIn () or follow him on Twitter (). Manuel Klein is a consultant at a leading provider of financial data and analytic applications for investment management and investment banking professionals. Services are used by the top 10 global investment banks and 95 of the top 100 asset managers. Moreover, since 2015, he has been actively engaged at the NGO Monetative for which he has been giving speeches at several banks, conferences and universities both nationally and internationally. The NGO provides education about the structure and problems of the current monetary system and advocates a “100% CBDC”, “sovereign money” or “Vollgeld” system. You can contact him via mail (manuel.klein@monetative.de) or via LinkedIn (). Jonas Gross is a project manager and research assistant at the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (FSBC). His fields of interest are primarily cryptocurrencies. Besides, in the context of his Ph.D., he analyzes the impact of blockchain technology on monetary policy of worldwide central banks. He mainly studies innovations as central bank digital currencies (CBDC) and other crypto currency projects as “Libra”. You can contact him via mail (jonas.gross@fs-blockchain.de), LinkedIn (), Xing () or follow him on (Twitter Jonas__Gross). Bibliography[1] Deutsche Bundesbank, “Die Rolle von Banken, Nichtbanken und Zentralbank im Geldschöpfungsprozess,” Monatsbericht April 2017, vol. 69, no. 4, pp. 15–36, 2017. [2] R. A. Werner, “How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking,” International Review of Financial Analysis, vol. 36, no. C, pp. 71–77, 2014. [3] European Central Bank, “The relationship between base money, broad money and risks to price stability,” Monthly Bulletin May 2012, pp. 20–25, 2012. [4] M. McLeay, A. Radia, and R. Thomas, “Money creation in the modern economy,” Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 14–27, 2014. [5] Z. Jakab and M. Kumhof, “Banks are Not Intermediaries of Loanable Funds And Why this Matters,” Bank of England Working Paper Series, no. 529, pp. 1–57, 2015. [6] M. Bordo and A. Levin, “Central Bank Digital Currency and the Future of Monetary Policy,” NBER Working Paper Series, no. 23711, pp. 1–30, 2017. [7] S. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” 2008. [8] D. Mills et al., “Distributed Ledger Technology in Payments, Clearing, and Settlement,” Finance and Economics Discussion Series of the Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C., vol. 2016, no. 95, pp. 1–34, 2016. [9] R. Böhme, N. Christin, B. Edelman, and T. Moore, “Bitcoin: Economics, Technology, and Governance,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 213–238, 2015. [10] Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, “Distributed ledger technology in payment, clearing and settlement: An analytical framework.” Bank for International Settlement, 2017. [11] J. Koning, “Fedcoin: A Central Bank-issued Cryptocurrency.” R3-Reports, 2016. [12] European Central Bank, “Exploring Anonymity in Central Bank Digital Currencies” IN FOCUS, Issue №4, 2019 [13] R. Ali, J. Barrdear, R. Clews, and J. Southgate, “The economics of digital currencies,” Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q3, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 276–286, 2014. [14] R. Ali et al., “Innovations in payment technologies and the emergence of digital currencies,” Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q3, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 262–276, 2014. [15] G. Danezis and S. Meiklejohn, “Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies,” CoRR: Computing Research Repository, vol. abs/1505.0, pp. 1–14, 2015. [16] Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, “Digital Currencies.” Bank for International Settlement, pp. 1–21, 2015. [17] Sveriges Riksbank, “The Riksbank’s e-krona project,” 2017. [18] J. A. Ketterer and G. Andrade, “Digital Central Bank Money and the Unbundling of the Banking Function,” no. IDB-DP-449. Inter-American Development Bank, pp. 1–18, Apr-2016. [19] M. Raskin and D. Yermack, “Digital Currencies, Decentralized Ledgers, and the Future of Central Banking,” NBER Woking Paper Series, no. 22238, pp. 1–18, 2016. [20] J. Tobin, “The Case for Preserving Regulatory Distinctions,” Economic Policy Symposium Proceedings, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 167–205, 1987. [21] I. Fisher, “100% Money and the Public Debt,” Economic Forum, no. Spring Number, April-June 1936, pp. 406–420, 1936. [22] J. Huber, Sovereign Money: Beyond Reserve Banking, 1st ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. [23] T. Mayer, “To Save the Euro, Turn it Into a Digital Stablecoin,” Financial Times Online, November 18th 2019, (accessed on: 29.03.2020). [24] M. F. Ordóñez, “Adiós a los Bancos”, Taurus, 2020. [25] J. Barrdear and M. Kumhof, “The Macroeconomics of Central Bank Issued Digital Currencies,” Bank of England Working Paper Series, no. 605, pp. 1–90, 2016. [26] U. Bindseil, “Tiered CBDC and the Financial System”, ECB Working Paper Series, №2351, 2020. Written by

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: 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: In the 7th century, the Indian mathematician 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 —the most common means of symbolic number representation in the world today: When zero reached Europe roughly 300 years later in the , 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: 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 : 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 , as Aczel describes it: Drawing analogies to the : 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: 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: 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 (or the four corners of the ): 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 (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 —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 global hive-mind. Despite being discovered in a spiritual state, zero is a profoundly practical concept: perhaps it is best understood as a fusion of philosophy and pragmatism. By traversing across zero into the territory of negative numbers, we encounter the imaginary numbers, which have a base unit of the square root of -1, denoted by the letter i. The number i is paradoxical: consider the equations x² + 1 = 0 and x³ + 1 = 0, the only possible answers are positive square root of -1 (i) and negative square root of -1 (-i or i³), respectively. Visualizing these real and imaginary domains, we find a rotational axis centered on zero with orientations reminiscent of the tetralemma: one true (1), one not true (i), one both true and not true (-1 or i²), and one neither true nor not true (-i or i³): Going through the gateway of zero into the realms of negative and imaginary numbers provides a more continuous form of logic when compared to the discrete either-or logic, commonly accredited to Aristotle and his followers. This framework is less “black and white” than the binary Aristotelean logic system, which was based on true or false, and provides many gradations of logicality; a more accurate map to the many “shades of grey” we find in nature. Continuous logic is insinuated throughout the world: for instance, someone may say “she wasn’t unattractive,” meaning that her appeal was ambivalent, somewhere between attractive and unattractive. This perspective is often more realistic than a binary assessment of attractive or not attractive. Importantly, zero gave us the concept of infinity: which was notably absent from the minds of ancient Greek logicians. The rotations around zero through the real and imaginary number axes can be mathematically scaled up into a three-dimensional model called the. In this structure, zero and infinity are geometric reflections of one another and can transpose themselves in a flash of mathematical permutation. Always at the opposite pole of this three-dimensional, mathematical interpretation of the tetralemma, we find zero’s twin—infinity: The twin polarities of zero and infinity are akin to yin and yang — as Charles Seife, author of , describes them: In Eastern philosophy, the kinship of zero and infinity made sense: only in a state of absolute nothingness can possibility become infinite. Buddhist logic insists that everything is endlessly intertwined: a vast causal network in which all is inexorably interlinked, such that no single thing can truly be considered independent — as having its own isolated, non-interdependent essence. In this view, interrelation is the sole source of substantiation. Fundamental to their teachings, this truth is what Buddhists call dependent co-origination, meaning that all things depend on one another. The only exception to this truth is nirvana: liberation from the endless cycles of reincarnation. In Buddhism, the only pathway to nirvana is through pure emptiness: Some ancient Buddhist texts state: “the truly absolute and the truly free must be nothingness.” In this sense, the invention of zero was special; it can be considered the discovery of absolute nothingness, a latent quality of reality that was not previously presupposed in philosophy or systems of knowledge like mathematics. Its discovery would prove to be an emancipating force for mankind, in that zero is foundational to the mathematized, software-enabled reality of convenience we inhabit today. Zero was liberation discovered deep in meditation, a remnant of truth found in close proximity to nirvana — a place where one encounters universal, unbounded, and infinite awareness: God’s kingdom within us. To buddhists, zero was a whisper from the universe, from dharma, from God (words always fail us in the domain of divinity). Paradoxically, zero would ultimately shatter the institution which built its power structure by monopolizing access to God. In finding footing in the void, mankind uncovered the deepest, soundest substrate on which to build modern society: zero would prove to be a critical piece of infrastructure that led to the interconnection of the world via telecommunications, which ushered in the gold standard and the digital age (Bitcoin’s two key inceptors) many years later. Blazing a path forward: the twin conceptions of zero and infinity would ignite the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment — all movements that mitigated the power of The Catholic Church as the dominant institution in the world and paved the way for the industrialized nation-state. The universe of the ancient Greeks was founded on the philosophical tenets of Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Ptolemy. Central to their conception of the cosmos was the precept that there is no void, no nothingness, no zero. Greeks, who had inherited their numbers from the geometry-loving Egyptians, made little distinction between shape and number. Even today, when we square a number (x²), this is equivalent to converting a line into a square and calculating its area. Pythagoreans were mystified by this connection between shapes and numbers, which explains why they didn’t conceive of zero as a number: after all, what shape could represent nothingness? Ancient Greeks believed numbers had to be visible to be real, whereas the ancient Indians perceived numbers as an intrinsic part of a latent, invisible reality separate from mankind’s conception of them. The symbol of the Pythagorean cult was the pentagram (a five-pointed star); this sacred shape contained within it the key to their view of the universe—the golden ratio. Considered to be the “most beautiful number,” the golden ratio is achieved by dividing a line such that the ratio of the small part to the large part is the same as the ratio of the large part to the whole. Such proportionality was found to be not only aesthetically pleasing, but also naturally occurring in a variety of forms including nautilus shells, pineapples, and (centuries later) the double-helix of DNA. Beauty this objectively pure was considered to be a window into the transcendent; a soul-sustaining quality. The golden ratio became widely used in art, music, and architecture: The golden ratio was also found in musical harmonics: when plucking a string instrument from its specified segments, musicians could create the , a dual resonance of notes said to be the most evocative musical relationship. Discordant tritones, on the other hand, were derided as the “devil in music.” Such harmony of music was considered to be one and the same with that of mathematics and the universe—in the Pythagorean finite view of the cosmos (later called the Aristotelean model), movements of planets and other heavenly bodies generated a symphonic “harmony of the spheres”—a celestial music that suffused the cosmic depths. From the perspective of Pythagoreans, “all was number,” meaning ratios ruled the universe. The golden ratio’s seemingly supernatural connection to aesthetics, life, and the universe became a central tenet of Western Civilization and, later, The Catholic Church (aka The Church). Zero posed a major threat to the conception of a finite universe. Dividing by zero is devastating to the framework of logic, and thus threatened the perfect order and integrity of a Pythagorean worldview. This was a serious problem for The Church which, after the fall of the Roman Empire, appeared as the dominant institution in Europe. To substantiate its dominion in the world, The Church proffered itself as the gatekeeper to heaven. Anyone who crossed The Church in any way could find themselves eternally barred from the holy gates. The Church’s claim to absolute sovereignty was critically dependent on the Pythagorean model, as the dominant institution over Earth—which was in their view the center of the universe—necessarily held dominion in God’s universe. Standing as a symbol for both the void and the infinite, zero was heretical to The Church. Centuries later, a similar dynamic would unfold in the discovery of absolute scarcity for money, which is dissident to the dominion of The Fed—the false church of modernity. Ancient Greeks clung tightly to a worldview that did not tolerate zero or the infinite: rejection of these crucial concepts proved to be their biggest failure, as it prevented the discovery of calculus—the mathematical machinery on which much of the physical sciences and, thus, the modern world are constructed. Core to their (flawed) belief system was the concept of the “indivisible atom,” the elementary particle which could not be subdivided ad infinitum. In their minds, there was no way beyond the micro barrier of the atomic surface. In the same vein, they considered the universe a “macrocosmic atom” that was strictly bound by an outermost sphere of stars winking down towards the cosmic core—Earth. As above, so below: with nothing conceived to be above this stellar sphere and nothing below the atomic surface, there was no infinity and no void: Aristotle (with later refinements by Ptolemy) would interpret this finite universe philosophically and, in doing so, form the ideological foundation for God’s existence and The Church’s power on Earth. In the Aristotelean conception of the universe, the force moving the stars, which drove the motion of all elements below, was the prime mover: God. This cascade of cosmic force from on high downward into the movements of mankind was considered the officially accepted interpretation of divine will. As Christianity swept through the West, The Church relied upon the explanatory power of this Aristotelean philosophy as proof of God’s existence in their proselytizing efforts. Objecting to the Aristotelean doctrine was soon considered an objection to the existence of God and the power of The Church. Infinity was unavoidably actualized by the same Aristotelean logic which sought to deny it. By the 13th century, some bishops began calling assemblies to question the Aristotelean doctrines that went against the omnipotence of God: for example, the notion that “God can not move the heavens in a straight line, because that would leave behind a vacuum.” If the heavens moved linearly, then what was left in their wake? Through what substance were they moving? This implied either the existence of the void (the vacuum), or that God was not truly omnipotent as he could not move the heavens. Suddenly, Aristotelean philosophy started to break under its own weight, thereby eroding the premise of The Church’s power. Although The Church would cling to Aristotle’s views for a few more centuries—it fought heresy by forbidding certain books and burning certain Protestants alive—zero marked the beginning of the end for this domineering and oppressive institution. An infinite universe meant there were, at least, a vast multitude of planets, many of which likely had their own populations and churches. Earth was no longer the center of the universe, so why should The Church have universal dominion? In a grand ideological shift that foreshadowed the invention of Bitcoin centuries later, zero became the idea that broke The Church’s grip on humanity, just as absolute scarcity of money is breaking The Fed’s stranglehold on the world today. In an echo of history, us moderns can once again hear the discovery of nothing beginning to change everything. Zero was the smooth stone slung into the face of Goliath, a death-stroke to the dominion of The Church; felled by an unstoppable idea, this oppressive institution’s fall from grace would make way for the rise of the nation-state—the dominant institutional model in modernity. Indoctrinated in The Church’s dogma, Christianity initially refused to accept zero, as it was linked to a primal fear of the void. Zero’s inexorable connection to nothingness and chaos made it a fearsome concept in the eyes of most Christians at the time. But zero’s capacity to support honest weights and measures, a core Biblical concept, would prove more important than the countermeasures of The Church (and the invention of zero would later lead to the invention of the most infallible of weights and measures, the most in history—Bitcoin). In a world being built on trade, merchants needed zero for its superior arithmetic utility. As Pierre-Simon Laplace said: In the 13th century, academics like the renowned Italian mathematician Fibonacci began championing zero in their work, helping the Hindu-Arabic system gain credibility in Europe. As trade began to flourish and generate unprecedented levels of wealth in the world, math moved from purely practical applications to ever more abstracted functions. As Alfred North Whitehead said: As our thinking became more sophisticated, so too did our demands on math. Tools like the abacus relied upon a set of sliding stones to help us keep track of amounts and perform calculation. An abacus was like an ancient calculator, and as the use of zero became popularized in Europe, competitions were held between users of the abacus (the abacists) and of the newly arrived Hindu-Arabic numeral system (the algorists) to see who could solve complex calculations faster. With training, algorists could readily outpace abacists in computation. Contests like these led to the demise of the abacus as a useful tool, however it still left a lasting mark on our language: the words calculate, calculus, and calcium are all derived from the Latin word for pebble—calculus. Before the Hindu-Arabic numerals, money counters had to use the abacus or a counting board to keep track of value flows. Germans called the counting board a Rechenbank, which is why moneylenders came to be known as banks. Not only did banks use counting boards, but they also used tally sticks to keep track of lending activities: the monetary value of a loan was written on the side of a stick, and it was split into two pieces, with the lender keeping the larger piece, known as the stock—which is where we get the term stockholder: Despite its superior utility for business, governments despised zero. In 1299, Florence banned the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. As with many profound innovations, zero faced vehement resistance from entrenched power structures that were threatened by its existence. Carrying on lawlessly, Italian merchants continued to use the zero-based numeral system, and even began using it to transmit encrypted messages. Zero was essential to these early encryption systems—which is why the word cipher, which originally meant zero, came to mean “secret code.” The criticality of zero to ancient encryption systems is yet another aspect of its contribution to Bitcoin’s ancestral heritage. At the beginning of the Renaissance, the threat zero would soon pose to the power of The Church was not obvious. By then, zero had been adapted as an artistic tool to create the vanishing point: an acute place of infinite nothingness used in many paintings that sparked the great Renaissance in the visual arts. Drawings and paintings prior to the vanishing point appear flat and lifeless: their imagery was mostly two-dimensional and unrealistic. Even the best artists couldn’t capture realism without the use of zero: With the concept of zero, artists could create a zero-dimension point in their work that was “infinitely far” from the viewer, and into which all objects in the painting visually collapsed. As objects appear to recede from the viewer into the distance, they become ever-more compressed into the “dimensionlessness” of the vanishing point, before finally disappearing. Just as it does today, art had a strong influence on people’s perceptions. Eventually, Nicholas of Cusa, a cardinal of The Church declared, “Terra non est centra mundi,” which meant “the Earth is not the center of the universe.” This declaration would later lead to Copernicus proving —the spark that ignited and, later, the : A dangerous, heretical, and revolutionary idea had been planted by zero and its visual incarnation, the vanishing point. At this point of infinite distance, the concept of zero was captured visually, and space was made infinite—as Seife describes it: The purpose of the artist is to the mythologize the present: this is evident in much of the consumerist “trash art” produced in our current fiat-currency-fueled world. Renaissance artists (who were often also mathematicians, true Renaissance men) worked assiduously in line with this purpose as the vanishing point became an increasingly popular element of art in lockstep with zero’s proliferation across the world. Indeed, art accelerated the propulsion of zero across the mindscape of mankind. Eventually, zero became the cornerstone of calculus: an innovative system of mathematics that enabled people to contend with ever-smaller units approaching zero, but cunningly avoided the logic-trap of having to divide by zero. This new system gave mankind myriad new ways to comprehend and grasp his surroundings. Diverse disciplines such as chemistry, engineering, and physics all depend on calculus to fulfill their functions in the world today: Zero serves as the source-waters of many technological breakthroughs—some of which would flow together into the most important invention in history: Bitcoin. Zero punched a hole and created a vacuum in the framework of mathematics and shattered Aristotelean philosophy, on which the power of The Church was premised. Today, Bitcoin is punching a hole and creating a vacuum in the market for money; it is killing Keynesian economics—which is the propagandistic power-base of the nation-state (along with its apparatus of theft: the central bank). In modernity, zero has become a celebrated tool in our mathematical arsenal. As the binary numerical system now forms the foundation of modern computer programming, zero was essential to the development of digital tools like the personal computer, the internet, and Bitcoin. Amazingly, all modern miracles made possible by digital technologies can be traced back to the invention of a figure for numeric nothingness by an ancient Indian mathematician: Brahmagupta gave the world a real “something for nothing,” a generosity Satoshi would emulate several centuries later. As Aczel says: A composition of countless zeroes and ones, binary code led to the proliferation and standardization of communications protocols including those embodied in the. As people freely experimented with these new tools, they organized themselves around the most useful protocols like http, TCP/IP, etc. Ossification of digital communication standards provided the substrate upon which new societal utilities—like email, ride sharing, and mobile computing—were built. Latest (and arguably the greatest) among these digital innovations is the uninflatable, unconfiscatable, and unstoppable money called Bitcoin. A common misconception of Bitcoin is that it is just one of thousands of cryptoassets in the world today. One may be forgiven for this misunderstanding, as our world today is home to many national currencies. But all these currencies began as for the same type of thing—namely, monetary metal (usually gold). Today, national currencies are not redeemable for gold, and are instead liquid equity units in a pyramid scheme called fiat currency: a hierarchy of thievery built on top of the freely selected money of the world (gold) which their issuers (central banks) hoard to its price, insulate their inferior fiat currencies from competitive threats, and perpetually extract wealth from those lower down the pyramid. Given this confusion, many mistakenly believe that Bitcoin could be disrupted by any one of the thousands of alternative cryptoassets in the marketplace today. This is understandable, as the reasons that make Bitcoin different are not part of common parlance and are relatively difficult to understand. Even , the greatest hedge fund manager in history, said that he believes Bitcoin could be disrupted by a competitor in the same way that iPhone disrupted Blackberry. However, disruption of Bitcoin is extremely unlikely: Bitcoin is a path-dependent, one-time invention; its critical breakthrough is the discovery of absolute scarcity—a monetary property never before (and never again) achievable by mankind. Like the invention of zero, which led to the discovery of “nothing as something” in mathematics and other domains, Bitcoin is the catalyst of a worldwide paradigmatic (which some have started calling ). What numeral is to number, and zero is to the void for mathematics, Bitcoin is to absolute scarcity for money: each is a symbol that allows mankind to apprehend a latent reality (in the case of money, ). More than just a new monetary technology, Bitcoin is an entirely new economic paradigm: an uncompromisable base money protocol for a global, digital, non-state economy. To better understand the profundity of this, we first need to understand the nature of path-dependence. Path-dependence is the sensitivity of an outcome to the order of events that led to it. In the broadest sense, it means history has inertia: Path-dependence entails that the sequence of events matters as much as the events themselves: as a simple example, you get a dramatically different result if you shower and then dry yourself off versus if you dry yourself off first and then shower. Path-dependence is especially prevalent in complex systems due to their high interconnectivity and numerous (often unforeseeable) interdependencies. Once started down a particular pathway, breaking away from its sociopolitical inertia can become impossible—for instance, imagine if the world tried to standardize to a different size electrical outlet: consumers, manufacturers, and suppliers would all resist this costly change unless there was a gigantic prospective gain. To coordinate this shift in standardization would require either a dramatically more efficient technology (a pull method—by which people stand to benefit) or an imposing organization to force the change (a push method—in which people would be forced to change in the face of some threat). Path-dependence is why occurrences in the sociopolitical domain often influence developments in the technical; US citizens saw path-dependent pushback firsthand when their government made a failed attempt to to the metric system back in the 1970s. Bitcoin was launched into the world as a one of a kind technology: a non-state digital money that is issued on a perfectly fixed, diminishing, and predictable schedule. It was strategically released into the wild (into an online group of cryptographers) at a time when no comparative technology existed. Bitcoin’s organic adoption path and mining network expansion are a non-repeatable sequence of events. As a thought experiment, consider that if a “New Bitcoin” was launched today, it would exhibit weak chain security early on, as its mining network and hash rate would have to start from scratch. Today, in a world that is aware of Bitcoin, this “New Bitcoin” with comparatively weak chain security would inevitably be attacked—whether these were incumbent projects seeking to defend their head start, international banking cartels, or even nation-states: Path-dependence protects Bitcoin from disruption, as the organic sequence of events which led to its release and assimilation into the marketplace cannot be replicated. Further, Bitcoin’s money supply is absolutely scarce; a totally unique and one-time discovery for money. Even if “New Bitcoin” was released with an absolutely scarce money supply, its holders would be incentivized to hold the money with the greatest liquidity, network effects, and chain security. This would cause them to dump “New Bitcoin” for the original Bitcoin. More realistically, instead of launching “New Bitcoin,” those seeking to compete with Bitcoin would take a attack-vector by initiating a hard fork. An attempt like this was already made with the “Bitcoin Cash” fork, which tried to increase block sizes to (ostensibly) improve its utility for payments. This chain fork was an abject and a real world reinforcement of the importance of Bitcoin’s path-dependent emergence: Continuing our thought experiment: even if “New Bitcoin” featured a diminishing money supply (in other words, a deflationary monetary policy), how would its rate of money supply decay (deflation) be determined? By what mechanism would its beneficiaries be selected? As market participants (nodes and miners) jockeyed for position to maximize their accrual of economic benefit from the deflationary monetary policy, forks would ensue that would diminish the liquidity, network effects, and chain security for “New Bitcoin,” causing everyone to eventually pile back into the original Bitcoin—just like they did in the wake of Bitcoin Cash’s failure. Path-dependence ensures that those who try to game Bitcoin get burned. Reinforced by four-sided , it makes Bitcoin’s first-mover advantage seemingly insurmountable. The idea of absolute monetary scarcity goes against the wishes of entrenched power structures like The Fed: like zero, once an idea whose time has come is released into the world, it is nearly impossible to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle. After all, unstoppable ideas are independent lifeforms: Macroeconomics is essentially the set of games played globally to satisfy the demands of mankind (which are infinite) within the bounds of his time (which is strictly finite). In these games, scores are tracked in monetary terms. Using lingo from the groundbreaking book , there are two types of economic games: unfree (or centrally planned) markets are theatrical, meaning that they are performed in accordance with a predetermined script that often entails dutifulness and a disregard for humanity. The atrocities committed in Soviet Russia are exemplary of the consequences of a theatrical economic system. On the other hand, free markets are dramatic, meaning that they are enacted in the present according to consensual and adaptable boundaries. Software development is a good example of a dramatic market, as entrepreneurs are free to adopt the rules, tools, and protocols that best serve customers. Simply: theatrical games are governed by imposed rules (based on tyranny), whereas rulesets for dramatic games are voluntarily adopted (based on individual sovereignty). From a moral perspective, sovereignty is always superior to tyranny. And from a practical perspective, tyrannies are less energy-efficient than free markets because they require tyrants to expend resources enforcing compliance with their imposed rulesets and protecting their turf. Voluntary games (free market capitalism) outcompete involuntary games (centrally planned socialism) as they do not accrue these enforcement and protection costs: hence the reason capitalism (freedom) outcompetes socialism (slavery) in the long run. Since interpersonal interdependency is at the heart of the comparative advantage and division of labor dynamics that drive the value proposition of economic cooperation and competition, we can say that money is an infinite game: meaning that its purpose is not to win, but rather to continue to play. After all, if one player has all the money, the game ends (like the game of ). In this sense, Bitcoin’s terminal money supply growth (inflation) rate of absolute zero is the ultimate monetary — a game-theoretic focal point that people tend to choose in an adversarial game. In game theory, a game is any situation where there can be winners or losers, a strategy is a decision-making process, and a Schelling point is the default strategy for games in which the players cannot fully trust one another (like money): Economic actors are incentivized to choose the money that best holds its value across time, is most widely accepted, and most clearly conveys market pricing information. All three of these qualities are rooted in scarcity: resistance to inflation ensures that money retains its value and ability to accurately price capital across time, which leads to its use as an exchange medium. For these reasons, holding the scarcest money is the most energy-efficient strategy a player can employ, which makes the absolute scarcity of Bitcoin an irrefutable Schelling point—a singular, unshakable motif in games played for money. A distant digital descendent of zero, the invention of Bitcoin represents the discovery of absolute scarcity for money: an idea as equally unstoppable. Similar to the discovery of absolute nothingness symbolized by zero, the discovery of absolutely scarce money symbolized by Bitcoin is special. Gold became money because out of the monetary metals it had the most inelastic (or relatively scarce) money supply: meaning that no matter how much time was allocated towards gold production, its supply increased the least. Since its supply increased at the slowest and most predictable rate, gold was favored for storing value and pricing things—which encouraged people to voluntarily adopt it, thus making it the dominant money on the free market. Before Bitcoin, gold was the world’s monetary Schelling point, because it made trade easier in a manner that minimized the need to trust other players. Like its digital ancestor zero, Bitcoin is an invention that radically enhances exchange efficiency by purifying informational transmissions: for zero, this meant instilling more meaning per proximate digit, for Bitcoin, this means generating more salience per price signal. In the game of money, the objective has always been to hold the most relatively scarce monetary metal (gold); now, the goal is to occupy the most territory on the absolutely scarce monetary network called Bitcoin. Historically, precious metals were the best monetary technologies in terms of money’s five critical traits: divisibility, durability, portability, recognizability, and scarcity. Among the monetary metals, gold was relatively the most scarce, and therefore it outcompeted others in the marketplace as it was a more sound store of value. In the ascension of gold as money, it was as if free market dynamics were trying to zero-in on a sufficiently divisible, durable, portable, and recognizable monetary technology that was also absolutely scarce (strong arguments for this may be found by studying the ). Free markets are distributed computing systems that zero-in on the most useful prices and technologies based on the prevailing demands of people and the available supplies of capital: they constantly assimilate all of mankind’s intersubjective perspectives on the world within the bounds of objective reality to produce our best approximations of truth. In this context, verifiable scarcity is the best proxy for the truthfulness of money: assurance that it will not be debased over time. As a (pre-Bitcoin) thought experiment, had a “new gold” been discovered in the Earth’s crust, assuming it was mostly distributed evenly across the Earth’s surface and was exactly comparable to gold in terms of these five monetary traits (with the exception that it was more scarce), free market dynamics would have led to its selection as money, as it would be that much closer to absolute scarcity, making it a better means of storing value and propagating price signals. Seen this way, gold as a monetary technology was the closest the free market could come to absolutely scarce money before it was discovered in its only possible form—digital. The supply of any physical thing can only be limited by the time necessary to procure it: if we could flip a switch and force everyone on Earth to make their sole occupation gold mining, the supply of gold would soon soar. Unlike Bitcoin, no physical form of money could possibly guarantee a permanently fixed supply—so far as we know, absolute scarcity can only be digital. Digitization is advantageous across all five traits of money. Since Bitcoin is just information, relative to other monetary technologies, we can say: its divisibility is supreme, as information can be infinitely subdivided and recombined at near-zero cost (like numbers); its durability is supreme, as information does not decompose (books can outlast empires); its portability is supreme, as information can move at the speed of light (thanks to telecommunications); and its recognizability is supreme, as information is the most objectively discernible substance in the universe (like the written word). Finally, and most critically, since Bitcoin algorithmically and thermodynamically enforces an absolutely scarce money supply, we can say that its scarcity is infinite (as scarce as time, the substance money is intended to tokenize in the first place). Taken in combination, these traits make absolutely scarce digital money seemingly indomitable in the marketplace. In the same way that the number zero enables our numeric system to scale and more easily perform calculation, so too does money give an economy the ability to by simplifying trade and economic calculation. Said simply: scarcity is essential to the utility of money, and a zero-growth terminal money supply represents “perfect” scarcity — which makes Bitcoin as near a “perfect” monetary technology as mankind has ever had. Absolute scarcity is a monumental monetary breakthrough. Since money is valued according to reflexivity, meaning that investor perceptions of its future exchangeability influence its present valuation, Bitcoin’s perfectly predictable and finite future supply underpins an unprecedented rate of expansion in market capitalization: In summary: the invention of Bitcoin represents the discovery of absolute scarcity, or absolute irreproducibility, which occurred due to a particular sequence of idiosyncratic events that cannot be reproduced. Any attempt to introduce an absolutely scarce or diminishing supplied money into the world would likely collapse into Bitcoin (as we saw with the Bitcoin Cash fork). Absolute scarcity is a one-time discovery, just like heliocentrism or any other major scientific paradigm shift. In a world where Bitcoin already exists, a successful launch via a proof-of-work system is no longer possible due to path-dependence; yet another reason why Bitcoin cannot be replicated or disrupted by another cryptoasset using this consensus mechanism. At this point, it seems absolute scarcity for money is truly a one-time discovery that cannot “disrupted” any more than the concept of zero can be disrupted. A true “Bitcoin killer” would necessitate an entirely new consensus mechanism and distribution model; with an implementation overseen by an unprecedentedly organized group of human beings: nothing to date has been conceived that could even come close to satisfying these requirements. In the same way that there has only ever been one analog gold, there is likely to only ever be one digital gold. For the same quantifiable reasons a zero-based numeral system became a dominant mathematical protocol, and capitalism outcompetes socialism, the absolute scarcity of Bitcoin’s supply will continue outcompeting all other monetary protocols in its path to global dominance. Numbers are the fundamental abstractions which rule our world. Zero is the vanishing point of the mathematical landscape. In the realm of interpersonal competition and cooperation, money is the dominant abstraction which governs our behavior. Money arises naturally as the most tradable thing within a society—this includes exchanges with others and with our future selves. Scarcity is the trait of money that allows it to hold value across time, enabling us to trade it with our future selves for the foregone opportunity costs (the things we could have otherwise traded money for had we not decided to hold it). Scarce money accrues value as our productivity grows. For these reasons, the most scarce technology which otherwise exhibits sufficient monetary traits (divisibility, durability, recognizability, portability) tends to become money. Said simply: the most relatively scarce money wins. In this sense, what zero is to math, absolute scarcity is to money. It is an astonishing discovery, a window into the void, just like its predecessor zero: Zero has proven itself as the capstone of our numeral system by making it scalable, invertible, and easily convertible. In time, Bitcoin will prove itself as the most important network in the global economic system by increasing social scalability, causing an inversion of economic power, and converting culture into a realignment with. Bitcoin will allow sovereignty to once again inhere at the individual level, instead of being usurped at the institutional level as it is today—all thanks to its special forebear, zero: Central planning in the market for money (aka monetary socialism) is dying. This tyrannical financial hierarchy has increased worldwide wealth , funded perpetual , and plundered entire commonwealths to “” failing institutions. A reversion to the free market for money is the only way to heal the devastation it has wrought over the past 100+ years. Unlike central bankers, who are fallible human beings that give into political pressure to pillage value from people by printing money, Bitcoin’s monetary policy does not bend for anyone: it gives zero fucks. And in a world where central banks can “just add zeros” to steal your wealth, people’s only hope is a “zero fucks” money that cannot be confiscated, inflated, or stopped: Bitcoin was specifically designed as a countermeasure to “expansionary monetary policies” (aka wealth confiscation via inflation) by central bankers. Bitcoin is a true zero-to-one invention, an innovation that profoundly changes society instead of just introducing an incremental advancement. Bitcoin is ushering in a new paradigm for money, nation-states, and energy-efficiency. Most importantly, it promises to break the cycle of criminality in which governments continuously privatize gains (via ) and socialize losses (via inflation). Time and time again, excessive inflation has torn societies apart, yet the lessons of history remain unlearned—once again, here we are: How much longer will monetary socialism remain an extant economic model? The countdown has already begun: Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Liftoff. Rocket technicians always wait for zero before ignition; countdowns always finalize at the zero hour. Oil price wars erupting in Eurasia, a global pandemic, an unprecedented expansionary monetary policy response, and another quadrennial Bitcoin inflation-rate halving: 2020 is quickly becoming the zero hour for Bitcoin. Inflation rate and societal wellbeing are inversely related: the more reliably value can be stored across time, the more trust can be cultivated among market participants. When a money’s roots to economic reality are severed—as happened when the peg to gold was broken and fiat currency was born—its supply inevitably trends towards infinity (hyperinflation) and the functioning of its underlying society deteriorates towards zero (economic collapse). An unstoppable free market alternative, Bitcoin is anchored to economic reality (through proof-of-work energy expenditure) and has an inflation rate predestined for zero, meaning that a society operating on a Bitcoin standard would stand to gain in virtually infinite ways. When Bitcoin’s inflation rate finally reaches zero in the mid 22nd century, the measure of its soundness as a store of value (the stock-to-flow ratio) will become infinite; people that realize this and adopt it early will benefit disproportionately from the resultant mass wealth transfer. Zero and infinity are reciprocal: 1/∞ = 0 and 1/0 = ∞. In the same way, a society’s wellbeing shrinks towards zero the more closely the inflation rate approaches infinity (through the hyperinflation of fiat currency). Conversely, societal wellbeing can, in theory, be expanded towards infinity the more closely the inflation rate approaches zero (through the absolute scarcity of Bitcoin). Remember: The Fed is now doing whatever it takes to make sure there is “infinite cash” in the banking system, meaning that its value will eventually fall to zero: Zero arose in the world as an unstoppable idea because its time had come; it broke the dominion of The Church and put an end to its monopolization over access to knowledge and the gates to heaven. The resultant movement——reinvigorated self-sovereignty in the world, setting the individual firmly as the cornerstone of the state. Rising from The Church’s ashes came a nation-state model founded on sound property rights, rule of law, and free market money (aka hard money). With this new age came an unprecedented boom in scientific advancement, wealth creation, and worldwide wellbeing. In the same way, Bitcoin and its underlying discovery of absolute scarcity for money is an idea whose time has come. Bitcoin is shattering the siege of central banks on our financial sovereignty; it is invoking a new movement——as its revolutionary banner; and it is restoring Natural Law in a world ravaged by a mega-wealth-parasite—The Fed. Only unstoppable ideas can break otherwise immovable institutions: zero brought The Church to its knees and Bitcoin is bringing the false church of The Fed into the sunlight of its long-awaited judgement day. Both zero and Bitcoin are emblematic of the void, a realm of pure potentiality from which all things spring forth into being — the nothingness from which everything effervesces, and into which all possibility finally collapses. Zero and Bitcoin are unstoppable ideas gifted to mankind; gestures made in the spirit of “something for nothing.” In a world run by central banks with zero accountability, a cabal that uses the specious prospects of “infinite cash” to promise us everything (thereby introducing the specter of hyperinflation), nothingness may prove to be the greatest gift we could ever receive… Thank you Brahmagupta and Satoshi Nakamoto for your generosity. Thank you for reading The Number Zero and Bitcoin. Follow me on Twitter: My sincerest gratitude to these amazing minds: @real_vijay, , , , , @NickSzabo4, , @MartyBent, , , , @MarkYusko, @CaitlinLong_, , , , , , , @MustStopMurad, , , , @FriarHass, , , , , , , @RaoulGMI, @DTAPCAP, , @Rhythmtrader, , @sthenc, , @ck_SNARKs, , , @relevantpeterschiff And anyone else I forgot :) Sources: Written by