(BTC) upcoming halving – a once-every-four-years reduction in the supply of new units of the cryptocurrency – has got traders, analysts and gawkers abuzz over the potential price impact. German bank BayernLB predicted last year that , roughly 12 times the current level. Cryptocurrency markets got a sneak preview on Wednesday as a lesser coin, (BCH), went through its own halving. Spoiler alert: There wasn't much to see.  You're reading First Mover, CoinDesk's daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have to. You can . "All in all, this has been very anticlimactic," Denis Vinokourov, head of research at Bequant, a cryptocurrency exchange and institutional brokerage, wrote in an email.  Bitcoin cash prices rose 5.9 percent Wednesday, entirely in line with its trading range on most days. Cryptocurrencies have been volatile since long before the coronavirus hit. Bitcoin climbed 2.3 percent on the day. "In crypto, that's normal," Roger Ver, executive chairman of  and a key proponent of bitcoin cash, said in an audio interview over Telegram from his home in St. Kitts.  Ver says he hadn't been expecting much from the event. He's been around the crypto industry since the early days, and witnessed bitcoin's halvings in 2012 and 2016. This week's halving was the first for bitcoin cash, which split off from bitcoin in 2017.  "A leap year happens every four years," Ver said. "Life goes on. Nobody cares. After you've been through one leap year, it's not interesting or exciting anymore." The episode offers a dose of reality for crypto-industry newcomers who might be looking forward to something spectacular when bitcoin's next halving arrives in May. It's so hotly anticipated that clever web designers have erected pages featuring countdown clocks. As of the latest look, it'll take place in an estimated 34 days, seven hours and 47 minutes. (On May 13, around 09:25 UTC.) If bitcoin cash's halving is any guide, there really won't be much to see. Maybe champagne glasses will clink somewhere, celebrating the passage of another four years of bitcoin's remarkable existence since it was created in early 2009 atop what is now the world's largest blockchain network.  See CoinDesk Research's  Bitcoin's price, currently around $7,300, has climbed 20-fold since the start of 2015, the first full year of historical data from the popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. There were a lot of days between then and now, many of them up, many of them down, and only one of those days in 2016 coincided with a halving.Blockchains like the ones powering bitcoin and bitcoin cash rely on high-speed computer operators and data centers known as "miners," which collectively process quintillions of computations per second in an effort to maintain and protect the security and integrity of the network. To keep the miners affixed over the long term, according to Ver, "the price only has to double once every four years." "I've always said that the price is the least interesting thing about cryptocurrencies," Ver said. "The price is just a side effect of the amount of adoption you're getting in the world."Four years is quite a span – enough to frustrate investors, analysts and researchers who might prefer to clearly quantify the price impact of past halvings, or of the upcoming halving.Just think back to how much has happened in cryptocurrency markets in the past six months: Chinese President Xi Jinping said the world's largest economy would "" afforded by blockchain technology. (Bitcoin jumped 12 percent.) The U.S. , threatening to escalate into a war. (Up 10 percent.) The coronavirus came along. (Bitcoin plunged, then , and is now up 2 percent year-to-date.)  "The market's always pricing in everything," Ver said.  With many investors seeing bitcoin as a potential hedge against inflation – a digital and more portable form of gold, as it were – the unprecedented trillions of dollars of coronavirus-related aid and stimulus might ultimately make the halving an afterthought. Unlike the coronavirus, after all, the halving was telegraphed years in advance.     Blockware Solutions, which brokers high-speed computers used for cryptocurrency mining, wrote Wednesday in an e-mail that price is "not just supply side economics," but demand. "Bitcoin has the most robust ecosystem in the blockchain industry, and the fundamentals continuously improve due to the global macro improving sentiment and accelerating demand," according to the note. The point was that bitcoin watchers shouldn't draw too many conclusions from bitcoin cash's halving.Rich Rosenblum, a former managing director of Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs who now oversees markets at the digital-asset trading firm GSR, noted bitcoin cash prices usually trade in sync with bitcoin's – similar to the way gold and silver prices track, as do oil and gasoline.  "The bitcoin halving in a month is going to have more impact on bitcoin cash than the bitcoin cash halving," he said in a phone interview. Bitcoin cash's halving took place at 12:19 UTC, when the blockchain network reached block number 630,000. The most immediate impact was also, perhaps, the most visible: The next data block took nearly two hours to close, well beyond the average of about 10 minutes.  According to Ver, that probably happened because miners reallocated their computational power toward suddenly more profitable blockchains like Bitcoin and Bitcoin SV.   The Bitcoin Cash protocol has a feature that automatically adjusts the difficulty of mining a new data block when there's a sudden scarcity of miners; the mechanism is designed to lure some back. Block 630,001 took just 16 minutes to close, the data show.  Just like adding an extra day to the calendar every four years, these halvings have to happen to make everything work right. So when bitcoin's halving comes, will it be time to pop the champagne? Why not. Will it be entertaining? Better have YouTube queued up, just in case.  BTC: Price: $7,327 () | 24-Hr High: $7,399 | 24-Hr Low: $7,210 Trend: Bitcoin has found acceptance above the three-day 200-candle average and looks set to extend the ongoing rally toward $8,000. That would bring prices back to a level seen ahead of the massive sell-off on March 12.  The cryptocurrency is changing hands near $7,312 at press time, while the long-term average is now located at $7,093. As seen on the three-day chart, the bulls repeatedly failed to keep gains above the crucial average in the three weeks to April 5, before flipping the hurdle into support during in the last few days. The breakout may prompt more buyers to join the market, leading to stronger price gains. Supporting the bullish case is the three-day chart MACD histogram’s crossover above zero, a confirmation of bearish-to-bullish trend change.  The bullish case would be neutralized if the spot price drops below $7,050, violating the ascending trendline connecting the March 13 and March 30 lows. First Mover is CoinDesk's daily markets newsletter. You can .

Home » post » Unity Technologies to Allow Game Developers to Integrate Kin Cryptocurrency into TitlesThree years ago, Gnd-Tech took a look at some of the best video game technologies. We focused mainly on game and physics engines, as well as graphics and audio APIs. Obviously, the aim is to give gamers the best in-game experience possible. In this regard, another option that game developers ought to explore is the use of cryptocurrencies. And now, thanks to Unity Technologies, independent game developers can do exactly that.PinterestUnity Technologies, along with messaging app Kik and the Kin Ecosystem Foundation, created the altcoin Kin in 2017, and they were able to raise $100 million in Kin’s token sale. Now, Unity and Kin are encouraging independent game developers to use this relatively new digital currency in the gaming world. Venture Beat claims the aim of using this altcoin is to democratize game development, thus giving smaller developers a chance to compete with their bigger, more established counterparts.Medium reports in their article ‘The Kin Gaming SDK on Unity’ that Unity will consolidate through the Kin software development kit (Kin SDK) all the services and tools required to make games, whether mobile, augmented reality, virtual reality, or console. This way, developers will be able to save time, effort, and money as they will be able to create their games on one single platform as opposed to different platforms.Moreover, Unity will allow game developers to monetize their games through a Kin-established ecosystem that promotes social interaction among gamers. In short, gamers will be able to freely interact with one another in this gaming ecosystem, whose ultimate goal is to create a social network of gamers who will be willing to use the Kin altcoin in gaming, thereby leading to its mainstream adoption.This development is testament to how far game developers will go to enhance the gaming experience of their clientele. On the flip side, this development is further proof of the growing acceptance of digital currencies and blockchain both in the gaming industry and across other businesses.A handful of art galleries, for instance, now accept digital currencies as payment for artworks, with blockchain used to prove the provenance of each work. Prices are adjusted frequently on account of the volatility of Bitcoin. Some of these galleries include the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York City, the Mayfair Art Gallery in the UK, and the Thierry B Art Gallery in Australia. Another sign that the general public is beginning to accept cryptocurrency is through its adoption in everyday activities. Lottoland launched the world’s first ever Bitcoin lottery, and the prizes are also constantly adjusted based on the value of the cryptocurrency. These developments clearly illustrate the increasing adoption of digital currencies across all types of industries. With game developers more tech savvy than most, expect them to be at the forefront of the evolution and integration of cryptocurrency.Now, whether Kin SDK will take off remains to be seen. Ultimately, the challenge is to create high-value games that gamers will actually want to play. If these independent game developers can make a game like Fortnite, for instance, or even League of Legends, then gamers will likely follow. Only then will this endeavor fully succeed. The idea behind it, though, makes perfect sense, and is in fact commendable. Copyright 2019 GND-Tech - All Rights Reserved. | Contact Us | Privacy Policy  

(BTC) upcoming halving – a once-every-four-years reduction in the supply of new units of the cryptocurrency – has got traders, analysts and gawkers abuzz over the potential price impact. German bank BayernLB predicted last year that , roughly 12 times the current level. Cryptocurrency markets got a sneak preview on Wednesday as a lesser coin, (BCH), went through its own halving. Spoiler alert: There wasn’t much to see.  You’re reading First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. Assembled by the CoinDesk Markets Team, First Mover starts your day with the most up-to-date sentiment around crypto markets, which of course never close, putting in context every wild swing in bitcoin and more. We follow the money so you don’t have to. You can . “All in all, this has been very anticlimactic,” Denis Vinokourov, head of research at Bequant, a cryptocurrency exchange and institutional brokerage, wrote in an email.  Bitcoin cash prices rose 5.9 percent Wednesday, entirely in line with its trading range on most days. Cryptocurrencies have been volatile since long before the coronavirus hit. Bitcoin climbed 2.3 percent on the day. “In crypto, that’s normal,” Roger Ver, executive chairman of  and a key proponent of bitcoin cash, said in an audio interview over Telegram from his home in St. Kitts.  Ver says he hadn’t been expecting much from the event. He’s been around the crypto industry since the early days, and witnessed bitcoin’s halvings in 2012 and 2016. This week’s halving was the first for bitcoin cash, which split off from bitcoin in 2017.  “A leap year happens every four years,” Ver said. “Life goes on. Nobody cares. After you’ve been through one leap year, it’s not interesting or exciting anymore.” The episode offers a dose of reality for crypto-industry newcomers who might be looking forward to something spectacular when bitcoin’s next halving arrives in May. It’s so hotly anticipated that clever web designers have erected pages featuring countdown clocks. As of the latest look, it’ll take place in an estimated 34 days, seven hours and 47 minutes. (On May 13, around 09:25 UTC.) If bitcoin cash’s halving is any guide, there really won’t be much to see. Maybe champagne glasses will clink somewhere, celebrating the passage of another four years of bitcoin’s remarkable existence since it was created in early 2009 atop what is now the world’s largest blockchain network.  See CoinDesk Research’s  Bitcoin’s price, currently around $7,300, has climbed 20-fold since the start of 2015, the first full year of historical data from the popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. There were a lot of days between then and now, many of them up, many of them down, and only one of those days in 2016 coincided with a halving. Blockchains like the ones powering bitcoin and bitcoin cash rely on high-speed computer operators and data centers known as “miners,” which collectively process quintillions of computations per second in an effort to maintain and protect the security and integrity of the network. To keep the miners affixed over the long term, according to Ver, “the price only has to double once every four years.”  “I’ve always said that the price is the least interesting thing about cryptocurrencies,” Ver said. “The price is just a side effect of the amount of adoption you’re getting in the world.” Four years is quite a span – enough to frustrate investors, analysts and researchers who might prefer to clearly quantify the price impact of past halvings, or of the upcoming halving. Just think back to how much has happened in cryptocurrency markets in the past six months: Chinese President Xi Jinping said the world’s largest economy would “” afforded by blockchain technology. (Bitcoin jumped 12 percent.) The U.S. , threatening to escalate into a war. (Up 10 percent.) The coronavirus came along. (Bitcoin plunged, then , and is now up 2 percent year-to-date.)  “The market’s always pricing in everything,” Ver said.  With many investors seeing bitcoin as a potential hedge against inflation – a digital and more portable form of gold, as it were – the unprecedented trillions of dollars of coronavirus-related aid and stimulus might ultimately make the halving an afterthought. Unlike the coronavirus, after all, the halving was telegraphed years in advance.     Blockware Solutions, which brokers high-speed computers used for cryptocurrency mining, wrote Wednesday in an e-mail that price is “not just supply side economics,” but demand.  “Bitcoin has the most robust ecosystem in the blockchain industry, and the fundamentals continuously improve due to the global macro improving sentiment and accelerating demand,” according to the note. The point was that bitcoin watchers shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from bitcoin cash’s halving. Rich Rosenblum, a former managing director of Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs who now oversees markets at the digital-asset trading firm GSR, noted bitcoin cash prices usually trade in sync with bitcoin’s – similar to the way gold and silver prices track, as do oil and gasoline.   “The bitcoin halving in a month is going to have more impact on bitcoin cash than the bitcoin cash halving,” he said in a phone interview.  Bitcoin cash’s halving took place at 12:19 UTC, when the blockchain network reached block number 630,000. The most immediate impact was also, perhaps, the most visible: The next data block took nearly two hours to close, well beyond the average of about 10 minutes.  According to Ver, that probably happened because miners reallocated their computational power toward suddenly more profitable blockchains like Bitcoin and Bitcoin SV.   The Bitcoin Cash protocol has a feature that automatically adjusts the difficulty of mining a new data block when there’s a sudden scarcity of miners; the mechanism is designed to lure some back. Block 630,001 took just 16 minutes to close, the data show.  Just like adding an extra day to the calendar every four years, these halvings have to happen to make everything work right. So when bitcoin’s halving comes, will it be time to pop the champagne? Why not. Will it be entertaining? Better have YouTube queued up, just in case.  BTC: Price: $7,327 () | 24-Hr High: $7,399 | 24-Hr Low: $7,210 Trend: Bitcoin has found acceptance above the three-day 200-candle average and looks set to extend the ongoing rally toward $8,000. That would bring prices back to a level seen ahead of the massive sell-off on March 12.  The cryptocurrency is changing hands near $7,312 at press time, while the long-term average is now located at $7,093. As seen on the three-day chart, the bulls repeatedly failed to keep gains above the crucial average in the three weeks to April 5, before flipping the hurdle into support during in the last few days. The breakout may prompt more buyers to join the market, leading to stronger price gains. Supporting the bullish case is the three-day chart MACD histogram’s crossover above zero, a confirmation of bearish-to-bullish trend change.  The bullish case would be neutralized if the spot price drops below $7,050, violating the ascending trendline connecting the March 13 and March 30 lows. First Mover is CoinDesk’s daily markets newsletter. You can . Source link

Looking to learn more about the world of Blockchain? Here is your chance: Block Live Asia makes its debut as a never-before-seen part-convention part-festival from 18 to 19 April!If you think that Blockchain is irrelevant… well, you should start paying attention.Today, Blockchain has already extended its services to our nation’s banks, real estate, schools, and across many industries.For example, Singapore Airlines’ frequent flyer programme, Krisflyer, has restructured its payments and loyalty programme by implementing the Blockchain structure for its new digital wallet. With Blockchain, the digital wallet allows members to use frequent flyer miles to make in-flight purchases.Ngee Ann Polytechnic is also the first Singaporean education institution to use Blockchain to verify the validity of the Polytechnic’s diplomas. With a student’s Blockchain ID, prospective employers or Universities can retrieve the student’s academic records and education history quickly and securely.The use of Blockchain can also provide students with greater autonomy over their education by offering access to content and suggested courses based on their past qualifications and grades.Beyond applications for consumers and the general public, many Blockchain startups have chosen Singapore as their launchpad for their initial coin offerings (ICO) due to the nation’s tax-friendly rules and state funding. As a result, Singapore’s marketplace is now burgeoning with companies looking to do an ICO – there are more than 600 companies in Singapore today that are related to the Blockchain technology in one way or another. With numerous industry leaders recognising the usefulness of Blockchain, many companies have incorporated it into their modus operandi.You might be wondering, “I still don’t get it. How does this all work?”Allow me to explain the technicalities of Blockchain in layman’s terms.You should be familiar with Google Docs. Imagine a Google Document that is shared across a network of computers. This network then ‘refreshes’ the Document regularly to reflect the same changes across all the computers in its network. If you can understand and imagine this, you already have an elementary understanding of Blockchain!Information held on a Blockchain exists as a shared database. The Blockchain database is not stored in any single location; instead, its records are public and easily verifiable, and are available on millions of computers simultaneously. Hackers are theoretically unable to corrupt the database because no centralised version of this information exists. Instead, a hacker must be able to hack each and every version of the document at once, lest his or her efforts to make any changes to a document be undone once the rest of the network ‘refreshes’. The Blockchain technology was initially developed for Bitcoin by a person – or group of people – pseudonymously named Satoshi Nakamoto. To this day, nobody knows who – or how many people – Nakamoto is. Nakamoto is also known as the creator of Bitcoin. The tech community has since found other potential uses for the technology.As mentioned, the Blockchain network has no central authority – it is the personification of a democratised system. Since it is a shared ledger, the information in it is open for anyone and everyone to see. Therefore, anything that is built on Blockchain is, by its very essence, transparent. Everyone involved is accountable for their actions.Yet, here is the catch: A Blockchain has the potential to replace all processes and business models which charges a small fee for a transaction. This is because a Blockchain carries no transaction cost. As such, many existing systems are threatened by Blockchain.Even superapp companies like Grab and Carousell are threatened by Blockchain technology. All a Blockchain needs to do is encode the transactional information for a Grab ride or a Carousell listing, and the entire existence of a profiting middle-man is nullified – thus disrupting the business model of these companies. On the flip side, Blockchain may be the solution to make recorded music profitable again for artists, by cutting out music companies and audio streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify. The music you buy could also be encoded in Blockchain itself, which will make it an online archive for any song purchased. As the prices charged for such Blockchain transactions can be small, subscription and streaming services could be rendered obsolete.Curious about the potential of Blockchain? You are in luck. Block Live Asia is a sincere delivery of Blockchain technology. If you have been jaded by avaricious and unscrupulous Blockchain companies and organisers, you are not the only one.The intention behind Block Live Asia is clear and simple: it hopes to provide an accessible platform to get more Singaporeans interested and educated in Blockchain technology. This out-of-the-ordinary Blockchain festival is focused on people and companies with genuine intent. Whether you’re a rookie or a complete idiot at Blockchain, Block Live Asia is for everyone. While you’re there, check out the creative installations and photo-op spaces, such as the interactive tunnels of the creator of Blockchain, a Dank Memes Gallery, and even a movie on Blockchain. There will be keynotes and panel sessions, where you will get the chance to rub shoulders and interact with renowned industry leaders of the Blockchain technology, such as the CEO of bitcoin.com, Roger Ver; the President of Singapore Fintech Association, Chia Hock Lai, and many more.Date: 18 April and 19 April Venue: Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre Hall AAddress: 10 Bayfront Ave, Singapore 018971 Visit https://blocklive.asia/ now and sign up to get free admission to the event. Photos by Soloman Soh of the DANAMIC team. Event Poster courtesy of Block Live Asia Stock Exchange of Thailand moving towards Cryptocurrency... Visa wants YOU to give it a pretext to use blockchain... Cosimo Ventures invests in blockchain and digital assets firms... Copyright © document.write(new Date().getFullYear());

The Rollo and Slappy ShowBy Rollo McFloogleYou won't regret your time here but the state will.Starting in undefined…00:001:17:351xEpisode 197 - The Catholic Case for BitcoinHearing this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, 'What are we to do, brothers?' Acts 2:37 What happens when you mix hardcore Catholicism and hardcore Bitcoin maximalism?  We brought on 0knowledgeactor to make the case for Bitcoin for Catholics and to draw some interesting comparisons between the two. Follow 0knowledgeactor Twitter: @0knowledgeactor Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com2:31:19May 5, 2020Episode 196 - What the Fed Does and How Bitcoin Fixes It with Andy EdstromSubscribe to the podcast The Federal Reserve and the financial markets can be hard enough to understand under normal circumstances, but throw in the events of recent months and it gets downright overwhelming.  We invited Andy Edstrom, author of Why Buy Bitcoin, to walk us through how the Fed operates and how it effects the markets.  What are quantitative easing and repos?  Are we headed towards hyperinflation?  How long can they keep all of this up?  Does Bitcoin fix this? We discuss these questions and more! Follow Andy Twitter: @EdstromAndrew Book: Why Buy Bitcoin AndyEdstrom.com WESCAPGroup.com Check out Swan Bitcoin SwanBitcoin.com Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:14:47April 28, 2020Episode 195 - Hodling to Bitcoin Monetization with CarCampItWhat's the deal with hodling?  Why do so many Bitcoiners care so much about Bitcoin if they don't seem keen on spending it right now?  We invited CarCampIt on to talk about why we hodl and why Bitcoin is a great savings mechanism.  We also touch on why and how we think Bitcoin will be a boon for everyone--even those without the ability to acquire some before monetization occurs. Follow CarCampIt Twitter: @CarCampIt, @FAGcast Friends Against Government Podcast Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com58:28April 21, 2020Episode 194 - Inoculating Yourself with Critical Thinking with JW WeathermanWe're all trying to drink from a fire hose of information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and there's a lot of specialized, technical information surrounding it.  How does a layperson navigate through all of it?  If you figure out how to filter information and respond with intelligence through this hysteria, you should be set going forward for anything else. Follow JW Weatherman Twitter – @JWWeatherman_ Mathbot.com Tales from the Crypt #143: JW Weatherman & Giacomo Zucco Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:01:32April 13, 2020Episode 193 - In the Dressing Room with Quincy JohnsonYour favorite truck driver is back for another episode with us.  We talk about cooking on the road, how truckers and the industry are dealing with COVID-19, how to take responsibility for your own life, and get into some good ol' fashioned wild Quincy stories. Follow Quincy on Twitter @BBWLOVE08142839 Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:23:59April 6, 2020Episode 192 - Pwease No ImplicationsSubscribe to the podcast With the panic surrounding Coronavirus and the normies stocking up on supplies, there have been some in the libertarian and gun communities that have been making memes about using their guns to steal those supplies from the unarmed people.  We brought on our friend, Steppy, to discuss how good (or bad) of an idea it is to make jokes like this. Follow Steppy on Twitter @PweaseNo Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com55:34March 31, 2020Episode 191 Bonus - The Wonderful World of Gardening with Jared from Biting the BulletSubscribe to the podcast Mr. Mongoose Energy himself, Jared from the Biting the Bullet podcast, has a softer side: gardening.  I talk chat with him on Twitter all the time about it, so I decided to have him on the show to talk about it.  We talk about each of our gardening setups, our successes and failures, and even give some gardening tips for those who are interested in getting started (like Slappy). Follow Jared and his Mongoose brethren on Twitter and Instagram Jared's Twitter Jared's Instagram Biting the Bullet's Twitter Biting the Bullet's Instagram Luke's Twitter Typo's Twitter Check out the Biting the Bullet podcast Biting the Bullet podcast Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:23:42March 25, 2020Episode 190 - From Marine to Antiwar Advocate: the Story of MDVet4PeaceSubscribe to the podcast We found another one!  Veterans are some of the best peace advocates out there, so we brought MDVet4Peace on the show to share his incredible story with us. Follow MDVet4Peace on Twitter @MdVet4 Check out the Defend the Guard Act Defendtheguard.us Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:23:35March 24, 2020Episode 189 Bonus - Keeping Two Hands on the Wheel with the Coronavirus with CarCampit and BirdarchistWe've got a bonus episode for you!  Car and Bird jumped on with me (no Slappy this episode) to toss some of our thoughts around on the Coronavirus.  We think that a lot of people need to pump the brakes on the panic and approach this stuff pretty differently. Follow them on Twitter @CarCampIt @birdarchist Check out the Friends Against Government podcast Friends Against Government Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com20:29March 18, 2020Episode 188 - The Ills of Modern Healthcare with Vake RajFresh from his Twitter break, we welcome now Vake back to the show to talk about our healthcare industry and many of the problems that it faces.  What's getting in the way of doctors and other healthcare providers to deliver the best service to their patients? Follow Vake Follow Vake on Twitter Previous appearances Episode 46 – An overview of Bitcoin and what’s going on with it today with Vivek Raj, Part 1 Episode 47 – An overview of Bitcoin and what’s going on with it today with Vivek Raj, Part 2 Episode 64 – Bitcoin forks and current Bitcoin news with Vivek Raj Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:38:23March 17, 2020Episode 187 - Should Libertarians Work Above or Below the Table?Subscribe to the podcast No libertarian likes to pay taxes, but can we take lowering our tax burden and overall government footprint too far?  Should we always strive to work under the table, away from the line of sight of the taxman, or should we maximize our productive output by making the most of our most valuable skills above the table? Items discussed Rollo's tweet Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com48:10March 10, 2020Episode 186 - Exploring Thyme and Astrological Analysis of Altcoin Marketing Drivel with BirdarchistSubscribe to the podcast We once again welcome our friend, Birdarchist, who made an absolute beast of a power move to get on the show despite his claims it was inadvertent.  We start off with some chat about nothing in particular and then transition into piecing through an article that Rollo stumbled upon about the altcoin, Tezos.  It's a disaster of a piece if you're looking for any substantive reasons to think Tezos provides any value, but that's why it's such a good microcosm of the altcoin space.  We take the opportunity to discuss a number of the downfalls of altcoins, including liquidity problems and how proof of stake systems wind up becoming cartelized. Just buy Bitcoin. Items discussed Tezos to the Moon: How the Unstoppable Cryptocurrency Rally Could Double Whales Double Down on Tezos Cryptocurrency Amidst Retail Driven Selloff Follow Birdarchist Friends Against Government podcast Follow Bird on Twitter Follow the Friends Against Government podcast on Twitter Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Original image (modified for this use): 52616890.jpg1:25:02March 3, 2020Episode 185 - Libertarians Are Coming for What?Subscribe to the podcast We libertarians tend to take the "live and let live" approach to a lot of moral issues.  If you're not violating the rights of others, then we have no interest in using force to stop you from doing whatever you want to do.  Does that mean that the behavior should always be encouraged?  And if the behavior isn't expected to be very beneficial for society, how do we go about promoting better behavior?  We use an article from The American Mind by Bedivere Bedrydant that takes a critical stance on libertarians getting in the way of a ban on pornography to explore these ideas. Items discussed Libertarians Are Coming for Your Sexual Dignity - The American Mind Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:00:16February 25, 2020Episode 184 - Governments and Bitcoin: A Look at Game Theory with CarCampItSubscribe to the podcast A lot of people like to dismiss Bitcoin by saying something like, "Bitcoin is nice and all, but the government is just going to shut it down."  The whole purpose of Bitcoin is strike at the root of government's power, but just assuming that the government not only can but also would want to simply shut it down ignores a lot of the interesting game theory that's going on in the global competition for power.  We bring on our friend and frequent guest, CarCampIt, to discuss these ideas. Follow CarCampIt Twitter: @CarCampIt, @FAGcast Friends Against Government Podcast Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Original image (modified for this use): g1:03:22February 18, 2020Episode 183 - Tearing into Politics and Current EventsSubscribe to the podcast We change things up a bit this episode by talking a little bit about politics and current events.  We talk about how normies handle politics, Nancy Pelosi tearing Trump's speech during the State of the Union, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Instagram post, and the Coronavirus.  We even reveal our massive conspiracy theory on national levels of politics. Items discussed AOC's Instagram post The Iowa Coin Flip Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:00:11February 11, 2020Episode 182 - Friends of Children, LLC with Jacob from Tasting AnarchySubscribe to the podcast Jacob from Tasting Anarchy joins us on the show for a third time to take us back to first principles to discuss how we could work through the problems of child abuse.  We all know how bad the state is with CPS, but not many people discuss the alternatives.  We do that here and so much more. Items discussed Episode 179 - Evading Prison Time with Private Escape Markets Episode 340: Government Bureaucracy Horrors - Child Protective Services Edition Is the Non-Aggression Principle Axiomatic? Sammy Nikolayev story Follow Jacob TastingAnarchy.com Follow Tasting Anarchy on Twitter: @TastingAnarchy Chillderburg.com Follow Chillderburg on Twitter: @Chillderburg Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:52:11February 4, 2020Episode 181 - Getting 6.15 Bitcoin with American HodlSubscribe to the podcast Set phasers to bullish for this episode.  We invited American Hodl on the show to help us make an appeal to people, specifically libertarians, standing on the sidelines on Bitcoin.  Why is Bitcoin important?  What should you do to get your first Bitcoin?  We discuss this and much, much more! Follow American Hodl on Twitter @american_hodl Items mentioned Dear Libertarians: Bitcoin Fixes This Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Join our Telegram group Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com1:17:35January 28, 2020Episode 180 - Canceling Cancel Culture with BitcoinSubscribe to the podcast Target Tori was the latest example of an attempt at Cancel Culture that ultimately failed because of how ridiculous it was.  Whether or not the perpetrator was being serious or was simply a troll, it was at least nice to see people rally around Tori and help her out.  But the internet rage mobs in general aren't a great idea.  It makes us stick our noses in places they probably don't belong. Is there a way out?  There sure it.  Once again, Bitcoin fixes this.  BTCpayServer is a tool that people susceptible to cancellation should start leveraging.  And it's just an awesome tool in general: we've recently added it at LibertyMugs.com to handle our Bitcoin payment processing. Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1058:49January 21, 2020Episode 179 - Evading Prison Time with Private Escape MarketsSubscribe to the podcast "I have not fled justice--I have escaped injustice and political persecution." These words were spoken by Carlos Ghosn, a former Nissan executive on trial in Japan.  He was charged with financial misconduct and did not trust the Japanese courts to give him a fair trial.  So instead of getting railroaded, he hired some people to smuggle him out of Japan and back to his home country of Lebanon.  This raises some interesting questions about private markets for escaping justice systems. Items mentioned Former Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn's dramatic escape from Japan prompts Interpol wanted alert - ABC News Episode 110 - How Would Fraud Be Handled in a Libertarian Society? Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1048:41January 14, 2020Episode 178 - Discuss with Buck: Will Touching the Libertarian Party Turn Me to Stone?Subscribe to the podcast Our friend Buck joins us this week to talk about his plans to try to become a delegate for the Libertarian Party so he can vote to make Jacob Hornberger the presidential nominee.  He only wants to nominate Hornberger so he can spread the message of liberty and convert people to the movement and wants no other involvement in politics (including voting in the election).  He wants us to join the Libertarian Party simply to support him.  Are we being unreasonable by saying no when the effort on our part would be very low? After all, Bitcoin fixes all of this. Items mentioned Dear Libertarians: Bitcoin Fixes This Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:34:45January 7, 2020Episode 177 - Stocks, Dumb Money, and BitcoinSubscribe to the podcast Services like Cash App, Robinhood, and Acorn have been popping up that break down the barriers to entry to the stock market for average people.  Is this access good or bad?  Is it good that so many of us are so invested in stock market and other investment vehicles that we may not really understand?  What caused us to get here and is there a way out? Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1053:48December 31, 2019Episode 176 - The Christmas Episode DisasterSubscribe to the podcast Welp, this happened.  Merry Christmas. Follow these creeps on Twitter @CarCampIt @birdarchist Check out the Friends Against Government podcast Friends Against Government Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1059:57December 24, 2019Episode 175 - We Need Some Criteria to Be Considered a LibertarianSubscribe to the podcast We all want to grow the libertarian movement, but not everyone always fully buys in.  We don't want to do purity testing, but we need some some ways to qualify and define libertarians.  We use a few examples to work out how to deal with this issue and try to appreciate some of the nuance to come up with something suitable. Items discussed Episode 148 - The Tulsi Gabbard Question Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1041:07December 17, 2019Episode 174 - Government Picks the Low-Hanging Fruit to Take Guns from and Throw in CagesSubscribe to the podcast With red flag laws looming around us, the government has been more active in confiscating guns from the people it deems shouldn't have them.  While they are something to worry about, does it distract us from paying attention to the things it already does at achieve the same ends?  We look at two things going on this episode: an article detailing a new Pennsylvania law that requires people convicted a domestic abuse crime to turn in their guns and the case of Derek Heuring, an Indiana man who police busted for meth after obtaining a warrant to search his house with probable cause that he stole the GPS tracker they planted on his car because it went silent.  They're not very likely to take our guns en masse but will instead go after some easy targets first that will be hard for most people to defend. Items discussed New Pa. law aimed to disarm accused domestic abusers within 24 hours. Hundreds in Philly haven’t turned in guns. Derek Heuring v. State of Indiana Oral Arguments Derek Heuring v. State of Indiana Memorandum Decision Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1044:34December 10, 2019Episode 173 - Diving into the Hong Kong Protests with Reason's Zach WeissmuellerSubscribe to the podcast We discussed some of the reactions to the Hong Kong protests in Episode 167, but in this episode we welcome Reason's Zach Weissmueller for an in-depth discussion on what's really going on there.  Zach recently traveled to Hong Kong to experience the protests and talk to some of the people involved, so we welcome his valuable insight on the questions we have. Items discussed Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie - Why Hong Kong Protestors Are Channeling Bruce Lee Follow Zach Reason.com Follow Zach on Twitter: @TheAbridgedZach ReasonTV Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:03:04December 3, 2019Episode 172 - Todd Hagopian and the Libertarian PartySubscribe to the podcast The great Todd Hagopian joins us this week to discuss his campaign to take the Chair of the Libertarian Party from the incumbent Nick Sarwark and why Todd thinks that anarchists like Rollo and Slappy, who want nothing to do with politics, should get involved with the Libertarian Party. Follow Todd LibertarianInChief.com ToddHagopian.com Follow Todd on Twitter: @ToddHagopian Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:00:46November 26, 2019Episode 171 - Frigid Bitcoin Cold Storage Using Yeti Cold with JW and Will WeathermanSubscribe to the podcast Bitcoin can only be useful if users are able to properly and adequately secure their keys.  If someone can easily find a way to gain access to your keys, then your Bitcoin is as good as gone.  As the value of Bitcoin continues to climb, hodlers will find it all the more imperative to have cold storage options that eliminate as many attack surfaces as possible.  A number of products and services available for purchase like hardware wallets and custodial multisignature arrangements, but they have their own drawbacks, so there is still a need for solutions that are simple to use and don't make the same security compromises.  Enter Yeti Cold, an open source project by JW Weatherman and his son, Will, aimed at providing a solution for maximizing the safety of your Bitcoin. Check out Yeti Cold YetiCold.com Yeti Cold Github Follow JW Weatherman on Twitter: @JWWeatherman_ Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:02:41November 19, 2019Episode 170 - Libertarian Charm School with Carey WedlerSubscribe to the podcast Libertarians do a lot of things well, but I think that we can all admit that socially we can often use a little bit of help. We have a great message of peace and love, but the reactions we get from people can be so redundant and frustrating that we have the tendency to get a little bit nasty. We also tend to take very aggressive stances on positions that our non-libertarian friends might not be ready for. We invited Carey Wedler on the show to discuss how we can do a better job with interacting with others and spreading our message. Follow Carey Instagram – @careywedler Youtube Facebook Foundation for Economic Education The Anti-Media Items Discussed Episode 165 – Analysis of the Amber Guyger Case with the Empress of Meme Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $10 51:54November 12, 2019Episode 169 - Is Christianity Compatible with Libertarianism?Subscribe to the podcast As Christian (specifically Catholic) libertarians, Slappy and I get it from both sides.  Some libertarians say you can't be both a Christian and a libertarian.  Some Christians say it too but for obviously different reasons.  We explore this question and perhaps offer some of our own ultimatums. Previous episode Episode 27 - Can Christians Be Anarchists? Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1054:06November 5, 2019Episode 168 - Muh Patriotic TariffsSubscribe to the podcast The law of comparative advantage is pretty straight forward and even Paul Krugman acknowledges the importance of free trade.  But many conservatives, in brainless support of President Trump, find ways to justify the economic destruction of tariffs.  Even the usually solid Pat Buchanan has an awful take on tariffs.  We discuss a piece penned by him. Items discussed "Tariffs Are Economic Patriotism, Putting Americans First" - The American Conservative Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1057:22October 29, 2019Episode 167 - Kissing China's ButtSubscribe to the podcast We love China.  China is great.  Don't ever say anything bad about anything the Chinese government is doing.  There are no protests.  We stand with the NBA players who stand with China. Is that the only side to the story? Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1049:18October 22, 2019Episode 166 - What's in Store for Bitcoin with Jake from Tasting AnarchySubscribe to the podcast We all know that Rollo is super-bullish on Bitcoin, but our friend Jake from Tasting Anarchy has some thoughts on the future of Bitcoin that we thought would be interesting to discuss.  He seems some threats to Bitcoin's goal to become money but also sees some incredible opportunities if it does succeed. Items discussed The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous #94 BONUS - Bitcoin and Bitcoin Adjacent Things with JW Weatherman - Friends Against Government Podcast Follow Jacob TastingAnarchy.com Follow Tasting Anarchy on Twitter: @TastingAnarchy Chillderburg.com Follow Chillderburg on Twitter: @Chillderburg Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $102:33:53October 15, 2019Episode 165 - Analysis of the Amber Guyger Case with the Empress of MemeSubscribe to the podcast There's a lot to talk about in the case of Amber Guyger's killing of Botham Jean.  We brought the Empress of Meme on the show to discuss what happened at the apartment, during the trial and sentencing, and our reactions to it all. Items discussed "Amber Guyger VS the State of Texas" - The eMilitia Podcast "Killing Dylann Roof" - The Atlantic "Prison in a Free Society?" - Bob Murphy Follow the Empress of Meme Instagram: @empressofmeme The eMilitia Podcast Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:14:38October 8, 2019Episode 164 - A Libertarian Swings and Misses on Explaining MoneySubscribe to the podcast We talk about money a lot (mostly spurred along by Bitcoin) and criticize a lot of people for their lack of understanding of it.  We found an article from a libertarian who meant well, but just gets his explanation of money so wrong.  It's important to fix these mistakes. Article discussed "How I Use Beer as Money" Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1037:30October 1, 2019Episode 163 - How to Raise Kids and Have an Awesome Family and Life with JW WeathermanSubscribe to the podcast JW Weatherman comes back to the show to drop some advice on family life.  How should you raise your kids in such a crazy world?  What's the problem with the education system and how can homeschooling be a solution?  How do you set yourself up to achieve all of this?  We discuss these questions and more. Follow JW Weatherman Twitter - @JWWeatherman_ Mathbot.com 10HoursofBitcoin.com The Bitcoin Threat Model Free Market Success Story BreakTheirRules.com Twitter - @BreakTheirRules Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:14:24September 24, 2019Episode 162 - Are There Safety Concerns for Uber and Lyft?Ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft often find themselves in the  news for any number of criticisms probably mostly due to their  disruptive nature.  We go through a recent article from SF Gate about  some concerns that some female drivers have about safety and we give our  commentary on it. But first, we talk a little boxing. Items discussed Tyson Fury vs. Otto Wallin Fight Highlights “‘There really isn’t anything that can keep you safe’: Women Uber and Lyft drivers speak out” – SF Gate Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:08:57September 17, 2019Episode 161 - Appreciating the Fine Arts with ScoparchistA lot of art these days gets criticized for not being like the art of year or even centuries past.  In the pursuit of appreciating art, we might have the tendency to push those feelings aside and say, "Well, maybe this just isn't for me."  But is there something more to it?  And what is fine art anyway?  What's the state been up that has effects on art today?  We have Scoparchist on the show to discuss this and more. Follow Scoparchist Twitter: @Scoparchist Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:11:38September 10, 2019Episode 160 - The Monetization of BitcoinWe expect Bitcoin to become global money, but is it money yet?  We say it's not and that it requires some steps to get there.  We explain what money is and why it's important before we take you along the circuitous path of monetization in this week's episode. Items discussed "Applying Carl Menger to the Monetization of Bitcoin" by Rollo McFloogle "Shelling Out: The Origins of Money" by Nick Szabo De Moneta by Nicholas Oresme The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous The Ethics of Money Production by Jorg Guido Hulsmann Sponsor Liberty Mugs Support James Nixon Diamond Life Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1055:00September 3, 2019Episode 159 - Let's Boycott the BoycottsSomeone shot an elephant, so everyone lost their minds.  But then, it wasn't quite what they thought it was.  When will we learn that maybe we shouldn't let a picture, headline, or short video clip induce us to go into a rage mob frenzy? Items discussed You get none so nobody goes rage mobbing. Sponsor Liberty Mugs Support James Nixon Diamond Life Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1050:23August 27, 2019Episode 158 - Relax with the Murray Rothbard HateA few weeks ago, Nick Gillespie was on Thaddeus Russell's Unregistered Podcast and made some of the typical complaints about Murray Rothbard from his detractors.  We decided to give our two satoshis about what we think about these Rothbard detractors. Items discussed Episode 291: 'Professional Libertarians,' Bird and Car, from the Friends Against Government Podcast - Free Man Beyond the Wall Episode 88: Unregistered Live in Brooklyn with Dave Smith and Nick Gillespie - Unregistered Podcast Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $1044:49August 20, 2019Episode 157 - How We Can Dump This Government with Donnie GebertWhy do we accept the state of our society?  Was the Constitution written in a way that can still apply today despite all of the major changes in the world since it was written?  Do the police do the job they’re supposed to do?  Do we have any alternatives? What if you could be your own senator?  Donnie Gebert joins us on the show this week to discuss these ideas and more. Follow Donnie The Null Hypothesis of Politics A Direct Republic by Donnie Gebert Ep. 42 Former Military Intelligence Sergeant Donnie Gebert Explains That a Direct Republic Is Now Possible – The Bob Murphy Show Episode 290: How to Overcome 'Flintstone's' Governance in a 'Jetson's' World – Free Man Beyond the Wall Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:45:03August 13, 2019Episode 156 - Birdarchist Fights the State with a Cucumbermcfloogle.com/156 A few weeks ago, Rollo went after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter over a tweet about gardening.  Birdarchist playfully jabbed back, but plenty of other people took some umbrage over it.  So Bird is here this week to talk about whether or not gardening will defeat the state and then whatever else comes up. Items discussed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s gardening tweet Follow Birdarchist Friends Against Government podcast Follow Bird on Twitter Follow the Friends Against Government podcast on Twitter Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $101:10:50August 6, 2019Episode 155 – The PCP Trial, Part 2: James Nixon’s Perspective as a Defendantmcfloogle.com/155 Two weeks ago, we released Part 1 of a short series on a trial about a  federal case regarding an alleged PCP drug ring where Slappy gave his  perspective as a member of the jury that was able to muster a number of  not guilty verdicts for the defendants.  This week, we have James Dixon,  one of the defendants on the case, give his story about his arrest and  trial.  It’s a story of corruption on top of corruption on top of  corruption by the police and courts. Items discussed Episode 153 – The PCP Trial, Part 2: Slappy’s Perspective as a Juror “How a Confidential Informant Ran a North Philly Drug Business – All While Working for the DEA” – Philadelphia Inquirer Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: @RolloMcFloogle @Slappy_Jones_2 Check us out on Patreon Shop on Amazon through our link Learn everything you need to know about Bitcoin in just 10 hours 10HoursofBitcoin.com Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $102:00:00July 31, 2019Episode 154 – Wasting Time Worrying About WasteThe state can be a pretty pernicious thing, infiltrating our minds even when we think we’ve inoculated ourselves.  We decided to tackle a few issues that we might be a little more difficult to dump out. Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter: […]00:00July 23, 2019Episode 153 – The PCP Trial, Part 1: Slappy’s Perspective as a JurorWe aren’t often afforded the opportunity to make an immediate impact on the business of the state and the lives of victims of it.  But Slappy did when he was selected to be a member of a jury for a federal case regarding PCP.  Slappy talks about the trial, why he believes the men are […]00:00July 16, 2019Episode 152 – Who Needs Tokens When You Have Bitcoin?We received an email last week from a listener regarding some points on decentralization and tokenization using altcoins for things like issuing stock in a company.  We decided to do sort of a part 2 to last week’s episode to discuss these ideas.  Do people tend to overuse the idea of “decentralization” and should entirely […]00:00July 9, 2019Episode 151 – Hold On, We’re Talking BitcoinThis week, we run some victory laps around us warning about the intrinsic value of gold some time ago and then transition into some of the critiques made against hodling and Bitcoin being the one and only money. Items discussed A Bitcoin Maximalism Debate – Peaceful Treason Space Miners Race to an Asteroid Worth Quintillions […]00:00July 2, 2019Episode 150 – That’s a Nice Bolo Tie, Mister with Steve Miller-MillerIt’s Episode 150, so we celebrate it by keeping Slappy off the episode with “technical difficulties” and bringing on Steve Miller-Miller to poke fun at libertarians and talk about some of his favorite things. Follow Steve Twitter, @blessyourgrind The Lolberts Monumental Waste of Time Sponsor Liberty Mugs Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, […]00:00June 25, 2019Episode 149 – Grayson Fritts: The Cop Who Is So Religious That He’ll Do Whatever the State Tells Him to DoA preacher in Knoxville County, TN had a very controversial video of his sermons released.  Grayson Fritts repeatedly told his congregation that that he believed that the Bible informs us that gays should be executed.  We could just chalk this up to Fritts being a nutjob, but his other job makes his views considerably more […]00:00June 18, 2019Episode 148 – The Tulsi Gabbard QuestionWe’re keeping the theme of handling someone being wrong, but we’re changing it up a little this week.  What do we about someone like Tulsi Gabbard?  She’s great on foreign policy but very bad on everything else. Sponsor Liberty Mugs Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $10 […]00:00June 10, 2019Episode 147 – Yeah, But He’s Wrong on That One ThingAs libertarians, we often find it difficult to agree with each other, so when we’re faced with dealing with the rest of the world, finding common ground on political and ethical issues can be exceedingly difficult.  What do we do?  As Bitcoin maximalists, how do we deal with the huge numbers of people who promote […]00:00June 4, 2019Episode 146 – They Send Men to War, But at What Cost?War is horrific and it has terrible effects on those who fight in them. Article discussed Hunters—father and son—hold town hall to discuss border security Sponsor Liberty Mugs Earn Bitcoin by using your credit card GetPei.com, use promo code jz6ei7 to get $10 Keep in touch with us everywhere you are Like us on Facebook […]00:00May 28, 2019Episode 145 – The Gun Boy, @NotGregoryMYou’ll shoot your eye out, kid!  We welcome Greg, known as @NotGregoryM on Twitter, on the podcast to talk guns.  I don’t think we’ve ever had a guest come on the show to talk about guns, so we’ll call him our resident gun expert.  He’s a wealth of knowledge and an all-around good guy.  Maybe […]00:00May 21, 2019Episode 144 – Life as a Marine in Afghanistan with @JTTRisky0861What’s it like serving in the military in Afghanistan as you begin to question the war?  We’ve all heard the dramatic stories about soldiers turned antiwar activities, but what was it like for the average Marine?  Jared, known as @JTTRisky0861 on Twitter, is a former Marine who became antiwar and found his way to libertarianism […]00:00May 14, 2019Episode 143 – Talking About Peter Schiff’s Comparison of Gold and BitcoinPeter Schiff is well known in libertarian and Austrian economics circles for his outspoken support of free markets and critiques of government interference.  He’s also known in Bitcoin circles, but that’s because he’s a vocal critic of Bitcoin and its competition with gold.  After a couple of tweets going after Bitcoin and its comparisons to […]00:00May 7, 2019Episode 142 – Tasting Anarchy with Jake from Tasting AnarchyNeed a nice wine pairing to go with your anarchy?  What’s the best Chianti for a cypherpunk?  We’ve got the perfect guest, Jake from the Tasting Anarchy podcast, to tell us everything we need to know about wine and liberty! Don’t forget to sign up for Chillderburg. Follow Jacob TastingAnarchy.com Follow Tasting Anarchy on Twitter: […]00:00April 30, 2019Episode 141 – Dealing with Frauds and Scams in the World of BitcoinThere’s an awful lot of noise in the Bitcoin space due to people trying to promote their altcoins.  The most contentious debates and arguments happen in the Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash communities and the latest installment has featured people calling on Twitter to do something about the @Bitcoin handle.  People supportive of Bitcoin Cash control […]00:00April 23, 2019Episode 140 – Fires and ScamsWe took an opportunity this episode to talk about some current events happening now.  First up is the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and how many libertarians reacted with conspiracy theories and a total lack of empathy.  Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Then changing gears, we discussed the delisting of an obvious […]00:00April 16, 2019Episode 139 – The Anti-Libertarian Tweetstorm by Teri Kanefield with Peaceful TreasonWe’ve finally made it happen!  We welcome our friends, Will and Jared, from the Peaceful Treason podcast to talk some shop this week.  There was a tweetstorm by a U.C. Berkeley author and lawyer that she titled “Libertarians: Destroyers of Democracy” that was just too ridiculous that there was no way we weren’t going to […]00:00April 9, 2019Episode 138 – “Let Me See Your Hands”Vallejo police have released the video of the slaying of rapper Willie McCoy at a Taco Bell.  A Taco Bell employee called 911 to report an unresponsive person sitting in a car.  When Vallejo police arrived, they found McCoy as described, but they noticed a gun in his lap.  They drew their guns and discussed […]00:00April 2, 2019Episode 137 – Yanking the LeashConspiracies exist and there’s plenty of odd accounts of events, but that doesn’t give someone license immediately go off the rails and make wild accusations of conspiracies while having almost no facts.  It’s not a good look for us as libertarians.  Bad people exist and they do some pretty awful things sometimes even without the […]00:00March 26, 2019Episode 136 – Cracking the Egg of Capital PunishmentWe’ve talked about how to deal with crime on past podcast episodes, but how should a libertarian society deal with an active aggressor?  The recent “egging” of Australian senator Fraser Anning by a 15-year-old provides us with an opportunity to dig into this with a recent event. We’ve also discussed how a libertarian society would […]00:00March 19, 2019Episode 135 – Andrew Yang Is Clueless About Guns, But We Have Better IdeasDemocrat Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang is taking some flak for his thoughts on gun control.  And he should because his thoughts are pretty bad, but that means he’s pretty popular among the typical bad idea machines.  Slappy and I take this opportunity to talk through how we think a libertarian society would handle risky people […]00:00March 12, 2019Episode 134 – Bill of Rights for Domestic Workers?Slappy and I came across an opinion piece where a local nanny was complaining about working conditions for domestic workers like cleaners and nannies.  She was suggesting that a “bill of rights” is required to be placed into law by the city of Philadelphia to alleviate these issues.  We read through the article and discuss […]00:00March 5, 2019Episode 133 – The Not-So-Civil War with Prof. CJ of the Dangerous History PodcastSlappy and I welcome Prof. CJ of the Dangerous History Podcast to talk about his show and the recent epic 28-hour long series he did on his podcast, “The Not-So-Civil War.”  We start with some general conversation about Prof. CJ and education, but then we dig into some questions we had about the Civil War. […]00:00February 26, 2019Episode 132 – You’re All a Bunch of Socialists!There were some audio issues during post-production.  We got them to reasonable levels but Rollo’s voice is a little louder than Slappy’s and a bit less crisp. Well, not all of you are socialists.  But it’s interesting to notice how many on the right decry the left’s socialism only to succumb to its temptations as […]00:00February 19, 2019Episode 131 – Guy Swann of The Cryptoconomy Podcast Carries the Lightning TorchWe welcome Guy Swann from The Cryptoconomy podcast to talk about Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, Guy carrying the Lightning Torch, and bringing Bitcoin to the world. Items mentioned SLP52 Jack Dorsey & Elizabeth Stark – Bitcoin: Native Currency of the Internet – Stephan Livera Podcast 10HoursofBitcoin.com Follow Guy Twitter: @TheCryptoconomy The Cryptoconomy Podcast Sponsor Liberty Mugs […]00:00February 12, 2019Episode 130 – We Interrupt Your Normally Scheduled Program…Slappy and I have CarCampIt of the Friends Against Government podcast on the show to talk about some of the current goings on in the world.  We talk a bit about Super Bowl commercials, abortion, and PETA’s Twitter account. Follow CarCampIt Twitter: @CarCampIt Friends Against Government Podcast Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us […]00:00February 5, 2019Episode 129 – How Do You Deal with Criminals in a Libertarian Society?We take libertarianism all the way to its logical conclusion.  That means we don’t want the state to exist for anything.  This includes ways to handle criminals.  Libertarianism answers the question of what constitutes a crime very well, but it’s not quite obvious what to do once we think we know who the criminal is. […]00:00January 29, 2019Episode 128 – What to Get from the Covington Catholic March for Life Media DebacleI’m sure you’ve heard about it already, but there was an incident in Washington, D.C. at the March for Life.  It sets up like a joke, but what do you get when you take groups of Native Americans, Black Hebrew Israelites, and students from an all-boys Catholic High School?  Utter social media mayhem.  We discuss […]00:00January 22, 2019Episode 127 – How to Deal with Racists with Quincy JohnsonThis episode contains some language, so listener discretion is advised. We had the privilege of bringing everyone’s favorite truck driver, Quincy Johnson, on the show to talk about how to deal with racists and then chat a bit about politics. Follow Quincy Twitter: @QuincyLovesBBWS Sponsor Liberty Mugs Keep in touch with us everywhere you are […]00:00January 15, 2019Episode 126 – Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin with Heavily Armed ClownBitcoin just turned 10 years old, so what’s better to talk about than Bitcoin to start the new year?  We brought on Colin, known as Heavily Armed Clown on Twitter, to discuss how he got into Bitcoin, the economics behind it, adoption, the bear market, and more! Items discussed Mathbot.com JW Weatherman’s Course Buy a […]00:00January 7, 2019Episode 125 – The Fall of Stefan MolyneuxStefan Molyneux is known for bringing a lot of people into libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism.  But over the last few years, he’s been saying some pretty odd to flat our ridiculous things that should make someone start to question him.  What went wrong?  Slappy and I discuss. Items discussed Stefan Molyneux Thinks Voting Is the Solution […]00:00January 1, 2019Episode 124 – What We Want For ChristmasMerry Christmas!  Slappy and I spend some quality time with you during this special season to tell you what we want for Christmas.  Grab some fruitcake and some eggnog and cuddle by the fire for this Christmas special! Sponsor Liberty Mugs Get a free Liberty Mug by signing up for the Tom Woods Liberty Classroom […]00:00December 24, 2018Episode 123 – Bitcoin Bomb Threats!Bitcoin’s all time high was a year ago today.  We’re in a bear market, so there’s been plenty of FUD being spread around by the no-coiners.  We discuss some the recent Bitcoin bomb threat, criticisms, and some critiques on altcoins. Items discussedDon’t Buy Bitcoin.  It’s Going to Crash!!!Episode 106 – CNBC’s take on Bitcoin and […]00:00December 18, 2018Episode 122 – Feeling Bullish on Taking Down PC CultureThe extreme leftists and social justice warriors keep getting crazier and crazier with no real end in sight.  The latest victim of their silly whininess is Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray, who was “discovered”to have tweeted out an “anti-gay slur” when he was 15 years old.  Fortunately, the vast majority of people seem to think […]00:00December 11, 2018Episode 121 – Remembering the Death of Joseph Pacini at the Hands of the PoliceAt the end of the month, it will be four years since Joseph Pacini, an at the time 52-year-old man from Clifton Heights, PA, was gunned down by police following a charge of making terroristic threats.  We immediately picked the story up as soon as it happened since it occurred so close to where we […]00:00December 4, 2018Episode 120 – Should We Be Strict Capitalists? with Dean-OOur friend, Dean-O, recently penned a piece on his site The Rogue File called “Why I’m No Longer a Capitalist (It’s Not What You Think)” where he has decided to transition away from being a strict capitalist in favor supporting a free market that allows for what he refers to companies that use some “socialist […]00:00November 27, 2018Episode 119 – The Real IDI’ve been hearing about this Real ID that I’m supposed to be getting in the next few years, so I finally looked at what it is.  It’s not good.  Of course, the government will tell you it’s for your safety, but what else could they be using it for?  CarCampIt joins us to discuss. And […]00:00November 20, 2018Episode 118 – What if a single company takes over a private city?We recently came across a tweet questioning whether the free market could handle a situation where a single company had control over a city.  Could they dominate the people?  What happens if they don’t like certain groups?  Are there free market solutions to these problems or is this an example of an exception to the […]00:00November 13, 2018Episode 117 – Girl SlappingJason Stapleton got triggered when recent guest of ours Mance Rayder posted a screenshot of a kind of dumb conversation happening in his Facebook group. He then proceeded to whine about Mance and his views with his cohost. The problem, though, is that everything he accused Mance of thinking was untrue. So we’re firing back […]00:00November 6, 2018Episode 116 – Mance Rayder on unions, culture, and…It’s been long overdue, but we finally got Mance Rayder on the podcast.  We start with some conversations about unions, pivot to immigration and culture, and then go onto some talk about some issues we see among people resisting a world without the state.  Keep up and enjoy! Items Discussed Episode 85: Award Winning Journalist […]00:00October 30, 2018Episode 115 – Teachers and schoolWe’ve all had teachers and we’re all expected to put teachers on some holy pedestal of respect and awe.  Is that misplaced?  Are public schools the only poisonous place to send your children to be educated or do private schools suffer from many of the same problems.  Do teachers get paid enough?  In this episode, […]00:00October 23, 2018Episode 114 – CharityAs libertarians, we will often be asked how a free society would handle the role that the government takes in helping those in need and providing a safety net.  We provide some ideas and insights on private charity and the wealth that is created with free markets. Items Discussed The End Is Near and It’s […]00:00October 16, 2018Episode 113 – Anecdotes of liberty growing in the minds of peopleThe news cycles have been especially stupid as of late, so instead of focusing on all of the annoying and bad things going, we decided to take a step back and acknowledge some nice observations from our own lives of people turning some corners towards liberty. Sponsor Liberty Mugs Get a free Liberty Mug by […]00:00October 8, 2018Episode 112 – Chris Pacia challenges our Bitcoin maximalismWe’ve been talking about Bitcoin and promoting Bitcoin maximalism a lot.  One of our friends offered to set us up to talk to Chris Pacia to debate and discuss some ideas around Bitcoin maximalism. Rollo ate a steak for dinner, so he thinks he’s ready.  Grum once again decides to crash the party, nullifying the […]00:00October 2, 2018Episode 111 – Nullification with Michael Boldin of the Tenth Amendment CenterThere’s not much we can do to fight the state, but one of the options available can be very powerful: nullification.  We brought the expert, Michael Boldin, on to talk about all things nullification. Follow Michael Tenth Amendment Center State of the Nullification Movement Report @TenthAmendment @MichaelBoldin Follow Michael on Facebook Sponsor Liberty Mugs Get […]00:00September 25, 2018Episode 110 – How would fraud be handled in a libertarian society?We can all agree that fraud is less than savory behavior, but is it Non-Aggression Principle violation level behavior?  Is it simply lying? Regardless of how we categorize it, how would we deal with it in a free society?  We’ve got some answers. Items discussed Prisons in a free society? by Bob Murphy Sponsor Liberty […]00:00September 18, 2018Episode 109 – What is Bisq and why are decentralized, non-custodial Bitcoin services important?We’re still mashing the Bitcoin button for picking podcast episode topics, but this one is a little bit different because it’s fairly actionable. Rollo recently finally used Bisq to purchase some Bitcoin.  Bisq is a decentralized, non-custodial Bitcoin exchange that offers some serious improvements over the Bitcoin exchanges that we’ve grown accustomed to. Also, we […]00:00September 11, 2018Bonus Episode 108 – Gratuitous nerding out by “one and a half” engineers on the alleged moon landing hoaxCarCampIt and Birdarchist were discussing game theory and the possibility of a moon landing hoax in the most recent episode of their podcast.  I, Rollo, had some ideas and disagreements on some of Car’s points, so I invited him to jump on a call to talk about it and release the first ever BONUS EPISODE […]00:00September 6, 2018Episode 107 – Why Bitcoin will be the one and only moneyWe’ve been dedicating a lot of time on the podcast and the blog about Bitcoin and we’ve been teasing our Bitcoin maximalism.  Now it’s time to explain why we believe that Bitcoin is set to be the one and only money. Previous episodes mentioned Episode 90 – Bitcoin scaling problems and solutions with JW Weatherman […]00:00September 3, 2018Episode 106 – CNBC’s take on Bitcoin and Rollo opens a Lightning Network nodeBitcoin has been in the mainstream for awhile now and the media has been running their fair share of stories.  CNBC is running a special called “Bitcoin: Boom or Bust”.  Based on their teasers, it looks like it will be quite the doozy—and not in the good way. And while they’re busy with that, the […]00:00August 28, 2018

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ICO ICO Analysis: Dock.io Published 3 months ago on February 7, 2018 By Alan Simoni According to Research and Markets, the online recruitment market in the US is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 6.47% during the period of 2016-2020. As the online recruitment industry continues to grow in size and popularity, online recruiters have developed in-house recruitment CRMs that are heavily reliant on data intelligence. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. Data helps online recruiters find and recruit suitable talent for their clients and also gives them insight through metrics on how their current processes are working. More specifically, data helps online recruiters target actionable applicant pools and highly-qualified passive candidates. Because of this reliance on quality data intelligence, online recruiters have been more aggressive to their approach of data acquisition. One start-up looking to take advantage of this growing trend is Dock.io. Founded by the team who created Remote.com, Dock.io is seeking to be a blockchain-verified data acquisition platform for online recruiters. Token The Dock.io token (DOCK) will be implemented using the Ethereum ERC20. DOCK holders generate value from the token as a means of currency for data transactions. Essentially, the value of the tokens is linked to the amount of data being acquired by third-party applications on Dock.ios platform. Theoretically, as data acquisition on the platform increases, so would the price of each DOCK token. // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // The company has yet to release any information on use of funds. However, the companys website at least breaks down the total token distribution: 30% towards the token sale, 30% towards ecosystem incentivisation, 20% towards the team (2-year vest), 10% towards cold storage (2 year lock), 6% towards investors, and 4% towards advisors (2-year vest). Dock.io (DOCK) tokens are valued at US$0.067 per 1 DOCK with a US$20M hard cap (equivalent to 1 billion tokens). The company has not yet stated its intention to list the DOCK tokens on any major crypto exchanges. Team Dock.ios core team consists of serial entrepreneurs that have all worked with each other in the past. As compared with the majority of ICOs, the quality of the team seems to be on par. The companys Co-founder, Nick Macario, is a serial entrepreneur thats currently the CEO/Co-founder of Remote.com. Nick previously had success through the acquisition of his company Branded.me by Outsource.com (which was likely an incredibly small deal). The companys other Co-founder, Elina Cadouri, is also a serial entrepreneur thats currently the COO/Co-founder of Remote.com. Elina had previously founded Outsource.com (which acquired Branded.me), which has now been closed. The companys CTO, Stenli Duka, is currently the CTO of Remote.com. Worth noting: Dock.io has no listed CEO. The rest of the companys team is a mix of engineers/developers, a data scientist, and two business development professionals. However, they all hold jobs at other companies just like the companys core team. Dock.ios advisory board consists of Lasse Clausen (serial entrepreneur and blockchain angel investor), Christopher Heymann (blockchain angel investor), Lester Lim (a blockchain advisor thats involved with many ICOs), Avish Bhama (serial entrepreneur), and Darius Rugevicius (a blockchain investor). Worth noting: none of the advisors lend credibility to the ICO. Notable investors include: Passport Capital and BKCMs Digital Asset Fund. Verdict Dock.io presents a highly speculative buying opportunity for investors interested in short-term capital appreciation. First off, Dock.io lacks a dedicated team. Secondly, none of the companys core team has achieved true success with their prior start-ups. Third, the company provides no details on the use of funds from the token sale. Normally, these signals would trigger a major red flag and lots of caution tape. However, this ICO doesnt seem to be malicious, rather it seems to be more like a project than an actual company. Its also worth noting that the company has selected Deloitte as its auditor meaning, the company wont run away with the funds raised by the ICO. While Dock.ios ICO has some notable investor participation, its likely that theyre involved as flippers. Meaning theyre not long-term investors theyre only participating for a quick profit. Risks Any fundraising events (including ICOs) always include the use of funds. No information on the companys use of ICO funds is a major red flag. Is the money going towards operations and development or towards the teams crypto wallets? Based on currently available information (at the time of writing), theres no answer to this question. -3 The basic premise of any successful start-up is that it has a dedicated and talented team yet, Dock.io doesnt have any of the above. All the current team members are holding multiple jobs most of them are employees at Remote.com.Which means Dock.io is likely plagued by a high amount of execution risk. Additionally, 20% of total token distribution towards the team is relatively high (especially since theyre not full-time). -1.5 The prior companies founded by Dock.ios core team, never achieved meaningful scale. Theres no reason to believe that Dock.io will be any different, especially since the entire team is balancing multiple jobs. -1 Growth Opportunities Dock.io has announced three partnerships with: Fund Request, Remote.com, and SmartRecruiters. This opens up the company to offer services to over 15M registered users between the current three partnerships. Forward-looking, as the company develops new partnerships (with other recruiting platforms), theres the potential of rapid mass scale. +4 Unlike the majority of ICOs, Dock.io already has a functioning product thatll fully launch in Q2 2018. Additionally, the current team has created functioning products in the past (Remote.com), so technology risk is relatively low. Market adoption risk has also been mitigated by the companys current partnership with SmartRecruiter which proves that larger scale recruiting platforms are interested in blockchain-verified data acquisition. +4 The identity and access management market has been experiencing incredible growth according to research by MarketsandMarkets, its expected to reach $14.82 billion by 2021. While incumbents control the broader identity and access management market, niche service providers (such as Dock.io) still have a lot of runway for growth and could potentially be high-value acquisition targets by larger companies. +3 Disposition Because of Dock.ios flaws, the DOCK token is worth renting not owning. Meaning its an ICO thats only good for flipping this is due to the fact that Dock.io doesnt seem or behave like a real company (it seems much more like a project). Even though Dock.io seems to be a project by the team at Remote.com, it doesnt mean there isnt any profit potential around this ICO. Like some of the institutional investors involved, flipping the DOCK tokens will likely prove to be a profitable trade. Against this backdrop, we believe that a score of 5.5 out of 10 is warranted. Investment Details: Type: Utility Symbol: DOCK Whitelist: Feb. 8, 2018 Public Sale: Feb. 21, 2018 Price: 1 DOCK = $0.08 U.S. Hard Cap: $20 million Jurisdictions Barred from Participating: China Payments Accepted: ETH Disclaimer: no position in Dock.io at the time of writing. Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink. Rate this post: Important for improving the service. Please add a comment in the comment field below explaining what you rated and why you gave it that rate. Failed Trade Recommendations should not be rated as that is considered a failure either way. (2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this. Loading... Alan Simoni 3.9 stars on average, based on 7 rated posts Follow @HackedCom Feedback or Requests? Related Topics:ICOico analysisinitial coin offering Up Next ICO Analysis: Acorn Collective Don't Miss ICO Analysis: Signals You may like ICO Analysis: Emanate ICO Analysis: MYDFS ICO Analysis: FIC Network ICO Analysis: HighIoT ICO Analysis: Ambit Mining ICO Analysis: CoinJanitor Click to comment You must be logged in to post a comment Login Leave a Reply Cancel replyYou must be logged in to post a comment. ICO ICO Analysis: Triwer Published 2 hours ago on April 27, 2018 By Kent Hamilton Triwer is a parcel delivery platform that aims to take over the courier express parcel market while reducing its carbon footprint. Triwer will help e-commerce business consumers receive their deliveries more efficiently and at a lower cost. By using smart contracts and GPS tracking, Triwer will eliminate inefficiencies and bottlenecks benefiting both online businesses and shoppers. The company will operate on blockchain technology that will be able to track assets each step of the delivery cycle among multiple carriers creating more competition that results in more options for consumers. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. The Triwer application has a built-in price comparison that will allow businesses and consumers to choose the best options and prices for them. Online shoppers will be able to create a profile that they can use across multiple online stores so they will always be in control of their shipping options allowing personalization of delivery preferences including GPS tracking down to the final of delivery. Transportation companies will also benefit by being able to acquire additional deliveries that are close to their route improving efficiency and reducing emissions. Triwer uses Ethereum ERC20 smart contracts that can be duplicated by multiple parties carrying out different commitments to the delivery process. The main contract will be on the Ethereum blockchain, however sensitive information will be stored on side-chains operating on the Triwer protocol providing privacy when necessary. When an order is placed, a smart contract is initiated and validated through the blockchain. Sensitive data is transferred to side-chains until completion. Triwer will generate revenue of 5% 15% of the overall delivery process. Cross-border deliveries and crowd deliveries are expected to yield the highest returns. Triwer will launch in cities in every major European country initially with crowd delivery services. Then they will expand into nationwide service provisions, and ultimately cross borders. The goal is to scale quickly by building critical mass and market penetration by using aggressive marketing and sales strategies. // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // Token All transactions on the main blockchain and side-chains will operate using Triwers ERC20 utility token (TRW). There will also be a mobile app that will use an automated exchange application that transfers cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies into TRW for the smart contract. When starting the smart contract, the shipper pays into an escrow service that holds the TRW until the contract e. The recipients of the TRW may choose to hold on to it for future payments using Triwer, or they can convert TRW back to another cryptocurrency or fiat currency. The public token sale beginsMay 15, 2018, and endsJune 30, 2018, with a token price of $0.08 USD per unit of TRW. 375,000,000 TRW (37.5%) will be available during the public token sale with a hard cap of $25 million USD. The token distribution is as follows: 37.64% Company Reserve 37.50% Public Token Sale 14.86% Private Pre-Sale 8% Marketing & Bounty 2% Private Investors The public sale starts May 15th, 2018. You can sign up here. Team The team brings relevant experience with 12 members being listed on the website along with 4 advisers. They also include their LinkedIn profiles with the majority of the team listing Triwer at the top. The following are a few team members and advisers: Per Havden CEO:Formerly: iStone AB; Financial Adviser, PricewaterhouseCoopers; Manager in Corporate Finance Ernst & Young; Business Development Manager Alexander Martin Finance Manager with 25 years experience managing startups. He was previously with Ernst & Young in London and Barcelona. Carl Unger Brand & Marketing Manager with 30 years experience in branding, marketing and PR, having worked with three of the largest communication companies in the world. Triwer advisers include: Kedar Iyer Founder of Emergent Phenomena, Ethereum blockchain expert and author of two blockchain books. Suchet Dhindsa COO of Everipedia who previously served the United Nations. Michael Stout -Senior Security Expert who consulted at the NATO Joint Warfare Centre. Visit their website,triwer.io, to view the complete list of team members and advisors. Verdict Triwer aims to improve the shipping and receiving experience for companies and consumers with full transparency, best-price delivery, and last mile real-time tracking. If Triwer can achieve their goal of becoming the best option for point-to-point deliveries and express deliveries for e-commerce shoppers, the profit potential is enormous in this vast market. Risks Team members have outside obligations which detract from giving full attention to the success of the project. -1 More than likely there will be multiple new competitors arising in this industry and existing companies such as Amazon will inevitably seek to use blockchain technology to enhance their business in the near future. -1 Marketing is extremely important in creating a successful ico as well as a successful business in the future. Only 8% of the token allocation isallocated for marketing, including bounties. -1 Growth Potential While some competitors are focusing on U.S. markets, Triwer aims to corner the market in European countries before expanding to Asia and the U.S. +4 Token metrics are favorable for ICO investors with over 50% of total tokens available during private pre-sale and public sale with a low market cap of $25 million. +3 The team is 12-members strong and brings extensive knowledge, experience, and expertise in the areas necessary to complete the roadmap theyve set for themselves to be successful in the short and long-term. +3 Disposition Triwer has the ambitious goal of becoming the Uber of the European parcel market with 100% insured shipments, a paperless system that uses PickPack, and a platform with 24/7 live chat and phone customer support. If able to provide deliveries with real-time and last mile tracking, people able to control their shipping needs with a smartphone, and transparency thats enabled by blockchain technology and smart contracts, Triwer could provide excellent returns for investors. Triwer receives a rating of 7 out of 10. Investment Details Symbol: TRW Platform: Ethereum Public Sale:May 15, 2018 June 30, 2018 Price: 1 TRW = $0.08 USD Hard Cap: $25M USD Payments Accepted: ETH, BTC Tokens Available For Purchase: 375,000,000 TRW Total Token Supply:1,000,000,000 TRW For more information regarding Triwer: Website:triwer.io Telegram:t.me/triwer(over 43k members) Twitter:twitter.com/TriwerTech Facebook:facebook.com/triwertech/ LinkedIn:linkedin.com/company/triwertech/ Reddit:reddit.com/user/triwertech Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink. Rate this post: Important for improving the service. Please add a comment in the comment field below explaining what you rated and why you gave it that rate. Failed Trade Recommendations should not be rated as that is considered a failure either way. (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this. Loading... Kent Hamilton 4.5 stars on average, based on 29 rated postsKent Hamilton - ICO Analyst on Hacked and Founder of CryptoDayTrader.io - ICO Insider Info Follow @HackedCom Feedback or Requests? Continue Reading ICO ICO Analysis: Emanate Published 1 day ago on April 26, 2018 By Joshua Larson Perhaps the most glaring use case for blockchain and smart contracts is the music industry. This new technology could easily disrupt the entire billion dollar industry. Its no wonder numerous startups are rushing into blockchain to carve out their nitch. New ICO Emanate (MN8) believes they have an edge on the competition by building their platform on EOS instead of Ethereum. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. Emanate is a music creation and collaboration platform that allows creative artists the tools to rightfully, and legally monetize their works via smart contract. Brought to us by Pedro Colaco, creator of the worlds leading cryptocurrency streaming platform,Dsound, Emanate will be one of the first apps on the EOS platform. With Dsound as our proof of concept on Steem, and some investigation on Muse we have settled on EOS as the best platform to commence build of our production grade platform. EOS covers decentralised storage, ultra fast processing, no transaction fees, and smart contracts. Furthermore we believe that those involved in EOS have the right vision for blockchain technology and we relate strongly to the ethos. MN8 is designed to reward creators, producers, distributors and influencers in the music industry ecosystem.According to the company: For fans and listeners, Emanate is positioned as the very best place to hear the latest new sounds, to discover the biggest new tracks first, and to earn cryptocurrency in exchange for musical influence and following. // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // Emanate offers six key components for listeners and creative artists: Web App:The first feature to be released, Web App allows music producers to seal their work withSmart Collaboration then publish it on the platform. Music lovers willdiscover the original content, create playlists and follow their favorite artists. The artists and anyone else involved in creating the song will be programmed into the smart contractso they can receive their fair share of listening royalties.Tracks created on the Emanate platform will be instantly published for discovery and monetization via listener playback, collaboration with other artists and commercial licensing. Listeners can also earn MN8 tokens in exchange for playlist creation and sharing. Smart Collaborations:The blockchain smart collaboration layer will launch day one of the Alpha release. Each time two artists share some audio, an agreement is executed on the blockchain. This is the backbone of the Emanate ecosystem which is used for royalty calculations and artist payments. Mac and PC Studio Apps:Used by music producers for track management and sound discovery, studio apps may become nodes in the content network. It will allow streamlining of the music production workflow, leveraging files stored locally on your hard-drive, with IPFS-based Emanate samples. Digital Audio Workstation (DAW): Emanate will fully integrate with DAW. Sounds, samples and track packages that are shortlisted in the discovery apps will appear in the DAW file browser to be queued and auditioned for tracks. Plugins will be released which will bring Emanate sounds and collaborations directly into the DAW, removing file downloads completely. The journey from sound recording to full track release will now exist in a frictionless, Emanate based workflow. Audience Attribution:Proprietary algorithms will ascribe ownership to rightful creators and will help identify and reward unique music. MN8 audio exchange protocol:Emanate Live is built on the MN8 AEP, so new protocol releases will be realized as the platform evolves. They will launch an open source API and SDK development program, allowing the entire music industry to access the ecosystem and leverage its power and interconnected system. A series of audio-recognition algorithms will ensure only unique, high-quality audio makes it to the platform. Another audio analysis process will look for copyright violation and Emanate will not only protect artists from fraud but will also reward and incentivize musicians for the creation of unique music. Token MN8 is a utility token that actually offers utility. Here are the guidelines: MN8 will need to be staked on the platform in order to run a record label. MN8 is required for artists and/or labels to publish official releases to the platform. All accounts (listeners, artists, labels) will require a balance of MN8 in order to stay active. Listener accounts are debited micro-payments as payment for their plays. Record labels will need to hold a significant amount of MN8 as a deposit in order to receive royalties from their artists. Emanate tokens will also be used to process transactions and licensing agreements off the Emanate Live platform via the Audio Exchange Protocol. Listeners can also earn MN8 tokens in exchange for playlist creation and sharing. Each Emanate application can operate as a node on a studio computer, generating even more value for holders. The token will be launched on the EOS platform but selling will take place via Ethereum ERC-20. The private sale consisted of 19 million MN8 tokens, which were sold at various prices. The public sale will consist of 88 million units at a price per token of $0.12. In terms of allocation, the breakdown is as follows: 10.5% marketing 10.5% overhead 10.5% events/PR 5.3% legal 63.2% platform development Team, adviser and partner tokens are vested over 18 months with 25% unlocking at the end of the token sale and 25% every six months thereafter until 100% is reached. Accounts/airdrops will be completed at some stage in future to attract new users to the platform Team The group of mostly Australians seem pretty solid and better than average. They have a fair amount of hype despite being so early in their marketing plan. The Telegram and Twitter each boast 4,000 followers. Reis Colao (CTO/Founder) is a full stack developer with 30 years experience. He is the creator of Dsound, a popular music app build off steemit. James Frew (Industry Relations Director/Founder) produced, engineered, remixed and curated for Evolution Radio, BBC 1XTRA, KIIS FM and 2DAY FM, Tommy Trash, A-Trak, The Stafford Brothers, Gryffin and Marquee Las Vegas. He has scored film placements for Magic Mike, Trophy Wife, Persons of Interest and the Bold Type. Sean Gardner (CEO/Founder) spend a couple years as head of technology with DDB Group Australia, a rather large advertising agency. Trent Shaw (CFO/Founder) has 15 years experience in online technology. He worked as a sales manager for eBay and served in various roles at other top technology companies. The team is in the process of appointing experienced professionals in the Digital Rights Management space to help us contribute positively, fairly and legally to the world of Digital Rights Management. Emanate is assembling a team of artist ambassadors, lead by Jordy Dazz and Thomas Olsen who alone have over three million followers on their social media and music accounts. Ten advisers, three Territory Influencers, and four partnering artists round out the team. The advisers are a mixed group of seriously well

Russia Exposes British Lies On Skripal, But Trail Leads To USFacebook Moves 1.5 Billion Users' Data Out Of Europe To Circumvent New Privacy LawEx Chief Adviser For The UNs Child Labour Program Arrested For PedophiliaDems Sue For Hillary Loss, Comey Leaks Investigated, North Korea Suspends Nukes & The Marijuana RebellionThe Hemp Deception: The Stolen Future Of The American PeopleDemocratic Party Sues Russia, Trump, Wikileaks For Conspiring To Hurt Hillary In 2016 ElectionThe Top Ten Marijuana Myths That No One Should BelieveWhat Are 'Assad Apologists'? Are They Like Those 'Saddam Apologists' Of 2002?After spending several years developing my own theory as to whats wrong with the world, often flip-flopping back and forth between different schools of thought, there has been one theme in particular that constantly stands out as quite possibly the root cause of all the dysfunction. It seems pretty clear to me and a growing number of individuals that the ever-increasing tiptoe of society towards power centralization is at the root of most of the worlds problems.If one is to look at almost any type of market, whether its banking, government, media, big business, or even culture, everything is falling under centralized control; meaning society is becoming increasingly controlled by fewer people and fewer institutions. Another way to think about it would be the idea that fewer are gaining control over a larger group of people, hence the idea of a New World Order, where a small global network exercises jurisdiction over a large percentage of the worlds functions. It seems we have evolved from tribes, to towns, to cities, to states, to nations, and now to a one-world-system. This concept is discussed in-depth in a previous article.While having a globalized world of people who are interconnected isnt necessarily a bad thing, and in fact could be considered healthy for growth as a species, one has to wonder whether having a centralized design to society is healthy not only for humans, but the entirety of life on this planet. Yet, is it really ideal for everyone to fall under the umbrella of one system, when the world as we know it is so incredibly diverse? In my humble opinion the answer is definitively no. We all know that conflict arises when people are forced outside their will, so constraining everyone into the same box is sure to manifest a whole host of negative feedback patterns; who is in control of designing/maintaining this system? As Lord of the Rings,brilliantly pointed out, having too much power in one spot naturally breeds corruption, especially if that throne has the power to impact the world at large.With that in mind, the obvious antidote to this predicament would be decentralization of power, aka more power being placed into the hands of more people. Its basically like going from a singular society, controlled by a few select elite, to a multifaceted society controlled by its people, with everyone having the ability to control their own destiny. Fortunately, there is an ever-increasing amount of people who are catching on to this trend towards centralization, hence the popular meme the 1% vs. the 99%. As a result, those awake have begun to feverishly work on ways to decentralize power and give opportunities to the disenfranchised citizens of the world, so that they can become their own compasses and leaders in life. Power is beginning to shift.Before the world got introduced to Blockchain technologies, there were many pioneers in the move toward decentralization that rose up and paved the way. Some people refer to these pioneers as part of the peer-to-peer economy, collaborative economy, sharing economy, or just simply the peoples economy. Whatever name you want to go with, the basic premise is facilitating ways in which people can interact directly with each other, hence the name peer-to-peer, instead of relying on third parties or middlemen to conduct transactions through. It cuts out unnecessary legislation, which cuts costs on both sides of the transaction.Most people, without even realizing it, are already familiar with many of these businesses/institutions. Some of the most recognized ones today include: eBay, a peer-to-peer e-commerce platform; craigslist, a peer-to-peer classifieds/trading platform; Uber, a peer-to-peer transportation platform, Airbnb, a peer-to-peer hotel platform, Kickstarter, a peer-to-peer capital-raising platform, and many others not mentioned.Its not just these companies alone that have laid the foundation for the peer-to-peer economy either. Its also the explosion of farmers markets all over the world, the build-up of worker co-ops, which allows workers to directly own the company, and its peer-to-peer file sharing and communication through the use of the Internet; arguably the greatest tool in the history of mankind with the unprecedented ability to decentralize the control of information and ideas all over the world. Never in our known history have people been able to interact with each other directly and instantaneously, without the need for any type of institution to help facilitate it. The Internet is an ever-expanding reservoir of knowledge, and by far the biggest reason for this shift towards decentralization.All of these platforms have been paramount in the shift towards a decentralized social and economic model within society. However, like all fields, innovation can lead to new ideas that take everything within that space to new heights. In this case, blockchain technology is that innovation; and has the ability to totally revolutionize the way we structure a decentralized society. In many ways, blockchain is the next layer to be placed upon the Internet, hence the name Internet 3.0. Blockchain has the potential to be the future foundation of the peer-to-peer economy.Blockchain technology was the next logical step after the Internet in the progression towards a world owned by the people. What is so transformational about Blockchain technology is that it allows people to build collectives without the need to live close by, trust each other, or put in place some form of highly centralized control. Essentially, its allowing people to form new economic and governmental systems through the use of open source mathematical algorithms (blockchains) that represent the structural framework of how the businesses and organizations function. It also gives people the capacity to interact directly with each other all over the world, rather than go through unnecessary middlemen or regulators, who often take cuts along the way and require that people put trust in them. Blockchain makes everyone their own bank and gives people their own voice within collective systems.One of the other major areas Blockchain aims to solve is that of money, which happens to be one of the biggest problems facing humanity. Its not necessarily money itself that is the problem, because money is nothing more than a representation of value that makes trading in collectives easier, but its the distorted value of money and the lack of alternatives, which has brought about tons of negative ramifications on prices. Simply put, the exchange of value all over the world has become skewed. Basically, some people are getting more value then they should from trades, while others are getting less value then they should from trading. Many energy inputs dont match the economic/monetary outputs, which undoubtedly creates tension amongst people and societies. Blockchain is attempting to solve these problems by propping up new, open source currencies, giving power to individuals to control their own transfer of value, and allowing decentralized groups the ability to operate without central controllers. Blockchain technology could become the new legal structure of the Internet, where no throne is needed to watch over and dictate. For better or for worse, it could be the backbone for the Internet of Things.To help those unfamiliar with the blockchain space or advance the understanding of those already acquainted, I wanted to introduce eight blockchain companies that are already laying claim in this new space. The foundation of a new paradigm is literally taking shape right before our very eyes, so I suggest people wake up and start to pay attention if they want to ride this wave before the rest jump on board.Note: This is not an endorsement of any of these products/companies. Many have strong competitors and their own legitimate hurdles to climb before they are anything but a passing fad. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions. This is just to introduce people to some of the ideas and businesses being floated around in the space. There are many more important ones either not mentioned or that have slipped past my limited time and knowledge base. There is literally something new happening everyday in this space, so its impossible for any one person to have their mind fully wrapped around it.Its impossible to mention the realm of blockchain without mentioning Bitcoin, the first successful application of such a technology. Bitcoin is not only a pioneer in blockchain technology, but its the first successful crypto-currency. I would liken Bitcoins niche in the decentralized economy to being primarily a payment system and currency, which allows people from all over the world to financially transact with each other directly and cheaply, without the need for third party intermediaries, taxes, or legislation at the borders. It really is the first digital currency of the world that allows people to freely move value amongst one another peer-to-peer.In many ways, Bitcoin is like the gold of the crypto-currency space because it is both secure, limited in supply, and has the longest track record of success. Given this comparison to gold, Bitcoin is kind of like the weight that everything is tied down to within the space. Though its still young at only seven years in existence, it has given the entire blockchain space credibility and is one of the biggest catalysts behind a potential explosion in the decentralized economy. While it has serious infighting issues about how to scale that it must resolve before competitors capitalize, its pretty reasonable to assume that Bitcoin isnt going anywhere in the near future if it can resolve its difference and come to together as a community.Launched just over a year ago, Ethereum has taken blockchain technology to the next level through the use of smart contracts, which allow contracts to be programmed into the blockchain. This ability to create self-executing contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, has given rise to the formation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which are basically decentralized organizations of people who come together around a common goal, yet are bound together through the contract they all agreed to. In the simplest sense, the open source smart contracts that are programmed into the blockchain act as the legal framework for the business structure. Since they are self-executing, there is no need for middlemen and legislation to interpret or act as agents of trust in the transfer of value. There is sometimes no need for a central business or authority to exist at all since the smart contract is the business itself and nothing more than a program.There are so many use cases for Ethereum, like developing decentralized voting structures, creating online databases for wills and land contracts, or even creating digital locks for all types of content and services. Ethereum has already risen to number two in market cap amongst crypto-currencies and offers great flexibility for developers to build upon. However, its still very early in its growth process and very much still recovering from its mini-venture capital fund, The DAO, being hacked, which resulted in the Ethereum blockchain being hardforked into two. Nonetheless, it has shown great promise in terms of design and has the very real possibility of becoming the perfect open source platform for building all types of decentralized autonomous organizations upon.Only released just a few months ago, Steemit has become the first social media platform to be built upon the blockchain. What has blockchain community buzzing so far is that Steemit appears to have found a way to monetize social media, whether its by paying the posters of content or rewarding the curators of content. Essentially, Steemit is a social media platform (especially blogging) that users can get paid for using, unlike Facebook and Reddit where people post and curate content for free. There also seems to be no censorship or central control on the platform, which is a huge plus for many in the alternative mediaand liberty movements who are desperate for a way to escape the heavy censorship/demonetization coming down the pipeline through many of the major social media outlets. Steemit is built upon a Graphene blockchain, which allows it to handle thousands of transactions a second. It has also become a great space for those open-minded individuals to not only share ideas, but to make a little money from it. Its popularity has grown so fast in a few months that its already up to the number four spot in terms of market cap among crypto-currencies. However, Steemit is still in Beta and there are many questions that need to be addressed, such as how it will maintain value in the long-term. Despite the fact, Steemit has sparked an idea in the community, that we the people can profit from our own social media, as well as find ways to keep it open and free. If Steemit can successfully blossom into a widely used platform with good content, then it has the potential to capitalize on this new form of social media.Whether people like it or not, the derivatives market is here to stay and very much an important part of the financial system. Businesses need to lock in costs ahead of time in order to stay on budget, so a derivatives market has been created to provide businesses with the financial flexibility they need to maintain budgets without affecting their cash flow. With crypto-currencies being volatile due to the relative newness of the space, Bitshares has developed Bitassets to allow companies to hedge against this volatility by entering into derivatives contracts for crypto-currencies. As a result, companies who may deem Bitcoin too risky to hold on their balance sheets can now purchase derivative contracts to hedge against price volatility, giving them greater financial flexibility to maintain tight budgets.While Bitshares is very new and started off a bit slow, this kind of idea is essential to the crypto-space. Price volatility is one of the major hurdles keeping companies from holding crypto-currencies in their portfolios, so bringing in price stabilizing derivatives to bridge the gap between mainstream finance and the crypto-space is fundamental to its growth. Bitshares also has the ability to stomp out a lot of corruption that takes place in the derivatives markets by reducing the credit limits and decentralizing losses. Bitshares has the potential to carve out a niche market in derivatives, but it will be interesting to see how it and Ethereum interact with each other, given they both specialize in smart contracts and use/plan to use a Graphene blockchain. Ideally, they both will carve out areas of value.Many people are now aware of Uber, and recognize fairly easily just how powerful it has been in challenging the current paradigm of the taxi market. Its true that Uber has done many great things in terms of providing employees with more money and customers with lower prices. However, a new wave of competition is set to hit the scene called Arcade City, which is built upon the Ethereum blockchain. Essentially, Arcade City is fairly similar to Uber in that is pairs drivers with riders, but unlike Uber, Arcade City is based on blockchain, which cuts costs tremendously on both sides of the transaction. Blockchain allows drivers greater autonomy to set their own prices, accept many forms of payment, and take home more profits, as Arcade City takes little to no cuts along the way. With many starting to realize the increasing costs being tacked on by Uber, Arcade City is poised to capitalize on this trend if it can bypass many of the legal battles it currently faces and will continue to face. The apps global launch is September 1, 2016, so its going to be a company to watch very closely moving forward. Someone will capitalize on this market.Slock.it is another technology built upon the Ethereum blockchain, which is essentially a smart contract company that will specialize in digital locks. For example, Airbnbcould be completely automated through the use of Slock.it, or renting a bike could be completely automated through Slock.it, or even Wi-Fi routers could be rented out and automated through Slock.it. Basically, it allows you to rent, share, sell, or share just about anything without any middlemen. It really has a niche for facilitating the P2P sharing economy, without any central management of it.However, it will be interesting to see how Slock.it will recover from the recent hack of The DAO, being that some in the community are quite unhappy with them for producing sloppy coding, which they claim is partially to blame for the theft. This could lead to competitors like ConsenSys coming in and taking over the platform. One thing is for certain: The use of digital locks in the sharing economy is coming; its just a matter of who will step and deliver the vision.Logistics is an important part of the global economy, especially since products are moving all over the world at all times of the day. So it would only make sense that blockchain technology would revolutionize the logistics space. According to their website, Provenance is a platform that empowers brands to take steps toward greater transparency by tracing the origins and histories of products,all through the use of blockchain. The story/origin of the product can follow the product anywhere online, giving buyers and sellers more accurate information to conduct trade with.The real benefit of Provenance is that people can better understand where the products they want to buy are coming from. This is especially important for people who are conscious of certain ethical criteria in products, such as who made it (slave labor?), how its made (material), or the quality of it (organic/fresh). Provenance could provide a database for certificates that authenticate products as well as give consumers faith in companies. Provenance is still in its early stages of testing, but its already clear the tracking items all over the world through blockchain will become a reality in the future.Finally, the blockchain space wouldnt be complete without a spot for e-sports and betting. According to its website, Peerplays is the worlds first decentralized tournament management and wagering platform built entirely on the blockchain. Whats enticing about Peerplays is that there is no house, meaning the odds are not skewed towards the house. Instead, those on the system develop the structures of the games and how their rewards are to be given out. The blockchain simply holds the funds in escrow and divvies them out according to the smart contracts programmed in.Peerplays has the ability to take over fantasy sports leagues, online gambling like poker, online gaming (like Counterstrike, Dota, Fifa)and really any type of game people decide to create. Also supporting a grapheme blockchain, Peerplays can handle thousands of transactions per second. While Peerplays has many hurdles to climb just like the others, its clear that gaming will become fully integrated by blockchain technology in the foreseeable future, especially since it already takes place online. Why pay middlemen when gaming peer-to-peer?Note: Other ideas to check out include: Monero, Enigma, Waves, Ripple, Litecoin, Dash, Namecoin, IPFS, OpenBazaar, Bitfury, and many more I didnt list.As you can see from the hefty list of blockchain technologies entering the space (yet small compared to the overall picture), the entire economy could very well become connected to a blockchain in one way or another. It seems to me that nothing is safe, and given more time for the technology to grow and our knowledge of it to expand, it really appears to be the future of global economies and social structures. That doesnt mean there is not many major problems that must be conquered, especially as it relates to: 1. Scaling In order to handle a complex global economy with millions of different transactions.2. Regulation From governments who want to control trade throughout the world3. Security So regular people trust the platform enough to switch over and are protected from theft/hacking4. Decentralized Consensus Seeing if decentralized groups can work together orderly and peacefully, without sabotaging each other or suffering from inefficiencyAll four of these barriers are major threats to everyone in the space and many questions surrounding them will need to be answered as we move forward. There is no way to sugarcoat it; until we conquer these barriers, there will not be enough use cases to point to for mainstream society to decide and adopt blockchain on a larger scale.However, despite the numerous problems, blockchaintaking over seems an inevitability as more people wake up. The transition will be very bumpy, and even downright nauseous for some who are strongly attached to the old ways of doing things, but the old paradigm cannot go on and will not go on. All systems become obsolete and must give way to bigger and better things. This is how the free market is supposed to exist.The Internet gave us the age of information, which has led people on a path of pattern analysis and self-empowerment. As people become empowered, they inevitably want more control over the value they produce and how its exchanged within society. It seems now that blockchain is one of those revolutionary technologies that is going to give people the power they desire to be the boss of their own economic activity and create a truly decentralized economy of peer-to-peer activity. There may come a point where we dont need institutions anymore, because we can all become our own self-economic engines.The only question now is whether you want to get involved and help it manifest or you want to sit on the sidelines and watch it play out. I would suggest jumping in, because why wouldnt you want to get involved with a game-changer as big as blockchain. Lets change the world together and create a peer-to-peer economy to the benefit of us all. This is true freedom and real change that we dont need a third-party to do for us.(Reply)Hi Tim, Good article. Did you imply that Ethereum is planning on using Graphene somehow? (See Bts summary towards end). What did you mean by this? Thanks(Reply)I was thinking that Ethereum would switch to a graphene blockchain in order to handle huge transaction amounts, possibly when it switches over to proof of stake mining, or so they say they are making that switch eventually. Im looking more into it now and maybe i was actually mistaken on it. I thought that I have come across that and/or heard it in some of the videos from developers, but maybe Im wrong though. I will try and look more into it.Like i said, Im not perfect in this field so maybe I made a mistake on that line of thinking. If you have good info on it, please feel free to share. Thanks!(Reply)Hi Tim,Although Ethereum would benefit in ways technologically from switching to Graphene, realistically I do not think it will happen because they are perceived as direct competition. I suppose anything could happen though; this industry is often unpredictable and illogical. Perhaps a side chain will be developed between the two, before Ethereum undergoes such major surgery?Cheers and thanks again for the snapshot.(Reply)Hey Tim,Looks like you are right and Ethereum is switching to POS: http://www.ethnews.com/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-explainedNo doubt they took some notes from Graphene it would be the smart thing to doCheers This work by The Last American Vagabond is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, and may be reposted as is, with attribution to the author and TheLastAmericanVagabond.com.Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at Ryan@thelastamericanvagabond.com. 3","type":"audio\/mpeg","title":"Dems Sue For Hillary Loss, Comey Leaks Investigated, North Korea Suspends Nukes & The Marijuana Rebellion","caption":"Dems Sue For Hillary Loss, Comey Leaks Investigated, North Korea Suspends Nukes & The Marijuana Rebellion","description":"Dems Sue For Hillary Loss, Comey Leaks 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get the latest gambling news from calvin ayre TAGs: audio interview, Blockchain, ethereum, Ryan Gittleson, Virtue Poker Lee Davy sits down with Ryan Gittleson of Virtue Poker to learn why the new P2P decentralised poker platform is about to shake the poker industry like a rag doll. *To download this audio, right click and save link as* Virtue Poker is a peer-to-peer decentralised poker platform built using Ethereum. I sound like Scotty talking to Spock on the Enterprise. It’s complicated; it’s confusing, and it scares the hell out of me. But if I have learned one thing late on in life it’s to do the very thing that frightens me. So, I sat down with Virtue Poker’s Ryan Gittleson to try and learn how to speak Vulcan. “First and foremost, what we are trying to do is bring innovative technology to an industry that has not seen that much innovation in the past ten years. “The core properties of what we are doing, building on top of the Ethereum Blockchain, include transparency and trustless asset transfer. Properties that I think will be beneficial for the poker industry as a whole.” Why are you the right team to do it? “Virtue Poker is a project out of the Venture Production Studio called Consensys. The founder of Consensys is Joe Lubin. He was a co-founder of Ethereum which is a next generation blockchain solution. He started Consensys a year and a half ago with the goal of building decentralised applications that use this new technology. We are the spoken of as the thought leaders in this space and employ a network of engineers north of 100 people spanning the globe. We are not only working on poker but a host of other products as well.”  “The easiest way to describe the benefits of a blockchain is to use poker as an example. A lot of what we are doing doesn’t even touch the blockchain. It uses what is called The Mental Poker Protocol which is an encryption scheme that allows a series of individuals at a poker table to collectively shuffle a deck of cards without a centralised server involved in the process. Every single peer and machine in this subnet are responsible for shuffling the deck of cards, so you don’t have to rely on a server located in a far off country with a random number generator. “The blockchain is used to escrow tournament buy-ins. If you, me and Bob were to play poker, we each send ten ether (a cryptocurrency) to what’s called a smart contract which can be described as a cryptographic box which only unlocks when certain criteria are met. This contract sits on the ethereum blockchain, holds all of our money and waits for the game to be played. When the game is finished, and there is a winner declared that contract executes and pays the winner directly into their digital wallet. There isn’t a deposit or withdrawal process with Virtue Poker. The way it interacts is you have the digital wallet, and essentially we are bringing the live experience online. When you go to the casino you give them cash, get your chips, and when you win you exchange your chips for cash, and that’s it. There is no delayed withdrawal process. With us, it only takes 17 seconds to cash out.”  Why is now the right time to start? “The unique property of Ethereum is this concept of smart contracts. Ethereum was released a year ago, and Ethereum is what enables this new capability to exist on Virtue Poker where you have full custody of your money. We are poised to disrupt the industry in a way the poker industry has never seen before. “People are sick of the available options that are out there. PokerStars have dominated the space for the past decade, and it’s now ripe for new entrants in our opinion.” It is ripe because of the way PokerStars have been treated their professional player base? “Absolutely, PokerStars eliminated their Supernova program. I think they are making a big mistake that a lot of companies do. They aren’t listening to their customer. At Virtue Poker our aim is to be a customer centric platform that hears their needs and wants and responds to them.” It sounds perfect so why aren’t the big online poker rooms using this technology? “It’s a new technology. Ethereum was in relative obscurity until the beginning of this year, and it caught wind largely with financial applications. I doubt it’s even on their radar yet. They may be aware of Bitcoin, but it’s the underlying technology where the innovation lies.” I recently reached out to the top online poker rooms for their thoughts on cryptocurrency and formed the opinion they don’t believe it’s something their customers wants.  “It’s funny that you bring that up. I have been doing a lot of research with poker pros, and people like Bitcoin as a mechanism for depositing and withdrawing money because of the lack of payment processing fees. There is a steep learning curve in understanding the values that a cryptocurrency and blockchain system can provide and we just need to educate people. Once they see it, they will desire it and want to use it on their platforms.” “The biggest issue is the trust issue. The industry has come a long way since the Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet scandals, but there is still a lingering perception: ‘should I trust a platform with my bankroll’, ‘is the game fair?’ These perceptions exist even independent of whether they are true or not. And that is tainted the industry and done irreparable damage, and I think a solution like this allows for fair gaming. Everyone is involved in the shuffle, and you don’t have to trust us with your money. It will innovate the whole industry.” “Initially for the first release of the platform, you will only be able to conduct wagering using cryptocurrency so most likely the currency will be ether – the token used on the Ethereum blockchain, and we will most likely have Bitcoin availability as well. It will be a niche product starting out for the cryptocurrency enthusiasts. A lot of the high stakes players will like it because you don’t have to deposit $50,000 on PokerStars and got through the player transfer process to aggregate all of that money. Part of our marketing strategy is to enlist well known online and live pro poker players and get them to play on Virtue and showcase the games on Twitch. A lot depends on where we end up getting our initial gaming license. Most likely we won’t be able to offer this service to American residents or Black Markets but that part of the strategy we are still figuring out.” What are the added complications with cryptocurrency that doesn’t exist with real money when applying for a gaming license? “Luckily the UK has been very forward thinking with their classification and understanding of online gambling platforms that use cryptocurrency. Thay have a well-established regulatory regime, but largely it’s an education process. First, we have to educate the regulators on what a blockchain is and how does the poker player use it as part of their stack. One of the cool things about the blockchain is transparency. There is a chain of activity on the blockchain recording all the results, so it will be an attractive solution for the regulators when they get their head around it.” What will customers say to their friends to recommend Virtue Poker? “This is an amazing platform. It has seamless withdrawal and deposit options. The game is smooth and has a better user interface than the stagnant interfaces that have ben out there for so many years. It’s a new cool, innovative solution for the poker industry. The industry has been stale for the last decade because the same players have dominated it. There has been no incentive to innovate instead they have taken a step backwards by the way they have alienated their customers. Getting rid of a program {Supernova} that a lot of people use to support their livelihood is not a good move, you are not listening to their wants and desires. We want to be there for the poker player. We don’t want our platform infested with bots; we want to prevent collusion, and we want a level playing field so a recreational player would feel comfortable playing on Virtue Poker.” What are you really selling here beyond your product? “Integrity. We want to bring back trust to an industry that has been rocked by scandal. We want to show that a blockchain based solution can add value to a well-established industry and show this is a beginning of a technological revolution as more and more decentralised applications come out that use Ethereum or other blockchain solutions as part of their stack.” What weakness will get in the way if you don’t address it? “The biggest thing we are up against is adaptability. This isn’t going to be a platform where you can use a debit card or a Neteller account. There will be a learning curve to use cryptocurrency to play on our platform. But luckily it’s not foreign to the industry. A lot of platforms have added Bitcoin as a deposit and withdrawal option and a lot of people in the poker community have started interacting with digital wallets and solutions in our ecosystem. The other problem is the giant elephant in the room – marketing resources. We don’t have a hundred million dollar annual budget, but we hope to overcome that obstacle by getting reputable pros to like our product, and we have already begun a lot of those conversations.” Why is cryptocurrency perfect for poker? “Payment processing is a thorn in the side of the poker industry. The restrictions and hoops you have to go through to get money on and off a site is a headache for both parties. That’s a blockchain speciality. Bitcoin was invented as digital money that can move freely around the world; instantly and at no cost. There won’t be a 5% withdrawal fees on Virtue Poker. We are eliminating that headache and cost. It will be attractive to both us as a business and our players.” What will success look like next year and in five years? “By the end of next year we want to have released our product; have people using it and getting customer feedback. We are not naive enough to think we’ll get this right first time but we want to get people interacting with our product, using cryptocurrency and understanding how blockchain works. We don’t see this as only an application for the poker industry but a tool for a wider base understanding and adaptability of Ethereum and blockchain systems as a whole. “Five years out we aim to be able to have solved the trust problem in poker and have happy customers who feel that the game has been reinvigorating, not bot infested or shark ridden.” What promises do you want to make and keep? “The first and foremost is we will always listen to their feedback. We are not out here to be another cash hungry money grabbing platform. We’re here to solve some of the problems that plague this industry, and we promise to listen to then,” views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CalvinAyre.com Becky’s Affiliated: How True Flip is pushing the blockchain iGaming platform envelope The future of online poker? Virtue Poker outline plans for token sale Phil Hellmuth jumps on the crypto train with BlitzPredict Becky’s Affiliated: How Quanta is paving the way for blockchain tech in lottery Humaniq celebrates success: First working hybrid Blockchain and 100,000-strong community The Ayre Media Group is based in Antigua in the West Indies with teams in London, Manila and Vancouver covering the global gambling industry.Along with ensuring fair coverage of the gambling industry we highlight the great work of the Calvin Ayre Foundation.

ICO ICO Analysis: Dock.io Published 3 months ago on February 7, 2018 By Alan Simoni According to Research and Markets, the online recruitment market in the US is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 6.47% during the period of 2016-2020. As the online recruitment industry continues to grow in size and popularity, online recruiters have developed in-house recruitment CRMs that are heavily reliant on data intelligence. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. Data helps online recruiters find and recruit suitable talent for their clients and also gives them insight through metrics on how their current processes are working. More specifically, data helps online recruiters target actionable applicant pools and highly-qualified passive candidates. Because of this reliance on quality data intelligence, online recruiters have been more aggressive to their approach of data acquisition. One start-up looking to take advantage of this growing trend is Dock.io. Founded by the team who created Remote.com, Dock.io is seeking to be a blockchain-verified data acquisition platform for online recruiters. Token The Dock.io token (DOCK) will be implemented using the Ethereum ERC20. DOCK holders generate value from the token as a means of currency for data transactions. Essentially, the value of the tokens is linked to the amount of data being acquired by third-party applications on Dock.ios platform. Theoretically, as data acquisition on the platform increases, so would the price of each DOCK token. // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // The company has yet to release any information on use of funds. However, the companys website at least breaks down the total token distribution: 30% towards the token sale, 30% towards ecosystem incentivisation, 20% towards the team (2-year vest), 10% towards cold storage (2 year lock), 6% towards investors, and 4% towards advisors (2-year vest). Dock.io (DOCK) tokens are valued at US$0.067 per 1 DOCK with a US$20M hard cap (equivalent to 1 billion tokens). The company has not yet stated its intention to list the DOCK tokens on any major crypto exchanges. Team Dock.ios core team consists of serial entrepreneurs that have all worked with each other in the past. As compared with the majority of ICOs, the quality of the team seems to be on par. The companys Co-founder, Nick Macario, is a serial entrepreneur thats currently the CEO/Co-founder of Remote.com. Nick previously had success through the acquisition of his company Branded.me by Outsource.com (which was likely an incredibly small deal). The companys other Co-founder, Elina Cadouri, is also a serial entrepreneur thats currently the COO/Co-founder of Remote.com. Elina had previously founded Outsource.com (which acquired Branded.me), which has now been closed. The companys CTO, Stenli Duka, is currently the CTO of Remote.com. Worth noting: Dock.io has no listed CEO. The rest of the companys team is a mix of engineers/developers, a data scientist, and two business development professionals. However, they all hold jobs at other companies just like the companys core team. Dock.ios advisory board consists of Lasse Clausen (serial entrepreneur and blockchain angel investor), Christopher Heymann (blockchain angel investor), Lester Lim (a blockchain advisor thats involved with many ICOs), Avish Bhama (serial entrepreneur), and Darius Rugevicius (a blockchain investor). Worth noting: none of the advisors lend credibility to the ICO. Notable investors include: Passport Capital and BKCMs Digital Asset Fund. Verdict Dock.io presents a highly speculative buying opportunity for investors interested in short-term capital appreciation. First off, Dock.io lacks a dedicated team. Secondly, none of the companys core team has achieved true success with their prior start-ups. Third, the company provides no details on the use of funds from the token sale. Normally, these signals would trigger a major red flag and lots of caution tape. However, this ICO doesnt seem to be malicious, rather it seems to be more like a project than an actual company. Its also worth noting that the company has selected Deloitte as its auditor meaning, the company wont run away with the funds raised by the ICO. While Dock.ios ICO has some notable investor participation, its likely that theyre involved as flippers. Meaning theyre not long-term investors theyre only participating for a quick profit. Risks Any fundraising events (including ICOs) always include the use of funds. No information on the companys use of ICO funds is a major red flag. Is the money going towards operations and development or towards the teams crypto wallets? Based on currently available information (at the time of writing), theres no answer to this question. -3 The basic premise of any successful start-up is that it has a dedicated and talented team yet, Dock.io doesnt have any of the above. All the current team members are holding multiple jobs most of them are employees at Remote.com.Which means Dock.io is likely plagued by a high amount of execution risk. Additionally, 20% of total token distribution towards the team is relatively high (especially since theyre not full-time). -1.5 The prior companies founded by Dock.ios core team, never achieved meaningful scale. Theres no reason to believe that Dock.io will be any different, especially since the entire team is balancing multiple jobs. -1 Growth Opportunities Dock.io has announced three partnerships with: Fund Request, Remote.com, and SmartRecruiters. This opens up the company to offer services to over 15M registered users between the current three partnerships. Forward-looking, as the company develops new partnerships (with other recruiting platforms), theres the potential of rapid mass scale. +4 Unlike the majority of ICOs, Dock.io already has a functioning product thatll fully launch in Q2 2018. Additionally, the current team has created functioning products in the past (Remote.com), so technology risk is relatively low. Market adoption risk has also been mitigated by the companys current partnership with SmartRecruiter which proves that larger scale recruiting platforms are interested in blockchain-verified data acquisition. +4 The identity and access management market has been experiencing incredible growth according to research by MarketsandMarkets, its expected to reach $14.82 billion by 2021. While incumbents control the broader identity and access management market, niche service providers (such as Dock.io) still have a lot of runway for growth and could potentially be high-value acquisition targets by larger companies. +3 Disposition Because of Dock.ios flaws, the DOCK token is worth renting not owning. Meaning its an ICO thats only good for flipping this is due to the fact that Dock.io doesnt seem or behave like a real company (it seems much more like a project). Even though Dock.io seems to be a project by the team at Remote.com, it doesnt mean there isnt any profit potential around this ICO. Like some of the institutional investors involved, flipping the DOCK tokens will likely prove to be a profitable trade. Against this backdrop, we believe that a score of 5.5 out of 10 is warranted. Investment Details: Type: Utility Symbol: DOCK Whitelist: Feb. 8, 2018 Public Sale: Feb. 21, 2018 Price: 1 DOCK = $0.08 U.S. Hard Cap: $20 million Jurisdictions Barred from Participating: China Payments Accepted: ETH Disclaimer: no position in Dock.io at the time of writing. Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink. Rate this post: Important for improving the service. Please add a comment in the comment field below explaining what you rated and why you gave it that rate. Failed Trade Recommendations should not be rated as that is considered a failure either way. (2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this. Loading... Alan Simoni 3.9 stars on average, based on 7 rated posts Follow @HackedCom Feedback or Requests? Related Topics:ICOico analysisinitial coin offering Up Next ICO Analysis: Acorn Collective Don't Miss ICO Analysis: Signals You may like ICO Analysis: Emanate ICO Analysis: MYDFS ICO Analysis: FIC Network ICO Analysis: HighIoT ICO Analysis: Ambit Mining ICO Analysis: CoinJanitor Click to comment You must be logged in to post a comment Login Leave a Reply Cancel replyYou must be logged in to post a comment. ICO ICO Analysis: Triwer Published 2 hours ago on April 27, 2018 By Kent Hamilton Triwer is a parcel delivery platform that aims to take over the courier express parcel market while reducing its carbon footprint. Triwer will help e-commerce business consumers receive their deliveries more efficiently and at a lower cost. By using smart contracts and GPS tracking, Triwer will eliminate inefficiencies and bottlenecks benefiting both online businesses and shoppers. The company will operate on blockchain technology that will be able to track assets each step of the delivery cycle among multiple carriers creating more competition that results in more options for consumers. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. The Triwer application has a built-in price comparison that will allow businesses and consumers to choose the best options and prices for them. Online shoppers will be able to create a profile that they can use across multiple online stores so they will always be in control of their shipping options allowing personalization of delivery preferences including GPS tracking down to the final of delivery. Transportation companies will also benefit by being able to acquire additional deliveries that are close to their route improving efficiency and reducing emissions. Triwer uses Ethereum ERC20 smart contracts that can be duplicated by multiple parties carrying out different commitments to the delivery process. The main contract will be on the Ethereum blockchain, however sensitive information will be stored on side-chains operating on the Triwer protocol providing privacy when necessary. When an order is placed, a smart contract is initiated and validated through the blockchain. Sensitive data is transferred to side-chains until completion. Triwer will generate revenue of 5% 15% of the overall delivery process. Cross-border deliveries and crowd deliveries are expected to yield the highest returns. Triwer will launch in cities in every major European country initially with crowd delivery services. Then they will expand into nationwide service provisions, and ultimately cross borders. The goal is to scale quickly by building critical mass and market penetration by using aggressive marketing and sales strategies. // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // Token All transactions on the main blockchain and side-chains will operate using Triwers ERC20 utility token (TRW). There will also be a mobile app that will use an automated exchange application that transfers cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies into TRW for the smart contract. When starting the smart contract, the shipper pays into an escrow service that holds the TRW until the contract e. The recipients of the TRW may choose to hold on to it for future payments using Triwer, or they can convert TRW back to another cryptocurrency or fiat currency. The public token sale beginsMay 15, 2018, and endsJune 30, 2018, with a token price of $0.08 USD per unit of TRW. 375,000,000 TRW (37.5%) will be available during the public token sale with a hard cap of $25 million USD. The token distribution is as follows: 37.64% Company Reserve 37.50% Public Token Sale 14.86% Private Pre-Sale 8% Marketing & Bounty 2% Private Investors The public sale starts May 15th, 2018. You can sign up here. Team The team brings relevant experience with 12 members being listed on the website along with 4 advisers. They also include their LinkedIn profiles with the majority of the team listing Triwer at the top. The following are a few team members and advisers: Per Havden CEO:Formerly: iStone AB; Financial Adviser, PricewaterhouseCoopers; Manager in Corporate Finance Ernst & Young; Business Development Manager Alexander Martin Finance Manager with 25 years experience managing startups. He was previously with Ernst & Young in London and Barcelona. Carl Unger Brand & Marketing Manager with 30 years experience in branding, marketing and PR, having worked with three of the largest communication companies in the world. Triwer advisers include: Kedar Iyer Founder of Emergent Phenomena, Ethereum blockchain expert and author of two blockchain books. Suchet Dhindsa COO of Everipedia who previously served the United Nations. Michael Stout -Senior Security Expert who consulted at the NATO Joint Warfare Centre. Visit their website,triwer.io, to view the complete list of team members and advisors. Verdict Triwer aims to improve the shipping and receiving experience for companies and consumers with full transparency, best-price delivery, and last mile real-time tracking. If Triwer can achieve their goal of becoming the best option for point-to-point deliveries and express deliveries for e-commerce shoppers, the profit potential is enormous in this vast market. Risks Team members have outside obligations which detract from giving full attention to the success of the project. -1 More than likely there will be multiple new competitors arising in this industry and existing companies such as Amazon will inevitably seek to use blockchain technology to enhance their business in the near future. -1 Marketing is extremely important in creating a successful ico as well as a successful business in the future. Only 8% of the token allocation isallocated for marketing, including bounties. -1 Growth Potential While some competitors are focusing on U.S. markets, Triwer aims to corner the market in European countries before expanding to Asia and the U.S. +4 Token metrics are favorable for ICO investors with over 50% of total tokens available during private pre-sale and public sale with a low market cap of $25 million. +3 The team is 12-members strong and brings extensive knowledge, experience, and expertise in the areas necessary to complete the roadmap theyve set for themselves to be successful in the short and long-term. +3 Disposition Triwer has the ambitious goal of becoming the Uber of the European parcel market with 100% insured shipments, a paperless system that uses PickPack, and a platform with 24/7 live chat and phone customer support. If able to provide deliveries with real-time and last mile tracking, people able to control their shipping needs with a smartphone, and transparency thats enabled by blockchain technology and smart contracts, Triwer could provide excellent returns for investors. Triwer receives a rating of 7 out of 10. Investment Details Symbol: TRW Platform: Ethereum Public Sale:May 15, 2018 June 30, 2018 Price: 1 TRW = $0.08 USD Hard Cap: $25M USD Payments Accepted: ETH, BTC Tokens Available For Purchase: 375,000,000 TRW Total Token Supply:1,000,000,000 TRW For more information regarding Triwer: Website:triwer.io Telegram:t.me/triwer(over 43k members) Twitter:twitter.com/TriwerTech Facebook:facebook.com/triwertech/ LinkedIn:linkedin.com/company/triwertech/ Reddit:reddit.com/user/triwertech Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink. Rate this post: Important for improving the service. Please add a comment in the comment field below explaining what you rated and why you gave it that rate. Failed Trade Recommendations should not be rated as that is considered a failure either way. (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this. Loading... Kent Hamilton 4.5 stars on average, based on 29 rated postsKent Hamilton - ICO Analyst on Hacked and Founder of CryptoDayTrader.io - ICO Insider Info Follow @HackedCom Feedback or Requests? Continue Reading ICO ICO Analysis: Emanate Published 1 day ago on April 26, 2018 By Joshua Larson Perhaps the most glaring use case for blockchain and smart contracts is the music industry. This new technology could easily disrupt the entire billion dollar industry. Its no wonder numerous startups are rushing into blockchain to carve out their nitch. New ICO Emanate (MN8) believes they have an edge on the competition by building their platform on EOS instead of Ethereum. // -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace. Emanate is a music creation and collaboration platform that allows creative artists the tools to rightfully, and legally monetize their works via smart contract. Brought to us by Pedro Colaco, creator of the worlds leading cryptocurrency streaming platform,Dsound, Emanate will be one of the first apps on the EOS platform. With Dsound as our proof of concept on Steem, and some investigation on Muse we have settled on EOS as the best platform to commence build of our production grade platform. EOS covers decentralised storage, ultra fast processing, no transaction fees, and smart contracts. Furthermore we believe that those involved in EOS have the right vision for blockchain technology and we relate strongly to the ethos. MN8 is designed to reward creators, producers, distributors and influencers in the music industry ecosystem.According to the company: For fans and listeners, Emanate is positioned as the very best place to hear the latest new sounds, to discover the biggest new tracks first, and to earn cryptocurrency in exchange for musical influence and following. // -- Become a yearly Platinum Member and save 69 USD and get access to our secret group on Workplace. Click here to change your current membership -- // Emanate offers six key components for listeners and creative artists: Web App:The first feature to be released, Web App allows music producers to seal their work withSmart Collaboration then publish it on the platform. Music lovers willdiscover the original content, create playlists and follow their favorite artists. The artists and anyone else involved in creating the song will be programmed into the smart contractso they can receive their fair share of listening royalties.Tracks created on the Emanate platform will be instantly published for discovery and monetization via listener playback, collaboration with other artists and commercial licensing. Listeners can also earn MN8 tokens in exchange for playlist creation and sharing. Smart Collaborations:The blockchain smart collaboration layer will launch day one of the Alpha release. Each time two artists share some audio, an agreement is executed on the blockchain. This is the backbone of the Emanate ecosystem which is used for royalty calculations and artist payments. Mac and PC Studio Apps:Used by music producers for track management and sound discovery, studio apps may become nodes in the content network. It will allow streamlining of the music production workflow, leveraging files stored locally on your hard-drive, with IPFS-based Emanate samples. Digital Audio Workstation (DAW): Emanate will fully integrate with DAW. Sounds, samples and track packages that are shortlisted in the discovery apps will appear in the DAW file browser to be queued and auditioned for tracks. Plugins will be released which will bring Emanate sounds and collaborations directly into the DAW, removing file downloads completely. The journey from sound recording to full track release will now exist in a frictionless, Emanate based workflow. Audience Attribution:Proprietary algorithms will ascribe ownership to rightful creators and will help identify and reward unique music. MN8 audio exchange protocol:Emanate Live is built on the MN8 AEP, so new protocol releases will be realized as the platform evolves. They will launch an open source API and SDK development program, allowing the entire music industry to access the ecosystem and leverage its power and interconnected system. A series of audio-recognition algorithms will ensure only unique, high-quality audio makes it to the platform. Another audio analysis process will look for copyright violation and Emanate will not only protect artists from fraud but will also reward and incentivize musicians for the creation of unique music. Token MN8 is a utility token that actually offers utility. Here are the guidelines: MN8 will need to be staked on the platform in order to run a record label. MN8 is required for artists and/or labels to publish official releases to the platform. All accounts (listeners, artists, labels) will require a balance of MN8 in order to stay active. Listener accounts are debited micro-payments as payment for their plays. Record labels will need to hold a significant amount of MN8 as a deposit in order to receive royalties from their artists. Emanate tokens will also be used to process transactions and licensing agreements off the Emanate Live platform via the Audio Exchange Protocol. Listeners can also earn MN8 tokens in exchange for playlist creation and sharing. Each Emanate application can operate as a node on a studio computer, generating even more value for holders. The token will be launched on the EOS platform but selling will take place via Ethereum ERC-20. The private sale consisted of 19 million MN8 tokens, which were sold at various prices. The public sale will consist of 88 million units at a price per token of $0.12. In terms of allocation, the breakdown is as follows: 10.5% marketing 10.5% overhead 10.5% events/PR 5.3% legal 63.2% platform development Team, adviser and partner tokens are vested over 18 months with 25% unlocking at the end of the token sale and 25% every six months thereafter until 100% is reached. Accounts/airdrops will be completed at some stage in future to attract new users to the platform Team The group of mostly Australians seem pretty solid and better than average. They have a fair amount of hype despite being so early in their marketing plan. The Telegram and Twitter each boast 4,000 followers. Reis Colao (CTO/Founder) is a full stack developer with 30 years experience. He is the creator of Dsound, a popular music app build off steemit. James Frew (Industry Relations Director/Founder) produced, engineered, remixed and curated for Evolution Radio, BBC 1XTRA, KIIS FM and 2DAY FM, Tommy Trash, A-Trak, The Stafford Brothers, Gryffin and Marquee Las Vegas. He has scored film placements for Magic Mike, Trophy Wife, Persons of Interest and the Bold Type. Sean Gardner (CEO/Founder) spend a couple years as head of technology with DDB Group Australia, a rather large advertising agency. Trent Shaw (CFO/Founder) has 15 years experience in online technology. He worked as a sales manager for eBay and served in various roles at other top technology companies. The team is in the process of appointing experienced professionals in the Digital Rights Management space to help us contribute positively, fairly and legally to the world of Digital Rights Management. Emanate is assembling a team of artist ambassadors, lead by Jordy Dazz and Thomas Olsen who alone have over three million followers on their social media and music accounts. Ten advisers, three Territory Influencers, and four partnering artists round out the team. The advisers are a mixed group of seriously well

out out your methods first in some of the Altcoin Fantasy crypto buying and selling video games. As you transform an increasing number of gifted, you’ll begin to realize constant ends up in your buying and selling and that’s the way you’ll understand it’s time to start out making an attempt actual buying and selling.Like what you learn? Give us one like or proportion it for your buddiesoriginal post…Cryptocurrency, Telegram (GRAM)–Cryptocurrency adoption and building continues to develop into the primary month of the 12 months. While costs for Bitcoin and different best cash stays strong into 2019, blockchain and crypto have discovered a resurgence in messaging services and products taking a look to make use of a protected virtual cost.Last 12 months introduced in regards to the bombshell rumor that Facebook, which has been each a supporter and detractor of cryptocurrency, was once making plans to release a stablecoin on its WhatsApp messaging provider. The social media massive, who established a blockchain-based cost department early closing 12 months, was once additionally closely criticized for becoming a member of Twitter and Google in enforcing a crypto promoting ban that added gas to the already crushing undergo marketplace.Now Telegram, a best 10 messaging app, is reported to be launching its token and Main Net as early as March 2019. Speaking with CoinTelegraph, an nameless supply who claims to be with regards to the venture says the messaging massive is taking a look to get its blockchain-based community and token to marketplace throughout the subsequent a number of months.The up to now introduced venture, which is able to cross below the title Telegram Open Network (TON), raised with regards to $1.7 billion closing 12 months in two rounds of personal preliminary coin providing (ICO) investment. Despite the maligned panorama of ICOs, which via some studies has a fraudulence price with regards to 80 %, the Telegram ICO has been hailed as a a hit use of the fashion and one that gives a blueprint for different established corporations to discover the gap. Telegram, who studies having an lively per 30 days person rely of 200+ million, has catapulted to the highest ten of app-based messaging platforms, offering an in depth supply of publicity for blockchain and cryptocurrency.According to the supply, who claims being with regards to Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, the estimated March unencumber is topic to switch, with Durov being reluctant to offer a undeniable date for the token and mainnet release. In a separate file, Russian media outlet The Bell likewise commented on TON’s close to readiness, declaring that Durov has instructed buyers the venture is 90 % whole, however to look forward to the opportunity of delays. TON, which is able to make up the community portion of Telegram’s blockchain venture, is making plans to make use of a local cryptocurrency “Gram”, with without equal function of the provider to be a “new way of exchanging data.”While the messaging provider has been forthright about its plans to ascertain a blockchain and crypto-based platform, now not everybody has been excited for the venture. Following information closing October that the venture was once coming near its unencumber, the rustic of Iran issued a commentary towards Telegram and firms which might try to cooperate with the app. In explicit, the Iranian executive has claimed that the venture undermines nationwide safety, and has made an effort to limit and ban the provider relationship again to April 2018.In addition, Russia has additionally made an effort to prohibit the messaging provider, in spite of being the delivery nation of its founder and CEO Durov. In a high-profile invasion of privateness, the Russian executive tried to power Durov into sharing the app’s encryption keys, claiming that it was once a needful below their present telecom rules. Durov’s refusal, whilst unfavorable to rising the provider in Russia, has been extensively considered a good transfer against protective privateness and unfastened speech.Like what you learn? Give us one like or proportion it on your buddiesoriginal post…The crew at Zilliqa gave the crypto group their 26th update at the development of the ZIL community simply the day before today, the 22nd of January. This specific challenge replace was once distinctive in that it was once the remaining one ahead of the release of the Mainnet that has been scheduled for the 31st of January this 12 months. The announcement by way of the Zilliqa crew additionally highlighted the truth that the Mainnet release marks twelve months because the preliminary token era match (TGE) of ZIL at the Ethereum community.This challenge replace…is the remaining challenge replace ahead of the release of the Zilliqa mainnet on January 31, it marks the one-year anniversary of our token era match (TGE), and it — most significantly for us — represents a complete 12 months’s price of labor and bi-weekly updates from the Zilliqa crew.We’d love to thank everybody for taking the time to examine what we’re development and we will be able to remember to proceed the custom transferring ahead.The first ZIL tokens went live to tell the tale Huobi on January 25th, 2018.The earlier challenge replace by way of the crew at Zilliqa notified the crypto and investor communities of the completing touches being completed in opposition to growing the general finish product that’s the ZIL Mainnet. All sides of the platform were examined and retested at the 3rd model of the Testnet, code-named Mao Shan Wang. The crew at Zilliqa has had a convention of naming the Testnets after the Durian circle of relatives of end result. Version 1 was once code-named Red Prawn and Version 2 was once code-named D24The unofficial roadmap main as much as the Mainnet release is as follows:There shall be a Token switch window of a number of months after the Mainnet is introduced. More in this shall be launched by way of the crew after the 31st of Janaury.Checking coinmarketcap.com, we discover that ZIL is these days valued at $0.022 and down lower than a share level within the remaining 24 hours. With the mainnet just one week away, it is going to be price gazing the marketplace response of the ZIL token because of the pending match.Late remaining 12 months, Coinbase listed ZIL along different ERC20 tokens because the alternate plans to make bigger its choice of virtual property for its shoppers. There was once additionally hypothesis that facebook was building on the Zilliqa network. However, this was once debunked virtually straight away by way of the crew.Many crypto fanatics consider that the Zilliqa mainnet shall be a sport changer to the extent of inflicting a couple of shock-waves within the blockchain business.What are your ideas concerning the Zilliqa Mainnet release? Does it pose a danger to different blockchain initiatives reminiscent of Tron and Ethereum? Please tell us within the remark segment beneath. Disclaimer: This article isn’t supposed to offer monetary recommendation. Any further opinion herein is only the writer’s and does no longer constitute the opinion of Ethereum World News or any of its different writers. Please perform your individual analysis ahead of making an investment in any of the a large number of cryptocurrencies to be had. Thank you.Like what you learn? Give us one like or percentage it on your buddiesoriginal post…By CCN.com: Bitcoin Cash ABC opened Wednesday in sure territory, emerging greater than 7.5% towards the USA Dollar on a 24-hour adjusted time-frame.At 1130 GMT, the BCH/USD pair used to be buying and selling at $129.83 in step with aggregated information supplied through CoinGecko.com. The general marketplace cap, on the similar time, used to be on the subject of $2.282 billion, Bitcoin Cash’s highest since January 15, 2019, whilst its 24-hour adjusted quantity used to be above $256.244 million.In comparability, different most sensible cryptocurrencies underperformed. While Bitcoin’s valued surged through a modest 2%, XRP and Ethereum additionally jumped 1.6% and a pair of.2% on a 24-hour adjusted time-frame. Only EOS and Tron got here nearer to Bitcoin Cash regarding considerable good points. Both the blockchain belongings preferred greater than 5% towards the buck.The Bitcoin Cash marketplace may just now not supply any proof that would give a boost to their spectacular rally. Roger Ver, the person at the back of the Bitcoin Cash undertaking, had just lately introduced that they’d replace their Bitcoin.com pockets. On January 21, peer-to-peer market Bitquick had added BCH give a boost to to its platform. But the rally didn’t get started anytime ahead of January 22.On the opposite, Bitcoin Cash confronted survival threats right through the time since its onerous fork in November 2018. Its closest best friend Bitmain closed down international operations, fired 80% of its group of workers, and changed its two CEOs in what it known as an adjustment. Cobra, the co-owner of bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.org, stated in a debatable tweet that Bitcoin Cash is useless.Bitcoin Cash is useless. Needs new management and route/objective in a different way it is going to be value $Zero in a couple of years.The absence of cast basics left technical signs to do the reason.As visual within the Coinbase chart above, the Bitcoin Cash surge happened simply round its present give a boost to house close to $119.64. Similarly, an energetic resistance house to the upside capped the rally from maturing additional – because it did in 4 other events since January 17. It explains that Bitcoin Cash – at highest – will have to be consolidating inside of a strict buying and selling channel whilst anticipating breakout.According to Moon Overlord, a cryptocurrency dealer with 38.8k fans on Twitter, Bitcoin Cash is breaking out of a sizeable descending pattern line.$BCH apparently breaking out right here after a small endure entice / forestall raid. pic.twitter.com/HZA5kxzw1FNico, any other Bitcoin Cash analyst, discovered the coin breaking out of a falling wedge trend. Traditionally, this sort of transfer is bullish for belongings.“MACD and RSI rising, Buy Signal from the UCTS at the 6h chart,” wrote Nico. “EMA50-100 & 200 between here and potential target at 0.04sats so pay attention for any pullback in the road.”Update on $BCH, Falling Wedge Breaking up (after all). MACD and RSI emerging, Buy Signal from the UCTS on the 6h chart. EMA50-100 & 200 between right here and attainable goal at 0.04sats so concentrate for any pullback within the street,#bchabc #BCH pic.twitter.com/QU9p4pwDhtClick here for a real-time bitcoin money worth chart.Like what you learn? Give us one like or percentage it for your palsoriginal post…When following the crypto marketplace, there are lots of sources that you’ll flip to – information websites, Youtubers/vloggers, blogs, discord teams and boards. Telegram, which is a cloud-based cell and desktop messaging app, could also be a rising and massive supply for crypto similar teams, whether or not it’s airdrops, ICO information or indicators. There are over 1,700 Telegram crypto teams which may make it tricky to determine which of them are price becoming a member of and even discovering the nice ones in any respect. We constructed Telegram Crypto Groups for that very reason why – to provide help to to find crypto teams whether or not you’re in search of neighborhood channels, ICO channels, Bitcoin channels or different subjects.Here we’ll percentage Five best Telegram crypto teams we expect are promising. Some of those additionally noticed probably the most build up in reputation in August amongst all Telegram crypto teams.With over 134,000 workforce individuals, this workforce is on the upward push. They supply day-to-day updates on respectable airdrops and paintings with many initiatives to ship airdrops.This channel is geared in opposition to offering probably the most successful indicators and the remaining 14 indicators about Bitcoin (BTC) margin calls have ended in 11 out of 14 wins. They are recently at 1,161% gross benefit in leverage buying and selling and feature 31,007 individuals.High high quality indicators in Binance with Bitmex indicators, technical and basic research and crypto information posted each day. They are recently at 6,978 individuals.The ICO Showcase lists and charges all of the ICOs. If you wish to have to be up to date on all of the ICO updates, it is a nice channel to subscribe to. They have 96,518 individuals.This channel gives business indicators, margin buying and selling indicators, indicators and information. They additionally be offering a personal faculty channel to lend a hand investors maximize their buying and selling income. They recently have 79,126 individuals.We’ll be placing in combination any other replace subsequent month about which Telegram teams have been the most well liked for September. If you have got a favourite whether or not in this record or no longer, tell us within the feedback!Like what you learn? Give us one like or percentage it in your buddiesoriginal post… TO HELP SUPPORT AND MAINTAIN THIS WEBSITE DONATE TO THIS ADDRESS jQueryWhen information hit the crypto-verse that the CBOE change had withdrawn its utility for a rule trade on the SEC to believe a Bitcoin ETF, many investors had held their breath anticipating the price of BTC to fall a couple of hundred issues or even perhaps retest $3,200. The information most effective led to BTC losing from $3,600 to round $3,567: a decline of 0.91%. The King of Crypto is these days buying and selling at $3,600 indicating that the scoop had little impact on BTC.Looking on the general marketplace capitalization, we discover that it fell from $120.6 Billion to $119.1 Billion because of the scoop. This is a drop of one.24%. The general marketplace capitalization is these days again to $120.346 Billion indicating that the scoop didn’t do a lot harm.Numerous theories were floated round within the more than a few social media platforms. Four explanations that have been dominant have been as follows:Further elaborating at the 4 imaginable the explanation why the scoop of CBOE’s withdrawal of the Bitcoin ETF had little marketplace impact, we discover within the first state of affairs the these days ongoing govt shutdown has affected the purposes of many federal companies such because the SEC and CFTC. In the case of the latter, the CFTC has the only authority to resolve the way forward for Bakkt. Crypto traders and investors had possibly hooked up the dots and concluded there could be dangerous information in the case of the Bitcoin ETF because of the continued Shutdown. This then explains why there was once no panic promoting.The 2d state of affairs issues to the indifference many crypto dealer and traders these days have against the approval or rejection of an ETF utility. This is hinged on the truth that 2018 was once marked via the crypto markets been shaken via a number of ETF rejections. With time, investors have evolved an immunity for dangerous information from the SEC. There may be the added undeniable fact that many crypto idealists imagine that Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t intend for Wall Street to become involved within the purposes of Bitcoin.Thirdly, every other batch of CME Bitcoin futures expire the next day, January 25th. The present worth of BTC and different cryptocurrencies had already factored in this match thus the CBOE withdrawal didn’t have an effect on the markets as expected. Perhaps if the scoop arrived previous on within the month, there would possibly were severe panic promoting.The fourth concept that has been postulated is an extension of the second one: crypto investors and traders have dealt with the current bear market for over a yr and feature evolved an immunity to dangerous information. The ones nonetheless buying and selling or hodling have weathered the hurricane and feature develop into proof against any exterior adverse information.What are your ideas at the crypto markets no longer falling as anticipated when information broke that CBOE had withdrawn their Bitcoin ETF utility on the SEC? Has the ETF misplaced all relevance to crypto investors and traders? Please tell us within the remark phase beneath.Disclaimer: This article isn’t intended to offer monetary recommendation. Any further opinion herein is solely the creator’s and does no longer constitute the opinion of Ethereum World News or any of its different writers. Please perform your personal analysis prior to making an investment in any of the a lot of cryptocurrencies to be had. Thank you.Like what you learn? Give us one like or proportion it for your buddiesoriginal post…Galaxy Digital Raising $250 Million to Offer Loans to Crypto Firms: ReportYour email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *The tZERO buying and selling platform has simply introduced that secondary buying and selling of its safety tokens that were distributed to traders previous this month, is now are living. Accredited traders can now business tZERO safety tokens with different accepted traders via a virtual securities brokerage account at Dinosaur Financial Group, LLC. The latter will acts as a broker-dealer. The company has partnered with PRO securities, LLC, which is a subsidiary of tZERO.Earlier on within the month, groups at each Overstock and tZERO had notified the investor neighborhood that the buying and selling platform would get started operations by means of the tip of this month. The CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, defined that the release of tZERO has been 4 years within the making. With secondary buying and selling now are living, what stays is the overall release of the online platform.The ICO increase of 2017 and 2018 led many regulatory our bodies around the globe to step in to give protection to traders from fraudulent actions and the corresponding losses incurred from such investments. In the case of the American SEC, route used to be a little bit sluggish however they in the end issued a directive that some ICOs fall under the category of securities offerings. This led many willing marketers and corporations, to notice that Securities Token Offering (STOs) would be the subsequent large factor on the planet of crowdfunding.tZERO CEO Saum Noursalehi, defined why safety tokens have been a lot more secure than different tokens got from the standard ICOs.The global of safety tokens has lacked a regulated venue for secondary buying and selling. The buying and selling of our personal safety tokens is the crossing of the Rubicon for the brand new global of virtual property. This will create liquidity, democratize get right of entry to, convey transparency and potency to international markets and boost up the adoption of safety tokens.The Nasdaq powered DX.Exchange went are living on the 7th of this month. Users of the change can now business the cryptocurrencies of Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), XRP , Bitcoin Cash (BCH), EOS (EOS), Digibyte (DGB), Enigma (ENG) and Litecoin (LTC). They additionally be able of buying and selling tokenized variations of conventional shares equivalent to Apple, Facebook, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Descartes Systems Group, Baidu, Intel, Google and Nvidia.Earlier this week, the crew at Zilliqa and MaiCoin introduced their partnership to paintings at the new Hg Exchange. The imaginative and prescient of latest change is to offer common traders get right of entry to to high-growth startups equivalent to Uber, Airbnb, Space X, Grab and Didi Chuxing.What are your ideas of extra exchanges providing buying and selling of tokenized securities? Is this a glimpse of the way forward for making an investment? Please tell us within the remark phase underneath. Disclaimer: This article isn’t intended to provide monetary recommendation. Any further opinion herein is solely the creator’s and does now not constitute the opinion of Ethereum World News or any of its different writers. Please perform your personal analysis prior to making an investment in any of the a large number of cryptocurrencies to be had. Thank you.Like what you learn? Give us one like or proportion it on your palsoriginal post…The group at Robinhood knowledgeable the crypto and investor communities that that they had acquried two licences vital for his or her operations within the state of New York. The fee loose alternate has gained a digital forex license, often referred to as the BitLicense, and a cash transmitter license in NY. With those two licenses, citizens of New York can use the platform to put money into cryptocurrencies once Robinhood completes putting in the provider for its customers within the state. An precise timeline has no longer been given however they’ve promised it’ll be reside within the coming months.The announcement through Robinhood additionally defined their willpower in complying with regulatory necessities of each state they need to function in.As we introduce new monetary merchandise, we’re dedicated to partnering with regulators to verify compliance with trade necessities. Today’s announcement is proof of this dedication.We’re excited to convey commission-free cryptocurrency buying and selling to New York, and stay up for coming to extra states quickly.Robinhood is recently to be had in 30 American States with further plans of growth around the United States. The platform currently supports buying and selling of the next 7 cryptocurrencies.Robinhood recently be offering products and services to customers will to put money into shares, ETFs, choices and cryptocurrencies. The web site additionally mentions a long run Cash Management provider. The buying and selling is fee loose and out there by way of telephone or desktop.What are your ideas on Robinhood getting the related licenses to function in New York? Will this bring in different probabilities for the company? Please tell us within the remark phase under. Disclaimer: This article isn’t intended to present monetary recommendation. Any further opinion herein is solely the writer’s and does no longer constitute the opinion of Ethereum World News or any of its different writers. Please perform your personal analysis sooner than making an investment in any of the a large number of cryptocurrencies to be had. Thank you.Like what you learn? Give us one like or percentage it on your palsoriginal post…This is a sequence of weblog posts that specialize in Youtube crypto influencers the place we will be able to function thrilling Youtubers that target the arena on cryptocurrencies.The international of crypto is repeatedly evolving, and the group is rising at a fast tempo. There’s numerous jargon and in the market and too many of us making noise. So we’ve searched and scoured the entire of youtube to provide the maximum related channels you want to be careful for. We’ve interviews those channels and did the heavy lifting in order that you received’t must.Hackdroid Crypto: Simplifying advanced blockchain and crypto centered tasks so the typical particular person can perceive their generation and undertaking.ACF: How and why did you get into cryptocurrencies?Hackdroid Crypto: I were given into Bitcoin in January 2013 and feature been buying and selling ever since. The concept of being in entire keep an eye on of your price range is bad, empowering, and above all necessary for humanity.ACF: Is there a specific blockchain undertaking that excites you? If so, what’s it and why?Hackdroid Crypto: AC3 https://ac3.io/ is my undertaking that excited me extraordinarily. We’ve constructed our personal blockchain (now not on Ethereum or pre-existing networks) to decentralize the core basis for virtual content material. AC3 will position keep an eye on into the arms of content material creators like myself and permit them to totally keep an eye on their content material rights, distribution, and monetization.ACF: Where do you notice cryptocurrencies five years from now?Hackdroid Crypto: Bitcoin will disrupt 50% of gold’s marketplace capitalization. Institutional traders globally will start to cut up their investments into the blue chip crypto tasks treating them as a commodity (silver, gold, metal, and so on) BTC will probably be above $100okay in five yearsACF: What recommendation would you give to somebody who desires to speculate, business or get into cryptocurrency?Hackdroid Crypto: Coinbase Index fund goes to assist novices put money into all of the business which I like to recommend. I’ve referred over 100 folks that experience invested on Coinbase and I believe that they’re going to convey hundreds of thousands of “mom & pop” traders into the distance with their suite of gear. Also {hardware} wallets are nonetheless extraordinarily undervalued with child boomers changing into within the area.OJ Jordan: Crypto Corner is my video podcast devoted to all issues Crypto. I do a whole lot of tutorials and all the time attempt to simplify issues to permit those that are new or now not very tech-savvy. I additionally evaluation cash and feature visitors from the business to assist develop the crypto group.ACF: How and why did you get into cryptocurrencies?OJ Jordan: I heard about Bitcoin again in 2011 after which in 2013 however at time I discovered it too difficult to pay money for. Finally in 2015 I discovered Coinbase and it opened the door for me.ACF: Is there a specific blockchain undertaking that excites you? If so, what’s it and why?OJ Jordan: I’m really not precisely a Bitcoin maximalist however that is the only I care about essentially the most. As for altcoins, I check out to not get emotionally hooked up. My favorite coin is the one who provides me the most efficient benefit this week.ACF: Where do you notice cryptocurrencies five years from now?OJ Jordan: I’m hoping to peer the marketplace succeed in no less than $three bln marketplace cap and person adoption to be on a far larger scale than these days. Things take time to increase so I’m really not anticipating a complete new international simply but.ACF: What recommendation would you give to somebody who desires to speculate, business or get into cryptocurrency?OJ Jordan: When you listen a couple of coin, please take time to look at it and its marketplace efficiency as a substitute of shopping for in an instant. Word of mouth generally is a very bad factor on this business. For instance, each and every time Ripple or Ethereum bounce to a brand new All-time prime, I see an enormous spike in folks dashing to shop for. That’s simply the other of what a dealer would advise. Make certain you aren’t purchasing the hype.ACF: How and why did you get into cryptocurrencies?ACF: Is there a specific blockchain undertaking that excites you? If so, what’s it and why?Hardcore Crypto: NEO as a result of programming language flexibility.ACF: Where do you notice cryptocurrencies five years from now?Hardcore Crypto: Mass adoption. BTC to one million bucks.ACF: What recommendation would you give to somebody who desires to speculate, business or get into cryptocurrency?Like what you learn? Give us one like or proportion it in your palsoriginal post…The crew at Neo (NEO) has partnered with a lot of media corporations to prepare the NEO DevCon 2019 summit that can be hosted in Seattle, Washington. The match will happen at the 16th and 17th of February; which is precisely 3 weeks away. The Summit is supposed to deliver in combination builders, DApp creators and trade leaders from more than a few industries to percentage concepts at the present and long term growth of the trade.The Agenda of the DevCon contains discussions within the subjects of a sensible financial system, the way forward for NEO, blockchain software within the Internet of Things, decentalization and extra. The crew at NEO has promised to make essential bulletins as neatly us supply an up to date Roadmap of the challenge. The crew states the next.At the convention, NEO Foundation and its subsidiaries will announce roadmap and plans for the longer term. Industry mavens from most sensible tech corporations and main students will percentage their insights on “decentralization”, “Layer 2” , “distributed storage” and different blockchain-related frontier subjects.The NEO Devcon web site has long gone forward and supplied the next record of influential folks in generation, blockchain and industry, as visitor audio system on the match.What are your ideas at the Developer Conference in Seattle, Washington, being hosted by way of the crew at NEO? What are your expectancies of the development? Please tell us within the remark segment beneath. Disclaimer: This article isn’t supposed to offer monetary recommendation. Any further opinion herein is solely the creator’s and does no longer constitute the opinion of Ethereum World News or any of its different writers. Please perform your personal analysis prior to making an investment in any of the a lot of cryptocurrencies to be had. Thank you.Like what you learn? Give us one like or percentage it on your palsoriginal post…The international of cryptocurrencies can incessantly be complicated to newbies. Not best do they’ve to grasp an enormous choice of new phrases, how the whole lot works, and methods to discover a excellent challenge to spend money on, however additionally they need to care for problems which might be once in a while difficult to grasp even for the ones with revel in.Perhaps the most productive instance of ways advanced the crypto world can in point of fact grow to be from the second one greatest cryptocurrency by means of marketplace cap, XRP.The very first thing to grasp — which may be one thing that a large number of buyers in finding difficult — is that XRP isn’t the similar as Ripple.XRP is the second one greatest coin within the crypto international. It used to carry the 3rd position, however its growth and greater utilization secured further budget, and the coin controlled to overcome Ethereum, which used to be strongly impacted by means of bearish marketplace and intense festival. Now, XRP is 2nd best to Bitcoin.XRP used to be evolved by means of an organization referred to as Ripple Labs, and as a result of this, it used to be at the start referred to as Ripple. However, because of the confusion that adopted, the place it used to be tough to inform whether or not others are speaking concerning the coin or the corporate, it used to be renamed to XRP.Today, this can be a local cryptocurrency of the XRP allotted ledger, which is open-source and, in keeping with Ripple Labs, decentralized.When it involves Ripple Labs, this can be a corporate introduced by means of Ryan Fugger and Jed McCaleb. Since its introduction, about 8 years in the past, the company evolved XRP, in addition to a number of merchandise used for making fast bills any place on this planet. These merchandise — xCurrent and xRapid — have been temporarily known as complex fee techniques by means of banks world wide, and lots of of them made up our minds to go into a collaboration with Ripple to be able to exchange their outdated techniques, which incessantly take days to finish transactions. In comparability, Ripple’s merchandise can organize the similar in best four seconds, and their TPS is just about the similar as that of primary card firms.Another factor to notice about Ripple merchandise is they switch the cash by means of turning it into XRP, no less than for the aim of touring in the course of the community. Other than this, XRP is allegedly unbiased of Ripple, and its creators declare that the coin would live on even though the corporate have been to vanish.While that is evidence of the coin’s decentralization to many, others weren’t satisfied, and each XRP and Ripple needed to face a large number of accusations of centralization, coin manipulation, or even accusations of the coin being safety. This has resulted in a number of complaints, particularly in 2018, and XRP changed into a middle of a large number of controversies.However, as time stepped forward, so did the coin and the corporate, and this present day, maximum of the ones controversies are forgotten. XRP and Ripple completed a large number of luck on their respective battlefields, and each are well known and well-respected this present day.In reality, many have prime hopes for XRP and imagine that the coin could be the only to guide cryptocurrencies to mainstream utilization. Others speculate that it could grow to be the consultant of the 3rd era of cryptos. It is unknown what would possibly occur at some point, however for now, no less than, XRP appears to be dependable, extra solid than maximum cash, rapid in the case of acting transactions, and entirely unbiased.For the newest cryptocurrency information, sign up for our Telegram!Disclaimer: This article will have to now not be taken as, and isn’t meant to supply, funding recommendation. Global Coin Report and/or its associates, workers, writers, and subcontractors are cryptocurrency buyers and every so often would possibly or won’t have holdings in one of the crucial cash or tokens they duvet. Please habits your personal thorough analysis sooner than making an investment in any cryptocurrency and skim our complete disclaimer.Like what you learn? Give us one like or proportion it on your buddiesoriginal post…Whether you’re a beginner or had been buying and selling for moderately a while, discovering a bunch of compatible buyers may also be a good way to additional your finding out. Discord teams are a method of having pointers & alerts, and in addition an effective way to validate a industry thought you will have. As they are saying, two heads are higher than one.Before we proportion among the very best discord buying and selling teams, a handy guide a rough be aware on buying and selling “signals”. “Crypto signals” are necessarily recommendation on when to shop for and promote specific cryptocurrencies. The factor with following this recommendation blindly is that you just’re susceptible to falling sufferer to a pump and sell off during which the organisers of the scheme are normally the one ones to benefit. It’s our place that nobody must apply buying and selling alerts blindly, however as a substitute do your individual research and make a decision for your self.With that during thoughts, listed below are among the very best discord crypto teams that you’ll use to be informed extra about buying and selling and get new buying and selling concepts.This is a neighborhood powered listing of the entire Discord teams which can be cryptocurrency / blockchain comparable. They observe what number of customers are in each and every team, the outline of the gang in addition to sizzling/chilly teams.This is the professional discord server for the Cryptocurrency subreddit. It’s a big discord with a whole lot of knowledge and dialogue round quite a few cash. Join right here: https://discordapp.com/invite/GdVCYvrThis huge, 10,000+ discord team makes a speciality of connecting coin research, buyers, miners and builders discussing anything else and the entirety cryptocurrency. Join right here: Ftag%2FcryptoAgain, we don’t counsel purchasing on any alerts – ever. However, it’s attention-grabbing to look what buyers are taking a look into and the way they arrive to their selections via technical research and extra. Join right here: https://discord.me/cryptosignalsIf you don’t thoughts paying a little bit for some further excellent recommendation, then CoinMarketResearch is a brilliant possibility. While they do supply a loose chat house to talk about, the actual advantages of this team is the superb analysis and research that this staff completes. In addition to paid alerts, they supply elementary research in addition to ICO insights. Join right here: http://CoinMarketResearch.infoPremium alerts is some other huge discord providing dialogue, loose alerts and in addition a paid subscription carrier for “advanced” buyers. With common updates and an engaged neighborhood, this discord is bound that can assist you strengthen your buying and selling. Join right here: https://premiumsignals.info/This is a smaller discord team that talks about cryptocurrency comparable information, scams, upcoming ICOs and extra.. It has a couple of channels and has a big neighborhood which can be useful for sharing concepts and discussing your buying and selling. Join right here: https://discord.me/cryptopediaLast however under no circumstances least, sign up for our Altcoin Fantasy neighborhood and proportion your concepts. Our energetic neighborhood is right here to assist any questions in terms of our fable cryptocurrency buying and selling competitions, in addition to dialogue of all issues buying and selling! Join right here: https://discord.me/altcoinfantasyThe advantages of becoming a member of a few of these discord teams is that you just’re in a position to additional your finding out about cryptocurrency buying and selling and making an investment. The strategy of finding out to industry isn’t a easy one and so we suggest trying

get the latest gambling news from calvin ayre TAGs: audio interview, Blockchain, Ryan Gittleson, Virtue Poker Lee Davy sits down with the Ryan Gittleson, Head of Business Development and Marketing, for Virtue Poker, to learn more about the innovative new poker room, why Dan Colman and Brian Rast have jumped on the bus, and how this particular bonehead can learn more about blockchain.  *To download this audio, right click and save link as* Goa becomes the first cashless state in India. Sweden wants to become the first cashless country. I know that cash is dying. My banking experiences are woeful. Online gambling transactions can be convoluted and crushingly cumbersome. But I’m still afraid to take the plunge and exchange some of the numbers in my bank account, for numbers in a digital wallet. Here are the primary reasons for my fear. It’s new. It’s my money. I don’t want to lose it. And I don’t understand it. Regular readers of this website know that there is a strong feeling that cryptocurrency will become the king of gambling currency. It’s high time I learned to understand it, but each idiot’s guide I trawl through reads like the instructions manual for the Star Trek Enterprise engineering department. So what better way to shake this feeling than to speak to one of the founders of Virtue Poker, an online poker room, set to become the safest place to play online poker room in the world. A startup with that much bite, Dan Colman sent an email to the owners asking how he could get involved. What follows is an abridged version of a 60-minute conversation I had with Ryan Gittleson, the Head of Business Development and Marketing for Virtue Poker. Stop reading, and instead listen to the interview, it’s much better. What has changed since our chat in December? “We have grown our development team to five full-time employees. We added two part time consultants. We’ve solidified the Justice System. We have met with gaming regulators across the EU to introduce them to the platform, and the conversations have gone well. We incorporated in Gibraltar, so we are a company now. Yesterday, we added Dan Colman and Brian Rast to our team as advisors for the project.  And we received legal feedback on our token model and are ramping up for our token launch next month.” “We have the technology side down, but we don’t have the industry expertise or our pulse to the industry as Dan or Brian does. We were looking for well-respected pros who are passionate about cryptocurrency. Dan reached out to us, and I was introduced to Brian by a mutual friend. It was interesting to see their enthusiasm for the space, they are owners of cryptocurrency, but want to learn more about our business, and so they were perfect for us.” Are you marketing to people who are knowledgeable about cryptocurrency, or do you want to reach a broad range of individuals immediately?  “The growth of the distributed server processing system Ethereum community and general interest in blockchain technology means there will be a lot of people who get this right off the bat. But I see Virtue Poker as a bridge to mainstream, adoption and understanding of blockchain technology.  “Think of a bank. They have a ledger of who owns what and how much. When one person moves money to another the bank updates the ledger, reduces one account by the transfer amount, and adds it to the other. The bank will go through with that. There is a trust element they will do it properly, they won’t get hacked, and that their data will be of the highest integrity. “Blockchain takes this concept of a ledger, decentralises it, and replicates it across thousands of nodes around the world. This is what Bitcoin is. It’s a ledger of who owns what and how much, and there are all of these nodes and computers around the world that have the same copy of that ledger. “So when one person wants to move one Bitcoin to another, what happens is it’s broadcast to this global network of computers who are all competing to verify this transaction. Think of it like solving a cryptocurrency puzzle. The first to get it right gets a piece of the Bitcoin as a fee. That transaction is included with other transactions of a similar sort as a block. That’s added to the blockchain or this ledger, and all of these computers all over the world automatically update to the same as that ledger. That’s how Bitcoin works. If 50% of nodes go offline tomorrow, the ledgers are still in tact. “Ethereum took this concept of a decentralised ledger and instead of including in a transaction the ability to move money from A to B you can include computer code in that contract. “On Virtue Poker the computer code we insert creates a short term escrow account. The players on a table send their Ether to this table contract. It holds it in escrow stored on the blockchain. Included in that contract are the customer parameters of the game. Included in that contract is a chip counter understanding every player’s stake. At the end of a hand, all of the players submit a transaction to update the stakes in that contract accordingly. For a Sit n Go when all the player’s stakes reach zero except one the contract know to begin paying people out. “The players have a wallet. The only money at risk is the money sent to the table contract. When the game is over the money is returned to the digital wallet. One of our core value propositions is removal of player deposit risk. We are never in control of that money.” We trust banks without understanding how they work; I guess we have to take that same leap of faith to use cryptocurrency?  “I was watching Mr Robot Season 1 when I first heard about blockchain technology. The financial crisis that occurs when these records are deleted on the show, that’s analogous to real life, and one of the core value propositions of a blockchain is there isn’t a single point failure. You can’t go for one guy, one node, one computer and take this offline. You would have to get all the computers that are mining Ethereum around the world and take them all down simultaneously. It’s a new paradigm. The idea of decentralisation, this core tenet of this industry, it took me 4-6 months to fully wrap my head around it, so don’t feel concerned that you don’t get it right off the bat.” What does a digital wallet even look like?  “The best way to think of a wallet as private key and public address. Think of the public address as a postal address. Anyone can send things to you. And your private key is the only thing you can use to unlock that, in this case, your money. It’s called the public and private key pair. The wallet on your phone is a private key kept on your phone, or there can be one on your computer. “Other hardware wallets like the Ledger Nano, your private key is held on a device. It’s more secure because it’s not connected to the Internet, but if you lose that key, it’s like losing a key to your apartment and losing your key forever. A locksmith can’t help you. You lose that money forever. The only way you can recover that private key is using the recover phrase you created when you created your wallet. It’s a string of words like the cat walked along the river. You have to keep pieces of paper with recovery keys for all the wallets you have. It’s fascinating. It shows we are in the early stages of this technology. In the future, people will be using blockchains, and they won’t even realise it, in the same way, we use the internet and don’t think about it. Back to Virtue Poker. The first users will be people who are interested in this technology, but as part of our roadmap, we aim to broaden the appeal to all individuals who like poker irrespective of their knowledge of this type of currency and software.”  Do you think you need to dumb the communication down further to reach more people?   “I wrote most of the white paper working with my development team and tried to describe it to someone who is non-technical. Part of the challenge of Virtue Poker is taking these value propositions, and engaging in the form of content marketing that communicates to a broader audience.” An example from the white paper – Using a peer-to-peer, cryptographic shuffling protocol called Mental Poker, all players seated at a table are involved in card shuffling, and reach consensus at the end of each hand using a Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism – in English, please? “Ok, I didn’t do a good job of dumbing that down. Essentially, to put it into English, the difference between Virtue Poker and PokerStars –  let’s take the RNG. In real life you see someone shuffle the deck and you trust it’s fair. In the digital world, you can’t see it. PokerStars have an RNG stored in a server stored in some foreign country. This source of randomness is used to shuffle the deck of cards for all of the games on the platform. They have it tested to certify that it’s fair once every five years and there is no oversight after that. There is an element of trust. If I can’t see it how do I know it’s fair? “For the professional player, as long as they are winning money, they don’t care about these things. The recreational player who suffers a bad beat with a two outer on the river – there is this perception of doubt. At Virtue Poker we want to address that audience, and have them sleep safely knowing the games on Virtue Poker are fair. Instead of having one server that powers all of the decks in the game, every player has an RNG built into their computer on our client that is involved in shuffling the deck of cards. All players are included in a given hand with the shuffling of that deck of cards. Even if all of the players you are playing with were colluding and tried to hack their client and tamper with the deck as long as your computer shuffles that deck the game is fair and random. You only need one correct shuffle. That’s called Mental Poker, and we have incorporated it in Virtue Poker. It’s never been done before. We have spent two years building this out to answer the question, is online poker fair?” So you are positioning yourself as the safest place to play poker in the world, live or online.  “That’s part of the thought process behind our name: Virtue: high integrity. That’s the brand we are trying to build. PokerStars have 15-years experience. They don’t have malicious intent, but they don’t have strong brand loyalty with their customers. People play on PokerStars because they have to. PokerStars is just interested in improving their profit margin. Our goal is to provide the safest and most trusted online poker platform, to listen to the players, create a product for them, and make some money in the process.” How are you going to communicate with your audience?  “One idea is having a dedicated forum. Like 2+2 but for conversations on Virtue Poker. Another important point is problem gambling. We want to address those concerns and create mechanisms where people can lock themselves out of their client if they have a problem. I was reading a post about Americas Cardroom where a player wanted to lock himself out of his account, and they allowed him in a few days later. One of the things I will say. It’s easy to say these things. It’s going to be a lot of work. But this is our focus.” Why the Ethereum blockchain and not the Bitcoin blockchain?  “It’s a more comprehensive programming language; you can do more with it. I would liken Bitcoin to a pocket calculator, and Ethereum is a Macbook Pro.  Ethereum has taken the best of Bitcoin and built upon it to make it better. We also have to think about scalability. Blockchains right now are really slow. I think Ethereum can process in the realm of 40 transactions per second, and Visa can process 40,000 transactions per second. Ethereum has certain things in their roadmap to improve this protocol. The first blockchain that achieves scalability will be the one everyone uses, and I think Ethereum will be the first, and it’s not only me. The Ethereum community is the fastest growing and largest development community globally. When I started working on this project, there was 500-1000 on the Etherurm subreddit now there are 120k. You have to look at where the developers are, and where the apps are being built, that’s the blockchain that’s going to win. I could have an operating system that’s better than iOS and Android, but if no-one builds any apps on top of that, it’s going to be a waste of time.” Talk about your plans to build a decentralised poker network using this technology.  “We have this new solution, untested and unused. Let’s build a brand on top of this. Let’s show the integrity of this solution, get customers and leverage that into white labelling and licensing that software to other people around the globe. For example, let’s say Mexico or Brazil regulate online poker, and they are only going to give five licenses out to Mexican and Brazilian based companies, that means we can’t operate in that market, but we could approach them to partner. We could license our software to them, and it allows them to tap into our liquidity. That’s our growth strategy and being able to combat the rise in the regulation of online poker. If a country chooses not to legalise it, we can operate as a B2C brand. If they do regulate, we can partner with the licensees and benefit, and set us up for success either way.” What is your stance on poker bots and third party software on Virtue Poker?  “My opinion on third party software, like things that allow bum hunting is bad for the industry. On the contrary, if you all use a HUD I see that as creating a level playing field. If you created a built in HUD, then everyone has access to the same information. The third party software tools that allow you to sit next to a losing player comes from screen scraping. We are investigating a potential solution to that problem. It’s not good for the industry to distort a playing field even more. “With regards to poker bots, that’s an irreversible trend. What we want to do on Virtue Poker is have a bot v bot arena, a bot v human arena, and a human v human arena. If you try to use a bot in a human arena, we will discover that and ban you from the client. Another thing you can do is change the game. Ever heard of short-decked poker, 34 cards, and no poker bot has solved that game. So innovating the game types is an area of opportunity for us.” What is the name of your cryptocurrency and will you have an ICO?  “We are doing our token launch next month. It’s called Virtual Player Points (VPP). You can wager with it, you can stake it to become a justice, and you can use it to access special tournaments. We are also going to potentially use it as a rakeback system to reward people for using our platform.” Towards the end of the interview, I got a little lost when Ryan was trying to explain how the Justice System worked. I kept thinking about Wonder Woman’s legs and couldn’t focus. Rather than screw the interview up by continuing to ask Ryan Why? like a child, I asked him to explain it in more detail and here is Ryan’s explanation of the Justice System.  In order to combat collusion and cheating, Virtue has developed the Justice System. Justices are non-playing peers that are assigned to poker tables who provide security and protection to players on the Virtue Poker network and in exchange receive fees from players. Justices are assigned to tables on the Virtue Poker network, and every few hands, are randomly reassigned to another table. Justices can be thought of as validator nodes on the Virtue Poker network, signing each transaction for every hand on the platform and submitting hand histories for storage. The functions described below are automated: there is no manual oversight needed for a user to run a Justice node. And in return for providing this service, Justices can earn fees from Virtue Poker. Justices provide three core functions to the Virtue Poker network: In the rare instances, two peers at a table disagree as to the “state” of the table at the end of a hand or a game, a Justice can resolve the dispute in real-time and award the winner the pot. Each Justice submits each action of every hand for storage so that hand histories can be stored. This is a both required by gaming regulatory bodies and ensures essential services such as collusion detection, bot detection, and multi-accounting identification can be conducted. Partial Storage of Player Encryption Keys Justices will store a decryption key for the players at the table. The “Dropped Player Problem” for Mental Poker is defined as when a player drops out of a hand prior to a hand being completed. This is problematic, as all players must share encryption keys for community cards to be revealed and for a hand to be completed. Using Shamir’s Secret Sharing, each player’s keys can be encrypted and split amongst all players plus the Justice. If the player drops, the Justice can request the pieces from each player and decrypt the assembled pieces so that the hand can be completed. A Justice node on Virtue Poker can be activated by downloading the Justice client to a machine, opening the application and activating the Justice. Again, running a Justice requires no manual oversight, it can be thought of as a software program running in the background on your computer An infographic about the Justice System can be found here. The white paper for Virtue Poker is right here. The more I talk about blockchains, digital wallets, and cryptocurrency, the more it becomes apparent that the only way to learn is to get involved. In doing so, you are taking action, and there is no better form of learning than taking action, making mistakes, and then learning from those mistakes. It cannot be as difficult as it sounds. If it is, then it’s going to be a tough slog for these pioneers. During the interview, Ryan said that it doesn’t matter if you create a better OS than iOS or Android if nobody builds apps on your OS. I would extend that to include, it doesn’t matter how brilliant your online poker room is if everybody is scared of using it because they don’t understand all the jargon. views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CalvinAyre.com Becky’s Affiliated: How True Flip is pushing the blockchain iGaming platform envelope The future of online poker? Virtue Poker outline plans for token sale Phil Hellmuth jumps on the crypto train with BlitzPredict Becky’s Affiliated: How Quanta is paving the way for blockchain tech in lottery Humaniq celebrates success: First working hybrid Blockchain and 100,000-strong community The Ayre Media Group is based in Antigua in the West Indies with teams in London, Manila and Vancouver covering the global gambling industry.Along with ensuring fair coverage of the gambling industry we highlight the great work of the Calvin Ayre Foundation.

Can Ethereum Overcome Its Immense Technical Problems? [Podcast] Princeton Computer Science Professor Michael Freedman on why scaling this blockchain-based computing platform will be so difficult. Jim Epstein & Ian Keyser|Jul. 26, 2017 2:00 pm Ethereum is an "unstoppable computational machine" that puts "a lot more power and sovereignty in the individual." That's how ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin described this decentralized global computing network in an interview with Reason last year. Centralized institutions, Lubin says, will gradually be replaced by scattered computing nodes, leaving regulators no "corporation that [they] can step on, take information from, or cause to act in a certain way." Ethereum will become as well-known as the internet itself, "impact[ing] all aspects of our existence." It's a seductive pitch. "Ether"—the digital currency that powers the ethereum network—has increased in value about 3,000 percent so far in 2017 and it's starting to attract the same mainstream attention as bitcoin. Last month, a company built on the ethereum platform raised the equivalent of $153 million in three hours. Now that ethereum has a market cap of more than $18 billion, the network is facing immense technical challenges. Can it scale to serve millions of users? To discuss, we spoke with Michael Freedman, a professor of computer science at Princeton who, starting in the late '90s, worked on an earlier wave of peer-to-peer computing technologies. In 2011, Freedman co-authored a paper about a technique called "sharding" that ethereum developers are currently working to integrate into their network. Today, he's the co-founder and chief technology officer of the database company TimeScale. He's also serves an advisor to the decentralized computing platform Blockstack, which we discuss in the interview and was the subject of a recent Reason video. Subscribe, rate, and review the Reason Podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below: Don't miss a single Reason podcast! (Archive here.) Audio post production by Ian Keyser. This is a rush transcript—check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Michael Freedman: The problem I think is that the timeline for these things are very uncertain. This is along the time where we've seen this rapid increase in adoption of a theory. Now hundreds of millions or billions of dollars being put into this. The question is are we going to be able to develop the technology at the same speed at which we're jumping in in terms of demand? Why this is a real problem I think fundamentally is that many of the main technique that allowed us to achieve the security we have in bitcoin or in ethereum that is that effectively everybody can validate every transaction on the network. Everything that happens on the network is also an inhibited scale. The fact that there's no secret information or the fact that there is basically one kind of global historical log means that we kind of can't split this up into little things going off to the side, which is normally how we scale these things. Everybody does little work off to the side and then all together we make forward progress. That's fundamentally hard in this new model of global consensus. Jim Epstein: This is the blockchain that you're referring to? This idea that everyone can see every bit of information. Freedman: Correct. Everybody can see every bit of information or that there's really even putting aside the global visibility there's really just one historical log of basically every event that happens in the whole world. Epstein: Why is it hard to scale a system like that? Freedman: Well, because it kind of requires that as somebody is trying to make some progress you basically keep in your head everything else that happened in the world. Imagine that if you're trying to learn something where in your mind you have to think about all other worldly information that's happening at that same time. Effectively that's currently how blockchain works. Everybody knows everything in the world. While on the flip side the traditional way we've known to scale for now decades is you kind of split up the work. You only focused on your little bit of the information you care about. Other people could focus on theirs. Ne'er the twain shall meet in that you don't care about their work and therefore you don't need to track it. Epstein: Bitcoin is a currency system where you see all transaction in the ledger. Ethereum takes us to another level because it's attempting to be a global computer where all computation happens in this ledger or essential computation in this shared database that everybody sees. This element where everyone sees all of these computations. That's what you're not sure about. Is it that it becomes too much data and the ledger, this shared database, becomes too long or too large in terms of gigabytes? Or is it something else? Is it about the way the information flows? Freedman: These two things are very much related because as you currently have this global ledger the more that you're trying to at any one time ... If we're trying to do 100 things at once versus 100,000 things at once effectively the ledger is going to grow at a different rate. The fact that as more people try to use it we go from trying to do one or two transactions a second to seven transactions a second to 100 to a million transactions a second. Those are orders of- to changes, which mean that, one, everybody participating has to download more data just to keep up. Two, the growth of this ledger continues to get larger and larger over time. It's really almost the fact that at any one time the fact that you need to do so much more just to keep up that's the scalability problem. If you look to the shift of computing there was a big change in the '90s, which was when we went from these what they sometimes refer to as "scale up" where you have mainframes where you kind of build bigger and bigger individual computers versus scale out where you have normal ... The things that Google is running and the thing that you're running on your laptop are kind of very similar. In fact, it's just that Google or Facebook run a million of them or 10 million of these computers at once. As opposed to one on your desktop. It's not that they've built a giant computer. They just have a lot of computers that do things in parallel. That's kind of the scaling problem here. So far the way that we have scaled blockchain technologies ... In all of the current proposals about making the block sizes bigger and doing some other things are all still about scaling up. How do you build effectively bigger and faster mainframes? When if we really want to scale, when we want to hit those next orders of magnitude we need to do, then we need to go into the scaling out. How do we do things a lot in parallel? That's something that the technologies just don't yet have. Epstein: The big idea that you hear in the ethereum space is called sharding. In a nutshell, and you can correct me, this idea is that this is how the ethereum network is going to scale. It's that not every computer, every node in the system, needs to be updated with all of the current information but rather individual nodes, kind of what you're saying, spread out, can do it locally, and then maybe at some later point they'll all come into consensus. This will solve the bottle-necking problem. What do you think about this idea of sharding? Freedman: Everything I've talked about so far about scaling out in some sense uses what some might term sharding. This is not a new technology. This is how systems have been scaling out since the '90s. The real question is what are the technical challenges between trying to do this scaling out and yet still provide the type of strong security guarantees one wants in these blockchains. It is not at all surprising that one turns to sharding here. It's the general technique that we have been using for a long time now. The question was how you satisfy those needs with also the fact that it's harder to make work in this world where you want these global consensus problems. Probably compared to a lot of other computer systems now the security risks are so much greater because now the penalty for getting it wrong could be hundreds of millions of dollars. When that's not normally the cost of an individual bug, however minor, in a normal type of internet infrastructure. Freedman: These are kind of formal mathematical things. Until you have any impossibility results, which I know of no one here, it's very unwise to think that nothing could ever happen. Taking the lay answers, it's difficult but possible. We'll see how long this will take. We'll see how this will be aligned with what is also desired. The reason I say that is because right now most blockchain technologies give a ... I don't want to go into all the technical details but they give this strong notion of consensus. Although, a slightly weird one because you might not reach that. You might not be guaranteed that consensus until an hour later after enough work has happened in the blockchain. Epstein: Define the term "consensus." What does that mean? Freedman: Right, so there's consistency notions in distributed systems. This is effectively like when you go into the bank and you see that you have a certain amount of money in the bank. You don't expect it all of a sudden to change randomly. On the flip side, if you've ever tried to add something to your Amazon shopping cart you might have noticed that there might be some periods of time where you might see something in your shopping cart twice before it resolves itself. This is not really a bug. This is the fact that Amazon has decided to design their systems in a certain way to basically stress availability. That is they always want their service to be online and allow you to add stuff to your shopping cart. Over the fact of always basically being strongly consistent. Strongly consistent in the blockchain what they sometimes refer to as consensus. Consensus is that we have many parties which are reaching agreement. What they're reaching agreement on is the state of the world. In particular, they're reaching an agreement on who owns this coin? You don't want two people to own the coin at one time. Now the way this works in the blockchain is that people could cheat for short periods of time. Or there's actually a lot of divergence for the very recent time. What happens is over time, in particular after several of these blocks get released and turned into a chain, it basically will take more and more work that is basically burning computational cycles and money effectively to try and rewrite history. What people basically do is say, "Well, if this has been around for a while ..." This has been around for ... Often it's common to be for an hour or so. Then I'm kind of good enough with the risk of how much effort it would take somebody else to try and rewrite history. This basically said that after you have that historical record, after a certain amount of time, basically entire world agreed on exactly one record of history. There are alternate consistency models, for example, which are that if you and I are let's say running computer programs. You and I are selling goods, selling coins. I buy a coffee from the local bodega in New York and you're in London and buy something at the nearest pub. Why does the world need to know that you bought your beer before I bought my coffee? That yours happened before mine? They really have nothing to do with one another. Epstein: That's because you have a credit card processer? You have a third-party running that financial transaction, which is what you don't have in the blockchain world. Is that right? Freedman: Yes, but I'm actually kind of asking the question more from a fundamental thing, which is in a blockchain, which has one global log of all historical records, what the blockchain will actually have a record of saying is that you bought your beer three hours before I bought my coffee. The different question is that why given you're halfway around the world and your coin that you use to buy your beer has anything to do with the money I used to buy my coffee? Why do we need to establish this strict ordering between them? One of the ways that there's alternate models in distributed systems that allows us to, say, not decide which one comes first. Effectively it says, "Well, they don't have any relationship to one another so why do we need to actually ever make that decision?" This allows us to what we might call is weaken the consistency model. That allows it to have more flexibility and cheaper protocols. One of the ways we might see it is that a way that some of these systems might scale to greater sharding is they could actually change their model about what the system provides. Again, the possibility of this depends ultimately on what our final model is and what we want from it. Because everything right now is a little bit up in the air and not well-defined or formally considered it's hard to tell what is actually going on and what the properties it finally will have. Epstein: To kind of continue with your analogy, though, in the blockchain world and whether it be bitcoin or ethereum, the order while in the world where you're buying coffee or beer the timing doesn't matter. In the blockchain world the timing is essential. Freedman: In the blockchain world it expresses that timing. My point is then you could say, "We have difficulty in achieving this scale out in a world that captures that timing." You might ask the question, "Well, is that timing actually fundamental?" If it's not fundamental can we weaken our need to capture that timing and therefore allow us to build blockchain-based stuff that could scale better based on certain types of interactions because we don't need to ever capture their timing with respect to one another. Epstein: What you're weakening is the essence of what the blockchain brings to the table? Freedman: I'm pausing in my answer because that is weakening a current essence of the blockchain. I totally agree with that. I think the question that people have always asked in these type of distributed systems are there are always trade-offs. In fact, in this area that I started talking about it there are known results, they're known impossibility results, about how much you could scale or how available can we make these systems that have such strong consistency properties like the Blockchain currently has. What I'm saying is this might open up the door in creating a more expansive view about how do we develop different types of blockchains or add different properties if we're trying to optimize for different things? Right now we optimized for effectively strong global agreement. This is global consistency of all operations. It might be that we gave up certain things of scale to do so. Maybe there's other systems where we could achieve slightly different properties in terms of security and consistency for much better abilities to scale. Epstein: In terms of that analogy, though, this idea that's called sharding, which is the big idea in the ethereum community for how we're going to scale this system, how does that work and how does it weaken this system of consensus? Freedman: Yeah. Unfortunately, I did spend some time ... I'm not necessarily always catching up to what came out of ethereum this week. I did spend some time trying to understand it at the more technical level all the details with sharding. To be fair, right now, it seems a little less defined to me. It's kind of hard for me to answer that given that it didn't seem sufficiently well-specified or formally specified for me to be able to make a deep technical understanding of- Epstein: Well, sharding is this old technique. You wrote a paper about sharding in 2003. Epstein: Sharding is a technique that's constantly used in making the internet run. What is sharding? Let's start there. Freedman: Sure. Sharding is basically saying that if you have a big data set, or database usually, split it into lots of parts and let those parts operate independently. Think about your disc on your computer. Let's say you store one terabyte of data on your disc. You can't buy currently easily a 10 terabyte disc. Let's run 10 discs instead and they each have one-tenth of the amount of data. That basically is what sharding says. Epstein: Then why is it difficult to apply this concept to the ethereum space? Freedman: Well, ethereum and bitcon and all of these blockchain technologies are similar in that each computer, in this example each disc, is supposed to see all of the data to make sure that you didn't, let's say, do something different. You didn't take the same coin and, let's say again, if we go back in my analogy before of 10 discs. Let's say there's 10 separate computers, separate people. I didn't try to spend the same coin with person three as person seven or I didn't try to execute a program differently at program three and program seven and cause the world's state to diverge. In Bitcoin, I take that coin, I spend it, and all 10 nodes sees that I spent it in one way. If in a world where they only see a small portion of the data, a node responsible for that small portion might not see that I took this coin and I spent it with some other party because they're not storing that party's data. Epstein: The trick then with sharding would be to allow a certain amount of the information slip through so everyone can see something but maybe not all of it. That way everyone can be up to date with the essential information. I guess that's I assume what they're talking about when they talk about applying sharding to ethereum. Is that right? Freedman: Well, yeah. Like I said, this is when I think some of the low-level details matter a lot in that effectively what you're going to need to do is to make sure that the fact that ... In my example I tried to split what was one party into 10. I still need to make sure that everybody sees just enough data in such a way that I can't slip through a transaction. It might turn out that the way to design it could, let's say, scale ... In the example analogy I had of this thing in New York and this beer in London, I was able to say, "Well, this didn't matter because they didn't have anything to do with one another." What happens in fact if that bartender in London immediately took the coin you went to spend it on and tried to spend it in New York City. It might turn out in that case they do matter. They are related. The fact of your ability to scale might also in fact be a function of the workload of the system. How closely related, how intertwined are all of these operations to one another? What does that mean in terms of my need to keep all of the different parties up to date with how each other is behaving? There's a bunch of these different unknowns based on how well does the system allow me to update minimal information and how much does my workload even impact my ability to scale these things? These are all details that need to be explored and worked out. Epstein: They need to be worked out. Again, the ideas that you're saying they can be worked out? Give me a sense of how big a problem is this in terms of figuring out the technical details to make this pretty exciting technology called ethereum grow so that it can serve millions of people? Freedman: I don't like trying to predict the rate of technical change. These are probably easier than putting somebody on Mars, harder than building your latest website. Freedman: There's a lot of unknowns here. It's always really difficult to predict the speed of how- Epstein: Does it require some sort of a technical breakthrough? Is it uncharted territory technically? Do they have to figure something out that people that have been working in the field of distributive systems have not figured out up to this point? Freedman: I think there are definitely aspects of this that require some technical breakthroughs. The reason computer science is somewhat different than a lot of fields, which is that we sometimes create the world in which we operate. If you're building a rocket ship there are fundamentals of gravity that you need to deal with. If you're doing chemistry there's fundamentals of the world that you need to deal with. In computer science, what's interesting is that we could tweak our worldview in order to make systems easier to build. An example I gave before I said, "Well, it might be particularly difficult if we want this global consensus to scale." In fact, this has been an outstanding problem ... Probably the weaker form of this has been an outstanding problem for at least 25 years. The first person to basically develop what we now think of as general consensus protocols actually won the Turing Award, which is computer science's highest prize. Kind of like our Nobel Prize. Leslie Lamport, who developed some of these early consensus algorithms in the first place. They have always required basically everybody participate in the interactions. Now the question is how can we change that? Do we think that we're not going to change any of our assumptions and just make progress while adding onto that the additional complexity of all the security aspects of blockchain? Maybe but it's difficult because when people have been working on this for so long the question is what do we know now? What has changed that people haven't changed before? One of the common ways you do this is you change your model. You say, "Well, I'm not going to work on the same problem. I'm going to work on a slightly easier problem and being able to make progress on that." From what I do understand it sounds like the ethereum community is probably making the smarter approach of actually trying to solve an easier problem. The uncertainty really is is how easy are they ultimately going to make this? What do they give up in order to achieve those new properties, those new scaling properties? Epstein: What they don't want to give up, though, is the purpose of this system, which is decentralization. It's that we can run online applications. We can engage in forms of trade that don't require a third-party, whether it be the government or a bank, etc. I guess the question is it sounds like what you're saying is if you bring a third-party into it it's much easier to solve these problems in terms of scalability. You get something that looks a little bit more like what we have in today's internet. The question is- Freedman: Well, I wasn't only saying ... A trusted party is one direction. I wasn't saying that. Bitcoin, from 10,000 feet or a layperson's perspective, you could say bitcoin or blockchain was doing decentralization. As you know from my own background decentralization has always been in a cyclical aspects of the internet. The whole start of the internet in the 1960s and '70s was the very notion that we didn't want a centralized telecommunication network. It's called the internet because it's the network of many networks. We wanted to be able to in a decentralized fashion connect together a lot of networks and make them work. If you fast forward in the late '90s and really starting with around 2000 we had this rise of instant peer-to-peer systems. That again was very much decentralized. In some sense even more decentralized than blockchain was today because there was no well-defined miners that are now getting this centralization effect of basically running big mining rigs. They didn't have the same type of strong consistency properties that blockchain has. Again, we certainly know how to build decentralized systems that are scalable. What blockchain was able to do was saying how do we actually get some decentralization while also getting these strong security or consistency properties? Now the question is what does the middle ground look like and ultimately how will that fall out? Epstein: A difference in blockchain and this goes for bitcoin and ethereum is that there's a lot of money at stake. There's money running in this system and it wasn't true of all these earlier decentralized systems, right? Freedman: That's good and bad. The good thing is maybe it enables it not to just be the side project that you can hack on the weekend. You could spend real money hiring top people working on this thing. The bad thing is it raised the bar and it means that little bugs are really bad. The DOW had what? $25 million or $30 million lost just last week or something? We had a $30 million plus heist of the software to store wallets and multisig wallets. It creates a really high bar to get things right because the incentives for trying to break these things are so strong. Epstein: People in this space have drawn these analogies between the challenges of scaling the early internet and these challenges of scaling networks like ethereum. You worked on these early internet scaling problems. Is there an analogy? Freedman: I should say that was 30 or 40 years before my time. Epstein: You started in 1999. You worked on CoralCDN, right? Which addressed the slash dot effect. Slashdot was a website that was an aggregator that would send a ton of traffic to a site and blow it off the network. You were looking for solutions to that. When you started these internet scaling issues the internet had many fewer users and it wasn't clear that it was going to be able to scale to billions. Maybe it was. I don't know. Freedman: Yeah, just to set the bar, a lot of the earlier work that I'm talking about making the underlying internet, the communication, this was going on in the early '70s. By the time all these peer-to-peer systems were being looked at this is after the whole e-commerce growth and we already had an internet that was at least a hundreds of millions, if not billions, of users. Now I do think that the parallel isn't great. On one had these systems are trying to figure out how to scale. What we were doing before was trying to allow anybody to communicate with any other party. Now I think it's almost a return to the opposite. We went from a world where we're going to allow millions or billions of people to just keep separate data to a world with the blockchain where we need to say there's a global ledger. In fact, we're re-centralizing all of the knowledge. Now by centralize, it's not that it's run by one party but that all the knowledge is known by each party. That's almost counter to these other things where we try to split up the knowledge and let everybody just deal with their local information. Now the question, what all this debate upon, is how do we deal with these two properties, which somewhat look at their fundamental face at odds? How do we split it so that we can split the knowledge across all the worlds so we can scale to really high numbers? On the flip side, how do we do so in a way that keeps enough people looking at what each party is working on so we can do things like what is sometimes known as equivocate, which is tell different parties different types of information. This equivocation is fundamentally what attacking the blockchain is about, what double spending is with bitcoin. What it's saying is I am going to try to take one coin and spend it with two different parties. Equivocation is I'm going to take one fact and give different answers to different people. When we have split up all of our knowledge in different parts then that's hard to do or that that's easy to do. When we've brought all of the knowledge together and since every party needs to know about all of the knowledge in the world that's kind of how the blockchain makes this problem go away. Epstein: Talking about the early internet again and before your time obviously, you've talked about how the genius of the internet was that it was built in layers. At it's core is these simple computer programs called protocols. Talk about that and then also talk about ethereum in that context. Does ethereum violate that ingenious infrastructure or ingenious structure? Freedman: If you remember why I said it's called the internet, a network of networks, what was happening is that everybody had ... There were all these different computer networks running around the world. There wasn't agreement. There were old telecom networks. IBM had their own standards of what these networks should be. Ethernet started coming about at the time. What the internet was it was originally a project funded by the Defense Department. It was called the ARPANET or from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Administration. It was attempting to basically define a protocol by which you could connect these disparate separate networks and allow computers across them to communicate. It was meant to be this global language by which you could actually have computers on different networks actually reach one another, connect them together. That was what it now known as the internet protocol or IP. On top of that people started asking the question what should the intermediate layers look like? One of the fundamental ideas in computer science is also that of abstraction. Abstraction says that we could define interfaces so that they could guarantee some property and yet hide actually implementation details. If you think about webpages, for example, whenever you access a webpage it speaks a standardized protocol. That's HTTP. That's why when you type in a URL in your browser you see those four characters in front of that. HTTP colon and then something like www.cnn.com. That's saying speak the HTTP protocol. Epstein: Protocol meaning a computer program? A small program. Freedman: Well, a protocol is actually really a description of what is the syntax and semantics of messages that could be sent between two parties. Obviously everything is generally implemented in software. This doesn't actually mean it's a fixed program. If you look at HTTP for example there are hundreds or thousands of different programs that implement the standard. It's like saying what a protocol is is like a human language like English. It's saying there's words, there's pronunciation, and between those words and pronunciations people could communicate with one another. That's generally what a network protocol means. Where we're going with this message of abstraction is that if I want to connect two computers together do I need to call up my buddy and say, "hey, I want to speak to you in a certain way. Go learn my language." Or is there a ... I used English but is there a lingua franca of the way we can communicate? Can we say that if we each implement this particular way of communicating then we know we can communicate over the network? That's effectively what layering did. It said that if we all implement this one standard, this way that we want to take messages and split them up into little packets, and the way we address those packets so that different computers on the internet know where to ultimately send them then we could basically build this model where we can always connect more and more computers to the network and they'll still all know how to speak with one another. What the magic of that layering is, and I said connect more and more computers, is that the basic information that was sent in each packets back in the '70s and today much of that is very similar. These protocols have actually changed very little. The reason that was important was it gave us what people sometimes refer to as future proofing the network or future compatibility. Often in software engineering you talk about backward compatible. How do I know that when I do a software update it still works on Windows XP? What a nice layering model will look like is when I build a piece of software today how do I know that in 10 years from now it's still going to work. When you're talking about building protocols that can be deployed all across the network it's very hard to update them. Once you release them, the genie is out of the bottle, and you better hope that what you did stands the test of time. Epstein: By analogy is it like I can build the foundation of my house and then when I want to redo my kitchen I don't have to redo the foundation? It's like the complexity is at the surface layer? Freedman: I'm happy with that analogy. Or put it different. This notion of building on top is a good one because when you think about layering what this was really designed for is logically to think of these things going all the way down to what people call is the link layer, which is how does your phone communicate with a cellphone tower? Or how does your laptop speak WiFi? That's what's called the link layer. The network layer is how do those messages being sent off your laptop go all across the internet to speak to a server over there owned by Netflix to send you back your favorite movie? Then the application layer, which is where most of the action happens, which is how do we build new services on top of this network? If you look at the reason that this thing has been future proofed is it said we actually don't need that much from the network. In fact, that was one of the key fundamental ideas of the internet is that you had mostly a dumb network and you moved all of the smarts and all of the choice to the endpoints, to the computers. This was very different from what came before. Before we had in the telecom network all of the intelligence was in the core of the network. Mob Bell built these big computers or big machines and made all of this decision about what services are available? When your endpoint is that really stupid analog device that you pick up and just dial the numbers on. You can look at and say ... I remember as a kid watching commercials on television from AT&T saying we're going to get video conferencing any day now. I don't think that vision was ever realized from my teleco provider. It certainly became realized over the internet where we didn't have to wait for the ISPs to deploy video conferencing solutions. Skype came along, earlier things came along, and we could just immediately do this running on software on the end tests. Epstein: Okay. Let's bring to this ethereum, which ethereum is not promising to lay new cables that will be a new internet but it is promised as a new worldwide web. A new operating system for the web. A rethink of the protocols and the software architecture of how we communicate online. Does ethereum mesh with this? Does it violate this kind of vision of layering and a dumb network that you've laid out? Freedman: None of it really violates this layering model at least that I describe because all of these things ... Perhaps one of the limitations of the initial layering model is that almost all of the interesting stuff was thrown up into the application layer. Everything we talk about in the world today from a network perspective is just part of the application layer. What the network layering model was really said to do was focusing on how do we build the network infrastructure and instead let's move most of the real interesting stuff into the application layers, into the end hosts. Epstein: The application layer would be Twitter, Facebook? Freedman: The computer. Twitter, Facebook, but your web server that's sitting on your home. In fact, a blockchain miner and an Ethereum node is just speaking an application level protocol that is Ethereum's networking protocol over the internet. From the internet's perspective it doesn't matter that's ethereum or bitcoin or email or Google's web search. They're all the same. Then the question is, well, isn't this all part of the ... It doesn't violate anything. It's just an application layer. One of the things that happened in the internet architecture is all of the interesting stuff moved up into the application layer. Then we can look back and say, "Well, did it actually solve some of the fundamental problems?" What started happening is that in order to make the internet trusted we started building out services that the whole internet relied on. Some of those include DNS. If you type in a URL you rely on some infrastructure. This is- Epstein: DNS is how you find, say, Amazon.com. It's a directory. Freedman: Correct. It's a directory that maps these human-readable names into IP addresses. IP addresses are those things that the underlying network uses. It's like your post office address. It's those things the underlying network use to figure out how to send your data to its destination. Like the servers that Amazon dot com is running on. In order to use the applications it turned out that we needed to rely on things like DNS or relying on ... When you log into Amazon dot com the reason that you trust that you can buy stuff there and you're not speaking to some malicious hacker is that your browser comes pre-configured with cryptographic information from some specially trusted parties that are then going to have a relationship with Amazon. They're going to tell you, "Oh, by the way, this is actually Amazon who you're speaking with." Those are often called certificate authorities. What happened is while we are still running on top of the network there were some fundamental things that everybody started relying on to have a secure internet. I think that's some of the best criticism that the various services that are looking to decentralize the internet are having is that should that trust be held in a small set of hands? Is that trust well-placed? There are a number of situations where the people entrusted with that information didn't really keep up their end of the bargain either because of security bugs and perhaps security incompetence. Sometimes their own commercial reasons. Epstein: The structure of ethereum where applications are running on this blockchain that everyone shares that is in harmony with this dumb network model that's made the internet scale so well? Freedman: It's kind of an apples to oranges kind of question. From a strict networking layering perspective it doesn't violate any aspect of it. If you aren't so dogmatic about the question and look at what is the way that ethereum and bitcoin and these blockchains are scaling the basic way they're scaling today is that effectively everybody knows all bits of information. That's kind of pretty counter to all ways that we've scaled services before. Either sharding or the very traditional approach of using hierarchies. The way DNS and many services on the internet and even in nature work, the way they scale is that you have a hierarchy of who knows what? The closer you are to the top, the more course grain your knowledge is. If you ask who needs in ethereum's world or bitcoin's world does everybody know ... Who needs to know about every single transaction? Well, only a small set of involved parties does. Even though, there might be some parties out there that have a better view of, let's say, that this transaction happened in North America and they might know some people in North America. That's kind of how you use hierarchies to scale things. Epstein: Let me wrap up by getting to Blockstack, which is a project that you're an advisor to, and it came ... Muneeb Ali, who is one of the co-founders, got his PhD in your computer science department at Princeton. Tell me about this project in relation to what we've been talking about and why you think it might be a better model to bring some of these decentralized aspects to the web than, say, ethereum? Freedman: Well, I think it's trying to solve a different problem. A lot of our conversation is about what is Ethereum doing or some other projects doing? It particularly has this worldview or it seems to have this worldview that basically we want everything to be running on this globally audited system. A lot of the reasons that we're talking about scalability is a common number that's given is bitcoin today does on average seven transactions a second. Close to that. At it's peak, I think the Visa network does 200,000 transactions a second. If you look at the number of requests coming into Facebook or Google they're going to be probably way higher than that. Now you could ask the question of does this mean that in fact what we need from ethereum or the blockchain, do we need the network to do a million transactions a second? In the network, in a way that's globally auditable that everybody can see. Maybe the answer is no. Maybe the answer is instead you kind of figure out precisely what are the actual security properties you need that have this globally auditable view? What are the things that you could then take, some people in this community call it, off chain? What does this network bootstrap what does it allow you to do elsewhere that is hard and allow us to now use other technologies that we know how to do? Basic crypto, let's say. Once we use something like the blockchain to figure out what each party's cryptographic keys are, do we need to actually do their transactions on the chain? Or could they just sign something, communicate it like they normally do, using those keys that they boot strapped via the blockchain, and use public key crypto as we've known to do it for 30 years? Which is if anybody is later seen to be lying then you could use the fact that they've cryptographically signed and committed to message and the fact that the Blockchain tells you that these are their valid keys to point out that they've done something wrong. Really, the question in some sense is what is the level of global transparency you actually need or in fact want? One of the interesting aspects of this is do we want all of our computation to be happening in a global way? Or can we ask do we only want certain properties? Or are we trying to solve more concrete problems? Taking back more concretely to Blockstack, one of the things, and I talked earlier about, is DNS and certificate authorities. That one of the problems with today's internet is that everybody relies on what are effectively 13 or so parties who are running the so-called root DNS servers. That if some of them were to go down that creates availability problems. If any of them were to basically lie they could basically do that at will. Epstein: Which would be sort of like, we type in Google. We're relying on one of these services to route us to Google and they could send us elsewhere? Epstein: We're relying on this. Okay. Freedman: Correct. The same with certificate authorities. When you see that little lock box, that little lock in your browser bar, that says, "This is actually Google that you're speaking to" you rely on the certificate authority to make that secure. In fact, people have found out that different certificate authorities were found to be giving actual incorrect information probably purposefully in order to satisfy the requirements or the asks of local governments that they're operating in. Ideally, what you want is internet that when you think ... In order to try to talk to Google, you could, A, figure out where Google servers are located and somehow establish communication with the real Google. Then have a way that once you speak with them, have a way to be confident that you're actually talking to Google and not somebody else who is trying to listen in on the information, or in fact even change the results of your search requests. Now does that mean that Google doesn't provide a service? Do we need to get rid of Google and in fact make everybody's search queries public to the entire internet? I would actually think that most people would not want that and would actually think that's a massive back stepping in terms of privacy. Decentralization does not necessarily mean better privacy. It is really much more a function of what problem we're trying to solve. Is this a good problem for the solution? What I like about Blockstack is that it's figured out what are some of the services that are missing today that we can leverage the Blockchain to provide and dis-intermediate these trusted parties like certificate authorities and the DNS route servers that perhaps are playing a larger than life role in the internet than what some of the early architects the internet would have wanted them to do. The early internet wanted to be able to be decentralized. We now have certain entities to provide naming and security that are a much more centralized than we thought we'd probably want. What Blockstack allows you to do is actually say, "These services we don't need to make centralized, we don't need to make trusted." Now what you want to build on top of this that's up to you. I think that's actually much more conceptually in line with this notion of layering that said it wanted to enable choice at the application layer. If you want to build a decentralized search engine you could do that. If you want to build Google you could do that too. It really enables choice while allowing you to bootstrapping trust. That as a user I have choice in who I use and I don't have to trust other parts of the internet that I don't really have relationship and I probably don't have good reason to trust in order to decide that I wanted to use Google or I wanted to use Duck Duck Go or the latest, greatest decentralized search engine out there. What ethereum is trying to do is figure out how do we make as much computation as possible part of the global Blockchain. Now it very well could be that when people build onto applications on top of ethereum they might start deciding, "Well, let's do some of my application in the ethereum blockchain itself" and some of what they would call off-chain. You could get orders of magnitude difference in what you could then do off-chain or on-chain. Fundamentally, I think the whole view of ethereum sharding and ethereum scalability is trying to ask the question of how much more support can we put in the chain to allow more and more computation on the chain? What Blockstack I think is trying to instead say is that ... Again, as much as we'd like them there's not always a crisp demarcation between these two worldviews. What Blockstack has basically been trying to say is what are the minimal things that we need to do on the chain in order to give us the type of security that we'd want to build a lot of very interesting applications off-chain. Blockstack's, in some sense, focus is how do we enable secure applications off-chain given what we can do on the blockchain. Ethereum is trying to say how do we put more and more type of computation in our form of smart contracts on the chain itself? Epstein: Okay. All right. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate your time. I think we'll leave it there. Thanks for joining us. Jim Epstein is managing editor of Reason TV. Ian Keyser is a producer at Reason TV. container: 'taboola-below-article-thumbnails', placement: 'Below Article Thumbnails', Balaji Srinivasan: Technology Will Lead to a Borderless World What’s Hot in Porn Tech: Blockchain, Cam Girls, and Snapchat Bitcoin's Blockchain Tech Could Be the Answer to Voter Fraud VIEW COMMENTS (8) | LEAVE A COMMENT Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time. Report abuses. In 2011, Freedman co-authored a paper about a technique called "sharding" that ethereum developers are currently working to integrate into their network. Psh. Aren't there more than enough sharts on the regular Internet? Fuck You - Cut Spending|7.26.17 @ 3:18PM|# Blockchain money sounds like the perfect evil thing government would inflict on its subjects. This was a wonderful interview. I learned a bunch of things. Thanks Reason! "Love this website, Great Share.. GET free chrome gom vpn | HackBS You must have an account and be logged in to comment. Click here to register, or here to login if you already have an account Ed Krayewski | 07.26.2017 At the March for Our Lives, Kids Say Their Right to Feel Safe Trumps Your Right to Own a Gun Should We Build the Wall? We Asked Trump Supporters. 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[Note: I neither own nor have any trading position on any cryptocurrency.  The views expressed below are solely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer or any organization I advise.] Just as I did with the COIN ETF proposal last year, I have also written a 50-page paper for internal use diving into the world of ICOs.1 I am not sure if or when it will be made public (check back in 3-6 months to see if it has been posted), but here are a few salient points: ICO stands for “initial coin offering.” Depending on what cryptocurrency group is pitching an ICO, it may be in exchange for company equity, but often times there is no explicit contractual link between control of the coin itself with some kind of equity or financial performance of the company… because there is often no formal contract provided to investors.  Not all ICOs are alike and any prospective user or investor should look into the specific operational and funding arrangements. Since January 1, 2017, more than $200 million has been raised by more than a dozen ICO-related projects and companies, a figure that will likely double by the end of the summer and triple by the end of the year as turn-key platforms such as Prism, Swap, 0x, and Iconomi, are flipped on. The primary method of raising and funding an ICO is through bitcoin and ether deposits.  This has driven (mostly) retail investors to create accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges – most of which have poor track records such as Bitfinex – and acquire BTC and ETH.  This demand in turn has been a key driver in the current all-time highs seen by many cryptocurrencies including bitcoin and ether. There is very little regulatory or independent oversight of any of these coin offerings.  Most of the projects attempt to shield themselves from scrutiny from securities, commodities, and money-transmission regulators by setting up a non-profit organization or foundation.  These foundations are typically registered in a couple specific countries, each of which is now home to more than a dozen non-profit organizations specifically managing ICOs.  In addition, ICO promoters will often use euphemisms such as “tokens” instead of coins, or call their fundraiser a “crowdsale” or “donation” or “contribution” that the non-profit organization will later re-distribute after the ICO is over. Some of these non-profit entities sign exclusive development contracts with a for-profit entity that is run by the same people who operate the foundation.  That is to say, the foundation will hire the for-profit company to develop and advise the project that the ICO fundraiser marketed and advertised, yet often with no independent oversight. Ignoring accreditation status: very few, only a handful at most, of these ICOs are done in compliance with any KYC, AML, CFT gathering and sharing requirements. This is problematic.  For instance, over $1 billion in ransomware was liquidated (largely) through cryptocurrencies last year thus it could be relatively easy for bad actors (hackers) to liquidate their bitcoin and ether holdings into ICOs and not be easily caught due to the inability to link real world identities to specific blockchain activity. Last week Valerie Szczepanik, the head of the SEC’s distributed ledger group, made several public comments.  This included: “Whether or not you are regulated by the SEC, you still have fiduciary duties to your investor.  If you want this industry to flourish, protection of investors should be at the forefront.” As of right now, there are just a handful of ICOs that have explicitly attempted to protect investors by providing full transparency into their organizations.  Most do not disclose the principals, directors, and insiders involved within these organizations.  Some have private offerings called a pre-sale.  A pre-sale allows participants to acquire coins at a discount (e.g., pre-sale investors might receive 2x the amount of coins that the public coin sale will have at the same price).  In addition, the participants in a pre-sale are not typically named or made public prior to the public offering of the coins; nor are the conditions by which these participants able to sell their holdings typically disclosed. Historically companies which file paperwork in order to be listed on a public stock exchange have to submit an S-1 or its equivalent to regulators.  The S-1 is important and helpful to the rest of the market because it lays out who the insiders are, who the principals and directors are, how governance is handled, who is responsible, what the business is, what the liabilities are, etc.. In contrast, most ICOs currently have nebulous governance on purpose: because the operators do not want anyone to be held responsible in case the project is unsuccessful or the coin loses its value.  Caveat emptor is the name of the game. In any given month I am provided inside information about ICOs.  Complete strangers will send me pitch decks that outline their pre-sale and listing opportunities. Yes, some exchanges are paid to list these coins, often through a percentage negotiated beforehand with the ICO operator.  And there are market makers and underwriters in the form of family offices, high net worth individuals and small hedge funds.  There is an entire ecosystem that is completely opaque and opaque on purpose because many of these participants are trying to deflect responsibility in case a coin crashes or a project is unsuccessful or because they are found in non-compliance with a variety of regulations (e.g., not declaring taxes, self-dealing, insider trading, etc.). One project involved in building a distributed computer recently offered me about $50,000 over the course of 6 months in addition to the native coin they were pitching to the public.  All they wanted me to do: act as an advisor and promote their coin on social media. I said no to all of them but others said yes and that project above raised a couple million in USD. Last week I attended several events including Consensus and a different private conference held later in the week.  I gave a short presentation at one of the events and afterwards I walked to the buffet outside the room to get some food.  While gathering some grilled fish, the audio/visual operator for the event came up to me and told me: “Tim, I just put $100 into bitcoin and also ether.  How much more should I put into them?” My presentation wasn’t even about cryptocurrency investing or about ICOs, but this illustrates the exuberance of the current time period.  There is a lot of fear of missing out yet few people are actually looking at what these ICO-funded platforms or projects are attempting to do.  How can unsophisticated, technically unsavvy people learn more about them? Media publications?  But conflict of interest is rife. I have mentioned this multiple times over the years: unfortunately many “coin” media sites and magazines are not helping the due diligence situation.  Most “coin” reporters, if not all of them, own cryptocurrencies and benefit directly from increased demand of the cryptocurrency, but they often do not disclose it.  In fact, many times they report on coins they own and/or that their parent company owns.  Several small buy-side analysts and their firms also have published uncritical marketing material for cryptocurrencies and some do not disclose their coin holdings or outline the major risks involved in operating these types of networks, in effect white-washing the risks of anarchic chains. Others in privileged positions including some of the VCs that are active in this space are now also promoting ICOs but few disclose their active long or short positions.  Some of these VCs were entrepreneurs who have pivoted multiple times and this is a last ditch effort to drum up support for their sagging portfolio. 2 3 You just don’t understand the technology! One common refrain I often hear from ICO promoters is that ICOs are a new form of technology that empowers retail investors like never before and that the traditional world of institutions and laws has no place in the new economy.  And that naysayers and critics just don’t understand the transformative power of ICOs and cryptocurrencies. That may be true but in my case, definitely is not. In late 2014 I worked with a company called Melotic.  Melotic is a tech startup that raised about $1.2 million in the summer of 2014 to build a digital asset exchange: a trading platform that new cryptocurrency projects could be listed on, GDAX before GDAX.  For about 9 months I spent the bulk of my time talking to dozens of cryptocurrency projects and operators to find out what unique thing their company did and why they should be listed on Melotic.  Nearly all of them were half-baked scams, and others were just impractical (Urea Coin). 4 In May 2015, Melotic announced it was closing its exchange and moving into cross-border payments where it currently operates under the brand, Kleering. While Melotic deserves its own dedicated post, the takeaways we learned at the time were that traders (who were most of the user base) only cared about two specific things: (1) Anonymity.  Some traders publicly complained when we implemented a set of KYC and AML policies.  They said we should snub our noses at the government and banks and provide traders the ability to exchange cryptocurrencies without complying with local or national laws surrounding identity gathering and verification.  This is an opinion that is still very prevalent as shown by similar comments on /r/bitcoinmarkets and /r/ethtrader. (2) Pump and dump.  Day traders love volatility and cryptocurrencies often provide that volatile environment.  Because new cryptocurrencies such as an ICO are often even more illiquid and thinly traded than say bitcoin (which itself is relatively illiquid), whales and insiders without vesting and lock-up periods can quickly move the market up and down due to the large amounts of coin holdings they have.  This creates the booms and busts that many cryptocurrency traders savor.  Yet at Melotic, we were apprehensive about listing every single cryptocurrency under the sun, and tried to filter those we thought had unique utility and less volatile.  In the end we only listed about 10.  Yet empirically the most successful exchanges – as measured in volume – were those that listed every single coin that was launched.  Quantity over quality continues to persist today as exchanges compete for volume and liquidity of new coins.  This contrasts with regulated exchanges such as NASDAQ (pdf) and NYSE (pdf) which have listing requirements, including transparency into the companies principals.  Most cryptocurrency exchanges do not ask for similar requirements and in fact, some take a cut of the coins – similar to payola – in order to be listed. Over two years ago I wrote a post that looked at around 20 different ICOs and projects that did some kind of public coin distribution.  My new paper looks at them in more detail.  What were the findings? While we wait for that paper to be published another key takeaway is that: almost none of the projects lived up to the advertised utility or expectations that their promoters marketed to the community and investors that bought their coins.  Yet most of the cryptocurrencies, even ones that lack a real development community, are seeing all-time highs on the cryptocurrency markets. In other words: utility is completely divorced from market value of the coins; a phenomenon that seems unlikely to change in the short term. This is compounded by the fact that ICOs are by their nature, not designed for cash flow or optimized to be profitable. Why is that?  Because at its core: the non-profit entities that runs them are by definition, not-for-profit.  As a result, these projects largely rely on their token holdings and the price appreciation thereof, in order to be sustainable.  Thus the incentive to focus on marketing and create buzz to further increase the price appreciation of the coin holdings. And ignoring the informational asymmetries above, there are some other interesting wrinkles. Earlier this week I participated on a fintech panel and during the group discussion one specific ICO was briefly mentioned, the Basic Attention Token (BAT).  Brave, the company behind the BAT, had just raised $35 million in a crowdsale (unregistered securities?).  Notable to this sale was that over $6,000 in fees to miners were included in the transactions related to the ICO. https://t.co/oiFGyh1iju This is a $2220 tx fee, used to cut in line in BAT ICO. "Ethereum avg txfee $1" statistics include stuff like this. — Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) May 31, 2017 How many transactions can you fit into an Ethereum block during high demand times?  It depends on the complexity of the contract. For the BAT, it was about 90.  90ish people were able to participate in the first block of the BAT’s ICO. Those 90 ICO seats went to whoever attached the largest transaction fees. An unsavvy retail investor would need a lot of mempool luck if there is high demand and larger players investing millions are paying $1,000 USD fees just to increase their chance to get one of those scarce seats in the first block. This could mean that in the long run, all the “good” ICOs will be bought up by sophisticated investors aware of this limitation and only sub-par ICOs will run long enough (more than one block) to let unsophisticated retail investors in.5 ICO organizers often exchange coins for explicit support by outside endorsements and lobbying in their favor (e.g., advisors and influential personas are given a cut of coins). Therefore researchers, regulators, developers and potential investors looking at an ICO should look for paper trails to identify investors, users, organizers, insiders, and potential malicious actors.6  This also includes exchange operators and their principals who may learn weeks beforehand when a cryptocurrency will get listed and thus, may have material, asymmetric information they can act on. Investors should look very hard at what the risks and recourse there is in the event of a hard fork, what happens if their assets end up on a deprecated chain?  If it is an ERC20 token, what fork will the developers consider the “legitimate” chain?  Ethereum forked multiple times last year and currently, investors of ICOs based on ERC20 have few, if any, protections or recourse in the event an ICO organizer fails to deliver its promises let alone a technical problem occurs.  For instance, what happens if the network becomes too top heavy and open to the Hold-Up Problem?  Who has legal standing or recourse? ICOs can be done with existing technology – no blockchains are needed (just ask Beenz and Liberty Reserve) – yet because ICOs are being done on anarchic blockchains where reversibility is economically cumbersome and identification is non-existence, it can create new risks and challenges for investors.  Potential investors need to be able to answer: in case a dispute arises, how can recourse take place if key counterparties are not identifiable? Cryptocurrencies and the coins that piggy back on their network will likely continue to exist so as long as these non-profit entities have enough coins to liquidate to pay for marketing and advertisements. And so as long as there are others willing to buy their coins (e.g., liquidity). And while it may be too early to distinguish and separate the specific ICOs that are outright scams from poorly run companies, keep in mind that a couple dozen Pyramid schemes failing in 1997 led to massive unrest and a civil war in Albania.  We have already witnessed enormous strain and virtual fighting within the cryptocurrency community (e.g., the never ending Bitcoin block size debate and the Ethereum hard fork because of The DAO attack).  What would happen to the aggregate cryptocurrency market if the investors and insiders in a couple dozen ICO platforms (Pyramid or not) tried to liquidate their holdings onto an illiquid market? If you’re looking for dramatic excitement (currently) without many investor protections, the ICO world may have what you’re looking for.  But if you’re looking for sustainable operations with repeat revenue and cash flow connected to mainstream utility and accountability – aka a business – then you might want to do a double-take. Kimberley Process for Cryptocurrencies How newer regtech could be used to help audit cryptocurrency organizations How cryptocurrencies enable ransomware and how regtech can help counter it “How the ICO, OCO, and ECO ecosystem works at a high level” by Tim Swanson [↩] Kik, a messaging application which failed to gain traction, announced it would be issuing a cryptocurrency, but for what purpose?  Likely because it has been unable to raise new venture or institutional capital. [↩] A number of these portfolio companies likely are on life support, propped up not by revenue but coin holdings which speculators have driven up in market value.  In short: some of these cryptocurrency-based startups are commodity or FX plays, not utility-based investments. [↩] We also spoke with a lot of cryptocurrency exchanges to learn about their business and compliance practices, shying away from those that raised red flags around KYC and AML compliance.  One cryptocurrency exchange that is still very active today asked us to do the KYC for them as they were ideologically against gathering that information from their own customers. [↩] Note: this is not an endorsement of BAT.  I have not participated in any ICO or cryptocurrency crowdsale. [↩] Some ICO organizers have intentionally misled financial institutions about the nature of their business in order to get a bank account. Because ICOs typically do not comply with KYC, AML, and CFT procedures, this could lead to new fines and even banks being de-banked (correspondent banking access cut off). [↩] Share the post "A high level overview of ICOs" FacebookTwitterGoogle+LinkedInWeiboE-mail

revealed the truth in his blog, that xcoinx is, in fact, Onecoin’s privately owned site SEE HERE. (He later contradicted himself, but the cat is already out of the bag). In a short, but hilarious excerpt from the 4 ½ hour debate I was filibustered on, on April 9th, Ken Labine is caught arguing against Onecoin CEO and Founder, Ruja Ignatova about whether or not it is even an “Exchange” HERE. Onecoin is obsessed with Bitcoin. A Onecoin Press Release recently claim that people were leaving Bitcoin due to “the price plummeting” and due to its “recent rapid decline.” NOTE: Bitcoin is up nearly 30% since the day that came out. HERE IS THE OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE. Compare this to a 12-month bitcoin chart from the day the Press Release came out HERE. BC: Is Onecoin a cryptocurrency at all? TT: Well, a former onecoin member says THIS. Onecoin CLAIMS to show Onecoin’s blockchain in their back office, but let’s analyze this. I will walk you through the proof that the blockchain showing in the back office is bogus, step-by-step! Take a look at this. 1.) Bottom Right TITLE: “Current Block is Mining From” Here is you fake “blockchain” as seen in your back office. This is simply a looped counter (banner) VIDEO pasted over a looped video source. So, the above-looped video with the counter inserted over of it for “blocks mined” that flashes every ten minutes, which you all see, only gives the “appearance” of something technical happening, but of course, it’s all just smoke and mirrors. 2.) TOP LEFT, COLUMN ONE “Block Height” – nothing wrong here. This is simply the block count since the alleged Genesis block. 3.) COLUMN TWO: AGE – There is little deviation from 10 minute block times. This doesn’t make sense FOR TWO REASONS: a. There is zero “difficulty” within a closed loop system – REASON: a closed system does not “compete” with others. It is a self-satisfying reward EVERY TIME. b. If it were not a closed system than there WOULD be competition. As such, while the block times should AVERAGE 10 minutes, it is only an average. You would definitely see 3 minutes, as well as 15-20 minute block times occasionally because computers are literally “guessing” solutions, and USUALLY the amount of peta-hashes looking for such solutions would be similar to the amount of coin flips it would take to land on heads 10x in a row. After about ten minutes, one of the consecutive flips might do it. However, it is unlikely, but possible it could take 20 minutes or one minute. So, such little deviation is definitely “faked” and I have looked at MANY examples in the back office of block times and have never personally seen more than a minute of difference. 4.) COLUMN THREE: TRANSACTIONS – Just Lol for numerous reasons: a.) I have never seen more than one transaction posted here. WHAT DOES THAT IMPLY? Well, as you know, there are an alleged 1.85MM people who have traded tokens for mining. The distribution of those tokens would come from the blockchain (unless they have created in Excel Spreadsheets [which they seem to be]). So, there should be NUMEROUS, MAYBE HUNDREDS of transactions per block! b.) S-Systems (Onecoin’s fake auditor [similar to your fake exchange, xcoinx, and operated by Onecoin themselves] who has not published an audit for this “transparent” company since January) stated in their joke of an Audit (which has ZERO TECHNICAL DATA (- WHICH IS WHAT AN “AUDIT” IS!), which reads more like a Letter of Reccomendation to oneself, “There are no transactions not included in the Blockchain.” – well, as I just demonstrated, this is a lie AGAIN, FOR TWO REASONS: #1 This is a “logical fallacy” because if a transaction occurred outside the blockchain, HOW WOULD THEY KNOW!?! ANSWER: THEY WOULDN’T. and #2 if it were true, which it obviously is NOT, than transactions from each block solved would be registered in the blockchain as moving into your back office. Every time someone gets coins from mining they would be able to see the coin distribution from each block. 5.) COLUMN FOUR: TOTAL SENT – this is only “coins created” and it is called hyper-inflation. Other than that, nothing to point out here. 6.) COLUMN FIVE: SIZE (KB) – this is hilarious, also AGAIN, FOR A FEW REASONS! All sizes are shown as 188KB (although recently they show as 189KB). #1 this indicates that there is only a single transaction as shown in column 3. However, the size of a single bitcoin transaction is about 1-2KB, so this makes no sense. Furthermore, #2 if there were any “difficulty” in the mining process and if computers were batching transactions for coins created and distributed, than every single block would vary in KB greatly. 7.) BOTTOM LEFT: LATEST TRANSACTIONS – The PURPOSE of a “block explorer/ blockchain” is to be able to “FIND” transactions and transactional history. This is nothing “proprietary” that would need to be hidden. It simply does not exist with Onecon. You CANNOT “click” a transaction and find the history of it. Neither can you view any blocks or transactions over an hour and some change old. THIS, AGAIN, PROVES THAT THIS IS NOT A BLOCKCHAIN. JUST NUMBERS ON A SCREEN TIED TO A “COUNTER” USED TO DECEIVE. Furthermore, (technical) the alphanumeric hashes shown as “transactions” make no cryptographic sense! They are NOT math based in a cryptographic fashion, which could link any inputs and outputs together algorithmically. It is a complete farce! BC: Do you think Onecoin will fail and will hurt investors? TT: Of course it will. The company was Founded by an array of professional and career con-artists who make their money tricking and defrauding people. I was recently invited to participate in a small panel discussion between another MLM Professional and Onecoin “Defector” and a moderator of the discussion, to recap Onecoin’s history. I was excited to see the entire podcast picked up by “Internet Crime Fighters Organization (ICFO)”, in its entirety, which you can see here: http://internetcrimefightersorg.com/onecoin-review/ in just one month, despite its poor audio at times, its seemingly obscure subject matter (Onecoin), and its length of just over 2 hours, it already has nearly 5,000 views! Even though Ponzi schemes sometimes begin as a legitimate business, Onecoin is not even close! It’s Founders have ALL been involved in previous scandals, financial crimes, and ponzi/ pyramid schemes; most are career fraudsters, others convicted felons. Followers will say that “the past is the past,” but fail to acknowledge that there has been absolutely no change in these “leaders” behavior! Look: Onecoin and Ruja Ignatova have lied about. “Business Opportunity,” which solicits investment on the basis of advertised ROI’s and is using newly invested funds to pay off existing investors, cannot succeed. The centralized nature of Onecoin creates a single Point-of-Failure, which Ruja has already exploited multiple times: As evidenced HERE, Onecoin has already defrauded one of its members, Chris Stone, of $200,000 worth of “ponzi points” by direct theft! Ruja has REPEATED this theft recently with Onecoiners who are recently defecting due to these types of revelations which are coming out. Another Top Team Leader, who made a video complaining about their own recent theft. HERE: Message to Dr. Ruja Ignatova Onecoin from X Onecoin Top Leader & host Imi Shah. There is further proof that Onecoin’s “non-profit charity,” One World Foundation (CEO: Ruja Ignatova) is just another fake shell company used to lanuder money, and to give the appearance of a real organization set up to legitimize Onecoin, itself HERE. FORBES MAGAZINE COVER AND EDITORIAL LIE: Onecoin paid at least $300,000 to advertise in a marketing arm of Forbes, Bulgaria, called Brand Voice. However, two separate Onecoin Team Leaders here in the U.S. claimed they had paid $1MM (of investor/ ponzi earnings, of course). Onecoin promoted the fraud on their official website as an actual Forbes “cover” (and article) in order to lure in new investor-victims money HERE, but this was merely a paid advertisement. See Brand Voice Media Kit: HERE HERE IS THE ACTUAL FORBES COVER FOR THIS ISSUE (directly from Forbes Bulgaria’s website). The Financial IT Feb. The issue with Ruja on the cover is AN EXACT REPRINT of January. Onecoin PAID to simply reprint January and add a new cover and insert one article. Otherwise, both issues are identical. Video PROOF, which is a bit too long, HERE Here is the January issue directly from Financial IT’s own website Here is a slideshow of the February issue with Ruja, directly from Onecoin Norway’s site Ruja and affiliates have claimed to have bought several banks, including Hermes Bank (SEE DISCUSSION HERE) Sal Leto, Onecoin Ponzi Pimp and Team Leader in USA claimed, “(OneCoin) has acquired a hundred and eighty banking licenses, to legally own their own banks, their own branch and their own office, inside all one hundred and eighty countries that we operate in.” She and the Top Conspirators have LIED about nearly everything there is to LIE about, including that in 2012 and 2014 she was awarded Business Woman of the Year in Bulgaria (Category International Business). But this too was simply a paid publicity stunt perpetrated by a Professional Image Consultancy firm in her country. The Title “Business Woman of the Year, Bulgaria,” does not formally exist! CONCLUSION: This is ALL smoke and mirrors designed to deceive people and take their money! Onecoin has no intention of doing otherwise, and it is not now, nor will it ever be an actual and traded cryptocurrency (with a 120 BILLION coin cap), let alone with ONE MILLION Merchants! BC: What is the goal of your mission here by challenging Onecoin? TT: Not everyone involved in Onecoin are scammers, of course. But I have personally spoken with MANY IA’s and Team Leaders who have ADMITTED that they are completely aware of it being a fraud ….but they don’t care “as long as we’re making money!” Part of my Goal is to prove once and for all that Onecoin is founded by bad players and con-artists who know nothing whatsoever about cryptocurrency. It is based on a perpetual pattern of new and convincing lies in this hybrid scheme, which is only meant to deceive and bring in new investors to pay off the old. It is to prove that the company’s founders have established a pattern of fraud and that the end goal of this is no different: to enrich themselves at the expense of others. It is to demonstrate that you cannot trust these people, as they do not have anyone but their own best interests in mind, and that they will do or say anything to keep the money rolling in as long as possible. It is to preach that Due Diligence is important whenever you are considering entrusting your money with startups or so-called “Business Opportunities.” My MISSION for challenging them is for widespread disclosure, exposing their countless incidents of lies and deception, so that they collapse sooner, rather than later. This reason is twofold: #1.) fewer people hurt and financially destroyed, #2.) to mitigate the legal and global legislative and regulatory ramifications of a second (or now third with the DAO) Mt. Gox. Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology can and WILL change the world! I am hoping that Onecoiners will eventually come to their senses now, rather than before it is too late, but either way will come to understand the great industry, market, opportunities, and freedom which an honest and transparent cryptocurrency can be Final note: There are plenty of things I was not even able to cover, despite the length of this. However, the hyperlinks herein will assist anyone (or Authorities) investigating the subject to delve much more deeply into this sinister world of pseudo-cryptocurrency/ ponzi/ pyramid fraud. Good luck! Bitcoin.com would like to thank Tim Tayshun for allowing our readers to view his research. What do you think about Onecoin? Let us know in the comments below? Images courtesy of Pixabay, and Onecoin Websites and articles https://t.co/MEllI7R6jt #bch pic.twitter.com/5W0utZBfYP This week the Bitcoin ABC developers officially announced the much anticipated Bitcoin Cash network hard fork on May 15… read more. https://t.co/vRHIpxTpKd #bitcoinjobs #jobhunt #cryptojobs pic.twitter.com/4gs4muoiiP News.Bitcoin.com is Hiring Editorial Staff – In Tokyo, Stockholm and Your Town. Are you an experienced news editor or a news reporter with a nose for crypto? We are on a roll – increasing our readership every day – serving millions of readers each month… read more. Introducing the Simple to Use and Robust https://t.co/UtJJm8netW Wallet https://t.co/w5xA4uDpU9 #bitcoinwallet pic.twitter.com/hB4KCBzqjL Download the Bitcoin.com Wallet right to your device for easy and secure access to your bitcoins. Perfect for beginners, the Bitcoin.com Wallet makes using and holding bitcoins easy. No logins required. Facebook has recently made some changes to show you less news and more family-oriented pics and videos – even though you’ve previously subscribed. Here’s how to make Facebook show you our content again; Facebook has recently made some changes to show you less news. Here’s how to make Facebook show you our content again; a. Visit our Facebook Page https://t.co/d5QIuhCFPt b. Click the “Follow” button under our cover image. c. Select the “See first” option. pic.twitter.com/tFmrF73WQ7 — Bitcoin News (@BTCTN) February 19, 2018 1. Visit the Bitcoin.com Facebook Page. 2. Click the “Follow” button under our cover image. 3. Select the “See first” option. Get the latest price charts, statistics and our news feed on your site. Check out our widget services. We also deliver bite-sized news to your favourite messaging app; join our Telegram channel.Bitcoin.com chatted with Tim Tayshun, owner and operator of ezCoinAccess, who has been in the industry for quite some time. Tayshun gives our readers a definitive well-researched synopsis of the alleged ponzi and cryptocurrency MLM scandal called Onecoin. He believes he has provided enough information here (which is extensive) to prove that Onecoin is indeed a scam and not the “Bitcoin Killer” it claims to be.   Also read: UK Credit Rating Downgraded Amid Post-Brexit Uncertainty Bitcoin.com (BC): Can you briefly tell our readers a little about yourself and how you discovered Bitcoin? Tim Tayshun (TT): I remember very vividly, the exact day, in fact! On Feb. 28th, 2013 (BTC price $27) a friend excitedly described to me what Bitcoin is to him. On March 15th (price $37) I typed “what is bitcoin” into Google Search and thus began my first of two “journeys down the rabbit hole.” Watching the Cyprus drama and Bank runs unfold I bought some BTC on April 1st (BTC price $100). I followed it very closely for the next year and in March 2014 I sold some BTC and started ezCoinAccess, LLC. , with the goal of owning and placing a Bitcoin ATM locally. As the name implies, our focus was on making Bitcoin easier and more widespread, and we figured a (2-way) BTM would help accomplish this. My partner and I jokingly referred to the idea as the honey badger’s approach to increasing mining difficulty,” as anytime a transaction was made, we’d earn a few satoshi. On December 13, 2014, nine months later, we unveiled Orange County, CA’s first bitcoin ATM at Mission Market Express (inside OC’s busiest Train Station). It was the 117th 2-way machine, globally. (BTC price $350) The philosophy of ezCoinAccess lead to simultaneously developing relationships with Bitcoiner friends here and across several African countries, forming an informal collective of “trusted participants,” which we called AUTONet (African Umbrella Trust Organization & Network). This grew our network and connections and led to fun opportunities, including being invited on an almost monthly basis to give presentations at Bitcoin Meetups across Africa (which I do over Skype or HangOuts). This development inspired the creation of the “Wheel of Bitcoin” in order to do LIVE giveaways of FREE BTC after every presentation for newbs who set up new wallets (and anyone else, really). It has since been spun in Accra, Kumasi and Tamale (Ghana), Gaborone (Botswana), Freetown (Sierra Leone), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), and Nairobi (Kenya). And more recently at CoinFest Events in the U.S., Canada, and even Seoul, Korea. I also host a Bitcoin and Blockchain Meet-Up Group here in Orange County, CA. In relation to the Africa focus, despite some unexpected delays and dev issues, myself, David DeSantis and some partners are finally launching NewAfricaRadio(.)Net this summer, which is a syndicated and crowd-sourced ( 24-hour online) Bitcoin, Blockchain and crypto-centric program specifically for Africans; with a simple, free mobile app to follow by 2017. An interesting extension of this also ties into another project Team I am working with have created a separate platform for blockchain based ticketing, via an application we’re calling BiTiX (more on that TBA soon). BC: When did you first hear about Onecoin? TT: Let me preface the rest of this interview by stating that I am SOURCING nearly everything possible from their original sources, despite the language. The information IS mostly available in English, if you look, but Onecoin Kool-Aid drinkers are very easy to dismiss any negative report on their company and have been deeply indoctrinated into believing that bloggers are just “PCP’s” (“Penny-chasing-parasites” who thrive on collecting advertising pennies by getting people to click-through the links on their pages, and who seek out Top Companies to attack and sensationalize lies about them). A “PPP” is a “Pictureless Profile Prick” who comments on blogs or stories without an actual photo of their face on their thumbnail image, and who is just “jealous,” a “hater” or having “fear” (as opposed to “faith” in Ruja and Onecoin). This cult-like indoctrination and brainwashing literally causes them to proceed within the scam with 100% blinders on, believing ONLY what they are told by the Leaders, and NONE off the facts, evidence and proof for which they are given from the “evil detractors.” Rather than following the dirty multi-million dollar money trail, which is lining the back pockets of the Top Leaders and co-conspirators in the scam, from themselves, the victims; their attention has been diverted to attack groups and people who are more likely to be considered Consumer Rights and Protections Advocates! It is true lunacy! I realized that this was the first “cryptocurrency company” in the world, which did not even accept cryptocurrency! I first heard about Onecoin shortly after closely following the infamous Paycoin (XPY), GAW, Josh “Homero” Garza, “$20 Floor,” Merchants “Coming Sooooon!™” debacle and watching that train-wreck unwind. I remember thinking how absolutely crazy it was seeing their PayBase Logo flashed across the Miami Beach Hotel after-party and pool-side Paycoin HD commercials looped on every TV at TNABC 2015 (Onecoin tried demonstrating credibility by pulling a similarly expensive and 100% paid sponsorship stunt 9 months later by purchasing the 4th Annual EU – South East Europe Summit, held by The Economist)! So, around March of last year someone hit me up asking me if I wanted to join Onecoin. Onecoin is purported to be the “most transparent” cryptocurrency company (their *blockchain is “audited” – **read ridiculousness). However, they are both Centralized and Closed Source. Their claim is that they have “fixed” all of Bitcoin’s “flaws” and are “better than Bitcoin!” Ummmm… “Odd” – I thought. And about ten sec. after pulling up their embarrassingly novice looking website (perhaps speaking to their technical abilities to even make an alt-coin) and catching glaring spelling and grammatical errors, I realized that this was the first “cryptocurrency company” in the world, which did not even accept cryptocurrency! For entertainment purposes, I decided to watch one of their terrible videos HERE: (Ruja describes “switching on” the blockchain),  and explains Onecoin “mining.”  Here I learned something about cryptocurrency “value,” which contradicted all previously known laws of supply & demand, which simply was that “the higher the mining difficulty, the higher the value of the coin!“ BC: Do you think Onecoin is bigger than MMM Global? TT: There are both differences and frightening similarities. MMM Global at one point had from 5 to 40 million Members who lost up to $10 billion. MMM started in 1989, declared bankruptcy in 1997, and Sergei Mavrodi (the Founder) was on the run until his arrest in 2003. In 2007 he was convicted to serve 4 ½ years in Russian Prison. But, within a year of his release, he was at it again. Another year later he froze all pay outs, then started again some months later with similar results. This has been a “rinse and repeat” cycle from 1989 to present. This is the power, deception and replication model of the ponzi world. Juha Pariala, their Top Leader, whom Onecoin claims is making $4MM per month has a motto, “Duplication is Everything!” By comparison, Onecoin is only 22 months young, although it claims to have brought in $4.1 Billion Euro from an alleged Membership of over 2.1 million Independent Affiliates (IA’s) during this time. Affiliates purchase  “Cryptocurrency (mis)Education Packages” (DETAILS) ranging from 110€ to 27,500€ (and more recently a 100 000€ “ELITE” package!!!) which all come with (ponzi-) tokens for “mining” (ponzi-) coins; however, there is NO “mining,” as you could have guessed, as the function of this system is based directly on exchanging “X” amount of tokens for “X” amount of coins, under the false premise that all members are “mining” a coin.” ONECOIN NEWS REPORTS ON FINLAND TV (subtitled) TT: IA’s earn 10% commission on anyone they sign up, but with the caveat that only 6% goes into their “cash account” while 4% goes into what is called a “mandatory account.” So, the cash account is semi-liquid but expensive to withdraw from (I believe 15€); and the mandatory account, as the name implies, only allows you to either buy more tokens (or coins) or to use towards upgrading your packages towards the Infinity Package. Note: there are IA’s who have multiple or even dozens of accounts!) Additionally, the more expensive or multiple packages you buy (or “credits” you “roll” from your Mandatory Account into), the more tokens you get for mining, but ALSO, the more “SPLITS” you get with, the higher package. “Splits” are a common scam in the ponzi world because they double the amount of your tokens (which are really only ponzi points), but unlike any stock, commodity or asset, do not affect the price of that asset (or in this case “cryptocurrency”). There is a “Split Barometer” (which seems to be tied to any slow-downs to Onecoin’s Alexa Ratings Rankings) to notify IA’s when their money will next double, and therefore how hard they need to work to hussle in new victims. Onecoin even offers something called “CoinSafe” (more like “CoinUNsafe”) which promises to earn additional interest of 12%+ (“like a bank”) on any coins you keep “locked” in an account for 12, 18 or more months. How this interest is accrued remains a mystery (are coins from the alleged blockchain somehow “reserved” for later allocation!?). Onecoin has falsely promoted a “KYC” policy, which they claim will be placed directly into their “New Blockchain” in October. October 1st is when they “switch on” the “new blockchain” and presumably “transfer coins” from the old one to the new one (cause you know, that’s possible), as well as “Double” all members current coins and tokens (some new feature in blockhcain tech they invented, apparently?). Anyone else see the ridiculousness of these claims?! Despite Ruja Ignatova claiming that “Onecoin will ‘bank the unbanked” (where have we heard this before?), anyone familiar with KYC knows that this claim is impossible and will have to be abandoned. Onecoin’s current KYC policy took an unheard of 30-60 days to apply for and does NOT apply whatsoever when signing up for the scheme, but only when attempting (and with a >95% fail rate according to the inundation of quickly deleted FB posts not their official pages) to sell coins. To inadvertently prove how ridiculous their bogus “KYC” Policy is, Onecoin Ponzi Pimp, Ken Labine, signed up his cat! I am not joking! Labine’s cat, Milo, is a “Onecoin Miner,” HERE. It is important to note: almost everything and every delay which Onecoin does is solely for the purpose of trying to keep money in the game longer. This is necessary in order for new funds coming in being available to pay off existing investors. FOR A MUCH MORE DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE SCHEME AND HOW THE PONZI/ PYRAMID HYBRID IS STRUCTURED, SEE HERE HERE. Interestingly, about half of Onecoin’s entire network comes from their acquisitions of other failed ponzi scams, their contact information and, of course, their once broken dreams, which Onecoin promises “will make up for it this time (and finally make them rich, of course – after they “buy in” again).” These former failed ponzi scams, now part of Onecoin are well documented, and include: Conligus (10,000’s of members est. – the Steinkeller brothers), Univer Team (120,000 members est. –  Alexandre Arenales), Unaico/ SiteTalk, OPN (Opportunity Network), ( over 400,000 members est. – Sebastian Greenwood , Frank Rickets,  Christian Goebel, others), Bonofa (60,000 members – Christian Goebel), BNG International (10,000’s members – John Mercucci). Every single one of these people listed, and a great deal of other Top Leaders in Onecoin have been involved in other scams, several in many cases, and for some, scamming is literally their career! Onecoin will CERTAINLY cause greater financial devastation than Mt. Gox, several times over, and will be the direct cause of several suicides, guaranteed. While many have no idea that this is a scam, having zero backgrounds in cryptocurrency OR MLM (in some cases), I have contacted and spoken with dozens of Team Leaders who DO know, but simply don’t care! The money is too good and they have already built their downlines and are making money! For this reason, Onecoin will CERTAINLY cause greater financial devastation than Mt. Gox, several times over, and will be the direct cause of several suicides, guaranteed. I am guessing at least a dozen. Maybe more! This is the perfect storm for massive financial loss and suicides, as well as deep shame and embarrassment for those who have established a downline, which includes any friends and family. This will be like their worse hangover imaginable, and it will stay with many of them for years to come, as these types of enormous scams are devastating relationship destroyers. They say hindsight is 20/20. BC: Can you tell our readers about the leaders of Onecoin? Such as Ruja Ignatova? TT: “Dr.” Ruja Ignatova has a fairly barren LinkedIn Profile and very little verifiable evidence for such an allegedly accomplished woman (dubious claims include: “200+ IQ/ MENSA Member,” “Business Woman of the Year, Bulgaria in both 2012 and 2014 [note: there is no such official award or Title],” “‘Expert’ in Cryptocurrency,” “Consulted cryptocurrency companies,” “has written a book on cryptocurrency,” and much more unverified claims). She is the Cult Leader, and there is some evidence suggesting that she and Sebastian Greenwood are really only the puppets to a far more sinister and nefarious criminal underbelly. But, let’s focus more on what we know and can prove.   HERE is, I believe her first (and LAST) interview EVER with a cryptocurrency advocate group out of Estonia (where they are also under investigation). Sebastian Greenwood is the Master Distributor at Onecoin. He was heavily involved in BigCoin (Onecoin’s immediate predecessor) and Prosper Club (AKA: Prosper Inc.) with partner/ scammers: Jarle Thorson and John Ng, which defrauded investors out of over $50MM. Ruja Ignatova appears to have essentially functioned as a Treasurer for this scam. Prior to this, He was also involved (as Global Product Mgr) in the SiteTalk/ Unaico scam, which followed the typical ponzi playbook, and also cost investors tons, and which later merged a percentage of affiliates into what is now Onecoin. Additionally, he was CEO and Co-Founder of Loopium. Nigel Allan was the first President and face of Onecoin, early on, coming freshly out of several scams which stole everyone’s money, including Crypto888 and Brilliant Carbon (which sold fake “carbon credits” to investors). He is a career criminal but had a falling out with Ruja in January of last year (probably too much dirt to wipe clean). Watch this short video for his and more of Sebastian’s history. BC: Can you explain the recent conference they had and what that was all about? They had a sign there calling “Bitcoin dead” right? TT: They had a three story tall image behind the stage claiming, “Onecoin: The Bitcoin Killer!”. This occurred at Onecoin’s biggest event of the year, “CoinRush, London,” on June 11th. Leading up to this event, Top Leaders in Onecoin had been claiming for over a year that as soon as they hit 630.000.000 coins mined (30%), that they had between 50,000, 150,000 and “500,000 Merchants already lined up” to be on-boarded. Ken Labine even recorded a video of himself, completely ecstatic about being able to buy “whatever you could think of, cars, Ferrari’s, etc.,” as soon as the 30% “mined” happened (HERE is that crazy video HERE is that crazy video).   Mind you, they do not have a wallet and the coins ONLY trade internally, and their value is created based on one of two factors: 1.) it can either remain constant (i.e., horizontal), or 2.) it can go up. Nevertheless, 30% “mined” came and went mid-April and there was not a single word from the Company. Due to this, Ken Labine and others had egg on their face for promising their downline what their upline had promised them: Merchants! But, ALL reps determined that this announcement would come at the massively hyped London Event, CoinRush! What happened instead, was Ruja announced the following: For more analysis of the June 11th CoinRush Event in London, check out this blog (and some of the other detailed Onecoin coverage) HERE. BC: You are planning on having a moderated debate with Ken Labine. Can you tell us about this? TT: Sure. Labine has agreed to join into a “Moderated Debate” this Wednesday, at 12:00 NOON Pacific Standard Time. He told me he doesn’t want to speak until 24 hrs before the event. I just hope he shows! Stay tuned! I will post the link or follow up here or in the comments  Labine and I have a bit of history. A year ago we had a “friendly” on-air discussion about Onecoin. We initially agreed on many of the ideologies for supporting a cryptocurrency, but of course disagreed 100% that Onecoin was a real one. Like any indoctrinated Onecoiner, Labine has trouble following logic and is dismissive or avoiding of any of the real issues. Fast-Forward to April 9th, 2016, CoinFest. Labine agreed to debate me at 4:00 PM PST, which I planned on incorporating into the itinerary of the Event. We had some cool speakers already, Amy Elizabeth from the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (FB Page) and M.K. Lords of AirBitz. So the debate was going to be a fun diversion, but rather than letting me speak a single word he carried on his “Opening Statement” for literally 4 hrs. 20 min. Besides slightly disrupting the day’s schedule, this cowardice and avoidance was the turning point in which I felt it was really time to go against this giant scam and expose the lies and corruption of Onecoin, as widely as possible. Without naming names, there are many have contributed to documenting the fraud and ponzi nature of Ruja and her scam, and they are the ones who paved the way for what we know today. Onecoin is a particularly terrible and devious, hybrid ponzi/ pyramid/ cryptocurrency scam! It is a particularly dangerous one, as its members are not only financially tied to their belief in it, but people are also INCREDIBLY emotionally tied to it, more so than anything else I have ever seen, and in a similar way we enthusiasts support and believe in the future of REAL cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, Dash, Ethereum, etc! It is no exaggeration at all to label this a “cult,” and I am not joking! Albeit in German, this News Report talks about Onecoin using unauthorized MasterCard, being a ponzi/ pyramid scheme, being looked at by financial regulators, AS WELL AS an Agency dealing specifically with sects (like Scientology) HERE! In fact, Germany is only one of nearly a dozen countries who have recently opened investigations into Onecoin. Video from a major News Network reports on the actual arrest of several Onecoin Leaders in China, this past March and about Onecoin being an illegal ponzi scheme, and interviews a Police Officer from Ghuang Zhong who is working with Top Authorities via “Project Hurricane,” which was initiated to fight cyber crime and these types of scams. $45.7 million dollars was seized from the Onecoin investors during the raid (VIDEO HERE). Germany is only one of nearly a dozen countries who have recently opened investigations into Onecoin. The Swedish Gaming Board declared OneCoin to be “a chain letter game or similar,” after Police launched a preliminary investigation (SEE HERE) NOTE: You should be aware that under Swedish Law, a chain letter is the same thing as an illegal pyramid scheme. The Norwegian DSA call OneCoin out for being an “ugly” pyramid scheme (SEE HERE). The Norwegian DSA went on to say that “OneCoin is marketed in Norway as an investment scheme. An “enormous” ROI of about 18,000% is cited in OneCoin promotional material, along with claims OneCoin can be used like a bank account that pays 13% interest.” NOTE: While claiming to be the new Bitcoin, they instead concentrated on selling so-called “Tokens”… which multiply themselves with express speed when they frequently split, which means that the number of tokens doubles (company-wide) without a drop in value. This, the Norwegian DSA claim, is evidence of pyramid scheme fraud.” Austria has issued a warning to its citizens that OneCoin was an illegal pyramid scheme (SEE HERE). Latvia has also declared OneCoin to be an illegal pyramid scheme and Ponzi (SEE HERE). It should be noted that none of this or anything else is enough to convince Labine or others what’s really going on. They are simply “smarter” than all of these Federal authorities and other Agencies who “do not understand Onecoin.” The Founders of one of the biggest Ponzi scams in recent history, Zeek Rewards, will be going to court next month, July 7th, to face Trial on a Federal Indictment. One of the many facts that the Department of Justice will be trying to prove is that: “The co-conspirators used this money, in Ponzi-like fashion, to pay other victim-investors in the scheme and to personally enrich themselves.” “…and that the true revenue of the scheme …came from victim-investors.” It is easy to see how this would also be the crux of the case if and when Onecoin or any of their Top Ponzi Pimp Affiliates are indicted by Prosecutors here in the U.S. As the Ponzi scheme grew in size and scope, banks and other financial institutions began to question the co-conspirators about the fraudulent appearance of the scheme, and many shut down or refused to open Zeek bank accounts.  – And this is exactly what has been happening within Onecoin, as something like 15 bank, so far, have forced them to close their accounts on compliance and suspicious activity concerns, such as Money Laundering. More coverage on what the similar ponzi scheme, Zeek Rewards, is facing HERE. In regards to the bank changes, it appears that the IMS Account set up with Deutsche Bank is owned by Frank Rickets, former CEO of OPN/ SiteTalk, a known ponzi which lost everyone’s money. This would seem to be the very definition of Money Laundering, since it is not even in one of Onecoin’s many Shell Companies (great article covering the shell companies and Real Estate investments from a recent Bulgarian Newspaper. links and so much more can be found in this Finnish Blog, which has well over 8,000 comments on the scam: MuROBBS). It was new friends from this blog who contacted me, claiming to know family and friends there and in neighboring countries who have literally mortgaged their homes or sunken their entire 40 years worth of Life Savings into this “get-rich-quick scam, which will replace Bitcoin as the #1 cryptocurrency. BC: Onecoin says it is second largest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin in market cap. But it doesn’t show it on coinmarketcap.com or anywhere else. Why is that?  TT: Onecoin is not traded on the open market. If it were, it would crash. No exchange will list an unfungible alt-coin, particularly one with no known developers, technology, security or benefit. So, Onecoin quietly created their own. However, like in many of their scammy efforts, Onecoin has shown themselves extremely lazy in even making their pseudo coin pass any real scrutiny, whatsoever. They created what they called a “cryptocurrency exchange,”  xcoinx. But xcoinx does not function at al, even though it has been over a year since its May 2015 launch. 100% of their FAQ’s are  plagiarized, verbatim, from BitStamp, as well as plagiarizing the UI mostly from CoinMarketCap (and placing Onecoin as the #2 in market capitalization, directly below bitcoin and above Ethereum), as evidenced and can be compared below: Onecoin has advertised this as an independent 3rd party site, which is just another lie. One of their Top Team Leaders in the UK, Joby Boughey (formerly a Team Leader with another giant ponzi scam called “U-Fun/ U-Token”), accidently