We feature the top brokers and exchanges that offer the option to buy VeChain (VET) with a credit card or debit card. For larger sums you can also send a wire transfer. We list exchanges and services based on personal experience, and reputation. Please view the risks associated with Vechai and cryptocurrency trading at the bottom of this page. Also access our affiliate disclaimer.

Securities.io ratings are determined by our editorial team. The scoring formula for digital assets (cryptocurrency) brokers takes into account over dozens of factors, including account fees and minimums, trading platforms, customer support, regulatory bodies, and investment options.

VeChain is an open-source blockchain project, focused on disrupting supply-chains and enterprise operations.  Developers at this project launched a custom built blockchain in 2018, titled ‘VeChainThor Blockchain’, which is capable of executing smart-contracts.

VeChain allows for the quick and transparent transfer of value, through use of blockchain technology.  Furthermore, its unique set of attributes allows for complex smart-contracts to be executed.  These features allow for the blockchain to function as a payment system, in addition to a decentralized data ledger – potentially replacing traditionally compartmentalized systems.

The VeChain network functions through use of dual token system.

VET – As the heart of the VeChain system, VET tokens are used as a means to transfer value between parties.

VTHO – These tokens are used in conjunction with VET during value transfers. VTHO tokens function in the same manner as ‘gas’ on the Ethereum blockchain – fuelling transactions.

These tokens function on the VeChainThor Blockchain, with consensus being reached through use of a ‘Proof-of-Authority (PoA)’ protocol.  PoA is a variation of Proof-of-Stake, which incorporates a block approval system, controlled through a central party.  This eliminates that ability for blocks to be created anonymously – a key feature with the blockchain being aimed towards enterprises.

Developer participation in VeChain is quite high, relative to most projects. While still underway, the following are a couple of the upgrades expected to be implemented on VeChain in the coming years.

The VeChain foundation has, in the past, made it known that the project is being developed with a clear ideology.

“VeChain Foundation believes strongly in compliance and self-regulation…We want to set a standard within the industry to drive home the ideology that blockchain cryptocurrency projects can embody ‘Transparency, Fairness, Openness’, this is our commitment to the community and ecosystem at large.”

Having been launched in 2015, VeChain has been around longer than most projects.  This staying power has allowed for modest levels of adoption over the years.  Notably, VeChain recently signed a partnership with travel agent giant, Travala.com, which will allow for VET tokens to be used as a form of payment on the platform.

For a full list of established partnerships, click HERE.  Some of the more noteworthy companies on this list are as follows.

Such levels of adoption have allowed for VeChain to firmly entrench itself within the top-30 projects, when ranked by marketcap.

Over the course of its life, VeChain has managed to remain relatively free of controversy.  The lone event which stands out was a $6.5M hack, which occurred in late-2019.  It should be noted that this event occurred due to human error, not a shortcoming in the project coding itself.

To date, no official classification of VeChain has been provided by regulators.  While similar projects, such as Ethereum, have been deemed non-securities, the risk remains that this is the case due to a lack of decentralization.

As with any project, proceed with caution when trading/holding, as the classification of a digital asset may change at any time.

VeChain was created in 2015 by Sunny Lu.  Notably, Sunny Lu served as the CIO of Louis Vuitton China prior to spearheading VeChain.

While Sunny Lu remains at the helm of VeChain, the entire ecosystem is overseen by a committee of elected professionals, known as the ‘VeChain Steering Committee’.

There is a very high degree of risk involved in trading securities, and this trading risk is  higher with Cryptocurrencies such as VET or VTHO due to markets being decentralized and non-regulated. There is no central bank that can take corrective measure to protect the value of Cryptocurrencies in a crisis or issue more currency. You should be aware that you may lose a significant portion of your portfolio.

Securities.io is not a registered broker, analyst, or investment advisor.

All information contained herein should be independently verified and confirmed. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage whatsoever caused in reliance upon such information or services. Please be aware of the risks involved with any trading done in any financial market. Do not trade with money that you cannot afford to lose. When in doubt, you should consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

Some of the links in this website either through images, text, audio or video are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item or use the service, the owner of this website will receive an affiliate commission.

To learn more visit our affiliate disclosure page.

Penguin FA — Republic Protocol ($REN)Crypto PenguinBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingJan 15This article was first released to the CryptoBirb Exclusive Moon Club. For more information, visit discord.gg/emw5Npb.Website | Lite Paper (Q1 2019)| White Paper (Dec 2017)| Twitter | Telegram | Reddit | Github | MediumCirculating/Max Supply: 631,984,400 /1,000,000,000Mineable ❌Masternodes ✅ (Darknodes)Table of ContentsOverviewToken UtilityToken EconomicsTeamRoadmapCompetitionConclusionRecommended ResourcesOverviewSource: https://youtu.be/kjX72sHFZhI?t=238Republic Protocol started out with a mission to build a protocol for a decentralized dark pool that allows traders to buy and sell large amounts of cryptocurrencies without announcing their intentions through an open order book. It currently supports Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ERC20 tokens, with plans for expansion to other cryptocurrencies.Republic Protocol’s description from their original white paper (left) and from their new Q1 2019 Litepaper (right)In a November 2018 presentation and their January 2019 update, the team revealed that in their quest to create the most private dark pool possible, they ended up creating a new virtual machine called RenVM. Their new algorithm allows a decentralized network of computers to work with data while maintaining end-to-end privacy.Their ultimate aim is now to become a platform for privacy-preserving decentralized applications. In the short term though, Republic Protocol will still be focused on creating a private decentralized dark pool.Dark PoolsFacilitating OTC cryptocurrency trading has the potential to be highly lucrative. In April 2018, Reuters reported Genesis Trading as handling $75–80 million daily trading volume on average. Circle Trade handled $24 billion in volume in 2018. A dark pool is a form of OTC trading that offers greater privacy.Normally, a trader announces their intention to buy or sell by placing an order that is displayed in an order book. Other traders can then see that order and raise or lower their prices to fulfill it.Rich whales can have trouble filling large orders on regular exchangesIf you are a whale trying to get in and out of large positions though, placing large transparent orders can be problematic. It provides information to other traders who could try to copy or undermine your efforts. Market prices can also be affected by traders who react to the large order. This is why some exchanges offer the option to place hidden orders.But hiding the order alone is not enough for large orders to be filled without affecting market prices. Traders can still determine the existence of a hidden buy or sell wall if large numbers of trades go through but fail to make a difference in the market price. A sudden increase in trading volume can change the price as traders react, resulting in slippage.This is why whales and traders with large positions often turn to dark pools, where large hidden orders can be discreetly matched and filled by other hidden orders. This usually requires a third party that has to be trusted to match these hidden orders while keeping information about these orders hidden from others.But how do you know if you can trust these third parties?Source: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-16.htmlMany existing dark pools have been fined by the SEC for lying about how they operated and failing to keep order information confidential. As long as the party operating the dark pool has access to order information, there will always be the possibility that they will try to profit from it.A Decentralized Dark PoolRepublic Protocol is planning to solve this problem by creating a protocol that allows orders to be matched without any knowledge about the details of the orders. This makes it impossible for any third party to reveal information about orders submitted to the dark pool.Through the use of the Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm, orders are split into fragments and distributed to different nodes that then work together to match orders. Privacy is maintained because no single node has the full order information. Ethereum smart contracts are also employed to help maintain privacy and verify computations. Once orders are matched, traders can then perform atomic swaps to exchange assets directly with each other.RenVM — A Privacy Preserving Virtual MachineCTO Loong Wang explains the benefits that RenVM will bring to their dark pool (Source)In order to make their dark pool more secure, stable, and private, Republic Protocol created RenVM, a virtual machine where privacy can be maintained for all inputs, outputs, and even for generated data.CTO Loong Wang says that RenVM can be used to build privacy-preserving apps in areas like voting, financial, or sensitive data analysis (Source)RenVM makes it possible for a dApp running on Republic Protocol to work with sensitive data (such as financial or health information) and calculate a result (such as filling an order or conducting medical research) without ever exposing that sensitive data to anyone.There will be several different components to Republic Protocol’s new platform built on RenVM. So far the team has revealed three components, which are:zkTransactions Layer: RenVM can create private keys on different blockchains that are unknown to everybody. These blockchain-specific private keys are each controlled by dapps called zkTransactors. Users can deposit funds through these zkTransactors. From that point on, trades and transfers can be made while keeping balances and transactions secret. When the users wish to reclaim their funds, they can simply withdraw the cryptocurrencies back to their own blockchain-specific wallets.Note: The Lite Paper states that this “makes private transactions possible for any blockchain”, but it does NOT specify any way of hiding deposits, withdrawals, and public keys for public blockchains. This means private transactions and balances are only possible as long as the funds remain in the Ren ecosystem. Depositing and withdrawing a conspicuous amount of BTC through a zkTransactor in a short period of time will probably make your transaction easily traceable.Interoperability Layer: Different zkTransactors are created for different blockchains(e.g. a BTC zkTransactor, an ETH zkTransactor, an LTC zkTransactor). These zkTransactors are compatible with each other. As long as both parties have deposited their funds into zkTransactors, they can freely perform cross-chain atomic swaps, trading freely between different cryptocurrencies.Dark Pool Layer: This is the previously mentioned decentralized dark pool, a protocol that privately matches orders in a hidden order book. Eventually this will be open to allow third parties to build their own dark pools with customizable rules to meet various requirements.The Application Layer allows dApps to be built using all of RenVM’s technology. So far the team has revealed two dApps that will be built on RenVM.RenEX: Republic Protocol’s dark pool is currently up and running in beta form, but will be migrated to RenVM over the course of 2019 to take advantage of its end-to-end privacy and interoperability features.SwapperD: This will be a wallet that interacts with RenVM and an interface that allows users to access Ren’s private cross-chain atomic swap features.CTO Loong insists that the dark pool is still their main focus (Source 1)(Source 2)RenVM was created to allow their dark pool “to offer privacy at every level” (Source)Despite the massive potential opened up by the creation of RenVM, CTO Loong Wang maintains that Republic Protocol’s main focus is still on creating their dark pool, and the creation of RenVM is merely a result of their dedication to making that dark pool as private as possible.At least in the short term, it seems likely that Republic Protocol will continue to focus on launching their dark pool. However, CEO Taiyang Zhang’s closing remarks in their latest update seem to suggest much loftier long-term goals:“As the ecosystem grows, and the core components are completed, Ren will introduce development tools to support the open development of private applications of any kind, as well as new products, paving the way for unstoppable privacy.”— Taiyang Zhang, 18 Jan 2019Token UtilityREN’s main use at the moment is for the right to run a Darknode. 100,000 REN is required to run each Darknode.Right now, these Darknodes help match orders that are submitted to the dark pool and are rewarded with transaction fees. This makes REN’s current value highly dependent on the volume of dark pool trading taking place on Republic Protocol.All Darknodes will be rewarded for contributing to RenVM (Source: Lite Paper)In the future, Darknodes will be rewarded for facilitating RenVM’s privacy preserving computations. For each computation, all Darknodes will receive an even split of an upfront fee and a variable incentivization fee that can be raised to get special priority from Darknodes.CTO Loong Wang explains how REN trading fees will be chargedWith the use of zkSNARKs, traders will NOT have to submit a large refundable bond in order to access the network as stated in the 2017 white paper. However, a small REN fee, payable by the trader or a third party, will still be needed to open an order.REN will no longer be required for all trading fees as suggested in the 2017 white paper. The team announced in April that nodes can be rewarded with the Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies used in the transaction instead.Token EconomicsSource: e is a fixed supply of 1 billion REN tokens with no inflation.Republic Network raised 35,500 Ethereum from their February 2018 ICO. The token price was $0.0513 USD/0.000055 ETH (private sale) and $0.0561 USD/0.0000581 ETH (public sale).Token Distribution is as follows:Private Sale: 56.6% (Including 5% early adopter tokens)Public Sale: 8.6%Team and Advisor Tokens: 9.9%Community Development and Partners: 5%Reserve: 19.9%Contrary to what is stated in their ICO FAQ, the team tokens do NOT have a 2 year vesting period. Instead, the team and advisor tokens will start being unlocked in February 2019 and will continue to be unlocked every four months until February 2020.Source: https://t.me/republicprotocol/116573The team is using some of their reserve tokens to run bootstrapping Darknodes to help maintain the network. This will also give them some revenue as trading volume picks up.Overall the team and advisors control 34.8% of the total supply. 56.6% of all tokens went to private sale buyers. This could make it easier for whales who control the majority of the supply to manipulate prices.TeamThe website lists 13 team members and the majority of them had little professional experience prior to joining Republic Protocol. All seven members of the development team (including the CTO) were educated at The Australian National University and many of them only recently graduated around 2018. This is definitely a very young development team that’s looking to prove itself through its code.Here is some information on some key members of the team:CEO Taiyang Zhang has two years of experience as a software engineer, 3 years of experience as director/co-founder of software development company Neucode, and is a co-founder of the cryptocurrency trading fund Virgil Capital. Though he has accomplished more than most people his age, Taiyang is only in his early 20's and is still relatively unproven as a CEO.CTO Loong Wang has a computer science degree, 1 and a half years of experience as a software developer for Neucode, and 7 months of experience as a researcher at the Australian National University. He also seems quite young and inexperienced, but has the right background and education for his role.Software developer Jaz Gulati was the co-founder of Neucode along with Taiyang Zhang.Backend developer Divya Mary has 2 years and 8 months of experience working as an Application Engineer at Oracle India.Darren Toh is their Head of Communications and Compliance. He has a diploma in corporate law and corporate tax, plus many years of experience in various legal and compliance roles. Since Republic Protocol’s solution will have to be customizable enough to comply with various dark pool regulations in different countries, it is important that they have access to this kind of legal expertise.There are some notable advisors listed, including:Loi Luu, co-founder and CEO of Kyber Network, describes himself as Republic Protocol’s Technical Advisor. Loi’s expertise should come in handy, since Kyber Network is working on a protocol for decentralized token swaps and Republic Protocol is working on a protocol for ‘dark’ decentralized cryptocurrency trading.Prabhakar Reddy is an investor at venture capital firm Accel Partners, co-founded a successful audio and video-on-demand business that was acquired by BookMyShow, and has an MBA from Harvard Business School. He should be able to give Republic Protocol some valuable business management advice.Advisor Anup Malani is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School teaching law and economics. Anup’s guidance combined with Darren Toh’s legal experience give Republic Protocol a very solid edge on the legal front.Overall the team has a lot of developers with university training in relevant fields, though they are somewhat lacking in terms of experienced blockchain developers. As their technology continues to mature, they would also benefit from the addition of more members focused on marketing and business development.RoadmapTrading Pairs currently available at Ren ExchangeWhen Republic Protocol showed up in late 2017/early 2018, it was still basically a white paper ICO project. Since then, they have delivered a testnet release, mainnet beta release, a working dark pool exchange built on their protocol, created RenVM, secured a partnership with OTC trading service Wyre, got listed on Binance, and have recently announced the launch of public Darknodes.Ren Development Plan outlined in their Jan 2019 postThough they have accomplished quite a bit in one year, there are some important updates still to come for Republic Protocol. Some important milestones are highlighted below, but more details can be found in their Roadmap Update #1 and January 2019 Update.RenEx’s user referral program is still not available to the general public (Source)Q4 2018: User Referral Program for RenExThough it was planned for the end of 2018, the user referral program for Ren Exchange is still not available to the general public as of January 2019. When this launches, we can expect to see increased marketing activity for RenEx.An updated white paper should be on its way (Source)Early 2019: RenVM Updates, Updated White PaperRepublic Protocol have only started releasing details about RenVM with their latest post and release of their Lite Paper. More technical details and an updated white paper are expected. This is still relatively new information and many investors may not yet be aware of Republic Protocol’s new scope. A well-written release or promotional content promoting RenVM could attract many investors to REN.Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) will be an ERC-20 token backed by BitcoinJan 2019 : WBTCAnnounced in October 2018, the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) project by BitGo, Kyber and Republic Protocol will create a new ERC-20 token (WBTC) that is backed 1:1 by bitcoin. Republic Protocol will be able to use this new WBTC token to open up more trading pairs between WBTC and other ERC20 tokens. This could help increase trading volume on Ren Exchange and boost income for Darknodes. The plan is for WBTC to be up and running within January of 2019.CTO Loong Wang offers a sneak preview of SwapperDQ1-Q2 2019: SwapperD Full ReleaseNo specific release date has been set for SwapperD, but their development plan timeline has it listed before 3rd Party Dark Pools (which should come out by Q2 2019). A pre-release version has already been posted on their Github. This ‘atomic swapper’ tool is an important step towards making atomic swaps accessible and easy for both RenEx and any third parties that want to build on Republic Protocol.Late Q2 2019: Third Party Dark PoolsRepublic Protocol’s RenEx is currently the only dark pool running on their protocol. By the end of Q2 2019, third parties will be able to create their own dark pools using Republic Protocol. This should drastically increase the earning potential of Darknodes and increase $REN’s value.Q3 2019 and Beyond: zkTransaction Layer, Interoperability Layer, Third Party RenVM dAppsNo dates have been set for the release of these features, but these are important milestones that will affect both Ren’s dark pool and privacy-preserving dApp platform. Announcements regarding these technological developments or confirmation of third party dApps (which will pay fees to Darknodes) on Republic Protocol can all be potential price catalysts for $REN.CompetitionCentralized OTC/Dark Pool ServicesIn terms of decentralized dark pools, Republic Protocol currently has no competition. However, there are many exchanges and services that are already offering various OTC and dark pool trading options.Cryptocurrencies available for OTC trading at GenesisSome of them include:Genesis (since May 2013)Kraken Dark Pool (announced June 2015)Bitfinex OTC Trading Desk (announced Dec 2016)Circle Trade (Switched focus to OTC only BTC trading in 2016)Koi Trading (Created Aug 2018, Got $3M investment from Binance Labs)Coinbase Prime (launched November 2018)Bittrex (launched January 2019)These third party services can be regulated by authorities and could provide traditional investors with more peace of mind. They also have the advantage of providing direct fiat options. Investors with large amounts of fiat can send money directly through these brokers to purchase their desired cryptocurrencies.As a decentralized dark pool, RenEx does not have a bank account that investors can wire their dollars to. However, they did partner with TrueUSD so investors with fiat have the option of converting to TUSD before they can trade on RenEx.Loong explains how USD-BTC trades can be matched without the need for a stablecoinThat being said, RenEx is not the only exchange that can run on Republic Protocol. Third party brokers and exchanges can build their own dark pool offerings that use Republic Protocol as a private, secure way to find matches for orders before facilitating the trade in whatever manner they choose.The main advantage Republic Protocol has over traditional third party services is that it is decentralized. Since everything runs on code, there is no way to bribe somebody to receive preferential treatment. Since nobody knows the full order information, it cannot be leaked to anyone to give them a trading advantage. This provides a guarantee of privacy that no regular OTC desk or centralized dark pool could ever offer.As a global decentralized dark pool, Republic Protocol could also offer the potential for much greater liquidity than current OTC desks that may still need to rely on personal calls and connections, or have to wait for counterparties to come to their desks before they can fill a large order.However, if these OTC services decide to use Republic Protocol, they could become customers instead of competitors.EnigmaThe Enigma team is working on creating a protocol that can perform secure multi-party computations, allowing for private smart contracts and privacy-preserving dApps. At the moment, Republic Protocol’s focus is still on creating the best decentralized dark pool protocol they can, but their recent announcement of RenVM makes them a potential competitor for Enigma in the medium to long term future.Ren’s medium post detailing RenVM was released shortly before a sharp decline in Enigma token pricesInvestors certainly seem to view these two as potential competitors. Following Republic Protocol’s post explaining their plans for RenVM, Enigma token prices fell sharply.In Loong’s speech at Buidl Seoul 2018, he mentions potential uses for RenVM that sound very similar to what Enigma describes on their website, such as privacy-preserving finance and health apps.Loong discusses the differences between Enigma and RenVM (Source)Loong points out in the Republic Protocol telegram that RenVM will be more optimized than Enigma to process data streams (such as the stream of orders that will be placed on their dark pool protocol) while Enigma is more focused on general computing. Ren’s Lite Paper even advertises itself as “powering zero-knowledge financial applications”.Loong also claims that RenVM is more efficient and stable than Enigma, where any node can become a single point of failure.Enigma CEO Guy Zyskind: “we randomly select a single worker to execute each computation” (Source)Enigma CEO Guy Zyskind confirms in this post on the Enigma forums that the current testnet implementation of Enigma does allow for a node to become a single point of failure, though he says they plan to address this issue in future updates. Director of Engineering Victor Grau Serrat also clarifies in a subsequent post that a single node going down only results in a delay in the computations (not a total failure).Enigma’s main focus is the creation of their privacy protocol. It has multiple senior software engineers on their team that each have more than a decade of work experience. Enigma already has many launch partners that are planning to integrate their private smart contract technology. It also has one dApp, Catalyst, that has been built using their platform. Yet Enigma is still not truly production ready. After the delay of their mainnet in September 2018 in order to build more functionality before release, no new mainnet launch date has been set.Republic Protocol is currently mainly focused on their decentralized dark pool and has a relatively young team. Ren’s Lite Paper also talks more about powering financial applications rather than powering privacy dApps in general. No partners for RenVM have been announced yet.Enigma seems to be further along in terms of business development and could still have some breathing room while Ren builds out its dark pool, but Ren looks to be quickly catching up in terms of technology.ConclusionRepublic Protocol’s goal of creating a decentralized dark pool has a lot of great potential. Their young development team has accomplished a lot in the past year, creating a working product in the form of RenEx. Their new RenVM technology has even more potential and can open up many more doors in the privacy-preserving dApp space.The Ren token’s main use as bonds for Darknodes does not give it much value at the moment due to the low trading volume on RenEx and the Republic Protocol. As support for third party exchanges arrives and third party dApps powered by RenVM are announced, the value of REN should increase greatly.Current REN prices are well below the ICO private sale price of $0.0513 USD.Investors who are interested in profiting from the lucrative OTC cryptocurrency trading market or believe in RenVM’s potential can look into securing the 100,000 REN needed for a Darknode as a potential option.Recommended ResourcesRepublic Protocol Introduction Medium Post:Republic Protocol: An IntroductionAn open-source decentralized dark pool for trustless cross-chain atomic trading of Ether, ERC20 tokens and Bitcoin…medium.comEpicenter Interview #230 Loong Wang & Taiyang Zhang: Republic Protocol — A Decentralized & Trustless Crypto Dark Pool:Republic Protocol Update on RENVM and Lite Paper:Ren — The Evolution of a ProtocolIntroducing our broader vision for Ren from its beginnings as Republic Protocolmedium.comCTO Loong Wang talks about RenVM at Buidl Seoul 2018:CryptoBriefing Republic Protocol Code ools/The Birb Nest publication is a facet of the CryptoBirb community. For more information please visit https://discord.gg/kUpraEH

The MB size limit per Block is for the Bitcoin's blockchain. In Ethereum, there is theoretically no limit for the block size. However, blockchain is not meant for data storage and storing large documents will be very expensive. Here are some instances where people hacked into the Bitcoin Blockchain and stored some unexpected data. You would have to compress and store the doc/pdf/audio in Hexadecimal format. That said, many blockchain-like solutions designed just to store data were developed recently. STORJ seems to be famous and well developed. Filecoin is another such solution which is yet to materialize. Enigma is one more initiative which is being developed in the MIT Media Lab. Like you mentioned, blockchain might be used to maintain Distributed Hash Table(DHT) which contains hashes of the data files stored off-chain. This is to ensure integrity of data. These are the costs for storing data on Ethereum public blockchain as of June 7th, 2016: This is Solidity code for creating contract with Kilo Byte of data. If we run this code in the online compiler, we get an estimated transaction cost of 5925085 gas. The gas price today is 23731285772 Wei (10^18 Wei 1 Ether $15). So, storing Kilo Byte of data in the public blockchain, as per conversion rates on June 7th is approximately $2.11. Similarly, reading Kilo Byte of data costs 284396 gas, which is approximately $0.1. This price might increase if there is an increase in the Gas value or Ether value. More information about gas prices can be found at “Appendix G. Fee Schedule” of the Ethereum yellow paper.

Mid-2017 saw a large number and a wide variety of crypto projects launched that ran the gamut from technology to investment products, through to media and markets offerings.The Revain Platform, a blockchain-based review forum for any type of product or service, also debuted at this time, focusing initially on the crypto-market. In addition to reviewing Revain’s upward trajectory, we’ll also delve into a few of the key players in the crypto-market’s boom of mid-2017 and see where they are now.It was an incredible year for the growth of crowdfunding in 2017. Although there is some variation between reports, the final amount of funds raised by crowdfunding in 2017 was estimated to be between a fiat equivalent of $4 billion USD and $5.6 billion USD.The year saw the largest growth of crowdfunding with initial offerings of over 50 companies a month. A substantial number of crowdfunding startups — specifically 876 — posted in 2017 along with the largest amounts of money ever raised through crowdfunding. Previously estimated totals were updated to reflect a new total of a record $6.2 billion USD. Despite this boom, by the close of 2017 there were definite winners and losers in the crowdfunding arena.Mid-2017 saw the emergence of some of the most successful crowdfunding ventures that are currently industry leaders. Each of these crypto projects has brought something new and valuable to the market, or innovated and improved existing models.Let’s now take a look at these leaders in more depth:Launched in July 2017, EOS charged into the crypto arena as a blockchain operating infrastructure for decentralised applications. It touted improved scalability by allowing for apps to be built and tested in a public environment. Competing with Ethereum, numerous transactions per second could be made, increasing the efficiency of Blockchain projects.A billion minted EOS were released at each stage as fixed-number tokens during their crowdsale which continued through to the middle of 2018. EOS’s capacity quickly exceeded all other blockchains, achieving a top spot on the performance charts. The project subsequently raised $700 million USD during its crowdfunding.In the aftermath of its crowdsale, as reported by cryptocurrency news source Coinspeaker, “EOS has posted the healthiest performance in the top 20 cryptos surging over 25% in one month.” It continues to develop its products. The first stablecoin, CarbonUSD, was added to the EOS ecosystem in September 2018, and Circle listed EOS on its investment platform. Technologically, EOS has surpassed Ethereum and Bitcoin because of its high-growth pace compared to other cryptocurrencies.The total market cap of all EOS-based tokens is now $6.18 Billion USD. The recent high performance from EOS’s top 10 tokens represent 12.6% of the EOS’s total market cap, giving EOS a 5th place ranking on the CMC’s (CoinMarketCap) top 100 cryptocurrencies.The Bancor network was initiated in June 2017, providing users with the ability to create liquid smart tokens and convert them into other tokens by calculating their own prices. The project aims to remove exchanges, which typically charge excessive fees and can be hacked. BancorX currently supports Ethereum ERC20 tokens and makes cross-blockchain transfers with its own BNT token. In partnership with LiquidEOS, it also built a cross-blockchain DApp — Bancor’s EOS “Block Producer” (BP), the counterpart of a miner on the Bitcoin (BTC) network.Bancor also launched BancorX on EOS which offers fast and exchange-free trading between Ethereum and EOS-based tokens. The partnership with EOS was completed in November 2018.Other product developments will, according to Bancor Co-Founder Guy Benartzi, include a “major crime-fighting initiative described as a coalition of crypto defenders.” This will result in Bancor’s internal tools used to track hacked funds being made available to a wider audience.Bancor’s project raised $152.3 million USD in crowdsale with an uncapped ICO at its inception. It currently ranks 95th on the CMC’s top 100 cryptocurrencies.Launched in June 2017, Status, a mobile Ethereum OS, changes your smartphone or mobile device into a light node on the Ethereum network. With the application, users are able to send and receive encrypted messages, as well as smart contracts and payments with a Status-SNT token. They can also interact with decentralised applications and chatbots and store crypto-assets with the built-in Status wallet.Further product development for Status will involve establishing a Status DApp directory which will offer users a network to find their most practical DApps.Although Status had technical difficulties getting started, the project managed to raise $108 million USD in 2017. It currently ranks 60th on CMC’s top 100 cryptocurrencies.Crowdfundings had a 46% failure rate in 2017 with Bitcoin.com reporting that another 113 projects were classified as “semi-failed” due to vanishing teams and dwindling communities. Further, there were many projects that never produced a product or had any intention to produce one at all. Founders merely retreated with the raised funds or, “slowly faded into obscurity.” All included, the failure rate of 2017 crowdfundings jumps to 59%. Here are a few of those legends:Enigma launched in September 2017, boasting new encryption and security techniques, only to be hacked just before its crowdsale went live. Using the system’s mailing list, website, and Slack channel, hackers contacted potential investors about a “pre-ICO sale” and made off with approximately $500,000 worth of ETH (ether coins).Enigma is a decentralised data marketplace which ironically aims to become a central source for standardised, reliable, and high-quality crypto data for various crypto assets. Despite its scandalous beginnings and because of its huge market potential and promising pre-ICO buzz, Enigma raised $45 million USD in its crowdsale in 2017. It peaked in January 2018 but then suffered a steady downtrend during the January-February crash just weeks later. In March of 2018 it ranked 88th on CoinMarketCap but is no longer in the top 100 cryptocurrencies.Ahoolee, a Russian project launched in August 2017 was built with the goal of facilitating e-commerce. It sought to compensate for the deficiencies in traditional search engines and aimed to improve online marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and Google Shopping. Ahoolee would be the world’s first search engine using a decentralised platform for collecting and indexing information from open sources with confirmation of authenticity based on the blockchain technology.Regrettably, the project failed spectacularly by being unable to collect a soft cap, and all means funding was returned to investors. The Ahoolee team, however, is still intent on developing the project further.Droplex, launched in August 2017 with a white paper that was later proved to be a carbon copy of QRL’s white paper. QRL is a decentralised communication platform. Though the scam attempt was promptly caught by investors, the fraudsters were still able to make off with roughly $25,000 USD.Launched in August 2017, Revain a product review platform providing blockchain-trustworthy reviews of crowdfunding projects, arrived with v1.1.of The Revain Platform.Initially, Revain had a prominent interest in the crypto-market: specifically, cryptocurrency, exchanges, coins, and ICOs. Reviewers were awarded a native RVN token that can be swapped for R tokens, which can then be traded on exchanges.After its inception, Revain subsequently created a full-fledged version of The Platform and expanded to cover the entire ICO ecosystem-related infrastructure, which included projects, exchanges, and wallets. The Platform recently added a forum for reviewing Crypto Cards.Revain recently announced a major milestone of more than 2,000 additional crypto projects and exchanges listed on The Platform available for review. This makes Revain the only place on the Internet where the authentic experiences of other users, experts, and investors about almost any crypto entity is easily accessible.Moving forward, Revain continues to develop its product. While most of their content had been focused on the crypto-market, in 2019 The Platform will feature many more consumer-style goods expanding into e-commerce, gaming, and FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods).Revain is also considering how blockchain will affect consumer industries moving forward. Their product and dev team is continually developing more advanced algorithms and models of machine learning to ensure high-quality reviews. The Platform is also working on the possibility of implementing a reference-based service.Revain raised over $9 million USD in its September 2017 crowdsale and is currently ranked 57th on the CMC top 100 cryptocurrencies.Like any other startup venture, crowdfunding has its champions and those that were defeated. In an unprecedented race of crowdfundings in mid-2017, Revain has held steady and with the current market’s demand for blockchain reviews, its Platform is gearing up for an exciting run.First Trustworthy Review Platform, Built With Blockchain Technology. https://revain.org/

A lot of cryptocurrency projects are using Slack as a medium of communication. Ethereum introduced the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) concept with its crowd sale. Raising funds before the project was finished in exchange for tokens. As People got unexpected high returns on ICO, Most of the new investors are now try to invest on a coin As early as possible, because **Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is going to the moon** Now if you’re not deep into crypto, To give you context for why there is epic FOMO happening right now take a look at these returns. Slack has a feature, that sends users an email to let them know they have unread direct messages and It’s is enabled by default.Naturally, scammers have started sending direct messages to users. This bypasses email scam filters since the email is coming from no-reply@slack.com as Slack is a reputed site When an ICO happens the Coin Developer team is communicated through a variety of public channels. These announcements create a very convincing template for scammers to use.Like 5 to 100% bonus for attracting more users to get trapped. But Here comes the advantage of Blockchain, We can know the exact amount got scammed. Etherscan.io makes it easy to look up transactions on the blockchain to a particular address. Using the address in the scam we can see 90 transactions and a token balance of $439,492.70 USD A scammer can set tasks for every user via slackbot. Once the scammer is detected and kicked out of the slack group there is no way to delete the tasks. As a result, slackbot sends the message even after the scammer is removed. We can understand, In large and legit organizations, Work must be completed even after the member left. But an Open community like above is damn hard to clean the mess done by a scammer. There are some users who will first doubt it because There is a lot of Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) in the trading channels. So, It is obvious that they will search it on google. I heard about Red Pulse along with Kyber (an ICO that is so hot right now). So naturally, I was curious to know more. See What I found on Google Now the Top Ad takes me to below site. I will talk about this Site in Next Head I show you where that ad took me. Now See What is the actual ICO Site is Also, send a variation of Slack DM Scam involves an alert from the security team about the hardfork and ask you to transfer all your coins to their address. Like I got mail alike The effectiveness of this one is harder to measure since we don’t know the technical details of a wallet. Dev Teams are dealing with this type of scam by kicking the scammers out of the slack group. This deletes all the direct messages from the scammer. If you’re investing into crypto and using the communities, if it sounds too good to be true But probably it is a scam. So Always Look for official channels to verify everything. Always be skeptical. The official channels can get hacked. The Enigma ICO accounts got hacked resulting in nearly $500,000 being stolen. Follow me if you want to learn more about crypto and how to invest safely. *Hacks are pretty common in the crypto world:* So please be aware and share this so others can see and be careful not to click on links received like that! This is not a joke and you can be hacked also by ALL your funds if you don’t pay attention Add All other Address or link in the comment section So Others can get aware and give you Thanks. I am a tech enthusiast & Digital nomad from Dhenkanal, India I've been dealing with Bitcoin since 2014.I started CoinGyan to help users around the globe to learn about popular Cryptocurrencies. Here at CoinGyan, I write about Bitcoin Wallet, Cryptocurrency wallets, & making money from Crypto. Hey Coiners, Welcome to the best crypto coins blog CoinGyan. I’m Jatin K Hota, a tech enthusiast & cryptocurrency entrepreneur  from Odisha, India. All Rights Reserved © 2017 - by CoinGyan

Bitcoin, the base protocol which controls the governance of the peer-to-peer cash system and the economic incentives of a securely distributed, highly available global financial network with a public unit of account on an immutable public ledger, has many subtle, often missed tricks up its sleeve.I have spoken many times about its Turing completeness, its unbounded predicate scripting language, its small-world, highly connected network and a plethora of on-chain innovations that aid the tsunami of transactions from services and APIs that will form the backbone of the Mandala network that is Metanet, with microservices performing specialised internet-like tasks in an incentivised web of privately secure microtransactions.That is a microscopic overvue of what Bitcoin is, and all of that wonderful stuff is great, however, the subtle macroscopic elements of Bitcoin are the real keys to its success and longevity.Bitcoin, often imitated but never bettered, has been systematically attacked and usurped countless times, but all variations and forks of the original protocol miss the key tenets that make Bitcoin truly unique and groundbreaking as a holistic, symbiotic economic system.Proof-of-Work, merkle trees, elliptic curve cryptographic methods, hashing, blinding, salting, signature strings and countless methods used in Bitcoin were far from new at the birth of Bitcoin and many of these concepts were well documented in the 60s and 70s. However, creating an honest, incentivised system with no central issuer that solved the Byzantine Generals double spending problem, is foremost in its architecture. It was that which was truly groundbreaking.I wont dwell on the latter as it is well documented and fairly well understood, but I do want to focus today on one often overlooked (intentionally by many) keywords. I have covered SegWit, Lightning and other off-chain systems before in quite some detail, so to avoid repetition, lets all agree that if its not on Bitcoin (on-chain), its not Bitcoin.The keyword often overlooked is honest, which is a key constituent to a unit of account. All data must be immutably and irrevocably timestamped as to what happened, when, and in what order. Certain details of any transaction, such as private keys, signatures, notation and names are obfuscated by the signature generation and verification process performed by the miners who secure the network by continuously striving to solve a hash puzzle of difficulty derived from an aggregate.An honest system breeds accountability and an accurate account that provides an element of traceability. Most sectors of the public domain require true records of transactions, such as accounting, voting, trading, receipts, taxation, mortgages, loans, deeds, shares, stocks, legal documents, electronic data interchange, utility services, wills, bonds, debentures and payment transactions.A good rule of thumb to understand here is that the more money involved in any given sector, the more corruption there is in obfuscating key details in order to maximise financial benefits for a privileged few who can beat the system. Government spending, taxation, banking and trading are the big four in terms of organised corruption.Bitcoin was designed as a public commodity ledger of truth. A peer-to-peer payment system, a timestamped unit of account and a medium of exchange. The design of Bitcoin uses Proof-of-Work; miners who provide the network security by entering an economically incentivised hash-puzzle competition, providing a vote towards emergent consensus upon the longest chain. Miners receive transactions to hold in its memory pool in time order, whilst announcing the transaction details to the rest of the network. Simply stated, the miner who discovers a block gets to place their received transactions into it, signing it and announcing to all to cross-reference with their copy, confirm, then start over again hashing away at the next block.If a miner falls out of consensus it will be working on its own bifurcated chain tip and the rest of the network rejects it. With a minimal amount of hashpower compared to the rest of the network, the lone wolf will have the last block built on top of, and their work on the previous block will be discarded and everybody starts again, working on the next block. Its a very simple system of time-ordered checks and balances to ensure everyone is on the same page and everyone ultimately reaches consensus. Its an economically incentivised E.C.D.S.A (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) implementation that registers on a time-chain tree of blocks (ledger) that solves the Byzantine Generals problem upon a highly resilient Small World Network.A time-chain tree of blocks. A blockchain. A timestamped ledger of truth!Blockchains are not new! Everybody is building a blockchain solution for something or other, as its a cool new buzzword that is touted to be the next big thing; the saviour of a company, an investment prospect with promise of huge returns, a speculative offering with little or no utility, a Ponzi system, nothing more.A blockchain is just a Lamport signature, invented in 1979.Guess what? It didnt work! Neither do the thousands of other blockchains either, and most arent even blockchains. Ripples XRP isnt even a blockchain! Its a centralised database (DLT) of concatenated transactions and a series of payment transmission hubs, based upon the SWIFT banking system from 1974, but without a money transmitter licence or banking compliance services. Its a private club and they ask you to be the money transmitter in hope the laws regulating these things wont apply to individuals. It does!The same rules apply for those failing miserably at hosting an off-chain Lightning node for the deliberately hobbled BTC, which masquerades on exchanges as Bitcoin and is nothing of the sort. It requires a licence to be a money transmitter and it was what Bitcoin had already solved in the first place. Capping blocks at 1MB, and adding Segregated Witness is a way for those who control legacy Bitcoin implementations to change the protocol as originally designed. Its a vanity project to ensure full blocks, high fees and the destruction of time-ordered transactions for smaller, heavily redacted ones.Have you ever asked the question, why?By usurping Bitcoin by injecting malicious software upgrades by a web of prominent and heavily funded actors, who are in on the master plan and use deceptive techniques of coercion and misinformation to further their agenda for control and subterfuge of the Bitcoin name. Satoshi Nakamoto defined the Bitcoin protocol with a very detailed whitepaper, describing what it is, how it works, what it solves the methods involved.Satoshi copyrighted Bitcoin by way of invention and released it for public use under an MIT licence. This means it should retain its copyright header in-tact and is free to share, distribute, use, fork, request additions via pull request and the right to contribute to code improvements and bug fixes via request, which are merged or rejected at the discretion of the repository keymaster. This was Satoshi until 2010 and was passed onto Gavin Andresen to hold the SSH public keys.It wasnt until 2016 when the subterfuge kicked up a notch when Gavins commit access was revoked in a hack whilst away on holiday and Blockstreams Bitcoin Core team not only kept access by permanently locking Gavin out as an existential threat. Now, Bitcoin was in the hands of a few who had ulterior motives to redesign the system to maximise their personal gain. Bitcoin as BTC was no more, as transactions had been moved off to a new chain and sent back redacted, hobbled and turned into a shadow banking system of speculation without utility.Satoshi is back and hes pretty pissed off right now. Dr Craig Wright is the father of Bitcoin and went by the sobriquet of Satoshi Nakamoto long before Bitcoin was released. Bitcoin isnt a vanity project, its the lifes work of one great but flawed man who had help from a few others to bring Bitcoin to the world.It wasnt a pet project, it was an obsession. One that still drives him to this day. Imagine if you spent your whole life learning and studying how everything is to be carefully balanced and coordinated in such a way to work as a secure economic system for use by everyone, including commerce and banking? To have multiple failures and dead ends until it was perfect, for someone to steal your creation and add fixes to things which you spent years discovering and rejecting as something that cannot work. Imagine if you created a Turing complete predicate scripting language to create anything you can possibly imagine, only for it to be ripped to pieces and deprecated into disuse.Well, you had better pay attention because Satoshi is reclaiming what he started and quickly restoring the protocol back to its former glory. Now, he has armed himself with over 1000 patents pending and several hundred granted. Dr. Wright has proven to the US Copyright agency that he authored Bitcoin and has been granted copyright for the Bitcoin name and most of the original codebase. Over the coming weeks and months this industry will be shaken to the core (excuse the pun) as regulation kicks in, litigations are enacted and sentences handed out. It will be nothing short of a bloodbath.I humbly suggest you understand in advance what is now inevitable. Your due diligence now will go a long way in protecting you if you are active in this space. The days of crying decentralised and censorship resistance is a Core mantra for anarchists to perpetuate their agendas, not the implementation as Satoshi intended, designed and built. Law is law, and the crackdowns apply to everything that is not Bitcoin, which includes BTC and BCH.Bitcoin was unique in 2009 as it had a very carefully designed economic system that is unequalled to this day. There are too many elements to list what is involved in the building of this system; one which I will save for another article upon its deeper, nuanced, economic structure.Bitcoins blockchain is defined as a digital tree of signed E.C.D.S.A hashed transactions using timestamped ordering of Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange techniques upon a Small World Network. That is the shortest definition of just the transactional element of Bitcoin, of which there are many, many more.If you take just that short definition as the definition of a Blockchain, then you can wipe 99% of all altcoins off the map!Many are permissioned ledgers, basically privately distributed databases with some kind of loose consensus mechanism. I can build a faster, more scalable and secure database system than any permissioned ledger Ive ever witnessed or researched. It appeals only to companies who buy into the hype and most fail within 18 months. As an Enterprise Architect, Ive witnessed this many, many times over the last few years.The fact of the matter is, in a space filled with such greed and so many self-proclaimed experts popping up in social media, people are either in complete ignorance, are ill advised, or holding ulterior motives or agendas.Most people are either indoctrinated into a cult following or blinded by their position of investment. One seems to reinforce the other and is propagated and positioned by peers (the community) in a self-reinforcing delusion of disparate and self-contained ecosystems.The sad thing is that Bitcoin in its original form can do anything all of the other cryptocurrencies aim to achieve, yet the act of creating more specialised versions only segregates the ecosystem further and parasitically sucks revenue, trade, utility and value from the original.The marketplace has become a cesspit of greed and misinformation. The world is taking notice, shunning it as a package deal, tainting all with the same rancid brush. No wonder corporations who wish to dip a toe into this space either get scammed, are scammers, or run for the hills in search of safer propositions. This industry needs to grow up to be taken seriously, and there are no signs of organic maturation; so I see a world of crashes, losses, despair, fraud, scams, arrests, litigation and serious prison time for many prominent individuals marching to the beat of their own drums.For many, most of this information will get lost in translation. I will not be surprised at all as most in this space never understood Bitcoin in the first place, so form blinded life filters to justify a means to an end.No matter how much information I post for you, to go away and do your own research and come up with your own truths, a shockingly large amount of people still prefer an idol, or be told how and what to think. We call these sheeple.These are the weak minds that the internet trolls and shills target, and it can be very effective too upon a considerable slice of noobs, or uninitiated.As I want you, the reader, to fully comprehend everything I have mentioned above, I need to come up with an analogy that will stick in your mind, so that you never forget. A little bit of shock and awe is long overdue, so I apologise profusely in advance.A shitanalogyYoure at home and you need a shit!(bear with me here, Ill get to the point soon)You have a toilet in your own en-suite. You can shut the door and quietly crap in peace. Its entirely your responsibility to replace the lavatory paper (loo roll, if youre feeling uncouth). Its also up to you if you flush afterwards! Completely down to you to choose if you wash your hands, spray air freshener, sing Nessun Dorma in the operatic style of Luciano Pavarotti or swing a cat!Your actions in that room are only important to you and you will only leave it in a state that youre happy to return to next time you over indulge in a Vindaloo and need to pebbledash the porcelain. Each to their own!This in essence is your permissioned ledger. Private permissioned ledgers such a HashGraph and various Hyperledger products build private permissioned ledgers. Transaction validators such as Ripples XRP or Stellars XLM are public permissioned ledgers, so think of it more like curling one down in your hotel room bathroom. Dont forget to tip your maid!The next analogy is your family or guest bathroom at home. The kids may use it and make a mess. Guests may use it and you hope they are of the same courteous mindset as you, and you will be judged by non-family members and a reciprocal, unspoken display of etiquette by both parties are displayed in context of the company you keep and the standards you portray.This is the Litecoin and Dash analogy. A carefully orchestrated balance of control and unspoken rules and nuanced coercion but with some discernement over the company you keep. EOS is the same bathroom but youve already told everyone how amazing your toilet is and 50 guests at your garden party are all blind drunk and sooner or later, something is going to get stained, soiled or broken. You certainly wouldnt want to be at the back of that queue when youre touching cloth!Bitcoin, as a publicly distributed ledger has to operate with the whole world watching and judging. This is the realm of the dreaded public bathroom and all of the joys that come with it. Come on, weve all driven for too long on a journey and been caught short, only to get that lightbulb moment.McDonalds!Nope. Cheeseburger, fries and a milkshake will not suffice my needs today. Todays offering is for the gods of cleanliness and immediate availability to bless me with Lily and Riceflower scented candles, Buddha Bar eclectic mix of asian audio serenity in 5.1 Dolby Stereo surround sound and a personal 3 piece suited, multilingual porter, armed with hot cedarwood flannelettes, breath mints and a splash of Paco Rabanne.Never in history have these stories become mutual reality, however; you hope and pray there is a free cubicle with a working door, seat and cistern. If youre lucky enough to win this game of chance, then rare do you get the bonus of a working lock, toilet paper and zero puddle of piss combo.This scenario is the rainbow of possible actions performed before your arrival.You see, what Bitcoin did in 2009 was very special. For the first time in history it gave us a way of publically transacting immutably in private, adhering to all of the rules of law in a manner that is accountable and traceable.It gave us the ability to take a dump in public privately. We could shut the door in an ideal environment. Those who dont perform (the cleaners in this bathroom scenario) can be held accountable for their actions, be it peer, corporation or government. An evidence trail of transactional history that can be proven by immutable records. Nobody needs to know who grows a tail in a public bathroom and everyone gets a perfectly working door to be as private as they wish to be.If you are a sham version of Bitcoin that introduced off-chain solutions, like BTC (Bitcoin Core) with SegWit and the perpetual 18 month promise of Lightning hubs that require Money Transmitter licensing to be legal in most civilised countries. Or, BCH (Bitcoin Cash) with Avalanche, CTOR, DSV and other methods of obfuscation and timestamped record deletion, then you should expect with anonymity the full spectrum of publicly organised crime and decimation of data.To not adhere to the design of Bitcoin allows and actively encourages your environment to be host to drug dealers cutting up on the cistern, it doesnt bring to justice those who vandalise the mirrors to escape being seen, and nobody is accountable when someone goes full Assange and paints you a new Nutella mural in the style of Jackson Pollock. This irony is, this is the world that anonymity and obfuscation of truth gives us.So, to summarise, what lessons have we learned?Monero and Zcash is to hide everything. It doesnt make you your own sovereign bank, it makes you an idiot at best and an accomplice to organised crime, fraud, trafficking and money laundering at worst. Oh, and they are not anonymous at all. They can and are being tracked, more than any other coin. Trust me on this, Ive contracted for G.C.H.Q on and off for 25 years. They are watching your every move and convictions are just starting to happen now, globally.Bitcoin offers us freedom to transact peer-to-peer, borderlessly for next to nothing. Bitcoin SV is the reference node implementation that brings the original design of Bitcoin back to the world, for safe, lawful, private transactions with a whole host of world changing technology stacks, symbiotically built on top of Bitcoin that will genuinely blow your mind and frictionlessly revolutionise many of the things we do today. That is another story for another time.Find out more about Bitcoin SV (Satoshis Vision) direct from the original source with hundreds of articles describing what Bitcoin is and is not, by Satoshi Nakamoto himself, Dr. Craig Wright at Oh, and a word of warningThose urinal cakes dont taste of lemon!This Op Ed article is for infotainment purposes only and should not be regarded as financial advice in any way. Thoughts and ideas are my own and not all information should be taken at face value.

HomepageAbout membershipSign inGet startedHomepage Member previewFrancesco CoreaBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingComplexity scientist, data strategist, tech investor and AI advisor. All opinions are my own.Dec 1, 2017The convergence of AI and Blockchain: what’s the deal?Why a decentralized intelligence may affect our futureImage Credit: Zapp2Photo/ShutterstockIt is undeniable that AI and blockchain are two of the major technologies that are catalyzing the pace of innovation and introducing radical shifts in every industry. Each technology has its own degree of technical complexity as well as business implications but the joint use of the two may be able to redesign the entire technological (and human) paradigm from scratch.This article wants to give a flavor of the potentialities realized at the intersection of AI and Blockchain and discuss standard definitions, challenges, and benefits of this alliance, as well as about some interesting player in this space.I. Setting the stageImage Credit: 4zevar/ShutterstockI have been talking and writing about AI since a while now, so I will not waste any time defining what it is and what is not (if you want to know more about it, you can check my explanation or a brief history of AI).However, I never touched upon blockchain and cryptocurrencies so far, so I will dedicate this first block to describe what it is and how it works.A blockchain is a secure distributed immutable database shared by all parties in a distributed network where transaction data can be recorded (either on-chain for basic information or off-chain in case of extra attachments) and easily audited.A blockchain is a secure distributed immutable database shared by all parties in a distributed networkPut simply (with Bank of England’s words), the blockchain is “a technology that allows people who don’t know each other to trust a shared record of events”.The data are stored in rigid structures called blocks, which are connected to each other in a chain through a hash (each block also includes a timestamp and a link to the previous block via its hash). The blocks have a header, which includes metadata, and a content, which includes the real transaction data. Since every block is connected to the previous one, as the number of participants and blocks grow, it is extremely hard to modify any information without having the network consensus.The network can validate the transaction through different mechanisms, but mainly through either a “proof-of-work” or a “proof-of-stake”. A proof-of-work (Nakamoto, 2008) asks the participants (called “miners”) to solve complex mathematical problems in order to add a block, which in turn require a ton of energy and hardware capacity to be decoded. A proof-of-stake (Vasin, 2014) instead tries to solve this energy efficiency issue attributing (roughly) more mining power to participants who own more coins (there are many variations of it and some skepticism around its famous “nothing at stake” problem — see Buterin’s blog post to know more on this).Additional mechanisms are the Byzantine-fault-tolerant algorithm (Castro and Liskov, 2002), the Quorum slicing (Mazieres, 2016), as well as variations of the Proof-of-stake (Mingxiao et al., 2017), but we will not get into those now.The final characteristic that needs to be explained is the category of blockchain based on the different network access permission, i.e., whether it is free for anyone to view it (permissionless vs permissioned) or to participate in the consensus formation (public vs private). In the former case, anyone can access and read or write data from the ledger, while in the latter one predetermined participants have the power to join the network (and of course only in the public permissionless case a reward structure for miners has been designed).It should be clear by now the intrinsic power of this technology, which is not simply a disruptive innovation but rather a foundational technology that aims to “change the scope of intermediation” (Catalini and Gans, 2017). Distributed ledger technologies will indeed reduce both the costs of verification and networking, influencing then the market structure and eventually allowing the creation of new marketplaces. Iansiti and Lakhani (2017) also drew a brilliant parallel between blockchain and TCP/IP in a recent work (which I highly recommend), showing how blockchain is slowly going through the four phases that identify previous foundational technologies such as the TCP/IP, i.e., single-use, localized use, substitution, and transformation. As they explained, the “novelty” of such a technology makes it harder for people to understand the solution domain, while its “complexity” requires a larger institutional change to foster an easy adoption.However, it is also true that the blockchain is shifting the traditional business models distributing value in an opposite way with respect to previous stacks: if it made more sense to invest in applications rather than protocol technologies fifteen years ago, in a blockchain world the value is concentrated in the shared protocol layer and only marginally at the application level (see the “Fat Protocol” theory by Joel Monegro).It’s a stack with “fat” protocols and “thin” applications (Joel Monegro).To conclude this introductory section, I will just mention on the fly the possibility for the blockchain to not simply allow for transactions but also the possibility to create (smart) contracts that are triggered by specific events and threshold and that are traceable and auditable without effort.Bonus Paragraph: Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)A big hype is nowadays surrounding this new phenomenon of the Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). Even if many people are pouring money into that because of its resemblance to the most common (and valuable) Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), an ICO is nothing more than a token sale, where a token is the smallest functional unit of a specific network (or application).ICOs experts (if any) will forgive my approximate definition, but an ICO is a hybrid concept that has elements of a shares allocation, a pre-sales/crowdfunding campaign, and a currency with a limited power and application’s domain.It is definitely an interesting innovation that introduces new unregulated ways to raise capitals, but it also poses several issues to an unprepared community. I am happy to receive feedback on this, but I would distill the key points of an ICO evaluation in what follows:a token has an additional utility with respect to the exchange of value and companies selling token with the only goal of raising capital are sending a bad signal to the market. Tokens are needed to create a users’ base and to incentivize stakeholders to participate in the ecosystem at the earliest stage. A good white paper is not enough;Be wary of token sales that are uncapped;Be wary of token sales that have no time limit;Be wary of token sales that do not clearly state the (present and future) number as well as the value of the token (it could sound absurd, but you may be surprised of how non-transparent an ICO can look like).II. How AI can change BlockchainImage Credit: Phonlamai Photo/ShutterstockAlthough extremely powerful, a blockchain has its own limitations as well. Some of them are technology-related while others come from the old-minded culture inherited from the financial services sector, but all of them can be affected by AI in a way or another:Energy consumption: mining is an incredibly hard task that requires a ton of energy (and then money) to be completed (O’Dwyer and David Malone, 2014). AI has already proven to be very efficient in optimizing energy consumption, so I believe similar results can be achieved for the blockchain as well. This would probably also result in lower investments in mining hardware;Scalability: the blockchain is growing at a steady pace of 1MB every 10 minutes and it already adds up to 85GB. Satoshi (2008) first mentioned “blockchain pruning” (i.e., deleting unnecessary data about fully spent transactions in order to not hold the entire blockchain on a single laptop) as a possible solution but AI can introduce new decentralized learning systems such as federated learning, for example, or new data sharding techniques to make the system more efficient;Security: even if the blockchain is almost impossible to hack, its further layers and applications are not so secure (e.g., the DAO, Mt Gox, Bitfinex, etc.). The incredible progress made by machine learning in the last two years makes AI a fantastic ally for the blockchain to guarantee a secure applications deployment, especially given the fixed structure of the system;Privacy: the privacy issue of owning personal data raises regulatory and strategic concerns for competitive advantages (Unicredit, 2016). Homomorphic encryption (performing operations directly on encrypted data), the Enigma project (Zyskind et al., 2015) or the Zerocash project (Sasson et al., 2014), are definitely potential solutions, but I see this problem as closely connected to the previous two, i.e., scalability and security, and I think they will go pari passu;Efficiency: Deloitte (2016) estimated the total running costs associated with validating and sharing transactions on the blockchain to be as much as $600 million a year. An intelligent system might be eventually able to compute on the fly the likelihood for specific nodes to be the first performing a certain task, giving the possibility to other miners to shut down their efforts for that specific transaction and cut down the total costs. Furthermore, even if some structural constraints are present, a better efficiency and a lower energy consumption may reduce the network latency allowing then faster transactions;Hardware: miners (and not necessarily companies but also individuals) poured an incredible amount of money into specialized hardware components. Since energy consumption has always been a key issue, many solutions have been proposed and much more will be introduced in the future. As soon as the system becomes more efficient, some piece of hardware might be converted (sometimes partially) for neural nets use (the mining colossus Bitmain is doing exactly this);Lack of talent: this is leap of faith, but in the same way we are trying to automate data science itself (unsuccessfully, to my current knowledge), I don’t see why we couldn’t create virtual agents that can create new ledgers themselves (and even interact on it and maintain it);Data gates: in a future where all our data will be available on a blockchain and companies will be able to directly buy them from us, we will need help to grant access, track data usage, and generally make sense of what happens to our personal information at a computer speed. This is a job for (intelligent) machines.III. How Blockchain can change business/3317In the previous section, we quickly touched upon the effects that AI might eventually have on the blockchain. Now instead, we will make the opposite exercise understanding what impact can the blockchain have on the development of machine learning systems. More in details, blockchain could:Help AI explaining itself (and making us believe it): the AI black-box suffers from an explainability problem. Having a clear audit trail can not only improve the trustworthiness of the data as well as of the models but also provide a clear route to trace back the machine decision process;Increase AI effectiveness: a secure data sharing means more data (and more training data), and then better models, better actions, better results…and better new data. Network effect is all that matter at the end of the day;Lower the market barriers to entry: let’s go step by step. Blockchain technologies can secure your data. So why won’t you store all your data privately and maybe sell it? Well, you probably will. So first of all, blockchain will foster the creation of cleaner and more organized personal data. Second, it will allow the emergence of new marketplaces: a data marketplace (low-hanging fruit); a models marketplace (much more interesting); and finally even an AI marketplace (see what Ben Goertzel is trying to do with SingularityNET). Hence, easy data-sharing and new marketplaces, jointly with blockchain data verification, will provide a more fluid integration that lowers the barrier to entry for smaller players and shrinks the competitive advantage of tech giants. In the effort of lowering the barriers to entry, we are then actually solving two problems, i.e., providing a wider data access and a more efficient data monetization mechanism;Increase artificial trust: as soon as part of our tasks will be managed by autonomous virtual agents, having a clear audit trail will help bots to trust each other (and us to trust them). It will also eventually increase every machine-to-machine interaction (Outlier Ventures, 2017) and transaction providing a secure way to share data and coordinate decisions, as well as a robust mechanism to reach a quorum (extremely relevant for swarm robotics and multiple agents scenarios). Rob May expressed a similar concept in one of his last newsletters (that I highly recommend — you should definitely subscribe);Reduce catastrophic risks scenario: an AI coded in a DAO with specific smart contracts will be able to only perform those actions, and nothing more (it will have a limited action space then).In spite of all the benefits that AI will receive from an interaction with blockchain technologies, I do have one big question with no answer whatsoever.AI was born as in an open-source environment where data was the real moat. With this data democratization (and open-source software) how can we be sure that AI will prosper and will keep being developed? What would be the new moat? My only guess at the moment? Talent…IV. Decentralized Intelligent CompaniesImage Credit: Wit Olszewski/ShutterstockThere are plenty of landscapes of blockchain and cryptocurrencies startups out there. I am anyway only interested in those companies working at the intersection (or the convergence, as someone calls it) of AI and blockchain, which apparently are not that many. They are mainly concentrated in San Francisco area and London, but there are examples in New York, Australia, China, as well as some European countries.They are indeed so few of them that is quite hard to classify them into clusters. I usually like to try to understand the underlying patterns and the type of impact/application certain groups of companies are having in the industry, but in this case is extremely difficult given the low number of data points so I will simply categorize them as follows:Decentralized Intelligence: TraneAI (training AI in a decentralized way); Neureal (peer-to-peer AI supercomputing); SingularityNET (AI marketplace); Neuromation (synthetic datasets generation and algorithm training platform); AI Blockchain (multi-application intelligence); BurstIQ (healthcare data marketplace); AtMatrix (decentralized bots); OpenMined project (data marketplace to train machine learning locally); Synapse.ai (data and AI marketplace); Dopamine.ai (B2B AI monetization platform); Effect.ai (decentralized AI workforce and services marketplace);Conversational Platform: Green Running (home energy virtual assistant); Talla (chatbot); doc.ai (quantified biology and healthcare insights);Prediction Platform: Augur (collective intelligence); Sharpe Capital (crowd-source sentiment predictions);Intellectual Property: Loci.io (IP discovery and mining);Data provenance: KapeIQ (fraud detection on healthcare entities); Data Quarka (facts checking); Priops (data compliance); Signzy (KYC)Trading: Euklid (bitcoin investments); EthVentures (investments on digital tokens). For other (theoretical) applications in finance, see Lipton (2017);Insurance: Mutual.life (P2P insurance), Inari (general);Miscellaneous: Social Coin (citizens’ reward systems); HealthyTail (pet analytics); Crowdz (e-commerce); DeepSee (media platform); ChainMind (cybersecurity).A few general comments:It looks interesting that many AI-blockchain companies have larger advisory board than teams. It might be an early sign that the convergence is not fully realized yet and there are more things we don’t understand that those ones we know;I am personally very excited to see the development of the first category (decentralized intelligence) but I also see a huge development in conversational and prediction platforms as well as intellectual property. I grouped other examples under “miscellaneous” because I don’t think at this stage they represent a specific category but rather only single attempt to match AI and blockchain;Those companies are incredibly hard to evaluate. The websites are often cryptic enough to not really understand what they do and how (a bit paradoxical if you want to buy the blockchain transparency paradigm) and technology requires a high tech-education to be fully assessed. Cutting through the hype is a demanding task and this makes it very easy to be fooled. But let me give you a concrete example: ever heard of Magos AI? In the effort of researching companies for this post, I found myself reading several articles on this forecasting blockchain AI-driven platform company (Wired, Prnewswire, etc.), which just did an ICO for over half a million dollars and that made great promises on its deliverables. The website didn’t work — weird, if you consider that they need to share material/information on the ICOs. But you know, it might happen. I made then an extra effort because I read it on Wired and I was curious to know more about it. I was able to find its co-founders, which I couldn’t find eventually on Linkedin. Weird again. Well, there are people who do not like socials, fair enough, especially if you consider that until three months ago there was no proof of the company existence whatsoever. Let me look into the rest of the team. Nothing even there, and no traceable indications of their previous experiences (except for the CTO master in analytics, that I found no proof of). I tried to then dig into the technology: white papers, blue papers, yellow papers, you name it. I only found reviews of them, no original copies. Final two steps: I don’t consider myself an expert in blockchain at all, but I read, a lot. And I also believe I am fairly knowledgeable when it comes to AI and what is happening in the industry. These guys claimed they created 5 different neural nets that could achieve the same accuracy in complex different domains than Libratus (or DeepStack) reached in Poker, but I never heard of them — very weird. Well, you know what? Maybe I could write them and meet them to understand. Their address points to the AXA office in Zurich. Ah.After 5 minutes of research, I finally Google the two key words: “Magos scam”. It seems these guys took the money and disappeared. They are surely building the 6 neural net somewhere, so stay tuned.My point here is that exponential technologies are fantastic and can advance mankind, but as much as the benefits increase also the potential “negative convergence” increases exponentially. Stay alert.V. ConclusionImage Credit: Sasun Bughdaryan/ShutterstockBlockchain and AI are the two extreme sides of the technology spectrum: one fostering centralized intelligence on close data platforms, the other promoting decentralized applications in an open-data environment. However, if we find an intelligent way to make them working together, the total positive externalities could be amplified in a blink.There are of course technical and ethical implications arising from the interaction between these two powerful technologies, as for example how do we edit (or even forget) data on a blockchain? Is an editable blockchain the solution? And is not an AI-blockchain pushing us to become data hoarder?Honestly, I think the only thing we can do is keep experimenting.ReferencesCastro, M., Liskov, B. (2002). “Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and Proactive Recovery”. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 20(4): 398–461.Catalini, C., Gans, J. S. (2017). “Some Simple Economics of the Blockchain”. MIT Sloan School Working Paper: 5191–16.Deloitte (2016). “Blockchain Enigma. Paradox. Opportunity”. White Paper.Iansiti, M., Lakhani, K. R. (2017). “The Truth About Blockchain”. Harvard Business Review, January–February 2017: 118–127.Lipton, A. (2017). “Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers in Retrospective and Perspective”. arXiv:1703.01505.Mazieres, D. (2016). “The stellar consensus protocol: A federated model for internet-level consensus”. White Paper.Mingxiao, D., Xiaofeng, M., Zhe, Z., Xiangwei, W., Qijun, C. (2017). “A Review on Consensus Algorithm of Blockchain”. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) Banff Center, Banff, Canada, October 5–8, 2017Nakamoto, S. (2008). “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. White Paper.O’Dwyer, K. J., Malone, D. (2014). “Bitcoin mining and its energy footprint”. 25th IET Irish Signals & Systems Conference 2014 and 2014 China-Ireland International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies (ISSC 2014/CIICT 2014), Limerick, pp. 280–285.Outlier Ventures (2017). “Blockchain-Enabled Convergence”. White Paper.Sasson, E. B., Chiesa, A., Garman, C., Green, M., Miers, I., Tromer, E., Virza, M. (2014). “Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from bitcoin”. In Security and Privacy (SP), 2014 IEEE Symposium on, pp. 459–474.Unicredit (2016). “Blockchain Technology and Applications from a Financial Perspective”. Technical Report.Vasin, P. (2014). “BlackCoin’s Proof-of-Stake Protocol v2”. White Paper.Zyskind, G., Nathan, O., Pentland, A. (2015). “Enigma: Decentralized computation platform with guaranteed privacy”. arXiv:1506.03471.BlockchainArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningData ScienceBig DataOne clap, two clap, three clap, forty?By clapping more or less, you can signal to us which stories really stand out.5.7K38BlockedUnblockFollowFollowingFrancesco CoreaMedium member since Mar 2017Complexity scientist, data strategist, tech investor and AI advisor. All opinions are my own.

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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Here are the latest items and commentary on current economics news, market trends, stocks, investing opportunities, and the precious metals markets. We also cover hedges, derivatives, and obscura. And it bears mention that most of these items are from the “tangibles heavy” contrarian perspective of JWR. (SurvivalBlog’s Founder and Senior Editor.) Today’s focus is on Bitcoin recovery expert David Veksler. (See the Cryptos section.) First up, over at Sharps Pixley: Lawrie Williams: Russia May Now be World’s No. 2 Gold Miner One of my regular consulting clients in the American Redoubt recently told me a tale of woe with a very happy ending. Here is how “Bob” told it to me. (Pardon any factual errors, because I’m relating all of this second hand):  In early 2012 Bitcoin cost a relative pittance — less than $10 USD would buy an entire Bitcoin (BTC). So, on a whim, Bob invested $100 in Bitcoin. That bought him around 13.5 BTC. Then he essentially forgot about it, until in early 2017 he heard news that the Bitcoin market was heating up. The news? The cost of buying 1 BTC exceeded $1,000.  That really caught his eye. Bob remembered that he had his Bitcoin wallet stored on an old laptop computer that had died back around 2015, due to a failed motherboard.  He also realized that he probably hadn’t made a copy of the Bitcoin wallet, and he only had a vague recollection of the passphrase that he had chosen. Now in a minor panic, he removed the dead laptop’s hard drive and attached it to a “sled” disk drive USB adapter, and connected it to his new laptop. He was not a happy camper when he found that the old laptop’s 250 GB drive was corrupted and only about half of the files were working. But at least he saw a “wallet.dat” file. He breathed a sigh of relief and copied that wallet file to several 4GB memory sticks, and put them in various safe places. Then, just a few month later, Bob read that Bitcoin had jumped to $2,500 per BTC.  So he gave one of his 4GB backup sticks to his son the computer wizard, and asked him to check on the status of his Bitcoins. His son soon had bad news: “The wallet is corrupted, Dad. You’re probably out of luck.” Then, together, they spent many hours going through his entire collection of backup disks and backup CD-ROMs. Most of these were old 100MB ZIP disks. Mournfully, they found that there was no backup of the crucial “wallet.dat” file. As the year 2017 neared its end, Bitcoin kept climbing higher and higher versus the US Dollar. By December, it cost $19,000 to buy one “coin”. This made Bob’s seemingly unretrievable Bitcoin wallet worth about $256,500. Ouch! This situation was starting to cost him some lost sleep. So Bob contacted his other adult son–also quite tech savvy–and gave him another one of the 4 GB backup sticks, as well as the original corrupted hard drive. Bob asked him to do some research, and see if there was any way to recover the lost Bitcoins. He promised him a 1 BTC fee, if he was successful. Bob also wrote down five different variations of his passphrase for him, to the best of his recollection. In January, 2018, the price of Bitcoin suffered a major retreat, dropping to around $6,500 per BTC. During this time, Bob’s son used several pieces of off-the-shelf recovery software in his quest. But he didn’t make much progress. He was able to determine that the wallet held just over 13.5 BTC, but he was unable to access it. After conferring by phone, they decided to hire an outside consultant.  After doing some background checking, they hired David L. Veksler. He is well-known in the cryptocurrency world, and he has published many articles on the subject of crypto wallet security and Bitcoin, in general. Mostly of these have been for the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Veksler’s small company is WalletRecovery.info. They  charge a recovery fee of 20% of the value for wallets under 10 BTC and 10% for wallets over 10 BTC. This is done with an informal contingency contract. (The client pays nothing unless they are successful at recovery.) Only a day later, David Veksler had good news for Bob: He’d had been able to recover the wallet! All that Veksler then needed was a new Bitcoin receiving address to send the recovered coins to. Done. Project complete, with no muss, and no fuss. Bob now had just over 12 BTC in his new wallet. (There was also a small amount that Veksler recovered from a separate “post-fork” wallet.) Bob directed his son to keep 1 BTC for himself, and then to buy 10 hardware wallets in which to distribute just over 1.1 BTC each. When I last checked, it cost $10,040 to buy 1 BTC. That makes Bob’s 12-and-a-fraction in BTC now worth around $122,480. That is not a bad return on a $100 investment! Needless to say,  Bob now keeps much better records of his passphrases, and keeps multiple backups of his wallets at different locations.  (In case of fire.) And he’s in the process of examining how to diversify into two or three other cryptocurrencies, to hedge his investment. He asked me to make a special mention of David Veksler and WalletRecovery.info in SurvivalBlog, saying:  “To call him ‘highly recommended’ is a genuine understatement.” Here is a fascinating Sovereign Man audio interview: Simon Black’s Crypto Update By way of the great Alt-Market blog: The Dollar – From Bohemia To Bust The US Dollar Fights Back After Inflation Data Surprises to the Upside National debt ‘unsustainable,’ intelligence director Coats says. Next, at Zero Hedge: Household Debt Rises By $572 Billion, Ends 2017 At All Time High. A total of $13.5 trillion! Reader H.L. flagged this at Alt-Market: Stockpile For A SHTF Situation: Nine Ammo Storage Tips Every Gun Owner Should Know SurvivalBlog and its Editors are not paid investment counselors or advisers. So please see our Provisos page for our detailed disclaimers. Please send your economics and investing news tips to JWR. (Either via e-mail of via our Contact form.) These are often especially relevant, because they come from folks who particularly watch individual markets. And due to their diligence and focus, we benefit from fresh “on target” investing news. We often “get the scoop” on economic and investing news that is probably ignored (or reported late) by mainstream American news outlets. Thanks! No Bob doesn’t have $122,480. All he has is a file that says what 12 and a fraction bitcoin’s are currently worth. Unil he cashes them in and actually has $122,480 in US currency in hand (assuming US currency has some value) he has $0.00 dollars. Your email address will not be published. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting. When searching, use quotes around terms that need to appear together (e.g. “log home”) Please let others know they too can trust SurvivalBlog for the most reliable and practical survival information by voting for SurvivalBlog on topprepperwebsites.com James Wesley, Rawles (JWR) is Founder and Senior Editor of SurvivalBlog, the original prepping /survival blog for when the Schumer Hits The Fan (SHTF). He began SurvivalBlog in 2005. It now reaches more than 320,000 unique visitors weekly. JWR is a journalist, technical writer, and novelist. His survivalist novel Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse, is a modern classic that reached #3 on the New York Times bestsellers list. Two of his other novels have also been best New York Times bestsellers. Jim is the originator of the American Redoubt movement and a frequent talk show guest on shows such as Alex Jones. He is also a retreat consultant specializing in off-grid living, rural relocation, and survival preparedness.

When 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. 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When the bubble finally popped last year, the “market cap” of all crypto fell over $700B, an 85% drop from its peak in January — steeper than the dotcom bubble’s 78% crash. The media gawked at this collapse, and as usual, proclaimed this was the nail in the coffin for cryptocurrencies.There’s already been enough hysterics and I-told-you-sos. In this essay, I just want to answer the simple question:It’s easy to believe that the ICO bubble, having taken place on uncensorable public blockchains, was a fundamentally new phenomenon.The technologies that enable bubbles are always new, but the underlying social dynamics are not. The open and permissionless nature of blockchains allows anyone to co-opt them. Thus, blockchains enabled multiple social forces, all interacting in the same network, all reified under the name “the ICO bubble.”In this blog post, I’ll examine three major moments in history that illuminate three separate social dynamics that were at play in the ICO bubble.The first is the peer-to-peer file sharing revolution in the late 2000s, which explains the ideology of decentralization, the proclamations of revolution, and companies trying to circumvent securities laws.The second is the penny stock boom of the 90s, which explains the casino of shitcoin gambling, market manipulation, and fraudsters that comprised the long tail of ICOs.And the third is the dotcom bubble, which explains the mass of speculators, the new paradigm of decentralized companies, the VC coins, and the redistribution of wealth.By exploring these episodes, I hope to show you how the ICO bubble recapitulated well-known patterns of human behavior.History does not repeat, but there are a few refrains it loves to come back to.(I recorded an audio version of this blog post if you prefer listening.)Bitcoin shares deep roots with the P2P networks. File sharing protocols became the world’s first global decentralized networks. Bitcoin’s gossip-based networking model was inspired by Gnutella, the protocol behind LimeWire. Many P2P barons were foundational to the crypto movement: Jed McCaleb of eDonkey2000, Zooko Wilcox of Mojo Nation, and Bram Cohen of BitTorrent to name a few. They also share a philosophical lineage — Lawrence Lessig, the intellectual godfather of piracy culture, is the originator of the phrase “code is law.”The P2P file sharing revolution began in 1999, with a little application called Napster. On its face, Napster was straightforward: log in, search for a song you want, double click, and it’s yours.It sounds simple, but it’s hard to describe how large of a paradigm shift Napster was.Remember what it was like to purchase music in 1999: standing in a CD aisle, surrounded by rows of disc jackets, debating in your head which album to spend your $20 on. Jay-Z? Smashmouth? Or maybe J-Lo? Every purchase was a careful tradeoff. Music was scarce and precious.Napster changed all that. It was like a bank vault of music was propped open, free for anyone to plunder. Entirely via word of mouth, Napster spread across America like a riot, clogging up bandwidth on college campuses and dialup lines.Soon, legal challenges from Metallica and Dr. Dre would thrust Napster into news headlines. Napster seized the national conscience. At its peak in 2001, the service had more than 80M registered users. The RIAA took notice.After a lengthy court battle with the RIAA, a judge ruled Napster liable for all of its users’ copyright infringement, despite the fact that Napster’s servers didn’t host any copyrighted content. This legal doctrine, known as vicarious infringement, was the death knell of Napster and of any file sharing-based business model. Napster was driven to bankruptcy and forced to clamp down on all illegal file sharing. But Napster’s surrender was only the beginning of this war.To the digital revolutionaries, the lesson of Napster was obvious. Despite all downloads being peer-to-peer, Napster operated a central server, primarily used for search indexing and peer discovery. This was its downfall. If the file sharing revolution were to continue, it would have to decentralize and become resilient to legal injunctions.A traditional war had to evolve into guerrilla warfare.Decentralized alternatives to Napster gradually arose, intentionally designed around this legal constraint. Successors like Gnutella (LimeWire) and eDonkey2000 (eMule) would have decentralized architectures that would be much more difficult to take down.As the children of Napster proliferated, a philosophy began to solidify around internet piracy. Slogans materialized: “information wants to be free,” “open culture,” “sharing is caring.” A new political party called The Pirate Party was formed, championing online freedom and copyright reform, winning multiple political appointments across Europe. Radical innovations in intellectual property were explored such as the Creative Commons and copyleft licensing. The revolution had gained an energy and identity of its own.BitTorrent, founded by Bram Cohen in 2001, would arguably be the last stage in the evolution of P2P file sharing. The BitTorrent protocol overtook KaZaA, Limewire, DC++, SoulSeek, and all the other P2P networks. By 2012 it’s estimated to have peaked at a staggering 400M-500M monthly active users, almost half of the entire Facebook userbase at that time. During its peak, BitTorrent was by far the single largest source of Internet traffic in the world.It’s worth asking: why did BitTorrent dominate file sharing while other networks fell into irrelevance?Simon Morris, a former executive at the BitTorrent company, wrote an excellent four-part tour de force analyzing the parallels between BitTorrent and crypto (if you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing, I encourage you to read its final chapter). I’ll be building upon many of his insights here.BitTorrent was intentionally structured differently from other P2P file sharing projects. The project’s original home page begins its explanation of BitTorrent like this: BitTorrent is a free speech tool. BitTorrent gives you the same freedom to publish previously enjoyed by only a select few with special equipment and lots of money. (“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one” — journalist A.J. Liebling.) Bram Cohen explicitly disavowed all illegal file sharing usage of BitTorrent. He never once acknowledged this as a legitimate use of the service. The core team and their messaging was unimpeachable. And this is precisely what allowed BitTorrent to flourish on the back of all of its legitimate uses: Linux distros, World of Warcraft updates, dataset sharing, and so on.BitTorrent was never supposed to be a revolution in internet piracy; it was supposed to be a revolution in low-cost file distribution. This unobjectionable mission statement made BitTorrent safely beyond the reach of the RIAA or any other aggrieved copyright holder.There’s a striking parallel with crypto: Vitalik and the Ethereum core team never endorsed the flood of ICOs — they often denounced them. This is precisely what allowed Ethereum to flourish, despite being subverted by ICOs for speculative and extralegal purposes. If Ethereum did not brand itself as a revolution in decentralized computing, as “the world computer,” it would have been labeled by regulators as an illegal ICO platform.If you fast forward to today, the story of P2P file sharing is the story of BitTorrent. All other protocols have faded into obscurity. But BitTorrent is no longer used for downloading music in the western world.I’ll give you three reasons: Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora. Newcomers in the music industry have adapted, and these services transformed the experience of discovering and listening to music.P2P file sharing once competed against the experience of driving to Walmart and buying a $20 DRM-protected CD to listen to a single hit song. Between the two options, the decision was comically easy: just pirate it.Daniel Ek, the former CEO of uTorrent, understood this firsthand. After witnessing the new decentralized file sharing networks replace Napster, Ek came up with the idea for a company he’d eventually name Spotify:I realised that you can never legislate away from piracy. Laws can definitely help, but it doesn’t take away the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry — that gave us Spotify.Today P2P file sharing has significantly declined. But make no mistake: the digital piracy revolution moved industries. It forced music and film to cater to a digital-first world and eventually incentivized the invention of web streaming. The companies that didn’t adapt are now footnotes in history. Those that did will get to build the media dynasties of the next decade.If you listen to Lawrence Lessig or Peter Sunde, it’s easy to assume the file sharing revolution was rooted in ideology. But few file sharing veterans are still committed to piracy today. Trying to explain file sharing by appealing to intellectual property reform is like trying to explain the Boston Tea Party by appealing to John Locke. Ideology, while important, is usually post hoc.The file sharing revolution took off because people opposed a rule: you can only consume music how the record industry says you can.People hated this rule. So they broke it. And P2P protocols enabled this great, overwhelming mob of rule breakers to demonstrate the way they thought music ought to work.Today, music works that way. No matter where you are, by doing a search and double clicking, you can listen to almost any song ever created.Simon Morris claims this was the raison d’être of BitTorrent, and of decentralized networks more generally. Decentralization allows rules to be broken. And when a rule is opposed widely and strongly enough, people will build the technology to break that rule, and that technology will spread.Without this sort of rule-breaking (whether by accident or design) it’s quite hard to imagine why decentralized blockchain technology even matters. It’s a distributed data store with a complicated and slow update mechanism… The one value proposition that everyone seems to agree on for blockchain technologies is that they are ‘censor-proof’. And this matters only if you have something that someone wants to censor.So why did ICOs need to be decentralized? Why couldn’t the bubble have kicked off through equity-backed blockchain startups like in the dotcom bubble?To Simon Morris, the answer is obvious: because ICOs were not just about the chance to invest in speculative blockchain projects. They were also about breaking rules: the rules around capital formation.This begs the question, why do people want to break the rules around capital formation so badly?Consider the initial conditions of the ICO bubble. The bubble was primarily driven by countries in Asia with high savings rates and income inequality — China, Japan, and Korea. Over the last decade, we’ve seen income inequality rising, declines in wage growth for the global middle class, waning trust in governments, and a mass of overeducated young people with shrinking opportunities.The most massive wealth creation events in the world took place over the last decade — but it all went to other people. You didn’t get any. This new wave of technology has subjugated your digital life and attention span, but its fruits belong to the capitalists in Silicon Valley, not you.The ICO bubble let young people convince themselves: hey, maybe I can get my share. I see this Bitcoin thing, I see this Ethereum thing, they’re so novel and revolutionary, why couldn’t they change the world?And wouldn’t they get just a little convinced that for once, they were a step ahead of their parents, ahead of the gatekeepers, ahead of Wall Street and Silicon Valley?So they got in early. They started using VPNs. They got friends and family to create overseas accounts. They broke the rules. And what were those rules good for anyway, besides rigging the system for the rich? Why couldn’t anyone in the world invest in whatever they wanted? Who needs disclosures anyway, if the future is going to be open source?The market kept proving them right. So they speculated, they joined Subreddits and debated ideas and convinced themselves that their investments would revolutionize the world’s infrastructure. A decentralized future was fast approaching, and they were going to be, for once, at the vanguard ushering it in.And of course, when reality finally caught up, it showed them the consequences of breaking those rules. 2018 brought everything crashing down, laying bare all the scams, frauds, and widespread market manipulation. A once ecstatic market flattened out like a pancake.And here we must also acknowledge the other side of the market: entrepreneurs. To them, ICOs represented a great equalizer. After all, ICOs were dispersed internationally, and venture capital is still hard to come by outside of Silicon Valley. In the age of the Internet, in the age of blockchain, why hadn’t technology already leveled the playing field? Why should it matter where an entrepreneur lived or what language they spoke, so long as they knew the language of programming?With ICOs, you didn’t need an intro to Sequoia to get your company started. Now you simply needed a good idea and a white paper, and the world’s capital would beat a path to your door.Remember all the stories of VCs quaking in their Patagonia vests, worried that they were being displaced?And then there were the reverse ICOs, where established companies ICOed their own token, as in the case of Kik or Kakao. This is perfect if you want to fund an internal blockchain-related initiative, but skip all the burdensome overhead of shareholder protections or revenue generation.Even among startups funded by Y Combinator, the hottest accelerator in the world, I heard reports that a startling number of them were pondering ICOs. Even Silicon Valley elite wanted to break the rules! In this case, they wanted a way out of their illiquid startup ownership, and speculators were all too happy to provide it to them.It was only in retrospect that they would each realize why these rules were there in the first place. Once again, crypto relearned the lessons that traditional finance had long ago internalized.Let’s grant that the ICO bubble was instigated by a desire to break the rules around capital formation. Today, with the dust having settled and the ICO bubble now an awkward memory, we can reexamine its battle cries with more clarity.Did people really care about changing the rules around capital formation? Did they really care about democratizing investing access? Did they really care about reforming accredited investor laws, financial disclosures and AML/KYC requirements?Many intellectual commentators rallied against these during the run-up, but this too was probably just part of the frenzy of revolution. I don’t see much clamoring for this in 2019.As for the file sharing revolution — copyright law is, for all intents and purposes, mostly intact 20 years later.So what does the file sharing revolution tell you about the ICO bubble?First, it tells you that you should not take ideology at its word. The underlying causes of revolutions are usually more pragmatic than they appear.It also explains the supply side for ICOs, companies that wanted to circumvent traditional channels for capital formation, and the demand side, individuals who were desperate to get access to high-growth speculative investments. Once the incentive to break the rules has waned, the revolution is likely to stop. That is precisely what we’ve seen in both file sharing and in ICOs.But there’s another, darker side to explaining the ICO bubble — as an enabler of fraud, manipulation, and gambling. For this, we turn to our second historical model: the penny stock boom of the 90s.Balaji Srinivasan once claimed that tokens would turn blockchains into the world’s biggest stock market. This may someday be true — but for now, it seems that blockchains have become the world’s biggest penny stock market instead.The term “penny stock” evokes images of shady stockbrokers in boiler rooms, and for good reason. You’ll remember Jordan Belfort, the protagonist of the 2013 film Wolf of Wall Street, made his fortune hustling as a penny stock broker.Penny stocks are defined differently in different countries, but in the US, a penny stock is a stock issued by a small company that trades below $5 a share (originally it was stocks that traded below $1, but inflation and all). They are generally quoted OTC and seldom trade on national exchanges. They have low liquidity, little public information, and are not required to make significant financial disclosures.The legal designation of penny stocks began after the 1929 stock market crash, which subsequently triggered the Great Depression. It was believed that the crash was partially caused by unbridled speculation on penny stocks, and this led to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 designating legal restrictions on penny stock trading.Throughout most of the 20th century, penny stock offerings could not legally be placed in newspapers. Orders could only be placed via telephone. The highest quality penny stocks would only provide financial reporting once a year, and the very worst penny stocks had no financial disclosures at all. Given these barriers, penny stocks tended not to receive much attention.But starting in the mid-90s with the growth of the Internet, penny stock trading exploded. Discount brokers emerged, offering automated interfaces and much lower trading fees. As retail investors flooded in, the space grew faster than regulators could track it, and market manipulation became rampant.Eventually, the SEC stepped in and brought a string of high profile cases against Mafia crime families for penny stock manipulation schemes. All of these schemes were ultimately enabled by the Internet: it accelerated the velocity of fraud and allowed bad actors to connect directly with speculators.Penny stock trading has been brought back under stricter regulatory oversight, but it’s still extremely speculative, and manipulation is common. In 1989, the heyday of penny stocks, a survey found that Americans had been cheated out of at least $2B a year by fraudulent penny stock schemes.There’s an obvious parallel here with the ICO bubble.The SATIS group estimated that 81% (!) of ICOs were scams and it’s been widely reported that over $9M was stolen per day in 2018 (annualized, that would be upwards of $3B a year). By sheer number, the overwhelming majority of ICOs can be explained this way. But the parallel between ICOs and penny stocks runs deeper.Let’s take a step back here and ask: why are people so drawn to penny stocks in the first place, given how fraught they are?As a former professional poker player, I can tell you the answer is simple: people love to gamble. Humans will forever be drawn to the idea of turning around their fortunes, of outsmarting the establishment, of skipping steps on the social ladder. No matter how much gambling is stigmatized, regulated, or outlawed, it always survives one way or another.For penny stocks, they tap into the same greedy credulity behind all get rich quick schemes. It hardly matters what the underlying company does.But we must also acknowledge the other side of this market: the hustlers and fraudsters. To them, penny stocks are a gift. And they also don’t care what the stocks represent — they simply need a company with a ticker and story to manipulate. Greed takes care of the rest.Here’s a telling article published in 2000 on common Internet penny stock pump and dump schemes. Let’s contrast it to ICOs.Before the Net, these promoters hired squads of telemarketers to push their stocks on unsuspecting investors. Now, it’s as easy as blasting out e-mail, or if they’re industrious, maintaining a Web site.The modern version: hiring an ICO marketing agency, which will manage your Telegram chat, Subreddit, Medium account, and BitcoinTalk thread.Don’t have a real community? No problem, buy a fake one.The current fashion is to announce the discovery of a new, inexpensive method of sending broadband signals over telephone lines at speeds far exceeding existing technologies… The promoters issue a constant stream of press releases chronicling development breakthroughs, marketing agreements and endorsements of the technology from qualified scientists.How about a “hyper-scalable” “quantum-resistant protocol” for “supply chain management”? Getting some credentialed advisors to praise your protocol? Maybe rumored partnerships with a couple Fortune 100 companies?Optimistic posts then begin appearing on Internet stock message boards, such as those maintained by Yahoo and Raging Bull. Because few have heard of the new company, the promoters plant messages on other heavily frequented boards.If the promoters do a good job, and the market is strong, the stock price can soar from a few cents a share to $10, or in some cases, much more. Eventually, the share price collapses after the promoters sell out and quit pumping.(many of these examples are drawn from Anatomy of a Pump & Dump Group)You know the jig. Bounties, referral bonuses, airdrops, presales, advisor shares, purchased reviews, paid followers, social media bots, wash trading, painting TA signals, and so on. By the time the ICO boom had gone mainstream, this procedure was a well-oiled machine.Most of the long tail of ICOs — and that tail was very long — were complete nonsense. According to most trackers, the total number of ICOs was well into the thousands, and that’s only counting those that were able to rise above the noise.And like each penny stock boom before it, the ICO boom ended in multiple regulatory actions against the worst offenders. But regulators can’t reach everyone, and most of the pump and dumpers either moved on or continue to manipulate coins at smaller scales.ICOs, just as penny stocks, are a two-sided market. Speculators don’t care about the technology, they just want tickers to bet on and get rich. Fraudsters don’t care either, they just want tickers to manipulate and get rich. Everyone gets what they need, the market bustles with activity, and everyone makes money — until they don’t.If you think about it, global, uncensorable blockchains are basically the optimal platform for another penny stock boom. It’s no wonder that bad actors and speculators were quick to converge on it. But despite the technological accoutrements, it’s an old story.So what do penny stocks explain about the ICO bubble? Penny stocks explain the shitcoins, the scams, the unregistered securities, the market manipulation, and most of the long tail of the ICO bubble. Again, by volume, this is most of what was happening in the bubble.But I want to be careful here. Penny stock fraudsters were quick to co-opt ICOs, but the concept of an ICO didn’t begin that way. ICOs arose out of blockchain community crowdfunding, first pioneered by Mastercoin in 2013, with Augur being the first ICO on Ethereum in 2015. Most of their investors were nerdy cypherpunks, excited to support some new technology they could play with.We should not conflate cryptocurrencies, the underlying technology, with the ICO bubble, which was a speculative phenomenon that converged atop it. The ICO bubble was something that happened to crypto, not something intrinsic to it.Most of the technologists and cypherpunks who built this stuff were simply motivated by building a new financial system. And they’re still whittling away, even after the thundering herd of speculators and fraudsters have come and gone.So we’ve looked at P2P file sharing and penny stocks in comparison to the ICO bubble. But there’s still one aspect of the bubble that I’ve failed to address so far — technological innovation.After all, I don’t believe for a second that the crypto boom was principally about defrauding people, or that its underlying technology was irrelevant. The very opposite — the ICO bubble occurred atop the kindling of real technological innovation. To fully understand this, we have to turn to the last historical precedent: the dotcom bubble and its soothsayer, Carlota Perez. All bubbles are about greed… but some bubbles are also about the installation of technological revolutions. — Carlota PerezThe World Wide Web — the Internet as most people know it — was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Its invention was the spark that set off the Information Age, and alongside it, the greatest stock market bubble of this generation.Compared to the technologies that came before it, the Web evolved rapidly. The Internet only had 2% penetration in the US when the Mosaic browser launched in 1993. Six years later, at the height of the bubble, a full 36% of the US was online. (Telephones took more than 30 years to reach the same level of penetration.)The rapid rise of the Web, combined with low interest rates and the Clinton tax cuts of 1997, led to an incredible bullishness around the growth potential of the Internet. Venture capital became cheap and opportunistic. Entrepreneurs flocked to Silicon Valley.Netscape, the company that built the Web’s most dominant web browser, kicked off the age. Netscape IPOed for $2.9B in 1995. It was somewhat unusual for an unprofitable company to IPO so successfully, but Netscape’s revenues were growing so rapidly that this would soon be forgotten.The Netscape IPO would be quickly followed in 1996 by Yahoo!, Excite, and Lycos, all fantastically successful IPOs by companies that were also growing rapidly. And though, like Netscape, they were burning through cash, it didn’t seem to matter. Internet companies had become anointed.Any company, so long as it had a “.com” in the name, attracted huge valuations. Investors pulled money out of slower-growth companies to plow more capital into dotcoms. Retail investors, having recently received tax rebates, piled in. The Internet itself became the interface for many investors, through platforms like E-Trade (which also IPOed in 1996). Many publications reported stories of white collar professionals quitting their jobs to daytrade tech stocks full-time.In just five years, the NASDAQ had risen more than 400%. This fomented an all-out frenzy. In 1999 alone, Qualcomm 26X’d its stock price. Analysts stopped emphasizing P/E ratios and began citing Metcalfe’s Law. A WSJ article from 1999 posed the question: are profits just a “quaint concept” that doesn’t matter anymore? The Super Bowl in January of 2000 featured no fewer than 16 dotcom commercials.Companies like Pets.com were going from incorporation to IPO in a single year. Almost every single IPO popped, with an average of 68% first-day gains. Investing in tech IPOs was widely agreed to be a foolproof way to multiply your money. A phenomenon of dotcom parties spread across the valley, and those close to founders often received “friends and family” shares as tokens of generosity.It was a time of excess. The trend was baffling to Wall Street, to the East Coast elites, to the old money. Storied hedge funds like Tiger Management went under, unable to keep up with the shifting market structure. But the techies — they knew it all along, they told themselves.On March 10 of 2000, the NASDAQ would hit its peak. The first tremor of weakness was on April 14, likely triggered by a tax selloff. By the end of that week, the NASDAQ tumbled a staggering 25%.Soon, dotcoms realized that their burn rates were unsustainable. The Fed announced plans to aggressively raise interest rates, and the economy would see six such tightenings over the next several months. Capital wavered.By May 18th, Boo.com went bust. In November, Pets.com followed. A few months later, Webvan shuttered operations. The show came crashing down faster than it had started, and funding had all but vanished. By the end of 2001, after the September 11 attacks, most publicly traded dotcoms went bankrupt. Trillions of dollars of investment capital had evaporated.The ensuing recession would last several years. It wouldn’t be until 2004 when the first major post-crash dotcom company, Google, would IPO again.With hindsight we can say that investing in the Internet was clearly right. It’s obvious how dramatically the Internet has changed the world. And yet the dotcom bubble seemed to have veered off somewhere terribly wrong.What happened? Why couldn’t people at the time see it? And what can it teach us about the ICO bubble?To understand the dotcom bubble, we have to start with Carlota Perez.Carlota Perez is the patron saint of venture capitalists. Her seminal work, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital has been been cited by Marc Andreessen and Fred Wilson as pivotal to their understanding of the tech industry.I won’t do her book justice here, but I’ll attempt to summarize the key ideas that are relevant to both the dotcom crash and the ICO bubble. I’ll be quoting heavily from Carlota herself.Carlota Perez subscribes to the long wave economic cycle theory, known as Kondratiev Waves, in which technological innovation occurs in 45–60 year waves.According to Perez, these innovation waves consist of three phases:Installation is the period when a new technology is first explored, installed, and then speculated on. This speculation leads to an unsustainable asset bubble and a spectacular collapse. Then a more sober period of deployment takes place, during which the technology matures and sustainably alters many aspects of society. After a full deployment cycle has exhausted its economic growth, a new technology initiates a new innovation wave, and the cycle begins anew.There have been five technological revolutions in 240 years… Each of these revolutions drives a great surge of development and shapes growth for half a century or more.The same general shape can be observed in each cycle.Each of these revolutions was kicked off by a seminal project that would catalyze the technology — the industrial revolution with Arkwright’s Cromford mill, the steam and railway age with the Liverpool-Manchester Railway, the steel and heavy engineering age with Carnegie’s Bessemer steel plant, the age of automobiles with Ford’s assembly line, and the computer age with Intel’s 4004 microprocessor.By this model, the moment that kicked off ICO bubble must be the launch of Ethereum. Ethereum was not the first cryptocurrency, but it was the first ICO to produce astronomical returns, and it would set the foundation for the frenzy that was to come. Ethereum launched in 2015, exactly 44 years after the Intel 4004 in 1971.Why call them revolutions, though? Because they go far beyond the powerful set of new industries; they also transform the whole economy by providing a new techno-economic paradigm.Simply put, a techno-economic paradigm is a new accepted way of doing things. When a new technology takes form and begins driving innovation, it brings with it a new logic of how businesses should be structured. For example, with the advent of the automobile, the paradigm encouraged businesses to adopt mass production, economies of scale, and standardized products for mass marketing appeal — the logic of the factory. In this paradigm, every American should own not just a mass-produced automobile, but also a TV, a refrigerator, a washing machine, etc.The emerging heuristic routines and approaches are gradually internalized by engineers and managers, investors and bankers, sales and advertising people, entrepreneurs and consumers. In time, a shared logic is established; a new “common sense” is accepted for investment decisions as well as for consumer choice. The old ideas are unlearned and the new ones become “normal.”As a techno-economic paradigm becomes ascendant, any entrepreneur who does not subscribe to the new paradigm will be seen as low-status and behind the times.We know the techno-economic paradigm of the late internet revolution: move fast and break things, launch MVPs, iterate in short cycles, pursue business models with zero marginal cost. Basically all the mantras consumed today by aspiring tech founders.Cast in these terms, the techno-economic paradigm of crypto is almost embarrassing to say out loud. Here’s what we taught founders about how to build a business in the crypto age:Basically, cargo culting the Ethereum ICO—the same way dotcoms cargo culted Netscape.In the ICO bubble, founders who deviated from this paradigm were seen as low-status, opportunistic, “not getting crypto,” and were thus less rewarded in their fundraises. Yet in hindsight, almost none of this was predictive of an entrepreneur’s long-term success.Keep the dotcom crash in the back of your mind. For now, I’m going to focus entirely on how Perez’s account of financial bubbles comports with the ICO bubble.Frenzy is the tumultuous period when financial capital takes off on its own… All those benefitting from this flourishing of opportunities believe the world is going through a marvelous time.In the frenzy, new millionaires are minted. They try to multiply their wealth in the same way they made it, redeploying their capital to generate more profits. The gap between paper values and real values widens, and the newly rich come to believe that their newfound wealth is due to superior insight and intuition.Financial capital… breaks loose, backs the new entrepreneurs, dismantles as much as it can of the institutional framework, overinvests in the new infrastructure, and also uses the new technologies to innovate in instruments for financial speculation.Dismantles institutional frameworks, check. Overinvests in new infrastructure, check. Invents new instruments for financial speculation (ICOs, SAFTs, SAFTEs), check.As the various assets go up in price, confidence grows that they will continue to do so… Since the profits to be had are amazing, everybody — including widows and orphans — eventually become aware of the incredible possibilities. They gradually dare to enter what used to be alien territory, trying to get a piece of the action.Do you remember being told by Uber drivers to invest in BAT or IOTA? Do you remember the New York Times article, Everyone is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not?Perez recalls a quote by Bruce Nussbaum about the dotcom bubble:“So investors accepted sky-high P/Es, puffed-up bottom lines, and some strange business plans — because who really knew what was possible? It was a time of opportunity, a time to place bets. And they paid off…”Do you remember the nonsensical projects? The teams that no one had heard of? The copy and pasted white papers? All the shameless rhetoric about 10 trillion dollar TAMs and 100K transactions per second?The financiers (and the investors who trust their money to them) seem to be convinced that they have discovered the most profitable vein. They then indulge in the intense repetition of the same successful recipe, be it from canals from any river to any river, as in the first revolution, or more dot coms and telecommunications.Do you remember all the ICO investing syndicates? The Telegram groups? The newsletters?During Canal Mania in the 1790s, canals were created from river to river with no regard for routing, believing that canals magically produced demand. In the 1840s, railway projects were built from town to town without regard for engineering practicality. In the 1920s, real estate values became untethered from the constraints of urban planning, believing that the automobile meant any territory could be valuable if connected by roads. And of course, in the late 90s, dotcoms were funded with no evidence of product-market fit.And of course, do you remember all the voices (rejoicing and lamenting) the new redistribution of wealth?The whole frenzy phenomenon is, at bottom, a huge process of income redistribution in favor of those directly or indirectly involved in the casino, which funds the massive process of creative destruction in the economy. That regressive distribution generates a double vicious cycle: one is economic, expressed in the market; the other is social, expressed in political terms. Both get worse as the bubble increases.The ICO bubble was simply a variation on the theme. The players and the tactics were different, but the human stories were the same. Like in the dot com bubble there were, as always, stories of overnight millionaires, flagrant scams, manifestos declaring a new technological order, levered debts and second mortgages that ended in catastrophe — all the usual roil and ruin of speculative manias.Crypto’s gilded age is probably now over. Most of those newly minted millionaires have unwittingly surrendered their riches. The hype has died away, ICO funding has dried up, SEC enforcement actions are trickling in, and the media’s crush on crypto has passed.But, Perez reminds us, the frenzy phase and subsequent crash is not merely painful — it is necessary to any technological revolution. The financial casino attracts the funds necessary to install basic infrastructure and facilitate social learning.Without the dotcom bubble, there would not have been all of the investments into optical fiber buildouts, ISPs and internet infrastructure, packet-switched networks for telecoms, and all the competition overs consumers that would ultimately galvanize internet adoption. We needed that social and technological foundation in place for the Internet to flourish.Perez’s book was written in 2003 during the nadir of the dotcom crash, and she presciently situates the Internet within her K-wave framework. History has proven her right.But we should be careful not to invert her thesis: she claims that all technological revolutions induce a bubble, but that does not mean all bubbles are induced by technological revolutions. Indeed, most aren’t. It remains to be seen which camp crypto falls into.She explains the logic of frenzy, the stoking of financial capital, and the rhetoric of paradigm shifts (“all companies will become decentralized”). She explains the influx of retail investors (“widows and orphans”), traditional financial capital piling in at dizzying prices (Telegram, Filecoin, Hashgraph), and the flood of traditional entrepreneurs contorting themselves to follow the new paradigm.In the end, we should count ourselves lucky that the ICO bubble was not as destructive as the dotcom bubble. About $15B were raised by ICOs in 2017–2018, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to all of venture capital, which deployed around $500B during the same period. And the ICO crash was not nearly as destabilizing as the dotcom bubble. When all is said and done, the dotcom bubble wiped out about $5 trillion of value and was much more concentrated in the United States. Losses in the ICO bubble were ~15% of that, absorbed across many more economies, and during a time of relative economic prosperity. (Also, we should be cautious when conflating the “market cap” of crypto with the NASDAQ.)The ICO bubble had no single cause. Mono-causal explanations always fall short in explaining complex phenomena. But its effects are easier to pinpoint.There are now many world class teams well-capitalized to build, scale, and evolve blockchain technology, and tens of millions of people in the world who now understand decentralization, proof of work, and private keys. Looking back, it’s really quite amazing! It comes at a high cost, but Perez hints: it’s likely that bubbles like these are the only way to overcome technological inertia.At the same time, most people had their first interaction with crypto during its orgiastic adolescence. It’s not a great look. But this has been true for every technological revolution of the last 250 years. In that regard, crypto is in good company.I was too young to appreciate the dot com bubble when it happened. It’s strange to say, but I’m glad to have witnessed a speculative bubble from up close. I’ve now got war stories to share with future generations. It was a wild time, when anyone in the world could launch a coin and raise tens of millions of dollars to build a network that no one could control. I don’t think we’ll see anything like that again for a long time.If you believe that crypto has the stuff of a technological revolution, then as Perez puts it, the collapse will pave the way for a more fruitful deployment phase. At the end of the day, I’m an optimist about technology. So it won’t surprise you that I think this deployment phase is coming. But it will be slow, unglamorous, and probably won’t make for nearly as entertaining of headlines.Special thanks to Simon Harris, Salil Deshpande, Erik Torenberg, Jeff Meyerson, Nick Shalek, and Rachel Basse for reviewing this piece

An Australian Beginners Guide To Cryptocurrency By on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE 28 min readAround this time in June 2017, I took the plunge and jumped into the wild world of Cryptocurrency but the same question plagued me then as it undoubtedly does many others currently Where the hell do I start!?The question sounds simple enough but like many others, I Googled and found an overload of information and choices, littered with Ads further adding to my confusion. It was near impossible to separate the real and valuable information from the ill-informed. Eventually, I found a friend who was heavily involved in Blockchain technology and Cryptocurrency, who was able to guide me in the right direction early on.Fast forward over two years and I have found myself on a crazy journey thats seen me jump into the cryptosphere with two feet, both emotionally and financially! Ive seen unbelievable 1000% unrealized gains in 2017 followed by a brutal market crash! Like many others who were there for the wild ride in 2017, I got to watch those gains evaporate due to greed. Since then I have spent the time and money learning and refining my trading abilities to get to a point where I have been trading full-time for nearly eight months. And all the while, I have been helping many friends, colleagues and complete strangers on their first trip down the rabbit hole by spamming them with long detailed messages at all hours of the night possibly confusing them beyond repair. However many believed the information invaluable and suggested I should post a polished (with a few fewer explicit!) guides to help newcomers, and perhaps even some seasoned Crypto hands.In this guide while I wont focus on the difference between Bitcoin and Blockchain, how it works and all those excellent questions Ill cover a wide range of topics ranging from where to buy cryptocurrency, which exchanges I recommend and why, safeguarding your crypto assets, where to find good paid and free content, wallets, portfolio balance and more! Many of these lessons I have learned the hard way, so hopefully, I can save you time and prevent some of the painful mistakes I made, setting you in a better direction!On a side note These are my personal opinions formed from my own experiences, this is not financial advice nor have I been paid to shill or endorse any of the services or platforms that I will mention in this guide. Quite simply, I use these platforms, have found value in everything mentioned and think others may find the information valuable as well. Ive posted links to every service mentioned, including referral links below as well as some donation address should anyone wish to donate. Donations are much appreciated and will ensure the time will be spent keeping this guide up to date and extra articles and content added in the future.SO probably the two/three most important things first up Many people straight up ask me; Is Bitcoin worth investing in What should I buy? Whats a good coin to invest in other than Bitcoin? Which coin is the next bitcoin? Should I go 100% Alt coins? What coin will be the next to do 1000x gains? I generally avoid some of those questions like the plague butNO NO NO! Dont be scared off by Bitcoins higher cost, Bitcoin is the king!Firstly I usually suggest beginners start with the BIG 3 (Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin). As a very rough template for your portfolio, I recommend around 70% BTC, 20% ETH and 10% LTC.At some point, you will want to diversify your portfolio and get more exposure to other high cap Alt coins and even some low cap Alt coins, the FOMO (fear of missing out) will take hold when some of those coins start having crazy parabolic gains. Even so, you should still have at a minimum 7080% of your portfolio in the BIG 3 (BTC, ETH and LTC in that order from biggest holdings to lowest), 10% to high cap alt coins, 10% to low cap alts coins and 10% trading account IF you are interested in actively trading. I mostly recommend the blue-chip cryptocurrencies to start as they have constantly held their value and position in the top 5 coins over the years.So for a more diversified example between 60-70% Bitcoin (this would include your 10% for trading should you look at actively trading), 1020% Ethereum, 1015% on a small selection top 20 alt coins (including LTC) and remaining 5-10% spread over a handful of lower cap alt coins.Regardless of how much money you invest, that should be a rough template.Obviously, you can play around with the percentages of the top 3 but I personally wouldnt go less than 50% BTC and that has been my advice to anyone who has asked.Its generally where a lot of newcomers to space make their first mistake of going all-in on cheap alt coins thinking it will be the next bitcoin and become filthy rich.The chances of that happening are very slim to none. Diversifying your portfolio is important and while Alt coins can see larger gains in bull markets (a market where the price is increasing), they can also lose 90%+ of their value in a bear market (a market where the price is decreasing).Secondly dont invest all your funds at once! The key to this is called DOLLAR COST AVERAGING! Essentially the idea is to spread your capital over a period of time to get an average entry price so lets say you have 10k to invest, you should dollar-cost average that 10k into the market over an extended time frame.For example - invest that 10k in 22.5k increments over a period of 45 weeks, even longer if you want but keep in mind the market moves up and down a lot faster than traditional markets.Crypto is a highly volatile market which means it can sometimes swing 1020% in a day. You dont want to invest that 10k at once and see your crypto investment drop 20% the next day, instantly losing 2k of your initial 10k investment.If you dollar cost average you minimize that risk you may not catch the bottom but you shouldn't be buying at the top either!There are a few services I will mention further down that can help you dollar cost average into the market.The only time its not worth dollar-cost averaging is if you have an understanding of technical analysis and can use your knowledge of the market to get your best entry. That knowledge comes from learning and experience gained over time! Whilst some people have gone big and made large profits, my guess is theres an equal (or perhaps larger) amount of people who have gone big near the top and have been feeling investment pain since December 2017 (the height of bitcoins price).Regardless if you are planning to invest and/or trade, as much as the cryptosphere may say otherwise, HODLing is not a viable investment strategy. HAVE A PLAN take profits because while HODLing in a bull market might be viable, HODLing in a bear market is suicide. Set targets Invest and trade with a plan. You wont go broke taking profit and many myself included have learned this lesson the hard way. If your plan is to buy Bitcoin and check on it in 5 years time, theres nothing wrong with that and in fact, for the vast majority of people, it is probably your best option. But buying something without a plan and hodling the asset with sheer hope of recovery or make a massive profit while its price falls off a cliff, is a fast way to lose your capital.Thirdly If you want to trade, spend time and money learning. If you are going to invest your hard-earned capital into a market, the best investment will be knowledge of the market and the skills to navigate through it. As a very generalized rule; any service offering guaranteed returns and is combined with referral payouts IS A SCAM and should be avoided! Dont be lazy, take the time and effort! The end result will be worth it.Theres some really good books and free content on YouTube. Ihighly suggest a book called trading in the zone if you are interested in cryptocurrency trading, with an audio version free on YouTube. There are countless other great books (mostly based off Forex trading) and endless Youtube How To video guides. Seriously, if you dont understand something, theres usually a good chance someone has made a video explaining it. Todd from The 51% Crew does some great more advanced Youtube videos on technical analysts and indicators.Theres also some decent cheapish online courses that I have done and highly recommend- I found the chart guys and trader Cobbs online trading courses cheap, simple and effective. Neither of these courses will make you a trading god but they will speed up your education and understanding of the market and offer a good foundation to build on. Its worth noting that a lot of what is taught in both their courses can be found for free or cheaper but you are paying for the convenience of that leg work being done for you and presented in an easy, clear and precise manner.Trader Cobbs courses are designed around a few viable rules-based strategies in which repetition and simplicity is the key to success. He takes a no-nonsense approach and only teaches what you need to know so you can effectively use his strategies. It doesn't matter if you are completely new to trading or have plenty of experience under your belt, the courses will cut out a lot of noise and set you in a better direction!The Chart Guys courses go into more detail on technical analysis when compared to Trader Cobbs courses but are still set around the basics in a very beginner-friendly style. You will learn more about common indicators, patterns and the foundations of trading (trends, support lines, etc). They also do hours of free content on YouTube so be sure to check that out as well.Where To Learn More And Increase Knowledge! Some decent Facebook groups/pages worth joining; Crypto Australia , Crypto Coin Trader, and Nuggets News .Be warned, you may have to sift through a lot of posts and articles of people shilling whatever they have invested in but there are good places to get information and learning resources (and hopefully this helps you get there!). Also take care on which crypto Influencer's you follow, as they are just as likely to shill a project in their own self-interest always DYOR (Do Your Own Research) before investing in something.Nuggets news also has a paid group (and excellent free content on YouTube). Alex gives good fundamental analysis on projects, makes some excellent trade ideas & suggestions, does large amounts of learning & tutorial videos, offers large discounts to a lot of affiliates like Trader Cobb, The Chart Guys and loads more! Its a touch under $50 a month and there is no minimum subscription so its well worth it. The group gives access to a lot of top quality video learning content that can be hard to find for free, and access to some very smart individuals within his group that post great content and offer valuable advice.He has capped the Facebook group size (or he has in the past) when things got really crazy to avoid s*** posts and to keep the quality and the integrity relatively high within the group, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it capped again. I personally am a member of his group and find it to be one of, if not the best and highest quality group I am apart of.Discount code with the link below for anyone interested in joining.Security And Safe Guarding Your Crypto Before I get into where to buy from (brokers) and which exchanges to use (trading)...There are some really important safety steps that should be taken. I find that this is an aspect that gets overlooked far too often and maybe one of THE most important steps when starting off. Crypto is full of scammers and hackers and some people have lost millions due to unsafe practices.Theres a saying in the cryptosphere NOT YOUR KEYS, NOT YOUR CRYPTO! You are your own bank brokers and exchanges can only be trusted to a certain extent. Your funds are safest in a wallet which YOU control.#1 Open up a new email address Id suggest using Protonmail.This email address will be purely for anything crypto-related so use it whenever you sign up to a broker or exchange.Do not use the email for anything else.#2 Make a strong password containing upper case, lower case, numbers, and a symbol.Never have your account name and password auto-saved to auto-fill. Ever.You also shouldnt use the same password for everything.Password management is important and there are programs and apps that can do this for you.#3 Download Google Authenticator. Its a 2FA (2 form authentication) which will give you a new code every 30 seconds on your phone or tablet etc. Whenever you sign into an exchange or broker, it will ask for the code after you have initially logged in it wont let you proceed (or anyone else) without the code.*** VERY IMPORTANT *** Once you set up an account with a broker or exchange, you should then add your 2FA via their platform. They will give you a written code with a QR code that you can scan with Google Authenticator PRINT THIS PAGE OUT!! scanning this code and entering it when asked will activate 2FA, and will then clear the backup codes forever unless printed, copied or saved. For obvious reasons, it's not the best idea to keep a copy on your computer. Same goes for all exchanges and brokers you sign up to. That way if you ever break your phone or tablet, you can just reload Google Authenticator onto another device and re-enter/scan those codes onto the new device. If you dont have it backed up, it can take days to weeks before exchanges and brokers will allow you to have access to your account and usually it will only be unlocked by sending large amounts of proof of identity. Then they can and in most cases, will manually remove your 2FA code re-granting you access to your account/fundsObviously, store these codes somewhere safe.I personally have a fire/water resistant/proof safe at home I keep all this in.I will also be getting a bank safety deposit box to keep spares and instructions for my wife should anything ever happen to me as a backup.4# Its very important you bookmark and even add shortcuts to the broker/exchange sites on your homepage or in a file on your phone/computer.One of the most common scams that I see and hear often are sites being created identical to the proper exchanges with only a very slight variation to the web address. Traders will simply type in a web address which directs them to the fake site, where they proceed with their login and password. Scammers now have the means to login to the proper exchange and steal funds! Quite an easy mistake to make. Obviously, THIS is the idea behind having Google Authenticator - It puts a to stop to that.Those are your basic steps and honestly almost makes you bulletproof, but theres plenty more you can do to protect yourself.More Advanced Security Measures... Every time you log in to an account or trade, do it through a VPN. Not essential but it gives you an added layer of protection. If you are connecting to a public WiFi, its a must.Express VPN and Nord VPN are very highly rated and reliable VPNs but feel free to do your own research as there are many out there. I personally prefer Express VPN due to its faster speeds. Nord VPN is cheaper and also allows you to pay in Bitcoin! 30 day free referral using Express VPN Link.Get 30 free days of ExpressVPN!Here are 30 days free to get you started. Get 30 Days Free! 30-day money-back guarantee Ultra-fast VPN servers acrosswww.expressrefer.comNordVPN: Best VPN Service Provider | #1 Editors' ChoiceProtect your privacy online and access media content with no regional restrictions. Strong encryption and no-log policynordvpn.comBrave Browser should become your main default internet browser. Its fast, secure, open-source and blocks Ads & trackers. Plus you can earn BAT tokens as a reward for looking at Ads.Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave BrowserWelcome to the new Brave browser. Experience a faster, more private and secure browser for PC, Mac and iOS and Androidbrave.comIf you are looking at investing over 12k, Id highly suggest investing in whats called a hardware wallet.I use ledger nano S but they have recently released a new version called ledger nano x. Trezor is also a very popular multi-coin hardware wallet.Combine the hardware wallet with the ledger live desktop app and your funds are SAFU (Very safe)!Hardware wallets require you to physically confirm a transaction so theres no way someone can hack you and send/steal your funds.If you are investing larger sums.Get a new laptop. It doesnt need to be anything fancy.Use it purely for crypto and implement all the safety procedures I have just outlined. **No visiting questionable adult sites or torrent downloads on it! **If you opt for a new laptop/desktop computer, the OS (operating system) can make the world of difference in how secure your device is.A windows system is the least safe but easiest to use.A mac system is a middle ground.A Linux system (which I run) is the safest but hardest to use. If you decide to get a custom laptop and splash a little cash, I went with and recommend a Metabox laptop with Linux or windows as OS (operating system), the former if not very tech savvy. It will have enough GPU power to run multiple monitors as shown further below. Obviously theres plenty of alternative ways to bulletproof yourself but you will be ahead of most with what I have just outlined.Metabox Laptops - Official Metabox Site AustraliaMetabox design superior gaming laptops and mobile workstations, integrating the worlds most advanced and customisablewww.metabox.com.auNow for the bit, you probably want to hear!Getting money into crypto via brokers. Best Australian Brokers In My Opinion (not in any particular order). CoinspotIndependent reserveBtc marketsCoinjar ACX.ioSwyftxCaleb & BrownLocalbitcoins I recommend signing up with all of them. Each has their Pros and Cons but all are great platforms.Coinspot is probably the most beginner-friendly and easiest to use platform, their fees are high but they have a really good selection of alt coins to invest in.The downside is that there are cheaper fees on other platforms and their spread can be sub-par, which means you will pay more for the coins then what their actual value is. It isnt much of an issue if you stick with the platform so buy and sell through them only or send funds there to sell if the arbitrage is good.If you are planning on sending funds off their platform, Id suggest using someone else. As I said above, they do have a very easy and friendly platform with a huge selection of alt coins (something around 180?) so it makes it a good one-stop-shop place. DO NOT TRADE on Coinspot, its an excellent fiat in and fiat out platform but fees and spread will kill your balance if you attempted to actively trade on a regular basis.I have and still use Coinspot.Swyftx Ive only just started using it recently myself but have heard lots of good things about them. It's easy to use has a decent selection of coins (roughly 70), competitive fees and a good spread but most importantly theres a couple more advanced order types/options. So far so good and I plan to use it more in the future.Definitely, see Swyftx as a great alternative to Coinspot and perhaps even superior. Relatively new Australian broker/exchange which adds an unknown element but one to keep an eye on going forward! Im impressed with them!Independent Reserve , BTC Markets , CoinJar and ACX.io are a little more long-standing and reputably advanced brokers. I highly recommend Independent Reserve. It has less coin options but better spreads with very low fees plus larger daily/weekly deposit and withdrawal amounts. It is and has been my go-to brokerage since getting into cryptocurrency.Still the best on the ramp in my opinion.BTC markets are similar but with smaller deposits and withdrawals, and has a few more altcoin options. Overall a really good broker with decent volume.ACX.io lagged behind those two in my opinion but they have rearranged their fees to be more competitive (they may now be one of the cheapest) so its definitely worth using again. There liquidity was lower in the past so the prices were usually slightly higher compared to Independent Reserve but an excellent on-ramp none the less. Its very similar to Independent Reserve.Coinjar I have an account with but have not actually deposited through them.The rather cool thing they do differently is you can order an eftpos card via them and load it with crypto to spend on every day items.Conversion rate is probably is not the best but its a good way to spend profits.Localbitcoins is like a Gumtree for Bitcoin person to person cash/money for Bitcoin.Caleb and brown are for large purchases I think their bare minimum was 10k however I believe they have recently dropped this minimum to 2k. They can do very large transactions into the million+ dollars almost instantly.Another option I didnt mention above is Coinbase .You can also link your debit/credit card to Coinbase to do instant purchases but you unfortunately cant withdraw AUD from the platform (USD/EUD only). Which means you would need to send your crypto funds to one of the brokers I mentioned or a 3rd party business to sell/spend your crypto like Paidbycoins or livingroomofsatoshi (LRoS).I use these services regularly to pay bills, but find Paidbycoins has the far better spread of the two. I had an issue of my own doing, contacted them and they were very quick to fix my mistake. Overall excellent to deal with.There are also two more services that you can invest in crypto with very little effort. Getpaidinbitcoin for weekly investing (perfect for dollar-cost averaging into the market) and Bamboo a micro investing application.Getpaidinbitcoin You nominate a specific amount of your take home pay after tax to be wired by your payroll to the service. As an example Use your nominated amount (let's say $100 a week) of your pay to be converted into a specific coin of your choosing ($100 worth of BTC or ETH). Its a great set and forget service which gives you exposure to the market. The purchased BTC/ETH then gets sent directly to a wallet of your choice where you can use your funds as digital money for purchases, or to build up your portfolio.Another platform that focuses on micro-investing (which is still in early release and the app is only for IOS currently) is Bamboo. Bamboo is linked to your bank account and does round up purchases weekly.So lets say you buy some breakfast and coffee for $46 it will automatically round it off to $50 and do that for all your purchases throughout the week. It will then round up the loose change once a week to invest into crypto automatically.Its still in its early stages but could be a great alternative way to get into the market. Ill be waiting for the Android version to be released which shouldnt take to long if the team keep making headway. However - it is a simple Fiat in and Fiat out service so you dont actually own the cryptocurrency. You do get to choose where it gets invested and can re-balance your portfolio free of charge at any point.Orders - A Quick Explanation. Market order Buying/Selling at the current market price.Limit order Buying/Selling at a specific set price.Stop Loss Order triggers a market sell at a specific price.Stop Limit Also known as a trigger order At a specific price triggers a sell limit order.Trailing Stop A stop-loss order that trails your order with a specific gap you set.OCO One Cancels the Other lets you place two orders at one and whichever triggers first will clear the other.Wallets!! Once you have purchased your crypto you have three options, leave on the broker's account (not advised), send to an exchange to trade (including trading for alt coins the broker may not have) and/or send to your wallet(s).Its not advised to leave large sums on brokers or exchanges because sometimes they get hacked and funds were stolen OR they go broke and run off with your funds. The best option is always to put any funds your not actively trading into wallets.Now not to confuse you but your cryptocurrency isnt actually stored

Editor’s Note: The following is “new” article by Rayo, taken from Vonu: Book 2, Letters from Rayo, the second major batch of vonu publications from the 1960s-1990s that we’ve been able to obtain. This article in particular absolutely destroys any credibility collective movementism had–anarcho-capitalists are targeted as well. All abbreviations and original errors have been left to uphold the integrity of the original publication–[brackets] will be used for any corrections–any errors beyond that are those of your humble transcriptionist. If you’re interested in picking up FREE copy of the book he references, The True Believer, click here to do so. Please enjoy and keep look out for more great content like this. Reprinted from PREFORM #9, May 1970 For those not acquainted with it, collective-movementism (also called “utopianism” “bullshit libertarianism”) comes in many styles. There are the “educationalists” who think freedom will be achieved by just talking about it, the “politicians” busily campaigning for tweedle dee as the lesser evil to that terrible tweedle dum, the “revolutionists” who want to play cops-and-robbers with the Establishment (or, more usually, TALK about doing it). Some dream of utopia of “limited govt” capitalism, some anarcho-capitalism, some anarcho-communism. But no matter how great their surface differences or how bitterly they feud among themselves, they share the same fundamental fallacies. The basic premise of the collective-movementists is, in essence: no one can be free unless/until everyone is free. From this authoritarian assumption comes what there is of their strategy: to change society as whole – to achieve freedom thru altruistic crusades and provide it for all as free gift. Such strategy goes contrary not only to historical experience but (in the case of the “individualists”) to their economic theory social ideals as well. (The anarcho-communists are at least consistent in their mistake.) The collective-movementists propose to produce maintain freedom by means proven ineffective for the large-scale production of anything of value – failing to recognize that incentives/benefits must be individualizable. They embrace dichotomy between means ends failing to recognize that, in social movements, the means employed will determine the ends (if any) achieved. The collective-movementists are invariably utopianists – dreaming not of INDIVIDUAL freedom for those willing to expend the effort to achieve maintain it, but of “free society” wherein millions of people behave as the dreamer thinks they shd [should]. Such view is implicitly authoritarian – perhaps another reason why the best-intentioned political crusades have brought forth only more tyranny destruction. Consider the results of the Russian revolution, of the many “social reform” movements in the US of 50 yrs ago. Collective-movementism, in all its bizarre variations, is too flagrantly irrational to be explained just as an error in philosophy. The cause must be sought in psychology – for this highly recommend Eric Hoffer’s THE TRUE BELIEVER. Not surprisingly, most collective-movementists fail to achieve even their own personal ends. Most “mass movement” advocates end up as feuding little sects. Most “educationalists” talk only to themselves in their little magazines, books conferences; their utterances so dogmatic unrelated to reality as to repel most people. As an alternative to collective movementism/utopianism, advocate what call libertarian realism, the application phase of which is self-liberation. believe that freedom can be achieved by individuals/small groups regardless of how others choose to live. intend to demonstrate this not thru verbal manipulations but by becoming more and more free. But words may suffice to clear up some misconceptions regarding libertarian realism: In rejecting collective-movementism the libertarian realist does not shun association with others. Rather he recognizes that friendship love can be the coin of trade among close, compatible personal acquaintances. In rejecting utopianism the libertarian realist does not discard his ideals. Rather, he rejects trying to impose HIS ideals on others; he actualizes them in his own life. In rejecting “educationism” the libertarian realist does not oppose education. Rather, he rejects the notion that most of the population can be propagandized into values world views which clash with their living patterns. He recognizes that education-in-freedom self-liberation must proceed hand-in-hand. In rejecting crusades the libertarian realist does not neglect selling. Rather he refuses to try to sell an empty bag – which is not selling but preaching. He recognizes that he can SELL freedom to rational people as he is able to DELIVER it. (How many automobiles wd [would] be sold by someone who claimed his design wd [would] run 30 miles on pound of sage brush a qt [quart] of water, but who cd [could] not make his 1st delivery until 50 yrs after he had received 20 million pre-paid orders – with the automobile then to be given to everyone, whether they had paid for it or not?) In rejecting “revolution” the libertarian realist does not necessarily shun active resistance. Rather he rejects attempts to destroy the State per se. He uses force only to repel or deter attack upon freedomite client. (A private protection service does not attempt to eradicate stealing as mode of behavior; rather it prevents or discourages burglars from molesting its customers.) In rejecting “social change movements” the libertarian realist does not deny the possibility of social progress. Rather, he recognizes that social change comes only as the summation of individual changes. In rejecting utopian speculation the libertarian realist does not neglect theory. Rather, he recognizes that theory must relate to practice, otherwise it becomes mysticism. Help us spread the message of vonu! Donate monthly via Patreon and reap valuable benefits, such as monthly vonu email from newsletter authored by Kyle Rearden, monthly private Skype audio/video chats, and vonu merchandise! Click the image above to donate crypto-currencies: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, Ethereum, and Zcash! We are crypto-currency preferred podcast! Click here to find the show on your favorite podcatcher! Click the image below to get FREE copy of Rayo’s book, Vonu: The Search for Personal Freedom, in PDF or audiobook format!

Blockstream's Austin Hill: confidential blockchains can remove systemic risk from finance By Ian Allison Updated November 18, 2015 14:49 GMT Austin Hill, chief instigator of the highly regarded Blockstream project, believes confidentiality of data on blockchains will lead to hitherto unseen levels of confidence in the financial system itself.Hill, whose background is in zero knowledge proof applications and cypherpunk technologies for privacy in electronic cash, thinks blockchain users should be able to have their cake and eat it: the efficiency of a shared ledger system without sacrificing the privacy of transactions therein.Confidential Transactions is one element within the sidechains project, which Hill says has garnered a lot of interest from Wall Street. He explained how retaining privacy through some cutting edge encryption can leverage the real time audit capabilities of the blockchain, strengthening integrity generally in many use cases.Hill told IBTimes: "In some use cases you might want to prove a leverage ratio for an asset class and the issuing of new assets against a base asset. You may want to say - we do not have insurance contracts that are above and beyond our core assets, or we don't have fractional lending going on above a certain ratio."You could prove that without having to show what the underlying assets are. So using these technologies I think there's a lot of potential for removing systemic risk and improving confidence in our finance system."Blockstream's Confidential Transactions does not disclose the value of a transaction but allows the network to check that inputs add up to outputs and things balance; the network understands that encrypted 3 + encrypted 5 = encrypted 8. The actual amounts are only disclosed to the sender and the recipient, and potentially their auditor. It uses one-way homomorphic encryption which uses less in the way of computational power than two-way homomorphic encryption."There is a small size trade-off in terms of the size of transactions. But traditionally one-way homomorphic encryption is a lot more manageable than two-way homomorphic encryption which is still very bleeding edge science. In fact there is a range of values that you can hide using this technology. You can do multiplication, you can do greater than/less than, you can do all sorts of mathematical operations."This is a very new area of cryptography. It's based off a lot of other research and is a very powerful tool for striking an appropriate balance between corporate confidentiality and leveraging public blockchains. We have seen a lot of interest among major companies who want to use this technology.Blockstream aims to bring innovation to Bitcoin and follows the spirit of fairness of public blockchains. However, Hill and co-founder Dr Adam Back saw the huge potential beyond Bitcoin and Sidechains Elements have been developed accordingly."Sidechain Elements is like a Lego tool kit for building blockchains. It doesn't define what the end blockchain looks like, but it gives a whole bunch of new powerful tools that allow you to construct blockchains according to whatever rule set you desire. In some situations those are going to be public, openly available blockchains, in other situations they might be federated blockchains," said Hill.Corporates trading with multiple partners and transferring stock, bonds or loan products would constitute such a private blockchain environment, due to corporate confidentiality and protecting customers' records."In many cases you may not want to reveal that information. There is an information advantage to people who data mine the blockchain, who may be able to do things like front running of transactions, where they understand the flow of money or the flow of transactions and they can then predict certain moves in a market place."Blockstream recently announced Liquid, the first commercial deployment of sidechain technology which uses a pegged federated system to move bitcoin rapidly between exchanges in a rarefied environment of added privacy, without existing capital reserve requirements and risks.Hill said: "The whole concept of Sidechains is that you can build multiple blockchains that are all interoperable. Confidential Transactions could potentially be included in the Bitcoin blockchain but I suspect that would take a lot of time and would be a major change because all wallets, everything that talks to the Bitcoin blockchain would have to upgrade and there would be a very long period of testing."In its current form the target is not to roll it [Confidential Transactions] into the Bitcoin blockchain, but rather let sidechains like the Liquid chain be able to deploy it, such that certain trading partners may want to have a network that has different properties than the Bitcoin blockchain."Participants who choose, who are part of this network and consortium can automatically transfer bitcoin in a very rapid way, but they also have the assurance now that bitcoin transfers from one exchange to another are not publicly available for other people to monitor."You can either deploy it in a federated model or eventually, once we actually make some changes to Bitcoin core, you will be able to do it based on merged mining, where you leverage all the same hash rates," he added."Right now we use a federated two-way peg, and eventually in the future we look forward to a time when the two-way peg will just be a normal supported feature in Bitcoin. So you won't need to use a federated peg, you could just automatically move coins from one network to another and that would be supported by all the miners."Hill likes to use an analogy from the early days of the internet to illustrate Blockstream's goals. "Imagine you had to go to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the standards group, if you had a new idea for a service you wanted to build on TCP/IP - imagine you needed to get everyone to upgrade their protocol, every time you wanted to make a change. That would have completely slowed down and really hampered the speed at which we got things like streaming audio, steaming video, interactive websites."The idea is that people can now innovate in permissionless way. They can go out and deploy a sidechain that has the features they want, and we can let the free market decide which ones are popular."As well as Wall Street's banks, Hill has also seen interest from other areas of financial services such as insurance companies. He also said he was familiar with what the R3 project is doing adding that "many of their customers and R3 themselves are looking at our tool kit and looking at some of our opensource work to see if fits their use cases".Providing privacy to blockchains is a hot topic with a number of noteworthy players in the space such as MIT's Enigma project, ZeroCash and Hawk.Hill said: "This is an exciting time. We are at the very beginning of the rise of these types of technologies. Some of this has been researched in academia before, but now we have not only a proving ground, but in Sidechains we actually have a model that can say, how will you get these deployed?"Some are trying to bootstrap new networks, and that's a different approach. We believe fundamentally that it's much easier to build a parallel sidechain, where you are leveraging all of the existing work that's done and allow people to move coins in and out of that network freely. We think that gives a really good environment to make some of these technologies actually commercially viable."More about Blocksteam Blockstream announces Liquid movement of Bitcoin quickly and securely between exchanges Godfather of Bitcoin Adam Back explains how blockchain will prevent another banking crisis

Noelle Acheson is a veteran of corporate research and member of CoinDesk’s product group. The following article initially seemed in Institutional Crypto via CoinDesk, a publication for the institutional marketplace, with information and perspectives on crypto infrastructure delivered each and every Tuesday. Sign up here. ——————– Spare a idea for the monetary regulators: the American ones, without a paycheck right through the federal government shut-down and a whopping backlog looking ahead to once they in the end get again to paintings; and the European ones, with a fragmenting union, disjointed capital markets and a glut of latest regulations seeping during the labyrinthine halls of energy. Now, evaluate the very other approaches to crypto asset law from every aspect of the Atlantic. While the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is considering the larger image and dealing on drawing up sector-wide regulations, it’s also passing judgment and handing out punitive fines. Last 12 months noticed 18 virtual token-related actions from the SEC, in comparison to 5 in 2017. The European aspect, alternatively, appears to be extra eager about understanding how to think about the larger image. It’s fascinated with what construction the decision-making procedure will have to take. It’s forming committees. Recommendations are flying around the departmental divides, and arrangements are being made for the deliberations. It appears to be ceaselessly considering about regulating virtual property, quite than in truth doing so. As an instance, previous this month you will have spotted yet more calls for EU-wide crypto regulations, this time from each the European Banking Authority and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). This would possibly at the floor look like the cultural variations that movie fanatics are already conversant in: the quick, action-heavy method of the U.S. blockbusters vs. the considerate and cautious taste of the European indies. But it’s greater than that. The variations are in truth embedded in prison constructions and traditions and spotlight the unfathomable issue of attaining settlement on how the brand new elegance of crypto property will have to be regulated. European legislation is in response to Napoleonic code, or “civil law,” through which the whole lot is regulated via pre-established legislation or administrative resolution. Codified statutes predominate, and law is continuously much more complete than it must be, which additionally makes it much less agile. Its goal, alternatively, is to supply a uniform algorithm to hide all situations and to foster harmonious coordination. The U.S. runs on a “common law” device, through which judges have a better position in resolution making and regulations are made on a case-by-case foundation, continuously (however no longer all the time) in response to earlier rulings. Another giant distinction is that the European Union has sovereign realms to respond to to. Many of the selections taken via the EU must be ratified via the true international locations, which provides them much more scope to undermine Europe-wide tasks, relying on their nationwide pastime. Getting issues completed on a top-down, regional foundation could be very, very tricky. What’s extra, in Europe securities legislation remains to be, at the complete, nationwide. The push against capital markets union is shifting slowly, despite being some of the priorities of the present mandate: of the 13 foundational legislative texts offered via the fee since 2014, only three were followed. And time is working out: the present mandate leads to May, and the urgency fuelled via expanding worry over Brexit and the opportunity of some other monetary disaster does no longer appear to have speeded up the tempo of development. In the U.S., the connection between the states and the federal businesses is more practical. An extended historical past of enforcement of the appliance of federal rules via the Supreme Court has introduced a veil of interoperability to the patchwork of state law. So, comprehensible frustrations over the loss of readability at the a part of the U.S. regulators and their sluggish, case-by-case method will have to be tempered with an appreciation that a minimum of they aren’t as bulky as their European opposite numbers. That, blended with the sheer dimension of the U.S. capital markets, approach that each one eyes are on what steps the SEC will take relating to crypto property. Yet that’s to not say that the European Union isn’t taking crypto property significantly. The file launched via ESMA final week published the result of a months-long survey of member states’ regulators, in a bid to spot not unusual definitions and parameters relating to virtual tokens. It additionally highlighted gaps in present law and steered measures to near them. The regional securities frame known, alternatively, that most of the attainable answers have been beyond its remit, implying that exact agreed-upon measures have been nonetheless some distance off. Meanwhile, we’re prone to see person international locations in Europe take tentative steps towards permitting crypto asset issuance on regulated exchanges. Yet the diminished dimension of the native markets and the fragmented regulations governing exchanges and custody are prone to constrain tokens issued in Europe, particularly since community results – which depend on a huge marketplace – are a elementary a part of token valuations. In the U.S., however, 2019 is prone to convey a flurry of movements and statements from the SEC, as unregistered securities choices are punished, list proposals are tested and readability is given as to expectancies going ahead. While this may increasingly affect different securities regulators all over the world and edge the sphere against a extra complete framework, regional variations and nationwide issues make that most definitely wishful considering. Yet even disappointing development is healthier than none. The structural stumbling blocks that obstruct the great intentions of sprawling financial blocs, and the diminished dimension of extra agile and “crypto-friendly” jurisdictions, will consolidate the U.S. position as some of the extra safe and liquid markets for virtual tokens. And its regulators gets the danger to set the precedent for crypto asset law going ahead. Let’s simply hope they may be able to get again to paintings quickly. Like what you learn? Give us one like or proportion it for your palsoriginal post… You have reacted on "Oceans Apart: Crypto Regulation in the US and EU" Japan Not Considering Approval of Bitcoin ETF, FSA... Coinbase Hires New Compliance Chief for UK Operati... 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Required fields are marked *Comment Name * State of Lightning: What’s the Path for Network Adoption in 2019? This is a visualization of the lightning community taken at 22:29 (UTC) on Friday. Created by way of blockchain analytics startup 1ML, the snapshot represents all the nodes working lightning tool and developing public fee channels atop the bitcoin blockchain. Looks complicated, proper? And consider it or now not, this community is getting steadily higher on a daily basis in keeping with 1ML. In the previous 30 days on my own, the choice of lightning fee channels has greater by way of kind of 36 %, bringing to general to kind of 22,000 channels. Active lightning nodes have in a similar fashion shot up – over 16 % in contemporary days – and at the moment sit down at round 5,690 allotted nodes. Launched in beta last March, the layer-2 bills era is actively maintained and advanced by way of over six other building groups unfold out around the globe. These come with Eclair by way of Acinq, Lightning Network Daemon (LND) by way of Lightning Labs, c-lightning by way of Blockstream, ptarmigan by way of Nayuta, Rust-Lightning by way of Matt Corallo and Lit by way of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative (DCI). And even outdoor of those six, Pierre-Marie Padiou, co-founder and CEO of Acinq, predicts there are part a dozen extra out “in the wild.” Highlighting that the codebase to construct lightning purchasers is open-source and to be had to any individual “without asking permission,” Padiou added {that a} record of 30 some-odd enhancements to the community have been agreed upon by way of builders throughout a summit in Adelaide, Australia November of closing yr. “Now, after the summit, the work will continue to formalize the decisions taken during the summit, and implement them in the clients so that they can be deployed,” defined Christian Decker – core tech engineer at Blockstream – in a former interview with CoinDesk.  Since November, one characteristic has already been launched by way of CTO of Lightning Labs Olaoluwa Osuntokun enabling “the ability to send a payment to a destination without first needing to have an invoice,” as detailed on GitHub. Explaining that every shopper workforce “has their own favorite features,” Decker added that extra adjustments to the community can be launched in “incremental” steps rising piecemeal over coming weeks and months. As such, lightning builders are constructive concerning the endured luck of the lightning community, anticipating expansion traits noticed in 2018 to proceed to upward thrust in 2019. “We have been seeing tremendous activity during the past few months and are confident that this trend is going to amplify in 2019.” According to blockchain analytics web site P2SH.data, the volume of bitcoin despatched via lightning channels since closing June has skyrocketed from not up to 25 BTC to 578 BTC. State of the lightning community on bitcoin mainnet. Source: www.p2sh.info  Speaking to bigger adoption figures in 2019, Decker advised CoinDesk that the important thing in the back of growing “a very active and engaged community … building and improving lightning” would come all the way down to its endured doable to “change how we do payments in the future.” Indeed, the principle use case of the lightning community as described at the authentic webpage is “lighting-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times.” Transactions the use of the lightning networks takes seconds to finish, in comparison to the nine or so mins – on reasonable, no less than, with fluctuations in accordance with block variance and miner good fortune – for transactions at once at the bitcoin blockchain, in keeping with knowledge from bitinfocharts.com. And whilst bills for items and services and products the use of a debit or bank card is finished with relative ease in maximum advanced economies, restrictions to such conventional banking services and products is a commonplace battle for marginalized populations inside of (and outdoor) first global nations. According to a global map of the general public lightning channels unfold out around the globe, lots of the servers working at the lightning community are concentrated in North America and Europe. World map of the lightning community. Source: https://explorer.acinq.co Speaking to this consumer demographic, Padiou defined to CoinDesk that whilst bitcoin’s building group has “historically been stronger in North America and Europe,” the nodes being depicted at the map didn’t display the choice of cellular customers for lightning, who could also be “a bit more evenly distributed.” “I consider that the language barrier is continuously underestimated, and tasks like [Reading Bitcoin] which offer translations to Chinese, Japanese and Korean [people] are very helpful.” From Decker’s standpoint, the map of public lightning channels “matches pretty closely with the map of Internet users, or the map of deployed bitcoin nodes” which is “to be expected since those are the regions that are most likely to know about bitcoin, have some bitcoins, and [are] testing the software.” Nevertheless, Decker affirmed that builders are devoted in 2019 “to extend the reach of bitcoin and lightning globally.” “I’m not aware of any specific plans to foster adoption in certain regions specifically [but] we’d definitely welcome any user from those regions, and do our best to support them,” stated Decker. Since March of closing yr, the lightning community has noticed the choice of new fee channels develop from kind of 1,500 channels to over 20,000. Growth of lighting fixtures community channels through the years. Source: https://bitcoinvisuals.com For now, there aren’t particular numeric goals at the time table for lightning builders to achieve by way of the tip of 2019, even though as discussed there’s a lengthy record of options geared toward increasing community capability anticipated for roll-out in months to return. Standing for “Basis of Lightning Technology,” BOLT 1.Zero is a commonplace, open-source repository of code that accommodates the entire important technical necessities or specs for customers to take part within the lightning community. Not to be puzzled with BOLT – a lightning-inspired zcash implementation of the community launched August closing yr by way of Dr. Ayo Akinyele  – BOLT 1.1 is the envisioned improve to BOLT 1.Zero that may surround the brand new building paintings going into lightning. Speaking to CoinDesk in a former interview, Osuntokun said that the precise roadmap for BOLT 1.1 was once “difficult to put estimates on … as it largely comes down to the prioritization of the various development team for each implementation.” “[Clients] will implement features in parallel, according to their own prioritization and to the extent that suits them best … some implementations may choose to omit some of the features,” added Decker. The 5 options that Osuntokun highlighted with CoinDesk as possessing the “biggest impact to the end-user” contains: 1. Splicing: Currently, every fee channel possesses a set capability simplest ready to ship the volume of bitcoin to start with staked on the outset of channel advent. However, within the tournament {that a} consumer wish to build up or lower channel capability, they require opening a completely new channel with the similar contributors. Requiring the same quantity of charges and affirmation wait time as a typical bitcoin transaction, splicing guarantees customers are ready to keep away from the preliminary ache of constructing a brand new channel by way of making changes to the capability of present ones. 2. AMP: Standing for “Atomic Multipath Payments,” AMP in keeping with Osuntokun items “a massive boost in usability” for the lightning community. Instead of bills being routed alongside a novel trail at the community, AMP permits customers to ship via fragments of bills via a couple of public channels within the community. Additionally, as identified by way of c-lightning developer Rusty Russell, AMP will also be leveraged by way of customers as a “bill splitting” characteristic when making lightning bills to a unmarried birthday celebration from a couple of other assets. 
3. Wumbo Channels: Named after an episode in an American youngsters’s caricature display known as Spongebob Squarepants the place starfish personality Patrick makes use of the time period “wumbo” to indicate will increase in measurement, wumbo channels seek advice from an build up at the most choice of bitcoin that may be despatched inside of a lightning fee channel. Put in position by way of lightning builders for protection causes, the utmost capability of a channel at time of writing is 0.16 BTC or kind of $570. 4. Static Address for/to faraway outputs: Aimed at making improvements to “disaster-recovery scenarios” at the lightning community, Padiou explains that static addresses be certain simple fund restoration for customers. “This feature – the static information address – means that with only the seed to your lightning wallet you would be able to recover the main balance in your channel,” stated Padiou. The seed being a mnemonic restoration word connected to all lightning (and bitcoin) wallets, customers these days require each this data and channel-specific data to recuperate misplaced price range. 5. 2p-ECDSA: Perhaps the good improve within the eyes of Osuntokun, 2p-ECDSA would camouflage the transactions performed at the bitcoin blockchain to create lightning fee channels. At provide, transactions opening and shutting a fee channel are simply differentiable from transactions on-chain. This growth as soon as carried out would upload an additional stage of anonymity for customers by way of making lightning channel process tougher to differentiate from conventional bitcoin bills process. Speaking to the entire expected adjustments to the BOLT repository, Padiou highlighted: “We didn’t have to change very important, very low-level design decisions … It’s very good news because we could have made big mistakes and could have had to start over but it’s not the case. Going to 1.1 is just building upon the already working first version.” Through the lens of the improvement time table set for 2019, the concern, then, in Padiou’s thoughts, is “reliability in all its aspects” to inspire endured adoption of the tech. “A payment network needs to ‘just work.’ It only has value if it allows you to send and receive money when you need it,” Padiou contended, including: “The more reliable it gets, the more companies with large user base will be ready to support it.” Like what you learn? Give us one like or percentage it for your palsoriginal post… You have reacted on "State of Lightning: What’s the Path for Network..." The Time Is Now: We Need an Active Approach to Blo... Who’s Left, Joined and Almost Joined Coinbase Sinc... Hong Kong Stock Exchange CEO Casts Doubt on Crypto... MimbleWimble: Is Bitcoin’s Curse Looming on The Ho... Cardano (ADA) Founder: Crypto Prices Could Take 10... Op-Ed: Why the Bitcoin Bubble Burst is Good for Cr... Dow Futures Prep for Opening Bell Plunge as Bitcoi... The ‘Thirdening’ Approaches: How to Watch Ethereum... Ford Touts Growth in North America, Downplays Loss... jQuery('.yuzo_related_post .yuzo_wraps').equalizer({ columns : '> div' }); A buying and selling magazine is without doubt one of the main components that separates newbie buyers from pros. Trading journals are supposed to trace the efficiency and reasoning at the back of all trades. They can help within the essential considering and decision-making procedure by means of tough a justification for each and every unmarried business any person makes. In maximum circumstances, main buying and selling corporations require their analysts to stay a business magazine or notes outlining their reasoning and the technical setup into which they’ve entered.  Ultimately, buying and selling journals are supposed to lend a hand establish patterns in a dealer’s method that lead to losses by means of highlighting the mistakes in a dealer’s judgment. The end-goal is to create a procedure for doing in order that is each clear and unfastened from bias, taking into consideration the type of mirrored image that makes a really perfect dealer. The extra you report and write issues down, the better it’s to retain and interpret that piece of knowledge being able to rule out inconsistencies on your studying.  The identical will also be stated for conserving monitor your trades all through the yr with the method of bettering your mindset – geared against successful small winning stakes and lowering private mistakes. Your psychological state on the time is, due to this fact, some of the 3 main components you must come with on your magazine. You’ll wish to define what sort of emotional state you had been in while you entered a business. If you can not persistently follow a ‘confident’ stance at the trades you’re making, then there should be some a part of your technique and technical setup you don’t agree with. For instance, let’s say you entered into an extended business with 10 % of the grubstake on Monday and wrote “unsure/high-risk business/cautiously bullish within the mentality segment. By Friday, that business is shaving off 30 % of your buying and selling account. A glance again on the buying and selling magazine will inform what went flawed. To get started with, you invested 10 % of your overall budget in a high-risk business. Seasoned buyers check dangerous waters with small bets and continuously take hedges with the intention to decrease losses. Simply put, your buying and selling magazine is like retaining up a replicate and tracking the irrational exuberance and shortage of control regulations. Just ask your self: “am I entering into the right trade feeling confident and does it favor my stringent self-applied ruleset?” The extra you start to observe writing and recording, the extra you’ll understand your mindset starts to switch with it as you expand agree with on your personal buying and selling taste. This brings us to our 2nd standards each and every magazine wishes: business efficiency. This might appear somewhat obtrusive in the beginning look, as all buying and selling journals must possess an access/go out place, the placement measurement, and date in addition to benefit/loss and any forestall losses you carried out. However, oftentimes the technical reasoning at the back of the business is overlooked and this is without doubt one of the extra an important components in business efficiency. Assuming your bias is checked and your rulesets lend a hand to split your emotional state from doing the rest drastic – akin to going all-in for ‘Lambo gains’ – then the reasoning at the back of your trades stand as crucial justification on why you entered them within the first position. If from a technical viewpoint, you noticed a falling wedge adopted by means of a big uptick in rising bullish quantity and also you took an extended business feeling assured, then that might lend a hand to streamline your essential considering and once more spotlight spaces the place you’re more potent whilst indicating different spaces on your research that want growth must you lose. From a fundamentalist standpoint, it’s possible you’ll want to observe sure main information bulletins or an organization hiring a specific CEO with a very good monitor report that might in the end impact an organization’s final analysis. This brings us to our 3rd standards all nice buying and selling journals must possess: marketplace stipulations. The stipulations define precisely what the present state of a specific marketplace was once in on the time while you entered your business. This is vital as it is helping you start to spotlight patterns on your buying and selling taste which are inconsistent with marketplace situation. If you map out days during which you’re feeling assured buying and selling, then, by means of all way, observe the marketplace stipulations down and provides a coarse define of what was once taking place on that given day. If you’re buying and selling greater than 2-Four occasions a month on unsure days, then possibly it’s perfect you allow that exact marketplace on my own% of buyers propagate bearish sentiment, capitulation has happened. As the trade now is aware of, this wasn’t the case, as BTC fell to a every year low of $3,150 in mid-December. And as such, talking to Bloomberg at 2018’s finish, the trade player made it transparent that he wouldn’t make time-bound, specific value predictions at some point. But, it sort of feels like there have been some nuances to that self-imposed rule. In a up to date Fox Business interview, Lee touched at the prediction once more, for the apparently umpteenth time. The Fundstrat consultant that the truth that BTC didn’t achieve $25,000 through 2018’s finish used to be a “huge disappointment,” noting that yesteryear used to be a yr of robust adjustment for the wider crypto house, particularly with regards to the cave in of ICOs and the impact that they performed on Bitcoin. When requested if he may just retrace his steps and retract his prediction, Lee strangely stated that the $25,000 is “actually a fair value for Bitcoin,” however made it transparent that he wasn’t creating a time-bound forecast. Backing his name, Lee famous that BTC has had 70% pullbacks up to now, and survived, even thrived. He added that as crypto turns into a viable asset magnificence, BTC is most likely going to guide a transfer to the upside. Like what you learn? Give us one like or proportion it on your palsoriginal post… You have reacted on "Tom Lee: Bitcoin (BTC) At $25,000 Is “Fair,” Bu..." 10 Reasons Bitcoin Won’t Ever ‘Go to Zero’ as Davo... Bitcoin Price Not Oversold at $3,000? Analyst Says... ‘Decentralized Airbnb’ Starts Charging Fees as ICO... Cryptocurrency Creditors Making a Killing Despite ... Why the BitTorrent Airdrops Will Benefit the Value... Here is BiTorrent’s Official List of Exchanges and... Traders: Bitcoin Price Recovery Above $3,400 May L... ‘Big Bitcoin Heist’ Ringleader Jailed for Massive ... jQuery('.yuzo_related_post .yuzo_wraps').equalizer({ columns : '> div' }); Edward Woodford is the co-founder and CEO of Seed CX, which, provides a certified change for institutional buying and selling and agreement of spot virtual asset merchandise and plans to supply a marketplace for CFTC-regulated virtual asset derivatives. The following is an unique contribution to CoinDesk’s 2018 Year in Review. While 2018’s falling bitcoin costs led many observers to put in writing off virtual belongings altogether, the correction must in reality assist drive the marketplace as a complete to mature. That maturation is strictly what the distance wishes to draw extra institutional buyers, whose arrival en masse will reinforce the marketplace for everybody through expanding liquidity, each immediately, by way of the price range they make investments, and not directly, by way of the truth in their adoption. Their access will sign to different buyers that the marketplace is strong and devoted. Between 2015 and overdue 2017, when the cost of bitcoin was once ceaselessly emerging, there was once bullish euphoria available in the market. Traders have been prepared to depend on little-known or unregulated exchanges regardless of the hazards – the prospective upside made the ones dangers profitable. In the early days, virtual belongings offered a novel state of affairs through standard buying and selling requirements: the operational threat (threat of loss from insufficient procedures, safety, and insurance policies used to habits operations) of buying and selling was once more than the marketplace threat (threat of economic loss because of the existing stipulations of a marketplace an investor is invested in). Loss of a few cash (or virtual belongings) right here and there to hacking, for instance, might be outweighed through the truth that returns have been astronomical and buyers have been detached to the cost of bitcoin and different virtual belongings because it was once expanding, exponentially, in an overly brief time period. For instance, bitcoin skilled a price increase of 460+ percent over the six-month length from July 1, 2017 ($2,492.60) to January 1, 2018 ($14,112.20). Trading on platforms with very prime operational dangers might be fully logical the usage of an “adjusted” Sharpe Ratio, a risk-weighted measure. The adjusted Sharpe Ratio would take into accout the go back of making an investment in bitcoin over a time period and the risk-free fee of making an investment in a risk-free asset (akin to a U.S. Ttreasury bond) and resolve the chance of the portfolio (marketplace and operational dangers) to resolve the risk-adjusted go back. Using the instance above, taking a risk-free fee of roughly 1.five %, the portfolio’s go back, which exceeds 460 %, and the portfolio’s threat of, let’s say, 135 % (35 % for marketplace threat and 100 % for operational threat), would yield a Sharpe Ratio of roughly 3. This Sharpe Ratio would constitute a stupendous risk-weighted go back because the go back exceeds the chance through a a couple of of 3. Today, returns have normalized for arbitrage alternatives as liquidity has greater throughout exchanges. Those who hired a purely lengthy technique and loved exponential returns would now be experiencing losses if using the similar technique during the last six months. Aside from a purely directional technique, buyers will inform you that “easy returns,” akin to easy arbitrage alternatives (purchasing the similar asset on one change and promoting it at a miles upper worth on every other) have disappeared. When the returns they’re seeing are nearer to what they’d be expecting from extra established asset categories, buyers’ willingness to just accept the op-risk, or attainable of losses from hacking and different preventable reasons, is a great deal lowered. In brief, the exchange to the risk-reward ratio implies that exchanges are not given a go for deficient operations, lax safety, troubling conflicts of hobby, and inadequate oversight. For instance, maximum exchanges use a unmarried pockets to carry belongings for all individuals. Even with the majority of belongings held in chilly garage, a unmarried pockets creates a tempting goal for hackers and different criminals. Now, we’re seeing extra exchanges introduce segmented pockets infrastructure (as at Seed CX, the place we create a devoted pockets for every change player). This angle shift method exchanges that provide devoted wallets and different security-focused options – those who have the bottom operational threat – will draw in extra institutional buyers, who should believe now not handiest monetary and operational dangers but additionally dangers to their popularity when buying and selling virtual belongings. It additionally method exchanges have to supply the surveillance and account infrastructures required to stop inefficient or suspect buying and selling: industry signals, circuit breakers, order e-book audit trails, and so forth. As we discussed above, adjustments available in the market since 2017’s rally imply that “long-only” methods are not workable and “easy return” alternatives are a lot more difficult to come back through as a result of extra teams are chasing the similar alternatives. For instance, DeVere Capital just lately announced the release of an actively controlled cryptocurrency fund that will likely be excited about arbitrage alternatives between exchanges. This method exchanges that need to draw in and stay buyers should construct the infrastructure to supply extra subtle buying and selling methods, together with swaps, derivatives, and choices, to not point out mixtures of the ones and see markets. The transformation of the marketplace infrastructure nonetheless has an overhang of its historical past. In the primary 3 quarters of 2018, hackers stole $927 million of cryptocurrency from exchanges and different buying and selling platforms. And whilst many exchanges nonetheless fall brief on security features, others are making vital strides ahead. In addition to segmented wallets, we’re seeing larger use of multi-signature safety (at Seed CX we require two keys, generated through unbiased events, to get entry to wallets), extra enforcement of whitelisted withdrawal IP addresses, and the greater pursuit of regulatory licenses. Two years in the past, the doorway of institutional buyers to the virtual asset house gave the impression far away and not likely. Today, due to falling costs, institutional buyers don’t seem to be handiest getting into the marketplace however are an increasing number of dictating the phrases of {the marketplace} – to the advantage of everybody buying and selling in it. Glass ball and dollars symbol by way of Shutterstock. Like what you learn? Give us one like or proportion it in your buddiesoriginal post… You have reacted on "Stranger Things: The Upside of Down Bitcoin Prices" Augur Interface Veil Acquires Search Engine for Pr... China First, EU Next? Donald Trump Faces New Major... State of Lightning: What’s the Path for Network Ad... Apple is Not Learning From its Mistake: 3 iPhone M... Interview: Crypto Exchange CEO on Bringing Bitcoin... The Finance Prof. Who Says Bitcoin’s Going to ‘Bit... ‘Bitcoin is a Garbage Network’: Fortune 500 Softwa... Dow Futures Prep for Opening Bell Plunge as Bitcoi... South Africa: Two Arrested for Kidnapping Boy, Dem... jQuery('.yuzo_related_post .yuzo_wraps').equalizer({ columns : '> div' }); Free Markets Don’t Create Free People: Bitcoin’s Tech Success Masks Its Failure James Bridle is a author running throughout applied sciences and disciplines and writer of “The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.” His paintings may also be discovered at http://jamesbridle.com. The following paintings will seem as an creation to “The White Paper by Satoshi Nakamoto” to be revealed through Ignota Books.  For extra on bitcoin’s 10th anniversary, take a look at our new interactive function Bitcoin At 10.  It’s tricky to grasp when people first began securing or ‘encrypting’ messages to cover them from undesirable readers; the apply will have to, through human nature, be nearly as outdated as written language, even supposing examples are sparse. We know, for instance, that Julius Caesar used a easy type of letter substitution to keep up a correspondence together with his generals, transferring every personality 3 steps down the alphabet with the intention to scramble it. The historical Greeks, in particular the military-minded Spartans, used a tool referred to as a scytale, which allowed a hidden textual content to be learn through wrapping a strip of parchment round a cylinder of a selected dimension in order that the letters coated up in a selected order. Tales of the Greco-Persian Wars are filled with secret messages, now not least the tale of Histiaeus, a commander who, in line with Herodotus, shaved the pinnacle of his favourite slave and had it tattooed with a message urging revolution within the town of Miletus. When the slave’s hair grew again he was once dispatched to town, with the directions that the recipient will have to shave him as soon as once more and skim the message there printed. Such excessive measures had been taken because of the concern of presidency surveillance, a justification incessantly cited these days. The Persian king managed the roadways, and had the facility to inspect any message – and messenger – that travelled on them. From the very starting, cryptography has been each an army era and a device for undermining present powers. Cryptography’s price as an army instrument is double-edged, after all. Like different guns, its effectiveness depends upon the facility of 1 aspect to outgun the opposite. For a very long time, this steadiness most commonly held, with efforts through one aspect to crack the secrets and techniques of the opposite forming long-running and engaging backstories to many standard conflicts. It was once an act of decryption that introduced the United States into the First World War when British intelligence services and products decoded the notorious Zimmermann Telegram proposing an alliance between Germany and Mexico. In the final months of the struggle, the cracking of Germany’s ADFGVX cipher through French cryptanalysts enabled the Allies to stave off a last German offensive on Paris. Cryptography was once first mass-manufactured within the Second World War, within the type of the Third Reich’s Enigma machines, after which digitized within the type of the Colossus, the arena’s first programmable digital pc, evolved to wreck the German army’s Lorenz cipher. The wild invention and supreme good fortune of the Bletchley codebreakers over their Nazi adversaries may also be learn as the primary of many circumstances of the virtual overcoming the bodily; the Lorenz SZ42 was once a large, advanced device of rotating cogs and wheels which defied codebreakers for years. By the top of the struggle, it was once utterly readable through an digital device. The secrecy across the Colossus itself supposed that its life had little affect on long term pc design, nevertheless it marks the purpose at which cryptography modified radically in nature – as a result of what’s virtual is in the end distributable, even supposing it will take the expansion of the web within the 1990s for this to change into extensively understood. In 1991, a pc safety researcher referred to as Phil Zimmermann created a programme referred to as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which enabled customers of house computer systems to strongly encrypt electronic mail messages the usage of a mixture of a lot of well known algorithms. What grew to become PGP from any other selfmade device product into one of the contentious artifacts of the last decade wasn’t the way it was once made, however the way it was once disbursed. Since the Second World War, international locations have been compelled to legally outline cryptography as a weapon; like another munition, cryptography was once matter to one thing referred to as the Arms Export Control Act. At the time of PGP’s liberate, any cryptosystem which used keys – the strings of randomly generated numbers which secured hidden messages – longer than 40 bits required a licence for export. PGP used keys which have been 128 bits lengthy and nearly not possible to crack on the time, and this made it exactly the type of era that US government sought after to forestall falling into overseas palms. Zimmermann by no means supposed to export PGP, however, fearing that it will be banned outright, he began distributing it to pals, announcing, “I sought after to give a boost to democracy, to make certain that Americans may continue to protect their privacy.” Shortly after that, PGP discovered its means onto the web after which in another country. In 1993, the USA authorities began a proper investigation into Zimmermann – for exporting munitions with out a license. As wisdom of the case unfold, it was a flashpoint for early virtual activists who insisted at the rights of everybody to offer protection to their very own secrets and techniques and their very own personal lives. The freedoms and risks of code was the topic of earnest debate, and in any other foreshadowing of long term virtual taste, of hacks, pranks and stunts. Zimmermann had the device’s supply code published as a hardback ebook, permitting any individual to buy a duplicate and kind up the device themselves. As he was once keen on mentioning, export of goods repeatedly regarded as munitions – bombs, weapons and planes – may well be limited, however books had been safe through the First Amendment. Variants at the RSA set of rules – the 128-bit procedure on the middle of PGP – had been published on T-shirts bearing the message ‘This shirt is classified as a munition’. Some went additional, having strains of code tattooed onto their hands and chests. The Crypto Wars, as they was identified, galvanized a group across the perception of private – slightly than nationwide – safety, which tied into the utopian creativeness of a brand new, extra loose, extra equivalent and extra simply society growing in our on-line world. Another building that brought on standard public disquiet was once the USA authorities’s proposal for a chipset for cell phones. The Clipper chip was once designed through the NSA to supply encryption for customers whilst permitting regulation enforcement to listen in on communications – a state of affairs that was once ripe for abuse, both through corrupt officers or through professional hackers.