Who knows about Bitcoin?

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iWriteStuff
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

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Silver wrote: October 13th, 2017, 8:27 am
iWriteStuff wrote: October 13th, 2017, 8:02 am
Silver wrote: October 13th, 2017, 4:38 am # Name Symbol Market Cap Price Circulating Supply Volume (24h) % 1h % 24h % 7d
1 Bitcoin BTC $94,420,065,004 $5681.03 16,620,237 $3,783,240,000 -0.26% 9.94% 29.55%
2 Ethereum ETH $30,937,601,223 $325.37 95,084,369 $1,018,150,000 -0.06% 5.86% 8.48%
3 Ripple XRP $9,438,775,390 $0.244525 38,600,451,446 * $375,325,000 -0.96% -5.94% 2.70%
I dare you to have a Satoshi Giveaway contest - person who can accurately guess the closing price of BTC as of Friday evening gets 250K Satoshis or something ;)
That might get more people thinking about cryptocurrencies. I wonder if everyone is shying away from the discussion due to lack of understanding. Even if investing in the coins is not of interest, the technology behind them will have growing influence in our lives.
I think it's fairly common to shy away from something as unfamiliar and intangible as cryptocurrencies. People don't understand it until they use it.

That being said, the daily swings in price could make it a very interesting contest.

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iWriteStuff
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

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Interesting read over at our favorite hangout!

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-1 ... ll-bitcoin
The One Way Governments Could Actually Kill Bitcoin...

Uncle Sam does have one weapon… one way they could potentially disrupt Bitcoin.

Some day the US government and Federal Reserve might actually wake up and realize that crypto is the future.

And when that day comes, the obvious tactic would be to create their own version of the Blockchain that uses “crypto-dollars”.

Cryptodollars would be equivalent to US dollars. So $1 in physical cash = $1 in your bank account = 1 cryptodollar.

Cryptodollars would be legal tender and accepted everywhere in the country– Wal Mart, Amazon, etc., but without any of the wild gyrations and fluctuations that we see in the Bitcoin price.

The introduction of cryptodollars would clearly have an impact on the demand for Bitcoin.

Hardcore users would certainly still hold Bitcoin, so it wouldn’t go to zero.

But casual users might very well abandon Bitcoin in favor of cryptodollars due to the convenience of being able to spend them anywhere.

The added benefit to the US government is that a crypto-dollar blockchain would solidify the dollar’s status as the international reserve currency.

So they definitely have compelling reasons to do this.

Now, it might never happen. Or it could take years.

But the possibility exists. So keep that in mind before going ‘all in’ on crypto.
This is the end game I believe will happen eventually! Co-opting by the three part axis of evil - Govt, Private Banks, Central Banks.

Clarifying remarks: I bought some Bitcoin today for the first time ever.

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-1 ... n-must-die

Myths About Bitcoin That Must Die

Oct 16, 2017 10:00 PM

Authored by Marcuss via ValueWalk.com,

If you know anyone who spent some time in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s (or if you did), ask him or her about Life cereal, Mikey, and pop rocks.

You may get a look of bewilderment. Or, you may get a knowing chuckle and an “Oh yeah, what happened to him?”

To briefly explain… in a television commercial (back when everyone watched the same half-dozen TV channels), a cute boy named Mikey is urged to try a sugary breakfast cereal concoction called Life. To the amazement of the older doubting Thomases egging him on, Mikey approved of Life, spawning the catchphrase, “He likes it!”

Then – years later – the rumor surfaced that the actor who played Mikey had (after surviving Life cereal) eaten an bag of Pop Rocks candy, which were little candies that snapped and crackled on your tongue, chased by a can of Coca Cola. And, word was, little Mikey’s stomach exploded from the mixture of the two heavily carbonated substances. It was a story that had just the right mix of gossip, speculation and shock value to take on a life of its own.

Of course, it never happened. (Mikey grew up to become an ad executive.) But it was a good story, and one that destroyed the Pop Rocks industry. (You can read more about Mikey and what actually happened to him here.)

I bring up Mikey because the world of bitcoin is plagued by similiarly silly – and pernicious – rumors and misinformation. But while Mikey/Life cereal/Pop Rocks mythology was (mostly) harmless fun, bitcoin mistruths can cost you money… in the form of big opportunity cost.



The truth is, a lot of what you read about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is simply wrong. I’ve seen articles in the likes of the Wall Street Journal that are factually incorrect. And now that the bitcoin price has soared above US$5,000 – the media seems determined to “warn” investors about the dangers of bitcoin.

(With Stansberry Research, we’re going to be holding a webinar on Wednesday night (US EST)/Thursday morning (Asia) that are going to be exploding some of those bitcoin myths… you can learn more about it here.)

So today, I’m debunking bitcoin’s biggest myths to set the record straight…

1. Bitcoin is not real money

The fundamental characteristics an asset must have to be considered money are:

Uniformity: In other words, every “dollar” or bitcoin is the same as the next one. When you’re talking about using seashells or cows as currency, uniformity is hard to achieve.

Divisibility: Dollars and bitcoin need to be divisible, broken up into small increments to cover a wide range of value transactions. Cows? Not so much, unless you’re hosting a barbecue.

Portability: Your currency must be easy to transfer and store.

Durability: Older, agriculturally-based forms of money had a shelf life. Gold is the ultimate when it comes to durability. Paper notes deteriorate.

Limited Supply: A currency is worthless if there’s no scarcity to it. In our office here in Hong Kong we have a 500 million dollar note issued by the Zimbabwean government – it’s a simple reminder of what ultimately happens when governments try to endlessly print their way to prosperity.

Acceptability: to be considered money, the asset has to be widely accepted. People all over the world will take U.S. dollars. They won’t however take Turkish lira.
Bitcoin holds all of these characteristics with the exception of acceptability – although that is rapidly changing. Japan passed a law earlier this year that made bitcoin acceptable as legal tender.

And the digital element of bitcoin? Well, more than 90 percent of all money that exists today around the world is not even physical… it’s purely digital, existing only on computer servers.

2. Bitcoin can be hacked

In certain circles, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general are synonymous with hacking – thanks to some high-profile hacks of cryptocurrency exchanges – like Mt. Gox in 2014 or Bithumb in 2017.

In an area so nascent, of course there are hackers looking to exploit individuals’ inexperience, or find technological loopholes. Hackers have always and will always be a risk to ANYTHING where value resides on a computer network.

But bitcoin is one of the most secure assets an individual can own – it’s just that it’s 100 percent up to the individual to secure it themselves.

Cryptocurrency exchanges have been hacked. They are third-party platforms where you have no visibility as to how customers’ digital assets are being secured. That’s why I’ve said repeatedly that you shouldn’t keep large amounts of bitcoin on an exchange because when it’s on an exchange you don’t own it, they do.

And when it comes to hacking, you are far, far more at risk from other cybersecurity vulnerabilities – just look at U.S. credit reporting agency Equifax who announced recently that the Social Security numbers along with other personal information of millions of Americans may have been compromised.

That’s a catastrophic breach. And this kind of thing happens all the time. So there’s no use worrying about bitcoin “hacking” when you can take full personal control and accountability for securing it yourself (rather than be at the mercy of an incompetent third party).

3. Bitcoin is used by criminals

“Bitcoin’s core use remains what’s it’s always been: paying for drugs or extortion fees on the Internet.”

That’s a quote from a recent Fortune magazine article.

The suggestion that bitcoin’s core use is for buying drugs and extortion is nothing new – and it’s part of the media’s ongoing narrative. It’s understandable in many respects.

After all, there have been recent ransomware hack/virus attacks that demand users pay a small ransom in bitcoin to unlock their computers.

And who can forget the FBI’s 2013 takedown of Silk Road.

Silk Road was an online marketplace used to sell illegal drugs, dirty pictures, and stolen plastic.

These criminals thought that because bitcoin operated independently of the U.S. government, their activity couldn’t be traced.

But they were proved wrong once the government shut Silk Road down, and made an example of this illegal marketplace.

You see, it turns out bitcoin is nowhere near as anonymous and untraceable as cash.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous. That is to say, a bitcoin address can be tied to a particular user. You may not know who that user is, but that user has an identity. Think of it like a username on a website. You may not know who’s behind it, but that username is tied to a particular person – and their actions are tied to that username.

The whole point about bitcoin is that it’s actually transparent. Every transaction is recorded on the blockchain and visible to everyone.

In short, just because bitcoin has been the method of payment used by some criminals, it’s definitely not the currency’s core use.

4. Bitcoin is not regulated

A lot of people are worried about bitcoin because the government hasn’t come out with an official policy about how it should be run.

In short, there’s no financial system, like the U.S. Federal Reserve, manging its existence and value. And as a recent Forbes article “warns”, “there is no ‘good faith and credit’ of the government standing behind the currency.”

But think about it… does a government’s romise that something is “money” protect its value?

The U.S. dollar can be printed at will… and only has value because the government says so.

Plus, more regulation on bitcoin is quickly being established. For example, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which regulates futures and options markets, already approved the creation of options trading around bitcoin.

And the SEC recently came out with a statement hinting that it will soon begin regulating cryptocurrencies.

These moves will only bring additional stability to the bitcoin market, and with it, some new money.

But what about in the rest of the world?

China recently announced a ban on initial coin offerings (ICOs), where companies create and issue cryptocurrencies to the public in exchange for bitcoin or ethereum (the second-largest cryptocurrency).

But China didn’t “ban” bitcoin. And even if a government did want to ban it, the question is “how”? That cat’s already out of the bag. And bitcoin doesn’t answer to any government.

There is no bitcoin head office, no CEO, no board of directors.

What’s more, there’s no incentive for any major economy to “ban” bitcoin. (Japan, the third-largest economy in the world, made it legal tender.) Any government that does ban it is simply saying “we don’t want innovation, technology jobs, new companies, or enterprise in general”.

Now don’t get me wrong – there is and will be regulation, and there may even be a temporary shutdown of the exchanges.

But regulation is a different story altogether. For example, don’t think for a second that Uncle Sam is going to let you make 10x on a cryptocurrency trade and not pay your “fair share” of tax to the coffers.

5. Bitcoin is too volatile to invest in

Most people look at bitcoin’s daily price changes and write bitcoin off simply because it’s more volatile than your typical blue-chip stock. But these swings are growing smaller, as more and more people move money into bitcoin.

According to investment firm ARK Invest, at the beginning of this year, “bitcoin’s daily volatility was about one-fifth that of five years ago, and 28 percent less than January 1, 2016.”

And this trend should continue, as time goes on… and more money flocks into this sapce.

That said, even with this level of volatility, bitcoin delivered better risk-adjusted returns than stocks, bonds, gold and real estate over the past five years. In fact, over the past year alone, bitcoin performed twice as well as stocks, on a risk-adjusted basis.

I’m not saying bitcoin won’t be volatile. Like any asset, cryptocurrencies will continue to experience rallies and corrections. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking “this time is different” and that bitcoin will go up forever. The cryptocurrency could absolutely be in for a short-term price bubble. But over the long term, the upside is far from over. You just need to proceed carefully. And “invest” no more than you can absolutely afford to lose.

Don’t believe the media hype

As I said earlier, the media doesn’t really understand bitcoin. So what you read in the mainstream media on cryptocurrencies should be taken with a liberal dose of salt.

The truth is, bitcoin is a just a cryptographically scarce and secure medium of exchanging value. It’s not a vehicle for criminals or not a real currency. And bitcoin, and the technology behind it – called the blockchain – is quickly changing the world. And it’s here to stay. Being on the outside (and not understanding it) will limit your ability to profit.

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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

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Who want to know about bitcoin: here is news, interview, analitycs.

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

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mambo24 wrote: October 18th, 2017, 6:16 am Who want to know about bitcoin: here is news, interview, analitycs.
Thank you for posting your very first comment in this thread. What is your opinion of the technology behind bitcoins? Do you think that blockchain applications will grow?

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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

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Whether you like Bitcoins or not, whether you think it's all a scam or not, the technology behind the coins is going to change our world. The article is a bit long so use the ink below if you want to read the whole thing.

https://hackernoon.com/8-thoughts-on-bl ... 8b916138b8

Lou KernerFollow
Crypto enthusiast, investor, and advisor. Partner at Flight Ventures where I manage the Israeli Founders Syndicate. Partner at Chameleon, a digital consultancy.

Oct 8

7 Thoughts On Blockchain, Cryptocurrency & Decentralization After Another Three Months Down The Rabbit Hole

Invite to the “How To Value Cryptocurrency 2.0 Conference Call October 23rd, 1pm-2pm EST”

Everyone’s ADD, including me. I get attracted by shiny objects. I first noticed Bitcoin as a shiny object in mid-2013. I went down the rabbit hole far enough for The Wall Street Journal to call me “Wall Street’s Bitcoin expert” while they live blogged a Bitcoin conference call I hosted. I invested in ChangeTip. I bought and sold BitcoinWallet.com. Unfortunately, by late-2014, nine months in to a severe Bitcoin price decline, my focus wandered to new shiny objects.

Fast forward to 2017, and my mind wandered to a new shiny object, ICOs. Once again, I got the four smartest people I could find on the topic, and held a conference call on June 29th during which I had my crypto epiphany.

Crypto is now so shiny, so luminous, I can’t divert my eyes. I’m living and breathing crypto 24/7. Reading every thoughtful post I can find. Meeting anyone thoughtful on the topic. Holding more crypto conference calls. And writing and writing on crypto, because that’s the best way to learn. After 3 months going down the rabbit hole a second time, here’s what I learned.

1. I’m A One Eyed Man In The Land of Other One Eyed People
We’re still so early, that much about what people are saying and writing about crypto is more theory than fact. Lots of people (including me) compare the the crypto bubble to the Internet bubble. But the parallels between the development of crypto and the development Internet are everywhere I look. Take this snippet from Wikipedia’s “History of the Internet’’:
“With so many different network methods, something was needed to unify them. Robert E. Kahn of DARPA and ARPANET recruited Vinton Cerf of Stanford to work with him on the problem. By 1973, they had worked out a fundamental reformulation, where the differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol…..”

As a non-techie, that sounds exactly like a paragraph I read yesterday on Medium. But an important difference about the evolution of crypto and the evolution of the internet is how public crypto’s early evolution is. There were maybe a few thousand people who cared about what Cerf was doing in the early days of the Internet. So it was done out of the public’s eye. It wasn’t until 1994, 21 years after Cerf’s 1973 solution, that Netscape introduced it’s browser, and most people learned about the internet.

Crypto is evolving in its early days in a public way, so it’s messy, and theoretical, and dense. So if you feel like you don’t really understand crypto, join the crowd. Neither of us would have understood much if we sat in the room with Vint Cerf in 1973.

Another sign that it’s early is that foundational parts of crypto theory like Joel Manegro’s Fat Protocol post , which has been repeated ad infinitum, is being questioned and rethought by Teemu Paivinen, Jake Brukhman and others (h/t Yannick Roux).

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

Video and graphs at the link below that didn't come along for the copy/paste ride.

Good or bad, blockchain technology is in your future in a big way. Can you recall the first time you heard about the Internet or email and didn't really pay much attention? Blockchain has the potential to be bigger than either of those technological advances and much more impactful in many ways given its multiple application possibilities.

The price of one Bitcoin now is $5748.02

Remember the 8. It appears in the twitter image at the end of this post.

https://hackernoon.com/is-crypto-like-a ... 2a1e7f0453

Lou Kerner
Crypto enthusiast, investor, and advisor. Partner at Flight Ventures where I manage the Israeli Founders Syndicate. Partner at Chameleon, a digital consultancy.

Oct 22

Is Crypto (Like) A Religion? & 6 Other Crypto Thoughts

About four months ago, during a conference call I held with four crypto thought leaders, I saw the Crypto light. Some refer to the light as Decentralization. Others call it Blockchain. I refer to it as Crypto. The Crypto light is so shiny, so luminous, I can’t divert my eyes.

Over the last four months, I’ve met hundreds of amazing people who’ve also seen the Crypto light. But even with Bitcoin at $100 billion in market cap, the number of people who have seen the Crypto light is minuscule. According to this Cambridge University study, published in May, 2107, between 3–6 million people own cryptocurrency. And how many of them are true believers?

Crypto also has its blasphemous heathens on CNBC and the Bloomberg tape:

But I don’t wast mindshare on the haters. I continue to post on Medium, hold new Crypto conference calls, and hold Crypto Meetups, as my way to spread the Crypto gospel. I spend my time learning from, teaching, and helping, the Crypto converted. That’s the highest ROI for the Crypto community. I’m also spend time with the curious and the open minded. But everyone has to come to the Crypto light on their own path. I mean, how do you help someone appreciate that an algorithm is more trustworthy than their government?

So is Crypto a like a religion? Well, some of the words used to describe Crypto do have religious connotations. But, to me, Crypto is more like physics. The blockchain enables trust (if you don’t get that watch this compelling TED Talk by Bettina Warburg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RplnSVTzvnU ). And then Blockchain and cryptocurrency couple to enable Decentralization at a scale never previously imagined. So to me, Crypto isn’t a religion. Rather, Crypto is the strongly held belief that because of these technologies, there’s going to be massive disruption and wealth creation (greater than the Internet), and the world’s going to be a better place. If that belief system is a religion, then I’m a happy Crypto disciple.

2. When Will Crypto Go Mainstream?
The question I get asked the most is when is Crypto going mainstream? When will my parents, or wife, or friends stop thinking I’m an idiot for investing in tulips. Will they ever see the light?

That question makes me think of the Andy Samberg’s SNL video Lazy Sunday.

Even though YouTube was the 2nd or 3rd largest streamer of user uploaded content in December, 2005, it was still tiny. Then someone uploaded Lazy Sunday on to YouTube, and that day, YouTube became the fastest growing website in the history of the Inernet.
No one could have forecasted the impact of uploading Lazy Sunday on YouTube. It was lightning in a bottle. That’s the way these things generally happen. That’s the way it will happen with Crypto.

As a final note, I’ll mention that I was running the largest UGC streaming company in 2005 (Yashi) when YouTube blew by us. Five years later when Chad Hurley invited me to speak at a YouTube event, I couldn’t help myself. I laughed and told Chad that if Lazy Sunday had been uploaded on to Yashi, we would have been YouTube. Chad laughed, told me I was totally right, and then asked “But why would my brother have uploaded it to Yashi?”.

So the point is, it’s lightning in a bottle. but the harder we work, the smarter we worker, the more together we work, the likelier we are to capture that lightning and go mainstream.

3. Governance & Token Economics Are The Biggest Crypto Risks
Two weeks ag I wrote that the biggest risk to cryptocurrency is governance. Whether it’s SegWit2x, or the unfolding governance caused Tezos disaster, governance is an entire discipline we need to get better at.

Bad token economics are also a major risk to cryptocurrency. It’s an area I’m diving deep in to at the moment. If your interested, join the NYC Token Economics Meetup. If your a token economics expert, or want help opening a Token Economics Meetup in your city, LMK via comments on this post.
Token economics and governance are also very related. Not sure if this captures it perfectly, but I like graphs that provide mental frameworks:

An Actual Original Thought of Mine
4. With Volatility Decreasing, Is It Time To Sunset HODL’ers?
Chris Burniske posted a great graph on Twitter showing the long term decline in daily volatility of Bitcoin over the last six years:

While HODL’ing is a great term to describe how to deal with the gut wrenching volatility of Bitcoin, volatility has largely been decreasing for six years. In addition, HODL’ing has negative connotations that the those of us trying to move the industry forward should be trying to shed.

I’m not a branding guy, but I like “Fellow Traveler” to describe fellow crypto enthusiasts. We’re all going down this amazing path together, not knowing for sure exactly where it’s heading, but pretty confident it’s a better world. The term’s antecedent is from the Bolshevik revolutionary Trotsky who coined the term poputchik (‘one who travels the same path’) in the 20’s to identify the intellectual supporters of the Bolshevik régime. In the 40’s and 50’s in the U.S. it was a pejorative term for a person who was philosophically sympathetic to Communism. I’m going to use “Fellow Traveler” and see if it catches on. I’m also still working on FAMGA.

5. DAG’s Are A Thing
Back in the old days, around two weeks ago, I used to think that the serial nature of the blockchain was the key to it’s immutability. It turns out that blocks (i.e. information) don’t have to be serial (in a chain). In fact, they don’t even need to be blocks. And that being serial, by definition, slows down the speed of the network. Hence the opportunity for DAGs.

DAG stands for “Distributed Acrylic Graph” with a block structure that can look like this:

From The IOTA White Paper
The most famous DAG is Tangle, the DAG structure underlying IOTA, a $1.2 billion market cap cryptocurrency establishing a machine-to-machine micropayment system. It’s early days for DAGs, and crypto message boards are filled with haters, but based on multiple conversations I had this week with entities at the forefront of DAGs, I’m pretty sure they’re a thing.
6. Videos of The Week
Last week I wrote about the awesome Credit Suisse Crypto Sympsoium. You can see a video of A16Z’s crypto expert, Balaji Srinivasan’s data filled opening keynote here.
7. Tweet of the Week
Whenever anyone asks me if it’s too late to get in to Bitcoin, I’ll just share this tweet from 2011:
save btc.png
save btc.png (77.46 KiB) Viewed 1235 times

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BeNotDeceived
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

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Samuel the Lamanite wrote: June 6th, 2011, 8:41 am IMO, BitCoin is just another method for wild specualtion as can be seen in the rapidly rising price. Others can get involved but I'll stick with Gold, Silver, Oil and other real assets.
Michelle wrote:
"Work is a principle of eternity." I remember reading that when I was younger (wish I could find who said it, I want to say Brigham Young?)

WHAT WE BELIEVE wrote:
Work Is an Eternal Principle

https://www.scribd.com/document/4569572/Welch-The-Good-Samaritan-A-Type-and-Shadow-of-the-Plan-of-Salvation wrote:
Because the two pence (denaria) would represent two days' wage, ... 8-)


Work is the biblical basis of money, and is exactly defined, as energy applied over time; work is very measurable, just check your electric bill. Cryptos represent work, but unfortunately they represent the waste thereof, i.e. a counterfeit of a true principle. :evil:

.

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-2 ... pto-assets

"Worse Than Tulips..." And Other Enduring Misconceptions About Crypto Assets

Tyler Durden's picture
by Tyler Durden
Oct 29, 2017 3:00 PM

Via CoinDesk.com,

Chris Burniske is a cofounder of Placeholder Ventures in New York and former blockchain products lead at ARK Investment Management LLC. Jack Tatar is an angel investor and advisor to startups. In this opinion piece, adapted from their book Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor’s Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond, they explain what mainstream financial commentators still don't understand about the space – even if the markets are starting to get it.

* * *

This has been a breakout year for crypto assets, but not so long ago we were thickly in "blockchain, not bitcoin" season.

When we began work on our book, the consensus play seemed to be stripping the native assets out of blockchains and privatizing these originally open networks.

With the book, we set out to make a stand for public blockchains as the more important innovation, to confront the misguided (and persistent) claim that crypto assets are elaborate scams, and to reassure macroeconomists that not all crypto assets are currencies.

Bitcoin, not blockchain

One of the main motivations for writing the book was to emphasize the value of the native assets that incentivize a distributed set of actors to provision a digital good or service with no central operator, i.e. crypto assets.

Given the recent boom in interest around crypto assets, it seems counterintuitive that much of 2014, 2015 and 2016 were dominated by the idea that blockchain technology was important, while crypto assets could be forgotten and little would be lost.

The term distributed ledger technology (DLT) became popularized to convey this concept, effectively washing those pursuing DLT-strategies clean of association with bitcoin. Many in the financial services industry were all too eager to forget that bitcoin was the mother of blockchain technology.

Fall 2015 was when the frenzy around private blockchains really began, with Blythe Masters and Digital Asset Holdings featured on the cover of Bloomberg Magazine, and the Economist running a front cover piece called "The Trust Machine."

The combination of Masters, Bloomberg, and the Economist led to a spike in interest in blockchain technology that set off a sustained climb in global Google search volumes for "blockchain." In the two weeks between Oct. 18 and Nov. 1, 2015, just after Bloomberg and the Economist published their articles, global Google search volumes for 'blockchain' grew 70 percent.

We find ourselves on the flip side of Jamie Dimon’s reasoning: we believe the majority of private blockchains and DLT implementations will become the CompuServes and AOLs of the cryptoasset movement.

Time and again through the history of information technology, open has won out over closed, public has won out over private. This is not to say there isn’t a place for closed and private, but rather that the impact such systems have on the world consistently pales in comparison to the change brought about by open and public systems.

As we write in the book,

"We see many DLT solutions as band-aids to the coming disruption. While DLT will help streamline existing processes — which will help profit margins in the short term — for the most part these solutions operate within what will become increasingly outdated business models."
Baby boomer biases

Famously, Nout Wellink, former president of the Dutch Central Bank, said of bitcoin, "This is worse than the tulip mania... At least then you got a tulip [at the end], now you get nothing."

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

Nout displays a type of anti-crypto asset bias many baby boomers suffer from: if these things have no physical form, how could they possibly have value?

To start, such a mindset then raises the same question of much of our world, which is increasingly based upon things that have only digital representations and amass massive amounts of value.

For example, the market caps of Twitter, Facebook and Google are largely based on 100% digital services - certainly, those services produce cash flows, but cash is paid in exchange for a digital service, implying a purely digital service can have value.

To sate the skeptical, in our book we provide a deep dive into methodologies for valuing bitcoin, and explain how the methodologies can be put to use for crypto assets more broadly.

One of our favorite explorations was working to quantify the contributions of developers, which we don’t think we nailed, but hopefully provided a basis for future work and exploration. Below is one of the developer graphs, showing the frequency of activity based on code repository points and the number of days a crypto asset project has been in the works.

In addition to explaining how crypto assets have a very real form of value, we spend two chapters exploring the most famous market disasters across all kinds of asset classes, including John Law and the Mississippi Company that brought France to its knees, the cornering of the gold market by Jay Gould, and different forms of this time is different thinking.

We spend a significant chunk of time exploring the history of financial speculation to highlight that all asset classes go through growing pains, and we should expect the same of crypto assets.

We may have new bad actors in the crypto markets, but they are playing old tricks.

Why so many?

A question asked by many new to the industry is, why do we need more than 100 currencies? Can’t we do with just a handful? And if these things intend to be currencies, why are they so volatile?

For that reason, we titled the book Crypto assets, and not Cryptocurrencies, and we explain our thinking as follows:

Historically, crypto assets have most commonly been referred to as cryptocurrencies, which we think confuses new users and constrains the conversation on the future of these assets. We would not classify the majority of crypto assets as currencies, but rather most are either digital commodities (crypto commodities), provisioning raw digital resources, or digital tokens (crypto tokens), provisioning finished digital goods and services.

A currency fulfills three well-defined purposes: to serve as a means of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. However, the form of currency itself often has little inherent value. For example, the paper bills in people’s wallets have about as little value as the paper in their printer. Instead, they have the illusion of value, which if shared widely enough by society and endorsed by the government, allows these monetary bills to be used to buy goods and services, to store value for later purchases, and to serve as a metric to price the value of other things.

Meanwhile, commodities are wide-ranging and most commonly thought of as raw material building blocks that serve as inputs into finished products. For example, oil, wheat, and copper are all common commodities. However, to assume that a commodity must be physical ignores the overarching “offline to online” transition occurring in every sector of the economy.

In an increasingly digital world, it only makes sense that we have digital commodities, such as compute power, storage capacity, and network bandwidth. While compute, storage and bandwidth are not yet widely referred to as commodities, they are building blocks that are arguably just as important as our physical commodities, and when provisioned via a blockchain network, they are most clearly defined as crypto commodities.

Beyond cryptocurrencies and crypto commodities - and also provisioned via blockchain networks - are “finished-product” digital goods and services like media, social networks, games, and more, which are orchestrated by crypto tokens. Just as in the physical world, where currencies and commodities fuel an economy to create finished goods and services, so too in the digital world the infrastructures provided by cryptocurrencies and crypto commodities are coming together to support the aforementioned finished-product digital goods and services.

Crypto tokens are in the earliest stage of development, and will likely be the last to gain traction as they require a robust cryptocurrency and crypto commodity infrastructure to be built before they can reliably function.

The markets catch up

We wrote Cryptoassets to cut against the grain of thinking that claimed bitcoin and its digital siblings were a niche movement, and instead to emphasize to investors that this represents the greatest opportunity for investors and entrepreneurs since the Web.

In the midst of writing, the markets came to the same realization, taking the aggregate network value of crypto assets up roughly 15-fold, and doing much of the convincing for us.

Nonetheless, we hope the book serves as a useful guide to the uninitiated, an explainer for befuddled financial professionals, and a reflection on the wild ride it’s been for the crypto OGs.

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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by BeNotDeceived »

Cryptos are commodities consumed to produce nothing, but a worthless string of numbers, that are more useless than paper currency.

Block chain technology sounds great it, if it was used for something of real value.

Work is a commodity that is easily quantified.

Back in the day, diesel was cheaper than gasoline. Now the price is higher, exactly in proportion to its work content. Electric companies adjust to match closely the energy content of each fuel.

Cryptos too aren’t finite, but rather are manipulated to control the supply, which has no intrinsic value.

Energy too isn’t finite, the difference being that it represents real value.

Cryptos can be stored, whereas energy storage has limits, but there are ways to certify capacity to produce. The abundance of energy combined with innovative ways to produce and utilize it, is what drives prosperity. Cryptos are a House of Cards of epic proportions. :twisted:

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-3 ... tocurrency

Can The Cautious Capitalist Invest in Cryptocurrency?

by financedude85
Oct 30, 2017 8:22 AM

The currency market is hot and many investors are attracted, but “What we’re looking at is a new technology that people are still trying to understand,” says Mathew Gertler of Digital Asset Research and compares it to the Internet in 1994. Warren Buffet has been quoted as saying. “Never invest in a business you cannot understand.” Joe Kinahan of TD Ameritrade illustrates the bitcoin transaction problem: “Say you agree to buy a car [in bitcoin] and the price on Saturday is $32,000 and because of a bitcoin move, on Monday it’s $41,000, people just can’t live their lives like that.”

Opening the bitcoin market to average investors is a problem of securitization. Goldman Sachs is considering bitcoin operations. J. P. Morgan is working on its own block-chain technology even though its chairman calls bitcoin a “fraud.” Shares of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) called Global X FinTech (FINX) are up 43% for the year. LedgerX LLC has received permission to trade bitcoin futures and options from the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). ProShares has filed an application for an ETF dependent upon receipt by the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) of approval for trading of long and short options on bitcoin. Wall Street sees the demand and wants a piece of the supply.

In October of 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote, “The steady addition of a constant amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.” Over 16 million bitcoins have been “mined” by computers running the open-source software Mr. Nakamoto released in 2009. As gold miners are less rewarded for their effort expended as they dig deeper into the earth, so over time, will bitcoin miners be paid less for their work. The reward for each “block” added to the “blockchain” is halved every 210,000 transactions or every four years at a rate of one transaction every ten minutes. Like gold, bitcoin has the “law of diminishing returns” included in its programming. The deeper a gold miner digs, the more it costs to produce an ounce of gold.

Since 2009, the reward for verifying and storing newly broadcast bitcoin transactions has been reduced by half, and then halved again. The halving will continue until the miner is paid nearly zero in about one hundred years. There is a finite amount of gold, which can be removed from the planet before the product is worth less than the effort expended to produce it. Rather than ever-larger steel monsters eating the Earth’s crust, bitcoin miners use ever more powerful central processing units (CPU’s) to keep up with their competition for the next bitcoins to be “hashed.” Rewards for mining bitcoins have an endpoint similar to that of gold. By halving the reward every four years, the miner will eventually be paid next to nothing for effort expended.

Shekel is a term still used to refer to coined money in some cultures today. Croesus, King of Lydia in the 6th century BC, may have been the first to issue coins called shekels. Originally a weight measure for barley, it became a monetary value when it was used to measure gold. One shekel equaled about one-third of an ounce of gold. Today, one of those shekels would be worth about four hundred dollars. Coins stamped out of metal with universally recognized value expedited transactions of goods and services. Instead of having to trade a load of barley directly for food, shelter, and clothing at the time of delivery, a barley producer could take the value of his barley in tokens that could be carried in a pocket or purse. With convenient conveyance and storage also came increased risk of sudden loss to thieves, so security of savings became more important as people's collection of shekels increased.

The most popular shekel today is bitcoin. Bitcoin introduces the certain value of hard currency in a form that is portable, transmittable and secure. One bitcoin today represents the value of fifteen shekels or about five ounces of gold, but 10,000 bitcoins can be carried on a memory stick. For an equivalent value of shekels, one would need at least a couple of pickup trucks. Bitcoin, with the click of a mouse, can be used as a buy-in for an online poker game, to order a new television, or purchase a tropical island. Shekels, where accepted, require delivery and delivery is a problem when carrying such weight and wealth in a pocket, purse, or pickup truck. Bitcoin is secured by the ever-decreasing possibility of hacking the source code, which gets longer with a new iteration every ten minutes. For their efforts, honest mining would better reward hackers than digital theft. Shekels can wear holes in pockets, be left in purses at the blackjack table, or be outright burgled.

But bitcoin today is not the only cryptocurrency available as shekels were not the only coined precious metal. Coins of other realms stamped with other royal faces came to compete with the shekel accompanied by the problem of comparative valuation between currencies. How many drachmas per shekel? What is the value of 1000 obols in staters? Today the questions include: How many Litecoin per Bitcoin? What is the value of 1000 Peercoin in Ethereum? What are a million Euros worth in IOTA?

Enter Legolas. Not the Sindarin Elf of the Woodland Realm in The Hobbit, but “a demonstrably fair, premium centralized exchange using decentralized blockchain technology.” As Forex is the market in which currencies are traded, so Legolas intends to be the market for cryptocurrencies. Developed by Frederic Montagnon, co-founder of French ad tech company Teads, Legolas intends to bring security and transparency to the infant market for “cross-chain” transactions. Legolas, like bitcoin, will publish all its transactions in a public blockchain to prevent theft by hacking. In so doing, they will create a monetary digital token, called LGO, compatible on the Ethereum blockchain. One side of every transaction on the Legolas Exchange will be denominated in LGO.

As important as security is Legolas’ proposed ability to make large, immediate and anonymous transactions between bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, and fiat money. For this purpose, the Legolas business model requires inclusion of an established banking institution. Their associated bank, PayQix, is a next generation bank with accounts in both fiat and cryptocurrencies, which can process large transactions.

There is pent-up demand for investment vehicles that will allow conservative investors to dip a toe into the cryptocurrency market. Fundamental to opening this market to average investors are immediate, transparent and secure intra-chain (Ethereum/bitcoin), cross-chain (Litecoin/Ethereum), and fiat/crypto (Euro/bitcoin) transactions. Legolas intends to cover 100% of this market and become “the largest fair exchange in the world”, and be able to answer the question, “How many shekels for one bitcoin?”

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

Since the name of the most well-known cryptocurrency includes the word coin (in Bitcoin), most detractors tend to focus on the currency part of cryptocurrency and overlook the more important technology behind the currencies. The following article discusses yet another use for Blockchain.

https://www.coindesk.com/last-hurdle-li ... er-launch/

The Last Hurdle: Liquidity Alliance Closes in on Distributed Ledger Launch
Oct 30, 2017 at 12:45 UTC by Michael del Castillo

A world of frictionless commerce relies heavily on lenders being able to trust they'll be repaid – or if not, that they'll get something else in return.

But this "something else" – collateral – isn't nearly as easy to move as the money itself.

To solve this problem, a group of international depositories and stock exchanges called the Liquidity Alliance united this year to launch LA Ledger, a blockchain solution designed to do to collateral what bitcoin did for value transfer. Now, having completed the proof-of-concept, the group is ready to launch a commercial product with only one thing left in its way: regulatory approval.

While the participants have been in conversation with regulators since Q2 of last year, last week, the group transitioned from "informal conversations" to a "more formal presentation" with regulators, according to Liquidity Alliance member and chief commercial officer for post-trade services at TMX Group Brian Gelfand.

Specifically, the blockchain built using the open-source Hyperledger Fabric is designed to break down borders between pools of collateral trapped within national systems by migrating traditional collateral from a central escrow to a distributed blockchain.

And the technology has proved beneficial.

"The technical solution is very elegant," said Steve Everett, general manager of collateral management at Strate, which is also part of Liquidity Alliance. "We are meeting with the regulators ... and nine out of ten of the questions – because the solution is so elegant – are more on the legal and regulatory front."

While many proofs-of-concept have languished on the shelf since the early days of blockchain enthusiasm, Liquidity Alliance's latest push signifies a growing momentum behind central securities depositories (CSDs) seeing their work come to fruition.

Philippe Seyll, the co-CEO of Luxembourg's CSD Clearstream and a member of the initiative, told CoinDesk:

"The proof-of-concept will remain a proof-of-concept if we don't get the blessing of the regulators."

Collateral questions

This step of engaging regulators should not be taken lightly.

Each of LA Ledger's CSD and stock exchange participants – which also includes The Canadian Depository for Securities Limited, Norway's VPS and Deutsche Börse in Germany – are subject to different local regulations, as well as regional regulations that transcend country boundaries.

Learning how each member can be compliant with different controls while using the same blockchain is of utmost importance, Gelfand said, adding:

"One of the keystones of this whole exercise is you're dealing with regulated entities ... and this mechanism has to work and be approved in each of the jurisdictions in which we operate."

It can be quite complex.

For example, among the unknowns is how lenders can "realize" (the gain or loss resulting from a sale of an asset) collateral that has been tokenized on a blockchain.

Traditionally, collateral consists of digital accounts of ownership for homes, cars and commercial property, whereby if a borrower defaults, a complicated series of processes are initiated that result in the collateral being forfeited to the lender.

But on a blockchain, where each of those processes are compressed into a single smart contract with the collateral represented as a token, it's possible that certain delays meant to protect borrowers (something regulators will be particularly interested in monitoring) could be undone.

Continuing distribution

In spite of the progress being made with regulators, however, the customers of multiple LA Ledger participants have expressed concern that the true value of a pool of collateral won't be achieved if only a handful of countries participate.

During a joint session held by Liquidity Alliance members Deutsche Börse and VPS last month, a few of their large bank clients were given a deep dive into how the platform operates. While the clients came to the same conclusion as Strate's Everett – saying the technology was sound – they wanted to see more CSDs involved in order to reach "critical mass," according to VPS executive vice president Sveinung Dyrdal.

Drydal and Deutsche Börse's senior vice president Gerd Hartung both agreed that adding more members would be key to the blockchain platform's ultimate success.

Dyrdal concluded with optimism, though, saying:

"I'm quite sure we will see CSDs that would like to explore the opportunity of renewing their core by using new technology."

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

https://medium.com/@mariabustillos/why- ... 986d9094ab

Why does journalism need blockchain technology?
Blockchain technology by itself can’t answer this question, but it is the paper on which we can write the answer.
By Maria Bustillos

(cross-posted from Civil)

Blockchain technology entered the world in January 2009. What you may already know is that Satoshi Nakamoto combined existing techniques like digital signatures, peer-to-peer networks, and public-key cryptography to create Bitcoin, the world’s first real cryptocurrency. But what the Bitcoin system brought into the world, more importantly than the cryptocurrency, is a new kind of recordkeeping.
Whenever people need to know whether or not something happened — someone depositing money in a bank account, changing the title of a house, or voting in an election — we set up institutions to guarantee that it happened. For important transactions, we have multiple layers of authority to make those guarantees. We have the Fed, credit agencies, the passport office, the DMV, notaries public, government licensing and regulatory bodies — many, many institutions whose purpose it is to know what happened.

Blockchain technology can be used to make those guarantees automatically, by distributing a shared, verified public record to as many people as are interested in seeing that record. Anyone interested can join a computer network and download the record. Each new set of entries to the record — each block — is added by all the computers in the network, and then verified and timestamped. Because new information is added on block by block, no one can go back and alter what has already happened. The record is incorruptible.

It’s obvious why this sort of recordkeeping is valuable for journalism: it allows us to maintain archives that can’t be censored or altered after the fact. We can amend previous records only through addenda, in other words: not through erasure. This is the first benefit of blockchain technology to the free press, and this benefit alone makes it worth moving our news media into blockchain-based publishing systems. But there is more.
Our media have grown dangerously vulnerable to tampering in the Internet age. The vuvuzela of propaganda drowns out the work of real journalists. Platform companies like Facebook and Google take advertising money for showing you news stories they did not pay to produce. They’re not journalists, and they have failed, catastrophically, and are still failing, to understand the importance of impartial media in a free society. Mark Zuckerberg claimed that it was “crazy” to suggest that his company had affected the results of the 2016 U.S. election. At the moment he spoke these words, his company’s political ad sales pages were bragging about Facebook ads’ power to affect elections, as they still do (“influence online and offline outcomes through DR and video”).

There is no exaggerating the irresponsibility of Silicon Valley’s tech titans, who somehow wound up being in charge of your information, who are accountable to nobody, and who have no earthly idea what they are doing.

By creating an ad-free publishing economy on Civil’s Ethereum-based platform, instead of on the traditional web, Popula is putting up a wall against tampering. Popula is accountable to its readers alone, and is impervious to the interests and agendas of advertisers or other intermediaries or “influencers” of any kind. Readers, and readers alone, provide our community, our platform, and the funding for our journalism.
In addition to this, Popula’s readers and their interactions with the publication will be part of a larger, novel experiment in cryptoeconomics. This sounds scary, but I promise you, it’s not. It’s useful and fun.

Consider Internet comments. At the moment, you can’t be sure whether a Facebook comment on your feed came from a bot paid for by some Dr. Evil freak billionaire, a Russian troll farm, or your cousin’s friend from work. Some hidden percentage of what you are seeing online is not commentary from real people, but bought-and-paid-for, computer-generated propaganda.

Now imagine for a moment that commenting on a news story wasn’t free to every Tom, Dick and Yuri, but was instead a privilege that comes only with a paid subscription to a responsible publication. It would be worth paying something to know that the comments are real, right?

Commenters can earn tips on the Civil platform, so there will be a point to being smart and careful about what you write. Imagine adding information to a news story you’re interested in, and not just getting thumbs up or ‘likes’ for it, but getting paid for it. Same with comments: make a comment that others find interesting, and your subscriber account can be credited with microtips that will accrue for as long as they continue to read and value your contribution. And, when someone comments, the microtipping system forwards a portion of every tip to all subscribers, meaning that all subscribers benefit from an active network.

By the time the stories of November 2016 are told in full, from Cambridge Analytica to the truth about the mass dissemination of propaganda on social media, I believe it will be even more obvious that the free press in America is in a state of crisis.

If we want information that is true to the best of our ability to report it, unaffected by commercial or political interests, we need to remove the influence of advertisers or sponsors on editorial concerns. Money never comes without strings. That’s why we can’t allow anyone but our readers to pay the bills.

On Civil’s Ethereum-based platform, we can make very nearly certain that only individual readers are paying for our work: Blockchain technology is as valuable for the hidden tampering it forbids, as for the verifiable gathering and dissemination of information it permits. That’s why my colleagues and I gave up everything else we were working on for the chance to start Popula, an alternative internationalist news and culture magazine: it’s the world’s first publication to live on the blockchain, and to use this new technology to benefit everyone who believes in society’s unfettered right to inform itself.

Journalist, editor and entrepreneur Maria Bustillos, whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Awl, Harper’s, the Guardian and The New York Times, is the editor-in-chief of Popula, an alternative news and culture publication that will be launching on the Civil platform. Popula is written and edited by Trevor Alixopulos, Aaron Bady, Willy Blackmore, Maria Bustillos, Ryan Bradley, Vanessa Davis, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Sarah Miller.

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin- ... for-18-btc

18 BTC @ USD$6,000 (current price) each = $108,000
18 BTC @ USD$10,000 (potential price) = $180,000

Buy now!

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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by iWriteStuff »

Silver wrote: October 30th, 2017, 9:35 am https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin- ... for-18-btc

18 BTC @ USD$6,000 (current price) each = $108,000
18 BTC @ USD$10,000 (potential price) = $180,000

Buy now!
I will gladly write you a check for $108,000 in exchange for 18 BTC. Just don't try to cash it until BTC hits $10k ;)

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-3 ... ious-means

The Government Continues Attempts To Take Down Bitcoin Through Nefarious Means

Oct 31, 2017 1:23 PM

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

The government really dislikes it when people make a living by conducting moral business practices without paying for their permission to do so.

This is all too evident when examining the most recent arrest of a man for selling Bitcoin.

According to local news media reports, a Michigan man named Bradley Anthony Stetkiw has been charged by local authorities for operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.

The charges have been filed in US District Court. According to an indictment released by Detroit TV news services WD-IV Friday, the 52-year-old ran an exchange through the LocalBitcoins website, conducting transactions at restaurants in the Bloomfield area.



Stetkiw is alleged to have sold bitcoin without a license (paying for permission from the government) as part of a business venture for approximately two years.

After selling about $150,000 in bitcoin, the feds set up a sting operation to catch Stetkiw. He sold more than $56,000 worth of bitcoin to federal agents through six meetings. Authorities say that that volume of transactions makes him subject to federal anti-money laundering regulations.

The government is not alleging that Stetkiw harmed anyone or took any property.

He’s in trouble for not paying to register himself as a business. According to the indictment:

Operating under the user name ‘SaltandPepper,’ Stetkiw bought, sold and brokered deals for hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoins while failing to comply with the money transmitting business registration requirements set fort in Title 31, United States Code, Section 5330.
Earlier this year, Detroit resident Sal Mansy plead guilty to the charge of operating an unlicensed money services business. He allegedly conducted $2.4 million-worth of transactions over a two-year period ending in July 2015.

Other arrests in Missouri and New York suggest actions against independent U.S. bitcoin sellers are becoming more commonplace.

These arrests also suggest what many have feared for years: the government is attempting to take down bitcoin using nefarious means since they cannot figure out how to regulate the cryptocurrency.

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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

The price of one Bitcoin is now $6879. https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

On 8Sep2017 when I first posted in this thread, the price actually fell from about $4600 to about $4200. Over $2000 gain in less than two months. Percentage-wise it's more than the bank is paying on your savings account. Those kind of gains are scary, but most cryptocurrency gurus say the price is still headed north.

Y'all don't use your grocery money on any of this stuff, ya hear?

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »


Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

Remember, friends, don't spend your grocery money on this or any investment.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-0 ... ave-higher

Bitcoin Rebounds Back Above $7500 As Goldman Eyes Next Wave Higher

Tyler Durden's picture
by Tyler Durden
Nov 8, 2017 8:32 AM

Bitcoin has roundtripped $1200 from record highs near $7600, down to $6900, and back up to $7500 this morning on the heels of renewed interest in China crypto trading and a technical report from Goldman suggesting $7941 as a short-term target.

Quite a move but back to highs...

Two months ago, when Chinese regulator issued the “Seven Regulatory Bodies” Announcement and shut down the Bitcoin trading, the whole world thought that China Bitcoin gates were closing.



image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

As CoinTelegraph notes though optimists were claiming that Chinese government might free Bitcoin trading under certain circumstances in the future, nobody anticipated that the day is coming this soon.

On Nov. 1, ZB.com, a new cryptocurrency trading platform, began to serve sellers and buyers all over the world, including those in mainland China. ZB.com has become a major trading platform which provides trades of BTC, LTC, ETH, ETC and another major type of cryptocurrencies within a few days.

What’s more, on Nov. 8, it started to accept CNY as a deposit. In other words, the CNY trading market which was closed by the regulators is activated now. The platform only accepts credit cards and debit cards for CNY deposit. WeChat Pay and Alipay are not accepted yet.

Though it’s still too soon to state that Bitcoin trading is freed by the Chinese government, it's highly likely that the government, instead of banning Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is more interested in regulating the market and supervising the trading. Like it or not, a new era of Bitcoin in China is coming, and law and order might play a more significant role now.
Additionally Goldman Sachs technical analysis team signals Bitcoin's next leg is higher to $7941...



It exceeded an equality target from the July low at 6,044. This break indicated potential for an impulsive advance, one that could reach at least 7,941. This is the minimum target for a 3rd of 5-waves up and should therefore be a level from which to watch for signs of a consolidation.

It’s important to emphasize that a stall near 7,941 should be viewed as corrective/counter-trend. A typical 4th wave will often hold ~23.6% of the length of wave 3; which from 7,941 measures out to ~6,767. Given that this is just a 3rd of 5-waves up, the implications are that Bitcoin has potential to run further over time (wave 5 of 5).

View: Next in focus 7,941. Might consolidate there before continuing higher. Consider the pullback corrective against 6,767. Re-assess below 6,042 (38.2%).

Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

Blockchain is more important than the price of Bitcoin.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/shipping ... g-alliance

By Joshua Althauser
Shipping Giant UPS Joins Blockchain in Trucking Alliance

3023 Total views 124 Total shares
Shipping Giant UPS Joins Blockchain in Trucking Alliance
Global shipping major UPS was accepted as member of the Blockchain in Trucking Alliance (BiTA) as of early November 2017. BiTA is a Blockchain consortium that is mainly focused on the trucking and shipping industry.

In its announcement, the consortium claimed that UPS will assist in the development of standards around the use of Blockchain in systems used to track or monitor packages, facilitate payments between shipping parties and other industry applications.

According to UPS director of enterprise architecture and innovation, Linda Weakland, there are several possible applications of Blockchain that the company plans to explore when it joined the consortium like improving the efficiency and transparency of shipping transactions.

"The technology has the potential to increase transparency and efficiency among shippers, carriers, brokers, consumers, vendors and other supply chain stakeholders."

Other UPS projects involving Blockchain
Before joining the consortium, UPS has already launched several projects to explore the possible use cases of the technology in its customs brokerage business. The plan of the company is to use the technology to shift away from its largely paper-based processes and establish a more efficient, shared platform that can also be used by its customers and third-party associates.

In supporting the development of standards around Blockchain, UPS claimed that it aim to promote logistics strategies that allow its customers to participate in global trade and finance.

Brief profile of BiTa
BiTa was introduced in August 2017 with a goal to use Blockchain technology in the trucking industry. In his statement then, BiTA cofounder Craig Fuller of TransRisk claimed that the alliance was established to develop standards around Blockchain applications in the sector.

“We formed the Blockchain in Trucking Alliance to develop common standards around Blockchain applications in the trucking industry, from speeding up transactions to securing data transfers. The technology holds great promise, but to encourage its proliferation, we believe that developing industry standards were paramount. PS Logistics brings a depth of industry experience and full-service logistics knowledge to help our industry innovate with integrity through this new technology.”

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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

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https://hackernoon.com/deepsee-io-the-s ... 3cb95f10c5

Trent LapinskiFollowing
Tech Entrepreneur. Journalist. Technologist. Crypto. Docker. WordPress. http://ReNuCoin.com, http://ShotVentures.com, http://Stratus5.com / http://wpdocker.com
Nov 7
DeepSee.io The Solution to Fake News: The AI Social Aggregation Platform The Internet Needs
The Internet is dying from fake news and propaganda, who will save it?


An AI blockchain content aggregation and distribution platform.

A few months ago I was browsing the propaganda cesspool that is now Reddit and came across a post from someone looking to solve the fake news problem using machine learning, blockchain technology, and artificial intelligence. I messaged them immediately, told them who I was and my experience and arranged a phone call. Turns out I was actually talking directly to the CEO and founder of DeepSee.io, Travis Garland. The next thing you know Travis and I spent the next 3-hours on the phone discussing everything from cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology to alien conspiracy theories.

After our call it was clear to me that DeepSee.io needs to exist. Not for my own benefit, or even Travis’s benefit, but because the Internet today has a fake news and propaganda problem built on a mountain of misinformation. If you’re the mainstream media, an established social media celebrity with a large following, or run an established website you can pretty much push whatever propaganda you want online today even if it isn’t true.
Aggregation sites like Reddit used to use a democratic process for sorting content, but they have long since abandoned their values in exchange for clickbait, corporate propaganda, porn, power moderator users, and cute pictures of cats. Reddit now caters to the powers that be, censors content creators, and panders to the masses for the sake of engagement rather than trying to find the truth or the best high value content.

Meanwhile, sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Google have become corrupted by corporate and political interests as well as foreign investors, and no longer seek the truth. In fact, one of Twitter’s largest investors was a Saudi Prince who was just arrested for corruption, and both Twitter and Facebook are being funded by Russians.

With all that said, evil mega-corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit use tools like machine learning not for the betterment of humanity, but instead to profit off us, distract us, put us in echo chambers, and brainwash the entire planet into believing in their false realities.

DeepSee.io the Solution to Fake News
The concept behind DeepSee.io is to use the same machine learning technology that is being used to brainwash our Facebook news feeds, and instead leverage this technology to promote high value content created by people instead of corporations. The plan is to use blockchain technology, similar to Bitcoin and sites like Steemit to create a transparent ledger for content and moderation. This will create a transparent platform of governance where the truth cannot be hidden. Machine learning algorithms can automatically detect and label propaganda for what it is: fake news.
This way DeepSee can create a content media aggregation platform that will become a beacon of truth rather than a platform for misinformation. Keep in mind, it is because of fake news that half the country was convinced Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, and that pedophiles and sexual abusers didn’t run Hollywood. If a platform like DeepSee.io existed during the 2016 election the people of the World would have had a tool to discover and discuss the truth based on democratic consensus, transparency, and verified against machine learning algorithms.

Not only will a platform like DeepSee combat fake news, but it will also become a platform that helps high value content creators who share valuable truthful information reach an audience. This will create a new distribution platform for content creators allowing them to be in control of their own content, reach larger audiences, and do so transparently without the risk of censorship.

That is why I think DeepSee.io needs to exist. The technology that these major tech companies are using against us is being used for evil, and it is time for a startup like DeepSee.io to come along and disrupt them and use these tools for good. The Internet needs a new platform based on new technologies to help us combat the fake news problem and seek truth. To do so, we need to challenge the existing systems by using the same technologies they’re using, but instead tweak them for truth.

If you oppose censorship, propaganda, fake news, being put in echo chambers, and monetized like cattle perhaps you should check out DeepSee.io which is currently in the process of raising funding to complete development of their platform. Their friends, family, and private token sale begins on November 14th, if you are an investor and are interested.

Travis and his team are hoping to raise money nontraditionally by leveraging an initial coin offering (ICO) instead of relying on the current system and powers that be. This way, his vision and what he and his team create does not become corrupted like everything else we were promised by the tech overlords.

Disclaimer: I have signed on to this project as an adviser because I think this is an awesome startup, haven’t really asked about compensation yet because ultimately I just want to see this exist. If I somehow benefit from this becoming successful in the future, then so be it.

Silver
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Posts: 5247

Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin- ... max-keiser

By William Suberg

Bitcoin - New Asset Class ‘First in Hundreds of Years’, Max Keiser
Max Keiser has agreed with CME Group’s Chairman Emeritus Leo Melamed that Bitcoin is a “new asset class.”

Describing as the “first new asset class in hundreds of years,” Keiser’s bullish investment stance on the virtual currency has gained serious weight as CME prepares to launch futures trading this month.

This is why 99% of pundits get it wrong. #Bitcoin is the first new asset class we’ve seen in hundreds of yrs. pic.twitter.com/OTObTN71VW

— Max Keiser (@maxkeiser) November 7, 2017
Melamed had told Reuters that his open stance to technology was obligatory and that Bitcoin represented the need to “examine change.”

“My whole life is built around new technology. I never said no to technology. People who say no to technology are soon dead, I’m still that same guy who believes in at least examining change. That’s what Bitcoin represents.”

CME Group’s decision to interact with Bitcoin came with significant repercussions, prices rising dramatically and many heralding a watershed moment for cryptocurrency’s reputation.

Melamed himself described the move as “a very important step for Bitcoin’s history.”

“We will regulate, make Bitcoin not wild, nor wilder. We’ll tame it into a regular type instrument of trade with rules,” he continued.

His comments come the same week as Goldman Sachs forecasts a further price jump to almost $8,000 for Bitcoin, despite fears of price volatility and network disruption following the SegWit2x hard fork.

“The market has shown evidence of an impulsive rally since breaking above 6,044. Next in focus $7,941. Might consolidate there before continuing higher,” a note to investors read Monday.

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

See a pattern?
Bitcoin Price.png
Bitcoin Price.png (49.46 KiB) Viewed 997 times
https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-tale ... xpert-blog

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

https://cointelegraph.com/news/former-u ... nvestments

By Joshua Althauser
Former US Presidential Candidate Ron Paul Promotes Bitcoin-based Retirement Investments

Former Republican Congressman and US presidential candidate, Ron Paul, was hired as an endorser of Bitcoin-based retirement instruments. In his endorsement for the cryptocurrency firm, which is a subsidiary of Goldco, Paul touted to Americans the benefits of entrusting their savings to the Bitcoin-based retirement account provider.

In a video that accompanied an article titled “Ron Paul Is Shilling for a Bitcoin Retirement Fund Exactly Where You’d Expect” that was published by Mashable as of mid-November 2017, Paul urged Americans to contact cryptocurrency company to know more about the various investment options that are based on Bitcoin.

Paul also claimed that he is excited about the various options that Bitcoin opens up in the retirement sector.

“As a firm believer in currency competition, I’m excited to see the options that Bitcoin opens up.”

Other companies offering Bitcoin-based retirement account services
Aside from the promoted company, other firms are providing full services for Bitcoin-based retirement accounts. The companies provide assistance to their customers in purchasing Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies through their individual retirement accounts (IRA) or 401Ks. These firms claim that digital IRAs allow Americans to invest in virtual currencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin.

“Digital IRAs are unique retirement accounts that allow you to invest in digital currencies (also known as cryptocurrencies) like Bitcoin and Ethereum, in addition to the conventional assets that you utilize already.”

Such solutions are not new. In fact, one company previously shared that has raised over $2 mln within six months of its launch. As millennials tend to shy away from traditional investment options, many investors in their twenties actually prefer to diversify their investments despite the supposed risks.

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

20Nov2017.JPG
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