Who knows about Bitcoin?

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Silver
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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-2 ... riced-7200

Hyperbitcoinization? Bitcoin Trades At 85% Premium In Zimbabwe - Priced At $7,200

by Tyler Durden
Sep 27, 2017 1:57 PM

While bond notes were put forward as a panacea to diminish the flight of wealth from Zimbabwe... (as Steve Hanke noted, it was not)...

The most recent attempt by the government to increase liquidity (the money supply, measured broadly) was the introduction of bond notes in November 2016. Incidentally, in conversations I had with Dr. Kupukile Mlambo, Deputy Governor of the RBZ, in May of 2016, I strongly opposed the introduction of bond notes, indicating that they were inconsistent with orthodox dollarization and would result in a complete disaster.

Although bond coins existed on a small scale since December 2014, the introduction of bond notes was significant. These notes were “backed” by a $200m facility from the African Import Export Bank (Afreximbank) -- a bank that some allege is unusually close to the Zimbabwean government. Among other things, it has still failed to publish official documents regarding the bond note facility. The uncertainty surrounding these bond notes has resulted in a black market for dollars, where the bond notes normally trade at discounts ranging from 5-15%. Not surprisingly, banks have attempted to remove these notes from their books, with bank officials reportedly engaging in black market deals for large cash sums at over 20% discounts!

As for what the bonds might eventually be worth, it is prudent to assume that they will be defaulted on. In that case, and taking other African sovereign defaults as a guide, one is left to conclude that the bonds in default would fetch 5-18¢ on the dollar. So, bond notes, which are products of Zimbabwe’s monetary mischief, are in a death spiral that will witness further significant declines in value. In that event, discounts on other elements of the New ZimDollar would also realize massive discounts. The NZD would become worthless, and with that, inflation would raise its ugly head.

Zimbabwe has once again engaged in a fraud on the public, creating a monetary mess and hardship.
We noted in June that the cash crisis continued unabated.

Those awaiting cash transfers at a bank may wait a month to be cleared and, even then, the transfer may be refused.

The Standard, Zimbabwe’s leading Sunday newspaper, ran an article at the time entitled, “Black market thrives, as banks run dry.”

Some highlights from that article:

HARARE’S Road Port has become the unofficial bank of last resort, never short of cash, no queues and a multicurrency platform. The money market at this busy bus terminus now plays the role that the formal banking sector has failed. It is effectively making a mockery of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ).

This points to the nature of black markets. They thrive based upon fulfilling an existing need, not upon government control. They therefore replace whatever services the official market fails to provide.

“Top government officials, supermarket owners and service stations were behind the thriving black market, which is never short of cash.”
And now it appears many Zimbabweans have found an alternate way to store/transfer wealth away from Mugabe's prying (and confiscatory) eyes.

As CoinTelegraph reports, as the country appears to be headed toward another bout of hyperinflation,citizens are turning to dollars and Bitcoin.

The use of Bitcoin in Zimbabwe has grown exponentially as the government has begun to stop all credit card payments and has restricted the flow of cash into and out of the country.

People wishing to make payments for vehicles have been forced to use Bitcoin and car lenders are happy to accept.

In all the chaos, the price of Bitcoin on the local exchange, BitcoinFundi, has soared to $7,200.

This premium reflects a frantic desire to find ways to transact within an economy where government controls have made traditional means impossible.


image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

As TechZim reports, as ‘hard currency’ disappears from the street, the demand for alternative payment options such as bitcoin will but increase, resulting in the rate increasing further.

Those that are using BTC as a means of sending money back to Zimbabwe will be excited with this rate, not only smiling all the way to the bank but back from it too...

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-2 ... real-fraud

Macquarie Lashes Out At Dimon: "Modern Finance", Not Bitcoin, Is The Real Fraud

by Tyler Durden
Sep 28, 2017 2:23 PM

While the establishment including various central banks, China (which has a "modest" capital flight problem), commercial banks such as JPM and especially its CEO Jamie Dimon who called Bitcoin a 'fraud" similar to the tulip bubble of the 17th century, have come out as harsh opponents of cryptocurrencies, some notable "minority oppinions" have emerged in recent days, such as Morgan Stanley's CEO, James Gorman, who yesterday suggested that Dimon is wrong and that "Bitcoin is certainly more than a fad... the concept of an anonymous currency is an interesting concept."

However, the harshest criticism of Jamie Dimon's takedown of bitcoin came from Macquarie's head of AsiaPac equity strategy, Viktor Shvets who this morning said that it's not bitcoin that's the bubble- or fraud - but the entire modern financial system, which is 4x-5x bigger than the underlying economies, to wit:

When a number of financial executives recently described Bitcoin as a “fraud” akin to the tulip mania, it exhibited their apparent lack of appreciation of fundamental shifts that are altering global monetary and financial systems. If one describes Bitcoin as a fraud, how would one describe a ‘financial cloud’ that is at least 4x-5x larger than the underlying economies? It is unlikely that US$400 trillion+ of financial instruments circulating around the world would ever be repaid and most are now backed by assets that are already either worthless or are diminishing in value. How does one describe rates and the yield curve that are either directly determined by CBs (BoJ or PBoC) or heavily influenced by them (Fed or ECB)?

The following chart summarizes Shvets's concern: some $500 trillion in global financial assets including shadow banking, or roughly 500% global GDP.


As a result of this unprecedented financialization bubble, which is the true systemic fraud, "cryptocurrencies remain a tiny niche, but as in the case of tulips, they are a symptom of a deeply seated disease. They represent a desperate search for alternatives to the above potential "train wreck."

While we maintain that despite presence of US$7.5 trillion of excess reserves (amongst G4+Swiss central banks), global deflationary pressures are so strong that break-out of inflationary pressures is unlikely. However, if public sectors continue to insist on suppressing business/capital market cycles, then some form of full credit market nationalization and/or currency debasement becomes inevitable.
Hence, cryptocurrencies.

Shvets' then gives some advice to the Dimons of the world: "people living in glass houses should not throw stones" and explains what is really happening: like gold, bitcoin has emerged as an insurance policy to the insanity unleashed by a reeling, establihsment political system and central bankers determined to preserve the status quo at all costs, who "instead of repudiation of debts, deleveraging and clearance of past excesses", have encouraged the opposite, namely "accelerated leveraging and avoidance of debt repudiation and clearance." As a result, setbacks have been relatively mild, and "we have not experienced a Kondratieff winter since 1930s"... so far.

Shvets also warns that "there is always a price to pay for deliberate and long-term suppression of cycles, and that is subsequent recoveries (both real GDP and inflation) get progressively weaker" and adds that "eventually, gravity would take control, and it would be impossible to generate positive outcomes, as deflation takes control. However, it is not clear to us whether we are close to such a ‘black hole’. Our working assumption is that we would require a significant further jolt to the system to push us closer to the ‘black hole’ and force coalescence around far more robust policies, such as a merger of fiscal and monetary policies, minimum income guarantees, etc. This is where gold and cryptocurrencies come in. Both are outside the system, and offer an exposure to what can be effectively described as an insurance policy."

Shvets also admits that while cryptocurrencies are not yet money based on the conventional definition of being both "a store of value and a reliable and stable medium of exchange", he notes that "the big difference between today’s cryptocurrencies and (say tulips) is that even though Bitcoin price could be reflecting extreme speculation, it is built on a durable technology that is likely to continue to evolve and strengthen, and although governments might try to restrict and ban it, ultimately technology is going to win."

Hence, the challenge facing central banks is that although cryptocurrencies are today a tiny portion of the overall money pool, the nature of monetary economy is rapidly changing and central banks would have no choice but to adjust. Consumers and businesses would ultimately carry wallets consisting of different types of sovereign and cryptocurrencies, while transactions would be increasingly conducted via new technology channels (such as block chain).
Summarizing his retort to Jamie Dimon, and echoing what Mike Novogratz said earlier this week, Shvets asks rhetorically "Is there a role for cryptocurrencies and gold in investment portfolios?" and answers "Absolutely" because as explained above, these are nothing more than insurance policies against degrading of fiat currencies. However, for now, he says that the "US$ remains the king and until changes to the monetary system become more pronounced (cryptocurrencies account for ~0.5% of cash in circulation), economies would continue to reside on a de-facto US$ standard."

Which then brings us to the real $500 trillion question: "whether in this new environment, would the US$ be dethroned as the key linchpin of the global trade and finance?"

And, as Shvets explains in his full note below, it is every investor's own answer to that question, that provides the justification whether to buy - or stay away from - cryptocurrencies.

* * *

From Macquarie Capital's Viktor Shvets

About cryptocurrencies and tulips

“Bitcoin is a sort of tulip… it is an instrument of speculation but certainly not a currency and we don’t see it as a threat to central bank policy.”
- Vitor Constancio, ECB Vice President, September 2017

“You can’t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air… it is fraud and worse than tulips bulbs.”
- Jamie Dimon, CEO JP Morgan, September 2017

Are cryptocurrencies new tulips?

The world today has more than one thousand cryptocurrencies and both their number and market capitalization has proliferated at an astounding speed. For example, in June 2016, the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies was ~US$16bn (and over 80% was represented by Bitcoin). Today, market capitalization is in excess of US$160bn, and Bitcoin’s market share is only around 40%-45%. It was this rapid ascension that prompted the above-quoted references to tulip bubble in 17th century Holland. It is interesting that both Constancio of ECB and Dimon of JP Morgan referred to one of the most famous bubbles, without explaining why tulip mania originated in the first place.



The same forces that created early 17th century asset inflation are powering…

Most scholars today agree that it was rapid expansion of flow of bullion into Amsterdam (which in the early part of 17th century was the key centre of European trade and finance) that created a feverish boom, ending with the collapse of the tulip mania in 1637. The large increase in silver flows from the New World between 1570 and 1630s (shipments more than doubled), currency debasements by various states across Europe to pay for the Thirty-Year War and many other wars that raged in the first half of the 17th century, when combined with Amsterdam’s standing as a safe and reliable depository of money, had significantly increased Dutch money supply. Although at the time there were no reliable monetary statistics, several indicators suggest a substantial rise in liquidity. For example, mint output rose from 9m guilders in 1630-32 to 17m guilders in 1633-35 and ballooned to 23m guilders at the peak of Tulip mania in 1636-38, falling back to 11m guilders in 1639-1641. Similarly, deposits at the Bank of Amsterdam rose from 3.6m guilders in 1632 to 5.7m guilders in 1637.

Indeed, it was a continent-wide phenomenon, with supply of the New World silver and demographic bulge, led to price rises for most commodities and not just tulips (from corn, wheat, meat to firewood). It had become known as the great inflationary pulse of late 16thearly 17th centuries. As today, it was a world of declining real wages and rapidly rising income and wealth inequalities. In Amsterdam, this inflationary pulse was aggravated by the new financial innovations, including establishment of the world’s first futures and options clubs in 1609. These clubs (mostly well-managed for professionals) encouraged reckless zero-margin financing for tulips and other commodities, which gradually sucked in an increasing number of participants, who were not professional tulip growers. The rest is history.

In some ways it is not dissimilar to the sub-prime crisis in 2008 or the dotcom bubble in 1999- 2001. Rising liquidity and loose standards always lead to bubbles. As Douglass North once remarked, “In a society that rewards pirate skills, such skills would proliferate.” Adapting that for today’s world, in a society that encourages financial speculation and financialization of underlying economies, rolling bubbles are the inevitable by-product, and as Gresham’s Law says, “Bad money drives out good.” In the case of 17th century Holland, any high-quality gold coins were immediately reminted into their poorer cousins. Today, systematic currency debasements drive wealth into alternative currencies and other means of safeguarding value, be they land holdings, fine wines or cryptocurrencies.

…alternative asset classes from Bitcoins to fine wines and gold

As the global economy embarked on a three-decade-long quest for stability at a time of stagnant productivity and declining returns on conventional labour, the stock of ‘money’ has expanded as dramatically as anything that had been experienced during late 16th-early 17th centuries. If we examine G4 economies (i.e. US, Eurozone, UK and Japan), the stock of narrow money expanded from 100 in 1996 to 380 as at June 2017, while nominal GDP has only expanded to 190. Today, the world’s narrow money supply (M1 – notes, coins and shortterm demand deposits) approximates US$33 trillion, while broader money supply (M2) is ~US$85 trillion and the value of all outstanding financial instruments (equities, sovereign and corporate bond markets, lending, shadow banking and repo markets) is around US$400 trillion or ~4x-5x global GDP. At the same time, G4 plus Switzerland CBs’ balance sheet exploded over the last decade from a run rate of US$2-3 trillion to almost US$16 trillion.



In this context, cryptocurrencies remain a tiny niche, but as in the case of tulips, they are a symptom of a deeply seated disease. They represent a desperate search for alternatives to the above potential ‘train wreck’. While we maintain that despite presence of US$7.5 trillion of excess reserves (amongst G4+Swiss central banks), global deflationary pressures are so strong that break-out of inflationary pressures is unlikely. However, if public sectors continue to insist on suppressing business/capital market cycles, then some form of full credit market nationalization and/or currency debasement becomes inevitable. Hence, cryptocurrencies.

Unlike Holland of 1637, when the state was quite prepared to inflict pain by closing open futures and option contract positions, and thus quickly deflating the bubble, it is highly doubtful that today’s regulators would ever be prepared to embark on such a drastic action. As outlined in our recent review of the Kondratieff cycles (here), governments have been in the business of micro-managing economies and liquidity for at least three decades (certainly since Paul Volcker’s days). Instead of repudiation of debts, deleveraging and clearance of past excesses, central banks and politics encouraged accelerated leveraging and avoidance of debt repudiation and clearance. As a result, setbacks were relatively mild, and we have not experienced a Kondratieff winter since 1930s. However, as described in our note, there is always a price to pay for deliberate and long-term suppression of cycles, and that is subsequent recoveries (both real GDP and inflation) get progressively weaker. Eventually, gravity would take control, and it would be impossible to generate positive outcomes, as deflation takes control. However, it is not clear to us whether we are close to such a ‘black hole’. Our working assumption is that we would require a significant further jolt to the system to push us closer to the ‘black hole’ and force coalescence around far more robust policies, such as a merger of fiscal and monetary policies, minimum income guarantees, etc.

This is where gold and cryptocurrencies come in. Both are outside the system, and offer an exposure to what can be effectively described as an insurance policy.

While cryptocurrencies are not yet stores of value or proper mediums of exchange, they…

While we do not pretend to be experts on Bitcoin or other multiple variations of cryptocurrencies (which use different software), the essential point about all of them is that they provide relatively secure and divisible means of transacting that is borderless, with predictable and decentralized supply. Although the above quotes indicate that senior financial executives believe that Bitcoin is a fraud, the reverse in many ways is true, as it is in fact a highly transparent system, with every transaction that has ever taken place recorded on the database (block chain), which is visible to all and every entry is permanent. The entire business case is built around mathematics rather than fraud. However, it is also true that it can be hacked (think of Mt Gox) and it has evolved into one of the key avenues that turbocharges potentially fraudulent and illegal transactions (think of Silk Road). But it is only natural, as criminals have a much higher than average tolerance to risk (an occupational hazard, so to speak), and hence they tend to be the first on the scene. Eventually, many of the custody and safety issues associated with cryptocurrencies would be resolved (or at least sufficiently blunted) to engender greater confidence.

…represent insurance policy against fiat currencies and proliferation of different transaction technologies

The essence of money is that it has to be accepted as a store of value and a reliable and stable medium of exchange. Cryptocurrencies at the current juncture do not satisfy either of these conditions. The massive booms and busts that Bit coin has experienced over the last three-to-four years is indicative of speculation rather than store of value. Similarly, there are few centres where cryptocurrencies can be today exchanged for actual services. In that respect, Vitor Constancio is correct that cryptocurrencies are not yet proper currencies. However, it is equally disingenuous to argue that US$ or Euro inherently have an underlying value. Being nothing more than fiat currencies, these are not backed by anything that is valuable, other than the prestige of and confidence in the state and the governments that issue that currency. As multiple examples from the past illustrate, the governments can and regularly do debase this privilege. It is during these times that alternatives—be they tulips, gold, antique cars, Bitcoin or seashells—spring up. If the governments ban Bitcoin from circulating within sovereign territory or attempt to over-regulate it, it is likely that money would simply shift to another assets (principally gold and precious metals) and if these are restricted (a la the US government ban on gold in 1930s-60s), then other assets would take its place.

However, the big difference between today’s cryptocurrencies and (say tulips) is that even though Bitcoin price could be reflecting extreme speculation, it is built on a durable technology that is likely to continue to evolve and strengthen, and although governments might try to restrict and ban it, ultimately technology is going to win. Hence, the challenge facing central banks is that although cryptocurrencies are today a tiny portion of the overall money pool, the nature of monetary economy is rapidly changing and central banks would have no choice but to adjust. Consumers and businesses would ultimately carry wallets consisting of different types of sovereign and cryptocurrencies, while transactions would be increasingly conducted via new technology channels (such as block chain).

The key question is whether in this new environment, would the US$ be dethroned as the key linchpin of the global trade and finance?

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

Do you know Edward Snowden?

https://www.coindesk.com/edward-snowden ... ternative/

Edward Snowden: Zcash Is 'Most Interesting Bitcoin Alternative'
Sep 29, 2017 at 13:30 UTC by Rachel Rose O'Leary

Noted whistleblower Edward Snowden has come out in support of the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency zcash, calling it the "most interesting alternative" to bitcoin.

Writing in response to a tweet from technologist Mason Borda which read: "Zcash is the only altcoin (that i know of) designed and built by professional and academic cryptographers. Hard to ignore," Snowden replied, "Agree."

He continued:

"Zcash's privacy tech makes it the most interesting Bitcoin alternative. Bitcoin is great, but "if it's not private, it's not safe.'"

Snowden is a prominent privacy advocate and is most well known for his massive leak of classified NSA documents in 2013. Asked for his thoughts on monero, a competing private currency, Snowden said it was "amateur crypto" and pointed to traceability issues within the tech.

Snowden said that such design errors could put fellow whistleblowers at risk, stating: "Mistakes happen and have huge consequences for people like me."

The statements fed into the existing rivalry between the competing currencies. In the resulting flood of Twitter responses, Monero developer Richard Spagni strongly defended his project's technology, while the creator of litecoin, Charlie Lee, stated: “I own Monero but not Zcash”.

Zcash and monero are both geared towards providing privacy for their users, but use different tools to – arguably it seems – achieve the same end result.

While zcash is based on a cryptographic operation called zk-snarks, monero works by obfuscating information with ring signatures and stealth addresses.

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

A developer who is training people about Blockchain technology: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-2 ... oins-value

Bitcoin Core Developer Explains Bitcoin's Value

Sep 29, 2017 7:20 PM

Authored by Valentin Schmid via The Epoch Times,

Jimmy Song has 20 years experience as a software developer. So it’s easy to imagine that he took an interest in Bitcoin from the technology angle.

However, Jimmy first got interested in Bitcoin as a store of value and sound money, and only later started to contribute to the Bitcoin core development team and to train new developers for the technology.

The Epoch Times spoke to Jimmy Song about why Bitcoin is sound money, where its value comes from, and how it compares to the other cryptocurrencies.

The code provides the basis for Bitcoin as a store of value but it's the people behind it which keep it going...

Epoch Times: How did you first get interested in Bitcoin?

Jimmy Song: When I first read about it, Bitcoin had broken $1, and I wondered: what is Bitcoin? I’ve never heard of this thing, and why is it important that it broke a dollar? How can a Bitcoin have a dollar? I looked into it. I read about it. I read as much as I could and I discovered that it had this twenty-one million Bitcoin limit.

This is something where you can’t make more of it, and that was the big draw for me. I mean, there’s a medium of exchange component that was pretty interesting too. You could send money to Africa in ten minutes without anything complicated like the Western Union, but having the store of value property was far more interesting to me.

You’re not going to be able to inflate it in any way. Bitcoin is sound money because there is a fixed supply limit and demand is always increasing. That creates a really good investment, at least from my perspective, and so I bought some at around $30. I do wish I bought a lot more but everybody in Bitcoin does.

Epoch Times: Later you started programming for several Bitcoin projects, and now you contribute to the core development team. Please tell us why you believe in Bitcoin as a network.

Mr. Song: The big thing that appeals to me now is its anti-fragility. Nassim Taleb talks about anti-fragility in his book ‘Antifragile,’ but basically, Bitcoin gains from disorder and that’s what I’ve noticed. Why does it keep going up when there’s crazy things happening to it and especially with regard to this recent hard for with Bitcoin Cash?

I thought about it and upon reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason is: Bitcoin is being immunized against attack. It’s growing from disorder because there are actual people who are going out there and changing parts of the ecosystem. You can be a core developer, you could be a wallet developer, or you could be an exchange developer, you can be a merchant developer or a processor developer. Whatever it is, they’re all sort of working to make their part of the ecosystem better so that they can withstand these attacks and as a result, Bitcoin becomes a better store of value. Right? The more immunity it has to attack, the more secure it is, the better a store of value it becomes.

Things like the Bitcoin software just aren’t smart enough to handle stuff like that. It has to be people that actually fix it and that’s what I think gives Bitcoin a lot of security value — because you have all these people watching it and not just like computer software that’s running on its own. It’s developers, it’s the people that are actually checking the code or watching the network figuring out low probability scenarios and how to immunize against those. That’s what gives it value. That’s what gives us security. That’s what makes it a great store of value.

Epoch Times: According to you, the quality of the development team directly influences the value of the cryptocurrency.

Mr. Song: If you look at the different market capitalizations of cryptocurrencies, the quality of the developers and the price tends to be somewhat correlated. So Bitcoin is obviously the biggest and has the most developers, it’s number one and the second is Ethereum and number three right now is Bitcoin Cash.

That makes sense because it’s the developers that give any coin or ecosystem the antifragile quality. Right? They’re the ones that can react to attacks on the network. They’re the ones that can fix various things whereas, like coins that have gone down in value, their developers have abandoned it or they’ve since moved on to other things or aren’t very good. I don’t know if a correlation is necessarily causation but the fact that developers give the network security and the security gives it a store of value and that in turn gives it a higher price, that makes sense to me.

Epoch Times: Another important point for cryptocurrencies is the decentralization. They need to be decentralized, otherwise one could just use a centrally managed currency like the U.S. dollar. Would you say Bitcoin is the most decentralized of them all?

Mr. Song: I would say so. There’s a lot of different implementations of Bitcoin. There’s a lot of different nodes and software and wallets. There are all kinds of wallets on the Bitcoin network. You have exchanges, you have this whole infrastructure that’s very motivated to make it good and it’s definitely more decentralized than say Ethereum or, Bitcoin Cash or any of these other ones. A lot of them have foundations or a group of developers who run the show.

If you look at something like the DAO hack of the Ethereum network. They said, this is what we’re going to do and it was decreed by Vitalik Buterin and they had a hard fork, completely reversing the hack. That may be good for whatever they’re trying to do but that’s not decentralized.

Ethereum is not sound money for a lot of reasons, but that that’s one of the reasons that it would disqualify, it is that there’s a central person that you can go to and appeal to and say, “let’s make another a hundred million Ethereum right now.” Ripple suffers from the same problem. They have this huge storage of ripples that they can release to the market at any point.

If you have an authoritarian governance model, I don’t really see that as very secure sound, whereas with Bitcoin, it’s very decentralized. I mean, nobody would go along with raising of the twenty-one million limit and things of that nature. In that way, I see Bitcoin as more secure than all these other coins because there is no single point of failure. I think one of the best things that the founder, Satoshi Nakamoti, did was disappear because that took away sort of that authoritarian voice that he would have naturally had. And people still appeal to Satoshi all the time but, in a sense, his disappearance kind of led to the decentralization that we see today.

Epoch Times: Because you believe developers are so important for Bitcoin, you have recently started a training program with which you hope to alleviate some of the shortages.

Mr. Song: Developers are at the heart of what Bitcoin is. I recognize that almost every company is trying to hire ten big block-chain engineers or Bitcoin engineers and there’s a very, very small supply. The software developers that got into Bitcoin early enough are really rich so they don’t really need to work, or they started their own companies or they’re part of another company and they’re very happy already because their companies are very motivated to keep them happy.

I decided the way to fill that gap is just to train more people, and I do have some background in doing that. So I started the company Programming Blockchain, and I started recently with the first two-day seminar where I teach everything. I feel this is a win for everybody. It’s a win for the students because they can have a much more lucrative career in blockchain engineering or Bitcoin engineering.

It’s obviously good for the industry because they’re getting more Bitcoin developers, and this is big needs area for pretty much every company. It’s obviously good for me because this is something that I like to do. I feel like it’s contributing and also I’m making money. So win, win, win, and that’s the direction I want to go.

Silver
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 5247

Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-0 ... above-4400

IMF Head Foresees The End Of Banking As Bitcoin Surges Above $4400


Oct 2, 2017 10:56 AM

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Foundation for Economic Education,

In a remarkably frank talk at a Bank of England conference, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund has speculated that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have as much of a future as the Internet itself.

It could displace central banks, conventional banking, and challenge the monopoly of national monies.

Christine Lagarde–a Paris native who has held her position at the IMF since 2011–says the only substantial problems with existing cryptocurrency are fixable over time.

In the long run, the technology itself can replace national monies, conventional financial intermediation, and even "puts a question mark on the fractional banking model we know today."

In a lecture that chastised her colleagues for failing to embrace the future, she warned that "Not so long ago, some experts argued that personal computers would never be adopted, and that tablets would only be used as expensive coffee trays. So I think it may not be wise to dismiss virtual currencies."

Here are the relevant parts of her paper:

Let us start with virtual currencies. To be clear, this is not about digital payments in existing currencies—through Paypal and other “e-money” providers such as Alipay in China, or M-Pesa in Kenya.

Virtual currencies are in a different category, because they provide their own unit of account and payment systems. These systems allow for peer-to-peer transactions without central clearinghouses, without central banks.

For now, virtual currencies such as Bitcoin pose little or no challenge to the existing order of fiat currencies and central banks. Why? Because they are too volatile, too risky, too energy intensive, and because the underlying technologies are not yet scalable. Many are too opaque for regulators; and some have been hacked.

But many of these are technological challenges that could be addressed over time. Not so long ago, some experts argued that personal computers would never be adopted, and that tablets would only be used as expensive coffee trays. So I think it may not be wise to dismiss virtual currencies.

Better value for money?
For instance, think of countries with weak institutions and unstable national currencies. Instead of adopting the currency of another country—such as the U.S. dollar—some of these economies might see a growing use of virtual currencies. Call it dollarization 2.0.

IMF experience shows that there is a tipping point beyond which coordination around a new currency is exponential. In the Seychelles, for example, dollarization jumped from 20 percent in 2006 to 60 percent in 2008.

And yet, why might citizens hold virtual currencies rather than physical dollars, euros, or sterling? Because it may one day be easier and safer than obtaining paper bills, especially in remote regions. And because virtual currencies could actually become more stable.

For instance, they could be issued one-for-one for dollars, or a stable basket of currencies. Issuance could be fully transparent, governed by a credible, pre-defined rule, an algorithm that can be monitored…or even a “smart rule” that might reflect changing macroeconomic circumstances.

So in many ways, virtual currencies might just give existing currencies and monetary policy a run for their money. The best response by central bankers is to continue running effective monetary policy, while being open to fresh ideas and new demands, as economies evolve.

Better payment services?
For example, consider the growing demand for new payment services in countries where the shared, decentralized service economy is taking off.

This is an economy rooted in peer-to-peer transactions, in frequent, small-value payments, often across borders.

Four dollars for gardening tips from a lady in New Zealand, three euros for an expert translation of a Japanese poem, and 80 pence for a virtual rendering of historic Fleet Street: these payments can be made with credit cards and other forms of e-money. But the charges are relatively high for small-value transactions, especially across borders.

Instead, citizens may one day prefer virtual currencies, since they potentially offer the same cost and convenience as cash—no settlement risks, no clearing delays, no central registration, no intermediary to check accounts and identities. If privately issued virtual currencies remain risky and unstable, citizens may even call on central banks to provide digital forms of legal tender.

So, when the new service economy comes knocking on the Bank of England’s door, will you welcome it inside? Offer it tea—and financial liquidity?

New models of financial intermediation
This brings us to the second leg of our pod journey—new models of financial intermediation.

One possibility is the break-up, or unbundling, of banking services. In the future, we might keep minimal balances for payment services on electronic wallets.

The remaining balances may be kept in mutual funds, or invested in peer-to-peer lending platforms with an edge in big data and artificial intelligence for automatic credit scoring.

This is a world of six-month product development cycles and constant updates, primarily of software, with a huge premium on simple user-interfaces and trusted security. A world where data is king. A world of many new players without imposing branch offices.

Some would argue that this puts a question mark on the fractional banking model we know today, if there are fewer bank deposits and money flows into the economy through new channels.

How would monetary policy be set in this context?
Today’s central banks typically affect asset prices through primary dealers, or big banks, to which they provide liquidity at fixed prices—so-called open-market operations. But if these banks were to become less relevant in the new financial world, and demand for central bank balances were to diminish, could monetary policy transmission remain as effective?

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Silver wrote: September 29th, 2017, 8:39 pm A developer who is training people about Blockchain technology: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-2 ... oins-value

Bitcoin Core Developer Explains Bitcoin's Value

Sep 29, 2017 7:20 PM
I like his take on Bitcoin.... I do see some weaknesses to his argument, though. For one, there are millions of bitcoin already "lost" either through the Mt. Gox hacking a few years back or through "dead blocks", ie: accounts that have lost their identification codes, can't be accessed, or the user somehow lost the device on which they were stored. In this sense, there isn't a true 21 million bitcoin to be utilized, nor will there ever be. There's no method for recovery currently once they are gone. This problem will probably become more pronounced the more it is adopted and a wider audience of users dabble with the technology.

At some point, a superior blockchain currency will have to find a way to overcome this problem. Or perhaps the multiple forks BTC is taking will somehow resolve this issue.... That's the issue with non-fungible assets - once lost, they are lost forever. Still, the antifragility argument is a strong one. I don't believe even the Fed has an answer to this, aside from "Just keep printing more!"

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https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

Who can explain Bitcoin prices?

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# 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%

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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 ;)

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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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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).

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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 1236 times

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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by BeNotDeceived »

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:

.

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Re: Who knows about Bitcoin?

Post by Silver »

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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BeNotDeceived
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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?”

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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.

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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 ;)

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