Disclaimer: The below is extracts from many news stories, thoughts, discussions since 2011/2012. Keep in mind, when reading the below, Blockchain is a technology & protocol, not a business solution.

General rules when to use Blockchain/DLT technology

Rules when to use Blockchain/DLT technology
1. A blockchain is a digital ledger in which transactions made are recorded chronologically and publicly.
2. Linear records of transactions and data that form an immutable chain of information.
3. Holds the "single version of the truth" which makes it useful in banking, and businesses
4. Blockchains provide consensus not efficiency.
5. There is nothing easy about implementing distrubuted crypto systems. Launching a blockchain is extremely hard and perverts incentives. The skillsets to write code is very different than the skillsets required to develop distributed crypto systems. Make sure the use case fits the technology.
6. Ledger entries are broadcasted to all participants. Everything is duplicated across all nodes.
7. Whats the incentives for participants to start up participating nodes in a Blockchain/DLT. There are a lot of costs in running a participating node (network bandwidth, computational overhead, storage size).
  1. How does the system raise revenue to pay for its infrastructure? Identify & Prioritize Opportunities for Value for yourself and a node operator.
  2. There has to be a monetary incentive to participate in a blockchain. The running of a node must be made profitable in some way. Nodes don’t automatically support your network because they think your project is awesome. People need to benefit directly from running your software. Promises only work for a short time and after a while if it’s not paying off. Direct monetary reward is absolutely necessary for miners to participate.
  3. Why should I be motivated to use BlockChain/DLT rather than relational database? Compared to a relational database, BlockChain/DLT is much more expensive from the maintenance point of view. What kind of real business case do you see where the business revenue exceeds BlockChain/DLT maintenance costs? For example, if we take luggage insurance and we would like to create a registry where all the insuree's data is stored to avoid duplicate coverage. It is a lot easier and cheaper to create a single central registry to store this data than to create a distributed network that has to be set up by all the parties in their premises.
8. Proof-of-Work is Expensive. Achieving consensus is very expensive. It doesn’t matter what cool things people claim their blockchain can do, if the nodes can’t stay synced with each other, a centralized solution would be better. Since transactions or blocks can be missed or spoofed nodes need a way to ask for, and trust, information from other nodes.
9. Blockchains have a high degree of immutability. One of the benefits of a blockchain is its permanence. History and your balances cannot be changed easily by an attacker or a trusted third party. If you hear a use case that supposedly doesn’t require immutability, you must ask why would it require a ledger? It would be better served to use a traditional database that’s designed to update records, as opposed to an append-only ledger.
10. How do you secure the network? New blockchain projects are launched right into the fire of sophisticated attackers and an educated community.
11. Blockchains/DLT are decentralized and no one company is responsible for it. They are generally government-resistant so where is the incentive for a Government? They are created in an unregulated environment, outside the control of any central authority. A truly decentralized network cannot be regulated in any traditional sense, hence, blockchains are resistant to central authority-resistant (often phrased as censorship-resistant).
12. Physical objects cannot be represented on a blockchain due to the dual consensus problem. One source of consensus is the physical world. Who electronically "owns" the item and who physically is holding the item.
13. Generally 3 common usages of Blockchain
  1. Platform coins. Companies can issue tokens on the platform easily and use them for governance or stakeholder management.
  2. Tokens used within a specific blockchain-based application. Tokens/coins that allow participation in a unique blockchain use case. For example, a decentralized prediction market launching next year. The tokens entitle the holder to a share of all transaction fees from the prediction markets, as well as voting rights to settle disputed prediction outcomes.
  3. Currencies
The first step is choosing a sector and understanding the problems and pain points in the area. Are you solving a problem of efficiency or trust or other issues? Then finding a developer. But there is more to understanding what blockchain means for companies.

Some of my favorite notes, arguments, etc around the Bitcoin and Blockchain space.

It is quite possible that some countries will adopt digital currencies but it is unlikely that they will be based on blockchain because the governments will lose control of money creation and of ability to properly execute their policy. These digital currencies will be centrally controlled and distributed based on policies for incentives.
There are more index funds than there are stocks. There is more money speculating on goods and services than there are actual goods and services. In other words the international global derivatives market (a series of bets) is 10-20 times larger than the combined Global GDP of actual value creation. Information about money is indeed more valuable or as valuable as money. Information empires need to be both offensive and defensive in their provision of financial information and services.
What is Bitcoin?
1. 99% noise, 1% value
2. Hope and Hype
3. Cash is trash and has been for a long time.
4. A fashion statement not a technology
5. A social frenzy
6. 51% based attack on Bitcoin is based on economics not math
7. As technology advances, so does fraud
8. Blockchain is a theory not a consistent model that reflects reality
9. Blockchain is a platform, not a panacea.
10. Money is an intermediary in the exchange of value. It’s not value itself. It’s a verb.
11. Social asset, not a financial instrument
12. Whats worse? Blockheads or Blockchain? Or do they go hand-in-hand.
13. Government currencies arent fiat currencies, they are political currencies. Eventually technology will dominate even this.
14. Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money. The best laid BTC plans, both from misfits and millionaires, often go astray.
15. If you try to legislate against everything, eventually you have nothing. Could bitcoin function better without government regulations?
16. Fintech innovation as a catalyst that sparks regulatory change?
17. Money is being rewritten into code.
18. Digital Journal
19. Financial game-changer or the mother of all scams?
20. Money isn't viable if it fluctuates in value, particularly with the wild swings characteristic of cryptocurrencies. However everyone forgets that the very instability of government-produced money is one of the two critical reasons cryptocurrencies were created in the first place (the other being privacy).
21. Free? There is a big problem with Free. Value needs to come from somewhere.
22. The value of bitcoin is really predicated on its being a useful means of transactions. If you take that away, all you are left with is a bubble asset.
23. A nest egg abroad
24. A crash is a natural part of any market cycle.
25. Markets need new money to rally, or they must come down to find buyers (true of any asset, crypto or stocks)
26. Without censorship-resistance, Bitcoin is just a very expensive database.
27. Crypto craze
28. What are the benefits of decentralized financial systems?
29. Personal Finance, not Professional Finance.
30. Its a religion. More religion than asset.
31. A Culture not a Currency
32. Bitcoin is commodity, not payment instrument
33. Cryptonite, better watch out
34. Cryptobabble
35. Bitcoiners: Chain of Fools? A fool with a tool is still a fool.
36. The properties that made bitcoin a great decentralizing tool also rendered bitcoin an expensive and slow medium of exchange.
37. Lightning network: Above-chain project
38. A question of trust. Can you trust the code when there are hackers trying to exploit the developers mistakes?
39. Volatile because of a lack of fundamental valuation.
40. Cryptocurrency is too volatile to be used as money
41. A libertarian fantasy
42. An alternative economic model
43. A dark market
44. A cryptocurrency cataclysm
45. Cryptovation
46. Its a large step toward a digital economy.
47. A truly democratic solution
48. Its technology. Even if bitcoin has no value the technology behind it does
49. Currency
50. Depository System (wallet)
51. Payment System
52. Blockchain for data provenance. Data mining could be used to advance their business models?
53. Bitcoin is speculative investment, not currency
54. denationalize money
55. Bitcoin is a medium of exchange used to purchase goods and services.
56. Bubble Trouble. Explosive price growths causes excessive high peaks and extremely low valley's
57. Bubble, Breakthrough, Boom, Boon, Bane, or Bonanza.
58. Currency or Cult, its both
59. Bitcoin is an index to launder money
60. Legal Tender or Monopoly Money
61. futuristic folly to mysterious fortune
62. A capitalist revolution for the internet
63. bitcoin is the world's best performing asset classes in recent years, also its the most volatile
64. Innovation, Disruption, or Distraction.
65. Bitcoin a Distraction from More Important Risks?
66. Modern version of gold.
67. Bitcoin is a crisis currency in failing economies & hot spots. When there is instability in fiat people flock to it.
68. A computerized solution supported by a very powerful technological base
69. Decentralizing online marketplaces.
70. Bitcoin is a response to a breakdown in trust at Government levels. Its time to give technology a try.
71. Potentially transformative technology
72. An economic miracle accessible to anyone with a mobile device.
73. Bitcoin is just another Investment Bubble
74. An encouragement to take risks
75. A financial asset whoes "true" value cannot be determined using traditional financial analytical techniques. Cryptocurrencies don't have any real precedent from which to establish benchmarks. That makes them hard to value. Learn to measure the social velocity not price velocity. Behavioral finance.
76. A technology which can cause a monumental shift in the way we view economies.
77. An easy way to move wealth across international borders.
78. Its not a short-term phenomenon, its here to stay.
79. A pathological phenomenon.
80. Republic of Cryptography?
81. Bitcoin is a social network. See Metcalfe's law. Basically Bitcoins adoption becomes self reinforcing and makes every future transaction more valuable.
82. A separation of state and money. An end to economic and financial persecution. Overcomes financial blockaides.
83. It is a store of value that can't be censored and is resistant to seizure, but is susceptible to theft from hackers. An open source currency that is less influenced by the state of the economy or any looming geopolitical risk. Governments/Feds loose ability to affect monetary policy.
84. Crypto Cocaine? "greater fool" theory of investing?
85. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
86. A false God
87. A poxy currency
88. A blockchain of fools
89. Bitcoin bonanza
90. Government-proof store of wealth.
91. It undermine the government, reduce the power of central banks, and could destabilize the country’s economy.
92. They are technological constructs that use encryption techniques to regulate issuances and transfers.
93. loyalty points of freedom from traditional financial systems
94. Bitcoin is an indication in a complete lack trust and faith in the currency system. Gold market is manipulated by the paper market.
95. A good idea that didnt require force.
96. A Bit of a Modern Miracle at Any Price
97. Bitcoin has glitter but it isnt gold.
98. The Gold Rush of the new millennium?
99. The trust machine
100. A digital spreadsheet that, thanks to the laws of mathematics and cryptography, was more inviolable than carving it in stone.
101. A casino, not an investment
102. Wall Street is following the money. We tend to invest both time and money in what's trending.
103. It's hard to be trendy. There's a lot of fool's gold in trends.
104. Price is based on momentum not intrinsic value.
105. Bitcoin to bring financial sovereignty to the common man in the world of central banks.
106. How real is the virtual?
107. A mania that can only end in disaster
108. A systemic risk in the making
109. Bitcoin isnt volatile, it just never has a quiet day.
110. What is Bitcoin "currently" good for? Nothing but speculation.
111. Bitcoin price is just noise that distracts from the bigger developments that are taking place. People are missing the point of whats occuring.
112. Bitcoin is here to stay. It may not stay in this form forever, but it will continue to drive innovation and be a valuable, viable commodity for years to come.
113. Speculation: The majority of trading in financial markets is not for the exchange of goods and services but for speculation.
114. Bitcoin changes prices too quickly to be a currency and processes transactions too slowly to be a payments system, but it is juuust right for teaching libertarians everything they don't know about economics.
115. Bitcoin was created to decouple the past from the future. Blockchain technology was made to de-centralize the Bitcoin universe, and make it possible to transfer data without the consent of any one government.
116. The most promising feature of the blockchain technology is to facilitate peer to peer transactions across various industries.
117. The Value of Bitcoin Isn’t What Most People Think It Is. Bitcoin itself does not hold any value. The value in bitcoin is provided by the miners. No miners = no Bitcoin value. So to invest in Bitcoin, you should really be familiar with the state of Bitcoin mining, and what sorts of challenges and risks it might face.
118. World is $233 Trillion In Debt. There needs to be a financial reset. Debt as cash is dangerous.
119. Bitcoin is and remains a key facilitator for cybercrime.
120. Blockchain bridges a very important gap, that of trust.
121. Blockchain: A "See through equity"?
122. Bitcoin is a "synthetic commodity money".
123. Bitcoin mining has a positive effect on a China's economy. It plays an important role in reviving economies and providing employment in towns and cities that are not connected to economic nerve centers
124. Bitcoin becomes non-transactionable whereas gold is still transferable within a collapsed infrastructure
125. Bitcoin will be driven by a larger uptake of institutional investors and futures contracts
126. A decentralized currency allows for true independence from a state entity.
127. Even rumors can cause a massive drop in the value of bitcoin
128. Bitcoin bloodbath
129. Blockchain as command and control, empowering multiple trading partners to collaborate and establishing a single shared view of a transaction without compromising details, privacy or confidentiality.
130. There is a major problem posed by a currency like bitcoin with rapidly fluctuating value. "People want a fair exchange of value when they’re buying something, so if it costs $100, I want to pay $100"
131. On the simplest level, blockchains are public ledgers that record transactions shared among many users. Once data is entered on a blockchain, it is secure and unalterable, and provides a permanent record. Blockchains provide the ultimate in transparency and trust, making this technology a brave new world for organizations that strive to conduct transparent business.
132. Bitcoin craze chearly shows the generation conflicts (millenials)
133. The Bitcoin bubble may ultimately turn out to be a distraction from the true significance of the blockchain.
134. Ultimately, Bitcoin price will will ultimately be determined by its usefulness, its future use cases.
135. Bitcoin has a purpose but it wouldn't be to replace money.
136. Blockchain to reinvigorate shareholder democracy by enabling the return of voting power to the real beneficiary owners of equities
137. Bitcoin is an asset like art, diamonds or Pokemon cards
138. Bitcoin: Uncontrollable growth or decline against the value of the dollar.
139. An enslavement by the passion to get rich quick vs to promote righteous labor, which should, of course, be adequately compensated
140. Part of the "free banking" era
141. Cryptocurrency thefts: Who will demand security for all over profits for a relative few?
142. The entire point of money is that it allows parties to transact without having to barter. How does Bitcoin fit this?
143. As a currency, Bitcoin should be a serviceable unit of account, means of payments, and a stable store of value. It is none of those things. No one prices anything in Bitcoin. Few retailers accept it. And it is a poor store of value, because its price can fluctuate by 20-30% in a single day.
144. Politicized because its different
145. What's The Big Deal With Blockchain?
146. A Crypto exchange isnt about having the latest technology, its about the risk management procedures.
147. Only for middle-class dreamers. Those people profiled seem to be those who can least afford to lose this money.
148. cryptojacking = Ransomware mining
149. Social Engagement (sharing economy): People have missed the real power of cryptocurrencies. So far, they’ve been thought of as alternative currencies, taking the place of fiat currency in transactions. What cryptocurrencies really do is monetize social networks, unlocking the value of a network by harnessing user engagement.
150. Technology is ideology, not reality.
151. Cash is a 'public utility' that should not be privatize for profit (ie technology or blockchain based solution). Homeless will become barcode beggers?
152. The very nature of Blockchain is Eternal Records
153. Cryptocurrency is showing us that national currencies have not helped in unlocking the movement of money to where there might be need for it and that is why people are investing in cryptocurrency
154. Blockchain is about removing data silos, improving trust and operational efficiencies.
155. Virtual currencies issued by national governments would mean an end to the anonymity that is part of the appeal of independent cryptocurrencies.
156. Crypto-assets enable fast and inexpensive financial transactions, while offering some of the convenience of cash
157. Bitcoin is the internet... in the 1980s! Almost everything has changed and now its money's turn.
158. It's your money. Take charge of it
159. The best way to make money is to not lose it.
160. Bitcoin is a very good middle ground between governments who have the obligation to control money flows as best they can and citizens who have the incentive for money to be more independent.
161. "No urgent crisis" for blockchain to solve
162. Blockchain is becoming "buzzwords as a tool for corporate promotion"
163. Any crypto-asset price increases are based on the mob growing
164. Technology should be a slave not a master
165. Cryptocurrencies are backed by electricity costs?
166. Blockchain with a Purpose. Srinivas objective is to put blockchain on a positive trail to solve some of the most crucial challenges.
167. Decentralized, unstable, and consuming too much electricity
168. A mirage not a currency
169. Bitcoin: The peoples currency?
170. A social innovation
171. As long as we discover new ways to create value, new types of businesses will emerge.
172. Blockchains create "Governance Markets". Decentralized collaboration rather than centralized ownership. Prediction: Crypto-powered governance markets will solve the tragedy of the commons and drive future abundance at the same level of scale as the stock market and the corporation. In a pervasively connected world, it will be more global and democratized than what we’ve seen before.
173. We need to actually get to a point where the technology has real value and it only has real value if there are actually hundreds of millions of people using this technology.
174. Age of Verification, Age of Accountability
175. Banks are doing everything in their power to slow down the growth of crypto, while quietly stealing its revolutionary technology. JPMCoin is a perfect example of this.
176. Crypto Exchanges: They are the publisher, not just the postman. There cannot be a case of all profit, no responsibility.
177. It will change how economic rights are licensed empower inanimate objects to communicate and interact with each other.
178. Gambling or window to the future?
179. The price of Bitcoin is subject to the raw forces of supply and demand in a relatively illiquid market compared to international foreign exchange markets. The combination of having no broad consensus on Bitcoin valuation and the relative thin liquidity of its trading can result in very large price swings.
180. New asset classes are more volatile than established assets. As the benefits of cryptocurrencies become clear, more people and businesses will hold the coins for their utility value, which will reduce speculation and limit volatility. Improved adoption, functionality, and regulation of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin will serve to stabilise the price of the cryptocurrency. As regulation is introduced and the functionality of cryptocurrencies increases, the true price will become more consistent.
181. A digital currency is harder to plan for than to build. More politics than technology.
182. Innovation in digital assets continues rapidly and will likely drive increased institutional participation over time.
183. A delayering. Removing of the middle man.
7 Facts To Check Before Investing In A ICO Or New Cryptocurrency
1. Who’s offering the coin?
2. How active is the development team?
3. How strong is the community?
4. How much funding is backing it, and how are tokens distributed?
5. What’s the trading volume, and liquidity?
6. How does the market cap look?
7. What exchanges are hosting the currency?
Bitcoin to represent the ground zero at which three of the most important historical forces at work in the world today converge.
1. First and most obvious of these is the ongoing revolution in information technology that is transforming so many aspects of our lives.
2. Second epochal trend with which Bitcoin seems utterly in tune: the collapse of trust in the established financial system following the crash of 2008.
3. Third great force of history with which Bitcoin is conspicuously aligned is the dramatic surge in scepticism of – even scorn for – established political authority. Faith in traditional political parties and even in traditional representative democracy itself is evaporating at an alarming rate.
Tokenomics & Cryptonomics
Bitcoin has only two proven use cases after eight years: criminal activity and speculation
Bitcoin is not just an emerging asset class/currency, but a philosophical tool that helps early adopters to live incrementally further outside the scope of the State.
The degree to which economists have ignored Bitcoin is surpassed only by the extent to which Bitcoin enthusiasts have ignored economics. The divide between these groups is larger than that between analog and digital.
It is clear thereís a thirst for a new truly global currency and there is an increasing likelihood that governments will start regulating it.
Bitcoin is an experiment in unintended consequences that makes the North Korean government look efficient.
Can Bitcoin help you gain control of your digital footprint?
In their current form, cryptocurrencies carry serious risks.
Legitimize Bitcoins so we can provide our regulatory protections to the consumers.
When it comes to subjects like Bitcoin "It's not about fitting in, it's about standing out."
Bitcoins current problems are due to bad human behaviour rather than inherent flaws in the system
Bitcoins is about empowering the people to take over their personal finances, not governments and banks.
Bitcoins is the intersection of technology+people+finance
Bitcoins is offered to the people at no cost.
The future of money is digital
Bitcoin is not inflation proof. Inflation happens when "too many units of any currency chase too few assets."
Bitcoins is will cause a shift in wealth from fiat to private money
Bitcoin is maturing beyond its initial niche and begins to realise its true disruptive potential. Sophisticated service firms will be increasingly required to facilitate the system.
Bitcoin must grow out of its obsessive adolescence
It is important for investors to understand the difference between Bitcoin the technology, bitcoin the currency, and, Bitcoin companies.
- Bitcoin is a technology that bitcoin the currency is built on.
- Bitcoin companies simply operate within this set of protocols.
- Just like the internet isnít to blame when a website is fraudulent, it is not fair or logical to blame Bitcoin the technology or bitcoin the currency when a private company operates unethically.
- Now, more than ever it is important for investors to remain cautious when investing in Bitcoin or Bitcoin related companies. It is also the time for Bitcoin companies to step up and separate themselves from the companies with fraudulent intentions. This can be done by simply educating consumers and potential users with what to watch for.
Convenience is Not Always Worth the Price
Like water, Bitcoin may take the path of least resistance to gain adoption
Switch to a global currency?
Digital currencies must be zero trust, via a digital currency contract?
The Last Days of Cash. How e-money technology is plugging us into the digital economy.
Bitcoin needs to find ways to redistributing existing cashy/payments demand from offline to online
Bitcoin has the potential to completely transform every aspect of the internet, marketing, content distribution, and third-world empowerment as we know it.
Bitcoins wouldnt have existed without the financial crisis
Technology has the ability to overturn monopoly
Bitcoins allows banking for the unbanked and under-banked
Bitcoins will be a train wreck or a success
If this is the end of cash, there is money to be made getting rid of it
Where ever there is value there will be fraud
A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable.
Digital currencies may have many potential applications as a medium of exchange, particularly cross border
Current Bitcoin user base is basically crazy libertarians who are increasingly poorly-informed about currency systems and macroeconomics
- ie Kids with Code
Rather than trying to develop a completely new financial system as Bitcoin is trying to do, it makes more sense that banks, as existing money managers, absorb the benefits of the technological innovation.
Regulation Could Rob Bitcoin of its Low-Cost Appeal
In the notice, the IRS co-opted FinCEN's definition of digital currency:
- Virtual currency is a digital representation of value that functions as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and/or a store of value
Banks and governments have the monopoly about money.
Bitcoin is in trouble if regulation and enforcement becomes more costly than its benefits
Bitcoin's protocol is open source. So is its narrative. The story and the code evolve. There is no one way, just individual frames-of-reference. Bitcoin is greater than the sum of these arguments. Ultimately it will be moulded in our collective image.
- http://bitcoinmagazine.com/12226/lets-talk-libbitcoin-2/
Its not about Bitcoin, its about the features and where the energies of developers go.
Bitcoins, as property, will not likely succeed in raising Bitcoins curtain of anonymity.
US is currently based on the debt-based money system (and all of its negative effects)
I want to be able to issue "repayable" Bitcoins to someone.
With a Government backed Cryptocurrency we could have a Monetary Justice where new money can be issued directly to individuals and bypass Banks.
Bitcoin is No Substitute for Government Money, But a Refuge From Control
Consumer confidence in the financial industry is as low as it has ever been.
Lack of trust hurts everyone: consumers, investors, the financial industry, and the economy.
Big promises that could never be met and strategies to fulfill them that were never fully thought out.
Is this true "Money creation is too vital to be left to the state"?
People who confidently reject all the innovation in new payment and monetary systems are on the wrong side of history.
Experience isnt something you can purchase.
Digital dollars or bogus bucks?
Data the new hostage, cloud the new hideout, bitcoin the new ransom
What are the the Economics of Private Digital Currency?
Bitcoin's greatest asset is its community
Bitcoin in terms of tulips is using antiquated thinking.
Privacy is an illusion. You have zero privacy in todays connected world. Get over it.
It's not about inventing technology, but applying it.
Where do nudists keep their bitcoin?
- We have the answer.
- http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/11/17/bitcoin-is-getting-under-your-skin-literally/
Bitcoin is not only volatile in its value, but in its very essence.
The crusade to absorb bitcoin into the seams of the State has begun.
Bitcoin does not pander to power structures, it undermines them.
Bitcoin is meant to function outside of regulatory systems.
Just like the internet gave information back to the people, Bitcoin will give financial freedom back to the people.
Bitcoin will allow us to shape the world without having to ask for permission.
We have been brought to a point where it has become necessary to dissolve the bond between currency and institution.
Bitcoin: under-performing on trust. Bitcoin needs to regain some trust.
"If someone tells me, Oh, in Cambodia or in India, only 10% of people have a bank account, then I would assume these people are not capable to transact in an encrypted currency"
Entrepreneurs should stay as lose as possible to their target markets.
Bitcoin is R&D's largest community
Bitcoin is a self-conscious reinvention of every wheel in finance, and when you crowdsource your wheels some of them will be lumpy or ill-formed or oval.
Will regulations isolate the U.S. from ?parts? of the international bitcoin economy
10 things bitcoin won't tell you
1. Bitcoin could be the tip of a dangerous iceberg
2. We're a tax nightmare waiting to happen
3. Our hype is much bigger than our market share
4. Our volatility could leave you broke
5. We're fertile ground for fraud
6. Our little software problems can cost you big bucks
7. You may have to print out your 'digital' money
8. Our fees are low, but maybe not for long
9. Currency 'miners' could mine your bank account
10. You might need us some day, like it or not
Explore, analyse, modify, and learn from streams of data?
The past decade has seen major advances in machine learning to model and predict outcomes from data. However, the greatest challenge facing these approaches remains interpreting the results and gaining strategic understanding of the predictions. We still need ways to hypothesize and understand how a system works - the real value resides in actionability. Here I will introduce advances in the field of evolutionary computation that can accelerate this process by detecting key mathematical drivers and relationships from raw data. These results can be applicable in almost any situation -- from detecting laws of physics from motion-tracking data to modeling sales drivers in a retail chain.
Escrow agents are replaced by rule- and software-driven technology.
Specific performance of contracts is no longer a cause of action because the contracts themselves automatically execute the agreement of the parties.
The practical consequence of solving this problem means that any Internet user can send digital property to one another.
Digital Money Management, often referred to as Personal Financial Management (PFM), is the future of digital banking.
We are now headed towards a MASSIVE Sovereign Debt Crisis which will engulf large parts of the global financial system and cause the misplaced trust in governments to shift into the private sector
Privacy is a protected right, even in the US.
Building a community, 1 conversation at a time
Technology can address financial crime compliance
There are a lot of things that just aren't easy to accomplish with a grassroots approach.
Bitcoin is more ideology than trustworthy currency
Few economic injustices are more villainous than stealing from the poor. Yet this is what a government does when it devalues its currency.
New payment industry entrants seek to capitalize on technology opportunities.
Investing and trading bitcoin as one of the first major applications of crypto currency and believe increased investment and trading activity is helping create the payment network infrastructure and monetary base that will facilitate increased economic activity in the future.
- We believe investors value bitcoin based as a weighted average of potential outcomes that can range between $0/bitcoin to $1,000,000/bitcoin
- Bitcoin is creating a 'sell the news' type of environment.
- This broad set of outcomes means any small change in perception regarding the likelihood of the best case outcome drives significant changes to current valuation.
- This would imply volatility in the price of bitcoin may not go away anytime soon, as the potential for bitcoin is being constantly measured by the market in light of rapid technology development and unpredictable regulatory constraints.
- We believe traders value volatility as they continue to gravitate to bitcoin trading as an active 24/7 market uncorrelated with other asset class returns. Every year in recent memory, traders have looked to the future in the hope that volatility in the markets would finally return, and let them make some money. Those hopes have been almost entirely in vain, thanks to central banks steering markets on a narrow path. Wild fluctuations in the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will hark back to the good times.
- Since economic activity (sale of goods & services, money remittance, P2P. is intermingled with trading activity, we believe the trading activity is helping create the network capacity and monetary base to support the future economic applications of bitcoin.
Bitcoin Can Open Doors of the Global Economy for 2.5 Billion People
If you don't have your own currency, you basically lose a lot of sovereign powers. Without money, the government has no power.
Americans, bankers, venture capitalists, regulatory agencies and legislators know about digital currency seems to be based on fiction and not fact.
Cash: It's anonymous, invisible to the IRS, law enforcement and hackers, as well as to irritating marketers and data brokers.
Distributed Economy, Linked Data, HTTP message signing.
Reasons Paper Currency Should Be Eliminated
1. It would be more efficient: Change left at airport checkin, no looking for ATM.
2. Help foil crime: Cash is hard to trace, Prevent Bank Roberies, limit tax evasion.
3. It would be cheaper: It costs 2x the price of penny/nickel to produce.
4. Allow for negative interest rate: With physical cash, there can never be negative interest rates because consumers can always withdraw money and keep it under their mattresses. Below-zero interest rates could conceivably draw investment and boost the economy.
5. Paper money is filthy: Teeming with bacteria related to pneumonia, food poisoning, gastric ulcers and staph infections
6. There are many legitimate objections to this idea
  1. Consumers should be allowed to make anonymous purchases if they wish.
  2. Not everyone has access to broadband and can afford it.
  3. An electric currency would be vulnerable to power outages, among other threats.
  4. Bitcoin seems to fit the bill. Maybe it will replace it as well.
Bitcoin API, SDKs and enterprise infrastructure help developers focus their time and resources on building amazing apps, and not needlessly rolling out payments infrastructure.
Automation is Vital to Drive Business Value
Capitalistic - 10 seconds to send an email, 172,800 seconds to send money. The Internet as financial infrastructure will lead to a more agile global economy.
Privacy framework seeks to give users control of how their personal data is used and shared while ensuring that their identities are known to someone in case law enforcement comes knocking.
Self-Sovereignty of digital personal identity, personal data, and finance.
Electronic payment & e-comm are an inseparable couple
Bitcoin is Teaching Realism to Libertarians. It's not really clear that large piles of wealth sitting there actually exist without the state to protect them.
- The ability to do large scale capital accumulation without having to need a private army is basically an artefact of pre-existing law.
- I own the house I live in, but that house next door that I'm renting to you? The reason it's mine, is because the state says it is.
- Some people prefer gold over Bitcoin, but even if you own a lot of gold, and civilization breaks down, you'll need people to guard your gold.
- http://bitcoinmagazine.com/18000/bitcoin-is-teaching-realism-to-libertarians-an-interview-with-old-school-cypherpunk-vinay-gupta/
What privacy regulations apply to transactions Paid for using Virtual Currencies?
- What Privacy Regulations Apply if the Transaction Includes a Consumer Customer Resident in the U.S.?
One of the major perceived benefits from math-based currencies such as bitcoin is the notion that users' identities can be protected from those who could exploit that information for commercial purposes or to perpetrate identity theft.
The fundamental shortcoming of current payments networks is they try to secure the pipes, not the content.
Businesses Should See Digital Disruption As an Opportunity to Thrive to Greater Heights
Bitcoin: It's not all about the money. Bitcoin's blockchain ledger may turn out to be more important than the currency
Bitcoin is speculative but Blockchain will revolutionise the world
Will bitcoin will “always be currency of the future” (never the present)
1. https://gigaom.com/2014/11/18/skeptic-says-bitcoin-will-always-be-currency-of-the-future/
Technology is changing all industries and puts pressure on the traditional business models The difference between generation z and previous generations is, in brief, that they grew up with technology, embrace technology instantly and deploy it in their everyday life to a much greater extent than previous generations.
Within a couple of years, they'll use something called tokenization so the numbers you use to send are not the same as the numbers you use to receive.
Is paper money "social superior" to electronic currencies?
Can build consensus without seeking authority?
Can Bitcoin worked with legal, compliance, audit and regulators to implement controls and surveillances for trade execution?
"replicated, shared ledgers". That is: every full participant in the network has a full copy of the transaction ledger and the "magic" of the system is in how it makes sure that everybody's copy stays in step with everybody else's.
- http://gendal.me/2015/02/10/a-simple-model-for-smart-contracts/
Is Bitcoin an Economic Equalizer or a Tool for Conflict and Crime?
Digital toolsets like Bitcoin will put serious pressure on traditional brick-mortar businesses.
Blockchain will become tomorrows transparent pyramid schemes without verifiable identity. One of the ironies of the information age is how it's turning out to obscure rather than improve our understanding of what's really going on.
Bitcoin is a speculative attack on the current form of money. The time to consider how to prepare for that future is now before practical problems arise.
Biometrics is a statistical process with its acceptance boundaries being established by delineations between an acceptable access or not an acceptable access.
Bitcoin should be a Money Service Business, not a currency.
Traditional financial services providers are widely known for suffering a significant decline of profits in low nominal interest-rate environments. For FinTech companies however one of the supporting engines was the fact that clients felt that banks are of no use when they charge for “everything” but pay virtually 0 interest. This situation is due to change. We think this will be a period of volatility, transition and selection within the FinTech world.
Certificates (CA), to have any value, must have liability associated with their issuance.
Ultimately, like mobile, like the internet, and like computers before that, Blockchain is not the thing. It's the thing that enables the thing.
The argument for going forward with a formal acceptance of a digital currency is that the world consumer becomes venerable to losing their monetary holdings without knowing why. No government is backing the transaction when a lose occurs. – also, no government is taking a role of underwriter for the digital currency itself.
Its likely Bitcoin will pilot and empower Free Market Economy yet not be part of the mainstream finances.
Is Blockchain "The Right Answer to the Wrong Question"
Bitcoin users have rubbish passwords just like the rest of us
Blockchain will challenge trusted third party business models like eBay, Amazon and Uber by creating a way for buyers and sellers to interact safely without the costs of a platform. For this to occur users must first learn to manage their private keys. Additionally the practicality of implementing decentralized cryptosystems falls outside of the traditional IT development skill-set.
- simplifying business processes and creating trusted, safe records of business agreements and transactions with storage on a cloud based permissioned public ledger.
Paypal doesnt just protect your account, it protects your purchases. Impossible for any Blockchain/DLT to accomplish that.
Debate over the priorities of law enforcement, regulation, and personal privacy.
Blockchain: Disruption or distraction?
Put transparency and immutability together and you have a dream scenario for regulators, auditors and compliance officers
An economic productivity tool.
Cryptocurrency continues to evolve, shaping itself to the rapidly shifting needs of markets. As communication technologies have made our world increasingly interconnected, the need for means to support transactions taking place across borders in an expeditious manner with partners previously unknown has grown significantly. Cryptocurrencies offer the promise of digital cash, with many of its characteristics, good and bad. The market may fork in in coming years, with both government-sanctioned cryptocurrencies and private cryptocurrencies operating simultaneously to meet different market demands. Its possible to migrate to bitcoin and other crypto currencies in response to the market restrictions.
Social payments vs financial payments?
In todays age Identity is a currency. We are the product.
Blockchain should be used as a property ownership registry/recording system. Blockchain should not contain the product itself (ie a digital currency). Digital currencies are extremely dangerous.
Focus on improving existing systems, rather than getting excited about trendy technologies. Small incremental baby steps that offer business value is a more likely outcome.
Golden Copy: The Blockchain is Just a Database
The blockchain story is bull#%@^ blockchain is indeed a clever solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem (a fault tolerance problem in distributed systems), its practical applications are rather limited. The story that blockchain technology will re-shape significant components of the Internet is bull#%@^.
Authority is Good: Authorities make sense in important transactions because there will be conflicts between transacting parties. Resolving conflicts requires the enforcement of judgments, and enforcement requires administrative powers including the ability to reverse transactions. The nature of Blockchain irreversibility affords no liability protection available for users. Hackers, crackers, and key loggers will steal the funds with no administrative powers being able to reverse the transactions.
Blockchain: A technology looking for a problem to solve, rather than a technology created to solve a problem.
Regulatory and other hurdles will force most digital currency start-ups to partner with, rather than compete directly against, incumbent banks. Yet, most financial institutions remain in 'experimentation mode,' wary about the scalability of the technology, privacy issues associated with broadcasting commercially sensitive information about money flows, and the volatility and governance of non-fiat digital currencies.
Money as a weapon of control & economic censorship:
- Money dependent on systems of representation requires trust to work. With the creation of the Federal Reserve and other central banks, private corporations began taking over the supplying of money. This centrally planned money production intermediates human relationship by dividing all into classes of creditors and debtors, where the former are masters, while the latter often become de-facto slaves.
- The hidden captains of this managed democracy direct the flow of currency through financial engineering and have created incentive structures that are bent toward preserving their power. Stimulated by toxic asset bubbles, derivatives and quantitative easing, these incentives work like invisible hands of the market. They suppress democratic values by controlling information, which is the currency of democracy and suppressing free speech with economic censorship, as was seen in the case of the financial blockade against WikiLeaks.
At this stage in history, because everything is so well-connected, any situation in life will have an impact on the global economy.
Future of digital services: A naive developer playing with code he doesn’t understand, savvy thieves exploiting the vulnerabilities he doesn’t understand, and finally a squad of angry investors & criminals descending on him for screwing up their meal ticket. Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens a lot — although physical violence is, as far as I know, still fairly rare. To protect digital services, like Bitcoin or a Blockchain, the whole system needs to be protected through advanced security, hot & cold wallet rotations, one time keys, authentication & authorization tokens, multi-factor systems, etc. Less than 0.1% are sharp enough to build it and fewer than 1% of the 0.1% few are diligent to keep the system continuously secure.
2016 stats
- http://us9.campaign-archive2.com/?u=cb875975da196e21bcc6f8b5f&id=01e5227905&e=a1af1e0a4e
- 20%: Risk of a company having its systems breached
- 89%: Breaches that have a financial or espionage motive
- 91%: Percentage of breaches that involved stolen credentials
- Cryptography doesnt solve these problems! Bitcoin thefts are from stolen credentials. Since there is no central authority no one can help you.
Bitcoin is emerging from its "hacktivist" origins. People are starting to park their money in digital currencies, like Bitcoin, rather than parking them in fiat currencies. This is primarily due to the Negative Interest Rate Policy as well as Zero Interest Rate Policy of the Central Banks. Central Banks cannot get away with all the monetary printing. The more they print, the more they push investors away from wanting their fiat currency. A scenario of total collapse, the governments telling everybody that your money is now worthless and the bonds you own are now worthless. Institutional investors are recognizing this outcome, hence, they are the largest group of Bitcoin buyers.
- Lack of regulation was scaring a few customers; not that regulation helped in any way during the 2007 crash, and neither will it help in the next crash.
- The two Chinese exchanges, Huobi and OKCoin, both witness approximately 92% of the global trade in Bitcoin.
- There's a lot of hot money in China that has to go somewhere.
- Main emphasis on this movement is to find 'alternative' asset classes, which are mature enough, but not saturated. The risk-reward in such classes should be high.
After 7 years now Bitcoin is still an inaccessible, obscure experiment and esoteric online currency, used by few and understood by fewer. Despite the breathless prophecies of countless experts, neither death nor revolution have come to pass.
Regulators are starting to encourage and support the use of technology to reduce risk and ensure compliance. Blockchain as a piggy bank dramatically increases risk over what we have today. Blockchain as an accounting ledger can help that by automating reporting. To reduce risk you must separate the piggy bank from the ledger.
Since Bitcoin's creation in 2009, 33% of all Bitcoin exchanges were hacked, and 48% closed. Hackers manipulating a ledger that cant be corrected?
If you guarantee the authenticity of the user you guarantee the integrity of the transaction.
Without data confidentiality, a general purpose ledger is incomplete.
By clashing with new privacy laws like the ‘right to be forgotten’ and by making it nearly impossible to resolve human error and hackers mischief efficiently, the blockchain’s immutability could end up being its own worst enemy.
What data isn't sold to advertisers or stolen by hackers is carved up by government surveillance.
The Cashless Society Is Just Another Creepy Fantasy
- Liberated from the burden of physical currency, consumers could make purchases from the convenience of a mobile device. Every transaction would come equipped with fraud protection, reward points and a digital record of its time and location. Comprehensive tracking could help the Internal Revenue Service reclaim billions of tax dollars lost to unreported income, like the $80 I made selling a used refrigerator on Craigslist. Drug dealers, helpless without an anonymous medium of exchange, would acquire wholesome professions.
- This universe is missing one of the fundamental aspects of human civilization: A world without cash is a world without money.
- A claim is only as good as its enforceability, and in a cashless society every transaction must pass through a financial gatekeeper.
- {NSN OF1KA56TTDSI }
Whose vision will prevail, Wall Street or Silicon Valley?
I urge the cryptocurrency community to avoid infighting - the bigger fight to be had is for external adoption not different cryptocurrencies targeting different use cases
Bitcoin is independent of all nations. It may easily become a neutral medium of facilitating capital outflows (especially for China)
Bitcoin companies are hiring promotional CEO's and CTO's. The investors are being mesmerized, blinding them to the challenges the technology is facing.
Bitcoin Was Supposed to Change the World. What Happened?
Mobile technology is more important to bank the unbanked than Blockchain. Mobile money is issued to a mobile SIM card, not a Blockchain.
The most efficient outcome will prevail in any market.
Breaking a technology or process into functionally relevant components facilitates innovation.
Transactions improve when trust is managed by the system, not by mediators.
Blockchain will not solve poverty traps.
Blockchain may or not be successful but it is positioned with the trends in the marketplace. There is more opportunity infront of you than behind you.
Bitcoin will cause a slow death by papercuts as startups wake up to the possibilities offered by shunning legacy finance. M-Pesa and BitPesa has been pushing this for years. As payment wallets for the unbanked/unbankable grow grow so will the papercuts. Having a new technology that is not defined by law (unregulated) is an opportunity.
Every cryptocurrency community has a value to scammers and hackers.
With greater advances in technology come greater risks to cyber security. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has recently put cyber security and cyber attacks as the number one threat to America. Identity theft in hospitals is much more attractive to hackers.
For the next 10 years Blockchain should only be used for social currencies, social engagements. NOT financial engagements or financial services. Once the privacy & safety features of Blockchain matures then and only then consider it for Financial Services.
Every attempt to apply capital market measures will drive up the social market demands for Bitcoin. These social market reforms will lead capital market reforms. Is Bitcoin still a currency free from state intervention and large corporate interest?
Unlimited financial expansion is an illusion. Although money is a legacy of the first phase of industrial capitalism, it must now be attuned to the information age and its characteristics; a key critique for the discernment regarding the future form of currencies.
- See my W3C\stories\Beyond Bitcoin - Evonomics.pdf
Distributed capitalism? Example: 3D Printing
No free ride for Bitcoin.
At present, virtual currencies are vulnerable to crime, given they sit outside the financial-services regulatory framework. They make it easier to move illicit funds faster and more secretly than via the traditional banking system.
Blockchain is best used for recordkeeping, fraud, compliance technology, not a digital piggy bank.
Most blockchain evangelists exaggerate what blockchain does, overlooking what it was designed for, and stretch it to irrelevance.
Globalization works against the interest of the poor. When you have nothing you have nothing to loose.
These new technologies are doing more than just changing the way we live. They are changing the global economy, taking apart one industry after another, which destroys many old companies but also creates many forward-leaning new ones. People on the wrong side of the divide are angry and scared, so they understandably supported a leader who promised to bring their Old Economy jobs back. Trump wants to bring back the uneconomical jobs but tech is changing or replacing those jobs. This is creating a fundamental shift in the market demand and supply of skills the employers want. The opposition gets caught holding too tightly to the past and gets swept away.
Initially Blockchain will be used as sustainable monetary systems for communities so they can exist outside of fiat systems?
Blockchain is an irrational trend?
Bitcoiners & Blockchainers are extending their risk-taking culture to their customers.
To create a true payment system, people and the world need to work together. Blockchain can't do that. Blockchain promissed are causing people to follow like bady ducks, yet the technology will never be mother duck.
Focus on a road map and plan, not 1 implementation (aka Blockchain)
Does this make sense? Blockchain is so complex that only a few mathematicians & engineers can understand them, and they require massive computing resources to operate — yet billions of dollars are invested in them.
Self-regulation can happen but only if there is full transparency. Standardize the processes and automate the technology for know-your-customer (KYC), anti-money-laundering (AML), automated suspicious transaction reports (STRS) will facilitate innovation. But what happens to privacy in an environment like this? Is there privacy in an always connected world?
Ledgers have been around for 1000's of years. The true value of Blockchain/DLT isnt in the ledger, its in the automation of workflow. The Ledger is just the final resting place for the transactions execution/results.
The possibility of bitcoin eliminating currency is only a pipe dream as the mass acceptance can come about only if an authority issues it. Virtual currency is hard to track and has no legal binding which puts its users to risk.
Blockchain is more of a powerplay than a usable technology. The entrepreneurs are battling the large financial giants.
How can any Ledger thats also a piggy bank stand up against malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control system? It cant and your piggy bank is lost. If its just a ledger you might loose your privacy but not your bank account.
DLT & Blockchain is an append-only data store. This means you can only add, never change or delete.
As money and value progressively move online, quantum resistance will become an increasing priority. Its not possible to forge quantum money nor its underlying information but as you get access to the underlying information, forgery becomes easy.
The hype about Blockchains potential to transform financial services is way ahead of the reality, its more hope and promise but should still be taken seriously. Some of the ideas currently receiving millions of dollars of funding are akin to mediocre academic research projects.
The changes that blockchain, Bitcoin and distributed ledgers are introducing are probably inevitable. Just not very fast!
Blockchain, as a global piggy bank, has 1 massive side effect: Lack of regulation in a market that is largely based outside of the U.S., and the potential for market manipulation. This was the primary reason for rejecting the Bitcoin ETF.
Is half an apple better than no apple at all: There are issues with scalability and latency with the Blockchain model that utilizes cryptographic algorithms and shares the entire transaction history across every node in the network. Currently, there is no solution to this problem, as Blockchain does not provide the speed that is available using current technology. Use cases involving equity trading execution or card processing require execution cycles that DLT cannot currently provide.
Bitcoin: only 21 million units can ever be issued, and a fixed money supply is incompatible with a growing economy.
Traditional authentication and identification models do not scale well into the evolving IoT/Blockchain/Ledger space
Blockchain'ers tend to incorrectly bias very heavily towards using Blockchain technology to solve a problem that is fundamentally more social than technical.
Catch-22: You cant enforce rules against illegal transfers of Bitcoin/Digital Currencies unless you recognize it.
Gold is the only non-fiat currency in the world. It has always been a hedge against risk.
Blockchain: Open Source Money. Blockchains are simply distributed transaction processing engines. The technology allows data to be stored in a variety of different places while tracking the relationship between different parties to that data.
Traditional banks are not meeting the needs of 21st-century consumers (Mobile Devices)
Blockchain: A lack of trust is no basis for commerce. Whole proposition is built on distrust and on anonymity, shrouded in paranoia. And since blockchains are also highly hackable, disaster is frequently just round the corner.
Central banks will and must guard against e-money takeover. To compete Central banks would need to come up with options that solve the trust, security and anonymity issues associated with many forms of electronic payments. Cash currently fulfils that role, but its use is declining, so central banks need to rethink the "future form" of money.
Bitcoin: A currency needs to grow with the people, not overwhelm them.
By using "secure companion devices" you can shift authentication from a point-in-time event to an ever-present state where we tether the person to the system. Their presence can be constantly assured. Transactions can flow smoothly because we have a high integrity data trail.
Many liken the world of blockchain to the early days of the Internet, which was full of hope and promise but also adversely impacted by rapid growth. Ultimately a series of incentives supporting the Internet’s stability and security allowed it to accelerate forward into what it is today. There is a similar trajectory for blockchain technology. A cautionary tale is advised for those looking to commercialize it to remain vigilant of potentially problematic technical issues that could significantly retard momentum.
the cryptography behind Bitcoin is not foolproof and industry must plan for potential collapse. Failures will happen… as long as you have thought it through, you’re okay.
The headlong pace of technological change produces giant leaps forward in knowledge, innovation, new possibilities and, almost inevitably, legal problems.
Data are to this century what oil was to the last one: a driver of growth and change. Flows of data have created new infrastructure, new businesses, new monopolies, new politics and—crucially—new economics. Digital information is unlike any previous resource; it is extracted, refined, valued, bought and sold in different ways. It changes the rules for markets and it demands new approaches from regulators. Many a battle will be fought over who should own, and benefit from, data.
Bitcoin is becoming one mechanism via which investors channel funds abroad.
The real story of Bitcoin and Blockchain: Democratizing the creation and the administration of markets. We see it in lending marketplaces and with ‘robo advisors’ who are allowing people to participate in markets in ways they could not before. While this financial freedom has its benefits, it also presents risks. If money moves around the world the way email moves around the world, that would be a huge disruptive force throughout the financial sector. From a regulatory perspective, if you can clearly articulate the principles that you are trying to achieve, maybe you can give some of the innovators a chance to meet your policy goals, without your having to go and write very technology-specific rules around them.
The current debt-based market with unlimited supply and limited borders, allows for "too much quantitative easing," which is behind the problem of "too much debt and too little growth".
But my guess would be that the current Bitcoin rally will start its downfall once the daily returns are more evenly balanced out between up and down days.
Blockchain is particularly good at two broad types of applications: verification and efficient exchange of ownership.
Robots make speedier traders but with magnified/monumental mistakes.
It’s the incumbent’s job to find the innovation before the innovators find distribution (ie Wall Street firms innovation with their old business before the innovators disrupt Wall Street). Wall Street companies want things to stay the same because their leaders in most spaces. That’s just completely naive because someone who has nothing to lose will do whatever they can to build market share.
"Civil Asset Forfeiture": allow the government to take whatever they want from you, without a trial or any due process. They’ve also vastly expanded on the definition of such ‘financial crimes’, including failure to fill out a form if you happen to be transporting more than $10,000 worth of ‘monetary instruments’.
- Have too much cash? You’d better tell the government. If not, they’re authorizing themselves in this bill to seize not just the money you didn’t report, but ALL of your assets and bank accounts. They even go so far as to specifically name “safety deposit boxes” among the various assets that they can seize if you don’t fill out the form.
Each modern stock-market crash has been precipitated by a catalyst that has little to do with finance.
Too often we realize too late that the sort of thinking that once helped us survive a prehistoric moment of danger — when we were prey as much as hunter — doesn’t do much good when the danger is modern and longer term.
Blockchain is limited to very niche areas. Blockchain is still a very specialized solution to a very specific set of problems (verification and efficient exchange of ownership)
As blockchain innovation has developed in a myriad of independent efforts, the particular terms utilized have become fractured. A first step toward shared efforts and potential interoperability is a concise glossary of terms. Blockchain and distributed ledger discussions may use industry terms differently. For example, the word “consensus” has a particular relevance to blockchain applications.
A digital remastering: Many are concerned about the internet’s role in politics. But more worrying is the digital tsunami poised to engulf us as machine intelligence and a rising tech elite radically restructure life as we know it.
Without an identity you can’t access education, financial services, healthcare, you name it. You are disenfranchised, a displaced citizen, and marginalized from society.
Bitcoin & Blockchain is a bigger threat to itself than to the financial world. A lack of central authority creates a lot of in-fighting that erode people’s confidence in the entire technology. You need regulations and centralized leadership to bring order and safety, ?at least until the technology can mature to where humans are no longer required?
Mobile technology was rendering companies obsolete long before blockchain came along.
Cryptocurrencies are a minute-by-minute marketplace. They offer no investor protection.
Bitcoins potential for large-scale economic disruption outweighed the risk of it being a total loss.
Bitcoin scaling issues: Until now, this particular technological movement prided itself on its decentralised, anti-authoritarian foundation: a network that was so mathematically complete it could reject the need for a governing body. But as transaction times slowed, fees soared and endless discussions about what Bitcoin was trying to achieve wore on, it became clear some leadership was needed. 1 leader, 1 sane voice fighting tons of nonsense.
Ethereum Tokens: Fake asset or security? Key questions remain about certain types of tokens that defy easy categorization.
Distributed cryptsystems are immensly complex. The demand is greater than the speed the technology can be developed. Its expectations are many factors greater than its reality.
States/nations can withstand the invasion of armies, it cant withstand the invasion of ideas. States fear a future of money without boarders. That future represents a crisis for the political class.
Given the world of hackers, ransomware, and cyber criminals, does Bitcoin bring more trouble to society then it is worth?
Bitcoin and Blockchain too good to be true? It is in your best interest to question everything.
Bitcoin can beat economic sanctions.
If the people in these countries switch to a cryptocurrency, then not only are they more secure but their governments lose all power.
The price is in the eye of the beholder
Cryptos are not only the most profitable investment in the history of mammon… but also the most important innovation in the financial world since King Croesus minted the first gold coin in Lydia.
Crypto currencies are seen as less correlated with other assets. Their prices are not as closely correlated with the other asset classes.
Blueprint for a New Economy?
Bitcoin price target: $4200 with a market penetration of 0.15%. If market penetration reaches 2%-3% it will push Bitcoin to $50,000.
Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability
98% of those who think they are getting rich are actually getting screwed in the end
Technology is the solution to human problems, and we won't run out of work till we run out of problems. Use technology to do more not just to do the same thing more cheaply.
The US Dolar isnt printed, its borrowed into existance. It is commonly accepted to say the dollar is "printed", but we can see it is really borrowed. There is a real borrower on the other side of the transaction, and that borrower has powerful motivations to keep paying to service the debt. True, Bitcoin has no backing but Bitcoin is created out of thin air, the same way the dollar is created out of thin air. The quantity of bitcoins created is strictly limited by Satoshi’s design. The dollar’s value is pretty firm, due to the struggles of debtors. A bitcoin is not, itself, a debt. It is not borrowed into existence like the US dollar. The problem with borrowing a currency which its proponents tell us will go up another 30 times (and which has gone up 6.6 times in the past year) is that your payment is going up. Would you buy a house with a monthly payment of $1,000 a month, knowing this payment would go up to $6,000 by the end of the year and to $180,000 in a few more years? Anyone who borrowed bitcoin a year ago at $585 would be bankrupt today at $3850. Acceptance of bitcoin by merchants remains entirely dependent on the fact that it can be instantly converted to fiat money on bitcoin exchanges. That is why we often state it can at most be regarded as a secondary medium of exchange at the current juncture. Bitcoin’s value is set exclusively by speculators. So long as speculators expect the price to keep rising, they will keep buying and fulfill their own prophecy. When the chart begins to look ugly — all speculators are looking at the same chart — the price action will turn. If borrowing a rising currency is hazardous to your wealth, what does that say about bitcoin’s suitability for borrowing?
Can Blockchain power a "direct democracy"? Switzerland operates in a decentralized manner. We can see the benefits of this political model when compared to a traditional centralized model as each individual entity is empowered rather than centrally governed. Will Blockchain allow people to break away from centralized entities which lack transparency and can be manipulated?
Blockchain as micro data-centers? Thats BS. The entire Blockchain duplicated on everyones computers? Thats very inefficient.
Bitcoin is still an under owned asset and that will continue to drive demand.
Bitcoin price it not going up because it's going to work, it's going up because of speculation.
Even if Bitcoin Is The Rising Star, Gold Is Still King
Liquidity is traditionally a currency principle, but it limits stability. Stability is generally an asset principle (like gold for example) but limits liquidity. Can Bitcoin merge both into 1 and become a new asset class "commodency"?
The demand for efficiency and transparency continues to grow. Many financial institutions are scrambling to find solutions to reduce errors, speed up transactions, and provide greater transparency.
Blockchain & Bitcoin: They're never going to achieve what everybody believes is going to happen. All that's happening now is people are speculating on something that isn't going to happen.
Competing cryptocurrencies are driving innovation more than central bank monopolies. Currency competition can spur broader payments innovation.
In the Blockchain world, its best to not be impatienct and the first. Its about being the best and giving people something that makes a difference.
Gold is likely to disappoint those looking to hedge against recession. The most interesting variable in the gold price trends discussion is the new prominence of digital currencies like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an interesting hybrid between a currency and commodity with a dependency on technology and internet that no other commodity or currency can match. Gold has a 21st curveball throws at it, Bitcoin.
Direct exposure of end users to Bitcoin is dangerous. Passive exposure is the way to go.
Bitfinex (8/24/2017): It took five years to handle three bln orders on Bitfinex – in the last four months alone, we have handled more than one bln orders.
Autonomous Finance - Banking is necessary, banks are not
There is a direct correlation between countries with infrastructure challenges and unstable currencies. Those countries have the highest demand for access to a global "internet of money".
What asset value isnt faith based?
If a nation's legal tender is a means to control the people & the economy, what happens when AI's control crypto monetary policy?
At some point the market will wake up and apply rational valuation techniques. Current price implies a lot of belief in Bitcoin as a long-term store of value well beyond the economic value of the transaction platform.
"bagholder is a shareholder left holding shares of worthless stocks." Cryptoassets are not stocks & they never die... so what now?
Its possible the market cap of Bitcoin is too small to reach a price stability?
Bitcoin gained 87% in single month? It is a wild, speculative bubble, and we have a couple of hundred years of financial history to tell us how those usually end.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain the first technology that’s "just fundamentally difficult for otherwise intelligent and highly capable people to understand." To make sense of it first requires deciphering the political assumptions that inspire it. Bitcoin is an expression of extreme technological libertarianism.
Liberating capacity of technology: Facebook to connect people, Google to make information more accessible, Uber to improve transit, Blockchain to ????
Trades spend less time in the markets plumming.
The more money one has, after all, the more exposed to the failures of governments and fiat currencies that one becomes. Some users can really benefit from the protective nature that cryptography affords.
At times of unrest, it’s better to own assets whose value isn’t tied to government guarantees.
The recent price growth in many cryptocurrencies is not normal and entirely unsustainable. The very idea that a cryptocurrency – supposedly born because of a "mistrust of official money" – can be trusted after they skyrocket by 4,600+% in a year is absurd. The reality is that if there wasn’t so much ‘stupid money’ floating around in the world there would not be an endless stream of ICOs – cryptocurrencies have wildly benefited from the free-wheeling monetary policies they supposedly, in theory, should help police. As for the size of the market, while $170 billion is noteworthy this is still less than 2% the size of the gold market and a rounding error compared to the amount of leveraged fiat money floating around the world. Accordingly, the very idea that an isolated mania in cryptocurrencies represents a current threat to central bankers doesn’t make a lot of sense. Bitcoin, the king-pin of crypto, has been around for less than 9-years and has yet to live through a global economic downturn or financial calamity. Is Bitcoin really going to take its growing band of ICO misfits and trample the current fiat money system? Really?
As officials turn an eye toward the increasingly pervasive technology, the risk is that they’re reacting too late to both the pitfalls and the opportunities presented by digital coinage. Central banks cannot afford to treat cyber currencies as toys to play with in a sand box. It is time to realise that they are the real barbarians at the gate. If they don’t get a handle on bitcoin and their ilk, and more people adopt them, central banks could see an erosion of their control over the money supply. The solution may be in the old adage, if you can’t beat them, join them.
Crowdfunding: Brands are driven by communities.
Blockchain will turn the internet into the world's largest 'stock' market.
Governments don’t like competition especially when it comes to money. Governments know they cannot stop blockchain, in fact they don’t want to. What they want is to control it using powers of regulation, taxation, and investigation.
Permissionless DLTs allow anyone to read, transact on, and participate in the validation process. These open schemes could be very disruptive if successfully implemented. A permissioned DLTs, the validation process is controlled by a pre-selected group of participants (“consortium”) or managed by one organization (“fully-private”), and thus is nothing more than a common communications platform.
Cryptocurrencies: Birth of an Asset Class? Stocks are the best investment game in town. But they haven’t always been that way. As a new asset class, stocks attracted a lot of speculative capital. It was only after they went through this original mania phase that markets evolved. That included things like government regulations, but also exchange rules themselves to govern stock trading and to provide the most accurate pricing information possible. Any new asset class will likely go through this phase, as early investors start getting rewarded, attracting less knowledgeable speculative investors in the first place. That seems to be the case today with cryptocurrencies.
Rise of the cryptocurrencies is likely a paradigm shift in society.
ICO's Cryp-Toeing Around Securities Regulation?
Bitcoin prices go down. Investors are just trading the news. Bitcoin's Price Will Move With China News.
Blockchain Terminology Standards: It’s difficult to have clear communication when different parties are using different terms for the same thing, or when 1 term has different meaning to different parties.
The sole use of money is to circulate goods, its the medium that makes trade. Money that is stable in value is the best trade facilitator. Stable money enables producers to quickly and reliably receive commensurate value in return for their production. Perfect money has a constant, invariable value. If money is unstable, winners and losers are created by exchange despite trade by its very name signaling an even transaction that elevates both sides. Regularly absent in the discussion of money is the simple truth that it is not wealth. Money is not an investment either. Money is an effect of wealth that facilitates its exchange, while also facilitating investment in the creation of future wealth. Money is just a way for the producers of actual wealth - meaning goods and services – to exchange it with other producers.
- Bitcoin doesnt facilitate easy exchange for goods or services, its not stable, its not easily accepted for goods/services, and is more looked at as an alternative store of wealth.
The demand for alternative, privately issued money has grown in concert with government mismanagement of the money it issues. Since 1971, the dollar has had no definition, or no golden anchor.
Bitcoin ledger is immutable. Transactions cant be reversed. Immutable theft? Why is that a good idea?
Religion of Bitcoin. Bitcoin & Blockchain are more of a religion vs a practicality.
Bitcoin May Have Real Value, as a Religion?
Dual demand on a single supply. Meaning each market vertical can put a new demand on Bitcoin. This will cause sustained price increases.
Markets price assets based on future expectations. Cryptoasset serves as a means of exchange, store of value, and unit of account. each cryptoasset serves as a currency in the protocol economy it supports. What kind of adoption a cryptonetwork will have to achieve to justify certain asset prices.
Cryptocurrency may make it tougher to access consumer information. Consumer attention and information may cost more. (pay the consumer to market them, not pay the marketing platform)
Should we dumb down tech? Are tech firms too smart? Some people seem to think so, and their proposed restrictions on tech companies could hurt customers. The race to develop knowledge leads companies to create great products. Data analysis does not provide vision for new ways of thinking. Innovations like the iPhone, blockchain, and Ethereum came from people seeing beyond data.
ICO: Imagine that a friend is building a casino and asks you to invest. In exchange, you get chips that can be used at the casino’s tables once it’s finished. Now imagine that the value of the chips isn’t fixed, and will instead fluctuate depending on the popularity of the casino, the number of other gamblers and the regulatory environment for casinos. Oh, and instead of a friend, imagine it’s a stranger on the internet who might be using a fake name, who might not actually know how to build a casino, and whom you probably can’t sue for fraud if he steals your money and uses it to buy a Porsche instead. That’s an ICO.
There have been at least three dozen heists of cryptocurrency exchanges since 2011 and more than 980,000 bitcoins stolen, worth about $4 billion.
Blockchain/DLT as a way to assure a sequence of events?
Blockchains are groupings of data maintained by a disperse network of computers rather than a centralized mainframe. Data is secured through encrypted 'blocks' and accessed via a peer-to-peer network.
Questions bitcoin bulls need to answer now
1. Bitcoin accounts pay no interest.
2. Why do I need digital currencies to protect me against the "runaway inflation" of traditional, so-called "fiat" currencies, when after eight years of unprecedented monetary expansion the inflation rate is still just 2.2%?
3. How can bitcoins be the currency of the future when their supply cannot be expanded to keep pace with growth in economic activity?
4. Bitcoin bulls are frustrated that the rest of us just don't “get it." Naturally, that's because we're all "losers" and ignorami who don't know our hard wallets from our public keys from our gas limits (if you can imagine). But doesn't a universal currency depend on being pretty easy for everyone to understand? Isn't it going to be a problem if your currency system is too clever for the rest of us?
5. One of the arguments for digital currencies is that they are outside the scope of governments and banking regulations. What happens to digital currencies when one is used to finance the next 9/11?
6. Yes, digital currencies could in theory save us money on banking fees. But how big are these really? 0.5% of deposits are fees. Bitcoin exchanges cost a lot more than 0.5%.
Overcoming limits and improving the flow of information is an inevitable trend of the industry. Disrupting almost every industrial sector through new digital technologies
Bitcoin: nothing more than loyalty points for extravagant computer games with absolutely zero intrinsic value
Blackberry: Crash was linked to its fundamentals, strategic positioning and the competitive landscape. Is Bitcoin in this precrash scenario?
Usually bigger companies have advantages that lead to better products.
Successful criminals exploit flaws in the legal system, successful hackers exploit flaws in systems and software, all create events in ways that we never anticipated. That’s why they’re successful. They think in ways we previously hadn’t. A group exploits the system as it’s built, and then we change the system.
The discipline we need in trading, investing, and as an engineer is to never get too comfortable.
Can you legally protect a bitcoin transaction? There is no centralized authority, whether a bank, regulator, or otherwise, involved in a bitcoin transaction. If you want to protect use a legally bound escrow agent.
Cryptocurrencies: Real money on software platform?
Is an ICO an investment or a donation?
It's not just speculators driving the evolution of currency, there's plenty of demand for decentralised payment systems and peer-to-peer interactions that cut out traditional banking channels
How Many Barrels Of Oil Are Needed To Mine One Bitcoin? Answer: 20. Thats 40 times greater than that required to power the entire Visa network.
Inefficiency will kill your team faster than anything else? What about Blockchain, its very inefficient.
Digiconomist = Cryptocurrency analyst?
PayPal Conquered The Globe, But Bitcoin Could Steal Its Throne
Bitcoin represents a new paradigm shift. It is complex and very versatile. During its short existence, crisis situations and geopolitical events have prompted investors to use Bitcoin as a safe-haven currency, or as a foreign exchange hedge. Economists and financial experts might wish to put forward brand new economic theories that would better explain Bitcoin’s amazing price trajectory.
Accelerating digital currency research and development is important to promote the economy
Blockchain: A digital platform secured by cryptography
Make the new tech available to all to ensure that it's not just the "high priests" of industry that will shape the future.
Its not about Blockchain. Its about becoming a "Smart Nation" by harnessing the power of technology and networks to improve the economy and society.
$300 Million plus of Ether was lost due to a bug in the multisig implimentation in ethereum, which begs the question, I thought blockchains were 'secure' what dose security in blockchain mean? Can they be secure?
Millennials might prefer Bitcoin to boring old bonds, but I wonder what they think of Ethereum after someone accidentally destroyed $300 million worth in various wallets by monkeying around with the code. I guess in a sense crypto is like bearer bonds. If you lose your wallet or briefcase, you're out of luck.
Bitcoin represents technology and evolution.
Will blockchain accelerate trade flows?
Cyber wealth vs real wealth.
Technological disruption is shattering all those truisms we've held on to for so long: Social media has cast new meaning on the phrase, "A stranger is just a friend you’ve never met."
Bitcoin price will continue to go up as long as it gains new believers. What matters for bitcoin is that it's still accumulating fresh believers every month at a faster rate than the volatility causes former adherents to turn their back on it.
Can Blockchain/DLT be used to create the Alt-Market vs Stock Market? Decentralized networks created on-demand?
Traders are always watching for signs that a market is overdone. They will exit Bitcoin for the next great thing.
Your attention has value, personal cryptocurrency will advertise it. Cryptocurrencies open the door to a world where everyone has their price.
When investing in Bitcoin dont think like a day trader, think like a believer. Buy, hold, and pray.
Blockchain ID system enables consumers to control and share their personal information without going through centralized systems that create "honeypots" of valuable information that are vulnerable to hackers.
Old school market rules don't apply to new cryptocurrencies
Tap the data its parent AT&T has built by tracking the habits of more than 100 million television, internet and wireless customers.
Bitcoins are the way to interact with the all digital economy.
It’s time to admit Bitcoin is more than just a bubble.
The success of a crypto project is inversly proportional to its ambition.
Bitcoin Surges Above $8,000 As Stupidity Goes Parabolic
Bitcoin keeps breaking records & ignoring the haters
Private Equity and Venture Forum that some entrepreneurs had worked with lawyers to create legal structure so that their funds could be digitally "tokenised", giving themselves and other investors a partial exit while raising more financing through token sales.
prioritising profits while ignoring investor needs
asset managers should develop products that clients need rather than ones that generate the most money for fund houses
All the fees are hidden through the crypto-mechanisms
30% of bank jobs projected to face elimination due to disruptive technologies by 2025.
Its about digital transformation, App economy, not a backoffice ledger.
We live in a world where pieces of code are worth thousands of dollars
Digital payments are making financial services more affordable
Could blockchain revolutionise the energy supply chain?
“crowdsourced” or “direct-to-home” terrorism, presently practised by the Islamic State (IS), was likely to dominate the rest of the 21st century.
Modern version of Central Banks shutting down wire transfers: Tether developers froze the loot in place before the hackers could cash out. They did this by writing new software that blacklisted the address where the loot was held, and convinced all the exchanges who use Tether to run the new software. This means that the looted funds can’t be moved or liquidated. The move amounted to a hard fork of the Omni Layer protocol, which Tether is built on. For extra safety, Tether says it won’t honor redemptions of any tokens from the stolen funds.
hodl: Bitcoin typo - Buy and hold on for dear life. Bitcoin is everyone’s favourite hodl.
Bitcoin Is 15 Times More Expensive to Keep Safe Than Gold. Because Coinbase and others charge a large fee.
Bitcoin eliminates intermediary fees and time constraints imposed by third-party institutions
1 Trillion Market Cap: A statistically meaningless, but psychologically daunting number. Will be be Bitcoin or Apple Stock.
There is a massive tech tsunami engulfing the world. Mapping the global Digital Economy and How this is affecting Governments and Financial institutions. Businesses need to learn now to cope with it.
Don’t Dismiss Bitcoin While Still Pondering Value
With AI it is wrong to conflate the use of such techniques in asset selection, portfolio construction and trading. Those are three separate disciplines which require very different quantitative tools and data, and Enigma, like most FinTech firms and Funds in Equities, is focused on asset selection using their alpha generation tools. To be clear, finding alpha is extremely important to funds and investors, but my point is that the tools are different and so is the data.
ICO problem = how to regulate unlisted firms
Wealth effect will fuel bitcoin spending.
Bitcoin is always worth more where demand is intense and supply limited.
Blockchain is powering a sharing community. As consumers see more of a merit in borrowing both goods and services rather than owning them, traditional businesses now find themselves in a unique position of having to find a way of countering the disruption being caused in various industries.
There are hardly any examples of money (including gold) that have ever worked without the backing of a central authority or a sovereign.
The tales of lost fortunes are shifting from hidden treasure chests to misplaced hard drives and forgotten keys.
The more valuable these cryptocurrencies become, the higher the likelihood of theft.
Technology can remove barriers to economic participation
First witnessed about a decade ago, digital identity theft has since then spread like wildfire. The alarming rates at which this crime expands is clearly visible considering U.S. in the year 2016 alone has 15 million victims.
Bitcoin has redefined money and created the hitherto non-existent concept of a scarce digital asset. It’s hard to hold it to the standards of "normal" assets.
The virtual world - Investors are becoming desperate to see value for the hard-earned money that they are saving towards retirement. - Fund managers are struggling to find alpha, and there are increasing instances of clients who are turning towards self-investing as a way to find growth.
What most people do on the stock market is literally an allocation of savings. The stock market isn’t where you get rich and it isn’t where people should think of themselves as "investors". One of the main reasons why millions of people jump on investment manias and get crushed by them is because of a simple Fear Of Missing Out.
Why does Bitcoin keep growing? Because it's time to separate money and state. The current Bitcoin price bubble is only a surprise to those who are new to the industry.
Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention and lack of oversight.
Despite many legendary names in the investment market cautioning investors to stay away from it, Bitcoin is witnessing huge demand.
Whatever your thoughts on social media, you have to admit that it has done an incredible job of getting people to air what used to be personal information online. At this point, most of us are already pretty comfortable relinquishing our privacy to businesses and the government. We hardly think twice when clicking on those buttons that say “Agree” or “I Accept the Terms.”
- The question is, will this go both ways? Will governments and corporations be willing to become more transparent in exchange for the benefits that blockchain provides?
The growing conflict between man and machine poses capitalism’s ultimate challenge.
Gold has performed abysmally since (it topped out) 2011. The money supply soared, and Gold tanked, not exactly a good sign. In doing the opposite of what was expected from it, Gold cemented the view that it was an ancient relic that has no place in today’s monetary system. “velocity of the money supply” which all but stalled after 2011.
As Bitcoin grows to trade above $11,000 for a third time in a week, entry-level users across the globe have begun to experiment with both trading and ownership. Additional publicity in the mainstream press has contributed to the wave of adoption, with multiple countries posting record highs on Localbitcoins.
Buy the rumon, sell the news.
If you dont have your own private keys you dont own any Bitcoin.
Prices will only rise if the enthusiasm of buyers outweighs the fear of sellers.
Crypto Collapse
The biggest security threat to a computer system is said to be the idiot at the keyboard (Cyberwar for Dummies)
Bitcoin is not in a bubble but other digital currencies are "flooding the market with perishable supplies of worthless value,"
The futures markets are all about risk transfer and not irresponsible gambling. But, in order to transfer risk, I need to be able to form a view about the value of the underlying asset. Still, now to value Bitcoin.
While cryptocurrencies appeal to people who lack faith in governments and banks, the digital assets often require a blind trust in companies about which few facts are available.
Should central banks embrace cryptocurrencies, or even pioneer their own? In a nutshell, no. Crypto assets are an unusual innovation, still in flux and often poorly understood. Trying to centralize them in a bureaucracy is exactly the wrong way to go.
The Government wants more of your own money so they tax you and dilute your personal value in the economy.
The West must decide soon whether it should try to regulate cryptocurrencies out of existence or join the fray - and perhaps lose its current financial dominance in the process.
Most people seldom stop to examine the speed of technological change and how it's transforming how we do business. But as we prepare for the so-called blockchain revolution, for which crypto is the new currency, many are refusing to accept the inevitable regarding how it will transform the global community and business.
Bitcoin is undergoing a historic deflation, which simply means that its value is growing relative to the goods and services it can purchase. This is in contrast to inflation, in which the value of the currency falls relative to its purchasing power. Inflation inspires spending – better to get rid of the money while it is more valuable. Deflation inspires saving – better to keep it so that your wealth rises over time. There is nothing selfish, strange, or weird about holding an asset that is rising in value.
Demand for bitcoin is far outstripping gold as inexperienced investors pile into the online currency. Three times as many people are searching for the phrase 'buy bitcoin' on Google as searched for 'buy gold' during the financial crisis.
There's an old market adage that says when the general public catches wind of a big market move occurring, that move is likely nearing its final stages before reversing its price trend. The Bitcoin publicity craze currently playing out in the world marketplace certainly fits into that old market saying.
A Tale of Lost Won (Volatility and server outage causes people to loose money)
Whether you believe in Bitcoin or not, whether you are invested or not, this market is in a bubble formation. The parabolic move in the charts can only lead to a sell-off; still, a bubble doesn’t make it a bad investment. The fear of missing out has driven the crypto currency to the moon; buyers have forgotten all the essentials to investing and are chasing Bitcoin to the moon.
Everything old is new again: Tontine is a financial product that combines features of an annuity and a lottery. Named after Lorenzo de Tonti, a 17th century Italian banker, Tontine allows people to share investments and divide up the money based on survival—as participants pass away, their share is redistributed to the surviving members.
If Bitcoin futures succeed, they should be a liquidity go-to when the broad market declines. Like stock index futures, a proper cryptocurrency index future may eventually prevail in a maturing market.
Bitcoin's Bubble: Bulls make money, bears make money, but pigs get slaughtered. If you've made money in bitcoin, congratulations, but don't expect the party to last forever.
6 red flags of an ICO scam
1. Use case does not require blockchain
2. Empty repositories for open-source projects
3. Mining structure disproportionately favors development team
4. Anonymous team or team with weak experience
5. Insufficient information on website/whitepaper
6. No clear roadmap
Bitcoin investing: As long as you can afford to lose everything you put into it, go with it
bitcoin’s value isn’t based on any underlying asset, but rather largely on human sentiment.
Bubbles tend to be driven either by new technologies (like railroads in 1840s Britain or the Internet in the 1990s) or by new financial innovations (like the financial engineering that produced the 2008 financial crisis). Bitcoin, of course, is both a new technology and a major financial innovation.
Futures trading often is compared to gambling. While it may be volatile and fortunes can be made (and lost) in mere moments, the futures market is not a casino. Futures price risk that exists. Gamblers create risk where there is none.
Assets like gold and fiat money derive their value basically from factors like status as legal tender, convention, and confidence. Now cryptocurrencies are, in principle, quite like gold and fiat money in this respect. So they can have value even if there are no underlying assets. It is true that Bitcoins have appreciated too much too fast. This may suggest possible short-term volatility but this by itself does not imply that a bubble is present; it can be that the assets were hugely undervalued to begin with.
What is 'Financialization': Financialization is an increase in the size and importance of a country’s financial sector relative to its overall economy. Financialization has occurred as countries have shifted away from industrial capitalism. This impacts both the macroeconomy and the microeconomy by changing how financial markets are structured and operated and by influencing corporate behavior and economic policy.
When credit and leverage expand faster than the underlying economy, you are creating an unsable system. I can use my house to borrow more than the growth of the GDP.
There is no well-accepted model that suggests a "fair" value for Bitcoin.
US economy: From cash to ash
Bitcoin: As long as there's buying, there's value. But when the buying goes away, so does the value.
Bitcoin Futures May Be a Validator But the Investment is Still Dangerous
Young People Feel Three Times More Confident They Understand Bitcoin Than Tracker Mortgages
How do you measure the Mania? Measure the social velocity? Measure the madness of men?
Sellers of bitcoin are often buying other cryptocurrencies, not cashing out
Be ware of Banking Trojans
Bitcoin price doesnt matter. The fact it exists tells the story users are tired of status quo
Headed for Bankruptcy: The U.S. is a little further advanced toward the final stages of becoming a degenerate empire. Saddled with the cost of keeping its legions all over the world… and the cost of supporting 70 million retiring baby boomers, it is headed for bankruptcy. According to the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles budget commission, Washington needs a tax revenue base equal to 21% of GDP to cover its costs. The new tax bill – or what we know of it so far – will raise revenue equal to about 17% of GDP. This will leave the feds with a $1 trillion-a-year shortfall. That means trillion-dollar deficits… as far as the eye can see. Empires are cyclical, not eternal. They go up… up… and up. Then, having gone up too far, they go down… down… down, usually ending in military defeat or bankruptcy – often both. It’s business as usual that brings them down.
Can Bitcoin Forks Deliver Value?
Bitcoin Rises As Banks Die
As a simple engineer what I don't understand is what happens if wealth is transferred to bitcoin and it then crashes. Does that do harm to the global economy or does the real wealth just get moved?
In two years there will be 300 million people in the world trying to get their hands on a few million bitcoin.
Its real estate, not the stock market, that undermines the wealth of the US consumer. A hot housing market makes for a happy voter, and a willing consumer. The housing market is pricing in growing earnings for the US banks (not US consumers). The US government used Fannie and Freddie to give housing loans to minority groups and low-income earners that, in hindsight, was bad economics but good politics.
Hedge funds are pulling out of gold bets as more exciting moves in equities and cryptocurrencies make safe-haven investments look boring.
Bitcoin: The Greatest Story Ever Sold
Volatility is what makes Bitcoin fun. The fact they its high risk and very volatile is what makes them good trading vehicles.
Stock market bubbles don’t grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but reality as distorted by misconception.
Even if the currency does see a short-term price correction, as is likely, the core value proposition at the heart of the bitcoin project continually proves to be vital and needed. The longer that the project succeeds, the better its future odds.
The problem with a bubble is that we don't know if or when it will burst, or indeed whether it is a bubble or just a shift in fundamentals.
Bitcoin continues to be impacted more from market chatter than the futures markets, with the institutional money less sensitive to the speculative talk that has been doing the rounds this week.
Some experts maintain that bitcoin will displace the existing fiat money and will usher in a new era of free banking, which will finally put to rest the menace of inflation.
The way the bitcoin network deals with congestion is essentially by auctioning off scarce capacity to the highest bidder. Customers have the option to pay a higher fee in exchange for immediate delivery or to pay a lower fee and wait until congestion declines enough to make room for lower-fee transactions. As fees rise, this becomes a more and more dicey proposition.
We no longer live in a world where people can rely on a savings account or a government bond to deliver an income on their savings.
Bubbles aren’t just about the madness of crowds, or excess liquidity and leverage. Every major bubble involves a premonition of the future. The trouble is that they turn out to be deeply flawed premonitions.
No one cares if bitcoin is a bubble, as longer there’s money to be made.
Bitcoin shows there is so much more to seduction than just showing up hungry.
The biggest question in the world of crypto has always been: what is the best real-world use case for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Is it digital money? The new gold? A medium of exchange for the black market? Now, after the meteoric rise in ICOs and Bitcoin prices, we can say for certain: speculation. And this isn’t a bad thing. The majority of trading in financial markets is not for the exchange of goods and services but for speculation. In the FX market, the most liquid in the world at $5T exchanged daily, over 80% of trading is speculative. Without speculators, markets would be less liquid and would function poorly. We believe that the blockchain may be one of the greatest technologies for speculative trading in history.
Small Business: Never give people goods on credit. Always collect money. Never sell to family members on credit because it will be hard for them to pay back which will affect your business.
Political power as a tool for self-enrichment
The price to be paid for the success of cryptocurrencies is the tsunami of crime and malevolent activity that will follow.
Bitcoinsternation: Speculative bubbles lead to speculative crashes
In the world today, you cant make money using conventional wisdom. Conventional business creats limiting beliefs and kills business progress. You need to modernize everything.
People are tired of being left out of the global economic surge.
When a user first signs up for Apple Pay, either via an existing iTunes credit card or by loading a new one onto the iPhone, the card information is immediately encrypted and securely sent to the appropriate credit card network. Upon determining that the credit card account is valid, a token is sent back down to the device whereupon it's safely stored within the iPhone's Secure Element.
A man buys bitcoin as he buys a lottery ticket — to strike it rich. Ask yourself… Who would give up his lottery ticket for a cup of coffee?
With the direction of cryptocurrency prices seemingly impossible to predict, I would caution investors on the merits of cryptocurrencies alone, and would encourage any early-stage or emerging tech investors to consider companies operating in the blockchain technology space as a better way to play long-term growth in this sector.
The AEI is a standardized test, implemented 10 years ago in place of the SAT. It has become a globally accepted metric for aptitude and projected performance in the modern workplace. Colloquially called “The Qs”, the AEI tests 3 variables: Adaptability Quotient (AQ), Emotional Quotient (EQ), and Intellectual Quotient (IQ). While each is valued, it’s clear that AQ is the most prized of all. A heightened reliance on AQ — Adaptability Quotient — is probable. Technology is changing at an exponential rate, requiring us to learn at a faster clip than humans have ever had to before. The behaviors we have honed for decades will become obsolete in a few short years.
Decentralization will naturally restore net neutrality.
Maybe the Bitcoin mania has something to do with the emergence of the “winner take all” society. During the last two decades, the top one percent of U.S. earners captured more than 40 percent of the country's total earnings growth, one of the largest shifts any society has endured without a revolution or military defeat.
Despite the laudable blockchain technology and the great opportunities it offers in enabling quicker transactions, numerous problems can be associated with its products – such as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin Is Worth Far More than Its Price. Bitcoin’s value isn’t its power to make transactions or its investment appeal. It is the power to make people think about money and the relations that happen around it and the necessity of it being controlled by the state or any other authority.
Bitcoin is similar to a gold standard in at least two ways. (1) Both Bitcoin and gold are stateless, so either can provide an international base money that is not the creature of any national central bank or finance ministry. (2) Both provide a base money that is reliably limited in quantity (this is the grounding for Selgin’s characterization), unlike a fiat money that a central bank can create in any quantity it likes, “out of thin air.”
If Bitcoin wants to be taken seriously it probably shouldn’t be this easy or legal to manipulate the markets. (Bitcoin trading bot referrence from MtGox days)
Second Market: A private share-trading platform
Ripple holds 61.3 billion of the 100 billion XRP coins in existence.
Cryptocurrencies by their nature are secure and encrypted however the vehicles we use to store them are still very vulnerable. Users of digital wallet provider BlackWallet found this out the hard way at the weekend when the web server was hacked resulting in the theft of their stash.
It's time to look a little more defensively and start moving away from technology and some of the other names that have had huge runs here.
Blockchain can be used for diamonds to stamp out illegal trading of the precious stones. It will use blockchain to record when gems change hands so that their authenticity can be guaranteed.
Through a combination of Blockchain based patented ecommerce technology, natural capital land acquisition, and tokenizing one square meter of land at a time; OMAAT will democratize the purchase and protection of natural capital by creating an open and transparent global commonwealth of land asset owners.
Bitcoin is essentially a kind of financial "innovation," a decentralized anarchic financial system that is completely different from the existing government credit-based currencies. As a virtual credit center is applied to the monetary system, it offers the promise of a financial utopia. Such a system can easily lead to speculation because its participants are not interested in the technical value of blockchain, and are more concerned about what they can gain from the cryptocurrencies that rely on the blockchain technology. Some institutional investors even hope to use their professional judgment and control over market sentiment to profit from such speculation.
Can blockchain repair capitalism?
The cryptocurrency asset class, with over $500B in market capitalization, has proven itself to be a phenomenon that is at least worth paying attention to.
Blockchain it is an open ledger that multiple parties can view at the same time, functioning in a decentralised manner without being owned or controlled by a single entity. Transactions and other data can be recorded with the agreement of other parties and, once recorded, the data is immutable which means it cannot be changed. Whatever you see on the blockchain is whatever was agreed, processed and recorded.
If bitcoin doesn't rebound from current levels, then "the brand is tarnished," and success stories about investors having made millions off the cryptocurrencies will change to people losing all their investments.
The value of bitcoin today represents the collective analysis of all bitcoin market participants.
A Blockchain project that works but doesn’t create business value is doomed from the beginning.
Bitcoin has become ever more popular with ordinary investors.
The financial-services industry has been undergoing a revolution. But the driving force is not overhyped blockchain applications such as Bitcoin. It is a revolution built on artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things.
Patchwork oversight not sufficient for crypto
In a world where hardware, software and data are increasingly commoditized, governance is the only defensible asset for crypto networks.
Unlike traditional stock markets, Bitcoin and crypto is traded globally and can be influenced by companies or countries across the world deciding to support it or crack down on it. This results in both upwards and downwards cycles happening a lot faster.
Cryptocurrencies hail the end of state-controlled money. Cryptocurrencies are ideal for circumventing legal or regulatory authorities, because they aren’t governed by any.
Crypto Skeptics Suffer from a 'Failure of the Imagination'. Crypto suffers from dissociative/derealization disorders.
When you have an unregulated exchange, the ability to manipulate prices goes up significantly. Just a few coordinated sales can change the price.
“stablecoin” concept – the techno-magical idea that a cryptocurrency can tell the market what its price should be, rather than the market determining what a cryptocurrency’s price should be.
ICO greatest risk: Lack of transparency regarding the identity of the issuers and underlying business plans
The lesson former KGB officer Vladimir Putin drew from the collapse of the Soviet Union was that it was its internal weaknesses, rather than external pressure, that led to its unravelling.
Four different forces that influence behavior: law, social norms, markets, and architecture (i.e., technical infrastructure or code).
Like all good suppressions of freedom, the heavy-handed push to chase down bitcoin profits comes from the land of the free (ie America)
The fate of gig-economy workers is frequently in the hands of market forces that are well beyond their control.
Investing in Bitcoin now is equivalent to betting that its will implement successful scaling solutions and become usable on a large scale.
The top 1%, will own 64% of global wealth by 2030
As long as you have dictatorships on the rise you will have a different ending, because the rulers in those countries will turn to Bitcoin to build a nest egg abroad
All ICOs are all just performance art trying to make a point about underfunded and ill-equipped securities regulators.
The ability to recruit game-changing technical talent is going to be pivotal to your organization's success in 2018, but the market is competitive and technology is rapidly evolving. Hiring the right developers has never been more difficult.
While debate around the use of ICOs continues, Initial Loan Procurements (ILPs) have emerged as a new fundraising method. Similar to an ICO but in the form of loans rather than coin acquisitions, ILPs enable borrowers and creditors to enter into a loan agreement through legally binding smart contracts.
seigniorage - profit made by a government by issuing currency, especially the difference between the face value of coins and their production costs.
Bitcoin mining operations suck up so much electricity that they are in some cases causing power rates to spike for ordinary customers. It's all worth it for the relatively few jobs created?
Other cryptos supposedly exist to fix flaws in Bitcoin. While doing so, they introduced new flaws.
How can firms foster technological innovation while upholding a rigorous cyber-defense strategy? Problems can arise when companies run head first into innovation without considering potential risks.
Wall Street is 'drunk on bitcoin nonsense'
A company’s actions impact a stock and its price. Regulation, Bugs, and News exert a lot of influence over the value of cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin is a nonproductive asset, and people who buy it do so merely with the hope they'll find someone else who will pay more for it
Why havent large institutions adopted Bitcoin/Blockchain? Trustworthy institutions tend to evolve slowly and prize stability.
We are moving toward an ever more complex automated world. We should embrace only those advances that truly bring a benefit.
Satoshi added the 1M consensus limit in 2010, intentionally set above the free market fee range. This artificial ceiling acts against network DoS, raising the cost of attack. Setting the limit above free market range resulted in a safety limit reasonably free from politics.
Computational law is when AI meets Blockchain? Blockchain “freezes the future”. “Once you’ve put it on a blockchain it’s very difficult to change your mind, and if these rules become self-reinforcing it would be a very costly affair both in terms of money but also in terms of effort, time, confusion and uncertainty if you would like to change that.
Security is never something we actually want. Security is something we need in order to avoid what we don't want.
rapid industry growth in blockchain has fueled a war for talent in crypto hiring and forced people to learn in real time.
Digital and real worlds are melding together faster than people think.
Using algorithms to analyze the blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. Less than 1% of hours with such heavy Tether transactions are associated with 50% of the meteoric rise in Bitcoin and 64% of other top cryptocurrencies. The flow clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests incomplete Tether backing before month-ends. These patterns cannot be explained by investor demand proxies but are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis where Tether is used to provide price support and manipulate cryptocurrency prices.
Can Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can disrupt banking the way Mr. Trump disrupted American politics.
Don't get too far ahead of the customer. Customer needs beat customer wants. Focus on the problem, not on yourself.
Bitcoin is "breaking the internet"
A global crypto-currency really needs global supervision to avoid regulatory arbitrage across borders.
cryptocurrency, blockchain and cryptoassets: These days it’s hard to avoid pronouncements about how cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology could change everything (or at least, create massive wealth). Yet there’s an equally loud chorus labeling them a massive scam, useless, and dangerous. And a surprisingly large audience still doesn’t understand what’s going on. One big reason for the confusion is that we’re not all talking about the same things.
Use AI to better understand consumer behaviour? Really? Data mining your own customers? Where does it stop? Why is this a good thing?
Cryptocurrencies are no match for a central bank
As pointed out by Cornell University computer science professor Emin Gün Sirer, the number of Lightning Network routes has grown 10 times in the past five months, but the probability of successful routing has not increased at all.
Today digital literacy is becoming more important than English literacy. We live in a remarkable time, when the promise of digital technology to genuinely improve human lives has accelerated in unimaginable ways. Enterprises expect to collaborate across numerous location and schools can connect their students with insights from around the world. Healthcare providers can deliver patient care over digital connections. And connectivity is so intertwined that we take it for granted, turning wonders into daily expectations. There is an optimism that is exciting and awe-inspiring. Digital technology promises to make a meaningful impact on humanity.
For BTC to succeed it must go through a time of professionalization. Kids with code dont cut it.
For all the talk about a new era of fintech, in which digital currencies will supplant fiat money and the blockchain will be immune from subterfuge and an independent network unto itself, it seems as if there is a leap—and thus a missing link, so to speak—to the evolutionary process; as if the blockchain suddenly became not only intelligent but wise, rendering all other forms of artificial intelligence redundant and the role of humans remedial in the extreme. Such a scene reads more like a doomsday scenario than the dawn of a 21st century period of enlightenment.
Many crypto enthusiasts are looking at blockchains as a way to correct the sins of the past (government over-reach, lack of sound money, expensive middlemen, centralized businesses, etc.)
Legitimate use cases like decentralized exchanges and prediction markets are not gaining any traction while scams and useless games are thriving. CryptoKitties was lambasted when it was first launched since it garnered significant traction and caused transaction backlogs and increasing fees on the network. Then later, it was criticized for sacrificing full decentralization for the sake of usability. And this tension between usability and decentralization – manifest by the lack of user engagement on most dapps so far – was the most troubling concern for those at Dappcon.
team protocols, decentralized mosaics
Easy software builds that aren't technologically complex, so work can go into marketing instead of development.
Most of the crypto sector is nothing but unsubstantiated hype, a melting pot of impractical ideas fueled by psychologically manipulative marketing, greed and deceit. Like it or not, this is the reality of not just crypto but the majority of capitalism as a whole.
Digitizing with debt instruments such as purchase order financing.
Media industry: blockchain could solve some interesting problems, particularly with verification of content
Bitcoin is the bloodline of liquidity for crypto
Problem gamblers more likely to obsessively trade cryptocurrency
Bitcoin: The road to new highs is likely to be littered with short-term run-ups followed by substantial, yet healthy, pullbacks. A climb to new heights will not be a steady journey -- it will involve many highs and lows, something that investors must weather through.
Comments by financial institutions such as TD Ameritrade suggest that there remains significant interest in bitcoin as an investment asset rather than as a point-of-sale option.
Bitcoin market cap is ~140bil, gold's market cap is ~7tril. Do the math!
Bitcoin, Blockchain, Libra and other potential new payment solutions are shining a light on deficiencies in the system.
Feds fear of recession becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
Bitcoin fans must abandon the dream of deflationary digital gold. Inflation is the key to its future. Even after its crashes and bubbles, it has become a semi-permanent feature of the landscape. But it may only become a currency if it acts more like the dollar, with a low but predictable inflation target.
With people told to work from home and stay away from others, the pandemic has deepened reliance on services from the technology industry’s most prominent companies while accelerating trends that were already benefiting them.

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thoughts_quotes_sayings.md

thoughts_quotes_sayings.md

Disclaimer: The below is extracts from many news stories, thoughts, discussions since 2011/2012. Keep in mind, when reading the below, Blockchain is a technology & protocol, not a business solution.

General rules when to use Blockchain/DLT technology

Some of my favorite notes, arguments, etc around the Bitcoin and Blockchain space.

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Disclaimer: The below is extracts from many news stories, thoughts, discussions since 2011/2012. Keep in mind, when reading the below, Blockchain is a technology & protocol, not a business solution.

General rules when to use Blockchain/DLT technology

Some of my favorite notes, arguments, etc around the Bitcoin and Blockchain space.