Is Blockchain Technology Really the Answer to Decentralized Storage?

 

The Blockchain has become much more than a simple piece of technology.

It has become a symbol for freedom, transparency and fairness. With this being said, it’s no wonder we see projects leveraging Blockchain tech as a “one-size-fits-all” tool to solve all sorts of problems, many of which could not be further from the original purpose of the Blockchain. Nowadays, the words “Blockchain technology” are thrown around alot and sometimes the use of the technology itself is unnecessary. Tim Swanson, Director of Market Research at R3CEV has even coined the term "chain washing" to describe companies/startups that are using or trying to use Blockchain technology in certain areas when in fact, they could be using more advanced technology for the purpose at hand.

This becomes especially evident when it comes to file and data storage. Although the Bitcoin Blockchain is basically a decentralized database for transactions, accounts and balances, keeping that information on a decentralized ledger is already proving to be a challenge due to capacity issues. Nevertheless, several projects and companies insist on looking at Blockchain-based solutions for storage and, while there are clear cases of misguided enthusiasm when it comes to the use of Blockchain technology, there are some projects out there that are worth taking a look at.

Blockchain Technology as an Incentive Layer

When it comes to a mutualistic relation between Decentralized Ledger Technology (DLT) and data storage, the most common use case for the Blockchain is as an incentive layer. This means that data isn’t stored on the Blockchain itself, but the network at hand is able to leverage the Blockchain as a ledger for automatic payments and/or for value exchange, enabling users to pay for storage or access to files. In this case, the advantages for using the Blockchain over any other technology are clear. These include faster settling times, lower transaction fees (which enable microtransactions), higher privacy and the ability for transparent and immutable record keeping. While the Blockchain isn’t being used for data storage, it is providing the foundation on which the decentralized network is built, allowing it to run with no central authority whatsoever.

There are several projects leveraging the Blockchain in such a way. Storj, one of the first and most successful decentralized storage networks on the cryptosphere, comes to mind. The project started out using a Bitcoin-based asset but later moved to an ERC20 token on the  Ethereum Blockchain. This token, the Storj Coin (SCJX), is used by clients to pay for storage and acts as an incentive for nodes that keep part of the client’s files. These files have been previously shredded, encrypted, and distributed to multiple nodes in order to ensure their safety and availability.

Another popular example is Filecoin, a project developed by Protocol Labs, the creators of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). In case you aren’t familiar with IPFS, it is an alternative p2p hypermedia protocol that allows files to be stored in a permanent and decentralized fashion. This provides historic versioning for files, removes duplicates and even allows users to save on bandwidth since files are downloaded from multiple computers and not from a single server.

While IPFS provides a basis for the storage of files, Protocol Labs took this one step further with the development of Filecoin which, according to the whitepaper, “works as an incentive layer on top of IPFS.” The system is different from the one used by Storj on many levels. In Filecoin, miners are paid to store and retrieve files, while also receiving mining rewards from their “useful Proof of Work." There is also no set price for file storage. Instead, users and miners place buy and sell orders in a decentralized storage exchange, making Filecoin a competitive marketplace in which prices can adapt to outside conditions.

While Filecoin and Storj focus on providing affordable cloud storage services, a project named Decent is currently working on a decentralized content sharing platform which allows users to upload and monetize/share their work (videos, music, ebooks, etc) without the need to rely on a centralized third party. Users can access content in a much more affordable way by skipping these intermediaries while the nodes that host the content are rewarded with fees. Much like Storj, the files stored by the nodes on the Decent network are shredded and encrypted.

Blockchain for storage? Is it possible?

Storing data on a Blockchain like Bitcoin would be doable, in theory. However, Bitcoin’s current blocksize limit only allows for 1MB of data to be stored every 10 minutes. Even if you remove that limit, nodes will eventually stop being able to maintain a copy of the Blockchain due to its size, resulting in a centralized and easily-disruptable network. Of course, the scalability problem hasn’t deterred developers from trying to use the Blockchain as a storage solution and a project called Archain may just have found a solution. Archain is a cryptocurrency project that wants to address online censorship by creating a decentralized archive for the internet. To do so, Archain will leverage a new Blockchain-derivative data structure, the "blockweave" which according to the whitepaper, allows the network scale to an “arbitrary size."

Once a user submits a page for archiving on the Archain system, it is stored on the blockweave with the fees paid by the user being allocated to the miner that finds the block at hand. Since the  Archain requires miners to store both the current block and a previous block that has been randomly picked from the blockweave, miners have an incentive to store as much as the data as they can without being forced to store the entire blockweave. As such, Archain is able to ensure that content requested by users is always available without the need for it to be stored by every single node on the network. Archain is also able to address download speeds by incentivising users to propagate poorly-mirrored blocks.

Private Blockchains?

You cannot talk about chain washing for too long without talking about private Blockchains. The concept of a private Blockchain is, to a degree, paradoxical as there is really no use for a Blockchain if the network is closed. To put it simply: If a Blockchain network is not immutable, open or transparent, then a regular database will usually be far more efficient than a Blockchain. Yet there is a little known project leveraging a private Blockchain in combination with the public Waves Blockchain to provide clients with the “best of two worlds." We are talking about Sigwo Technologies LLC, a company that focuses on providing dApps and consulting services for legacy businesses that want to integrate Blockchain technology for data storage and disaster recovery.

Although Sigwo Technologies LLC provides a wide range of services, its use of the Jupiter Blockchain, the Mercury token and the Waves Platform caught my attention. Jupiter is a private Blockchain built specifically for encrypted information storage. Different networks are created for different companies, allowing authorized nodes to join in and download the data on the chain. So far, Jupiter is not much different from any other private Blockchain. What makes it stand out is how Jupiter is able to ensure transparency and immutability despite being a private Blockchain.

Once data is stored on Jupiter, the block hashes from the private Blockchain are stored permanently on the Waves Blockchain. This is done by adding the block hash to a Waves transaction. Since Waves transaction can be paid for with a custom token, the Mercury token is used which makes the process affordable.  Since block hashes are stored on the Waves Blockchain, any change made to the private Blockchain will be publically detected. This happens because the hash from a certain block will always vary according to the information contained in the block. What we’re left with is a Blockchain in which large amounts of data can be stored by specialized nodes (unlike public Blockchains) while remaining publicly verifiable.

Conclusion

As we have seen, there are no shortage of projects that are using Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies to make decentralized storage possible. However, it is also worth noting that DLT is still in its early stages and it is possible that other, more advanced technologies can replace it with respect to specific use cases. In other words, Blockchain may not be the answer for everything.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Digital Currency Mining May Look
Much Different in 2025

 

Digital currency mining has reached the point

where all mining equipment combined uses more electricity than Iceland. However, the cryptocurrency market capitalization is still minuscule in comparison to other traditional markets. Such electricity consumption may soon become unsustainable if the adoption rate of digital currencies continues to grow at its current pace.

Higher mining difficulty

Bitcoin mining difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks to remain at roughly 10 minutes per block. As more mining capacity is brought online, the difficulty increases accordingly. Thus difficulty increases proportionally to the increase in computing power of the network. The mining difficulty of both Ether and Bitcoin has increased exponentially since their respective genesis blocks. This trend will likely continue as adoption keeps increasing. Therefore, digital currency  miners will have to constantly acquire more powerful mining equipment. The times where everyone could mine Bitcoin with his/her personal computer are long over.

More centralized

The rising mining difficulty has forced miners to keep buying new and more powerful mining equipment. The problem is that these super-computers are also very expensive, creating a significant barrier to entry that only those with deep pockets can overcome. Mining benefits greatly from economies of scale, which further limits the ability of small-time miners to be competitive. Because of this, mining has become heavily centralized. AntPool claims to be the largest cryptocurrency cloud mining company in the world, controlling 17.82 percent of the hashpower of the Bitcoin network. Most mining companies are located in China due to the low cost of electricity and labor.

Green alternatives

As the hashrate of Blockchain networks keeps increasing, the amount of mining hardware will continue to grow. These mining computers consume vast amounts of energy, and this is with the entire cryptocurrency market being relatively miniscule in size. One can only imagine how much electricity will be used for mining if digital currency becomes mainstream. Unfortunately, the electricity that powers these machines usually comes from non-renewable sources of energy, which contributes to climate change.

Austrian company HydroMiner is one of the few mining companies that are planning to make mining more sustainable and profitable by using renewable energies. Nadine Damblon, CEO at HydroMiner, pointed out in an interview for CoinNoob that there already are companies using solar energy for mining, but that hydroelectric power is probably the better solution since it’s more consistent and because the water can then be used to cool down the mining equipment.

Proof of stake

In a proof of stake (PoS) network, every validator owns a portion of the network. This is much different from Proof of Work (PoW) where every validator needs to own expensive mining equipment. PoS also encourages greater decentralization of the network, since all the currency holders are involved in securing the network in proportion to the amount of currency they own. Additionally, PoS is extremely energy efficient, since there is no need to make computationally difficult calculations. It also enables much faster validations. Proof of stake does have a couple of drawbacks, with the most serious being the “nothing at stake” problem. Imagine that a network which uses PoS is under attack by a hostile actor who is trying to supplant the valid Blockchain with one of his own. It makes economic sense to “mine” on both Blockchains, since it costs you nothing to do so.

In fact, that’s the smart thing to do, just in case the attacker succeeds. With Proof of Work, a miner must instead decide to mine on one chain or the other, since mining equipment can only be used on one network at a time, and burns expensive electricity doing it. Blocks on the Bitcoin Blockchain will always be verified through PoW. However, Ethereum is moving towards PoS with its new “Casper” protocol. If successful, this will enable Ether holders to stake their coins in a smart-contract in exchange for transaction fees. Many are eyeing Ethereum to see if they can in fact solve the heretofore intractable problems with Proof of Stake.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
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David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

 

According to a recent study by the Cambridge Centre

for Alternative Finance, central banks around the world are strongly in favor of Blockchain technology. This, in spite of the recent report by the ECB that Blockchain technology is too immature for widespread use. According to the study, central banks surveyed indicated that 20 percent of central banks will be using Blockchain technology by 2019, and 40 percent will have active Blockchain applications within a decade.

Priorities

Among the respondents, however, many declined to give time frames but indicated that Blockchain technology was high on their priority list. The findings indicate what many market researchers had already been noting, namely, that the banking industry is starting to grasp the power of Blockchain technology.

The central banks who responded indicated that they are most interested in using Blockchain technology for permissions platforms or protocols, but also indicated strong interest in both Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ironically, a large percentage also indicated that they are considering using Blockchain technology to create their own central bank-issued digital currency. In fact, more than 80 percent of the banks surveyed indicated that this was the main reason they were conducting research. The findings represent a new shift in adoption away from government free cryptos to attempts at centralized digital currencies.

Governments embracing crypto?

The use of Blockchain in the government sector has certainly been increasing. From railway lines to mining farms in Russia, Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are on government's’ radar. Other applications appear to be coming on line as well, including Blockchain-based data security after the Equifax hack, and Blockchain based voting systems like Horizon State, which has created a platform for fraud-free voting through Blockchain for state use.

Founder Jamie Skella said:

“For the first time in history, thanks for the post-unforgeable characterises of distributed ledger transactions, we have a ballot box that cannot be hacked. When the result of a vote cannot be tampered with, unprecedented trust amongst communities – and indeed companies – is delivered for constituents.”

With central banks around the world embracing Blockchain technology, and governments seeking solutions for data tampering and fraud-less voting, Blockchain technology will continue to gain market share.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

China’s Crackdown on
Cryptocurrency Trading.
A Sign of Things to Come?

China’s Relationship with Bitcoin

The Chinese government released a list of 60 initial coin offering trading platforms and instructed local agencies to make sure all platforms were listed and closed down. The delayed crackdown is in line with previous practice in China. The Chinese government often adopts a wait-and-see approach to activities that are largely unregulated until the magnitude of the activity becomes clear. The extent of speculative investment and the risk of losses to investors if the bubble bursts motivated the government to intervene in cryptocurrency trading. In China, the popularity of cryptocurrencies has been boosted by the tightening of controls on money moving out of the country over the past two years. This has lowered the value of the China’s currency, the renminbi, as investors seek assets in different denominations and chase higher yields. Cryptocurrencies are also popular because they can be used to transfer funds offshore and circumvent foreign exchange controls.

The government is particularly concerned with the use of cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings to perpetrate and disguise fraudulent activity, including money laundering and ponzi type investment schemes. Chinese authorities are anxious to avoid any social unrest in the lead-up to the 19th Party Congress. The effects of the 2015 stock market collapse, where the A-share market lost one-third of its value over a period of one month, are still being felt. In some respects, the regulatory intervention in China is mirrored in other countries that have been dragging their heels in coming to terms with cryptocurrencies. It was only in July this year that the US Securities Commission issued a report determining that DAO tokens were “securities” and must be regulated accordingly.

China’s Own Cryptocurrency

In January last year, the People’s Bank of China issued a notice announcing it would be issuing its own digital version of the renminbi. The notice highlighted the benefits of a government backed digital currency in terms of cost, coverage, convenience and security. In the initial phase, it’s likely that trading in this digital currency will be limited to regulated entities such as banks along similar lines to trading on the conventional foreign exchange markets.

By launching its own digital currency, the Chinese government avoids the risks associated with privately-issued cryptocurrencies and ensuring they are not used as a means of circumventing China’s strict capital and currency controls. When China introduces its own digital currency (no formal date has yet been announced), the impact on the global economy will be significant. Not only will it challenge the existing global payment systems and establish China as a leading rule maker in this area, it will also enhance the importance of the renminbi as a global reserve currency.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Here's The Man Who Created ICOs And This Is The New Token He's Backing

 

 

The video begins with a loud, hyper, motorized ticking noise.

The camera zooms in, between the backs of some mens’ heads, to show a conference panel. The screen gets darker, the camera jolts back and forth, then it shows the backs of chairs, then everything goes blurry …. It seems like the last video anyone would want to watch. (Quite literally. More than four years after it was published, it still only has 94 views.) But four and a half minutes in, one of the panelists begins to describe an idea he’s had:

“If you wanted to, today, start a new protocol layer on top of Bitcoin, a lot of people don’t realize, you could do it without going to a bunch of venture capitalists and instead of saying, hey, I’ve got this idea, you can — you’re familiar with Kickstarter I assume? Most of you? You can actually say, okay, here’s my pitch, here’s my group of developers — there’s a lot of developers in this room. If you get a bunch of trustworthy guys together that people have heard of and say, okay, we’re going to do this. We’re going to make a new protocol layer. It’s going to have new features X, Y and Z on top of bitcoin, and here’s who we are and here’s our plan, and here’s our bitcoin address, and anybody who sends coins to this address owns a piece of our new protocol. Anybody could do that. And I’ve been telling people this for at least a year now because I want to invest in it. I don’t have a ton of coins, but that’s where I want to invest my coins. And I’ve yet to find somebody who wants my coins. Does anybody in this room want my bitcoins because I want to—”

“I’ll take them,” someone shouts, and the video ends.

It was the 2013 San Jose Bitcoin conference. By that point, the panelist, J.R. Willett, had been hawking his crazy idea for more than a year. In January 2012, on the Bitcoin Talk forum, the Seattle-based software engineer published a white paper titled, “The Second Bitcoin White Paper.” (To quote the summary: “We claim that the existing bitcoin network can be used as a protocol layer, on top of which new currency layers with new rules can be built …. We further claim that the new protocol layers … will provide initial funds to hire developers to build software which implements the new protocol layers, and … will richly reward early adopters of the new protocol.”) Seventeen months later, still no one had tried it. Little did he know it would be five years before the idea in his white paper would become a runaway trend (built on Ethereum instead of Bitcoin, but the same concept nonetheless), raising $2 billion in just the first nine months of 2017 and leaving venture capitalists fretting about the future: the initial coin offering.

Though Willett, who’s been obsessed with Bitcoin ever since he discovered it in 2010, did finally launch the first ICO, Mastercoin (now called Omni), back in 2013, he’s not been involved in cryptocurrency in recent years — until now.He’s found what he calls “the perfect token sale” and is backing it with more than $1 million of his own money — and not even at a pre-sale price. (“I feel pre-sales stink of insider favoritism, so we’re not doing a pre-sale,” he wrote via email.) The so-called UpToken, whose sale begins October 16, is also different from the tokens that have garnered the most attention this year — those powering new decentralized blockchains and apps built on top.

So what exactly is Willett backing? What he calls the “shovels” in this digital gold rush: crypto ATMs (by Washington-based company Coinme) with tokens that offer discounts and cash back to token holders. While ATMs — physical infrastructure that have been around since the 1970s — don’t feel like they belong in a blockchain-based future, Willett says, “This really pushes crypto assets/crypto economy to new audiences and opens that gateway to people who will learn about Bitcoin perhaps just by walking in the mall and seeing the Bitcoin ATM.” Whether or not Willett's new venture aiming to "put a crypto ATM on every corner" will turn out to be an instance yet again in which he was two steps ahead or an idea whose time has passed remains to be seen.

From Penny Stocks To Magic Internet Money

In 2010, the quirky, affable Willett was a software engineer who had an intellectual interest in “these ridiculous penny stocks would float way up and crash.” He traded them on paper, but not with actual money. He was also researching, payment systems for some personal projects, when he read that credit card chargebacks could be avoided with Bitcoin. At that point he fell down the rabbit hole. “I spent days just reading everything I could about this,” he says. “I didn’t know if Bitcoin would be huge itself, but I thought, something that looks a lot this is going to take over the world and I really would like to own a piece of it.”

But with two children and another on the way, there wasn’t a lot of extra money to throw into a speculative investment — especially one in which the exchange options were, one, the “sketchy-looking” Mt. Gox website, which was named for Magic the Gathering cards and subsequently lost almost half a million dollars worth of Bitcoin, and two, mailing an envelope full of cash to a guy in Canada who would send you bitcoins back.

For months, he and his wife argued, with him insisting Bitcoin could be huge. “Watching the penny stocks — the dumbest things would suddenly take off because someone was pumping them up and others were legitimately hyping these ideas that were getting people excited, and some were blatant scams. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the ICO market today,” he says. But he believed Bitcoin could get into a speculative bubble. “People on the Bitcoin forum were already moaning about the speculative bubble from 1 cent to 25 cents. How could something go up 25 fold? Everyone was saying, this is unsustainable, this is a crash, it’s going to end in tears. And I was thinking, this could go so much higher.” Finally, after four months of bickering, his wife gave him $200 for both his birthday and Christmas and said, “Flush it down the toilet if you want to.” With that money, he launched a Bitcoin mining scheme — in which he paid random people from Craigslist monthly to run his mining software.

From Sleepless Nights To The First ICO

But mining bitcoins wasn’t enough. Willett kept lying in bed night after night, trying to imagine what would happen with cryptocurrency. He dreamed up something like contracts on top of Bitcoin, the way email is layered on top of TCP/IP, but wondered how he could pay for its development. Realizing he could float a coin on top of Bitcoin that buyers would automatically own if they sent bitcoin to fund its development, he wrote the white paper but didn’t want to play entrepreneur himself. Finally, after a year and a half of promoting his idea, he became so frustrated no one was trying out his idea, he decided to do what he called an “initial distribution” himself. “Basically the reason I did the first ICO is that I just wanted to prove that it would actually work,” he says.

The invention of the ICO “did not seem like such a big deal at the time,” though Willett says it was this “bizarre feeling of, whoa, I published a white paper and an address, and strangers were sending me money.” And though Mastercoin proposed all sorts of ideas like decentralized commerce and a decentralized exchange, Willett soon realized, “What everyone got really excited about was, hey, I can publish a paper and people will send me money. Literally within a few months, other projects were doing the same thing — the most famous of which was Ethereum.”

But Willett was correct that launching a new venture was stressful. First, soon after launching the sale, “there were literally people saying I’ve reported you to the SEC, you’re going to go to jail,” says Willett. “I got really worried about the SEC swat van — if there is such a thing — kicking down my door and dragging me off in the middle of the night.” (He hadn’t consulted a lawyer.) Then, there was the fact that, after raising $500,000 worth of bitcoins, the price jumped tenfold. Suddenly he had $5 million to keep safe. Though at first he had contractors working to develop Omni while he kept his full-time job, once the token reached 100 multiples of its ICO price, he sold just 2-3% of his tokens — “just enough to make my wife happy to be able to quit my job,” he says. But then it went down almost a hundred-fold. Within a year, he was back at his old employer, Cozi, working on a calendar applications for families.

This year, watching ICOs take off, Willett had mixed feelings. On one hand, “I worry about unsophisticated people losing their shirts,” he says. On the other, he says, “token sales allow people to participate in a number of exciting projects at a very early stage,” and he finds it exciting that projects that are doing good work can now “get the funding they might otherwise not have gotten to push the ball forward in the crypto economy.”

‘The Perfect Token Sale’

When Bitcoin ATM purveyor Coinme called Willett, he became convinced ATMs were the next big expansion of the crypto economy — as long as their network was powered by a token. He persuaded the team to adopt what they’re calling UpToken, which is designed like loyalty points, and quit his job again in July. He now serves as a contractor on the project.

While it seems counterintuitive that many people would buy digital currencies through a physical ATM, Coinme cofounder and CEO Neil Bergquist says, “Bitcoin appeals to a technical audience. The majority of the world is non-technical, and what they need is a physical portal to participate not only in the crypto economy but also in financial transactions in general.” On top of that, he says, the experience can be preferable to a process even as easy as a service like Coinbase’s where it can take about a week from time of purchase before the coins show up in your account. “We get calls and Facebook posts every day from people saying, this was amazing, I just bought my first bitcoin, it was so easy and instant,” says Bergquist. On top of that, the transaction allows more privacy, whereas signing up for an online exchange may require you to link your bank account. Plus, crypto exchanges have a long history of being hacked.

But just how popular crypto ATMs can prove to be and how much volume they can handle remains to be seen. The average ATM volume per month is only $100,000 and Coinme currently has 39 in Washington state, while fewer than 1,600 exist total worldwide, compared to an estimated three million fiat ATMs. However, Bergquist isn’t banking everything on the ATMs. “We see ATMs as the beachhead,” he says, adding that Coinme gives customers their own Coinme wallets, crypto IRA and 401(k) offerings and other financial services. The company even has a private client division for customers who want to buy and sell up to $1 million of cryptocurrency a day.

But if ATMs are the beachhead, the troops need to be increased. About 85% of all Bitcoin ATMs are located in North America and Europe, which the same geographies where the unbanked are a lower proportion of the population than the rest of the world. Perhaps a token could rev up demand for more ATMs — which is the purpose of UpToken. Every ATM user receives a cash back equivalent to 1% of the ATM fees, which range from 5-10%, in UpToken. Any customer who pays for their transaction fees in UpToken will receive a 30% discount on such fees. And UpToken holders will be able to vote on the new cryptocurrencies to be added to the network. Willett says this is the “perfect” token sale because it’s grows in accordance with the amount raised. Also, for UpToken, it doesn’t matter whether Bitcoin or Ethereum or another coin we may not yet know becomes the dominant coin.

As for whether this offering could get the “SEC swat van” to come running, Marco Santori, a partner at Cooley who is familiar with how securities law may apply to crypto assets, says the risk that a coin like UpToken is labeled a security is low. On top of that, he thinks crypto loyalty points is the wave of the future. “I think [crypto loyalty points have] the potential to unlock a tremendous amount of value in industries that have really been untouched by the technological revolution over the last 10 years. Affinity points — airline miles and loyalty haven’t changed very much over time, for example,” he says.

However, Spencer Bogart, head of research at Blockchain Capital, says the setup is like “a big Rube Goldberg machine.” Noting that he believes that tokens seem best for businesses that want to build a network effect — where early adopters benefit the more people end up joining the network — he says, “The ATM experience is not better to me because other people also use the ATM. I don’t care if 100 of my friends use the ATM or don’t use it or anybody in San Francisco uses it or doesn’t use it.” On top of that, he says competitors could just charge better rates instead of offering discounts. Or, pump-and-dumpers could buy a lot of UpTokens to have their coin added to the network and then sell if their coin wins and the price jumps.

Coinme ATM users who received UpToken with the 1% reward may not like the fact that they can't touch their Uptokens until they've amassed $10,000 in ATM transactions, but Bergquist explains this is like not being able to redeem airline miles until you've earned at least 10,000 miles.

As for Bogart's network effect criticism, Bergquist says that the vast majority of Coinme users have never purchased a Bitcoin before, so "the network effect of UpToken will be felt across the entire crypto community," he wrote via email. He also says the more ATMs that are deployed, the lower the fees, as small Bitcoin ATM operators can charge as much as 17%. As for people trying to sway elections to pump and dump, Willett, using Litecoin as an example, wrote in an email, "Of the hundreds or even thousands of people who used their UpToken to win that auction for Litecoin, undoubtedly some of them would sell Litecoin as the price went up. I don't see a problem with that. It's still great news for Litecoin to be on a massive worldwide ATM network."

UpToken is a crypto token meant to be used like loyalty points. Compared to some other blockchain projects that are attempting to bootstrap decentralized networks, it should be easy to see whether they've achieve their goal to "put a crypto ATM on every corner." As with his initial idea, only time will tell — but now many more will be watching.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Aeron Leverages Blockchain Tech
for Safer Flights

 

Humans have been flying since the Wright Brothers took flight

on December 17, 1903. Flying is considered to be one of the safest modes of transport that humans use. However, accidents do and will happen. It is incredibly difficult to arrive at numbers related to accidents with and without fatalities because of poor record keeping in the early days of aviation.

Boeing publishes the “Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents between 1959-2016”, which tells us that there have been 623 fatal accidents involving commercial jet fleets and 1948 total accidents in this time period. However, this number just covers commercial aviation and not private planes that meet accidents. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), there were 1,290 air accidents just in 2014 and that too only in the United States. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could use new technology to reduce the amount of accidents that happen each year? Aeron is a project that intends to do just that by using Blockchain technology.

Aeron is making aviation transparent and reliable

The key issue to address is the human factor when it comes to aviation safety. Pilot errors, possible corruption in the flight schools all contribute towards unsafe skies. Aeron, by implementing Blockchain technology, can benefit pilots, airlines as well as ordinary consumers. They are planning to integrate Blockchain in such a way, so that pilot logs become more verifiable and transparent. They are also going to implement solutions that will help verify flight school credentials and help aircraft operators access uncorrupted data.

All of this is possible because the Blockchain itself is immutable and records once stored can’t be changed. Combined with the deployment of smart contracts and a cryptographically secure database, Aeron would be able to eliminate falsification, create verifiable logs and basically deliver an “airline in a pocket” through its deployable applications. The workings of Aeron are rather simple. All persons involved in the operation of the aircraft will have access to customised apps. As an example, pilots will have the functionality of personal flight logging in their app.

Aviation companies have the ability to collect and verify data from aviation schools, service companies, airlines and aircraft operators. In the wider ambit, if there is any data mismatch between any Aeron data source, it would be possible to quickly detect the problem and take corrective measures. Aeron will also enable expired pilot licenses to be detected while giving flight school students and consumers the access to a verified global database through aerotrips.com. Aeron has put up a one-pager to explain the workings of the project succinctly.

After a successful pre-sale, Aeron launches crowdsale

Aeron has successfully concluded their presale of Aeron (ARN) tokens and has raised over $1 mln. Now, they are launching a crowdsale that will help them build the platform and develop the technology required, as well as follow up with government relations and lobbying with aviation authorities. In total, 100 mln ARN tokens will be issued. ARN tokens are ERC-20 compliant. Investors have the chance to buy 60 mln of these tokens that are available during the crowdsale. The end date of the crowdsale is Oct. 23, 2017, and each token costs $0.50. Early investors will receive bonus tokens. Investors can visit the Aeron website to secure their bonus tokens. The ICO has been rated 4.8 by Icobench.

Why hold a token sale at all?

The Aeron token sale is their inclusive attempt to gather funds for the project.  Aeron can this way not only gather investors from different parts of the world but also incentivize investors to promote their products. The token sale would enable participants to take advantage of liquidity as these tokens can be traded on various exchanges post the sale. After the token sale, the Aeron (ARN) token will be distributed to the buyers. A maximum of 100 mln ARN would be released and over time the supply will reduce due to lost keys etc. ARN tokens would be used both within and outside of the Aeron ecosystem. The tokens will be used for a subscription fee and transaction-based fee for log entries, commission on paid services, commission on intermediation and client introductions, as a currency for the purchase of aviation services and for flight school-related services.

Aeron is a project led by experts

Aeron is an ambitious project that will start to transform the aviation sector with the passage of time. The project is led by people who have significant experience in the aviation sector. The CEO, Artem Orange is a serial entrepreneur in high tech industries like telecom and is himself an aviation enthusiast. Nadezhda Barkanova, the CTO is a qualified air traffic management engineer with 11 years of work experience and is specialized in production of aeronautical databases, flight crew training and flight simulators. The CDO, Konstantin Gertman has 14 years of experience in consulting and market research as well as financial businesses and is the co-founder of aerotrips.com and is himself an EASA certified pilot since 2013. With this team at the helm, Aeron has the potential to benefit from years of industry experience not only in aviation but also in other crucial technical fields that the project needs to succeed long term.

What is the future for Aeron?

After the crowdsale is over, Aeron plans to utilize a big chunk of the collected funds, up to 40 percent for research and development. Marketing and promotion will take 30 percent, technology infrastructure 10 percent, lobbying authorities, legal consultancy and administration the remaining.

They have plans to build a multi-stage platform over time in phases. In the future, they will be able to offer services related to aircraft maintenance records and even tracking spare parts that would lead to great improvements in flight safety. Aeron has released a whitepaper that lays out in detail their token sale and post-sale plans. Given that they have plans to work closely with each aspect of the aviation industry, be it spare parts manufacturers, airlines, pilots and flight schools. There is a chance for investors to be able to gain from not only investing in the token sale and profiting from future increases in token price but also from the transactional revenues that the tokens will generate for the owners.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Cryptocurrency Is A Bubble:
What's Next?

 

In my article Cryptocurrency Is A Bubble I predicted it would crash.

Well I was wrong, it crashed twice.

In part two, Cryptocurrency Is A Bubble, Revisited,
I argued you should skill up because this was the big one.
Which I’m sure many are doing right now.

Now the big question is what is going to happen next?

It is going to crash again but the trend is going to be up punctuated with gut wrenching corrections. This is only the beginning, not the end, of Bitcoin and the other 1,000 altcoins. There is only one call to make. That call is simple and was highlighted by Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan: Is cryptocurrency a fraud? JPMorgan thinks it is, and you'd think they should know, having been investigated by the likes of the FBI and fined bazzillions for such things.

However, I say no.

Clearly if you agree with Jamie Dimon and you are right that people just “can’t go around inventing their own currency,” you should just avoid the whole area. Don’t let go of that view and buy in at the top. Now that would be painful. If Dimon is right, cryptocurrencies will end badly just like many banks.

If cryptocurrencies are not frauds, they will grow. The key question, then, is what is the current market cap of all cryptocurrencies on earth now and what could it be in the future? It is currently $121 billion. (Though by the time you read this it might be a lot higher.) $121 billion is equivalent to the market cap of McDonald’s, esteemed purveyors of hamburgers.So here is the Google trends for them both–and I’ve thrown in the U.S. dollar, for fun.

I think it is very bullish that China wants to clamp down. China bans powerful ideas because it cannot stand any but its own. China just endorsed the power of cryptocurrencies so any doubts about the strength of the concept can be forgotten. If cryptocurrency is this potent, then a market cap of $121 billion is a drop in the bucket. So what should the float of a global currency platform capable of making the Chinese government skittish be?

Let’s take gold as a benchmark–after all, that is what its fans claim it is. The market cap of gold reserves is held to be $5 trillion and gold is good for nothing but dentistry, electronics and payments in times of war. So why couldn’t cryptocurrencies match it? As long as a cryptocurrency can be accessed and created then its money supply can grow to meet the needs of its user base. As Bitcoin and the likes are nowhere near the mainstream then the upside must be multiples of where it is today. That could be a striking multiplier.

So what could go wrong?

The main risk is that cryptocurrencies could be banned outright everywhere. It is an obvious thought and the one grasped at most frequently. I don’t think this will happen, as for a start, politicians don’t close their own loopholes. Furthermore, it only takes one global jurisdiction to allow cryptocurrency and the distributed nature of cryptocurrencies and the Internet leaves the door wide open for all. What is more, blockchain technology has huge potential to revolutionize economies by building a trustless infrastructure with transparency. This will disintermediate layers of inefficient gatekeepers whose rent seeking behavior gums up the economies of the world with their unnecessary tollgates.

Any economy using that technology will wield a massive economic advantage against luddites so the outcome is economically inevitable. Luddites can’t win. Have they ever? You could say cryptocurrencies are better than old style currencies and that their very nature makes them invulnerable but I feel the protection is in the pure efficiency of blockchain technologies and the giant economic advantages they will bring. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are genies that won’t go back into their bottles and like the Internet, change everything.

Blockchain is about trustless systems. Trustless systems, of which Bitcoin is one, are the real revolution behind this surge. Trustless systems are a platform for tremendous progress. Imagine all the things in your life that would be better if you didn’t have to trust or distrust people. How many hours a week do we spend unlocking doors or substantiating facts or protecting ourselves from error and "bad actors."

Blockchain is going to be huge and it would be perverse if the thing that is driving it forwards, cryptocurrency, was somehow going to be run out of town on a rail at the same time. So while China might try and nip Bitcoin in the bud I think it is unlikely that less twitchy and less totalitarian countries will follow suit. It could happen but I believe it won’t.

So if it is not banned, what is the future?

The clamor is a clue–cryptocurrencies are creating more than $121 billion of noise, the real is trend to look at is the U.S. dollar. That is 13 trillion dollars of money talking. So if Dimon is right, Bitcoin is perhaps worth a bit more than the noise made by Big Macs, which is $23 billion dollars of happy meals, but if he’s wrong then ‘to the moon’ is certainly a possibility. How high is the moon? It is hard to judge, but I would be surprised if it was not at least 10 times as much as today. Is 100 times such a dream?

It is worth remembering that the total value of stocks on the NYSE and Nasdaq is $27 trillion. And more intriguing still, U.S. money supply is on $13 trillion. Then even more interesting still, the U.S. national debt is around $20 trillion. So there is $27 trillion of stocks, $20 trillion in bills but only £13 trillion in money.

Optically that does look right. $47 trillion in paper assets, not to mention hard assets like land, real estate etc,  but only $13 trillion in money? Money starts to look like a pinch point to me. Now could that be a reason for a hunger for usable currency… could there just not be enough money about? Could the missing ingredient in the tepid world economy, which doesn’t seem to get either growth or inflation, be not enough M2 (let’s call it money)?

Could there just not be enough money to get activity going? Has it all been sumped in assets and higher technical solvency requirements? If Gresham’s law is true, and bad money drives out good, then governments better get cracking and get the money out there and save us all from stagnation and/or Bitcoin. If they don’t, then cryptocurrencies will do the trick. ICOs anyone? Bitcoin or no, it’s a new dawn and you have to be in it and it’s going to be wild.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Blockchain Providing Bridge for Unbanked, Lifting Global Economy

 

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Bitcoin.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

 

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Essential Inbound Marketing Strategies for Every Startup

 

Inbound marketing has become increasingly popular

in the marketing and advertising world for the last several years, and it's no surprise why. While traditional outbound ad campaigns attempt to persuade unfamiliar audiences with sales-y messages, "inbound" campaigns focus on the value they can provide users. And that prompts those users to naturally gravitate to those business when the need arises. Generally, inbound marketing strategies are less expensive, hold a wider range of benefits and, over the long term, will generate a higher rate of return. So, if these benefits resonate with you, consider the following inbound marketing strategies, which are among the most popular. At this point, they're essential for all new startups:

On-site content marketing.

On-site content marketing is useful in a number of ways. Not only does new content drive new readers to your site, it keeps your existing readers and customers engaged with your brand, allowing you to maximize client retention. You'll have to provide highly detailed, original and valuable content, which isn't always easy or straightforward; but, with a steady stream of high-quality content, you'll find that the advantages can be enormous. Content marketing also provides syndication fuel to your social media and email campaigns and boosts your search rankings (more on this momentarily). In a recent survey I conducted, of 357 marketers, 93 percent of respondents said they planned to increase or keep their on-site content marketing budgets the same. That's pretty high praise for the power of on-site content!

Off-site content marketing.

Your off-site content marketing campaign will function in a similar manner, prompting you to provide well-written, targeted, valuable content, but instead of publishing it on your own site, you'll be publishing it on another site (hopefully, a major media publication!). The advantage here is the opportunity to gain visibility with new audiences, who may not have heard of you otherwise. You'll get referral traffic, and your brand reputation will steadily grow as you work your way up to bigger and better publishers. Here's an article I recently wrote to help entrepreneurs get started with off-site content marketing: "5 Ways to Get Media Coverage as a Startup."

Search engine optimization (SEO).

On-site and off-site content marketing will provide you substantial fuel for increasing your search visibility. On-site content attracts inbound links, while off-site content directly builds links to your site. The more high-quality, valuable inbound links your website has, the higher it will rank in search engines. In fact, a recent report from Google noted that two of the top three ranking factors in the algorithm were content and inbound links. But there are other, more technical components to SEO you'll need to implement to boost your inbound traffic from search engines. These include optimizing for mobile devices, improving site speed and targeting strategic niche keyword phrases. It's a time-intensive strategy, but it pays off in spades.

 Social media marketing.

Organic social media marketing has taken its fair share of hits, but it remains one of the most effective strategies for generating new visibility. You have the power to engage with almost anyone in the world through social media, gradually building up a loyal audience (as long as you're consistently providing valuable insights and material).

Throw your on-site and off-site content into syndication here, and your followers will have even more reason to stick around. Alone, social media can generate a steady stream of traffic to your site, and build your brand, but its real power is amplifying the effects of your other inbound marketing strategies. According to the same survey referenced earlier, 65 percent of respondents — the highest percentage across 10 marketing strategies included in the survey — said they believed that social media marketing was poised to become even more effective in the next five years.

Influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing is relatively simple in concept, but it's a little more difficult to carry out practically. The idea is to target "influencers" in your industry –these are thought leaders, movers, and shakers who hold the best reputations and the biggest portions of audiences in your niche. By working with these influencers on joint content projects or even just innocuous exchanges on social media, you'll cross-pollinate your audiences (oftentimes for mutual benefit), and earn a better reputation by proxy.

The hardest part is identifying the influencers most likely to benefit your brand and persuading them to engage with your campaign. Influencer marketing seems to be the most cutting-edge strategy on this list, evidenced by the highest percentage of marketers (38 percent) agreeing to a statement on the survey — in this case saying they were "not currently using this strategy, but plan[ned] to in the future."

Email newsletters.

I hesitated to include email newsletters on this list, since email marketing in general might be considered an outbound strategy. However, email newsletters usually revolve around the provision of content to subscribers, increasing their loyalty and retention while simultaneously setting up a recurring traffic stream back to your site. Because your content is providing value to your readers and subscribers, and you're not just using it as a way to advertise your products and services, it can be considered a form of inbound marketing. Additionally, email marketing may be a relatively low-hanging fruit: In the survey, email marketing was reported as the second-easiest tactic to perform, but one that provided the fifth-highest ROI of the ten strategies included.

Personal branding.

Finally, personal branding may be used in conjunction with almost any of the strategies above. For example, you might have some of your upper-level team members post more on-site content and reach out to major publications for guest-posting opportunities, or even to become contributors in order to fuel an off-site content strategy.

Chuck Reynolds

Marketing Dept
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about -Inbound Marketing.
Interested or have Questions. Call me 559-474-4614

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden