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

Blockchain Technology’s
Next Big Superstar

ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) are on the rise, as more startups

turn towards blockchain-based platforms to raise funds. Just during the first half of 2017, startups raised a record of $1.27 billion through ICOs.The rise of ICOs has also resulted in the growing popularity of Bitshares and Ethereum, two of the most well known cryptocurrency platforms. ICOs use these cryptocurrency protocols to create digital currencies on top of these platforms.However, several issues are starting to arise with ICOs related to fraud and “illegal fundraising”. China, for example, just banned ICOs as forms of new digital currencies in order to prevent fundraising scams.

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

Blockchain Firms Ripple, R3 File Dueling Lawsuits Over Crypto Contract Dispute

Distributed ledger startups Ripple and R3

have become embroiled in a new legal battle, with both startups filing lawsuits related to a contract dispute between the two firms. Ripple alleged in a complaint filed today in the Supreme Court of California that R3 failed to honor an agreement that included an option to purchase 5 billion XRP, the cryptocurrency of Ripple's distributed ledger network. According to Reuters, R3 asked the Delaware Chancery Court to uphold the deal, which would have allowed it to buy the XRP at a price of $0.0085 per token before September 2019. Currently, XRP is currently trading at roughly $0.21 apiece, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

A copy of R3's complaint was not available at press time. According to Ripple's complaint, R3 and Ripple allegedly struck a deal to create a joint commercial venture, which would have followed an earlier test, centered around XRP, that involved a number of banks involved with R3's consortium effort. In the complaint, Ripple accused R3 of failing to uphold its end of the bargain as its fundraising efforts picked up steam, ultimately concluding with a $107 million funding round announced this spring. Ripple also accused R3 of hiding the fact that several of its consortium members, including Goldman Sachs and Banco Santander, among others, were looking to exit the group despite promises of advancing XRP to the banks involved.

A spokesperson for Ripple told CoinDesk in a statement:

"Our filing is straightforward – R3 misrepresented their ability and intent to deliver on their commitments. Given XRP’s ~4000% increase over the course of the year, R3 suddenly wants to tap into the value of XRP, though the facts are clear that they did not earn any option based on our agreement. We wish them well as they continue to try and build their consulting practice. In the meantime, Ripple is focused on serving our ecosystem of nearly 100 customers and signing up more."

When reached, a representative for R3 declined to offer specifics on the case but struck an optimistic note about the firm's prospects in court. "R3 does not discuss the details of pending litigation," the spokesman said. "We are confident in our position and hope for a speedy resolution of this matter." The suit is a notable one, given that R3 and Ripple are two of the industry's best-funded startups and both focus their products primarily toward financial institutions. R3 and Ripple have raised $107 million and $96 million, respectively, in venture capital to date.

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

 

Three Equifax investors sold $17.8 mln in shares

days before the company announced it had suffered one of the biggest hacks in history. As Reuters reports Friday, the shares sold three days after Equifax knew of the hack, and it was as yet “not clear whether these transactions were part of a pre-arranged sales plan.”

The credit giant has said that hackers gained entry to sensitive information from an unprecedented 143 mln accounts between May and July. Data such as names, social security and driver’s license numbers fell into the hands of malicious parties, along with 209,000 credit card numbers. Larger than any comparable attack in the US, Equifax is due to publish a report into the events in the coming weeks, while commentators highlight the vulnerability of centralized information storage.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, this is a 10,” an analyst told Reuters.  

“It affects the whole credit reporting system in the United States because nobody can recover it, everyone uses the same data.”

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence vice-president Mike Warner went even further, describing the breach as “representing a real threat to the economic security of Americans.” Legacy infrastructure is becoming an increasingly difficult topic to avoid as hackers launch ever more sophisticated attacks affecting hundreds of businesses and other organizations at once. WannaCry, the Bitcoin ransomware attack which appeared in May, partly achieved its international success due to the inadequate and outdated software still used by prominent entities.

Bitcoin Congressman Polis Legislation Abolishes Tax For US Crypto Payments Below $600

 

Bitcoin-friendly congressman Jared Polis has introduced legislation

that could allow US citizens to pay in cryptocurrency without reporting it for tax. The Cryptocurrency Tax Fairness Act, a bipartisan effort with Republican David Schweikert, aims to give everyone a $600 leeway to use crypto without needing to submit a tax return to the IRS later.

Bitcoin and virtual currencies are still classed as property in the US, obligating users to report any form of gains or losses on holdings each tax year, regardless of amount. The issue is especially poignant in 2017, as the US’s largest exchange Coinbase battles the IRS in what consumers and politicians alike have criticized as an “overly broad” tax investigation. “To keep up with modern technology, we need to remove outdated restrictions on cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, and other methods of digital payment,” Polis said in a

press release Thursday.  

“By cutting red tape and eliminating onerous reporting requirements, it will allow cryptocurrencies to further benefit consumers and help create good jobs.”

Washington is currently home to the Blockchain Caucus, a joint initiative begun in February by Polis aiming to increase education and awareness of virtual currency among the echelons of US politics. Commenting on the new act, Coin Center CEO Jerry Brito, who worked with Polis on the Caucus, said it would create a “level playing field.”

“We applaud Representatives Polis and Schweikert for their leadership in introducing the Cryptocurrency Tax Fairness Act, which would treat cryptocurrencies similarly to how foreign currency is now treated and relieve users from having to keep track of small personal transactions,” he said. “Not only will this create a level playing field for digital currencies, it will also help unleash innovation on applications like micropayments, which can consist of dozens of transactions per minute and thus are difficult to square with the current law.”

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