Exempt crypto security laws

https://www.coindesk.com/us-lawmakers-file-bill-to-exempt-cryptocurrencies-from-securities-laws

Could be good , time will tell what regulations will proceed and which ones will not.

"
The “Token Taxonomy Act” was introduced Thursday by Reps. Warren Davidson and Darren Soto, a move that comes months after a roundtable in Washington, D.C. that sought input about regulatory measures for the industry. According to the text, the bill – among other items – seeks to exclude “digital tokens” from being defined as securities, amending both the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934."

Of course fake volume

https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/12/20/only-coinbase-binance-have-300k-users-fake-volume-on-most-crypto-platforms

Most of these others need eyeballs, but don't offer much value in a bear Market.  Click bait everything as a thing these days. 

Will EOS be a target of SEC ?

https://blockmanity.com/news/cardanos-founder-says-that-the-sec-will-target-eos

Most of these were securities or flat out scams.   And EOS was interesting till it was just a joke of a "company".  But can the SEC target Companies that didn't actually offer tokens or do an ICO in the US or to US citizens? 

Don't use Coinbase.

https://mashable.com/article/sec-coinbase-complaints-fraud/

There are many stories like this. And worse.   Coinbase has been great for getting average non Technical users into crypto with their ease of use and mobile app.  But they are worse than the banks people complain about.  And with none of the actual benefits the big banks offer. 

The reality is coinbase has no legit customer service or the support either doesn't care or can't do anything.  They overcharge and blame others.    They hold money for months.  Their shift card partner is another terrible company in itself and money seems to disappear or charges  get denied and you have to delete and reinstall and configure over and over. 

The sad reality is coinbase could have pushed crypto and blockchain to the masses in a great way, instead they are just more overlnflated egos from wall street who founded a company and created a wall street like company without the wall street  benefits.  

Stay away from Coinbase.  

One of those hope tomorrow is a better day

One of those days where not a lot of real news , but a lot of losses.   Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.   But I'm not sure most altcoins or even Ethereum will last.  

    Most won't go to zero, but as everybody loves to Proclaim "remember the early internet in 1995" memes almost all of those internet companies didn't last.   Microsoft and Apple were not internet. Apple was practically bankrupt back then too and irrelevant. And kind of missed out early on and Microsoft was soon broken up.
 
Google came later and stole the thunder from the Yahoo's and altavista's and so on.   Netscape and Prodigy and CompuServe disappeared.   AOL and their free 3.5 inch disks became irrelevant.   Even Amazon wasn't really internet.  They were an online book store that sold cheap books. 

   So taken with a grain of salt things like Ethereum and Litecoin and others are great early adopters to push things forward and the Vitalik's and Lee' and many others may go on to form various startups, but most of the early companies disappear. I think a lot of the hodlrs who dream of 100 bucks becoming a million  will be depressed in a few years.  

And blockchain and decentralized have many advantages, but most tokens are pointless.   And two thousand tokens are definitely a mostly pointless endever.    But maybe a cardano will eventually have a "real" platform. Or not.   Or a fixed Iota for autonomous cars.    Or a Square token payment system. Or QTUM or something we don't even know about yet. Or real quantum computing will change everything. 

Time will tell, but an interesting space to be in.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-markets-see-sharp-decline-as-total-market-cap-drops-12-billion-in-one-hour

BITCOIN HASHRATE HITS NEW RECORD WITH 50% GAIN IN AUGUST

Bitcoin hashrate records record gains in August 2018.  Good stuff. 

Lightning Network explained ...

https://youtu.be/c4slzFdykpc

Good long video that goes into some details about the lightning Network.

What is Hashgraph video explained...

https://youtu.be/RDLdGsDX41s

Problem with blockchain and cryptocurrency

The underlying Technology behind blockchain and cryptocurrencies has phenomenal possibilities.  Even using  things like tangles and DAG graph theory (Hashgraph and IOTA in a sense) can change logistics and IOT.   The problem is it's a bunch of fake news. Hype nonsense.  Faux advisors who are snake oil salesmen and sales women with a fancy suit and nice story, not much else. 

Decentralized and disruption?  Not really, it's worse than the dot com and COBOL 1999 ending the world nonsense.  It's clickbait and paid shills on all the media websites. It's great  peer reviews but no real world use case. Or private investors like Goldman Sachs under some other name pumping money into a 'decentralized' company. 

The problem with Ethereum is it's not even decentralized. Most of these blockchains and cryptocurrencies and platforms are not.  Add the ICO and crowd funding and crowd building and crowd marketing nature and it's a lot of wanna be Steve Jobs and Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs.

  At least Bitcoin has a person or person(s) that disappeared years ago and isn't pimping it out at every  conference and Meetup and on social media.  Yes it has core developers that have opinions and ideas and eventual forks, but that's no different than most Apache open source projects.  Then again that's not exactly decentralized or autonomous either. 

And then you have the IBM nonsense. A company with a CEO that should have been fired years ago and an organization that's been irrelevant for twenty years.  Great they built a machine to win on Jeopardy.  Now they pimp that out like it's some advanced AI system.  And they jump on the blockchain bandwagon selling more nonsense and marketing bull.

IBM is a joke and in a year or two they will abandon hyperledger and jump to something new or different.  It's what they do. Any company tying themselves to some IBM backed  hyperledger stellar blockchain is asking to redo it all by 2020.  That's what IBM does.  They did it with Hadoop and big data. They are a terribly run organization.   Why anyone would pay them to use their Technology is confusing to me.  The old saying was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" should now be "anybody should be fired for buying IBM." Run from them. 

   The problem with blockchain really is it's become just like most of the internet.  It's all based on lies and fake stories.  "Oh build the future" and have nothing more than a white paper.  And sometimes not even that. Oh let's name it Kodak coin or ice tea on the blockchain or whatever. 

The blockchain really needs to be decentralized. And used for what it's good at , not based on some fantasy from people who have no idea how most of the technology actually works. But hey raise 100 million because people are idiots and listen to someone selling them the moon.

There are tons of possibilities and opportunities, but until the nonsense fades and the moon, hodl, and lambo shills fade, it'll be all hype. Until then the people actually building the infrastructure and scale and real world use cases will build in silence, in a sense.  

Lightning network raspberry pi github tutorial

https://github.com/Stadicus/guides/blob/master/raspibolt/README.md

This is a cool thing to test out.  Build a node for the lightning network with a raspberry pi.  

Ico regulations world.

Great reading if you're looking at raising funds , creating a crypto coin or just investing. And these regulations keep changing.

Chp 1 - Asia
ICO regulations around world

Chp 2 - Middle East, USA, UK
ICO and blockchain cryptocurrency regulations around the world. 

How will Blockchain Change the World ?

How will Blockchain Change the World ? 

     Blockchain, bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Monero and the like are changing the world as we speak...

    However they also aren't exactly being used for much more than speculative investments. Or silk road like transactions. Or Ponzi scheme like ICOs. And why not when people can earn 100%, 200%, 900%  returns in such a short time.  It's a very interesting dynamic but it's only one piece of the 'blockchain' and cryptocurrency puzzle.   As they say it's like we are early stages of the 1993 internet but wth the 1998 Hype cycle.   The investment money is driving the hype, but the technology will change the future.  People just don't realize it yet. Most people don't even know what this is and the banks are so fearful they are trying to create their own private blockchain consortium.  

   

Cryptocurrencies as legal tender is the defacto Bitcoin and blockchain answer and use case.  It's a ledger. It's secure. It's transparent. It's immutable.  It's mined. It's decentralized. It's a currency.  But the blockchain isn't just about monetary value or currency. In fact, most of the cryptocurrency movement isn't currency at all, it's a speculative investment just like anybody who buys stock in Tesla or Apple.  The real difference is some people can actually go and buy a pizza with BTC ; whereas owning stocks in Tesla is a complicated process to get it out.  

     Speaking of values and currency worth, who wants to buy a pizza with 1 BTC if it could be worth double tomorrow?  Or triple.  And when certain altcoins go up in value by 900%, it's a fascinating ride, and makes sense.  However, what happens when this all comes crashing down?  And we know it all will.  That's where we will see the real changes, the real players, the real interest.   The real fallout and disruption.  The fake players will disappear onto the next assumed hype cycle.  The real players will actually try and change the world.  It's so new and exciting that who doesn't want to be a part of this change.  This decentralized change coming.

     It's hype times a million right now and many people who couldn't even tell you what Bitcoin or the blockchain is, have invested in it.  It's money. It's a lot of money.  And it'll probably keep going up.  But maybe it won't.   Or maybe it will.

     Things like Ubiq smart contracts and Ethereum smart contracts are really the way of the blockchain future.  How do you get normal everyday people to care?  The internet didn't really become a defacto standard till smart mobile phones.  True people used AOL and prodigy and compuserve, but nobody cared or needed it. And the connections were too slow and not always on.  Many people assumed the internet was just a fad.   Email changed a lot of dynamics because everybody suddenly had a way of sending messages without  paying for a stamp.  

     I digress into the internet and dot com era to bring you back to the blockchain era. Things will change. It's just too early to figure out how it will all play out, but it's not about connecting the rest of the world who don't have the internet or bank accounts.  Oh that will make things progress faster. It'll make a few people millions or billions of dollars.  But the blockchain will change the world. And the centralized middle man will fall.  And smart contracts, the blockchain, cryptocurrency, automation, machine learning, AI, and IOT will bring a new future we never even imagined.   

The future is coming, will you pretend it's not? 

     

But extension blocks and bitpay to solve the bitcoin scaling issue?

So my last post spoke about the 165k bitcoin backlog and how there is a serious issue in scaling transactions. But bitpay and extension blocks could be a possible solution. 

Will it solve the transactional scaling weakness ? And will it ever be approved and integrated ?  And how will that change things ? 

bitcoin has a serious problem

If they don't figure a way to scale transactions, bitcoin will just be like many wall Street and finance funds. And thats a lot of hype and BS and millions for a few.

Imagine if bitcoin became as popular as a Visa credit card  or say a Bank of America debit card?    It can't handle minimal real world purchasing transactions now. This backlog is a serious serious issue. 

China may ditch paper money

Blockchain, Bitcoin, paper money.   What say you China ?  They are on the road to eliminating paper money altogether ?  Sounds fierce.  Sounds like a good plan. Sounds meaningful. Sounds righteous. Sounds interesting.  But will China do it ? And when ?

Cost benefit analysis of smart contracts.

"The aim of smart contracts is to deliver superior security than traditional legal contracts and to reduce the administrative and transactional costs involved in legal transactions. While smart contracts will most likely not universally replace traditional legal contracts in the near future, they can reduce the burden, time and complexity of writing new legal documents for each new transaction as smart contracts can automate this process to a large degree."

Good read.

https://btcmanager.com/a-cost-benefit-analysis-of-using-smart-contracts-in-banking/

Scaling Blockchain by thinking like a biologist

Great line about scaling blockchain. I agree.  So maybe we should start working with biologists and chemists and strategize a way to design and scale blockchain in terms of independent distributed biological nodes.

"Systems will never scale if you require global consensus for local actions by independent agents. For example, I should not have to know where every dollar in the economy is when I want to buy something from you"

https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/arthur-brock-blockchains-major-design-flaw/2016/03/15?utm_source&utm_medium&utm_campaign