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foreverlogical · 5 years

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The election season of 2015 and 2016 was defined by chaos, infighting and a pool of deep resentment that came boiling over when votes were cast. But this election was barely noticed. It happened on February 17, 2016, in a rundown labor union hall in Portland, Oregon. Union members were voting on a new contract with their employer, Koch Industries. The union members felt powerless, cornered, and betrayed by their own leaders. The things that enraged them were probably recognizable to anyone who earns a paycheck in America today. Their jobs making wood and paper products for a division called Georgia Pacific had become downright dangerous, with spikes in injuries and even deaths. They were being paid less, after adjusting for inflation, than they were paid in the 1980s. Maybe most enraging, they had no leverage to bargain for a better deal. Steve Hammond, one of the labor union’s top negotiators, had fought for years to get higher pay and better working conditions. And for years, he was outgunned and beaten down by Koch’s negotiators. So even as the presidential election was dominating public attention in late 2015, Hammond was presenting the union members with a dispiriting contract defined by surrender on virtually everything the union had been fighting for. He knew the union members were furious with his efforts. When he stood on stage to present the contract terms, he lost control and berated them. “This is it guys!” his colleagues recall him yelling. “This is your best offer. You’re not going to strike anyway.”

I thought of the free-floating anger in that union hall often as I travelled the country over the last eight years, reporting for a book about Koch Industries. The anger seemed to infect every corner of American economic life. We are supposedly living in the best economy the United States has seen in modern memory, with a decade of solid growth behind us and the unemployment rate at its lowest level since the 1960s. Why, then, does everything feel so wrong? In April, a Washington-Post/ABC Poll found that 60% of political independents feel that America’s economic system is essentially rigged against them, to the advantage to those already in power. Roughly 33% of Republicans feel that way; 80% of Democrats feel the same.

What reporting the Koch story taught me is that these voters are right— the economy truly is rigged against them. But it isn’t rigged in the way most people seem to think. There isn’t some cabal of conservative or liberal politicians who are controlling the system for the benefit of one side or the other. The economy is rigged because the American political system is dysfunctional and paralyzed—with no consensus on what the government ought to do when it comes to the economy. As a result, we live under a system that’s broken, propelled forward by inertia alone. In this environment, there is only one clear winner: the big, entrenched players who can master the dysfunction and profit from it. In America, that’s the largest of the large corporations. Roughly a century after the biggest ones were broken up or more tightly regulated, they are back, stronger than ever.

I saw this reality clearly when I went to Wichita, Kansas to visit Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, a company with annual revenue larger than that of Facebook, Goldman Sachs and U.S. Steel combined. Charles Koch isn’t just the CEO of America’s biggest private company. He also inhabits one extreme end of the political debate about our nation’s economy. A close examination of his writing and speeches over the last 40 years reveals the thinking of someone who believes that government programs, no matter how well-intended, almost always do more harm than good. In this view, most government regulations simply distort the market and create big costs down the road. Taxing the wealthy only shifts money from productive uses to mostly wasteful programs. Charles Koch has been on a mission, for at least 40 years, to reshape the American political system into one where government intervention into markets does not exist.

But for all the free-market purity of Charles Koch’s ideology, there is not much of a free market in the corporate reality he inhabits. Koch Industries specializes in the kinds of businesses that underpin modern civilization but that most consumers never see—oil refining, nitrogen fertilizer production, commodities trading, the industrial production of building materials, and almost everything we touch, from paper towels and Lycra to the sensors hidden inside our cellphones. This is the paradox of Charles Koch’s word – he is a high-minded, anti-government free-marketeer whose fortune is made almost exclusively from industries that face virtually no real competition. Koch Industries is built, in fact, on a series of near-monopolies. And it is these kinds of companies that do best in our modern dysfunctional political environment. They know how to manipulate the rules when no one is looking.

Consider the oil refining business, which has been a cash cow for Koch Industries since 1969, just two years after Charles Koch took over the family company following his father’s death. Charles Koch was just in his early 30s at the time, but he made a brilliant and bold move, purchasing an oil refinery outside Saint Paul, Minnesota. The refinery was super-profitable thanks to a bottleneck in the U.S. energy system: the refinery used crude oil from the tar sands of Canada to be refined into gasoline later sold to the upper Midwest. The crude oil was extraordinarily cheap because it contained a lot of sulfur and not many refineries could process it. But Koch sold its refined gas into markets where gasoline supplies were very tight and prices were high.

Why didn’t some competitor open up a refinery next to Koch’s to seize this opportunity? It turns out that no one has built a new oil refinery anywhere in the United States since 1977. The reason is surprising: the Clean Air Act regulations. When the law was drastically expanded in 1970, it imposed pollution standards on new refineries. But it “grandfathered” in the existing refineries with the idea that they would eventually break down and be replaced with new facilities. That never happened. The legacy oil refiners, including Koch, exploited arcane sections of the law that allowed them to expand their old facilities while avoiding the newer clean-air standards. This gave them an insurmountable advantage over any potential new competitor. The absence of new refineries to stoke competition and drive down prices meant that Americans paid higher prices for gasoline. Today the industry is dominated by entrenched players who run aged facilities at near-full capacity, reaping profits that are among the highest in the world. In this industry and others, the big gains go to companies that can hire lawyers and lobbyists to help game the rules, and then hire even more lawyers when the government tries to punish them for breaking the law (as happened to Koch and other refiners in the late 1990s when it became clear they were manipulating Clean Air regulations).

The oil refining business is just one example of how Koch has benefited from complex regulatory dysfunction while public attention was turned elsewhere. In the 1990s, for example, a Koch-funded public policy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) pressured states to deregulate their electricity systems. California was a pioneer in this effort, and the results were disastrous. Lawmakers in Sacramento created a sprawling, hyper-complicated system that surgically grafted a free-market trading exchange onto an aged electricity grid. Virtually no one paid attention to the 1,000-page law as it was being written. Almost immediately after the markets went online in the early 2000s, electricity traders at Koch Industries and Enron began gaming the system. They earned millions of dollars doing so, even as prices skyrocketed and the state’s grid collapsed in rolling blackouts. Lawmakers were blamed when the lights went out, and then Governor Gray Davis was recalled. The role that traders played in the crisis was hard to understand and hidden from view. Federal regulators filed a case against Koch for manipulating markets in California, but the legal proceedings dragged on for more than a decade. Koch ended up settling the charges and paying a fine of $4.1 million, long after the damage was done.

To take another example: In 2017, Koch helped kill part of the Republican tax reform plan to impose a “border adjusted” income tax that almost certainly would have hurt Koch’s oil refining business. The plan was being pushed by none other than Paul Ryan, a onetime Koch ally who was then Speaker of the House. Ryan wanted to include the border adjustment in President Trump’s tax overhaul because it would have benefited domestic manufacturing and would have allowed the government to cut corporate taxes without exploding the deficit. But former Koch oil traders told me that the border adjustment tax would have hurt profits at the Kochs’ Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota. Koch played a vital role in killing the border adjustment tax before a vigorous public debate about it could even begin (A Koch Industries spokesman insisted that the Koch political network opposed the border-adjustment measure only on ideological grounds, because it was basically a tax, and not to protect profits at Koch’s oil refineries) . By the time most people started paying attention, Paul Ryan admitted defeat and jettisoned the border adjustment.

Charles Koch doesn’t talk about issues like this when he talks about free markets. When I met him, Charles Koch was giving interviews for his new book that described his highly detailed business philosophy, called Market-Based Management. I had heard a lot about this philosophy, but what surprised me most when I interviewed the people who worked with him, some for decades, is how much they admire him. They said he was brilliant, but also unpretentious. He was uncompromising, but fair. I felt this way too, the minute I met the billionaire. I remember him telling me something along the lines of: “Hello, Chris! You didn’t need to put on a tie just to see me,” when I walked in the door (my audio recorder wasn’t even running yet, so the quote might be inexact).

Charles Koch’s avuncular, aw-shucks persona masks his true nature. I think of him instead as an uncompromising warrior. He has been fighting since he was a young man. He fought his own brothers, Bill and Freddie, for control of the family company (and won). He fought a militant labor union at the Pine Bend refinery (and won). Most of all, he fought against the idea that the federal government has an important role to play in making the economy function properly—even while taking advantage of government laws to maintain his company’s advantages.

When Charles Koch became CEO in 1967, the U.S. economy operated under a political system that is almost unimaginable today. The government intervened dramatically in almost every corner of the economy, and it did so to the explicit benefit of middle-class workers. This happened under a broad set of laws called the New Deal, which was put in place in the late 1930s. The New Deal broke up monopolies, kept banks on a tight regulatory leash, and even controlled energy prices, down to the penny in some cases. It greatly empowered labor unions and boosted wages and bargaining power for workers. Charles Koch dislikes every element of the New Deal. He has formed think tanks to attack the ideas behind it, donated money to politicians who sought to dismantle it, and built a company that was hostile to it.

As it turned out, the American public joined Charles Koch, to a certain extent, during the 1970s. Vietnam, Watergate, rampant inflation and multiple recessions shattered Americans’ confidence in the government’s ability to solve problems for ordinary people. Passage of the Civil Rights Act shattered the political coalition behind the New Deal, which had relied on Southern segregationists for support. Ronald Reagan rode the tide of antigovernment sentiment to the White House. But even Reagan wasn’t able to repeal the New Deal. He failed miserably when he tried to repeal Social Security, for example. He cut taxes, but never could restrain spending. What emerged during the 1980s and 1990s was an incoherent governing system, one that is deregulated in some key areas, like banking and derivatives trading, but hyper-regulated in others like the small business sector.

If the American political system is confused, Charles Koch is not. He rules over his company with undisputed authority, and he uses that authority to spread his Market-Based Management doctrine. This philosophy inspires the rank-and-file employees at Koch Industries—the company cafeteria is full of young, entrepreneurial workers who thrive in a system that heaps promotions and bonuses on top performers, while unsentimentally weeding out employees considered weak. But the unbending nature of Market-Based Management, and how it applies to the factory floor, played a big role in building the rage that swept through that union hall in Oregon.

When Steve Hammond, the union boss, tried to bargain with Koch, he found himself fighting over ideology, not benefits. In one case, the Koch negotiators wanted to strip down workers’ health care benefits, requiring employees to pay more money out of pocket for their benefits. The Koch team framed their request not as a way to make more money for Koch, but to create a system that better reflected the ideals of Market-Based Management. “It’s a matter of principle,” recalled union negotiator Gary Bucknum. “The principle is that an employee should be paying something toward their healthcare, or otherwise they’ll abuse their health care.” It was hard to bargain against principle. And the unions didn’t have the leverage to fight. The policies that once supported labor unions have been steadily undermined since the 1970s, dragging union participation in the private sector down from about 33% of the workforce to less than 10%. The union took the cut in health care benefits.

The current American political debate is focused on the shiny objects, the high-profile contests between Team Red and Team Blue. But companies like Koch Industries have the capacity to focus on the much deeper system, the highly complicated plumbing that makes the American economy work. This is where Charles Koch’s attention has been patiently trained for decades, as administrations have come and gone in Washington.

Thanks to this focus, Koch wins every time.

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crystalized-dreams · 4 years

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So, I have spoken a bit about PSO2 in the past and if you follow me on Youtube, you will notice I ended up playing quite a lot this last weekend (it’s surprising I slept at all) and I just kind of wanted to talk about it a bit more.

I’ve tried a few times to pick up the Japanese version again, but a combination of the amount of hoops to jump through to buy AC, everything with the tweaker (That said, a huge shout out to those who works on it— it’s a lot of work and they deserve so much credit for their amazing job which allowed me to play on the Japanese server when I did), and just feeling a bit bad I couldn’t really respond in Japanese along with friends having given up on the game until a proper English release somehow came out, it was just kind of a lonely experience and even when I tried again at some point, the game had moved the story along to such a point with so many new features, I just felt lost.

But I always really loved the game. Like I genuinely had fun with it and enjoyed nearly every part of the game. In fact, the only things I can think of that I really didn’t care for were:

Time Trial missions – One of the things I generally enjoy in PSO2 is having moments where I can just explore and take a breath. Occasionally, some quests do require you to have a certain clear time, but they’re not too bad most of the time… The frustrating ones are the literal time trials which require pretty much instant precision and one wrong move or bad roll of RNG can completely ruin it. More often than not, we came within seconds of finishing. There’s thankfully not tons of quests for this, but it is one of the main dailies for farming meseta (or at least was when I had played)

Scratch Cards – The game does have a gachapon system split into both a premium one with a real money currency and an in-game one with FUN Points which is a currency generally gotten through interactions with other players, but can also be gotten through tickets from certain achievements and exchanging Excubes (which become more common to get further into the game). The positive part of these things is Scratch Card items are not only just “vanity” items (so they do not effect gameplay AT ALL), they can be sold on the market, as long as someone has premium or a shop pass. Unfortunately, as scratch cards are not usually recurring, most items are essentially retired once the Scratch Card expires causing prices to rise immensely, especially for any consumable items such as voices, poses (which include dances), make-up, and accessories. I’m hoping this is something the North American release make end up working on by maybe making it so the items return from time to time to lessen the crazy economy on the Japanese server along with some items essentially permanently poofing out of existence.

Storage/My Room Limits – While there is additional storage you can buy, it’s unfortunately only for up to 3 months at most. You do get one extra storage with Premium as well. I’d just love to see more storage options, but the Furniture Limits actually is what gets me the most. Most of my inventory in the Japanese server was furniture I couldn’t place due to these limits. Ignoring that you only have 5 slots without Premium or a My Room Pass which is painfully small, the limit can go up to 150 with Premium/a My Room Pass with three large rooms which may sound like a lot, but one item =/= one slot. An item can cost between 1-5 slots on average, some even much higher at 10-20 (though, it’s rare). A good example is any item you Auxiliary can use– those cost 3 slots each. Because of that, you can end up with a lot of empty space which is frustrating, especially as someone who is generally good at fitting things into spaces even if it can be a bit crowded. I would love if the limit could at least be reconsidered for Premium, but I guess we’ll see.

And that’s really it, honestly. And despite my complains about the My Room limit, I still managed to make a room I was really happy with in PSO2: #gallery-0-5 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-5 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

(These are very old screenshots from a recording done about 5 years ago so the quality isn’t the best)

The only other thing I would maybe say is the Client Order limit (20 for regular players 40 for premium) just as someone who likes to grab everything I can just incase. It isn’t the end of the world though and just requires you to take the time to think more on which you want to focus on at a time and while there is A LOT at first and it can be a bit overwhelming, eventually you manage to sort it out plus being able to give some to your Auxiliaries helps too.

Regardless, despite my FUN Point Scratch failures (sure hope those items return, but hey if you got some you don’t want, please consider selling to/trading with me!), more than anything when I played the Beta was remembering just how much fun I had.

I never got bored or anything. There was no real reason I stopped beyond having trouble keeping up with so many barriers to go through. It hits so many things I enjoy about MMOs without most of the more frustrating things.

The closest there are to raids are more free to all special events. Going in with a “PUG” (Pick-up group for those who aren’t familiar with MMO acronyms) isn’t an end-all situation. You don’t have to join a team/alliance (though, it can still be fun with good friends and there are some good bonuses and pretty base layouts!), you don’t have to play with others, you can play by yourself just fine and sure, maybe you will run into others in multiplayer areas, but there’s no guarantee and honestly, they’re pretty big!

Being able to invite AI characters (whether of actual NPCs or versions of player characters) gives support so you can still be playing by yourself while still having help. There’s still advantages to playing with others, like anyone can revive you which is really cool and revives can even pick up multiple people at once if close enough. That said, dying isn’t necessarily the end of the world either– you can go back to the ship, get some more potions if needed, and hop right back in and get your loot and things. It feels forgiving and it’s a nice chance of pace. At most, the only time I can think of where I got “screwed over” due to teammates is during some emergencies that really require more cooperation and some just aren’t fully viable by yourself, but they’re also optional content for the most part and while they can give you good items, they’re not be-alls and end-alls and even if they’re rare, you can try again.

And that’s the other thing, there’s so many ways to play– you can spent tons of time in a map, just waiting for different weather conditions or things to happen or you can speed through. Unless certain quests require things to be done in a certain amount of time or there’s a certain rank you’re trying for, there’s nothing wrong with taking your time.

One of my personal favorite things is everything feels so fluid. I can heal, I can attack, I can dodge and block and move and jump and everything feels a lot more freeing than how rigid I tend to feel in most MMOs. There can be close calls and sometimes things can get frustrating, but in general, I’m still having fun. Being able to move around so freely and explore with semi-randomly generated dungeons and events also keeps it from feeling boring. The only thing I would even say comes close to boring is maybe repeatable quests but… you can even just send out your Auxiliaries for those. They may not too great at first, but they’ll get better, and it gives you time to do other things. You can change your class whenever, you can use different weapons per class, you can use so many different skills, switching through things feels quick, and even though I know this isn’t completely unique to this game, everything together just keeps me interested.

Even if I don’t feel like going out on exhibitions, I can just hang out with all the fun things in my character’s room too. Or just send out my auxiliaries and things. Like a casual hub paired with an action game with other players too. And sometimes it just… feels fun to just jump in and see what happens. I don’t normally like surprises, but with PSO2, the chaos can just be so much fun. There’s so much to do and time goes by so fast– I never expected to play as long as I did, but time went so fast and I enjoyed every second of it.

Honestly, I wish I did more of the story during the beta, but I really wanted to wait to experience it at the same time as my husband. The voice acting was great though and I’m SO happy they dubbed Quna’s songs. So many games/anime will just leave songs in Japanese with subtitles and while that’s not a bad thing (I have plenty of songs where I listen to them in both Japanese and English), there’s something I always really enjoy about hearing the same song in other languages so hearing these songs in English finally really warmed my heart.

I hope they keep the same cast and I can’t wait until the game fully opens. I’ll probably continue poking around on the forum in the meantime 🙂 Looking forward to PSO2’s Open Beta launch– I just really hope it includes PC too T~T ❤ Sadly, the Valentine's Day decorations weren't up during the Beta, but here's a screenshot taken over on the Japanese server while working to get my character as close to the original on the North American server:

I think I got pretty close:

Now to just… try and wait patiently until I can finally play again on the North American servers 😛

Let’s talk about the PSO2 Closed Beta for North America! So, I have spoken a bit about PSO2 in the past and if you follow me on Youtube, …

#MMOs #Phantasy Star Online 2 #PSO2 #PSO2 NA

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bitcoinbillionaireblog-blog · 7 years

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Bitcoin Billionaire 5a

Bitcoin Billionaire 5

Open minded people who investigate what is now happening with blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and who then take a chance and invest in this once in a lifetime opportunity will at a minimum have their lives enhanced by suddenly finding themselves making international contacts and transactions. They will start thinking about the world in terms of foreign affairs, economics, business, technology, and science. The profits in this new economic world are staggering, and I must admit that it is completely exhilarating when these cryptos take off. The gambler’s rush in Bitcoin and Ethereum is better than holding a two dollar parlay bet on a longshot horse that becomes a wire to wire triple crown winner; because the thrill of victory often lasts for several months at a time, and making a killing is not a one shot deal. These digital assets often take off with afterburners blazing and they fly straight up the charts with near vertical trajectories. We are talking about seeing your money double in two months, and then do it again the following month, and then rise by 30% in a week. We are often seeing thousand percent annual increases, on ICO or initial coin offerings, and on crypto tokens of which there are hundreds. There is around one-hundred billion dollars invested in the tokens right now, with an additional several hundred million dollars of capital invested by corporations such as Microsoft, Wanxiang, and IBM, or venture capital companies such as Fenbushi, and by governments, and the major accounting firms such as Deloitte, and consortiums of big banks such as those who have partnered with Blythe Masters. Whether or not Blythe Masters becomes the first Bitcoin Billionaire remains to be seen, but I think that her Digital Assets will have the greatest dollar volume of all of the global crypto currency and blockchain companies by far. They are just now finishing a complete rebuild of the ASX Australian Securities Exchange, and she has her eyes on the Toronto Stock Exchange among others, and her blockchain distributed ledger systems will be used by many large international banks.

In early 2016 I started exploring Bitcoin. I bought my first Bitcoin for $630. Today, a year and a half later, Bitcoin is trading at $4,066 and people are saying that although it is down today it will most likely break $5,000 soon. Others say that until it hits $10,000 the big money will sit on the sidelines and wait and see. Most financial analysts and economists would agree that if only five-percent of the money that is currently invested in gold or gold derivatives worldwide transferred into Bitcoin that the increase in the value of a single Bitcoin would be astounding!

I needed some cash today so much like digging in the couch for lost coins and raiding the piggy bank, I surprised myself when I raised $485 from QuadrigaCX my exchange in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada by selling three and a half Litecoins for $63 each which was great because I had paid just three dollars each for them eighteen months earlier. I also sold a half of an ETH or Ether the Ethereum token for $270. Just some residual pocket change from closing out an old wallet with a small balance that had grown to become significant. I also received $6.07 worth of Bitcoin from Genesis Mining to my Blockchain.info bitcoin wallet on my iPhone. On top of it all that evening I made $23 from Steemit account https://steemit.com/@doubleeagle where just under four hundred dollars remains of my eighty-dollar investment. I earn about seventy cents per day from Slush pool in eastern Europe for the hashes produced by my noisy old, Antminer 5 Bitcoin miner. The seriously outdated but reliable rig has paid itself off many times over and is still running fine. The key to my system of investing in Bitcoin is that I think of that seventy cents daily payout in Bitcoin of around 17,000 to 18,000 Satoshis per day. Imagine a time when a Satoshi is like a dollar is today, and when a Bitcoin will be worth well over one million dollars. I would say that this is all highly speculative, but in my view the extraordinary returns from crypto currencies are matched only by the lottery for the average person; ironically it seems to me that there are very high odds in favor of windfall profits if the Bitcoin is held long term.

There is a reason why so few writers have tried to write a book about what is happening with Bitcoin. This, although it is probably the story of the century, and marks a great epoch in human history. Trying to write a book on this topic is like trying to drink from a much-referenced fire hose. Change is everywhere, and unexpected dramatic change happens weekly. There is always the potential for the digital tokens to disappear if they are not handled correctly or even sometimes if they are. This reminds me of how the penny mining stocks used to be, in the days of commodity exchanges like the VSE Vancouver Stock Exchange. Bitcoin is said to be economically modeled after a commodity such as gold. Bitcoin like gold has a limited supply of twenty-one million and is always becoming more expensive to produce.

Bitcoin went through the planned second ‘Halving Event’ in July of 2016 where the payout per ten- minute block dropped from twenty-five bitcoins to twelve and a half bitcoins per block until the next halving four years hence. The current volume of Bitcoin mined is $7,318,800 per day. This does not include transaction fees. Miners are being rewarded $304,950 USD per hour or $50,825 for each single ten-minute block. As you can imagine there is intense competition among miners to get these prizes. It is a mathematical probability question as to whether a miner should gamble and go it alone mining where if the block is found the entire reward may be kept. I opted instead to join a large group of other independent miners from all over the world who plug our hash rate into Slushpool. Now the mathematical probability equation works in my favor. We share the payouts after pooling our resources, we get to cast votes on critical issues, and we receive reliable daily revenue, which arrives in my Bitcoin wallet. I should say that I do not receive daily mining payouts any longer because when I went to spend the rewards with large transactions there were inordinately high fees due to the composite nature of all those little payouts. I have since switched my payouts from Slushpool and Genesis Mining to 0.01 BCT lots, and just leave them building at the pool or with Genesis.

The inevitable Bitcoin and Ethereum big-events, breakthroughs, milestones, and catastrophes, and hacks to feel crucially important to market participants. There are definitely political aspects to Bitcoin as each and every country and jurisdiction on the planet will try to come up with a Bitcoin strategy. We see issues about the so called un-banked, the potential for micro- loan payments between people of the First World countries and women and men in the Second and Third World. There are consequential matters of freedom and empowerment, like Bitcoin’s potential for eliminating the huge fees migrant workers pay when they try to send money back home to their families. Billions of hard earned and badly needed dollars could stay in the migrant worker’s own hands if they transferred the money using Bitcoin with its comparatively tiny fees for the actual transfer and no foreign exchange fees for currency conversion. We crypto currency enthusiasts learn all too soon that the world is not watching, that most people do not care, and in the end the big Bitcoin halving event, and the various hard and soft forks amounted to mere speed bumps during a technological race that has moved on to new events at new locations by new participants. Bitcoin is a product of consensus, and consensus, in turn, is a function of mathematics, computer code, and game theory.

Excerpt 2

Vitalik Buterin is an extremely intelligent young man who started out writing about Bitcoin and then created Ethereum, which is Bitcoin’s biggest competing currency. The focus was no longer to be on the value of the Ethereum token ETH, but rather on the ability of coded ‘smart contracts’ to use the immutable blockchain in the EVM for legal commerce whereby the funds are not released until certain conditions are seen to have been fulfilled by the smart contract. As an aside, I must say that no one is complaining that Vitalik’s original vision of a cheap token did not work out, and Ethereum has soared to recent prices as high as four hundred dollars and can boast a total capitalization of thirty billion dollars USD with rapid global multi faceted growth. So, will Vitalik be the world’s first Bitcoin Billionaire? I do not know, but he has been voted the most influential person in crypto by industry participants. Like so many intellectuals before him Buterin seems to eschew riches, instead, he is happy in his role as "Chief Scientist" for the Swiss non-profit Ethereum Foundation and experiencing extensive travel and learning foreign languages. His sudden ability to speak Chinese surprises audiences as he takes questions and gives lectures in Mandarin. I was surprised to see Vitalik speaking fluent Russian when he met Vladimir Putin recently. Vitalik just announced that Metropolis will be released in late September of 2017 with a hard fork. ‘The Plasma Framework’ scalability solution will be done in coordination with Joseph Poon of ‘Lightening Network’ fame, and will feature 'zk-SNARKs' or zero knowledge proofs. Vitalik does not like mining, he says that it wastes electricity and computing power. He and Vlad Zamfir have been working on Casper a Proof of Stake system that does not require Proof of Work mining . POW or Bitcoin Mining makes it too expensive in terms of electrical costs, equipment costs, maintenance costs, programming costs, and time needed to download the entire blockchain ; for a hacker to build a super- computer and try to overpower or out-speed the blockchain in a malicious attack to harm the blockchain or to commit fraud.

In 2016 big money flowed into the development of Ethereum from Microsoft the sponsor of the event along with Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and Fenbushi the largest venture capital firm in Asia. We are talking an easy hundred million dollars committed with every indication that ‘all systems are go’ for even bigger things to come in the near future. The Devcon 2 event in Shanghai was successful beyond all measure and caused me to really stand up and take notice of what these alt-coin pioneers had already accomplished, and where they were headed. I also benefited from the trip by making contacts from Beijing that could help me in my lobby to bring Bitcoin Mining back home to Manitoba.

I watched a YouTube video today that was put out by Roger Ver who would definitely be in contention for the first Bitcoin Billionaire title. He holds a majority of the Bitcoin in Peter Smith’s Blockchain.info which is my recommended Bitcoin wallet. Peter Smith’s wallet web portal is based in Luxembourg, but it seems that most transactions are routed through some small islands off the west coast of Africa. The Blockchain.info wallet has more funds than all of the other Bitcoin wallets combined. I keep my Bitcoin in my Blockchain.info wallets on my Samsung S7 Android, and on my iPhone 6, and I also have a matched version on my main desktop PC. I really like the way the Blockchain.info wallet user interface works. They have fifteen million wallets in use and have completed one hundred million transactions. Ver was criticizing the Bitcoin Core team and Blockstream a closely related company that employs many Bitcoin Core developers. Adam Back heads up Blockstream and he is a very respected long time Bitcoin developer. I sat across from him at lunch at Construct 2017 , the invite only San Francisco developer’s conference put on by CoinDesk and sponsored by IBM. I said loudly so as to catch his ear that I liked the idea of flexible fees. I have interests in Bitcoin mining and I like earning mining fees. So yes, I admit that I am biased, but I still want fees to be fair for migrant workers and people in the third world. There are about two- hundred and fifty thousand dollars per day paid to miners in fees. Roger Ver is saying that people will leave Bitcoin for alternative crypto currencies if fees get too high or the network has delayed confirmation times, what he warns could become a poor user experience. This was in fact happening and fees had risen from being nearly free to fifty dollars and more sometimes, which Core points out people were willingly paying albeit with a grumble. But everyone had made such high profits just on the increase in the value of Bitcoin alone that they could afford the fees with ease and they did.

The Bitcoin blockchain forked on August 1, 2017. That means that if you had a tenth of a Bitcoin on July 31 you got a matching tenth of a BCH BitcoinCash token. You doubled your token count you now hold equal amounts of BTC Bitcoin and BCH BitcoinCash.

My company website https://smartpropertyblockchain.ca has live prices for BTC and ETH posted on the home page from Cryptocompare.com widgets .

Bitcoin is at $5,352.55 Canadian Dollars and BCH or BitcoinCash at $899.23 CAD. The Ethereum blockchain had seen a previous fork and stable trading patterns have evolved over the past year my website shows Ethereum priced at $418.03 CAD and ETC at $18.90. These forks are a little bit like stock splits but there is no guarantee that you can access the cloned token unless you have made arrangements.

The decision to do the fork on August 1st must have been made at the Consensus 2017 event in New York sponsored by Barry Silbert. He is America’s premier crypto currency entrepreneur. He would be my pick and he would get the highest rating in my handicapping of the Bitcoin Billionaire’s Stake Race. He has over fifty crypto currency related companies in fifteen countries. I really feel like a small thinker when I watch the maneuvers of a big thinker like Barry Silbert, owner of the Digital Currency Group, Grayscale Investment Trust, and CoinDesk magazine. I invested in the new Bitcoin ETF derivative GBTC units from Grayscale, and I did ok with them. They only deal with accredited investors with net worth of over one million dollars exclusive of residence or income of over two hundred thousand dollars a year for each of the past two years. Luckily for me the oil business was not yet completely dead so I qualified on income. The units are based on NAV net asset value rather than being a fraction of a bitcoin as many people mistakenly believed when the fund was launched. I balked and sold out after receiving an offer to invest two hundred and fifty thousand dollars at four o’clock PM that would be priced at NAV regardless of where the unit price had ended trading on close at 4 PM. I could not see much difference between this overly attractive offer and the late- trading issues mutual funds had seen many years ago.

I must admit however that I was wrong earlier when I was very critical when Silbert started buying Ethereum Classic ETC tokens after the Ethereum fork. As Andreas Antonopoulos the best promoter of Bitcoin on earth whose opinion I value so highly warned in a video I watched about the resurrection of Ethereum Classic ETC by Charles Hoskinson after an unknown hacker in Russia using the handle Arvicco first revived the discarded pre-fork Ethereum blockchain.. “When one is most absolutist in their position, that is often the time when one is completely wrong” and time has shown that such was the case. I attended the conference with my pitch for Bitcoin mining in Manitoba but had no inkling about what was happening behind the scenes in the five floors of meeting rooms at the New York Marriot Marquis hotel located on Broadway in bustling Times Square. A so called “New York Agreement” was signed by many big time Bitcoin companies and exchanges in some hidden back room negotiations at the trade show. It was later announced that an unstoppable fork would take place on August 1, 2017, as it later in fact did, just as predicted.

The one-megabyte block size will remain the same with slight capacity improvements as part of Segregated Witness off chain features are added that save space. This is an improvement that Erik Lombrozo has been promoting for the Core team, and that Andreas Antonopoulos has recommended as a good BIP or Bitcoin improvement Proposal. This will mean that fees will remain higher than they would be if the block size went to two- megabytes as many thought it was poised to do, or to an eight- megabyte size that many users had also been lobbying for during the past year. Transactions may be slower because of the full blocks but the ten-minute block benchmark is adjusted by a mechanism called the ‘difficulty’ which adjusts every two weeks in Bitcoin and every four hundred blocks in the much faster fourteen- second Ethereum blockchain. It is August 23, 2017, three weeks on today, and I have not seen problems with high fees or slow confirmations. People said yes, I want that free money and welcomed the new BCH received after the split.

There is a video commentator from Epicentre that I like to watch online named Meher and I wound up sitting beside him for while in Shanghai at Devcon 2. I let him know that I liked it when he and Sebastien Couture and Brian Fabian Crain did online shows for Epicentre and that I was a fan. I was interested to see how he would describe the experience to his co-hosts and their viewers when he got back to Europe. I was sure to tune in on YouTube when the video came out. In the video he said the event and the city of Shanghai seemed like “science fiction”. That it was like living a scene in a science fiction movie. He was spot on as usual. That is what it felt like to me as well only probably a lot more because being so much older I see so many things that would have looked like science fiction in the 1950s and 60s. It started right at the airport where I was chauffeured to the Hyatt on the bund hotel in an BYD all-electric car instead of taking the Magnetic Levitation high- speed train into the wildly lit and crowded and busy streets of downtown Shanghai.

Vlad Zamfir was received enthusiastically by the crowd of nearly 2,500 Ethereum professionals. Vitalik praised him highly to the crowd and thanked him for his assistance in dealing with a serious DDOS or dedicated denial of service attack some bad actors tried pulling in the middle of the night before in Shanghai. The attack was obviously planned to catch everyone in Ethereum off- guard because so many staff were in Shanghai and away from London and Switzerland, and to exploit the time zone differences.

The Construct 2017 conference in San Francisco was held in the Palace of Fine Arts an historic symbol of technology in the Bay Area. I observed that it was a two Tesla event although , there was also a BMW electric car there which I thought was very futuristic. Vlad Zamfir was a little down at the conference and he looked tired. When he started his presentation on Casper and how proof of stake was going for him and Vitalik he was shocked to see that many people were doing other things and several were not even listening to what was really huge important news. He went through the very interesting talk and I guess he realized that maybe either these were Bitcoin guys or maybe they intended to watch the video when it came out. Later that day I listened to him again when there was a plenary on the threats of AI or artificial intelligence. Vlad clearly said that he was worried about inventing something that in the future might have unintended consequences that might somehow technologically imprison people instead of freeing them from banker’s control. He fears a government somewhere could somehow use some of this to enslave the entire population. Vlad was seeing the bad side of the world because he had been spending months running game theory scenarios looking for fatal flaws that could be exploited by hackers of the Casper Proof of Stake Protocol that Vitalik has promised will take Ethereum away from mining. He said that he was pushing as hard as he could ahead but the weight on his shoulders was a tremendous responsibility and was becoming a heavy burden although he was more than up for the challenge. Thirty- billion dollars worth of Ethereum at risk now, and a perhaps a slight risk that despots somehow misuse these tools. Several months of serious game theory will do that to you. I think that by doing a full risk analysis Vlad is being responsible, and I am sure he will never end up doing anything but good.

There are reasons to be suspicious about malicious bad-actors behind the scenes. State actors, money launderers, tax cheats, ransomware hackers, all manor of criminals that hide in the dark could try to use crypto to avoid the law. On the dark web Tor browser sites like Silk Road have already enabled criminal activity. It is common knowledge that the Tor browser was released by US Office of Naval Research and DARPA on September 20, 2002. We also know how Bit Torrent enabled peer to peer file sharing that could be used for pirating copyrighted material and that there is pornography on the Internet and how prostitutes could be contacted on the backpage website. So, do we just shut down the Internet ? Of course, we don’t, and we can’t because the Internet has become a huge indispensable sector of our society and economy.

We still do not know who Satoshi Nakamoto was or if he was just a cover name for an operation of the United States or some other government. Possibly Bitcoin was designed as a fall back plan because in 2008 a sudden catastrophic meltdown in the American economy based on bad mortgages took place that was becoming a crisis nearing that of the Great Depression of 1929, and a total collapse was feared imminent by many top level officials at that time. Banks were failing and major companies where in terrible financial shape. Some people still claim that some of the larger Bitcoin transactions today are funding Black Ops worldwide. European authorities have also reported that the Islamic State terrorist cells in Paris and Belgium used Bitcoin to fund operations before the horrible attacks.

I find it unfortunate that this generation has to function in a trust -less society in cyberspace and in the a trust-less society in the real world. The real world has fake news, propaganda and lies, and the crypto world has alias usernames, encryption, and reputation. They have a very strong want for consensus and avoid contact with people who have been shunned for the social transgression of saying the group might be wrong about something. Algorithms on MSN and Facebook and many other social media sites give the viewer content that has been determined to appeal to them by their politics. I was determined not to say anything about the recent American election because I am not a citizen of the United States. The Construct 2017 San Francisco event opened with exasperated announcements that many attendees were having trouble at the airport because of the tremendous confusion because President Trump had just announced his immediate travel ban. There were terrible scenes on television of families at the airport with their travel plans disrupted and their lives turned upside-down, some innocent travelers were being held in custody because of all of the confusion. Someone took the microphone on the stage and addressed the crowd with a defiant suggestion that the programmers should fight to make blockchain based identity documents so that refugees with no passports or birth certificates could prove that they were legitimate refugees rather than the sleeper cell terrorists they were being accused of being.

Later at the lunch that I had basically shouted out that I liked flexible fees for the benefit of Adam Back, I turned the topic as to whether or not judges could be trusted, because as I told them all that I find it shocking that they really do not trust judges or their legal systems. I told the bright young star of 21 from Los Angeles that maybe it was generational but that I still trusted judges. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt and an assumption of honesty. They had been conditioned to expect the worst from people because of their real world ethics had begun to reflect their cyber ethics, and their game theory ethics. I tried to argue that if one does not believe in ‘the good man or woman’ one probably will feel like a sucker trying to be a ‘good man or woman’. They got the last word in with “ Look at our last election” to which I was pledged not to comment but it was a winning argument.

I know that I look like an old cop and I try not to freak people out. It did not matter that I looked like an old cop when I was in Fort Collins Colorado and I was able to explore the civic culture of recreational marijuana so as to get an idea of what to expect at home now that Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has legalized it. I was also very interested in the Fort Collins Solar Clean Energy Collective. They had a great set up with local people buying unit shares. Their large array of collectors were not dual axis solar tracking as I would suggest but it was up and running and was financially viable. I have found that many programmers have a side interest in solar. That was the main thing the two engineers from Microsoft wanted to talk about in San Francisco. Elon Musk has some new solar roof tiles that are lighter, cheaper, more attractive, harder to break, and easier to install than ordinary roof tiles, and his whole package of a Tesla in the garage, with a Powerwall 2 battery for the house and solar panels or roof tiles intrigues young engineers . I find a lot of excitement about this at Bitcoin conferences by programmers. One of the best micro-applications that I heard of at Consensus 2017 was a micro-token that self generated off of a solar panel that then sold itself through smart contracts with utilities and exchanges. I have been trying to design a dual axis solar tracker program using a raspberry pi mini-computer and Arduino controllers. I am going back for the third semester of computer programming at the University of Winnipeg next month. I decided a long time ago that rather than to first take code off of Github, I would put some good code on. I have nightmares of Trace Mayer shouting in my face “where is your code, show me your code, you will never make the team, you’re just not good enough”. Trace is rough on rookies but when he goes on Jeff Berwick’s Dollar Vigilante show to debate Roger Ver he does argue a good case and he is obviously a guy who would make any team.

I had one mission at the event and I had driven through the mountains from Winnipeg to San Francisco in my GMC pick up truck to ask Zooko Wilcox a question about ZCash mining. I intended to walk right up to Zooko Wilcox and ask him a question about Claymore’s new ZCash mining software. Zooko is a tall thin man, kind of a tough guy like Clint Eastwood or an eccentric billionaire type like Howard Hughes. He was really on his guard because he had recently stated publicly that he feared for his safety and was rushing ahead with unbreakable encryption because he feared the government would try to stop him in any way they could. His logic was once it was launched he would be safe. I watched how he inter-acted with the other big-name speakers, like Joseph Poon , and Vlad and others genuinely liked him and he was obviously very popular and he had decades of experience and achievements.

He was standing alone for the first time and I pounced. I stood right in front of him and I said “ Hello Zooko. I am Jeremiah a miner from Winnipeg and I have just one quick question about the Claymore ZCash miner if you can spare me a minute”. He smiled warily sizing me up and by that I mean he probably was thinking , “Is this fat bastard from the NSA?”.

I stood my ground and held his eyes in a lock and waited. He smiled a little at my audacity and reached down and turned up my identity tag to this invite only event where press were expressly prohibited. CoinDesk took a post event survey and have announced that next years event will welcome the media. He read Double Eagle BTC and stared at me accusingly. “Yes I said I am a miner from Winnipeg and as you are the main guy for ZCash tell me if you think I should trust Claymore? He said mining, I don’t have anything to do with mining. I said well, Claymore sells for forty dollars on a plug and play mini 16 GB SSD drive that auto mines ZCash but they take a minute and a half per hour and use your resources as they want. They might mine the same coin, or mine another coin. My point was could they do something I did not want happening on my system during that time. IPFS or the Interplanetary Filing System has proven that networks of idle computers can rent out their storage space. Zooko knew what I meant but he really did not know much about mining or he was playing dumb to fit with his ‘Ceremony’ narrative ; which has bizarre cloak - and -dagger elements that I do not know enough about to go into it, although he did go over it in some detail on stage. It involved his attempt to assure people that there had been no pre-mine of ZCash and that no one had a universal key. It involved six computers in different locations that all cut a DVD with one sixth of the code. Then the computers that had been previously stripped down and their hard drives were destroyed. I think this example of the social trait of millennials in general and techies in particular demonstrates counterproductive ways that the ‘no good man or woman’ mindset can impact beliefs and behaviour. Reputation played a role as Zooko has a very good reputation, and his other participants lent their excellent reputations to the effort as well. Still Zooko said on stage that he felt that he could not just say trust me. My question is why couldn’t Zooko just say trust me? In any event as I write this about eight months later ZCash has a market capitalization of $566 million USD and is priced at $274.66. It looks like a real winner because several of the best new Ethereum wallets such as Jaxx are using ZCash for anonymity. My pool Slushpool has started mining ZCash and it seems Claymore’s mining program was just fine but I have several other new ZCash mining programs available for free. Genesis mining now has ZCash mining contracts available, along with Ethereum, Monero, Dash, and Litecoin. I made out like a bandit on the X-11 Dash contracts that I bought last year. We can take a deeper dive into comparative experiments that I have done to calculate the value of home mining versus cloud mining such as buying contracts with companies such as Genesis Mining.

Talking about the unknown origins of so much of this new technology the recent story of ‘ Mimble Wimble’. Named from Harry Potter it is super encryption that suddenly appeared posted online. The ramifications of this new super encryption technology are being discussed but no one knows where it came from. It is really the next big thing and by the time I get this book up to that chapter hopefully it will be better understood.

One does not have to look at the latest mathematical encryption techniques to find the actual conceptual barrier that the over 55 crowd has the most difficulty understanding. This new paradigm changes everything that we have grown up believing about business, proprietary assets, and value. I think that it all started in 1991 with Linus Torvalds who released the Linux operating system for free, all he wanted to retain for himself was control of the name Linux. Torvalds probably would not wish to be entered in the Billionaire sweepstakes as he acted in sharp contrast with Linux as to what Bill Gates had done with Microsoft. Torvalds later set up GitHub which is a stack based open source code repository that has become the main gathering place for programmers. Many companies do their development on GitHub. This means that everything is out in the open and nothing has a patent or trademark or needs a licence to be copied. Elon Musk shocked investors when he bravely re-declared Tesla’s commitment to open source. From the size of the lithium battery that goes into the battery pack, to the weight of the Powerwall 2, everything is openly for competitors to see, and that includes autonomous automobile navigation systems. Competitors could potentially save millions of dollars in development costs that Tesla had to spend to get the same information, or to get the design to that stage. Satya Nadella the visionary CEO of Microsoft understands and he has made Azure Microsoft’s big new blockchain data base management system open source. He has announced plans for Excel spreadsheets to have Bitcoin as an available currency, and of course Microsoft accepts Bitcoin on their website for any of their products. IBM is dabbling with open source by participating in the hyper-ledger project but it is certainly not ready to sanction a change in policy yet.

Maybe I should give an example from my own business situation of how this plays out in the real world. I have smartpropertyblockchain.ca which is a new company in Canada that has a stated purpose of offering a blockchain alternative to the Torrens style paper- based government Land and Property Title Registries that the government or it’s surrogates run. What if your government was Venezuela, or Libya? Land fraud is common in many countries and is hard to protect yourself against the risk of it. One or two bribed clerks with a rubber stamp, or maybe a lawyer with some bogus or altered documents, and anyone could be in jeopardy of losing their property. There is a company in Austin Texas called Factom and by the looks of the smiling faces on their website it is a great place to work. The company has been very successful and has many major law enforcement agencies on it’s client roster including the Department of Homeland Security. Factom’s CEO Peter Kirby is quoted in CoinDesk as having said “We really believe that when you move all of the data in the world into the blockchain you can create a lot of transparency and value”. Early investor Tim Draper is quoted in the same article saying “Centralized data is prone to critical failure by any individual mistake, whether by user error or malicious hacking. By decentralizing data through the blockchain, Factom avoids critical failures due to user error or hacker”. Their code for Factom is open source and they state clearly that it will help any new Startup they would be happy to share their code free of charge.

Factom is doing very well with big new contracts, and a token called Factoids that has tripled recently, or as Jim Cramer from CNBC’s Mad Money investment show would say “en fuego”. My website shows the price of Factoids FCT in Canadian dollars as $38.57. So, will it hurt them when my team looks to them as a guide? They all look like great people and I know what a great city Austin, Texas is as I have been through there a few times. How does it threaten them for me, way up here, across the border in Winnipeg Canada doing local property titles in any way compete with them?

Smartpropertyblockchain.ca may find some technique for electronic appraisals as automated real estate valuation modeling is one of our main features in development with working models in hand. If in the future in some twist of fate Factom could use our code for appraisals or perhaps our geomatics technology integrating drone surveys and digitized records on the blockchain they would be welcome to it. Blockchain forks and a new chain is born. That is the ethos of the new world. The music is more or less free and the singers the put on big shows because that is where the profits are. People will attend a seminar and pay a few hundred dollars for the event. They will ask if the slides from the presentation are available on the web. It is understandable that the lecturer might feel that keeping the slides unavailable might be a good idea for job security. Not so, not in this new world. Many older managers will never get the concept and will be eased out of their positions and retired. I have a rule of thumb that I go by for myself. I must devote about four hours per week or two full days per month worth of time devoted expressly to learning new things so I can keep up with the progress around me in technology. It might be my newest smartphone or keeping my wireless printer mated to my desktop PCs Windows 10 after the latest update. Maybe it is my trucks Magellan GPS navigator, or our home satellite system or WIFI router. Perhaps I am just taking an hour to look at Rust or Python. It is usually challenging and often frustrating time out of my busy schedule trying to keep up with the times. I can imagine that a lot of people just don’t bother and are tired of always having to relearn programs after they upgrade. People who fall behind will wind up totally confused dealing with their city or government any more because of their lack of computer skills and should wake up and realize that they need some training.

The idea that computer coding is for everybody is also quite a stretch in my opinion. Judging by the attrition rate among my classmates at the University of Winnipeg Applied Computer Sciences program. I have observed that even really bright tech- savvy students find learning Java for example quite difficult.

Certainly, people should by now know all about Windows 10 and also basic email security rules and policies. I think time spent reading this book would qualify for example so you are already doing it, great!

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martinfzimmerman · 7 years

Text

Gerald Celente on Markets: “When Interest Rates Go Up, This Thing Goes Down”

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Mike Gleason (Money Metals Exchange): It is my privilege now to welcome in Gerald Celente, publisher of the renowned Trends Journal. Mr. Celente is a well-known trends forecaster and highly sought-after guest on news programs throughout the world and has been forecasting some of the biggest and most important trends before they happen for more than 30 years now. It’s always great to have him on with us.

Mr. Celente, thanks so much for the time today, and we appreciate you joining us.

Gerald Celente (Trends Journal): Thanks for having me on, Mr. Gleason.

Mike Gleason: Well, I want to start out talking about the first half of the year of Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump had an ambitious agenda to get the economy going but hasn’t been able to push any significant legislation through this Congress. How do you see that playing out from here, and what bearing does all this have on the dollar, Gerald, because the greenback has been taking it on the chin here recently?

Gerald Celente: Well, you point out something very significant. Go back to when Trump got elected, and going into the beginning of the year, so from November to the beginning of 2017, the dollar was soaring, and it all of a sudden started reversing. I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like this in my life with so much hatred is being sent out by the media, not only against Trump, but the Russians, and any other person or country that they don’t like. Of course, I’m no Trump supporter, I’m a political atheist, I didn’t vote for either of Trump or Clinton in the last election. And I’m not one of these people that say, “Oh, you have to go out and vote. If you don’t vote then you deserve what you get.” No, if you vote, you deserve what you get, because I don’t support the Bloods and the Crips, and that’s what the Democrats and Republicans are to me. They’re murderers and thieves, their track records prove it. So, what I’m saying about Trump has nothing to do with me being a Trump supporter.

The hatred that the media has been selling, with hating the Russians, no evidence at all that they hacked into the Democratic National Committee, it’s our assumption, it’s our belief, it’s our analysis. Can you imagine going to a court, Mike, and saying that to a judge? (The judge might say) “Show me some evidence.” “How dare you ask me to show you evidence, judge? Don’t you know who I am? I’m a presstitute for the Cartoon News Network, I’m a presstitute for the New York Times, the toilet paper of record. I’m a presstitute for MSNBC. I’ll shove any crap I want down your throat and you repeat it to the American people. I don’t need proof, all need are assumptions, and you know how good those are. You might remember that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda.” So, what I’m saying is they sell lies, and they sell hatred and dissent in the United States like I’ve never seen before in my life. Every time somebody got elected that you didn’t like, the media would say, “Well you may not have supported that person, but now it’s the president of our United States and we have to all work together. “

So now going back to the dollar. The war against Trump is actually the war against the economy in many ways, because when the Trump rally began, and anybody could go back to the facts, when Trump looked like he was going to win on November 8th, in the morning of November 9th, the Dow futures dove by over 800 points, thinking that he was going to win because the markets wanted Hillary. And then it reversed. And it reversed on the belief that his programs, again whether you like them or not, not the issue, only talking about business, were good for business because of tax reform, because of deregulation – again, whether or not you agree with it isn’t the issue, we’re talking about business – and with also the rebuilding of the infrastructure. None of that happened. That boosted of the dollar, now we’re going into reverse. And, also, the rhetoric keeps heating up. Not only against Russia, but across the globe.

Mike Gleason: It has been almost a decade now since the 2008 financial crisis. We’ve seen evidence since that time that some Wall Street banks have acted like criminal enterprises, and they continue to enjoy the support of politicians in Washington DC. No one has been more vocal on that subject than you. Now we have Donald Trump promising to “drain the swamp,” but more evidence of cheating and market rigging have been piling up. You could be forgiven for thinking that a reckoning will soon come, but experience has shown, these characters are basically untouchable. What are your thoughts, Gerald, any of these folks going to go to jail any time soon?

Gerald Celente: Well, they’re too big to jail, you remember that little freak, Eric Holder. Yeah, you remember him, he was brought in by Obama, the most transparent president he says in his campaigning for the presidency back in 2008. Yeah, so transparent that you could see right through him. He was a guy that promised to bring the banksters to jail. And Eric Holder, where does he go, he goes back to work for one of the white-shoe boy’s firms over there on Wall Street, and wants to protect the banksters, and he says they were basically too big to jail.

We saw, what, $150 billion worth of fines, and not one head roll? It’s a neo-feudal society, there are different rules for the political nobility and the economic elite. As you point out, yeah, Trump didn’t drain the swamp, he just brought in new swamp creatures. Whether it’s Mnuchin or all the generals that he brought in. I’ve never seen a White House filled with so much military brass and a bunch of Wall Street billionaires. So, when we’re looking at it, no, I don’t see any of that change coming.

But again, going back to the dollar and the strength of it, there may be some positives coming out of it. Wilbur Ross who’s the Commerce Secretary, this isn’t a guy I’d want to do business with, but if this is the guy that’s going to defend my interest on the business field, and he’s going to renegotiate these lousy trade deals, that’s great for America. So, there’s a give and a take on it, but right now it’s only been a one-way street and that is when you look at the polls, that Trump is down at historic lows, and look at Congress, what, only 10% of the people look up to Congress? And yet people argue that their bunch of crooks is better than your bunch of crooks? So, I don’t understand what’s going on, how people could take orders from these jerks that play politicians.

Mike Gleason: Speaking of the 2008 financial crisis, it looks to us like history is likely to repeat, perhaps sooner rather than later. You can make a good argument that a number of markets are now in bubble territory, including stocks and bonds. There is also plenty of irresponsible lending –subprime autos, student loans, and hundreds of billions lent to oil companies which may go broke unless oil gets back up towards $80 per barrel. Markets are certainly due for a big correction. That said, if the VIX is any indication, traders have never been less worried. What do you think, can the wheel stay on this a while longer?

Gerald Celente: Yeah, they can. And that’s the one thing that I learned, and you really nailed it before when you were talking about the corruption. They’ll rig the system any way they want to make things happen. Look, I would’ve thought this thing would’ve collapsed in 2012. I never heard of negative interest rates. You know Mike, I like you, you’re a nice guy, I got a 10-year bond for you. Yeah, you buy, and then I’m going to give you negative yields after 10 years because I like you so much. I mean, who could get away with this kind of crap? The central banks, the bank of Japan. And it’s the same thing around the world. So, people are dying to get anything that’s going to show them any kind of return. So that’s what’s keeping the markets, they’ll rig the game anywhere they can.

I got a better one for you. Hey, how about a thing called Quantitative Easing? Isn’t that nice? Negative rate interest policy, zero interest rate policy, we’ll do anything we can to keep the Ponzi scheme going and the banksters rich. One of our Trends Journal (contributors), Anthony Freda, a great illustrator, did a cover for us, and he had a Jesus Christ with a whip and he’s driving the banksters out of the temple, but now they have names in front of them, JP Morgan, Chase, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, on and on. Nothing’s really changed. And that’s all it is. I mean, look at the guy, the little boy they elected over there in France – a Rothschild kid, Macron. And it’s one after another.

So, I mean, they’ll rig the game any way they can. Will there be a correction, we’re forecasting a 10% correction. And so are others. But again, we don’t see a crash, because they’re going to do what they can to prop this thing up. I talked about Japan, what do they have, the GDP is, what, 250, that’s a GDP ratio. I mean, look at China, 300. So, they just keep the Ponzi schemes going. They’ll invent anything that they can.

Mike Gleason: We definitely want to get your thoughts on North Korea since the mounting tensions there have made big news this week. The prospect of a nuclear exchange is of course what people worry about. We’re well-accustomed to bluster and threats from Kim Jong-un and his predecessors, but now Donald Trump has threatened to use America’s nuclear arsenal. What is your best guess on how this will play out? Will Trump launch a preemptive attack using conventional weapons? Is this brinkmanship, just a negotiating tactic, what?

Gerald Celente: It’s not a negotiating tactic. I mean, I’ve been hearing this North Korea stuff all my life. Read the details of the sanctions that they just put on North Korea. What is it? The UN voted, because they’re testing missiles. You know what North Korea’s GDP is? It’s smaller than West Virginia’s. They have a population the size of Texas. You read the quotes coming out on what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and it says, “North Korea warns US, rejects talks. The sanction’s resolution aims to cut a third, or $1 billion from North Korea annual foreign reserves. And I’m not good at math, but a third, or 1 billion, that’s $3 billion is their total foreign revenue. 3 lousy billion dollars. What is Bill Gates worth, 86 billion? Warren Buffet, 76 billion. Bezos, 73 billion. Zuckerberg, 56 billion. Look at the tough talk against the little nobodies. The reason why North Korea has nuclear weapons, and they made this very clear, is because they saw what the United States did to Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. And they say, “You’re not going to do that to us.”

What countries has North Korea invaded? Look what they did to Libya, overthrowing Gaddafi. Hey, how about that war they launched against Afghanistan, because they had to find a man by the name of Osama bin Laden that was living over there. Oh, and look at that war in Iraq, yeah, they had to get rid of Saddam Hussein, those North Koreans, they can’t stay home. And now they’re in Somalia and Sudan, and they just sold $150 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia to slaughter the innocent Yemenis, the poorest nation in the Middle East. Of course I’m talking about the United States.

North Korea and China have been asking the United States and South Korea, “Stop doing these massive military drills on our shores. Stop threatening us constantly.” What if we had North Korea up in Canada, China and Russia doing military drills down in the Gulf of Mexico, and Iran off the coast of New York? They’d be bombing the hell out of them from the United States, these people for getting too close to us. Yet the United States aggression against this country … Do they have a crazy guy running the show? Sure looks it, but hey welcome to America. Look at the freak show that we got going on and have been going on for a long time. So we have no right being there. Honor the Founding Fathers, no foreign entanglements. This is all rhetoric, we’re fighting a nobody that’s done nothing to us. They have not done anything to the United States. Oh, they may have a missile that could hit Topeka, Kansas by 2025. I got a gun, does that mean I’m going to shoot somebody? If there’s 50 cops outside, and somebody shoots in one of them, are the other 49 going to blow your brains out? What threat is North Korea to the United States?

Mike Gleason: With all this said, Gerald, what are your thoughts on gold? It has encountered some road bumps, but it is held in there pretty strong, actually, and never fell below $1,200. What trend is in store for the yellow metal in your view?

Gerald Celente: Well, it’s exactly what you said before. When you’re talking about what’s going on with a cheap dollar, that’s keeping gold up and also the instability. Gold is still the ultimate safe-haven asset. And other countries around the world are buying it because they understand that. We get the diluted message in the United States. You could talk all you want about, for example, or did you see earnings coming in, how great they are? Yeah, when you use the Gaap earnings principles, the generally accepted accounting principles, but when you look at the investment research company and they talk about the other measurements, the return on invested capital measurements instead of seeing over 10% growth over the last two years, you’re looking at like a minus 5% (decline). So these numbers are rigged too, when you look at them. The whole thing is being held up on hype and hope.

Then you look at where the gains are coming from, only a few industries. One of them being oil, because oil prices went up a little bit, so the energy sector is going up. But long-term, energy isn’t going to keep going up, it’s a supply and demand issue. And every time the oil prices go up a little bit over $50 a barrel, you got more supply coming online, and it keeps the prices in check. So, when you look at the technology, you look at energy, you look at the banking sector, it’s only a few sectors that are driving up the financials. And the cheap dollar is keeping the emerging market game alive as well, because they’re borrowing money for free. Then they borrow that money … If the dollar goes up, then you’re going to start seeing some real panic, and if interest rates really start going up, the game is over.

Again, this is a Ponzi scheme that’s been generated by Quantitative Easing, which means printing tons of cheap money and negative, or zero interest rate policy that allows stock buybacks and merger and acquisition activity. End of story. When interest rates go up, this thing goes down, and it goes down big. But the interest rates have to go up to a percentage much beyond where they are now, they’ve got to get back into the 3.25% range, as we see it, before you’re really going to start feeling the pressure. But even it at 1.5 to 2, you’re going to start seeing it really starting to hit.

Mike Gleason: Well, as we begin to close here, Gerald, any final thoughts or anything that you want to hit on that we haven’t discussed already?

Gerald Celente: I think we’ve hit on it all. The other wildcard to watch also, by the way, is the rhetoric against Iran. That keeps going on and on. Iran has not invaded a country for 250 years. Yeah, but they’re in Syria. Well, that’s because Assad invited them in, and whether you like him or not, he was elected, and an international forum said it was a fair and free election. But the hatred that the United States has against Iran … And again, people know nothing about the history of how the United States, the CIA and the MI6 in the UK overthrew the democratically elected government of Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, because the guy had the nerve to nationalize the oil company, and that’s when they brought in the Shah. And the oil companies that were going to be hit by that were Anglo-Iranian Oil, better known as British Petroleum (BP) and Standard Oil better known today as Exxon-Mobil.

So we believe the one to really watch, the wildcard there, that could really be a destabilizing force, driving up oil prices, driving up gold prices and really causing major destabilization not throughout just the Middle East, but through much of the world, is if there’s a real war with Iran. And also, keep your eye on Ukraine. That’s very unstable, and that could explode yet again at any moment.

Mike Gleason: Well, Mr. Celente, thanks as always for your time and your analysis today. We love having you on, because you really don’t pull any punches, and I know our audience really appreciates that. Now, before we let you go, as we always ask you to do, please let folks know about how they can get their hands on the wonderful information that you put out both online and with the Trends Journal magazine, as well as anything else that’s going on there at the Trends Research Institute that folks should know about.

Gerald Celente: Well, they can go to TrendsResearch.com or TrendsJournal.com. We not only publish the Trends Journal, which is a quarterly, 50-page magazine, no ads, full color and, also, we have a Trends in the News broadcast each weekday night, and we have a Trends Monthly, Trend Alerts, and there’s a money back guarantee. It’s the only place we are going to read and hear history before it happens.

Mike Gleason: Well, excellent stuff once again. I hope we can catch up with you later this year as these events begin to unfold, and ultimately, what it will likely mean for precious metals’ investors. Thanks again, Mr. Celente for being so generous with your time. I hope you enjoy the rest of your summer and have a great weekend.

Gerald Celente: Thank you, and thank you for all you do, Mike.

Mike Gleason: Well that will do it for this week. Our sincere thanks to Gerald Celente, Publisher of the renowned Trends Journal. For more information, the website again is TrendsResearch.com. Be sure to check that out.

Mike Gleason is a Director with Money Metals Exchange, a national precious metals dealer with over 50,000 customers. Gleason is a hard money advocate and a strong proponent of personal liberty, limited government and the Austrian School of Economics. A graduate of the University of Florida, Gleason has extensive experience in management, sales and logistics as well as precious metals investing. He also puts his longtime broadcasting background to good use, hosting a weekly precious metals podcast since 2011, a program listened to by tens of thousands each week.

The post Gerald Celente on Markets: “When Interest Rates Go Up, This Thing Goes Down” appeared first on Gold Silver Worlds.

from Gold Silver Worlds http://goldsilverworlds.com/economy/gerald-celente-markets-interest-rates-go-thing-goes/

#Gold Silver Worlds

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daneflewellingus · 7 years

Text

Open Letter to Elite Dangerous Developers (FDEV)

Open Letter to FDEV (general feedback and suggestions about in-game economics)

First, I would like to say how much I thoroughly enjoy playing this game. Ive been playing for a couple years now, which is far longer than I have stuck with any other game, so obviously you guys have done a lot right to be able to keep people interested for that long. The size of the game is magnificent, the game is visually breath-taking, and when coupled with VR the immersion is unparalleled. The main purpose of this letter is to suggest an alternative way of looking at how to grow the economy in the game. Since I started playing the game and occasionally browsing the forums for help with the various issues that new players need help with, I noticed two common themes. There were many questions about how to go about making money and, inevitably, the topic of Robigo would come up (No, this is not going to be a letter begging you to bring back Robigo). Of all the responses, most fell into one of two categories: either in support of long distance smuggling runs and okay with the high risk/high reward payout, or firmly against the fast money. The thing that was bothersome to me was the haughty attitude and general rudeness of anyone discussing Robigo, but that will be handled later. After Robigo was essentially shut down or “nerfed,” many people became extremely cautious about discussing trading and smuggling routes in the open forums. As one commander put it, “whatever gets discussed in the forums, the nerf bat soon follows.” As a result, trying to get any kind of information about trading was soon relegated to “check with eddb.io” and very little else. It seems that players are extremely unwilling to share information about any kind of success they are having for fear of that success being taken away. It seems to me that the economics of the game are being handled in much the same way as one would handle a houseplant – prune where you don't want it to grow, and hope that it grows in other directions. I would humbly submit that this method works fine for plants, but does not work for the kind of economy you are trying to create. Instead, I would like to suggest an alternative way of thinking: rather than thinking of the economy like a plant, think of it like a track team. If one runner is slower than the rest, you don't slow everyone else down to match them. Instead, you train and encourage the slow runner to increase their speed and become an asset to the team. In the same way, if there are areas of the economy that are out of balance, encourage other areas to expand and become more attractive rather than stunting the growth of an expanding area. This will also help with avoiding the game feeling like an endless grind – something that is a danger if the rewards keep getting cut back and players get less and less for their time and effort. As an example, lets look at the Robigo system again. There were lots of players doing the long distance smuggling and that one specific area was overbalancing the rest of the game. Instead of shutting down Robigo, an alternative method would have been using the in-game mechanics that area already in place. Create a community event where “…Local authorities have been tracking an abnormally high amount of smuggling coming out of the Robigo system. As a result, any players who intercept these illegal traders and hand in bounties on them will be rewarded.” This serves to both dampen the amount of smugglers making the run, and encourages growth in the Bounty Hunting section of the game. (Yes I realize that community events usually last a week and smugglers would have the option of just sitting out for a week and coming back. However, what if you ran the goal for a month instead of a week? Most players would prefer to change tactics rather than sitting out a whole month.) The main point is that there are alternative methods, and the in-game economy would react much better to re-focusing and changing the area of growth rather than pruning back growth. TL; DR: You want the in-game economy to grow. Instead of cutting back areas where you feel its growing too fast, re-direct that growth into other areas. That way you don't lose momentum (or player interest). TO THE OTHER PLAYERS: Seeing the rudeness, contempt and sheer arrogance of some of the responses on the forum was disheartening, offensive and almost enough to make me want to quit playing the game. This happened on both sides of the Robigo argument, neither group is innocent. There were many players who felt that smuggling out of Robigo was too easy and made money too fast. You repeated over and over that getting the funds for the bigger ships that quickly cheapened the game, and lessened the experience. To be completely honest, I find both those arguments perfectly valid. Its admirable that you have a code that you stick to, and your loyalty is impressive. Its perfectly fair to want the reward to be the worth the effort, and to avoid short-changing the experience. Do not think for one second that this means you have the right to dictate to me how I should be playing the game. The whole point of this game is that people get to make their own choices, and have to live with the consequences. If there are people who are willing to accept the higher risk in order to get the higher rewards, that is their decision. Yes they get paid more, but they also lose more when that gamble fails. Just because you would not make that choice does not mean that it should be denied to them. In real life, there are people who take huge risks every day – take the stock market as an example. I would never be willing to take some of the financial risks that some of the traders make on a day-to-day basis. However, they are willing to take the risk – some of them get the reward, others lose harshly. The same concept applies to the game.

#elite dangerous

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upsegucu-blog1 · 7 years

Text

Fifa Coins Generator

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#fifa #fifa17

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bitcoinbillionaireblog-blog · 7 years

Text

Bitcoin Billionaire Excerpt 5

Bitcoin Billionaire 5

Excerpt 2

Vitalik Buterin is an extremely intelligent young man who started out writing about Bitcoin and then created Ethereum, which is Bitcoin’s biggest competing currency. The focus was no longer to be on the value of the Ethereum token ETH, but rather on the ability of coded ‘smart contracts’ to use the immutable blockchain in the EVM for legal commerce whereby the funds are not released until certain conditions are seen to have been fulfilled by the smart contract. As an aside, I must say that no one is complaining that Vitalik’s original vision of a cheap token did not work out, and Ethereum has soared to recent prices as high as four hundred dollars and can boast a total capitalization of thirty billion dollars USD with rapid global multi faceted growth. So, will Vitalik be the world’s first Bitcoin Billionaire? I do not know, but he has been voted the most influential person in crypto by industry participants. Like so many intellectuals before him Buterin seems to eschew riches, instead, he is happy in his role as "Chief Scientist" for the Swiss non-profit Ethereum Foundation and experiencing extensive travel and learning foreign languages. His sudden ability to speak Chinese surprises audiences as he takes questions and gives lectures in Mandarin. I was surprised to see Vitalik speaking fluent Russian when he met Vladimir Putin recently. Vitalik just announced that Metropolis will be released in late September of 2017 with a hard fork. This will be done in coordination with Joseph Poon and his 'Lightning Network' and will feature 'zk-SNARKs' or zero knowledge proofs. Vitalik does not like mining, he says that it wastes electricity and computing power. He and Vlad Zamfir have been working on Casper a Proof of Stake system that does not require Proof of Work mining . POW or Bitcoin Mining makes it too expensive in terms of electrical costs, equipment costs, maintenance costs, programming costs, and time needed to download the entire blockchain ; for a hacker to build a super- computer and try to overpower or out-speed the blockchain in a malicious attack to harm the blockchain or to commit fraud.

I watched a YouTube video today that was put out by Roger Ver who would definitely be in contention for the first Bitcoin Billionaire title. He is a majority owner of Blockchain.info which is my recommended Bitcoin wallet. The wallet web portal is based in Luxembourg, but it seems that most transactions are routed through some small islands off the west coast of Africa. The Blockchain.info wallet has more funds than all of the other Bitcoin wallets combined. I keep my Bitcoin in my Blockchain.info wallets on my Samsung S7 Android, and on my iPhone 6, and I also have a matched version on my main desktop PC. I really like the way the Blockchain.info wallet user interface works. They have fifteen million wallets in use and have completed one hundred million transactions. Ver was criticizing the Bitcoin Core team and Blockstream a closely related company that employs many Bitcoin Core developers. Adam Back heads up Blockstream and he is a very respected long time Bitcoin developer. I sat across from him at lunch at Construct 2017 , the invite only San Francisco developer’s conference put on by CoinDesk and sponsored by IBM. I said loudly so as to catch his ear that I liked the idea of flexible fees. I have interests in Bitcoin mining and I like earning mining fees. So yes, I admit that I am biased, but I still want fees to be fair for migrant workers and people in the third world. There are about two- hundred and fifty thousand dollars per day paid to miners in fees. Roger Ver is saying that people will leave Bitcoin for alternative crypto currencies if fees get too high or the network has delayed confirmation times, what he warns could become a poor user experience. This was in fact happening and fees had risen from being nearly free to fifty dollars and more sometimes, which Core points out people were willingly paying albeit with a grumble. But everyone had made such high profits just on the increase in the value of Bitcoin alone that they could afford the fees with ease and they did.

My company website https://smartpropertyblockchain.ca has live prices for BTC and ETH posted on the home page from Cryptocompare.com widgets .

0 notes

bitcoinbillionaireblog-blog · 7 years

Link

Bitcoin Billionaire 4

Excerpt 2

Vitalik Buterin is an extremely intelligent young man who started out writing about Bitcoin and then created Ethereum, which is Bitcoin’s biggest competing currency. The focus was no longer to be on the value of the Ethereum token ETH, but rather on the ability of coded ‘smart contracts’ to use the immutable blockchain in the EVM for legal commerce whereby the funds are not released until certain conditions are seen to have been fulfilled by the smart contract. As an aside, I must say that no one is complaining that Vitalik’s original vision of a cheap token did not work out, and Ethereum has soared to recent prices as high as four hundred dollars and can boast a total capitalization of thirty billion dollars USD with rapid global multi faceted growth. So, will Vitalik be the world’s first Bitcoin Billionaire? I do not know, but he has been voted the most influential person in crypto by industry participants. Like so many intellectuals before him Buterin seems to eschew riches, instead, he is happy in his role as "Chief Scientist" for the Swiss non-profit Ethereum Foundation and experiencing extensive travel and learning foreign languages. His sudden ability to speak Chinese surprises audiences as he takes questions and gives lectures in Mandarin. I was surprised to see Vitalik speaking fluent Russian when he met Vladimir Putin recently. Vitalik just announced that Metropolis will be released in late September of 2017 with a hard fork. This will be done in coordination with Joseph Poon and his 'Lightning Network' and will feature 'zk-SNARKs' or zero knowledge proofs. Vitalik does not like mining, he says that it wastes electricity and computing power. He and Vlad Zamfir have been working on Casper a Proof of Stake system that does not require Proof of Work mining . POW or Bitcoin Mining makes it too expensive in terms of electrical costs, equipment costs, maintenance costs, programming costs, and time needed to download the entire blockchain ; for a hacker to build a super- computer and try to overpower or out-speed the blockchain in a malicious attack to harm the blockchain or to commit fraud.

My company website https://smartpropertyblockchain.ca has live prices for BTC and ETH posted on the home page from Cryptocompare.com widgets .

I find it unfortunate that this generation has to function in a trust -less society in cyberspace and in the a trust-less society in the real world. The real world has fake news, propaganda and lies, and the crypto world has alias usernames, encryption, and reputation. They have a very strong want for consensus and avoid contact with people who have been shunned for the social transgression of saying the group might be wrong about something. Algorithms on MSN and Facebook and many other social media sites give the viewer content that has been determined to appeal to them by their politics. I was determined not to say anything about the recent American election because I am not a citizen of the United States. The Construct 2017 San Francisco event opened with exasperated announcements that many attendees were having trouble at the airport because of the tremendous confusion because President Trump had just announced his immediate travel ban. There were terrible scenes on television of families at the airport with their travel plans disrupted and their lives turned upside-down, some innocent travellers were being held in custody because of all of the confusion. Someone took the microphone on the stage and addressed the crowd with a defiant suggestion that the programmers should fight to make blockchain based identity documents so that refugees with no passports or birth certificates could prove that they were legitimate refugees rather than the sleeper cell terrorists they were being accused of being.

I know that I look like an old cop and I try not to freak people out. It did not matter that I looked like an old cop when I was in Fort Collins Colorado and I was able to explore the civic culture of recreational marijuana so as to get an idea of what to expect at home now that Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has legalized it. I was also very interested in the Fort Collins Solar Clen Energy Collective. They had a great set up with local people buying unit shares. Their large array of collectors were not dual axis solar tracking as I would suggest but it was up and running and was financially viable. I have found that many programmers have a side interest in solar. That was the main thing the two engineers from Microsoft wanted to talk about in San Francisco. Elon Musk has some new solar roof tiles that are lighter, cheaper, more attractive, harder to break, and easier to install than ordinary roof tiles, and his whole package of a Tesla in the garage, with a Powerwall 2 battery for the house and solar panels or roof tiles intrigues young engineers . I find a lot of excitement about this at Bitcoin conferences by programmers. One of the best micro-applications that I heard of at Consensus 2017 was a micro-token that self generated off of a solar panel that then sold itself through smart contracts with utilities and exchanges. I have been trying to design a dual axis solar tracker program using a raspberry pi mini-computer and Arduino controllers. I am going back for the third semester of computer programming at the University of Winnipeg next month. I decided a long time ago that rather than to first take code off of Github, I would put some good code on. I have nightmares of Trace Mayer shouting in my face “where is your code, show me your code, you will never make the team, you’re just not good enough”. Trace is rough on rookies but when he goes on Jeff Berwick’s Dollar Vigilante show to debate Roger Ver he does argue a good case and he is obviously a guy who would make any team.

Talking about the unknown origins of so much of this new technology the recent story of ‘ Mimble Wimble’. Named from Harry Potter it is super encryption that suddenly appeared posted online. The ramifications of this new super encryption technology are being discussed but no one knows where it came from. It is really the next big thing and by the time I gey this book up to that chapter hopefully it will be better understood.

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bitcoinbillionaireblog-blog · 7 years

Text

Bitcoin Billionaire 4

Bitcoin will arrive like an unexpected tsunami for most people who will be shocked by all of the changes to their daily lives and personal finances that this strange new currency will bring seemingly overnight. They will think when they start hearing about crypto currency that it is some sort of social fad, or they may think that Bitcoin is an app like Facebook or maybe PayPal, something they can do without. Credit card companies will compete with cash back offers, and free insurance, or discounts on car rentals and flights. I wrote this book for new first-time Bitcoin adventurers. I also wrote it for any serious players out there who are already doing commerce in the blockchain and Bitcoin space, and who are trying to understand the fast emerging new government laws and regulations, concerning their business activities. My analysis of the American Securities Exchange Commission’s recent bulletin posted on their website concerning the Ethereum blockchain DAO hack will be a chapter unto itself. In another chapter about Bitcoin mining, I will write about my personal niche in the blockchain space: real-estate and property titles, document securement, time-stamping, anti-tampering tools, and unbreakable encryption. I am a miner and I do it for profit, but importantly for me, only miners get to vote. Mining is important because it provides the essential electronic infrastructure that the blockchain runs on, and then connects together with other nodes over the internet worldwide in real time to form unstoppable networks. Open minded people who investigate what is now happening with blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and who then take a chance and invest in this once in a lifetime opportunity will at a minimum have their lives enhanced by suddenly finding themselves making international contacts and transactions. They will start thinking about the world in terms of foreign affairs, economics, business, technology, and science. The profits in this new economic world are staggering, and I must admit that it is completely exhilarating when these cryptos take off. The gambler’s rush in Bitcoin and Ethereum is better than holding a two dollar parlay bet on a longshot horse that becomes a wire to wire triple crown winner; because the thrill of victory often lasts for several months at a time, and making a killing is not a one shot deal. These digital assets often take off with afterburners blazing and they fly straight up the charts with near vertical trajectories. We are talking about seeing your money double in two months, and then do it again the following month, and then rise by 30% in a week. We are often seeing thousand percent annual increases, on ICO initial coin offerings, and on crypto tokens of which there are hundreds. There is around one-hundred billion dollars invested in the tokens right now, with an additional several hundred million dollars of capital invested by corporations such as Microsoft, Wanxiang, and IBM, or venture capital companies such as Fenbushi and Digital Assets, and by governments, and accounting firms such as Deloitte, and consortiums of big banks such as those who have partnered with Blythe Masters. Whether or not Blythe Masters becomes the first Bitcoin Billionaire or not remains to be seen, but I think that Digital Assets will have the greatest dollar volume of all of the global crypto currency and blockchain companies by far. They are just now finishing a complete rebuild of the ASX Austrailian Securities Exchange, but she has eyes on the Toronto Stock Exchange among others and she has many large banks as clients. In early 2016 I started exploring Bitcoin. I bought my first Bitcoin for $630. Today, a year and a half later, Bitcoin is trading at $4,066 and people are saying that although it is down today it will most likely break $5,000 soon. Others say that until it hits $10,000 the big money will sit on the sidelines and wait and see. Most financial analysts and economists would agree that if only five-percent of the money that is currently invested in gold or gold derivatives worldwide transferred into Bitcoin that the increase in the value of a single Bitcoin would be astounding! I needed some cash today so much like digging in the couch for lost coins and raiding the piggy bank surprised myself when I raised $485 from QuadrigaCX by selling my three and a half Litecoin for $63 each which was great because I had paid just three dollars each for them eighteen months earlier. I also sold a half of an ETH Ether for $270. Just some residual pocket change from closing out an old wallet with a small balance that had grown to become significant. I also received $6.07 worth of Bitcoin from Genesis Mining to my Blockchain.info bitcoin wallet on my iPhone. That evening I also made $23 from Steemit where just under four hundred dollars remains of my eighty-dollar investment. I earn about seventy cents per day from Slush pool in eastern Europe for the hashes produced by my noisy old, Antminer 5 Bitcoin miner. The seriously outdated but reliable rig has paid itself off many times over and is still running fine. The key to my system of investing in Bitcoin is that I think of that seventy cents daily payout in Bitcoin of around 17,000 to 18,000 Satoshis per day. Imagine the day when a Satoshi is like a dollar is now, and when a Bitcoin will be worth well over one million dollars. I would say that this is all highly speculative but in my view, the extraordinary returns from crypto currencies are matched only by the lottery for the average person; ironically it seems to me that there are very high odds in favor of windfall profits if the Bitcoin is held long term. There is a reason that so few writers have tried to write a book about what is happening with Bitcoin. This, although it is probably the story of the century, and marks a great epoch in human history. Trying to write a book on this topic is like trying to drink from a much-referenced fire hose. Change is everywhere, and unexpected dramatic change happens weekly. There is always the potential for the digital tokens to disappear if they are not handled correctly or even sometimes if they are. This reminds me of how the penny mining stocks used to be, in the days of commodity exchanges like the VSE Vancouver Stock Exchange. Bitcoin is said to be economically modeled after a commodity such as gold. Bitcoin like gold has a limited supply of twenty-one million and is always becoming more expensive to produce. Bitcoin went through the planned second ‘Halving Event’ in July of 2016 where the payout per ten- minute block dropped from twenty-five bitcoins to twelve and a half bitcoins per block until the next halving four years hence. The current volume of Bitcoin mined is $7,318,800 per day. this does not include transaction fees. Miners are being rewarded $304,950 USD per hour or $50,825 for each single ten-minute block. As you can imagine there is intense competition among miners to get these prizes. It is a mathematical probability question as to whether a miner should gamble and go it alone mining where if the block is found the entire reward may be kept. I opted instead to join a large group of other independent miners from all over the world who plug our hash rate into Slushpool. Now the mathematical probability equation works in my favor. We share the payouts after pooling our resources, we get to cast votes on critical issues, and we receive reliable daily revenue, which arrives in my Bitcoin wallet. I should say that I do not receive daily mining payouts any longer because when I went to spend the rewards with large transactions there were inordinately high fees due to the composite nature of all those little payouts. I have since switched my payouts from Slushpool and Genesis Mining to 0.01 BCT lots, and just leave them building at the pool or with Genesis. The inevitable Bitcoin and Ethereum big-events, breakthroughs, milestones, and catastrophes, and hacks to feel crucially important to market participants. There are definitely political aspects to Bitcoin as each and every country and jurisdiction on the planet will try to come up with a Bitcoin strategy. We see issues about the so called un-banked, the potential for micro- loan payments between people of the First World countries and women and men in the Second and Third World. There are consequential matters of freedom and empowerment, like Bitcoin’s potential for eliminating the huge fees migrant workers pay when they try to send money back home to their families. Billions of hard earned and badly needed dollars could stay in the migrant worker’s own hands if they transferred the money using Bitcoin with its comparatively tiny fees for the actual transfer and no foreign exchange fees for currency conversion. We crypto currency enthusiasts learn all too soon that the world is not watching, that most people do not care, and in the end the big Bitcoin halving event, and the various hard and soft forks amounted to mere speed bumps during a technological race that has moved on to new events at new locations by new participants. Bitcoin is a product of consensus, and consensus, in turn, is a function of mathematics, computer code, and game theory.

Excerpt 2

Japan has surged ahead among the other leading world economies by adapting point of sale Bitcoin terminals at several hundred- thousand retail stores. The People’s Republic of China is still the dominant world player in Bitcoin because of all of mining and equipment manufacturing design that takes place there, and because their government has had the best Bitcoin strategy. Bobby Lee the CEO of BTCC the first and still the largest Bitcoin exchange in China who is a definite contender for the first Bitcoin Billionaire title, said recently that his company did not encounter much friction from the People’s Bank of China as they were growing their business because the PBOC views Bitcoin as a digital asset rather than a currency. He also says we should not expect terminals to pay for goods with Bitcoin in China because even Hong Kong dollars are not permitted for use in China only the Renminbi China’s official currency may be used as legal tender. Bitmain the major manufacturer of Antminer Bitcoin ASIC or application- specific integrated circuits Bitcoin mining hardware is chronically backlogged with orders for mining equipment; but why should they sell the machines instead of just plugging them in and keeping both the machine and the money it earns everyday Bitcoin mining. The Bitcoin revolution comes at a most opportune time for the Chinese. They have excess hydro-electric generating capacity and they need cash for their rapid expansion, and mining Bitcoin creates immediate cashflow. The situation is much the same in my home province of Manitoba, Canada, with our large northern rivers flowing into the Hudson Bay. I comprise a one- man lobby that is on a mission to promote Bitcoin mining in Manitoba, and I often lobby the government, and Manitoba Hydro the utility which is a Crown Corporation to get involved. That is why I took some extra steps during my visa application to attend Devcon 2 the big worldwide Ethereum Developer’s Conference in Shanghai which I will go into later. Vitalik Buterin is an extremely intelligent young man who started out writing about Bitcoin and then created Ethereum, which is Bitcoin’s biggest competing currency. The focus was no longer to be on the value of the Ethereum token ETH, but rather on the ability of coded ‘smart contracts’ to use the immutable blockchain in the EVM for legal commerce whereby the funds are not released until certain conditions are seen to have been fulfilled by the smart contract. As an aside, I must say that no one is complaining that Vitalik’s original vision of a cheap token did not work out, and Ethereum has soared to recent prices as high as four hundred dollars and can boast a total capitalization of thirty billion dollars USD with rapid global multi faceted growth. So, will Vitalik be the world’s first Bitcoin Billionaire? I do not know, but he has been voted the most influential person in crypto by industry participants. Like so many intellectuals before him Buterin seems to eschew riches, instead, he is happy in his role as "Chief Scientist" for the Swiss non-profit Ethereum Foundation and extensive travel and learning foreign languages. His sudden ability to speak Chinese surprises audiences as he takes questions and gives lectures in Mandarin. I was surprised to see Vitalik speaking fluent Russian when he met Vladimir Putin recently. Vitalik just announced that Metropolis will be released in late September of 2017 with a hard fork. This will be done in coordination with Joseph Poon and his 'Lightning Network'and will feature 'zkSnarks' or zero knowledge proofs. Vitalik does not like mining, he says that it wastes electricity and computing power. He and Vlad Zamfir have been working on Casper a Proof of Stake system that does not require Proof of Work mining per se. POW makes it too expensive for a hacker to build a super computer and try to overpower or out-speed the blockchain. In 2016 big money flowed into the development of Ethereum from Microsoft the sponsor of the event along with Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and Fenbushi the largest venture capital firm in Asia. We are talking an easy hundred million dollars committed with every indication that ‘all systems are go’ for even bigger things to come in the near future. The Devcon 2 event in Shanghai was successful beyond all measure and caused me to really stand up and take notice of what these alt-coin pioneers had already accomplished, and where they were headed. I also benefited from the trip by making contacts from Beijing that could help me in my lobby to bring Bitcoin Mining back home to Manitoba. I watched a YouTube video today that was put out by Roger Ver who would definitely be in contention for the first Bitcoin Billionaire title. He is a majority owner of Blockchain.info which is my recommended Bitcoin wallet. The wallet web portal is based in Luxembourg, but it seems that most transactions are routed through some small islands off the west coast of Africa, and has more funds than all of the other Bitcoin wallets combined. I keep my Bitcoin in my Blockchain.info wallets on my Samsung S7 Android, and on my iPhone 6, and I also have a matched version on my main desktop PC. I really like the way the Blockchain.info wallet user interface works. They have fifteen million wallets in use and have completed one hundred million transactions. Ver was criticizing the Bitcoin Core team and Blockstream a closely related company that employees many Bitcoin Core developers. Adam Back heads up Blockstream and he is a very respected long time Bitcoin developer. I sat across from him at lunch at Construct 2016 the invite only San Francisco developer’s conference put on by CoinDesk and sponsored by IBM. I said loudly so as to catch his ear that I liked the idea of flexible fees. I have interests in Bitcoin mining and I like earning mining fees. So yes, I admit that I am biased, but I still want fees to be fair for migrant workers and people in the third world. There are about two- hundred and fifty thousand dollars per day paid to miners in fees. Roger Ver is saying that people will leave Bitcoin for alternative crypto currencies if fees get too high or the network has delayed confirmation times, what he warns could become a poor user experience. This was in fact happening and fees had risen from being nearly free to fifty dollars and more sometimes, which Core points out people were willingly paying albeit with a grumble. But everyone had made such high profits just on the increase in the value of Bitcoin alone that they could bear the fees with ease and they did. The Bitcoin blockchain forked on August 1, 2017. That means that if you had a tenth of a Bitcoin on July 31 you got a matching tenth of a BCH token. You doubled your token count you now hold BTC and BCH. My website has live prices smartpropertyblockchain.ca Bitcoin is at $5,352.55 Canadian Dollars and BCH at $899.23 CAD. The Ethereum blockchain had seen a previous fork and stable trading patterns have evolved over the past year my website shows Ethereum priced at $418.03 CAD and ETC at $18.90. These forks are a little bit like stock splits but there is no guarantee that you can access the cloned token unless you have made arrangements. The decision to do the fork on August 1st must have been made at the Consensus 2017 event in New York sponsored by Barry Silbert. He is America’s premier cryptocurrency entrepreneur. He would be my pick and he would get the highest rating in my handicapping of the Bitcoin Billionaire’s Stake Race. He has fifty- seven crypto currency related companies in eighteen countries. I really feel like a small thinker when I watch the maneuvers of a big thinker like Barry Silbert, owner of the Digital Currency Group, Grayscale Investment Trust, and CoinDesk magazine. I invested in the new Bitcoin ETF derivative GBTC units from Grayscale, and I did ok with them. They only deal with accredited investors with net worth of over one million dollars exclusive of residence or income of over two hundred thousand dollars a year for each of the past two years. Luckily for me the oil business was not yet completely dead so I qualified on income. The units are based on NAV net asset value rather than being a fraction of a bitcoin as many people mistakenly believed when the fund was launched. I balked and sold out after receiving an offer to invest two hundred and fifty thousand dollars at four o’clock PM that would be priced at NAV regardless of where the unit price had ended trading on close at 4 PM. I could not see much difference between this overly attractive offer and the late- trading issues mutual companies had seen many years ago. I must admit however that I was wrong earlier when I was very critical when Silbert started buying ETC tokens after the Ethereum fork. As Andreas Antonopoulos the best promoter of Bitcoin on earth whose opinion I value so highly warned in a video I watched about the topic of ETC. “When one is most absolutist in their position, that is often the time when one is completely wrong” and time has shown that such was the case. I attended the conference with my pitch for Bitcoin mining in Manitoba but had no inkling about what was happening behind the scenes in the five floors of meeting rooms at the New York Marriot Marquis hotel located on Broadway in bustling Times Square. A so called “New York Consensus” was agreed to by many big time Bitcoin companies and exchanges in some hidden back room at the trade show. It was later announced that an unstoppable fork would take place on August 1, 2017, as it later, in fact, did, just as predicted. The one-megabyte block size will remain the same with slight capacity improvements as part of Segregated Witness off chain features are added that save space. This is an improvement that Erik Lombrozo has been promoting for the Core team, and that Andreas Antonopoulos has recommended as a good BIP or Bitcoin improvement. This will mean that fees will remain higher than they would be if the block size went to 2 megabytes as many thought it was poised to do, or to an eight megabyte size that many users were also lobbying for the past year. Transactions may be slower because of the full blocks but the ten-minute block benchmark is adjusted by a mechanism called the ‘difficulty’ which adjusts every two weeks in Bitcoin and every four hundred blocks in the much faster fourteen- second Ethereum blockchain. It is August 23, 2017, three weeks on today, and I have not seen problems with high fees or slow confirmations. People said yes I want that free money and welcomed the new BCH received after the split. Did I mention that BCH is worth $899.23 CAD?

#bitcoin #bitcoin mining #ethereum

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