Bitcoin Billionaire 5
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. 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 SEC or 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 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 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.
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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 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.
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. 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!
