Episodes
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Successful youtubers have built their career on technology. They are in an excellent position to take advantage of the benefits of cryptocurrency.
Listen to learn why you should accept cryptocurrency for your youtube channel.
Follow me @cryptocup
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Missing episodes?
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I first want to thank PimpMastaFunk for the review below. Honestly, I really do appreciate constructive criticism and the time that was taken to write this.
I'd like to and address each point and make it clear who I am, how the podcast is evolving, and what you can and should expect from it.
Positive pieces. Honestly, I can't say anything more than thank you.
How the podcast started and how it has evolved. When I started learning about blockchain and crypto I found lots of people talking about what coins to buy. The entire space felt very scammy and I thought I could bring a different spin to it.
I spend every waking moment dealing with technology from my professional to personal life and thought I could bring a different vibe to this space, so the podcast was born. It's tough to be honest. I have a more than full time job a family and not a lot of time to spare, yet I stay up late nights learning about new things and sharing it with you.
I'm a huge advocate of blockchain and cryptocurrency and firmly believe it is our future, so I don't mind investing my time into it. I believe it will pay off in the long run and short term I get to analyze different projects, work on my speaking skills, and learn new things. Win Win Win as far as I'm concerned.
Price is something I try my best to stay away from and at first I really didn't want to talk about specific coins, rather focus on blockchain. Unfortunately people want to hear about specific coins and what they should buy. My compromise is to focus on some of the underlying tech of the tokens and/or coins and stay away from price.
Detrimental to the space - EOS episode.
Familiarity with the project
Bitraged YouTube video on EOS
Tone and positive attitude
All new projects in this space are scams
Feedback I will work on
Focus on the objective details and facts and move away from vague marketing hype
Approach projects objectively and from a critical starting point
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This is part two of privacy coins and this time I'll talk about Zcash, however the founders prefer not using the term privacy. Would you call your paycheck a privacy check?
Purpose of privacy coin
Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies expose your entire payment history on the public blockchain. Coins like zcash pickup an important part of where bitcoin left off and that is to protect the information between receipients.
What is Zcash?
Zcash is the first open, permissionless cryptocurrency that can fully protect the privacy of transactions using zero-knowledge cryptography.
Introduced in the fall of 2016.
Clone of Bitcoin with the addition of encryption
Zero knowledge proofs - ability to prove a transaction without revealing details
JP Morgan taking encryption component and adding it to their own blockchain
The Company
People
Leading scientists from some of the world's most prominent universities
Zooko part of DigiCash in the late 90's and another company focused on privacy
Strong technical team with diverse background
Crypto elite advisors
You can tell a lot about a company based on their hiring standards. Here are a few snippets from Zcash
Every line of code is a business decision. Understand the nature of the business challenge really well.
Think long term
Siloed knowledge is bad
The biggest pattern we follow is to reduce complexity. A prime objective of systems architecting is to simplify, simplify, simplify. Design for the simple case first.
History
ZeroCoin (2013)- Originally the team was interested in implementing into Bitcoin blockchain. Due to overhead and latency it wasn't accepted
Bitcoin conference met with others that had developed zk-SNARKs
Joined forces to create Zcash
Got Zooko onboard. With long history in digital currencies and business experience
Investment capital
How does Zcash work?
Ability to send private or public transaction
Public behave similar to bitcoin
Private are encrypted using Zk-Snarks where only sender and receiver can see the transaction. The public blockchain records the encrypted transaction
What I like
Zooko long history with digital currencies
Strong technical teams
Binance listing
>1B Market Cap
Small number of tokens ~3m
JP Morgan legitimizing Zk-Snarks
Github very active
Easy to buy on a large number of exchanges
Just added to Circle as a payment option
Very long term strategic company
Security audit finding and resolving several issues. Planned future audits with upcoming releases
Recent hires include marketing director
What I don't like
Premine or initial distribution of 10% of coin to founders, investors, devs
Native wallet on linux. Requires 3rd party for most users
High valuation at such an early stage without native wallets, major merchant integration, and adoption
The company behind it released the code to the community and working on projects that are not directly related to the project (JP Morgan example)
CloakCoin Resources
http://zerocash-project.org/
http://zerocoin.org/
https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/507.pdf -
A listener recently asked to have some episodes about privacy coins. I decided to kick off this series with the focus on one of the lesser known privacy coins called CloakCoin.
Before diving into CLOAK let's talk about why privacy coins exist in the first place
Why would you want a privacy coin?
When most people first hear about privacy coins their minds automatically think it's for criminals. Well, it's not.
Why would you want to hide anything? Ask yourself the following questions. Do you have curtains on your windows at home? Do you leave your bank account balance laying around at work for everyone to see?
The answer is no for most and that's because we like privacy and it's not because we are criminals.
Here are a few other scenarios that are possible in the near future.
Hackers gather data from public blockchains and publish the history of everything you have ever purchased
What if your workplace decides to fire you for shopping at a store that sells medical marijuana
You donate money to a political cause and other services you want to use discriminate against you because of the purchase
I think you probably get the point and will probably agree this information is nobody's business.
Many coins don't provide sufficient privacy, which is why coins like Monero, Zcash, Verge, Dash, and Cloak were created.
What is CloakCoin?
CloakCoin is another cryptocurrency that has been around since 2014. It was started from a clone of Bitcoin and the Cloak team created several features on top of it to build what is known as Enigma and CloakShield.
In layman terms Enigma is the underlying system to mix the transactions and CloakShield is the encryption layer. Combined these are the technologies that Cloak uses to create a private, secure, untraceable, and decentralized cryptocurrency.
POS, Staking, Cloaking, Mixing
It uses (POS) Proof of Stake rather than Proof of Work (mining) to secure the network and validate the transactions.
By having CLOAK coins (Staking) y0u earn 6% of your total number of coins annually.
As a coin holder also known as a Cloaker. You can be part of the network (mixer node) that cloaks the transactions and receive 1.8% of the transaction fees as a result.
How does CLOAK work?
When you send a transaction to another person it gets routed through Cloakers to mix your transaction. I guess the best analogy would be that person A needs to pay person B $100. Instead of person A handing person B $100, person A gives out $1 bills to a bunch of people he/she doesn't know, but can trust since they are rewarded by doing so. They all are guaranteed to deliver the total $100 to person B.
In this situation person B receives the total amount and has no idea who sent it.
Security Audit
The big question remains does it really live up to the hype. Well, the Cloak team had an audit done of their system by a third party auditor. The link is below to the full audit. To summarize they didn't audit everything, but did prove some things worked as expected.
Other issues were found and Cloak teams resolved some already. I really really like the fact that this was done and it brings transparency and credibility to the project.
What I like
Open Source
Security Audit
Resolved some issues from security audit only a few months ago
Binance listing
<100m Market Cap
Small number of tokens ~5m
Been around since 2014
What I don't like
Previously missed timelines, initially identified as scam
Git repository has limited updates
Reddit Commuity (1,273) rather small (this is both a pro and a con)
Old fork of Bitcoin therefore inherited some vulnerabilities
No Mobile Wallet (It is part of their roadmap)
Unclear communication
User Problems
Not minting because you don't have mature coins
Unclear payout for Staking, Cloaking, Minting. In wallet, on exchange, when moving coins it resets. What is a good coin weight. -
How many blockchains is enough?
Do we really need all of these new projects that keep popping up? I believe the answer is yes and I'll tell you why.
First things first. Blockchain is not cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency is not blockchain. You can have a cryptocurrency not based on blockchain and a blockchain without a currency attached.
Having said that the most common applications of blockchain technology are cryptocurrencies. It's just a use case that makes sense.
As of today there are 1,569 cryptocurrencies listed on CMC website. Most of them are based on blockchain technology and I would be willing to bet a large part is almost an exact clone of Bitcoin.
CMC only lists coins and tokens available for purchase, however this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Many people download the Bitcoin and Ethereum code and work on projects completely independent of their famous market names.
There are projects like HyperLedger where you won't find any tokens for sale or an ICO, but just an open source project to help push forward adoption of Blockchain technology.
I'm running several blockchains myself to better understand the technology and capabilities. I am probably not alone and there are probably millions of test blockchains alive and well.
What's the purpose and do we really need so many?
In order to answer the question it's best to go back to the early days of the internet. There were developers that learned how to create websites and started launching the early version of the world wide web. I was one of them and remember doing the exact same thing then.
Creating different test websites, launching a few, making lots of mistakes, and learning along the way. The average person had no idea what a website was, how to access it, and those initial sites were used by a small population.
As time passed the developers improved, the technology improved, more people became aware, more access was available, and viola overnight we have the internet as we know it. Actually it was more than 20 years in the making, but it started the same exact way as blockchain based projects.
Right now Bitcoin is 9 years old and maturing as it should. It continues to grow and develop along with everything around it. The thousands of other coins and who knows how many blockchain projects are the test beds, this is the early internet, and it's how we all learn, get exposed, and eventually develop our tomorrow.
Do we need all of these different blockchain based projects?
Do we need 1,569 cryptocurrencies? You bet we do. If there were only one or two we would have something to worry about. Sure most of them are junk and buyer should be aware. It's just part of the ecosystem. You get the bad with the good.
Here is a snapshot of Amazon from October of 1999. No such thing as Amazon Prime, No streaming music, No Alexa, No streaming movies, you get the point. We needed this version of Amazon before getting the version we have today.
Setup private ethereum blockchain
Installing Hyperledger blockchain -
Ethereum is by far the most popular blockchain platform for developing applications. EOS blockchain is another up and coming platform providing many of the same features and filling some voids where Ethereum fell short.
What is EOS blockchain?
EOS.io is an open source platform for building blockchain apps or Dapps that aims to resolve a few shortcomings of Ethereum. Cost, Scalability, and ease of use.
They want to solve the scalability issues commercial customers need and provide an easy to develop platform for other businesses. (think bluehost for websites)
EOS blockchain is being developed by a company called Block.One
Decentralization is a concept that is thrown around a lot, but does anyone really care? With recent examples of Facebook data scandal you might. Chances are you are still using these platforms.
What is important to most people are the features of the platforms and not the tech underneath them. EOS understands that and intends on solving the issues that plague blockchain and allow new more modern apps to be developed.
Many blockchain based applications require users to hold tokens and spend them to use the platform. EOS does not.
The team behind EOS.io
Dan Larimer has been in the cryptocurrency space for a long time and founded some very successful blockchain based projects including BitShares, steemit.com, with this being his latest project.
Since building blockchain based applications is not easy and this guy has some real world experience, he has taken the experience from doing it and created a platform to solve the common issues.
EOS can't stop raising money
The largest ICO launch to date raising over $700 million dollars by selling EOS tokens.
Mike Novogratz and Derek Rundell partnered with EOS to give 1 Billion USD for projects being developed on EOS.IO
How does EOS.io work?
Making it more decentralized utilizing delegated proof of stake algorithm vs proof of work that both ETH and BTC use - Dan explaining DPOS
Incentivized voting for candidates block producers and locking up tokens (Smart participation, a lot to lose, and put money where their mouth is according to Thomas Cox)
CPU, Disk, and Memory are the basic elements needed to run applications. The relative amount of tokens you own determines the amount of network resources you are able to consume
Separation of token cost from utility
When does EOS launch?
EOS Dawn the 2.0 Testnet is now available. That is just a test network, which means a place for developers to start getting their hands dirty. The production launch date is planned for June and will not be done by Block.One. The community itself will take the open source software and launch the EOS. The EOS Go community is one of the communities rallying behind this initiative.
BitFinex building on EOS blockchain
BitFinex to launch Decentralized exchange
How to buy EOS token?
It's available on Binance, Kraken, or buy via Shapeshift or Exodus. If you are in the U.S. be very cautious and do some research before buying.
What I like
Backed by a guy that has been around crypto and blockchain since the early days with many successful projects under his belt
This translates into a lot of experience, struggle, and overcoming obstacles
Very active Git repository. When the updates are from hours ago rather than days or months it's clear that this is an active project
Block.one has been excellent at marketing by pulling off such a huge ICO
Strong partnerships is an understatement
I love the mindset about there will be bugs and issues and we will resolve them. This is a reality with software. Some people just don't admit it
What I don't like
Difficulty to buy the tokens in the U.S.
Trying to solve scalability for commercial and ease of use for regular businesses (making it as easy as building a website).
Solving each is a challenge on it's own, -
Current state of the cryptocurrency market
Are you a short term trader or a long term believer in crypto?
People are making money on the market while it is going up and when it is going down
When someone sells others buy and vice versa
Never invest more than you can afford to lose
Have a plan rather than trading with emotions
Circle Jobs
Recently acquired by Goldman Sachs and they have more than 50 jobs available right now. Everything from blockchain engineers, mobile developers, project managers. There are positions around the world in the crypto space.
Lightning labs jobs
The company behind the lightning network working to make blockchains faster, better, and cheaper. Recently raised $2.5 million from nearly a dozen investors including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Square Capital executive Jacqueline Reses, litecoin creator Charlie Lee and former PayPal COO David Sacks.
CoinBase jobs
Over 70 global job listings including design, security, engineering
BlockStream
A company built to extend the functionality of bitcoin using sidechains. They currently have 9 positions around the globe focused on software engineering, blockchain, bitcoin
Abra
A few blockchain engineer positions
Ethercast
Job board based on Ethereum. 39 active listings including blockchain developers and smart contract engineers
Visa
Currently hiring for a Blockchain Engineer. Think Blockchain is not going mainstream? Why is one of the largest payment processing companies hiring then?
BitPay
Hiring senior software engineer
Ethlance the freelancer alternative
Find a job or hire a freelancer. A new platform based on blockchain offering similar services to companies like freelancer
XBTFreelancer
Hire freelancers and pay them in bitcoin or become a freelancer and get paid in bitcoin
Indeed Cryptocurrency Jobs
Over 600 Cryptocurrency jobs currently listed
Indeed Blockchain Jobs
1,500 Jobs listed for Blockchain
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The idea of Smart contracts was first proposed back in 1994 b y Nick Szabo. Smart Contracts are also known as Crypto Contracts. The term contract might be confusing because it doesn't need to be a legal document. Contract is just an agreement to do something if specific criteria is met.
Smart Contract are self-executing contracts using a If then concept
If you are a developer this concept is very familiar. If not then you probably don't know what that means. See what I did there?
There is a website not related to blockchain called IFTTT. Check it out if you are interested in home automation. It has some really cool stuff and it will get you comfortable with If-Then concepts. This is the core of Smart Contracts
Many things that you interact with today are already using If/Then concepts
RedBox
Pay at pump discounts
Grocery store discounts
What is different between Smart Contract and just regular If/Then statements?
Blockchain transparency and immutability
Code + Currency tied together
Smart Contract Examples
Rock Paper scissors example I used in a previous episode about dApps
Toll Roads. If one of your vehicles passes then deduct the amount from your account
Website ownership transfers. Currently done with escrow or trusting the other person
Automobile ownership transfer
Why use Smart contracts?
Bring trust where trust does not exist
Automation - No Middleman
Reduce costs, Reduces time, guaranteed outcomes
Where do Smart Contract run?
Just like you download an app on your phone or computer. The app needs a specific OS. Windows runs windows, iPhone runs IOS, Android, etc
Smart Contracts are created and built to run on a specific platform. Ethereum is one of the platforms using Solidity as the programming language.
Smart Contract Platforms
Ethereum is the most popular platform utilizing smart contracts.
Neo is also known as the Chinese Ethereum
EOS - Security of Bitcoin and smart contracts of Ethereum
ChainLink - Brings Oracles (Data from outside sources) to Smart Contracts
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Micro Payments are very small transactions. How small?
Nobody really agrees on a standard definition of a micro payment. Some companies claim anything under $20, others say it's $5, and some even as low as 1 cent. We already pay for small amounts on our mobile devices for games, music, and movies for less than $1.
The concept of Micropayments or micro transactions was coined far before cryptocurrency and even before the world wide web was invented.
According to Wikipedia the idea of a micropayment was created to pay copyright holders for their work.
When the internet came around the idea popped up again with the intention to pay people to create content
Most recently cryptocurrency sparked up the conversations again and companies like SatoshiPay were created with a concept called nanopayments
Previous attempts to enable this concept never took off and fizzled away. Some of the reasons it failed is due to our current way of sending and receiving money and the fees associated with the transactions. It just doesn't make sense to send someone a fraction of a cent and get charged more in fees than the transaction amount.
SatoshiPay has also had challenges with rising bitcoin fees and transaction times
Why would you use MicroPayments?
Our payments systems today are built because of the technology that was around at the time. It's what we are familiar with. Let's take an example and challenge the idea of our current payment system.
Electricity Bill - Today
You receive a bill monthly, but does that make sense?
In the past people would walk from house to house to get a reading from your meter
Technology changed in the past 10 years and now most meters are digital and can be read remotely
Today you don't really understand the impact of your daily use because the financial impact is a month later
Your power bill still comes monthly
Electricity Bill - Tomorrow
What if you could pay daily, or hourly, or maybe even every minute?
We have the technology in place. The meters already calculate it, but it's not how we are charged
You probably don't think much about turning lights off, your computer's power, or fall asleep watching tv.
What if you knew exactly how much money you pay when you are at home vs when you are at work?
This technology is possible today and I'm sure if you or I paid our electricity bill daily then we would use less
What will it take to enable MicroPayments?
With all of the cryptocurrencies in the market there are several addressing the low to no transaction fee issues
I believe cryptocurrency is what will turn this idea of micropayments into a reality
In the example of power companies it will take time to introduce the tech, but it's not unrealistic
We already have many smart home devices from thermostats, voice assistants, and other home automation where we can really easily control our costs and behavior. With time this will only accelerate and improve.
What other problems can micropayment solve?
The electricity bill is only one example
Every bill you can think of including car payments, home water usage
You could pay payments for things you normally wouldn't. Maybe you prefer to pay the exact same amount every day, so you pay your barber $1 a day and get a haircut every few weeks.
Let's your imagination run wild. The technology is here and it's a matter of time when we start seeing real life examples of micropayments that change the way we look at our bills -
What is Abra digital wallet?
Underlying wallet is a bitcoin wallet
Once you have your wallet has cash or bitcoin you can exchange for other currencies
If you choose to purchase another crypto Abra keeps Bitcoin in your wallet with a contract on the blockchain keeping the price of bitcoin and the currency selected the same ratio
If your chosen currency rises you'll increase your bitcoin holdings, and if it decreases you'll reduce your holdings
How to invest in 20 different cryptocurrencies from your mobile device via "technical magic"
Cryptocurrency Available now
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dash, Ethereum Classic, Zcash, Omisego, Qtum, Doge, Golem, Vertcoin,
Cryptocurrency Coming Soon
Bitcoin Gold, Stellar, Digibyte, Augur, Status, Stratis, Ox protocol
How to use Abra
Fund wallet
Bank Account (1-2 Days) U.S. & Phillipines
Cash (Philippines only)
Credit Cards (4%)
BitCoin
Litecoin and Ether deposits coming soon
Where to download Abra
Iphone IOS - App Store
Android - Google Play
Abra Wallet gives you control of the private keys
This is different from typical exchanges. You own your private keys and therefore your cryptocurrency.
That also means you need to protect the key and the Wallet Seed
Partnering with Abra
No Affiliate program
Looking to partner with existing network of POS providers
Merchant payment services
Partnering with exchanges
Other payment problem solvers
Who is Abra
Founded by Bill Barhydt in 2014
Offices in U.S. and Phillipines
Several rounds of funding
Just launched All in One Cryptocurrency Wallet and Exchange
Concerns
No 2FA (2 Factor Authentication)
Don't actually own the currency you exchange -
Decentralized applications otherwise known as dApps are one of the key reasons the Ethereum blockchain was built
What are dApps?
Traditional applications are hosted on a server and owned by the person or people that created them. If the server crashes the application doesn't work. The owner has full control of the application, the data, and if they want to make changes they can.
Distributed apps on the other hand are hosted on the blockchain. Ethereum is the most popular blockchain hosting dApps. The fact that a dApp is running on ethereum you'll get distributed out of the box, immutable (can't change it), and trust via smart contracts.
How to access dApps with MetaMask
MetaMask is a browser based plugin that allows you to browse and interact with the ethereum blockchain. It is one of many ways to interact with ethereum and what I'll use to access the example dApp.
Example of a dApp
The best way to explain what dApps are is to provide an example of one. Probably the most common is CryptoKitties, but we will use a different example
There are over 1,000 applications on State of the Dapps.
One simple example is called RoShambo also known as Paper, Rock, Scissors.
Player 1 starts a game and chooses either paper, rock, scissors, and a random number between 1-100
Player 2 chooses the same
Hands are revealed and winner is chosen
If there is a tie a random number will be generated between 1-100. The user that picked the closest number wins
If both users selected a number the same distance from the random number a draw will be declared
The smart contract is open source and available for viewing on Etherscan.io
Is this possible without Blockchain and dApps?
Yes, you don't need a blockchain, dApps, or ethereum to run this application.
The benefits are that you can play the game confident that you are not being cheated by the person running the game because they put the code on the blockchain
dApps are still primitive
This is a simple example of a dApp and you'll find 1,000 more to get a feel for how complex they are.
It doesn't take too long to realize that they are very basic and in a primitive state.
Looking back at any technology in the early days the same is true. Think about video games, web pages, even ecommerce stores.
The important thing to grasp is the possibilities dApps bring to the table and how useful they can be.
What are the benefits of dApps?
Decentralized meaning no single point of failure and no owner that can manipulate the data, application
Bringing trust where there normally isn't trust
Efficient applications by design due to the Gas concept with ethereum. Bad design creates high cost, which forces developers to create better applications.
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Learn from Crypto history and use it as context for the present
Crypto Predictions
There are people all over claiming to be crypto fortune tellers. They predict prices as if they can see the future. Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of crypto, however I will not predict.
Nov 23, 2011 “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin” – Wired | $2.37
Nov 27, 2013 “A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail” – The New York Times | $955.67
Dec 16, 2014 “Bitcoin’s financial network is doomed” – The Washington Post | $325.10
Jan 19, 2016 “R.I.P. Bitcoin. It’s time to move on.” – Washington Post | $382.00
Dec 08, 2016 “Bitcoin is a bubble. It will burst on Monday 12 December 2016” – Linkdin | $771.23
Aug 15, 2017 “A Bitcoin Is Worth $4,000–Why You Probably Should Not Own One” – Forbes | $4,179.97
Sep 12, 2017 “JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says bitcoin is a ‘fraud’ that will eventually blow up” – CNBC | $4,367.12
Litecoin will hit $1,000 or $1,500 this year
Bitcoin will hit $40,000 this year
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/
Since early January the cryptocurrency market tanked and has been taking the slow road to recovery. It's been a long two months, so thought it would be good to find some older posts to help you zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Crypto is alive and well, just think what people will say about this time in the not too distant future.
Crypto Patience
July 20, 2015
It was my bad luck that I came to know about the bitcoins when prices are $1000 / bitcoin.
March 3, 2016
Prices gradually fall to $ 420. is enough to make me panic. but we must remain patient. keep calm and do not sell your bitcoin now
3 months ago
Litecoin droping fast! sold at 63 a couple of days ago should i buy now or wait to drop lower?
2 Months
Should I buy? Planning to buy ~10 LTC or so. Hoping to get around $360 ea if I can get my account set up, am I too late to the party?
What should you do?
Decide your long term plan with crypto. Do you believe in it? Come up with a plan and stick to it. No emotional buying or selling.
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DragonChain started out as a Disney incubator project and now it's grown up and turning into a Blockchain platform for businesses.
DragonChain is #59 postion coinmarket cap as of March 1st, 2018
Slogan = A Turnkey Blockchain Platform for Business
Strong team and advisory board
Dragonchain was originally developed at Disney’s Seattle office in 2015 and 2016 as the Disney Private Blockchain Platform. Over 20 use cases and applications were explored and documented 1 publicly via the W3C Blockchain Community Group . The platform was later released as open 2 source software under the Apache 2 license in October of 2016.
The Dragonchain Foundation, a Non-Profit Corporation was created in January of 2017 to maintain ownership and responsibility of the open source code
Hosting - AWS then Google Cloud
Initially distributed via an initial coin offering that took place from October 2nd until November 2, in 2017
DragonChain ICO - 238 million tokens were distributed
433,494,437 DRGN - Total supply of Dragons
What is DragonChain?
3 Separate things (Platform, Incubator Program, and Marketplace)
BlockChain Platform - Q2 2018
Ease of integration
Blockchain expertise not required
Protection of business data
Short, fixed length blocks
Currency agnostic
Interoperability
Simple architecture
DragonChain Incubator program - Startup
http://www.metropolischain.com/ - The entire goal of Metropolis is to create a platform where it is easy and cost effective for employers to connect with top talent. Developing our Employment Ecosystem on a blockchain where data will be 100% verified.
http://www.looklateral.io - Our project approach is to plan, build and run the first global platform for democratising fine art. The technical and business roadmap below describes the activities and events that will take us towards our goal.
http://www.biocrypt.tech/
http://www.givewithnothing.org/ - Improve charitable giving through trust, accountability, and transparency
https://www.iagon.com/
DragonChain Marketplace - marketplace (Q4 2018) Buy turnkey smart contracts
Use to buy services on and/or interact with Blockchain
What I like about Dragon Chain
3 year old project
Strong management and advisory team
CEO strength is technology/architecture
Very well documented
https://dragonchain.github.io/
Solid idea with strong competition that validates the idea
What I have concerns about
Focused on Data Privacy, private when other solutions can be used for same thing
Strong Competition (VeChain, HyperLedger)
Other solutions similar that have major partnerships (VeChain),
Project Links
Git Repository
Whitepaper
Use Cases from Disney
DragonChain Opportunities for
Entrepreneurs - build apps on marketplace or projects in incubator
Investors - buying dragons with expectations that it goes up
Business - buy dragons to get tokens to utilize services on blockchain -
Latest Crypto News
Georgia is the 2nd state to propose Crypto as a tax payment method
LitePay - Launching the 26th @ 9pm Pacific time. No card, but will launch the Merchant payment processing account
Why would a business eCommerce store, Physical location or others want to accept cryptocurrency?
It's a new form of digital payment that is faster, cheaper, and there are millions that have it and ready to use it.
Adoption doesn't happen overnight
Rewind back 20 years ago and try to convince someone to send an email when they could send a letter through the post office.
It just made sense, but for those not familiar it was a strange concept.
Email or in other words a digital letter was instant and free. There were no middleman like the post office to deal lose it or destroy it
It still took years for people to adopt email and realize the potential
The problems of email adoption
It was a new concept not easy to understand for those not familiar
You had to have a special email application to receive and send
It required you to have a special email address
A username and password is required to send email
Others would need your email to be able to send you email and vice versa
CryptoCurrency is plagued with the same problems
It's difficult to understand
You need a special application (wallet) to send and receive
A special address is needed to receive crypto (Public Key)
A special key is required to send crypto (Private Key)
Others would need your public key to be able to send you crypto and vice versa
Who would want to accept Crypto
eCommerce stores
Selling physical products or Information
Other Internet Business
Content Creators
YouTube, Blogs, Podcasts
Physical Brick and Mortar stores
Grocery Stores
Car Wash
Restaurant
Service Business
Bartender
Waiters/Waitresses
DJ's
How to accept CryptoCurrency
Easy - 5 minutes to do it
Print QR code with public address and place on sign (LTC accepted here or BTC accepted here)
Medium Difficulty - Less than 1 hour to do it
CoinBase Commerce
Accept Cryptocurrency in Wordpress, over email, any webpage that you can place basic html codes
Shopify
Payment vendors such as GoCoin and others that integrate with Shopify platform to accept crypto
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The real growth of cryptocurrency will come with the adoption of cryptocurrency in real world transactions.
You are an early adopter and it's your best interest to help grow the community. The more of us that do that the bigger the impact we will have. Even if we don't, I believe it will happen naturally.
It takes years to change the culture of a company if there is an intentional focus to do so. Technology such as cryptocurrencies and blockchain are revolutionary changes, but it doesn't happen overnight. Changing something such as our core understanding of money, banks, and the way software works is something that takes time.
Music Adoption
Think about music for a second. Records, Cassette Tapes, CD's, Mp3s, Streaming music. The first 4 were all physical and now we are in a digital world.
1850's Records
1960's Cassette tape
1982 CD's
1990's MP3s
The iPod was released in 2001 and moved Mp3's in our pockets. Pandora really started taking off 10 years later in 2011 and the concept of streaming really began to take hold
Music continues to morph into different things, but the underlying purpose is the same. Entertainment.
Currency Adoption
Cash has been a physical item for thousands of years and starting back in the 1950's we started seeing the introduction of credit cards.
1950 - Diners Club Card
1958 - American Express Card - Dining and Entertainment
1975 - Visa Debit Card
1994 - First eCommerce transaction online
1998 - Paypal launched
2010 - First bitcoin transaction 10,000 BTC for a pizza
Each step of the way it took time for adoption to really take off. The internet changed the way people shop and also changed the way we use Cash. Bottom line is that cash and checks is not what most people use anymore.
Visa revenue 700M Quarter in 2006 and 4.5B in 2016 (~7x in 10 years)
Paypal 3.5B in 2010 to 13B annual revenue in 2017 (4x in 7 years)
Credit card adoption is at an all time high. Everywhere you go a credit card can be used. This is directly related to their revenue growth.
Cryptocurrency Adoption
Let's get back to Crypto. We have seen the currencies grow in value significantly over the past year, but the adoption is still lagging. It's hard to spend crypto right now. Just like with credit cards in the early 90's. You could, but it was not easy.
Think about the credit card timeline and now think about crypto. It's obvious where we are at and that's in the very early days.
It will take time for people to understand what this thing called cryptocurrency really is.
It will take time for more exchanges to fail and more coins to crash and plenty of scams and naysayers to tell us that the sky is falling.
This is not an easy road, but we can and will make it.
There will be many people opposed to cryptocurrency and fighting back. Do you really think these guys will go down easy? They will do everything in their power to push back and they will absolutely look at how they can profit from it.
I'm excited to be in cryptocurrency right now and you should be too. Remember how far we have come and how far we need to go.
There are plenty of efforts to continue to spark adoption and I'm very excited to see how those play out.
Grass root efforts - @litecoindad with #PayWithLitecoin
Coinbase Commerce
Official LitePay Website
LitePay Podcast episode
Several crypto payment vendors on sites such as Shopify
What can you do?
Consumers - Contact your favorite business via email, twitter, contact forms, call them, whatever. Tell them to start accepting crypto
Business Owners - Start accepting cryptocurrency. It's easier than ever and takes only minutes to setup.
The next episode will focus on how to accept crypto currency as a business owner
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Why do you need a tracking app? Why not just coinbase?
If you have several alts across different exchanges or have crypto in wallets instead of on a single exchange then you need a crypto tracker app.
There are several free options available
Most have IOS and Android version available
Bit worth & Blockfolio
Coin Cap - Since 2016
Crypto Pro - Since 2016
HODL real-time cryptocurrency
Coin stats - If you have more than 5,000 in crypto they charge for using it
Blockfolio tracer app includes the following features for bitcoin and altcoin portfolios
Overview of crypto portfolio
Percentage of holdings
Total $$ holdings
Price of crypto
Portfolio without prices
Drill down into each crypto
Price notifications
Coinbase - not reliable
Candlesticks
Options for different timelines
Volume
Delta change
Detailed holdings
Trading pairs
Comprehensive list of currencies
Over 2,000
Supports several different fiat exchanges
Has News integrated
Are these apps good to use? Is it safe?
I am personally not comfortable having all of this information available for some company to consume and most likely profit from it. Unfortunately for the type of functionality giving up this information is the price you pay to use it.
How can I get around it?
Some people divide their investments by a certain number to make it look like you have smaller amounts than actual
Things I don’t like
Constantly refreshing the app. This is a personal problem, but many others have the same issue
Prices on exchange are not the same as app - typically some discrepancy between the exchange and the app
Blockfolio had some scaling issues back in December. Seem to have been resolved now -
Litecoin introduction
Full disclosure, my first cryptocurrency purchase was litecoin and I’ve been an advocate ever since. There is a possibility that I have a bit of a bias towards litecoin. I’ll do my best to provide you with unbiased info
I’m the type of person that always roots for the underdog. They always carry more passion and determination that anyone that has already made it. That raw and uncut grit makes underdogs have the potential to bring down the big dogs.
When I started reading about blockchain and cryptocurrencies litecoin was the coin that I felt was the underdog. It sat in the shadows of bitcoin. Litecoin had everything and more than bitcoin did. It had everything to prove and nothing to lose.
Litecoin’s creator Charlie Lee took the original code from Bitcoin and tweaked it to create litecoin.
His idea was to take bitcoin and make it faster, better, and cheaper. All three of his original goals still hold true till today.
Here is a quick bitcoin to litecoin comparison
Litecoin Overview
Created in 2011 by Charlie Lee a former Google Engineer
Trading Symbol LTC https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/litecoin/
Video of Charlie Lee explaining Litecoin and why it was created
Peer to Peer Open Source Cryptocurrency
84 million coins can be mined vs 21 million
4x faster than bitcoin
Block confirmation timings from 10 min to 2.5 min
Scrypt hashing vs SHA256
Litecoin Timeline
2011 - Created
2013 - Charlie Lee started working at coinbase
Early 2017 - Charlie went Part time @ coinbase to work on Segwit
May 2017 - Segregated Witness (Segwit)
May 2017 - Litecoin added to coinbase
Dec 2017 Charlie selling coins
What makes litecoin different?
Thousand cryptos on the market
Litecoin is Payments focused
Gold Vs. Silver Analogy
Smaller payments - Litecoin
Larger payments - Bitcoin
Lightning network testing phase. Lightning labs performed atomic swap between Bitcoin/Litecoin off chain. Meaning coins it didn’t record on any blockchain
Focus now is
Marketing
Scalability
Litepay https://www.litepay.us/ - Feb 26th launch date
Arizona Senate Bil 1091 - Pay tax liabilities with cryptocurrency such as litecoin or bitcoin https://legiscan.com/AZ/text/SB1091/2018
Coinbase - Initial platform for most users
Pricepoint - beginners look at price rather than market cap. Litecoin is easier to digest, get a full coin, pyschology
Plugin to accept payments - being released to allow websites to easily accept crypto payments
Future focus is
Smart contracts RSK and payments - https://twitter.com/RSKsmart
Litecoin Links
https://litecoincore.org/ -
Show Notes
CryptoCurrency Phishing Scam - Another cryptocurrency scam where phishing sites are setup to imitate real sites and steal users crypto.
Senate hearing - overall positive outlook for cryptocurrency.
BitGrail exchange owner report hack of almost 17 Million Nano being lost. BitGrail is an Italian based exchange that was the first exchange for RaiBlocks now know as Nano.
There were several strange incidents that raised questions about the reliability of the exchange such as users reporting negative balances of crypto, The ability to withdraw more than they have. Based on the owners behaviors (exchange maintenance, daily withdraw limits, stopping withdraws, requiring KYC validations, etc.
The devs of Nano appear to be taking a backseat and distancing themselves from this now. I understand not wanting to be part of this, however they did recommend using the exchange months back. Some people lost a little, others lost small fortunes.
Lessons learned, don’t keep your currency on an exchange and realize that crypto is still the wild wild west.
Several credit card companies now ban buying crypto. Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup are a few that banned crypto purchases. Some people are also reporting their banks issuing statements that also block crypto.
I realize CC companies want to limit their exposure to customers that have a tendency to go overboard. Credit cards are restricted for use in most if not all Casinos for example. I personally don’t like the idea of them deciding where I can use it, however it’s really not my money until I pay it off. They are just protecting themselves.
Banks on the other hand I don’t agree at all. Fortunately my bank has not restricted my purchases, however if it does I will be moving to another bank. As a side note I started reading a book called the creature from jekyll island.
Coinbase launched new commerce plugin. They have had API options before, however launched what appears to be an easier way to integrate your ecommerce site and accept crypto
https://commerce.coinbase.com
Not accepting new users now, but can join waitlist
I continue seeing small ecommerce sites starting to accept cryptocurrency. This type of example continues to push the adoption of cryptocurrency forward. - Show more
