Author: GW Alger

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Crypto: The Good, Bad and Ugly

https://youtu.be/zOx7i8IzE0w

Jeff Berwick is Editor-in-Chief at The Dollar Vigilante, which represents itself as the economic thinking of libertarian purists (anarcho-capitalists), grounded in free-market Austrian economics.

This talk was held at the Blockchain Summit London.

Berwick speaks of the historic rise of Bitcoin as the biggest threat to central banks and governments in history. He describes central banking as a scam which impoverishes the 99%.

He discusses how central banks and the Rothchilds use money to control the population and the world.

The following are notes from his presentation:

Continue reading “Crypto: The Good, Bad and Ugly”
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The Future of Movie Financing with MovieCoin

Before the video interview was removed, Christopher Woodrow was discussing using blockchain to finance feature film productions via MovieCoin in partnership with BANKEX.

MovieCoin describes itself as “The Fintech Platform for the Entertainment Industry.”

Founded in 2017, MovieCoin has offices in Vancouver, British Columbia and Santa Monica, California.

Woodrow notes that the big source of Chinese movie financing has been drying up and he believes MovieCoin will be a big player in the future of film financing.

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Incentivizing Employees With Tokens vs. Equity

Tokens that are readily available to trade on an exchange are more liquid than equity.  Hence, tokens provided to early employees as an incentive for early support in a new company’s evolution are more beneficial to the employees, since they can convert them to cash right away.

Of course equity requires that employees devote themselves to the long-term success of the company to benefit from a liquidity event some day in the future.  This would seem to better support the future of the business and hence the employees.

We’ll see how the new blockchain economy plays out with blockchain startups as time progresses.

Tokens can better incentivize startup employees than equity
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Coinbase to Become Crypto NYSE?

Brian Armstrong is CEO of Coinbase, which has recently grown to over 500 employees (founded in 2012).  Coinbase is working to establish an open financial system for the world that will create innovation, efficiency and economic freedom.

They aim to be the trusted, legal compliant place for people to trade crypto.

In this Techcruch Article (and video) the company is described:

Coinbase is known for being the most popular exchange for converting fiat currency into crypto — most of the largest traded exchanges are crypto-to-crypto — but he foresees a future in which it plays host to a growing number of cryptocurrencies as it becomes standard for companies to create their own token, which runs alongside equity as an alternative investment system.

Armstrong states the investment phase is driving the crypto market but the utility of blockchain is where the long-term value exists.

Armstrong articulated that:

Web 1.0 was about publishing information, web 2.0 was about interaction and web 3.0 is going to be about value transfer on the internet because now the web has this native currency and so applications can be built that instantly tap into this global economy on the internet.

Coinbase plots to become the New York Stock Exchange of crypto securities
https://www.coinbase.com/
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What is Tether?

Tether is a unique (and controversial) cryptocurrency.  It is unique in that it’s tied to existing fiat currencies.  Currently, Tether supports US Dollars (USD), Euros (EUR), and in the future Japanese Yen (JPY). What this intends to accomplish is limit the volatility of the Tether cryptocurrency to that of the underlying fiat asset.  All good so far.

The controversy is delineated in this TechCrunch article, not the least of which is the lack of transparency with their claims of fiat-backed cryptocurrency, which is in contradistinction to what its website states.  The same article points out that:

The most interesting thing about Tether is that you don’t need to redeem them for dollars. As long as a cryptocurrency exchange believes that one Tether is worth one dollar, you can just use your Tether to buy bitcoin, or ether, or whatevercoin, and then transfer / convert that to dollars.

So, although it’s yet to be verified that Tether is a fraud, it’s very much being used.  Certainly the utility of some type of fiat-based stablecoin is of interest to the crypto community in that it’s been one of the top ten cryptos for a while, in spite of its reputation.

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Blockchain Patience And WW III?

Gary Vee speaks about blockchain at the ChainXchange conference in Las Vegas on August 14, 2018.

He emphasizes patience, stressing that we are still early in the game.

He suggests becoming a practitioner in the execution of blockchain within your craft to make a long-term impact.

Re cryptocurrencies, he warns that it’s likely that 90-98% of currencies won’t make it. He notes that blockchain is a foregone conclusion, but the currencies built on it are not.

99% of people’s understanding of blockchain begins and ends with Bitcoin, which further signals that we are at the beginning.

If you truly understand blockchain and its inherently decentralized nature, how would China, Russia and the United States accept and allow it to happen? Other than atomic bombs and armies, it takes away all their leverage. Parallel this with a global movement of nationalism and blockchain becomes more vulnerable than you might think.

The internet has already upended the status quo and they don’t want blockchain to execute a 2.0 version on them.

The nirvana of blockchain at scale equates to the dynamics of WW III.

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A Case for EOS

https://youtu.be/A3Yp2Z50_lk
Dallas Rushing Discusses EOS:
* Instant transactions
* No-cost transactions
* Real-Name account names
* VCs have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to the EOS ecosystem
* Chinese govt ranked EOS as best blockchain in world
* Block producers who support the ecosystem
* Currently processing the most transactions per second of any blockchain in the world
* Blocktivity.info shows EOS as the most active blockchain in the world

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The Liabilities of Uncertain U.S. Crypto Regulation

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, whose company created cryptocurrency XRP, and Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, who now runs a dedicated crypto fund, shared their thoughts at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco yesterday.

Among a number of blockckain and crypto points, they discuss regulation, or lack of it in the United States. Arrington emphasized that the lack of regulatory clarity is “single-handedly fucking the next stage of technology development.”

Arrington also noted that he does not like EOS.

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Charles Hoskinson’s Presentation and Q&A re Cardano in Tel Aviv


In August 2018, in Tel Aviv, Charles Hoskinson discussed Cardano and answered questions about banks and cryptocurrencies.

Hoskinson is the CEO and Founder of Input | Output Hong Kong (IOHK), which is “a technology company committed to using peer-to-peer innovations to provide financial services to the three billion people who don’t have them.” They created the Cardano distributed computing platform that runs the blockchain for the Ada cryptocurrency, which aims to run smart contracts, decentralized applications, side chains, multi-party computation, and metadata.

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