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Ripple vs Bitcoin: Could Ripple be the Next Bitcoin?
XRP Price, Live XRP Price Chart & Market Cap CoinCodex
Bitcoin Investment 2016: Is It Worth It?
Complete Ripple Price History Chart with Market Cap ...
Bitcoin forecasts for 2016 - Bitcoinist.com
Ripple XRP Price Today 📈 Live Ripple Prices, Charts ...
BitMax.io(BTMX.io)News Digest 2019 10 02
Visa, Mastercard, and others reconsider involvement in Facebook's Libra network
Central banks don't need their own digital currencies
Vestager says Libra's potential to spawn an economy raises risks
The world's most-used cryptocurrency isn't Bitcoin
Ripple's Xpring Launches Crypto, Fiat Payments That Integrate Into Any App
Congressional Challenger to House Speaker Pelosi Is Fundraising in Crypto
Mark Zuckerberg Addresses Libra Regulation, KYC in Leaked Transcript
Binance and Polychain Are Funding a Crypto-Friendly Bank in Malta
(All citations are taken from The Wall Street Journal)
· Facebook Libra's potential financial partners reconsider their involvement following a backlash from U.S. and European government officials.
· The new project has broad ambitions for itself as part of a shift from the company's nearly complete reliance on targeted advertising.
· Members of the Libra association have signed nonbinding letters of intent and they haven't yet handed over the $10 million that Facebook requested from each member to fund the creation of the digital coin.
(All citations are taken from Bloomberg)
· Opposing opinions say that central banks' action to issue their own digital currencies can have a profound and negative impact on a nation's economic and financial landscape.
· One basic feature of the project would be to issue electronic deposits available to eligible citizens or businesses, allowing more people to have direct access to the accounting and payments mechanisms.
· The primary objection to an official government e-currency is the potential regulations that will be imposed on more economic institutions.
· The European Union's antitrust chief said to take steps of scrutinizing Facebook Inc's planned cryptocurrency because of the risk that the project would lead to a separate economy.
· The EU competition commissioner has already opened an investigation into Facebook's digital currency project.
· Financial stability concerns may be as central to the probe as competition issues.
· Tether, whose market capitalization is more than 30 times smaller than that of Bitcoin, accounts for about 70% of all the digital-asset world's market value.
· Tether was used in 40% and 80% of all transactions on two of the world's top exchanges, Binance and Huobi.
· It is also a pathway for most of the world's active traders into the crypto market.
(All citations are taken from Coindesk)
· The suite of services includes an Xpring software development kit (SDK) that allows programmers to integrate XRP apps in multiple programming languages.
· It also includes a variety of new tools for working on both XRP and Ripple's Interledger Protocol (ILP).
· Developers could download the code and run it themselves, or now they can go to Xpring and plug into the service.
· 2020 congressional candidate hopeful Agatha Bacelar (D) is looking to unseat Pelosi in California's 12th district, according to her campaign website.
· Touting her background in the STEM fields, Bacelar's claims the "once-bright future for crypto in America has been dimming" and "has suffered as federal intervention pushed innovators out of our district and the country."
· The candidate is also fundraising $1 million in cryptocurrency through the Coinbase exchange.
· In the closed-door staff meeting, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Libra has elicited large amounts of public criticism. However, he added, "The public things, I think, tend to be a little more dramatic."
· With illicit uses of Libra at the top of watchdogs' concerns, he moved on to talk about know-your-customer (KYC) verification for the new payment network, saying Calibra and the Libra Association will have to do more to prove users' identities.
· After personally investing in bitcoin in 2016, Malta-native Paula Pandolfino is now co-founder of the upcoming Founders Bank in Malta, scheduled to open in 2020.
· Pandolfino said the bank raised $10 million so far and is looking to raise $30 million more in the near future.
· The bank's leading investors include the crypto exchange Binance (also based in Malta), the hedge fund Polychain Capital and the Czech firm Carduus Asset Management.
(The contents above are all cited from corresponding websites, and don't represent the opinion of BitMax.io platform)
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InvestInBlockchain - Cryptocurrencies in the Top 100 With Working Products
Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency that started it all back in 2009, after the global financial crisis and subsequent bailouts of banks left many people disenfranchised with fiat currency and outdated, insecure financial infrastructure.
Today, Bitcoin is being used for peer-to-peer payments across the globe. More than that, though, it is leading the way towards a future in which financial technology is trustless, secure, resilient, and censorship resistant. Without Bitcoin, this list would not exist.
The platform that brought smart contracts to the blockchain, spurring a minor revolution in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Before Ethereum, Bitcoin and its transaction-oriented design was the central focus of most blockchain projects.
After Ethereum, teams saw the value of decentralized apps (dapps) and smart contracts, and shifted their focus to compensate.
Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum whitepaper was released in late 2013. The project itself was announced January 2014, with a crowdsale the following July. The system officially went live in July 2015.
Since then, hundreds of businesses, individuals, and blockchain projects have adopted Ethereum as their main smart contracts platform.
Ripple is focused primarily on one thing: fast and cheap international transactions.
Current banking infrastructure has failed to evolve in the 21st century, such that it still takes 3-5 business days on average for an international transfer to be processed. With just 4 second transaction times and at a fraction of the cost of a wire transfer, Ripple's working product is already impacting the banking sector.
The big knock against Ripple is that its native token, XRP, is completely unnecessary. Indeed, driving adoption of Ripple's banking solutions is far easier than getting real-world adoption for XRP.
If you're interested in seeing a discussion about how XRP adoption will occur, you might find this reddit thread worth a read. Meanwhile, all of us will just have to wait and see whether XRP adoption strategies ultimately come to fruition.
Bitcoin Cash was created in 2017 when the first ever hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain took place. The split was the result of Bitcoin's 1MB blocks filling up. Transaction speeds were declining, fees were increasing, and it became clear to the community that the current model wasn't sustainable for scaling.
In a move that still causes cryptocurrency fights to this day, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash soon emerged as separate but similar projects. BCH has 8x the block size of BTC, giving it roughly 8x the transaction throughput. Its fees and transaction times are much faster, as predicted.
Learn more about Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash.
The Stellar project and its associated Lumens (XLM) token was forked from the Ripple protocol in 2014. Stellar has come into its own since then, providing a blockchain connection service for fiat transactions between banks, payment systems, and people. Stellar is fast and reliable, and it works with practically no fees for the end-user.
Stellar is a payments system, meaning its job is to move money as efficiently as possible. Partnerships with banks and financial institutions were key in evaluating its status, as was the ability to actually send money using the network.
Several non-profits and commercial entities have agreed to use Stellar as part of their financial infrastructure. Recently, the team partnered with IBM and KlickEx to facilitate cross-border transactions in the South Pacific and announced an affiliate with Keybase to streamline international transactions.
Stellar also has projects being built on its network by major established entities. IBM's blockchain division is using XLM for their payments infrastructure, for example, and the Veridium startup is working with both organizations to tokenize its carbon credits market.
Litecoin is a Bitcoin fork that was created in 2011 by Charlie Lee as a cheaper and faster (2.5 minute block time instead of 10) alternative to Bitcoin. This is accomplished predominantly because Litecoin uses a Scrypt hashing algorithm instead of the SHA-256 algorithm used by Bitcoin. It's common to hear Litecoin called "digital silver" to Bitcoin's "digital gold," and in reality Litecoin does not really expand upon the functionality of Bitcoin in a significant way so much as it makes different tradeoffs.
That being said, it does succeed in being cheaper and faster to use than BTC, which has led to it being accepted by hundreds of merchants and thus making Litecoin one of the most widely used cryptocurrencies for digital payments.
Tether is an unusual project. Whereas most cryptocurrencies rise and fall in value, Tether was designed to stay the same, fixed at a 1:1 ratio with the U.S. dollar.
This allows users to store, send, and receive digital currencies across platforms without incurring significant losses due to value fluctuations.
The Tether stable coin sounds straightforward, but the project isn't without controversy. USDT is supposedly backed by real USD sitting in a bank account. But in which account? Who controls it? And is Tether being used to manipulate the value of Bitcoin? It's all part of the Tether controversy.
Released in 2014 as a fork of Bytecoin, Monero has since made a name for itself as the most popular privacy coin on the market.
Most cryptocurrencies offer little in the form of anonymity. Monero was built for privacy from the ground-up, featuring stealth addresses, ring signatures, and complete coin fungibility. All of this adds up to a near-perfect cloak of anonymity, allowing Monero users to conduct transactions without exposing their identity.
Monero has had steady growth over the years thanks to a dedicated team of developers and an active community. The project continues to evolve with new privacy features and improved transaction security.
NEO was founded in 2014 as one of the earliest smart contract platforms, giving it a wide breadth of possible functionality. The platform's strongest use case is digitizing traditional assets so that they can be easily tracked and exchanged on the blockchain.
NEO is also well-known as the "Chinese Ethereum," and the fact that it is a Chinese-based project does seem to make Chinese dapp developers somewhat more likely to build on top of it than other platforms.
In fact, NEO has already supported dozens of ICOs and remains one of the predominant platforms for supporting smart contracts and dapps.
Binance Coin is an exchange token used to reduce trading fees on the Binance platform.
Users can opt to pay exchange, listing, and withdrawal fees using BNB and enjoy as much as a 50% discount on all charges. This turns out to be a powerful incentive for purchasing and holding BNB, as what trader doesn't enjoy saving money on transactions?
Binance Coin is an ERC-20 token that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. Its purpose is extremely limited, but because such a vast number of Binance users transact with it every day, it qualifies as a working and active product.
Zcash is another immensely popular privacy coin that often cracks the top 20 cryptocurrencies. It uses the tagline "internet money" and promises to fully protect the privacy of transactions with zero-knowledge cryptography.
Zcash provides anonymity by shielding transactions on the blockchain, preventing anyone from seeing the sender, recipient, or value of each transaction. The technology is so effective the Ethereum team is investigating it to enable anonymous transactions on their network.
Zcash has grown in leaps and bounds in 2018. The dev team published a roadmap through the year 2020, which includes a major features upgrade in the October 2018 Sapling release. Coinbase is also considering listing Zcash, which is a huge boost for any cryptocurrency.
Qtum is a smart contracts platform similar to Ethereum, only with a stronger focus on value transfers and decentralized apps. It's meant to be something of a hybrid between Bitcoin and Ethereum, allowing businesses to build smart contracts on the platform or just focus on cryptocurrency transactions.
Qtum launched in March 2017, and dashed straight to the top. The initial offering sold over $10 million in tokens after just 90 minutes. The project differentiated itself by providing a rare Proof-of-Stake smart contracts platform designed to compensate for some of Ethereum's shortcomings, including lack of compatibility for mobile devices.
Qtum released its mainnet in September 2017, opening the doors to a fully functional smart contract and dapps platform. Several projects already have an established presence on the network. One of the more exciting ones is Space Chain, which aims to create an open-source satellite network anyone can use for data transmission, storage, and development.
0x Protocol (ZRX)
0x Protocol has one of the most important working products in the entire Ethereum ecosystem. It is a permissionless, open-source protocol that facilitates trustless exchanges of Ethereum tokens through relayers and dapps that build on top of the protocol.
Not only has 0x been providing this functionality for over a year now, but they've been working to expand the protocol functionality significantly since that initial launch. In 0x protocol 2.0 and beyond, it will be possible to trade tokens built on standards besides ERC-20, including non-fungible ERC-721 tokens.
In a market full of scams and vaporware, 0x's valuable contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem have made it one of the best performing cryptocurrencies of 2018.
Bytecoin is another popular privacy-focused cryptocurrency with a strong community and user base. Transactions on the Bytecoin blockchain are instantaneous, untraceable, unlinkabe, and resistant to blockchain analysis.
Bytecoin has been around for a long time now, with contributions to the project beginning in 2012. However, that hasn't stopped the project's developers from continuously improving the product.
The recently updated Bytecoin roadmap has a hard fork for a consensus update scheduled for August 31, as well as numerous initiatives for community growth constantly in the works.
Founded in 2015 by former Bitcoin developers, Decred's most important working product is its solution to Bitcoin's biggest problem. No, not scalability… blockchain governance.
You see, early Bitcoiners have been debating block size limitations and the efficacy of other scalability solutions like the Lightning Network for years, even though the problem of scalability really only became discussed in the mainstream in 2017.
With its community-based governance model and strong adherence to the core ethos of decentralization, Decred is built to evolve and improve rapidly. That means that it's equipped to handle not only the scalability problem today, but other big problems that might arise down the line.
When you have poor governance, it is an arduous process making any upgrades to a project, no matter how necessary they may seem to the majority of coin holders. Decred's best-in-class and still improving governance model give it an intriguing case to be a leader in digital payments for a long time to come.
BitShares aims to improve worldwide access to financial services via blockchain. The tagline "assist the unbanked" summarizes the project nicely. In practice, this translates to BitShares operating as a decentralized exchange, one that was built from the ground-up to avoid scalability issues and keep transaction fees low.
BitShares was launched in 2014 by Dan Larimer, who would then go on to take a lead development role in both EOS and Steem.
The current state of the project offers decentralized asset exchange, price-stable cryptocurrencies, recurring and scheduled payments, user-issued assets, and more, all available through a decentralized system powered by delegated PoS consensus.
Steem is the cryptocurrency that powers Steemit, a decentralized social media platform that incentivizes user participation through micropayments. Think of it like Reddit, only instead of just upvoting or downvoting posts, users can actually reward creators for their effort.
Steem is a functional cryptocurrency used exclusively on the Steemit platform. That gives it something of a limited use, but seeing as how Steemit is live and boasts a few hundred thousand users, it's hard to argue it isn't a working product. Some people may even be earning money using Steemit.
Siacoin (SIA)
Siacoin is one of the leaders in decentralized cloud storage, a more secure and affordable alternative to centralized cloud storage solutions like Amazon S3, Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, and others.
Sia 1.0 was launched in June 2016, and has achieved considerable adoption since then. With the $200 billion cloud storage market widely seen as one of the spaces most ripe for blockchain disruption, Sia has gotten off to a nice start by offering a functional decentralized cloud storage platform for over 2 years.
Augur is one of the most recently launched products on this list. The platform mainnet went live in early July 2018, bringing to fruition almost 4 years of post-ICO work.
Augur is a decentralized prediction market that uses game theory to generate crowd-sourced insights. Essentially, thousands of people working together have shown the remarkable ability to forecast outcomes.
With Augur, users can put REP tokens as bets on these predictions, essentially creating a form of "useful social gambling."
Augur's release was a long time coming. The project started as far back as 2014, nearly a year before the ICO. The creators cite the complexity of Augur's smart contracts as the chief cause of the lengthy development time.
Regardless of its past, Augur is now a live product with a bright future. Over 300 predictions have already been made, with the largest winning payout hitting $20,000. Betting volume even exceeded $1 million within the first weeks of launch.
Basic Attention Token was one of the easiest projects to include on this list. That's because its working product, Brave Browser, has more than 3 million active usersbetween its mobile and desktop platforms, making it one of the most widely-used working products in the blockchain space.
Not only is Brave Browser functional, it's the only browser on the market that has built-in ad-blocking and tracker blocking, making the browsing experience both cleaner and faster than what you get with other popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
The future remains uncertain for the BAT token itself, as its adoption depends heavily on whether or not advertisers buy-in to the Brave model, as well as how willing Brave users are to be shown relevant ads and to pass along the BAT they earn to content publishers.
Given Brave's success in just a short time since being launched, though, the future does appear promising for BAT.
Nano (XRB)
Nano (formerly RaiBlocks) is all about scalability. The coin has nearly instant transactions with a completely fee-less structure. The platform accomplishes this by creating a unique blockchain for every account, preventing bloat and allowing for practically infinite scalability.
Nano's motto of "do one thing and do it well" has gotten them a long way. The team doesn't have to deal with scaling or slowdown issues thanks to the underlying structure of the project, allowing its roadmap to focus on wallet updates and outreach. This is one cryptocurrency that's essentially feature complete, and it has been for some time.
Golem (GNT)
Golem has set out to be the Airbnb of computing resources. Have you ever needed extra GPU power to finish up a render? How about processing scientific data similar to the [email protected] project?
Even if you don't have those needs, a lot of groups do. Golem aims to provide easy access to those resources, all of which are rentable for a small cryptocurrency fee.
Golem hit the mainnet launch button in April 2018, and was met with a fair amount of fanfare. One of the main goals for the feature-incomplete launch was to push the product out so real users could put it to work.
The team was interested in strengthening their interactions with end users to help guide the future of the platform. The team has several major milestones planned for the coming months, so the mainnet release is only just the beginning.
Pundi X (NPXS)
Pundi X has been shooting up the market cap rankings so far in Q3 2018, and they also happen to have a working product that just recently became available to retailers.
The primary Pundi X product is a point-of-sale (POS) device that enables quick and easy mobile transactions for both fiat and cryptocurrencies. 500 POS devices are already being used by retailers in Asia, and there are thousands more scheduled to be distributed in the coming months.
In addition, Pundi X also offers XPASS cards, cryptocurrency credit cards that can work in place of mobile apps for making digital payments.
What makes the Pundi X project noteworthy is that it enables consumers to pay retailers in cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH, and it immediately converts the payments into local fiat currencies so that retailers don't need to worry about price volatility of the cryptocurrencies.
This makes it significantly easier for people to use cryptocurrencies in their daily lives, making Pundi X an exciting project for blockchain enthusiasts who are looking for signs of future mass adoption.
Waves was the first ever blockchain platform that made it possible for anybody — regardless of their programming experience — to create blockchain tokens. Additionally, Waves has a decentralized exchange where tokens can be traded and exchanged with fiat currencies.
Since the project's first releases in 2016, Waves has gone on to make their DEX accessible from mobile phones and expanded its functionality significantly, while also building several strategic partnerships to help grow the Waves community and user base.
Ultimately, though, the Waves Client is the project's most important working product, as it is what allows tokens to be issued, stored, sent, and exchanged among users.
KuCoin Shares (KCS)
Similar to Binance Coin, KuCoin Shares is an exchange token that can be used to pay reduced fees on cryptocurrency trades. KCS has the added bonus of paying dividends to long-term hodlers, as well, paying out a 5% ROI for most users.
The nature of KuCoin Shares is one of the reasons the KuCoin exchange has gotten so much attention since it appeared on the scene. The tokens themselves are limited in scope, of course, but the sheer number of people using them for trades and buying them for passive income is enormous.
Wanchain aims to build new and improved financial infrastructure to seamlessly connect the digital economy through blockchain interoperability. The use cases for Wanchain's network are vast, and they include decentralized financial services, supply chain logistics, medical data sharing and security, digital ID management, and more.
With the recently released Wanchain 2.0, it is now possible to transfer Ether cross-chain using Wanchain's Ethereum Mapping Token, WETH.
Ethereum interoperability is just the start, though, and it's expected that cross-chain support for Bitcoin and a couple of ERC-20 tokens will follow before the end of 2018.
Komodo is a fork of Zcash that uses the same zk-snark cryptography to hide information about transaction participants and amounts being sent. Functional privacy coins aren't unique (there are a handful on this list) but Komodo does have some unique features.
For one, Komodo was the first ever decentralized initial coin offering. Moreover, Komodo helps other developers to build their own customizable blockchain solutions, from building and securing independent blockchains and launching decentralized ICOs, to integrating projects into the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
KMD would already qualify as a working product for its anonymity features on digital payments, but add the end-to-end blockchain building solution and it's clear that Komodo is making meaningful contributions to the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Ardor is a scalable blockchain platform that allows businesses to create their own child chains and tokens with relative ease. This helps keep blockchain bloat to a minimum and provides multiple transactional tokens without sacrificing core chain transactions. It's also a remarkably energy efficient platform that uses Proof-of-Stake to power consensus.
Ardor launched its mainnet on January 1, 2018 after a full year in testnet status. Its core features are largely in place, with the roadmap set to improve things like scalability and snapshotting.
The Blockchain-as-a-Service-platform hosts a few projects of its own, including the Ignis ICO, which was the first child chain on the mainnet.
Huobi is a digital asset exchange platform founded back in 2013, now offering well over 250 different trading pairs. The Huobi Token, meanwhile, is an ERC-20 token that is used on the exchange for discounts on trading fees of up to 50%.
In addition, 20% of the income generated on the Huboi Pro trading platform is used to buy back HT on the open market.
Unlike most buyback programs, the main purpose of Huobi's program isn't to reduce the circulating supply of HT. Rather, the HT that is bought back goes into a Huobi Investor Protection Fund, which is used to compensate Huobi users if they lose coins or tokens on the platform, as well as to ensure market stability and protect investor interests.
ZenCash (ZEN)
ZenCash is yet another privacy coin with a working product in the Top 100, originally launched in the first half of 2017.
What makes ZenCash unique is that it's the first blockchain with Transport Layer Security (TLS) integration for node encryption, making communication on the ZenCash network both private and highly secure.
Some other interesting parts of the ZenCash product include Tor nodes and built-in chat messaging services. In the future, the ZenCash team will deliver a DAO Treasury Protocol-level Voting System as well as a scalability solution to handle greater transaction volume.
PIVX is another privacy coin that focuses on keeping users and their associated transactions hidden under a cloak of secrecy. The project also tries to keep transactions as fast and fee-less as possible, something not all privacy platforms can boast about.
PIVX launched in January 2016. The coin is currently spendable and delivers the privacy features it promises, though it's not yet a widely accepted currency by merchants.
Future plans for PIVX include governance functions to engage the community, wallet voting, and its own zPIV decentralized exchange.
Kyber Network (KNC)
Kyber Network launched their mainnet in Q1 2018, enabling instantaneous and secure inter-token settlements through a Decentralized Liquidity Network.
It's currently possible to swap ERC-20 tokens on the network with just a few mouse clicks, giving it some basic functionality that is already being used to improve liquidity for Ethereum tokens.
In the future, however, Kyber Network will expand its functionality significantly in an effort to seamlessly connect dapps, DEXes, protocols, payment systems, token teams, investors, fund managers, and digital wallets.
Bancor (BNT)
Bancor is a liquidity provider that enables users to exchange tokens without the need for a third-party to be involved in financing the transaction.
Gaining liquidity is incredibly important for young cryptocurrency projects, as a lack of liquidity makes it risky for investors to buy a considerable amount of a given coin or token, knowing that it might be exceedingly difficult to sell should they wish to.
Bancor's technology makes it possible to convert one token to another, so that investors can be confident that they won't be stuck involuntarily holding a cryptocurrency that they want to sell. This functionality makes the Bancor Liquidity Network one of the most promising working products on this list, and one that has already achieved a good deal of adoption.
Loom Network (LOOM)
Loom Network is still less than a year old, having been founded in October 2017. However, they have accomplished a lot in that short time span, including having launched numerous tools to help software developers learn how to build blockchain solutions.
The most important of these tools — and Loom's biggest working product — is the Loom software development kit (SDK).
However, Loom Network is far more than just a simple blockchain coding academy. It is also a production-ready scalability solution for Ethereum, as the Loom developer toolkit helps programmers to build highly scalable dapps which connect to the Ethereum blockchain through special side chains called DappChains.
The project may still be in its infancy, but Loom Network is already contributing more utility to the cryptocurrency ecosystem than the vast majority of other cryptocurrency projects.
Polymath wants to be the world's go-to resource for security tokens on the blockchain. What Ethereum did for tokens, Polymath will do for securities.
The advantages of this are enormous, but the Polymath team likes to point to 24/7 market access, the elimination of middlemen, and trading access for 2 billion unbanked people around the world as the chief benefits of their efforts.
The Polymath platform launched in October 2017, and has since released a new security token every week, attracting investors and traders alike. It's not as exciting of a project as some other blockchain tech, but it's delivering on its promises with a working product.
Bibox Token (BIX)
Bibox is a encrypted digital asset exchange whose primary differentiator from other crypto exchanges is that it integrates AI technology.
The purpose of the AI is to help Bibox's traders, which it does by providing quantitative computation and analysis of trading activity, personalized risk allocation strategy, speech recognition, and objective analysis of the various coins and tokens listed on the exchange.
The Bibox exchange first launched back in November 2017. It has operation centers in the US, Canada, mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Estonia. BIX token holders receive 20% of the exchange profits, and also get discounts on trading fees, similar to Binance.
https://www.investinblockchain.com/top-cryptocurrencies-working-products/
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Navigating Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP: How Google Is Quietly Making Blockchains Searchable
It's a balmy 80 degrees on a mid-December day in Singapore, and something is puzzling Allen Day, a 41-year-old data scientist. Using the tools he has developed at Google, he can see a mysterious concerted usage of artificial intelligence on the blockchain for Ethereum. Ether is the world's third-largest cryptocurrency (after bitcoin and XRP), and it still sports a market cap of some $11 billion despite losing 83% of its value in 2018. Peering into its blockchain—the distributed database of transactions underpinning the cryptocurrency—Day detects a "whole bunch" of "autonomous agents" moving funds around "in an automated fashion." While he doesn't yet know who has created the AI, he suspects they could be the agents of cryptocurrency exchanges trading among themselves in order to artificially inflate ether's price.
"It's not really just single agents doing things on their own," Day says from Google's Asia-Pacific headquarters. "They're forming with other agents to have some larger group effect."
Day's official title is senior developer advocate for Google Cloud, but he describes his role as "customer zero" for the company's cloud computing efforts. As such it's his job to anticipate demand before a product even exists, and he thinks making the blockchain more accessible is the next big thing. Just as Google enabled (and ultimately profited) from making the internet more usable 20 years ago, its next billions may come from shining a bright light on blockchains. If Day is successful, the world will know whether blockchain's real usage is living up to its hype.
Danish researcher Thomas Silkjaer is using Google's BigQuery to map publicly available information about XRP cryptocurrency addresses. The craters represent some of cryptocurrency's largest exchanges.
Last year Day and a small team of open-source developers quietly began loading data for the entire Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains into Google's big-data analytics platform, BigQuery. Then, with the help of lead developer Evgeny Medvedev, he created a suite of sophisticated software to search the data.
In spite of a total lack of publicity, word of the project spread quickly among crypto-minded coders. In the past year, more than 500 projects were created using the new tools, trying to do everything from predicting the price of bitcoin to analyzing wealth disparity among ether holders.
When it comes to cloud computing, Google is far behind Amazon and Microsoft. Last year Google pocketed an estimated $3 billion in revenue from cloud services. Amazon and Microsoft, meanwhile, generated about $27 billion and $10 billion, respectively.
Day is hoping that his project, known as Blockchain ETL (extract, transform, load), will help even the playing field. But even here Google is trying to catch up. Amazon entered blockchain in a big way in 2018 with a suite of tools for building and managing distributed ledgers. Microsoft got into the space in 2015, when it released tools for Ethereum's blockchain. It now hosts a range of services as part of its Azure Blockchain Workbench. But while Amazon and Microsoft are focusing on making it easier to build blockchain apps, Day is focusing on exposing how blockchains are actually being used, and by whom.
"In the future, moving more economic activity on chain won't just require a consensus level of trust," says Day, referring to the core validating mechanism of blockchain technology. "It will require having some trust in knowing about who it is you're actually interacting with." In other words, if blockchain is to go mainstream, some of its beloved anonymity features will have to be abandoned.
A native of Placer County, California, Day got his first computer at the age of 5 and a few years later started writing simple programs. A fascination with volcanoes and dinosaurs turned his interest to life sciences, and he ultimately graduated from the University of Oregon with a dual degree in biology and Mandarin in 2000. From there he headed to UCLA to pursue a doctorate in human genetics and helped build a computer program to browse the genome.
It was at UCLA where Day began relying on distributed computing, a concept that is core to blockchains, which store their data on a large network of individual computers. In the early 2000s Day needed to analyze the massive amounts of data that make up the human genome. To solve this problem he hooked many small computers together, vastly increasing their power.
"Distributed-systems technology has been in my tool kit for a while," Day says. "I could see there were interesting characteristics of blockchains that could run a global supercomputer."
Hired in 2016 to work in the health and bioinformatics areas of Google, Day segued to blockchains, the hottest distributed-computing effort on the planet. But the talents he had honed—sequencing genomes for infectious diseases in real time and using AI to increase rice yields—were not easily applied to decoding blockchain.
Before Day and Medvedev released their tools, just searching a blockchain required specialized software called "block explorers," which let users hunt only for specific transactions, each labeled with a unique tangle of 26-plus alphanumeric characters. Google's Blockchain ETL, by contrast, lets users make more generalized searches of entire ecosystems of transactions.
To demonstrate how customers could use Blockchain ETL to make improvements to the crypto economy, Day has used his tools to examine the so-called hard fork, or an irrevocable split in a blockchain database, that created a new cryptocurrency—bitcoin cash—from bitcoin in the summer of 2017.
Google Cloud developer advocate Allen Day presents his early cryptocurrency work at Google's Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore in August 2018. DORJEE SUN / PERLIN
This particular split was the result of a Hatfield and McCoy "war" within the bitcoin community between a group who wanted to leave bitcoin as it was and another who wanted to develop a currency that, like cash, was cheaper and faster to use for small payments. Using Google's BigQuery, Day discovered that bitcoin cash, rather than increasing so-called micro-transactions, as the defecting developers claimed, was actually being hoarded among big holders of bitcoin cash. "I'm very interested to quantify what's happening so that we can see where the legitimate use cases are for blockchain," Day says. "Then we can move to the next use case and develop out what these technologies are really appropriate for."
Day's work is inspiring others. Tomasz Kolinko is a Warsaw-based programmer and the creator of a service that analyzes smart contracts, a feature of certain blockchains that is designed to transparently enforce contractual obligations like collateralized loans but with less reliance on third parties, like lawyers. Kolinko was frustrated with his blockchain queries.
In December, Kolinko met Day at a hackathon in Singapore. Within a month of the meeting, Kolinko was using Google's tools to search for a smart contract feature called a "selfdestruct," designed to limit a contract's life span. Using his own software in conjunction with Day's, Kolinko took 23 seconds to search 1.2 million smart contracts—something that would have taken hours before. The result: Almost 700 of them had left open a selfdestruct feature that would let anyone instantly kill the smart contract, whether that person was authorized or not. "In the past you couldn't just easily check all the contracts that were using it," Kolinko says. "This tool is both the most scary and most inspiring I've ever built."
Day is now expanding beyond bitcoin and ethereum. Litecoin, zcash, dash, bitcoin cash, ethereum classic and dogecoin are being added to BigQuery. Independent developers are loading their own crypto data sets on Google. Last August, a Dutch developer named Wietse Wind uploaded the entire 400 gigabytes of transaction data from Ripple's XRP blockchain, another popular cryptocurrency, into BigQuery. Wind's data, which he updates every 15 minutes, prompted a Danish designer named Thomas Silkjaer to create a heat map of crypto flows. The resulting colorful orb reveals at a glance more than a million crypto wallets, including big exchanges like Binance and London's crypto debit card startup Wirex, which are neck deep in XRP transactions.
"Google has been a bit of a sleeping giant in blockchain," says BlockApps CEO Kieren James-Lubin, who is partnering with Google to sell enterprise blockchain apps. In addition to Day's work, Google has filed numerous patents related to the blockchain, including one in 2018 to use a "lattice" of interoperating blockchains to increase security, a big deal in a world where untold millions of crypto have been stolen by hackers. The company is also pushing its developers to build apps on the Ethereum blockchain, and Google's venture arm, GV, has made a number of significant investments in crypto startups.
The giant, it seems, is waking up.
Reach Michael del Castillo at [email protected]. Cover image by Munshi Ahmed.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2019/02/04/navigating-bitcoin-ethereum-xrp-how-google-is-quietly-making-blockchains-searchable/#5105408f4248
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A write up on a few coins i'm invested in.
Hey guys, figured I'd contribute to this new community with some of my personal investments and a short summary of why I believe in them, their current price and my price predictions. Feel free to criticize and discuss!
APPC (Appcoin) Current price 2.88(4.49 ATH)
What?: Appcoin is a brand new coin that's been on the market for about a week(Only on binance). Appcoins purpose is to serve as a form of payment for Ads and Market billing on the App market- Apptoide which currently serves as a marketplace for 200m+ Users(More so popular in SE Asia).
Why?: Appcoin was released in the midst of a total market crash regarding the south Korean FUD, getting it at this current price is a steal. Unlike most coins Appcoin already has a platform for it to be used on and can be implemented very soon. Keep in mind the Mobile App industry is a 77 Billion dollar industry. Further more the market cap has been fixed on CMC, since the devs have had a massive coin burn, I give it a week until this coin enters the top 100. Also people will be able to buy APPC on apptoide directly with Debit/CC, meaning that you could buy APPC and transfer it to an exchange and sell/trade it rather than use lets say Coinbase for bitcoin to trade on exchanges.
Price Prediction: I'm gonna go ahead and say come this friday Appcoin will be conservatively valued at about 4.00 followed by 5-6$ end of January and an optimistic range of 7-10 dollars in February.
XLM* (Stellar) **Current price .61$(.94 ATH)
What?: (Copied from their subreddit) Stellar is an open-source, distributed payments infrastructure. It is a leapfrog technology that connects people, payment systems, and banks with a focus on the developing world. It lets you facilitate multi-currency and asset transactions quickly, reliably, and for a fraction of a penny by using a crypto-asset called Lumens (XLM) as a bridge
Why?: I'm in a bit of a rush, but there is a LOT of info on the net about stellar, Main things I think are huge for it are: IBM support and involvement, ICOS accepting Stellar. There is so much more but one thing I find amazing about stellar is it's team & Advisors: Inventor of ripple, founder of Ripple, lots of the team come from the company STRIPE and so much more.
Price prediction As it almost hit the 1$ mark recently, I see it hitting a steady .80-.90 Come a week or two. I think End of febuary we'll see a 1.50/75$ price, but hey i'm just being optimistic. The coin is already ranked 8th on CMC.
XRB(Raiblocks) Current price 19.97$(37$ ATH)
What?:(Copied from their FAQ): RaiBlocks is a trustless, low-latency cryptocurrency that utilizes a novel block-lattice architecture, where each account has its own blockchain and achieves consensus via delegated Proof of Stake voting. Offers feeless, instantaneous transactions, as well as unlimited scalability, making RaiBlocks ideal for peer-to-peer transactions. The network requires minimal resources, no high-power mining hardware, and can process high transaction throughput**
Why?: I don't really need to shill this one, but if you havent gotten on the XRB train hop on now while you can. Raiblocks has already made a mobile wallet, will be rolling out on Binanace soon(Has been held hostage in bitgrail and mercatox), has an amazing Dev team, A rebrand coming, ZERO fees and it's price right now is a steal for what it'll be worth in a month. Seriously it's currently around 45% of it's ATH, don't let this be the coin you kick yourself for not getting in on- its not too late.
Price prediction Gonna say we'll see a 30-35$ end of this month and end of February beginning of March we'll see a modest 50-60$. EOY 100$.
Other coins I'm currently invested in are as follows: VEN, REQ, POE, SC, and KIN which ill do another little write up on tomorrow if i have time.
Honorable mention/ side note: My little low risk high reward shitcoin is KIN, the fact that it's made by KIK and will be used in a similar manner to APPC's purpose I think it's worth a small investment at it's price being 0.0006$ right now. For those who don't know KIK is a mobile messenger app used by 300m+ people worldwide, the coin would be used as currency to send $ or purchase stickers. Don't think there's a market for stickers? In 2016 they made 270 MILLION alone on just sticker sales. The coin isn't anything special but it's a nice little something to throw some change in and bury it away for half a year.
Anyways thanks for reading feel free to follow my twitter: https://twitter.com/Crypto_Kanye
submitted by Yeezus_aint_jesus to Cryptonions [link] [comments]
Bank of England adviser tells Bloomberg that cryptos fail fundamental financial tests
Crypto Market Recap
Cryptocurrencies are mostly higher in midday trading as the price of Bitcoin (BTC) is 0.90% higher in the last 24 hours to USD$3,612.13. Bitcoin Cash (BCH), EOS (EOS), and TRON (TRX) are leading the gains in major coin today, all up more than 5% to USD$129.51, USD$2.48, and USD$0.026568, respectively. Ripple (XRP) and Binance Coin (BNB) are lagging major coin in today's trading, meanwhile, down 0.29% and 0.71% to USD$0.319089 and USD$6.49, respectively.
Crypto Developments in Financial Services
US-based crypto exchange Coinbase has launched cross-border wire transfer services via the SWIFT network for high-volume Coinbase Pro and Prime users in Europe and Asia, according to an official announcement Tuesday. Additionally, the post details that, "select Coinbase Prime customers globally will also have access to our US and European over-the-counter (OTC) trading desks and Coinbase Custody." Coinbase Custody is a service mainly for institutional customers that stores large amounts of cryptocurrencies.
The London Stock Exchange Group confirmed in an official post on Tuesday that its Millennium Exchange trade-matching technology will power AAX, a new crypto exchange venture launched by Hong Kong-based ATOM Group. AAX will reportedly launch in the first half of 2019 and aims to provide a, "scalable," and, "compliant," cryptocurrency trading platform, according to ATOM Group. AAX will be the first cryptocurrency exchange to use the London Stock Exchange Group's Millennium Exchange trade-matching technology.
Bakkt, the long-awaited cryptocurrency platform venture by the Intercontinental Exchange, announced in a Tweet on Tuesday that is in search of a number of high-ranking positions. The tweet by Bakkt contains vacancies for eight different high-ranking positions, including a director of blockchain engineering, a blockchain developer, a director of security engineering, and a senior full stack engineer. Bakkt is hiring for US positions in Atlanta and New York City and international positions in Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, London, Tel Aviv, and Singapore.
Crypto Regulatory Environment
A new report published by the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) finds that problems in Bitcoin (BTC) will only be solved if the network departs from a proof-of-work (PoW) verification protocol. As per the report published on Monday, "Simple calculations suggest that once block rewards are zero, it could take months before a Bitcoin payment is final, unless new technologies are deployed to speed up payment finality." The report goes on to discuss that, although second-layer network solutions like the Lightning Network may help scaling, "the only fundamental remedy would be to depart from proof-of-work." The report notes that such a departure from PoW would likely come from social coordination or institutionalization.
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Dutch central bank, and the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets, the country's financial regulator, are planning a regulatory framework that could introduce a licensing scheme for domestic cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet service providers. A joint report published by the two Dutch authorities cites, "high financial crime risks," as reasoning for the licensing scheme pertaining to domestic cryptocurrency industry.
Huw van Steenis, a senior adviser to Bank of England (BOE) Governor Mark Carney, said in an interview with Bloomberg on Monday that cryptocurrencies fail fundamental financial tests. Van Steenis, who boasts tenure at Schroders and Morgan Stanley, responded when asked about the potential threat cryptos pose to economic stability, "I'm not so worried about cryptocurrencies. They fail the basic tests of financial services. They're not a great unit of exchange, they don't hold value, and they're slower."
General Crypto News
A report published by crypto analytics firm Diar indicates that on-chain Ethereum (ETH) transaction value hit an all-time high in December 2018. Users conducted transactions worth 115mm ETH in December 2018, the largest monthly total excluding activity following a hard fork caused by a DAO hack in 2016. The US dollar value of ETH on-chain transactions in December 2018, however, recorded a 22-month low of USD$815mm, down from USD$1.1bn a year prior.
https://bitcoinist.com/bank-of-england-cryptocurrencies-threat-not-worried/ https://bitcoinist.com/bis-bitcoin-depart-proof-of-work/ https://bitcoinist.com/london-stock-exchange-confirms-tech-sale-to-hong-kong-cryptocurrency-exchange/ https://blog.coinbase.com/announcing-new-features-and-services-to-make-trading-easier-for-high-volume-customers-in-asia-and-57a30ad08e2f?gi=fa5d40da3c9f https://coin360.io/ https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://cointelegraph.com/news/a-glimpse-into-the-future-what-happens-when-there-are-no-more-bitcoin-to-mine https://cointelegraph.com/news/bank-of-england-adviser-cryptocurrencies-fail-basic-financial-tests-lack-value https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-on-chain-transaction-volume-reached-record-high-in-december-2018 https://cointelegraph.com/news/major-central-bank-institution-bis-bitcoin-must-depart-from-proof-of-work https://cointelegraph.com/news/nyse-operators-long-awaited-crypto-platform-bakkt-announces-new-key-vacancies https://cointelegraph.com/news/vulnerability-is-found-in-constantinople-hours-after-eth-devs-call-it-least-eventful-hard-fork https://twitter.com/Bakkt/status/1087729490522972163 https://www.bakkt.com/careers https://www.bis.org/publ/work765.htm https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-adds-cross-border-wire-transfers-for-whales-in-europe-and-asia https://www.coindesk.com/dutch-financial-authorities-plan-licensing-scheme-for-crypto-exchanges https://www.coindesk.com/london-stock-exchanges-trading-tech-to-power-new-crypto-exchange https://www.dnb.nl/en/binaries/Crypto%20Uk\_tcm47-381603.pdf?2019012109 https://www.lseg.com/resources/media-centre/press-releases/lseg-technology-selected-atom-power-aax-digital-asset-exchange https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/01/22/binance-crypto-and-blockchain-event-in-singapore-a-resounding-success/
I thought this might be of real help for the ones that are just joining crypto and still want to read.
Let's face it: there are a lot of cryptocurrencies out there, with new ones coming out almost daily and old ones disappearing seemingly just as fast as they appeared. It's easy to get overwhelmed.
If you are new to cryptocurrencies, this is an excellent starting point to learn about each of the top 50 cryptocurrencies (by market cap). Even if you're a crypto veteran, this is a great resource to reference if you ever get any of the top 50 confused, or if you want to read more about a new coin which has joined the ranks.
Our hope is to point you in the right direction, spur your interest to do more research, and steer you away from the potential scams out there (And yes, there are potential scam coins in the top 50!)
Here at Invest In Blockchain, we are obsessed with researching the internet for all things crypto. The information found in this post is the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking research by me and other writers on our team.
Note that this list is constantly changing and I will do my best to keep it up-to-date, but the top 50 moves almost daily! Please refer to coinmarketcap.com for the latest information on the top 50 cryptocurrencies and their prices.
(Information accurate as of May 23, 2018)
#1 – Bitcoin (BTC)
The king of the crypto world, Bitcoin is now a household name; to many, it is synonymous with "cryptocurrency". Its purpose is to provide a peer-to-peer electronic version of cash to allow payments to be sent online without the need for a third party (such as Mastercard).
The rapid rise in Bitcoin's price has brought about an explosion of new Bitcoin investors. With the huge increase in interest has come a rise in merchants accepting Bitcoin as a legitimate form of payment. Bitcoin is fast moving towards its goal of becoming a currency accepted worldwide.
Bitcoin's development is led by Bitcoin Core developer Wladimir J. van der Laan, who took over the role on April 8, 2014. Bitcoin's changes are decided democratically by the community.
For an in-depth look at Bitcoin, including an explanation of Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin's history, an analysis of Bitcoins' value and a description on how bitcoin actually works, see our comprehensive guide "What is Bitcoin? Everything You Need to Know About Bitcoin, Explained".
For a more detailed description of Bitcoin's economics, what makes money and how Bitcoin works in the economy as a whole see: "Bitcoin Explained" and "Bitcoin is a Deflationary Currency".
#2 – Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum is the revolutionary platform which brought the concept of "smart contracts" to the blockchain. First released to the world in July 2015 by then 21-year-old Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum has quickly risen from obscurity to cryptocurrency celebrity status.
Buterin has a full team of developers working behind him to further develop the Ethereum platform. For more background information on Buterin, read our article, "Vitalik Buterin: The Face of Blockchain".
Ethereum has the ability to process transactions quickly and cheaply over the blockchain similar to Bitcoin, but also has the ability to run smart contracts. For future reading on smart contracts, see "What's the Difference Between Bitcoin and Ethereum"; but for now, think automated processes which can do just about anything.
For further reading on Ethereum, including an analysis of the platform's strengths and future prospects, read "What is Ethereum, Everything You Need to Know Explained".
#3 – Ripple (XRP)
Ripple aims to improve the speed of financial transactions, specifically international banking transactions.
Anyone who has ever sent money internationally knows that today it currently takes anywhere from 3-5 business days for a transaction to clear. It is faster to withdraw money, get on a plane, and fly it to your destination than it is to send it electronically! Not to mention you will be paying exorbitant transaction fees — usually somewhere around 6% but it can vary depending on the financial institution.
Ripple's goal is to make these transactions fast (it only takes around 4 seconds for a transaction to clear) and cheap.
The Ripple team currently comprises over 150 people, making it one of the biggest in the cryptocurrency world. They are led by CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who has an impressive resume which includes high positions in other organizations such as Yahoo and Hightail.
Check out "What is Ripple" for more information, including a closer look at what they do, controversies and future prospects.
#4 – Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
Bitcoin Cash was created on August 1, 2017 after a "hard fork" of the Bitcoin blockchain. For years, a debate has been raging in the Bitcoin community on whether to increase the block size in the hope of alleviating some of the network bottleneck which has plagued Bitcoin due to its increased popularity.
Because no agreement could be reached, the original Bitcoin blockchain was forked, leaving the Bitcoin chain untouched and in effect creating a new blockchain which would allow developers to modify some of Bitcoin's original programmed features.
Generally speaking, the argument for Bitcoin Cash is that by allowing the block size to increase, more transactions can be processed in the same amount of time. Those opposed to Bitcoin Cash argue that increasing the block size will increase the storage and bandwidth requirement, and in effect will price out normal users. This could lead to increased centralization, the exact thing Bitcoin set out to avoid.
Bitcoin Cash does not have one single development team like Bitcoin. There are now multiple independent teams of developers.
Read "What is Bitcoin Cash" for more information. You can also check out their reddit and official webpage.
#5 – EOS (EOS)
Billed as a potential "Ethereum Killer", EOS proposes improvements that can challenge Ethereum as the dominant smart contract platform. One main issue EOS looks to improve is the scalability problems which has plagued the Ethereum network during times of high transaction volume, specifically during popular ICOs.
A perhaps more profound difference EOS has, compared to Ethereum, is the way in which you use the EOS network. With Ethereum, every time you make modifications or interact with the network, you need to pay a fee. With EOS, the creator of the DAPP (decentralized app) can foot the bill, while the user pays nothing. And if you think about it, this makes sense. Would you want to have to pay every time you post something on social media? No, of course not!
In addition to this, EOS has a few other technical advantages over Ethereum such as delegated proof of stake and other protocol changes. Just know that EOS has some serious power under the hood to back up the claim of "Ethereum Killer".
EOS was created by Dan Larrimer who is no stranger to blockchain or start ups. He has been the driving force behind multiple successful projects in the past such as BitShares, Graphene and Steem.
For more information on EOS such as how and where to buy EOS tokens, EOS's vision and potential challenges, see "What is EOS".
#6 – Litecoin (LTC)
Similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin is a peer-to-peer transaction platform designed to be used as a digital currency. Due to some notable technical improvements, Litecoin is able to handle more transactions at lower costs. Litecoin has been designed to process the small transactions we make daily.
Litecoin is sometimes referred to "digital silver" while Bitcoin is known as "digital gold". This is because traditionally silver was used for small daily transactions while gold was used as a store of wealth and was not used in everyday life.
The Litecoin blockchain is a fork from the Bitcoin chain. It was initially launched in 2011 when its founder, Charlie Lee, was still working for Google. Well-known as a cryptocurrency expert, Charlie Lee is backed by a strong development team who appear to be achieving what they set out to do. They have recently achieved a very notable accomplishment with the first successful atomic swap.
For an in-depth discussion on what Litecoin does, how it is different than Bitcoin and the team backing up the development, see "What is Litecoin".
#7 – Cardano (ADA)
Cardano is a smart contract-focused blockchain. It was originally released under the name Input Output Hong Kong by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood, a few of the early team members of Ethereum, and later rebranded into Cardano.
Cardano is trying to fix some of the largest problems the cryptocurrency world which have been causing ongoing issues for years such as scalability issues and democratized voting.
They have the potential to challenge Ethereum's dominance in the smart contract world. Cardano is developing their own programing language similar to Ethereum; however, they are focusing more heavily on being interoperable between other cryptocurrencies.
While some cryptocurrencies are all bite but no bark, Cardano is quite the opposite. They are quietly focusing on a strong software which will be completely open-source.
Cardano's team comprises some of the best minds in the industry, and they seek to create a strong foundation which others can build upon for years to come.
For up-to-date information on Cardano's status see their Reddit page or official website. You can also read our article "What is Cardano" to learn more about them.
#8 – Stellar Lumens (XLM)
In a nutshell, Stellar Lumens seeks to use blockchain to make very fast international payments with small fees. The network can handle thousands of transactions a second with only a 3-5 second confirmation time.
As you may know, Bitcoin can sometimes take 10-15 minutes for a transaction to confirm, can only handle a few transactions a second and, in turn, has very high transaction fees.
If this sounds a lot like Ripple, you're right! Stellar Lumens was based off of the Ripple protocol) and is attempting to do similar things. Some of Stellar Lumens' main uses will be for making small daily payments (micropayments), sending money internationally, and mobile payments.
Stellar Lumens is focusing on the developing world and, more specifically, the multi-billion dollar industry of migrant workers who send money back to their family in impoverished countries.
The Stellar Lumens team is led by Jed McCaleb, who has worked in numerous successful startups in the past such as eDonkey, Overnet, Ripple, and the infamous Mt. Gox.
For more information on Stellar Lumens, including the history and what sets Stellar Lumens apart, see "What are Stellar Lumens". You can also learn about the differences between Stellar Lumens and Ripple.
#9 – TRON (TRX)
As stated in TRON's whitepaper, "TRON is an attempt to heal the internet". The TRON founders believe that the internet has deviated from its original intention of allowing people to freely create content and post as they please; instead, the internet has been taken over by huge corporations like Amazon, Google, Alibaba and others.
TRON is attempting to take the internet back from these companies by constructing a free content entertainment system. This will enable users to freely store, publish and own data, giving them the power to decide where and how to share.
The project is led by founder Justin Sun, who has been listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 list twice (in 2015 and 2017). In addition, Sun is a protégé of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group, China's former Ripple representative and the founder of Peiwo APP.
Sun has assembled a strong team with heavy hitters including Binshen Tang (founder of Clash of King), Wei Dai (founder of ofo, the biggest shared bicycles provider in China), and Chaoyong Wang (founder of ChinaEquity Group). Sun has also secured the support of a few notable angel investors such as Xue Manzi.
For up-to-date information on Tron and further discussion of the technology and team, see "What is Tron" and their website.
#10 – IOTA (MIOTA)
IOTA has seen many of the issues Bitcoin and Ethereum have with the POW (proof-of-work) and POI (proof-of-importance) models and looks to improve them with their revolutionary transaction validation network simply called "tangle".
When issuing a transaction in IOTA, you validate 2 previous transactions. This means you no longer outsource validation to miners which requires wasteful amounts of computing power and usually a large stake of coins. These required resources are, in effect, centralizing the currencies which many believe were created to be decentralized in the first place.
With IOTA, the more active a ledger is, the more validation there is. In other words, the more people who use it, the faster it gets. You don't have to subsidize miners, so there are no fees on transactions. That's right: zero.
The IOTA team has been actively developing blockchain technology since 2011, and created the IOTA foundation and company in 2016. Since its emergence, the team has been continuously growing, attracting exceptional talent from around the world.
For more information on IOTA's team and their revolutionary"tangle" technology, check out "What is IOTA".
#11 – NEO (NEO)
A leading platform for smart contracts and sometimes referred to as "China's Ethereum". NEO (formally Antshares) hopes to digitize many types of assets which were formerly kept in more traditional means, and therefore make it possible to use them in smart contracts.
To imagine a potential use case of NEO, think digitizing the title to a house into a smart asset, and then setting up that asset to automatically transfer to another person after payment for the house has been received. This would be, in effect, a simple smart contract.
NEO founder Da Hongfei is a leading figure in the cryptocurrency world and has worked on numerous blockchain projects in the past. The development team consists of 6 in-house investors and a large community of third-party developers.
For a complete overview of NEO, including the team, history and competitive analysis, check out "What is NEO".
#12 – Dash (DASH)
Dash (which comes from 'digital cash') aims to be the most user-friendly and scalable cryptocurrency in the world. It has the ability to send funds instantly confirmed by "double-send-proof" security with the added functionality of erasable transaction history and the ability to send transactions anonymously.
Like Bitcoin, Dash is meant to be used as a digital currency but has some added values such as much faster transaction times and lower fees. For a slightly higher fee, Dash has the added function of "instant send" which allows transactions to be confirmed almost instantly. This is one of the main selling points of Dash because many believe that this feature would allow it to be used in brick and mortar establishments.
The Dash development team consists of over 50 members and is led by former financial services professional Evan Duffield.
For the latest on Dash, see their official website and reddit page. You can also read "What is Dash" to learn more about the project.
#13 – Monero (XMR)
Monero is a digital currency designed to be used as a completely anonymous payment system.
A common misconception with Bitcoin is that it is completely anonymous. In reality, all payments processed on the Bitcoin network are recorded on a public ledger (blockchain), so Bitcoin is actually only partially anonymous or "pseudonymous".
This means that you can, in theory, trace back every transaction a coin has been involved with from its creation. Though users aren't able to inherently link the public key on the blockchain with the private keys used to store the coins themselves, there will always exist a correlation between the two.
Monero has solved this problem by implementing cryptonic hashing of receiving addresses, therefore separating the coin from the address it is going to. This can be hugely valuable for anyone wishing to conceal their purchases.
The Monero development team consists of 7 core developers, only two of which are publicly known. There have been over 200 additional contributors to the project and software updates are implemented every six months or so.
To learn more about Monero including its competitors and challenges, read "What is Monero". If you're thinking about investing in Monero, check out our opinion piece "Should You Invest In Monero?".
#14 – Tether (UDST)
Tether is a cryptocurrency token issued on the Bitcoin blockchain. Each Tether coin is allegedly backed by one US Dollar. The goal is to facilitate transactions with a rate fixed to the USD.
Amongst other things, Tether looks to fix some of the legal issues which can arise when trading cryptocurrencies and it aims to protect people from market volatility.
Tether has faced controversy regarding their business model, and some consider it a scam. More info can be seen on reddit posts such as this.
#15 – NEM (XEM)
NEM (New Economy Movement) is the world's first proof-of-importance (POI) enterprise based on blockchain technology. With a focus on business use cases, the software was built from the ground up with adaptability in mind. NEM's goal is for companies to use their "smart asset system" to implement customizable blockchains. A smart asset can be almost anything: a cryptocurrency token, a business's stock or a company's invoicing and records.
Some potential use cases for NEM's technology include: voting, crowdfunding, stock ownership, keeping secure records, loyalty rewards point programs, mobile payments and escrow services. A list of NEM's use cases can be found here.
The development of NEM is monitored by the Singapore-based NEM Foundation.
For more information on what NEM does and what sets NEM apart from its competitors, see "What is NEM".
#16 – VeChain (VEN)
As described in VeChain's development plan, the organization's purpose is to build "a trustfree and distributed business ecosystem based on the Blockchain technology self-circulated and expanding".
They plan to do this by creating an efficient trustless business ecosystem to significantly reduce the wasteful information transfer systems of today.
Some of the areas and industries the VeChain platform is focusing on include eliminating counterfeiting in the fashion and luxury industry, food safety tracking systems, digitizing maintenance in the car industry and many other global supply chain processes.
For more information on VeChain, see their reddit and website. Read "What is Vechain" to learn about the project, and our investment opinion piece "5 Reasons to Invest in Vechain".
#17 – Ethereum Classic (ETC)
Ethereum Classic came about after a hard fork of Ethereum in 2016. The fork was a result of the infamous DOA hack where around 50 million dollars worth of Ethereum was stolen due to what was considered an oversight in the code.
The blockchain was forked in order to recoup the losses from this attack, but a small portion of the community did not wish to go back and change the original blockchain. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and subsequently the development team chose to go with the hard fork and work on what is now "Ethereum" today.
There is a lot of ongoing controversy with Ethereum Classic which can be better described on this reddit thread. For an in-depth discussion of Ethereum Classic, see"What is Ethereum Classic".
#18 – Binance Coin (BNB)
Binance Coin is the coin used to facilitate operations on the Binance platform, a cryptocurrency exchange that is capable of processing 1.4 million orders per second. The name "Binance" is derived from the combination of the terms "binary" and "finance", referring to the integration of digital technology and finance.
The BNB coin is used to pay exchange fees, withdrawal fees, listing fees, and all other possible transaction expenses on the Binance platform. In order to incentivize new users to do their cryptocurrency trading on Binance, the team is offering discounts when BNB is used to pay fees. The discount will be 50% in the first year, 25% in the second, 12.5% in the third, and 6.25% in the fourth year before the discount ends.
Binance was primarily marketed to Chinese cryptocurrency investors at first, but they also have English, Korean, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Russian versions of the platform.
For a deeper look into Binance, you can read the whitepaper or check out the trading platform here.
#19 – Bytecoin (BCN)
Bytecoin describes itself as "a private, decentralized cryptocurrency with with open source code that allows everyone to take part in the Bytecoin network development". It is the first coin to offer untraceable payments, unlinkable transactions and resistance to blockchain analysis.
With Bytecoin, it is possible to send instant transactions anywhere around the world, which are totally untraceable and don't require additional fees.
Bytecoin's development is community-driven and a list of all of the different community websites can be found here.
For more information on Bytecoin, see: "What is Bytecoin".
#20 – QTUM (QTUM)
QTUM (pronounced Quantum) is an open-source value transfer platform which focuses on mobile decentralized apps or Dapps. QTUM is the world's first proof-of-stake smart contracts platform.
QTUM is meant to be used as both a value transfer protocol, like Bitcoin, and a smart contract platform, like Ethereum. They have a number of technical innovations which some consider to make it superior to Ethereum, and they are focusing on mobile applications.
The platform itself is very new. It came about in March 2017, after a highly successful crowdfunding campaign raised them nearly 16 million dollars in only 5 days. QTUM has a small but strong development team and an impressive list of investors backing their ideas. QTUM's development is lead by the Singapore based QTUM Foundation.
For further reading on the background of QTUM and what sets them apart, see "What is QTUM".
#21 – Zcash (ZEC)
ZCash is a value transfer protocol forked off of the Bitcoin blockchain. ZCash can be used like Bitcoin, with a few added improvements. With "zero cash technology", ZCash shields both the amount transferred and the senders, making transactions truly anonymous.
ZCash is one of the new kids on the block in the world of "private transactions".
An interesting note is that Ethereum is in the process of implementing some of ZCash's technologies to enable transactions on the Ethereum network to be anonymous as well.
ZCash is being developed by the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company. They've had some great successes, most notably JP Morgan's announcement that they would implement Zcash's privacy technology to Quarum, a technology JP built on Ethereum.
Interested in investing in ZCash? Here's the opinion of one of our writers: Should You Invest In ZCash?
ZCash was recently featured on the Radiolab episode The Ceremony.
#22 – OmiseGO (OMG)
"Unbank the Banked" is the slogan of Omise's online platform OmiseGo and that's exactly what Omise has set out to do. Founded in 2013 off of the Ethereum blockchain, Omise aims to revolutionize the financial dynamics in Southeast Asia.
Omise is targeting individuals and businesses of all sizes by improving the current financial system which is slow, outdated, and inaccessible to most "everyday" people in these countries.
With their planned online exchange OmiseGO, Omise seeks to speed up the way money is spent and sent, both domestically and internationally in Southeast Asia and beyond.
They have a lot to celebrate too. OmiseGo has been building partnerships in the region and recently partnered with McDonald's and Credit Saison.
Omise has established a strong team of over 130 staff members located in different countries. CEO and founder of Omise, Jun Hasegawa, has been involved in multiple startups and worked for Google for over 16 years.
The OmiseGO platform has been endorsed by some of the heavy hitters in the cryptocurrency world such as Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood, the co-founders of Ethereum.
For more information on what OmiseGO aims to do, see "What is OmiseGo".
#23 – ICON (ICX)
Fresh off a successful ICO, the Korea-based startup ICON is looking to provide a medium to connect all the different blockchains together. This puts ICON in the same field as Ark, which is attempting to accomplish similar goals.
The main concept of ICON is their idea of a "loopchain". As stated in their whitepaper, a loopchain can be described as a "high-performance blockchain that can provide real-time transaction, which is based on enhanced Smart Contract." Through ICON, participants will be able to connect to any blockchain without relying on the current centralized exchanges.
ICON has a relatively large team from various backgrounds. They have also secured the help of a few notable advisors such as Jason Best and Don Tapscott.
For more information on ICON and the work they're doing, see "What is ICON".
#24 – Lisk (LSK)
📷 Lisk is a decentralized network, like Bitcoin and Litecoin, which enables developers to deploy their own side chains off the main Lisk blockchain. These side chains are fully customizable blockchains which enable you to change the parameters you want to fit your own blockchain application.
This is similar to Ethereum and QTUM in some ways. With Lisk, the main difference is that the customizable blockchains split into their own separate side chains. This saves developers the grueling legwork of designing something from scratch. At the end of the day, side chains are only decentralized databases of blockchain applications.
Lisk is being developed by a small but quickly growing Berlin-based team. They are led by co-founders Max Kordek and Olivier Beddows who are veterans in the cryptocurrency and development world.
For a thorough look into Lisk including more on what Lisk does, its competitors, challenges and teams, see "What is Lisk". You can also check out our case study of an accountant who invested all his life savings in Lisk: "Accountant Invests All in Lisk".
#25 – Zilliqa – (ZIL)
Zilliqa is a blockchain platform which focuses on solving the problem of scaling on public blockchains. With Zilliqa's network, the number of transactions increases at a linear rate to the number of nodes.
This means that as nodes increase, so will its ability to handle high transaction volume. Zilliqa has already run a successful test on their network, where they were able to achieve 1,200 transactions per second with only 2,400 nodes.
Zilliqa also is the first blockchain to successfully integrate "sharding" into a public blockchain. This concept is extremely useful in improving the rate of scalability, bandwidth and performance in blockchains. Sharding, in effect, splits nodes into "shards" which can then conduct micro-transactions in each blockchain block.
In addition to this, Zilliqa claims to be more energy-efficient to mine. They also plan to implement dapps into their platform in the future.
For more information on Zilliqa, see their website and reddit. Our article "What is Zilliqa" can provide you with an overview of the project.
Source: https://www.investinblockchain.com/top-cryptocurrencies/
submitted by SilverSniper2017 to cryptoinvestingtop [link] [comments]
Live Ripple (XRP) Price; Live Litecoin (LTC) Price; FAQ. How Crypto Prices Work; 2017 Year Overview; 2018 Year Overview ; 2019 Year Overview; #Contact. Authors Team; Facebook; Instagram; Telegram; Twitter; Youtube; More. Search. Binance – Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Exchange BNB ICO Token Sale? by Bitcoin Exchange Guide News Team. August 14, 2017. Home Exchanges Binance. Facebook. Twitter. Telegr When Bitcoin was launched back in 2009, the mining reward was 25 BTC, which was halved back in 2016 to 12.5 BTC and then to 6.25 on May 12, 2020. Mining rewards will continue to halve until the final bitcoin has been mined. This means that the reward for miners will get smaller over time, and it will also take progressively longer to reach the final bitcoin. Bitcoin halving has the potential ... Following the trend of spikes in Ripple's value late in the year, XRP went from $0.0041 on Dec. 1, 2015, up to $0.008997 on Dec. 10. By Jan. 17, it was already back down to $0.005. Throughout 2016, Ripple remained within the general range, not getting back up to $0.02 until April 4, 2017. From there, it rose and by May 18, 2017, Ripple was at ... The best exchange for trading XRP is Binance. Description. XRP is a cryptocurrency that was launched in 2012 by Chris Larsen, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto. The maximum supply of XRP is 100 billion coins, which were all created at launch (it is not possible to produce additional XRP). 80% of the total XRP supply was given to fintech firm Opencoin, a company that was later renamed to Ripple in ... Bitcoin Dominates Jack Dorsey's Cash App in Q1 2020 with $306 Million Revenue. BitMEX Causes a Significant Surge in BTC Transaction Rates at 13:00 UTC Daily. Bitcoin Transaction Fees See a Massive Spike In The Run Up To The BTC Reward Halving . Bitcoin Yet To Standout As 'Safe Haven' After Its Price Dwindled During Tough Times. Ethereum's Scalability Issues Will Be Eliminated with ETH 2 ... Bitcoin Investment 2016 – Bitcoin is still ascending, seemingly growing in value every day, as well as popularity. The fact is that with the increasing globalization and diversity of economic markets, a universally accessible currency with a set value like the Bitcoin is tremendously valuable. This is the basis for its success, and the reason it's still likely smart to invest in Bitcoins. The future of the bitcoin industry is bright for the year 2016, which is not surprising when considering the price of bitcoins has been skyrocketing quite quickly. In the past year, the price of the bitcoin went from $230 in September to over $480 by the early part of November. These numbers are impressive and it looks like this will continue to be the trend throughout 2016. Ripple vs Bitcoin: The Story So Far. When people have the Ripple vs Bitcoin argument, one thing that everyone can agree with is that both blockchain projects have performed outstandingly. However, being the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has always been the number one coin in terms of value, market capitalization, adoption, and real-world usage.
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How To Buy Ripple On Binance
"Fair Value" Of Bitcoin, Binance USDC, XLM/XRP Pair, Bitcoin ERC20 Atomic Swap The Modern Investor. Loading... Unsubscribe from The Modern Investor? ... XRP Fair Utility Value $.72 ? And Ripple / Binance FUD Digital Asset Investor. Loading... Unsubscribe from Digital Asset Investor? Cancel Unsubscribe. Working... Subscribe Subscribed Unsubscribe ... My Second Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvXjP6h0_4CSBPVgHqfO-UA ----- Supp... This video will show you how to check if your ripple purchase was successful and how much Ripple you currently own. Link to create a Coinbase account: https:... +44 7966 871854 - Adrian Hibbert Moving BitCoin from Bitstamp Exchange to Bittrex Exchange http://Bittrex.com http://Bitstamp.net Adrian Hibbert Internet Mar... Ripple Countersues R3 Bank over XRP options valued at $12 billion! A piece of the article - Sourced Below In the summer of 2016, Ripple's former CEO Chris Larsen made a fateful decision: he ... Is it too late to invest in Ripple? Ripple XRP has appreciated over 1700x in value in the past 12 months. There is alot of speculation in the market right now - is it too late to invest in Ripple ... Apple Integrates Ripple, Binance Burns Their Coin And Crypto Will Be Huge The Modern Investor. Loading... Unsubscribe from The Modern Investor? Cancel Unsubscribe. Working... Subscribe Subscribed ... Objectivement pour le Bitcoin le rendez-vous avec l'histoire est cruellement raté. Certains d'entre vous se pose déjà des questions sur le futur des cryptos et je ne les blâme pas mais prenez ... Ripple XRP And Binance To Support Hardware Wallets ... 2016 Bitcoin Halving Predictions that AMAZINGLY came TRUE and what's COMING UP! - Duration: 33:52. Digital Asset News 25,537 views. New; 33 ...
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text:
define(function (require) {

    require('../coord/geo/geoCreator');

    require('./geo/GeoView');

    require('../action/geoRoam');
});

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: Pandas drop duplicates within groupby This is my csv look like,
name, cuisine, review
A, Chinese, this
A, Indian, is
B, Indian, an
B, Indian, example
B, French, thank
C, French, you

I trying to count how many times the diff kind of cuisines appear by name. This is what I should be getting
Cuisine, Count
Chinese, 1
Indian, 2
French, 2

But as you can see there are duplicates within the name e.g. B so I try to drop_duplicates but I can't. I use
df.groupby('name')['cuisine'].drop_duplicates()

and it says series groupby object cannot.
Somehow I need to apply value_counts() to get the number of occurrences of the cuisine word but the duplicates thing is hindering. Any idea how I can get this in pandas? Thanks.

A: You're looking for groupby and nunique:
df.groupby('cuisine', sort=False).name.nunique().to_frame('count')

         count
cuisine
Chinese      1
Indian       2
French       2

Will return the count of unique items per group.

A: Using crosstab
pd.crosstab(df.name,df.cuisine).ne(0).sum()
Out[550]:
cuisine
 Chinese    1
 French     2
 Indian     2
dtype: int64

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Well it seems every company is trying to provide new ways for consumers to view it's content and now HBO besdies already having a mobile site now has a widget aynone can get to view upcominf shows and other information. Well after downloading it and giving it a whirl it seems to work really well and was glad they came out with it although my favorite is channel is Sho Time because of the two shows Weeds and Dexter and for those of you who have not seen either you need to sit down in front of the tube and veg for a couple days but dotn worry if you can not do it now Dexters next season does not come out till the end of this year and Weeds the third season will be around the same time. Probably for sweeps weeks but anyways lets hope Shot Time gets a widget up and running so I can download and try it out and may just put it on my blog.


During this paintings, representatives from 3 teams offer specific discussions of key recommendations and ideas in sustainable group improvement in Canada. The participants comprise Chris Bryant, Jill Dickinson, Thom Meredith, Maureen Reed, Mark Roseland and Robert Woollard.
Due to the fact 1973, Storey's nation knowledge announcements have provided sensible, hands-on directions designed to assist readers grasp dozens of kingdom residing talents fast and simply. There at the moment are greater than a hundred and seventy titles during this sequence, and their amazing recognition displays the typical hope of nation and town dwellers alike to domesticate own independence in lifestyle.
This quantity encompasses a number of medical papers which have been offered at a world workshop at the affects of climatic variability held in Wengen, Switzerland, September 1997. For the 1st time, an review is made from the interactions among actual and organic parts of the Earth process at the foundation of shifts in severe weather conditions, instead of easily alterations in suggest atmospheric stipulations which learn has tended to target until eventually lately.
Sustainable administration of agroecosystems within the twenty first century faces extraordinary demanding situations. conserving the surroundings whereas feeding a burgeoning inhabitants which could achieve 9 billion via mid-century, conserving the world's biodiversity, and maintaining agriculture in an more and more city international is a tremendous undertaking.
Avoiding easy prescriptions for the applying of ecological rules to agriculture, Sustainable Agroecosystem administration: Integrating Ecology, Economics, and Society emphasizes the ongoing centrality of the atmosphere point of view, and the necessity to combine ecological, fiscal, and social concerns in agroecosystem technological know-how and management.
With contributions from distinct leaders within the box of sustainable agriculture, this authoritative ebook first delineates the current and destiny demanding situations agroecosystems face. It then reports the $64000 contributions made by way of Dr. Ben Stinner, a pioneer within the box of agroecosystem ecology. offering historic historical past of makes an attempt to attach the ecological and agricultural sciences, this standard-setting source highlights fresh efforts to combine typical and social technology views. It additionally examines the demanding situations for constructing built-in techniques to agroecosystem management.
Through quite a few case experiences with international functions, the textual content makes it abundantly transparent that only technological techniques are inadequate for fixing the nutrients platforms difficulties of the longer term. It explores sensible cutting edge thoughts, guidelines, and study wishes essential to enhance administration ways that emphasize entire procedure productiveness, diversify agricultural operations, and maintain a number of features, together with ecological integrity.
Thus, many economists insist that global sustainability is achievable only through large increases in the consumption of goods and services in both poor and rich countries. The bad news, then, is that growth is seen as the only politically and economically viable means to alleviate poverty and inequity both within countries and between rich and poor countries. The good news is that many advocates of this approach have at last accepted the fact of limits to material growth. A consensus is emerging that the needed increase in consumption will be sustainable only if there is a corresponding reduction in the material and energy intensity of goods and services (see Pearce 1994).
We need every person's gifts. In Toronto, a group of homeless people were able to plan, help to build, and manage their own housing in a project called Street City. It is a small "town" comprised of seventy-two residents (half women, half men), complete with houses, streets, trees, and recreation areas, all built inside the vacant shell of a large Canada Post building that had skylights added to it spanning the length of the ceiling. The adaptive design for reuse of this vacant building won an award.
One of the keys to building community identity is to discover and celebrate the inherent and historic meanings of special places. Every city, town, and neighbourhood has them. Montreal has its famous Mount Royal, which identifies the city. Winnipeg has the Forks, a 100-acre parcel of land in the heart of the city where the Assiniboine River meets the Red River. The site was publicly reclaimed in 1989 from Canadian National Railways. The Forks is a special place imbued with natural beauty, symbolic meaning, and historic significance, being the birthplace of western Canada, the site of five forts, the location of a Hudson's Bay Company trading post, and the meeting place for Aboriginal people for over 6,000 years.


Writing is about self-expression. Yes, you can quote someone else, share your opinion about something else, paraphrase, regurgitate, and expound. But your own writing is so much more profound than anyone else's because it comes from you. From your heart. From your soul.
A couple weeks ago I took Mande White's course "Twitter Magic Bullet Virtual Intensive" (it was awesome!) to learn the ins and outs of how to use Twitter to expand my business, reach out to more people, get more clients. Rather than just dive into the how-to's, Mande spent the first portion of the class talking about the mindset you need to have to succeed. It wasn't about wanting more money or visualizing the road to success paved with dollar bills and diamonds. It was about being who you are. Being transparent. Being authentic.
When I started writing almost 20 years ago, I was devouring romances because I'm the biggest, sappiest, idealistic romantic you'll ever meet. I believe in happily ever after. I believe in true love. I even believe in Santa Claus—shhh, don't tell anyone—because I don't want to live in a world where there's no magic. With all that love and romance and magic you'd think my novels would be paradigms of wonder and brilliance. Sadly and shockingly, no. My heroines were wimpy and pathetic. No backbone, no imagination, no verve. They ate and slept and pined, pined, pined. Any minute the knight on the white charger would come dashing by and rescue them and all would be well. What more does a story need?
Well, it needs a lot. Storybook heroines need to be larger than life. It took many years for me to understand that and many more years to start putting that into my writing. Since I based my heroines on me and my real life had the excitement of week-old leftovers, my stories were about as thrilling. I had no goals, no motivation, and only tepid conflict. Surely that was enough, right?
Wrong! Successful characters need solid goals, strong motivation, and lots of conflict. So does a successful life. No more stuffing down that inner spark. No more pushing aside my dreams. After many detours, narrow winding roads, wrong turns, and more than a few flat tires, I've found my path. Being me means trusting my intuition and listening to the voice in my head that tells me to speak up and speak out. It's scary, but I'm starting. Being transparent means putting these thoughts down on paper or on the Internet where other people can read them. That's really scary. Being authentic means doing these things and not worrying about what other people think. I'm a worrier so this is the most difficult. By the time I'm 90 I figure I'll have this handled.
I firmly believe we're here on this planet to make a difference. To help others make a difference. We come into this world with gifts and talents and it is our duty and responsibility to use them, to put them into effect, to harness and guide them in ways that allow us and the people around us to shine. I've always loved words—anagrams and cryptograms and crossword puzzles, immersing myself in books, exploring story ideas and learning what makes them fail or succeed. My gift is my love of words. My talent comes from the experience of writing and reading and researching and understanding how words go together to form thoughts that inspire others.
To be authentic you need to understand who you are. I'm irreverent, often sarcastic, and I have a wacky sense of humor that makes me laugh at inappropriate times. My husband says I'm the nicest person he knows but my weird humor has hurt people's feelings. Unintentionally, but it has. I'm flawed, as are most people. As a writer, I can use my own personality traits on my story heroines and create some interesting characters. Can you imagine a really nice woman who inadvertently laughs during a solemn eulogy? Or a woman who enters a hushed church, stumbles on the carpet, and swears loudly? Consider your own character flaws and how you might use them in your story.
My dream is to inspire others to write well. So many people write books. So many people want to write books. Think how amazing it would be if all of those books inspired you, in some way, to be better. To be greater. To be more of who you are. Romance novels, stories of courage, accounts of people who persevered through hardships, all of these fire the heart and make it yearn. Inspiration leads to passion. And passion touches readers. If you are transparent and authentic, you will write from the heart. That's what your readers want. That's what they'll fall in love with. And that's why they'll buy your books.
Writing is about self-expression. Be you. Be transparent. Be authentic.


text:
Algassime Bah (born 12 November 2002) is a Guinean professional footballer who plays as a striker for Greek Super League 2 club Olympiacos B.

Career
In 2019, Bah was sent on loan to Russian lower league side Vista. In 2021, he signed for Olympiacos in the Greek top flight after receiving interest from Spanish La Liga club Atlético Madrid, AA Gent in Belgium, Italian Serie A team Milan, and France. On 19 September 2021, he debuted for Olympiacos during a 0–0 draw with Atromitos.

References

External links
 Soccerway.com Profile

Guinean footballers
Expatriate footballers in Russia
Living people
Guinean expatriate sportspeople in Russia
Association football forwards
Olympiacos F.C. players
Super League Greece 2 players
Super League Greece players
2002 births
Guinean expatriate sportspeople in Greece
Guinean expatriate footballers
Expatriate footballers in Greece
Olympiacos F.C. B players

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


You may not believe the fact that Ottogi is South Korea most successful instant noodle brand on par with Samyang(Thank Wikipedia). This Instant noodle has been in Malaysia market for quite sometimes without anyone noticing. You should start going to nearest supermarket and gaze on the shelve for any of these left. Since everyone is giving all the credits to Samyang hot and spicy instant noodle, somebody should give one or two reviews on Ottogi Cheese Instant noodle.
Samyang hot and spicy noodle is too much to bear even for those who are seasoned spicy food consumers. Since we do not want to disappointed all the Oppa or Unni at Korea, we must at least buy Korean products in order to showcase our love to Kpop. The least thing we can afford to do is buy their not-so-overpriced instant noodle.
Imported instant noodle always start as low as RM15 to as high as RM30 for 4 or 5 packs. I bought 4 packs of Ottogi Instant noodle for RM18.00. Estimates RM4.50 per pack. I am not from a rich background but if we were to watch nice Korean drama and Korean movie on internet without spending a dime is enough to justify my spending spree on Korean Instant noodle. I am just redeeming my misbehavior.
Ottogi Cheese Ramyeon is imported by Tian An Trading Sdn Bhd located at Subang Jaya, Selangor.