source: BitcoinMacroEconomics.com

The Cryptocurrencies Revolution

source: Loosekeys.tv

Demystifying the Blockchain

This is bonkers.

A new so-called blockchain company is selling virtual real estate online with prices as high as $120,000 for a 10-meter by 10- meter piece of virtual land.

You can buy a plot of virtual land in a virtual city, with certain neighborhoods costing more than others, like in a real city. Except that it isn’t a real city. It is all virtual.

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Somehow this company, Decentraland, managed to raise $26 million in 30 seconds from investors last year. That money isn’t “virtual” — it is real.

Welcome to the world of blockchain, the latest technological revolution to those in-the-know — and what seems like the latest get-rich-quick gibberish to the average person.

You’ve probably heard that the blockchain is a technology that is going to change the world !

It is the backbone of Bitcoin, the now infamous cryptocurrency. You might even have heard someone trying to explain blockchain by describing it as a “trusted distributed ledger.” If you’re like most people, that’s when you stopped understanding — or even trying to understand — what this whole blockchain thing is all about. (Stick with me for a moment and I promise you’ll understand it very soon.)

It all feels a bit like 1999, circa the dot-com bubble. In Cannes, France, just last week, at an annual gathering of advertisers, there was a “blockchain yacht” and a “blockchain villa.” In Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, there was a “blockchain lounge.”

Meanwhile, Fortune 500 companies are investing billions in the blockchain. IBM has a whole division focused on blockchain, as do the consultancies Accenture and PwC. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, has dismissed Bitcoin, but says “the blockchain is real.”

Silicon Valley venture capitalists have already sunk more than $1.3 billion into blockchain technology just this year. And just this week, Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most prominent technology firms founded, in part, by Marc Andreessen — who is credited with inventing the modern Web browser — announced a $300 million “crypto” fund to exclusively invest in blockchain technologies. “For those of us who have been involved in software for a long time, it feels like the early days of the internet, web 2.0, or smartphones all over again,” Mr. Andreessen and his colleagues said when introducing the fund.

By Andrew Ross Sorkin

Facebook Bans Ads for Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies

SAN FRANCISCO — Want to get rich quick through Bitcoins or other virtual currencies? You’ll have to do it without Facebook.

The social network said Tuesday that it would ban all ads for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, in order to stop promotions that it sees as “frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices.”

Under Facebook’s new policy, no ads from well-known digital currency exchanges or for initial coin offerings will be allowed. Among those who will be affected is James Altucher, a self-described “crypto genius” whose viral ads have become a talking point in how the cryptocurrency boom has led to scams and wild price fluctuations.

Facebook’s move followed questions about whether it has done enough to protect its site from bad actors. The company has been trying to clamp down on misinformation and false news after admitting last year that Russian agents had used it to spread divisive and polarizing messages.The world of cryptocurrencies, which people have flooded into as prices soared in recent months, has also increasingly raised fears that parts of the market are dogged by scams. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday that it had halted what may have been a fraudulent initial coin offering that asked people to fund what was supposed to be the world’s first “decentralized bank.”

The company has been trying to clamp down on misinformation and false news after admitting last year that Russian agents had used it to spread divisive and polarizing messages.

source:Erin Scott, Reuters

Rob Leathern, a Facebook product management director, announced the ban on cryptocurrency ads in a blog post. He said the ban was intentionally broad, as Facebook seeks to “better detect deceptive and misleading advertising practices.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has recently expressed an interest in digital currencies. In a Facebook post this month, he wrote that he was studying how to introduce cryptocurrency to his company, adding that he thought it would “take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands.”

By Sheera Frenkel

source: Reddit

Grandpa Had a Pension. This Generation Has Cryptocurrency.

Most readers have probably heard of Bitcoin, the digital coin that dominates the cryptocurrency market. It has gained notice both because of its skyrocketing value (from less than a cent in early 2010 to around $2,600 currently) and because it is frequently a key player in hacking- and black-market-related stories, from the looting of nearly half a billion dollars in coins from the Mt. Gox exchange in 2014 to the recent demand for payment in Bitcoin in the WannaCry ransomware attack. (For the uninitiated, here is a useful primer on Bitcoin.)

But do you know Ethereum, with a total value of coins in circulation of close to $20 billion?

source: James Heimer

Bitcoin Cash, which split off from the original Bitcoin on Aug. 1, lost about half its value within hours, then nearly quadrupled by the next day? Or, rounding out the Big Four, Ripple — whose currency is known as XRP — which shot up to about 40 cents by mid-May from less than a cent at the end of March? (Full disclosure: I owned but unloaded three of these currencies before writing this article.) Then there are over 800 lower-value and often creatively named coins among those listed on Coinmarketcap.com. One can buy FedoraCoin (its jaunty symbol being the Justin Timberlake-approved hat), CannabisCoin (one guess what it looks like) or, to choose one of many bringing up the rear, Quartz, currently priced around three-thousandths of a cent. (Bad news for those who bought it at just under $2 at the end of May.)

After years as a niche market for technologically sophisticated anarchists and libertarians excited about a decentralized financial network not under government control, digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream. “It’s the wild, wild West,” said Ron Ginn, 35, founder of a private photo-sharing service called Text Event Pics in St. Augustine, Fla., who has taken all his money out of the stock market and put it into Ripple and real estate. “This is like getting to invest in the internet in the ’90s. I’m obviously very bullish, but I expect to make a couple million dollars off very little money. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. Finance is getting its internet.”

By Teddy Wayne
50 Cent · Get Rich Or Die Tryin'