Category: Bitcoin

Facebook and Telegram move in on crypto

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn BitcoinLeave a comment

Although it has taken Internet messaging giants a while to join the cryptocurrency scene, it was inevitable that they would become involved at some point. So, it’s no surprise to see a New York Times article by Nathaniel Popper and Mike Isaac discussing how “Facebook, Telegram and Signal, are planning to roll out new cryptocurrencies over the next year that are meant to allow users to send money to contacts on their messaging systems, like a Venmo or PayPal that can move across international borders.”

Facebook’s secretive actions have been much discussed in the last few weeks, as they have been employing blockchain engineers and crypto experts, and has been in talks with crypto exchanges, but as yet haven’t revealed their precise plans. It is believed that Facebook is working on a token for Whatsapp that would allow users to send the tokens to other users almost instantly.

Telegram, the messenger channel used by numerous crypto-related projects, is also working on a digital asset in some form. Meanwhile, Signal, which is a specialist messaging service used by technology specialists and those working on privacy issues, is also said to have a token in the works.

The messenger app advantage

The advantage companies like Facebook and Telegram have over bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is this: they already have millions and millions of users; Telegram has 300 million worldwide and Facebook has billions. In other words they have a global reach that the crypto projects as yet don’t have and as a result Facebook and Telegram can make the digital wallets used for cryptocurrencies available, in an instant, to hundreds of millions of users.

Eric Meltzer, co-founder of a cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm, Primitive Ventures, remarked, “It’s pretty much the most fascinating thing happening in crypto right now. They each have their own advantage in this battle, and it will be insane to watch it go down.”

Regulations may be problematic

However, the likes of Facebook and Telegram may face the challenge that existing crypto platforms know all too well — the issue of regulations. Popper and Isaac state that the messaging companies are likely to face many of the same regulatory and technological hurdles that have kept bitcoin from going mainstream

Will it be a crypto token or a stablecoin?

It is likely that Facebook will opt for a stablecoin solution, although it is rumoured that its token will be pegged to a basket of currencies rather than just the US dollar. This will make the token unattractive to speculators, but attractive to consumers who would be able to use the token to pay for goods knowing that it has a stable value. Furthermore, as Popper and Isaac suggest, “Facebook could guarantee the value of the coin by backing every coin with a set number of dollars, euros and other national currencies held in Facebook bank accounts.” As Meltzer say, it is going to be exciting to watch how it plays out with Facebook and Telegram.

Is Google making the blockchain searchable?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, Blockchain, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I came across an interesting article on Forbes the other day by Michael del Castillo. He tells a story about data scientist Allen Day, a former Google employee, who while looking at some of the tools he developed there, saw something puzzling. What he saw was “a mysterious concerted usage of artificial intelligence on the blockchain for Ethereum.”

Day was able to look into its blockchain and see a “whole bunch” of “autonomous agents” moving funds around “in an automated fashion.” Although Day has no idea who created the AI, he suspects “they could be the agents of cryptocurrency exchanges trading among themselves in order to artificially inflate ether’s price.”

Day also remarked that he didn’t believe this was the work of a single exchange, but is rather a group effort. Part of Day’s job is anticipating demand for a product before it even exists, and in the light of what he has seen, he believes that making the blockchain more accessible is the next big thing.

Let’s not forget that Google made the Internet more usable, bringing it billions in revenue, and if Day is correct in his predictions it could have another major pay day by making the blockchain searchable. Del Castillo says if it does, “the world will know whether blockchain’s real usage is living up to its hype.”

Day has already been working on this with a team of open-source developers, who have been loading data for bitcoin and ethereum blockchains into Google’s big data analytics platform called BigQuery. And, with the help of lead developer Evgeny Medvedev, he created a suite of sophisticated software to search the data.

Day is hoping that his project, known as Blockchain ETL (extract, transform, load) will bring Google’s revenues from cloud computing services up to the level of Amazon and Microsoft. Google is some way behind both of them, but it will struggle to match Amazon’s revenues of $27 billion from cloud services, because Amazon has been in the blockchain game since 2018 with a suite of tools for building and managing distributed ledgers. And Microsoft got into the space in 2015, when it released tools for ethereum’s blockchain. These two companies are focused on making it easier to build blockchain apps, whereas Day wants to reveal how blockchains are actually being used, and by whom.

Day has been demonstrating how his Blockchain ETL could function by examining the hard fork that created bitcoin cash (BCH) from bitcoin. “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 is now expanding beyond bitcoin and ethereum. Litecoin, zcash, dash, bitcoin cash, ethereum classic and dogecoin are being added to BigQuery.

It seems Google is waking up to blockchain and is now powering ahead by filing numerous patents related to the blockchain. The company is also encouraging its developers to build apps on the ethereum blockchain, and GV, Google’s investment division has made some investments in crypto-related startups.

Is the crypto community just smoke and mirros?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Bitcoin, Blockchain, ICOLeave a comment

You’ve probably noticed that ‘community’ is a buzzword in the crypto sphere. There isn’t an ICO that doesn’t refer to building its ‘community’, which is really another way of talking about their investors, because that is what they are. But ‘community’ sounds warm, fuzzy and friendly when compared with the ‘investor’, which instead suggests neutrality, detachment and anonymity.

Why crypto geeks chose ‘community’

In the traditional world of business it is very important to build loyalty among clients and customers; that’s one of the functions of great branding, but the crypto startups focused on the concept of ‘community’ at the start, in my opinion because they were operating on the fringes and therefore wanted to use a word that suggested a coming together of like-minded people, as well as a sense of equality between those who developed the crypto projects and those who basically crowdfunded them.

In the early days of crypto, this rather ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ approach served a good purpose; it strengthened belief in a new technology by making everyone feel they had skin in the game, even if an individual’s financial commitment to a new project was $100, let’s say. However, as the ICO took off and every project wanted to build followers who would buy into it, what had been a collection of believers turned into, as Michael K. Spencer writes in his article for Medium, “communities more prone to pump and dump” who were never really loyal followers.

Now crypto projects need to get real

Spencer’s argument is, and I agree with him, is that the so-called ‘communities’ built up by ICOs on Telegram and elsewhere are not as useful to projects as they were once thought to be. The reason for this is that the crypto world has moved on significantly since the launch of bitcoin. Crypto projects now need real clients and products with a real world use.

Communities show no loyalty

In short, a project’s community that has come together just for the Airdrop, or whatever freebies a project wants to hand out, is rarely loyal. These marketing tools may build numbers of followers on social media quite rapidly and make a project look as if it has broad support, but most of those people are just there for the giveaways and once they have them, they’ll be off.

Spencer says, “Crypto saying that its community is its best resource, is like Facebook saying it’s valuable because it has over 2 billion users.” Building community is not where crypto projects should be focusing; they should focus more on real world applications, demonstrate utility and by doing so attract loyal clients and investors.

Crypto businesses run away from USA

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn BitcoinLeave a comment
Image result for Crypto USA

The USA usually takes the lead on new technology: after all it is the land of Apple and Silicon Valley, not forgetting many innovations of the past. However, when it comes to crypto startups it appears to be driving them away, right into the arms of places like Switzerland. It is true that some of the large comaniy’s like Coinbase and Ripple Labs, who are past the startup stage, are US registered, though even Coinbase has spread its wings far beyond the United States.

Jeff Kauflin writing for Forbes recounts a very interesting story about a meeting between Republican congressman Warren Davidson and the CEO of a crypto startup in 2018. The CEO was trying to decide where to locate his company and said to the Congressman, “Look, it’s nothing personal. We just don’t trust that you guys are gonna get this done right. So we’re feeling kind of Swiss.” What he meant was that with all the uncertainty around regulations in the US, they were thinking of going to crypto-friendly Switzerland.

This uncertainty and the slowness of the US regulatory authorities are damaging everyone. As Kauflin says, “most companies that created digital tokens and sold them through ICOs assumed they wouldn’t be deemed securities.” However, once they realised that the regulators, the SEC being the main one, were thinking differently, they knew there was going to be a legal problem. This drove them away from considering locating startups in the USA.

To remedy this, Warren Davidson has introduced a new digital token bill, aimed at removing uncertainty and making the USA more appealing for crypto startups.

Caitlin Long, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley, when interviewed by Kauflin said: “Lawyers right and left were telling clients, ‘Don’t issue tokens to U.S. investors and don’t domicile in the U.S.’”

By contrast, last year Switzerland declared that some ICO tokens are not securities, which went down well with crypto entrepreneurs. So much so that about 420 crypto and blockchain startups are domiciled there. The USA has 2,100 startups, but it also has a population that is 40 times larger than that of Switzerland. Mathematics says that Switzerland is out-performing the USA as a location for technological innovation.

Davidson’s Token Taxonomy Act aims to amend the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, “to get the regulatory certainty that I feel like the market needs.”

Under the new bill, some of the criteria for exemption from security status are: the blockchain platform the token runs on has already launched; the token’s supply can’t be controlled by a single person or group of people; once finalized, transactions can’t be altered by a single person or group of people; and the token “is not a representation of a financial interest in a company, including an ownership or debt interest or revenue share.”

If this Bill passes it will create a significant change in the US for startups and would ensure that innovation stays in the USA rather than running away to Europe.