Interesting and somewhat expected when dealing with a persons finances and private information. Slow adoption is not a sign of failure in this case though and as the article stated, when there is significant advantage to using the app, like the starbucks one, people will use it. It is something we have to consider as we start to roll out DNotes payment network. How do we make it faster, more secure, and significant benefit to the user.

Has anyone heard how Chris made out at CoinFestUK? It would be great if there was a video clip.

Thanks Chris! 

It's interesting to see people's perspective on crypto and how easily money is lost and services are here today, gone tomorrow. Something I think we forget to take into account with this industry and, investment opportunity, is just how easy it is to get involved yet we continue to compare it with other investment markets such as stocks and commodities both consciously and subconsciously.

For example, what would you consider a workable portfolio in the stock market that could produce extended future earnings, ie income, for an individual? $100K? $500k? A million or more in USD? If your talking about life long income or retirement, more than a million invested is really needed.

However, you can buy millions of crypto coins for pennys compared to stocks and traded commodities making it very easy to buy in. But, here's the rub, value and future value.  Our minds tend to play a dirty trick on us when we work with money and value. A million alt coins valued at a tenth of a cent is nothing like a million US Dollars yet, our subconscious doesn't see it that way. Our mind ignores the vast difference in value and tells us we must be making a great investment since we are getting so much for so little completely ignoring the vast difference in real value.

And, that's a problem.

Anyone can buy in and risk whatever they bought trying to manipulate the market, without risking much really. "Pump and Dump" has become so prevalent, yet totally illegal, that coins are created specifically for the purpose. Companies run by people with no financial acumen hold themselves out to be crypto-financial advisers applying unproven and untested theories to your money!

The only saving grace comes in two things: it's early, the industry needs to shake out and settle down and, believe it or not, regulation. We absolutely need to follow the rules that apply to what I will call the "real financial world" since we are quickly becoming that very world.

So, we invest, we buy, we gain, we loose. You have to look at it as a learning curve and be glad you not spending mega dollars to learn a hard lesson unless you play with Bitcoin itself, then, all bets are off, good luck!

In conclusion, Alts like DNotes are, without a doubt, the best way to build a future but, to those "instant gratification" types out there, it won't happen overnight. Building value and real use cases for a crypto takes time and an enormous amount of work. It also takes talented people fully committed to the task such as we have here.

In conclusion, I have, over the last year or so, consolidated my long term holdings down to about 8 to 10 coins that I continue to invest in and support. That from about 60 at the height of it all. I see this further shrinking to perhaps 5 with DNotes at or near the top. No instant miracle coins, no super high tech wonders, no overnight "to the moon" projects, just good old fashioned hard work, good marketing, committed development team and, good use case with ongoing development.

So, you pay to play but sooner or later, you pay to invest so your money can pay you back. Then you can play some more...

.

Thank you for the kind words Wiser, excellent article, but sorry to hear of the struggle you are facing. We are doing our best to take the path of long term growth and building a globally accepted supplemental digital currency, that is a monumental task with far reaching implications. I have even noticed a trend in articles and writings geared toward realistic viability of projects and solving real world problems, and feel a shift in the industry coming where DNotes can thrive and people will begin coming over to our camp.

This week in crypto has been a rough one for me. I wrote about it here: http://creativecurrencies.cu.cc/2016/04/08/a-rough-crypto-week/

My real point in sharing it, though, is I wanted to make another shout-out to the DNotes team for standing out in the area of stability. When services or coins I like suddenly close down or make sudden changes that leave me scrambling, it really helps me to appreciate the value of coins which are actually built to last and have solid principles underlying them from the beginning.

Good job, everyone! It won't be long before all your hard work will be richly rewarded

I found this on Twitter today and it would be funny if it wasn't eerily true. I'm not sure if they switched the definitions on purpose or not.


"The @ECB explanation of why central banks can’t become insolvent is very similar to that in the Monopoly rules."

We will add this to our wish list. Beginning the second half of this year we will kick R&D into high gear. I am thinking of posting Chapter 15 - DNotes Story on our website. Any suggestion? DNotes Story will be very informative to those who like to learn more about DNotes.

No problem, if you have any other questions or feedback, please let us know. We are always appreciative of constructive feedback. You have a great day as well.

More on OpenBazaar:

Introducing OB1

JUN 11, 2015

We have said many times that we believe in emergent, decentralized, start-up innovation. Institutions public and private, no matter how well intentioned, tend to protect their institutional interests, whether is it a current revenue stream, or a position of market power. That makes them inherently conservative. Start-ups and the entrepreneurs who create them are almost always outsiders. They depend entirely on innovation for success. So we are sensitive to market power and constantly on the look out for innovations that unlock markets by creating value for consumers and changing the structure of markets.

We bet on networks like Twitter and Tumblr because they efficiently connected creators and consumers challenging the incumbent bureaucratic hierarchies in the media industry. But those networks also concentrate market power through network effects and as they grow, they tend to consolidate control over their creators and consumers in an effort to extract more economic value. This is capitalism’s creative destruction at work. We celebrate it, but we also look for opportunities to continue the process with new models, that are even more efficient.

That interest in what’s next has led us to look closely at protocols that further flatten hierarchies and decentralize control. We are pleased to announce, today, our investment in OB1.

OB1 is a company formed to further the development of OpenBazaar, an open source project that is refining a protocol that will enable anyone, anywhere to sell products and services to anyone, anywhere in a fully decentralized marketplace. Because the marketplace is defined by a protocol and distributed across every participant’s server, the hosting costs are shared and there is no way for a central authority to leverage network effect market power to extract rents from the participants.

This begs the question of how OB1 can be a for profit business that will generate a return on the investment we are announcing today. How can a business that is consciously architected to undo network effect defensibility, one that is tearing down the walls and filling in the moats that every paper on market based competition has insisted are necessary for success… succeed. To paraphrase the old EF Hutton ad (yes I am dating myself), they intend to make money the old fashioned way: they intend to earn it.

OB1 will offer a set of value added services to buyers and sellers on the OpenBazaar market. They expect others to provide services to the participants on OpenBazaar, and they don’t expect to have any proprietary advantage over those competitors. As investors, we hope that their familiarity with the marketplace and the goodwill they generate as early sponsors of the open source project will give them an advantage but we understand they must execute very well or be left behind.

A close observer might say that the recent experience with decentralization is that it often leads to an unanticipated re-aggregation that creates extraordinary market power and financial returns. This is certainly the story of the TCP/IP and HTTP protocols that are the foundation of the Internet. Those protocols radically decentralized the creation and distribution of media and fundamentally changed the structure of the media industry. But the challenge in this newly decentralized world was discovery. When media was defined by distribution, the newspaper, radio station or cable franchise decided what was available to you. In a world where anything was available, the hard problem was finding what you want. The answer was search. And Google, whether they fully understood it or not, stepped in to meet that need and reaggregated human attention is a way that created an enormous amount of market value.

A cynic might then say that OB1, is consciously architected to create this same reaggregation opportunity in commerce. I can say with some conviction, having talked about this for hours with the founders of OB1 that this is not their plan. But I also have to say that none of us understand exactly how discovery will work in a fully decentralized marketplace and how to prevent discovery from becoming a source of market power in the decentralized world we envision. We hope by calling it out here, you will keep us honest and help us imagine a new model for discovery that won’t subvert the goal of empowering buyers and sellers to trade freely and to capture the value they create.

Finally, we can’t end this post without addressing the potential dark side of decentralized markets. Decentralization empowers individual participants in the network or marketplace. Some may use the protocol in ways that others consider immoral or that are illegal in some jurisdictions. That should, however, not prevent us from creating an open protocol. TCP/IP and HTTP, for instance, allow content to be shared between any two people who have access to the Internet. Some of that content is morally reprehensible to many if not most people. Some of that content is illegal.

Still overall, most would argue that society is better off because the Internet has enabled everyone to connect and communicate. The Internet could have been designed to centralize control, but then it would not have enabled the permissionless innovation that led to so many of the services we now use every day. The OpenBazaar protocol makes the same conscious design choice. It is inherently decentralized. It favors innovation over control, so it is possible that the openness of the protocol could lead to use cases that some or most of us would disagree with. But as with TCP/IP and HTTP, we believe the creative and legitimate use cases will quickly dominate the marketplace.

OB1 will, of course, not knowingly offer its value added services to anyone using the OpenBazaar protocol to engage in illegal activities. The trickier question is how OB1 supports the development of an open protocol, one that they do not control, without encouraging, or endorsing, or even facilitating the misuse of that protocol. This calculus is further complicated by the fact that many current contributors to the open source project may be motivated by a mistrust of political or economic power. We do not have an easy answer. It would be disingenuous for us to say the OB1 team has no influence over the open source project.

They are respected code contributors. They are likely to encourage the development of the protocol through their own work and will now be in a position to offer bounties to encourage the development of specific features. But we can’t think of any design principle we could encourage, that would eliminate the possibility of misuse, without undermining the value inherent in a free and open marketplace, so the best we can do is aggressively advocate for the responsible use of the OpenBazaar protocol, be open and transparent ourselves, and be an example for others.

USV and our syndicate partners at A16Z are committed to responsibly furthering the OpenBazaar protocol. We are excited to be working with the team at OB1 who we know shares our values and that commitment.

Source: https://www.usv.com/blog/introducing-ob1

Thanks Alan. It is hard to believe that someone can graduate from high school with straight A's and still be financially illiterate.

It's hard to believe that the media has wasted so much time talking about the money laundering and tax evasion that they assume is associated with using bitcoin.


'Panama Papers' Explained For 5-Year-Olds

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/04/04/panama-papers-reddit_n_9613058.html