Quote from: Chase on Today at 06:29:34 PM

Interesting article from the Washington Post on the career ambitions of the millennials.  In all fairness to them, no generation produces thousands of Mark Zuckerbergs.  All it takes is a handful of millennials to make the changes that will impact the world.


Why millennials may not produce many more Mark Zuckerbergs

Millennials have been heralded as the uniquely diverse, highly educated, politically independent social media marvels. But a new poll finds many of them would also just like a good job at an established business with some vacation time.

The survey conducted by the Harvard University's Institute of Politics in collaboration with the Washington Post also shows Americans ages 18 to 29 are less-than-impressed with technological wonders and business giants today, divided on the virtue of government regulations and just as worried about their digital data being swallowed by tech companies as the federal government...

Full Story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/01/why-millennials-may-not-produce-many-more-mark-zuckerbergs/

Quote From Shepherd Today:

Thanks, Chase, very interesting article. One in three interested to start their own business is not bad. That is still a very large number. My advice is don't do it, if you are not passionate about. If you are, take your time and learn all about what it takes to be successful in business. Double check your "great idea" and learn everything about the business you want to be in. Can you be equal to or better than the competition? Don't be a me too. More than 50% of them failed within five years. There is a lot to learn. You are welcome to ask specific business related questions. I will be happy to help. That is what I am passionate about - helping new start-ups and struggling small business owners.

Good. I hope that will solve the technical problems. Rebuilding customers' confidence will be a challenge.

"Maybe bitcoin isn’t the problem here?" No. Bitcoin is not the problem. Incumbents facing the threat of being disrupted have the tendency to remain ignorance so that the truth can conveniently be misrepresented.

We expanded our news distribution and hundreds more news outlets have published the announcement of our new company and the book launch in the first half of 2016.

DNotes is very systematic, yet patience, in everything we do, but may not always be easy for everyone to understand. Building a trusted brand and good name recognition is a long and expensive process. We are one of the most PR astute players in our industry, with a significant amount of resources invested in PR campaigns. Yet, I doubt if more than 50% of the people in our industry have even heard of DNotes or CryptoMoms. Consequently, our PR efforts must continue alone those lines. Don’t expect people to support DNotes if they have not even heard of it; definitely wishful thinking that they would accept DNotes as a medium of exchange; not until they know DNotes well.

Everything that we have been doing, and continue to do is towards building DNotes as the trusted global digital currency for everyone worldwide to participate. It will take a combination of many strategic plans/projects executed over a number of years. Your consideration if DNotes is a worthy long term investment should place high emphasis on the strategic path we have laid out and what we have delivered based on what we promised. I do sense that short term investors have the tendency to ask “Are we there yet?”  No, we have a long way to go.

We are reaching out even more aggressively beyond our industry in 2016. It will be an exciting year. We believe that many more will begin to understand and appreciate why we have taken a very different path. I trust that Tim (TeeGee) will represent us well in articulating “The DNotes Difference” in the new video he is working. We are very appreciated of his dedicated efforts and hard work. Thank you very much. Tim.

Welcome to DNotes, bhokor. DNotes is a long term investment. We believe that for the currency to be useful and valuable as a medium of exchange there has to be fundamental value to support it, hence a for profit company. The real payoff could take a few years and best suited for long term investors. We know that we are making all the right moves, but also mindful not to get ahead of ourselves.

Thanks, RJF.

Getting DNotes in and out of Cryptsy is quick and problem free when I tested it a couple of days ago. Sending Bitcoin out is still a problem. I am still waiting for two transactions sent 5 days ago.

Thanks, RJF. I wish many more people understand why it is necessary for us to do so much extra work in order to strive towards mass acceptance of DNotes one day. We are trail blazers with a very clear vision of where we are going and what must be done systematically to get there. Everything is carefully, managed, timed and strategically integrated. Our sphere of influence will continue to expand, involving more and more people as more projects are launched.

We are always advancing towards making DNotes the trusted global digital currency for everyone worldwide to participate. Unfortunately, our industry seems to have an over abundance of followers, almost like mindless zombies. Globally, there must be thousands of companies claiming to be involved in blockchain projects, including many large banks. Blockchain as a decentralized consensus ledger for the transfer of asset of value without the oversight of a central authority or intermediary is revolutionary. We believe that its greatest value is when it is coupled with a stable currency. Many are using blockchain as a glorified database.

The necessary stability is not achievable until there is significant fundamental value to support the increasing value of the currency. We are even more convinced that our new company is spot on to help get DNotes to the next level.

Stay tuned for our next press release, scheduled for tomorrow. Here is a sneak peek:

Bitcoin Alternative DNotes Announces Company Launch and Book for Small Business Owners in 2016

CHICAGO, Illinois – December 15, 2015 – DNotes today announced the early 2016 release of a book for small business owners. The announcement comes on the heels of October’s revelations about the company’s plans for the launch of a new for-profit enterprise next year. DNotes officials have confirmed that the new company launch and the planned book release are part of an ongoing strategy to differentiate the DNotes ecosystem and better serve partners and customers throughout the cryptocurrency industry and beyond.

According to respected entrepreneur, technology visionary, and DNotes co-founder Alan Yong, the new company will fully integrate the DNotes currency, blockchain, and a seamless new payment system, to provide the currency with greater stability and long-term appreciation. The current plan calls for DNotes to maintain as much as 25% of the new enterprise, which will give the company the platform it needs to support the digital currency’s growth.

From CryptoMoms Forum:


Quote from: Zoe on December 13, 2015, 11:28:29 PM

Hello Cryptomoms.

This is a very nice forum tyou have going on here. I checked out some of the Bitcoin forums and they are disgusting. I've been buying a bit of Bitcoin here and there for over a year but never new what else to buy.

"Say hello everyone" is so other people who don't know what to post can at least say hello.


Quote from: Chase on Today at 03:54:48 AM

Hi Zoe and welcome to CryptoMoms!  This thread is a great idea as I know we have a lot of silent (perhaps shy?) readers.

Thanks for the compliment on the CryptoMoms forum - it is our intention to be friendly and welcoming to everybody.  You must have witnessed some of the "boys behaving badly" on other forums.

Please let us know if we can help you in any way.

From Shepherd Today:

Welcome to CryptoMoms, Zoe. We understand that not everyone is comfortable in posting, though our membership has been growing rapidly by the day. However, I do encourage our members to introduce themselves and ask questions that may be helpful to them. We are a very dedicated team with good knowledge of technologies and our industry. I am also very knowledgeable in the general business areas. We are here to be of help as much as we can.

Although there is a great deal of confusion with occasional negative news in our industry, the general trend has been very positive. It may take many more years, but this will turn out to be a massive industry with massive job and wealth creation. DNotes is systematically positioning itself to be one of the major players. Get to know us early. There will be many opportunities in the coming years as we continue to expand. Be sure to sign up for one of our CRISP plans at: http://dnotesvault.com/

Quote from: Shepherd on December 09, 2015, 12:11:03 AM

Wow! CryptoMoms blew right through 14 K Members and the traffic has been growing too.

4789 Posts in 568 Topics by 14018 Members

Thanks for all your support. We are gearing up to do a lot more next year.

Our top priority next year is to start working with woman small business owners with an attempt to pull and engage other resources that are helpful for all small business owners and their employees. I will be starting a new thread to answer business related questions. Let us know if you have any suggestions as to how we could be more helpful to small business owners.

As  part of our Christmas tradition, we will be sending out DNotes, as gifts, to all our CRISP For Kids on Christmas week. There will also be a number of special prizes given out. If you have not signed up a CRISP For Kids account for your child, this is a great time to do so. This is a great gift idea for anyone - parents, grandparents, family and friends.

Quote From Shepherd Today:

Impressive!  We have  "Most Online Today: 197. Most Online Ever: 273 (February 18, 2015, 02:25:23 PM)"

Since the last post it has grown to: 4828 Posts in 569 Topics by 14275 Members.

I will read the full article another day when I have a little more time to spare.

In the mean time, here is my take. Blockchain technology, indeed offers massive potential and will be hugely disruptive. Yes, it is currently over-hyped and attracting too many "me toos", may be more than usual. A lot of investment will not work out with many disappointed investors, but nothing unusual. Most will be too early and many will fail. DNotes is taking Blockchain very seriously. We will be a major player one day but we will not the first bull to charge into the "China Shop." We are keeping ourselves well informed and mapping our the most viable Blockchain related projects. Frankly, we believe that we have a huge advantage of packaging the technology with our own digital currency.

Evgeny Kaspersky, is the head of the largest privately-owned cybersecurity company and international software security group Kaspersky Lab. Anything he says is taken seriously. His following statement may cause serious concern:

“As long as [cryptocurrencies] do not interfere, authorities won’t pay attention. Once [cryptocurrencies] begin to displace the national currencies – they will be immediately banned.”

Personally, I do not expect digital currencies to displace national currencies for at least another century. Human does not react well to drastic massive changes within a short period of time but we adjust and adapt well when it happens gradually over a long period of time.

At DNotes, we firmly believe, that there are huge growth opportunities, for a very long period of time, if we can strategically position our ecosystems to effectively adapt to changing economic and political environment based on a very long term view. Essentially, that is what we have been doing, and we will continue to go down that path.

We are positioning DNotes as the trusted global digital currency that will gradually supplement national currencies over the next five to ten years. Given the success, that is a very healthy growth path with significant value appreciation from its current price of less than $100 per 10,000 DNotes today. As I often said, where you are right now is of less consequence than where you are going from here. We are invested for the long term with very dedicated efforts to continue adding well planned strategic building blocks as we expand our growth path. 2016 will be the year when we begin our reach to engage small business owners and their employees.

The book I am writing is dedicated to assist small business owners, including many women small business owners. The vast majority of small business owners and their employees are struggling today in the face of mounting regulations and high cost of doing business. Many small business owners struggle to meet payroll on a regular bases and skip supporting their own retirement savings. Many employees have not see a pay raise in years. We are committed to help in ways we can to foster better employer/employee relationship and improved ways of doing business. We believe that CRISP For Retirement, and CRISP For Employees Incentive Benefits when offered as a package with interactive support by virtual of a dedicated web site will make a difference. We also plan to engage other groups as part of the resources that are beneficial for small business owners. Any suggestions you may have will be very much appreciated.



Kaspersky Lab Says That Cryptocurrency Is The Future Of A United Society

he international community is not ready to use cryptocurrency, though it is a great invention. This is according to Evgeny Kaspersky, the head of the largest privately-owned cybersecurity company and international software security group Kaspersky Lab. Once cryptocurrencies develop to the point where they can replace national currencies, governments will ban them immediately says Evgeny.
Kaspersky Lab provides cybersecurity services, including anti-virus for over 300 million users and over 250,000 corporate clients worldwide.

Evgeny Kaspersky stated during the Kaspersky Digital Radio press conferencededicated to the results of the outgoing year:

“I believe that cryptocurrency is a great invention, but geopolitically this world is not ready to use it yet. If there was a unite government and the world was united in a single society – then cryptocurrency  would work very well in such a world. This is the future.”

Today cybersecurity has a major role in all areas of digital technology. While BitcoinCT r:  8 is used in some criminal activities, more often companies that provide anti-virus protection do know what modern and future society should be ready to face. Evgeny Kaspersky said:

"We have finally entered the digital age and got used to live a “double life” Now almost all the events that happen to us and everything we do – whether it's calling to our parents or job meetups, buying concert tickets or making plans to vacation – it’s committed using digital tools and is recorded in the cyberworld. Sometimes, similarly as in the offline world, users find it difficult to ensure their security in the face of the huge number of cyber threats. The business and government mission is to make the human environment, both physical and digital, convenient and safe."

However, Evgeny Kaspersky mentioned that once cryptocurrencies will develop to be able to replace the national currency governments would ban it immediately:

“I am more than sure that different countries will take turns to prohibit the use of cryptocurrency because they can’t control it. As long as [cryptocurrencies] do not interfere, authorities won’t pay attention. Once [cryptocurrencies] begin to displace the national currencies – they will be immediately banned.”
Source:

http://cointelegraph.com/news/115842/kaspersky-lab-says-that-cryptocurrency-is-the-future-of-a-united-society

From CryptoMoms Forum:

Quote from: indiamikezulu on Today at 03:37:47 AM

Indeed, Shepherd; but as was noted on the Dnotes thread, we are early adopters! (Late late early adopters . . . ) A daily change of terrain is the only constant on Planet Krypto.

It was most refreshing to see also on the Dnotes thread a mention of the psychology of the planetoids. It will be some time before the percentage of sociopaths is reduced, by the steady inflow of nice normal people, to a ratio reflecting that of the real world. (I look forward to the first anthropological studies of this sub-culture.)

Mark

From Dyna Today:

It is very encouraging to see an increasing traffic at this forum. Our registered membership has been growing by over fifty a day; quite impressive. We are currently developing plans to reach out to small business owners, especially women small business owners and their employee. This is a very time consuming process. 2016 will be a very active year for DNotes.

Great article. We are all early adopters, indeed.

Like we have mentioned many times before, positioning DNotes to stay on the right track with a solid foundation is our highest priority. As we continue to advance and add value to our ecosystem, the value of DNotes will take care of itself. It will take DNotes five years to become firmly established and we are barely two years old. For a young organization of this age, without VC funding, we have accomplished a lot - thanks to you all.

Thanks for the compliment, Wiser. It will be very challenging for Cryptsy to regain the trust and confidence of their customers and "ex-customers" short of new management or partnership. It will take a change of culture and mind-set that value customers as one of the most precious components in building and growing a successful company.

Since everything is inter-related and affects one another in any business - everything matters to varying levels of importance. The four most important components affecting any business beyond a one man show are: You, your big idea, your employees, and your customers. Any short comings of significance in one or more of these components degrade the chances of success of the company. This happens more often than not, causing a high rate of business failures. Unfortunately, Cryptsy's mind-set is a reflection of top management and very common in our industry. Most founders have the tendency to over value their own skill-sets and early success, without realizing that to be sustainable with healthy growth everything matters. I believe that my book will be truly helpful to a lot of small business owners, including those in our industry.

It is amazing how the media worldwide can be so easily fooled by a Hoaxer.

New Clues Suggest Craig Wright, Suspected Bitcoin Creator, May Be a Hoaxer

WHEN WIRED NAMED Craig Wright Tuesday as the most likely suspect to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of bitcoin, we laid out two possibilities that outweighed any others: “Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.” Three days later, new clues point to that second, strange scenario.

Source:

http://www.wired.com/2015/12/new-clues-suggest-satoshi-suspect-craig-wright-may-be-a-hoaxer/

Getting DNotes in and out of Cryptsy does not seem to be an issue.

However, I made two withdrawals at .1 BTC each over two days ago and have not received them. I wish them well but find it difficult to accept that they are working hard to resolve a technical issue. At a minimum, they are handling damage control poorly. I hope it's not more than that.

The Dawn of the Profitable Unicorn

This is a must read for anyone interested in long term investment in technologies. There are very few profitable unicorns and they are highly dismissive at the early stages. If you only discovered the opportunity when everybody knows it’s a unicorn, you already missed your best opportunity.

Major success in business does not happen by accident or by good fortune alone. A great idea is worth practically nothing unless that great idea can be become a great product or a great service that is in high demand. It takes four critical components to build a solid base to enable a great idea to become a huge success: you, your great idea, your employees, and your customers. Any short comings in any of them will degrade everything else and bring your total score down and you will not be the best in class.

“Most investors in technology companies squander vast sums by reacting to short term jitters or global jolts rather than concentrating on the staying power of those emerging enterprises on the right side of history.”

This is my favorite quote from the article. High burn rate at the early stages will not only “squander vast sum of money” but will also squander staying power. It takes great patience and discipline to breed a large scale successful company – “a rare form of species known as the profitable unicorn.”
***************************************************

The Dawn of the Profitable Unicorn

Dec 11, 2015
•   1,823 views
•   38 Likes

Michael Moritz
Chairman, Sequoia Capital

The San Francisco-based buyout firm Francisco Partners recently published a delicious analysis relevant for anyone wondering about what the future holds for technology stocks. It is a bulletin in which both pessimists and optimists can find hope and it offers a helpful perspective for those wondering about the current valuations of technology companies.

First, the bad news. The 15 technology companies with the largest market capitalizations in 2000 have been decimated — losing about $1.35 trillion, or roughly 60 per cent, of their combined market value.
Only one, Microsoft, has a market capitalization that is higher than in 2000. One extraordinary aspect of this meltdown is that it did not occur, as some might suspect, in the much ballyhooed dotcom wonder companies of yesteryear. Instead it was a blight that affected most of what were once considered blue-chip technology holdings.

In 2000 Nortel sported a market value of $209 billion that, like those of its classmates, had been bloated by the enthusiasm of the era; it has since gone bankrupt. While other members of this corporate bracket have avoided that ignominy, their long-term stock charts present bleak pictures. Cisco’s market value has faded from $403 billion to $144 billion; Intel’s from $288 billion to $161 billion; and EMC’s from $218 billion to $51 billion.  

For the class of 2000, the sharpest property price declines have been in the deteriorating neighborhoods of systems, hardware and semiconductors. This is due to the continuing decline in the cost of computing, the rise of open-source software, the move to the “cloud” and the emergence of massive data-centers where companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook are increasingly designing their own approaches.

Now a word from sunnier climes. Fifteen companies that were together worth less than $10 billion in 2000 are now among the world’s 50 top technology companies as measured by market capitalization, with a combined worth of $2.1 trillion. (Had Amazon been included, rather than being classified as a retailer, this number would have swollen by another $250 billion). Apple, which even in 2000 was viewed as little more than a curiosity, has risen in value from $6 billion to $659 billion. A few themes jump out of this listing — the power of novelty, the shift towards China, the benefits of patience and the virtues of capital efficiency.

Several of today’s most valuable technology companies did not even exist in 2000. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter together have a collective corporate history of only 33 years. Even Google and SalesForce were barely smudges on the horizon in 2000. These companies now have a combined value of about $850 billion. Beyond some of the customized systems in their own data centers and, in Google’s case some sideline activities such as its Nexus phones and Chrome notebooks, none of these companies sully their hands with anything as taxing as hardware. They have thrived from the artful deployment of software, in particular the “cloud based” variant, and — for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (and Google’s YouTube service) — organizing and collating the contributions of their users.

Perched in a clump as the fourth, fifth and sixth most valuable technology companies of the day — are Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. This threesome is now worth $409 billion — testament not just to how much China has progressed in a decade and a half but a harbinger of the next several decades as the country places increasing emphasis on spawning its own technology.

Woe betide the management of any western technology company that underestimates the challenge posed by the vast number of emerging Chinese competitors — fueled by an ambition and work regimen that’s hard to match in Europe and the US.

Finally, a note about two other themes that jump out of this listing — patience and profits. Most investors in technology companies squander vast sums by reacting to short term jitters or global jolts rather than concentrating on the staying power of those emerging enterprises on the right side of history.

And for the founders and chief executives of all of today’s billion-dollar “unicorns” there is another abiding message. Almost all of today’s technology juggernauts formed before about 2008 required smallish amounts of capital. Google, for example, only consumed $8 million before turning profitable. Maybe this means that  a new, and very distinctive, class of company will now come into vogue — a rare form of species known as the profitable unicorn.

This article originally appeared on the opinion page of The Financial Times.

Source:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dawn-profitable-unicorn-michael-moritz

Very interesting read with some compelling arguments. Evander is a great story teller. I hope he is only partially correct. That would be a tough world to live in. I am more optimistic and believe that fiat currencies will survive for another century. Meanwhile Bitcoin and other digital currencies, like DNotes will supplement fiat currency at a growing ratio. I do agree that gold bar has a serious disadvantage of not being easily divisible, unlike digital currency. Inherently, it is not efficient to serve the movement of money and transfer of wealth.

This is an interesting interview with Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum  about the Next Generation For digital currencies.

What caught my attention is that some of his ideas are not that far from what we have in our long term plan, starting with the for profit company next year. Technically zero volatility = perfect stability. That is extremely difficult to achieve but important for large scale global commerce.

In our case, having a group with sufficient invested interest in DNotes does give us the “monetary policy advantage” Buterin referred to. We may have to introduce a dual currency model to achieve a near perfect volatility. This is not likely to happen for a few more years.       


“It needs to offer some kind of monetary policy advantage over bitcoin proper.”

“Come up with an asset which is designed to have lower (or possibly zero) volatility against something like the dollar or SDR by having another high-volatility asset "absorb" its volatility.”


CT: What should new features be in cryptocurrency in order for it to succeed?

VB: Regarding cryptocurrency specifically, I think that right now in order for a new cryptocurrency to really succeed in the payments space specifically, it needs to offer some kind of monetary policy advantage over bitcoin proper. One route here is the "stablecoin" approach: come up with an asset which is designed to have lower (or possibly zero) volatility against something like the dollar or SDR by having another high-volatility asset "absorb" its volatility. Otherwise, the best thing to do to help small-scale coins get adopted is better development of "universal gateways": services that make it easy for customers and merchants to pay each other in different currencies and convert as needed.

“My vision for the crypto consumer-merchant-payments infrastructure architecture of the future is one where the customer declares the set of currencies S that they are willing to pay in, the merchant declares the set of currencies T they are willing to accept, then if S and T have an intersection you pay in whatever both are happy with and otherwise you use pathfinding algorithms over decentralized markets to find the cheapest way to exchange between something the customer is happy to give and something the merchant is willing to accept.”

CT: Scalability is Bitcoin’s main issue - What are your thoughts on this?

VB: Particularly, note that scalability isn't just a problem that we will have some far day in the future, it's a problem now. The reason is that if we can solve scalability today, then we can reduce the cost of a blockcain transaction by 100x, say from $0.04 to $0.0004. At those levels, using blockchains for many things will become dirt cheap, and people will start using blockchains as high-reliability application deployment infrastructure just because they are lazy. Imagine blockchain-based encrypted email. Very simple to write, with scalable blockchains it could be done in only 100 extra lines of code.
Scalability and also price volatility. Normal people do not want to be paid in volatile crazy tokens that can go up or down 2x in value before they have a chance to spend them.

CT: In what application will the next generation Blockchain be used for?

VB: In the longer term, I actually see blockchains and other decentralized technologies like distributed hash tables merging together into a kind of decentralized super-operating-system. Essentially, this dOS (not the same as microsoft's DOS) will be used not just for high-value stuff like payments but also as an infrastructure for very many kinds of web applications for perfectly mundane aspects of daily life. You could be conducting zero-knowledge privacy-preserving job searches on a blockchain of the future with a decentralized reputation system. E-commerce, IoT, everything.

Read More:
http://cointelegraph.com/news/115828/interview-with-vitalik-buterin-about-next-generation-for-cryptocurrencies