Tell that to those guys in Montana:

https://www.ccn.com/u-s-senator-warns-closing-montana-coal-plant-will-hurt-bitcoin-mining-industry/



Well, if one is not enough:

Bitcoin mining’s growing demand for cheap energy revived a shuttered coal mine

You were saying....

There is also the Bonner Bitcoin data center, which until recently was one of the largest in the world, as CCN reported two months ago. Last year, according to the Missoula Economic Partnership, an initiative aimed at promoting business activities in the Western Montana city of Missoula, the Bonner facility was expected to expand from the then 12,000 mining rigs to 55,000.

Montana’s pro-cryptocurrency bona fides are also proven by the fact that its state government is the first in the U.S. to offer a grant to a bitcoin mining operation. Last year in June, the governor of Montana, Steve Bullock, announced that out of the $1,124,030 that had been allocated as economic development grants to assist main street businesses in creating jobs, training employees, and planning for growth, $416,000 would go to a bitcoin miner named Project Spokane.

“Missoula County received $416,000 of BSTF Job Creation funds to assist Project Spokane, LLC to expand, which will allow the company to create 65 new jobs in Bonner,” said a press release from Bullock’s office. “The BSTF funds will be used for purchase of equipment, machinery, furniture and software and for wage reimbursement. Project Spokane, LLC is a data center that provides blockchain security services for the bitcoin network.”

ATAPIRIRE, Venezuela (Reuters) - To hear Venezuela’s leftist President Nicolas Maduro tell it, this remote hamlet of 1,300 souls is perched on the cutting edge of an innovation in cryptocurrency.

Located in an isolated savanna in the center of the country, Atapirire is the only town in an area the government says is brimming with 5 billion barrels of petroleum. Venezuela has pledged those reserves as backing for a digital currency dubbed the “petro,” which Maduro launched in February. This month he vowed it would be the cornerstone of a recovery plan for the crisis-stricken nation.

But Atapirire residents say they have seen no efforts by the government to tap those reserves. And they have little confidence that their struggling village has a front-row seat to a revolution in finance.

“There is no sign of that petro here,” said homemaker Igdalia Diaz. She launched into a diatribe about her town’s crumbling school, pitted roads, frequent blackouts and perpetually hungry citizens.

It turns out that Venezuela’s petro is hard to spot almost anywhere. Over a period of four months, Reuters spoke with a dozen experts on cryptocurrencies and oil-field valuation, traveled to the site of the pledged oil reserves and scoured the coin’s digital transaction records in an effort to learn more.

The hunt turned up little evidence of a thriving petro trade. The coin is not sold on any major cryptocurrency exchange. No shops are known to accept it.

The few buyers Reuters could locate were those who had posted about their experiences on online cryptocurrency forums. None would identify themselves. One complained of being “scammed.” Another told Reuters he had received his tokens without problem; he blamed U.S. sanctions against Venezuela and “awful press” for hurting the petro’s debut.

Senior government officials have given contradictory statements. Maduro says petro sales have already raised $3.3 billion and that the coin is being used to pay for imports. But Hugbel Roa, a cabinet minister involved in the project, told Reuters on Friday that the technology behind the coin is still in development and that “nobody has been able to make use of the petro ... nor have any resources been received.”

The Superintendence of Cryptoassets, the government agency that oversees the petro, is a mystery. Reuters recently visited the Finance Ministry, where the Superintendence is supposed to be housed, but was informed by a receptionist that it “does not yet have a physical presence here.”

The Superintendence’s website is not functioning. Its president, Joselit Ramirez, did not respond to messages on his personal social media accounts. Phone calls to the Industry Ministry, which oversees the agency, went unanswered.

The Information Ministry did not reply to emails seeking comment.

Maduro added to the confusion this month by announcing that salaries, pensions and the exchange rate for Venezuela’s decimated currency, the bolivar, are now pegged to the petro. That move stirred bewilderment on Venezuela’s streets and among economists and cryptocurrency experts who say the petro-bolivar tether is unworkable.

“There is no way to link prices or exchange rates to a token that doesn’t trade, precisely because there is no way to know what it actually sells for,” said Alejandro Machado, a Venezuelan computer scientist and cryptocurrency consultant who has closely followed the petro.

The chaos speaks to the desperation and disorganization that are gripping Maduro’s government as Venezuela melts down.

The petro was supposed to help his administration weather the hyperinflation that has rendered the bolivar all but worthless. He vowed that a cryptocurrency, which allows financial operations to be carried out anonymously, would enable Venezuela to undermine U.S. financial sanctions and raise hard currency.

The government pegged the value of the petro to the price of one barrel of Venezuelan oil - currently around $66 - and promised to back it with crude reserves located in a 380-square-kilometer area (147 square miles) surrounding Atapirire. U.S. President Donald Trump in March banned Americans from buying or using the petro.

Analysts are skeptical of Maduro’s claims that the petro has already brought in billions in hard currency. They say digital records associated with the initial coin offering, or ICO, do not provide enough information to determine how much, if anything, has actually been raised.

“This certainly doesn’t look like a typical ICO, given the low level of transaction activity,” said Tom Robinson, chief data officer and co-founder of Elliptic, a London-based blockchain data company. “We have found no evidence that anyone has been issued a petro, nor of it being actively traded on any exchange.”

A visit by Reuters to the area around Atapirire, meanwhile, showed little oil-industry activity. The only visible rigs were small and aging machines installed years ago. Several were abandoned and covered in weeds.

In an opinion piece posted August 19 on Aporrea, an online Venezuelan commentary and analysis site, former Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez estimated it would take at least $20 billion in investment to tap the reserves, money that Venezuela’s troubled state-owned oil company PDVSA does not have.

“The petro is being set at an arbitrary value, which only exists in the government’s imagination,” Ramirez wrote. He oversaw the nation’s oil industry for a decade under late President Hugo Chavez. Ramirez is now in exile in an undisclosed location after being accused of corruption by the Venezuelan government, allegations he denies.

PDVSA did not respond to an email seeking comment.

‘WE GOT SCAMMED’
In contrast to buyers of well-known cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, holders of petros are difficult to find.

One gathering place is an online cryptocurrency forum called Bitcointalk, where enthusiasts began posting messages in early 2018.

Some initial posts were bullish. But that optimism soured as time went on. Several participants groused about a lack of information and delays in getting their coins. One complained of being unable to transfer or sell the tokens.

“As of now yes we got scammed, time will tell if it was a good investment or not,” a forum participant identified as cryptoviagra wrote on June 25.

Another buyer, the only one to respond to questions from Reuters, said via social-media messages that his experience purchasing petros “worked pretty well overall.” He blamed the U.S. ban for depressing petro sales, along with what he considered negative media coverage. He asked that his name be withheld because he feared “persecution” by the U.S. government, adding that “I don’t consider Reuters to be a honest news organization.”

Reuters could not independently confirm whether any forum participants had invested in the petro.

Cryptocurrencies gained popularity over the last decade, led by proponents who said they would lower financial transaction costs, give citizens alternatives to commercial banks and protect them from inflation induced by central-bank policies.

Transactions are validated by a network of computers and recorded on a public ledger called a blockchain. Individual operations are available for anyone to see on the internet, but the identities of those involved are kept secret. The operations are secured by cryptography, the computerized encoding and decoding of data.

Fevered purchases of crypto assets in 2017 drove Bitcoin’s price to nearly $20,000. Its success fueled a wave of coin offerings by other startups, including scams that raised millions of dollars before being broken up by authorities.

Cryptocurrency issuers seeking to provide transparency in fundraising use blockchain ledgers to show each individual purchase of the new currency. That gives potential investors a sense of how much money is flowing in, and provides a relative gauge of demand.

The Venezuelan government, in contrast, has not provided a purchase registry.

The petro’s “white paper,” a public document that describes the conditions of the offer to prospective buyers, says the principal platform for the coin is NEM - a decentralized blockchain network promoted by a Singapore-based non-profit. Owners of NEM accounts are anonymous, but can disclose their identities in the description of their coins if they wish.

In March, a NEM account claiming to be operated by the Venezuelan government issued 82.4 million tokens as part of an ICO associated with a digital coin described as the petro. Those appeared to correspond to a set of “preliminary” coins described in the white paper that buyers could later swap for petros once the ICO was complete.

Around 2,300 of those tokens were transferred to 200 anonymous accounts in small quantities in early May, NEM records show.

That time frame is consistent with comments posted by participants on the Bitcointalk forum who said they were buying petros. If sold at the price set by Maduro based on oil prices at the time, the sale of those tokens could have raised about $150,000, according to Reuters’ calculations.

In April, another anonymous NEM account issued a different set of tokens that it described as part of a separate phase of the petro aimed at major investors.

That account in June transferred a total of around 13 million tokens to about a dozen anonymous accounts, NEM records show. The sale of those tokens could have raised about $850 million at official prices. But there is no way to verify that those were sales, and no large investors have admitted to taking a position in the petro.

Roa, the higher education minister, oversees a state agency called the Venezuelan Blockchain Observatory. He appeared to validate analysts’ suspicions that the petro, at present, doesn’t exist as a functioning currency.

Reuters spoke with him briefly on the sidelines of a petro event in Caracas last week. Roa described the NEM transactions as “early models,” adding that Venezuela was now working on its own blockchain technology. He said buyers have made “reservations” to purchase petros, but that no coins have been released.

What is clear is that the petro does not trade on any major cryptocurrency exchange.

Hong Kong-based Bitfinex, one of the world’s largest exchanges by volume, in March said it never intended to list the petro due to its “limited utility.” It officially banned the token from its platform following U.S. sanctions.

Three other major exchanges - San Francisco-based Coinbase, Seattle-based Bittrex and San Francisco-based Kraken - declined to comment or did not respond to questions as to why they have not listed the petro.

Maduro on April 26 announced that 16 exchanges had been “certified” to trade the petro, adding “they begin operating as of today.” Most are little-known in the crypto world.

Reuters could not locate seven of the exchanges, which had no internet presence. Seven others did not respond to requests for comment. Italcambio, an established Venezuelan currency exchange that Maduro said would trade the coin, does not manage or sell petros, its president Carlos Dorado said in an emailed response to Reuters.

The only exchange that has publicly discussed plans to list the petro is India’s Coinsecure.

In an interview with Reuters earlier this month, CEO Mohit Kalra said Coinsecure within two months would provide Venezuela with an exchange for trading petros, along with technology to operate it, and that Venezuela would pay royalties for its use.

Kalra did not answer calls seeking additional information.

‘WHAT IS A PETRO?’
Oil is the heart of Venezuela’s economy. In choosing to back its petro with petroleum, the country has joined a small but growing number of cryptocurrency issuers linking the value of their tokens to physical commodities.

The Royal Mint, which produces coins for the United Kingdom, in 2017 announced a gold-backed digital coin called RMG. Other tokens have emerged that are backed by diamonds.

The big difference is those cryptocurrencies are tied to physical assets that can be readily traded. In contrast, Maduro promised that the petro would be backed by oil reserves that still lie deep underground near Atapirire in a bloc known as Ayacucho I.

The government says the area holds 5.3 billion barrels, citing an “independent international certification agency.” PDVSA did not answer an email seeking details.

No matter how much oil it holds, the area lacks crucial infrastructure to get it out of the ground, including roads, pipelines and power generation, said Francisco Monaldi, a native of Venezuela who now teaches Latin American energy policy at Rice University in Houston.

“There is no investment plan for this area and no reason to think it would be developed before other fields with better conditions,” he said.

Just locating the bloc requires significant effort.

PDVSA employees who agreed to take a reporter there confused it with a different bloc. Reuters had to map Ayacucho I with GPS software using coordinates published by the government as part of the petro’s creation.

Meanwhile in Atapirire, residents say they have been forgotten.

A fish farm that used to provide employment now lies abandoned. The town’s clinic has no doctor or functioning ambulance. Many spend hours waiting along the dusty road for Chinese-made buses that serve as the only public transit into El Tigre, an important oil hub that lies 60 kilometers (37 miles) to the north.

Teacher Rosa Alvarez said that around half of her first-grade class had stopped showing up because they were hungry and the school no longer provides state-sponsored meals.

She says government officials have ignored her complaints. But in May the Education Ministry laid out a new mandate: Teach students about the virtues of Venezuela’s new cryptocurrency.

Standing before a white board earlier this year as her students giggled and chatted, Alvarez said she was stumped.

“How am I going to explain that to them if nobody will tell me what is a petro?” she said. “How do I buy a petro? With what?”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cryptocurrency-venezuela-specialrepor/special-report-in-venezuela-new-cryptocurrency-is-nowhere-to-be-found-idUSKCN1LF15U

"Located in an isolated savanna in the center of the country, Atapirire is the only town in an area the government says is brimming with 5 billion barrels of petroleum. Venezuela has pledged those reserves as backing for a digital currency dubbed the “petro,” which Maduro launched in February. This month he vowed it would be the cornerstone of a recovery plan for the crisis-stricken nation.

In an opinion piece posted August 19 on Aporrea, an online Venezuelan commentary and analysis site, former Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez estimated it would take at least $20 billion in investment to tap the reserves, money that Venezuela’s troubled state-owned oil company PDVSA does not have."

Currently the majority of miner are located in china.
And china's energy is to 66% generated by coal-fired power plants.  That's by far not a 'low carbon footprint'.

I am suspicious of Siri's plan as he talks about a decentralized non-profit system "Democracy.Earth" and then $1.5 million in a vote-token "presale."
He seems to be trying to introduce "slogans of liberation" to gain investors and gains.

If I am correct there is a country that recently used the blockchain technology in their voting system, and it was a country from Africa. Countries are facing a lot of problems with the corruption and weird voting system there, it's like a national sport.
Switzerland did it recently and The US will do in 2019. When The USA do something every sheep follows

https://skemman.is/bitstream/1946/31161/1/Research-Paper-BBEVS.pdf
Thanks for sharing that. I had no idea people had deployed blockchain based implementations of a voting system. Too cool!

.

Will Crypto Mining Become Obsolete?
News reports have come out stating that crypto mining is phasing out and graphics card sales are proving that to be true.

This is BTC hashrate:


From June to March it has gone up 4 times, but.....it has also gone 2.5 since then, unlike ETH.

So, what's the normal conclusion?
That is a far shorter time span ETH miners have managed to bring the hash rate closer to a point where it makes little sense to mine, this due to the availability of miners.
In BTC case, it was never a problem of having cheap electricity and mining not being profitable, and this is the reason we're having continuous growth as more and more ASICs are being produced and sold.

If indeed your assumption of ASICs taking over from GPUs in ETH mining would be real we would have seen a spike in the hashrate, right? Which is not there!!!!!

Global warming is certainly one of the humanity’s greatest challenges. For decades, public opinion has held heavily industrialized nations accountable for the damage done to our planet. In the quest to preserve Earth, it has become en vogue to critique Bitcoin mining for its high energy use and potentially harmful impact on the environment.

Towards the end of last year, the Bitcoin $BTC▼1.11% network was running on enough electricity to power more than 20 European nations. More recently, an article was run with the headline Bitcoin mining now accounts for almost one percent of the world’s energy consumption. Under a certain light, this is certainly true.

Bitcoin mining relies on Proof-of-Work to maintain its ledger. This mining network is made up of (and powered by) computers, which obviously use electricity. As adoption increases, more computers join the network, making the whole thing quite energy-intensive. Profit and efficiency is directly tied to energy input – a seemingly dangerous business model if electricity sources are not considered.

But while the data indicates that Bitcoin uses one percent of the world’s electricity, it misleadingly suggests that (if it wasn’t for Bitcoin) that electricity would not be produced – or necessary. In fact, often is the case that the electricity used to power Bitcoin mining farms comes from a surplus of energy that countries are desperate to unload.

In the case of green-energy solutions such as wind farms and solar, it is often very difficult to store or even sell that energy if the supply outweighs demand. This problem is particularly common in countries like China – where up to 70 percent of the world’s Bitcoin is being mined.

Reuters reported that “wasted [Chinese] wind power amounted to around 12 percent of total generation in 2017,” and distributing that surplus is proving incredibly difficult because other countries in the region are also energy-rich.

Simply put, countries that attract cryptocurrency miners with cheap electricity can do so because the supply greatly outstrips the demand. Cryptocurrency mining plays an important role in normalizing international energy markets by consuming power that would otherwise go to waste.

Andreas Antonopoulos, a prolific cryptocurrency researcher and influencer, has explained the situation quite succinctly:

The energy consumption in mining, I think, is misrepresented. […] What happens when you build a 50 megawatt plant in a place where they only have 15 megawatts of demand? In some cases, if it’s alternative energy, like wind, solar, or hydro, you can’t turn it off or turn it down. You’ve built it, and it will produce, and then what? You’re basically wasting energy.

Now what if, in that environment, you can find a way to turn that energy into an alternative store of value […] by using electricity that would be otherwise wasted. Now, Bitcoin is an environmental subsidy to alternative energy all around the world.

What needs to be realised is that the advent of Bitcoin is effectively driving the decentralization of energy production, which Antonopolous notes is “one of the most important trends in human history.”

Having energy “stored” in the form of cryptocurrency offsets the costs involved of developing those solutions – especially now that we know that lots of renewable energy goes to waste. The Bitcoin mining industry actually contributes to the development of alternative energy solutions through the conversion of surplus energy into a valuable commodity, simply by making use of the electricity produced.

Canada’s largest utility, Hydro-Quebec, is a perfect example. Reuters reports that “the province estimates it will have an energy surplus equivalent to 100 terawatt hours over the next 10 years. One terawatt hour powers 60,000 homes in Quebec during a year.”

Not surprisingly, Bitcoin mining operations have inundated Hydro-Quebec with applications to make use of the surplus. As such, profits have been steady, a whopping annual average of roughly $3 billion over the past four years.

[Edit: Hydro-Quebec has since clarified details of its profits, and this post has been updated to reflect its data. Particularly, it pointed out that the numbers relate specifically to its profit, not revenue, as was originally reported. Surely, an important distinction.]

So much money has been generated by lucrative deals that it was “forced” to share $45 million with its customers as profits exceeded the regulator-approved rate of return. This will surely act as inspiration for other nations to create similiar renewable energy solutions.

Attacking Bitcoin mining for its electricity usage is certainly easy – it’s an obvious target. In May, Ars Technica reported that by the end of this year, Bitcoin could consume up to 7.7 gigawatts, which sure sounds totally scary, until you run some comparisons.

The VISA corporation consumed more than 182 gigawatts of electricity over a seven year period. As it stands, it would take Bitcoin almost 24 years to consume as much electricity as VISA did in seven. Supposedly, it’s Bitcoin that is the danger to the environment, not VISA. Yeah, right.

Antonopoulos does concede there are challenges associated with managing Bitcoin’s electricity usage, but it is a complex discussion that requires consideration from many angles. The idea that by simply using electricity, Bitcoin must be bad, is nothing short of narrow-minded.

“This is a long game, […] the implications and complexity of how cost is allocated and how energy is consumed is huge,” Antonopolous declared. “I don’t think we can afford two Proof-of-Work systems on this planet, but I think we only need one.”

To which extent, the power to drive energy innovation, in the end, could be Bitcoin‘s “killer app.”

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/08/28/bitcoin-drives-energy-innovation/

China is poised to block more than 120 foreign cryptocurrency exchanges as part of the government’s broader crackdown on activities related to digital money, according to state media.

Authorities will block access in China to 124 websites operated by offshore cryptocurrency exchanges that provide trading services to citizens on the mainland, the Shanghai Securities News, a newspaper affiliated with the country’s financial and markets regulators, reported on Thursday.

It said authorities will also continue to monitor and shut down domestic websites related to cryptocurrency trades and initial coin offerings (ICOs), and ban payment services from accepting cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin. The newspaper cited people close to the Leading Group of Internet Financial Risks Remediation, which was set up by China’s cabinet in 2016 and headed by Pan Gongsheng, a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China – the country’s central bank.

Multiple calls made by the South China Morning Post to the central bank went unanswered.

The report marks the latest effort by Beijing to intensity the clampdown on cryptocurrency activities because of concerns about financial instability.

Censors recently shut down at least eight blockchain and cryptocurrency-focused online media outlets, some of which raised several million dollars in venture capital. These entities found their official public accounts on WeChat blocked on Tuesday evening, owing to violations against new regulations from China’s top internet watchdog.

Separately, Beijing’s central Chaoyang district issued a notice on August 17 banning hotels, office buildings and shopping malls in the area from hosting events promoting cryptocurrencies. The document was leaked online this week, and confirmed by the Post with the local authority.

Last September, Chinese regulators banned ICOs, describing them as an unauthorised illegal fundraising activity. During the same month, Chinese regulators also ordered Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges to cease trading.

ICOs are a form of crowdsourced fundraising by which companies exchange their newly created cryptocurrencies – called tokens – for payments in an existing currency, usually an established cryptocurrency such as ethereum or bitcoin. ICO investors profit when their tokens gain in value at a faster rate than the currency they used to pay for them.

The government crackdown prompted Chinese cryptocurrency exchange operators and ICO projects to move their operations in friendlier jurisdictions, such as Singapore.

In February, state media first reported that China will soon block all websites related to cryptocurrency trading and ICOs – including overseas platforms. Popular cryptocurrency exchanges, including Bitfinex, Bitnance, Huobi and OKEx, have since been blocked on the mainland.

Since the crackdown began last September, a total of 88 cryptocurrency exchanges and 85 ICO projects have been shut down in China, and the yuan-bitcoin trading pair has dropped from 90 per cent to less than 5 per cent of the world’s total bitcoin trades, according to Shanghai Securities News.

Pan, the central bank deputy governor, said in Beijing last December that China made the right decision to clamp down on cryptocurrency exchanges.

“If things were still the way they were at the beginning of the year, over 80 per cent of the world’s bitcoin trading and ICO financing would take place in China – what would things look like today?” he said. “It’s really quite scary.”

https://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/2161014/china-block-more-120-offshore-cryptocurrency-exchanges-crackdown

A new movement says that crypto-voting can purify democracy—and eventually eliminate the need for governments altogether.

IN A CAFÉ on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a one-time videogame developer turned political theorist named Santiago Siri is trying to explain to me how his nonprofit startup, Democracy.Earth, aims to fix the world’s broken politics with the help of the blockchain.

THE CONVERSATION HAS already covered a dizzying amount of ground. We’ve discussed the emergence of the Westphalian order of nation-states in the 17th century, Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election, the total collapse of Venezuelan society, and Siri’s own experience of political corruption in his native Argentina. But he finally boils it all down to one short sentence.

“We want to tokenize the like,” Siri says. At the center of the project is the creation of what he calls “political cryptocurrency”—blockchain-generated tokens that users of Democracy.Earth’s software can spend as votes.

The way Siri sees it, we have traded in the original liberating potential of the internet for sterile corporate serfdom. Our time spent online retweeting and upvoting and clicking on emojis serves mainly to help unaccountable corporations like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to better target us with advertising. Siri dreams of a new kind of social media platform on which we spend “vote tokens” that can do anything, from electing politicians and passing referendums to enacting the bylaws of a social club or establishing the business plan of a corporation. It’s democracy by click.

The vision is a radical departure from the one-person, one-vote, once-every-year-or-two trip to the ballot box we are familiar with—and by which, in Siri’s view, we are so ill-served. Users of Democracy.Earth’s one-size-fits-all governance platform—code-named Sovereign—would have infinite flexibility to vote on any kind of topic or person, whenever they log on. In the Democracy.Earth future, every day will be election day, and the ballot will include anything that enough of us think should be there.

In this perfect world, Siri argues, the supposedly unhackable and absolutely transparent blockchain will ensure that no centralized election authority is required to tabulate a vote, and no corrupt politician or gridlocked legislature can interfere with the popular mandate. But coming up with a superior form of voting technology is just the beginning; the larger, far more revolutionary goal is to devise a decentralized decisionmaking process that eliminates the necessity for any kind of central government at all.

“We are not in the business of selling e-voting machines or helping modernize governments with internet voting,” Siri says. “We want to empower people down to the individual level without asking for the permission of governments.”

If the dream of bitcoin, the token generated by Satoshi Nakamoto’s blockchain, was to free money from central bank control, then the dream of Sovereign is to free politics from central government control.

Siri’s complicated, multilayered solution to democratic dysfunction raises a host of questions and paradoxes. There is no shortage of secure-voting-systems experts who believe that radical blockchain democracy could cause more problems than it solves, and is in fact an invitation to gaming and manipulation at odds with the idea of transparent, fraud-free voting.

Still others question how Democracy.Earth plans to solve the gnarliest quandaries faced by any voting system: How does one simultaneously ensure transparency in the voting process while guaranteeing the anonymity of the voter? How can one enfranchise direct voting without running the risk of a feckless tyranny of the majority motivated by short-term passions making terrible decisions?

But nothing raises more eyebrows than the jewel in Democracy.Earth’s crown: the vote token. Because—like bitcoin, like Ether, and like so many of the cryptocurrency tokens sold by blockchain startups in initial coin offerings, known as ICOs, to fund their own operations—the Democracy.Earth vote token has a financial value.

According to Siri, early in 2018 Democracy.Earth raised $1.5 million in a vote-token “presale.” It has plans to mint “a maximum” of 500 million tokens, provisionally priced at 12 cents each, for a company valuation of $60 million. Democracy.Earth employees will be compensated for their labor with tokens. The bottom line: There will be a financial market for the mechanism that Democracy.Earth users employ to vote.

And that’s a headscratcher.

“Ask yourself,” says Joseph Kiniry, CEO of Free & Fair, a company that provides secure election services, “if combining the idea of an ICO and democratic elections sounds fishy or not.”

THE TROJAN HORSE that rolled through Buenos Aires in 2013 was designed, like its ancient Greek forebear, to catch the unsuspecting eye. Towed down the streets by a car, 20 feet high and exquisitely carpentered, it caused an immediate sensation. Kids ran alongside. An excited crowd gathered when it came to a halt in front of the Palace of the Argentina National Congress, the political heart of the South American country.

The publicity stunt aimed to spread awareness of an upstart new force in Argentinan politics, the Partido de la Red. “Until then, we were just the guys from Twitter, the nerds, playing politics,” says Siri, a cofounder of the party. “But then everyone was like, ‘What the hell is that?’ People started taking selfies. It became a symbol of the campaign.”

Partido de la Red means “Party of the Net”—as in, the internet. It was founded to represent the interests of an emerging generation of millennial, always-online activists thoroughly dissatisfied with decades of Argentina’s endemic political corruption and spectacular financial crises. Its affiliation with the internet was meant to signal faith in a new kind of collaborative democracy. One of its primary goals was to elect politicians who would commit to uphold decisions made by party members in open, online debates. No more closed-door maneuvering. No more voting according to who delivered the most cash.

“We had one rule,” Siri says. “Obey the internet.”

The Trojan Horse’s symbolism ran deep. Like the original equine that carried hidden Greek warriors into the city of Troy, it represented the idea that the Partido de la Red would sneak its way into the established order and wage war from the inside. But it was also a play on the computer world’s co-optation of the name. This party was a computer virus designed to breach the security of Argentinian politics.

At first, things seemed to be going well. In its first attempt to contest an election, the party captured 1.2 percent of the national vote, considerably better, Siri says, than the 0.2 to 0.3 percent a new party usually gets. “We had a lot of followers online,” Siri says. “It became a movement. We got into the game.”

“And then,” Siri says, “things started to get really strange.”

Provocateurs began showing up at party meetings. Siri’s car tires were slashed. A shadowy character told him that a “donation” of a million pesos to a federal judge would magically solve his party’s registration problems. He discovered that “changing the system from within was not going to happen,” Siri says. “The system was going to change you first.”

So instead of trying to infiltrate the old system, Siri decided to build an entirely new one. He started putting together his blockchain governance platform. In January 2015, he made his way to Mountain View, California, where he had 10 minutes to impress Sam Altman, president of legendary startup incubator Y Combinator.

It wasn’t going well. Siri remembers being “super nervous.” When Altman asked him a question about how many users the fledgling enterprise might eventually have, “I invented a number out of thin air.” The 10-minute window was closing fast.

Then he showed Altman Instagram pictures of the Trojan horse.

“They were like, ‘What!? What did you do!?,’” Siri says with a smile. “They loved us.”

DEMOCRACY.EARTH’S WHITE PAPER, “The Social Smart Contract,” is a tract that is equal parts crypto-libertarian manifesto and a technology road map for Sovereign. When stripped of its rhetoric (“The internet is incompatible with the nation-state,” “Representative democracies are an accident of the information technologies of the 18th century”), it breaks down into half a dozen major pieces.

In addition to the blockchain and vote tokens, there is also a flexible ruleset for voting called “liquid democracy,” a complicated system for identity validation involving video selfies and “attention mining,” and even a version of a universal basic income scheme that will regularly “drip” new vote tokens into the accounts of Sovereign users.

Fully explicating the potential and pitfalls of any single element of Democracy.Earth’s technology requires a lengthy journey into mostly unmapped territory. Consider, just for starters, the concept of “liquid democracy”—an approach to voting that is radically different from Western democratic electoral systems. In Sovereign’s scheme, users are allocated a stockpile of votes they can use (or spend) in a variety of ways.

They can vote more than once on a particular topic, to express a heavier “weight” of intent. They can delegate their votes on a topic to trusted experts who are expected to understand the issue at hand in greater depth. They can even change their votes or retract their votes after the fact, if they change their minds on a subject or if they believe an elected representative has failed to deliver on their promises.

Log on to the beta version of vote.democracy.earth for the first time, and you start off with 1,000 votes to do with as you please. A scroll of questions, action items, and ongoing debates occupies the center of the screen. Should there be a second Brexit vote? Should Venezuelan opposition leaders maintain dialogue with the repressive Maduro government? Do you think a universal basic income should be granted unconditionally?

Liquid democracy is an always-on mashup between direct democracy and representative democracy. Voters are simultaneously constituents of multiple overlapping organizations: local, international, aspirational. In Siri’s imagination, dipping into liquid democracy’s never-ending flow will fit as naturally into the lives of the smartphone generation as checking Twitter or Instagram.

Moritz Ritter, managing director of Berlin-based advocacy group Liquid Democracy, which is unaffiliated with Democracy.Earth but has been pushing similar ideas about how elections can be reimagined for years, says the purpose is “to take the current system of representative democracy and make it more responsive and distribute power more equally. In our view, this is necessary, because we see a growing disconnect between political actors and citizens manifested by shrinking numbers of members in political parties, dramatically shrinking voter turnout in elections, and growing mistrust of political systems.”

“Democracy.Earth,” Ritter says, “is a really thorough approach for rethinking online voting and allocating political power without centralized institutions.”

As described by Ritter, it’s easy to see the appeal of liquid democracy for a constituency dissatisfied with politics as currently practiced. But it may be a mistake to try to map what Democracy.Earth is doing directly to our current status quo. Whenever I asked Siri how exactly his technology would affect something like the emergence of Donald Trump in US politics or the authoritarianism of President Maduro in Venezuela or, in perhaps the most formidably dismaying scenario, the total power of the Chinese Communist Party, Siri would change the grounds of discussion away from the political exigencies of the moment and toward the contemplation of more ethereal, long-range goals.

The internet and the blockchain, he believes, have smashed the old nation-state era to dust. In this new, profoundly globalized, borderless, and increasingly decentralized universe, we are no longer defined by our geographical location in a particular territory. Instead, we are citizens of the world, and in the future we will require the evolution of new, decentralized organizations aligned with the constraints of our new reality. Democracy.Earth, I gradually came to understand, is an ongoing research laboratory and thought experiment in how to design decisionmaking mechanisms appropriate to this new world.

“Our aim is to provide a token that can be trusted for governance because of the legitimacy we can bring in regarding identity validation and liquid democracy rules,” Siri says. “I think we are discovering the building blocks for creating purely digital institutions—institutions that never need to go through a bureaucracy or a bank or a state in order to exist.”

THE PROPOSITION THAT new solutions are necessary for our strange new world is hard to argue against. The problem lies in proving that something as complex as Democracy.Earth fixes more than it breaks. Consider the most fundamental piece of Sovereign’s infrastructure, the blockchain.

The case for the application of the blockchain to voting systems is that blockchains are supposed to be perfectly transparent scorekeepers that can’t be hacked by Russian bots or bought off by Super PAC fund-raising or corrupt Argentine politicos. The immutability of a “distributed ledger” shared on multiple computers is an article of faith in the crypto community. Using Sovereign, Siri says, voters will be able to track their votes on the blockchain; they will know without any doubt that their vote was cast and counted as intended.

Herb Stephens, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur who serves as Democracy.Earth’s treasurer, says the goal is a system in which “everyone has a copy and everyone can monitor the things that matter to the public in general.”

Or, as the white paper puts it, “with a blockchain-based democracy votes become censorship-resistant and every single voter can audit an election without requiring any kind of access rights to infrastructure.”

Experts in secure voting systems disagree.

“It is a terrible mismatch for the voting and election space,” says Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer at Microsoft Research who has spent 30 years researching secure voting systems. “It seems attractive, until you scratch under the surface. There are so many ways in which blockchains don’t solve the real problems, they just make everything worse.”

Dan Wallach, a professor specializing in computer security at Rice University, believes that the crypto-infatuated generation is far too optimistic about what their new toys can achieve.

“Blockchain people haven’t really been paying attention to the threat models inherent in voting, particularly bribery and coercion,” Wallach says. “They tend to make naive assumptions about voters’ ability to control the cryptographic keys and software used to express their votes. None of these systems are suitable for use in real-world municipal elections.”

Wallach and Benaloh both reiterated the classic “garbage in, garbage out” problem that has long afflicted computer programming. Certainly, once things are recorded on the blockchain it is very hard to change them. (As Harper Reed, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign chief technology officer, told me, “the blockchain is great for knowing whether people are messing with your stuff.”)

But Benaloh is worried about vulnerabilities that occur before data is encoded in the blockchain. There could be malware on your smartphone that alters your vote as soon as you try to spend your token. Even worse, there could be an agent of a repressive state with a gun to your head dictating exactly how you vote.

Or, your vote could just get bought—something that some researchers think will be even easier on the blockchain than at the old-school ballot box.

Although Democracy.Earth intends for Sovereign to ultimately be “blockchain-agnostic”—that is, it should be compatible with a multitude of different public and private blockchains—right now it is being designed to take advantage of the “smart contract” capabilities built into the Ethereum blockchain.

These contracts automatically execute transactions on the blockchain when certain conditions written into the blockchain’s code are met. Sovereign’s vote tokens, therefore, can automatically trigger smart contracts. For example, an organization debating whether to spend funds on a particular project holds a vote; if a majority spends their tokens voting yes, the funds are instantly released.

But in a system where the decisionmaking entity—the vote token—is itself something bearing a financial value, the potential for smart-contract mayhem is enormous, says Ari Juels, a Cornell Tech computer scientist who studies blockchains and smart contracts. In early July, Juels coauthored a blog post pointing out that smart contracts could be equally as effective at “buying elections” as they would be properly executing the results of an election.

“The Democracy.Earth scheme offers a clear and simple illustration of the type of attack we’re concerned about,” Juels writes in an email. “Very simply, someone can anonymously launch a smart contract that buys people’s votes by purchasing their Democracy.Earth voting tokens.

The broader point is that the very transparency of blockchains can be a liability in elections, as it exposes the choices of voters. Smart contracts can automate vote buying, guarantee payment, and otherwise undermine election integrity. The white paper suggests that the connection between identities and cast votes might be broken using new techniques. But breaking this connection when a voter wants it in place in order to sell her vote is hard.”

“I hold the same opinion as the rest of the international experts in crypto and elections,” says Kiniri of Free & Fair.1 “There are nearly only ‘cons’ to using blockchain technology in the voting process.”

THE SON OF a corporate lawyer and slipper company entrepreneur, Siri grew up in Buenos Aires, idolizing both Steve Jobs and Che Guevara. Before getting involved in Argentinian politics, he carved out a successful niche as a videogame designer, launching two game companies as well as cofounding a game developer association. He dreamed, he tells me, of building a game like SimCity, “only with actual citizens.” He jumped on the blockchain bandwagon early, although he notes, just a tad ruefully, “I wish I bought more.”

“But I bought enough,” he concludes.

As far as his own politics are concerned, Siri says that he’s been “introduced in different places around the world as either a revolutionary leftist or a Davos-man entrepreneur engaging in politics. Both are flattering to me.”

There’s no question he’s hard to put in a box. Every conversation I had with Siri was a roller-coaster: Game theory, the quantum nature of reality, the failure of the Bolshevik revolution, the internet’s responsibility for the polarization of our current information ecology—in real time, you can feel Siri restlessly trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together. He’s a big thinker, tackling problems that are as big as they get.

But the more we delved into the nitty-gritty of Democracy.Earth’s technology, the more difficult it became to evaluate its objective merits. When I pointed Siri toward Juel’s blog post about smart-contract vote-buying and shared Benaloh’s critique of the blockchain as applied to real-world elections, his answers took me further into the labyrinth.

“Of course there are all kinds of concerns as we expand our understanding of how to architect systems built only with information,” he wrote via email. “We are aware of the diverse set of attacks that can happen. But voting isn’t a uni-dimensional problem. It’s just the name we give to transactions happening within the wider realm of governance. Elections, as we understand them under the traditional sense on how they’ve been held by the nation-state, are probably not the fittest form of governance to be delivered in digital form ... That’s why intrinsically understanding how blockchains can scale social consensus is definitely the way to go.”

What Siri seemed to be saying is that Sovereign isn’t really intended as a replacement for how the United States elects a president or California passes an initiative. Instead, it's really an exercise in figuring out how to use the blockchain to make group decisions in the crypto-digital domain. Sovereign, in other words, represents government of the crypto-people, by the crypto-people, and for the crypto-people.

Ultimately, maybe, the crypto-people will soon just be the people. But we’re not there yet. Underlying everything in the Democracy.Earth platform, and more generally in the whole crypto-libertarian project to remake society into a decentralized utopia free of coercion and exploitation, is a near-evangelical faith in the premise that computer code can solve the messy realities of human life.

“The interesting thing about crypto,” Siri says, “is that you can start creating institutional models that no longer rely on the fallibility of human authority but are strictly based on code, mathematics, and encryption; you can start building an institutional reality where the checks and balances are protected by hard promises, by fundamental mathematical constructs that are simply impossible to break due to the intrinsic properties of how information works.”

This is a difficult argument to challenge by picking away at potential smart contract vulnerabilities, or any other objective critique of the blockchain as it exists now, because the answer to every problem is a new technological solution that just hasn’t been discovered yet. And it’s an impossible argument to challenge by pointing out such things as the possibility that a centralized database with really strong security provisions is probably a more efficient way to run an election than by using the blockchain, when the whole point of the project is to avoid having a central authority in the first place.

A PRIMITIVE VERSION of Sovereign was tested during the 2016 Colombian referendum held to approve a peace treaty between the government and the FARC rebels. One thousand expatriate Colombians who were unable to register to vote in the actual election took part. In a preliminary stab at implementing the flexibility of liquid democracy, the trial group was given the opportunity to cast a symbolic vote on seven different propositions relating to the peace accord, rather than just a binary yes/no on whether to pass the accord.

Siri says the approach helped explain the surprise real-world defeat of the accord, because the Sovereign-using voters approved six of the peace-related proposals, while overwhelmingly rejecting a proposal to allow FARC to participate in government.

As an experiment in how voting could be conducted with more nuance than conventional models, the FARC referendum is interesting. But it still falls short as proof of how a full-fledged Sovereign exercise of vote-token fueled liquid democracy might work, because too many pieces of the puzzle still remain in development. Most critically, there has been, to date, no real-world test of the use of Sovereign’s blockchain generated vote tokens. And that is precisely where the whole Democracy.Earth experiment is most provocative.

The main reason voting-technology researchers cast a leery eye on the merger of cryptocurrency and voting stems directly from the example of bitcoin, which evolved from means of exchange to speculative commodity. Instead of being used to actually buy things, bitcoin has turned into the digital equivalent of gold—a way to get rich by simply buying and selling when the price is right.

So what’s to stop “owners” of vote tokens from buying and selling them as commodities instead of using them to vote?

Siri and Stephens both acknowledge that the potential for vote-token speculation is a real concern. At the very moment I was posing them the question in early July, the entire Democracy.Earth team held a one-week retreat to figure out how to guard against exactly such a scenario. After the retreat was over, Siri sent me a preliminary draft of their new “token economics” white paper. Along with another dollop of rhetoric—“we consider token-based liquid democracies to be the most flexible form of democratic governance that can be constructed with digital technology”—the paper made a pledge that Sovereign’s vote tokens would be built with incentives designed to keep token prices stable.

Like many elements of the Democracy.Earth technology roadmap (and this is a common aspect of ICO white papers) the goal sounded more aspirational than grounded in executable code. But two different academic cryptocurrency researchers with whom I discussed the plan said they were hard put to figure out why a vote token had to have monetary value in the first place. One suggested that the primary motivation was likely “business reasons”—that is, funding ongoing operations or, more simply, profit.

Even worse, to participate in this form of voting, you have to be able to afford the vote token in the first place. Someone has to cover the cost of computation on a public blockchain. In the world of old school politics, “paying to play” is generally frowned upon. Perhaps in theory Democracy.Earth’s outline of a universal basic income scheme could address that issue, but that’s also another example of adding complexity to an already Rube Goldbergian contraption.

Siri’s rejoinder is that there has to be some real skin in the game to make online voting meaningful. “The purpose of using a blockchain is for decisions that aim to be immutable, and hence able to trigger cryptocurrency transactions or execute smart contracts,” Siri says. “Our aim is to evolve the experience using social media into something that is effectively able to push institutional change with transactions that are backed by economic drivers brought in by the users themselves.” In other words, paying to play is a good thing.

HARPER REED, OBAMA’S former CTO, professed himself a bit befuddled by how blockchain dreams intersect with the kind of door-knocking and phone-banking that modern American election campaigns are built on. “Winning an election is all about committing to a space, committing to a locale, and actually organizing,” Reed says. “I have a hard time understanding how, as a borderless crypto person, you can effect change. By definition, you are standing outside of a space instead of committing to it.”

Siri agrees that politics work best on the ground. “That’s how politics works everywhere,” he says. But he thinks he is as committed to grassroots organizing as any clipboard-wielding pavement pounder. It’s just that his precincts are all online.

“We are on a mission to create a ‘new space’ and breed a sense of global citizenship within it,” Siri says. “In essence, we want to help you migrate from your political system without needing to change countries. Think of the people in Venezuela: They’re under a tyrannical regime that has a hyper-inflationary currency, and the majority is unable to leave their families and loved ones. Our aim is precisely to work with those communities to provide them a set of tools able to empower them in a way that gives them an exit.”

What he means by “exit,” however, is not a chance to physically leave the country but a chance to “leave” oppressive financial and political systems of authority. He sketches out a scenario: Imagine there’s an organization that aims to represent Venezuelan dissidents. Some have left the county, some are still inside the country, but all of them have identities validated on Democracy.Earth’s blockchain. The members take a vote (with their anonymity protected) on whether to digitally “airdrop” some cryptocurrency assets on a group of dissidents within the country. A “yes” vote executes a smart contract that releases the funds. Now the dissidents are no longer trapped by the hyperinflating insanity of the bolivar or state controls on currency exchanges. In theory they will enjoy financial security backed up by the blockchain. (Provided, of course, that there are ways to actually spend that cryptocurrency on food or shelter or whatever, which does not seem to be an insignificant quibble.)

It is precisely in a place like Venezuela, Siri argues—where the politics are irremediably broken and civil society is in such shambles—that people will be most likely to experiment with new ways to exercise their sovereignty. But the goal isn’t necessarily to replace President Maduro with someone else. It’s far more radical than that—the goal is to make the president, any president, irrelevant to the needs and desires of a self-organizing population taking advantage of blockchain-generated tools to transcend primitive electoral democracy.

“If we can effectively build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete, maybe we are worthy of not needing governments anymore,” Siri says. “I know it’s ambitious. But either we build tools that help us adapt to our new weird reality or we go back to the dark ages.”

More than once, listening to Siri, I found myself inwardly gaping at what seemed like windmill-tilting to the nth degree. Getting rid of government altogether? Come on! But every time I emerged from my daze and took a hard look at the world around me, the prospect that a new dark age was looming on the horizon seemed less fanciful.

And the notion that our weird times might call for weird measures seemed less quixotic.

https://www.wired.com/story/santiago-siri-radical-plan-for-blockchain-voting/?mbid=BottomRelatedStories_Sections_5

This Windows comparison is interesting.

However I didn't get your idea about vitalik and the bankers.
 vitalik Buterin really acts in a weird way sometimes, but in my opinion tokenization model is revolutionary and it was a great blow to the financial system.

Now companies does not need to be funded through the stock market, they can be easily funded without any burocratic issue through ethereum ICOs.

Who’s using Bitcoin to buy and sell goods and services?

A lot fewer people than you probably would have guessed. After peaking at $411 million in September, the amount of money the largest 17 crypto merchant-processing services received in the best-known cryptocurrency has been on a steady decline, hitting a recent low of $60 million in May, according to research that startup Chainalysis Inc. conducted for Bloomberg News.

While the amount merchant services such as BitPay, Coinify and GoCoin received increased slightly in June to $69 million, it was still a far cry from the $270 million received a year ago, Chainalysis found.



Bitcoin advocates have long suggested the virtual money would one day replace fiat currencies as a means of doing business, but after a rise in use last fall, the cryptocurrency has lost what little appeal it had as a way to buy goods or services.

“It’s not actually usable," Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, said in an email. Often, he said, "the net cost of a Bitcoin transaction is far more than a credit card transaction." And Bitcoin-based transactions can’t be reversed, an issue when a merchant or a consumer comes up against fraud.

The decline in use for payments coincided with the spike in speculative investing that drove the price of the biggest virtual currency to a record high of almost $20,000 in December. While Bitcoin’s price has steadied somewhat recently after crashing more than 50 percent, consumers still appear to be reluctant to use the digital coins for transactions.

“When the price is going up so rapidly last year, in one day you could lose $1,000 if you spent it,” Kim Grauer, senior economist at Chainalysis, said in a phone interview. What’s more, high transaction fees have made paying for small-ticket items like coffee with Bitcoin impractical, she said.

In January, payment service Stripe Inc. stopped supporting Bitcoin as usage declined and price swings intensified. A number of companies such as travel services provider Expedia stopped accepting the cryptocurrency as well.

That’s a troubling sign for some fundamental investors, who maintain the belief that the cryptocurrency has to be in use in the real world versus just be a speculative instrument to have long-term value.

"Most people who are not Bitcoin core maximalists argue that yes, you need people to use these things as means of payment to become money," Kyle Samani, managing partner at Austin, Texas-based hedge fund Multicoin Capital, said in a email. "Or as my co-founder Tushar likes to say, don’t think of money as a noun, but rather as an adjective. The more something is used as money, the more ‘moneyness’ it has."

The way Bitcoin is being utilized is changing as well. Because the fees to process a transaction in Bitcoin can be steep and varied -- they peaked at $54 in December, but are down to less than $1 today -- not many people are using the coins for small transactions, like buying a cup of coffee. They are spending the virtual currency more to pay vendors like freelancers located overseas: For those cases, using Bitcoin can be cheaper and faster than using traditional financial services.



“In the last six months we’ve seen a large uptick in crypto companies paying their vendors in Bitcoin, including law firms, hosting companies, accounting firms, landlords and software vendors," according to Sonny Singh, chief commercial officer of processor BitPay. His company has seen a five-fold increase in crypto companies paying their bills from last year, he said.

Bitcoin faithful continue to buy bigger-ticket items such as furniture, and still the occasional sports car. At Overstock.com Inc., crypto-based sales are up two-fold in the first half of this year versus a year ago, the company said. Top items bought with cryptocurrency include living-room furniture, bedroom furniture and laptops, according to the site.

Many people, however, are only speculating with Bitcoin or selling off small amounts to convert it into a fiat currency, and use that to pay for goods and services. Long-time advocate Graham Tonkin said he converts his Bitcoin and Ether from time to time to cover credit-card bills.

"I assume many people are like me, where you won’t be doing your everyday transactions in it," said Tonkin, who is chief growth officer at crypto finance research company Mosaic. “I don’t believe [it] fits the characteristics of money very well."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-01/bitcoin-s-use-in-commerce-keeps-falling-even-as-volatility-eases

It has nothing to do with the nm in the chips, it's all about reward and availability

To reply to both of you, chip sales are a leading indicator of sentiment. So follow my logic here: if chip sales are weak, it's because miners aren't investing in new equipment, which is likely because they don't think it will pay for itself. This means they don't see the price increasing. Miners, more than anyone else, are likely to have a better feel for the future price because their viability is at stake. When miners expect the price to continue rising, they can run losses in the near term to buy more equipment because they expect the higher price to eventually make up for it. So the inverse is the conclusion here. The fact that nvidia, which is a public company well-versed in issuing public guidance under SEC rules, was so blindsided by the weakness for crypto chips in the latest quarter is an indication of how fast the market is slowing down, which indicates how bleak miners view future price prospects to be.

The difference between nvidia and other crypto chipmakers is nvidia is a public company. They issue forward looking guidance and it was to meet certain requirements. Rose private chipmakers have no such obligation and are reporting numbers lookin backwards, so Bitmain's profits in 2017 are a lower quality data point compared to nvidia and also wildly outdated at this point.

That's why I think nvidia's guidance portends to poor sentiment by miners, which in turn portends to a poor price outlook going forward.

Despite Bitcoin’s 2018 price slump, the dominant cryptocurrency’s hash rate continues to surge at an astonishing pace. Although the value of Bitcoin has decreased by 53% since January 1st, 2018, the hash rate has increased 155% in the same time period.

The continued growth in hash power demonstrates a strong, continued belief in Bitcoin by miners worldwide and may foreshadow a hidden bullish trend.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4670899

Vitalik Buterin opened a proposal on GitHub about fixing transactions price in ethereum plataform.

It Will not be totally fixed, but it will no more be determined by free market.

What do you think about it?

I didn't know we can buy Amazon gift cards with BitPay. Do you know if it's only gift cards for the .com version or there are others too?
Bitrefil also has Amazon voucher but it depends on your country (I think it has only USA) https://www.bitrefill.com/refill