What links flowers, mandarin oranges, and pineapples? They’re all neatly recorded on Maersk’s new digital shipping ledger.

Moving millions of gigantic metal boxes around the world is hard work—but circumnavigating the associated paperwork can be even harder. So the world’s largest shipping company has been trialing how it can make use of the digital technology behind the world’s most notorious cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, to make it a little easier.

Bitcoin is built on what's called the blockchain: a digital ledger where each line is recorded based on the previous one using cryptographic techniques, making it almost impossible to modify at a later date. The ledger isn’t stored centrally, and multiple parties can agree by consensus that the details contained within it are accurate—which means that it's in everyone's interest to keep it so. That makes it perfect for recording financial transactions, but also doing plenty else, too.

The shipping company Maersk has now announced that it has been working with IBM to use the blockchain to keep track of shipments as they’re hauled across the seas. This isn’t the company keeping track of the metal boxes themselves, but rather their contents. The company claims that a single container being hauled from East Africa to Europe might require paperwork to be dealt with by as many as 30 different people, spread across 200 or more interactions.

So with IBM it’s built a tool based on blockchain that allows every participant in a supply chain to see the progress of a shipment, including where the container is and the status of its documents. The hope: shippers reduce the weight of paperwork that needs to be done, while customs officials and clients can see where goods are at all times. So far, shipments of flowers from Kenya, mandarin oranges from California, and pineapples from Colombia have all been tracked using the tool as they flowed into the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

Maersk isn’t alone in using the blockchain to keep track of stuff. As the New York Times points out in a long piece describing IBM’s foray into blockchain, Big Blue is working with 400 different organizations to apply the technology to different situations. That includes Wal-Mart, which announced last year that it was using blockchain to record and log the origins of produce in order to improve health and safety standards.

IBM is clearly looking to assert its control as a blockchain force to be reckoned with, but others will snap at its heels. Microsoft is already working on the technology, and its open nature means that it’s already being used by smaller upstarts to do everything from build cryptocurrencies for the world of corporate finance to make a more private Internet. One thing is clear: there's certainly more to blockchain than Bitcoin.

I think simply placing a BTC address is a lot better than signing up on an ad campaign to fill the site with trash.

Four years ago, Alberto's career prospects were bleak. The 23-year-old Venezuelan had just graduated from college with a degree in computer science, but his nation's economy was already shredded by 13 years of socialism.

"There were job opportunities, but they paid like $20 a month, and we were used to traveling and buying things from abroad so we couldn't settle for that," his friend Luis recalls. Alberto and Luis—whose names have been changed for their own safety—teamed up to start a clothing business, but the venture floundered.

Then Alberto discovered bitcoin mining.

He read about it on an Argentinian gaming forum. An item posted to the site described a process of getting paid in a new internet-based currency denominated in strings of numbers and letters, in exchange for running computations on a home computer. His parents said that the whole thing sounded like a Ponzi scheme. Alberto, however, sensed that his life was about to change.

Four years later, his country is embroiled in a humanitarian crisis. The supermarket shelves are bare. Children are fainting from hunger in their classrooms. A mob recently broke into the Caracas zoo to eat a horse. Many Venezuelans subsist on a monthly government stipend equivalent to about $9.

Alberto, meanwhile, based on his own account, is earning more than $1,200 a day mining bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies.

...Bitcoin miners may have unique access to foreign goods, but they also live under constant threat. Many fear they'll be discovered by the Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional (sebin), the country's secret police force. SEBIN officers hunt for bitcoin miners and then extort them under the threat of arrest and criminal prosecution.

When the cost of living rises faster than paychecks do year after year, eventually that becomes a very big problem.  For quite some time I have been writing about the shrinking middle class, and one of the biggest culprits is inflation.  Every month, tens of millions of American families struggle to pay the bills, and most of them don’t even understand the economic forces that are putting so much pressure on them.  The United States never had a persistent, ongoing problem with inflation until the debt-based Federal Reserve system was introduced in 1913.  Since that time, we have had non-stop inflation and the U.S. dollar has lost more than 98 percent of its value.  If our paychecks were increasing faster than inflation this wouldn’t be a problem, but in recent years this has definitely not been the case for most Americans.

And unfortunately inflation is starting to accelerate once again.  In fact, it is being reported that inflation rose at the fastest pace in four years in January…


Meanwhile, our incomes have been incredibly stagnant.   In fact, we just learned that median household income did not go up at all during 2016.

This is one of the reasons why we consistently see families fall out of the middle class month after month.  Even if you keep the same job year after year, your standard of living is going to steadily go down unless your pay goes up.

The things that we all spend money on month after month just keep going up in price.  I am talking about food, housing, medical care and other essentials.  If there is one thing that we can always count on, it is the fact that things are going to cost more tomorrow than they do today.

Let’s talk about food for a moment.  Whenever I go to the grocery store, I am almost always shocked.  I still remember a time when I could get everything that I needed for an entire week for about 20 bucks, but these days you can’t even fill up one cart for 100 dollars.

That is because food prices have been rising aggressively for many years.  The following is a list that was posted on The Economic Policy Journal that shows how much some food and grocery items have increased over the past decade…


And thanks to out of control government spending and reckless manipulation by the Federal Reserve, we have come to a time when inflation is starting to accelerate once again.

According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were being used the government would be telling us that inflation is rising at a 6 percent annual rate for the first time since 2011.

At the same time, evidence is mounting that U.S. consumers are simply tapped out.  Previously, I have explained that interest rates are going up, consumer bankruptcies are rising, and lending standards for consumers are really tightening up.

All of those are things we would expect to see if a new recession was starting.

And today we learned that the number of Americans refinancing their homes has fallen to the lowest level that we have seen since 2009…


If you will remember, we also saw a slowdown in mortgage refinancing just before the great financial crisis of 2008.

For mortgage applications overall, they are now down almost 31 percent from where they were a year ago…


A 31 percent decline in a single year is catastrophic.

If this continues, it won’t be too long before everyone is talking about a new housing crash.

And we also learned this week that FHA mortgage delinquencies increased during the fourth quarter “for the first time since 2006”…


So many things are happening right now that we have not seen happen in many years, but most people are choosing not to see the red flags that are popping up all around us.

None of our long-term economic problems have been fixed.  And even though Donald Trump won the election, the truth is that our economy is in the worst shape it has been since the last financial crisis.  I continue to encourage all of my readers to get prepared for very hard times, but just like back in 2007 we are experiencing a wave of tremendous optimism right now and most people think that the party can somehow continue indefinitely.

Whether Donald Trump won the election or not, the truth is that a major economic downturn was going to come anyway.  You see, Donald Trump is not some magician that can just wave a wand and somehow make the consequences of decades of very foolish decisions instantly disappear.

We have been on the biggest debt binge in human history, and there is going to be a great price to pay when this immense debt bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, most people are not going to acknowledge the truth until it is too late.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/this-is-one-of-the-big-reasons-why-so-many-families-are-feeling-extreme-financial-stress

It is quite funny to see a picture of some random japanese man as satoshi nakamoto in the video here https://youtu.be/moj5IMAXo8s?t=505

Don't know why they have placed that picture and who actually is that man  

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
The usual solution is for a trusted company with a central database to check for double-spending, but that just gets back to the trust model. In its central position, the company can override the users, and the fees needed to support the company make micropayments impractical.