It is a bit puzzling about the price. There are some awesome marketing initiatives such as Inside NEM and it seems the founders are all over the world talking it up at conferences and so forth. Plus there is all this great news from the development point of view. I would think the price would be higher than it is, but I know a lot of coins remain undervalued for a long time and NEM seems to be one of them. Also, it may be that in cryptoland, people are so impulsive and want their millions now and will quickly move on from a coin that is stable to one that has more flashy growth at the moment. If I had more money I'd be picking up more of this coin now. At some point its price should break through and stay much higher than it is now, I would think. It's just a matter of when.

Here's an interesting short piece on how a high percentage of ETH smart contracts are vulnerable to attack for various reasons. I think if NEM's smart contracts are truly more robust (I think they are but lack the technical know how to judge), the marketing people should make a lot of hay out of this one.

https://news.bitcoin.com/report-claims-34000-ethereum-smart-contracts-vulnerable-bugs/

Chase, that is a fascinating article, the one about lessons learned from the last bubble. Thanks for sharing it.

One thing I noticed was that long term, businesses that take a slower growth strategy tend to fare better than those who attempt to get big fast. It seems like on this point, DNotes is right on track. In the cryptocurrency world, a slower growth approach is downright revolutionary.

Thanks for posting that article. I'd completely forgotten the angle of US/Globalist directed regime change. I have no doubt Bush, Clinton, and maybe to a lesser extent Obama would and did do these kinds of stunts, where they would manipulate events in another country under the auspices of democracy but really to create some sort of puppet state. I would need more information before I could confidently say that is going on now. Trump is a different sort of leader. For one, he's not globalist. Also, it really doesn't help that Venezuela has had a lot of drug cartels under Maduro (some of which might have been covertly funded by US previous administrations). The US does have a genuine self interest of keeping drugs out of our country and often that means going after the sources, the cartels. With that said, the "drug war" has often been an attempt to cover up doing just the opposite. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. And there is a good point raised in that an imperfect sovereign nation is going to be better off than one that is basically a colony of another country (unless of course the arrangement is truly agreeable to all parties and freely chosen).

The key here is that teachers need to point them in the right way. I think if it's done right, teachers can pass on knowledge of cryptocurrencies in the context of the various cautions that should be in place for investing it. Otherwise, it is likely kids will learn a partial picture elsewhere and might be more vulnerable to scams. Of course, parents can and should be instrumental teachers to their children about this (if they know).

Women and men definitely have different and complementary skills, so both are important for the industry to really thrive. I think in general, men would be better at trading because they can more easily take their emotions out of it. Women are way better at networking and making connections, which is absolutely vital in a new industry. I think to succeed you really need to have a lot of self knowledge about your skills, strengths and weaknesses, and then figure out a way to maximize on your strengths while improving the weaknesses.

I was surprised by how many people responded that high school is too early to expose students to cryptocurrency. I think they should know about its existence for sure, though possibly with due cautions that there is much more for them to learn. I totally agree with the above point that any education about cryptocurrencies should be part of a larger discussion on responsible personal finance. I don't think children are adequately taught about personal finance in schools or anywhere else. Adults aren't adequately taught about these things either. That's why so many of us are now under crushing debt.

I saw this article in the NemRed Telegram channel. It seems to do a good job explaining what exactly is going on with the Venezuelan Petro. It looks like a mess.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/venezuela-says-its-cryptocurrency-raised-735-million-but-its-a-farce/

The current state of decentralized exchanges is that they work but are really clunky. If you guys manage to create a non-clunky decentralized exchange, I hope you eventually open it up to the general public to trade coins and tokens. There's a real need there.

Here's another up and coming exchange to seek a listing on:    
   
https://exchange.bankera.com/add-token

ctya, can you please add to your list?

Great letter! I can't wait to read the rest of the white paper/business plan. Mostly it will be great to see it all in one place.

DNotes already gets grand prize for being the most respectful hub in the cryptospace. I love hanging out here mostly for that reason.

Thanks for this info. Good to know!

I hope you're right in the sense that the central bank would have no legal authority to do anything about the results of its investigation. I'm not sure how much weight such an investigation would carry in Lithuania. Hopefully zero.

I think low transaction fees are an integral part of a good decentralized currency. When I first got into Bitcoin, it cost around 8 cents to send any amount of it anywhere in the world, in contrast to $40 for an international wire transfer (not counting recipient fees). Now it costs around $20 or $40 to send Bitcoin, which means why would anyone go through the trouble of using it as an alternative to an international wire transfer? Bitcoin's problem is that it doesn't have a built in way to reduce fees as value goes up, which means *someone* has to decide to do it and implement it, which means ultimately you can't completely get away from some amount of centralization. However, you still can approach it. NEM's recent statements concerning who can and cannot use its technology are a case in point. Some NEM holders do not like the fact that Maduro wants to use NEM for his Petro cryptocurrency. But NEM says the technology is free and open for all, even the people we don't like. That to me is more along the lines of what decentralization should look like. The NEM leadership still decides when to reduce NEM fees to keep the currency usable.

This high school in New Jersey is already teaching its students about cryptocurrencies.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/07/bitcoin-education-at-high-schools-and-colleges.html

As one who's actually attempted to *use* the ETH platform, I can tell you NEM is much easier. It won't be long before others catch on. ETH seems to have better name recognition at this point, but NEM is starting to catch up on that too.

NEM does have a voting system about supporting projects, but that is only for asking the community if any funds should be given to project XYZ, not for whether project XYZ should be *allowed* to use the open source technology that has been developed. I don't think there is a way to prevent anyone from using it without making it proprietary (and not open source).

I think the ramifications of NEM somehow stepping in and telling Maduro et al, "No, you may not use our block chain!" would be pretty sweeping, and probably more of a detriment to whatever good in the world cryptocurrencies can accomplish than the "good" of prohibiting a "bad person" from doing something crazy with a cryptocoin. Just imagine that NEM got taken over by bad people (Maybe Maduro himself launches a coup and takes over the NEM foundation or something), and decided that no "good" organizations could ever build anything on NEM. Then what?

I think it's honestly better to keep it open sourced and decentralized, and see who uses the technology. I've heard of at least 7 or 8 tokens launching on the NEM block chain, so it won't be long before Petro becomes just one of many others.

Apparently Bankera is under investigation by the Lithuanian central bank. Bankera is soon to be a NEM token. Does that make them bad too?

Yes, I'd like to see a statement from Bankera on this. If there is an investigation going on, we should all be kept updated.

It's great to know they're working on it, at least. I know sometimes it can take a while for the blocks to download because there aren't that many peers.