Thank you for your kind words, mayback. We strongly believe that we are here to serve the best interest of DNotes' stakeholders and together we can make DNotes a purposeful trusted digital currency for everyone. That is our best pathway to gain global mass acceptance. We know that is a big bold vision and will not happen by accident. It will take years of hard work to build a solid foundation. However, once DNotes starts gaining momentum, a lot of amazing things can happen fairly quickly.

We appreciate your positive feedback. It is inspiring. Thanks.  

Wow - fantastic post on Steemit. Thank you cryptospooge, you made my day!


Discovering DNotes - Under the Radar? Probably Not For Long

Earlier this year, while researching a curious experiment to fund a retirement with earnings from cryptocoin faucets, I came across a coin that has grabbed my attention. I didn't know it at the time, but DNotes would quickly become my second largest crypto holding after BTC. (Should I say hodling? In this case, definitely!)

Let me tell you what I saw that got me interested.

The first thing I noticed was that they had additional separate websites dedicated to educating people about cryptos. Ok, nice.

They also had an online wallet with a bit of a twist. The DNotesVault, where you can store your coins if you don't want to manage a wallet yourself, actually has a guarantee fund. Yes, they actually have a separate fund, offline in cold storage for security and all that, just to guarantee the funds you store in the Vault.

That's something they don't have to do, and I hadn't seen anyone else doing that. But they thought about that and implemented it for the safety and security of their community. Banks only do that with your dollars and euros because it's a government mandate. These guys do it because it's the right thing to do. Ok, very nice.

What really caught my eye were CRISPs. Cryptocurrency Investment Savings Plans.

You deposit funds in a specific type of account in the Vault and agree not to withdraw the funds (although you could, with a penalty - seems fair) and they provide you with interest. Just like a bank, only the interest is actually much better than anything you could get in a bank today.

These guys were providing something I hadn't seen any other coin provide. They were building stability right into their coin ecosystem. They were thinking about the needs of the consumer. This idea really stuck with me.

So I wondered why this coin wasn't better known and I started looking around. It was very quiet in the forums and social media. It was more or less dead.

When coin developers and their communities go quiet, it usually means the coin is dead. But this one wasn't. It was still there after three years, maintaining very good gains since its inception. And doing it without some of the volatility that other currencies had.

I soon discovered that it wasn't dark because it was dead - they just went radio silent for a while. But they weren't sitting still. They were actually very busy.

Planning.

There was a lot going on behind the scenes.

I learned that I was right about what I had thought they were doing - thinking about the needs of their community and their ecosystem. They actually had a philosophy. And they were planning further based on that philosophy.

I think it was within days of me opening a CRISP and hilariously (to me anyway) beginning to fund it with tiny bits of coins from faucets, that they started announcing the things they had been working on.

Such as:

Re-releasing the coin as DNotes 2.0. They are going to allow owners of DNotes to swap out the coins with the new version. Other coins have done this and it's a rather bold thing to do. But seeing what else they are doing, it makes good sense.

They had rewritten the code so the coin was going from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake to be more in line with their overall philosophy. PoS coins are getting a lot more traction now. This is a smart move.

They have also rewritten the code in a different programming language - C#. According to the developers (and lots of unrelated outside sources), it will allow the coin to be used for a lot more applications to be built on top of it and add a lot of functionality. I know next to nothing about these technicalities, but I'll take the techies at their word on this. This also seems like a great move.

There's going to be Lots of PR associated with this Dnotes 2.0 rollout. That includes lots of press with co-founder Alan Yong's book and all the videos they are producing to support it and promote DNotes.

There's more, including projects further down the road such as banking-like services, multicurrency credit/debit cards, and a full cryptocurrency exchange.

Ok, now it's not just a matter of 'I like their philosophy.' It just got real. There are a lot of reasons to think DNotes 2.0 will not be undervalued like DNotes 1.0 had been. DNotes 2.0 is very likely to take a place among the top 50 coins in the near future.

So, at the time I was opening my account, the price was going up and I was hoping I wasn't too late.

I don't think the sharp rise in price earlier this year had too much to do with what the DNotes team was doing. I think it had much more to do with the general crypto market forces. There was a huge influx of capital into altcoins in the months prior, and I think there were many examples of huge gains by altcoins that were being played out, and DNotes, which was very much under the radar, just became the next victim of that wave.

But, it already had my attention. And to a certain extent, I was panic buying before it went up too much. The wave played out and the price came back down. Too much if you ask me, but many close to DNotes would say that it is undervalued anyway. I was actually ok with the price coming back down. That just gave me an opportunity to keep buying little chunks of DNotes at a better price.

So here we are. Probably a few weeks away from the swap to DNotes 2.0.

I'm a little too cautious to make a specific price prediction for after the release of 2.0. I think there are just too many variables.

But, I look at the market caps of some of the top 100 or even top 50 coins, and I just can't justify many of them. And I look at the plans the DNotes team has, the approach they have taken, and their general philosophy, and I can't help but think that DNotes belongs up there.

I do the math and I shake my head. That would mean a huge gain in the price.

Discovering DNotes reminded me how I felt when I first found and researched Bitcoin 4 years ago. I just have a gut feeling about this one again. I was right about Bitcoin. I hope I'm right again.

Full disclosure - yeah, I own some DNotes. Duh! My hodlings of DNotes represents less than 10% of my crypto stash. I own less than 10 different coins. I didn't write this post to pump DNotes and I don't work for them. I just believe in it and have some faith in the team and would like them to succeed.

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@cryptospooge/discovering-dnotes-under-the-radar-probably-not-for-long

Running "30 FSA and finance bureau experts" will not be cheap either, so I imagine the Japanese government believes they'll get a return on this investment for their country and its population. It makes sense to provide a safer environment if you want your population to invest in cryptocurrencies. This to me indicates that Japan sees it as a potential for increasing the populations wealth.

I guess the flipside to this is concern that an attack on a poorly run exchange could lead to the investments of Japanese funds being stolen and removed from the country. Both considerations indicate yet again, that as the market capitalisation of cryptocurrencies increases, governments are not just taking it seriously, their investing in staff and departments to manage it.

I wonder if having monitored and secure exchanges will give these businesses a more dependable reputation which will then attract foreign investment through them. This government sponsored security could lead to increased international business for Japanese exchanges.

Thanks, Tim. I read the article and like it a lot. A self-regulating global association for our industry sounds intriguing. It would be amazing for DNotes to have the honor to the leadership role but that is a huge undertaking. It may make more sense for the current Digital Currency Council to evolve into such an organization: 

http://www.digitalcurrencycouncil.com/
https://www.digitalcurrencycouncil.com/tag/banking/

There are some good points here. I believe our industry should be promoting fair and reasonable regulation that does not inhibit the technology. It's easy to get confused when people talk about "regulating digital currency", I don't believe there is such a thing as regulating a decentralized digital currency itself, but the services provided that allow you to use them is where you need to focus.


In an opinion piece published by CNBC today, former CFTC commissioner Bart Chilton suggests that digital currency enthusiasts need to be more active in seeking regulation for their industry if they want Bitcoin to have the “bright” future that many of them envision. In the op-ed, Chilton says that there are two main reasons for the currency’s recurring problems in recent years.

His first observation is that “digital currencies like Bitcoin aren’t like stocks.” As Chilton notes, most of these cryptocurrencies have no company assets that give them intrinsic value. As a result, their value is determined solely by what buyers are willing to pay to take ownership of them.

The second reason is that they are “largely unregulated by governments. They lack the type of AML and KYC protections that banks are required to provide, and offer few customer safeguards to protect against exchange failure. On the regulatory front, there is no effective surveillance of trading, no authorized investigators, and no punitive legislation to ensure that “bad actors” are deterred from criminal activities. According to Chilton, “This all makes digital currencies exceedingly susceptible to fraud and manipulation. It's an open range for abuse.”

To remedy those apparent weaknesses, he suggests that digital currency enthusiasts shouldn’t wait for regulations to be imposed upon the industry. Instead, they should invite “appropriate regulatory oversight” and take the lead on its development.

That is likely sound advice, and it comes from a man who has spoken highly of digital currency and the blockchain in the recent past. In 2016, Chilton called for then-President Barack Obama to embrace Bitcoin and its technology to ensure that the US shared in its potential economic benefits. Moreover, Chilton seems to recognize that digitization of money is inevitable. The question is how quickly it occurs, and what form it ultimately takes.

The launch of DNotes 2.0 has been delayed. The learning curve has been more demanding than anticipated and the amount of customized C# coding is also more than we anticipated. As much as I am always very conservative in estimating time-line and cost, I have been down this route before. Big complex projects like DNotes 2.0 development often ended up taking longer and costing more; sometime with more problems than expected. Fortunately, in our case, there are no major known problems.

A lot of that is because of the inherent challenges in dealing with the unknows. It is even more pronounced in our decentralized open source environment. There are heaps of contributions and work-around but very time consuming to sort through. It is not uncommon to end up with incomplete solutions, with the last most difficult 10% unfinished.

I anticipate that it will take a few more months and we will update our community on any significant developments. Meanwhile, our developer will be working with his team and create a git repository on GitHub.

DNotes 2.0 is a large-scale project creating a new coin to replace DNotes with a 1:1 coin swap. We are migrating from our current Proof of Work (POW) to Proof of Stake (POS).  This is a multi-year project leading to 100% conversion to C#, along with numerous applications to best support our projects as outlined on our road-map: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1924858.0

It is common for VC to help their investment projects with support in some way, normally a seat on the board and their expertise depending on the size of the company, and the stage of growth it is in.

There are several components:

Business;
Venture Capitalists or investors;
Product platform;
Capital raising platform (for ICO or even standard investment);
Consulting services;

Current iterations in the market can cater for product and capital raising agent, for say, an ICO -- however we've seen that very few ICOs are successful or credible in their claims. For the ICOs out there who do have good products, there is still little chance that they will beat the low odds of long-term business success because of other prevailing factors like management, marketing, employee satisfaction, company culture etc. There are also no platforms offering the consulting services to maximize their success -- let alone any capable of doing so. I imagine this is likely because developer and ICO platforms are more product-centric, and the fees (in dollars or crypto) from consulting probably can't yield the 10,000% returns possible by with a quick ICO pump and dump. If they were thinking longer-term, they'd see that products born on their platform that reach heightened levels of acclaim will reach much larger returns, but there is a much higher personal investment involved. This approach would align the long-term interests of the platform, investors, and business.

I wouldn't be the person making any decisions on this, but I will offer my vision of how this could look several years in the future:

TimMarsh holdings is a startup that wants to enter a highly competitive market with its own take of a popular energy application, where leftover solar power collected from off-the-grid homes can be collected and then automatically sold on a peer-to-peer market place. The barebones of the application interface have been built, and the trading credit system designed, but you need 5 million dollars to expand the idea into a working platform. You could use the DNotes platform to list an 'unverified' ICO, and go it alone, procuring your own team of expert crypto advisors from LinkedIN, or blockchain "experts" who are already onto their 4th project in 18 months, but your preferred approach is to approach DNotes Global to run a verified ICO that allows access to more choosey and wealthy investors who select on quality, or even operate one in partnership with us.

DNotes Global meet you, and if you passed all preliminary checks, we would extensively review and verify all your personal details and scrupulously research your business idea, potential market, and your competitors and see if there is a viable business case that we could help you build a business plan for that we would be willing to put forward to our list of accredited investors (this list could be those accredited by US law, or a set of investors that meet our own conditions, but we will continue as though it is the former).

The ICO for example could be split into two pools:

Pre-ICO = for accredited investors, who get first right of refusal on all ICO offerings on the platform. There are benefits to having first right of refusal: always being able to purchase before soft/hard cap on ICO is reached, with spillover eating into the standard ICO token pool; the first right to any bonus tokens; and all token offerings that include attached sale of equity would be included in this round to meet securities laws. One example would be purchasing 50k of equity in the business, and also purchasing 50k of tokens used in its economy. Another would be having "mastercoins" that are issued in the pre-ICO round that stake and produce normal coins based on coin age instead of having 'investment bonuses' for early buyers, which will encourage them to not dump their holdings instantly once they hit the exchange. Just highlighting potential solutions to obvious problems in the current market.

After the pre-ICO, DNotes could look among your investors for those who would be able to offer their expertise in areas needed by your project (in a capacity commensurate with their investment + further pay), we could factor this self-interest into decisions we make when building an advisory team of experts in various fields from business strategy, marketing, operations etc. We could also have a network of DNotes employed professionals with skills from writing business & press releases, through to legal, accounting, economics and graphic design. The more businesses that join our network, or partner with us, the wider the number of skills within the system becomes. All of this could be done for a set fee based on hours worked, or monthly retainer, but another option for select businesses of our choosing would be to officially partner with DNotes Global, where these services are provided in exchange for an agreed amount of equity in the business / tokens. Suddenly bright people with great ideas, but no team around them to make it happen have access to a powerful network of highly skilled and highly driven business professionals to make their business idea come to life, and have a much higher chance of succeeding.

Main ICO happens = Everbody not on the verified list can invest, no securities (tokens for equity) can be exchanged here, but normal tokens can. If the TimMarsh holdings wanted, they could include a small "bonus" for early investors as is the current norm (not that I'd see the point).

DNotes then helps the business to build their application and implement it on the DNotes blockchain. We would aid in verification and validation phases, and then help them to market & manage the release of their product.

The DNotes team of assembled consultants and professionals will continue to meet / keep in touch with the ICO issuer and ensure everything is running smoothly, auditing the business where need be, and our business analysts will be looking for ways to improve process efficiency and find further opportunities for growth.

Over time, DNotes builds a reputation for successful projects, this means more promising individuals would come to DNotes to achieve their future success, and also give investors more confidence that due diligence has been done, and that the businesses long-term prospects are maximised due to DNotes Global's involvement.

**Just one way it could look in the future**