BitCoin, Ethereum, Smart Contracts, Proof-of-Stake, Cardano, IOTA, ERC20 Tokens, Casper and Solidity. The Blockchain The BlockChain technology is a creative technique that uses hash functions and principles of distributed computing, to create a tamper-proof distributed ledger system. Such a trusted distributed ledger system, that is impervious to malicious tampering, has several real world use-cases; with applications ranging from supply-chain management, wire transfers, odometer readings; to electronic voting, bank transactions, and in short any real world scenarios that require some form of “trust management”. For more on understanding the Blockchain technology read my article “ ” . BlockChain Demystified: Looking Under the hood of the BlockChain In this article we will examine the Blockchain landscape and crypto currency platforms, including Ethereum, Casper, Cardano & IOTA. We will examine how Blockchain and cryptocurrency technology continue to evolve in 2018. Bitcoin Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency built on the principles of BlockChain. While Bitcoin introduced the world to cryptocurrency, it really showed a real world application of the blockchain technology. Mining for the cryptocurrency requires using high amounts of computation power to generate . In essence the mined “cryptocurrency” is merely an incentive mechanism to propagate the creation of “seals” for new Blocks in the Bitcoin BlockChain. Proof-of-Work Few facts on Bitcoin as of 2018 Bitcoin was invented by an unknown person or group of people using the name and released as open-source software in 2009. Satoshi Nakamoto As of July 2008 Bitcoin is the largest market capitalization in cryptocurrency, with Ethereum (Ether) a close second. The current size of the Bitcoin Blockchain as of . So each node that has a full copy of the bitcoin blockchain stores the 163 GB data. March 2018 is 163GB Every Block on the Bitcoin blockchain is limited to 1MB in size. Bitcoin is similar to “gold” (and is often referred to as ), in that there is a finite supply of bitcoins, and they get progressively harder to mine. “digital gold” BitCoin is considered as the first generation of Cryptocurrency. On 1 August 2017, a hard fork of bitcoin was created (Forked at block 478558), known as . Bitcoin Cash has a larger block size limit and had an identical blockchain at the time of fork. Bitcoin Cash On 24 October 2017 another hard fork, , was created (Forked at block 491407). Bitcoin Gold changes the proof-of-work algorithm used in mining Bitcoin Gold The inherent limitation of Bitcoin The major inherent limitation of the bitcoin implementation, and consequently the reason it is not suited as an every day curency is, scalability. In order for Bitcoin to be used as a real world currency, it would have to process and record thousands of transactions per second. However currently it takes 10 minutes to generate a new Block in the Bitcoin Blockchain and every block has a size limitation of 1MB. Also, if the Bitcoin blockchain would process thousand transaction per second, it would require all the nodes on the Blockchain to have high network bandwidth to be able to keep up with all the new records in the local copy of their blockchain. So it is not government, legislative or regulatory hurdles, but the inherent scalability issue which is the major reason why Bitcoin cannot, in its current implementation, be used as mainstream currency exchange. Ethereum and is a combination of that allows for the execution of Smart Contracts. Ethereum uses Proof-of-Stake in the mining of some of its blocks, and the Ethereum network upgrade to use Proof-of-Stake is called . Ethereum is considered the second generation in cryptocurrency, Blockchain and an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), Casper Few facts on Ethereum as of 2018 Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, and the Ethereum system went live on 30 July 2015, with 11.9 million coins “premined” for the crowdsale. is a fundamental cryptocurrency for operation of Ethereum. The value of the Ethereum currency grew over 13,000 percent in 2017. Ether In 2016 Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains — the new separate version became Ethereum (ETH), and the original continued as (ETC). Ethereum Classic Ethereum introduced the concept of “smart contracts”, which are computer programs that are stored on the blockchain. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the runtime environment for smart contracts in Ethereum. Every Ethereum node in the network runs an EVM implementation and executes the same instructions. Smart contracts are high-level programming abstractions that are compiled down to EVM bytecode and deployed to the Ethereum blockchain for execution. Smart contracts require credits to be executed on the Ethereum network, which can be purchased using (the underlying currency on Ethereum). “Gas” Ether Serpent is another programming language for writing Smart Contracts in Ethereum. Solidity smart contracts can be written using the Solidity (a language library with similarities to C and JavaScript) is currently the most popular programming language in which to write Smart Contracts. Remix IDE (browser based IDE) or Truffle IDE. Smart Contracts Smart Contracts are computer programs that are written in “Turing complete” programming language (i.e. a full programming language), and reside on the blockchain. These contracts can be programmed to execute when certain criteria are met on the blockchain. Since the smart contracts are computer programs that are stored on the blockchain itself, they are impervious to tampering just like data on the block chain. The smart contract program code can be review by any member of the blockchain, and cannot be altered once it is logged in the blockchain (thereby preventing anyone from maliciously altering the program in their favor). There are many applications of smart contracts, the most popular of which are crowdfunding applications, where smart contracts are used for ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). Thus for example, smart contracts can be programmed to crowdsource monetary resources, and can be programmed to automatically execute and release the monies to the parties when the funding threshold is reached. Proof-of-Stake Proof-of-Stake(PoS) is an alternative mechanism where by, instead of every member(node) of the blockchain competing against each other and thereby using vast amounts of computation power (i.e. electricity and resources) to compute the Proof-of-Work; the network randomly selects only certain members(nodes) to compute the PoW for the next block, and only that node is authorized to compute the next block on the blockchain. The selection of the node is made based on the “stake” that the node has, which is based on the “deposit” of cryptocurrency that the node as made to a centralized “treasury wallet”. A higher “stake” increases the chances of a node being selected as the next node to mine the next block. Ethereum is slated to move away from Proof-of-Work toward Proof-of-Stake in the coming months, and this network upgrade is known as . Casper More on Casper here: First impressions of Ethereum’s Casper — Proof of Stake (PoS) ERC20 Tokens Smart Contracts on Ethereum can be programmed to issue tokens. These tokens can be used as a surrogate for transaction currency and could represent derivative cryptocurrencies (ICOs), shares of a stock, IoUs, or even favors. Tokens are derivatives from the underlying cryptocurrency of Ethereum, i.e. Ether. ERC20 is a standardized format in which to write smart contracts that generate standardized token contracts. The ERC20 standard has three optional and six mandatory interfaces that must be implemented in the contracts. These include, Mandatory: totalSupply : determines the totalSupply of the underlying derivative (token). balanceOf : provides the token Balance information of an address. transfer: transfers tokens from the totalSupply to an account transferFrom: transfers tokens from one account to another approve: checks if there are enough tokens in the totalSuppy to transfer to an account. allowance: checks if the balanceOf of a user account is enough to transfer tokens to another account. Optional: name (optional): Name of the token or Coins in the ICO symbol (optional): token symbol decimals (optional): how divisible is a token ERC223 is a proposed format update for ERC20. More on ERC20 Tokens here: Understanding ERC-20 token contracts ERC20 token contracts can be written in the programming language “Solidity”. Here is a resource that provides more information on how to use smart contracts to generate tokens to create your own cryptocurrency on the Ethereum network: Create your own CRYPTO-CURRENCY with Ethereum Cardano and IOTA and they attempt to solve the scalability issues that plague blockchain cryptocurrency, and are aimed at providing cryptocurrencies and blockchain with the necessary features such that it may be used as currency for every-day transactions. Cardano and IOTA , currently in development are slated as the third generation in cryptocurrency, Few facts on Cardano and IOTA as of 2018 Cardano is a new cryptocurrency platform launched in Sept 2017 IOTA Coin beta launched in May 2017, and is an open-source cryptocurrency focused on providing secure communications and payments between machines on the Internet of Things. As of December 2017, the market capitalization of IOTA was $13 billion, making it the 4th largest cryptocurrency in circulation. The IOTA Tangle vs the Blockchain IOTA uses the concept of instead of traditional linear blockchain, to address the scalability issue in existing blockchain technology. DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) A DAG also known as the IOTA tangle, consists of nodes and directed connections(edges) between the nodes, such that it creates a network instead of a linear blockchain. Every new node in the IOTA tangle has to verify at least two existing nodes to connect to the Tangle. Thus, is a new data structure based on the Direct Acyclic Graph and does not need miners and data block. Tangle More on Tangle here: IOTA’s Tangle — Simply Explained https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/IOTA Blockchains and Sidechains Sidechains are a mechanism for interoperability between different blockchains. The two different blockchains are connected via a two-way peg that determines the “exchange rate” between the two blockchains. Sidechains are emerging mechanisms that allow tokens and other digital assets from one blockchain to be securely used in a separate blockchain and then be moved back to the original blockchain if needed. More on Sidechains here: What are Sidechains? In Conclusion Blockchain has spawned several new and innovative technology on its underlying infrastructure, the most exciting of which are the cryptocurrency platforms including Bitcoin(1st generation), Ethereum (2nd generation) and Cardano & IOTA (3rd generation). The Ethereum platform introduced and has an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that executes the smart contracts. Smart contracts are computer programs that reside on the blockchain. ERC20 is a standard to write token contracts on Ethereum. Smart contracts can be written on the Ethereum platform using the programming language Smart Contracts Solidity. The Ethereum platform is moving towards Proof-of-Stake algorithm (from Proof-of-Work) and this upgrade to Ethereum is called Casper. The main issue that is currently preventing blockchain cryptocurrencies from being used as a mainstream currency is the inherent scalability issue (i.e. limited transactions per second). The next generation of cryptocurrency platforms i.e. Cardano and IOTA, that are currently in development, aim to solve these issues. 👏 Found this post useful? Hit the button below to show how much you liked it :) Follow me on Medium for the latest updates and posts! Read Next: 5 Most Common Myths about the Blockchain technology and Bitcoin

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Making sense of the Blockchain Landscape in 2018

Ethereum has been around for four years now. The platform that was to “Build Unstoppable Applications” quickly turned out to be a Token Manufacturing Plant which churns out Ethereum tokens for any conceivable idea, object or abstraction imaginable. From those that can be used for ( ) to those that are probably not meant for such use ( ), the is seeing more people get on board day by day. However, the train which everyone seems to miss is this one called also known as ‘getting real users to come on to your platform and do stuff with your highly valuable token’. ‘Sin Forgiving’ Jesus Coin SpankChain tokenization train adoption, One of the primary reasons for the low adoption rate is the poor user experience and the high barrier to interaction that this ecosystem imposes on its users. Convincing investors to buy your ICO tokens is one thing; turning your ICO investors into daily users, or even attracting new users on to your platform is an entirely different ball game. Token projects and dApps at large have had to compromise user experience in exchange for integrating Ethereum tokens on their platform. Having to deal with 15-second confirmation times, and the occasional failed transaction is not something most users (or for that matter even developers) are accustomed to handling. One scenario in particular where for interacting with tokens takes a headshot is when users have to hold a balance of the native cryptocurrency the token was built on — in most cases that being Ether. Users need to hold an ether balance in their wallets, along with the token, to perform any form of transaction with that token, such as transfers or staking. user experience To oversimplify and remain in context — You need to hold a balance of both Ether and Jesus Coin for your sins to be forgiven or better, both Ether and Spank Token for receiving the host of exciting benefits that the SpankChain platform offers! Regardless of the magnitude of excitement these tokens provide, that is still a tall order for attracting new users on to your platform, let alone retaining them. So, how can we move to a model where tokens can be designed such that users need not hold ether? The possible solution (and an ERC20 improvement) this article covers is called with credits to its author . ERC865 Ludovic Galabru To keep it simple (the finer technical details are linked below) — it involves a bunch of functions added to the ERC20 model, For such a model, custom wallets can be created such that token holders will not need to hold ether for making transfers. The wallet will simply forward all transfer transactions of its users to a delegate who would execute them. The step-by-step mechanics of making such transfers are given below. which allows third parties (aka ‘delegates’) to execute transactions on behalf of the holder of the token. The delegate will pay the gas fees in ether in exchange for getting extra tokens from the holder. For a scenario where Alice wishes to transfer 500 ERC865 Tokens to Bob Step 1 and 2 demonstrating the collection of details and generation of signature on Alice’s wallet Alice fills out details of her transfer on her wallet, including a fee of 10 ERC865 Token paid to the delegate who would execute her transaction Her wallet makes her sign this transaction and generate a unique signature for this transfer. The details of this transaction and the signature are passed to a delegate off-chain (via API, Telegram or other means) The delegate can choose and execute the signature (of his liking) which will verify the authenticity of the signature, check whether the signer has enough balance, and whether the details of the transfer are correct. If all checks return positive, and the execution was successful, 500 ERC865 tokens will be transferred from Alice to Bob, and 10 ERC865 tokens from Alice to the delegate. Step 3 and 4 demonstrating how a delegate can choose and confirm a signature from a delegation marketplace Keeping the above four points fresh in mind, let’s move to a few FAQs which should clear the air about this standard. Frequently Asked Questions Who can be a delegate? A. Delegates can be broadly classified into one of two entities —  (i) The owner or creator of the token who probably would have finished his ICO and is already sitting on a stockpile of ether(ii) An independently running marketplace where delegates can come forward and execute signatures of transactions whose tokens they would like to receive as fees. 2. Why should I trust this delegate? A. Same reason why you would trust the entity who created the wallet in the first place.Decentralization purists would obviously throw tomatoes at this concept, but one should understand that there is no proposed model in this space that is truly decentralized. It is finding the ‘in-between’ that truly adds value. 3. Are transactions confirmed instantaneously? A. Depends on who the delegate is. If the delegate is the token creator or their partner, one would expect them to have built the capability into their wallets to instantaneously handle delegated transactions. On the other hand, if the wallet is pushing transactions to a delegation marketplace, the transaction would only be confirmed when a delegate comes forward to execute the transaction signature in exchange for receiving those tokens as fees. 4. Can existing ERC-20 tokens be changed to support this ERC-865 capability? A. If the ERC-20 token was coded such that they are (a practice which I heavily recommend to all solidity developers) then yes! Else no. upgradable 5. What is this described in step-2? transaction signature A. Essentially a sequence of random characters which is unique to the signer. Any person who possesses the details of the transfer (sending and receiving addresses, the amount transferred and the delegate fee) can verify using the signature that the message was indeed signed by the sender.From the perspective of user experience, the wallet can be designed in such a manner, that senders will not need to have any knowledge about transaction signatures or their inner workings. It should look and feel like any normal transfer made with ether. 6. Can the delegate or any other party play foul by creating double-spends or transferring more fees to themselves? A. No. There are a handful of checks built into ERC-865 which disallows the delegate from executing a signature twice or changing the fee. Only the details of the transfer signed by the sender can be executed.The only blurry aspect of transaction execution controlled by delegates is avoiding the execution of certain signatures because their tokens are not valuable or the fees are too low. 7. Is there any drawback to using this concept for my new token? A. None as of yet. But if paying ether for transaction fee is a big issue you are bothered by, you might want to revisit a key decision you made previously — The choice of Blockchain. To some, this approach might feel like sticking a band-aid on Ethereum’s method of handling transaction fees where token holders (or in more technical words — ) are charged the fee for gas, without any option to let someone else pay. However, this might be a very Ethereum specific problem as some of the newer, shinier Blockchains have built-in capabilities to handle this issue. those causing a change of state in the EVM Opportunities Most people in the Blockchain space would agree that fully regulated security tokens is the next big use case for smart contracts. If Ethereum happens to be the platform of choice for these tokens, then a concept like the one described above would go a long way in streamlining integration and adoption. It would allow these tokens to be moved and exchanged among traders without any attachment to cryptocurrencies. Security Tokens: A stablecoin implemented on the above concept would prove mighty useful for both token holders and delegates alike. A price stable Ethereum token which removes the need to hold ethers, would allow holders to move funds as seamlessly as most mobile and bank wallets (minus the drawback of having to pay the delegate, and the slightly longer confirmation times). On the other hand, delegates would find these tokens more valuable to collect fees, since they won’t have to face the roller-coaster, pump-and-dump excitement when it comes to token price. Stablecoins: Because why not? If you happen to own a fairly good amount of ether, better design a token where you can delegate transactions for your users. The tokens that you collect as fee could be issued back to your users in the form of a loyalty reward or better custom baked into your token economics. All future tokens: Technical Reference For my technical readers, I’ve written and coded some resources to get you started — Github: Demo: https://github.com/adilharis2001/ERC865Demo http://delegation.adilharis.com:8080/ If you wish to know more about this implementation or you happen to be in the market for a Blockchain expert for your project, book me for free, for a quick 30-minute online consulting session. I have a new initiative called which will facilitate this. Consult Me Live

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Transfer Ethereum tokens without Ether — An ERC20 Improvement to Seriously Consider

Sunrise project for crypto Whats the real reason why crypto is facing so much slack? If you slightly do your research you will find — It is difficult to have a bank account if you trade in crypto due to money laundering concerns. If you are an exchange then you know how difficult it is to get a bank account. Binance had to switch countries and setup research lab in Malta to figure out compliance. Central banks in some countries had to even ban the market entirely. So why the hell we need anti-money laundering regulations? Let me explain with a “stolen car” example. Let’s say you bought a car for $10k from someone and you did not know it was stolen. Tomorrow the rightful owner discovers that you have his car. Obviously he is going to take it back, leaving you in a $10k hole. Now you have a right to recover it? Now, let’s say the bank was in the know and also facilitated the transaction. Then obviously the bank is liable. You can then recover the money from the bank. But, why do banks have to know what is going on? Now, here is the real deal. Assumptions Most crimes in the world have a financial motive. Criminals protect themselves by escaping jurisdictions Large crime syndicates can have power to subvert democracies, form dictatorships and expand international business of crime. Such criminals can not be dealt with normal human beings or even local police. The hidden super heroes protecting humanity You might not have heard of It is a group of Central banks representing most countries who make these rules to catch and disable organised crime. This organisation although has no teeth but writes the rules that provide teeth or gathers intelligence for other bodies to effectively prevent, mitigate and disable crime on earth. Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The highest level of crime fighting and Decentralised at its core This organisation basically mandates that all banks must watch transactions that may have reasons to be suspicious. If they find anything wrong then they must report those transactions to their respective countries intelligence units. Otherwise the liability of not following this lands on the bank. It does not enable any mass surveillance but only reporting of suspicious transactions. Secondly, it mandates that known international criminals, syndicates and uncooperative jurisdictions should be reported, so that they can be tracked and the network be uncovered. Three levels of responsibilities on banks — Identify the customers. Know your customer (KYC or CIP) — Rule out fake or stolen identity through independent sources and verify against watch lists. Customer Due diligence (CDD) — Check if the source of wealth is legal. Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) It further minimises cost of tracking crime by letting banks decide the level of diligence required except mandating absolute correct identification of individuals and beneficial owners (Level1). Expanded scope of Anti-money laundering These structures were put in place to track terrorism and then the scope got expended to include other heinous crimes, drug trafficking and now even bribes taken by people in power. The dilemma with crypto currencies By now I hope you realize how critical this is in keeping the world from going insane. On one side the problem is caused by money being a dual use technology that itself creates incentives for crime. On the other side the potential of smart money that can possibly eliminate such incentives. It has potential to enable tracking accross borders and asset classes on chain pseudo anonymously an make it even more stronger. However, there is a huge gap in crypto-currencies. The problem is because all transactions are remote and peer-to-peer. — currently there exists no way to correctly identify individuals remotely i.e. name, date of birth and current address. Anyone can easily create a fake electronic document or switch any information. Problem 1 Thus, the law requires that any information be checked by independent source. So, either you check the physical document and its security features. Or do level two due diligence. Use global databases to authenticate the existence of the identity. — correctly authenticating the person presenting the identity remotely. Any criminal can replace the photograph on a electronic document. Or evade detection on a video interview by untrained staff. Problem 2 — it is difficult to expect individuals to carry out checks, unless they are completely automated and reusable. Final problem Basically, we need a global wallet registry that runs all these checks in the background. It protects individuals privacy and automates the KYC+CDD clearance. Enter cryptographic-KYC — a cryptographic shield for the crime fighting super heroes! The global financial institutions have no way of checking identity documents. There is an and every possible identity document. Having a global database of identities for verification has its own GDPR issues. epidemic of fake passports Diro labs was able to invent a new technology that basically gives a user the ability to capture live screen shots from inside password protected areas. It further proves that the user was able to login to a website at a particular date and time. All of this cryptographically verifiable using SSL certificates from the websites and blockchain that can be then be authenticated by a third person based on simple cryptography. secure websites For example, A user can login to his utility company and generate an Original document of his residential address proof. Login to his bank account and capture is profile or bank statement as an original document with a time stamp. It is able to prove that the remote user is in control of the bank account and the information is real. A user can login to any government portal like Aadhar, or US social security and capture his/her identity document to be presented to other third parties remotely. Global impact and use case This technology eliminates all fraud documents. Now, it is not required to trust physical documents that have no way of knowing the authenticity unless you are trained to spot them. It also eliminates the need for physical verification. It solves the problem of millions of fake identity documents that are in circulation today. Now, one can remotely authenticate real identities on the Internet. It can also identify the real identity owners remotely by having them to validate themselves against multiple websites like banking, utility provider and government. It saves a ton of money by automating the physical KYC, and customer due diligence for financial institutions. Revenue recovery increases by preventing KYC, due diligence failures during on-boarding. And, most importantly, slashes the global risk and liability for money laundering. The silver-lining Having a secure cryptographically provable identity that can meet NIST 800–63 standard globally changes the game. It truly decentralizes the global trust in identities and privacy control. Balancing Privacy and surveillance in the most user-centric way through real decentralisation. It uses the same cryptography of SSL/TLS that is used today that makes the internet secure and internet banking possible. Why is it a game changer for crypto? Diro labs is building a global wallet registry that also acts as a shared KYC/CDD utility that the user controls and the banks can trust. All international laws like FATF, MLD4, JMLG etc mandate financial transactions to have identity proofing and verification through independent sources. Having NIST800–63 compliant identity proofing and verification on internet is a game changer for the Fintech world. Having cryptographic verification of documents restores trust between banks and blockchain transactions. A global wallet registry turns the dual use technology once tightly controlled by governments, and used in wars, into a global crime fighting machine. A reusable identity clearinghouse solves the user experience and liquidity issues that the current ICOs and exchanges are facing. It provides a bridge between governments and the crypto world in an effort to make a better world. Further use cases Having a global legally valid and cryptographically verifiable identity on the internet solves a lot of accountability issues like fake news, fake influencers and potentially even hacking. Having cryptographically verifiable documents with provenance changes the paradigm of notary, apostille and trust in general. Ability to mathematically prove documents and sources behind private logins to third parties has direct impact on global commerce. Imagine a ship verifying a Letter of credit document if it is coming from a bank or tampered. applying for visa or passport all remotely. Verify beneficial ownership or company information that is not in public domain. Verify property documents or availability of funds in a bank account remotely and without intermediaries. Legally verify clients and vendors of Uber & Airbnb remotely and instantly. Decentralised Trust will be the corner stone of peer-to-peer shared economies of the future.

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Why cryptographic KYC is a game-changer for Crypto industry?

A way to improve rich search results and usability for websites. Image courtesy of https://unsplash.com/ What is structured data? By definition, structured data refers to a high degree of organization and quality in presenting data to search engines. For example, imagine you have a website with various subpages — search engines can index these pages and figure out the content. However, it can take time. Especially depending on how much traffic your website gets. By explicitly telling search engines what your page contains, you allow them to easily index, display, and generate rich results or snippets when possible. Examples In the first image, you can see search results appearing in the Google carousel. Two are marked up as that link to their respective players. Similarly, in the second image, you can see a list of events (movies) available on the page. VideoObjects Rich Video Snippets and Rich Search Results Data Types There are various ways to approach structured data. Two common, and simplest in terms of development, are Microdata and JSON-LD. Microdata Microdata consists of inline HTML attributes defining vocabulary; such as the type of content being displayed. This is the least recommended way of defining structured data, even by the creators themselves. Schema.org Nevertheless, supplying structured data is better than not supplying anything at all. In my experience, I don’t think it should be disregarded entirely for JSON-LD. Microdata works nicely with auto-generated markup which I will get to later on. JSON-LD Similarly, JSON-LD, (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data), is designed around the same concept to explain to browsers the content that the page contains. It has become the newest web standard in active development by Google. In conjunction with Schema.org, they work to improve advanced search results, rich snippets, and the of the web. knowledge graph Data Types There are many data types which you can choose from that are supported by both Google and Schema vocabulary, but each have their respective differences. For the rest of the examples, we’ll be using and Breadcrumbs Movies. Breadcrumbs Breadcrumbs are used as a navigational aid for users to see which page they are currently on and all of the previous ones leading back to the root of the site. Specifics In this example, imagine we are on the subpage: www.example.com/movies/mission-impossible-fallout Breadcrumbs seem self-explanatory, but in fact, you need to do some special things in order to get Google to index your data correctly. Firstly, the root element “Home”, cannot be an item of the breadcrumb object. Otherwise, Google will index your root site twice like the following: › Home › Movies › Mission Impossible: Fallout www.example.com In actuality you’d want to link your website like so; Home is the root page. › Movies › Mission Impossible: Fallout www.example.com Secondly, the first subpage “Movies” is level 1, and “Mission Impossible: Fallout” is level 2. However, link the current page! you should not Breadcrumb Microdata Example As mentioned above, you should not include the root page as a inside the but you can still make a link to it with no downsides. listItem BreadCrumbList, The first subpage needs:1). To be of type **ListItem**2). Have a (level) of 13). Contain a separator item after the current item such as , etc. position › > | || In Google’s examples, the › separator is used frequently, so that’s what I stuck with Movies Strangely enough, the object is entirely supported and shows up in rich snippets/results but is in the list of support data-types. Movie not included Movies come in various forms of results depending on the device and search query. In theory, rich results such as videos and movies improve click through rate. Mobile Rich Snippet These look great, right? Let’s generate some markup! Not so fast bucko... Google has an obvious obligation to promote their own platform, YouTube, first. It can be extremely difficult to get previews like this in the SERPS . It’s unlikely you’ll get rich results within days or even weeks after implementing them. It’s decided by Google and their hidden algorithms, marking up all data correctly, and a lot of luck. Be patient. Testing Google has nice tools to test structured data and sometimes even allow you to see an example “preview” of what the search engine would generate from your markup. The first tool I recommend using is the . structured data testing tool This tool allows you to fetch structured data through a website crawler and/or paste the code snippet in directly to see valid/invalid microdata and JSON-LD. Try it for yourself: <script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":" ","@type":"Movie","url":" ","name":"Mission Impossible: Fallout","description":"Ethan Hunt and the IMF team join forces with...","image":"https://www.example.com/image.jpg","dateCreated":"1977-12-31T23:00:00Z","datePublished": "2018-08-05T22:00:00Z","expires":"2018-08-12T22:00:00Z","duration":"P0DT1H27M13S","director":"Christopher McQuarrie"}</script> http://schema.org https://www.tele5.de/mediathek/filme-online Understanding the generated result: When you supply enough information to apply for a possible rich result in Google, a button named [ ] will show up. Don’t be alarmed if your result looks different than the one below. A variety of factors (always, right?) plays a role in generating a correct thumbnail. If the image was recently uploaded or not indexed by Google, the preview may show blank or even nothing. PREVIEW Data Structure Result - 0 Errors, 0 Warnings Alternative resources Unfortunately, Google is going through a phase of many beta versions of the search console, analytics, and data structure testing. While testing, be aware if you supply information with minimal warnings and no errors, your markup or JSON-LD is valid. most likely Rich Results That being said, this tool will generate a nice preview. Albeit, only for mobile view. Search Appearance Under › › Search Traffic Search Analytics Search Appearance View available rich results if applicable — see impressions, CTR (click through rate), and position per search query. Please note; search results are delayed by 3 days. Events There are two main types of events. Short term and Long-Term. Short Term These events get indexed by Google every day, as long as there are more events available. This can be useful if your content or event has a very short lifespan. Advantages If you have a long array of events ready to be picked out by Google, this would be the recommended way to show events. The rich results will change constantly, so long as there is data available. With this, impressions for this result will increase — in theory improving click-through rate to your page. Disadvantages Specifying your data as short-term events when not having enough data could cause search results to be less desirable. Long Term Events get indexed with a starting and ending date. The indexed result will remain until at least one becomes expired. Advantages Exact dates for an available event can be very important in cases where events last many days or even weeks. e.g. a multi-day music event. Disadvantages This has come up before in development; if you let Google decide which date to show by itself (3 maximum events at a time on Desktop and Mobile; excluding other search results) — you could be stuck with data that you don’t want to be displayed. This can take up until at least one event becomes expired. Conclusion & Keynotes There is no one right way to describe to search engines what your page contains. Do what makes sense. Microdata is not obsolete If you can supply the data for page hierarchy, use microdata. In my first introduction, I was assigned to add to our existing pages. Thankfully, the CMS allowed to access parent pages and it’s parent’s pages, allowing us to crawl up the hierarchy up to the root of the site. We wanted to make navigation easier for the users, thus microdata (visible data) made more sense than JSON-LD. Examples can be seen . BreadcrumbList here I was about 8 years old at the time, but microdata was launched to mark up event information. I initially learned about this microdata format from searching similar sites as the one used in my examples. They still use this microdata along with BroadcastEvent very successfully. hCalendar Tools There are many tools to use to see social sharing previews, validate structured data, and view valid markup examples. : a great tool to see valid JSON-LD snippets. Steal Our JSON-LD : simply put; this is a complete dictionary by the creators themselves. I highly recommend testing with the microdata/JSON-LD examples. Schema.org Examples : I found out about this after completing event markup on a very popular page. Nonetheless, it’ still very handy when quickly troubleshooting structured data. Structured Data Testing Tool Chrome Extension Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this content, please consider supporting me with the clap icon. If you have any questions, comments, or all of the above, feel free to comment below or send a private message.

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San Francisco, CAAugust 1st, 2018 I will keep this post short, but I’ve been following the trend toward securitizing real assets for a while and I have come up with my five favorite use cases as well as articles that elaborate on each use case. 1. Gold (Royal Mint Bullion): The -based coin, called Royal Mint Gold (RMG), is a digital representation of gold stored in The Royal Mint vault. Blockchain The Royal Mint Bullion, the Royal Mint company that sells physical gold, is the first company to allow customers to hold gold-backed assets on Blockchain, Tom Coghill, RMG’s Commercial Lead, stated in an . Coghill also mentioned that one RMG coin is equal to one gram of gold, adding that “it’s real gold you’re holding when you’re holding our RMG.” — interview with Express.co.uk Cointelegraph 2. Real Estate (Propy): Enter , an international peer-to-peer real-estate marketplace aimed at solving the problems of purchasing property across borders. It is arguably the world’s first blockchain-based network for fostering the seamless purchase of international real estate online. Propy The “Propy Registry” is fueled by smart contracts designed to track and execute real-estate transactions according to regional regulations. Capitalizing off of the groundbreaking advancements of , Propy allows brokers, buyers, sellers and title agents and notaries to execute transactions utilizing blockchain-based private keys within existing legal frameworks. — Ethereum NASDAQ 3. Supply Chain for Pharmaceuticals (Chronicled, MediLedger): The aims to demonstrate compliance with the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). It utilises blockchain technology to track and trace prescription medicines. The project also seeks to demonstrate an ability to prevent counterfeit medicines from entering the supply chain. — MediLedger Project Enterprise Times 4. Cargo Shipments (Blockfreight) Blockfreight’s three key elements are: Smart contracts to permanently and securely define the bill of lading, payment terms and other elements to a completed cargo shipment, built on the blockchain. Ethereum A tradeable token built as a counterparty asset, secured by the blockchain. The tradeable token pays for the transaction fees and eliminates spam on the decentralized system. bitcoin Storage of the bill of lading and other documents too big to fit into a bitcoin block, using the Inter Planetary File System protocol. — CCN 5. Art & Collectibles (CODEX) In today’s art world, you need to consult an expert to track and prove the authenticity of a piece of art. It’s slow, expensive, and prone to error. Codex is changing that. Lurie describes the protocol as “a decentralized registry for unique assets, starting with art and collectibles… We store provenance information so that everyone can easily do business with those assets. Once you have a title, you can prove where you got it. And that means you have verifiable information about it and get access to services that read that data — insurance, asset-backed lending with liens, artist royalties, buying and selling, escrow.” — Coincentral What are your favorite examples of real world assets on the blockchain? Let me know in the comments below. ___ Disclaimer: These opinions are solely my own and do not represent the opinions of Sharespost or any companies that I may advise or invest in. Please follow me on , , and if you’d like to connect. Twitter Medium LinkedIn

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Bitcoin value Oct.16 2013 — $150, Bitcoin value Nov.30 2013 — $1,150, Bitcoin value Dec.19 2013 — $560. What was that? We all remember the huge Bitcoin run at the end of 2013, or to give it a more common name — “The 2013 Bubble”. I’m not saying whether it’s right or wrong to call it a bubble, but I can tell you it was all to do with market cycles. After 2013, the dropped as there seemed to be one long correction. For months after, we experienced a long period of consolidation and capitulation in a downtrend, until October 2015. price of bitcoin Bitcoin chart 2013–2015.Fast forward to today’s market; Bitcoin had a huge rally when it crossed the $500–600 mark in the middle of 2016, and from there the only way was up to $20,000. After touching the peak, there was a quick 2-month drop back to $6,000 on February 6 this year. This was the recorded low as of this writing. When we take a closer look at the Bitcoin chart, there’s no dispute possible the 2013 chart is nearly identical to the 2017 chart. What are market cycles? In general, we are speaking about the time period between two highs or lows of a market. In the conservative stock market such market cycles happen over longer terms (years) on average. The image below shows the cycles of the US stock exchange throughout history, starting from the Great Depression in 1929 up to the current day. The last famous recent lows of the cycles were around the years 2000 and 2008. They were the dot-com bubble pop and the sub-prime real estate crash. Is the NASDAQ close to the peak again? Time will tell. As you can see — “markets take the stairs up and the elevator down”, this is also true for any other financial markets, including the crypto markets. What differs between the conservative stock markets and the crypto ones, is the crypto volatility. While a sharp daily movement of NASDAQ is considered to be 1–2%, Bitcoin, which is considered the most stable crypto currency and the base asset, can drop more than 10% daily (and rise 17%, and vice versa). And this is considered usual behavior. The psychology of a market cycle Karen Bennett, writer at cheatsheet.com, has the created the amazing chart (above) showing the psychology of a market cycle. It describes the most common emotions people experience as the market fluctuates. These human emotions drive our financial markets much more than the market fundamentals. Meet the 10 stages of a market cycle Stage 1: Hope ‘Hope’ is the first sign of recovery after “the serious disbelief” stage (see Stage 10 — last in the cycle). The market is showing positive signals for a new bull run. However, investors are still careful. Small amounts of money are being invested. Stage 2: Optimism Optimism defines the second stage where prices are rising as new capital is being invested. This stage is reached when the market has been in a sustained uptrend for many months. The market has a positive outlook, and therefore many investors are comfortable investing money at this stage. Stage 3: Belief As time goes by, the optimism turns into belief. This stage of ‘belief’ is defined as one of the first signs of a bull market. Investors seek new opportunities in the market. Stage 4: Thrill Searching for alternative investment options can be a good idea if you know what you are doing. People easily get caught up in feeling thrilled as they select random projects because they believe nothing can go wrong. Everything is running up. It is important to keep track of your excitement level as being overexcited is a clear sign for closing a position. Stage 5: Euphoria The end of a huge run-up is defined by euphoria. Human emotions are taking over, nothing can stop us now, it’s all puppies and sunshine. There is only one direction — up. In this phase of the bull-run, the “stupid money” jumps onboard the train, this kind of money is the first to leave. At this stage, expect the press to report about the bull market, and you get the “meet the new young millionaires” articles. At this stage, the smart money is taking profit throughout the parabolic movement. Stage 6: Complacency At this stage, the bull-run is stagnating as people’s lofty expectations are not met. The first signs of a reversing market start to pop up. This is a very dangerous stage as people think the complacency stage is just a short break before the bull-run continues. Many investors are ill-prepared for the upcoming market reversal. Stage 7: Anxiety Finally, people become aware that this bull-run can’t go on forever. They see the market is reversing, losing value and money. The fear of losing lets traders delay the realization of a loss, which then turns into much greater losses. Stage 8: Denial However, the value of your investments continue to drop, and many investors refuse to sell hoping for an even bigger correction upwards. Investors act defensively as they are convinced they have invested their money wisely. However, generally, almost no coin is able to come out scot-free. When there is rain everyone gets wet. Stage 9: Panic The market continues to decline as a bear market has become the new reality. Investors try to save their funds by desperately selling their investments, as they are afraid to lose everything. Often we see a major sell-off happening at the panic stage. Stage 10: Depression People lose all hope and their belief in the existing market conditions. The market is at its lowest point in the current cycle (as will be noticed afterward). This is where stabilization and consolidation start building again. This stage can take a very long time. In general These 10 stages repeat over time and define a market cycle. Not every market cycle will follow this exact chart and the exact time it takes. However, it should give you some valuable insights into the psychology of market cycles. All markets go through cycles over the short-term. The duration and amplitude of these cycles are partially defined by risk (which is very high for the crypto market). However, market cycles are hard to predict. But, we know that markets will not continue up indefinitely or fall to zero (in legitimate markets). In the past, they have always “reverted to the mean.” Bitcoin is not the only one to cycle Bitcoin is not the only crypto that shows certain market cycles. Take a look at the Ripple chart. You can spot two large market cycles and two smaller cycles. This is just part of the “Altcoins season.” It’s not just limited to Ripple. Market Cycle Trends There are two major trends we generally see in a crypto market cycle: : New money flows into the market. Most of the money goes to Bitcoin as this is the entry point of the crypto market. Entry of liquidity : The dominance of Bitcoin started to decline from December 2017 as many investors were looking for new altcoin investments. This surge of altcoin buying is sometimes an indicator that a market is overbought as people seek new opportunities, and so potentially indicates the start of a new decline in the near future. Bitcoin dominance Where are we at in the current market cycle? First, no one knows, and we can only estimate. At the moment, it seems like we are between the stage of anger and depression (the image below shows the actual price and market cycles graph). As mentioned before, we have had a large correction from the $20K area to $6,000 (as of this writing). We expect the price to remain stable or slightly negative for a while. Is this positive overall? Yes, definitely. This is natural and needs to happen. The feeling of euphoria has bloated the blockchain space. The depression will kill a lot of unnecessary projects, the dumb money, and will create some room for the stronger real projects that are here to stay, and to new, better projects and new smart invested money. The best approach to market cycle investing As markets cycle from bear to bull, we believe it is necessary to experience a “recovery.” It is unlikely that markets will enter a true bull market until losses from the previous bear market are recovered. The phase of optimism/belief can be seen as the entry point of a new bull market. Generally speaking, buy when the market is weak (feelings of anger, depression or disbelief) or during a period of depression or accumulation (i.e., in mid-2014 to 2015 was a long accumulation period of around $300), and sell when the market is strong (feelings of optimism, belief or euphoria). Watch out, because market cycles do not exactly follow this pattern. In some extreme markets, the bear market never fully recovers losses before falling into a deeper bear market. In Conclusion: Key steps to understanding market cycles Market cycles are a natural thing, accept it. Cut out emotions as they can become your worst enemy. Look for both positive and negative catalysts that can trigger a new phase. It’s hard to pinpoint exact beginning and end points. Market cycles help analysts make better decisions. Buy low, sell high. As simple as that. Originally published at cryptopotato.com on April 17, 2018.

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There are many ICOs. The phenomenon, that started three years ago, has become very accessible due to Ethereum based ERC-20 tokens. After you’ve learned a good ICO, in the following list you will find 10 red-lights for bad ICO investments. how to identify No well-known crypto advisers, no famous venture capitalists investing. Watching interviews with the team’s key members can help answer if you trust them or not. 1 — Team is inexperienced in the crypto field: Is the company only here for the money? If the pivot is not necessary, then yes. If the company is already profitable in their field, why is the ICO needed, besides the “easy money?” 2 — “This is an existing company, with 3 years’ experience and 20 workers”: The more funds are raised with a bonus — the more likely the price will be traded close to that discount level. The more serious case is when there is no vesting for the pre-sale investors. 3 — Bonuses for everyone: other than a very few cases, an unlimited cap or a very-high cap means huge demand is needed to make up a secondary market (or exchanges). No one will be waiting to buy the tokens on the exchanges. 4 — Hard cap is huge: The whole ecosystem is built around the project’s token. If you can replace the token with Ethereum or Bitcoin and it still works, there is no real need for a token, hence no real need for an ICO. 5 — No real need for the token: when you see too many Facebook and Google Remarketing banners and ads, especially when they promise nice profits. That’s a red light. 6 — Aggressive marketing: Join the Telegram, ask questions, see how the developers respond to these questions. Same can be said about the ICO’s BitcoinTalk Announcement thread. A strong community creates high-value discussions. 7 — Community’s discussions are of low quality: either the cap is too high, or the demand is too low, or both. Better for the project to raise 100% of 20M than 50% of 40M. 8 — The public sale lasts too long: It won’t be said clearly because the legal team doesn’t let the ICO teams speak about exchanges, but this is a major part of the game. In 2016 Poloniex was the hottest exchange, 2017 was Bittrex’s year. Is Binance the exchange of 2018? Might be. What we do know, is that each new coin added there — benefits its initial ICO investors. 9 — No signs of a major exchange looking to list the ICO’s tokens: Assuming the company is selling only 10% of the circulating tokens for 100 Million USD, the token initial market cap is starting from 1 Billion, without making any 3x or 5x that will explode the market cap value before trading even started. This depends on the circulating supply. Be suspicious of the following: If there is no finite number of tokens, a small percentage is distributed to the public, no lock up on the tokens reserved for the team. 10 — Market cap is already huge: How do you find good ICOs to invest? Visit our . ICO List section Originally published at cryptopotato.com on February 26, 2018.

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And how to provably associate a DID with a person is the blockchain for sustainable development impacts, aiming to help standardize the measurement and rewarding of impact. Through their protocol and native IXO tokens, ixo plans to incentivize the funding and tracking on impact projects through unlocking a new economy for collecting and verifying impact data. ixo It’s crucial for ixo to encourage data integrity. As such they’re highly involved in the decentralized identity space, because it’s important that the several network stakeholders are properly identified. ixo uses the W3C DID and Verifiable Claims standard drafts to facilitate this process. (See also: on decentralized identity, I previously wrote about ERC 725 and ERC 735 in the context of implementing a simple KYC claim verification for a crowdsale, check it out below.) _Implementing a simple KYC claim verification for a crowdsale_hackernoon.com First impressions with ERC 725 and ERC 735 — identity and claims The W3C standards The W3C, always the trailblazer, has been hard at work on standards for and . Decentralized Identifiers Verifiable Claims (Note that the examples provided below are vastly simplified for clarity, and kind of butcher the well-crafted standards.) DIDs — Decentralized identifiers DID stands for , and represents a new identifier for an identity that is detached from central control. From : Decentralized Identifier the horse’s mouth Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier for verifiable, “self-sovereign” digital identity. DIDs are fully under the control of the DID subject, independent from any centralized registry, identity provider, or certificate authority. They had me at . Onwards: self-sovereign DIDs are URLs that relate a DID subject to means for trustable interactions with that subject. DIDs resolve to DID Documents — simple documents that describe how to use that specific DID. Here’s an example of what a DID Document could look like: {"did": "did:example:person-123456789","pubKey": "DDoFgPQ4JyjrsBwqGg2yCoZdGk5x11k7nGXXeg3wokFy"} This simple document declares a DID and its corresponding public key (more complex documents can include other info, such as the location of associated personal data, or the DID owner’s agent). There isn’t much one can do with this in isolation. However, combining a DID with verifiable claims is quite powerful. . Let’s explore. Proving ownership of a DID on which a trusted claim has been made would grant you access to whatever the claim grants you access to Verifiable Claims Verifiable Claims are a method for trusted parties to provably issue a credential on a DID (c_laim_ and are used interchangeably in this post). Again, the W3C: credential Driver’s licenses are used to claim that we are capable of operating a motor vehicle, university degrees can be used to claim our education status, and government-issued passports enable holders to travel between countries. This specification provides a standard way to express these sorts of claims on the Web in a way that is cryptographically secure, privacy respecting, and automatically verifiable. Think of a traditional driver’s license. It’s usually issued by a trusted party (your local motor vehicle authority) on a person identified by a government ID. They evaluate your driving skills and, if you pass muster, they’ll associate a claim with your government ID saying you’re fit to drive. Verifiable claims are a more secure way to achieve the same result on DIDs. If my identifier with the motor vehicle authority is not my government-issued ID, but a DID, how would this work? First, they’ll need to verify that the applicant owns the DID they claim to. This is done through the use of public-key cryptography, as will be described later in this post. Once that verification is completed, the authority can issue a claim confirming the applicant’s ability to drive. This is what it could look like. {"issuer": "did:example:trusted-authority-123","issued": "2010-01-01","claim": {"id": "did:example:person-123456789","canDrive": true},"signature": "g4j9UrpHM4..."}} This represents a claim by that the DID can drive. Anyone could produce a similar document. What makes this claim verifiable is that it’s signed. That is, we know that the value could only be correctly produced by the owner of (because cryptography). This means that, if we know that indeed represents the authority it claims to be, we can trust this claim to be legitimate, and ascribe the ability to drive. did:example:trusted-authority-123 did:example:person-123456789 signature did:example:trusted-authority-123 did:example:trusted-authority-123 did:example:person-123456789 Here’s a use case. Suppose you’re stopped by your local transit authority for a random document check. All they really need to know is that you’re authorized to drive. However, a traditional driver’s license contains a lot of other unrelated data (such as your name and address), and all that data leaks in the document check process. Proving ownership of your DID and showing the associated claim will yield only the information required and no more. Identities and claims on the IXO blockchain In order to make it easier for people to register with ixo’s network, the ixo Foundation forked and built KeySafe, a browser extension that simplifies the process for someone to create a decentralized identity. KeySafe generates a decentralized identifier (DID) on behalf of the user. From the : MetaMask draft whitepaper Each participant in an Impact Exchange project […] is identified as an entity, using a Digital Identifier [DID]. Entities can refer to natural persons, organizations, software agents or devices. For instance, an Evaluation Agent could be an identified software agent that functions as a Smart Oracle, checking submitted claims data against external data references and performing algorithmic calculations, to arrive at a conclusion that verifiesthe claim. These identifiers resolve back to verifiable identity credentials, such as a proof of skills qualification, that can be used to determine the eligibility of the entity to exchange their claim for funding. In order for someone to register with ixo, this DID needs to be ledgered on ixo’s blockchain. Setting up KeySafe Once installed, a user must set up KeySafe for the first time. This setup process will generate a DID for the user (more precisely, it generates a public/private key pair, and derives the DID from the public key), as seen below. Generating a DID with KeySafe (simplified journey) Once the user has followed the journey and a DID is generated, it’s time to register the DID on the ixo blockchain. Ledgering the DID In order to ledger the DID on the ixo chain, ixo requires a proof of ledgering intent. In other words, ixo must know that the owner of the DID must have wanted this ledgering to occur. As such, whomever issues the request for ledgering (be it the DID owner or a third party) must prove this intent. A way to verify that this is true is by requiring that the ledgering request payload contains a signature of said payload. This is what the payload looks like. {payload : [10,didDoc: {did: "did:sov:person-123",pubKey: "DDoFgPQ4JyjrsBwqGg2yCoZdGk5x11k7nGXXeg3wokFy",credentials: [],},],signature: {signatureValue: [1,"8B81986B9E458E3B6D55F...",],created: "2018-07-20T16:50:07.420Z",},} That long hex inside is the result of signing the in the payload with the DID's private key. We first transform the didDoc into JSON: signature didDoc {"didDoc":{"did":"did:sov:PRTxGnvgX7YGPCTkVfwevH","pubKey":"DDoFgPQ4JyjrsBwqGg2yCoZdGk5x11k7nGXXeg3wokFy","credentials":[]}} And then have KeySafe prompt the user to sign it. KeySafe prompting the user to sign the ledgering payload When we submit this payload to the , this signature will be verified before any ledgering occurs. Only a successful verification will result in ledgering. There are 2 steps to this verification. ixo Blockchain API The first step is to confirm that the supplied DID and public key match. Skipping this step would allow an attacker to supply a different public key, whose private key they control, and use it to generate a valid signature. A DID can be matched to a public key because the DID itself is derived from the public key. We then simply have to check that the supplied DID is the same as the one derived from the supplied public key, as such. base58.encode(base58.decode(publicKey).slice(0, 16)) The signature itself can be verified through an algorithm which takes the original message, the public key, and the signature as inputs. Only an agent in possession of the DID’s private key will be able to generate a signature that will pass this verification. It’s important to note that this process doesn’t prove that the registrant is actually in possession of the DID’s private key. An attacker might have found this signed message elsewhere (in the ixo chain, for example). This isn’t much of a problem: the private key can not be calculated from a message+signature pair, so all the attacker can do is replay the ledgering, which is presumably an idempotent operation. As such, this proof is enough for ixo. Since the only way for an attacker to successfully register this DID is having found this signature elsewhere already, we can assume ledgering has occurred already and that, when it did, it was done by the DID owner (since the correct signature could have only been produced by the owner of the private key). Provably associating a person with a DID ixo, however, cares about associating a DID with an actual person. As an identity provider, we at then need to conduct a KYC process on an individual to prove their identity. We must also prove their ownership of a DID. Fractal Asking the user to sign a challenge nonce As such, Fractal needs to subtly alter their KYC procedure for identity provisioning. Alongside the normal identity questions, we will ensure the user has KeySafe installed and configured. Once this has been confirmed, Fractal can issue a cryptographic challenge: we ask the user to sign a message whose contents are plausibly unique (a ). This uniqueness guarantees that there’s little to no chance that such a message has been signed before, making it next to impossible for the attacker to supply a correct signature as a response to this challenge. nonce A way to make this message plausibly unique is to use a . If the user is able to produce a valid signature (as defined above), it must mean they are in possession of the DID’s private key. UUID Now that we have confirmed the association between a person and a DID, we’re ready to sign and issue a claim on their KYC status. We can then broadcast the following into the ixo blockchain. {"issuer": "did:sov:fractal-123","issued": "2010-01-01","claim": {"id": "did:sov:person-123","kycLevels": ["IdentityVerified", "AccreditedInvestor"]},"signature": "g4j9UrpHM4..."}} And boom — ixo can now rest assured that this DID does indeed match to a person, whose identity has been validated by Fractal. At , we offer a hassle-free, user-friendly launchpad solution combined with a comprehensive customer identification service (KYC/AML) to successfully deploy your token launch with ease. Planning an ICO? Fractal

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Every day, traders all over the world face the challenge of navigating the increasingly complex and unpredictable financial markets. The path to profitability can often be lonely and incredibly time-consuming. Many have turned to social trading networks and copied the strategies of leading traders within the community to enhance their own performance. These platforms produce thousands of success stories from unknown traders who become masters of their craft. One such story is Wes Nolte, a 30-something South African-born chief technology officer based in London. Wes (known by his eToro username ‘Wesl3y’) joined in 2015. Through his diverse, risk-balanced, and bodacious trading style, he earned himself a position as a Popular Investor (PI) within just 2 years. PI is a program that allows top traders, such as Wes, to build their own financial business and earn a 2% management fee. eToro Secret to success Wes’s secret comes from a personal interest in studying economics and human behavior. “I read a lot on sociology and psychology out of pure interest. I also read a lot on macro and microeconomics, and I’ve found that economics is simply the study of human behavior via the proxy of “perceived value,” e.g. fiat currencies, stock. Once you’ve learnt this, and understand more about people (especially group-mentality) you become a significantly better trader — although you still need to couple this with a good deal of patience. For example, almost all positive and negative events that affect an asset are overplayed, either overbought or oversold. And big events e.g. an exchange is hacked, or a president makes an aggressive statement, become very good trading opportunities.” When he was asked what drew him to eToro, he said he was “curious about how a social network built around trading might work; because of the ease and speed of trading; the great user interface; the fact that it’s secure; plus the knowledge I can draw from and give to the community.” As someone with 17 years trading experience, Wes was also interested in the PI program, and how it enables top traders to earn a second income. Wesly Nolte Crypto Trading Cryptocurrencies became a very intriguing asset class for Wes. Beyond their trading profitability, he views crypto as a great tool to potentially “flatten the hierarchies that our society and culture, and so on, are built upon.” Asked how he first discovered crypto, he said, “I first heard about bitcoin in 2010 when the price started jumping up from a few cents to dollars, and myself and friends were wondering what the hell was going on. I was skeptical and also quite poor, so I didn’t pick any up. Roll on 2013 and bitcoin is still doing its thang, and a few other cryptos had emerged. I decided to get in and bought some XRP and bitcoin, and built a mining rig to mine more bitcoin and a few million Dogecoins.” Like most people, he also has his share of regrets during the December/January Bull Run. “It felt like an enormous melt-up, and I dumped a lot of crypto fairly early in the rise. It hurt to watch it continuing up but less so once I saw it crash. I did buy back in after the second or third sell-off, so I got in too early, but at least prices were way off their highs.” Despite the uniqueness of crypto, Wes acknowledges that for all asset classes, including stocks, commodities, currencies, and cryptocurrencies. “the market has been tough across the board this year” Trading Bots As more amateur traders enter the crypto markets, the presence of trading bots has increased significantly. Yet Wes doesn’t believe that bots are currently much use for . trading cryptocurrencies “I don’t think crypto trading bots are useful, yet. Three major reasons: first, the technology isn’t advanced enough yet. Second, spreads and fees on cryptos are still fairly high compared to traditional markets. Third, there isn’t enough history or market activity for them to learn from. I also believe this will change over time, especially as institutions begin trading crypto”. Being an eToro influencer We asked Wes if he feels any added pressure, responsibility or aversion to risk due to his every trading move being followed by 70,000 traders. “My trading style continues to evolve, but that’s more around market conditions than because of copiers. At the end of the day I’m trading with my own money too, and I want to be successful. I remember that when I hit $2,000,000 in assets under management (AUM), I felt quite giddy, and my trading style changed but only temporarily because I found that this wasn’t working out very well. I had a good long introspective think and was able to shake off the emotional burden of carrying so much extra cash on my back. This was around half-way through last year, and it served me well as by the end of the year I was managing nearly $20,000,000 and had created millions of dollars in profits for my copiers.” Wesly Nolte On the bear market Many people have become discouraged by the bear market and are thinking of selling. We asked Wes what tips he could give to traders during this time. “Ask yourself why you got in, what your goals were, and why you’re getting out. Remember that very little has actually changed besides sentiment (although you shouldn’t ignore this either), and that during this correction solid foundations for the future of cryptos have been established. They’ve been recognized by countries and banks, regulation is coming, and that’s a good thing, traditional institutions are getting involved in a big way and many, many businesses are now building on blockchain. Patience”. Wes is one of thousands of traders who make money every day while amassing followers and establishing a name for themselves online. Although trading has traditionally been a highly specialized and isolating activity, today it’s become far more community oriented and collaborative. With patience, motivation, and the right mindset, anyone can learn to generate passive income while growing their network and increasing their knowledge of how to spot value across different markets and asset classes. Originally published at cryptopotato.com on July 22, 2018.

How I turned a passion into a 20M Dollar business

AWS AI Services Scratch Extension In my previous , I have mentioned that we should prepare our children for the future. In the future, to succeed our children should have skills like creative thinking and problem solving. STEM education can improve this skills. post According to MIT Professor , coding is the new literacy. A visual programming language called could stimulate the curiosity we know it exists in the children from the day they have born. You can read stories about how it changes children’s lives , and . Mitchel Resnick Scratch here here here As I am working with , I have been wondering how we could teach AI to our children easily. Then I came across , an extension framework to Scratch for adding new functionality to Scratch. With ScratchX, you can write extensions to integrate Scratch with anything you imagine. There are sample extensions for , , and . AWS AI services ScratchX LEGO WeDo Arduino Raspberry Pi Then I thought I can make a Scratch extension for using AWS AI services like Polly and Translate. And it is . here You can try sample project that uses Amazon Polly to speak the text you have entered in the language you choose. Also you can translate text between languages and speak the translated text in target language. here Below is a video recording of the sample project. Developing The Extension If you wonder how the extension is developed, let’s develop the extension step by step together. A minimal Scratch Extension is created like below. After creating the extension object, we should register it by calling ScratchExtensions.register with the name of the extension and a descriptor which defines the blocks that will be created. For more information on making Scratch Extensions, see . here We can develop our extension in three steps: Create the descriptor Implement the methods Try the extension in ScratchX Let’s start. Create the descriptor The descriptor defines the blocks that will be created after the extension is registered. Created blocks will be shown in ‘More Blocks’ section of ScratchX. The blocks of our extension are defined as below. First block is for initializing the AWS JavaScript SDK in the browser. Amazon Polly blocks are the next two blocks. And last blocks are for Amazon Translate service. Parameters of blocks aredefined as ‘say %s’. We can use lists to choose parameters from with ‘%m.sourceLanguages’ syntax, where ‘%m.’ says that we want to use a list and sourceLanguages shows the name of the list. In ScratchX lists are known as menus and menus are defined with ‘menus’ field. Blocks of our extension will look like below. Blocks are shown in ‘More Blocks’ section 2. Implement the methods After we defined our blocks, we will implement the methods that will be executed when blocks are used. For more information on method details, you can look . Usage of AWS services in the browser with AWS JavaScript SDK is explained in detail in . extension JavaScript file my previous blog post 3. Try the extension in ScratchX In order to try our extension, we should load it from a URL. I recommend for this. MiniWeb HTTP Server After you can run the server in your directory at 8080 port, you can try it in your browser by visiting the address below. I recommend Google Chrome browser, ScratchX is not working in Firefox. IE will not load the extension from http: url, although it works over https: url. https://scratchx.org/?url=http://localhost:8080/awsAiServicesScratchExtension.js When ScratchX warned you, click ‘I understand, continue’ to load and try the extension. Summary In this post, I have shown how a Scratch Extension can be created easily for using AWS AI services in Scratch. You can find the code . For more information on making Scratch Extensions, see . here here For more information on how AWS AI services can be used in the browser using AWS JavaScript SDK, please see my previous blog post: You Can’t Fail To Learn A New Language With These AWS AI Services: Translate, Rekognition, Polly Also, you might like my other post about creating a serverless app for saving allergy information with the picture of children and searching the allergy information later with the picture of the children by using face recognition methods of Amazon Rekognition: Serverless Allergy Checker with Amazon Rekognition, Lex, Polly, DynamoDB, S3 and Lambda I will continue to write about different use cases of AWS AI service. I will add object and text detection features to the extension using Amazon Rekognition. I am developing a Chrome Browser Extension for reading the selected text in the page you are viewing using Amazon Polly and detecting Authy authentication codes from the camera using Amazon Rekognition. Please stay tuned or follow. If you like this post, please share, clap or follow. Thanks for reading.

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Target

AI Is Hard? It’s Child’s Play With This AWS AI Services Scratch Extension

I firstly want to start off by thanking each and every one of you for helping me reach on Medium. This is something I never thought would be possible when starting this journey and I am grateful we are treading the advancements of the space together. 3000+ followers I would like to take this milestone as an opportunity to launch a new series titled In this series, I will be discussing up-and-coming projects, significant project milestone releases and much more. “Cryptocurrencies Unleashed”. I will be debuting this series with as an ode to launching their on . In this post I will be focusing on the functions and benefits the (as a whole) will unleash to game developers and publishers. “Game Development & Enjin” Enjin Smart Contracts Ethereum’s Mainnet Enjin Platform Overview The Enjin Platform “gives communities, content creators, game servers and game publishers, an easy solution for implementing virtual goods and real value, into their gameplay and communities. Enjin has developed/will develop a powerful framework of open-source software development kits (SDKs), wallets, game plugins, virtual item management apps and a payment gateway platform”. I have already featured in my series, discussing how (from a gamer’s perspective) will be revolutionized by the introduction of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies, which you can find . Enjin “Real World Applications of Cryptocurrencies” Video Game Virtual Goods here Unfortunately, current Ethereum Standards ( and ) would have restricted the platform’s functionality and efficiency as these require a to be deployed for each fungible or non-fungible token/collection. A new standard ( ) was proposed by Enjin’s CTO, which is a standard interface for multiple item/token definitions in a making it vastly more flexible and efficient. If you want to find out more about you should check out my blog post titled , . ERC-20 ERC-721 separate contract ERC-1155 single deployed contract ERC-1155 “A Proposal To Shake Up Ethereum” here is the to the and is the standard used by their . Using it as its backbone has unleashed a host of functions and benefits for game developers and publishers which I will discuss below. ERC-1155 cornerstone Enjin Platform smart contracts What are Enjin’s Platform functions & benefits? Besides solving many issues faced by gamers today, the brings a host of benefits for game developers and publishers. With the launch of their (and Unity SDK & UI tools in the near future), developers will be able to back their video game virtual goods with cryptocurrency . They will be able to leverage the to create and via an . Below you can find a list of functions that are available at launch: Enjin Platform smart contracts without requiring any blockchain knowledge Enjin Platform complex token designs economies extremely user-friendly plug & play interface — Creators have the ability to mint items backed by tokens which immediately makes the item . For example, each could be backed . Reserve Value ERC-20 valuable Mammoth Mount by 500 ENJ — Items can be destroyed (or ) in order to retrieve its reserve value. For example, if a gamer decides to melt his (backed by 10,000 ENJ), this will result in her receiving 10,000 ENJ (if there are no fees) in return for having it removed (and destroyed) from her possession. Item Melting melted Chromatic Sword — Trading between two parties can be done using a . In addition, items can be to specific owners and only traded with certain . For example, creators could leverage this to also regulate the secondary market by whitelisting only approved marketplaces in which items can be sold/bought from. Enhanced Security securely built-in escrow system bound whitelisted parties — Creators can choose to apply a when trading takes place. Additionally, they can choose to charge a fee when items are melted. These fee are applied regardless of the platform trades/melting happen on as they are in the smart-contracts themselves. Advanced Commission Model fee baked — Creators have the ability to of their items. For example, they can mint 10 and only 10 of thus when one is melted, it decreases the total number whilst increasing their value. Controlled Item Economics control the minting nature Chromatic Swords — Since there are so many options when minting items, game creators can find new and unique ways to . For example, creators could create rare non-fungible items that would be highly collectible used to fund their game pre-sale (see War of Crypto below). Unique Funding Models fund their project Projects Utilizing Enjin Given the and of the , it’s no surprise that projects are already primed and ready to leverage its power. These include: power ease-of-use Enjin Platform War of Crypto (WoC) WoC is “a blockchain-based 3D multiplayer game for PC, Android, and iOS has just announced via Twitter that their most valuable in-game ERC-1155 token will be a Dark Dragon that contains 10,000 in Enjin Coin (ENJ) . These will be the first ERC-1155 tokens to ever go on sale , and the first cryptocurrencies to be backed by another cryptocurrency , Enjin Coin. War of Crypto’s pre-sale of characters will begin on the 28th of July and will offer a range of heroes and skins that will only be attainable through peer-to-peer markets, once the pre-sale has completed”. You can find more information about , , as well as their reveal trailer below. WoC here War of Crypto Trailer 9Lives Arena has announced their adoption of the in their upcoming game named . This is a “ Touchhour Enjin Platform 9Lives Arena competitive online RPG that will also feature a unique companion app for iOS and Android that will give players an innovative commandable, Tamagotchi-style sidekick to help them gather and craft resources. Designed for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, with its companion app targeting iOS and Android, 9Lives Arena utilizes the latest in technology developed by Enjin to place all its characters on the blockchain”. You can find more information about , , as well as their reveal trailer below. 9Lives Arena here 9Lives Arena Trailer Conclusion The unleashes a host of benefits to game developers and publishers and it’s no surprise projects are already adopting it — , , etc. Enjin Platform “Actions speak louder than words” “The proof is in the pudding” I would like to close with a brilliant video related to this subject matter which I highly recommend you watch. How many claps does this post deserve? How about a follow? If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to 👏 👏 many times (you know you want to!), give my blog a 👣 👣 and 🤲 🤲 with your friends. There’s a limit of 👏 👏 you can give to each post, so I urge you not to try and exceed that limit… you might break Medium! clap follow share 50 claps Speaking of which… If I still have your attention, please leave a comment and let me know what else you would like to see me writing about. You can find links to my social media and sign up to my newsletter below. ermos.crypto+medium@gmail.com You can also show your support by donating to the following address: : ETH/ENJ 0x4c7195E074cf0Ab6F77Bdb7C97Fd2567066Bb712 . Disclaimer: All information and data on this blog post is for informational purposes only. My opinions are my own. I do not provide personal investment advice and I am not a qualified licensed investment advisor I make no representations as to the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity, of any information. I will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or any losses, or damages arising from its display or use. All information is provided as is with no warranties and confers no rights.

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Cryptocurrencies Unleashed: Game Development & Enjin

I don’t know a single developer that’s good and without a job or something to do. Good developers are in high demand. You might not find a job for a top or famous company, but local companies are desperate to find talent. You don’t have to move to Silicon Valley to find a job as a developer, especially as a Web Developer, one of the professions that is more open to remote working. There’s no shortage of opportunities in the foreseeable future, too. On the contrary, there will likely be more demand for developers in the future, to develop new software or maintain an existing one. Being able to work remotely Remote working, even for just a few days a week, makes for a good work/life balance. It’s not allowed in all the environments, but remote working is a perk that’s very well suited to . software development No need to waste time commuting, having the problem of finding something good to eat during the day, being forced by office politics and rules to leave at some specific time of day, or — worse — waiting until people decide it’s time for leaving to avoid being the first out and sending the “wrong message”. All you need is a good internet connection and some quiet place in your house (a dedicated room is highly recommended) and you can sit there, do your best work, and take time off as needed. Maybe you like walking the dog at 11:00 AM, and in some places, that’s totally allowed to pick your own hours, as long as you perform the job you’re expected to do. Good pay and economic benefits Software development is one of the jobs that generally comes with a good pay. As a remote employee, you can choose to work for a richer country and take advantage of the economic benefits of doing so. Of course, this depends a lot on the options available to you. If you choose to be a freelancer, that’s another field where companies are willing to spend good money on talent. You have the option to go indie Say you work 10 years for a company and one day you “go crazy” and decide to leave your job because it does not satisfy you anymore. Or you get laid off, or the company closes down. Most professions require someone to hire you, but software development has this nice thing called indie development, where you basically go on your own, build something, and sell it to the world. It can be a SAAS (Software as a Service — aka Web App), a mobile app a desktop app, even an ebook on the subject you’re the most expert about. You can leverage years of experience into a new venture, and you get a new experience you can offer to future employers as well. It’s a creative outlet It’s not painting or design, but is a highly creative profession. programming Any time you set out to write a program you’re creating something new, much like when you were playing Lego as a child. Many times you experiment with technologies, only to find that’s not a good way, so you choose a different path. Every time you write a new program, you learn something new. It’s never boring (unless your job is boring in the first place, but the craft of programming in itself should not be boring — otherwise you always have the option to look for a non-boring job) Coding is social Even if one might spend 10 hours a day sitting alone with a computer, saying programming is social is perfectly right. We use software built by people, people wrote the manuals and guides to using that software, we rely on Open Source software, interact with people on forums to discuss and learn more about programming, and finally, we make the software for people. You work with a team, that might be distributed or local to your office. You have stakeholders, people are waiting for your fixes. Programmers like to go to conferences, the bravest even speak at them, and we like to rant, comment or share things on Twitter. We star projects on GitHub, open issues, submit a pull request to improve the work of someone else. All of this is a social activity, and the best thing is that you can go at your own pace, and be as social as you want. You will learn every day Every day you’ll be presented with new challenges. You’re an engineer working on potentially very complex problems. You need to know how to figure things out, and if you don’t, you need to learn it on the job. You are expected to be learning every day, and this is awesome as you’re not stagnating in the job market but building up lots of experience as the time passes. Valuable experience for your company, other companies if you decide to switch jobs, or even for yourself if you want to try going indie. It’s up to you Everyone has the same opportunities. We have access to the most powerful servers and services in the world. Your phone is thousands of times more powerful than the computer the NASA used to send people to the moon. A person in Siberia can have the same hardware someone in Silicon Valley uses. You have access to millions of books online. All it takes is time, dedication and perseverance, and you will learn all you need to learn to perform any kind of job. The barriers are lowering every day. 10 years ago the landscape was completely different, and imagine 10 years from now. You can make an app and sell it worldwide in very little time and upfront investment. Interested in learning JavaScript? Get my free ebook at jshandbook.com Originally published at flaviocopes.com .

8 good reasons to become a software developer

Text Processing and Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all others that have been tried. But what about those that been tried? Is there even room for criticism of democracy itself in a democracy? Regardless of the answer, there’s no way of opting out of a democracy. You’re born into it, just like you’re born into any other system of civilization that’s currently running as the operative system of your nation. Should you happen to be born in the United States of America today, you would be born into a system that has elected a somewhat unusual leader. A leader that has been described as a poor man’s version of a rich man, a weak man’s version of a strong man and a stupid man’s version of a wise man. Many of those who describe him as such are still baffled by the fact that he got elected in a democratic election. What most fail to see is that he probably got elected of the aforementioned traits rather than despite them. A poor man’s version of a rich man, a weak man’s version of a strong man and a stupid man’s version of a wise man is the perfect candidate in a democratic system because in a true democracy, poor, weak and stupid people have the same right to vote as everyone else. haven’t because Wherever you happen to be born and whatever your opinion about the system you happen to be born into, your options are always limited by whatever rules and regulations that happen to govern that particular geographic area at that particular time. Rules that very rarely have anything to do with whether a particular action is moral or not. All systems of governance that humanity has tried so far, including democracy, haven’t favoured truly moral behaviour in populations but rather behaviour that is well adapted to the very specific set of rules that they happen to be born into. This is all too often reflected in the jaw-droppingly un-sophisticated behaviour of our so called leaders. Behaviour found not only in the White House, but across the globe and across the political spectrum. One can’t help but thinking that the leaders of the world shouldn’t struggle with language or maths but few, if any, seem to master both. To be unfit for office seems to be a prerequisite for those that want to hold it. It’s a catch 22 and an unfortunate side effect of collaborations between human brains in general. So what can you do about it? Sadly, not a lot on the macro scale. Your vote won’t matter. It’s that simple. What you do is to ignore the cyclical nature of the specific system you happen to be born in and shift your attention towards things that actually do have an impact on your life and the lives of those around you. The internet is a dangerous place for the gullible but a fantastic resource for the curious mind. You can never opt out of the whole system but you can choose to ignore more and more aspects of it as the internet evolves. First of all you can stop listening to whatever propaganda-machines that are running on your nations media networks. You can cover your house in solar panels. Get off as many grids as you can. Last but not least you can start using Bitcoin, the only sound type of money this world has to offer. The amount of people you can transact with without hassle might still be very small, but usage is growing at a staggering rate. Transacting is also not the only way in which you can use it. One of the most mind-blowing features of Bitcoin is that every participant of the network has the power to increase its price by simply using it and thereby limiting its supply. Hodling, as this behaviour is often referred to as, is using. The bigger the movement grows, the more useful it becomes and the more powerful a tool it becomes. It liberates the little man from the economic constraints of whatever governance-scheme he has fallen victim to. The earlier you get on this train, the more rewarded your courage will be and the more liberated you’ll become. can not Your political opinions, let alone your opinions on democracy as a whole, will matter less and less in the coming decades. Free-thinkers, anarcho-capitalists and libertarians all around the globe have this new tool to shield themselves with from the whims of third parties. We will, finally, get to witness the power of a truly free market on a global scale. The transition period might be short or long, peaceful or violent, spectacular or almost invisible but make no mistake, change coming. Pandora’s box has been opened and if the beast we found inside turns out to be Roko’s basilisk or not remains to be seen. Regardless, you should probably prepare yourself. Democracy’s days are counted. is

Mind

The problem with democracy

The Canary Dies

According to a recent research study, the robotics economy is projected to see an explosive growth, increasing from a total market value of to a potential market valuation of . According to the , the robotics market has some great prospects in terms of compounded annual growth in the coming years. 40 Billion USD in 2016 135 Billion USD in 2019 market statistics The term Robotics was first introduced by science fiction author, Isaac Asimov. Robotics is the branch of technology that handles the design, operation, construction and application of robots. In the book Mr. Asimov described the three laws of Robotics: ➡️ A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. ➡️ A robot must obey orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. ➡️ A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. I, Robot (1950) The Articficial Intelligence (AI) and robotics economy consists of various branches ranging from human-friendly companion robots that citizens to fully and anything in between. One of the projects that aims to disrupt the robotics industry by making the development process faster, cheaper and easier is Kambria. accompany elderly autonomous vehicles is building an open blockchain platform where businesses and developers can come together to collaborate on creating new innovative projects that will enable the launch of consumer-based applications. Kambria ✅ , which is the company behind the initiation of the Kambria project, has already been very active in the robotics business, manufacturing personal robots. Kambria is based in the worlds’ tech capital, Silicon Valley, USA. OhmniLabs By building their own open source blockchain platform, Kambria aims to accelerate the development of AI and robotics. The project centers around the Kambria codebase in which everything and everyone comes together. The codebase is similar to Android and Linux, as it specializes in having all the items needed to build a robot or robotics parts. The Kambria DNA (KDNA) is the modular language that enables different parts in the database to be combined and made into a specific robot or robotics part. The KDNA can contain both hardware and software. When developers re-submit their developments back into the Kambria codebase, they can get rewarded for their accomplishments by the incentives given to them in Kambria’s nativate KAT tokens. The Kambria alliance enables manufacturers to interact with the Kambria codebase to ask for robots or robotic parts to be made while incentivizing the platform’s developers. The Kambria innovation marketplace can make a big difference in the acceleration of the robotics development as the marketplace will hold development competitions with significant token rewards. Free-riders and violators will be penalized by the Kambria community and in some cases legal actions will be made against malicious actors, keeping the network safe from frauds. All the technology that will be developed on the Kambria platform will be made available free of charge for personal and Research and Development (R&D) purposes. An option for a licensing fee on commercial and enterprise usage will be made available. ✅ In their Initial Coin Offering (ICO), Kambria intends to raise a total capital of 19,000,000 USD, in exchange for 50% of the total token supply. While the presale phase has recently been finalized, we are waiting for the Token Generation Event (TGE), or public sale to commence. More details will be announced shortly. According to their Telegram channel, a total of 5,000,000,000 KAT tokens will be minted. KAT will be launched as a native ERC-20 token. Several ICO rating platforms were very positive about the Kambria project potential. ✅ Having a team that is comprised of highly qualified team members and top-notch investors will definitely add confidence to the project to make it a success. Besides having field experts and people with blockchain experience on their team, Kambria has also been endorsed by one of the most respected Venture Capital firms in this industry, called . Partner and CEO of #HASHED, Simon Seojoon Kim is also one of the project advisors, and is joined by other industry giants, like Kyber Network’s CEO Loi Luu, NEO Capital founding partner, Roger Lim and WeTrust CEO and Co-founder George Li. #HASHED ✅ As I see it, the AI and robotics economy is gaining ground and it is gaining it fast. Do I believe robots will take over jobs of ‘regular’ employees, of course I do, it would be naïve to think they won’t. I do however think there are opportunities for people that are adapting to these new technological innovations. Sometimes you need to break out of your bubble and educate yourself about new innovations that potentially will be a part of our everyday lives. You don’t want to be left behind. Kambria is elaborating on the development of AI and Robotics and is trying to establish a decent market share in this niche. Doing the research on this project has made me realize its full potential. I will be following this project closely. ✅ If you would like to know more about the Kambria project you can check out their official channels: Website: https://kambria.io/ Whitepaper: https://kambria.io/Kambria_White_Paper_v2.pdf Telegram (ENG): https://t.me/kambriaofficial Telegram Announcement Channel: https://t.me/kambria Twitter: https://twitter.com/KambriaNetwork Facebook: https://facebook.com/KambriaNetwork Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/KambriaOfficial/ Email: info@kambria.io Full disclosure : I do not own Kambria tokens and I have not yet participated in Kambria ICO. This article is not intended as investment advice. It is just my personal opinion about the Kambria project. You should always do your own research. This article was created in exchange for a potential token reward from Bounty0x and it is written by LindaCrypto. Subscribe to my channels Steemit, Medium and Twitter if you would like to be informed about Blockchain en cryptocurrency projects and news. My handle is @LindaCrypto for all channels. You can also read my articles on LinkedIn . If you like my article please give me a clap. Thank you! LindaCrypto

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Kambria: disrupting the robotics industry, a project overview

In which we observe that two things which appear quite different are in fact very much the same. Map of Europe, circa 1595 (src: ) https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/505388389411524578/ I. PoW vs. PoS I went to an amazing debate recently at . Grand Central Tech Hosted by Crypto NYC, the event pit two prominent Proof of Work advocates against Proof of State advocate Nate Rush in an engaging debate over arguably the most important question facing the blockchain community. For those unfamiliar, “Proof of Work” and “Proof of Stake” are types of what is known as a “consensus algorithm”: a set of rules for how a blockchain decides what transactions become “canonical” and which do not. A blockchain’s consensus algorithm is a little bit like its constitution: the fundamental rules which define it and determine its behavior. Of the two, is currently the de-facto standard, powering both Bitcoin and Ethereum, the world’s two largest cryptocurrencies. In essence, PoW requires participants to demonstrate that they have done a certain amount of computational work in order to place a transaction into the canon. By imposing this work requirement, Bitcoin and Ethereum make it economically inefficient to attempt to place fraudulent transactions into the canon. As long as the “good guys” have at least half of the computers, the “bad guys” will not be able to commit fraud, and the transactions in the blockchain can be trusted as being accurate. Proof of Work (PoW) Proof of Work was pioneered in 2008 in the original Bitcoin paper, written by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. It was the first algorithm to solve the “double spend problem”, the achilles heel of prior cryptocurrencies. It is lauded for being effective, simple to understand, and simple to implement. Its essential drawback is its profound energy requirement: since the “work” of Proof of Work involves arbitrary (and unproductive) computation, participants in the network are essentially competing to waste the most electricity. is a more recent, experimental consensus algorithm often touted as a potential replacement for Proof of Work, and seeks to avoid PoW’s substantial energy cost. It does so by making the determination of which transactions enter the canon a function not of computing power, but rather of possessing and committing tokens. A participant commits some tokens (such as Bitcoin or Ether) in order to have a say in which transactions become canon. The more tokens they commit, the more likely they will get to decide. If you commit coins to try to include fraudulent transactions, there is a high chance those coins will be lost. Therefore, PoS creates an incentive to try and include honest transactions over fraudulent (assuming most of the token holders will prefer honest transactions). The challenge with PoS is that it is more vulnerable to certain types of attack, such as those coming from manipulations of the price of the token. There is much interest in the Ethereum community about moving to a Proof of Stake algorithm in the future, and it is an area of active research. Proof of Stake (PoS) II. Realpolitik vs. International Institutions Listening to the debate (and reflecting on reading I had done in the past on these protocols), I could not help but be reminded of a similar debate occurring in courses of international affairs. In international affairs, there is the notion of , developed in Germany in the 19th century, is a political philosophy which holds that, in the absence of a hypothetical strong global government, practical realities like military strength determine the relationships among nations. They view nations as co-existing in a “state of nature”, in which ideologies, values, and norms are irrelevant or minimally impactful. As a philosophy, it is known to be effective, simple to understand, and simple to implement. realpolitik In absence of trusted diplomacy, states are incentivized to engage in arms’ race, competing to build stronger armies with more advanced weaponry. Resources are diverted from social goods like schools and hospitals, as the prosperous nation with a weaker military will inevitably be overrun. Periods of stability exist either when one nation is so powerful that there can be no challengers (a hegemony), or when multiple nations are similarly matched, and so the settle into a peaceful, if tense, stalemate (a multipolar world). Wars litter history like so many punctuation marks. Mount Washington Hotel, site of the Bretton Woods Conference (src: Booking.com) Towards the end of World War II, the allied nations of the world came together in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire and set to work developing an alternative. This war of all against all had gone on for too long, they said. We will develop an of organizations and connect the nations together via a network of finance and trade, with mechanisms to debate, regulate, and resolve disputes. We will beat our swords into ploughshares, and learn war no more. international system This system has proven to be very effective. While it has facilitated the intense concentration of global wealth into the hands of a few, it has also succeeded in preventing total war among the great powers, and in general is understood to have promoted science, technology, culture, and an improved quality of life for billions. III. Dialectics Rule Everything Around Me It is interesting to contrast these two systems of international affairs with the two consensus algorithms being presented, and to reflect on the essential similarity in the problems they solve. In both cases, we seek to achieve order among competing, possibly antagonistic parties. The first approach is to hinge the result on a show of force. This approach works in as much as force is a proxy for other desirable attributes: control over resources, organizational ability, conviction, and it is simple to understand and to implement. This approach is limited in that it necessitates hard-won energy being put towards no productive work. Inasmuch as the essential process of life is the acquisition and allocation of energy, this is necessarily suboptimal. The second approach is to attempt to create a more nuanced system of mental relationships, and to hope that this framework is robust to the inevitable attempts at exploitation and capture by those seeking influence over the outcomes. Unlike the first approach, this approach is more vulnerable to being undermined, and in ways which can be difficult predict, detect, and respond. If we as a community — a cryptocurrency community, or a world community — have the skill and commitment to execute on the vision, then this system would allow participants to contend in a way that is fair and in which outcomes hinge on a display of desirable attributes, but also highly efficient, in as much as it consumes as little energy as possible to preserve energy for other tasks. Higher risk, but higher reward. Looking at these two debates, which is essentially one debate, it is hard not to take a moment to look ever further back and draw a second connection, between these debates and our own development as animals, in which we began as simple bodies but over time developed sophisticated minds. And the same way, the tensions between these schools of thought is the same as the tension between our bodies and our minds: the mind carries risk, and often we wonder if the body was all we needed. On the other hand, the body is limited, and the mind holds such great promise. Do we have the skill, vision, and fortitude to make the leap, without losing touch with where we came? Originally published at kronosapiens.github.io on March 16, 2018.

Canon

Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake: a Mirror of History

is like air — you don’t feel it or know it even exists, but you need it all the same. From your addicting Android smartphones and all the apps you love in it, to Air traffic control stations and even the Large Hadron Collider, everything runs on Linux. For those who didn’t know, Linux is an open source operating system based on UNIX. We’ll go into the technical details later in this post. Linux But alas, UNIX is not free Every engineering student would have encountered and experienced Linux at least once in the four years. Mine was at the summer break of the first year. The technical clubs of NIT Trichy — Delta and Spider, were inducting for Web Developer and App developer positions. Getting into those clubs meant an opportunity to work with talented seniors and peers and learn from them. The inductions involved several rounds of coding tasks spaced throughout the holidays, and a hackathon and once we returned to college. I was naturally confounded on which role to learn and apply for as I didn’t have an inkling of either. However, I saw one more opportunity which most including myself overlooked — the system administrator position. The name had a zing to it and I decided to try out for it. interview Then started my Linux journey. My summer was spent trying to dual boot my laptop and crashing it, installing virtual machines, configuring SSH, FTP, Samba servers, learning LVM, Bash scripting and most of all wondering why on earth it doesn’t work for me like it did for the dude on StackOverflow. After hours of debugging, more than my knowledge of Linux, my patience increased ( So did my eye power as I had to wear glasses the next month). SSH protocol is used for remote login to another system Learning Linux lead me into developing an interest in computers and how they operate. It was not long after that I was completely hooked to Linux — Working on a remote computer(through SSH) and transferring files without internet connection ( through Samba server) seemed like magic to me. I started writing scripts for automation and used to set reminders (cron jobs). I ended up getting into Spider club. The Linux skills also helped in securing internships next year. Whatever the motivation be, Linux is a must learn operating system for coders and electronics enthusiasts alike. It almost becomes a necessity when you start working in a technical role. Many of my classmates were asked questions on basic Linux commands and concepts in their job interviews. Practical experience in Linux trumps hours of learning through archaic textbooks. If you wish to gain a basic understanding of Linux or you have technical interviews coming up, the following might help you. Here are some basic Linux concepts one must know. 1. What is Linux? Linux is an open source operating system based on UNIX. The operating system is the system software that manages computer hardware and software. Suppose you want to perform 25597 / 10, the OS is the one which facilitates this input to be performed by the computer processor(hardware) and displayed to the monitor screen(software). Open source means, some good people did all the work in developing the software and released the source code for free. You can add your own features and even debug the source code. Linux comes in various flavors /distributions such as— Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE which are commercial, while Debian and Arch Linux is entirely community driven. All these have the Linux kernel in them. Linux appeals to programmers due to its versatility, power, speed and the package manager which lets them install software seamlessly. 2. What is the kernel? The kernel is the heart of the operating system. Linux Kernel is a low-level system software. It provides an interface for user-level interaction. It manages the system resources such as RAM, Disk, Processor, output devices etc. 3. What is the shell in Linux? Linux shell is basically a user interface. You can enter your inputs into the shell, The shell would execute the commands and communicate with the Linux OS in doing so. There are varieties here too — BASH (Bourne Again SHell), CSH ( C Shell), KSH ( Korn Shell) and TCSH. 4. What is Bash? BASH is a short form of Bourne Again SHell. It is also a command language and has its own command syntax. 5. What are file permissions in Linux? There are 3 types of permissions in Linux OS that are given below: User can read the file and list the directory. Read: User can write new files in the directory or modify the file. Write: User can access and run the file in a directory. Execute: Directory here is similar to a folder in Windows. The chmod and chown commands are used to control access to files in UNIX and Linux systems. The chmod command stands for “change mode”, and allows changing permissions of files and folders in Linux. The chown command stands for “change owner” . With the chmod , User U, Groups G, and Others O can be granted varying permissions such as Read, Write or Execute to files and directories. Read has a value of 4, Write of 2, Execute of 1 . Add the values of required permissions and assign it in the corresponding position for UGO. 6. What is sudo? It stands for “super user do!” .If you add “sudo” before any Linux command, it will run that command with elevated privileges. So you could now perform certain admin tasks such as the installation of servers or reboot. 7. What happens when you give ‘ sudo rm -rf * ’? It is the code that deletes everything on the computer. rm means to remove, -rf flag deletes entire folder forcefully. * stands for every file/folder on Linux system. Nope, Never doing that 8. What are Editors in Linux? A text editor is a must have application for any operating system (for plain text, writing code). Linux editors can be divided into two categories, * GUI editors — They are graphical and user-friendly . Eg- Gedit and Sublime. * Console text editors. — They work right inside the terminal and are.But they are difficult for beginners. Eg- Nano, Vi, Vim. 9. What commands do you use in Linux filesystem? It is a built-in command which stands for ‘print working directory’. It displays the full path to the directory you are currently in. pwd: This command list out all the files in the current folder. Is: This stands for ‘change directory’. This command is used to change to the directory you want to work from the present directory. cd: This command is used to create an entirely new directory. mkdir: This command is used to remove a directory from the system. rmdir: 10. What are some Linux file content commands? Displays the beginning of the file head: Displays the last part of the file tail: Concatenate files and print on the standard output ( the terminal). cat: Displays the content in page form — one page at a time. more: Displays the content in page form and allows backward and single line movement. less: Awwwww 11. What is Cron? The software utility cron is a time-based job scheduler. Cron schedules jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. You could set it to download a movie every Friday evening (Write a script to download the latest movie and assign it to cron). 12. What is LVM? LVM, or Logical Volume Management, is a storage device management technology. It gives users the power to pool and abstract the physical layout of component storage devices such as hard disks and external drives for easier and flexible administration. 13. What is CLI? CLI (Command Line Interface) is a text-based interface in Linux which lets users interact with the OS and applications. It is unlike the GUI(Graphical User Interface) in Microsoft which has graphical icons, links, and folders. CLI allows a user to perform tasks by entering commands manually. Its working mechanism is very easy and fast, but it is not user-friendly. 14. What is LILO? LILO (Linux Loader) is the boot loader for Linux operating system to load it into the main memory so that it can begin its operations. Bootloader here is a small program that manages a dual boot. LILO resides in MBR (Master Boot Record). 15. What are the Grep, Awk and Sed commands? Grep, awk, and Sed are three of the most useful command-line tools. Grep ( lobal egular xpression rint) is used to search for specific terms in a file. Eg. to find all the lines in your project report having the word ‘result’. G R E P Awk is a text pattern scanning and processing language. It is mostly used for data extraction and reporting in Excel files. Eg, To print certain columns of an excel sheet only. Sed refers to tream itor. It can perform text transformations on a given file or an input stream. Eg, You shared an assignment from your friend. To replace all instances of his name with yours, use Sed. S Ed 16. How to find help on Linux? Run the command with the -h or –help flags. For example to know about ls, type ls -help. The man command shows detailed manuals for each command. These are referred to as “man pages.” If you want to know about ls command, type man ls. May the Linux be with you The above questions are by no means exhaustive. To start exploring Linux use these links — , .There are many good resources out there to develop your skills in Linux. Link1 Link2 Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program . - Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux

Microsoft

Here’s what you need to know about Linux

I love being a developer, I love writing apps and I love writing good quality code. I call myself a software crafter as I believe in our that reminds me to write well-crafted code and behave professionally. manifesto A few days ago published the for the . Since the early days of , this has been the showcase for what is state of the art developing an Android app. With what we’ve seen in the last two years, Google giving hints and tools for how to architecture an app, many of us were curious about the code. Google source code Google I/O app Android But soon, developers posted about and in there. To be honest it’s not as bad as it used to be but it’s not the reference source base it should be. The problem, developer from all over the world will look at this code, they will copy it. It was always like that. This code should be a role model, an ideal example. It is not. Especially sad for a rewrite as stated in the . huge methods classes Android blog There is more to it Not only are samples sloppy, the tools and documentation start to favor unprofessional habits. A while ago I posted : this tweet Reading sounds like building releases or even deploying should be done from It is the other way around! If more than a pet project NEVER build releases locally! Be professional! Gradle first! Ci first! AS last! be professional! https://developer.android.com/guide/app-bundle/build … @androidstudio @AndroidDev My intention with this was not to accuse Googlers of being unprofessional. What I wanted to ask for was to discourage cowboy development and make real world professional development a first-class citizen. In the beginning In the past Android sample code was focused on the usage of Android APIs. The snippets didn’t bother about architectural questions nor if it’s clean code. And that’s fine. But developers had no other code to learn from an started copying sample code. The thought behind: This is how “Google” says you this. have to use Things changed Fortunately, things got better. Googlers became more aware of the unintended mess they created. We got , , , . testing support architectural guidelines architecture blueprints architecture components When I discovered that “app bundles” can now be created via Android Studio and the documentation favours this method over releasing via gradle by placing it first which resulted in my often misinterpreted tweet. It reminded me of Google I/O where it was announced that you can now publish from Android Studio right into the PlayStore. That feature, I remember, made me really angry. In my opinion it’s a very useless feature, even more, I consider it dangerous. It is encouraging cowboy development. Whats wrong? Publishing from your IDE does not guarantee reproducibility. Is this project checked in into version control? Is everything that is being sent committed? What branch are we on? How do you know what you are sending actually works? Maybe you tested it on your device but did you check there is no serious lint warning telling you this will crash on older android version? Did you run your unit test suite to make sure all the old features still work? “Works on my machine” issues are something that should never be the case for a release. Mobile is serious business nowadays, apps are serious software projects. For most companies, it’s their core business! Often developers still don’t treat them like this. Testing, architecture, clean code took a long time till they made it to Android. The knowledge from Java backend developers didn’t make it over although both spoke the same language by then. It can even be seen in Android itself: The Android source If you ever peaked in into the Android open source code (AOSP), you know: It’s a huge mess. It’s such a large and hard to maintainable mess that maybe the only way out is a new platform with a new API called . Flutter As I said in the beginning, I don’t think that the developers at Google are unprofessional but they sometimes encourage (unintended) unprofessional development. Android Studio Does Android Studio or the development documentation help us here? Not much to be honest. Most developers I know, spend the first minutes removing all the boilerplate that the “new project wizard” created. Or think about the UI tools like the SVG import of Android Studio. How do you import dozens of SVGs? Manual, one by one! Why is there no batch tool? In most companies, there is a process for designers to deliver specs and assets. Designers don’t work inside Android Studio. So is our IDE aiming for the hobbyist only? Let’s talk about tests! It feels like the developers working on Android Studio hardly run tests from there. How often do we see: “ ” issue after clicking the icon next to some test. Lately, thanks to caching code, tests won’t run at all or wrong code runs. Running tests in Android Studio became like gambling: the outcome is unpredictable. Something like test-driven development becomes very hard with such a setup. no tests found Speaking about caching: “Invalidate caches and restart” is the most used option developers seem to use nowadays. That there is a menu entry for that says a lot! I’ve never hated an IDE and I’ve used most of them, from JBuilder, Eclipse and even the horrible Java IDE for Blackberry development. But I do hate Android Studio! Especially as using IntelliJ for Java projects is like wellness and Android Studio is just a fork. It’s unbelievable how big the difference is especially when it comes to performance. The broken chain Android Studio became the biggest pain point in daily Android development for many of us. After a broken platform, we now have broken tools. Stabilising our tools should be more important than adding some nice to have options. Or as one developer said to me: “at least finish them for once!”. InstantRun anyone? It feels like Android Studio is facing some serious . feature creep While writing this article Android Studio 3.1 is still the stable version to go with. It has been for a long time. That sounds wrong. We need smaller, quicker releases. Like the ones, we aim for in our mobile apps. Release once or twice a year that proved wrong in the past decades and is the opposite of agile development. You might say, there are canary builds. But we don’t develop for fun, this is our work. We want less pain, not more. For the canary builds, version jumps in AS often means version jumps in your tools and project so it’s not easy to go back. As another developer once said in a discussion about tooling: “give me a sharp knife”! What do we need? Focus on the small and mid-size teams and apps! Don’t focus on the hobbyist. Flutter made the entry level for starters so low that it this battle is already lost. Don’t focus on large organizations: At some point Android Studio doesn’t scale, very large teams like Uber or Facebook can’t use it. That is fine. You can’t cover all possible cases. To the developers of the Android teams: Be aware of the role model you are as a developer and the responsibility you got with that. Focus on clean code! Just look at the I/O app: There might be some basic architecture now but the code itself is far from clean. Same goes for AOSP including architecture components. Give us tools we can work with! Give us sharp knives! Something that can do few things but those really well. https://shop.deadzebra.com/feature-creep-kills-print/ (not another Dagger rant)

Just give me a sharp knife Google!*

www.designisdead.com Want to learn how blockchain can help your business? Join one of our free lunch sessions or request a blockchain workshop ! A quest for internal excellence , it was hard not to bump into the word last year. At Design Is Dead, we believe blockchain has the potential to disrupt many existing and yet to be discovered business opportunities. No disruption is possible without people, one of our mottos is for good reason. We asked ourselves a couple of questions; how we can showcase blockchain and increase internal awareness, how we can share knowledge internally and how we can engage everyone on the team. Blockchain technology ‘to go fast go alone, to go far go together’ To tackle these questions, we decided to make a proof of concept that incentivises some internal processes. Along the way we try to engage different team members (designers, UX analysts, full-stack developers). Not only to create an experience that integrates with our current infrastructure and has a low entry barrier, but also to familiarize the team with blockchain in a fun and interactive way. We do have lunch sessions and internal excellence tracks, but nothing beats a real world, tangible example. We settled on two tasks to incentivize as starters: filling in timesheets on time and submitting/reviewing pull requests. The latter was an idea from our full stack team after one of our other internal excellence tracks. A unique opportunity One of the cool things about blockchain is that the technology has evolved from a payment system (e.g.; Bitcoin) to a full-fledged decentralized computer (e.g. Ethereum). This means that certain blockchains can be programmed with “smart contracts”, a set of conditions recorded on the blockchain so that transactions automatically trigger when the conditions are met. The code can not be changed once deployed onto the blockchain, as a result we do not have to trust a third party to reward us when we meet the conditions described in the contract. This is exactly what we are doing with our programmable incentives; sending tokens after someone completes a pre-defined set of conditions that is known to tall parties involved. Incentives drive behaviour, (open) access to these programmable incentives sets a stage for potential change. We want to thus program incentives that promote positive outcomes in a trustless system: cooperation, equitability and morality. Smart Contracts We have created three main smarts contracts on our blockchain. The first smart contract, is our very own virtual currency, Knuckles! The knuckles will be our incentive for completing tasks. The smart contract will keep track of the token balances and contains logic for sending tokens to one another. The second smart contract is a simple module that allows us to create and remove timesheet administrators, who can then verify and approve submitted timesheets. Users and their manager can see a historical list of processed timesheet periods and their rewards. Our third and final smart contract is slightly more complex: a bounty hunter game. Our employees already get paid for their work of course, thus the approach is slightly different from some bounties you might encounter in open source projects or open protocols. As a software company with multiple teams we use a versioning tool, called bitbucket, to better organize collaboration. Team members submit pull-requests to projects to upload new code. These requests need to be approved by someone on the team after a code review. When a pull requests gets approved a reward gets sent out to the reviewer for completing this nagging task. If the submitter did a great job and not too many changes are requested, he too gets rewarded. A bounty standard One thing we’ve worked really hard on is standardizing our implemented features. This means that the same smart contracts can be used for any company to start incentivizing employees or even customers through bounties. Some examples include a job request, voluntary work, rewarding customers to view ads, smart energy credits for responsible energy usage or even automatic payment delivery in the supply chain based on location. We can even go much further in the future, where we can drive ethical AI behaviour through cryptographic incentives. We’re currently finishing up the blockchain side of things for the project and will keep you posted on new developments, stay tuned. Want to learn how blockchain can help your business? Join one of our free lunch sessions or request a blockchain workshop !

Ethereum

Chain

Programmable Incentives — A Blockchain proof of concept

You can read this article on my own blog, if you prefer that to medium. is a fairly new column store database. It’s developed by the guys over at Yandex (the Google of Russia), made to scale horizontally reasonably well and run high speed aggregate queries on hundreds of billions of rows of data. Clickhouse It uses its own SQL dialect and it matches pl/pgSQL in terms of expressivity and simplicity. It even includes higher order functions for working with nested object within rows, such as and . arrayMap arrayFilter What is Clickhouse used for ? In short, Clickhouse is used to run fast analytics on very large amount of data. It’s rather bad as a transactional database, but it can run aggregate queries on billions of rows in sub second times. It fills the ever increasing niche that technologies like Hadoop, Spark, Druid, Big Query, Redshift, Athena and MonetDb aim for. It allows a team to easily store and analyze large sets of data with high dimensionality. More importantly, it blows the aforementioned solutions out of the water in terms of speed and query complexity. Clickhouse is meant solely for analytic workloads, so as long as you have a lot of and aggregated functions such as , and it will be blazing fast, even if your number of rows is in the 11 to 12 digits area. But if you want to do a lot of large scale joins and point queries, a typical RDBMS is still going to be the better choice. GROUP BY COUNT SUM DISTINCT It should be noted here, Clickhouse does not yet support queries like and in its stable syntax. Even when it will, they will be slow due to its compression mechanism. Again, this is not a database meant for transactional workloads. DELETE UPDATE It will also compress your data, the space this saves is based on the column granularity and on how much query speed you are willing to sacrifice. The way Clickhouse compresses and partitions data is a key to its quick queries. If you want to read more about how column stores work, I would suggest you start with the , since most of the information there is quite easy to understand and accurate. Wikipedia article What exactly makes Clickhouse amazing ? 1It’s extremely easy to setup and use,even if you need data replication and data distribution on a few dozen machines. Deploying a Clickhouse cluster on 3 machines is almost instant if you are familiar with what you are doing and could take you a few hours to do properly if you are learning everything from scratch. No need for obscure libraries, no endless configuration files, user permission issues and arcane problems with data distribution and replication. 2 It’s not fragile. One horrible thing I’ve noticed in my rendezvous with various “big data” technologies (spark is a chief offender here) is that they tend to often break with no warning and for no apparent reason. Even worse, they give little information as to why the problem happened within the humongous logs they generate. Clickhouse is designed to recover from failure and it produces quite a reasonably sized system log with clear explanations of the problems it encountered. 3 It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it adds a steam engine to the carriage. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Clickhouse is that it doesn’t try to push a lot of limitations on you nor does it force you to completely re-think the way you store and query your data. Its data types cover everything from nested structure to matrices, it has a gigantic library of functions and one of the most versatile query language that I’ve ever seen. Unlike Map-reduce or other column store solutions, that will force you to rethink your entire schema, you can pretty much duplicate a transactional database schema with Clickhouse and it will do just fine. 4It’s actually got quite an amazing documentation and a great community. Perhaps the nastiest thing with “big data” technologies nowadays is that most of them are designed in order to sell support. A prime example of this would be Druid, open source and free in theory, but an unbreakable bastion of weird complexity coupled with a complete lack of documentation and community involvement. is relatively easy to search through and it’s being groomed, expanded and improved constantly. Clickhouse’s documentation The community is nothing short of amazing, it’s quite tiny, consisting of the developers and users from Yandex plus a few other early adopters, but that hasn’t stopped every question and issue I raised on Github and StackOverflow from being answered within hours. The developer also seem to very receptive to contributors external to Yandex. Enough talk, let’s install the thing The first step is to install Clickhouse, for the purpose of this tutorial, it’s best to have a machine running Debian or Ubuntu, since that’s the official OS Yandex supports. It’s also quite easy to install it on , I’ve personally installed it with success from the on Arch, it exists as a . If all else fails, you can use the or . Fedora, CentOS, Suse and RHEL AUR repository package for Gentoo docker image build it from source To install it on Ubuntu, the execute the following: sudo apt-add-repository 'deb http://repo.yandex.ru/clickhouse/deb/stable/ main/' sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv E0C56BD4 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install clickhouse-client clickhouse-server Now you can start the server as a daemon by running and connect to it via the client by running . sudo systemctl start clickhouse-server clickhouse-client If you want to play around with the configurations, you can find them inside and respectively. /etc/clickhouse-server /etc/clickhouse-client Playing with some data For this introduction, I chose to use the , it’s a rather small dataset of ~1 million rows, but it means downloading and insertion will be very quick. The query speed will scale linearly with larger datasets as long as they fit on a local RAID and won’t suffer to much if data is distributed. NYC property taxes dataset In case you’ve installed an older version you may want to run: SET experimental_allow_extended_storage_definition_syntax = 1; This will allow you to use the syntax used throughout this tutorial. If your version is new enough, trying to run this will just throw an exception, no need to worry, you are all set. Let’s create our database and table: CREATE DATABASE test_database; USE test_database; CREATE TABLE tax_bills_nyc (bbl Int64,owner_name String,address String,tax_class String,tax_rate String,emv Float64,tbea Float64,bav Float64,tba String,property_tax String,condonumber String,condo String,insertion_date DateTime MATERIALIZED now()) Before we insert that data, let’s look at the things which might be a bit unclear here. is a way to create to column that is automatically set whenever a row is inserted based on the function after the keyword. In this case, the function I chose to use is , in order to get the insertion timestamp for each row. MATERIALIZED now() sets the storage engine for the table. There are many types of that clickhouse supports. Including your bog standard engine, engines that are meant to buffer rows when a very high write rate is needed, engines that are meant to speed up joins and many others. MergeTrees are the best table engines for most analytic queries, and the engine is the most simple of those, and usually the best choice. ENGINE = MergeTree table engines MEMORY BUFFER JOIN MergeTree Whilst I the specific of the engines would take too long to explain here. If you are familiar with , , , or … then thing of MergeTrees as being something conceptually close to that. MergeTree long-structured merge-trees Radix trees immutable “Vectors” Merkel trees Patricia trees If you aren’t, I’d like to invite you to the when your local church of Functional programming next meets. data structures sermon will partition the table using the column. Partitions are the largest storage unit under tables in clickhouse. You can delete partitions, attach partitions and temporarily drop partitions. Efficient clickhouse replication and distribution also depends on good partitioning. PARTITION BY tax_class tax_class From the end user perspective, what you should care about most is that partitions are very fast to operate on using , and . > < == For the column you partition by, you should chose one with somewhat low granularity, as a general rule of thumb. A good rule of thumb is to have less than 1000 distinct values per billion of rows. When your data associated with a point in time, a good partition key is the date associated with every row. is similar to a btree index in an RDBMS, from a user perspective. It speeds up queries using comparison operators. Unlike , you can use high granularity data here without losing performance. Again, in the case of a table where you often query based on a time associate with each data point, a good candidate for this value is the timestamp of each row. You can order your table by a combination of columns if you so desire. ORDER BY PARTITION Now you should be familiar with most of the new concepts you need to get along with Clickhouse, the rest should feel quite natural to you. Let’s insert our data: curl -X GET 'http://taxbills.nyc/tax_bills_june15_bbls.csv'  | /usr/bin/clickhouse-client --input_format_allow_errors_num=10 --query="INSERT INTO test_database.tax_bills_nyc FORMAT CSV" That should take a few seconds or minutes based on your internet speed, once it’s done, we can start testing some queries. If you want to work with a bigger dataset but don’t have time to define your own table, just run the above command a few more times :) Let’s take it for a ride Ok, lets run our first query, don’t blink: . That query should have been relatively instant, probably done in sub ms time if you are using server grade hardware. SELECT COUNT(*)/pow(10,3) FROM tax_bills_nyc For the purpose of this tutorial I’m using an E3–1270v6 with 32GB of EEC DDR4 at 2.133 GHz, but really, any old server or laptop will do. Lets try something a bit harder: SELECT SUM(emv) as total_emv, SUM(tbea) as total_tbea, SUM(bav) as total_bav, tax_class,tax_rateFROM tax_bills_nycGROUP BY tax_class, tax_rate That should have taken somewhere between 50 to 10ms depending on your machine, quite the feat for doing a GROUP BY 2 dimensions and summing up 4 different columns. Ok, what if we add a high dimensionality column in the , let’s say the owner’s name, since there are about 885,000 distinct names in the dataset: GROUP BY SELECT SUM(emv) as total_emv, SUM(tbea) as total_tbea, SUM(bav) as total_bav, tax_class,tax_rateFROM tax_bills_nycGROUP BY tax_class, tax_rate, owner_name That was probably slightly slower, but it still probably took under half a second, despite the high granularity of our new grouping criteria. But, if we built our schema correctly, we should be able to filter most queries using our order or partition column, let’s add a where clause based on the column: tax_class SELECT SUM(emv) as total_emv, SUM(tbea) as total_tbea, SUM(bav) as total_bav, tax_class,tax_rateFROM tax_bills_nycWHERE tax_class='1c - condo in 1-3 unit building'GROUP BY tax_class, tax_rate, owner_name Suddenly, our query time drops in the sub 10ms range again. Clickhouse not only offers speed, but it has various type and value manipulation functions that can allow us to easily write a query which output something that’s easily human readable: SELECT concat(toString(uniq(owner_name) / pow(10, 3)), ' thousand distinct names among the owners of ', toString(uniq(address) / pow(10, 3)), ' thousand properties') AS result FROM tax_bills_nyc This should give you a result similar to: 85.058 thousand distinct names among the owners of 989.466 thousand properties Ok, let’s try and see what happens if we try grouping by every single column in this table. To save you some typing, we’ll use the function, which will essentially do just that. DISTINCT(*) SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT(*)) FROM tax_bills_nyc Surprisingly enough, this once again takes under half a second. It might actually be quicker then some of the previous GROUP BYs since we didn’t have to transform any of the string typed columns into a printable version. In my books, that was quite impressive when I first saw it. Have I peeked() your interest ? Hopefully you can see why I’m very excited about this database due to the expressive syntax and amazing query speed alone. This was mostly a toy dataset, meant to make this tutorial easy to follow. So I encourage you to try and go up to a few billion rows and see for yourself how unbelievable this database is. As for the dataset you want to do that with, I leave that up to you. Maybe try one of your large internal tables on which you often have trouble running analytical queries. Try formatting some of the data in your “data lake”, which you’d usually use a tool like Spark or Athena to query, and insert it into Clickhouse. If enough people are interested, I might produce a followup article or series with some more tips, tricks and real world usecases for Clickhouse. If you enjoyed this article you may also like: Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software If I were to select the worst Linux syscall

Blink

Community Is

Clickhouse, an analytics database for the 21st century

In 2018, respecting your users’ privacy should be easy, right? After the revelations made by Snowden about the NSA practices and all other that followed, web hosting providers and other services changed their practices, right? That’s what we thought — and the illusion didn’t last for long. Today we take you on a little data tour: who’s collecting them, how, and for what? Lire cet article en français sur EcoCrypto.fr SETTING UP THE CONTEXT You might know it; else we recommend you to read the manifesto — we recently launched a publication, EcoCrypto, that respects its users and their attention. Regarding their attention, that’s our issue. However, when it comes to respecting our users’ privacy, it’s much bigger than us: we must double check each third party service we use to ensure they’re not abusing our (and your) trust. When we published the , we realized . We decided to write an article to provide a comprehensive overview of the main tracking solution currently enforced pretty much everywhere on the web. At the end of the article, we propose two sets of recommendations. The first one is for everyone: the very basics on how to protect your privacy online. The second one is specific to webmasters: how to respect your users’ privacy. manifesto how little people knew about the systematized data harvest that happens online THE TRACKER MANIA Each additional tracker is one more guest at the feast held on our privacy. Let’s start with the basics: what’s a tracker? Essentially, it’s a small script one can place on his/her website — it allows the different services used to collect data on the visitors, therefore enabling new services for the webmaster. A tracker is like a snitch for a third party — each additional tracker is one more guest at the feast held on our privacy. A SMALL DOZEN OF TRACKERS, THE MINIMUM? Note: To stay true to the original article (written in French for a French public), we kept French websites as examples. The situation is similar all around the globe, even worse in some countries . Any media website is using at the very least a dozen trackers. No need to trust us, : it lets easily you visualized all the trackers present on a website. check by yourself using Ghostery Here is a little tracker-tour of a selection of the most visited websites in France: leMonde.fr [France’s #2 (audience) daily national newspaper] — different trackers 32 leFigaro.fr [#1 Daily national newspaper] — 35 Mediapart [Online only publication] — 21 l’Express [Weekly magazine] — 49 tf1.fr [#1 Private TV channel] — 35 France2.fr [#1 Public TV channel] — 18 Agence France Presse (AFP — French news agency) — 12 Finally, the cleanest of the bunch, l’Humanité, still has 10 different trackers. Note: The measure was made on July the 18th, on the Homepage of every website. Remember to disable any adblocker or script blocker to see all the trackers on a given website. Elle.fr [Weekly women magazine] — ; Liberation.fr [Daily newspaper] — 53 trackers 40 trackers Quite often, the people working on/for these websites don’t even know about the trackers. We reached out to French crypto publications to let them know about their privacy-intrusive practices. All said they were “surprised” to discover how extensive the net was. Some might say they were laughing at our face — you are the judges. From this little visit to the horror gallery we can conclude two things: The owners/webmasters of 99% of internet websites are apparently not even thinking about respecting their user privacy. The users of these websites don’t know about the tracking and its consequences. Therefore, they don’t ask/push for practices that would be both cleaner and more respectful of their privacy. If there is any change coming up, it will come from the users: we need to be demanding and uncompromising. To do so, one must know what one is fighting against — let’s start a quick tour of some of the shadiest practices taking place in the online tracking world. A TYPOLOGY OF THE TRACKERS There are several different types of trackers, here’s an overview: : These trackers allow webmasters (and advertising services) to collect additional data when a user goes on a website — this data is then used to increase the effectiveness of the ads. The most common are Double Click and Facebook Ads. We’ll give more details on a subsection of the advertising trackers — the pixels — a little below. Advertising trackers : the most famous is Google Analytics, but there are many others. They’ll have their section. Statistics services trackers they allow for a direct integration of social media on a website, such as liking a Facebook page from a media website. It means that the user is identified (through his/her Facebook/Twitter/X profile). One last thing: no need to interact with the buttons to be recognized — that’s the whole beauty of the mechanism. Smile! You’re being spied on. Social networks trackers: VISITOR STATS… AND AN EXTREMELY DETAILED PROFILE Each webmaster has the same issue: he/she needs stats to know the most visited pages or articles, where his/her users are coming from, how many are they… To do so, the go-to is to implement Google Analytics. The value proposition of Google Analytics is pretty straightforward: Google is an expert on data collection and processing, you’re probably not. Implement this little script and Google will do most of the work for you: collecting the data, processing it, or presenting it in comprehensive dashboards. It’s convenient, and most (if not all) websites now use it. The issue? All the data is going through Google, putting it another way: Google is now collecting data on 99% of any websites users, straight at the source (on the website). If each website were a bar, the Google Analytics situation would be similar to having a Google Home with the mic always on at the very center of the room. It’s already annoying and problematic when it’s just a few bars/websites. However, now, since almost all websites use this mechanism, it became the web all-seeing eye / all-hearing ear. Anyone who handled a website with Google Analytics implement knows what we’re talking about: the amount of data available on any user is staggering. It’s hard to give a precise number because each implementation of Google Analytics is different. Google itself boasts about its ” — 400 different “metrics and dimensions here is the list. Webmaster rejoice! We suggest an alternative at the end of the article. ONLINE ADVERTISING AND USER PRIVACY: STRICTLY IRRECONCILABLE When we talked about advertising trackers, it was a rapid overview. Allow us to zoom in a little here. First, some basics about online advertising: It’s paid by action: cost per click, per thousand views, per specific action (register, download an app…) All actions are not equal — a click can come from someone completely outside your main target or on the contrary from the potentially perfect customer Online advertising campaigns can be adjusted in real time and at any time. When the basics are clearly stated, it’s easy to understand that there is a choice to be made between privacy and online advertising. To optimize the online ads, one must collect more and more data to improve his/her targeting and avoid unnecessary expenses. Online media and social networks often get quite lyrical about their “fight to protect users’ privacy” — don’t let yourself be fooled. All the most visited websites are big users of online advertising services and use many trackers: in short, they have no respect for their users’ privacy. Even worse: they are making money out of its violation. THE SPY-PIXEL Still unconvinced? You think that “ethical advertising” is a thing? Let us zoom on a specific kind of trackers: the advertising “Pixels,” such as the . Once again, it’s a little script that works a bit like Google Analytics. The webmaster implements the pixel on his/her website and gain access to extra (advertising-related) statistics and services. Facebook Pixel On of the main interest for webmasters is that all the data collected will be available straight in Facebook Ads — it makes it much easier to optimize the ads: it’s a mandatory tracker for anybody who is dedicating a significant budget to the platform. Thanks to the pixel, the website owner can make the connection between the ads on Facebook and actions undertook on his website: signups, purchases, downloads, and others. One of the problems with the Facebook’s pixel is the same as Google Analytics: since the pixel is now everywhere, Facebook is collecting data right at the source on most of the most visited websites. An example of a retargeting scenario using Facebook (source: ) Lyfe Marketing Besides, the pixel allows a specific kind of advertising campaigns called “retargeting”: the term refers to any ad where the targeting is made using the previous behavior of the prospects. A typical retargeting flow using Facebook (Pixel and Ads service) looks like that: You go to a given website, let’s say a lawnmower shop. Smile, someone’s is spying on you! Thanks to the pixel, you’re immediately recognized, your “Facebook ID” (unique identifier of your Facebook profile) is added to a retargeting list. You go on Facebook and discover incredible sales of lawnmower straight in your newsfeed. THE LITTLE GIFTS DISCOVERED BY THE WAY Before we delve into our recommendations, let us examine a concrete example that tells a lot about the challenge it became to respect the privacy of your website users online. Ever heard of WordPress? It’s a framework (~engine) allowing you to create blogs and websites easily — this is what we use on EcoCrypto… for now. A default WordPress installation uses a service called Gravatar: thanks to it, each user (=anybody who write articles or comment on one) can have his/her very own profile picture. Even better, users can go on gravatar.com, create their account and set their profile picture once — Tada! Your picture is now on every WordPress using Gravatar without having you to set it up again. Nice, right? Except that the reality behind the gimmick is quite ugly. Gravatar uses the email to match its user with his/her profile picture. It means that With the round trip, Gravatar can build a list of the users of every WordPress installation — still looking for that sweet custom profile pic? by default, anyone commenting on a Wordpress sees his/her email getting a free round-trip to Gravatar’s servers. Many alternatives exist, and they can be set up in a few clicks, but since Gravatar is enabled on all installations, it’s still widely used. The default installation, combined with the widespread ignorance of the practice allows Auttomatic (Gravatar’s developers) to stuff itself with the emails of its users unknowingly collected over the years. To go further, here’s an interesting read on Gravatar’s privacy issues. This kind of scenario repeats itself over and over again when it comes to privacy. Everyone agrees with and supports the concept, yet only a few really look into it. On the business side, the “respecting your users’ privacy” theme is nothing else than a potential communication topic: it’s rarely enforced at the software level. SO, WHAT CAN WE DO? We tried to stay concise and not delve too much into the technical details — we’ve omitted many practices, this article is not exhaustive at all. Dozens, probably hundreds of different tricks and mechanisms exist to track and spy on users online. Some are much more insidious and harder to counter than others, such as fingerprinting. What inspired this article is the surprisingly hard journey to set up a simple blog that respects its readers’ privacy. All of this happening while Apple, Google, Facebook and others are painting themselves as “privacy champion” in front of the general audience, while they are the first to systemize the very end of the idea of privacy. We should fight back, or maybe we should have ten years ago already? It’s never too late! We’ve left this topic to the experts, and because of that we are reaching a situation where violating the privacy is now the norm — and those who want to respect it struggle. TOOLBOX: THE BARE MINIMUM TO PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY The good news (there is one!) is that protecting your privacy necessitates that you block all the ads — as well as the script that detects if you have an adblocker or not. Stealth has a bright side! What follows is the bare minimum setup, you must go much further to be really covered, if ever possible: 1. BLOCK THE ADS For Chrome users, we recommend the + (anti ad-block defuser) combo: it’s easy to set up and works well. Firefox users can use for similar results. Nano Adblocker Nano Defender uBlock Origin Note: Whatever adblocker you chose, don’t forget to enable the EasyList corresponding to your country. Here’s a demo GIF for the French list: You can try your setup by visiting any media website with the adblocker enabled; you’ll see a lot of free space! Insidious ads such as sponsored posts (“native advertising” as professionals call them) are not blocked — beware. 2. LIST AND BLOCK THE TRACKERS Ads are only the start. Now we need to tackle the trackers. The good news is that there are very extensions to take care of this for you. Privacy Badger is developed by , a nonprofit that has been defending civil liberties in the digital word for years — it’s not enough to blindly trust them, but it does provide reassurance. You don’t need any specific setting, but you might want to have a look at the trackers list (by clicking on the extension icon) and disable those you don’t need. At the beginning of the article, we mentioned — it also works quite well, and might be easier to use for some. the EFF — the Electronic Frontier Foundation Ghostery 3. USE HTTPS, EVERYWHERE When you visit a website that uses HTTPS, the exchanges between your browser and the website are encrypted. HTTPS is now widespread, but its implementation on certain websites is quite messy: they’ll make you switch back and force between the secured and regular HTTP. , another browser extension from the EFF solves the issue: it forces websites to use HTTPS whenever it’s available. HTTPS Everywhere ADDITIONAL NOTES ON PRIVACY TOOLS If you want to be even safer, use instead of Chrome. If you’re looking for sensitive stuff online, . Finally, if you want to be a little safer, look for more sensitive stuff, or leak critical information please check . Before going to the dark side of the web, READ and document yourself. Firefox Google use TOR at least, it’s super easy to set up TAILS — an operating system (Linux based) made for privacy To keep the article short-ish, we limited ourselves to three tools. To really cover your digital steps, you’ll have to go much further. We could have easily listed a hundred of different relevant for different situations — it would be pointless. You need to be able to pick the most suitable tools for your usage by yourself. To do so, there is no other way than lifting the hood to delve into the technical stuff. tools Privacy is not given nowadays; you must fight for it. All around the globe, nonprofits are doing their part with their means. The EFF edits a which could be an excellent place to start. Surveillance Self Defense guide RESPECTING USERS PRIVACY AS A WEBMASTER If you are handling a website, the most critical action you could start with is breaking free from Google Analytics. We have chosen , an open-source and analytics solution. The self-hosted part means that the data stays on our servers: it’s essential. Matomo self-hosted Depending on your hosting provider, setting up Matomo might be more or less accessible. If your hosting provides supports , the installation will be done in a few clicks. Else, you might need to learn a thing or two on server management. Softaculous The other actions you can undertake will depend on the services and framework you use. Rather than a list of tools, let us suggest a methodology: : reduce to the very minimum the number of third-party services you use. Each new service is a potential risk both for your website and for your users’ privacy. Even a decent, honest service can go rogue in a flash, and it won’t warn you about it. Third-party services minimization security : despite 1/, you’ll have to use some third-party services. Look into the developers of these services, their other products, the reviews. There might even be other people who audited their code and talked about it. Use open-source services whenever it’s possible. Investigate any third-party service you do implement on the main services (Social media, Google…) — you can’t reach cost-efficiency on these services without violating your users’ privacy. Forget about online advertising More and more people are getting “privacy-fluent” and would be a well-intentioned webmaster to establish a decent setup. Ask for help! happy to help Let me know if you liked this article and you can keep pressing 👏up to 50 claps. check out my wiki for more content like this. Don’t forget to clap it to help it spread: This article is the translation of an original (French) story. EcoCrypto.fr

Flow

Apple

Mozilla

Respecting Users' Privacy: The oddity that must become a standard

Please share this article to help spread the message. I will donate all profit of my consultation earnings to SENS Research Foundation that does valuable scientific research to fight aging and extend our lifespan. http://sens.org Life extension and longevity research gets very little public funding, so our help is very much needed! My hourly fee is $200, but you are free to donate more if want to. HOW TO PROCEED? Contact me to discuss details. Donate directly to SENS: http://www.sens.org/donate I will start working for you. If you don’t know what I do please check my personal website: . http://poutintsev.com In short my specialties are: business management, online business in general, marketing, advertising, start-ups and ICOs. Email: filip.poutintsev@gmail.comSkype: filip.poutintsevTelegram: poutintsev You can contact me using: This campaign is carried out with the help of Immortality Foundation, a non-profit educational organization that educates people about life extension, aging and biological immortality: http://www.immortality.foundation P.S. I urge other business people to follow my example and do the same!

I will donate my whole salary to charity!

San Francisco, CAAugust 3rd, 2018 Having spent more than a decade as a hedge fund investor, many of my friends are now curious about my formal entry into the blockchain space as an operator and ask for resources that they can use to educate themselves about the space. My personal favorite whitepapers are the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and 0x’s whitepapers — all for different reasons, but my favorites nonetheless. I’ve taken some time to put down some thoughts on why I think each of these whitepapers stands out to me. : This whitepaper was what originally sparked interest in the virtual currency space — Satoshi Nakamoto (under a false name) wrote about the “double-spend” problem in payments which had required a third party to prevent. The whitepaper subsequently goes into key concepts that are still prevalent in literature pertaining to blockchain today, defining key terms that you see in everyday discussion now such as “proof-of-work” and concepts such as “public keys” versus “private keys.” Bitcoin Whitepaper This whitepaper represents a turning point where the community goes from looking at cryptography as a perfect use case for Bitcoin — a peer-to-peer payment system — to understanding that cryptography can also be used to build decentralized applications that do not have to be related to payments or financial technology such as Namecoins, Colored Coins and Metacoins. I am a fan of this whitepaper because it was able to spark a movement around creating ecosystems of (dApps) built on top of various public chains, Ethereum being the first. Ethereum Whitepaper: : The 0x whitepaper does not try to be longer or shorter than necessary at fifteen pages. The Abstract clearly lays out the structure of the following material in a clear and succinct way and provides a clear and compelling hook for the necessity of a new protocol.ther systems are “opinionated” whereas the 0x protocol will be “unopinionated — not impos[ing] costs on its users or arbitrarily extract[ing] value from one group of users to benefit others.” In a climate where tokenomics consultants create dozens of use cases for a token that may or may not be realistic, I like the simplicity of the utility of the 0x token — “for market participants to pay transaction fees to Relayers and for decentralized governance over updates to the protocol.” 0x Whitepaper What are your favorite whitepapers and why? Do you think that the blockchain ecosystem should start creating a standard around what types of information should be included in every whitepaper? Let me know in the comments below. __ Disclaimer: These opinions are solely my own and do not represent the opinions of Sharespost or any companies that I may advise or invest in. Please follow me on , , and if you’d like to connect. Twitter Medium LinkedIn

My Top 3 Favorite Whitepapers

There are times when you may need to have a lot of tabs open, and navigating through them can be a bit painful, as your list can be too crowded that you are not able to read any title from the list of tabs. You can only view the icons of your tabs. There is a great Chrome extension that allows you to search through your tabs and navigate through them by only using your keyboard. It is called TabSwitcher, and it is intended to help increase your productivity by decreasing the amount of time needed to find the right tab just when you need it. You can write the title of the tab that you want to navigate to, use the up and down arrows in your keyboard to go up and down he list and open the tab you want, or close any tab that you do not need anymore. You can use the key in your keyboard, or your mouse click to choose the tab. Enter You can use to close the selected tab. ; Once you install it, you need to refresh the opening tab and then use the following keys: COMMAND+SHIFT+K or CTRL+SHIFT+K. It even works searching through tabs that are part of multiple windows. does not work on the new Chrome tab, and for the time being, neither Google Docs, based on my own experience. TabSwitcher This plugin is open source, and you can view the source code on . Github The author of this great plugin is the author of , which displays trending open source projects on your new tab in Github, and is very active in the open source community. Githunt There is another great Chrome extension called that deactivates inactive tabs, which as a result, decreases your RAM usage which you can also like. The Great Suspender

How to switch between your Chrome tabs using your keyboard

What A VC Learned from Interviewing with the CIA My notebook after I received a mysterious call… “The poet is of no party. Otherwise, he would be a mere mortal.” — Charles Baudelaire I interviewed to become a spy with the CIA in the fall of 2006. It started with a phone call. After a short greeting, I remember a disembodied yet firm voice saying, “Michael, we came across your application for the role of political analyst, but we were wondering if you might instead be interested in the clandestine service.” I can’t exactly recall what I mumbled right then, partly because I was surprised, but mainly because I had never thought of becoming a spy. For all sorts of reasons. But how many times in your life is someone going to call you and ask? So I had to see how deep this rabbit hole could go. I took a dive, “Yes, I would.” “Great, let’s schedule a preliminary phone call interview for next week.” During the following week, I had no idea what to expect, let alone no clue how to prepare, so I did nothing. It’s not like a McKinsey interview where you can practice in advance by bullshitting case studies and tumbling through mental math on how many ping pong balls can fit into a 747. At the time I was renting an attic apartment in a family’s colonial home off Brattle Street — ”Tory Row” — in Cambridge, Massachusetts. , MIT’s magazine, had hired me as a writer. I covered everything from quantum computing to ultrasonic backscattering for brewing a better beer. I had dropped out of Oxford University, where I was working towards a doctorate in philosophy. This is not how is supposed to begin. I didn’t own a suit and I couldn’t even pick out an expensive watch. Technology Review Casino Royale I took the call in the family’s living room amid a rubble of children’s toys. It was one of those late October afternoons when you notice the days are getting shorter. Reception was bad in the colonial attic and I was afraid the call from this unknown, untraceable number would cut out. On the other hand, being in the living room had its dangers, too. Mom and the kids could walk in. Short greetings again but a different bureaucratic voice. “I’m going to go through a series of questions and do your best to answer them. Ok? So…” — and recall this was 2006 — ”What are the main motivations and grievances driving sectarian conflict in Iraq between the Sunni, Shi’a, Yazidis, Assyrians, Kurds and Iraqi Turkmen?” Yazidis? I pace when I have serious conversations on the phone. Hurdling scattered toys, I said, with great weight and authority, drawing on the works of Plato, Nietzsche, and Kant, “Ummmm…” I did my best to repeat the general analysis I had gleaned scanning the daily. I probably sounded like the slouch in class who hadn’t done the reading, but raised his hand anyway to get credit for attendance. New York Times He cut me off. “What is intelligence? What kind of information does the CIA want? Just any? Is it the kind that you can Google?” “Ummm, well of course not,” I offered. “It’s the kind that someone else doesn’t want you to have.” “Sometimes. But not always. It’s information that is of critical interest to the United States, for its national security, for its foreign policy. That may be the plans and intentions of high-level foreign government officials. But it may be time-sensitive information that these officials don’t even realize is of importance.” I tripped on a stuffed penguin. “I see.” He then went on to explain to me the two main entry-level roles in the clandestine service, and that spies typically worked in pairs, one of each role together. On the one hand, there is the “operations officer”, who is more like what you’d think of when you imagine a spy. Undercover abroad, they work to turn non-US citizens who have access to foreign intelligence into sources. This involves building relationships — and also cajoling, persuading, and manipulating — so you can imagine the kind of person who is good at this is the kind of person who can size someone up, build rapport, and make friends quickly. If you’ve met me, you know that someone is not me. They also practice what is known as “tradecraft,” which refers to the bug plants, the dead drops, street surveillance, the secret meetings in safe houses, and so on. Maybe I could do that. I left a key under a rock outside a friend’s house once. The other role is called a “collection management officer.” If the operation officer collects the jigsaw pieces, the collection management officer is supposed to anticipate how they will fit together, what picture they will form, even though he doesn’t have the puzzle box. With a view to looming trends, this person places the information collected into the wider context of events, backed by research and regional expertise. Together these two solve the puzzle. “So what role would you prefer to apply for?” I don’t know how I passed this round of the recruiting process, but I did. I told him I’d probably be better suited to the collection management role, only because it felt more academic to me. I did not, however, make it past the next round. That included an IQ test, a personality test, a statement of values, a set of essay questions, and a list of the books I was supposed to use as sources. I still have the booklist. Some of the titles, many quite good and largely critical of the CIA’s activities and failures: Steve Coll’s , a meticulous history of the Taliban and the rise of Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s; the impassioned by Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Osama Bin Laden unit at the CIA’s counterterrorism center; strangely, I thought, a spy novel — by David Ignatius. Ghost Wars Imperial Hubris Agents of Innocence I had to print out my essays and send them to an address in Virginia that disappeared a week afterward. One of my favorite details comes from the personality test. “On a scale of one to five, with one being ‘strongly disagree’ and five being ‘strongly agree,’ this statement is true: When I walk down the street, I feel an aura of power around me.” What the hell were they tracking for? I’ll never know why they passed on hiring me; maybe it’s because I didn’t have an aura of power. But ever since I have reflected on the nature of intelligence gathering and the methods that were described to me. Venture capital has its own information gathering process. You can’t search for it on Google or read it on Twitter. We are trying to obtain time-sensitive information on teams and technologies that no one else seems to think important. The future is present, but invisible on the surface. We have to gather it from a place unseen, where no one is looking. Like the CIA, 1517 works in pairs. People have called us Mulder and Scully from . (For some reason they think I’m Scully — the rational skeptic — and Danielle Mulder, enthusiast of the paranormal and mysterious. The truth is the opposite!) X-Files I’m skeptical of investors who work alone. People ask us if we follow technological trends, but we really build jigsaw puzzles using both our strengths, traveling to distant places. Danielle builds relationships and trust just about better than anyone I have ever met. She’s a gravity well for great people and sources of expertise. And she has a keen emotional intelligence that gives her a sound judgment when it comes to assessing character and why people do things. Not to mention she executes more in a second than most in a minute. I am more of a collection officer. A background of reading, talking to experts, and general curiosity help me bring order to the pieces we come into contact with. The most exciting people we meet are the ones who point the way to the picture forming of a future to come. I don’t have the puzzle box to guide us to the solution. We meet founders and they bring us to the edge of our understanding. What we learn there is not something you’d ever read in a headline. If you did, it’d already be too late. ? “φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ,” Heraclitus says. “Nature loves to hide her secrets.” You can read the CIA’s definition . What is intelligence here — Michael Gibson

Abroad

Human Intelligence

Before the advent of computers and the wave of automation that followed, the bottleneck of value creation in the economy was the rate of production of goods and services. If someone had the skills to efficiently produce a large quantity of something useful, that person would likely have been able to capture a lot of value from the economy; it didn’t matter too much that other people elsewhere in the world were also producing similar goods/services — In the absence of a single global marketplace, industries were naturally decentralized based on geography. In the modern age, however, due to the combination of automation and globalization, the bottleneck of value creation is no longer the ability to mass produce goods and services; it is the acquisition of customers. This is why advertising and media have become such powerful forces in our economy — Brand awareness, instead of quality or production efficiency, has become the most significant differentiator between competing products/services. With the advent of search engines and social media, the game of acquiring customers has changed significantly. Because the number of (online) media channels is now essentially unlimited and unregulated, it has become trivial for companies to monopolize them one at a time. There are many ways for a company (or a group of companies) monopolize a media channel, some of them are: Buy out (or forge alliances with) blogs/publications which produce popular content and use them as vehicles to promote the company’s agenda. Buy out advertising space related to certain search engine keywords by offering to pay a high CPC/CPM to ‘price out’ the competition from targeting those keywords. The more ads a company buys, the more clicks they get, the cheaper their CPC is. Buy out advertising space which targets certain social media profiles by offering a high CPC/CPM to ‘price out’ the competition from targeting those kinds of social media profiles. Sponsor influencers to exclusively promote the company’s products or services. By creating and/or mediating the majority of popular media channels, a small number of large firms and corporations have gained the ability to essentially sell monopoly rights over specific media channels to the highest bidder — This has turned into a zero-sum game in which companies weaponize their capital against each other by driving up the price of CPC and CPM advertising. Large tech corporations like Google and Facebook create virtual battlefields and then make a profit by selling weapons to all sides; whoever spends the most wins the war. Because the monopolization of media channels is an expensive but predictable winner-takes-it-all game, it follows logically that corporations would be the biggest winners and that this would result in increased centralization. A common alternative explanation to justify why corporations are getting so big is that they are more efficient in a macroeconomic sense. Some common beliefs include: Corporations leverage economies of scale to improve efficiency and deliver maximum value to customers. Corporations help to centralize wealth (I.e. there is only a handful of highly paid CEOs and executives for every tens of thousands of poorly paid employees); more wealth in fewer hands creates an illusion of monetary scarcity for everyone else; this illusion incentivizes the masses to work harder for the same amount of money. The world’s total money supply may be increasing rapidly (thus diluting the intrinsic value of money), but because of wealth concentration, the masses do not actually notice the surplus wealth in the economy; this hidden wealth helps to keep inflation metrics low whilst providing the rich with the kinds of nominal ROIs that they expect. While the points above may hold some truth, they are not the root cause of why corporations keep getting bigger. Even though it’s true that economies of scale do deliver certain efficiency benefits, in many cases, it’s likely that those benefits are cancelled out by corporate inefficiencies such as bureaucracy and the sheer unnecessary complexity that plagues most corporate systems. It could be argued that the bigger a corporation becomes and the more industries it monopolizes, the more inefficient it becomes. Hypothetically, if a corporation managed to monopolize all industries within a country, it might end up just about as fair and economically efficient as a typical a communist government operating a planned economy. The second point which advocates concentration of wealth as a way to improve economic efficiency makes sense in terms of limiting global consumption but it does so at the expense of production efficiency.Moreover, concentration of wealth fosters an economic environment which most people would consider unfair; it turns capitalism from being a game of skill to being a game of attention-seeking and social manipulation. One of the root problems of wealth concentration is that such few people end up with so much wealth that they do not have the mental bandwidth to spend it efficiently; instead they naively invest bulk sums into hedge funds, mutual funds, venture capital funds, indexes, stocks and bonds (which further perpetuates inefficient corporate growth and wealth inequality) — On the occasion that they do invest in small ventures, members of the wealthy elite tend to only invest in startups operated by their friends and acquaintances. Talented people who do not have direct connections to wealthy individuals are essentially locked out of the so called “free market”; in the tech industry for example, there is essentially only one path to success: Get accepted into a tech incubator (to get access to the media channels and to the VC funding channels that they control). Raise funding from Venture Capitalists (not necessarily to get funding but mostly to get access to the corporate acquisition channels that they control; or to get access to the IPO market). Either get your startup acquired by a big corporation or do an IPO. It should also be noted that in the US, regular people (who are not accredited investors) are not even legally allowed to invest in promising startups once they’ve started on this magical 3-step journey. In order to become an accredited investor to participate in this scheme, you need to either have assets totalling over $1 million or you need to earn over $200K per year. See https://www.wikihow.com/Become-an-Accredited-Investor What a startup does and what value it brings to society are just minor details which can be factored out completely. Because corporations collectively have a monopoly over all major media channels, they don’t need to be efficient to make a profit, they can keep acquiring useless startups and shutting down random projects at a very generous pace and still turn a profit. Blockchain technology is different in that it offers a way for people to create and invest in tech businesses outside of the incestuous 3-step process described earlier. When someone buys a cryptocurrency, most of the money goes directly to the people/organizations who created the coin; those are the same people who will be developing the underlying services (or the ecosystem of services) which gives (or will give) intrinsic value to the coin. Unlike with stock market investing, money invested in cryptocurrency will not be used to fund an army of incubators, “journalists”, VCs, corporate executives, corporate lawyers, investment bankers, M&A consultants, lobbyists, etc… There is no point in asking the question “is cryptocurrency bubble?” without also considering the economic context that made it valuable in the first place.

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive July 22nd, 2018

@prashantramnycPrashant Ram

@adilAdil Haris

@vishal144Vishal Gupta

@garrettvGarrett Vorce

@John1wuJohn Wu

@ricrubenRic Ruben

@ricrubenRic Ruben

@whoisjuliosantosJúlio Santos

@ricrubenRic Ruben

@ceyhun.ozgunCeyhun Özgün

@ermosErmos K

@flaviocopesFlavio Copes

@dataturksDataTurks: Data Annotations Made Super Easy

@knut.svanholmKnut Svanholm

@johnpcutlerJohn Cutler

@LindaCryptoLinda Willemse

@kronosapiensDaniel Kronovet

@amirtha255Amirtha Varshini A S

@dpreusslerDanny Preussler

@Nico_VergauwenNico Vergauwen

@george3d6George Hosu

@BBerdahBrice Berdah

@filip.poutintsevFilip Poutintsev

@John1wuJohn Wu

@FatosMorinaFatos Morina

@15171517 Fund

@jonathangrosduboisJonathan Gros-Dubois

@rfreemanRichard Freeman, PhD

@prashantramnyc
Prashant Ram

@adil
Adil Haris

@vishal144
Vishal Gupta

@garrettv
Garrett Vorce

@John1wu
John Wu

@ricruben
Ric Ruben

@ricruben
Ric Ruben

@whoisjuliosantos
Júlio Santos

@ricruben
Ric Ruben

@ceyhun.ozgun
Ceyhun Özgün

@ermos
Ermos K

@flaviocopes
Flavio Copes

@dataturks
DataTurks: Data Annotations Made Super Easy

@knut.svanholm
Knut Svanholm

@johnpcutler
John Cutler

@LindaCrypto
Linda Willemse

@kronosapiens
Daniel Kronovet

@amirtha255
Amirtha Varshini A S

@dpreussler
Danny Preussler

@Nico_Vergauwen
Nico Vergauwen

@george3d6
George Hosu

@BBerdah
Brice Berdah

@filip.poutintsev
Filip Poutintsev

@John1wu
John Wu

@FatosMorina
Fatos Morina

@1517
1517 Fund

@jonathangrosdubois
Jonathan Gros-Dubois

@rfreeman
Richard Freeman, PhD