http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/3/101 We know that in a neural network, weights are initialized usually randomly and that kind of initialization takes fair / significant amount of repetitions to converge to the least loss and reach to the ideal weight matrix. The problem is, this kind of initialization is prone to vanishing or exploding gradient problems. One way to reduce this problem is carefully choosing the random weight initialization. Xavier’s random weight initialization aka Xavier’s algorithm factors into the equation the size of the network (number of input and output neurons) and addresses these problems. Xavier Glorot and Yoshua Bengio are the contributors for this concept of initializing better random weights. This not only reduces the chances for running into the gradient problems but also helps to converge to least error faster. General ways to make it initialize better weights: a) If you’re using ReLu activation function in the deep nets (I’m talking about the hidden layer’s output activation function) then: Generate random sample of weights from a Gaussian distribution having mean 0 and a standard deviation of 1. Multiply that sample with the square root of (2/ni). Where ni is number of input units for that layer. b) Likewise if you’re using Tanh activation function : Generate random sample of weights from a Gaussian distribution having mean 0 and a standard deviation of 1. Multiply that sample with the square root of (1/ni). Where ni is number of input units for that layer. So what is this Xavier’s initialization? Only major difference in Xavier’s initialization is the output no term. We add the number of output units for that layer. For Tanh: Generate random sample of weights from a Gaussian distribution having mean 0 and a standard deviation of 1. Multiply that sample with the square root of (1/(ni+no)). Where ni is number of input units, no is the number of output units for that layer respectively. # python code is here import numpy as np W = np.random.rand((x_dim,y_dim))*np.sqrt(1/(ni+no)) Why does this initialization help prevent gradient problems? This sort of initialization helps to set the weight matrix neither too bigger than 1, nor too smaller than 1. Thus it doesn’t explode or vanish gradients respectively. I learnt this from Coursera’s Awesome Deep Learning Specialization: deeplearning.ai Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter tuning, Regularization and Optimization : https://www.coursera.org/learn/deep-neural-network/ Here is the original Paper: Understanding the difficulty of training deep feedforward neural networks ; PMLR 9:249–256 Xavier Glorot, Yoshua Bengio If you liked this article, then clap it up! :) Maybe a follow? Connect with me on Social: _View Rakshith Vasudev's profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. Rakshith's education is listed…_www.linkedin.com Rakshith Vasudev | LinkedIn _Rakshith Vasudev. Learn Artificial Intelligence with me as we progress to make this world a better place. Tensorflow…_www.facebook.com Rakshith Vasudev _Getting started with Datascience, best programming practices. Topics include Machine Learning and others._www.youtube.com Rakshith Vasudev

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Curious about crypto trading bots but have never had a chance to use one? This will be the first guide in a series of posts that highlight the benefits and show you how to get started with the most popular trading tools. crypto What is Cryptohopper? is a cloud-based trading bot that lets you configure strategies and automate your trading across multiple exchanges. The main benefit of using a cloud-based like this is the extremely simple setup process and 100% uptime of your crypto trading bot. When compared to some of the self-hosted bots, this is a huge advantage as you don’t need to worry about a stable internet connection or your computer being compromised. Cryptohopper tool How do I get started trading with Cryptohopper? After and logging in for the first time, click on the “Config Wizard” button and enter your TRADE-ONLY API Keys to get started. Cryptohopper only needs access to make trades for you, make sure you for each of your API Keys. creating an account disable withdrawal permissions Step 1: Select Your Exchange & Enter Your API Keys Step 2: Select & Configure Your Trading Strategy Step 3: Enter Your Risk Management Limits For Your Strategy What exchanges does Cryptohopper support? Binance Bittrex GDAX Poloniex KuCoin Kraken Bitfinex Cryptopia What trading strategies can you optimize with Cryptohopper? Relative Strength Index (RSI) Fixed Rates Bollinger Bands Easy Bollinger Bands Advanced Multiple TA Factors External Signals Each strategy comes with many configuration options for you to make it trade exactly how you need. We recommend that you read the documentation and heavily backtest your strategy to make sure it is going to perform as expected when trading live. What are external signals? Cryptohopper is the only crypto trading bot that allows you to subscribe to and trade external from crypto trading groups and market experts. Each signal on the marketplace gives you a report of past performance and lets you create a hopper with a single click. trading signals What is the backtesting tool? Backtesting is the process of simulating a trading strategy against historical price data to determine its profitability and measure its risk. This is extremely helpful as it will give you a much better idea of how it will perform under live trading conditions rather than going into it blind. Backtesting can also give you insights on tweaks needed to make a trading strategy perform better than buying and holding and asset. Creating a backtest with Cryptohopper is extremely simple, just click on the “Backtesting” tab and select the hopper you configured earlier to get started. Once the test is finished running, it will give you a report detailing a strategy’s profit, number of trades, and average holding time. How much does Cryptohopper cost? Unlike many other crypto trading bots, offers a free trial and a subscription model that allows users to get started trading without the huge upfront cost. Their subscription pricing is split up into 3 tiers ranging from to a month. Each upgraded tier allows the trading bot to manage more open positions. Here is the full table of pricing options: Cryptohopper $19 $99 is the perfect tool for novice and expert traders looking to automate their trading strategies.. Their trading dashboard and build-it backtester make it very easy to optimize your strategy to be profitable regardless of a bear or bull market. We recommend that you heavily backtest your trading strategies before trading live. Cryptohopper Additional Resources Cryptohopper FAQs Cryptohopper Tutorials Cryptohopper Documentation Cryptohopper Support If you liked this guide and are looking for other crypto trading tools, please check out our . Ultimate Resource List For Crypto Traders Originally published at www.cryptotrader.tax on May 12, 2018. https://upscri.be/hackernoon/

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Humans have been on the quest to defy the natural cycle of life and death since time immemorial. We may not have succeeded in disregarding death as of yet, but we surely are now capable of slowing down its pace. Science, technology, and medicine have come together to longevitate the lives considered to be most significant lifeforms to inhabit Planet Earth. “The quest to live forever, or to live for great expanses of time, has always been part of the human spirit.” — Paul Root Wolpe, American Sociologist The life expectancy ratio of men ageing 60 between the years 1985 and 1990 was 16.22. For the men ageing 80 and above 100, this number dropped down to 5.88 and 1.99 respectively. Between the years 2010 and 2015, the ratio of men at 60 expected to live longer was 18.78 while that of men ageing 80 and 100 or above was 7.25 and 2.40. From 2030 to 2035, men at 60, 80 and 100+ will have a life expectancy ratio of 20.42, 8.13, and 2.66 respectively. It is often said that women tend to live longer than men. The truth- between 1985–1990, the life expectancy of females at the age of 60 years was 19.23, females ageing 80 was 7.19 while that of women over 100 years was 2.26. This number has been on a significant rise over the years. From 2010 to 2015, the life expectancy of females ageing 60, 80 and 100+ was 21.64, 8.53 and 2.65 respectively. These numbers are expected to grow further on and are expected to reach a total of 23.27, 9.47 and 2.91 over the period of five years from 2030 to 2035. Conclusion: Humans live far longer than ever before. Also, the gap between life expectancy of men and women is starting to close. The above statement may give you a sense of accomplishment and happiness, but this rise in the life expectancy of sexagenarian, octogenarian, and centenarians isn’t necessarily a good sign. Does the name Dr Ezekiel Emanuel ring any bells? Let’s jog your memory- He was the bioethicist who assisted Former US President Barack Obama on healthcare. If you still don’t remember him, this might be more helpful- He was the one who wrote the somewhat infamous article “Why I Hope to Die at 75”. People had varied reactions to this article published in 2014- some called him a lunatic, some accused him of being ungrateful for this precious life yet many people thanked him for giving a voice to their thoughts. Everyone wants to live for a century, but when Emanuel expressed his desire to die gracefully along with his senses, it struck anger. Why is it so hard for us to accept our fate? Would you prefer to live all alone with a diseased body causing you pain every single moment? Yes, old age can be entirely different provided there’s proper care but do we have enough resources to take care of the growing elderly population? Here’s something else you may not know- The population of people in the age group of 65 or above is expected to reach 1.4 billion by 2030 and 3.1 billion by 2050. What do we need? Long life and healthy life are two separate things, and the odds of having a combination of these two are rather slim. Medical advancements assist us in every way possible, allowing us to live out a few more years regardless of how miserable they might be. While we need to change our attitude towards old age, there’s also an immediate need to address the ageing population issue. Senior citizens are often left to fend off for themselves due to missing support systems. Whatever systems do exist, they are not so as well-equipped as we would like them to be. There is a severe lack of senior homes that are capable of providing proper care and facilities. Also, the existing number of senior homes is nowhere close to housing the current population of older adults, let alone that part of the population which is going to need support over the coming years. Apart from this, the caregivers in these support homes fall short regarding experience and training. The knowledge required to take care of a senior citizen, who is at a very critical age and demand the best attention possible, is almost non-existent. In short, the whole care sector is very unorganised and is in dire need of a better system that manages everything from care homes to caretakers. The perfect solution: GladAge While everyone is racing to get ahead without any regard for such issues, GladAge decided to slow down, take a pause, and do something about this soon-to-be the most significant global problem. Here’s how- GladAge has taken a step in this direction by bringing blockchain technology to the rescue. Blockchain technology is largely disrupting various sectors and has shown the potential of transforming a sick industry into a healthy one. Thus, empowered by blockchain and a purpose at heart, GladAge has built an entire ecosystem that can provide the best options concerning care homes, personalised care and everything else that a senior citizen could ask for. GladAge will help property owners in leasing out their properties to governments or societies thus creating a source of revenue for themselves. The entire economy will be backed by a cryptocurrency (GAC)and smart contracts will bind the stakeholders. In-home caretakers will be paid using GAC coins and an e-commerce platform will provide access to care equipment and trading of assets or art forms. Caretakers will undergo a careful training and screening process to ensure the best of services. The senior citizens will have access to a feedback system where they will be able to rate caretakers and provide their feedback. Various services offered by the platform will be powered through Smart Contracts to make the whole process reliable, auditable, transparent and convenient. With vetted homes, well-trained caretakers, care equipment, and on-demand services, the sole purpose of GladAge is to create a happy and senior-citizen friendly environment. To do so, the platform promises a hassle-free living for an active lifestyle and social engagement. It is necessary to remember that apart from a safe home, our elders also need a life where they have the chance to connect and socialise with like-minded people. Not only this, the blockchain-powered platform will even allow services trading for any senior willing to offer his skill/service/expertise to corporates or NPOs. In essence, GladAge is willing to give everything it takes to right everything that is wrong with the aged care sector. All it asks for is your support and cooperation to make this possible. Don’t you owe this much to your elders? 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I have played with the Keras official example for a while and want to share my takeaways in this post. image_ocr.py The official example only does the training for the model while missing the prediction part, and my final source code is available both on as well as . More technical detail of OCR(optical character recognization) including the model structure and CTC loss will also be explained briefly in the following sections. my GitHub a runnable Google Colab notebook OCR task declaration The input will be an image contains a single line of text, the text could be at any location in the image. And the task for the model is to output the actual text given this image. For example, OCR example input & output The official image_ocr.py example source code is quite long and may look daunting. It can be breaking down into several parts. The generator for the training samples, this part of the source code will generate vivid text images resembling the scanning documents with artificial speckles, random locations and a variety of fronts. The model callback to save the model weights and visualize the performance of the current model with some generated text images after each training epochs. The model construction and training part. We will elaborate more on this part in the next section. Model structure The model input is image data, and we first feed the data to two convolutional networks to extract the image features, followed by the Reshape and Dense to reduce the dimensions of the feature vectors before letting the bidirectional GRU process the sequential data. The sequential data feed to the GRU is the horizontally divided image features. The final output Dense layer transforms the output for a given image to an array with the shape of (32, 28) representing (#of horizontal steps, #char labels). Base model structure And here is the part of the code to construct the Keras model. CTC Loss As we can see in the example image, the text could be located anywhere, how the model align between the input and output to locates each character in the image and turns them into text? That is where CTC comes into play, CTC stands for connectionist temporal classification. input -> softmax output Notice that the output of the model has 32 timesteps, but the output might not have 32 characters. The CTC cost function allows the RNN to generate output like: Output sequence -“a game” with CTC blanks inserted CTC introduced the “blank” token, and itself doesn’t translate into any character, what it does is to separate individual characters so that we can collapse repeated characters that are not separated by the blank. So the decoding output for the previous sequence will be “a game”. Let’s take a look at another example of the text “speed”. Output sequence -“speed” According to for the decoding principle, we first collapse repeating characters that are not separated by blank token, and then we remove the blank tokens themselves. Notice that if there is no blank token to separate the two “e”s they will be collapsed into one. In Keras, the CTC decoding can be performed in a single function, . K.ctc_decode The is the model output which consists of 32 timesteps of 28 softmax probability values for each of the 28 tokens from a~z, space, and blank token. We set the parameter to perform the greedy search which means the function will only return the most likely output token sequence. out greedy Alternatively, if we want to have the CTC decoder return the top N possible output sequence, we can ask it to perform beam search with a given beam width. One thing worth mentioning is that if you are new to beam search algorithm, the parameter is no greater than the parameter since the beam width tells the beam search algorithm exactly how many top results to keep track of in iterating all timesteps. top_paths beam_width Right now the output of the decoder will be a sequence of tokens, and we just need to translate the numerical classes back to characters. So far we only talked about the decoding part of the CTC. You may wonder how the model is trained with CTC loss? In order to compute the CTC loss, it requires more than the true labels and predicted outputs of the model, but also the output sequence length and the lengths for each of the true labels. A sample of it could look like [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 26, 25] stands for the text sequence ‘abcde z’ y_true. is the output of the softmax layer, a sample of it has the shape (32, 28), 32 timesteps, 28 categories, i.e. ‘a-z’, space and blank token. y_pred is the output sequence length img_w // downsample_factor — 2 = 128 / 4 -2 = 30, 2 means the first 2 discarded RNN output timesteps since first couple outputs of the RNN tend to be garbage. input_length will be 7 for the previous sample, label_length y_true In Keras the CTC loss is packaged in one function . K.ctc_batch_cost Conclusion Checkpoint results after training the model for 25 epochs. Model performance check after 25 training epochs If you have read this far and experimenting along on the Google Colab you should now have a Keras OCR demo running. If you are still eager for more information about CTC and beam search, feel free to check out the following resources. — An in-depth elaboration of CTC algorithm and other applications where CTC can be applied to such as speech recognition, lip reading from video and so on. Sequence Modeling With CTC . Quick and easy to understand. Coursera Beam search video lecture Don’t forget to get the source code from as well as . my GitHub a runnable Google Colab notebook Originally published at www.dlology.com .

How to train a Keras model to recognize text with variable length

With internship season in full swing I’ve reflected on last years internship memories and lessons. Interning at was a very valuable experience, and I’ve written this post to shed light on my journey and experience, in hopes that is useful for incoming interns or anyone that is interested in joining Facebook. Facebook Background Last year (July — October 2017) I completed a Software Engineering internship at Facebook, Tel Aviv. I worked on the team, which is part of . Internet.org aims to solve the social, economic and technical barriers to connect the 4 billion people without access to the internet. Express Wi-Fi Internet.org Facebook Interview Process I applied to Facebook through Facebook! I submitted my resume via the careers section. At the time, I was an undergrad student in Israel at the Technion, and had a nice , and 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃 collection of hacks, projects failed start up attempts One thing that stood out about the Facebook application process, in comparison to other large tech companies, is that you are not required to submit a grade sheet. Facebook loves recruiting engineers who are builders, and I think this approach stems from the belief that a high GPA is not necessariliy an indication of strong engineering skills (although it can help!). This gives the hackers and builders a chance to shine and show off all the cool stuff they’ve built. After submitting my resume, I had a phone call scheduled with a London-based recruiter. It was a short non-technical conversation where she told me about the company and asked me a few questions about my interests and experiences. After this we scheduled an interview that took place at my university’s campus. I won’t dive too deep about the actual interview process because there is a ton of accurate regarding this. The interview questions and required preparation is pretty similar to prepping for a Microsoft / / <BIG_TECH_COMPANY> interview. Know your data structures and algorithms well. Cracking the Coding Interview is a highly recommended book throughout the industry, although I didn’t have time to sift through all 700+ pages. I used online interview sites like HackerRank and LeetCode. information available online Google One thing that I learned in retrospect is that interviewers really want to see you do well. My experience is that they’re not going to approach you with nefarious, evil dynamic programming questions just for kicks (although we’ve all heard horror stories 😱 😰😱 😰😱 😰😱). Interviewers take time out of their schedule to interview candidates, and the goal is to find people who are the very best at what they do. So, try to be as relaxed as possible, and focus on the task at hand! A couple of interviews later I had received an offer 😎😎😎 I was really excited to find out what happened next! About 3 months prior to team selection, Facebook sent out an email where we were asked about our technological interests, fields we’d be interested in exploring and fields we did NOT want to work in. Take time in thinking about this and research the projects available at the site you’re going to join. They take these preferences into consideration and try to find you the best match possible given the available teams projects and needs. 4 weeks later, I got a phone call from the intern director who let me know I was set to start at Express Wi-Fi! Facebook uses a strength-based approach. It’s really important that everyone gets to work on what they are passionate about, as they believe it is a crucial component for high quality work and success. Preparing for the internship Being as excited as I was to start, I wanted to prepare for the internship by learning about relevant technologies. This ends up being a bit tricky as you don’t know what project and tech stack you’re going to work on until a few days into the internship. One thing that I recommend learning if you’re not already familiar with (whether or not you’re coming to Facebook!) is version control! You’ll be using this on every team at Facebook and hopefully any other company you end up at. Facebook . You could learn it or learn git. The concepts are similar and knowing the basics of version control makes it easier to submit / iterate on your work. It is important to mention that as an intern Facebook isn’t expecting prior domain specific knowledge. Projects are selected carefully for this reason, and interns are expected to learn and ramp up on the relevant tech stacks. This can sound daunting, but Facebook provides a lot of internal wikis, videos, and general help for learning internal technologies. For the open source technologies (Android, iOS, React, php etc.) Google and Stack Overflow are your friends 😄😄😄😄😄. My projects consisted primarily of writing and interacting with Facebook specific backend frameworks. There was no real way to familiarize myself with the tech prior to beginning of my internship, but it was completely fine. I was given the time to learn and ramp up and had an excellent intern manager who helped me along the way. uses Mercurial hack So how does this whole internship thing work? In general, a Facebook internship is a 12 week process. Each intern is assigned to a team where they are assigned a specific intern project. Your main goal during your internship is to complete the project successfully and ship it to production. For the first week of the internship all the Tel Aviv interns were flown out to the London offices for an orientation week. This was a lot of fun, as you will have time to explore the city, get to know other interns, and explore the amazing London offices. After a week we returned to the Tel Aviv offices to begin our internships. I started working steadily on my project and began to feel familiar with the codebase, while getting to know my team. My team and intern manager were super welcoming, friendly, and helpful. Hanging out with my team was fun, and ultimately the people at Facebook are one of the strongest reasons to join! During my internship process, I was given a lot of ownership on my project and freedom in code architecture and implementation. It’s not all work though! There are frequent office events such as hackathons, , and more. BFF outings Me (left) and Avner (right), at one of the company hackathons During this period, I learned a lot about software architecture and workflow at a scale as well as approaches and constraints regarding developing software for developing countries. (hint: not all mobile browsers run Javascript!). At the end of each week you have a 1-on-1 with your intern manager. Use this as an opportunity to get feedback on how you’re doing and where you can improve. In addition, use every meeting as a chance to give your manager an in-depth update about where you are in your project, what’s going well, and what is challenging. Around 6 weeks into the internship there is a mid-point review where interns are evaluated. You get detailed feedback about how you’re doing and whether your “trending towards an offer or not.” If you’re trending towards an offer don’t take your foot off the pedal! If you aren’t, there is still time to improve and get an offer. Either way, your status, strengths and weaknesses shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point as you have weekly 1-on-1’s where you should be getting a steady stream of valuable feedback. Here are my 2 cents on what helped me make my internship successful, and ultimately receive a full-time offer. Be independent and learn how to unblock yourself You’re going to be working on one of the largest codebases in the world. At Facebook’s scale and engineering speed, you’re going to have a lot of “ ” moments. Learn how to use the resources available to you. Facebooks code base is a huge monorepo, so you can always search to see how different pieces of technology were implemented or used throughout the company. In addition, there are Workplace groups (Facebook for work) with helpful discussions and company wikis and videos. If you can’t find the information you need to move forward, ping a team member. In general, I like to consult with team members after I’ve tried a few things myself as this makes the “debug” process easier and more efficient. what is going on?! Move fast Submit code early and submit code often. Submitting / sharing your work early is going to give you more time to iterate on it. Pushing code regularly helped me avoid ‘code paralysis’ where I would feel too overwhelmed and unsure about how to start a certain task. Be organized in your approach Your internship project is likely going to be composed of smaller stepping stones and functional blocks. Spend time breaking down how you’re going to approach each challenge and work diligently. I liked working with a pen and notebook to scope out my tasks and cross them out when completed. Find whatever system works for you, and keeps you focused and on point. my handy dandy notebook Get to know your team Don’t be that intern who is oblivious to his surroundings! The people at Facebook are fantastic, and an internship is a great opportunity to get to know the people you’re going to work with. There are many events for office employees, so be sure to go out and relax with your work buddies! It’ll make the experience a lot more enjoyable 😉😉 Beach event for the interns Work life balance . If you’ve worked too many hours and are no longer efficient, recognize that and take a break or stop for the day. The internship (and full-time work later!) is a marathon and not a sprint. There are a lot of fun things to do around the office and clear your mind if you’re stuck on a task. Take advantage of that. The view from the offices are pretty calming too! More isn’t necessarily more What’s next I’ve recently started full time at Facebook Tel Aviv, after completing the Software Engineering “bootcamp” in London and Silicon Valley. I was lucky enough to be able to rejoin my team at Express Wi-Fi. I’m currently working with Android, React Native, GraphQL and a bunch of awesome technologies for an amazing cause. Lastly, we’re always on the lookout for great people! If you’re interested in hearing more about my experiences feel free to reach out or leave a comment below ✍️✍️✍️. If this post was helpful, please click the clap 👏 button below to show your support! ⬇⬇ If you’d like to connect feel free to follow me on , , and , where I regularly post on tech adventures, hacks and startup related content ✌️✌️✌️✌️💻💻💻💻 Medium Instagram Github Linkedin

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…if your goal is to stay connected to the hottest information Source: pixabay.com Twitter is a great platform to stay in touch with excellent minds in the blockchain and cryptocurrency world. Personally, I have gotten a lot of insight from the people I will list here. Some of them may be people you already know while others will be new. . Most of them come out to clear misinformation in the crypto world especially when it pertains to the area they function. And you know how important information is in the world of today. The purpose is to be connected to credible people that you can trust their information 1. Joseph Young (username: iamjosephyoung) I came in contact with this guy when a simple tweet of his explained a situation that was already a source of panic. His insights are so precise and apt. . Also, he is honest, sincere and plain straightforward. I have never seen a useless tweet from him. In a world where top media giants produce misinformation, there is need to be connected to someone like Joseph. His information can be trusted to a large extent 2. Ari Paul (username: AriDavidPaul) He is the CIO of BlockTower Capital. . He has a strong knowledge of the blockchain world and passes his information in a way that is easily comprehended. His insights are unique and they are worth reading every time. He offers a simple approach to communicating sincere facts, sometimes with a bit of humor (or sarcasm) 3. CZ (username: cz_binance) This is the CEO of Binance. Binance is a leading cryptocurrency exchange platform (now) headquartered in Malta. . He is growing so fast as a global leader in the cryptocurrency space. If you have a Binance account, you ought to be connected to him. Apart from using his account to laud important information from Binance, CZ also gives occasional insight about developments in the real world concerning the blockchain ecosystem 4. (username: KyleSamani) Kyle Samani 5. Tushar Jain (username: TusharJain_) This duo are the managing partners of Multicoin Capital. . If you want to go down deep into fundamental economic analysis or you desire a technical breakdown of any fundamentals, these are your friends. These are the guys you don’t speed-read what they write. If you are not so vast in the crypto world, you can get lost easily. But if you are patient and willing to understand deep, you will find their thoughts and arguments very enlightening. They take you deep in insight and analysis of the crypto market and ecosystem 6. Luke Martin (username: VentureCoinist) For people who love charts and technical analysis, this is someone to get connected with. . His technical analysis is not meant as a financial instruction or advice. You follow his analysis at your own risk. But you will find it interesting to see how he thinks and how he interprets the trends and patterns on a chart. He unveils various insights based on charts to make decisions 7. (username: Excellion) Samson Mow This is the CSO of Blockstream. A very popular figure in the world of bitcoin. . Playful at times. He is well-meaning in his expressions, very sound in fundamentals and a promoter of global adoption for bitcoin. He is someone to stay in touch with. He is a source of reliable information 8. (username: francispouliot_) Francis Pouliot Here is someone that is so into growth and development in the crypto space. If you are keen on keeping tabs with structural development in the world of cryptocurrency, this is someone you would love. . He is also a strong advocate for bitcoin adoption especially by traditional and institutional investors 9. BTF%$D! (username: CryptoHustle) For me, this is the source of humor on the list. He often gives insight and analysis of the market, but I don’t take him serious. However, that doesn’t mean he is always wrong. . His tweets are often intended as jokes also. If you are quickly offended, you may not like him. He often posts pictures, videos that apply to the current state in the crypto market that would make you laugh (or at least smile) 10. (username: Cryptomanran) Ran Neu-Ner This is the host of the TV show, Crypto Trader on CNBC. He is a great source of news and information. His show does interviews with many of the big names in Crypto. He also covers big events in the crypto world. . You get links from him to watch the latest episode of his show on YouTube. He asks good questions and you can tell he kind of likes his job. His show is very enlightening and educative. His tweets are also like that Some may be wondering why I have not included very big names like the founders of Litecoin and Ethereum, etc. The purpose of this is to get you connected to people you probably do not know and can get a wealth of information and value from. There are other sound people in the crypto space with excellent minds. . However, don’t follow blindly. Verify the account and see if the tweet content of the account is something you want to be seeing on your timeline. If you have other insightful people you know, you can post in the comments. Cheers! You’ll get to meet more of them through the RTs of those on this list P.S. You can connect with me on Twitter here

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The 10 best accounts on Twitter about Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain

Cryptocurrency has a bad reputation, buying and selling coins is even worse. The problem is obvious: a lack of transparency on the part of the exchanges married to a shortage of best practice information due to an absence of regulatory guidance. Fundamentally, this has arisen due to the rapidity of Cryptocurrencies growth into wider public consciousness. The problem for those hoping to encourage wider adoptance is the concerns most people have relating to the trustworthiness of companies operating these exchanges. Government intervention clouds the sensibility of participation further. Where US regulatory Commissions and bodies are unsure of how to proceed, it understandably gives those considering participation pause for thought. However unlikely it is that the Government impose stricter regulations on how tokens can be used or exchange, the mere suggestion that it is a possibility pumps the breaks. Where some(most) exchanges tackle these issues by sticking their heads in the sand or attempt to manoeuvre to more favourable geographic regions, others are viewing this constraint as a massive opportunity to encourage consumer trust. One such company, , is doing everything in its power to embrace regulation and industry best practices, while continually innovating to stay ahead of the curve. Mandala What is Mandala? Mandala is an exchange created by traders for traders. This means a platform which integrates simplicity, security and sustainability while understanding current trends in order to meet future needs. Due to the fact the creators of the exchange are traders themselves, they understand the issues affecting the domain. By working closely with users they will simplify the platform to create the easiest to use interface available. Where Coinbase and others make it incredibly difficult to control stop-losses or automated sells, or don’t offer it at all, Mandala is making these mechanisms incredibly easy for both Novices and Experts to use on their system. That is critical because the perception that participation is incredibly difficult has played a significant part in discouraging wider adoption. If Crypto is ever to emerge as a viable alternative to Fiat currency, and it has to due to the massive benefits is offers to consumers, there have to be products and services which enable regular people to cross that chasm of doubt. Mandala promises to be part of any solution. How will they achieve this? They aren’t simply providing the keys to the car and recklessly allowing users to harm themselves before they understand how to operate it. Their goal is to empower users to participate in this exciting domain by providing tutorials and educational resource which endow individuals with the knowledge to make better decisions. Like other exchanges, part of their strategy will be to create their own token. This will allow users to access premium features, such as market insights, strategies and a virtual trading assistant. The Braintrust behind Mandala are experts in the sphere of analytics and AI and this knowledge will be utilised extensively to create products which inform traders to make better investments. While the above services offer a compelling reason for novice traders or those seeking to expand their knowledge to utilise the service, there is an overwhelming reason why should consider making the switch as well. Mandala tokens help reduce trading expenses by up to 80%. Crypto has grown so quickly choosing not to participate could be very damaging to your financial future. Mandala enables you to acquire the requisite knowledge to participate while helping you do so intelligently. Why they are embracing regulation Simply creating the simplest and smartest mechanism for exchange is one thing, but it doesn’t overcome the existing issues a significant number of people have with current exchange. Security concerns are the most important issue keeping new participants from adopting use of Cryptocurrency. It’s a question of risk. Where some exchanges are the ‘Wild-West’, anything goes and controls are non-existent or incredible difficult. ICO scams, disappearing coins and hacked exchanges indicate the depth and breadth of the potential problems. These incidents colour the perceptions of the space to reflect terribly on the entire industry. Not only does this inhibit participation it prevents technological progress which can have tremendous benefits for everyone. The world is changing. Governments realise the potential of Crypto and are moving to protect investors. In March 2018 the SEC that it deemed necessary for a digital asset exchange compliance, including registering as a national securities exchange, alternative trading system, broker/dealer, and money transmitter. issued a set of requirements Where some exchanges attempt to dodge the responsibility this places on their shoulders, Mandala have embraced the challenge of complying with the requirements. Their goal isn’t to follow the guidelines in principle, they will attempt to exceed them in order to create the safest exchange for consumers. That is as ubiquitous as now as it is for the future. Where the landscape shift Mandala are promising to evolve with the times. Irrespective of whether the SEC decides to implement regulation now or in the future, the reality is that it is coming. Mandala are embracing that as an opportunity to connect with consumers, where regulation becomes a gateway to wider participation by marking Cryptocurrency as a viable form of investment or store of value. They‘ve Filed for Regulation A+ with the SEC to Protect is Investors Mandala’s website rightly proclaims that “Industry leaders have a duty to lead with integrity and ensure the necessary steps are taken to protect users, further the adoption of blockchain technologies and meet the requirements of global securities laws.” By complying prior to the implementation of any regulations they avoid the uncertainty that could arise from being forced to halt trading or shut down. At the same time they, overcome the concerns of reluctant potential investors. Future Plans It’s easy to try and predict how regulation will evolve in the coming years, however that doesn’t mean that those assumptions will come to fruition. By being proactive, it is far easier to anticipate requirements that will arise and comply far in advance of any implementation date. That is who Mandala are, what they are doing and what they stand for. They are positioning themselves at the forefront of any regulatory debate by ensuring everything they do exceeds the minimum expected requirements. In doing so, they are improving the legitimacy of Crypto and Blockchain applications, in hope that their efforts will enable a new wave of wider public adoptance by building trust in regulatory compliance before its required.

Coinbase

Why Trading Platforms that Embrace Regulation will Win The Crypto Trading Wars

TL;DR Docker containers opened a world of possibilities for the tech community, hassles in setting up new software were decreased unlike old times when a mess was to be sorted by a grievous format, it reduced the time to set up and use new software which eventually played a big part for techies to learn new things, roll it out in a container and scrap it when done. Things became easy, and the best thing its open source anyone and everyone can use it, comes with a little learning curve though. Out of the myriad possibilities was the possibility of implementing complex technology stacks for our applications, which previously would have been the domain of experts. Today with the help of containers software engineers with sound understanding of the underlying systems can implement a complex stack and why not it’s the need of the hour, the figure of speech “Jack of all trades” got a fancy upgrade; “Master of some” based on the needs of the age. Simply put “T” shaped skills. The possibility of defining a complex stack in a file and running it with a single command, pretty tempting huh. The guys at Docker Inc. choose to call it Docker compose. In this article, we will use Docker’s example Voting App and deploy it using Docker compose. Docker Compose In the words of Docker Inc. Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. With Compose, you use a YAML file to configure your application’s services. Then, with a single command, you create and start all the services from your configuration. The Voting App Introducing the most favourite demonstration app for the Docker community “The Voting App”, as if it needs an introduction at all. This is a simple application based on micro-services architecture, consisting of 5 simple services. Voting app architecture [ ] https://github.com/docker/example-voting-app : Frontend of the application written in Python, used by users to cast their votes. Voting-App : In-memory database, used as intermediate storage. Redis : .Net service, used to fetch votes from Redis and store in Postres database. Worker : PostgreSQL database, used as database. DB : Frontend of the application written in Node.js, displays the voting results. Result-App The Voting repo has a file called this file contains the configuration for creating the containers, exposing ports, binding volumes and connecting containers through networks required for the voting app to work. Sounds like a lot of pretty long and commands otherwise, docker compose allows us to put all of that stuff in a single docker-compose file in format. docker-compose.yml docker run docker network create yaml Git and into the voting app repo. clone cd _example-voting-app - Example Docker Compose app_github.com dockersamples/example-voting-app Compose Time With all of our application defined in a single compose file we can take a sigh of relief, chill and simply run the application. The beauty of compose lies in the fact that a single command creates all the services, wires up the networks(literally), mounts all volumes and exposes the ports. Its time to welcome the command, its performs all of the aforementioned tasks. up $ docker-compose up After lots of “Pull complete”, hundreds of megabytes and few minutes (maybe more). . . Voila, we have the voting app up and running. Command lists all the running containers docker ps $ docker ps -a --format="table {{.Names}}\t{{.Image}}\t{{.Ports}}"NAMES               IMAGE               PORTSvoting_worker_1     voting_workerdb                  postgres:9.4        5432/tcpvoting_vote_1       voting_vote         0.0.0.0:5000->80/tcpvoting_result_1     voting_result       0.0.0.0:5858->5858/tcp, 0.0.0.0:5001->80/tcpredis               redis:alpine        0.0.0.0:32768->6379/tcp The above command displays all the running containers, respective images and the exposed port numbers. The Voting app can be accessed on http://localhost:5000 Likewise the Voting results app can be accessed on http://localhost:5001 Each vote cast on the Voting app is first stored in the Redis in-memory database, the .Net worker service fetches the vote and stores it in the Postgres DB which is accessed by the Node.js frontend. Compose Features Compose provide the flexibility to use a project name to isolate the environments from each other, the project name is the base name of the directory that contains the project. In our voting app this is signified by the name of the containers where is the base name of the directory. We can set a custom project name using the flag followed by the custom name. voting_worker_1 voting -p Compose preserves all volumes used by the services defined in the compose file, thus no data is lost when the containers are recreated using . Another cool feature is that only the containers which have changed are recreated, the containers whose state did not change remain untouched. docker-compose up Another cool feature is the support for variables in the compose file, we can define variables in a file and use them in the docker-compose file. Here the can defined in the environment file or can be defined in the shell. It is used in the compose file in the following manner: .env POSTGRES_VERSION=9.4 db:  image: "postgres:${POSTGRES_VERSION}" Command Cheat Sheet Its easy as breeze to start, stop and play around with compose. $ docker-compose up -d$ docker-compose down$ docker-compose start$ docker-compose stop$ docker-compose build$ docker-compose logs -f db$ docker-compose scale db=4$ docker-compose events$ docker-compose exec db bash Summary Docker Compose is a great tool to quickly deploy and scrap containers, the compose file can run seamlessly on any machine installed with docker-compose. Experimentation and learning technologies is just a Compose file away ;). I hope this article helped in the understanding of Docker Compose. I’d love to hear about how you use Docker Compose in your projects. Clap if it increased your knowledge, help it reach more people.

Fetch

Visit my blog

A Practical Introduction to Docker Compose

The latest controversy You’ve probably seen the video presentation about Google Duplex, the new assistant created by that can make phone calls that sound totally human interactions to the human on the other side (and to anyone listening). Google If you haven’t, please go watch the 4 minutes version. You can read more about it in . Not sure how this will work in real life. this article But the demo looks . amazing The controversy Honestly, I arrived to the presentation and discovered Google Duplex from the controversy in . And then I watched the video. Twitter And at first, I didn’t even understand the problem people was having with it. (I’m not even sure I have fully understand it). People demanded that Google Duplex should identify itself as a robot when speaking with a human. But why? I couldn’t understand. One of the issues was that Google had also announced that it’s going to call to get the opening hours of business in a massive way. Honestly, I didn’t perceive that to be a big issue. Monthly/weekly call to get opening hours? Is that so much an issue? So I tried to think more in terms of pros and cons. And I ended up perceiving multiple issues that are being mixed here. But first things first I think it is worth mentioning. We’re taking Google’s presentation at first value. We still don’t know how good it works in real life, just a few demos. Impressive demos. But demos. Opportunities I think it is worth pointing out the good things that Google Duplex brings. Good for the user. Ever since Alexa came out, there was the perception that it was useful, but not quite. Google Duplex promises to change the field. Disclaimer: he sees danger in Google Duplex, though However, from a local business perspective, this may be a win too. We tend to think every local service has a web page with opening hours and every restaurant or hairdresser has a booking system. But that’s not the case and in some cases it never will be. Google is effectively providing a solution that works for those businesses. From a technology perspective, a phone call that is indistinguishable from a human is amazing. And from my perspective an instance of a passed. Turing test Risks On the cons, part, I perceive the following: . . That’s a risk. But it is a risk that is not new. Hotels demand a credit card for making a reservation on the phone. Some restaurants don’t allow bookings in busy days at all or if not in person or if they don’t know the client. Denial of service “If booking is easy, business may end up having loads of appointments that are later cancellation or no-show” . “ . I won’t be the first to say that if monopolies are based on incredible service and not bullies and cronies, they may have value for society. Monopoly Google is a monopoly and it’s going to be a bigger monopoly” . . Again, a risk that is not new. I don’t take calls I’m not expecting from phones I don’t know. Not when I was living in Spain (they used to be offering the latest broadband deal) nor since I’ve been leaving in the UK (tired of recruiters or to explain I haven’t been involved in an accident). There is nothing new in the call coming from a human or an android (not the OS :D ) Fraud and abuse “Google has the technology to true natural language processing today. Some time in the future, many others may have it. That opens the path to fraud in massive scale” . “The scary . The . I’ll leave a discussion on this (and the self-identification part) for a future article. I think this is the relevant part but I perceive it is not always clear. Visceral reaction us vs them evil super-intelligence is here” Technology solutions Yes, yes. I know not everything can be solved with technology. But I’m an engineer and I cannot avoid trying. I remember the first thing I thought when I saw the first steps of the controversy (denial of service). Let’s build a solution. I will create an IVR using Twilio that would say aloud opening times, and offer some options. Until I understand that . And if small business don’t have it, they wouldn’t buy my solution either. those systems already exists But my idea “in a few years there will be human-like conversations with only androids involved”, is not original at all. In the LOL camp: Machines talking to machines is not the only technical solution. For the denial of service with cancellations and no-show, here is my pitch: Cryptocurrency based appointment system. Token exchangeable for mobile credit and returned if client shows as promised. I’m launching an ICO. Do you want some coins? :D Conclusion Google Duplex seems amazing from a tech point of view. Yes, there are risks, but in my opinion, they’re not new. There is also the perception that Artificial General Intelligence may be possible much sooner than we expected. : I decided to write this article when I got to this PS is brilliant. He may have controversial opinions. I don’t always agree with some of those opinions. is a similar case. But I always try to understand because they provide something I hadn’t thought about. Marc Andreessen Benedict Evans always Marc stopped tweeting after one of those controversies and the rage and fury (as opposed to discussion) that followed. Now it seems he cannot even like tweets. We should be able to exchange opinions.

Google Duplex and robocalls

KEEP CALM and build your own colors 🍭 I’ve been working with iOS for quiet a long time now and believe me, building a nice-looking visual interface is must for an app to get accepted by a larger audience. Good design, colors, concept everything matters when building a great UI. Gradients is one of the things that adds life to the colors. Plain color or a gradient? Let’s see which one is more eye catching.. Ofcourse the second one. Isn’t it? Mixing 2 colors is much more appealing than a single color. In this article, we’ll be discussing how to get that working in our own app. And trust me, it’s as easy as it seems to be. “Some more colors instead of a single one”. So, let’s begin then. Things we need to know — Render, compose, and animate visual elements. Core Animation Framework Every view in iOS has a layer associated with it that handles all the drawing and animations of the view. A view’s layer can be accessed using its property, an object of . [layer](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiview/1622436-layer) CALayer — An object that manages image-based content and allows you to perform animations on that content. CALayer A layer’s main job is to manage the visual content that you provide but the layer itself has visual attributes that can be set, such as a background color, border, and shadow. — A layer that draws a color gradient over its background color, filling the shape of the layer (including rounded corners). CAGradientLayer You use a gradient layer to create a color gradient containing an arbitrary number of colors. By default, the colors are spread uniformly across the layer, but you can optionally specify locations for control over the color positions through the gradient. Let’s see what can provide us with. CAGradientLayer — the colors that we need to make the gradient. It is an array of objects, i.e. you must provide and not just an object of . : [colors](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/quartzcore/cagradientlayer/1462403-colors) CGColorRef CGColor UIColor Example [UIColor.red.cgColor, UIColor.blue.cgColor] — starting point of the gradient. [startPoint](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/quartzcore/cagradientlayer/1462408-startpoint) — end point of the gradient. [endPoint](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/quartzcore/cagradientlayer/1462412-endpoint) — An optional array of objects defining the location of each gradient stop. [locations](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/quartzcore/cagradientlayer/1462410-locations) NSNumber You can refer to the complete documentation . here Code It Well, now that we know what all is needed for a gradient, it’s just a matter of time now before we get it working. Let’s first see how to get a gradient that we can use on a view’s . layer Great..!!! We have a gradient now. But, wait..!!! Why is it not working 🤔? refresh refresh refresh !!! noooo..still not working 🤯. Aahhhh..!!! We forgot one little thing. Just having a gradient isn’t enough. We have to apply it to our desired view also. That’s so silly of us 🤦‍♀️. Well, here’s how we can apply the gradient to our view. view.layer.addSublayer(gradientLayer) Here, the view can be any element be it a , , etc. You can apply gradient to each one of them in the same way. Applying gradient to a is as simple as applying it to other elements. The is added as the to the view’s layer. That’s so simple. Isn’t it? UIView UIButton UILabel UICollectionViewCell CAGradientLayer sub-layer That’s it. That’s all you we to get a nice-looking gradient on our screen. Okay..!!! Now that we know how to get this working, I have a question on my mind. This is purely a UI thing, right?. Can we not get it in the itself 🧐? Though it not so much of code, but why write it everytime I need a gradient? Why not change some attributes in the storyboard’s itself 🤔 ? It’ll be so easy if we can get that too. Storyboard attribute inspector Looks like we’re getting demanding? 😉 LOL. Well, I know the pain. Getting to change an attribute in the itself is so much more satisfying than doing the same through code. Here we go then..🙂 storyboard Get it in the Storyboard itself..!!!✌️ and is what we can use to achieve this. @IBDesignable @IBInspectable With and , it’s possible to build a custom interface for configuring your custom controls and have them rendered in real-time while designing your project. IBInspectable IBDesignable You can read more about it . here Set the custom class of view to in storyboard’s . This is how it will appear in the in storyboard. DesignableView Class Inspector Attributes Inspector Getting to see what it will look like is must for a great UI. Coding the same thing again and again to get the perfect look is much more tiring and hefty. This is one of the greatest advantage of storyboard, actually this is what storyboards are made for. of what will be the end result. Look and Feel That’s it. Code once, use anywhere we want. No extra code, nothing. Add as many colors you want to show in the gradient. Go on, give it a try. 🤠 Sample Project You can download the sample project from . here Promotions Don’t forget to read my other articles: Everything about Codable in Swift 4 Everything you’ve always wanted to know about notifications in iOS Coding for iOS 11: How to drag & drop into collections & tables All you need to know about Today Extensions (Widget) in iOS 10 UICollectionViewCell selection made easy..!! Feel free to leave comments in case you have any doubts.

Apple

Color it with GRADIENTS — iOS

By , Co-Founder and President of Spin. on . Euwyn Poon Originally published Quora When I was a kid, I’d spend hours daydreaming about the future. What would the world look like? How would we all get around? In my imagination, people would step onto moving sidewalks and be whisked away to their office, the grocery store, the bank. The moving sidewalks of my imagination have yet to appear. But there is a need for a new kind of urban transportation — something that can reduce our dependence on Ubers, personal cars, and even bikes. I’m betting on the scooter. But not just any scooter. A motorized scooter that starts with a couple kicks and then glides over sidewalks with ease. Maybe it sounds a little fantastic, but our team at Spin already has scooters in operation in San Francisco. And they’re going to change personal mobility in a major way. Here’s why: Urban migration is skyrocketing. More people than ever before. live in cities now And most young people aren’t dreaming of suburban enclaves with manicured front lawns and big backyards. They want to be downtown in the mix. They want the conveniences of city life rather than the quiet of the suburbs. This migration is increasing stress on already overburdened transportation systems. And cities are taking note. In Germany, just cleared the way for cities to ban cars from some streets. already has plans to close off many streets to cars and give the city back to pedestrians. And London is slapping the owners of diesel engine vehicles with a if they drive in certain areas. a court ruling Barcelona “congestion charge” These efforts are only going to accelerate as cities attempt to curb pollution and create a more livable environment for both new and long-time residents. But an enjoyable environment isn’t the only factor cities have to consider. Current personal mobility options are causing congestion. Right now, the car is still king when it comes to getting from point A to point B. But cars simply aren’t an efficient way to travel around an urban environment. Sure, it’s great for carpooling. But take a look around the next time you stop at an intersection. How many of the cars are full of people? How many only have a driver? Ridesharing efforts like Uber Pool have helped with this problem, but the reality is, there are still gaps. Personally, my office is just far enough from my apartment that walking isn’t a good option. But driving isn’t either. When I call an Uber, I have to wait for them to fight through traffic to arrive. Then, we battle more traffic along the way — sometimes stopping to drop off other riders. I recently had to cancel a dinner meeting because of traffic. I called an Uber to pick me up from my office, hopped in, and made it one block before getting hopelessly stuck. Since the restaurant was across town, I called my business associates to cancel, got out, and walked back to my office. A smaller, easier mode of transportation is more convenient for moving around cities. Bikes are the current alternative to cars, but not everyone enjoys riding them. That made me wonder why and look to other options. Riding a motorized scooter differs from riding a bike in a key way — you don’t break a sweat. When we were testing both bikes and scooters here at Spin, it became clear that the scooter has a much lower physical barrier to entry. And motorized scooters don’t take a tremendous level of coordination to operate. Everyone gets it on their first try, which adds to the fun factor. Two people can even ride them side-by-side and hold a conversation without much difficulty. We don’t just need a new mode of transport. We can benefit from a new model of ownership. Similar to bikes, scooters can be shared. While they’re lightweight enough to carry, they aren’t the type of thing you’d bring into a restaurant with you. At Spin, we made our scooters stationless so you can park them anywhere without worrying about what happens next. And their small size makes that manageable, even in areas with high foot traffic. We’re already testing our scooter in San Francisco to learn how riders use them and how adoption will spread. And I can’t wait until people in every city across the U.S. can hop on a scooter, skip the traffic, and ride to their destination. By , Co-Founder and President of Spin. on . Euwyn Poon Originally published Quora For more trending tech answers from , visit . Quora HackerNoon.com/quora

Uber

How Technology Will Fix Traffic Jams

Let me start with an “ad hominem” argument first (it is not really one): Daniel is the founder of a , so obviously very vested and interested in the success of the blockchain hype. Failure of the blockchain hype would mean business failure for him. blockchain startup This means that he is serious about this arguments, so that makes it interesting to reflect on them. The argument that blockchain gets rid of middlemen is funny. If there are no middlemen, who are the miners? Who are the other actors building trust in the system? Or providing hardware wallets for people to store their tokens on? Just because you might rid of the current middlemen does not mean that you are not replacing them by new ones, which are not necessarily better. However, the new ones are less regulated and more implicit than the ones we currently have. Does that create more transparency? Not really, and it dilutes accountability much more than before. You better not get scammed out of your BitCoins because there won’t be a good legal framework to help you at the moment. Also: “Blockchain is the first decentralized network for any kinds of value transfer” does not really mean anything. In loose terms, SWIFT was first, and SWIFT was not centralized either and can actually execute quite a few more transactions per second than BitCoin. This brings us to the next argument. Blockchain itself does not reduce transaction costs for people. Except if you are into money laundering. Then, it is really great and allows you to keep more of the cut. Implicit trust in institutions is always going to be cheaper than explicit trust generated by mining and data distribution. Just because you capitalize mathematics doesn’t make the statement true. Have a look at if you want to have a solution that is good at reducing transaction costs for money transfers. They don’t need blockchain for what they do. No one needs blockchain for what you are saying it is required for. TransferWise Regarding Big Tech companies: the major players don’t define the rules of the game. They at most operate too freely when there is a vacuum. Regulators still define the rules. We are currently in a world where governments and lobbyists try to shift responsibility onto companies because they don’t have solutions yet themselves: for example, when implementing the right to be forgotten. That is not what should happen, though. Obviously, tech companies have responsibility for any data scandal, but we also have a responsibility to improve the laws to protect ourselves better in the future. So, how exactly is blockchain better for your data? You won’t really control who has copies of your data anymore. With BitCoin, all the miners need a copy. With decentralized systems, many other participants will need to store parts or all of your data. This is not better for your data. It makes it much harder to control where your data actually ends up. The internet started out as fully decentralized system with algorithmic routing of data, but that got quickly superseded by manual routing tables on the highest level because there were concrete political concerns about automated routing of, for example, US data through China or Russia. You will not get rid of this with algorithms. Saying that there is an algorithmic solution that is simpler than the real world is denying the complexities of the real world. (Moreover, “internet networks” is not a real term by the way. It’s marginally better than calling it “internet tubes”, but not much.) You don’t need the blockchain to keep your data private. Messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal and Wire implement end-to-end encryption successfully without blockchain. My original article has dug into the issues that would originate from decentralized versions of Google, YouTube and Facebook in depth. Saying that there would be no such entities because everything would be decentralized is exactly the problem. If we end up with a “blockchain-based” decentralized version of all these platforms and no company being accountable for any that, who is accountable and liable and can be pressed for changes? If regulation is already difficult, how much more difficult would it become? Daniel has been avoiding those points in his response. Also, even if I repeat myself, one of the great things we can learn from the “blockchain” is that you always have emerging centralization and consolidation — even when you start out with a decentralized system. Mining pools have become very centralized, as have ownership and control over the source code. Again, have a look at . https://arewedecentralizedyet.com Why should we spend so many resources trying to setup decentralized systems and their rules to just end up with something centralized again? Whatever the next big thing will be, it will not be “blockchain” as people understand it now.

A response to Daniel Tung on "Blockchain is the ultimate April Fool's joke"

Harnessing Ethereum Blockchain for peer-to-peer Marketplaces. What is (XNK)? Ink Protocol Ink Protocol is an up-and-coming blockchain project that aims to provide a decentralized payment and reputation system for peer-to-peer marketplaces. This project allows users to securely buy & sell anywhere with decentralized reputation & escrow using the XNK token. It seeks to enhance trust between buyers and sellers based on the reputation they have built across platforms. Ink Protocol is developed by the team at , a marketplace with more than 10 million registered users for selling and buying secondhand goods online. Listia was launched in 2009 with VC backings from , and a few other VC firms. Recently, ConsenSys Ventures . Listia YCombinator Andreessen Horowitz announced their investment in Ink Protocol Benefits of Ink Protocol Buyers Buyers can view any seller’s global reputation, pay with escrow, and leave feedback for completed transactions. The Ink Pay app is also in development, which will greatly simplify the way people buy and sell with XNK. Sellers Reputation is decentralized, independent, and available anywhere. All reputation gained across platforms counts toward your overall reputation! Bring it with you and never worry about rebuilding it from scratch. Any marketplace Ink Protocol can be integrated into new or existing marketplaces and can also be used in marketplaces that don’t directly handle payments. Currently, Ink Protocol has been integrated into , , , …, with more to come! Listia.com EverydayCarry.com Sharetribe.com QRYPTOS.com Any transaction Ink Protocol doesn’t require a marketplace. It can be used for any peer-to-peer transaction, regardless of its whereabouts. After 2.5 months of integration on Listia, Ink Protocol has already reached the milestone! 1 millionth XNK listing Roadmap for 2018 Remember that Ink Protocol itself is already for anyone to use, so this roadmap only pertains to complementary features and applications that the XNK team is actively looking to work on. Anyone can and is encouraged to build additional or even competing apps. A more complete roadmap including 2019 and beyond . completely finished and available can be found here Q2 2018 Launch Ink Pay App and Ink Pay partnerships Launch Ink Protocol transaction explorer/browser (like “Etherscan for Ink”) Marketplace partnerships Consumer app partnerships Shipping and logistics partnerships Launch first live integration with consumer app partners Create a developer community around the and Ink Developer Portal Gitter Q3 2018 Launch Ink Protocol public API for easier partnership integration Launch first reputation score aggregator Launch feedback and reputation importer for existing marketplaces Launch reputation and payment widget for 3rd party web sites and apps Start work on fiat payments integration More marketplace, consumer app, and other partnerships Q4 2018 Start work on marketplace plugins for forums and message boards Start work on marketplace plugins for online stores Start work on accepting additional cryptocurrency payments Launch additional live integrations with consumer and marketplace partners More marketplace, consumer app, and other partnerships Integrate local marketplaces and other marketplace verticals into Ink Pay International growth for Listia and Ink Pay Why should we keep an eye on Ink Protocol? For the past 4 months, the Ink Protocol team has been focusing on both front- and back-end developments of the technology, along with securing strategic partnerships with the likes of ConsenSys, , or … Due to a lack of substantial marketing, XNK is still relatively under the radar, despite being a finished product and being adopted and supported by several big players in the Blockchain and eCommerce space. EverydayCarry.com Sharetribe Now that they are about to release their Ink Pay app in June, the XNK team is about shift some of their focus to the PR front. They have a lot of experience and connections in the Business and eCommerce sectors through years of running Listia, so we can expect their marketing efforts will be quite effective. We should definitely keep an eye on Ink Protocol in the near future! Disclaimers: This article is for educational purposes only, not a financial advice! : For those who want to learn more about Ink Protocol Medium: https://medium.com/@PayWithInk Website: https://paywithink.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/PayWithInk

Andreessen Horowitz

ConsenSys

Techcrunch

Ink Protocol — Blockchain for Decentralized Reputation and Escrow

Dropbox

ARKit Tutorial: Image recognition and virtual content transform

I hope to provide a step-by-step walkthrough of the Dynamic solution to this problem. Programming This article is assuming that the reader is already versed in the recursive solution. If there are many questions on that one, I will follow up by editing this post. Or I might just come back to edit it anyway. Let’s start with looking at the code. I will be using and be breaking down what happens in the key parts of the script. This is called a bottom-up approach because we are working our way up the indexes instead of recursion which is done by looking to decrement indexes until termination. Python The function takes S (the coins list), m (the length of the coins list) and n (the change we want to make up). In this article , we shall use the simple but sufficiently representative case of S=[ 1,2,3 ] and n = 4. In the red box below, we are simply constructing a table list of lists, with length n+1. We are first initialising all values in the individual lists to be 0. Then after that we will be initialising the first list in the table to all ‘1’s. Why is this so? Let’s move on to understand why. The function to find the number of combinations. First, let’s get comfortable with looking and understanding the figure below completely. With our case of n = 4 and S = [ 1,2,3 ], The variables we will be working with are as follows: S is the input list, j is the index tracking each S. The number of lists in table are initialised to n + 1, to accommodate the base case of n=0. Why are they filled with ‘1’s? This is so that the program will always return 1 when n=0, similar to the recursive solution to this problem. Next, let’s look at what happens in the nested for loops. We will be iterating through each list in table starting from index 1, and within each iteration we will be iterating through S. In this way, we accumulatively compute and would be able to avoid duplicated computations moving forward. By implementing it in nested for loops and incrementing the indexes, we call it a bottom up approach. What the nested for loops represent Now comes the tricky part (at least for me when I was studying it). Let’s focus on the two statements inside the nested for loop. These two statements are executed for every element in each list in table starting from n=1. Let’s look at the two lines of code: Similar to the recursive solution, for each iteration of the inner loop, we want to get the solutions which compulsorily includes S[ j ] and store it in x, and also get the solutions which compulsorily excludes S[ j ] and store it in y. In doing so, we would be able to reference earlier solutions to avoid duplicate computations. Why do it this way of including and excluding the coin S[ j ] for each computation? The explanation is simple. For each coin, there can be only two possibilities; to include it or exclude it in consideration with that value of n. And we know that if the coin (which is S[ j ]) is larger than n, then x would return 0 since including it into consideration would be impossible. Now, let’s start with two questions: 1. What is the significance of i — S[ j ] ? The value of previous i to reference after S[ j ] is taken from i. Including S[ j ] is compulsory. 2. Why reference [ j ] ? We want to reference the same position in S, which is S[ j ], just at a different n. 3. Why is it used as an index for table array ? To reference earlier calculations of n arrays. What the two statements mean: 1. First Statement By making S[ j ] compulsory, we deduct S[ j ] from i and reference the past computed n, where n = i — S[ j ]. 2. Second Statement Finding out all the solutions which exclude S[ j ] by referencing the previous computed S[ j ] = S[ j ] — 1. Let’s dive deeper. Let’s Deep Dive into Second Statement: 1. What is the significance of [ i ][ j-1 ]? Referencing the same n, in the previous element of S. 2. Why make it always return 0 when j<1 ? When j = 0, we are not considering any S[ j ]. 3. In that case, does the list S have to be sorted? No, since we are accumulatively iterating through m working towards when j=m and only interested in the final case. 4. How about the case of using S[0] and S[2] but NOT s[1]? We do not need to compute that, since ultimately we want to know how many solutions exist for i==n after iterating through all the coins in the coins array. Now, let’s start running through the nested for loops with the test values. Let’s run through the nested for loops. Illustration of the steps above. I hope that this post is able to help people who are trying to understand this problem. Pardon me that I did not really spend time on the aesthetics, hope the content would make up for it. Please also refer to the Dynamic Programming Solution from the Geeksforgeeks website and read through the post: _Given a value N, if we want to make change for N cents, and we have infinite supply of each of S = { S1, S2, .. , Sm}…_www.geeksforgeeks.org Dynamic Programming | Set 7 (Coin Change) - GeeksforGeeks

Different

The Coin Change Problem — Explained

A couple weeks ago, we saw in conjunction with Heroku to deploy our Haskell application. The process resulted in a simpler Circle CI config than we had before, as we let Docker do most of the heavy lifting. In particular, we no longer needed to download and build stack ourselves. We specified the build process in our Dockerfile, and then called . We also saw a couple different ways to login to these services from our Circle CI box. how to use Docker docker build In the future, we’ll look at ways to use more diverse deployment platforms than Heroku. In particular, we’ll look at AWS. But that’s a tough nut to crack, so it might be worthy of its own series! For now, we’ll conclude our series on deployment by looking at the Github developer API. Most projects you’ll work on use Github for version control. But with the API, there are a lot of interesting tricks that can make your experience cooler! This week, we’ll see how to setup a server that will respond to events that happen within our repository. Then we’ll see how we can send our own events from the server! You can follow along with this code by looking at ! this Github repository This article builds a lot on our knowledge of the Servant library. If you’ve never used that before, I highly recommend you read our series. You’ll learn about Servant and much more! You can also download our for more tools to use in your applications. Haskell Web Skills Production Checklist Github Webhooks Primer First let’s understand the concept of webhooks. Many services besides Github also use them. A webhook is an integration where a service will send an HTTP request to an endpoint of your choosing whenever some event happens. Webhooks are often a way for you to get some more advanced functionality out of a system. They can let you automate a lot of your processes. With Github, we can customize the events where this occurs. So for instance, we can trigger a request whenever creates a pull request. In this article, we’ll set up a very simple server that will do just that. When they open a new PR, we’ll add a comment saying we’ll take a look at the pull request soon. We’ll also have the comment tag our account so we get a notification. The Github part of this is easy. We go to the settings for our repository, and then find the “Webhooks” section. We’ll add a webhook for custom events, and we’ll only check the box next to “Pull Requests”. We’ll assign this to the URL of a Server that we’ll put up on a Heroku server, hitting the endpoint. /api/hook Building our Server First let’s make a data type for a Github request. This will be a simple two-constructor type. Our first constructor will contain information about an opened pull request. We’ll want to get the user’s name out of the request object, as well as the URL for us to send our comment to. We’ll also have an constructor for when the request isn’t about an open pull request. Other data GithubRequest =  GithubOpenPRRequest Text Text | -- User’s name, comments URL  GithubOtherRequest  deriving (Show) So we need a simple server that listens for requests on a particular endpoint. As we have in the past, we’ll use Servant for this process. Our endpoint type will use our desired path. Then it will also take a request body with our GithubRequest. We’ll listen for a post request, and then return a as our result, to help debug. Text type ServerAPI = “api” :> “hook” :>   ReqBody ‘[JSON] GithubRequest :> Post ‘[JSON] Text Now we need to specify a instance for our request type. Using the , we’ll find a few fields we need to read to make this happen. First, we’ll check that, indeed, this request has a pull request section and that it’s action is “opened”. If these aren’t there, we’ll return : FromJSON documentation Other instance FromJSON GithubRequest where  parseJSON = withObject “GithubRequest” $ \o -> do    (action :: Maybe Text) <- o .:? “action”    prSectionMaybe <- o .:? “Pull_request”    case (action, prSectionMaybe) of      (Just “opened”, Just pr_section :: Maybe Value) -> do        …      _ -> return GithubOtherRequest Now we can fetch the user section and the comments URL from the section. We do this with a function on a object like so: pull_request Data.Aeson where  fetchUserAndComments o’ = do    uSection <- o’ .: “user”    commentsURL <- o’ .: “comments_url”    return (uSection, commentsURL) Note we want , NOT ! We want to leave a single comment, rather than performing a full review of this PR. It was VERY annoying to figure out that the documentation covers this under the section, NOT the section on pull requests! Once we get the user section and comments, URL, we need one more step. We’ll get the user name out of the section, and we’ll return our final request! comments_url review_comments_url Issues instance FromJSON GithubRequest where  parseJSON = withObject “GithubRequest” $ \o -> do    (action :: Maybe Text) <- o .:? “action”    prSectionMaybe <- o .:? “Pull_request”    case (action, prSectionMaybe) of      (Just “opened”, Just pr_section :: Maybe Value) -> do        (userSection :: Value, commentsURL :: Text) <-          withObject “PR Section” fetchUserAndComments prSection        userName <-          withObject “User Section” (\o’ -> o’ .: “login”) userSection        return $ GithubOpenPRRequest userName commentsURL      _ -> return GithubOtherRequest Handling the Endpoint Now we need a handler function for endpoint. This handler will pattern match on the type of request and return a debugging string. If we have indeed found a request to open the PR, we’ll also want to call another function that will add our comment: IO hookHandler :: GithubRequest -> Handler TexthookHandler GithubOtherRequest =  return “Found a non-PR opening request.”hookHandler (GithubOpenPRRequest userName commentsURL) = do  liftIO $ addComment userName commentsURL  return $ “User: “ <> userName <>     “ opened a pull request with comments at: “ <> commentsURL

addComment :: Text -> Text -> IO ()... Adding a Comment In order to add a comment to this pull request, we’ll need to hit the Github API with our own request. Again, we’ll do this using Servant’s magic! First, let’s make another API type to represent Github’s own developer API. Since we’re getting the full comments URL as part of our request, we don’t need any path components here. But we will need to authenticate using : BasicAuth type GithubAPI = BasicAuth “GithubUser” () :>  ReqBody GitPRComment :> Post ‘[JSON] () Our will only need a for the body of the comment. So let’s make a simple wrapper and add a instance for it: GitPRComment Text newtype ToJSON newtype GitPRComment = GitPRComment Text

instance ToJSON GitPRComment where  toJSON (GitPRComment body) = object [ “body” .= body ] We can create a client function for this API now using the magic function from : client Servant.Client sendCommentClient :: BasicAuthData -> GitPRComment -> ClientM ()sendCommentClient = client (Proxy :: Proxy GithubAPI) Now to build our commenting function, we’ll start by building the auth data. import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as BSC

...addComment :: Text -> Text -> IO ()addComment userName commentsURL = do  gitUsername <- getEnv “GITHUB_USERNAME”  gitPassword <- getEnv “GITHUB_PASSWORD”  let authData = BasicAuthData (BSC.pack gitUsername)                               (BSC.pack gitPassword)  ... Now we’ll set up our client environment using the comments URL: addComment :: Text -> Text -> IO ()addComment userName commentsURL = do  ...  manager <- newManager tlsManagerSettings  baseUrl <- parseBaseUrl (Data.Text.unpack commentsURL)  let clientEnv = clientEnv maanger baseUrl  ... We’ll add a simple function taking our admin’s username and composing the body of the comment. We’ll tag ourselves as well as the user who opened the PR: addComment :: Text -> Text -> IO ()addComment userName commentsURL = do  …  where     commentBody adminName = GitPRComment $       “Thanks for posting this @” <> userName <>       “! I’ll take a look soon! - @” <> adminName Now we wrap everything together by making our client call. And that’s it! addComment :: Text -> Text -> IO ()addComment userName commentsURL = do  gitUsername <- getEnv “GITHUB_USERNAME”  gitPassword <- getEnv “GITHUB_PASSWORD”  let authData = BasicAuthData (BSC.pack gitUsername)                               (BSC.pack gitPassword)  manager <- newManager tlsManagerSettings  baseUrl <- parseBaseUrl (Data.Text.unpack commentsURL)  let clientEnv = clientEnv maanger baseUrl  runClientM (sendCommentClient                authData               (commentBody gitUsername))             clientEnv  return ()  where    commentBody = ... Conclusion Services like Github do their best to provide a good user experience to all their normal users. But if you get a little bit advanced, you can often customize their behavior to a great degree! Notice how important it is to know how to setup a simple server. This gives you limitless freedom to manipulate the system and add your own behaviors. It’s a cool perk of learning these specific web skills. If you want to see the full code I wrote for this article, check it out on ! this Github repo To learn about more web skills that can magnify your programming ability, check out our . It’ll walk you through some different Haskell libraries, like Persistent for databases, and Servant for web servers. You can also download our . It’ll give you a lot more ideas of libraries to use to enhance your Haskell experience! Haskell Web Skills Series Production Checklist

Heroku

Advanced Github: Webhooks and Automation

Shattering those dreams and building new ones During your research, or just random browsing the articles put up by your google search about trading bitcoin, have you ever come across statements like this: - How to buy your own Lambo by day trading bitcoin - Make a living from anywhere in the world by trading - Follow “X” golden rule and trade yourself to incredible riches - … Well, I have, far too many. I’ve even come across statements of people saying: “I just quit my job today, looking forward to trading full-time.” Reading comments, clickbait titles and ads like that gives me the shivers, because they target gullible people with only one goal, to take their money as fast as possible. They all promise the world to people, the opportunity to live your dream and tell you, that it’s easy to get there. “Anyone who wants to sell you overnight success or wealth is not interested in your success; they are interested in your money.” — Bo Bennett We at have another view on this, we do believe that trading holds the possibility to your life, but it’s not easy, there’s no golden rule, and there is no safe way to accomplish your dreams. Edge Analysis Group enhance Typically, at this point in the article, I would briefly warn you about the dangers of trading and how you should not trade with money you cannot afford to lose , but I’m going to go deeper into that further on in the article. Trading: a dream job? Most YouTube video’s or popular bloggers will portray trading as a smooth, comfortable, quick way, for anyone, even with a shoestring budget to make millions. The only thing you need to do is follow a set of rules and read something like: “how I made a million bucks in 30 seconds with only a penny”. If you don’t believe me, type in “how to get rich trading” on YouTube and see for yourself. Well, to bust in an open door, there’s no easy way to getting rich, and those videos are the way these people make money. Those who do portray it like that, don’t get their income out of trading, but out of selling you a dream_._ However promising, I urge not to buy into the dream of quitting your day job and sit on a beach trading full time. Trading as a profession is a , both physical and emotional, it may be the exhausting thing you’ll ever do, and unless you are trading for commissions or a paycheck, it’s not a convenient way to earn an income. very demanding occupation “If you don’t work very hard, it is extremely unlikely that you will be a good trader” — Bruce Kovner. Earning an income VS building wealth For most people, there is no difference between making an income and building wealth, even worse, just as I did, they see earning a salary as the only way to building wealth. That’s also why some people quit their day jobs to become a full-time trader, so they can be the ones who are the protagonist of a get rich story. Well, I’m going to say that and are two things. earning an income building wealth very different Earning an income is keeping the lights on. Everyone needs a minimum amount of money each month to get all the bills paid and to cover all living expenses. Therefore you need a consistent way of getting money each month, this can be by getting a job, being self-employed or starting a business, but you need a source of steady income. I can already hear some of you thinking: “well trading is a job, so what are you getting at?..” Well yes, trading is a job, when you trade for an investment bank, hedge fund, as an independent trader, etc. When you are trading like that, you are either trading for a paycheck by your employer or trading for management fees or profit percentages with other people’s money, but you are not trading your own money for an income. Let’s clarify it with a small example: Say you have an honest starting account of $10,000 and you live like a hermit and only need $1,000 a month to get all the bills paid. To get that amount every month, you would need to consistently make 10%, without a fault, to keep your trading account level. If you want to enlarge your trading account, the % goes up. What do you think your chances are to get that percentage of profit every month? Then factor in that you are likely just starting to trade and still have to make every mistake in the book. So if you are reading this and you were planning to switch jobs and are looking to start as a trader with a big firm, or you want to go independent, well then sorry to burst your bubble, but if you don’t have the job already, chances are you never will. The trade of independent trader is highly regulated and the requirements for a job as a trader, are so high, that if you haven’t started out with that career in mind, you will probably never make it. So, if trading is not a viable job option, then what’s it good for? Well, it’s excellent for building wealth As stated, building wealth is something entirely different than earning an income, it’s building up your assets. While this might seem logical, most of us make the following mistakes: 1. Not seeing money as an asset. Before going deeper into building wealth, I think it’s best to go back to the origins of money and to precisely define what money is. . Money, in whatever shape or form, has been invented to solve the problem of the coincidence of wants Before the existence of a medium of exchange, people had to rely on a barter system, bartering goods or services for other goods or services. While this might seem by some as a better system than the current financial system, it posed a big problem, because you might not get in return those goods or services that you need or want, or maybe you want those goods or services, but you want them in the future. Let’s explain this with an example, say a wheat farmer has a good harvest and goes to sell his produce on the market. If there isn’t a standard medium of exchange, the farmer would need to barter all of his goods for other goods, that he then would need to store, to trade them in the future against the products he actually wants. There’s no guarantee for the farmer that he will be able to get to goods and services he wants in the future, by paying with the products he received for his crops. That’s why money was invented; it is a on which everyone agrees upon an exact amount of value for the said currency. means of exchange of value So by definition, money is nothing more than a means to convert labor, goods or services, produced or delivered now, into a form of agreed upon token/store of value, which you can later on exchange for other products or services. This definition turns money into an asset, a means of conducting trade between different parties. So as stated above, means building up your assets, so if money is an asset, owning more of it is building up wealth. But where people tend to go wrong is, they stockpile these assets in a savings account, letting them pile up in case they need them in the future. gathering wealth While it would seem like a sensible thing to do, it’s one of the worst things you can do, when your goal is to build wealth. Thanks to rising inflation, the money we stockpile in savings accounts get depreciated year after year, so the amount of work we had to put in to amass the money, gets worth less and less. So instead of letting your money sit there, it’s better to put those hard-earned Dollars to work, and there are various ways to do that*****: - Investing in the financial markets - Investing in real estate - Trading the financial markets - Giving out loans and getting percentages on it - …. The list doesn’t end there and not every option is a good option for everyone, but the good news is, there will always be a way that is suited for you. For us at , we feel that trading the financial markets is the way to go and we set out to assist each other and everyone who’s interested in trading, to find their edge. Edge Analysis Group *I do want to give this quick word of warning, never put all your savings into investments. Make sure that you have enough set-aside, that if something unforeseen happens, you still have enough liquidity available. 2. Mixing up assets and liabilities. A lot of people think that owning a house that they’ve paid for with a mortgage is an asset, and also their car, which they have paid for with a loan and that TV bought with a credit card, …. Are those items really assets if you are monthly paying an amount to keep them? Well unless you are not a human being, the answer, unfortunately, is NO. As long as you have to keep paying off a loan for it, it is not an asset. This is the biggest and most common mistake made and it just utterly kills your ability to build wealth. It might give you a good feeling having all these things at your disposal, but for every one luxury you pay with a loan, it’s the lender who’s building wealth, and you are providing. “If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.” — Warren Buffett So if putting your money to work seems a daunting task, this one might be a bit easier, don’t buy things you cannot pay for up front. Paying off a loan is giving the lender a fixed paycheck over time. 3. Trading money you cannot afford to lose. Though we at believe trading the financial markets is an excellent way to build wealth, and we make it our goal to help everyone who’s interested to find their edge. We do advocate the following words of warning: . Edge Analysis Group Never trade with money you cannot afford to lose It might sound like a simple warning, but it’s far from it. Although great opportunities for building wealth appear almost every day, so do chances to lose money. The financial markets are by definition a zero-sum game, it’s a trading market like any other, and there are always two parties for each trade. So if one is making money, it’s because the other one paid it. That being said, the financial markets obviously don’t only have players losing money, there have been enormously successful people, who made staggering amounts of money and who are now counted among the most wealthy people in the world, with Warren Buffett and Ed Seykota being some of the most widely known examples. “Risk no more than you can afford to lose, and also risk enough so that a win is meaningful” — Ed Seykota Guidelines for building wealth As a summary, there are no fixed rules you can follow to get rich quick, but there are guidelines to improve your financial situation and start you on the road to building wealth: 1. Make sure you have a steady income to pay all the monthly expenses 2. Put your money to work 3. Do not pay for goods or services with loans 4. Do not trade with money you cannot afford to lose Thank you for reading this article, and if you want to know more about me or , you can contact us via following links. Edge Analysis Group Edge Analysis website _One of the most overlooked features of technical analysis is the use and reliability of fundamentals, psychology and…_edgeanalysis.co Edge Analysis - Finding Your Edge. Edge Analysis Discord _Step up your game with a modern voice & text chat app. Crystal clear voice, multiple server and channel support, mobile…_discord.gg Discord - Free voice and text chat for gamers Our Twitter channel _The latest Tweets from Edge Analysis Group (@edgeanalysis). Don't pay for signal providers, become your own…_twitter.com Edge Analysis Group (@edgeanalysis) | Twitter This article has been written by AndyN; content creator and proud member of Edge Analysis Group .

fees

Trading: Earning an income or building wealth?

I receive a lot of inbound communication from investors seeking exposure to gaming and (for the purposes of this discussion, I will consider the esports sector to be all encompassing of , esports, and adjacent markets). The esports industry is hot right now, and many investors feel like they are missing out. When they look for investment opportunities, often it becomes clear, there is not an ample supply of investment opportunities in esports. esports gaming **Typical Questions:**1) How do I invest in esports? Should I invest in the publicly traded game makers? Can I put money to work in an esports specific Venture Capital fund? How do I get access to early stage esports startups? I’m astonished by the frequency with which I hear these questions. It seems as if weekly, I get a call or email from an institutional investor, family office, or even an individual investor asking about both direct investment opportunities and institutional investment opportunities in esports. There are a number of ways to gain exposure to esports as an investor. In an attempt to broadly answer the questions above and outline where those opportunities are, I’ve summarize the public and private opportunities as I see them and categorized them into three groups: Institutional Investments (in VC funds) Private Market / Direct Investments (ie. startups) Public Market / Stocks Institutional Investments (in VC funds) There are very limited “pure play” institutional investment opportunities focused on esports. is the only truly “esports only” VC fund that I know of currently (I’d consider them a clear market leader in the esports industry). There are other funds investing frequently in esports who have substantial domain knowledge, but have non-esports exposure as well (many of those are listed in my blog post here: ). BITKRAFT Who is Investing in Esports As you can see in the blog post, Who is Investing in Esports, there are hundreds of investors putting money to work in esports. There are dozens of venture firms doing so and a few, are very actively pursuing a thesis within the space. Some of the most active venture investors in the space include: , , , , , , , , , , and others. These are the names I come across and bump into all the time around early stage founders in deals that I’m chasing in esports. March Capital Crosscut Courtside Deep Space Ventures Everblue Management Greycroft Index Ventures CRCM Catalyst Sports Sterling VC BITKRAFT Most of these funds listed above are not focused solely on esports, so that you may already have exposure to, or may not want. That could be a good, or a bad thing, but that’s up to you to consider when evaluating the risk/return profile and exposure profile of these funds. if you’re looking to make an institutional investment in a fund to get esports exposure, you’re likely going to have to accept their exposure to other end markets Good news, this is changing, as . Additionally, there are a couple other funds raising money right now that will be “esports heavy” with exposure to other things like VR, AI, etc. These funds may be a good way to make a macro bet on esports. I’m aware of at least 3 “esports only” venture funds and one esports focused early stage accelerator that are in the process of raising money right now The risk of investing in one startup, is diversified away to a basket of startups when you invest in a fund, but at the same time, the upside from a fund investment, is lower than that of investing in one startup that hits it big. Additionally, the time horizon of a fund investment is typically 7–10 years. Startups can often take that same time to mature as well, but often there is a chance they pay out much sooner as well. In a fund investment, you’re getting slightly less risk, slightly less return, and a longer duration. For those seriously interested in making institutional bets, I am happy to make introductions to the fund managers I’ve alluded to above who are currently raising capital. Private Market / Direct Investments (ie. startups) Maybe becoming a Limited Partner (investor) in a VC fund isn’t appealing to you due to the minimum check sizes, investment horizon, unwanted market exposure, etc. The alternative would be to invest directly into early stage esports startups yourself. The hard part, is that the startup market is very challenging to navigate. If you’re about to make your first startup investment, you are likely to face some of the following challenges: Quality Deal Flow — You will likely need to have a relationship with one of the investors / funds mentioned previously to be in the flow on the best deals coming to market in the sector. Occasionally, there will be exceptions to that rule, but do not expect that the be the norm. The best deals are usually circulated among a subset of these investors who are very active in the space, and bring strategic value to the cap table when they invest. Skyrocketing Valuations — There is currently a flood of capital chasing deals in the esports space. A lot of that capital is what I call “patient capital” coming from family offices and high net worth individuals that do not have the same investment time horizon and return hurdles that institutional investors face. This drives up valuations, and makes good investments even more scarce. Strategic Value — One of the best ways to get into the hottest deals in the space is to offer some sort of strategic value to the company, as an investor. This is a bit of a chicken or the egg scenario for some people, as you need investment exposure to the space to add value in some cases, but you need to have a clear value-add to get that investment exposure. If you’re not an experienced angel or early stage VC, these founders in the “hot” deals likely don’t see any strategic fit to have you in their cap table. Diversification — I tell all early stage investors or angels, to do more than one deal at the early stage in any sector. Any one early stage bet has a very high chance of failing. So you need a portfolio of exposure to the early stage asset class, which means that getting access to just one great deal isn’t enough, you need access to many great early stage deals which takes us back to item number 1 above (Quality Deal Flow). What do you invest in? — Do you invest in an esports organization? Do you invest in a startup? How about a game developer? At what stage? How do you decide? With a lack of experience investing in either startups or esports, you may struggle to honestly answer these questions and land on the right investment opportunity for yourself. I’m not trying to discourage you from investing directly in esports startups (or startups in general), but I am encouraging you to become familiar with the risk/return profile of the asset class and not dive head first into something without knowing the mitigating factors to the risks you are taking. Investing in one startup or a few startups is the highest risk, highest return potential of any investment discussed here. You have to consider that the odds are that any one startup investment will fail, but you do have the potential for a decent sized short term win, and a massive long term win if you place your bets correctly in direct startup investments. Public Market / Stocks To date, you can certainly gain exposure to esports via some publicly traded companies, but similar to the institutional dilemma, direct, pure-play exposure to esports is hard to find. You can however, get some uplift from the rising tide of the gaming and esports market via exposure to some of the following publicly traded companies. The public companies that have the greatest percentage of their revenue levered to the esports space are: , , , , , . In my opinion, if you’re looking to catch some uplift from the rising esports tide, these stocks would give you exposure to that broad trend. Although these are mostly game makers, and less directly impacted by the performance of “esports” directly, their games are the IP behind the space and are correlated. Tencent Activision Blizzard Electronic Arts Nintendo NetEase TakeTwo Some publicly traded companies that do have esports and or gaming exposure, but as an even smaller percentage of their overall business include names such as: , , , . Additionally, there are hardware manufacturers such as that have benefited a great deal from the growth in esports (however, a lot of their growth is attributed to the use of GPUs for B2C and B2B processing). I would suspect that the ‘ ’ between esports market momentum and movements in these stocks is very low, or even negative. Amazon Microsoft Sony Apple Nvidia beta The downside to investing in these public stocks, is the limited upside and lack of pure play esports exposure. While you likely won’t lose all of your money as if often the case in startup investing, the real home runs in the space are in the early stage private market. Publicly traded stocks allow investors to trade the upside of a fund, or direct startup investments for relative safety and liquidity. Update/Edit: Goldman Sachs published a report in June 2018 on esports. There is an article about that report here: — go check it out and see if you can get your hands on the report — it’s very long and worth the read on where to put money to work. TheStreet.com/ Goldman Sachs esports Report Conclusion In conclusion, There are a number of ways to get exposure to the esports space, but none of them are perfect. You must consider your investment objectives, timing, risk tolerance, risks and mitigating factors to those risks among other things. To help those who may not be as familiar with the asset classes discussed here, I’ve compared what I feel are the risk, return, duration and liquidity considerations among the three types of investments, on a relative basis here in this table. Some of this is subjective and up to interpretation based on your perspective, market position and experience. A special thank you to Nahid Giga who provided very helpful insights while drafting this article. is a venture capital investor that has invested in a number of esports teams and startups. Stephen Hays Connect with Stephen on LinkedIN Here Follow Stephen on Twitter Here

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